Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass

uncouth.
    The endless sky of Wyoming, and then, farther up into the mountains, the foreboding yet exhilarating forests of spruce and fir. The sulfurous exhalations of Yellowstone, the fantastic roiling belches of the mud pots, the hissing vent-hole aspirations of fumaroles. The impatient ninety-three-minute wait on the boardwalk for the spray of Old Faithful, with the brimstone taste of it in their lungs. Tourists rushing out afterward to reclaim their scattered laundry, having stuffed it down into the maw of the geyser some moments before the turbulent ejection.
    Bears walking the roads and leaning up against their car with dagger-claws, nose-smearing against the glass, mugging for snacks. Jim trying to put some of Mary's lipstick on one bear, and the bear snarling and snapping at him, Jim pulling his hand back just in time, milliseconds away from the end of his guitar-picking.
    Pelicans floating overhead, as ghostly white and slow moving as if in a dream, and seagulls drifting and squealing, no matter that they were still a thousand miles from any present-day ocean.
    The tattered clouds of the Pacific Northwest, then—all the way to Puget Sound—where the slate and metallic sheen of the skies, bruise purple and storm green, was beautiful, but seemed to attach its leaden colors to Maxine's blood in a way that she found dispiriting. Too far from home, was all, perhaps, or maybe it just wasn't her place on earth.
    In her home movies from that trip, she can see hints of what was to come, in those few frames that she inhabits, in the moments when Bonnie grabs the camera and turns it back on her. Not quite yet a worry or a fretfulness, but instead maybe just the beginnings of a kind of stillness or wariness: the dawning, perhaps, of an understanding of the nature if not the name of the thing—the blessing and the curse—that was in her. The realization that she probably wouldn't be able to slow it down or moderate it, even if she ever desired to. Which was just fine, more than fine, at the age of twenty-three. But not in control. Apace with it, but not in control of it.
    Seeing those beautiful pewter skies in the Northwest and feeling the first tug or bump of depression: as surprising an emotion to her then as if a large ship far out at sea, floating serenely and confidently above a thousand feet of water and with no sign of a shore in any direction, was to suddenly bump hard against something just beneath the surface.
    In the Pacific Northwest, she saw a killer whale. She was sitting by herself after their last show, out on a porch overlooking the water. She was lulled by the ghostly white shapes of the big sailboats in their moorings on the dark water, masts stark against the sky without their sails, the water lapping almost but not quite rhythmically against the dock. The male musicians were still inside the bar, drinking. Maxine kept turning and looking back in from the darkness at the yellow window squares, and at the mirthful, vibrant figures moving around within those frames. She wanted to join them but for some reason could not.
    When the whale surfaced she saw only the back part of it, going back down, gleaming wet in the night. She thought at first that it was a sailboat turning slowly over. When she realized what it was, she ran inside to get the others—her sorrow or sadness jolted out of her, burned so clean and free, it was as if it would never return—but the whale did not reappear, and they teased her and accused her of being drunk.

    Once they were turned away and headed back, Maxine quickly felt better, headed back downhill. The continent as vast as her dreams, and thrilling for that, but unsettling; it was as if the physical detachment from her home, one of those fractures that Fabor had counseled them about, had opened up, and everything she was, and everything she might be, was draining out.
    They ran out of money in Idaho and Fabor wouldn't wire them any, so they had to wait tables and