Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass Page A

wash dishes in a truck stop, and play live shows in the parking lot each night, selling autographed black-and-white glossies of themselves afterward to raise enough money to get back home; but no matter, they were pointed in the right direction, and because of their youth, it was nothing but fun, only an adventure.
    They were driving two cars, the Browns in one and Jim and Mary in another—they traded drivers and passengers—and Jim and Mary pulled a little homemade shell of a trailer that was stuffed with all their gear. Passing back through Colorado, they detoured to go see Pikes Peak, where, frustrated by how hard the trailer was to maneuver, Jim Reeves unhitched the trailer, took their luggage out, and gave the little trailer a shove with his boot, sent it catapulting over the edge of a thousand-foot cliff just for laughs.
    At another point in the journey, still in Colorado, Jim and Mary's car ran out of gas in an autumn snowstorm in the middle of the night. Jim Ed hiked down off the mountain in his dress boots while the others stayed with the cars and struggled to build a wretched little fire with comic books and wet branches. They were on a back road, and no traffic passed by—they imagined they might remain stranded there on into the winter, and the next spring—but fortune favored them and Jim Ed found a cabin at the bottom of the mountain at daylight and got a ride back up to their cars with a can of precious gasoline. They continued on their way, back down toward the flatlands, back down toward warmth, back down toward home. Driving hard now, nonstop, with no more gigs scheduled, and the strange and intensely bittersweet pull of home aching in all of them.
    They did not regret the tour, but each felt as if he or she had somehow gotten away with some great risk or gamble, in the adventure of their outing—had sought to pull away from the directive of where the larger world most wanted them to be and what it wanted them to be doing, and that although the freedom of that pulling away had been exhilarating, they were getting back home only just in time. What the consequences of not getting back home and reattaching might have been, they could not have said, but they knew instinctively that those consequences would not have been in their favor.
    Almost as if each of them had been guilty, while on that grand trip, of spurning their various gifts, and were made uneasy by the strange thrill they felt in that betrayal, that willful destruction of the vague contract they each held. A contract that, unlike the one with Fabor, they had never signed, and never requested.

    They drove day and night, heading south and west, down out of the mountains and across the broad plains and then back up into the hills and hollows. They took the good roads straight on toward Memphis, arriving south of there just before dusk. They stopped and looked down at the Mississippi and were reassured by the force and mass of it, as well as by the deceptive leisureliness of its pace. The muddy color of the river, as well, was calming—prior to their trip out west, that color was the only one they had ever known a river to be—and with the last of the sun glinting off the water it looked like a winding path of bronze, passing with strength through a seething velvet jungle, and they relaxed further, watching it and considering the things they had seen.
    Jim offered everyone a drink from his flask. There was a hand-carved sign in the pull-out area where they were parked that told the story of the New Madrid Fault, over which they were sitting. Back in 1811, the fault—which underlay the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, down through Memphis and Tupelo and Jackson and all the way down to New Orleans and into the sea—had cracked like an eggshell. The Mississippi had run backwards for days in what everyone, slaves and slave owners and freemen, believed with deepest conviction was the end time, with the bodies of men