Driving the King (2 page)

“See you inside, Mr. Weary.”

By the time Claude had walked around to the side door, the plane had turned to a spark, the sun flashing on the metal as bright as it burned when it came out the furnace. Eastern flights used to land just down the road from Kilby at the old Gunter Air Base. The guards would march hoe squads down there to clear the kudzu off the fences around the runways. Air traffic towers looked just like the
ones at the prison. The guards who manned those walkways looked down on us ready for somebody to run. The men who did always died. The only question was whether it was the twelve-gauge or a carbine that put him down.

I hated the sight of an airplane, and the sound of them and their night flying was even worse. First it was army air corps and the air force after, with jets moving faster than sound. Sleeping on a Kilby tier was hard enough, but the noise and rumble, hearing free-world folks come and go as they pleased, was just one more thing to rack my mind.

So when I stepped out of the car and saw that clean shot line between me and the control tower, I had to stay in my right-now mind, let my fingers be my watch and compass, tell me where I was and when. I came on back to the moment before me, in time to see the plane, lower then, close enough to read the letters, and big enough to throw a wide shadow over the wire grass.

The Christmas carols on the terminal's speakers sounded like they were coming through a can. They had been stripped of anything colorful or sharp. The static popped louder than the drumbeat, and the only thing that made it sound like anything was the fact that the music was old and familiar. Los Angeles had spoiled me. I had experienced the pleasure of sitting in the Capitol Records
studios, listening to songs fresh-made. Most music fell short after that.

The row of airport televisions cost a nickel for fifteen minutes, enough time to watch Nat's television show from beginning to end. Of course, the show was a month gone, and it wasn't coming back. The sales department at NBC said nobody was willing to pay, but if every television had a coin box like the ones in the Dannelly Field lobby, then they'd find plenty of folks willing to ante up.

Midway down the terminal, the colored waiting sign had bright lights behind the letters, a Negro marquee. A few of the drivers sat in there and got a bit of breakfast at the sandwich window on the back end of the lunch counter. In the waiting area, children stood at the picture windows, and some sat on grown folks' shoulders, waiting to see the plane land. They pressed their fingers onto the glass. A cleaning lady, her name tag too far to read, paid no mind to the landing. She stood near the window with a spray can of Windex and a rag, ready to clean the smudges as soon as the people were gone.

Outside, Claude stood beside the other porters, milling with their backs to the windows. The man on the tractor had unhooked the flatbed and traded it out for the narrow stairs he would haul to the plane. No sooner than that plane stopped moving, wheels first and then the
propellers, those men had the bags off. Nat's never touched that wagon, because Claude was on point, earning every dollar and then some.

Skip was first out of the shadow of the plane's door, and then came Nat Cole, his feet on Alabama ground.

“Here we are, friend.”

That's what Nat told me when he came through the door. It was something he said when we pulled into his regular places. NBC. Capitol Records.
Here we are, friend.
Good days and the lesser days. Like getting there was part of the show, too.

I walked catty-corner to Nat, a step or two behind and just off to the right. Back in his prizefighting days, Skip was a southpaw, and he carried his bag in his right hand as he walked beside me. Once Claude fell in behind, the four of us passed through Dannelly Field like a shotgun house wind, a straight line from the back door to the front.

When we made it to the sidewalk, that Montgomery City Lines bus pulled in right beside us. That airport bus was not the one that had made the place famous. The notorious one rolled up Cleveland Avenue and made its way to the Court Square Fountain, but they all were kindred. If it wasn't Mrs. Parks's bus, it was the one young Miss Colvin had been thrown off months before. Those were the women I knew about. I couldn't think of them without
wondering about the unknown folks who got manhandled and laughed at, never speaking a word about it after.

The three bus riders were white folks, and once they were off, the bus carried only its driver with that pistol on his hip, nickel-plated with a chestnut handle. I neither stopped walking nor flinched. I had learned to hide any worry or tremble deep down in my gut, leave it where I had buried so much already.

Seeing that empty bus, I hoped that every Monday evening, when they used to watch Nat's show, they would have walked a little faster to get home, let that television be something to wrap the evening around. With the show dead, I had to bring him in person, give the folks the show I had aimed to see those years before.

The show must go on
was something singers were supposed to say, but I'd seen plenty of singers and never once had I heard one say it. I knew they lived it though. Skip told me about the time Nat finished a New York show and left the stage with a stomach full of blood. Leaving it half-done was unthinkable to the man. He only had two shows he didn't finish properly, and both ate at him as bad as that ulcer did. One was on television, and there was nothing I could do to change that. But the other was the concert I'd witnessed, the mob rushing him and the band onstage. That one, live from Montgomery, we'd try one more time.

Skip got in the passenger's side, and I let Nat in the back. I walked around to the trunk while Claude loaded the bags.

“You just don't know what's bound to happen when you get up in the morning, do you, Mr. Weary?” Claude told me.

“Damn sure don't. That's why I don't save my good liquor. Neither should you. Top-shelf all evening.”

Nat put his right hand out the window and gave Claude a shake, a good word, and another bill to add to his pocket. Then we were off, driving our quiet miles into Montgomery proper. I'd set up my Packard just like the Cadillac in Nat's driveway, the car we made our way around Los Angeles in. I had filled the wicker box with staff paper, a handful of sharp pencils, and a couple packs of Kools. He liked to write while he rode. Maybe his hometown would spark something better than the memory.

The last time Nat Cole was in Alabama, a mob tried to kill him. I stopped them, and paid for it with ten good years. I had brought him home, and I would make sure the show happened this time, from the first bit of handclapping when he took the stage to the last bit when the show ended. I would watch from my seat at the side of the stage, hidden in a nice bit of shadow where I could see everything.

I had planned to give something to the folks in Montgomery, but there was some selfishness in it, too. The evening was meant for me as much as anybody else. I needed new songs in my head, because I had spent my empty years living in what could have been. That old, lonesome show that haunted me had been playing for much too long.

M
attie kept straightening things that weren't even crooked. Her hat. Her collar. No need for it, though, because she looked as beautiful as ever, as if not a day had passed during the war, as if we hadn't fought a war at all. Maybe beauty was a private little miracle given to those who had been forced to love across the ocean. Time had been set backward, so that when we all got home, the world was waiting in the same place we had left it.

“I hope he doesn't mind a picture,” Mattie said. “He must get tired of people asking him all the time.”

“I'm sure he's used to it by now. He won't mind at all.”

She ran a finger around the camera's lens, and flicked the dust from her glove. Of course there was no dust to speak of, because she had been running her fingers across that lens the whole time we sat in the back of my brother's taxi, riding across town to the Empire Theater.
Her camera was a simple, elegant thing, a red leather box that looked something like a gift.

She had taken a picture of the marquee as we made the turn from Dexter Avenue.
NAT COLE TRIO.
He was the most famous man, black or white, ever to be born in my hometown, but that sign was a first for us back then. A Negro name with that much light behind it. In Montgomery that was rare.

“You're sure he won't mind?”

Mattie smoothed her collar again and breathed her nerves away.

“Absolutely. He won't mind one bit,” I told her.

Nat Cole was a friend of mine. He was born in Montgomery a few months before me. When Miss McCarthy called the roll on the first day of kindergarten, I answered when I heard my name.

“Nathaniel—”

“Present.”

“Not yet, Master Weary.”

As it turned out, two Nathaniels sat in that classroom at Montgomery County Training School. The first on the roll was Nathaniel Adams Cole. It seemed we were both a little surprised that our names weren't ours alone. At the same time, I was glad to know I had at least one thing in common with somebody. By third grade, I was the only Nathaniel left. Like many of the families in Bel-Air, Nat and his people had gone to Chicago.

He went up there and got himself famous. “Montgomery's Very Own Nat Cole Battles the Legendary Earl Hines in Chicago.” The papers added “Montgomery's Very Own” like it was his given name. For a while Eddie Cole's name was bigger than his younger brother's. “Sepia Records Presents Montgomery's Very Own Eddie Cole and His Solid Swingers.” And months later the stories read “The Cole Brothers and Their Solid Swingers.” Finally, the name was Nat's alone.

Before the war I worked with my family, driving a taxi from our stand on Jackson Street. Nat Cole was good cab conversation whenever his songs came on the radio.
You know, he was born right here.
He played the kind of music that made people feel generous enough to kick in an extra penny or two in tip money, as though Nat's crooning could get somebody from here to there a little bit faster, make the ride that much smoother.

Nat was good barbershop conversation next door to the cabstand at Malden Brothers.

You know, he's from right here.

Samuel Malden would say it every time a song came on, sometimes pointing his razor to the floor, as though Nat had sprung up through the clay and the earth, straight through the concrete and the black-and-white floor.

Martha Gray said it, too.
You know, he's from right here
, when anyone brought his records to the counter of
her shop around the corner on High Street. Though the top-forty slots reserved for the hit makers changed every Tuesday, Nat always had a place reserved. Nat Cole never really left, though he had been gone from Montgomery for all those years.

George Worthy said it, too, on his radio show,
Hometown Serenade
.
You know, friends, he's from right here.
George put a little bit more space between the words and talked in a whisper, his voice turned down and softened, a little brush on a snare drum.
Right here.
The station's signal came through strong on Centennial Hill. They played Nat's songs that evening, but in the back of that cab on the way to the show, his voice got weaker as we crossed from the Hill to downtown. Soon after, the voice was gone altogether.

The theater district was foreign to us and governed by different rules, going through side doors and sitting in balconies. Every so often, though, the closed doors were minded by a Negro janitor or doorman who I knew from the neighborhood. Mr. Cartwright had cleaned up at the Empire for as long as I'd known him, and he was just then sitting by the back door. The coin I pressed into his hand was newly minted, a half-dollar with Booker T.
Washington's face looking sideways from Mr. Cartwright's fingertips.

“Son, you don't have to do that.”

“I want to, Mr. Cartwright. Besides, it ain't about have to.”

He held the money for a while, flipped it over a couple of times, head and tail of Booker T. spinning.

“Appreciate you,” he said, and the door opened to us as long as no one found out.

I wanted to take a picture with Nat before the show and also have a word. I had a ring in my pocket. I had been waiting for that night to give it to Mattie, and who better for a serenade than Nat King Cole, born across town and a friend for all those years.

I heard the trio of voices on the other side of the dressing room door. In the mix of them, one was unmistakably Nat. Mattie turned her head and brought her ear a little bit closer to the door. She held her camera as if every picture she'd ever taken was still inside. Surely, the picture we would take with Nat would end up in a frame somewhere in the little house for sale on Tuscaloosa Street that I'd seen that morning. It'd be perfect for us. I had peeked through the gap in the blue-striped curtains. Maybe the picture would sit above the mantel, along with pictures of the wedding, the children, and all the rest to come.

After the show, we would go back across town to the Centennial Hotel and do some drinking in the Majestic Lounge. We would go up on the rooftop garden and stand in the middle of the cabbage palms in the night light. I had told Mattie, right there, years before, what she surely knew already, that I loved her. I'd tell her again with a ring, and once she said yes, we would go back down to the Majestic, where Nat, Oscar, and Johnny would surely play like the bands always did after their downtown shows.

I had a newfound taste for big-money liquor, and I had my GI money and a bankroll fat enough to buy one for everybody in the narrow little bar. I'd order some of that top-shelf bourbon that had gotten dusty, waiting for somebody to have a night worth reaching up that high to bring the bottle down for.

But before all of that I would have to ask Nat. Before I could ask him, I had to knock.

Mattie beat me to it, though. She knocked, glove against the steel, and the hollow door echoed loud enough to fill the empty hallway. Mattie smiled and nodded once more, calm then, as if the last of her nerves had flowed through her knuckles and bounced back and forth between the metal sides of the door.

We waited, listening for the footsteps of someone coming to let us in. I turned the knob, unlocked, and pushed the door to find a dark, empty room. Nothing moved but me,
and I could see myself more shadow than reflection in the many mirrors, each framed in darkened bulbs that carried no light of their own, only the little bit that came from the hallway.

The voices we had heard were a little louder inside, and I saw why that was. The ducts overhead carried the sound, and we had been fooled by the echoes. The voices came from an unmarked door we had passed walking in.

When I pushed it open, I didn't see anybody at first. It was a storage room stacked with marquee letters as tall as we were. They were the same set used to spell the names of the trio of men—Nat, Oscar, Johnny—sitting in the corner on worn-out theater seats.

“Is that who I think it is?” Nat said when he saw me, his seat snapping closed behind him when he rose to his feet.

“Guess that depends on who's thinking,” I said. “And who's being thought of.”

“Good old Nat Weary.”

“Ol' Nat Cole.”

When the boys saw Mattie, they all stood.

“Mattie. It's been a long time, but the years have been more than kind,” Nat told her.

“And you as well.”

“It feels like a long time ago, but I guess everything before the war does now.”

It felt good to be remembered. They had come to
Montgomery in the fall of 1941, playing for the college's Autumn Ball. Mattie had wondered if he would remember. Four years was not a long time, but Nat was right about the wartime years. They made even the best memories seem that much further away.

The marks of their work covered their palms. Oscar's and Johnny's fingers were more calloused than mine had become after years of holding a rifle like it was my last friend in the world. Oscar had those long nails like the guitar players who worked every Saturday night on the Hill and down Jackson Street, and the shoulder of his jacket had creases from the leather strap. Johnny had the same marks in a different place, rubs along his lapel where the bass rested. Their suits were work clothes a shade lighter than my army green, but made from shiny thread that caught the same light the pomade on their heads did.

“Would it be too much to ask you gentlemen for a photograph?” Mattie lifted that camera when she asked them. The way she said “gentlemen,” with that lilt in her voice, made the word sound like the flick of her fingernail on crystal.

They were more than willing, but the light wasn't doing us any favors. Three fixtures dangled from the ceiling, barely fixtures at all, just sockets on the end of dusty cloth wires. We arranged ourselves, the five of us, in that little bit of dingy light. We would be halfway in the shadows no
matter where we stood in that storeroom, as far away from starlight as we could ever be.

“This won't do,” she told them, her chin up and her eyes on the slim little fixtures. “All that light across the hall going to waste.”

“I do say, ma'am. I believe you have a point,” Oscar said. Then he motioned to me. I was, after all, the one closest to the door. Mattie shrugged and lifted the camera again.

“They won't miss that little bit of light we borrow,” she said.

And with a look to see that no one was coming, we made our march a few steps across the hall to the dressing room that on most nights was home to the star of the show. I felt along the wall until I found the switch. When all that light pushed through the dressing room mirrors, we went with it. We didn't have to share that space with anyone other than our smiling reflections.

“Perfect.” Mattie placed us just so and then she stood in the middle, facing the mirror and holding the camera before her. She clicked three shots.

“There. Just like that,” she said.

Before I left for the army, Mattie had asked an odd promise of me. She didn't want letters. Just pictures. Her uncle had died in the First World War, and her grandmother held on to his letters, going over his words so many times that the paper got too old and raggedy to
read. The pictures were different. Her grandmother would never see his grave, Mattie told me, but she could see his face as he stood on a bridge near Lorraine, the last of the distant places he would see in his twenty-three years of living.

I kept that promise. All she knew of my time came through the little portraits of faraway countrysides spared from the bombing. She sent to me as much of home as she could get that lens on. I had missed her voice, which just then, with that camera in her hands, made the simplest requests: “Sweetheart, raise your chin for me. Oscar, turn this way a little bit, please. Thank you.”

“Just a few more,” she said.

“Take your time,” Nat told her.

I was tempted to ask her right then. I wondered how the engagement ring would look with all of that dressing room starlight passing through it.

“I got a ring,” I told Nat.

I said this just loud enough for only him to hear, once Mattie had moved back for a few wider pictures. Nat patted me on the shoulder as Mattie told us to look her way.

“We're headed to the Majestic after the show,” I said. “I was hoping you could sing something for us when you get back across town.”

“You waited long enough, my friend,” he said. “How about we start the show with the two of you? Sing your
song first in front of all of Montgomery. Be the envy of this little town.”

“Even better.”

“I'll stop the show. Then you'll know what to do next.”

I nodded and felt his words in my chest, where they sank in deep. Nat had transformed my little plan, stoking the fires of a wondrous notion.

I was there on Saint John Street when Nat Cole got his new middle name. Adams was out and in its place, King. We grew up in the little Bel-Air houses, all with green trim and white clapboard siding like they'd grown from the same handful of seed. Nat Cole lived on the end of the block, next to the lot we turned into our playground. Sometimes he played with us and sometimes he stayed home practicing on that front-room piano with the door and windows open.

In the middle of “I'll Fly Away” and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” Nat would work in a riff from the school yard hymns. The rope jumping and the marble shooting and the whatnot would stop, and he'd know it was on account of our listening and every so often singing along. The one that everybody knew was “Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he.”

He had a famous man's name before he was either
famous or a man. I could lie and say I knew where he was headed, but it would only be a half lie. His hands were suited for a star turn, but I figured it would come from that work he did on that makeshift diamond we called a ball field. We had no hind-catcher, just a tree stump with cans on top. Instead of hearing “Wade in the Water” and “I'm on My Way to Canaan Land,” anybody who saw Nat Cole on the mound heard the sound of that curveball catching the corner of a tin can. The sound of his strikes rang out like his music did.