Driving the King (5 page)

O
n that first time Warden Duggan stood before us, those fresh off the bus from Ripley Street jail, he said that a man had to get used to his time inside, so we would have no visitors for sixty days. By the time I sat in that visiting room waiting for Mattie, the January cold was blowing in from every which way. I had prayed I would never feel another winter like the one I'd had in Belgium the year before, but I had found one worse than Europe a few miles from home.

The visiting room was in the old denim factory. Blue lint still covered the rafters, and webs of it came down, shaken loose by the birds that nested up there. I could tell a man who'd just come from seeing his people, because the blue dust colored his shoulders.

The cold and my nerves together had set my hands to shaking, so I did all I could to calm myself, or to look calm at least. A man couldn't show such things inside Kilby's
walls, so I put my shaking hands tight against the plywood of the visiting stall. My feet had the worst of it, though. The cardboard soles of the brogans couldn't do much to keep me warm. But the cold killed the stench at least. When they'd handed me those shoes, they still smelled like the last man's feet.

I did all I could to look my best. I gave the laundry trusty a month's tobacco rations and a handful of starch clay I'd brought in from the road. He said he'd mix the starch with water and soak my collar before he put the iron on it. I wanted to make my creases right and bring a little bit of order to myself. As for my face, I had to make do. Regulations said a Kilby man had to be clean-shaven, but we weren't allowed to use razors. All I had was a wooden spatula, lye, and whatever I could find to cool the burn. No matter if we cut the lye with potato or mashed kudzu root, the paste took off as much skin as it did hair, and the slick scars on a man's face stayed with him. With no glass mirror, just a scratched bit of metal nailed to the wall, I shaved blind and trusted the sting to tell me my face was clean.

We got one shower a week, and a man expecting visitors took it on Saturday, trying to scrub off six days of funk in that two minutes between the water bells they rang. I used that same lye soap I shaved with. Even getting clean, cold water or not, felt like burning.

When Mattie walked in, I wanted to stand. Notions of what was right and proper, what a man would do out of courtesy or love, had to be forgotten in favor of the rules. I couldn't raise a hand or leave my seat in the visitors' room, so I lifted my head and came as close to a smile as I could.

She said my name, but it was more breath than voice.

Seeing Mattie sitting across from me was a new kind of pain. She put on a good face for me, but she clinched her hands so tight that the veins kept rolling. With all of that straining in her smile, she surely felt like I did every hour, Kilby troubling me down to the root.

She put her hands along the edge of the chicken wire, as much of a touch as they would let us have. With the gauge of the mesh as tight as it was, we could barely find space that didn't have a piece of that wire on our fingertips.

“We're doing everything to get you home,” she said, pushing a little harder.

“Just wanted to take you to a show. All I wanted.”

“When we get you out of here, we'll go somewhere. Maybe we'll stay for good.”

When she talked about getting me out, I smiled because I loved her and everything she was doing for me. But I knew full well nothing would open the Kilby gate before I'd done every day of my time.

“And you? What about you?” I asked her.

I knew the answer. I could see the strain in her face, and
the throbbing in her temple. That's what that prison did to anybody sitting where she was. Like everyone on that side of the visiting stalls, she wanted to be a rock. But a rock could do only so much. We had a prison yard full, and men spent their days busting them down to gravel.

“I'm holding on. Thinking about getting you home,” she said. “Dr. Burk gave me the rest of the term off. She wrote letters trying to get some lawyers down here. She met Charles Houston when he was down here for the Scottsboro trial. I wrote to William Lewis in Washington. He worked for President Roosevelt. Lots of people are working to get you out.”

I knew all about the Scottsboro Boys, and thinking about them made things worse. People had come from all over to help the nine of them, sent to prison on a bald-faced lie. One of them was still on my tier. His face was scarred where they'd shot him when he tried to escape. They couldn't give that man his years back, and they couldn't give him his right mind when Kilby broke him.

“They've been throwing soldiers in jail all over. People are talking, trying to get something done about it. We have good lawyers working. Doing all we can.”

That smile she gave me then. Something pieced back together.

“Tell them I said thank you,” I said.

“You don't have to thank anybody. You saved a man.”

The trembling in her fingertips had been calm for a while, and Mattie's hands were like every other woman's in that place, fingers pressed hard against the wire trying to squeeze what they could through. The families were too practiced in coming to Kilby on a Sunday morning, and they knew that place as well as they knew their front rooms and church pews, where they should have been come Sunday.

“They can't do this.”

“They already did, baby. I love you for fighting for me, but you need to get ready for them saying no. When they give a man ten years, they don't go back on it.”

I hated to watch her drop her head then, because I knew our time was short. Her fingers rolled against mine, and some of the ink remained from her fingerprinting, treating her like she was locked up, too.

“Couple days before the show. You were talking about going to Oakland and spending a little time with your sister after she had the baby.”

She was silent for a moment, looking away. A few months had passed since that talk, but it seemed like so much time and California so far away. The prison walls and a fence line made it only that much farther.

“What'd they name the baby?”

“Joshua. Just made a month old.”

“He's got a big head on him like his pop?”

“He'll grow into his head, I'm sure.”

“His pop's twenty-five, and he still hasn't grown into his yet.”

She had easiness in her face, and I wanted to remember it. I had nothing but dead years between right then and 1955.

“You just need to go and see your people. Get your mind off this for a while at least. Get on a train and see that baby. It does me good to know you're out in the world with your folks.”

“I can't get my mind off this. Not with you in here.”

“You still need to go see your people. Go back to work. Otherwise Kilby might take your years, too. You don't owe the state of Alabama any time. They got me for that.”

“Part of me wishes you'd killed him. We could have gotten you in a car and taken you somewhere.”

“Never been the type to run. You neither.” It was hard to talk to her without seeing things as they should have been. My mind went back and forth between that and what was around me.

“Go out there and hold that baby. Your sister could use a little rest.”

“They do as they please,” she said, rocking.

“Always have. But you—Go see your people and send my love. We'll talk when you get home.”

The fellow in the stall next to me wore one of those sad
little wedding rings the men made. Some dried piece of weed twisted around his finger. He couldn't have anything real, because the guards might take it, say it was a weapon. Some men had married the women sitting across from them in ceremonies at the little jailhouse church in the pine grove. That kind of marriage turned them all into widows. It was no kind of life. Mattie might as well be sitting by my headstone at Lincoln Cemetery. And what could I give her but empty years, a marriage on some old stools in the jailhouse visiting room. It could not be.

Mattie and I had been married once.

On a leave weekend from Camp Gruber, I met her at a boardinghouse in Muskogee. The sign on the front desk said they rented only to married folks, but all the soldiers knew they didn't ask for papers. It was wartime, and our uniforms were license enough. The man at the front desk turned the book around and read the name like he was Saint Peter.

“Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Weary. Welcome to Muskogee,” he said, and hearing it out loud made it sound closer to being true.

When we made it upstairs, Mattie took a bottle of what I smelled on her neck and sprayed it in that little room. The loving I had done as a young man had come in little stolen
places, listening for the sound of some girl's momma and daddy who might open a bedroom door. There was all that stealing time, biting my lip or hiding the sounds that wanted to bubble out with the rest of it. In that hotel, we had a good taste of full-grown loving behind a locked door in a good and wide bed. When we talked afterward, with Mattie's cheek close to my chest, we didn't need our voices, because the words went straight into skin. As long as I made it home from the war, that was how it would always be.

Behind the Kilby church stood four shacks in a row. If a prisoner was a good worker, and if the warden gave permission, a man and his wife could have a conjugal visit, half an hour twice a year. I spent a day on a crew that cleaned the pine straw from the shacks' roofs. Each building had two rooms, one where the guard sat and one with a small bed. The doorway had no door, and the windows had no draperies. They rationed husbands and wives to one another, turned what was private into a shame. Any guard strolling by could get an eyeful of what was meant to be hidden. And, Lord, did they stroll. A trusty told me, “You get used to it after a while. Can't do nothing else if it's all you got.”

They led the prisoners from the Sunday visiting room to the church. I was close enough to the parking lot to see Mattie and my sister, who had driven her. I was too far away to see their eyes and faces, but they were close enough to be in the same piece of shadow. And Mattie rested her head on Marie's shoulder, and that was the last I saw of them before I walked through that church door.

I had no choice but to sit in that prison sanctuary, but I did most of my churching in my head. I prayed that Mattie would be happy in her life without me, and I prayed that she would understand when I told her not to come back. When I stopped sending letters. I wouldn't send any more dead man's words, talking about a love I couldn't bring to her door. I couldn't be anybody's man but Kilby's.

E
very other Sunday. Fifteen minutes and no more. I was allowed one visitor at a time. That was all I got of my family for nine years and seven months. It was the third Sunday in June, and I walked into the visiting room, looking for my brother sitting in the stall. A stranger sat in his place. When I'd walked across the yard from my block, I'd seen Dane's cab turn off the road, so he must have driven the man who was watching me as I walked to my seat.

It had been seven years since my last visit from a stranger, the last of the lawyers who had tried mightily. After that I told my family to understand that hope had no place in Kilby. I no longer lived for the day when I would go free. I lived for the odd Sunday when I could see my people, if only through the rusted-out wires. If prison had taught me anything, it was to let my face say nothing. So the stranger did not see my disappointment. I had learned to stop craving anything from the world, except for my
people. With him in my brother's place, it would be another thirteen days before I saw family again.

This stranger had a mark across his forehead left from a hat he wore a little bit cocked. He had a brand-new shave. That was something I missed, living someplace where I could lean back, close my eyes, and trust a man to put a razor to my neck.

“Morning, Mr. Weary. Augustine Tate. They call me Skip.”

He rolled his hands along the counter like they held an offering. Some fingers were straighter than others, and that, along with the line of his nose, told me that he had been a fighter. From the gray and wrinkles he carried along his head and his face, it seemed that his fighting days were years behind.

I nodded, but I said nothing, figuring whatever he had to say he'd get to.

“Sorry to take your family time, but I came to talk business.”

“I got no business.”

“Well, Mr. Weary—”

“Don't call me mister. No good getting used to it in here.”

“No, sir. I'll call you Mr. Weary. I owe you that much. Wasn't for you I wouldn't have a job. See, I work for Nat Cole. He sent me to talk to you.”

I had not heard that name in so long. Nat had sent letters, asking about lawyers and legal bills and whatnot. He was like all the rest of the folks who meant well and thought that something could be done. I told my people to tell him no. He didn't owe me a thing. All he did was mind his business.

“Wasn't for you, I might not have a job,” he said. “I'm his driver and his bodyguard.”

“You can't do much guarding sitting right here.”

“You're right, Mr. Weary. We're thinking ahead, getting something lined up for a few months from now. He needs to have one more man he can trust, and your name's top of his list.”

“Long way to come to hire a man.”

“A man we can be certain of. Every Negro singer in America knows what happened to Nat Cole in Alabama. They started hiring prizefighters and gangsters and ex-cons to do what you did. Stand in there if the time comes. You put more folk to work than Roosevelt.”

He had meant it as humor. But those reflexes, the laughing and smiling, I didn't use much anymore. So all I could muster was a nod.

“The thing is, Mr. Weary—”

“Just call me Weary.”

“Weary, you can pay an army of fighters and the like, but you never really know what somebody's liable to do
until it's time. Except for you, of course. We know exactly what Nathaniel Weary will do.”

“Like I said, I did what I had to.”

“No. You could have watched him get his head knocked in.”

The sound of a guard turning a window crank interrupted us. The blue cobwebs fell, and I would have thought that during my time inside the last of it would have rained down already. Some of the dust fell on Augustine Tate, who wore the clothes meant for better places, like the Los Angeles he spoke about, where looking respectable meant something. I could not see myself in Los Angeles, because my eyes had dimmed to such things.

“You can tell Nat that me being in here ain't his doing. Appreciate the gesture but—”

“It ain't just gratitude behind all this, Weary. Nat's got a television show that starts this fall. They wanted to whale on him for being onstage, imagine when he's sitting in everybody's living room? He sent me to make an offer, and to listen to you say yes.”

“I got a job waiting for me here.”

“I talked to your brother. Told me an ex-con can't get a taxi shield. Best you can do is be some shade-tree mechanic.”

“I don't need a license to pump gas.”

The look on his face then. Like he'd just heard the
sorriest thing a man could say, but I didn't care. I had to stop yearning for the world. There was no place left for ambition. So after all those hollowed-out years, pumping gas in a filling station five miles from Kilby was dream enough. It was damn near heaven.

“You got better waiting for you, Weary.”

“Better than prison? Tell me what ain't.”

“You're right. If I was in here, suspect I'd feel the same.”

He took two cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lifted them in his hand as he looked toward the guard. The screw walked over.

“Hope you got a third one,” I told him. “Got to pay your tithes in here.”

Skip turned toward him, and the guard motioned for him to lay them on the countertop. He looked back at me and shrugged. Pulled one more cigarette so the guard got his, too.

“Tithes my ass,” he said, low enough for me to hear. “This here is usury. The Lord only takes ten percent.”

He smiled then, and passed a lit cigarette through the wire.

“You didn't ask how much money you'll be making, Weary.”

“Seems I didn't.”

“Three hundred dollars a week. Once the TV money comes in probably more. It won't give years back to you,
but it's something. Put some miles between you and Alabama. See a little piece of the world.”

The tobacco was sweet and strong. I was used to smoking what came from the prison farm at Limestone. No sooner than that good tobacco went through me, I could feel the possibilities. An old part of my mind had opened once again. Skip spoke of life in Los Angeles. While he talked my mind went there. I saw myself on unknown streets, better than that yard dust I walked across every day.

The guard had lit his cigarette, and no sooner than he'd filled his lungs, he emptied them, coughing behind us. I was facing him, and knew better than to look his way. Skip smiled.

“Cuban squares. Stronger than most. Smoke got the drop on him.”

I didn't nod or smile. I just let it be one of those agreed-upon things without a word or gesture. Shaming a guard came at a cost, and my time was too short for such.

“Just so you know, Weary. This wasn't automatic. I told Nat I'd take a look. Told him maybe Kilby got the best of you. But I can see that ain't the case.”

Truth be told, I had damn near lost my mind more than once. It was so easy for my mind to find better places, but coming back to this world was harder each time.

“I don't know a thing about Los Angeles.”

“You didn't know anything about killing Nazis, and that worked out all right.”

He had offered a job with the most famous Negro in America. Jackie Robinson had retired, and every team had at least one of us. The television networks had none. Being famous had a cost for Nat Cole. A bullet through a window. The IRS trying to take his house. All manner of things in the mailbox. Skip had begun to walk the Coles' property at night, and he needed a day man to take on the driving.

He talked with his hands and needed more room than he had. He drove home each point with his finger into the plywood tabletop. Though his voice barely moved above a whisper, his hands made up for it. Every so often, he made fists. Always the left hand first and then the right.

“I imagine the world's going to be strange to you anyhow. Might as well let it be strange somewhere new. You got a friend in Los Angeles looking out for you. And in a few months you'll be looking out for him in return. Think it over.”

“No,” I told him. “I did all my thinking just now. Tell him I said thank you and yes.”

That was the first time I had said such—thank you and yes—and meant it in all those years. I said as much to the guards all the time.
Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.
But it was no
different than the knife I kept hidden sideways beneath my belt. A tool to keep living, even if life in there wasn't about much.

“Just got one more question. Like I said, everybody heard about the fellow who whipped the man who tried to whip Nat Cole. But, you know people tell a good story and sometimes they add their own gravy. So you never know how it happened. What kind of horn did you beat that man with? Some said a trumpet, and some say a trombone.”

“I used a microphone.”

“I asked Nat, and he wouldn't say. Said you never correct somebody's legend.”

Skip rose to leave. He was a good six inches taller than me. Splinters of plywood had caught in his gabardine, and he brushed them to the floor with the ash and dust.

“What's Nat riding in?” I asked.

“Cadillac limousine. Until they come up with something better.”

As Skip fell in with the line of leaving visitors, I allowed myself to see a better future. Pumping octane at the station my sister and brother-in-law owned was too humble. I saw myself driving through Los Angeles in a car longer than my cell, and it had already become real.

As soon as my visiting time was through, I walked across the yard to the church. My brother stood by his cab, looking at me. I moved slowly, trying to hold on to my
freest minutes as long as I could. We were not allowed to wave at anyone beyond the fence line. The guards in the tower might think we were signaling, a prison break in the works, and that was reason enough to shoot somebody dead. In five months the gate would open for me to leave that place. Augustine Tate had given me a taste of the free-side world. When I closed my eyes in that prison church, I paid no mind to the chaplain, I took a little trip to the place that waited for me when I got out.