Driving the King (7 page)

“Which way is it, the neighborhood?”

He asked as he stood facing the window with his hands on the back of the chair, rocking it on two legs while he looked at the Hill. I pointed toward Saint John Street, but we couldn't see any of the narrow shotgun houses, much lower than the trees. No landmarks outside of memory.

“My father's church?”

“On the west side. You can see the steeple. So many over there, it might be hard to tell which is which.”

“I learned to play here. That piano at the house. One at First Baptist, too,” he said. “Can hardly picture it, but this is where it was. I wonder if they changed out the pianos.”

“We can take a ride and see if you want.”

He didn't answer right off, his face had a look full of caution and maybe.

“What about the other one? The Empire piano. I'm sure it's right there still.”

He didn't ask about the direction of the theater. If he saw it in his head the same way I saw it in mine, we didn't need a window or map to find it. Thinking about that place put me right in the middle of it again.

“Crazy thing is, as far as theaters go it's beautiful,” he said. “Looks like the Palladium in London. A little bit smaller. One balcony instead of two. I wish the look of it was all I saw when I remembered it.”

“Tonight you'll be upstairs. It'll be different.”

He nodded, but there wasn't anything certain about it. Like he was making his head move, but his mind wasn't following.

“Sammy's singing ‘Route 66' in his Vegas show. That's where he had that car crash. He said singing about a road he almost died on takes the sting out of driving on it. I tried to write one about Alabama, but nothing worked. Maybe coming back might do the trick.”

He returned to the seat, the best and newest of the chairs in the building. When somebody came to that suite in a year or two and saw his name beside the door, they'd know that he'd sat there.

“I think about Montgomery and I don't hear any music.
I see a man with a pipe. You in prison. If I remember it like that, then I wonder if that's how the homefolk remember me.”

“This time tomorrow all they'll remember is the show. You can get last time off your back.”

“And yours?” he asked me.

“I let it go when I left here for California.”

It was a lie, but a lie meant for good. It might help him to think that one of us had let go of that evening. Remembering put it out front again and all around, big and bright as that light that blinded Nat to the man rushing the stage.

The third-floor suites gave the same views as the ballroom, so the people listening and drinking could walk around the place and see the whole city. My suite looked down on the alley where my brother's car was, back from his midday runs. His cab sat at the end of the line. A new paint job had the orange and the checkers shining, but it was the same car he'd driven me to the bus station in when I was off to the army, the same car he'd taken me and Mattie to the Empire in, the one he drove Skip out to Kilby to meet me in.

Every once in a while when I was out on the road crew, I saw a bright car on the highway. To see it was to dream about leaving. To have seen a spot of orange out on the highway fooled my heart into gladness, and sometimes I'd let my mind go along. And then the day finally came.

T
he day they let me out of Kilby, Dane drove me home with one hand on the wheel and the other on my shoulder. When we took the first turn out of the parking lot and through the gate, he held on like I was liable to fly through the window and tumble back inside again.

“You look good,” he said. And for good measure he said it twice more.

The access road curled through a pine grove before it hit the highway, so I had to see the prison once more as the road wrapped around the grounds and circled back toward Montgomery. I looked one last time, and let those walls and towers get small until I could close my eyes and let that be the end of Kilby.

By the time we got to Wetumpka Road, Dane finally let me loose and stretched his free hand along the seat behind me. He had let his beard grow in again. Every so often he'd shave and show up at the prison looking like he
was a teenager. Dane was a junior in high school when I went to war, and he had become grown in my absence. He had a picture of Eleanor and the kids pinned to the driver's side visor. That evening, I would meet my niece and nephew for the first time.

Yes I was free, but I was not home. Kilby was inside of Montgomery proper, so during those ten years I had never left my city. I didn't start to feel at home until we reached Jackson and High and the checkerboard paint of the cabstand. Most days my mother kept the window open so she could call the next driver to get a fare. Among the things I had hoped for in vain was that one day I would walk in and see her where she had always been, running the office, chatting with Miss Vee or whoever was in the seats across from her desk.

I started saying good-bye to my mother and father the day I got drafted, and I didn't stop until the bus to basic training was too far gone for me to see them. My leaving didn't have a bit of surprise in it. The last thing my mother said to me the night I went to Nat's show was that I looked nice and not to keep Mattie waiting, which I never did, but she told me just the same. The night I left for the show, the words were too quick. We spoke like people who expected to see each other again in a few hours' time.

It had come over her so fast, three days after our last
visit in the Kilby waiting room. My family had tried to get word to me, but in Kilby they told us our bad news when they felt like it, if at all.

I asked Dane about Pop.

“Better than he was.”

They said my father barely came inside the office. If he wasn't sitting in his car in the alley, he was sitting out at Lincoln Cemetery. Dane told me most of his customers were the folks with standing appointments at gravesides, new flowers or cleaning up a stone.

“He's better than he was.”

When we were children, we saw our father for a minute at a time on workdays, when he pulled up to get a new fare. A pit stop long enough to find out if we had finished our homework. In summer, he always asked if my luck against the curveball had gotten any better. He would come find us, too, and take his own reports, passing by the ball field or Tullibody High School when classes let out, fathering from the front seat of his car.

My first day home, he pulled up at the end of the taxi line. Pop was still driving his Hudson, and it sounded just as smooth as I remembered. That it had survived, looking as clean as it did when he bought it, meant something. I leaned down on his door, and he dropped his head on the steering wheel.

“Yes, indeed,” he said, like he did when Braddock and Schmeling fell, like he did when everything was right with the world. “Yes, indeed.”

If tears came, they brought no noise or heaving with them. He stuck his hand out the window and turned up his palm. And I grabbed him. My hands had forgotten the touch of my people, but it had come back in those hours. I held my father's hand tight, rocked it awhile.

“Have you been out there to see your mother?”

“No, sir. Not yet.”

“She'll rest better with you home.”

“I know she will.”

He brought his head off the steering wheel, and looked down the alley and then back and forth. Then he dropped his head once more, this time on my arm. His whiskers and glasses pressed into me. I stood against his taxi, as I had done so many times as a boy, handing him rolls of quarters and dimes and fare slips. My father's hands were leaner than they had once been. We had both aged more than we should have, and the only muscle left was the rugged kind that clung close to the bone. I couldn't tell his pulse from mine, and that was better than anything.

When we got to Lincoln Cemetery, my father backed up to the headstones and parked. Pop got out and opened
the trunk, and I followed him. I thought he was getting something out, but no, he had made a seat for us on the edge of the trunk. Though the air was cool and the daylight shorter, the empty trees let that low morning sun get through a little earlier, and it was warm enough to make sitting outside feel all right, or it would have if we were some other place, Riverside or Washington Park, anywhere but our family plot.

Some of the grass had faded. Maybe the patch where he always parked grew back slower than the rest. The caretaker had scattered dirt and sand on the bare spots, something for the Saint Augustine runners to grab hold of when the new grass came that spring. Coming down the gravel road we had passed fresh graves, red dirt and slabs, too soon for a stone. When I saw that place and thought of my mother, that raw feeling was all over me again.

Three graves broke the ground in our plot. Aunt Barbara and Uncle Walker had passed a few years apart, and they rested under a shared headstone, so my mother wasn't there alone. I had tried to reassure myself with those thoughts, six years of little eulogies every time I thought of her. That was the best I could do, because I couldn't be there. They had me in a field somewhere pulling vines on the day they brought her out to Lincoln. I had hoped that she would see me as a free man again. And
I would have been sitting next to her on the porch steps over in Bel-Air instead of sitting near her stone.

I had watched Kilby men die from grieving. They'd swing on a guard or grab hold of the fence. A man would climb as far as he could before the shot came and took him home on a bullet. Those boys just wanted to get back to their people, even if the dead family were the only ones they'd see. I'd thought about doing the same. With the sure-fire guards in the towers, I'd die quickly. What was left of me would have been brought to Lincoln and buried a few steps from where Pop and I sat.

One of his early fares, Mrs. Adair from our church, was still in the cemetery planting bulbs along the fence line. Her husband had been dead for twenty years.

“She didn't worry about you, because she knew you'd be all right when you got home. Said you'd get out a young man still with good years in front of you.”

He'd said it too many times for it to be true. She worried to her last day. Had I not done what I did, I would have been home with her. That was dangerous thinking, and she had even warned me about it herself. That first time she visited me, my mother told me that thinking like that was poison. I could tell she'd done her crying before she entered. She was dry-eyed when she spoke.

“You did exactly what you were meant to do. How would you feel if you hadn't? If those men had their way?” she'd said.

“Like the sorriest man in the world.”

“You're not that, Nathaniel. We both know.”

My mother and father had decided on our names after they read them in a pamphlet from a traveling preacher, Henry McNeal Turner, who had come through Hobson City to start a church. Our folks had a plot in Lincoln Cemetery, and people said Lincoln had freed the slaves, but that preacher talked about a few who had freed themselves, even if they died in the process. Nathaniel Turner. Denmark Vesey. Marie Angelique. They were among the names listed in two columns, like pallbearers carrying their own weight. My people had given us those names, expecting more from us than from the sorry world we were born into. Mama and Pop had been called by their first names all their lives, by adults and children. It galled them to the core. So they said fine. If people were set on calling us by our first names, they would call us by these. Any name-calling might summon something my parents had planted. Everything they gave us, from our names to our work, came from that idea.

“We bought a car,” my mother had said. “A taxicab. That new hotel they got going up on the Hill. People need to get there somehow.”

Mama announced this as my pop wiped a bit of red dust from the orange paint that made that secondhand ride look a little closer to brand-new. I couldn't have been more than seven, on one of our summer trips to stay with our family in Hobson City. I saw that first taxi when they came to the country to get us, driving the car through all that summer green with paint as bright as something ripe on a vine.

The paint was a shared idea. Mama thought orange would stand out. Pop was partial to houndstooth, like that stingy brim that was never far from his head. And the black cursive lettering.
CENTENNIAL HILL TAXI COMPANY
, as big as day.

My mother and father met working in a Hobson City carpentry mill. He was fifteen, and in all the working he had done before, that was his first time working for black folks. He made deliveries, on a wagon at first, and then with a truck. The first man to drive it ended up in a ditch, but my father managed to keep the truck on the lopsided roads of Calhoun County without turning it over, so he made decent money hauling pine to the shop and driving pews to the churches. He said that Methodists, Baptists, Garveyites, and Pentecostals all sat on the same grade of lumber that he delivered.

He kept the front seat clear of sawdust and pine tar in case he saw somebody walking along the road, especially the girl from the upholstery shop. He tied the hauling just so, leaving room enough for a few people to hop on the back, and she would always slide over to make room for one more. When my people left Hobson City for Montgomery, they made driving their business, shade-tree jitneys at the start. After they heard that a hotel was in the works on Centennial Hill, Mama and Pop made an enterprise out of what had started as goodwill.

My mother spent most of her time in the stand, but she drove her regulars. When I was inside Kilby, she never drove to visiting day with an empty car.
I couldn't imagine passing somebody on the road without stopping
. I saw her sometimes on my walks across the prison yard back to my cell. She'd make a day of it, circling back and forth with as many as needed a ride.

A couple years before, my father told me that they'd shut down the Hudson assembly line, so he held on to his car for as long as he could. The one we sat in now was not the first, but it had a good fifteen years on it. I heard the age of that car when he rose to his feet, the springs whining underneath us. He took a Thermos and a can of sweet milk from a box in the trunk, and then he picked up two
cups, good ones that I recognized from the dining room breakfront.

“Last time I had a decent cup of coffee was with you. We had to grind acorns. Pecans, too,” I said.

“Ain't enough sugar to make that go down.”

“What sugar?”

“Lord.”

After he poured two cups, he pulled spoons from the same box.

“I want you to stop talking about that place.”

I nodded, but he wasn't looking at me, just staring straight ahead.

“It's behind you. Been waiting years to say as much, so I'm saying it now. No more reason to speak on it.”

“I hear you.”

He brought his fist down on my hand and kneaded it.

“Besides, I want to hear about Los Angeles. We can sit down and mark a map before you leave.”

“Simple enough. Highway 80 to Route 66,” I said.

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

“The whole way out?”

“All the way to Los Angeles.”

“I've been to Shreveport,” he told me. “Past that, I can't do nothing but speculate.”

“I haven't seen a thing past Oklahoma.”

“You been to Belgium and France and all that.”

“That was different.”

“No it ain't.”

“I mean Los Angeles. I don't know a thing about it. Got to learn my way around is all.”

“Boom town. That's all it is. Like all that iron up under Birmingham. Big cities are just country-ass towns that got lucky. You'll learn to drive it like you learned this one. Ain't but two ways to drive. Keep straight or make your corner. I'm either right, or I'm wrong.”

“You're right.”

“Besides, Nat Cole could throw a rock and hit a man able to drive him. He wants you for that other thing. Ain't no map for that.”

Mrs. Adair had moved from the flower beds near the back fence, and made her way to the small cluster of shade trees across the clearing. The last time I had seen her was before the war, and she was elderly then. A line of graves carried her family name, with a handful of empty spaces left.

“I brought Ruby out every day this week. Told me she checked her almanac. First freeze coming next week sometime. I asked what she put down and she say she likes to mix it all up. Let it be a surprise come spring.”

She threw a hello in my direction, a garden trowel back and forth above her head. She lifted the garden hat for
good measure, showing that gold-and-red scarf wrapped around her hair. I waved right back.

“She told me she put down some of your mother's favorites. Tulips, like the ones she brought into the office a couple times. Of course your mother didn't care for tulips.”

“Anemones.”

“Yep. Blue ones if she could find them. Course, I told Mrs. Adair tulips were perfect, because your mother would have said likewise.”

He hadn't stopped stirring his coffee, though the spoon never touched the cup. He was as careful as always of scratching the bottom or chipping the mouth. My parents didn't get any china when they married, because their relations didn't have much beside well-wishes. The cups my father and I held were what my mother called her marriage china. Paid for in cash, a piece at a time. A new dish every so often when business was good, until they had a full set. Pop's stirring was habit more than thinking, because I could tell his mind had gone off somewhere.