Driving the King (17 page)

W
hen I got my sister on the phone Marie had to raise her voice on account of the music, so she moved to another room. She asked someone to hang up the phone when she got there. Marie's voice came back,
I got it
and
thanks
, and that front room phone went back on its cradle, and half the party noise went quiet. That bedroom door creaked enough to hear her closing it, and the rest of the noise that had followed her down the hallway went quiet as well.

“So Dane tells me you met a woman out there. Happy to hear. Of course I wanted to hear in person, but it's good to hear your voice at least,” Marie said.

“Every time I call it just rings and rings.”

“We're careful about answering. The crank calls don't stop. People never set foot on a bus still mad we don't ride. Some of the nastiest gutter talk you'll ever hear. One said he'd kill me dead. I never understood why people say that.
Silly when you think about it. If they kill me, what else would I be besides dead?”

“Don't make light of it, though.”

“Got to do something, otherwise we'll all go crazy.”

“So that's why you're having a party on a Thursday night,” I told her.

“It's a bail party.”

“This connection must be bad, because—”

“Bail party. We're going to jail tomorrow, and by we I mean anybody who ran a carpool. Police want to round us up, but we decided we'd go early. Catch them by surprise before they come looking.”

I wished she'd stayed in her party then, because the back room sounded lonely. Hearing her talk about Ripley Street jail in a quiet, empty place made it feel like she was already there. People were quick to say jail and prison were two different places, but that's a distinction folks make when they have never been to either.

“They just want to scare you,” I said.

“They did, but we're all scared together.”

I grew up hearing that steady line of her voice. I missed that dearly when she waivered, from bad news or grieving or tiredness. She was quiet for a little too long, but I didn't hear any crying. That breath, in and out, filled the receiver. Marie told me the walking wasn't the problem,
and neither were the rides. It was the worry about what might come next.

“I think about that place, and I remember the last time I went. Couldn't even get close enough to see you when they took you,” she said.

“Once you post bail you'll be in and out. Just like me, I'm out here.”

“We're meeting at the Centennial lobby in the morning, so we'll be together at least. The women from the Council say we should call it progress. The city's losing money and the mayor's desperate. I'll try to call it progress, but I can't until I'm home.”

“Like I said, in and out.”

“We had a seminar the other night. What to do when you get booked. Taking a little tissue paper in our pockets. Leave our wedding rings and things at home. Strange, Nathaniel. In a Sunday school classroom studying how to go to jail.”

“You'll be all right. Do what they told you, and you'll be out in a few hours. They'll drag it out, try to make you sweat, but you'll be fine.”

She opened the door then, and that music came back in and kept her company.

“You're the disc jockey for our little set. The records came in the mail yesterday, so everybody told me to tell you hello and thank you.”

“The new songs won't be out until Tuesday, so you all got a jump on folks.”

“Good to be first, ain't it? You were there when he made them?”

“A couple. I got two by Nancy Wilson, because she has Dane's nose a little bit open.”

“Yours, too, probably.”

That bit of music just then was familiar, but it didn't come from the Capitol stack I'd sent to them.

“I heard that boy a few months ago. Dale Cook.”

“That must be his brother or something, because this one's Sam. Whoever he is, they're about to wear out my needle, if the belt doesn't break first.”

“I'll put some money in the mail. If I'm listening to your bail party records I might as well kick in. If I was there I'd buy some bourbon for the cause so you'd know I was committed.”

“Committed means crazy.”

“Nothing wrong with crazy as long as I have some company. Me and you can stay crazy together. Just be careful tomorrow.”

“I will, love. Anyway somebody's about to take the phone from me. Itching to talk to you.”

He took the seat that Marie left. That wood creaked along with that sigh of his. I heard my father before he said a word to me.

“How's the car running?” he said.

“Fine. So they got you in the middle of the bail party, too.”

“Damndest thing I've ever seen. You know your brother's getting arrested, too. He's at the barbershop. They got a line out the door with folks going to jail tomorrow.”

“Your son wants to look sharp for his mug shot. That's how it's supposed to be. Act like they're happy to be there, then nobody will get scared off.”

“As of tomorrow all of my kids will have been down to that jail. I'm proud of every one of y'all. If you raise hell then we brought you up right.”

Marie had switched out the old records to her new ones. An instrumental started then, and the lone voice was my father's baritone that he'd dropped to a whisper.

“E. D. Nixon pulled me aside the other week and told me he needed a favor. A big favor done in a hurry. Asked me to drive a fellow named Rustin out of town in the trunk of my car. You hear me? In my trunk. Not the taxi, my Sunday car. They said he's an organizer up north. Union man, he said. Me and Nixon go back, so I said yes. I figured we'd get a few miles out and I could let him out, put him in the front seat, but the fellow said no. Part of the discipline, he told me. The minute we relax and talk is the minute a trooper rolls up.”

“That won't get you anywhere good.”

“No, sir. We got to where he was going, and I opened the trunk. He shook my hand, said thank you, and he was in the wind. Would have liked to talk to him, you know, be hospitable. Told me he respected the courtesy, but it was a discipline thing. Can't argue with that, especially coming from a man ready to ride in the trunk of a car for that long. That's why I'm glad I took the Lincoln. If we couldn't have a decent conversation, at least I could give the man a little more room. The things that people have to do.”

“You might as well be in it, if that's how you raised us.”

“I know, but they told me I can't keep my pistol under my seat if I drive a carpool. Defeats the point of having a gun if you ain't carrying when folks act a fool. I'm not in charge, though. I'll leave it to your brother and sister and the rest. I can fix the ride cars and be good with that.”

“That sounds like plenty.”

“How's that car running?”

“I told you, it's fine.”

“Just fine?”

“Better than fine. Wonderful.”

“Your sister and Pete put some hours in that car before you came home. Me, too.”

“And I appreciate you for it. Car's running pretty good, Pop.”

“Just pretty good?”

“Better than good, then. I told you, Pop. It's fine. Quit your worrying.”

“Like you don't.”

“I'll take care of mine out here, and you look after everybody back home.”

“I'll be out in front of Ripley Street when they make bail, don't worry.”

It was for the better that they had a party, because they wouldn't sleep well. I lost sleep the night before I went to Ripley Street, but it wasn't on account of knowing what would happen. I had just figured wrong. I expected that day to change things, but I was dead wrong about how.

DAY OF THE SHOW

4:30 P.M.

I
had to take that ride out to Kilby. My father had told me to stop talking about that place, but I had made promises. I needed to keep it on my mind for a little while longer. After marching through Europe with Pritchett and George and Bone, I had promised them a show whether they were alive to see it or not. They weren't the only ones, though. I had also marched on the roads around Kilby Prison with more boys than I could name. If anybody needed a show it was them.

I remembered Nat's father at First Baptist. He ministered to the sick and shut-in, and on First Sunday afternoons he took communion to the homebound and ended his route with the folks in our neighborhood. He took his
church on the road and brought them all a little taste of it like you might bring somebody a foil-covered plate of something still warm. I wanted to do the same for my Kilby gang, take them a little bit of that show they'd never get to see.

“I'm hoping you might take a little ride with me,” I said. “I told some of the boys at Kilby I was going to work for you. Some believed me and some didn't. They been in there so long they don't know who you are. Never seen a television. All they know is that wall. I want to go show my face. I want them to see yours, too.”

He nodded and got his coat and put that houndstooth on his head. With that we were gone to Kilby. I felt every mile of that drive as though the prison road were on top of me, pulled a little tighter across my gut the closer I got to the gate. It was a hard labor camp, and everything was work. Breathing was work. Keeping my mind right was work. So was calming the shake in my fingers on the steering wheel and the tremble of my foot on the gas. It was a fight. My body was asking why my mind saw fit to go back there.

Nat saw it for the first time.

“The one who attacked me. Was he out here?”

“He went to the cattle ranch. They got boys working a spread near the Mississippi line.”

“How much time?”

“Three years.”

“He's out in this world now, just like us.”

The ranch was probably better work than Nat's attacker had ever had. I could hardly call the cattle ranch a prison. They were more cowboys than prisoners. I had heard about their steak dinners, and I hoped it was a lie, but envy will make a mind believe all manner of things. Children pretend they are cowboys, but I was yet to see any child pretend like he was on a road gang.

I drove slowly when I passed the first of the road crews stacking dead trees for burning. With so many gangs out, it was no telling who was who. I looked for the vertical stripes of the trusty, so I could find Polk. I had the window down, too, in case I heard him before I saw him. Three miles past the Kilby gate I caught his voice. The way he dragged out a holler told me it was Polk. Those work songs made me ill, and I didn't know a man who liked them. The only worthwhile reason to holler one was that I had some kindred to sing them with.

I pulled off the road slowly, and the two guards had already turned to watch my car. I got out carefully and took my time with my walk. Coming toward that first guard, I needed to let him know all was well. I carried a folded map in one hand, and the other hand was outstretched for a little friendly wave. I touched my hat.

A Kilby guard is a simple man. The curious type wouldn't work in a place like that, at least not for long. I
answered their questions without saying a word, showed them what they already believed about me. I was a Negro driver of a long black car, looking for directions. The sun had found a seam, and it left a wall of glare on my windshield. The backseat was covered with shadow, so my passenger was unseen except for the one their simple minds put there. They surely thought I worked for a white man, and they would hesitate before messing with his driver. The longest ride they'd seen a Negro in was a paddy wagon or a hearse.

“Afternoon. My boss needs to get up to Wetumpka Road, and I got myself turned around.”

I could tell the guard had been in the service. Most of them had. He was too young for my war, but maybe Korea. He wore his uniform sharp, as he'd been taught in the military. His new service as a Kilby guard didn't call for all that, and he'd learn in time. Before too long he would be as sloppy as his partner was, pocket flaps on his uniform curled up and wrinkled and his button line raggedy and an inch out of line with his belt buckle.

I bet he was a good shot, though. They all were.

The guard closest to me looked at my hands before my face, making sure he could see what I carried. The map was folded to the plot of land we stood on. In the same hand I carried a pack of cigarettes, an offering in exchange for his help.

“The new road ain't on this map. Turn around. Right at the fork up to Highway Nine.”

He took two Kools, and then he took two more. He'd been in the Navy. The name of his ship was on the lighter he returned to his pocket as he breathed out the smoke.

“Menthol,” he said and shook his head.

I got a good long look at the gang in the patch and saw three men I knew. Five were new boys in brand-new uniforms who must have come over from the boys' camp at Mount Meigs. They might have been sixteen if that and working their first Christmas on Kilby farm. A lot of boys thought about running that time of year. You were a fool if you didn't think about running and a bigger one if you tried.

The second guard carried his tobacco in his jaw, not a fistful like some of them chewed on, but a neat, tight bit he kept packing down with his tongue. I could trace his steps with his spit, gravel turned chaw-colored and the rocks mortared together in places with the juice and bits.

A small pine tree rested near the gravel's edge. The bottom cut was raggedy from the half-dull saws with too much tree sap and dust in the teeth. The guards would send a man after any midget pine tree, something to take home to his living room or sell for a dollar.

“You and your man got your directions. I guess y'all can get back on the road then,” he said, handing the map back to me.

“Of course, I wouldn't leave without saying thank you and good afternoon, gentlemen.”

One of the hardest jobs I ever had was smiling in a guard's face, but I needed to get close enough for the boys to be sure it was me. I'd come back like I told them, and somebody would tell it right.

God as my witness. I'd put my last dollar on it if I had a dollar left. Nat Weary was out on that road in a Packard with rock candy paint that was so smooth the dirt didn't have nowhere to grab hold.

The song Polk sang had a merciful time, slow enough for the boys to get a little rest without stopping. He leaned his shovel and kept the count, rocking that root loose on the downbeat. The year I'd been gone had passed over his face two- or threefold. The only clocks that moved quickly in Kilby were the ones that sped through our visiting time and the ones that aged us. Polk's crow's-feet were as deep as his scars. He squinted some, trying to see who I was.

The weather was cool at least, but December was too early for a freeze. The ground got stingy in the deepest part of winter, fighting a shovel, bending weak metal or a too-thin handle. But the dirt still had some give left. Still, watching them pull, I could feel the spread of my bones and the pull in my muscles, neither enough to get that root free.

Polk leaned into that shovel one more time and he
looked over at me, I nodded toward the car and he worked a chuckle into that song. He had never called me a liar, but I knew how it sounded when I told him before I left Kilby.

Got a job in California driving Nat Cole.

Got me a job, too. Joe Louis bought himself a jet plane, and he told me I could fly him.

Where to?

The moon first, and then on the way back we might stop in Cincinnati to see this girl I used to know. Get a bite to eat. A hot sandwich somewhere.

I'm not lying, though. That's where I'm going.

I know, Showstopper. That's why we gave you that name. Bring ol' Nat Cole by next time you come to town. Stop by the store and bring some cigarettes.

What kind?

Shit, man. The kind they sell at a store.

Once the guards turned away, I tossed the cigarette pack in the bit of tall grass just off the road. Polk saw, gave me that little nod we all gave in case the guards were watching, barely a nod at all. I couldn't give the boys a show, but they could smoke better. It was damn near Christmas, so a man could at least smoke some tobacco that didn't taste like the dirt it was pulled from.

The gravel under my shoes might have been the same rocks I had to carry in buckets way back when, and hearing the crush of them as I walked to the car was as bad as
hearing those work songs. Nat by then had eased across the seat toward the near-side window. I told him to let the boys see him one good time. I figured that was as much show as we could give them. We sat for a moment before I started the engine, and Polk's work call got a little louder.

“This. Ten years of it,” Nat said. He had learned to hide his anger just like we helped him hide that mail. People were used to that smooth croon when he opened his mouth. The other voice he kept away from the cameras and microphones. In the car, he didn't hide it.

“Ten years for giving that man what he had coming.”

I nodded. “But I'm gone now. Last time I'll see the place.”

I eased off the shoulder and onto the road, but I stopped by the guards so they could see who I carried. He stuck his head out of the window.

“I want to thank you, gentlemen,” Nat said, looking at the guards but with his head tilted toward the men in that field. Lord, didn't his voice carry.

We drove about a quarter mile farther, and when the road widened I turned the car around, sending dust and rocks in a swirl behind us. Nat had his head turned to a group of boys near the shoulder. They looked like youngsters from the boys' camp cutting more pines for Christmas. The teenagers worked as trusties for the children who held armloads of pine branches for somebody's garland.

“All that time for a fight,” he told me.

“Don't ever think I'm sorry for what I did. Your fingers. Your jaw. Your face. He would have smashed everything he could.”

“I think about that night every time I get onstage. The ones who send the mail talk about it, say they'll get me again.”

“They got to come for us first.”

I drove a little faster then and turned up the radio, moving fast and thinking about the steps it took to cover the miles my gas foot pushed behind us.

“We never talked about it. How it felt when you put him on the ground.”

“I guess I felt like you feel when you stand onstage. I understand why somebody wants that all the time. I'd do all I could to keep that feeling.”

“That's the problem, Weary. I get that itch, and then I'm supposed to get humble, down-in-the-gutter humble, and forget they told me I was a star. I come off a stage with that fire running through me, and then I'm supposed to act like it's gone.”

“To hell with it. Can't let anybody take that.”

“They keep trying though, don't they? Not with a pipe, but they keep on.”

“To hell with trying. It's the rest of it. What they do.”

On the college station, George Worthy had started his
afternoon show with Nat's records, and the same secret that had been written across the Centennial's marquee was being told to anybody listening.

“My friends, the rumors you heard are true, tonight and tonight only . . . Montgomery's Very Own Nat King Cole. If you cannot make it to the Centennial then pull up a seat downstairs at the Majestic, or in your living room, because we will be broadcasting live. Get comfortable. Fix yourself a drink. We'll be playing nothing but Nat Cole from now until then.”

When we passed my crew again, I wanted to give them a song. So I slowed down, let the engine dip just underneath the music so the boys heard a little something. No matter how slow I drove, they would get only a line or two of the record. We never got a whole song from a car passing on the road. A few bars. A hook maybe. The boys in the weed patch would make do with that much, just like those scraps of things they found on the roadside. A pop bottle turned into a still. A bit of metal from an undercarriage for a knife. A piece of copper wire to turn into a bootleg radio to catch some music when the wind and clouds favored us with a signal. If not, the men would piece together a story, make the show up from scratch.

We were out in the weed patch today and we saw Nat Cole riding in a Packard
.
I swear on the Bible Jesus carried that his driver was old Nat Weary.

Some days Nat wanted music on the car radio, and some days he didn't. I had always wondered how a singer who'd sold millions of records felt about hearing his own on the air. I imagine that it was a different kind of listening. I never asked him to explain. Besides, he didn't seem to hear it. He was turned all the way around looking out the back window then.

“The cigarettes you dropped. They'll find them?”

“Polk saw me. He'll get the word out.”

“How many packs in the glove box?”

“Half dozen or so. I got a carton under the seat, too.”

I gave him every pack, and when we'd rounded a corner, beyond sight of the road guards and the towers, Nat started throwing while his music played. The notes on the radio came from the hands that, thirty years before, threw curveballs, shot marbles, and skipped rocks. He was still a good shot, throwing menthol boxes along the prison road and finding the tallest clusters of chickweed where nobody would find what we'd left unless he knew to look.

“Do you remember that song, Weary? That last one they were singing.”

“Yes.”

“Who's Hannah?”

“She's the sun. They're asking her not to rise. That way it'll be over tomorrow.”