Driving the King (12 page)

G
ot a call from your reporter friend last week. Said her name was Lomax,” Marie said.

“I was supposed to call you first. I intended to. You were nice to her I hope.”

“When have I not been nice? So I need a stranger to remind my brother he has people back here who want to hear from him every once in a while?”

Marie's voice came from a familiar place. She and Pete had moved in with my father a few years back. Her children made the same noise we had in those rooms. The echoes didn't change.

“As much as I call, I never catch you at home. How are you, dear heart?”

“Fine. It's not hard to keep busy, so I do.”

“That's the best thing to be.”

Every so often the house on the other end went quiet. Marie must have placed a hand over the receiver while she
corrected the children. The room would be quieter when she spoke again. I didn't mind a bit of noise, though. It saved me the trouble of asking if the kids were fine, since I heard for myself.

“Nat Cole from up the street on television. And you out there with him. Folks are talking about it. Next best thing to a real show.”

“What you think?”

“You know I could listen to that man forever. I'll have to miss the next one. We have a meeting Monday night about the busses. They arrested another woman on the City Lines. A seamstress at Montgomery Fair. Yesterday. Took her to jail right in front of her job.”

“They hurt her?”

“People who saw it said no. Your friend Mrs. Lomax wanted a phone call when something happened. And it just did.”

Montgomery Fair was just across from the Court Square Fountain, where the biggest Christmas tree in Alabama was always lit the Friday after Thanksgiving. The bell ringers were out, and Santa Claus had a throne set up in the front lobby, with lines of white children wrapped around the place. Half the downtown busses had stops at Court Square, so there might have been as many people waiting for the bus as riding it. When they arrested Rosa Parks, half of Montgomery was probably downtown.

When I drove in college, I'd circle the fountain looking for fares every Friday, weaving in and out of those busses. They kept up a racket, with every piece of loose metal rattling on the Court Square cobblestones. A cab was more money, but for some folks it was worth it, because the busses never had enough back seats. So a Negro rider might wait an hour just for standing room. The folks waiting downtown tried to look dignified when the drivers treated them any kind of way. Maybe it was worth the extra money of taxi fare. Taking a private ride with us was insurance against insult and embarrassment on the City Lines in the busiest part of town.

“We told everybody to stop riding tomorrow.”

I knew plenty of people who had sworn off the City Lines, but it was hard to imagine everybody doing so at once.

“I'm more relieved than anything. Been planning for a while, and now it's here. Maybe it's wrong to say I'm excited, because I didn't have to go down to jail. It's just about time, that's all.”

“You all need to be careful.”

“Too late for careful,” she said. “Me and Pete volunteered to run a carpool out of the lot.”

“Like I said, be careful.”

“So you told me. Been tiptoeing around this sorry town all these years and got squat to show for it.”

That house was half-filled with our old furniture and some good, sturdy pieces she and Pete had built and covered. Two of the old living room chairs sat in front of shelves of books and records. Marie and Pete had me over before I left, and I'd drank plenty of their gin. Those chairs flanked the brass telephone table. Since she knew phone numbers by heart, she didn't need her phone book. Instead, it doubled as a coaster, and the sweat rings from the tumblers had changed the yellow of the cover to some shade of gold.

“What did he sing?”

When I told her the four songs, she hummed the first line or two of each. “I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face” sounded good coming through the phone.

“Can't understand why it's fifteen minutes. Milton Berle's got the whole hour.”

“Milton Berle's got a sponsor.”

“Well, if I can't hear Nat Cole from up the street on television, then I'll hear him tonight. Hold on.”

Her voice changed, moving around when she shifted that phone on her shoulder. The albums were alphabetized, a chore for the children they turned into a game. The “C” section stood upright between a set of cast-iron jacks, and it had every one of Nat's albums along with Ray Charles and Ida Cox.

When I had been there with them, I'd put some hours
into listening on that hi-fi, sitting in that very chair, staring into the speakers, because what came out was clearer than anything I had ever heard. Some were on the charts and some years old, but they were new to me, like the needle had hit the vinyl while it was still warm from the press. I had left a few dimes for the children, pay for rearranging the records, so when my sister reached for an album, she knew exactly where it was.

“No ‘Christmas Song'?”

“Two weeks from tomorrow. He's saving it.”

And no sooner than I said as much did the swell of those strings come up.

“I can't wait two weeks to hear my song. After the weekend we had down here, two weeks seems like forever. No business waiting for my show and crying about missing it. I can hear it right now.”

“Crazy thing is I'll never see it on television.”

“You won't miss a thing. You'll be in the room when he's making it. That's a show on top of a show.”

Marie swirled that ice in her glass.

“I'm supposed to be at the gas station early. Watch the bus stop across the street to see how many get on. It's Monday, too. So the laundry girls will be waiting for that five o'clock bus. We got rides ready to go. The Lord may find it peculiar, but we'll all be praying for empty busses. Dirty smoke and squeaking doors and all the rest.”

Sometimes I was glad to be rid of my hometown, but leaving and forgetting are nowhere close to being the same. I thought about home when Marie covered the phone and said good night to the kids. Her fingers weren't enough to muffle my name, Uncle Nathaniel, as they told her to tell me good night. And even if a part of me hated that place, my people were in the middle of it.

“I told your friend to keep my name out of the paper. I could put her in touch with—with the executive committee.”

“You can say her name. I won't fall to pieces hearing you say something about Mattie. She's your friend.”

“You know, when that reporter called, knowing your name and everything, I thought she was your friend. Your
friend
friend.”

“Mrs. Lomax. That means married. With a bunch of kids.”

“She told me that, too. Not her then, but somebody, eventually.”

“I'm out here making Los Angeles feel like home. Turning strangers into friends.”

“I'm talking about finding one somebody.”

Truth was, I found me a few somebodies, just like I had at Mama Nonie's. Los Angeles was a place full of strangers, and I made the most of it. I could be a brand-new man every other night or so. Let a woman call me by a
borrowed name. It didn't matter that she forgot it as soon as I was dressed and gone, because I forgot hers as well. The part of my mind where I did my loving and remembering had been cut back to the root. It would come back, eventually, but until then all I could handle was the skin-deep loving that I paid good money for.

“Everything's fine. If not, it will be eventually,” I told her.

“That shows what kind of kin we are, dear heart. That's my resolution. Not just New Year's but from here on out. Make everything fine sooner or later.”

She was right about us being kindred as much in spirit as in blood. I drank some of the same liquor she and Pete had toasted me with before I left for California. And sitting there by my lonesome, I listened to the same music she had spinning back home.

B
eing the driver of a Capitol Records star meant I could take a seat in the Studio A lounge in the back row of seats behind the audio board. At the first of Nat's December sessions, a ten-minute break had stretched to half an hour on account of the squeak an engineer heard coming from one of the orchestra's chairs. A stray noise could kill a song as fast as a scratch ruined vinyl. Nat's engineer wore his headphones, listening as a maintenance man went down the rows and tested chairs with his weight. Each time Manny shook his head, the fellow moved on to the next one.

The folks from duplication made copies of the scores for the band, and they had come down from the fifth floor with a few handfuls of music changes. That was my first time seeing the two Negro transcriptionists, a woman and a man. As a general rule, I nodded to the other black folks in the place, whether I knew them or not. Nothing wrong
with having a little company. Johnny Mercer sang about enough of us before he built Capitol, so it stood to reason that he should hire a few.

The two of them passed sheet music along the rows nearest to me. The man nodded my way, and even though he looked familiar, I didn't know for sure. By the time he walked over to me, I remembered him. He had played the trombone with the New Collegians that night back in Montgomery.

“We never met back then, at least not proper like. Willie Walker,” he said. “Figured I'd see Nat Weary around here sooner than later. I heard Mr. Cole hired you.”

“Got out here a few weeks ago.”

“I got out here a week after that show.”

Last time I saw him, he was holding a piece of horn in each hand behind the Empire's screen, his trombone slide bent to hell. He shook my hand like we'd been friends for all those years.

“My cousin drove me to Mobile that night. I was on that Sunset that next morning and been here ever since,” he said. “Bust a white man across the head with a trombone and it's time to hit the road.”

“I should have been right behind you.”

“Nat put in a word for me when I got the nerve to ask him. I was working at a record shop around the corner
from the old building on Sunset. That's where me and my Evelyn met.”

He waved toward her, and once she'd emptied her hands of the sheet music, she joined us. She had a little bit of jewelry on her, a silver bracelet and two rings on her left hand. My Evelyn, he called her, with a little swell in his throat when he said it. His arm brushed her elbow as he introduced me.

“Baby, this is the fellow from that night back home, Nathaniel Weary.”

“So you're the one. The fellow from up in the balcony. Figure your ears have been burning all these years as much as you've been talked about.”

They both wore glasses like most everyone in the department did. A lifetime of small notes in bad light, and the eyes could take only so much. He had the round sort and hers were pointed. She wrapped both of her hands around mine and squeezed, her shake as warm as the hello was. The charms on her bracelet were typewriter keys, mother-of-pearl with letters, a number or two. Evelyn was the kind of California woman a country boy would fall for. She had as much city in her talk and her smile as she had down-home. Los Angeles with a little East Texas sweet. From Tyler, she told me.

“Sinatra and his people come through tomorrow. Got
a bit of work to finish so we can split at a decent hour. Me and Evelyn work another little job, a midnight show tonight down at John Dolphin's place, the one on Vernon. Come on down if you're off the clock.”

“Should be all done,” I told him. “I can hear you play that horn again.”

That look told me I'd just said something wrong. It was that bit of squinting he did, looking at something that was in his head.

“I moved on from my horn.”

He searched for something to say next, but Evelyn rescued him.

“We'll save you a table tonight,” she said, and he jumped in and repeated the same.

Manny finally raised a finger, and the man from maintenance ushered out the guilty chair, third from the right in the string section, probably to the cafeteria or the secretarial pool, where noises were too common to cause notice. Manny eased off the earphones. When he opened the mikes, the flood of studio noise came into the booth. Nelson Riddle called the orchestra back, and the musicians on the hallway phones filed back in. Nelson and Nat weren't big on wasting time. Quiet chairs and new music, the duplication folks left, and Willie and Evelyn headed for the door. Then it was just me and Manny.

“I asked Willie about his horn and I must have said something wrong.”

Manny swiveled his chair around.

“Way I heard it, Willie got hit in the jaw with something at that Alabama show, and he couldn't get right after. Shame, I heard he was pretty good.”

“He was,” I said. And I was hearing “Tuxedo Junction” again, a horn player's song if there ever was one, that trombone right next to the trumpet from the start. Everybody in the place swinging like they did.

Back on the other side of the glass, Willie said good-bye to the trombonists, Shorty and Juan. A little word and a laugh with his people. He said he had moved on from his horn, but I knew it didn't work that way. He was comfortable around those horn players, but no seat waited for him. A horn player needed a fighter's jaw, strong as the steel it was working. A little talk with his kindred during a break was as close as Willie could get to his old time.

“When Skip used to sit back here he told me that story. Soldier from Alabama. You hit that man with a chair from the bandstand the way I heard it.”

“If I could have dropped that Steinway on his ass, I would have.”

“Be better off with a Hammond organ,” he said. “B3. It's portable. Easier to handle.”

By then the players had taken their seats, and Nat had left the piano bench for his stool and his microphone. Manny picked up the headphones again. I liked to take a look at the reels of fresh tape turning behind me when the band started to play, seeing where that music was headed once it left those sheets.

Willie and Evelyn stood next to the blue Skylark in the east end of the parking lot. I hadn't known who it belonged to, but I'd seen the car every day with the top down, ready to make the best of quitting-time weather. Evelyn had the trunk open and stood there with another handful of papers. Instead of sheet music, this time she carried blue-and-green flyers no bigger than note cards with dolphins and microphones swimming around one another.

“We'll be looking for you tonight, Weary,” she said, handing a card to me. “Show one of these at the door, and you get a drink on the house.”

Willie was over by the Vine Street sidewalk, next to one of the security guards and a couple of delivery drivers who all held the same little flyer I did.

“If I'd known, I wouldn't have said anything about Willie's horn.”

“No need to be sorry. It wasn't your doing. Besides, we
know Skip from when he drove for Nat. He told us where you've been all this time.”

She leaned back against the open trunk, looking toward Willie. Some tourists were near them, pointing cameras toward the steeple. One asked the guard a question, directions it seemed like, and he pointed, then cupped his hands westward. Grauman's Chinese maybe, handprints in the concrete.

“Never heard him play his horn, but Willie's the best 'bone player I know. Maybe that's love talking, but there's no harm in that,” she said.

“He played ‘Tuxedo Junction' better than the boys in Birmingham,” I told her. “God's honest.”

“I don't doubt it for a minute,” she said. “We'll raise us some glasses tonight at Dolphin's, my friend.”

Willie came back around. He wore a short-brim Kangol, lifted enough to wipe his forehead. Going from that air conditioning to the street would bring that sweat out in a heartbeat.

“Got to show you something before you go.”

He turned one of the cases in the trunk sideways and flipped the lid open. Nestled in a little velvet-covered frame were two microphones, arranged head to tail.

“Philmore,” he said. “Lollipop mikes they call 'em. Just like what you whipped that man with.”

He gave one to me, and the microphone felt about right
in my hand. I remembered the weight of it but not the look, because I was grabbing halfway blind and keeping my eyes on that pipe. The cloth cord had tangled around my wrist, and I remembered the electric buzz that went dead when the microphone broke to pieces on that man's face. I set the Philmore back in the case, and Willie stacked it in the trunk with the rest.

“I was on the floor, trying to get my feet under me so I wouldn't get my head stomped. Didn't see you hit that man, but I damn sure heard him holler,” Willie said.

“Some of these boys singing tonight like to throw microphones on the floor,” Evelyn told me. “The way you hold it, you might have some R and B in your veins.”

“I can't carry a tune.”

“Neither can most.”

They got in their car, the seats, the piping, and the dashboard a couple of different blues. With the top down they'd be riding with the sky color underfoot and all around. Evelyn rubbed her hands along the headrest, settling in.

“So long, Weary. Until this evening,” Willie said, raising his voice above the turn of the engine.