by Ravi Howard
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.
Chapter 7
Montgomery
DAY OF THE SHOW
1:15 P.M.
I wondered how many times I could come back to Alabama before I had to start calling it something other than home. Home from war and home from prison. A year in Los Angeles changed everything, or at least I wanted it to. I had a house on Seventy-Fourth Street in Los Angeles, and for that week I’d been back in Montgomery, I’d found my rest in a third-floor suite at the Centennial Hotel. My hotel room was two floors above the cabstand I’d pretty much grown up in. I had spent as many hours there as I had spent at my house. A hotel room was a place for strangers, and that’s what I felt like. Maybe that was as it should be, so I could do the day’s work and get gone.
My brother and sister had offered me a place to stay, but they had families of their own. Besides, I wanted space and quiet to get everything ready for the show. Part of me, most of me, was fine with hotel living. With that corner room view on top of Centennial Hill, I saw my hometown as newcomers and travelers did, from the windows of a rented room.
I had reserved three of the four corner suites for the show. Each was named for the views it offered, College Hill, Riverside, Capitol Heights, and Centennial. Nat got College Hill, the southeast corner facing Bama State with its treetops and the copper dome on the bell tower. Skip took Centennial, the same one they’d given him when he visited me at Kilby. I stayed in the Riverside Suite, and it was nice enough. The best part was the sturdy walls that kept the room so quiet that the door knock I heard sounded more like a rumble.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Weary.”
Mrs. Varner stood there holding one of the hotel trays. I couldn’t get used to her calling me Mr. Weary, because she’d been at the hotel since it opened and had known me all of my years. She had insisted though. We were both professionals, she’d told me, and reminded me that I was grown, half as long as she’d been grown, but grown just the same.
“I heard our secret guest has arrived safely.”
“Yes, ma’am. We got him situated in his room.”
“I wanted to greet him at the door. You said not to make a big show out of him coming, but it is a big show.”
“Yes, ma’am. But it’ll be even bigger if we save the surprise until the time’s right.”
“And when will that be?”
“His name goes on the marquee at three o’clock when the ticket window opens. Mr. Worthy will make an announcement on the radio at four.”
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“It’s a strange plan, but it’s yours and we’ll follow. I must say, I do like to see somebody with a plan in charge. Heart after my own. You might be tired of me saying so.”
“No ma’am. Not at all.”
She set the tray on the table between the high-back chairs in the corner. She put it down gingerly, but the weight of it still rattled the tea set and the water glasses already there.
“We got something for Mr. Cole.”
She leaned and picked up the edges of the cloth to show me the bronze plaque. NATHANIEL ADAMS “KING” COLE SUITE. It took two lines to fit every word of that name, the one he was born with and the one just for show.
“The white hotels downtown have presidential suites and the like, even if no president saw fit to stay there. Mr. Cole is our biggest guest and he’s home folk, and we can say in all honesty he laid his head across the hall there. We might as well let people know.”
“He’ll be happy to see it.”
“I figure we’ll make a little fuss and show it to him this afternoon. Put it on an easel upstairs in the ballroom. If it was up to me you’d have one right alongside his.”
The bronze had been rubbed at the edges to give it a little gleam. Nat had a crown above his name just like the one on the spinning sign that had started every episode of his television show. Those signs had been made of balsa wood and painted to look like something more. Every prop was meant to fool you and look real, but they were all light enough to carry and cheap enough to throw away when the show was done. That plaque in the Centennial’s hallway, on the door of the finest room, was meant to stay as long as the building did. Something heavy, bolted deep into the plaster and the frame.
“He’ll try to be modest about it, but he’ll appreciate you for doing as much.”
Before she covered the plaque again, she rubbed the crown and letters with the corner of that cloth.
“Thought maybe you were busy with everything going on, but I wanted to make sure I visit with you before you go.”
Those chairs were the same as the ones behind the desk in the cabstand. To see Mrs. Varner in one was to remember her visits with my mother. She’d bring two cups of something steaming, whatever the hour and season called for, and they would sit and talk when they had a bit of time.
“They told me at the front desk you’re leaving us tomorrow. But as long as it’s for something greener, I’ll try not to get sad all over again. I always wish young folks well. I didn’t get to say it to you last time, but I’m saying it now.”
“I’m taking Nat to the airport in the morning, and then I’m heading back to Los Angeles.”
“That’s a good piece of driving. You got somebody to split it with you?”
“Just me, but I been out there and back on my own. I make my money driving, so the road’s the best place for me.”
She patted my hand one good time, and looked around the room. I kept it tidy, shoes lined along the baseboards and my hats stacked on the open shelf of the wardrobe.
“Catherine cleaned this floor today. I see she took care of everything like she was supposed to.”
Miss Vee lifted the glasses that hung around her neck to look at the windowsills and the radiator, the places where the dust liked to hide. As simple as the hotel was, it was never less than tidy. She used to clean the place before she became day manager, her title embroidered on her jacket in maroon and silver. The glasses hung on a chain of stones in those same colors.
“It’s impolite to ask what the man’s like, because you work for him and wouldn’t dare tell his business. But I know it’s nice working for Negroes.”
Miss Vee was right. I had never worked for white folks, but I had been in the US Army and an Alabama prison. Working for my own felt more like kindred.
“I got to Montgomery when I was fourteen from down there in Lowndes,” she said. “That was the last time I ever worked for white folks. Give me Negro strangers. New folks to greet every day.”
Miss Vee worked the desk the day I checked in, and she gave me that hug that people do without speaking. Her quiet was as strong as somebody else’s shout. It was the same with my mother’s name. She had not once mentioned her during that week I had been in Montgomery, but I knew she would eventually. I had steeled myself, or at least thought I had.
“Your mama and I talked about what you’d do when you left here. I had told her New York or someplace. I knew that if I ever asked after you I’d hear good news.”
I didn’t see Miss Vee before I left for California, and maybe I’d been hiding from folks. No matter how I carried myself, it took a while to get loose of that Kilby feeling. People didn’t ask me how I was doing and where I had been, they just hugged my neck or shook my hand too hard. I felt the pity in everybody’s touch.
“I’m glad you left here, Nathaniel. Glad you came back, too.”
She was my mother’s friend, one of her best over so many years. She knew that I had to mourn my mother in prison, a place that hardly respected living, let alone death and grieving.
“When she died I was out there, Miss Vee. I can’t get past it,” I told her, and my voice didn’t fail me. Tears stayed too low to spill over.
“Nobody expects you to, son. You’re not out there now.”
She left again then, and I was back in my quiet. It wasn’t sound, but the place was plenty enough filled. Miss Vee and her people still sprinkled their mixture in the vacuum bag, a spoonful of nutmeg or chicory. Cinnamon. Satsuma and clementine peels when they were in season. All of that plus the baking soda they sprinkled on the carpets before they cleaned them. All of our steps across those floors stirred up something sweet. When I rubbed my feet on the carpet, I breathed it into my lungs. Holding in that good dust and trying to let go of all the rest.
I stepped out my door, and Skip stood down the hall on the pay phone, shuffling through the nickels in his palm. Once he finished his call, he dropped the handful of change back into his pocket and waved me over.
“Everything’s set for when we get back to Chicago. New York on Thursday, then London Friday morning. Carlos had Nat booked through New Year’s, but they sold every seat. Might add a few more shows. ‘Twelve Nights of Nat Cole’ or some such.”
“He’ll like some good news.”
“He could sing about Christmas in July, and they’d still pay good money. I wonder if he ever gets tired of that song. But a hit record is a hit record.”
“That’s his money.”
“Ours, too.”
“Miss Vee left a plaque in my room. They’re naming the suite for him. It’s not sellout show news, but it’ll be good for him to know.”
“It’s nice, I suspect, get your name on something. You see how they started busting up the sidewalk down on Hollywood Boulevard? Walk of fame, my ass. Got it looking like a cemetery with a bunch of headstones. Name on a room is different. People pay big money for a suite, so they might as well see somebody’s name on it.”
The windows faced High Street, and the Christmas displays had people stopped and looking. Gray’s Electronics and Records had a display in the window, a fake fireplace with a flashing jukebox where the flames would have been. On the record covers in the window, singers wore red and green, and album titles were spelled out in letters the color of the tinsel and ribbon wrapped around the streetlights up and down the block.
“How’s it feel, old man. Back in Montgomery?”
“It looks small. This hotel. The houses. The sidewalks look too narrow. Leaving changes everything.”
“Didn’t know what to think of this place when I came looking for you. When Nat sent me out here, that was the first time he’d ever told me about that show. I’d heard all kind of stories, but never from him. He told me he wanted to do right by you.”
“He already did. I made more money in a year out there than I would have in five here. Hell, maybe ten.”
“That’s well and good, Weary. But still. His pride. With the show cancelled and all. If he puts some mone
y in your hand, you can put up a little fuss, but then you fold it in your pocket. Just call it meantime money. Until he comes back to Los Angeles.”
“How long?”
“Carlos might book New York when Nat comes back. The road’s been better to him than television, so who knows.”
“If he needs me when he comes back, that’s fine. But he doesn’t owe me.”
“He knows that man was liable to kill him if not for you whipping his ass. If he puts money in your hand, put it in your pocket.”
He pointed out the window at the southbound bus that let out a dozen or so nurses at Saint Margaret’s Hospital, the last stop for white riders before Centennial Hill.
“I think I figured out how to solve the bus problem down here. Double-decker busses. That way if anybody can’t stand sitting next to you, they can carry their ass up the stairs.”
“You can see about bringing one back from London.”
“I’ll look into it.”
Skip took another handful of change and started to dial a new number, and he reminded me of his warning about a man’s money and his pride.
“Take what he puts in your hand.”
“Mr. Adams, it’s Weary.”
Whenever we knocked on Nat’s door at any hotel, we used the name he checked in under, his middle name, in case somebody in the hallway overheard. The hours before a show need to be anonymous ones, so he had to be somebody else. Nat opened the door without showing himself, and closed the door behind me. He had changed out of his traveling suit, and he wore a red sweater and the round glasses he didn’t like people to see him in.
“I know you don’t care for surprises, so I’m telling you. This suite’s about to get a new name. Miss Vee made a plaque for you, with you being famous and all.”
“Boy from Saint John Street with his name on the wall.”
“About to be out front in a little while, too. They’ll have you on the marquee and the radio after that. Then everybody’ll know.”
“All my time in show business, Weary, and this is a first. A show nobody knows about.”