Driving the King

by Ravi Howard

  “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.

  “You know, Pop, they got a Bel-Air out there, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bel-Air. Got one in Los Angeles, just like us.”

  His eyes came back to me then. A smile, too.

  “Boy, I saw that Bel-Air in a magazine. Frank Sinatra or somebody. It ain’t nothing like ours.”

  “Nat’s got a spread in Hancock Park now. Three-story house.”

  “Say what?”

  “You hear me.”

  “Three stories. To get that high in Bel-Air, you’d have to climb a tree.”

  That was the first bit of chuckling I had heard in so long. And the laughing was better than any welcome home I could have heard. Mrs. Adair looked over, and Pop waved that all was well. She gave us one more in kind, rubbing her hands on her skirt first, as though waving how-do called for the cleanest hands. The springs made their noise again when he rose, that time reaching for a second Thermos filled with warm water that he used to rinse both cups and then set them in a box, the dish towel he dried them with folded in between so the porcelain wouldn’t chip.

  “Believe Mrs. Adair might be ready to get on back. Won’t be long. Think you might need to stay for a while.”

  I nodded.

  “I can come back around for you.”

  “I believe I’ll walk on back. Nice as it is.”

  My father’s hand on my shoulder just then felt as big as it used to when I was half his size. Pop was right about me needing some time alone. I sat down in the grass and looked at my hands. The trembling that had started somewhere in my gut had not made it to the outside yet. And I wanted to be alone when it did.

  As Pop drove away, he circled around on the Lincoln grass and gave a wide berth to the graves. When he stopped for Mrs. Adair, he set her box in his trunk while she shook the dirt from that quilt she’d knelt on. They left Lincoln slowly, careful of scattering the gravel. Then it was just me.

  I would need that walk when I left Lincoln. It was a good two miles back to the Hill, almost a straight shot. My legs were too used to turning at a fence. A straight line from Lincoln back to the Hill would be the longest walk I had made with free legs in ten years. Until then I sat on that grass in front of my mother’s stone, my legs outstretched and my arms out behind me, the way she had seen me so many times when I sat and listened.

  Chapter 9

  After I left Lincoln Cemetery, I walked to the garage over on Hall Street. My brother-in-law was under the hood of a Studebaker. Pete stared down, with a shop light close enough to his face to burn him. Marie stood on a ladder inside, hanging fan belts on the empty hooks. Marie had covered her clothes with a smock that matched the coveralls Pete wore. The stitching above the pocket read JEFFRIES AUTOMOTIVE, written in the same green as the Esso sign out front.

  “Anybody working today?”

  “Be right there,” Pete said without looking.

  “Ain’t got all day,” I said.

  Then he brought his head from under the hood to see who it was.

  “Marie.” The first time he said my sister’s name, it was a whisper. Then came the shout. “Marie! Baby!”

  Pete had my shoulders by then and was shaking me. He had a good thirty pounds on me, so him grabbing me was something indeed. He shouted for Marie again, but by then she’d come outside and was calling my name. Her voice sounded so sweet, because this time it wasn’t choked off from the crying and it wasn’t drowning in that Kilby noise. Pete let me go, and my sister’s hands were on me then.

  “I told you. Wouldn’t be long before you got home,” she said, something she’d been saying for years. “Told you.” She kept saying it, against my shoulder and my cheek and my ear—told you—until it was just above a hum that I needed to feel against my ear before it could truly be so.

  In most of the baby pictures, Marie was holding me, even if she was just then old enough to carry me on her hip. When I was too big, she settled for punching me dead in my shoulder or thumping me on my forehead. I’d watched her cry too much on our Sundays in the visiting room. On that first day home, the tears were fine, because they were the last she would ever have to cry for me.

  She let go of her hug long enough to put both hands on my face.

  “You look good.”

  “Better than I looked yesterday,” I told her. “Didn’t sleep last night, so ready to get out.”

  It had barely been a month since the last time she’d seen me, but on the outside with nothing between her eyes and my face, everything looked different.

  “Got something for you out back.”

  They called it a surprise, but it was a secret that had been talked about for a good long time. We walked through the garage into the backyard, where ten cars lined the fence. My car sat under a cover between a Ford truck and a Mercury. The lines were unmistakably Packard, and the tarp was thin enough to see some of the light flashing on the chrome underneath it.

  Pete whipped back the cover, and the wind helped him to bring it free. It was my first time seeing it. The car had been on back order and had arrived two months after I started my sentence. My family painted it the Centennial colors and hired a couple of part-timers to drive. Marie kept the oil changed and the tires good, and always told me the mileage and how much money I had on the books. For ten years it had circled Montgomery without me, racking up 97,000 miles and change. Pete had repainted the checkerboards and the orange with an oyster gray, and the paint carried as much light as the chrome did. Seats in taxis lasted only for so long, so Pete and Marie made decent money in car upholstery. Marie had asked me what I wanted, and I told her charcoal with pinstripes. I wanted the insides to look like a good suit I could wear anytime I had somewhere to go.

  “Can’t have you headed to Hollywood looking any kind of way. You need to look like you came from somewhere.”

  “You outdid yourself,” I told her. “Both of you.”

  I leaned into the window to get a better look at the floorboards.

  “Redid my mama’s house back in April, and we had some extra heartwood.”

  My Packard came off the assembly line looking like the next one, but the touch of my folks had it looking like no other. I leaned farther into the window until the toes of my shoes were only partly touching the gravel.

  “You do know how a car door works. I know you been gone for a while but, damn.” Pete opened the door while I was still in the window. “See, just like that.”

  Dane had given me the money Skip Tate had left, and I took five twenties off the stack and gave them to Pete. He stopped his laughing, and his face changed. He looked like a man with a hundred dollars in his hand.

  “Go on, Pete. Fold it up. Put it in your pocket. For the paint and the engine work. I’ll send you some more when I get set up.”

  “You know you don’t owe us a dime,” Marie said. Pete was quiet, already spending that money in his head.

  “Pete, you better fold that and put it in your pocket,” I told him.

  “Marie’s right. You don’t owe us a dime.” He didn’t say it like he meant it.

  I peeled off another hundred dollars and put it in Marie’s hand.
She tried to pull her hand away but I wouldn’t let her.

  “Here, now. For the seats and for the bookkeeping and the whatnot.”

  I had been charity for my family for too long. The hours they spent with me were empty ones that they would never get back. I wanted them to have something from me on the books.

  “Had my eye on that television at Gray’s.”

  “Every time he walks by, he slows down and stands flat-footed for ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “They got a sign in the window says you buy a set on your lunch hour, and they’ll deliver to your living room by supper time.”

  Marie held the keys in her hand. Rubbed them with the piece of lamb’s wool she’d run along the chrome.

  “They give you your license back?”

  “I don’t need anything else they can give me. Nat’s folks got me a California license.”

  I’d be a bootleg cabbie at best in Montgomery, and whichever cop pulled me over would want my till. If they wanted to pull cabbies over, they waited until a shift was just about done so they could shake somebody down for every dime. Pumping gas and washing windshields was the best I could expect. I saw Johnnie Beechum, the attendant who had worked there years before Marie and Pete bought the place, still cleaning dead things from the windshields, mosquitoes every summer and lovebugs every fall, and I was glad I didn’t have to take the offer. I prayed that I’d never have to.

  “You want to drive it now, with your California license and all?”

  “I’m not through stretching my legs.”

  When Pete came back out of the garage, his coveralls were off and he had his hat on. The oil was gone from his hands, and he was brushing off the soap flakes that had stuck to his forearm.

  “You got a date?” Marie said.

  “About to head to Gray’s to buy that Zenith,” he said, patted the pocket he’d put the money in like she needed proof.

  “When you get through, go buy a new hat. Looks like you wore that one in a street fight,” I told him.

  He took it off and regarded it a bit before he cocked it back on his head. “You know, I just might.”

  “Not that dime-store mess. Get a Stetson,” I said.

  “Then I’ll get you a new billfold while I’m at it, Nat. Can’t carry that kind of money in that dusty wallet you got.”

  With that he tipped his hat and headed on down the street.

  “You don’t owe us anything,” Marie told me.

  “I can do what I want to do again, so I want to do for my folks.”

  After I followed Marie into the office, a car crossed the bell line and stopped at the gas pump. A black woman was behind the wheel of a DeSoto, wood-sided and full of white children. When she came in, Marie spoke while she took the gas money and counted out the change. The name on her uniform said Lena.

  “Let me get a receipt, Marie, because the woman I work for now will swear up and down I took her damn change.”

  “I got you. Something else, too,” Marie told her.

  She counted out Lena’s change and tapped on a basket of purchase orders. Lena lifted the stack and took a sheet of paper. Some of the kids had gotten out of the car, and one had jumped on the bell line. She looked back to make sure they didn’t see her fold that paper into her apron pocket.

  “Nosiest children the world has seen. Will run tell any-and everything.”

  Once she left, Marie lifted the stack and gave me one of the same pages. “Women’s Political Council” printed across the top. A newsletter. A list of officers ran down the right-hand side, and my sister’s name was near the bottom. Marie Jeffries. Transportation Committee. That’s not all she wanted me to see, though.

  “I’m only showing you because you asked about her last time.”

  Though the ink of the machine turned everyone’s picture purple and dotted, the face above the column was Mattie. Letter from the Editor. And the signature, the first name familiar, and her married name. Matilda Allen.

  Marie looked over my shoulder to see what I was reading. And she left her chin right there, and that bit of sighing she did came down on my collarbone.

  “You got a whole new life coming to you. So you don’t have to dwell.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s fine.” Paused too long. So much she could have said then.

  Yes, my years had been long, but they had been just as empty. I had gathered no memories strong enough to quiet the old notions.

  “Like I said. A whole new life.”

  Marie and Mattie had gotten close when we dated. We had gone to see Murder in Harlem with Marie and Pete at the State Theater. I like that girl, Nathaniel. You and me, both, I’d told her. My sister helped me pick the ring, and she was the one who sold it for me, and used that money to pay off the note on the Packard.

  “Would it be better if she’d waited for you?”

  I shook my head. I saw the women who had waited on Kilby men. Young women. Old women. I’d watched enough of the regulars age in the visiting room, getting years-deep in the waiting.

  “You’ll have somebody soon.”

  Marie straightened up the newsletters and hid them beneath the purchase orders. She had told me to move on. And I surely would. But I needed to see Mattie’s face, and hear her voice, if only to say good-bye. That was as close to the good times as I could ever be again. Friend was not enough, but it was all I could have. But before I could see a friend, I needed a stranger.

  Chapter 10

  Mama Nonie’s Grill sold coffee and doughnuts in the front vestibule, and a small luncheonette served sandwiches and hot plates in the main room. A long row of high-back booths stretched beyond the pony wall. The girls would come around and talk to you, see what was on your mind. And if you had come looking for something in particular, they would show you to the back stairs that led to the cathouse floor.

  The young lady who sat next to me said her name was Sue. And I told her my real name, because if I was ashamed I wouldn’t have been there. We made plans, me and Sue. We talked about how long and how much money and it all sounded good to me. She drank straight bourbon out of a julep cup.

  “What you drinking, friend?”

  “Some whiskey I can’t even pronounce,” I told her.

  “Guess you can call it what you want, then.”

  I had ordered the oldest whiskey they had, ten years old, some that got bottled up around the same time I did. I could pretend that my time did to me what it had done to that liquor.

  “Take your time,” she told me.

  “Make sure you do the same when we get upstairs.”

  They charged by the hour, and she told me I could get a second go around if I still had my wind. And I told her I’d see when we got upstairs, because I wasn’t thinking about a clock. And when she rubbed her hand up my arm and back down again, it took everything I had to keep my head straight. I took my hand off my glass then, because I didn’t want my neat shot of liquor to tremble and spill all over. I had never been a clumsy man around women, in either conversation or in close quarters, and I didn’t want to start then. I had been itching for so long. Every part of me was knotted up, and I needed to get right.

  “First time lounging over here, or you know how it works?”

  “Both,” I told her. “Yes and yes.”

  I pointed to her glass.

  “Fine right now, but after a while. Bartender will send a setup to the room. I like me a slow-drinking bourbon in the afternoon. A little something to make it sweet. And you, some of that old long-name whiskey.”

  She touched me again, just a tip of her nail on the back of my hand. A circle on my skin. For so long the touch had been my own, grabbing myself by the handful, and letting every rub and push and pull take me from this world to one that was better, where the women who crossed my mind stayed until the walls shook and crumbled, and then I was alone and emptied out. In the end the best of my conjuring would be just another stain on my jailhouse mattress.

  “Thank you for the d
rink, friend,” she told me. “Third floor. Last door on the right.”

  The upstairs light came through the lead glass and transoms. Cloudy glass let in the sun but still hid the business. I needed that light as much as I needed that grind. I wanted to get to Mama Nonie’s in the daylight, because I needed to see every bit of the woman in that room with me. Sue and me there butt-naked with sunshine on us. Every time she said something to me I told her to say it again. True or not didn’t matter to me, but every word came floating right along with her bourbon and sweet tobacco still on her tongue, and it stuck to me just like that bedsheet cotton did once it lost its grip on the mattress. The sheets let loose like I did until I was too weak to move. And then we were still for a while. Sunlight and the breeze came through the same window and ran up my leg, and touched me where she had. I was wet and cool and warm all at once.

  Sue walked to the chest of drawers and fixed two drinks from that setup tray. Bourbon and whiskey, a saucer of limes, a bowl of ice, and a jelly glass with sugar cubes. She spooned two ice cubes and poured the liquor over.

  “You were in Kilby,” she said.

  It wasn’t a question. I didn’t say anything right off, but she waited and watched me.

  “Got out this morning,” I said.

  “You smell like that soap. That don’t mean you smell bad or anything, just familiar.”

  She drained into my glass some of the cool water at the bottom of the ice bowl, and then she poured a couple of fingers of whiskey.

  “They sent me to the girls’ home for a while. I made soap in the industrial school,” she said. Crushing cubes in her teeth, the first sugar and the second ice.

  “That lye would splash sometimes when we poured the buttermilk. Worse than grease burns. They made us wear those long leather gloves. Came up to here,” she said, drawing a line on her arm just above her elbow.

  While we did our business, she never let herself roll too far from that nightstand. That top drawer was where she kept whatever she had for men set on trouble. She took a long sip of her cool drink, then another, the whole time quiet and looking, considering me.