Driving the King

by Ravi Howard

  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.

  Chapter 18

  I sat at the bar while Evelyn and Willie ran microphone wires around the baseboards of John Dolphin’s place, from the stage to the homemade sound booth, a banquette and two tables pulled together off to the side. Dynamite Jackson ran the bar on the second floor of Dolphin’s building on Vernon Avenue. The back windows looked out onto his car lot, where every convertible’s top was down, every hood up, and every door open. What Dolphin didn’t make in car sales he made up for in records and live shows.

  The house band had trickled in, crowded around bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The drums were next to the piano, and two Regal cases sat against the speaker. A Fender bass against the wall. The organist screwed the legs on his Hammond. Manny was right. I could drop it on somebody if I had a mind to.

  Dynamite Jackson’s back was to me when I answered his question, but he turned around and asked me to repeat myself, as though that mirror behind his liquor had twisted my words around. He swallowed hard, too hard for the smooth liquor we both drank.

  “Ten years?” Dynamite said. “Good Lord, man. All this time. For beating a man?”

  “Didn’t even get to finish,” I said.

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  He poured another round. When Dynamite said sorry again, the man three stools down, not quite drunk but on his way, asked who died.

  “Nobody, Chester, worry ’bout yours,” Dynamite said. “Worry about that tab.”

  “What you sorry for then?” Chester asked me.

  “I was in jail back home.”

  “Parchman?”

  Shook my head.

  “Angola?”

  “Kilby. Alabama.”

  “For what?”

  “Started a riot.”

  “Good for you. Need to start one in Mississippi. Yazoo City. Tell them Chester McAfee sent you.”

  “That’s where you left from?” I asked him.

  “Yep. I carried my ass on out here in a hurry.”

  “You keep raising that glass, Chester. You want to buy that man a drink?”

  “Then I won’t have enough for your tip.”

  Dynamite had turned the wall behind him into a checkerboard of prizefighters and musicians, hanging pictures from his boxing days and headshots of the singers who’d played there. The poster of Dynamite caught him in his leaner years, lifting his title belt over his head. Heavyweight champion of California. In the others he was face-to-face with half of Murderers’ Row, either in the ring sparring or raising a glass at that bar.

  Dynamite was one of Skip’s old drinking partners, and that was how he got a job with Nat, who’d played that stage every Tuesday way back when.

  “So old Nat’s on television, now. I’m proud an’ all, but he’s keeping my Monday-nighters home.”

  “Fifteen minutes though. Show’s over in a jiffy, so anybody who stays home didn’t mean to come in the first place.”

  Evelyn stood at the upright piano, tightening the stand she’d set next to it. Once she was done, she brought the black-and-yellow cords back around to the tables.

  “Skip tell you we fought back in thirty-eight?” Dynamite asked me. “Tell you I whipped him like his pop used to?”

  “He told me you won by split decision.”

  “Decision? His knees decided to buckle. His ass decided to hit the canvas. That what he meant by decision?”

  Skip’s picture was among the boxers on the wall. Dynamite said that for somebody to get in one of the framed pictures they had to earn it in a boxing ring, on a field, or on a stage. Nat was there below the photograph of Melba Liston holding her trombone, and between two Robinsons, Sugar Ray and Ray Charles. Underneath that glass, the pictures looked a little faded, but they stayed free from any dust or splatters.

  When she finished with all the wiring, Evelyn sat next to me at the bar. Willie was still talking to the band, showing them something about the microphones.

  “These singers like to roll on the floor, knocking the mikes around. We saved up for those, same kind Nat and Sinatra use, so they don’t come a dime a dozen. These boys need to get famous first, because if the mike gets busted, nobody can hear them holler.”

  She said the singer was new in town, a fellow named Dale Cook out of Chicago. All Dynamite and Evelyn knew was that he had a gospel act with his brothers, but he was solo that night. I’d seen the kid, a teenager it seemed, putting flyers on the door and the notice board out on the sidewalk. Once I could see the face above the name, I realized it was him. LIVE TONIGHT, MR. DALE COOK. Those worn posters had no club’s name or date on them, so they worked when he did. He came in and nodded to Dynamite, who pointed toward the band, the Mellow Tones they called themselves, who were over there talking to Willie.

  “He looks nice enough, but they all do at first. Then they start doing splits and whatnot, and lo and behold that mike hits the floor and I got headphones full of noise.”

  “Willie’s talking to him, so maybe you’ll be all right.”

  “We lie to them. Say we borrowed Nat Cole’s mike and have to get it back safe. Then they sing a little better, like he’s on the end of it listening.”

  Willie set up the stand, and Dale Cook held that microphone, a Neumann, Evelyn called it, said it still smelled like the box. He cradled it like it was too precious to touch the ground, but his grip was hard enough to squeeze the song out of it.

  “He’s got a good touch. Sometimes I have to give a demonstration. Tell them to hold it like they would a lady’s hand at the school dance. Firm and gentle at the same time. But singers, you get all kinds. Everybody doesn’t have the same kind of couth.”

  Dynamite agreed, and he set two drinks down, a Jack Rose for Evelyn and a Seagram’s for Willie, who’d come over and taken the corner stool.

  “If he sings like he talks this one might be all right,” Willie said.

  The coasters on the bar were the ones the two of them had brought. W&E LIVE RECORDING. Evelyn raised her drink while she looked toward the door, getting the attention of the woman who’d walked in. I didn’t stare, but I wanted to. Had to. A little piece of that smile she gave Evelyn came my way.

  “This is a friend of mine,” Evelyn said. “Nathaniel Weary, this is Lucinda Abrams. Lucinda, this is Weary.”

  The diamonds in that argyle stretched from her shoulder down to her waist. One last cluster dotted the hat she wore just so. I left my stool to shake her hand, and there was that bracelet, the same as Evelyn had. Treble clef and a half note, clicking, just beyond my fingertips.

  “Happy to meet you, Weary.” She hit a sweet note when she said as much, like she was starting off a song.

  “And Miss Abrams, it’s a pleasure.”

  She asked Dynamite for a whiskey I’d never heard of with a little lime and a nice bit of ice. Dynamite measured out that drink, and I did the same with my talk, trying to sound like a whole lot of gentleman and a little touch of friend. Not too common and not too stiff, but smooth enough to sit for a while and let that talk go where it needed to.

  “Alabama, Evelyn told me. We’re not quite neighbors, but a couple states over, I suppose. West Memphis. Arkansas, not Tennessee.”

  “What’s wrong with Tennessee?”

  “About as much as is wrong with Arkansas, but I’m gone now. Been gone for twenty years.”

  She raised her glass and shook it just so, and that bracelet and the ice moved in the same bit of time.

  “Here’s to being gone from everywhere but right here,” she told me, that free hand pointed down, planting her flag in that little space between her stool and mine. I raised my glass, too, and put a little toast next to hers.

  “I’ll take being here, right now, over anyplace in the w
orld.”

  She squeezed three limes into the glass, careful not to let the seeds get past her fingers. Pulp settling into the hollow places in her ice cubes.

  “That whiskey is confused.”

  “No, sir. This whiskey has never had it so good. This California lime’s the best thing that ever happened to it. All that time in that barrel, that bottle, and now it’s home in this nice glass. A little ice, and fresh air, and a little lime.”

  “That whiskey might forget it’s bourbon.”

  “Well, friend, it’s not bourbon. It’s rye. I pulled enough corn when I was a girl that I don’t care for anything made from it. No qualms with rye.”

  Evelyn and Willie had slipped away, across the room to the booth by then, a few last things to do before the music started. Lucinda pointed to the glass, and got Evelyn’s attention at the booth. They both raised their glasses, a silent toast halfway across the room.

  “When I came in, she gave me the high sign that you were good people. Something we used to do when we were out and about, if we met a couple of boys. A Jack Rose on the rocks means for me to come over in a minute or two. A glass of milk punch means retreat. That meant we needed to cut our losses and start fresh without hurting anybody’s feelings.”

  “It’s good to know I passed.”

  “Nothing wrong with good company.”

  There was the little thing then, a nudge of my arm and a smile along with it. We left it at that for the moment, because the band needed attention.

  “Don’t like to have my back to them,” she said. “I know the feeling of singing in a new place. Good to see a friendly face or two.”

  Dale introduced himself, and said he was born in Mississippi, and he got a couple of handclaps. He called out Chicago and got a few more. Wendell Phillips High School, he said, Nat’s old stomp. He started his set with a tune from New Orleans, but when the organ started in you could tell he had Chicago in him, too. He wasn’t fighting that organ or hiding behind it. No, he climbed right on top as steady as could be. And his voice had two edges to it, a little bit of twist and a whole lot of smooth. What Willie and Evelyn heard through the headsets must have sounded like it needed to, because it sounded fine to me.