by Ravi Howard
Bone had had a taste of that whiskey. So had George and Pritchett. We said we’d do it again when the war was over. Some whiskey and a notion. The last I saw of them was when we pulled back and Battery C stayed to cover us. The last Bone saw of them was the day they ran from the prison march.
A driver in an ambulance company told us some of the prisoners from the 333rd were at a field hospital in Liège. We found Bone there. He had spent his winter at the prison on the Nuremberg parade grounds with a broken leg. I was happy to see him alive, because when I had looked at the faces of the boys in Wereth, I thought he was in that pile, too.
“Who made it?” That was the first thing he asked. Half-starved and crippled, he still had his mind on running and the ones who did.
“We found them. They didn’t make it.”
I couldn’t say much else to him. He’d kept them alive all winter in his imagining. His mind was better to them in dreaming than the Germans had been in life. All he needed to know was that they didn’t make it. The particulars served nobody but the ones who delighted in our blood. As far as Bone knew, they were shot clean.
“George and Pritchett, and the rest.”
We drank our tribute, and gave them their portion when we called the names.
“To the last, Weary.”
“The very last.”
My mind called the roll, names I hadn’t said out loud in years. The problem with quiet was that it opened the wrong door. The one where I’d stacked all that was troublesome.
“If there was something I could have done for you I would have. You know.”
Bone knew about Kilby, but I hadn’t told him. He had looked me up years before and called the cabstand. When he told my people he was coming to Montgomery, they told him where I was and why. If I had thought he’d call looking for me, I would have told my family to lie to him. He’d lived inside somebody’s prison, too, and I didn’t want him to feel more weight than he already carried.
“Nothing to do but worry. I had enough folks for that.”
“Still. Could have seen you.”
“Only thing you could do is this right here. Doing like we said.”
Bone had his hand on the bar rail, and his fingers tight on that brass.
“You know I would have busted you out. Hell yes I would.”
“Had it all planned out, I bet.”
“Yes, indeed. Drive through the gate, that’s how they do it in the movies. Saw one the other week at the picture show. They’ll have you thinking it’s real.”
He rolled through the list of names then, like he had a pocketful of Hollywood folks ready to free me. Half were singers, so we’d have a good bit of music to pass our time on the run. We stayed in that story for a minute, and it did us some good, a little salt in that boil to slow down all that bubbling my mind did.
Trudy stood at the top of the Majestic’s steps, the front desk traffic passing behind her. I heard Bone easing off that stool, and I stood right along with him. Trudy was as tall as he was, stately, standing there with her jacket on her wrist. They were married before the war, so I had heard her name quite a bit. When we said our hellos, I found out what Bone had told her about me.
“Charles told me you’ve been in Los Angeles since you came home from Europe. Good to know you like it enough to make it home.”
I didn’t look at Bone straight-on, but from the corner of my eye I saw he had his head down. Fidgeting with the hat he’d picked up then. Ten years in Los Angeles and no mention of Kilby. He had told his wife a bald-faced lie. I did the same.
“The years have been good. I suppose I have been there long enough to say it’s home.”
“Good to have you back all the same.”
My mother and father told me that a certain kind of friend could get you caught up in a lie, and that lie would tell you all you needed to know about that friend. Charles Pettibone had lied me out of Kilby. Ten years in Los Angeles didn’t have to be a lie necessarily. It was just trying the future on to see how it fit. That wasn’t a lie any more than trying on a new pair of shoes was lying to your feet. It made sense to see how it felt before claiming it.
“Looking forward to this evening. Said there’s a piano player here that’s pretty good.”
“I believe he’ll make a name for himself soon enough.”
“Nothing like a night in the city, Nathaniel. Charles and I thank you for the invitation.” That way she said “Charles” made me ashamed to call him by that nickname.
She held his cane and he took her coat, draping it around her shoulders as she put her arms through the sleeves. Then she put an arm under his, helping him stand without too much lifting. The touch did all the work, giving him a bit more balance. We said so long until evening, and they made their way across the lobby and out into the afternoon traffic. I watched them through the Jackson Street windows, heading toward the college, where a niece waited with her boyfriend, anxious and eager to impress.
I had filled two front-row seats with a promise. I needed to set eyes on them, loving folks in plain view. I would listen to Nat’s music as I sat near the side of the stage, with my eyes on the shadowy places, but I always got a good look at the front rows. I would listen to Nat and his love songs coming at me sideways in my corner. From there I couldn’t help but see the row where I would have been if things had been different.
Chapter 23
We opened Nat’s mailbags every Tuesday evening. All of the house staff, “the cohort,” as the Coles called us, gathered on the second floor of the carriage house and waited for what I had brought over from the NBC mailroom on Monday after the show. Lottie would leave the kitchen to help us. Elizabeth steamed the rugs on Tuesdays, so while the floors dried she would come over, too. Her husband, Walter, would have finished mowing and edging the front yard by then, and would have set the sprinklers. After a night of watching and walking the grounds, Skip would have had slept for a few hours and have returned to the sorting table as well.
The Coles received more letter openers than one family could use in a lifetime, so we put the surplus to good use. Some were sterling and a few were gold, the same as the records on the wall. Some plain and some initialed. We kept the letter openers in a piece of butcher block that ran the length of the tabletop. Skip stood next to Lottie, rubbing together two of the openers, a matching sterling set with wood on the handles.
“I bet this is how Saint Peter does it. Standing at the pearly gates separating the wheat from the chaff.”
“Your priest must get tired of you confessing the same blasphemy week after week,” Lottie said.
“It’s only blasphemy if it’s insincere,” he told her. “Wheat from chaff. Sheep from goats.”
“Why don’t you stop all that talking and give Mr. Weary a hand.”
Skip put the letter openers down and took hold of the chain connected to the middle rafter and looped it through the bottom handles of the mailbag. With it hanging upside down over the table, Skip loosened the ties and a foothill of mail rose in front of us.
Nat would answer them when he could, and sometimes we simply pulled an autographed picture from the stacks that never ran out. We kept boxes of 45s to send along as well. If somebody took the time to write a letter, then he might get to listen to a brand-new song before it hit the radio, a little music to go along with a kind word from the man. Congratulations, from Nat King Cole. With thanks, from Nat King Cole. All the best and more, Nat King Cole. The greetings were short but complete. A smile and a thank-you, and that’s all most people wanted really. Plus, anyone who would take the time to write a letter would tune in to see the show each week.
Skip and Lottie took the first handfuls, grabbing from the top of the pile only. Letters, I had learned, were just like green groceries, liable to tumble if you disturbed the bottom of the stack. I was five months into it by then, and I had gotten the feel. The rest of them had enough practice behind them to make quick work of it all.
I learned the rules. Never stick your ha
nds into an envelope, they told me. Shake the letters and pictures free. We would hear any piece of metal when it hit the copper tabletop. A consequence of stardom was that the world knew where to find you. The black stars of Hollywood had found all manner of letters from adoring folk, but they had also found straight razors and barbed needles nestled between parchments. Fingers had gone into envelopes and come out bloody.
Those without weapons made up for it with threats. Skip told me that he could spot a bad letter without opening it. A plump letter was a good one from a fan with lots to say. Hate mail was bone-thin. When we opened them, they always had big bold letters and language straight out of somebody’s gutter.
The mail was brought home to conceal the ugliness of it. Word about threats and the like made Nat Cole look controversial, and the sponsors were skittish enough as it was. After Alabama, some venues didn’t want him, because a man beaten onstage was an insurance liability.
One of the carriage house desks belonged to me and the other to Skip. His chair was rarely underneath it. Instead it was near one of the windows that filled the place with all-day light. It was as good as a watchtower, sitting on top of a three-car garage as it did. Between his walking rounds at night, Skip could stand in those windows and watch the property with clear sight lines to the Muirfield corner and the Fourth Street side.
The window carried that old handmade glass, full of ripples, like somebody had blown on it until it cooled. One pane was a new, machine-made replacement installed after someone had fired three bullets at the property a few years before. The first bullet shattered a guest room window in the main house, hitting glass a second time when it broke a mirror. A second ripped the wood paneling off the station wagon Nat and Maria took the girls to the beach in. A third broke the middle window of the carriage house.
Skip showed me where it had hit, and the bullet was still above our heads, deep in the crown molding. Wood putty hid the hole underneath the gloss of the trim paint. I wouldn’t have known if Skip hadn’t told me about it. It was our job to be mindful of such things, whether they’d been hidden or not.
Perhaps the one who burned NIGGER in the patch of lawn along Fourth Street was the same as the shooter, but most likely not. Walter told me he went out and turned the charred letters under with a spade and planted a camellia bush before the neighbors and gawkers passed. He worked hard on that yard, and every so often during our sort, Walter looked out the windows, looking for the trash people threw into the bushes and anything else that might be out of place.
“Yard looks good,” I said. And he agreed. He wasn’t one for false modesty, because he knew it was true as much as I did. Telling a yardman his work looked good was in some cases merciful, lifting his spirits while that sun beat him down. But calling the Cole grounds immaculate was gospel truth. It had to be the best yard on the block. If the people who gazed at the Coles’ house, especially those who didn’t want them around, looked hard for anything that was out of place, they’d be disappointed.
At the end of March, Walter had dug up a patch a foot deep and filled it with a truckload of limestone. On top of that he added gravel, crushed sand dollars, clamshells, and some bedrock the city had scooped out of the Los Angeles River after they’d dredged the bottom and poured down a new stretch of concrete. Walter finished the yard off with topsoil and a patch of grass as smooth as the living room carpet.
Walter missed a couple of mail sorts getting the yard ready, but by April he was with us again, watching out the window while Nat practiced his short game. The putts he hit just then were breaking just right, and rattling the tin when they fell.
“Knocked two strokes off his handicap since January,” Walter said. “Might be scratch by the fall.”
Nat stood on his green with his golf coach, Jimmie DeVoe. They had called Jimmie the Jackie Robinson of golf, and he was teaching the Jackie Robinson of television. Everything had a Jackie then, but it stood to reason, because Jackie had won a Series and retired. It was hard being Jackie, though, and he had a head full of gray hair before he was forty.
After every round, they replayed the putts he had missed. He was meticulous about such things. Treat a detail like a small thing, and it’ll get big in a hurry. Maybe that was what Jimmy was saying while he held the flagstick and looked at Nat’s line to the cup, reading and reading. But all of his golf was with the sponsors, potential sponsors, so the score didn’t matter as much as the deal that they never saw fit to make.
The mail table had taken on a new order, and the copper top was visible again. The stacks from the fans and well-wishers sat next to the signed photographs that would go back to them. We were finishing the last of it when Nat came up the stairs.
“You outdid yourself,” Nat told Walter. “Jimmie says your little green is better than most.”
“Might move the roses, get a load of sand and make a little bunker.”
“You hear that, Lottie?” Elizabeth said. “Giving up roses for golf.”
“Think Mrs. Cole might have a word to say about it first,” Lottie said.
“I think her short game is better than mine, so she wouldn’t mind one bit,” Nat said.
Though the neat stack of the good mail was waiting for him, he passed it by and reached into the unsorted stack, and pulled one at random. The envelope that Nat opened and read was brightly colored with the deliberate letters of a child.
“There’s a young girl in Cleveland who’s lost a tooth, her first it seems. She doesn’t love to smile like she once did, and school day pictures are coming.”
He took one of the autographed pictures and added a note to the little girl in Cleveland. The 45 single of “Imagination” was coming out the next Tuesday, but we had a stack already. I would drop them in the air mail, so she’d get it before it came on the radio. Be the first in Cleveland to hear the brand-new song. Surely, snaggletooth and all, she couldn’t help but smile like she used to.
Nat placed the girl’s letter on the good stack and reached for the other. After he read it, he returned it to the envelope and placed it on the pile. He didn’t speak a word about what it said. He kept his hate mail a secret from the world, and he would take it all in, but he never showed it on his face. He couldn’t afford to. Instead he wore the smile of a gambler, a smile that could mean anything or nothing at all.
“I need to know who I’m singing to. All of them.”
With that smile he said good evening, and he was gone. It was about time for the rest of us to leave as well. I offered Lottie a ride home, but she said she’d work awhile. The Coles had put a television in the laundry room, and Lottie said she’d watch Dinah Shore while she folded the wash.
My landlords, Elizabeth and Walter, lived on the third floor of the Coles’ house, so home was a short walk for them. Walter had lost his light for the day, so any yard work would wait until the morning. Elizabeth had dinner to fix for the Coles before her day was done. I saw them both standing over the little garden near the kitchen door, Walter with sheers and Elizabeth looking and pointing out the ripest peppers. He cut a few and a bit of the rosemary they stood in front of.
Skip had taken up his post in one of the wrought iron chairs, in the shadow of the carriage house and away from the light above the middle garage door. People had tried to get Nat to put up a fence or build a house way out of town. But part of being a star and staying a star was being seen. I had watched how people’s faces changed when they saw him on the street. I couldn’t imagine him hiding behind a gate. The Coles had done the opposite. A house on a corner with big windows, standing in the middle of everything where they could see and be seen. During the daylight hours the curtains were pulled back, because as Elizabeth and Walter might have said, the rooms needed daylight just like the lawn did.
Skip started his evening watch just a few feet away, and I finished my evening work, getting the car ready for the morning before I drove my own back across town to my place. Across the way in the main house, Elizabeth cooked dinner with the window ope
n, and that rosemary was in a pot, and the smell of it had circled back through the open window and carried through the garden and toward the carriage house. No matter the past of sniper shots and angry neighbors, the Coles had made Hancock Park home, and we had been trusted to make sure that didn’t change. The rest of the cohort looked out for the home front, and I made sure nothing came between him and his shows but the few miles of road we traveled to get there.
Chapter 24
It was a sure sign that she loved that job when Lucinda took me to Ivie’s on her day off. The weekly specials on the chalkboard were in her handwriting. The dinner plate prices looked just like the phone number she’d given me at John Dolphin’s place. That bit of leaning in her one. That lift in her eight, stretching up like an hourglass. Our waitress came to say hello, and so did half the others, giving me a good once-over to make sure I was decent enough for their friend.
Lucinda was dead set on me trying the chicken and waffles, a concoction that I had always found peculiar.
“I’ve seen people put cream and sugar on their grits. It can’t be stranger than that,” she said.
“The same kind of strange.”
She pushed the plate across the table, parted the things between us—ketchup, butter, her coffee and mine—and offered me a portion cut and set aside. The table wasn’t quite level, so the syrup had drifted toward the chicken, which was my main concern about having them on the same plate in the first place. Then I tasted a bite, and it all made sense for reasons I couldn’t quite describe.
“I told you. I think the part of the brain that says ‘delicious’ is the same place that tells you something sounds good. That paprika and the maple syrup mixing together is like a nice little duet.”
She pulled the plate back, and returned the coffees to where they had been. I offered her some of my eggs and chicken livers, but she said she was fine.