Driving the King

by Ravi Howard

  Nat saw it for the first time.

  “The one who attacked me. Was he out here?”

  “He went to the cattle ranch. They got boys working a spread near the Mississippi line.”

  “How much time?”

  “Three years.”

  “He’s out in this world now, just like us.”

  The ranch was probably better work than Nat’s attacker had ever had. I could hardly call the cattle ranch a prison. They were more cowboys than prisoners. I had heard about their steak dinners, and I hoped it was a lie, but envy will make a mind believe all manner of things. Children pretend they are cowboys, but I was yet to see any child pretend like he was on a road gang.

  I drove slowly when I passed the first of the road crews stacking dead trees for burning. With so many gangs out, it was no telling who was who. I looked for the vertical stripes of the trusty, so I could find Polk. I had the window down, too, in case I heard him before I saw him. Three miles past the Kilby gate I caught his voice. The way he dragged out a holler told me it was Polk. Those work songs made me ill, and I didn’t know a man who liked them. The only worthwhile reason to holler one was that I had some kindred to sing them with.

  I pulled off the road slowly, and the two guards had already turned to watch my car. I got out carefully and took my time with my walk. Coming toward that first guard, I needed to let him know all was well. I carried a folded map in one hand, and the other hand was outstretched for a little friendly wave. I touched my hat.

  A Kilby guard is a simple man. The curious type wouldn’t work in a place like that, at least not for long. I answered their questions without saying a word, showed them what they already believed about me. I was a Negro driver of a long black car, looking for directions. The sun had found a seam, and it left a wall of glare on my windshield. The backseat was covered with shadow, so my passenger was unseen except for the one their simple minds put there. They surely thought I worked for a white man, and they would hesitate before messing with his driver. The longest ride they’d seen a Negro in was a paddy wagon or a hearse.

  “Afternoon. My boss needs to get up to Wetumpka Road, and I got myself turned around.”

  I could tell the guard had been in the service. Most of them had. He was too young for my war, but maybe Korea. He wore his uniform sharp, as he’d been taught in the military. His new service as a Kilby guard didn’t call for all that, and he’d learn in time. Before too long he would be as sloppy as his partner was, pocket flaps on his uniform curled up and wrinkled and his button line raggedy and an inch out of line with his belt buckle.

  I bet he was a good shot, though. They all were.

  The guard closest to me looked at my hands before my face, making sure he could see what I carried. The map was folded to the plot of land we stood on. In the same hand I carried a pack of cigarettes, an offering in exchange for his help.

  “The new road ain’t on this map. Turn around. Right at the fork up to Highway Nine.”

  He took two Kools, and then he took two more. He’d been in the Navy. The name of his ship was on the lighter he returned to his pocket as he breathed out the smoke.

  “Menthol,” he said and shook his head.

  I got a good long look at the gang in the patch and saw three men I knew. Five were new boys in brand-new uniforms who must have come over from the boys’ camp at Mount Meigs. They might have been sixteen if that and working their first Christmas on Kilby farm. A lot of boys thought about running that time of year. You were a fool if you didn’t think about running and a bigger one if you tried.

  The second guard carried his tobacco in his jaw, not a fistful like some of them chewed on, but a neat, tight bit he kept packing down with his tongue. I could trace his steps with his spit, gravel turned chaw-colored and the rocks mortared together in places with the juice and bits.

  A small pine tree rested near the gravel’s edge. The bottom cut was raggedy from the half-dull saws with too much tree sap and dust in the teeth. The guards would send a man after any midget pine tree, something to take home to his living room or sell for a dollar.

  “You and your man got your directions. I guess y’all can get back on the road then,” he said, handing the map back to me.

  “Of course, I wouldn’t leave without saying thank you and good afternoon, gentlemen.”

  One of the hardest jobs I ever had was smiling in a guard’s face, but I needed to get close enough for the boys to be sure it was me. I’d come back like I told them, and somebody would tell it right.

  God as my witness. I’d put my last dollar on it if I had a dollar left. Nat Weary was out on that road in a Packard with rock candy paint that was so smooth the dirt didn’t have nowhere to grab hold.

  The song Polk sang had a merciful time, slow enough for the boys to get a little rest without stopping. He leaned his shovel and kept the count, rocking that root loose on the downbeat. The year I’d been gone had passed over his face two- or threefold. The only clocks that moved quickly in Kilby were the ones that sped through our visiting time and the ones that aged us. Polk’s crow’s-feet were as deep as his scars. He squinted some, trying to see who I was.

  The weather was cool at least, but December was too early for a freeze. The ground got stingy in the deepest part of winter, fighting a shovel, bending weak metal or a too-thin handle. But the dirt still had some give left. Still, watching them pull, I could feel the spread of my bones and the pull in my muscles, neither enough to get that root free.

  Polk leaned into that shovel one more time and he looked over at me, I nodded toward the car and he worked a chuckle into that song. He had never called me a liar, but I knew how it sounded when I told him before I left Kilby.

  Got a job in California driving Nat Cole.

  Got me a job, too. Joe Louis bought himself a jet plane, and he told me I could fly him.

  Where to?

  The moon first, and then on the way back we might stop in Cincinnati to see this girl I used to know. Get a bite to eat. A hot sandwich somewhere.

  I’m not lying, though. That’s where I’m going.

  I know, Showstopper. That’s why we gave you that name. Bring ol’ Nat Cole by next time you come to town. Stop by the store and bring some cigarettes.

  What kind?

  Shit, man. The kind they sell at a store.

  Once the guards turned away, I tossed the cigarette pack in the bit of tall grass just off the road. Polk saw, gave me that little nod we all gave in case the guards were watching, barely a nod at all. I couldn’t give the boys a show, but they could smoke better. It was damn near Christmas, so a man could at least smoke some tobacco that didn’t taste like the dirt it was pulled from.

  The gravel under my shoes might have been the same rocks I had to carry in buckets way back when, and hearing the crush of them as I walked to the car was as bad as hearing those work songs. Nat by then had eased across the seat toward the near-side window. I told him to let the boys see him one good time. I figured that was as much show as we could give them. We sat for a moment before I started the engine, and Polk’s work call got a little louder.

  “This. Ten years of it,” Nat said. He had learned to hide his anger just like we helped him hide that mail. People were used to that smooth croon when he opened his mouth. The other voice he kept away from the cameras and microphones. In the car, he didn’t hide it.

  “Ten years for giving that man what he had coming.”

  I nodded. “But I’m gone now. Last time I’ll see the place.”

  I eased off the shoulder and onto the road, but I stopped by the guards so they could see who I carried. He stuck his head out of the window.

  “I want to thank you, gentlemen,” Nat said, looking at the guards but with his head tilted toward the men in that field. Lord, didn’t his voice carry.

  We drove about a quarter mile farther, and when the road widened I turned the car around, sending dust and rocks in a swirl behind us. Nat had his head turned to a group of boys near t
he shoulder. They looked like youngsters from the boys’ camp cutting more pines for Christmas. The teenagers worked as trusties for the children who held armloads of pine branches for somebody’s garland.

  “All that time for a fight,” he told me.

  “Don’t ever think I’m sorry for what I did. Your fingers. Your jaw. Your face. He would have smashed everything he could.”

  “I think about that night every time I get onstage. The ones who send the mail talk about it, say they’ll get me again.”

  “They got to come for us first.”

  I drove a little faster then and turned up the radio, moving fast and thinking about the steps it took to cover the miles my gas foot pushed behind us.

  “We never talked about it. How it felt when you put him on the ground.”

  “I guess I felt like you feel when you stand onstage. I understand why somebody wants that all the time. I’d do all I could to keep that feeling.”

  “That’s the problem, Weary. I get that itch, and then I’m supposed to get humble, down-in-the-gutter humble, and forget they told me I was a star. I come off a stage with that fire running through me, and then I’m supposed to act like it’s gone.”

  “To hell with it. Can’t let anybody take that.”

  “They keep trying though, don’t they? Not with a pipe, but they keep on.”

  “To hell with trying. It’s the rest of it. What they do.”

  On the college station, George Worthy had started his afternoon show with Nat’s records, and the same secret that had been written across the Centennial’s marquee was being told to anybody listening.

  “My friends, the rumors you heard are true, tonight and tonight only . . . Montgomery’s Very Own Nat King Cole. If you cannot make it to the Centennial then pull up a seat downstairs at the Majestic, or in your living room, because we will be broadcasting live. Get comfortable. Fix yourself a drink. We’ll be playing nothing but Nat Cole from now until then.”

  When we passed my crew again, I wanted to give them a song. So I slowed down, let the engine dip just underneath the music so the boys heard a little something. No matter how slow I drove, they would get only a line or two of the record. We never got a whole song from a car passing on the road. A few bars. A hook maybe. The boys in the weed patch would make do with that much, just like those scraps of things they found on the roadside. A pop bottle turned into a still. A bit of metal from an undercarriage for a knife. A piece of copper wire to turn into a bootleg radio to catch some music when the wind and clouds favored us with a signal. If not, the men would piece together a story, make the show up from scratch.

  We were out in the weed patch today and we saw Nat Cole riding in a Packard. I swear on the Bible Jesus carried that his driver was old Nat Weary.

  Some days Nat wanted music on the car radio, and some days he didn’t. I had always wondered how a singer who’d sold millions of records felt about hearing his own on the air. I imagine that it was a different kind of listening. I never asked him to explain. Besides, he didn’t seem to hear it. He was turned all the way around looking out the back window then.

  “The cigarettes you dropped. They’ll find them?”

  “Polk saw me. He’ll get the word out.”

  “How many packs in the glove box?”

  “Half dozen or so. I got a carton under the seat, too.”

  I gave him every pack, and when we’d rounded a corner, beyond sight of the road guards and the towers, Nat started throwing while his music played. The notes on the radio came from the hands that, thirty years before, threw curveballs, shot marbles, and skipped rocks. He was still a good shot, throwing menthol boxes along the prison road and finding the tallest clusters of chickweed where nobody would find what we’d left unless he knew to look.

  “Do you remember that song, Weary? That last one they were singing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s Hannah?”

  “She’s the sun. They’re asking her not to rise. That way it’ll be over tomorrow.”

  “To sound like that in a place like this. I’d like to call it beautiful, but that’s not the word. It stays with you, I imagine. Even when you don’t want it to.”

  “Your people took you away from here so you’d never have to sing like that.”

  I prayed about those songs. If my mind went bad before the rest of me, I hoped those songs were the first things I forgot. My worn-out memory may show me mercy in the end. It would be nice to die believing I was never there.

  Chapter 27

  SCENE: Nat Cole driving a convertible down the Sunset Strip and singing “Anything Goes,” in the brand-new MODEL from AUTOMAKER.

  That was the number that Nat had created and that ad sales had pitched to a half-dozen potential sponsors. Nobody bought it. It was a good idea just the same, so they went ahead and produced it, because any good idea on the shelf would be worthless once the show was dead. So “Anything Goes” showed up on the rundown, the last song on the last episode of The Nat King Cole Show.

  Innovation, Bob Henry said. They’d have to give Nat credit for that much. Bob and a cameraman had driven down Sunset Boulevard, shooting the clubs’ marquees and their neon lights flashing in the evening. Nat would sit in a little Alfa Romeo convertible as that footage rolled across a screen behind him. The car came from the Warner Brothers lot, an after-hours favor from the property master in exchange for a few show tickets and some records. The show would end like it started, with homemade magic, some borrowing, and a good song.

  I picked up the convertible from a lot filled with cars and anything else on wheels. I passed a covered wagon, a couple of chariots, a half-dozen police cars, and a Model A full of bullet holes that most likely belonged to some Hollywood gangsters. The convertibles, made for sunshine riding, were parked in a row under the west side fence. Nat had been specific about the make. For one, he needed a low windshield that wouldn’t create much glare for the studio lights. The other reason wasn’t spoken, but I knew for a fact that he didn’t want to drive a car from a maker who’d said no to sponsoring him. Alfa Romeo didn’t advertise on US television, so they’d never had a chance to turn him down.

  While I drove the car onto the set, Mackie finished the Hollywood sign, with letters tall as the longboard he kept on his car. They arranged them just above the screen while I wiped the car clean. The first few letters looked plenty real hanging from the rafters. All of the HOLLY and the W had been lifted, and only the final three letters remained. Mackie carried an O above his head, and made a second trip for its twin. White lacquer covered the front of the letters, but the backs were unpainted and made from reused bits of plywood, some of them from the signs that welcomed the would-be sponsors, logos colored as bright as their store packages. No scraps of wood went to waste. They just started over as something else.

  As the band started playing, the projector rolled on cue and did the moving for Nat. The song was about three minutes and the tape was four, long enough for Nat to say his good-nights and for the credits to roll. Four minutes was a short trip down Sunset, but Bob Henry had edited out much of it and spliced together the rest. He took out the no-name places, and let Ciro’s rub shoulders with the Mocambo on the same block. His Palladium was a beat away from El Capitan. That Capitol Records steeple rose above the rooftops at the beginning and the end, and once or twice in the middle, so that Sunset looked more like a roundabout than a street.

  As light and easy as that song was, that sadness in the room came from neither the lyrics nor the melody. The business made that number feel like an elegy. I had driven Nat to the Biltmore the night they gathered to tell him the show was canceled. The formality was meant to be a sign of respect, I imagine, but a steak dinner and a good scotch didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to a man getting fired. They could call it what they wanted to, hiatus, cancellation. But they fired him. No other way to say it.

  I held the door when he left the restaurant. He had that tall walk about him, but he was fallen ju
st the same. His face didn’t tell on him, because anytime I passed the Biltmore, I saw a couple of photographers, and their pictures ended up in the tabloids. That hotel was no place for a star to walk looking lost or broken. He had to look like who he was, a star whose name the magazines printed in bold letters.

  Singing in the convertible with Sunset all around him, Nat headed toward the Biltmore once again. When Bob Henry did his cutting, the Biltmore’s block was gone. Maybe it was mercy not to have it on the screen, or maybe it was just coincidence, and that slice of Sunset was as good as any to throw away.

  With so much room between the microphone and the projector, the click of the film roll didn’t rise above the music. I got an earful of it though, and it drowned out everything by the end of the song. The volume wasn’t the problem. I was close enough to see that reel wind down, and three minutes and some change was all that was left of Nat’s time on the air. After the song was finished, Nat had enough Sunset on the screen for the applause, his good-evening and thank-you, and the closing credits. Once that last bit of film snaked through the projector, it was over. Across Alameda Avenue, at NBC’s color studio, the theme music and applause tracks for Robert Montgomery’s show were playing just then, and any viewers still tuned to NBC watched him instead.

  Nat raised his hands from the steering wheel as the studio audience applauded. He thanked them in that way that singers do, a makeshift bow with folded hands from the front seat of the roadster. I opened the door to let him out, and he gave them another bow then and a wave of the hand. Though the applause went on for some time, it had to end eventually, and the echoes followed close behind. And when that quiet settled in, the final episode had come and gone.