Driving the King

by Ravi Howard

  “Don’t leave just yet,” he told me.

  The cargo door on the mountain side of the building was open, and between that corner of moonlight and the handful of clouds, the sky over the mountain glowed brighter than the studio.

  “I’ll drive,” Nat said. “Get in.”

  During the show all Nat could do was pretend, so then he turned the key for real. The engine rumbled against the concrete floor, and he gunned it twice more before turning on the headlights and driving outside.

  “Been ready to do this all day,” he told me.

  We took the back gate and turned into the Burbank traffic that had lightened by then. Nat hit the gas just enough to test that ride. Not the least bit of rattle or shake when we shifted and picked up speed. Just as smooth as it could be. The flip side of getting there in a hurry was that the ride ended too soon. Nat brought us the long way around Warner’s until we reached the west entrance, where a property man waited for us. Merrill was cool enough about it, but I saw that bit of a double take he did when he saw who was driving.

  “Thanks for the tickets,” Merrill said.

  “Did they take care of you?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Cole. Never been that close to the stage.”

  I’d parked the Cadillac not too far from Merrill’s desk, something huge and oak made, left over from a movie it looked like. It faced a television that had around it some makeshift rows of car seats and chairs from a multitude of times and places, captain’s seats from boats and spaceships and shop-made benches built from scraps. Some of the stagehands must have watched with him. The television was still on, tuned to Robert Montgomery, who glowed in Technicolor, something brand-new for the top-money stars. The future of television, they called it, sharper colors and high-fidelity sound to match.

  We got in the Cadillac and drove back toward the gate, but Nat stopped me before I could leave the lot.

  “How about the once around? A few blocks of Los Angeles you haven’t seen yet.”

  And so we circled the back lot cities and saw little bits of London and Rome and Manhattan on the same block. We made a few turns around the town square and its city hall at the top of the granite steps. The unnamed city was nowhere in particular, but who knew what it would be in the morning. Empty carriage bolts filled the space above the city hall sign, space enough to carry another name every time that town had cause to be someplace new.

  “This is an amazing town when it wants to be,” Nat said.

  His voice was as steadfast as his poker face.

  “The roadster was something else.”

  “It’s not too late. I can work something out with Merrill. He likes the Crescendo. Get him a table and you can take the Alfa back out for a spin,” I said.

  “Some other time,” Nat said, too tired to make it sound true.

  Warner Brothers had those same tall backdrops that I’d seen inside the Paramount walls. At Warner’s they let the newly painted canvases dry at night. Rows of them hung on the scaffolding outside Studio 27, all stretched out like so much laundry on the line. The one thing missing was the kind of wind that might sway them. And inside the studio doors, twenty feet of shelves carried the old cities, rolled up and stacked so they showed nothing but the little bit of horizon colors that bled onto the edges.

  “I was hoping there’d still be time for good news,” I said. “A few more shows through the spring at least.”

  “Good news takes time, and I don’t have enough left. I told them to find me a sponsor, or end it. I paid as long as I could, but I can’t anymore. I almost lost my home once, and I can’t ever go back to those days.”

  “In a year or two. Maybe they’ll bring you back.”

  I knew good and well what the answer was before he said it.

  “It’s dead, Weary. They don’t bring us back.”

  I didn’t say anything. We had gone through all the “look on the bright side” talking. The contingencies and possibilities had come and gone.

  “The last time a show died on me was back in Montgomery,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that more than I’ve let on. Maybe I should go back. At least I can say the last time I was down there I gave the folks a show.”

  I didn’t know what to say at first, because I didn’t think I was ready to go back there. Los Angeles and my work and his show were meant to be my cure. But when Nat mentioned going home, it seemed then that my ailment was the same as his. Of all the shows he had done, that one he’d never forgotten. We’d always be tied to it, the back side of an interruption, trying to get back in front.

  “Nothing’s changed down there,” I told him. “If anything, Montgomery’s worse. The way they’re acting with these busses, somebody’s liable to kill you.”

  “The ones who didn’t want me to finish my show got what they wanted,” he said. “But now. Seems my schedule is about to open up. I’ll be damned if they stop me again.”

  His voice had a little more fire in it then, and the embers spread like fires do, with me close enough to catch some. Show business people know how to turn their anger into a song. A show. Maybe I’d learn to do the same thing I’d seen him do on live television. Change that burning into starlight.

  “With that camera, I never know who I’m singing to. Judging by the mail I have plenty watching who didn’t want me to finish. Whether they want me to or not, I stare them in the face and sing. I learned that a long time ago, but I learned it in spades at the Empire. You help me set up a show, and I’ll try it again in Montgomery.”

  “Whatever you need me to do.”

  “Good. Give the homefolk the show they never got to see,” he said. “You, too, friend.”

  It had started then as a make-believe notion passed from him to me. Then it became something possible, and beyond that something that was necessary. I saw it, and heard it, repeating in my head. From there, it was just a matter of making it so.

  Chapter 28

  Montgomery

  DAY OF THE SHOW

  5:30 P.M.

  Pete had my car on the lift to change the oil and get me set for my travels that next morning. He talked about my Packard like it was his, and for a good long while it had been. He worked on all the cabs, which together had probably driven a million miles around Montgomery, but those were circles. Mine was the first car of his that had made a round trip through the desert and was set to go back to California. He looked for something wrong and admired his work at the same time.

  “Salt,” he said. “That’s where most of the problems start, but not that salt in the water and the air, I’m talking ’bout the road salt up north. It eats through the bottom like nothing. Out west it’s sand, see, it gets in the block and starts trouble. Your oil is old, but it ain’t too filthy. Car like this, you can drive it forever if you keep it up.”

  He stared at the undercarriage, going back and forth with that light he held.

  “You got a good mechanic out there?”

  “You know I do my own work.”

  “Your stingy ass makes good money, so you need a real mechanic.”

  “Who says I’m not one?”

  “I’m saying it to your face. Just because you drive a car don’t mean you can fix one. Eating ham ain’t the same as raising a pig.”

  Marie came out of the station with a handful of candy, some cinnamon and some honey. She split it with me.

  “What’s Pete talking about?”

  “Nothing but some trash.”

  “Nathaniel was telling me how much he’ll miss my work tomorrow when he’s gone,” Pete said.

  “Hell, I might miss you, too,” I said.

  “Don’t understand the rush,” Marie told me. We stood near my front fender. She wiped the cinnamon dust from her hands before she reached up to the tire and measured the tread with her fingertip.

  “Been here a good solid week,” I said.

  “You talk like that’s any kind of time.”

  The boycott had taken its toll. Marie and Pete kept the pumps lock
ed at night so they couldn’t be firebombed with their own gasoline. The shattered front window had been replaced once, and in case another brick was thrown, the plywood stood at the ready behind a stack of radial tires. Crossed strips of electrical tape covered the new window and the garage door glass. In case the panes were broken, the brick wouldn’t make it through and hurt anyone. With all the busted windows, the boycott year had done to Montgomery what hurricane season did to the Gulf. The difference was, storms didn’t choose. They just rained on everybody.

  Marie and Pete’s carpool ran on odd-numbered days and every other weekend. The stops moved around for safety. The organizers moved, too. The Montgomery Improvement Association and the Women’s Political Council never stayed in the same space more than a few days at a time. I had passed the sewing space over the dry cleaners and wondered if Mattie still ran her newsletter out of there. I wanted to speak to her before I left.

  When I asked Marie where I could find Mattie, she didn’t say anything at first. She checked the tire’s tread again.

  “It would be strange for me not to say something. Been here all this time. It might seem rude.”

  Marie didn’t answer. She had moved on from the tire, messing with a sprig of pecan leaves caught under the fender.

  “Plus, I want her to know about the show. She and her husband are welcome.”

  She hadn’t answered me yet.

  “She still moves the office around?”

  She nodded, hesitated, but then she went ahead with it.

  “She’s at Gray’s today. The repair shop around back. Mr. Gray fixes the print machines, so they work there some days.”

  Marie told me she’d drive my car to make sure the tires and the brakes were fine. Before she took the keys, she squeezed her words into my palms.

  “That’s the problem with coming back. You start to dwell.”

  “Just a good-bye, and then I’m gone.”

  She let go, then clutched my keys like she meant to pray for them.

  “We’ll have your car ready when you get back.”

  The bell of the repair shop rang when the door opened, and I couldn’t see anybody. The shelves carried the hulls of radios and the insides of turntables. A few televisions had been cracked open, ready for the new tubes stacked on the shelves. It was the perfect back room for that boycott office, because the wall of radios hid Mattie from anyone walking in. I saw her hands through an open space. She cleaned them with a can of hair spray and wiped the ink away with a piece of terry cloth. The shop was small, so the smell of the aerosol, powder, and oil filled the place, as the mist crossed through the circle of lamplight.

  “Yes? Hello?”

  “Mattie, it’s me.”

  We didn’t touch this time. The smile across the room was respectable.

  “I asked Marie about you, and she said I could find you here. I was in town for a few days, but I’m leaving tomorrow. I wanted to speak before I did.”

  “I saw your car at the hotel, so I thought you might be here for a visit.”

  “Not just visiting. Nat Cole’s here. We have a show this evening down the street. The old stomp.”

  “I heard some talk earlier this afternoon. Nice when a good rumor turns out to be true. I suppose we can all thank you for bringing him.”

  “We wanted to bring folks a show. Just needed to keep it quiet this time until the last minute, but I wanted you and Oswald to know about it. Plenty of good seats so we want people to know.”

  “We appreciate you,” she said.

  I had to remind myself to keep talking, because the quiet was only good for staring and hearing things said so long ago. Things that needed to be left where they’d fallen. She had crossed her arms in that way she used to sometimes, with that ring finger making circles round and round her elbow.

  “I hear it might be over soon. The busses. Good news for you all,” I said.

  She crossed her fingers, but I knew she didn’t put much faith in luck. It was just something else to do with her hands. Mine were in my pockets.

  “Waiting to hear back from the Supreme Court, if you can believe it.”

  “I believe it, Mattie. Your work got you somewhere. Maybe you can celebrate when it’s over.”

  “More relieved than anything else. For a while at least. There’ll be something else after this though. Schools. People want to vote. I guess we’re ready for all of that now.”

  “You always have been.”

  Of all my plans and wondering about Nat’s show, I had to wonder about my unfinished business in Montgomery. It was my hope that we could both move on with no more questions. We were testing the bit of peace we’d made, to see if it was good and settled.

  After I moved to Los Angeles, I wondered about seeing Mattie again. If I would. When. How it would be. Maybe a benign reunion of old friends, with enough of my new life around me to kill all the old craving. But it was anything but that. The boycott, planned at first for just a day to send a message, had lasted through the winter and the spring, and Montgomery had made all kinds of news. Mrs. Lomax’s stories in the Tribune brought Montgomery to Los Angeles, not just on the pages but in person.

  A June headline announced a rally in support of the boycott at the Dunbar Hotel, and posters lined the shop windows on Central Avenue, listing speakers from the Women’s Political Council and the Montgomery Improvement Association, among them Mrs. Mattie Green Allen. With every seat filled, a couple hundred easily, I watched from the standing room outside the mezzanine’s doors.

  Mattie talked about struggling, but struggling on the way to something and someplace. The patience of Negroes has been abused. Waiting, she told them, was moving backward while the world slipped ahead. Six months of walking has moved us, the Negroes of Montgomery, ahead by years, but it’s hardly far enough. We still haven’t reached a moment of equal treatment. It seemed that Los Angeles was filled with folks who’d left Montgomery, but they had called theirs different names. Galveston. Baton Rouge. Jackson. Little Rock.

  Mattie’s voice had for so long been familiar to me, but in that ballroom it was electric. I might have lied to myself and believed I wanted only to speak to her. Maybe I could say I just went to show my face and say a respectable hello, but I wanted more than that. I wanted to say what was still on my mind. When the speeches and the handshaking were over, I called up to her room on the house phone. I needed to talk at the very least. When I asked if she would see me, she said yes.

  We had been married once. Just two names on the register at an Oklahoma hotel. So there we were again. A fine room in Los Angeles with no name on the register. We didn’t have to write down the lie or say it out loud to anyone.

  “They sent you to fight, Nathaniel. And Kilby. The people who sent you never felt any shame for how they did you. I don’t believe in being ashamed, Nathaniel. Judged by people who took everything.”

  I wondered about the other life, getting married in the Kilby church and making children on a prison mattress, having some time with my wife in a room with no door and no curtains. Maybe, if I was good and did what the guards told me, I could hug my children’s necks on Christmas. Mattie and I had traded that life for separate ones, except for that night in a Dunbar Hotel room. We squeezed out the last bit of that feeling, and maybe that was what I needed to get myself right.

  “I want you to have as good a life out here as I have at home. The one I’m going back to. None of that has anything to do with you and me right now. This is all we have.” That’s what she’d told me.

  We let good-bye become a feeling, the last promise we could make to one another when we got through. I had to put that feeling down and leave it all there, let it rest. When daylight came, she was on the Sunset Limited and I’d left for home, getting to my porch just after the morning paper. The front-page news was about the charge Mrs. Allen left. We have lived too long with the lopsided portions, always the last and always the bottom. Lay down the pieces of that life and make the one meant for us, with all of t
he honor and none of the shame.

  So back in Montgomery, standing there with Mattie in the hidden office, the workshop of the small things that needed tending and backroom plans, we said good-bye and thank you without another word. We’d already run through the last of them, and they didn’t need repeating. When she turned around she got her machines going once again. The last of me in that place was the sound of the silver door chimes, that quick bit of rustling that told Mattie I was gone.

  Chapter 29

  On that last Sunday afternoon before leaving for Montgomery, I sat with Lucinda on that narrow porch, cozy she called it, with just enough room for her gunmetal love seat. She sat with her feet in my lap, rolling her heels one way and flexing her toes the other. She had once told me about the dance steps her chorus did. Her feet told the same story, ankles rolling around and around.

  “I’m going home for a little while.”

  “I have to get ready for work soon anyway,” she said and poured some of that tea she made in the sunlight, setting it on the porch wall to let it sweeten.

  “No. I mean Montgomery.”

  “Everybody all right?”

  As light as that day was supposed to feel, that bit I had not told her weighed on me. I knew it would get heavier until I told it.

  “Nat had an idea. Well, we both did. He wants to put on a show back home. Give the folks the one he didn’t finish. I’ll be gone for a few weeks.”

  She didn’t say much for a minute. Just a little turn in the winding of her feet.

  “Back to Alabama, then.”

  “Just for a couple of weeks.”

  She lifted her hand to my shoulder and sat up, and her feet stopped their leaping as she set them on the ground.

  “And then what?”

  “Nat might be gone for a while, but plenty of folks need drivers. I’ll figure something out when I come back from home.”

  When she lifted off the seat, the bench rocked, and the creak of the spring counted the back and forth I did there sitting alone, while Lucinda stood on the edge of the patio.