Driving the King (15 page)

T
he beat of a typewriter came through the telephone line when I answered, and I figured it was Mrs. Lomax before she said hello.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Weary. Just calling to check up on you. Like to keep up with our readers when I can. I'm not big on surveys but a chat is just fine.”

“I'm all right, but I wonder if you call everybody who takes that paper?”

“I believe I told you, we're a small press, so what we don't have in circulation we make up for by being hospitable. Plus I wanted to see if you knew what today is.”

“Besides the one on the calendar? No ma'am.”

“A solid month off the busses. It galls me to hear people call a month an anniversary, so I won't. But Montgomery holds the record now. Baton Rouge stayed off the bus for two weeks when they tried. A month. You're proud of the folks back home I hope.”

“I try to keep my hope manageable. I'm game for good news, but if it's bad I'm not surprised.”

Her voice was gone again, turned to whoever was beside her. An older child asked a question about a word. Mrs. Lomax said something about a dictionary, then thesaurus, before she spoke into the receiver again.

“Excuse me,” she said. “My oldest has a book report. Deadlines all around this evening. I'm filling two holes in my front page. A famous Negro on television and a city full of black folks making waves in your hometown. Fifty-thousand black folks and not a one on the bus. They could fill the Hollywood Bowl a couple of times over.”

The numbers mattered to me. Somebody was always counting, keeping track, even when the numbers worked against us. It was good to hear a number that sounded like winning. But it had been one month. Thirty days felt like a triumph until I considered how long things had been the same or getting worse.

“I hope they're ready for what's coming,” I told her. “The law back home, they like to make examples of us. I know that for a fact.”

“They seem ready. It'll be a long winter for your folks, but I suppose it takes that sometimes.”

Montgomery's January was milder than most, but it was winter enough, with plenty of rain to make up for what we didn't have in snow. Going most places was a long-enough
walk, made longer by roads with no sidewalks. If the walkers didn't break in the first month, maybe the boycott would stay together. Imagining the empty busses rumbling through Centennial Hill was a good notion, enough to make that cold-weather walking worth the toil.

“Mr. Weary, I'm afraid the newspaper will spend more on long-distance calls than we will for electricity,” Mrs. Lomax told me. “I want to thank you for putting me in touch with your people. Problem is the more questions I ask the more I have. So I think it's better for me to ask in person. I'm finishing the paper tonight before I head to the airport in the morning. Montgomery might be home for a while.”

“I don't see myself ever going back, and I don't know why you want to, either.”

“My work takes me places, Mr. Weary, so it's not always about me wanting to go. Of course, how could I not be a bit curious? If it's over this time next week, I can say I got there in time to see it.”

“Those drivers wear uniforms like the screws wore at Kilby. Hats, ties, everything. They even carry the same pistols, right where the whole world can see them when that door opens.”

She was quiet for a minute. It took me years to realize that it wasn't normal for bus drivers to carry guns, to pull them when they pleased.

“Be careful. It's a different kind of trouble down there,” I said.

“Not exactly different. We had riots here a few years back. During your war. A couple hundred enlisted men, white boys beating and killing people. I reported from my window before they shot it out, then I went on the roof and saw everything. I don't avoid the trouble, but I find a smart place to watch.”

She had stopped typing by then, but a faraway typing continued, her child with slower strokes, searching out letters before putting fingers on the keys.

“You know who my father-in-law is, Mr. Weary?”

“I heard his name. Lucius Lomax.”

“People like to call him a gangster, but I think that's vulgar. He was a racketeer for a time, no secret to anybody. He said it didn't make much sense for folks to run and buy the
LA Times
to check the numbers when he could sell them his own paper for less. Even if they didn't win, they'd know what's what, maybe read a poem or two after they checked the wire. Mr. Lomax hired me to turn his newsletter into a paper, and I bought this typewriter and all the ones I wore out before this one. Lucius told me fighting back was a repertoire, Mr. Weary. All kinds of ways to do it, your kind and mine being two of his favorite. You don't regret it do you?”

“I miss my years, but it had to be done.”

“Those riots weren't stopped by the LAPD. It took so-called gangsters on rooftops shooting into mobs. Good way to see if men are serious about lynching folks is to aim something and fire. Lucius told me a typewriter is a piece of steel that tells people how you feel, but it's not the only tool for such things.”

The second typewriter had gone quiet then. Maybe her child was either finished or listening. Both possibly. Maybe one of those typewriters was lightweight and made for traveling. Alabama bound.

She hung up, and it was just me on that kitchen phone. The click of the typewriter was gone, but it stayed in my head, another sound to go with the ringing that had started again. There on my feet I had felt all right, but when I took a seat, the tiredness came over me. It was not from my work. It was just tiresome thinking about folks having to fight for the least little thing. I loved my people for fighting, but hated the reason why, and that left me with that crosscut notion of pride and anger pulling in different directions, two kinds of muscle fighting for the same piece of bone.

I'm an ex-Southerner who has returned, though this city is not home. My family hails from Galveston and New Orleans on one side, Mobile and Eufaula on the
other. I have seen the good-hearted ways of Montgomerians, and I have witnessed the low-down acts they have endured as they protest the Jim Crow seating on the City Lines busses. I arrived six weeks after this boycott began, and I intend to print dispatches from Montgomery until this action is over.

Mrs. Lomax didn't waste any time. Her first article from Montgomery, “Dispatches from the Southland,” ran in February. She had turned my birthplace and Los Angeles into twin cities. When her readers unfolded their papers, they would see that LA had been ordered to integrate the firehouses, and the people of Montgomery were walking until their city did the same with its busses. The other Negro papers reported, too, but they hadn't sent any journalists, so Mrs. Lomax showed Los Angeles how it felt to live in the middle of that story.

Her photographs gave top billing to an empty City Lines bus, broken-in walking shoes on the tabby sidewalk, and an anonymous car pool. She showed no license plates, and the faces remained in the shadows of the cars, but the rides were full and traveling. She caught a white bus driver staring out that opened door, with his sidearm showing and nobody there to flinch. Any Angeleno reading the
Tribune
knew what the world looked like from a Montgomery sidewalk.

Mrs. Lomax started her days walking with the morning commuters, and she ended them at the mass meetings.

I heard my share of shouting in many a Galveston church on steaming hot Sundays. I quickly forgot those lessons. But the people of Montgomery, for all of their joyful noise, discovered the spiritual value of silence and the grand power of quietude. The Baptists and Methodists of Black Montgomery, exuberant in their evening meetings, seemed to take vows of silence when they walked to work and school. These walkers greeted one another, friends and strangers alike, but when they crossed into Cloverdale, the Garden District, and downtown, they became as quiet as Quakers. The lesson was this: One can shout and sing for only so long, but the quiet sustains. Enemies can only wonder what the silent foe is thinking.

The
Tribune
's front page wasn't big enough for me. It could have run on past the kitchen table and stretched from wall to wall, and still I would have needed that much more. Even with everything happening in Los Angeles, it was my hometown all over the front page. I had hoped for some time that Los Angeles might cure me of home, but with Alabama all over my table, that long-ago heartache came right on back.

DAY OF THE SHOW

3:25 P.M.

T
he boxes behind the front desk held the Centennial's room keys. Box 312 was empty. I had reserved the room for a friend and his wife, so I knew then that they had arrived. I hadn't seen Charles Pettibone since the army, and his invitation was a wartime promise to some of the Alabama soldiers that had taken me eleven years to keep. I'd told them that when it was over and done with, I'd show them a time in Montgomery. Bone remembered that when I called him, laughing all the while he said yes.
Yes, indeed.

Miss Vee told me the lady was upstairs but the gentleman had gone across the lobby to the Majestic. I wondered if I'd know him by sight. Eleven years was plenty of
time to give an old friend a stranger's face, but that voice I couldn't miss.

He talked to Sonya while she tended bar, and she told him she had people down in Marengo. She and Bone called names, saying who had come up from the country and who was still there. I couldn't hear that voice without remembering his yell. Charles Pettibone called the cadence when it was his time to fire, a prelude then a blast, over and over, until that day they were overrun.

Bone had fought with Battery C when he was captured. The forest he used for cover also did him harm. The German shells that hit the Ardennes trees turned the wood to shrapnel. The bits that got into Bone's leg could have killed him, but they left him hobbled instead. The way his foot hung off the bar stool, I could tell it never got all the way right. That leg was good enough to walk on but that twist had healed into the bone. He kept touching that knee, an old habit maybe, or just a case of bone chill brought on by the weather.

The first thing out of his mouth was my name, with that laugh right behind it. I told him to keep his seat, but he paid me no mind. He needed his arms to stand as much as he needed his legs. Eyes, too, it seemed, because he stared at a spot on the floor as he steadied himself on that brass rail. Then he let go of his grip to shake my hand and grab my other arm, kneading it until my shoulder rocked in the joint.

“Look here, Miss Sonya. You see who walked in? Ol' Weary in his good clothes. See? This is citified thread in this Los Angeles suit. Last time I saw you—man—last time was a time.”

“Last time's got nothing on this. I'm ready to drink one with Charles Pettibone.”

“Like you used to tell it, you drink that good whiskey you can't pronounce. That's saying something 'cause you a college man.”

That laugh at the end woke up the place. People looked over, smiling, even though they didn't hear what he said.

“Before we came up, I told Trudy we'd have a nice supper in Montgomery. Kept your secret. Didn't speak his name to a soul,” Bone said, his voice low and rumbling. “Trudy likes surprises. I don't on account of my blood pressure. I like to know right off, or at least see it coming. Nice though, ain't it? Knowing something first.”

“It is. I'm like you, though. Surprises can go good or bad.

“All Trudy knows is we might hear somebody on the piano.”

He said “piano” with that drawl that could squeeze a word, wring out every bit of sound.

“Trudy went to get her coat. We're having lunch with her niece over at the college. She got herself a boyfriend she wants us to meet. He's studying chemistry. A senior.
She said that three or four times on the phone. Senior. Like it's supposed to mean something to me, as long as I been grown. Senior ain't nothing but a year. Young man's distinction.”

Bone had on his going-somewhere suit, and his shoes had as much polish as the bar top's stone. His cane was just as clean, carved from the same grade of wood as the wainscot it rested on. Whoever made it had carved leaves and branches, like that cane needed to favor the woods it was cut from. If a man knew he'd need one for the rest of his life, he might as well have one like that.

“Good to get out for a night. Our son and baby girl staying at Trudy's mama's house. She said she could handle two, but not another one. Told me don't bring her daughter home with a souvenir. Said the same thing when we dated. Sweet woman but she can be vulgar. I love her like I love mine, though.”

He settled back on that stool then, pointing up to the ceiling.

“He's up there?” He mouthed, “Nat Cole.”

I nodded.

“You said you knew him back when, but there's knowing folk and knowing folk.”

“I figured it was time for him to come back one last time. Me, too.”

“Gone for good. Can't say I blame you.”

“I left in a hurry after I got out, but this time I want to leave right. Want it to look like something.”

“You always had some style about you. The world is a raggedy-ass place, so any little bit helps.”

Bone's hair had turned the same color mine had, gray twisted with black like the herringbone in his blazer. We were equal parts young and old, with our heads keeping tally of the days, the ones gone and the ones we had left.

“Los Angeles,” he said, like the name alone was a question. “What you drive him in?”

“Cadillac most days. Imperial from time to time.”

“Lord, the choices of a rich man. I'd tell you to drop me off in one and pick me up in the other.”

“Might as well.”

The sun had tipped a little deeper into afternoon, but the window glaze made the hour feel later. The walking traffic had grown heavier. Children and the schoolteachers had finished their days. Parker's Pharmacy had a line near the ice cream counter. If the boycott had given Montgomery anything, it was a full sidewalk in the afternoons. People had gotten used to taking their time getting to a place, stopping at the High Street windows, doing a little shopping or looking at least.

I had seen enough busses pass to know the schedule. They were few and they were empty, and in that rattle I heard worn metal and broke-down oil. Me and Bone were
not Montgomery regulars, so we stared. The people on the street, some with their backs to the busses and some facing them, didn't pay the City Lines any mind.

“Say it might be over soon, but I hope they never go back,” I said.

“Don't make any sense though. Customer gives you a dime and you say go to hell.”

“What customers?”

“Yes, indeed. Nary a one. 'Cause the customers are gone. In the wind.”

He moved his fingers then, like the wind he spoke of needed a little help to blow. He raised his voice when he said it, too. The crowd of folks in there gave us a look then, a longer measure. I didn't mind if Bone got a bit loud, because the last time I heard his voice was in a field hospital. His bed was a few feet away but his voice sounded so much farther, coming at me from the bottom of a well. His eyes were the same way, sunk down low in his skin.

It was good to see him all the way back, with a little muscle in his voice and more weight in his gut. Getting everything back took time if it happened at all.

“Your ears. How they feel?” I said.

“I thought the ringing got better, but a doctor told me I was wrong. Said we just stop remembering how much better things used to sound. Can't worry though. Because when it gets quiet once and for all, that's it. At least for this world.”

When Bone raised his glass, I did the same.

I knew the names would come up eventually. It was a gathering meant for more than just us. The boys from Alabama used to drink together. William Pritchett, George Davis, Bone, and me. I made the same promise to them all.
Come to Montgomery, give me a holler, and we'll have a time.

A farmer near our camp in Tattenhall had given me a bottle, brown liquor without a label. Growing up I'd drunk as much homemade brew as store-bought, but that gift whiskey was different, better than anything I'd had. That man didn't know us, and he was too nice to bring up dying and killing, but I guess he'd watched plenty boys from Tattenhall go off to war. He knew we'd cross that Channel soon and face the same killers his countrymen had.

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.