Driving the King Read Free

terminal’s speakers sounded like they were coming through a can. They had been stripped of anything colorful or sharp. The static popped louder than the drumbeat, and the only thing that made it sound like anything was the fact that the music was old and familiar. Los Angeles had spoiled me. I had experienced the pleasure of sitting in the Capitol Recordsstudios, listening to songs fresh-made. Most music fell short after that.
    The row of airport televisions cost a nickel for fifteen minutes, enough time to watch Nat’s television show from beginning to end. Of course, the show was a month gone, and it wasn’t coming back. The sales department at NBC said nobody was willing to pay, but if every television had a coin box like the ones in the Dannelly Field lobby, then they’d find plenty of folks willing to ante up.
    Midway down the terminal, the colored waiting sign had bright lights behind the letters, a Negro marquee. A few of the drivers sat in there and got a bit of breakfast at the sandwich window on the back end of the lunch counter. In the waiting area, children stood at the picture windows, and some sat on grown folks’ shoulders, waiting to see the plane land. They pressed their fingers onto the glass. A cleaning lady, her name tag too far to read, paid no mind to the landing. She stood near the window with a spray can of Windex and a rag, ready to clean the smudges as soon as the people were gone.
    Outside, Claude stood beside the other porters, milling with their backs to the windows. The man on the tractor had unhooked the flatbed and traded it out for the narrow stairs he would haul to the plane. No sooner than that plane stopped moving, wheels first and then thepropellers, those men had the bags off. Nat’s never touched that wagon, because Claude was on point, earning every dollar and then some.
    Skip was first out of the shadow of the plane’s door, and then came Nat Cole, his feet on Alabama ground.
    â€œHere we are, friend.”
    That’s what Nat told me when he came through the door. It was something he said when we pulled into his regular places. NBC. Capitol Records. Here we are, friend. Good days and the lesser days. Like getting there was part of the show, too.
    I walked catty-corner to Nat, a step or two behind and just off to the right. Back in his prizefighting days, Skip was a southpaw, and he carried his bag in his right hand as he walked beside me. Once Claude fell in behind, the four of us passed through Dannelly Field like a shotgun house wind, a straight line from the back door to the front.
    When we made it to the sidewalk, that Montgomery City Lines bus pulled in right beside us. That airport bus was not the one that had made the place famous. The notorious one rolled up Cleveland Avenue and made its way to the Court Square Fountain, but they all were kindred. If it wasn’t Mrs. Parks’s bus, it was the one young Miss Colvin had been thrown off months before. Those were the women I knew about. I couldn’t think of them withoutwondering about the unknown folks who got manhandled and laughed at, never speaking a word about it after.
    The three bus riders were white folks, and once they were off, the bus carried only its driver with that pistol on his hip, nickel-plated with a chestnut handle. I neither stopped walking nor flinched. I had learned to hide any worry or tremble deep down in my gut, leave it where I had buried so much already.
    Seeing that empty bus, I hoped that every Monday evening, when they used to watch Nat’s show, they would have walked a little faster to get home, let that television be something to wrap the evening around. With the show dead, I had to bring him in person, give the folks the show I had aimed to see those years before.
    The show must go on was something singers were supposed to say, but I’d seen plenty of singers and never once had I heard one say it. I knew they lived it though. Skip told me about the