Driving the King (13 page)

I
sat at the bar while Evelyn and Willie ran microphone wires around the baseboards of John Dolphin's place, from the stage to the homemade sound booth, a banquette and two tables pulled together off to the side. Dynamite Jackson ran the bar on the second floor of Dolphin's building on Vernon Avenue. The back windows looked out onto his car lot, where every convertible's top was down, every hood up, and every door open. What Dolphin didn't make in car sales he made up for in records and live shows.

The house band had trickled in, crowded around bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The drums were next to the piano, and two Regal cases sat against the speaker. A Fender bass against the wall. The organist screwed the legs on his Hammond. Manny was right. I could drop it on somebody if I had a mind to.

Dynamite Jackson's back was to me when I answered his question, but he turned around and asked me to
repeat myself, as though that mirror behind his liquor had twisted my words around. He swallowed hard, too hard for the smooth liquor we both drank.

“Ten years?” Dynamite said. “Good Lord, man. All this time. For beating a man?”

“Didn't even get to finish,” I said.

“Sorry to hear it.”

He poured another round. When Dynamite said sorry again, the man three stools down, not quite drunk but on his way, asked who died.

“Nobody, Chester, worry 'bout yours,” Dynamite said. “Worry about that tab.”

“What you sorry for then?” Chester asked me.

“I was in jail back home.”

“Parchman?”

Shook my head.

“Angola?”

“Kilby. Alabama.”

“For what?”

“Started a riot.”

“Good for you. Need to start one in Mississippi. Yazoo City. Tell them Chester McAfee sent you.”

“That's where you left from?” I asked him.

“Yep. I carried my ass on out here in a hurry.”

“You keep raising that glass, Chester. You want to buy that man a drink?”

“Then I won't have enough for your tip.”

Dynamite had turned the wall behind him into a checkerboard of prizefighters and musicians, hanging pictures from his boxing days and headshots of the singers who'd played there. The poster of Dynamite caught him in his leaner years, lifting his title belt over his head. Heavyweight champion of California. In the others he was face-to-face with half of Murderers' Row, either in the ring sparring or raising a glass at that bar.

Dynamite was one of Skip's old drinking partners, and that was how he got a job with Nat, who'd played that stage every Tuesday way back when.

“So old Nat's on television, now. I'm proud an' all, but he's keeping my Monday-nighters home.”

“Fifteen minutes though. Show's over in a jiffy, so anybody who stays home didn't mean to come in the first place.”

Evelyn stood at the upright piano, tightening the stand she'd set next to it. Once she was done, she brought the black-and-yellow cords back around to the tables.

“Skip tell you we fought back in thirty-eight?” Dynamite asked me. “Tell you I whipped him like his pop used to?”

“He told me you won by split decision.”

“Decision? His knees decided to buckle. His ass decided to hit the canvas. That what he meant by decision?”

Skip's picture was among the boxers on the wall.
Dynamite said that for somebody to get in one of the framed pictures they had to earn it in a boxing ring, on a field, or on a stage. Nat was there below the photograph of Melba Liston holding her trombone, and between two Robinsons, Sugar Ray and Ray Charles. Underneath that glass, the pictures looked a little faded, but they stayed free from any dust or splatters.

When she finished with all the wiring, Evelyn sat next to me at the bar. Willie was still talking to the band, showing them something about the microphones.

“These singers like to roll on the floor, knocking the mikes around. We saved up for those, same kind Nat and Sinatra use, so they don't come a dime a dozen. These boys need to get famous first, because if the mike gets busted, nobody can hear them holler.”

She said the singer was new in town, a fellow named Dale Cook out of Chicago. All Dynamite and Evelyn knew was that he had a gospel act with his brothers, but he was solo that night. I'd seen the kid, a teenager it seemed, putting flyers on the door and the notice board out on the sidewalk. Once I could see the face above the name, I realized it was him.
LIVE TONIGHT, MR. DALE COOK.
Those worn posters had no club's name or date on them, so they worked when he did. He came in and nodded to Dynamite, who pointed toward the band, the Mellow Tones they called themselves, who were over there talking to Willie.

“He looks nice enough, but they all do at first. Then they start doing splits and whatnot, and lo and behold that mike hits the floor and I got headphones full of noise.”

“Willie's talking to him, so maybe you'll be all right.”

“We lie to them. Say we borrowed Nat Cole's mike and have to get it back safe. Then they sing a little better, like he's on the end of it listening.”

Willie set up the stand, and Dale Cook held that microphone, a Neumann, Evelyn called it, said it still smelled like the box. He cradled it like it was too precious to touch the ground, but his grip was hard enough to squeeze the song out of it.

“He's got a good touch. Sometimes I have to give a demonstration. Tell them to hold it like they would a lady's hand at the school dance. Firm and gentle at the same time. But singers, you get all kinds. Everybody doesn't have the same kind of couth.”

Dynamite agreed, and he set two drinks down, a Jack Rose for Evelyn and a Seagram's for Willie, who'd come over and taken the corner stool.

“If he sings like he talks this one might be all right,” Willie said.

The coasters on the bar were the ones the two of them had brought.
W&E LIVE RECORDING.
Evelyn raised her drink while she looked toward the door, getting the attention of the woman who'd walked in. I didn't stare, but I wanted to.
Had to. A little piece of that smile she gave Evelyn came my way.

“This is a friend of mine,” Evelyn said. “Nathaniel Weary, this is Lucinda Abrams. Lucinda, this is Weary.”

The diamonds in that argyle stretched from her shoulder down to her waist. One last cluster dotted the hat she wore just so. I left my stool to shake her hand, and there was that bracelet, the same as Evelyn had. Treble clef and a half note, clicking, just beyond my fingertips.

“Happy to meet you, Weary.” She hit a sweet note when she said as much, like she was starting off a song.

“And Miss Abrams, it's a pleasure.”

She asked Dynamite for a whiskey I'd never heard of with a little lime and a nice bit of ice. Dynamite measured out that drink, and I did the same with my talk, trying to sound like a whole lot of gentleman and a little touch of friend. Not too common and not too stiff, but smooth enough to sit for a while and let that talk go where it needed to.

“Alabama, Evelyn told me. We're not quite neighbors, but a couple states over, I suppose. West Memphis. Arkansas, not Tennessee.”

“What's wrong with Tennessee?”

“About as much as is wrong with Arkansas, but I'm gone now. Been gone for twenty years.”

She raised her glass and shook it just so, and that bracelet and the ice moved in the same bit of time.

“Here's to being gone from everywhere but right here,” she told me, that free hand pointed down, planting her flag in that little space between her stool and mine. I raised my glass, too, and put a little toast next to hers.

“I'll take being here, right now, over anyplace in the world.”

She squeezed three limes into the glass, careful not to let the seeds get past her fingers. Pulp settling into the hollow places in her ice cubes.

“That whiskey is confused.”

“No, sir. This whiskey has never had it so good. This California lime's the best thing that ever happened to it. All that time in that barrel, that bottle, and now it's home in this nice glass. A little ice, and fresh air, and a little lime.”

“That whiskey might forget it's bourbon.”

“Well, friend, it's not bourbon. It's rye. I pulled enough corn when I was a girl that I don't care for anything made from it. No qualms with rye.”

Evelyn and Willie had slipped away, across the room to the booth by then, a few last things to do before the music started. Lucinda pointed to the glass, and got Evelyn's attention at the booth. They both raised their glasses, a silent toast halfway across the room.

“When I came in, she gave me the high sign that you were good people. Something we used to do when we were out and about, if we met a couple of boys. A Jack Rose on
the rocks means for me to come over in a minute or two. A glass of milk punch means retreat. That meant we needed to cut our losses and start fresh without hurting anybody's feelings.”

“It's good to know I passed.”

“Nothing wrong with good company.”

There was the little thing then, a nudge of my arm and a smile along with it. We left it at that for the moment, because the band needed attention.

“Don't like to have my back to them,” she said. “I know the feeling of singing in a new place. Good to see a friendly face or two.”

Dale introduced himself, and said he was born in Mississippi, and he got a couple of handclaps. He called out Chicago and got a few more. Wendell Phillips High School, he said, Nat's old stomp. He started his set with a tune from New Orleans, but when the organ started in you could tell he had Chicago in him, too. He wasn't fighting that organ or hiding behind it. No, he climbed right on top as steady as could be. And his voice had two edges to it, a little bit of twist and a whole lot of smooth. What Willie and Evelyn heard through the headsets must have sounded like it needed to, because it sounded fine to me.

Dynamite's walls had no redwood and no panels to catch the sound like Capitol's did, but the walls didn't need them because the place was crowded with people by then and
the air was full of smoke and talking. The place had none of that tin can sound, just the sweet noise made in a room full of friends and like-minded strangers. The echoes had no place to bounce, because the sound always found a body or a soft place to fall into. Lucinda probably had a little bit of that sound on her shoulders, or some mixed with that cool water running down the side of her glass.

“I think this Mr. Cook might be all right,” Lucinda said, swinging around on that stool, tapping my hand as she told me as much.

“Next time I'll come and hear you sing,” I told her.

“You probably already have,” she said. “You just didn't know it. Choruses. Bunch of records and a handful of movies. Once upon a time I was all over Europe with Clora Bryant's band. The Sweethearts.”

“Where about?”

“A little of everywhere. France mostly.”

“I was over for a spell. Uncle Sam.”

“So you got to see a bit of the world.”

“Got to Paris in the end. Half-drunk and on parade. Still, it looked like a place a man would want to see again.”

“Didn't it though? I drank a little champagne everywhere I went. And the be-all, end-all, was that we drank champagne in Champagne,” she said.

“That's when you got too refined for corn whiskey?”

She gave me a look then, with a nice bit of salt in it.

“We have to start somewhere, don't we? As long as we end somewhere else,” she said.

“And look at me now. I ended up right here next to you, listening to that fellow up there singing that song I haven't heard in a while. Never like that. I'll take this over Paris and Champagne and all the rest of it.”

The way it came out, she could have thought it was the liquor talking. Maybe I had misfired and come across as foolish. Maybe I was a milk punch away from sitting alone. She had spooned out a sliver of ice then, and she took it like medicine. And that tightness in her lip was on account of the cold, or me talking my little piece of trash. But I was as serious as the state police, and I told her as much. She thought about it long enough for that ice to turn back to water in her cheek.

“It does sound pretty good. Him singing in one ear, and you and your talk right here. That's why I came to California in the first place. See what I could see, and hear what I could hear.”

When the band finished, we moved from the bar to the booth behind Willie and Evelyn, and before the band started to play again, Evelyn handed Lucinda two headsets.

“You ever heard a show like this, Weary?”

“Not yet.”

She took off her earrings and set them on the table, and
then she slid the headset on. I did the same. In my time at Capitol and NBC, I had been close to engineers and seen the needles jumping on the gauges, but I had never listened to the show like they had. I closed my eyes and my head was all about the listening. Lucinda knew that song, and when the drummer hit that high hat, she did the same with a light tap on my knuckle, so quick that the feeling stayed longer that her finger did. And that music and that touch got into my head like good liquor, mixing and chasing from the first taste to that last corner.

The candle on the table gave that small circle of light that asks you to lean into the glow of it. The little flame, half drowned in the pool of wax, went up and down like tidewater, and every wave gave Lucinda a new portion of light. And while I loved what I heard from that band, I wondered about her voice, trying to hear it in the songs that came through the headset. I lifted every bit of song from her talk, even that good-bye when we stood outside.

“Until next time,” she said.

I told her, respectfully, that I wanted to put next time on my calendar as sure as there was a Friday. I just needed to know where to call. She wrote her phone number on one of Evelyn and Willie's coasters. She waved it between her fingertips, and let that indigo ink from her fountain pen dry in the cool breeze coming down Vernon.