Driving the King Read Online Free PDF Page A

Angels . Hollywood had sent its armies to sit sentry, keeping watch over Saturday night. Those of us below them—sailors, nurses, a pilot or two—wore the wartime colors that we’d saved Europe in. We had gotten as far as the Empire and its velvet rope, where we waited for somebody to open the door.
    When Nat Cole played the 1941 Autumn Ball, he had filled the Centennial Ballroom. We hadn’t seen that kind of commotion since Erskine Hawkins came back from Harlem. Nat was not altogether famous, but famous enough. Thatwas the first time I had heard him play since we were children. One hand was Chicago fast, and the other nice and slow, like some country boy straight out the woods and in no hurry to go back home.
    During a break, Mattie and I eased up close to the piano, where I had thought that I might say hello to “my old friend Nat” to impress my date. I thought better of it, because so much time had passed. People changed, as they should. If I had left Montgomery for Chicago, then left Chicago for Los Angeles, my birthplace might feel small and distant. I didn’t expect him to recognize me, but I was sure glad he did.
    â€œGood ol’ Nat Weary!”
    â€œGood ol’ Nat Cole,” I said. Mattie looked at me like I was on a whole different shelf right then.
    You could still hear a little bit of Alabama in his voice, secondhand by way of Chicago and California, but it was there just the same.
    When I introduced him to Mattie, he greeted her with a smile and nod. They talked about “Honeysuckle Rose,” and she told him she liked what he did with “Song of the Wanderer,” different than what Erskine Hawkins and Count Basie had done. She spoke as calm as could be, the whole time her hands dug into my arm, strong enough to pull the elbow clean off. Once Nat started the second set, I felt the lighter touch of her fingers, practiced on pianossince she was a child. She played notes down my arm, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and a little of the song that came after, a medley that ended with her fingers in mine.
    Mattie whispered the names of the songs I didn’t know, and as the evening went on, she whispered all manner of preludes to the night that was our beginning. We’d met in a lecture hall, and what had started as talk across desk rows had taken on a new form. It had turned into a long-felt touch in those weeks that led autumn into winter, as we enjoyed the wonders of articulated love.
    Then came Pearl Harbor. As a part-time student and part-time cab driver, my number had come up among the first. Mattie and I were left with the bits of each other that could fit in the white frame of photographs we sent across the ocean. Every so often, a wartime radio was close enough for us to hear a Nat Cole record and that faint sound of home. Victory brought me back. On either end of my war years were those two shows of Nat Cole’s. That old one at the Centennial and the one I waited for with Mattie’s hand on my arm and her ring in my pocket.
    Nine of them would play the show. Nat at the piano. Oscar on guitar. Johnny on bass. The rest were horns, six of them, their positions set on the bandstand at the back of the stage. They were local players who marched with theBama State band. The New Collegians, they called themselves. The piano was separated from the bandstand by a screen decorated with autumn leaves in red, white, and blue, matching the bunting that lined the stage. During the shows I’d seen at the Empire, the thin fabric of the screen revealed only the shadows and lines of the bandstand. Once the music started, the screen would show them as it rose, lifting the music and applause right along with it.
    From the first row of the colored balcony we could see most everything. Too small a consolation. After Mattie set her camera on the floor, she nudged me. The seats in the front row downstairs were filling, including the two that we’d sat in