Taft (2 page)

She liked me because I played drums in a band. One of the many reasons she didn't like me later on. I wasn't a centerpiece, no Max Roach, no showy genius like Buddy Rich, but I was as solid a drummer as you were going to find and everybody wanted me. I made the other people look good. That's what a good drummer does. He keeps everybody steady and paced. He shines his light at just the right time. That was me.

I was born drumming. My parents admit to that even though they were never happy about it. I was asking to hold two spoons from the time I knew how to hold one. I heard beats in everything, not just music, but traffic and barking dogs and my mother washing dishes. I heard it. That was who I was, big arms and loose wrists. Getting a set of drums just made things easier. Getting a band made them easier still. Twelve years old, I was sitting in with a bunch of high school boys. I knew, right from the start.

The band I was in when I took up with Marion was called Break Neck, now one hundred percent scattered. We played mostly in Handy Park and when we couldn't get in there we played down by the water until the cops ran us off. It was all hat passing then, decent money if you were on your own but a joke once you carved it up in six directions. By the time we were getting real jobs with real covers, we were already falling apart, changing out the bass player one week, going through three singers in a year. I left before the whole thing evaporated. I got another band and then another one. As soon as I could outplay them I was gone.

If I had to narrow myself down to one mistake I've made in my life, it would be that I didn't marry Marion as soon as I found out she was pregnant. She was eighteen and I was twenty-five. She was still pretty much under the impression that I had hung the moon. She'd gone down to the drugstore and bought herself one of those kits that tell you yes or no. You didn't have to wait around very long, not like the old days of girls going down to the doctor's office. Back then when the test came back yes, everybody would go around saying the rabbit died. But someone told me a long time later that all the rabbits died. Killing them was how they did the test. I imagine a lot of rabbit farmers went out of business when the at-home tests came on the scene.

Marion didn't say one word to me about it before she knew for sure. She was brave like that. There are a lot of things you have to give Marion credit for. When she told me, she was happy. Her face was always very pretty when she was happy. She has a high forehead that slopes back. She has big eyes and wide, flat cheeks and a mouth that always looked like it was about a second from telling you everything but it didn't have to since it was all right there. We were sitting on the back steps of her parents' house, splitting a Coke because there was only one left. She was wearing cutoffs and a yellow halter top and she looked as good as any girl I'd ever seen. She hadn't gotten all dressed up or taken me away someplace secret to tell me. There was nothing to be ashamed about. Marion's face didn't have a worry on it. It said, I love you and you love me and all of this is going to be fine.

And that was the thing that made me turn on her.

It wasn't the news itself. It was something about the way she looked at me, like she knew I would never disappoint her, that made me want to disappoint her badly. This is called being stupid and cruel. This is being twenty-five and a drummer in a band when there are plenty of pretty girls who aren't pregnant asking for your time. I had been faithful to Marion because she was right, I loved her. But I didn't need her. It was her need of me that made me turn cruel.

So what would have happened if I had acted like the people on television? Picked her up and kissed her. Set her down in an old lawn chair all nervous and put a pillow up under her feet. What if I had rested the side of my face against the yellow halter top that barely covered her stomach and just held it there for a minute. Where would we be now? Marion and I keep no secret store of love for each other, I will promise you that. Everything that was kind between us we killed with years of dedication and hard work. When I hang up the phone with her now it's hard to imagine that one tender word has ever passed between us. I find myself thinking that we must have been drunk or stoned during any minute we were happy together.

She tried to stay close to me when she was pregnant. She didn't know what else to do. I guess she wanted to be there in case I wised up. Some days I was good to her and some days I wasn't. I picked up a few other girls on the side. I started taking myself seriously, talking big. I gave her money, but I made her ask for it. I never said one word about marrying her. She was my own fat shadow, getting bigger and bigger as she trailed along behind me. Every time I made her crazy and she wanted to light into me, she bit down hard and kept quiet about it. She was trying to hold on to her old sweet self. Marion had a clear idea about what kind of girl she wanted to be, no trouble, not one who complained no matter how badly she was treated. I can see her clear as day, coming to the bar in the hot late afternoons while the new band practiced. She'd sit at a table drinking ice water with her legs stretched over two chairs. She never looked like she was listening, never said anything about the music one way or the other. She was just making the effort to put herself in front of me. She had to leave her parents' cool house after working all day and ride a crowded bus downtown, not to talk to me or be with me, but just to sit in front of me in an empty bar so I wouldn't forget she was going to have my baby.

Franklin came sooner than anyone thought he would. I was playing at the Rum Boogie. When the manager told me at break that it was Marion on the phone I didn't take the call. She didn't tell him she was having the baby and I didn't think of it, a whole month early. Later, it came out that she was standing at a pay phone in the hospital lobby, having contractions and waiting on the line because no one went back to tell her I wasn't coming. She stood there listening, waiting for me to pick up until her legs just gave out on her. That pretty much explains my name not being featured on the birth certificate.

A visit to the nursery may not be Paul's road to Damascus: I was a bad man before I saw and a good man after, but it's something like that. Children get right to the point. I've known solid men to take off straight away in the face of their sons. I've known men you'd think were bad, hustlers and junkies, who smoothed over, found something in themselves that turned them decent because now they have a baby to look after.

How did this work? When Marion, a good girl, came to me and said she was going to have my child, I said I'd call her when there was time. But when my boy Franklin came I was so crazy for him I wanted to marry her a million times over just to keep them close to me. And the second I told her so, everything changed. Now I wanted her. She could relax, collect herself and take a look around. It was then that Marion had the luxury of discovering just how completely she hated me.

Marion Woodmoore took our son and went to live with her parents after she left the hospital. Right away I began my campaign that they should come live with me. Her parents didn't want that, no surprise.

"Can't believe you're even standing in my living room," her mother said to me. "I'm going to have to vacuum for an hour just to get your smell off the carpet."

Her father stood in front of the couch with his arms crossed to make sure I didn't try to get comfortable.

"Let me talk to him a minute," Marion said to them, calling off the dogs.

"We'll be right in the kitchen if you need anything," her father said, looking at me but talking to her.

"Don't let him hold that baby," her mother said.

Once they were gone I told her to come live with me.

"Hah!" I heard from the kitchen.

"My parents hate you," Marion said. She put her little finger in the baby's mouth and let him suck on it.

"Make up your own mind," I said to her. "You're a grown woman now. You've got your own family, me and Franklin. Families ought to be together."

"So you'd think," Marion said. She looked at the door to make sure no one was watching. "You can hold him for a minute." She handed me the tight bundle of my son, not even heavy enough to be a good-sized ham.

I was holding Franklin, who was named for her father, who was named for Roosevelt, his father's all-time favorite president. I told everyone I knew that I had named him for Aretha. "See that," I said, chugging him gently up and down.

"What?" Marion pulled back the blanket to look at the baby.

"See how he's looking right at me?" I said.

Marion relented and moved in with me when Franklin was six months old. Her parents stood at the door and cried. He was a good baby by any standard; none of that colic, laughing all the time. He only cried to let you know what he needed, a bottle or a nap. I liked to take him out with me. I liked for strangers to come up and say what a good-looking boy I had. I'd take him to the bars when I could do it without Marion finding out. All the waitresses would leave their tables and the cooks came out of the kitchen. Everyone in this town has known me forever. I wanted them to know my boy.

I tried my best to make things work with Marion, to make her settle down and stay. But no matter what kind of flowers I brought home or how many times I told her I was sorry, she couldn't let things go. She moved out just before Franklin turned two, and she took him with her. It was like she couldn't stand the sight of me. Every day I was nice to her she turned on me a little more.

"That day you were playing at Raymond's," she said as soon as I walked in the door. Three in the morning and I'd been playing since nine that night. I was nearly too tired to sleep.

"Don't," I said.

"I was sitting there at the table with you, seven months along, and here comes that girl. She sat on your lap. On top of you! She wasn't that big around." She made a circle between her thumb and forefinger to show me. "You didn't even push her off. You didn't ask her to sit in a chair."

I slid down the doorframe and sat on the floor. That's how tired I was. I didn't want to get any closer to her. "I was wrong," I told her. "My head wasn't in the right place back then."

"I should have put your head in the right place," Marion said quietly. She was tearing up a paper towel in tiny bits, which is what she did when she was mad. Newspapers, napkins, Kleenex, the mail, Marion shredded them like a pack of hamsters.

"Baby," I said from way over on the other side of the room. "Why don't you and me get married? That would make all this better. Franklin needs to have married parents. Then we'll be a real family. We'll get married and put the past in the past. What do you say about that?"

But she didn't say, because by then she was crying. Marion didn't like to cry in front of people. She scooped up all the paper shreds and took them into the bedroom with her and shut the door.

Six months after she moved out she came back again, saying she decided what she wanted was to go to nursing school and she figured I owed her that. Marion had been working as the cleaning girl at a Catholic school because the hours were right, but anyone could see she was a million times too smart for that and it was bound to make her crazy. The nuns were always getting on her about how she dusted the statues, had she wiped behind their feet? Cleaned their heads? Marion said the glass eyes on the Virgin Mary chilled her. I was all for seeing her go back to school, especially if it meant them coming home. Franklin was all over the place at that age, talking in sentences, picking up everything so fast I thought he must be way above average. I wanted to see him every day, not just on the weekends. I thought if they moved back we might be able to work things out, the three of us.

"I'm talking about lots of school here. I need to take classes just so I can start taking classes. That means time and money. Regular money," Marion said. "You're going to have to find yourself a salary job."

"Band's doing fine," I said, though I knew good and well what she was talking about.

"One good night, one good week, that's not going to cut it." We were sitting at a table at Muddy's at the time, having a couple of beers. She was twenty-one years old, but she was so steeled up inside nobody would have believed that. She still looked pretty, not the same kind of pretty she was when I met her, but maybe better. She wore her hair brushed back in a tight knot now instead of fixed up and she didn't bother with makeup. The fact that she didn't smile that much anymore made her look kind of mysterious. She was sexy now, even when I knew that sex, at least where I was concerned, was about the furthest thing from her mind. She was sexy in that way that pretty women who couldn't care less can be sexy.

"So if I get a regular job, you and Franklin'll come back?"

"You help me pay for school, take care of Franklin when I'm studying," she said, and took a sip off her beer. All cards out on the table, that was Marion.

I put my hands flat against my thighs. Whatever it was, it wasn't going to be forever. I was a drummer. That was all I'd ever been. Now I was a drummer and Franklin's father. I didn't see how those two things could cancel one another out.

Marion looked at her watch. "I told Mama I'd be home to help with supper," she said, and finished off the beer. "You let me know."

"I'll let you know now," I said. "You and Franklin come on home. I'll get a regular job."

"We'll come back when you've got the job," she said.

I walked up to the bar as soon as she was out the door and talked to a fellow named Danny King, long since disappeared from Memphis. I asked him, Did he know what was out there, what had he heard? The next thing I knew I had a job at Muddy's, first booking the music and running the floor at night, then six months later the manager quits to buy a dance club and I had the whole place to myself. Easy as falling down.

Of course, it wasn't what Marion had in mind. She wanted to see me out checking phone wires for South Central Bell or selling Subarus. Jobs that took place in the light of day. But she didn't press it too hard. She knew it was the first regular job I'd had in my life and that these things took some time.