The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto (24 page)

He’d dressed Frankie for the audition in a gray cowboy hat and a white sports coat with lace trimming. It cost Hampton a week’s pay. I should note that the mechanic had asked to be Frankie’s manager, and, while Frankie didn’t really understand the position, he’d quickly said yes. He liked Hampton. And seeing that he was feeding Frankie and letting him listen to his radio, Frankie couldn’t really refuse.

“Just play the way you played up in Detroit. No way they say no.”

“Okay.”

“You the fastest thing anyone ever seen.”

“Okay.”

Hampton seemed nervous. Another hour passed. Frankie wanted to knock on the door, but Hampton refused. “We don’t want to seem pushy. They’ll come get us.”

Eventually, with the sun beginning to set, a man in a suit came out the front door. Frankie ran up and said, “Excuse me,” and asked if someone would be greeting them soon.

“Auditions wait at the south door,” the man said. “Around the corner. But they’re gone now. Y’all need to come back next week.”

Frankie glanced at Hampton, whose mouth fell open. Frankie turned back to the man in the suit.

“Sir . . . can I get something that says we were here? For next time? So we can be first in line maybe?”

The man looked him up and down and grinned. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card.

“That’s all I got, young fella.”

The man walked away. Hampton cursed and shook his head.
The wrong door?

“It’s okay, Hampton,” Frankie said. “We can try next week.”

But the old man kept grumbling, upset by his mistake. He was sweating heavily. On the ride home, he banged the steering wheel many times. Then, after turning at a traffic light, he gripped his arm and fell against the door as the car veered to the curb.

“Hampton!” Frankie screamed, grabbing the wheel and steering wildly. “What’s the matter? Hampton! Hey!” He threw his leg over the man’s legs to brake the car with a screech.

“Oh no, no, no, no,” Frankie implored. He pulled open Hampton’s collar. His eyes were rolled back. He was moaning. Frankie screamed out the window, “Help! Where’s a hospital?”

Minutes later, he was pulling Hampton through double doors, his arms wrapped around the old man’s chest. He kept saying, “You’re all right, you’re all right,” but once inside he again screamed, “Help!” A nurse ran out to assist him, but a doctor with close-cropped hair and a barrel chest raised his hands.

“Hold up,” he said. “Y’all need to take him to the colored hospital.”

“Please!” Frankie yelled.

The doctor shook his head. “The colored hospital will take care of him.”

“But he’s in trouble!”

“Then you better get moving.”

Frankie’s breathing quickened. He squeezed his eyes closed. And something inside him snapped. Perhaps because of Baffa, or El Maestro, or never finding his mother, or any of the many precious things that had been taken from him in his life, he felt a force surging, a noise between his ears, like an angry glissando from one end of the keyboard to the other.

He would not lose Hampton, too.

“Now you listen,” he said, raising to within inches of the doctor. “I just came from the Grand Ole Opry. So did he. This is an important man.”

The doctor snickered. “Y’all came from the Opry?”

Frankie pulled the business card from his pocket and slammed it in the doctor’s palm.

“That’s right. I’m playing there Saturday night. I will leave you four free tickets in the front row if you take care of this man right now.”

Even as he said it Frankie felt as if he were listening to someone else. Where did he find these words?

The doctor sniffed as he read the business card. It belonged to a high-ranking events manager.

“You really playin’ the Opry?”

“Look at my clothes,” Frankie said.

The doctor pursed his lips. He nodded at the nurse.

“In the back,” he said.

A few hours later, Frankie sat near a bed, softly strumming his guitar, a blues progression that seemed to make its own rhythm.

“Keep playin’ boy. It soothes me.”

Hampton Belgrave, at seventy-seven, had suffered a heart attack, but the quick medical attention he’d received had stabilized him. He would live.

“You really promise that doctor tickets?” Hampton whispered.

Frankie nodded.

“To a show you ain’t doing?”

“Yeah.”

Hampton smiled and shook his head.

“You a lot smarter than when I found you in my trunk.”

Frankie fingered a chord. Hampton choked up.

“Ain’t no tellin’ what mighta happened to me.”

“You’ll be all right, Hampton.”

“Thanks to you.”

“Nah.”

“I’m going to sleep a bit now. Maybe say a prayer.”

The old mechanic closed his eyes, so he did not see what happened next: the D string on Frankie’s guitar turned a burning shade of blue. Frankie stared at it. He felt a chill run down his arms and legs. You have wondered about the critical passages in my child’s story? Here is one:

In the quiet of a hospital room, to the sound of an old man’s breathing, Frankie Presto finally understood that, somehow, through those strings, he held life in his hands.

Two weeks later and eight pounds lighter, Hampton returned home. He sat Frankie down and told him that managing a musician was obviously too strenuous for him, and “maybe you oughta consider someone with a better head for these things.”

Frankie was sad. He liked Hampton, and he wanted to see the inside of the Grand Ole Opry. But the truth was, he didn’t care for the cowboy clothes. And he never found Aurora York in Nashville, which was the reason he had come. The closest he came was the makeup counter at Harvey’s department store, where a middle-aged woman remembered a blond girl with a British accent who said she was moving to New Orleans.

It wasn’t much to go on.

But it was something.

So one morning, a few months after the Opry incident, Frankie took twenty dollars from the money left in Hank Williams’s envelope, and hid the rest in Hampton’s drawer, as a way of thanking Hampton for looking after him. Then he put on his sunglasses, gave the old man a hug, and walked off—with his guitar, his suitcase, and the hairless dog—to the Greyhound bus station, where he purchased a one-way ticket to New Orleans.

As he went to board, the bus driver said, “No dogs allowed unless you’re blind.” Thinking fast, Frankie put his hands out in front of him and said, “Why do you think I’m wearing these glasses?” He and the creature were allowed to get on. The bus pulled away. An older woman sitting across from him tapped him on the arm and stuffed a ten-dollar bill into his hands. “May God help you with your affliction,” she said.

Frankie thanked the woman. He heard the dog whimper. He wondered why God was always mentioned in the most unusual moments of his life.

32

1954

ABOUT THAT DOG.

Frankie was now eighteen years old, which meant his four-legged companion was even older. In the life of a canine, that is rare. But this was an uncommon animal, and its life span was clearly determined by need, not years. The dog was there to pull Frankie from the river. It was there to distract soldiers at the sardine factory. It was there to keep Frankie company when Baffa was arrested. And somehow it was there, in Detroit, outside the orphanage, when Frankie desperately needed a friend.

Down in New Orleans, the dog waited nights in hotel rooms while Frankie earned money playing with doo-wop groups and jazz quartets. During the day, the creature followed Frankie up and down the streets, waiting outside storefronts while Frankie asked about Aurora. Each time my child emerged dejected, with no new information, the dog rose, its tongue panting, and accompanied him to the next stop.

But as 1954 drew to a close, Frankie noticed his companion slowing down. It took longer to walk those streets or to navigate the high grass below the Huey P. Long Bridge, which straddled the Mississippi River. Frankie practiced beneath that bridge three hours each day, as the trains passed overhead. He’d become quite skilled at rhythm and blues, and he strummed to the beat of the wheels when they hit a gap in the rail joints. The hairless dog would look up at the noise.

“Chuckutty, chuckutty,” Frankie would sing.

But in recent weeks, nothing Frankie played could raise the creature’s head off its paws, not even when he imitated the high warble of a young Elvis Presley and the scrubbing rhythm of his new record called “That’s All Right (Mama).”

“You are a tough audience,” Frankie said.

The dog sneezed.

“What do you want to hear?”

The dog blinked and looked directly at him.

“Mmm? Something slow and pretty?”

Frankie leaned against a tree and began picking at a 2/5 progression. The air was warm and the sun ducked behind a single white cloud. Frankie’s memory drifted. Before he knew it, he was fingering “Maalaala Mo Kaya,” the song he’d once played to honor the buried dead in a Spanish field. Frankie hadn’t tried this piece in many years, and he was surprised by how easily it came back to him. Its simple melody was soothing. The hairless dog gave a big, silent yawn.

When Frankie finished, the animal came to him and Frankie scratched its ears. The dog licked his fingers.

“Thanks,” Frankie said, smiling. “Now I’m all sticky.”

The dog turned and walked to the river’s edge. The muddy current was moving quickly.

“Hey, careful,” Frankie yelled, leaning forward, but for the first time ever, the animal turned and growled, causing Frankie to lean back, confused.

There are songs that you play that you have to restart, and songs that you play that you never get right. But when a song is complete, there is no more you can do.

The hairless dog leaped into the water and paddled away.

Frankie watched limply, knowing somehow he was not supposed to follow, even as the last member of his original three-piece band disappeared down the Mississippi River.

A moment later he heard a rustling in the tall grass behind him. He turned his head and squinted into the sun. He saw a figure hovering above him, smiling.

“I hear you’ve been looking for me,” Aurora York said.