Driving the King by Ravi Howard Page B

and let those walls and towers get small until I could close my eyes and let that be the end of Kilby.
    By the time we got to Wetumpka Road, Dane finally let me loose and stretched his free hand along the seat behind me. He had let his beard grow in again. Every so often he’d shave and show up at the prison looking like hewas a teenager. Dane was a junior in high school when I went to war, and he had become grown in my absence. He had a picture of Eleanor and the kids pinned to the driver’s side visor. That evening, I would meet my niece and nephew for the first time.
    Yes I was free, but I was not home. Kilby was inside of Montgomery proper, so during those ten years I had never left my city. I didn’t start to feel at home until we reached Jackson and High and the checkerboard paint of the cabstand. Most days my mother kept the window open so she could call the next driver to get a fare. Among the things I had hoped for in vain was that one day I would walk in and see her where she had always been, running the office, chatting with Miss Vee or whoever was in the seats across from her desk.
    I started saying good-bye to my mother and father the day I got drafted, and I didn’t stop until the bus to basic training was too far gone for me to see them. My leaving didn’t have a bit of surprise in it. The last thing my mother said to me the night I went to Nat’s show was that I looked nice and not to keep Mattie waiting, which I never did, but she told me just the same. The night I left for the show, the words were too quick. We spoke like people who expected to see each other again in a few hours’ time.
    It had come over her so fast, three days after our lastvisit in the Kilby waiting room. My family had tried to get word to me, but in Kilby they told us our bad news when they felt like it, if at all.
    I asked Dane about Pop.
    â€œBetter than he was.”
    They said my father barely came inside the office. If he wasn’t sitting in his car in the alley, he was sitting out at Lincoln Cemetery. Dane told me most of his customers were the folks with standing appointments at gravesides, new flowers or cleaning up a stone.
    â€œHe’s better than he was.”
    When we were children, we saw our father for a minute at a time on workdays, when he pulled up to get a new fare. A pit stop long enough to find out if we had finished our homework. In summer, he always asked if my luck against the curveball had gotten any better. He would come find us, too, and take his own reports, passing by the ball field or Tullibody High School when classes let out, fathering from the front seat of his car.
    My first day home, he pulled up at the end of the taxi line. Pop was still driving his Hudson, and it sounded just as smooth as I remembered. That it had survived, looking as clean as it did when he bought it, meant something. I leaned down on his door, and he dropped his head on the steering wheel.
    â€œYes, indeed,” he said, like he did when Braddock and Schmeling fell, like he did when everything was right with the world. “Yes, indeed.”
    If tears came, they brought no noise or heaving with them. He stuck his hand out the window and turned up his palm. And I grabbed him. My hands had forgotten the touch of my people, but it had come back in those hours. I held my father’s hand tight, rocked it awhile.
    â€œHave you been out there to see your mother?”
    â€œNo, sir. Not yet.”
    â€œShe’ll rest better with you home.”
    â€œI know she will.”
    He brought his head off the steering wheel, and looked down the alley and then back and forth. Then he dropped his head once more, this time on my arm. His whiskers and glasses pressed into me. I stood against his taxi, as I had done so many times as a boy, handing him rolls of quarters and dimes and fare slips. My father’s hands were leaner than they had once been. We had both aged more than we should have, and