Downtown (14 page)

Boy Slattery bridled at my accent.

“Faith and begorra!” he bawled. “’Tis a little Irish lass, now. You know what they say about the Irish in my neck of the woods, sweet thing?”

I said nothing.

“Tell us, Boy,” someone yelled, and Boy Slattery grinned and draped his hammy arm around my neck and prepared himself for his audience. I felt his fingers like slugs inside the collar of my suit.

“Come on, Boy,” Brad Hunt said. “Play pool. You’re just stalling. You know I’ve got your ass in a sling.”

His voice was pleasant, but there was something solid and cool under it.

Boy Slattery was diverted. He let his arm drop from my shoulders and moved back to the side of the pool table. His stagger now was more pronounced.

“Okay, Brad,” he roared. “Come on back over here. I’m fixin’ to whup your ass.”

He peered down at the tabletop, and then said, accusingly,

“You moved your ball.”

“The hell I did,” Brad Hunt said mildly. The coolness was stronger, though.

“The hell you didn’t. That eight was way over across the table a minute ago. I had a clear shot at mine before—”

“I know you’re not accusing me of cheating, Boy,” Brad Hunt said, his voice growing softer and more affable. “So maybe you just made a little mistake. As it were. Go on and take your shot and I’ll buy you a drink. We’ve got folks waiting to play.”

Boy Slattery scowled at Brad Hunt and then down at the table. He rocked on his small, fat feet and hunched 105 / DOWNTOWN

his shoulders so that his neck nearly disappeared in stubbled rolls between them. I knew that he was about to do or say something offensive and irrevocable. Dislike and contempt welled up in my throat.

I went over to the table and studied it for a moment. Boy Slattery’s red seven lay six or eight inches from the pocket.

The eight was directly behind it. The cue ball was directly behind that. There was almost no way to hit the seven without striking the eight.

Almost.

“May I?” I said, and took the cue from Boy Slattery’s fingers without waiting for him to answer. He simply stared at me. I chalked the cue deliberately, walked around the table, studied the balls for a moment, leaned far over and, feeling my skirt climb far up the backs of my thighs and not caring a whit, slid the cue smartly into the cue ball, giving it just a touch of English. The cue ball bowled smoothly into the far side, banked sharply, and clicked gently against the seven.

The seven slid, neatly and softly, into the pocket.

There was total silence in the room, and then the men broke into laughter and applause. I straightened up and handed the cue to Brad Hunt. There was pure delight on his face.

“How on earth?” he said simply.

“I have five brothers who hung around Perkins’s Pub in Corkie every day of their lives,” I said, exaggerating the brogue until it was a caricature of every stage Irishman I had ever heard. “That’s what they say about the Irish in my neck of the woods, Mr. Slattery. They play better pool than anybody in the world.”

I turned around and walked out of Teddy Fairchild’s family rumpus room without looking back. I would wait for her on the portico; she could damn well find me. It would serve her right for running off and leaving me.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 106

Behind me I heard Brad Hunt call after me, “Is it really Smoky?”

“It is,” I called back, not turning. “Old Gaelic name. Been in the family for generations.”

The next Monday Matt called our last editorial meeting before we scattered for the Christmas holidays. Almost everyone was going home for Christmas; or somewhere at any rate.

Matt was going back to Texas, to Galveston, where his mother was in a nursing home now; Tom Gordon to the tiny town outside Macon where his large family farmed; Hank to Athens where his brother’s family lived; Alicia skiing in Aspen with someone she refused, with a small smile, to name; Sister to South Georgia, to be, as Tom grinned, Christmas Queen of the Wiregrass. Charlie would go, grimly, to Charlotte to his new wife’s family, and Sueanne and Teddy would stay in Atlanta. I was to leave for Savannah on the six P.M. Greyhound in three days, and felt a suck of dull dread whenever I thought about it.

The office was full of scraps of bright wrapping paper and curls of ribbon; fallen needles from the lopsided, drying tabletop tree in the lobby; piled gift boxes from Rich’s and Davison’s and Muse’s and J.P. Allen’s awaiting the talented ministrations of Sueanne, who was cajoled into wrapping everyone’s gifts; cloying bleats from Alvin and the Chip-munks, from the Muzak; and still-unopened gifts advertisers had brought Matt. There would be a staff Christmas party upstairs at the chamber the next evening, but we were going on to have our own afterward, at the Top of Peachtree.

No one’s mind was on the March issue, which we had met to try to finalize. Matt had to drag our flagging attention back to it so many times that he grew waspish 107 / DOWNTOWN

and abrupt, the chestnut hair only partly veiling the annoyance in his slitted green eyes. He looked, in the watery gray afternoon light filtering in through the windows, like he had slept the last three nights at the Union Mission. Even though we knew we were pushing him, we grew sillier and sillier.

“All right,” he said finally. “None of you are worth shit, and won’t be until after New Year’s. But by God we’re going to finish this issue before you leave here, if it’s midnight.

What’s next, Teddy?”

Teddy looked at her page layout boards.

“YMOG,” she sighed.

Everybody groaned.

“Is it in?” Matt said, glaring at us.

“No. I don’t think it’s even started. Frank Finley over at the paper was doing it; I thought he’d have it in by now. But he called this afternoon from Dobbins and said he was on his way to Vietnam and somebody else would have to take it. There are some notes in his office if we need them. He said somebody would hunt them up for us.”

“Christ, I hope somebody shoots the sonofabitch in the ass,” Matt snarled. “Is it too much to hope he was drafted?”

“’Fraid so,” Teddy said, and I thought her mouth quirked just a fraction. “Patterson finally sent him and a photographer over there to cover the First Cav.”

“Some people will do anything to get out of YMOG,” Tom said, grinning.

“Yeah, well, I’d give it to you, you bastard, if you could read or write,” Matt said. “Okay, Charlie, I want you to get on it. You’re going to have to move fast. You’ll need to interview him tonight or tomorrow if you’re going to get the piece in by the twenty-sixth.”

“Shit, Matt, I did the last one!” Charlie Stubbs howled.

“Be fair, dammit! You know we’re leaving Wednesday morning; I’d have to write all through Christmas—”

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 108

Matt grinned ferally. “Poor baby,” he said.

“What’s Eemog?” I said. I could not imagine what it might be, to engender such animosity.

“Young Man on the Go,” Tom Gordon said, safe in the certainty that art directors did not get assigned editorial pieces. “We do one a month. It’s the chamber’s pride and joy. A profile on some young up-and-comer from the local business and professional community, as they are fond of saying. A kind of gallery of local young Turks. Nary an un-flattering or discouraging word is ever, ever said about an YMOG. All their daddies are chamber honchos. The pieces are long as hell and dull as chicken-shit. Charlie and Hank usually take turns, but sometimes Matt gives up and farms them out. YMOG has driven more than one reporter to drink—or Vietnam, as the case may be.”

“Well, Charlie’s off the hook,” Hank said slyly. “Because this YMOG just called me and named his writer. Said if he couldn’t have…this person…the deal was off.”

“Just what we need,” Matt said between clenched teeth. “A fucking prima-donna YMOG. So who’s the writer?”

“Smoky,” Hank said, breaking into a grin. “Smoky or nobody.”

I stared at him. Everyone else looked at me. Teddy began to laugh. I turned my eyes to her.

“It’s Brad Hunt, Smoky,” she said. “Bradley Hunt III, scion and heir apparent of Hunt Construction. Oh, Lord, y’all, wait till I tell you what Smoky did….”

They listened as she told them about my encounter with Boy Slattery in her father’s billiard room. By the time she finished almost everyone was weak with laughter, and one or two of them got up to hug me. Only Alicia did not respond with glee, and Matt. Alicia sat 109 / DOWNTOWN

smoking silently, studying her nails and then me. Matt stared at me so long that I grew uncomfortable. Then he broke into the long-toothed grin that so totally transformed his ruddy fox’s face. He reached over and squeezed the bulb of the Bahamian taxi horn, and said, “Way to go, Smoky. By God, I’d love to have seen you whip Boy Slattery’s fat ass. You got talents I never dreamed of.”

“Apparently,” Alicia breathed.

“Okay,” he said, sobering. “Brad Hunt’s yours. Go call him now and do the interview today or tomorrow. I want the piece on my desk the morning of the twenty-sixth, no excuses. If you have to write it on the bus going home, do it. And Smoky, we don’t sluff off the YMOGs just because they’re crap. We treat them like the most important piece we’ve ever done.”

“It’s the only piece I’ve ever done, so far,” I said.

“Smartmouth is a privilege we earn around here,” he said shortly, and I flushed. Alicia’s laugh tinkled. I got up from his sofa and went back to my office to call Brad Hunt.

“Well, if it’s not Savannah Fats,” he said. “My wild Irish hustler. I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

He took me to dinner the following night at the Piedmont Driving Club for our interview. He picked me up after work in an incredible little automobile that looked like a bird in flight; only later did Hank and Matt, who were standing at the curb with me, tell me that it was a gull-wing Mercedes.

“Holy shit,” I heard Matt Comfort breathe, as Brad Hunt reached over and somehow raised the door up so that it did, indeed, look like the wing on an airborne gull.

“Long way from Corkie, Smokes,” Hank said, handing me into the little car. It smelled of leather and cigarette smoke and a wonderful, bronzy aftershave. The ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 110

car was so opulently ostentatious that I could only laugh helplessly, completely forgetting that a minute before I had been nearly mute with nerves.

“I hope this thing turns into a pumpkin one second past midnight, and you a rat,” I said to Brad Hunt as he gunned the car away from the curb.

“It turns into my brother Chris’s garage, from whence it came,” he smiled. “He races it around the South, and this is only the second time in my life I’ve been allowed to drive it.

If I get so much as a scratch on it, I do indeed turn into a rat, a dead one. I borrowed it because the gal who beat Boy Slattery at eight ball deserves something fancier than my four-year-old Pontiac. Hi, Smoky O’Donnell. You look mighty pretty tonight.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I needed that. I’ve been shaking in my boots all day. This is my first piece for
Downtown
. I’ve never interviewed an YMOG before.”

“Thank God,” he said. “I’ve never been one, either. Well, don’t think of it as an interview. Think of it as a first date.

I’m going to take you to the Driving Club for dinner and show you off, and then maybe we’ll go somewhere and dance. Can you dance as well as you play pool?”

“No,” I said. “And dinner would be fine, but I’m going to have to go home and start writing after that. You’re due on Matt’s desk the morning of the day after Christmas. I’ll be writing all through the holidays. What’s the Driving Club?”

He looked at me for a moment, and then laughed again.

“By God, I think we’ll skip dinner and go to North Georgia and get married,” he said. “It’s this old club where we—where a lot of quote, Old Atlanta, unquote belongs. Supposed to be harder than heaven to get into; somebody has to die before there’s a vacancy. Dull as dishwater. Terrible food. If you hate it, I will marry you.”

111 / DOWNTOWN

I didn’t hate the Piedmont Driving Club, but I was not comfortable there. I never was, in all the times I went there, with Brad or anyone else. It was simply too static, too assuredly placid, too steeped in its stone-and-oak exclusivity to get a deep breath in. It sat on its low, wooded hill north of the city like the fortress that it was, walled away by stone and mortar and money, and all of the well-dressed, middle-aged people who came in and out of it that night seemed to me the same person. There were many small Christmas parties in its private rooms that evening, and diners in the low, beamed tavernlike room where we ate before a huge fire were all decked in sedate glitter, and all spoke warmly to Brad, and asked after his mother and father, and smiled at me when he introduced me, and all might have been the same stocky, graying man in a dark blue suit, the same small, silver-rinsed woman in dark wool just touched with pearls or a lone diamond.

“What a cute nickname,” the women all twinkled at me, assessing my suit and accent like Jack Russell terriers. “I bet it’s your daddy’s, too. Savannah, did you say? We have lots of friends in Savannah—”

“
Downtown
?” said the men. “Good boy, Matt Comfort.

Heard him speak at Rotary. Real go-getter. Gon’ do well in ol’ Atlanta. You going to write stories for him?”

“She’s the one who put Boy Slattery away at the Fairchilds’

the other night,” Brad said over and over, and all the men laughed. They had heard.

“They won’t forget that,” Brad said when we had been seated, and ordered drinks. “They may never read a word you write, but they’ll remember that. Boy is not universally loved in this town. My father may be one of the few who really like him.”

“Are they old friends?” I said, thinking of Teddy’s father.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 112

“Sort of,” he said. “What they really are is soulmates. My dad thinks Boy’s politics are right on. He thinks he’ll be the next governor, and not a minute too soon. My dad’s construction company builds, among other things, dangerously substandard low-cost housing for the Negroes in the southeast part of town. Saves the owners a bundle in niceties.”

I looked at him curiously in the candlelight. He wore a beautifully cut sage green suit with a blue oxford cloth shirt and a striped tie, and looked like a fashion sketch in
Esquire
with his narrow head and good features and the cap of rough, silver-blond hair. He looked, it struck me suddenly, like a portrait of one of the young Medicis, which in effect was what he was, or this city’s equivalent, at any rate. And yet he sat talking easily, even humorously, of what could only be called his father’s racism, and something that was not at all complacent, something on the edge of anger, looked out of his blue eyes.