Downtown (20 page)

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 154

Luke did not tell me what he was, though, and he did not speak again. After a moment or two of banter with Tom Gordon and Hank, Luke and John Howard turned and went out of the hangar. I watched them until they got into a small, square sports car of a type I had never seen, filthy beyond anyone’s recognition with dried mud, and roared away. Hank told me later that it was Luke Geary’s, a Morgan.

“Who is John Howard?” I said to Hank as we walked to the Chevrolet.

“A bona fide hero from the early days in the movement,”

Hank said. “One of Dr. King’s closest lieutenants. Been with him since just after Montgomery. I’m surprised you didn’t recognize him; Luke’s picture of him on the Selma march was everywhere.
Life
picked it up. It’s famous. That’s where he got the scar.”

“Somebody—hit him?” I said, flinching to think of that fine bronze face taking the brunt of a billy club.

“Cop on horseback got him in the face with his flash-light on the bridge,” Hank said. “They thought for a while he was blind. I don’t think he has much sight in that eye. Luke shot him just as it was happening, and the cop backed the horse up on Luke and just stomped hell out of him. The horse smashed his ankle. Didn’t you notice yesterday that he’s got a limp? He shot that too—the world’s best shot of a horse’s ass, he calls it. He walked out on that busted ankle with the film in his shoe. He and Howard have been friends ever since. They spend a lot of time together.”

“I think maybe I remember the shot of John Howard,” I said, thinking that I did. “But I didn’t know that about Luke.”

“He’s one of the best young photographers in the country,”

Hank said. “He sells to
Life
and
Magnum
and
Black Star
.

Any one of them would grab him full-time, 155 / DOWNTOWN

but he doesn’t want to leave the South. The Civil Rights movement is his thing; he’s kind of obsessed with it. I’m really surprised he’d bother to shoot antique airplanes for Matt, but Matt’s already worked the old magic on him. And I think he’s given him carte blanche in the magazine. How he’s going to square that with Culver is beyond me. I know he’s the only photographer I’ve ever known who Matt lets pick his writers. We’re lucky to have him.”

“I guess I don’t remember much about Selma,” I said. “Not a lot about the Civil Rights movement was ever very real in Corkie. We were our own minority of choice, you know. Is he an actor? John Howard?”

“No,” Hank said. “He’s a minister. An ordained Baptist minister. Does that surprise you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know why it should, but it does.”

When I told Brad about the flight in the Stearman, and about Lucas Geary and John Howard, he did not respond as I had thought he might.

“I don’t like that flying business one bit,” he said. “You could have been killed, you know. Comfort should have his butt kicked. I wouldn’t have let you do it if I’d known.”

“It’s the best restored Stearman in the country, and the pilot is the best Stearman pilot. And Matt should indeed have his butt kicked, but not for the reason you think,” I said, surprised and faintly hurt. I had thought he would be amused and proud of me.

“Well, I want you to tell me about your assignments ahead of time, from now on,” he said curtly.

“Why, so you can forbid me to do the ones you don’t like?” I snapped. “Listen, Brad, it’s hard enough to get ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 156

Matt to give me assignments of any kind. You just don’t know what I go through to get them. This is only the second byline piece I’ve done, after your YMOG. If I start refusing pieces because you think they’re dangerous, or unseemly, or something, it’ll be just the excuse he needs to stop giving them to me. I’ll be doing the entertainment guide for the rest of my life.”

“I don’t think you’ll be doing anything at
Downtown
for the rest of your life,” he said, smiling his wonderful smile.

“As for the entertainment guide, what’s wrong with that?

It’s got a huge readership. You get to go to every new play and concert and restaurant and lounge in town. It’s like a full-time, year-round party.”

“That’s why,” I said sullenly, but I did not press it. I did not want to argue with Brad as well as Matt Comfort. I told him about Luke, then, and about meeting John Howard.

“Geary sounds like a madman,” he said. “Just what you need, another Irish lunatic. Howard I know, or know of.

He’s a good man. Atlanta wouldn’t be as far along in the race department as we are if it weren’t for him and a few others.”

“He intrigues me,” I said. “He has a wonderful face. I’d love to do something on him, with Luke’s photographs as a companion piece. There’s this sense of tragedy about him, a kind of sadness underneath. I’d like to find out about him.”

“Well, he’s been beat up a lot, I think,” Brad said.

“And there’s something I vaguely remember about a wife and kid who left him. Seems like he doesn’t preach anymore; I think he does something over at the Atlanta University complex. And then he’s something high up in SCLC. Most of the young ones are. I know Dr. King depends pretty heavily on him. Somewhere in all that there’s bound to be some tragedy.”

157 / DOWNTOWN

“I really want to do a piece on him,” I said, the desire so-lidifying. “He stands for a lot of what this city is about, it sounds like. A symbol of the best and brightest of us.”

“Yeah, well, good luck,” Brad said dryly. “Matt might like to do a piece on him, but unless it’s an YMOG Culver Carnes would as soon run a piece on Lee Harvey Oswald as do a big editorial darky piece.”

I looked at him. Even though I knew he was right, I hated both the certainty in his voice and the ugly epithet.

He flushed.

“Bad choice of words. It’s what Culver and some of his buddies call the Negroes, though. I’ve heard them do it. This piece is just not going to happen, Smoky. Don’t get your heart set on it. Even if by some miracle Matt got to run one like it, he’d never let you do it. Not a woman. You know I’m right, don’t you?”

“I’m going to do it,” I said.

March came booming in on a high wind so full of light that the new green leaves seemed to shimmer and tinkle like crystal. The March issue came out with my YMOG featuring Brad and my byline in fat, solid black and white beneath it, and as far as an YMOG could do it garnered quite a lot of complimentary attention. Brad was popular with much of
Downtown
’s readership, and as Matt had said on my first night with the staff, my name proved to be an attention-getter. Sister announced, a few days after the issue came out, that she had had a number of calls wanting to know who the new guy was, and Matt said he was telling everybody I was a sportswriter from New York he’d lured away from the
Herald Tribune
. I did not care about the letters or Matt’s teasing. I turned surreptitiously to the page with my byline so often that I had permanent ink ghosts on my fingers and forearms.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 158

Tom Gordon, catching me at it, laughed and said he’d run a photo of me with the Sunchasers, in May, so everybody could see just who Smoky O’Donnell was. I packed up several issues and sent them home to Corkie, but no one there replied. Even that did not materially dim my pleasure. I knew that I would not be going home again.

I did not see John Howard again, but Lucas Geary soon became a permanent part of
Downtown
’s furniture. He spent a great deal of time lying on the floor of one office or another, and his piles of camera equipment and clothing took up continuing residence in Matt’s office. At any given time that one of the staff went in, during an absence of Matt’s, to stretch out for a while on the sofa, it was necessary to step over Lucas’s equipment and often Lucas. Knowing that his shattered ankle often pained him, we smiled and chatted with him and stepped over him with equanimity, and soon got used to the ever-lurking Leica, whose cold eye followed us everywhere. I remember thinking, in that gilded spring, that possibly no group in contemporary history was so relent-lessly chronicled as the staff of
Downtown
magazine was by Lucas Geary.

Lucas became, to most of us, rather like another of Comfort’s more eccentric irregulars: like Francis Brewton, or tiny, wizened black Randolph, who came scuttling through each morning and made a small fortune shining shoes that did not need it, or like Mr. Tommy T. Bliss, an elderly gentleman who was such a rabid fan of the Atlanta Braves that he persisted in standing on his head on top of the home dugout whenever one of them hit a home run, despite the fact that the resigned constabulary removed him to the Fulton County Jail each time for disturbing the peace. It was usually Matt who bailed him out, and each time, Mr. Bliss would come up to our offices and stand on his head 159 / DOWNTOWN

in the lobby, by way of thanks. We bought Francis’s ancient newspapers and Randolph’s shoeshines and applauded Mr.

Tommy T. Bliss’s headstands and stepped over Lucas Geary.

They seemed all of a piece with Matt’s world.

But Culver Carnes did not find him amusing or intriguing.

Emissaries from the chamber of commerce upstairs, often escorting visiting dignitaries who wished to meet Matt, invariably had to step over Lucas, and the prim, tight-mouthed, beehived secretarial corps from the chamber hated him to a woman. There was not a skirt he had not shot up with the Leica, or a shocked face into which he had not grinned his shit-eating grin and drawled, “Thanks, toots.” Soon there was a memo about him from Culver Carnes, which Matt read with glee and put, he said, into the growing file of memos concerning the Coffee Cup Wars.

“What the hell are the Coffee Cup Wars?” Lucas Geary said when Matt told him, and I stopped what I was doing and went to listen. I had heard references to them for a couple of months, but had somehow never investigated.

Now, suddenly, I wanted to know.

“About a year ago Culver got the chamber offices all spruced up,” Matt said. “He’s always been bent out of shape because our offices are better looking. So he hired this little fag interior decorator, and spent a bunch of money, and got the whole shebang done over, everything matching, prettier than shit. Even had color-coordinated plastic holders for those paper coffee cups, you know. Theirs up there are yellow, to match the little fag’s sunflower motif, doncha know.

The ones we have down here are red. So somehow, I guess whenever one of us went up there for something, or when we all went up for the Wednesday morning meeting, our red holders would migrate up there and some of their yellow holders would

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 160

end up down here. It wasn’t on purpose; nobody down here cares what color their coffee cup holders are, but it just sent ol’ Culver to the moon to see those sneaky red cup holders up there in his little yellow heaven. And he’d holler like a stuck pig if he came down here and found yellow ones. He sent a stern memo, and we did try, but somehow it just didn’t seem a real big priority. So he fired off a whole series of memos that started off appealing to our pride and ended up threatening punishment for treason, and worse. And pretty soon those yellow cup holders started turning up in the damnedest places—in the window of Ham Stockton’s store, or on the roof of the building that Culver’s window overlooks, or in the goddamn Pink Pig flyer on Rich’s roof at Christmas. Once the chick that does the disco in the cage across the street every night had a couple of ’em hanging from her watusi. It got very creative. Culver of course thinks we’re doing it, but he can’t catch anybody, and besides that, can you imagine grown men and women…?”

And he grinned his doggy white grin at Lucas Geary. Lucas grinned back, a white crescent splitting the piratical red beard, framed Matt’s face with his two hands, and said,

“Shocking.”

“How about we go get a drink?” Matt said. And the two of them shambled out into the spring noon, in search of Cutty Sark and chicken livers at Emile’s.

It was, I think, the start of a beautiful friendship. After that, you seldom saw Lucas Geary that you did not see Matt.

Lucas spent long hours lying on the floor in Matt’s office, poring over his contact sheets and listening to Ramsey Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet on Matt’s tape machine, and when he and Matt did not lunch or dine alone, he came along with us on our staff lunches and evening freebies, as if he were one of us. Hank told me that they went out together many nights,

161 / DOWNTOWN

staying until all hours, and that often Matt slept over at Lucas’s place in Ansley Park, an airy, secluded guest house behind the large, genteelly shabby home of the widow of the former conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. It was, Hank said, surprisingly sophisticated and luxurious for one who seemingly lacked any visible means of support, and Matt thought that much of the furniture and many paintings and books and records had found their way there from the collection of the old lady. Lucas spent a good bit of time with her talking music, and she was frankly besotted with him. Hank thought a good bit of the musical chat was probably bullshit, but Lucas did seem to know a lot about all types of music, and did some chores and simple handyman work for her, and sometimes took her to the grocery store or the doctor in the Morgan, or walked her fusty old poodle. It was a good arrangement for both the old lady and Lucas Geary, and Matt enjoyed the aura of cultivation and the comforts of Lucas’s guest house.

“I reckon Alicia is getting a lot of sleep these days,” Hank said.

Alicia was not a happy woman in those first tender spring days. She said nothing, of course, but we did not see her getting into Matt’s car with him after the trips to the Top of Peachtree often anymore; instead Matt and Lucas would go off together, leaving Alicia to wait tight-mouthed with the rest of us in the building parking lot for her little yellow VW

bug to come hurtling down the ramp. Tom Gordon said that until that spring no one had even known what sort of car she drove.

For several weeks after Matt and Lucas became inseparable Alicia appeared almost daily in a new outfit, with freshly done nails and, two or three times, a new haircut. But, though she still spent a great deal of time with Matt in his office, now Lucas was there, also, supine or prone ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 162