Downtown (28 page)

“You look good enough to eat,” Lucas Geary said, smirking so that I could not miss the double entendre. He looked astonishingly grand in an Edwardian-cut coat and narrow trousers that clung to his long legs; he even had a ruffled shirt, and his beard and mustache had been neatly trimmed around his long face, so that his wicked white grin and pointed chin showed plainly. He looked like he had stepped from a Vermeer, or a Rembrandt, with his shining red hair and beard and the dark, mannered clothes, and I was sure that he knew it.

“So do we all,” I said, refusing to acknowledge the intent of his words. “Even you. You should have a Cavalier King Charles spaniel attached to you somewhere. I can think of just the place.”

“Do you think of it often?” he said.

“Almost never,” I said, and Matt raised his glass to me and said, “Great dress, Smokes,” and the afternoon flowed on into lavender evening.

Culver Carnes had had the layout for the Focus spread enlarged and set up on easels at one end of the bar, and draped them in blue cloth. Behind the bar, where the Top’s owner and manager, Doug Maloof, had had a faded mural of the potted peach trees that had once lined 221 / DOWNTOWN

downtown Peachtree Street in front of Davison’s department store, another blue drop cloth hung. The bar and restaurant had been done over in shades of deep green and peach and white, and it looked altogether fresher and more chic than the old gray plush and black leather. But I missed the old; it had been like a cave hung in the sky. Doug himself was hovering over the bar, where uniformed waiters stood at attention. A long buffet table laden with cocktail fare stood under the far window, and Tony, the piano player, was noodling idly at the Steinway, playing soft jazz and a smat-tering of early Beatles, his one nod to the times. Tony always said you had to go around the corner to the A Go-Go if you wanted to hear the new stuff.

The press came early and ate and drank like locusts. Matt knew all of them, and they him. He was popular with them all, but there was a nervy edge to most of them that spoke of envy, too, either professional or personal. I thought probably that it was both. He was at his most ebullient that night, telling outrageous stories; teasing, almost insulting, all the men; coming on shamelessly to the women; drinking steadily and showing none of the drinks, smoking ceaselessly.

In the dim room he seemed to shine, to give off a light of his own. I thought it must be hard, especially for the varnished anchor men and weather girls, to yield the limelight to a wizened, simian little man with aviator glasses and red hair hanging in his eyes and a suit that looked just out of a Salvation Army bin. But yield it they did, this night.

A good deal of liquor had been drunk, the hors d’oeuvres table nearly decimated, and the room filled up with smoke when the elevator bell in the lobby dinged, and the men of the Club walked in in a sort of informal military formation.

They looked so easily powerful and so all of a piece that they might have been struck from

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the same mint, as indeed, they had, and the room seemed to tighten around them. Men straightened their lounging stances and their ties; women patted their hair; everyone fell silent. Ben Cameron walked at their head, and Culver Carnes brought up the rear, much as if he was shepherding them. I looked at Matt, who was grinning.

“If he nips anybody in the ass I’m not going to be able to hold it,” he said under his breath, and I giggled.

Behind them walked a handful of solemn black men, young and not so young, all in dark suits and white shirts, all looking as solid and substantial as the men ahead of them, which in all respects they were. I recognized many of the faces from newspaper and television images; knew their names from half a hundred pages of recent and terrible history. I felt the nape of my neck go cool. They looked pleasant, ordinary, unremarkable, but I knew that they were not. They were total, whole. One might even call them dangerous.

Behind the small, formal smiles and nods, behind the cool, assessing eyes were marches; beatings in dark, hot country nights and mean urban noons; terror and imprisonment and bombs; firehoses and dogs and guns flashing in darkness.

In the eyes, ambushed black men spun forever in their doorways; children flew into pieces in the roaring air of churches.

When I said hello to John Howard, who walked up to where Luke and I stood, my voice sounded high and silly in my throat, like the bleat of a lamb.

The men of the Club were warm to Matt and cordial to all of us. All of them complimented me on the Focus piece, with a wash of indulgent gallantry over their words that I knew they used only with women. But they all seemed to know who I was, and almost all had heard of my victory at pool over Boy Slattery, and referred to it with enjoyment. I knew that of anything I might do, it would be that that they remembered.

223 / DOWNTOWN

Drinks had been passed around and pleasantries exchanged and Culver Carnes was moving toward the draped easels to begin his presentation when the elevator bell dinged again, and Boy Slattery came into the room.

“Oh, hell,” Ben Cameron said in a low voice to Matt. They were standing just behind me, and I listened unashamedly.

“Lint’s not coming?” Matt said.

“This is just for you to know,” Ben Cameron said, “but Lint is, at this minute, at Johns Hopkins undergoing extensive tests. He hasn’t been looking at all well this summer, and we’ve been after him to get himself looked at, but apparently something came up right suddenly, and Hill Fraser sent him to Hopkins straight from his office. I didn’t ask Boy specifically, but of course he’s the man when Lint’s not around—”

“How bad is it?” Matt said. His voice was tight.

“Don’t know,” Ben Cameron said. “You better pray for all our sakes it’s not serious. Christ, how come nothing ever happens to Boy?”

Before Matt could answer, Boy paused and looked over his shoulder and held his hand out behind him, and Alicia Crowley came out of the dimness of the lobby into the room, taking his hand as she walked.

The low roar of conversation stopped dead, a collective breath was drawn, and a soft babble broke out. In it, I recognized fervent, prayerlike exclamations of “Holy shit!” and

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!” At my side, Luke whispered,

“Shiver me timbers.” Behind me, Matt said nothing.

“Look what followed me up in the elevator,” Boy Slattery said, a smile of stunning slyness and offensiveness splitting his broad, red face. “I think I’ll keep her. May I, Matt?”

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“It’s the lady’s call, Boy,” Matt said, his voice slow and amused and lethal.

“The lady is honored,” Alicia said in her little-girl drawl, and the room erupted into laughter and applause. Boy bowed, still holding Alicia’s hand. Alicia smiled a small, self-possessed smile, and looked sleepily at Matt.

I have never seen a woman enter a room with the same impact that Alicia contrived that night. I’m still not sure what it was. She looked wonderful; she was tanned to a light, polished gold from the Nassau sun, and it or something had streaked her long, straight honey-colored hair with strands of pure platinum, so that it looked like a light-struck waterfall cascading over her cheekbones to her bare shoulders. She wore a short black sheath with one thin strap over her right shoulder, cut very low, and her flesh gleamed dully and without a white mark anywhere, so that you automatically wondered where her tan mark stopped, or if it did. Her eyes were a startling light blue in her tanned face, and her long, long legs were bare.

But it was more than her looks. It was as if something small and powerful and viciously, elementally female lived inside Alicia, and she had untethered it and sent it out ahead of her this night. You could almost see the darting shape of it, smell its musk, in the air around her. After she entered the room, conversation stalled and died out, and people simply stood looking at her and Boy Slattery, who kept his fat fingers solidly on her flesh all evening. He nodded to Matt and the staff of
Downtown
, said with a small, mean smile that he was ready for a rematch with me any time, greeted the Club affably and nodded to the black contingent, but he did not by so much as a nod or a look acknowledge the press. I could hear them stirring among themselves, heard derisive laughter and a muffled comment or two, but none of the reporters came up to

225 / DOWNTOWN

him to engage him in conversation. Boy was not popular with the Atlanta press. He had maligned them to his statewide constituency too many times.

Culver Carnes read the crowd with a practiced showman’s eye and moved to the front. He made a short speech of welcome, recognized Luke and John Howard and my efforts, and unveiled the layouts on their easels. Even though I was accustomed to them by now, the photographs leaped out at me with powerful immediacy. In their center, four or five times as large as life, a small boy hugged the front of a car in an ecstasy of delight, eyes screwed shut, and my words ran in bold white type over the dark background: “His name is Andre…”

The presentation was a great success. There was spontaneous applause and cheering when the layouts were first unveiled, followed by a tumbling spate of just the sort of questions Culver Carnes and Ben Cameron wanted. Microphones were held close when John Howard, who was the appointed spokesman for the project, talked; television lights flared and flashbulbs popped and cameras ground. We all said our few words for the press, and Ben skillfully brought the questions back into focus when they threatened to stray into the overtly political, and the conference wound down in a glow of mutual congratulations and praise. Only the black members of the party did not participate in the bonhomie; they stood a little apart, studying the white faces, saying nothing, their eyes revealing nothing. His duties over, John Howard moved to join them. Once I caught his eyes and smiled and held up my thumb and forefinger in a circle, but he did not respond to me. I felt hurt, like a publicly chastised child.

Doug Maloof moved to the forefront then, and said,

“There’s one more unveiling to go tonight,” and pulled a silken cord dangling from the blue drape over the bar, ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 226

and it fell away, and I gasped with pure delight, and my eyes filled with tears.

On the wall behind the bar was a great, vivid mural of this very bar, and around it were skillfully painted caricatures of the luminaries of the city. Ben Cameron was there, and most of the Club, and not a few of the news media and our more colorful local eccentrics. In the very center, in a tight circle, was…us. The staff of
Downtown
. Matt, standing dead in our midst with his red hair flaming in his eyes, a glass raised; around him, Tom and Hank and Lucas Geary. In front of them, seated, Sister and Alicia and Teddy and me. We were all immediately recognizable, if primitively limned, and we were all laughing.

At the piano, Tony swung into “Downtown”:
When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always
go…

downtown.

When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry seem to
help, I know…

downtown.

The room broke into a great cheer, and we all hugged Doug, and I know that there were tears on more faces than mine. Tom Gordon was wiping his eyes unashamedly, and Matt found occasion to put his dark glasses on. In my ear, Hank Cantwell whispered, “It don’t get any better than this, Holy Smokes! Don’t you wish your mama could see you now?”

“No,” I said, dull sadness and anger stabbing through the glorious giddiness, “but I wish my father could.”

The hubbub had almost died away, and the press was packing up its lights and cameras and downing a last quick drink when Boy Slattery held up the hand that was 227 / DOWNTOWN

not attached to Alicia and said loudly, “Wait up, folks, I got a question for Mr. Howard here.”

John Howard nodded gravely to Boy Slattery, and the cameras and microphones swung in close.

“Little bird told me some of your buddies from Lowndes County are in town, John,” Boy said affably. “Hear they’re lookin’ to do a little organizing, and I wondered if you were helping them out some, and if so, could you share your plans with us simple folks here in the city, so we can be prepared, like? Oh, and also, if your good wife and your little boy are with them? I know the rest of the old gang’s all here, including your great good friend Miss—or is it Sister—Juanita Hollings, and maybe even Mr.—or is it Brother—Carmichael…”

There was a long, airless silence in which I could hear only my heart hammering in my ears, even though the import of Boy Slattery’s words was not yet clear to me. Then John Howard said, very softly and clearly, “I can think of very little that is less your business, Lieutenant Governor,” and Ben Cameron said, equally clearly, “All right, folks, this press conference is over,” and more softly, “Sorry, John. Goddamn you, Boy.”

Boy Slattery held up a pink hand and said, smiling cheerfully, “Just askin’, Ben.”

The group of black men turned and walked deliberately out of the room, John Howard with them, and Boy Slattery followed them at a distance, Alicia still in tow. This time she did not look at him, or back at Matt. She simply followed Boy out of the room. Presently, with little more of import said, the Club fell back into formation and left, and we did, too. As I walked out of the still-bright room with Hank and Luke and Teddy, I looked back. At the bar, under the laughing image of himself on the wall, Matt sat, eyes on the starry cityscape beyond the windows. He was drinking a vodka and tonic

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with only Doug Maloof for company, and he was not smiling.

On the street in front of the parking lot, John Howard stood alone, waiting for his car.

“I’ll get the car, Smoky,” Teddy said, and vanished into the cubicle. Luke and Hank and I stood uncomfortably, saying nothing to John Howard, not knowing what to say.

Then he smiled.

It was a small smile, and did not reach his eyes, but it was a smile.

“I wish to God I’d been there to see you beat his ass, Smoky,” he said, and we all laughed louder than the comment merited, in sheer relief.