Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Oh, Lord,” I said.

  “Right. Okay, brace up. Here we go,” he said, and before I made the mental transition from awe to terror he took the Stearman up, steadily and inexorably, until we were nearly vertical. The engine drone built to a great scream and the little craft shook all over, and my own scream was totally lost in the roar of the wind. I closed my eyes.

  Suddenly the awful sensation of falling upward into nothing stopped, and I opened my eyes again, and saw the horizon of the earth wheel over my head, slowly and majestically, and knew that I was hanging upside down from an open cockpit, and had no idea on earth what, except a webbing of straps, was keeping me in the plane. I saw the mountain, and the hangar, and small dots that I knew to be my treacherous compatriots, all upside down, and then we swept down again in a great, stomach-turning dive, and I screwed my eyes shut once more and kept them shut until I felt the plane, at last, level out in the air.

  “Okay?” came the pilot’s voice.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, feeling my head swim as though I was going to faint.

  “One more, then,” he said.

  We were much higher; the earth and hangar looked very small, and I could barely make out the staff. This time he nosed the Stearman into a deep dive that was worse by far than anything we had done; by the time he took it up, I was crying with terror. We did the inside loop again, but this time I knew to wait for the respite of the gravity-free moment at its apex, and that the downsweep that followed it would soon end. And it did. The pilot flew in low to where Matt and the staff stood, waggled his wings and pointed to the mountain, and roared off around it. Behind me I could hear, just for a moment, faint cheers. They were the sweetest sound I had ever heard.

  He was as good as his word. We flew around to the other side of Stone Mountain and he did a few gentle curves and figure eights, and we killed perhaps twenty more minutes, and then he brought us home. It was Matt Comfort himself who stood beneath the wing to catch me when I crawled out of my seat, and I have always been glad that he was such a small man and my padded weight put him off balance so that he stumbled and nearly fell with me, because I could not, for that first moment back on earth, have stood. I could make myself smile brilliantly to their applause, and say the proper things, like “It was wonderful, like being a bird,” but I could not make my legs hold me up. I think, of them all, only Hank knew that. He came running over and picked me up in his arms like a child and bore me back to the hangar, humming loudly the Triumphal March from Aïda.

  “You did yourself more good today than you know,” he whispered in my ear, and I said, “I hope so, because if I had to do that again I’d shoot myself.”

  Behind me I heard my pilot telling Matt Comfort that he had taken me behind the mountain and turned me “every which way but loose.”

  “One day,” I said to Hank, still in a whisper, “I’m going to dedicate a book to that man.”

  Presently Hank set me down and I was able to make my legs work, and I walked with him and Tom Gordon into the hangar to divest myself of some of the layers of clothes. Matt had gone on to the office with Alicia, and Charlie had scratched off in the Camaro, top down in the warm, late-winter morning. When I reached the hangar, Lucas Geary was standing just inside it, drinking a Coca-Cola. With him was a tall black man I had never seen before, wearing, as Luke was, bleached, thin-worn blue jeans and a work shirt that had unquestionably seen many days of hard labor.

  When Luke saw me he saluted me with the Coca-Cola bottle and smiled the lazy, feral smile I had noticed the day before.

  “So you did it,” he said.

  “So I did,” I said. “No thanks to you. I thought you were supposed to shoot it. Or did you just figure I’d back out, like everybody else?”

  “Well, I thought you might,” he said. “But just in case you didn’t, we got here in time to snap a few of you coming down. Just for the record, in case Comfort should conveniently forget that you really did it.”

  I looked at him with interest; did he sense, then what I knew: that Matt had been testing me with the flight and was not apt to be totally pleased with the result? His narrow blue eyes crinkled in their nests of freckled flesh, and I could read nothing in them but a sort of abstracted awareness. His eyes might have been cameras themselves.

  As I thought it, he picked up the Leica that hung around his neck, shook what looked to be toast crumbs from it, and aimed it at my face. It is the shot that ran with the photo-essay: me still in the leather cap with the goggles pushed off my face, looking up at him with my lips slightly parted. It is an extreme close-up, and by some trick of light and shade in the hangar, in my pupils are mirrored the tiny thin reflections of another small plane that stood nearby in the hangar. It is a tricky shot, but it does have impact. I never minded the comparisons it drew, when it ran, to the young Amelia Earhart.

  At the time, I merely said, “If you point that thing at me again I’m going to spit into it,” and he laughed and dropped the camera. It bounced on its strap against his chest.

  “This is John Howard,” he said, and the black man stepped forward and held out his hand, saying nothing and studying me.

  “Smoky O’Donnell,” Luke said.

  John Howard shook my hand briefly and nodded, but still did not speak. His hand was hard and dry and warm. I wondered who he was.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” John Howard said. He had an actor’s voice, deep and musical, with the quality that I have always thought of as projection in it: I thought that he could make himself heard for a long distance without raising his voice. He had a long, narrow head with a close crop of only slightly napped hair, and a remarkable face. It was angular and seemed modeled of rough bronze planes, rather like one of Frederic Remington’s statues, and the only noticeably Negroid trace in it was the slightly flared nostrils. His eyes were, instead of brown, a yellowish hazel that you could see into; a wolf’s eyes. A long grayish scar ran through one eyebrow, bisecting it, and down across his left eye socket, just missing the eye. The scar raised one-half of his eyebrow so that he had a permanently quizzical look that saved him from mere handsomeness. But he was that, too. John Howard was always a man on whom it was a pleasure to look—up to a point. Little in his ledged face responded to other people. He was as still, in repose, as a bronze carving, much the color of one, and had the same surface warmth. At first I thought he was a workman of some sort, with whom Luke Geary had struck up a conversation, but when he spoke I knew that he was not.

  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, 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 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.”

  “I really want to do a piece on him,” I said, the desire solidifying. “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. 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 relentlessly 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 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 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…?”