Read Online Peachtree Road by Anne Rivers Siddons - Free Book Online

street to Wender
    & Roberts and meet, illicitly, Boo Cutler and have a fountain cherry Coke and a package of Tom’s potato chips, and they’d go to the afternoon show at the Buckhead Theatre and neck.
    Nobody, not Mr. and Mrs. Gentry, not Caroline’s Sunday school teacher, not her teachers at North Fulton High, not Charlie himself, could break that match up.
    Boo Cutler. With the drooping-lidded blue eyes and the spoiled, corrupted baby’s face and the bubblegumpink underlip and butter-yellow crew cut and the fastest ’48 Mercury in the South. Boo of the legends and the homeroom whispers: That he ran shine down from Hall County to South Georgia on weekends, and had been shot at many times by police and agents, but never hit. That he had laid more than fifty women by the time he was old enough to drive, and one of them taught at North Fulton. That he had a shotgun in the trunk of the Mercury with notches in it that represented the number of Negroes killed on back country roads in wire-grass South Georgia. That he had done it with a cow.
    It was the literal truth, I think, that he ran shine; at any rate, I remember one night when I was fifteen and he was sixteen the word went out that Boo was coming through Buckhead from up in Hall at precisely midnight with a load, and that he had vowed to be going a hundred and twenty when he did it, and that he didn’t care what cops were waiting for him, the Merc could take them all. It was in the late fall, I remember, on a Friday night after a home football game, and we all told our parents we were going to the show, and we went and stood
    48 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    out of sight around the corner on East Paces Ferry and Peachtree in the silent cold, waiting for him. There was, as usual for that time of night, virtually no traffic and few lights except for the marquee farther up at the movie house, and the wind was high and prowling, abroad in the sky, and the silence rang with our efforts to hear his engine. At first, when we did, it was so high and keening that we just thought the wind had intensified. And then Snake Cheatham said, “It’s him. That’s him.”
    And we came out of the lee into the full stream of the wind, eyes tearing, and we heard and saw Boo Cutler coming like a devil out of Hell down the empty middle of Peachtree Road, the few sickly streetlights catching the flying Mercury and flinging it along, its engine screaming full-throated and terrible and wonderful.
    We did not speak. He was past us and gone down Peachtree Road before we could comprehend the splendor and speed of him, the Merc riding so low that the exhaust bit great fountains of sparks out of the pavement, and before we could even turn our heads to test the new sound, a DeKalb County black-and-white flashed past impossibly far behind him, its siren sounding thin and mewling in contrast to the Mercury’s Valkyrie cry. Both were gone into the silence in an eye-blink, and we did not speak for a moment.
    “Jesus Christ, he must have been doing a hundred and forty,” Tom said weakly.
    “I just creamed my jeans,” Charlie said reverently.
    I remember that I cried, silently in the sheltering dark, and was ashamed of it, but not so ashamed that the memory of that perfect moment does not still have the power, all these years later, to bring tears of joy and thankfulness to my eyes.
    It was, in its fullness, as round and whole as an egg.
    Boo Cutler, Charlie…
    Buckhead is called that because a man named Hardy PEACHTREE ROAD / 49
    Ivy mounted, in 1838, the head of a buck on a tree over his tavern and crossroads store, and the name stuck among the settlers who met there. The tree on which the grisly trophy hung still stands in the parking lot of a liquor store. Hardy paid $605 for the land that makes up the core of Buckhead, 202 acres where the racetrack sat, and then Sears, and where now Buckhead Plaza is going up. We always heard that there was gold buried in a box under that earth, put there by an old