The Bottom by Howard Owen Read Free Book Online

our readers of just what a scumbag Wat Chenault was if not is.
    It kind of drove a stake through Chenault’s political career. He was lucky to avoid jail. A good lawyer can get you out of just about anything. He pleaded contributing to the delinquency of a minor or some such bullshit, but other stories of Wat’s misdeeds between the sheets with the younger set started drifting into the public domain, and he chose not to run for reelection. He retreated to his family’s lumber business, got into home building and then development. Everything that goes around comes around, and here’s Wat Chenault, twelve years later, trying to turn the blighted Bottom into an urban paradise and, coincidentally, make a nice little bundle for himself on the side.
    “Like I was saying,” Chenault says, turning his massive self back toward Wheelie and forgoing the opportunity to reminisce about the good old days with me, “I’m not looking for revenge here, but when you write things about me that damage me financially . . .”
    “How about if they’re true?”
    Wheelie frowns. I should just keep my damn mouth shut, but diplomacy has never been my strong suit.
    Chenault’s neck turns a spectacular color of purple, somewhere around eggplant. He swivels sharply in my direction and looks like he wants to jump out of that seat and throw a block, driving me through the plate-glass window and into the hallway. I take half a step back, but it’s probably too much trouble for him to get his ass up.
    He lets go of the chair arms and turns back to Wheelie.
    “You all have been malicious. There wasn’t any reason to bring up my youthful indiscretions.”
    I bite my tongue hard on “youthful indiscretions.” The only thing “youthful” about Wat Chenault’s indiscretion was the barely teenage girl he was sweating on in that hotel room.
    “What’s that got to do with the Top of the Bottom project?” he says.
    That’s what they’re calling it: Top of the Bottom. “Mixed-use” is the magic term they’re using these days. Somehow they hope to get the Targets and Best Buys, maybe even, praise God, a Walmart, to come to a part of the city that wasn’t even full-time habitable until they built the floodwall to keep out the James River back in 1995.
    They’ll fill the rest of the space with overpriced rental properties for the ones too young or too old to have school-aged children at home. The city is a lot of things, many of them good. It is not anybody’s idea of an educational mecca. The kids turn six and you can’t go the freight for private school, it’s time for what Chuck Apple, my stand-in on night cops, calls a Helen Keller Colonial in Chesterfield County.
    “Hell,” Chuck said when I asked for enlightenment, “old Helen could find her way around any one of them once she’d been in one. Every one of ’em’s exactly alike.”
    Wheelie tries to explain that what he did in disinterring the past is fair game.
    “We never accused you of doing something you didn’t do.”
    “Ah,” he says, and I know that, in Chenault’s mind at least, he’s got us. “You wrote that I was a felon. What I pleaded to wasn’t no damn felony. It was a misdemeanor. You called me a felon!”
    My heart does a little tom-tom number. I don’t remember calling him a felon, even if he is one. He just hired a good enough lawyer to get what started out as a felony watered down.
    Then he hauls a copy of our A section out of his briefcase.
    “How about this?” he says, and I breathe easier, although this won’t make Wheelie’s load any lighter. He’s circled a sentence on our editorial page from two weeks ago. I never read the damn editorials. Looking over Chenault’s massive shoulder, I can see that our first-floor thinking class wrote: “Mr. Chenault has come far since his unfortunate and felonious fall from grace, but we question the wisdom of his project.” (They call ’em “Mr.” and “Mrs.” and sometimes even “Ms.” in