Charming Grace (12 page)

“So you’re a
saint
, huh?
No
. Just a smug, silver-spoon southern belle. Most women can’t
afford
to turn up their noses at money and fame.”

“Don’t smear your values on other people and assume they’ll stick.”

“Do you understand what kind of responsibility comes with being famous? Do you understand what a responsibility my brother has to his studio, his film distributors, the movie theater owners, and his fans, for godssake? Do you understand what kind of power my brother will have once he proves he can
direct
a hit movie as well as act in one? Mel ‘Mr. Serious Director’ Gibson can kiss our collective Senterra asses, then!” She was in my face now, hissing hot breath on me. “And finally, do you understand that if you do
anything
else to screw up the filming of my brother’s directing debut I will personally stick one of your pissy-prissy southern belle beauty queen tiaras up your—”

“Your fans are headed this way.”

We heard a squeal. A handful of afternoon guests had wandered out of the Smith House. They were hurrying up the inn’s sidewalk, gaping at us, whispering, excited. Some pulled out cameras.

Diamond gave them a huge, phony smile, then pivoted back toward me with a pucker of pure disgust. “I have to go, now. I have fans. I have responsibilities to them.
You
are just a pimple on the ass of my world. Up your—”

“Hello!” I called to the advancing tourist group. “Did y’all know that Diamond’s real name is
Irma Magdalene
?”

Irma took a swing at me.

Never let it be said that we rich-chick beauty belles can’t dodge like a boxer when attacked. Years of ballet and tap-jazz are not for nothing. I ducked, she lunged, one of her stiletto heels snapped off, and she
whooshed
past me with both arms flailing. A cloud of dried horse manure poofed up as she landed inside the trailer. She scrambled to get a foothold in the floor’s deep muck. “You!” she yelled. “You! Dead! You bitch! Dead bitch!”

I shut the trailer doors and dropped a steel lynch pin in their latch. As I walked around front to the pickup truck’s open window, Diamond began pounding the trailer’s plywood walls. The trailer rocked. Strained through plywood, her muffled shouting produced a kind of weird new language.

“Let me
mumble
out of
mumble
here. Ah’ll
mumble mumble
your ass.”

“T-John?”

“Hmmm.” He jerked awake, smacking his lips and brushing the open
Enquirer
off his lap. “Sorry, hon.”

“I want you to take the trailer over to the Persimmon Hill estate. Give this note to Mr. Boone Noleene, when you get there.” I pulled a spiral pad and a little gold note pen from my overall’s front pocket, scribbled a few words, tore the page out, folded it, and handed it to him. “Then come back by here and pick me up. Here.” I handed him a cell phone from my deep hip pocket. “Call me if anyone gives you a hard time.”

“Hard time? Over manure, Hon? Why are you sending manure to— you’re sending manure to Stone Senterra?”

“Sort of.”

He frowned and fiddled with the turned-off hearing aid in one ear. “What’s that noise?”

“I’ll explain when you get back. Just ask for Mr. Noleene and give him the note.”

“Hmmm. Okay. I’ll be right back.”

He cranked the truck and drove off. The trailer rocked violently. I could just make out Diamond’s last, fading shriek.

Ah’ll mumble mumble get you for this
.

The small crowd of fans stood on the Smith House lawn, open-mouthed and stunned.

“Don’t worry,” I called. “It’s for TV. We’re being filmed.”

Everyone looked around excitedly. “Is it for one of those reality shows?” a woman asked.

I nodded. “Surprise Celebrity Road Trip.”

Stone was out on the lawn at Casa Senterra giving an interview to a shrewd-eyed reporter from
The Dahlonega Nugget
, and occasionally looking over at me to say, “My bodyguard, there, he’s a good old boy Southern crack-neck. He can vouch for me and my respectful intentions. My film about Harp Vance’s life will boost tourism here in Harp’s hometown a thousand percent. Did I mention I’m donating twenty-thousand smackers to the library and twenty-thousand to the fire department, all in Harp Vance’s name? Tell this nice lady, Noleene. I’m a big fan of all you crack-necks around here. Tell the lady, Noleene.” As if he were on safari and I was his native interpreter.

I leaned close to Stone and whispered, “It’s not ‘crack-neck,’ it’s ‘redneck,’ boss, or ‘cracker,’ and either way, it’s like somebody calling you a dumb guido or a greasy spic.”

Stone gaped at me. Then he recovered his public cool and grinned down at the reporter. “Come on up to the house with me, little lady. I’ll have one of my assistants show you around and let you take some
exclusive
pictures of my outdoor gym, while I call your publisher personally and tell him how much money Senterra Productions plans to spend on advertising in his paper.”

Stone glowered at me then led the reporter away. Across the lawn, Tex and Mojo pretended to guard the estate’s picket fence from the invading azaleas. Once Stone and the reporter were safely inside Casa Senterra, they leaned against the fence and laughed so hard I thought the pickets would split.

Mojo intoned in a fake announcer’s voice, “Coming next on The Stone Senterra Diplomacy Tour—Stone visits Harlem and talks jive with the brothers.”

Tex, nodding, wiped tears from his eyes. “Noleene, you better coach him on what to say and how to say it ‘fore we find him at the bottom of some old gold shaft wrapped in a Confederate flag with a ‘Fergit Hell’ bumper sticker slapped to his forehead.”

“I’m still tryin’ to get him to pronounce
Dahlonega
right.”

Stone never got it. But he tried. He really did. Little Dah, big LON, little ega, from the Cherokee Indian word for gold. Dah-LON-ega.

“Dah-la-NEE-ga,” Stone said on
ET
.

“Dah-LAWN-NEE-ga,” Stone said to Jay Leno, on
The Tonight Show
.

“You can’t separate the story of Harp Vance from where he grew up,” Stone told Barbara Walters on
The View
one morning. “I’m going to let the audience walk where he walked, see the town and the mountains he loved, feel like they’re part of his real life. Like those documentary guys do on the History Channel. Only it won’t be history. It’ll be now.”

“And this charming, special town has an equally special name.
Dah-LON-ega
,” Walters said, getting the name perfect the first time.

“That’s right,” Stone said. “DAH-la-na-GEE.”

At any rate, with my translation chores done, I loitered dully by the front gate. An hour ago Diamond had roared out of the property in one of Stone’s Humvees, (“I look big, I think big, I drive big,” he liked to say.) She was touring the town, I guessed, or hunting for squirrels to run over.

A new crowd of tourists careened toward me along the dogwood-draped sidewalk. They snapped pictures of the pretty Queen Annes and Victorians, then pointed excitedly when they saw Stone’s rented home-away-from-mansion.
Click, whir, click
. Like grasshoppers with castanets. They snapped the house, and they snapped pictures of Tex and Mojo, who waved. The tourists eyed me but didn’t take my picture; I waved but that didn’t reassure them. In prison a wise man learns to turn his face into a warning mask; the more you can scare some bastard with a cold-blooded look, the less trouble you have. Only one problem—that thing our mamas tell us is true.

You better smile, poteet, or your sweet little face will freeze in that ugly expression
. I used to stand in the exercise yard at Angola staring at the sun to see if I could fry the hard look out of my eyes, but all I got was a tan. I couldn’t smile—at least not a big, open smile—anymore. So I naturally scared people.

“New tour bus must be in,” Tex drawled. “This is the fifth big crowd today. I think we should do what I did back in ninety-eight, when the boss and Diamond were filming
The Kill Zone
up in Canada. I was still drinking, back then. I stretched about fifty feet of Crime Scene tape across the driveway to the boss’s private ski chalet. Told the crowd to go away. Scared the shit outta them. ‘Miz Diamond Senterra has done kilt her acting coach and chopped his pecker off,’ I said over a bullhorn.”

Mojo thumbed an unlit cigarette. “I’d believe that.”

I shook my head. “Diamond’s had acting lessons?”

They laughed. I headed toward the sissy picket fence at the front of the lawn, working my face muscles, trying not to chase anybody off with a look. Kids always saw through me with a kind of soft-touch radar, but there were no kids in this particular group.

“Afternoon, folks,” I started. “Y’all want some pictures, you stand over yonder by the gate. Mr. Senterra’s working, so he can’t come out and sign autographs. But I’ll take your addresses and you’ll get signed pictures in the mail. Personally by him. I’ll see to it—”

A pickup truck cruised up the little street, pulling a rattling wooden trailer with whitewashed plywood sides and top. The trailer rocked, and I could hear the thud of hooves pounding the walls. What kind of animal was inside? The pickup and trailer stopped along the curb. An old-man driver fiddled with a hearing aide in one ear then yelled out the open window at me. “You Boone Noleene?”

“Yessir.”

“Grace Bagshaw Vance sent you some manure for Mr. Senterra. Here’s a note from her.” The old man handed me a small, folded piece of paper. I stepped back, opened the note from Grace slowly, as if it were written on a butterfly’s wing, and read this:

I owe you a favor. Here it is. P.S. Don’t take any shit off Diamond on my account.

“You tell Grace I said thanks, sir,” to which the old man nodded and went “Huh?”

I walked around behind the trailer, frowning. It rocked. I pulled a lynch pin from the latch on the trailer’s doors then stepped back. The doors burst open.

Ruffled, dirty, sweaty, dusted in dried horse manure, one boot heel missing, her mouth moving sixty miles an hour on words tough enough to peel paint off a fender, Diamond leapt out. “You
keep
Grace Vance away from me, or I’ll rip her head off and piss down her—”

“Diamond!” the tourists yelled.

The whir and click of their happy cameras froze Diamond like a raccoon on a bayou back porch turning over a garbage can. She couldn’t even manage a phony pose-on-the-red-carpet-look-at-my-boobs-in-a-designer-gown smile. She just stood there, staring at those cameras with her mouth open in horror. A breeze lifted manure dust off her like she was a rug that needed spring cleaning.

“I could get a vacuum cleaner,” I said.

Her mouth formed silent words. You don’t want to know what they were. Then she teetered to the property’s picket fence, did a side vault over it, and wobbled quickly toward the house on one high heel. More manure dust poofed off of her. Tex and Mojo backed up so fast they ended up in the azaleas.

“Man, she didn’t look too good,” Tex would drawl later.

“Didn’t smell too good, either,” Mojo would add.

I folded Grace’s note and carefully put it away in my wallet for later re-reading and admiring. Somehow, she’d won round one in a cat fight with the saber-toothed Diamond. Then she’d sent Diamond to me as a prize. A gift for me. For my sake. What was she, psychic? I’d have to figure that out, but the details didn’t matter at the moment.

Hero
would be filming in Dahlonega for the next two months. For those two months I was going to be the happiest ex-con with a dilemma in Dahlonega, Georgia, little dah big LON little ega. Whatever happened next, for good or for bad, it would be worth the misery. Some women set a man free from himself. Grace was one of those women.

For the first time in a long time I looked up into the spring sunshine, and I felt myself really smile.

PART TWO

HERO

DIRECTOR’S SCRIPT AND PRODUCTION NOTES

PROPERTY OF SENTERRA PRODUCTIONS

THEFT OF CREATIVE MATERIAL IS A FEDERAL CRIME

WHOEVER HAS BEEN TRYING TO HACK INTO MY COMPUTER WILL END UP LIKE THAT BRITISH SOLDIER MEL GIBSON CHOPPED TO DEATH IN THE PATRIOT, WHICH WAS NOT MEL’S FINEST FILM WORK, BY THE WAY

SCENE:
Summer, 1980; Bagshaw Downs, a Tara-esque antebellum mansion fronted by a curving cobblestone drive, gardens, fountains, broad oaks. (Access to Downs denied by Helen Bagshaw, so filming will take place at a mansion on the coast near Mobile, Alabama; Georgia mountains in background to be digitally added in post-production.)

We hear beautiful 12-year-old Grace’s screams, squawks of peacock, and ferocious dog snarls in front gardens; Helen, James, and Candace run out of mansion dressed in evening clothes, Helen in cloud of blue tulle and low bodice; James Bagshaw in tux; big-haired Candace in sleek gown. They race to foot of massive oak. Find 14-year-old Harp (now lanky and handsome but still rough-edged) bloodied, fighting off wild dog with his Boy Scout pocket knife; Grace up in tree, hugging terrified peacock. James chases wild dog away.