by Joan Hess
Carlotta was sure.
Wild Cherry Wine (REVISED 5/20)
CLOSE SHOT—LUCINDA
LUCINDA, a hulking earth mother, is concealed behind a clump of bushes, and observing the scene with a curious frown. Her lips move silently and she blinks several times.
10 RETURN TO SCENE
A knuckle on the window brought me back with a yelp of surprise. I wiped my eyes and looked up at a seriously unappetizing view, a.k.a. Kevin Buchanon’s face. It was so close that I could see the fading blemishes, the emerging pimples, the smattering of blackheads (coming and going), and even the craterish pores of his nose.
“Arly?” he said through the glass. “Are you okay?”
I rolled down the window an inch and said, “Yes, I am just peachy. What do you want?”
“I was hoping you might see fit to explain about how men and women get along with each other,” he said, fogging the glass as he moved even closer. “My beloved’s all sad these days, except when I mention going to Boone Creek, and then she likes to whop me up the side of the—”
“Stop, Kevin. Under no circumstances am I going to attempt to analyze the unbreachable gulf between female sensibleness and male insufferableness. Not in my worst nightmare would I dare to interpret your and Dahlia’s interactions. Go away. Better still, run away from home and join the Foreign Legion. Maybe Dahlia will feel more kindly toward you if you have a battle scar and some medals.”
I rolled the window up and backed out of the lot. After a moment of debate, I drove toward Emmet to see if Wade Elkins had any new theories about the firebugs.
It was all for naught, in that he wasn’t home and I preferred not to hunt for him at his office. Just as well, I told myself as I drove home.
Chapter 4
15 CONTINUED:
Billy Joe and Loretta are grappling under the sheet as the door opens stealthily.
16 CLOSE-UP—WIDOW THIGPEN
Words cannot convey the level of shock on her face. However, she advances soundlessly, and we realize she is reliving memories of what has taken place in the bed in the past. A bemused look comes over her as she spies on the sweaty young lovers.
17 BACK TO SCENE
LORETTA
Oh, Billy Joe—is you sure this is right? I swore to God above that I’d save myself for my wedding night.
BILLY JOE
This ain’t a sin, my darling Loretta. Mebbe there ain’t no way to keep you from marrying Cooter, but he won’t be the one what takes your purity and hides it in his black heart forever.
WIDOW THIGPEN
What all’s going on—and in my own bed? Loretta Biggins, I am sorely ashamed of the way you’re carrying on with this white trash. No wonder your pa was gonna whip you!
LORETTA
Widow Thigpen! I didn’t hear you come in.
Billy Joe flops back with a groan of frustration. Loretta covers herself with a sheet and sits up.
WIDOW THIGPEN
I don’t recall hearing Billy Joe Jenks come in, neither.
LORETTA
I let him in through the window. I’m so sorry, Widow Thigpen. When Billy Joe gets too close to me, my body seems to catch on fire like a pile of kindling.
(beat)
But it’s a sin, ain’t it?
CLOSE-UP on Widow Thigpen as a knowing smile flits across her face.
WIDOW THIGPEN
I was young once, Loretta. I was in love with the boy down the road, and more times than I can count, we met under an old sweet gum tree and made love like we’d invented it.
(beat)
He was strong, and handsome as a movie star. The first time I was scared, but I closed my eyes and I never regretted it.
BILLY JOE
Then you’ll let us stay in here?
LORETTA
No! It’s not right, Billy Joe. I can’t let Ma and Pa lose the farm. It’s jest not right.
Loretta begins to sob as Billy Joe and Widow Thigpen exchange enigmatic looks.
DISSOLVE TO:
Frederick Marland rolled up the script and began to slap his knee with it. “This is so very amusing, Carlotta. Gwenneth and I come within centimeters of full engagement six times in the first fifteen scenes. Do you think I’ve got a elevator button between my balls? Going up, going down … going up, going down.”
He was slouched in the last seat in the van, his jaw extended with the petulance of a toddler and his dark brown eyes glowering as he unfurled the script and resumed reading it. Despite his tendency to regress, he was handsome enough to be followed around malls by giggly girls and a few young mothers pushing strollers and telling themselves they should know better. He’d agreed to let his sunstreaked brown hair grow for the role, and the soft curls over his ears and on his neck were those of a Renaissance cherub floating above a Madonna.
Although he was in his mid-twenties, on cue he could invoke an aura of adolescent innocence; within weeks of his arrival in L.A., it had earned him a small part in a soap. Inevitably, the writers had wandered on to other sordid subplots, and his character had slithered down the drain. The experience had served him well, however, and his career was proceeding exactly as he’d planned.
In the seat in front of him, Gwenneth D’Amourre was trying to hold the script still with one hand and steady her cosmetics case with the other as the van bounced from pothole to pothole. “Oh, Billy Joe—is you sure this is right? I swore to God above I’d save myself for my wedding night.” She looked up with a teeny-tiny frown. “Hey, Carlotta, did you make this rhyme on purpose? It’s kinda sweet, you know? This is right; wedding night.”
Gwenneth had prepared for the eight hours of plane and van. She wore a halter and shorts, and her baby-blue eyes were concealed behind the expensive sunglasses she removed only for the camera and bed. Very little was concealed behind the halter, but Gwenneth liked to give her fans a thrill when she sailed majestically through airports. Her lush golden hair (her term) cascaded down her lovely, supple shoulders like a tawny lioness’s mane (as above), and she was adept at flipping it out of her face with a toss of her elegant (ditto) chin. Gwenneth’s résumé was heavily peppered with adjectives, her private life with adverbs.
In the front seat, Carlotta had opted for the conservative yet comfortable attire of a blouse and khaki slacks. The remarks from the back rows of the van had caused her to lose her place in her notes, and her voice was sharp as she said, “Yes, Frederick, I do think you’re controlled by nothing more than a tiny, shiny black button. No, Gwenneth, I did not notice that the line contains an internal rhyme. If you can’t get it out without lapsing into that godawful singsong, I’ll rewrite it.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Gwenneth said thoughtfully, if not pensively. “Right, night. It sure does rhyme.”
“Can’t fool you, can I?” Carlotta muttered as she delved back into her notes, making check marks as she moved through them. The truck with equipment in the morning. Hal and Anderson on a late-afternoon flight, rental car reserved at the airport. Rewrite trailer scene to include the three-hundred-pound cavewoman. Locate liquor store. Carlotta drew a star by the ultimate item, glanced at the driver across the aisle, and gloomily drew a second star for good measure.
“… the one what takes your purity and hides it in his black heart forever,” said Frederick, his voice loud and incredulous. “Jesus H. Croissant, did Hal write this excrement?”
“Indeed he did,” lied Carlotta.
Frederick mentally ran through the terms of his contract. “Maybe it’s not that bad.”
Fuzzy Indigo was driving the van, zealously aiming for each pothole in the road and wishing he had a flask in the pocket of his army surplus jacket. The scenery was friggin’ unreal. Squalid houses, rusty trailers, ugly children, weathered chicken houses held together by barbed wire and spit. Ditches cluttered with aluminum cans, crushed paper cups, and a variety of distasteful things.
Fuzzy was by no means a perfectionist, but he was not immune to small displays of vanity. Alth
ough he was approaching sixty, he kept his skimpy gray hair combed across the creeping bald spot and long enough to slick back into a ducktail. He purchased only the trendiest fashions from secondhand clothing stores; even his shoes, a size too small, were handcrafted lovingly from the skin of an endangered species. His wit was legendary in drunk tanks from Tacoma to Tijuana.
He was less successful in other areas. The jacket had not been cleaned since he’d appropriated it months ago from a dumpster. He’d given up shaving more than once or twice a week, and at those times he felt as if he’d donated a pint of blood. It was rare that he could complete a compound sentence, or after a particularly stupefying weekend, a simple one.
Behind rimless glasses, his eyes darted furtively as if he anticipated a dorsal assault, which he often did when he roamed the less chic streets of L. A. His hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that veins were snaked across them like highways on a map, and a careful observer might notice similar lines throbbing across his temples.
Had he been a perfectionist in his profession, he wouldn’t have agreed (once again) to work nonunion for a laughable fee and a cut of the net.
Fuzzy spotted a fresh lump of road-kill and veered to ward it. His grin was humorless. Carlotta noticed it out of the corner of her eye and thought it maniacal. His gleeful chortle did nothing to alleviate her worry.
Directly behind him, Katherine “Kitty” Kaye was draped across her husband’s shoulder, snoring softly and dreaming of more lucrative days and more glamorous evenings. Her feline face was as rough as suede from excessive sun-worship, and her body, once firm yet round, was angular. Twenty-five years ago her voice had been praised for its melodious range. Now it was coarsened by a three-pack habit. Carlotta always gave her as few lines as possible and relied on her expressive mouth and eyes. Kitty was a trooper, a veteran but not a victim of Hollywood.
Her husband, Buddy Meredith, was a character actor who’d appeared in countless movies and commercials. Neither his face nor his name was ever recognized, not even by the residents of the neighborhood where he’d lived with Kitty for more than twenty years. It was a nice face, however. The gap between his front teeth and the slight imperfection of his nose gave him a nonthreatening demeanor, and his unfailing affability reinforced it. He was among the few in the industry who accepted gray hairs, wrinkles, discolored spots, and a thickening of the waist as the normal progression of nature.
As Kitty stirred, he smiled at her and lightly ran his finger along her high cheekbone to the crease alongside her slightly curled mouth. She’d once been beautiful, but he’d never been handsome. Even after more than two decades, he never quite understood why she’d agreed to marry a kid with a hick accent and a gap between his teeth.
“Maggody!” Fuzzy announced.
The five passengers looked up, and in an uncanny display of team camaraderie that had evolved during the production of several questionable flicks, groaned as one. As befitting her more extensive experience, Gwenneth outshone them all.
I knocked on Billy Dick’s front door and waited impatiently as a curtain twitched in the window. He opened the door part way and regarded me without expression.
“I’m glad I caught you,” I said. “I wanted to ask you a few more questions about the fire the other night.”
He came out to the porch and pulled the door closed. “Ma’s taking a nap in the living room. She’s still on the 1-late shift at the truck stop, so she doesn’t get home till dawn.” He hitched up his baggy pants and gave me a mildly curious look. “What do you want to know, Arly? I already told you and the sheriff everything I saw.”
I studied him, wondering why he sounded so casual when his forehead was damp with sweat and his eyes retreating into their sockets. “Just a few things, Billy Dick. What’s your girlfriend’s name and address?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“I need it for my report.” I took a notebook and pencil from my back pocket. “We can do this here, or we can do this at the sheriff’s office. I’m going over there anyway, so it doesn’t really matter to me.”
“Her name’s Trudi Yarrow, and she lives across from the gas station. Blue house, with a plastic birdbath out front. Her pa drives a red truck.”
“Okay.” I made a note. “You said she called you a little before nine, right?”
“Yeah, as soon as her parents left. Ma was at work, so I went on out to the truck and started for her house. I saw the fire, like I said, and stopped at the first house with lights on to use their telephone.”
“To call the fire department in Emmet,” I said with an encouraging smile. “Then what did you do, Billy Dick? Did you stay at this house, or did you go back to the fire immediately to wait there?”
“What d-difference does it make?” His eyes were barely visible in the fleshy sockets, but they weren’t so much as blinking. His face reminded me of a scoop of vanilla ice cream beginning to melt.
“Probably none at all. I’m just trying to get a clear picture in my mind of the sequence of events.”
To my surprise, he put his hands in his pockets and sauntered to the end of the porch. “I drove back to the fire and waited,” he said without turning around. “I didn’t see anybody until the volunteers came roaring down the road and tumbled out of their trucks. You’d have thought the White House was on fire, instead of some p-pile of rotted wood out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Did you see any of the other fires?”
He looked over his shoulder at me. “I went out to have a look at that one last week. I was at the Dee-Lishus when some of the boys told me about it.”
His voice was different, as was his entire posture, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was going on behind those colorless eyes. I finally put the notebook in my pocket and told him I’d be back if I had any further questions. As I drove away from the house, I glanced in the rearview mirror. He was watching me, and for some inexplicable reason, I felt as if he’d done so before.
“They’re here,” Eula Lemoy told Millicent McIlhaney, who was holding the receiver with her shoulder while she rolled out pie crust.
“They’re here,” Elsie McMay told Joyce Lambertino’s niece, since Joyce was hanging over the toilet bowl and unavailable to take the call. Saralee grasped the implications of the terse message, and when the retching noises stopped, relayed it through the bathroom door.
“Gwenneth D’Amourre has hair like a burst of sunshine,” Kevin began, then stopped when he caught the full wattage of his beloved’s glare. “But it’s kinda messy,” he added hastily.
“One of them’s an absolute hunk!” Tracy told Heather, using the pay telephone at the Suds of Fun Launderette. “If he so much as spoke to me, I’d fall over dead.”
Jim Bob didn’t tell anybody anything. He stood in the doorway of Jim Bob’s SuperSaver Buy 4 Less across the road from the Flamingo Motel, his arms crossed and his tongue flicking faster than a grass snake’s. He didn’t notice the sweat dribbling down his back as he watched Gwenneth carry some little fool suitcase into one of the motel rooms. He wasn’t sure, but he thought she’d gone inside #3.
“They’re here,” Mrs. Jim Bob told Brother Verber on the telephone. “I was planning to take some cookies to Lottie Estes, but I think I’d better stay home in case they drop by to see the house.”
“They’re here?” Estelle shrieked. She banged down the telephone without so much as a thank-you-for-calling and met Darla Jean McIlhaney’s startled gaze in the mirror. “I do believe your hair’s dry enough, especially in this heat, so you can run along now. That’ll be five-fifty, including tax.”
“They’re here,” Raz commented to Marjorie as they drove along the dotted line in front of Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill. Marjorie grunted unenthusiastically.
“Are they really here?” Larry Joe Lambertino asked the breathless student who’d burst into the shop room. “Or were you outside sneaking a smoke and now trying to slip into class without a tardy slip?”
&nb
sp; “They’re here,” the student said, praying Mr. Lambertino couldn’t smell the smoke on his breath.
“They’re here,” the dispatcher at the sheriff’s department told somebody or other. Before the end of her shift, she’d lost track of whom all she’d told, and had called her cousin twice by mistake.
I drove out the county road, checking both sides for overgrown logging trails that led into the tangled brush and scrubby oak trees. I stopped a few times to examine promising openings, but they either went only a few yards or had no tire tracks in the dust.
I passed the remains of the barn and continued on until I came to a house several miles farther down the road. Billy Dick had said the first house with lights on, I reminded myself as I went to the door and knocked.
An elderly woman opened the door an inch and stared at me with the malevolence of a crow. “You selling something?”
I showed her my badge and asked if she’d been home the night of the fire. She curtly assured me she hadn’t and slammed the door in my face. I drove to the next house, where no one was home. The only other house had a blankness that suggested it was uninhabited, and a quick look through the window confirmed it.
Making a note to stop at the middle house on my way back to Maggody, I drove into Hasty and found the blue house across from the gas station. The birdbath was there; the truck was not. I knocked on the door several times, and was about to leave when I heard rock music from the backyard of the house.
I tracked it down to a transistor radio next to a stack of magazines and a beach towel. The girl on the towel was prone, her bottom covered by a skimpy patch of material and her back bared and shining like a well-oiled lettuce leaf.
“Trudi?” I said as I approached.
She lifted her head. “Who are you?”
“Arty Hanks, the police chief in Maggody. I came by to ask you a few questions about the night of the fire.”
“I don’t know why.” She fumbled with the top of the bikini until it was hooked, sat up, and put on sunglasses. Her face was basically flat, and her mouth sagged above a chin that seemed to slide into her neck. Sullenness had already created permanent lines between her eyes, and the discernible protrudence of her forehead hinted at an alliance with the Buchanon clan.