Charming Grace

by Deborah Smith

  “Kill Or Be Killed,” Leo intoned. “The alien bad guy was a cross between Mr. Ed and a giant cricket.”

  She pointed in another direction. “What are those guys on the back row? The ones in the six-armed black-leather jackets?”

  “Gorkians. The mutant humanoid hit squad who chased Dad in Outlaw Planet.”

  “Who are the ones dressed in white dusters and cowboy hats?”

  “From Dad’s only Western. Showdown At High Plains.” Leo frowned gingerly. His jaw was healing nicely. But he hadn’t gotten up the nerve to tell his father he wanted to be a computer games designer. He sighed. Mika wound an arm through his. They resumed peeking at the audience. Leo rattled off sightings of more Senterra impersonators. “There’s the psycho, one-eyed Russian mafia leader Dad fought as a small-town police chief who secretly used to be an army special ops commando, and there’s the psycho, scar-faced South American drug lord Dad fought as the small-town police chief who secretly used to be a navy special ops commando, and there’s the psycho, turban-loving Libyan terrorist Dad fought as the small-town police chief who secretly used to be a marine special ops commando, and—oh, crap. There’s one Dad won’t be happy to see.”

  Mika squealed. “A guy in a diaper! Grace, you have to look. Look! A grown man dressed in nothing but a diaper!”

  “No, thanks.” All this time I’d paced behind them, occasionally checking my summer suit for invisible lint or glancing in a small silver compact to confirm my make-up hadn’t melted from the gummy backstage heat. I needed my smiling, perfect mask. Stone would make a grand backstage entrance at any second. Boone and the security guards were outside coordinating his pseudo-modest arrival. I tried not to think about Boone.

  “Grace,” Mika moaned, covering her laughter with both hands, “You have to come look at the diaper man.”

  “Comeon, Grace,” Leo urged. “He’s carrying a sign with one of Dad’s movie slogans on it.” Leo puffed out his chest and intoned deeply, ‘Straighten That Diaper, Son. Now Drop Your Rattle And Give Me Five Push-Ups.’” Leo and Mika looked at each other, burst into strangled hoots, then chorused, “Day Care Boot Camp.”

  Day Care Boot Camp. I groaned. One of Stone’s rare comedies, about a tough drill sergeant who’s forced to run his sister’s day-school nursery while she goes on her honeymoon.

  Then I remembered: Harp thought that movie was funny. It was the only Senterra film he liked. He went to see that movie twice. I gave up pretending not to care, eased the stage curtain aside, and looked out at the audience. “My God. Buzz Lightyear and the Village People had children together.”

  There were only a few normal-looking humans in the crowd, most of them on the front row, wearing media badges and carrying either cameras, videocams, or notepads. I recognized a female reporter from the Atlanta Journal/Constitution who’d covered all my legal battles with Stone, and a guy who covered the regional film scene as a stringer for several large newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Good. They’d gotten my phone messages. I had a plan.

  “Gracie,” Boone said , behind me. “It’s show time.”

  I pivoted, heart racing. He’d walked up so quietly, catching me off guard. He always did. Big and lean and deceptively casual. Always dressed in the soft shoes and khakis and dark golf shirt, trying not to look like a caged wolf in sheep’s menswear. His expression was careful, his eyes dark and intense, impossible to look away from. He had been inside me. For a split second we shared a cocoon of silent intimacy. I started to say How are you? or something equally innocent sounding.

  “Mr. Noleene! Pssst!”

  Boone frowned and stepped in front of me protectively as three rough young men and a tough-faced girl hustled toward us from a side entrance the stage. I’d never seen such a combination of dreadlocks, tattoos, gold teeth, and studded wrist bands. And that was just the girl. All four wore dark gray t-shirts with Street Wise across the chests in garish, graffiti-style lettering. And all four sported the blue badges of filmmakers.

  Boone’s face relaxed as he recognized them, but only a little. “You’re late.”

  The group leader, whose badge named him Antwoine Louis, thumped a fist to Boone’s. “Man, we tried to get in the front doors, but this place is full of more crazy-ass rednecked white mofo’s than Saturday night at a Hee Haw hoedown.”

  “Hey, watch the language.”

  I stepped from behind Boone and held up a hand. “White mofo, here. But for the record, I don’t do hoedowns.”

  Antwoine, et al stared at me. By now Mika and Leo had zoomed up behind us, their ears perked and eyes perched on stems. We all looked at Boone. He frowned. “All right, Plan B. Street Wisers, meet Grace, Leo, and Mika. Grace, Leo, Mika, meet Street Wisers. Antwoine and his co-producers got a documentary entered in the festival and I told ‘em I’d set up a little meeting with Stone. He might be able to help ‘em hook up with a distributor.”

  “Man, you don’t know how much we appreciate it,” Antwoine began, “after everything else you’ve done, we didn’t expect this, too—”

  Boone put a fingertip to his lips and another to one ear, listening to the transmitter tucked there. He nodded at the silent communication. Then, to Antwoine, “Mr. Senterra is on his way. Y’all go down the stage steps and wait in the edge of the audience. Mika, Leo, go down there with ‘em. Lead the cheering section. Antwoine—y’all put on your best happy faces, laugh at Mr. Senterra’s jokes, and applaud like crazy. He’ll notice. When he’s done you come back here again and I’ll do the introductions. Got it?”

  They nodded and rushed for the stage steps. Giving us curious looks, Mika and Leo trailed after them. “I have to go,” Boone grunted, and started away.

  I stopped him with a hand on his arm. “You bankrolled their film, I’m guessing.”

  “Yeah, well, without me they’d have needed a shoestring just to have a shoestring budget.” He was clearly uncomfortable with any kudos I might offer. “They’re from New Orleans. I was in prison with Antwoine’s papa. He died there. Antwoine grew up hard, but he’s smart and he’ll make good. He has something important to say.”

  “I’m guessing his film is about life on the streets? The way you and Armand grew up?”

  “Yeah. Something like that. Look, I have to go—”

  “Will Stone help him?”

  Boone smiled thinly. “I don’t know. Stone hates documentaries. Says they have too much information in ‘em. But I have to try. Stop lookin’ at me like that.”

  “It’s called respect.”

  He lifted my hand from his arm, turned it palm-up, and brought it to his mouth for a quick, hard kiss. Then he was at the theater’s back door, swinging it open, gesturing for someone to enter, while speaking into a tiny mike clipped to his collar.

  Stone burst in with an entourage that included Tex, Mojo, four uniformed security men, and an assistant who quickly gave Stone’s brown hair a fluff and a spritz of hair spray, then dabbed make-up on his forehead.

  “Grace!” Stone boomed, smiling. “Let’s get out there on stage, get ready to rumble, and get real! My fans await you!”

  “Oh, they’re in for a treat,” I said.

  T-minus-10, and counting. Grace was about to be introduced. I smelled trouble. Noleene, you always smell trouble. But I was usually right. I stood in the shadows backstage with the rest of Stone’s gophers, watching Grace step up to the curtain and prepare her mental game. I bet this was how she looked backstage at a hundred beauty pageants. Tough, focused, ready to kick some runway butt. She shrugged the tension out of her shoulders the way a quarterback does before he calls a play. Stone had been talking on stage for nearly two hours, showing film clips, telling jokes. Every time I peered around the curtain, his faithful flock looked hypnotized in their homemade costumes. It was so quiet you could have heard a fake alien antenna drop.

  “And now I want you to meet the woman behind the man in front of my first movie as a director!” Stone shouted into his hand-held mike. “Harper Vance’s tru
e-life wife, Grace Vance!”

  As the audience cheered, Grace slipped through the curtain on the balls of her feet, head up, arms loose, like a ballet dancer. Or a back-alley bare-knuckle fighter. “She’s up to something,” Mojo whispered.

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Tex drawled.

  I eased to the curtain’s edge and looked out. “Thank you,” she said to Stone, then let him hug her. He handed her the mike and she smiled beautifully at the audience. “What a handsome group of heroes,” she said. Inside garbage-can space armor and homemade monster suits, hearts melted and peckers rose. Stone’s fans whistled and applauded. It was as if Julia Roberts had waltzed out on stage and given them an air-kiss. They fell down at her feet and rolled around like puppies. Stone nodded his approval.

  “It is my happy assignment,” Grace said sweetly, looking at Stone as if he were butter and she was a bun, “to announce that Stone has agreed to donate his entire personal salary for Hero—five-million-dollars—which, of course, is just a fraction of what he’s normally paid for a film—five-million dollars—to the Harp Vance Scholarship Fund.”

  Stone stared at her. This was news to him. The audience whistled and applauded. The reporters snapped pictures, turned on their video cams, took notes. Stone wouldn’t be able to back-peddle from this public announcement. Grace didn’t bat an eyelash. Her smile never even twitched. “And!” she went on, as the applause began to fade, “Stone and I are also thrilled to announce the first Harp Vance Documentary Film Award at the Dahlonega International Film Festival, a $100,000 prize that includes a full production and distribution deal with Senterra Productions, and the first winner is—” Grace thrust out a hand toward Antwoine and his crew. “Antwoine Louis, producer and director of the documentary film, Street Wise!”

  Antwoine clutched his heart, mouthed Mofo, like a prayer, and nearly fell over.

  I had never loved Grace Bagshaw Vance more.

  Stone recovered from my on-stage ambush during DIFF, but he wasn’t happy. We negotiated heatedly until I agreed to accept only half his salary for the scholarship fund, but I stood firm on the film award for Antwoine. One-hundred-thousand dollars and a production deal. Stone finally tossed up his hands and yelled, “All right, I’ll give your personal pet punk the award dough and set up some studio meetings for him. Did Noleene have something to do with this?”

  “No. He didn’t know a thing about my announcements.”

  “All right. But no more surprises and no more bribery. Do you think I’m made of money?”

  “Since you’re on the Forbes top-ten-richest entertainers’ list along with Spielberg and Oprah, yes.”

  He grumbled. We shook on it.

  “Sammy Davis Junior and the Marlboro Man’s grandpa are here,” G. Helen announced drily, the next morning. Tex and Mojo showed up at Bagshaw Downs with a spectacularly wrapped package in hand.

  “We’re just the delivery guys,” Mojo said firmly. “Ask us no questions, and we’ll tell you no whys.”

  But Tex was more talkative. He pointed to the big package. “Boone made that in prison, for that architecture contest he won. He didn’t tell me to tell you that, but hell, I’m too old to be subtle. It’s like he gave you his heart.”

  The package contained a miniature house—no, a tiny, sprawling, handmade log villa, you could say, with a red copper roof and red copper pergolas on the roof and three small stone chimneys and Adirondack twig porches. All done in the most amazing detail.

  I went into G. Helen’s library—where she kept her personal liquor, guns, Tony Bennett albums and pictures of herself as a poor, pretty, determined mountain girl with big dreams—and I cried over the honor.

  Then I went to G. Helen’s elegant little office at the back of the mansion, carrying the miniature house atop the blueprint portfolio Boone had given me earlier. “I hear you’re sleeping with a man who builds houses,” I said drily. “Tell him I have an architect for him.”

  My grandmother eyed me over pearl-white reading glasses. One perfectly groomed auburn brow arched in a birdwing of smug victory. “I already have,” she said.

  Primary filming on Hero was in full swing. Stone finished up the scenes from Harp’s childhood, squinting into camera lenses as his pre-teen Harp and Grace acted out Stone’s version of their history. The set design people converted sections of downtown Dahlonega back to the storefronts from the 1970’s and early 1980’s, meaning tourists looked confused when they wandered into the general store and found college girls selling lattes at a coffee bar. G. Helen and her fortyish-G. Helen lookalike, the soap opera actress, struck up a friendship and were gawked at regularly around town, usually deep in conversation about men, clothes, and money over glasses of wine on the breezy back balcony at Wylie’s restaurant. Crowds of Stone’s fans invaded town to watch the filming from behind barricades. The inns and motels stayed full, the restaurants stayed full, the shops stayed full.

  All the Dahlonegans making money off of the above—including more than a few Bagshaws with local investments—were as happy as clams in mud. But I watched Grace and knew none of it made her happy. The circus had come to town, and her husband’s memory sat right in the center ring, whether she liked it or not. She’d pried a lot of money out of Stone for good causes, but she was hunting bigger alligators than that. Each time she watched the kid actors mouth Stone’s cheesy dialogue, I saw her cringe. Some how, some way, she had to get a rope around the one ‘gator that mattered most: Stone’s dumb script.

  Naturally, the Stone Man didn’t have a clue she was still tracking him through his own swamp. I figured as long as I didn’t know exactly when or how or even if she’d come up with a workable plan, there was nothing to warn him about, yet. Not that he’d have listened, anyway.

  “I’m saving my kiddie-time orchid scene until you bring me the goods, Noleene,” he reminded me with testy patience. “Can’t you persuade Grace to let me have one little peek at Ladyslipper Lost? Hmmm? So I can see where she found Harp as a kid? And where he’s buried now? And maybe she’ll let me film some scenes there?”

  At the time of that conversation, I was in the big trailer that served as a commercial kitchen at Camp Senterra, making a ten-gallon pot of my mama’s jambalaya for the twenty full-time guys I’d hired for on-location security. I laid a whole, raw crayfish on a cutting board and made a show of straightening his feelers and all his little legs. “This is you right now, Boss,” I told Stone. “A nice lookin’ crawdad. All safe and sound. But this is you after Grace finds out you want to film scenes in her secret orchid hollow.” I chopped the mud shrimp into about five pieces. Little legs and feelers went everywhere.

  Stone glared at me. “Either you get me into that orchid hollow, Noleene, or I’ll go to Grace’s nutty Aunt Tess and she’ll hook me up with people who can find it. I’ve already talked to her about it. She didn’t say no. Look, I swore I wouldn’t pry into your little friendship with Grace, but the least you can do is use that friendship for my benefit. You get me some access to that glorified flower bed, Noleene, or else.”

  I picked up crawdad legs one at a time, along with my balls.

  “I don’t want Boone embarrassed by this meeting with Jack Roarke,” I told G. Helen. “Or disappointed. Or to have his hopes gotten up or gotten, gotten down—oh, I’m drunk. I can’t even put sentences together that make sense. Am I doing the right thing?” We sat in the Downs gazebo at sunset, drinking martinis. I was nearly slurring my words.

  G. Helen stubbed out a long cigarette, then set her fine-stemmed glass down so hard it rattled on the glass tabletop. Her eyes flashed. She went green-gold before my eyes. “Do you realize that despite my sexy good looks I’m an old lady with an old lady’s perspective about life, and you’re pissing me off with your naïve ideas about what’s important?”

  I almost choked on a bite of martini olive. “I’m. . .sorry. You’re not old. And you’ve always been pissed off about something or other.”

  “You can’t fix what’s wrong with Bo
one’s life, any more than you could fix what was broken about Harp’s. You can only try to help Boone and see if he’s smart enough to take your help. Now, stop worrying and meditate on the sunset and look at those beautiful red poppies over there. My opium poppies are as innocent as they are dangerous. It’s all in how you use the harvest God gives you.”

  “But if Jack Roarke doesn’t—”

  “Jack is in Boone’s corner. Trust me. Ssssh. Poppies.”

  I stared at opium poppies the color of blood. “You’re putting a lot of trust in a man you barely know.”

  “Look who’s talking,” she said, and finished her martini.

  Sometimes, invitations marked ‘Trouble’ hear you calling their name, and sometimes the timing seems very, very weird.

  “No excuses, you’re coming, Boone,” Helen Bagshaw ordered, on the phone. “It’s just a little al fresco lunch in the wilds of my private real estate sanctuary. I want you to meet Jack Roarke. Jack Roarke wants to meet you. Grace wants to meet Jack Roarke. Jack Roarke wants to meet Grace. Everyone in Lumpkin County wants to meet the man I’m sleeping with in my dotage. Come on. You and Grace can be among the first.”

  “Pardon moi, but I smell an al fresco rat. Look, if Grace is up to something about the movie and she’s trying to distract me—”

  “Don’t be so suspicious. Just come to a nice little lunch atop the prettiest mountains in Lumpkin County. Very private. Very mine, all five-hundred acres of it. So you and Grace can spend some quality time together without violating the Senterrean code or whatever bizarre rule of honor you two have agreed to. Are you going to turn down an opportunity to enjoy Grace’s company?”