by Brad Smith
“There’s a lady who looks after me, like I’m a puppy or something. We do schoolwork too.” The little girl glanced toward the horses again. “Did they tell you I’m going to be riding one of your horses?”
“Yeah.”
“Which one—Nelly?”
“No. Nelly doesn’t want anybody riding her.”
“Why not?”
“Just the way she is,” Virgil said. “You know, it’s like how some people like baseball and other people don’t.”
“I like soccer. I can ride Bob, then?”
“Yeah. He’s pretty excited about it.”
“Stop it,” she said. She reached into the folds of the dress. “I brought them some carrots from craft services.”
“Go ahead,” Virgil said. He watched as the little girl slipped between the rough cedar rails of the corral to approach the team, her hand with the carrots extended flat as he’d shown her a couple days earlier. “You want to get on him and see how you like it?”
Georgia looked toward the trailers. “Should we get permission first? I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
Virgil smiled. “I’ve been getting into trouble my whole life without any help from you.”
He grabbed the harness from the back of the truck and went through the rail fence. Removing the halter from the big gelding, he fitted the horse with the Sweeney collar and bridle. It was a makeshift rigging for riding, but apparently that’s what they were looking for. It seemed authentic enough to Virgil, and even if it wasn’t, he doubted there was anyone around who might tell them otherwise.
He lifted Georgia onto Bob’s back and started by leading the animal around the paddock a couple of times. The gelding plodded along like a milk horse on its route, so Virgil handed the reins to the little girl.
“Let them hang loose and he’ll be fine,” he told her.
He stood back and watched horse and rider cross the large paddock, the little girl looking like a toddler atop the massive Percheron. When Bob reached the far fence, he turned on his own and made his way back. They drew near Virgil.
“How do I stop him?” Georgia asked.
“Tell him to whoa.”
“Whoa!” she shouted. The horse stopped.
“You don’t have to yell,” Virgil said. “He’s big, not deaf.”
“Sorry. How do I make him go?”
“Say giddyup to get him moving again. If you want him to turn left, say haw. Right, you say gee.”
“You’re making that up!”
“Give it a try.”
“Giddyup,” the little girl said, and the horse started walking. “Haw,” she said. When the horse turned to the left, Georgia whipped around on the animal’s broad back to smile at Virgil. “That is so cool!”
They did a couple more passes, with Georgia instructing the horse to stop and go and turn this way or that, and then Virgil lifted her down and pulled the harness from Bob, who plodded at once over to the shade, where Nelly had been standing the entire time, watching the proceedings, content not to be involved.
“Thank you, Virgil,” Georgia said.
“You are welcome, Georgia.”
He saw her look past him then and he turned to see Levi Brown approaching from the direction of the trailers, striding along the dirt road as if he were an important man on an important mission, wearing aviator-style sunglasses, his chest puffed out, his long hair trailing in the breeze.
“Here comes the cowardly lion,” Georgia said. “Guess I have to go.”
“What did you call him?” Virgil asked.
“He looks like the lion from The Wizard of Oz.”
Virgil glanced at the approaching Levi and smiled. “He does, doesn’t he?”
“They’re ready for you in the schoolhouse,” Levi said as he neared, looking only at the little girl and pointedly ignoring Virgil.
“See you later, Virgil,” she said.
Virgil winked at her as she walked away with the producer.
“What were you two talking about?” he heard Levi ask. “Was he bothering you?”
“No.”
“You shouldn’t be hanging around him,” Levi said. “Tell me the truth—was he bothering you?”
“No,” the little girl said again. “You are.”
• • •
Sam sat in the trailer, her feet up on the desk beside her laptop, her BlackBerry pressed to her ear. She’d been on the phone all the previous evening until she finally turned it off around midnight, and then again all morning. There were a lot of actresses interested in playing Martha Jones on the big screen.
Robb was sitting on the couch, the script in his hand. He’d been making familiar grunts of exasperation for the past half hour. Sam had been ignoring him, and the sounds had increased in both volume and frequency in response to that ignoring. Now she hung up the cell phone and looked over at him.
“Frances Lee Scott is too old, right?”
Robb frowned. “Christ, yeah. She’s like forty-something, isn’t she?”
“Martha is thirty-eight in the book,” Sam reminded him.
“Not hot enough,” Robb said.
Sam didn’t bother mentioning again that the role was of a pioneer woman eking a hardscrabble living out of the bush after her husband is killed by Indians. The overwhelming hotness of the actress playing her needn’t be a factor.
“We have the Jessicas,” she said. “Tait, McGee, and Alba. All very interested. Alba even offered to fly in and read for us.”
“She’s a total babe,” Robb said.
“She looks pretty contemporary, though,” Sam said. “I don’t know if I see her as period.”
“We could have dinner with her,” Robb suggested. “Has she read the script?”
“No, but she read the book. I can send the script to her agent.”
“Call her. Let’s have dinner.”
Tommy Alamosa knocked sharply and entered the trailer. “We’re ready for a run-through in the schoolhouse,” he said.
Robb exhaled heavily and got to his feet. He shook his head, looking to Sam for support. “I’m not really sure what this scene is about.”
Sam glanced at Tommy before replying. “Country girl comes to school in town, is mocked by the locals. Think Mean Girls in long dresses and bonnets.”
“Okay,” Robb said uncertainly.
“I talked to our wrangler about my idea for putting Georgia on top of one of the draft horses,” Tommy said. “You know—riding to school through the woods.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Robb said. “Lot of fucking around for a shot.”
“What’s this?” Sam asked.
Tommy told her the idea.
“I like it,” Sam said. “Those horses are photogenic as hell. It’s a nice little insert.”
“Yeah, an insert that takes half a fucking day to shoot,” Robb said. “And we’ll have to get someone to double for the kid. She’s not going to get on that horse.”
“Funny you should say that,” Tommy said. “I saw her riding him around the corral about a half hour ago.”
“On her own?” Sam asked.
“All by her lonesome.”
“Oh Christ, then, let’s shoot it.”
• • •
After a while Sam got tired of talking to agents who told her how stunned and saddened they were to hear of Olivia’s demise before morphing into well-rehearsed spiels of how perfect their client would be for the role. Having the same conversation over and over again got old pretty quick. Shutting her phone off, Sam decided to walk over to the schoolhouse to see how the shoot was going. There were times when Robb needed her around, as if her mere presence reinforced what little confidence he had in himself, and she sensed that this would be particularly true on this project. He really didn’t have a clue what the movie was about. She knew he’d started to read the book a half-dozen times and had always given up. She thanked God one more time for Tommy Alamosa.
She wished she hadn’t mentioned Jessica Alba to
Robb. Now he wouldn’t rest until they had dinner with her, and once they had dinner together, he would undoubtedly develop a huge crush on her, as he typically did with every beautiful actress he met, and then it would be up to Sam either to cast her or try to explain to him why she wasn’t right for the role. The sad truth was if Robb wanted her bad enough, Sam would relent and give her the job. Either way, the whole thing would be time-consuming and draining, and quite possibly the wrong choice.
The Fairfield Village schoolhouse, true to the era, did not have air-conditioning, and it was steaming hot inside. They were shooting close-ups of Georgia when Sam entered, the little girl sitting at her desk in the front row, with a dozen or so more kids of different ages and sizes behind her; the boys, cowlicked or buzz-cut, dressed in buckskin or cord, the girls in bonnets, wearing homespun cotton or gingham. The scene was one where her character, Sara, tells the assembly about the death of her father. At the end of the telling, the schoolmarm approaches and embraces her.
Sam stood at the rear of the building and watched a couple of takes. Georgia was terrific as the emotional Sara, holding everything in until the last moment when she becomes overwhelmed with the memory. The kid was a natural actor. Sam had found her through a casting agent who had seen her in an off-Broadway version of The Sound of Music and cast her before anyone could jump in with their two cents’ worth. Of course, the fact that she was too young to trigger Robb’s carnal urges helped.
The blocking for the schoolmarm’s approach was not working. Robb kept referring to the actress as “you” until Tommy Alamosa reminded him that her name was Lori. It was typical of Robb, Sam knew. By the end of the shoot, he wouldn’t know even half the crew by name.
They finally had to move the camera to get the coverage they wanted. While the camera department and grips were making the change, every one of the kid actors pulled a cell phone from somewhere inside their period duds and began checking their messages. Every one but Georgia, Sam noticed, who remained at her desk, in character.
When they finally got the shot, Tommy announced lunch, and the cast and crew escaped the sweltering building. As Sam and Robb started for the meal tents set up beyond the parking lot, Robb noticed the draft horses dozing on their feet in the corral off the end of the livery.
“Come on,” he said.
Virgil was sitting on a hard wooden bench in the shade of the building, rubbing neat’s-foot oil into the leather harness traces when they approached.
“Hey pal,” Robb said. “How’s it going?”
Virgil glanced up, squinting into the sun. “All right.”
“Listen, I had an idea,” Robb continued. “I want to put the kid on one of your horses, like she’s riding to school in the morning. Think you could swing that?”
“I think I could swing that,” Virgil said. “Say, that’s a good idea you had.”
“I’m thinking it would make a nice little insert,” Robb said. He hesitated; obviously there was something else on his mind. “Tell me something—you didn’t already let the kid on your horse . . . ?”
“Yup.”
Sam, hanging back, was watching warily.
“In the future,” Robb said, “you’d better check with somebody before you do something like putting one of my actors on a horse. You understand?”
“You better make a list,” Virgil said as he continued to work the oil into the leather.
“What?” Robb demanded.
“So I’ll know what I need to check with you on,” Virgil said. “I mean, right now I’m rubbing neat’s-foot oil into this harness. Should I have checked with you on that?”
“You need to use common sense,” Robb told him. “I thought you rural types were all about common sense.”
“That’s a stereotype.” Virgil smiled. “You don’t believe in stereotypes, do you, Mr.—um, what’s your name again?”
“My name is Robb Fetterman,” Robb said, his voice rising. “I’m the director of this film. Do you even understand the hierarchy on a film set? As a rule, I wouldn’t even be talking to you, I’d have someone else do it.” He paused but went on, as if he couldn’t stop himself. “I’ll try to make it simple for you. I’m the boss here, of everything. What I say goes. So you need to take that into consideration no matter what you’re doing. If you’re on my set, you answer to me. And if I don’t like the way you’re conducting yourself, I’m going to send you down the road, pal. Is that absolutely clear?”
Virgil set the newly oiled traces aside and got to his feet. “There’s a problem with that. And it’s got nothing to do with common sense. It has to do with leverage.”
Robb had been ready to walk away but now he turned back.
“Just leave it, Robb,” Sam warned.
“No,” Robb said. He looked at Virgil. “I want the hired hand here to explain leverage to me.”
“I can give it a try,” Virgil said, and he took a moment to think about it. “Okay, I used to play baseball, and I wasn’t half-bad at it. Not great, but fair to middling. Thing is—all I cared about was being a ballplayer. Now, on a ball team the manager is the boss. Same as you are here. Anything my manager wanted me to do, I would do it, no questions asked. If he told me to run five miles across broken glass in my bare feet, I’d have done it. You know why? So I could keep on being a ballplayer. Now, the difference between you and him is I don’t give a shit about you, or your movie, or anything else in your world. Which means you don’t have any leverage over me. So when you wander over here like you did a couple minutes ago and start telling me what an important person you are, I’m inclined to tell you to kiss my ass. You want to send me down the road, fill your boots. I’ve been fired by better men than you. But before I go, you’re going to pay me and those horses over there a day’s wages.”
The director blinked a couple times, as if he’d been slapped across the face, and then turned to Sam. “He’s finished,” he said. “Pay him off.”
But Sam was no longer paying attention. She was looking past the pair of them to the parking lot at the far end of the village, where a familiar black limousine with license plates that read RRH1 had just parked beside the production trailers. Ronnie Red Hawk was out of the limo, and he was walking around to the other side to open the door.
The actress Kari Karson got out.
“Jesus, what has he done?” Sam said.
ELEVEN
Virgil was back home by five o’clock. He went into the house and called Claire’s number and left a message on her voice mail, then went back outside, unloaded the horses, and rubbed them down before turning them out to pasture. Then he did the rest of his chores.
Afterward he walked out into the wheat field to the north of the house. In spite of the drought, the heads were getting heavy, turning yellow. In a week, they’d be ready to combine.
Virgil hoped that his movie work wouldn’t conflict with the wheat harvest. If it did the movie people would have to wait; he felt no loyalty toward them, so he would have no problem telling them that. But the truth was that the extra money was coming in handy.
As it turned out, he still had a job on the film set. To say there’d been a lot of commotion surrounding the arrival of the starlet Kari Karson would be an understatement, and the fact that Virgil had just been fired by the director basically became lost in the shuffle. Virgil, of course, hadn’t forgotten, but as he was loading up Bob and Nelly to head home, Tommy Alamosa walked over to ask where he was going. When Virgil told him what had happened, Tommy went off to talk to the woman, Sam. He came back a few moments later to tell Virgil it had been a misunderstanding.
“Sam said that an apology would smooth things over,” Tommy had said. “I told her I’d be very surprised if that happened.”
“Hey, if the guy wants to apologize, let him,” Virgil had replied.
Tommy had laughed and that was the end of it. Later that afternoon, Virgil hooked Bob to harness and the crew shot Georgia riding the big horse out of the thicket of trees beyond the village, the l
ittle girl sitting comfortably on the broad back, the heavy leather reins in one hand and a vintage honey pail, serving as a frontier lunch box, in the other. Tommy directed the shot and they got it in two takes. Robb and Sam spent the afternoon in the production trailer with Ronnie Red Hawk and his guest to the set, Kari Karson.
“Oh, to be a fly on that wall,” Tommy had said.
Now Virgil walked out of the wheat field and around the barn to see Claire, behind the wheel of her Honda SUV, pulling in the driveway. He’d told her to call him back and she’d probably been trying to do so, but Virgil hadn’t been anywhere near the phone.
“Which kind of negates this whole concept of me returning your call,” she said after mentioning the fact to him.
“You want a beer?” he asked.
She sighed. “You seem to think everything you’ve ever done wrong can be made right by offering someone a beer.”
“Wandering away from a phone ain’t much of a sin.”
“I’ll have a beer.”
They sat in wooden lawn chairs under the shade of the red maple trees behind the house, a few feet from the back porch. There was no breeze at all and the heat of the day remained. Claire was wearing a skirt, no stockings, and a light-blue button-down blouse. She kicked her shoes off and asked Virgil why he’d called.
“What killed Olivia Burns?”
“She drowned,” Claire said. “But she took a hard knock to the right temple beforehand. The coroner says she was probably unconscious when she went in the water.”
“So what’s the theory—she was out walking and slipped and hit her head on a rock or something and then went under?” Virgil asked.
“I would call that a Joe Brady theory,” Claire said. “I’d say it seems pretty unlikely.”
Virgil had a drink of the cold Budweiser. “So you’re thinking foul play?”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Claire said. “But why are you asking about it? The last time you showed this much interest in a murder case, you were the number-one suspect. Do you remember that, Virgil? Somebody killed Mickey Dupree and Joe Brady arrested you for it and then you broke out of jail and led us all on a merry goose chase all over upstate New York for a few weeks. Does any of that ring a bell?”