My Soul to Keep

by Davis Bunn

  Celia ran a hand down one cheek, leaving a wet streak. “I hate how you people can tear me apart.”

  Liz snagged the woman’s hand. “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “Nothing.”

  Liz made her grip feather light. “My heart tells me you’re not a woman to give in to pressure, dear, so I’ll only say this once. It’s not my nature to pry where I’m not welcome. I will never press. But if you want to talk, folks have told me I’m hard to shock.”

  Stanley surprised her by appearing at her other side. “She’s the best listener I’ve ever met, and even better at praying.”

  Liz reached with her free hand without looking over. “Give us a minute.”

  “No problem.” He set the second cup on the empty seat beside her.

  Liz handed the actor her coffee. Without lifting her gaze, she saw how they were part of a crowd, yet left in an island of solitude. A celebrity’s right, and her curse.

  Celia Breach saw nothing but the grass by her feet. “I can’t let him destroy me again.”

  There was no question in Liz’s mind who the star meant. “Has he said anything to you? I mean, of a personal nature.”

  “No.” Celia’s sigh was a ragged shiver. “I’ve been down this road before. Emotions run fast and furious on a set. You arrive, you dive in, you wrap, you hug, you leave. Only I can’t do that with him.”

  “Celia, honey.” Liz did what came natural. Which was to smile. “I’ve carried a mystery for quite a while. And it’s only now, this very minute, that I’ve finally found the answer.”

  “I’m not going to like what you want to tell me. I can feel it.”

  “You and I can probably agree on at least one thing. That Brent Stark defines the word hunk. Which makes his behavior down Austin way a tad strange. You see, since he got out of prison, the man has not dated. I mean, not even once. I had women in my bank and friends from town offer me some serious bribes for an introduction. I tried to set him up with ladies from church. But I’ve stopped trying. The man was always nice. Soon as he could, though, he’d disconnect and walk away. You know how it is in a theater group. People talk. And if they don’t know the facts, they make do with myth. I think most folks figured he’d had something happen in prison. I admit, I was worried. But he’s never talked about it. Not to me, nor to Stanley, and we know him as well as anyone.”

  Celia Breach hid herself from the crowd by taking back her hand and covering her face. She bent over until her face and hands met her knees.

  “I didn’t know anything about what went on with you two, except the accident, of course. The whole world knows about that. And Brent won’t talk about that either. And now I see.”

  Celia might have told her to stop. But this time Liz decided if she did say it, she didn’t mean it. Liz stroked the white blond hair beside the scar on Celia’s temple. “I might be totally wrong. But I don’t think so. It’s not just guilt over the accident. It’s love. I think he’s trying to make himself into a man who deserves you.”

  The young woman rocked in her seat. A few people turned their way, then looked off. Anywhere except at a woman who was coming completely undone.

  “Can I ask you something? In your other location romances, have you ever had a man go out of his way to leave you alone?”

  Celia shook her head on her knees. Back and forth. No.

  “Well, you’re a big girl. You can do what you want here. But I know this new man, and believe you me, he is new. Changed from the inside out. And I think one reason he’s never said anything to you is, if you decide not to let him into your life, it could very well destroy him. So my advice is, if you choose not to love him, let him down just as gently as you possibly can.”

  24

  The closer they came to sunset, the tenser the crew became and the more frenetic their movements. Stanley found Liz standing well back from the fray. She chatted with a young woman with a clipboard and neon-green eyeglasses. Stanley asked, “Everything all right?”

  Liz gave him a look he had never seen before. One that carried something so potent he felt it down in his boots. “Everything is fine.”

  All the questions he had carried over with him, about the star who was standing with Candace now, neither woman speaking, and both of them watching Brent with hollowed eyes. About how everybody kept looking from the pair of them to Brent and back, and not approaching either. About how Brent was studying the encampment through a portable lens, talking with Trevor Wright, talking into a walkie-talkie and then studying some more. It all just went away. Her look was that strong.

  Stanley said, “Well, okay then.”

  “This is Lisa,” Liz said, indicating the young woman with funky glasses. “Lisa is studying film. Trevor is her professor.”

  “Mr. Wright is the best,” Lisa said.

  “Lisa is interning as what they call a script girl. She was sent over by Brent to keep us company and tell us what is going on.”

  “I couldn’t think of anything I’d like more than to understand what’s happening,” Stanley said fervently.

  Something in the smile Liz gave him suggested she understood more than he expected. But it was Lisa who said, “They’ve chosen a super tricky shoot for their first go, like, they’ve been rehearsing for four days, which is amazing, I mean, four days on location with all the cameras and lights and everybody, and now they’re going to blow the whole thing up, we’re talking some serious pyrotechnics, and like, wow, I mean, really, if they don’t get it right, we’re one day into filming and already a week behind schedule, that would be so totally not good.”

  “Well, that sure cleared everything up for me,” Stanley said.

  Liz said, “Run that blow-up business by me one more time.”

  But a voice yelled, “Quiet on set!”

  Lisa gave a huge grin and finger wave and bounced away.

  The last sliver of sun disappeared behind the forested slopes. Trevor Wright worked as many as two dozen technicians handling lights and filters and reflectors. A trio of bullish men strapped into tanks began walking around the encampment, blowing out a blanket of mist.

  Candace Chen had approached unnoticed. “Inert gas. Heavier than air. Since there’s no wind, this will help maintain a constancy of lighting and extend the semblance of a single minute in time. And hide the burn. They’ve got three sets of residences, and they’ll rebuild for three full takes. The gas hides the ashes and the burn marks.”

  “There you go again,” Stanley said, “talking words I ought to understand.”

  She pointed to where the cinematographer, assistant director, and Brent were clustered by the camera stand. A stocky man equipped with a second massive portable camera stood a few feet away. “They intend to shoot this three times, and each go-round sweep through the entire scene. We’re looking at maybe nine minutes of film time. The risk is huge.”

  Celia spoke up from Stanley’s other side, “Feature-film location work averages three minutes of film a day. Instead of shooting this nine-minute sequence over three days, they have taken four days to rehearse. The trick is to make the cameras sweep along with the actors and have everybody work in such tandem that they don’t have to cut and paste. In film parlance, they’re shooting an entire action sequence in one continuous take. The result on screen will be a sensation of stepping inside the action.”

  “If it works,” Candace added.

  “I still don’t understand,” Stanley said, “but I’m nervous.”

  Jerry Orbain accepted the headphones from Brent, punched him on the shoulder, and watched him walk away. The makeup lady worked on his face for a moment, then sent him off with a nervous smile. Brent walked to the edge of the forest. He turned around. A man with one of the blowers moved up beside him, layering the ground.

  Brent lifted the flintlock musket and the hatchet to the crew. Then he backed into the forest. And vanished.

  “I’ve got chills,” Candace said.

  “Wait,” Celia said.

  “B
oone came home from a hunting trek to discover his children had been kidnapped,” Candace went on to explain. “He has been tracking his children’s captors for two days. He’s actually run away from the five men who started off with him. He attacks at sunset. Alone. Against an entire Shawnee settlement and a small squad of British soldiers.”

  Jerry called, “Sound!”

  “Check!”

  “Lights!”

  “Ready!”

  “Cameras!”

  “Camera one, rolling!”

  “Two, check!”

  “Clipboard!”

  A young man stepped in front of Trevor with an electronic board. “Scene twenty-seven, take one.”

  “Action!”

  For a tight endless instant, nothing happened. Then Boone loped from the trees.

  Not Brent.

  Daniel Boone.

  The man moved in incredible stealth. The only sign of his approach was the shifting ebbing swirling fog. One minute all was quiet—Indians by several campfires, British soldiers shaving in the stream, just another approaching night.

  Then mayhem.

  Boone was everywhere. His actions swept him through the first cluster of braves so fast they did not even have time to reach for their weapons. He took down three with one sweep of his flintlock, clubbing them into the mist. He flitted into one Shawnee dwelling, then another and a third.

  The alarm had still not been raised.

  A shout then rose from the British. Boone did not run directly toward them. Instead, he headed parallel to the riverbank. The hatchet fell to a thong on his wrist as he raised the musket. Two of the soldiers hurried their shots and missed. Boone, however, waited until he had lined up the soldiers. Lined them up in tandem.

  His single shot punched through all three men.

  “Priscilla!”

  His roar was the first time the man had spoken on set. Stanley’s brain, overloaded by the speed, the sheer shocking force of a warrior on the attack, managed just one thought.

  He had just heard Daniel Boone speak.

  “Priscilla! Madeline!”

  A child called back, “Father!”

  Boone dropped his musket and hefted two firebrands. They became his weapons now. They and the fire he left in his wake. He spun and he flew and he fought. There was no force on earth that could hold him off. Not with his children in danger.

  The light played upon Daniel Boone’s features. Stanley shivered. He could not help it. In his younger days, he had faced killers in the ring, felons who were kept in check only because they had this legal means of expressing their rage. He knew the look.

  Daniel Boone was in full warrior mode. He bulled through the last remaining braves blocking him from his daughters. The hatchet gleamed in the rising firelight as he chopped through the children’s bonds. He swept them up and fled.

  When he bounded back into the forest, Jerry shouted, “Cut!”

  The entire crew erupted in applause.

  Liz liked to think she saw the change in the moment of its conception. A gentle wave coursed through the crew, starting before the applause began and ending long after. They were no longer members of a disparate group, drawn together by one man supposedly hearing the voice of God. They were a team. They were making a movie. A film they believed in.

  And it was all the doing of one man.

  They rebuilt the Shawnee encampment in no time flat, or so it seemed to Liz. But by then, all concept of time had vanished. She could not believe Boone’s fight through the village had actually lasted nine minutes. It felt as though she held her breath through the entire take.

  If anything, the second take was more intense than the first. She knew what was coming and where to look. She knew the muscular young man running behind Boone was a Steadicam operator. She understood that even the slightest shift in the actor’s movements or angles was crucial, the timing of each blow to each opponent, the spot from where he took his shot all set with exactitude by the placement of the lights and the man on the Steadicam. Which made the speed and precision even more incredible.

  The third take was equally mesmerizing. While they rebuilt the set that final time, Celia became the one to get them coffee from the chuck wagon and drape her arm on Liz’s shoulder and explain things. Celia talked of how the lighting had to be restructured between each shot to maintain the exact same point in the day’s clock. She pointed to the new klieg light positioned high in the western hill, the one with the silver-orange tint, suggesting dusk’s final rays. She talked about how the soldiers and Shawnee had to practice fighting and falling so the cadence was maintained throughout, even down to where they hit the ground and how they lay.

  Liz tried hard to pay attention. But what she mostly took in was how this man she knew and liked so well, how he could transform himself into a complete and utter stranger. One who carried her into a myth that became more real than the surrounding night. Even as they reenacted the scene for a third time.

  After the third take, as Trevor and Jerry called it a night and thanked the crew, and Brent collapsed into the makeup chair and toweled off his dripping face, Liz finally glanced at her watch. She was astonished to find it was a quarter to three.

  In the morning.

  The last thought she had before her head hit the pillow was she had no doubt in her mind what she would say to those investors back in Texas.

  This project was a go.

  25

  Every other Sunday, Shari and the gang met at some Hollywood focal point and hung out for hours. Their Sunday gang numbered anywhere from twelve to twenty. They watched the trades and they chose their destinations carefully. They had to. They spent a major portion of their meager salaries on the indulgence. And no matter how they couched the gathering in excuses, it remained just that. A total extravagance, one they looked forward to with the carefree hope of children.

  They emailed back and forth with avid fantasy and ragged humor, borne on eating crumbs and claiming to be almost satisfied. They were all employed in one segment of entertainment or another, and all somewhere near the bottom rung. Their Sunday meeting points were chosen with the same desperate intensity they applied to all their so-called free time. Other days, they scrounged tickets to screenings, when warm bodies were needed to fill the seats and impress the critics. They met for coffee in known locales and chattered intelligently about European trends or hot spots in Cannes. Hoping to be noticed. Sharpening their tactics for the ninety-second chance they desperately craved.

  Their meetings every other Sunday were the same, only more so. They shared rumors about places where major players were to gather, for all of them were invisible enough in their jobs to overhear conversations about where directors and producers were going to brunch. They bribed waiters for tables close enough to be noticed. Maybe. Even if their faces were remembered and they had a chance to sip cocktails another night, and the power guy or gal started seeing them around and assumed they were somebody, then maybe …

  Their lives were built on a mountain of maybes and a myth of chances just around the next corner.

  This Sunday’s brunch was at Shutters on the Beach, a majorplayer spot in Santa Monica. Shutters was located where Pico Boulevard actually ran into the sand, one of the few buildings that did not have the road between it and the sea. Rooms at Shutters began at nine hundred dollars a night. The hotel had two restaurants. One was a diner with a sun-drenched patio. The other, called One Pico, was impossibly expensive. So they bribed their way to a table closest to the main restaurant’s entrance. The glass-rimmed patio was packed, though only the tourists paid any attention to the cinematographic backdrop of ocean and sand. Shari sat with eighteen cronies crammed into a table meant for twelve. The patio could not be booked, and though they had waited almost two hours, this was the largest table the restaurant was willing to give them. There was no need to worry about finding somebody worth being seen by. Not here, not on a Sunday afternoon. The place was that hot.

  There had been a littl
e chatter about Shari’s Variety mention at the outset, but she played it down. A mistake, she called it, and laughed. She hadn’t known how she was going to handle it until that moment. But the table went super quiet when her closest friend, Tiffany, mentioned it. Shari went with her first instinct, which was to pooh-pooh the whole thing. She did not know why until after, when she felt the sudden barrier dissolve. Shari spent a lot of time crammed into the corner, laughing in tandem with the others at things she scarcely heard, glancing repeatedly at the almost-invisible glass walls separating them from the street and the beach. These were her friends.

  Tiffany was seated to Shari’s left, a guy named Alf who worked as a junior contracts lawyer in the town’s leading entertainment firm to her right. Shari tried hard to put aside the sense of a divide separating her from the rest of the table. She slipped her chair back a notch so she was not touching shoulders and elbows on both sides and asked the waiter for another espresso.

  Tiffany, however, sidled even closer and said, “Okay. The real scoop now. What’s it like?”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “Your date with Brad Pitt. Come on, this is me. I’ve got to get a call from Alf to know you’re in the read?”

  “Because it was all a mistake, I’m sorry to say. You know I’d tell you if it was anything.”

  “I wonder.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Hey, you don’t have to get sharp. I’m just saying if it’d been me mentioned on page two, you’d hear the scream at Zuma Beach.”

  “I didn’t have the energy. I was up until four that morning playing babysitter to Colin Chapman.”

  “Oh. Him.”

  “Don’t get that way. It was another gofer duty. Only with champagne.”

  That satisfied her friend, at least partly. Tiffany was pretty enough and blond enough to be taken as just another vacuum head. But the sweet Arkansas exterior hid a young woman with the drive and the smarts to make it. If only. “Still. Colin Chapman.”

  Shari pretended not to notice that the rest of the table was listening again. “Believe me. You see the guy pass out three times in four nights, need the bouncer and the driver to pour him back into the limo, a lot of the glitter wears off.”