Charming Grace

  “We had a chance to live clean in Vegas. I liked my job. I had a girlfriend. One who doesn’t charge by the hour.”

  “You think I don’t want you to have it good? I’m doing this for you.”

  “Bullshit. You love bein’ a player.”

  “Yeah, I’m a player, bro. That’s my talent. That’s how I’ve taken care of your sorry ass and mine since we were kids.”

  A low blow. He turned his face away, sipped a beer, flirted with a flight attendant, and looked pitiful. I caved. “How much money’d you con out of those guidos?”

  He smiled. “A hundred-thousand plus change.”

  I stared at him with my mouth open. He smiled broader. Armand liked to make big announcements. He dreamed big, illegal dreams. My hooked-trout expression made him throw back his head and laugh. “Call it your college fund, bro.”

  Yeah, he was my brother and I loved him.

  We’d go to hell together.

  “Do you understand what ‘self sabotage’ means?” that self-esteem counselor said to me when I was in lock-up, as a kid.

  Being a wise-ass at the time, I answered, “Yeah, but my bro says it’ll clear up my acne.”

  The counselor ignored my bad attitude and told me I was letting Armand drag me into trouble. That I was finding excuses to stick with Armand even if I knew he was bad for me. That he would go down hard some day and take me with him. To which I said, “Our daddy left us. Our mama died. No one else gave a damn about us. We take care of each other. He’s not gonna take me down. I’m gonna take him up.”

  Big talk and bullshit. As I got older I pissed away my chance to go to college because of Armand. Deep down, I was scared to try hard enough. Scared that I couldn’t do it, couldn’t be a regular citizen, couldn’t be somebody. And scared that going off to study architecture would have left Armand alone with a lot of bad ideas and the wrong friends. Believe it or not, it was me who kept him out of the worst trouble.

  “The only thing that scares me is something happenin’ to you,” he’d admit once in a blue moon, when just the right combination of scotch and pot took the edge off his cocky crap. “I’m not ever gonna let you get hurt, little bro.”

  “And I’m not ever gonna let you down,” I’d answer. Just myself. Let me down.

  By the time I turned twenty I had a whole list of excuses why I’d been rejected by all the big southern universities. I told myself it was because I hadn’t spent a day in any kind of school since I was eight years old; all I had for an academic record was a night-class GED with none of the side dressing colleges look for, like a varsity letter or president of the science club or even a Boy Scout badge, holy merde. My SAT scores were lousy, and the Why-I-Want-To-Attend-This-Fine-Institution essay I sent with my applications probably made me look about as smart as a swamp rat. I wrote like I talked.

  Education, she’s a dream of mine.

  A damned fine sentence in my opinion, but not to the college admission boards.

  “Boonie, hon,” a girlfriend told me, “what do you need college for? Be like your brother. Live high on the hog with a handsome smile.”

  “I’m not handsome.”

  “Boonie, hon,” she cooed (Back then I had a lot of girlfriends who cooed,) “Boonie, hon, that’s all right. You’re so good you make up for being smart.”

  Damned by faint praise.

  “Bro, no damned college deserves you.” Armand was mad on my account. He couldn’t steal me a college admission, and he couldn’t buy it off the back of a truck, and he couldn’t barter for it with a gambler or charm it out of a stripper. So he decided to do an end-run around college all together.

  “Screw it, bro,” he announced. “I been researching this architecture thing. Architects don’t make shit. I mean, the famous ones do, you know, the big dogs who design big office buildings or museums or something, but most architects don’t pull down the big cash.”

  “They make good enough money. I’m gonna be a famous one. If I can just get into college.”

  “What do you need college for? You already know how to draw houses. And barns. You don’t think big enough, bro, that’s all. Big buildings. What you got against skyscrapers?”

  “People need houses. And barns. People need homes. I like to draw homes.”

  “Okay, but here’s the thing, bro. See, you need backing. Financial backing, so you can be a developer, not just an architect. That way you get all the money and attention. Women love the man with the money and the plan.”

  “That’s now how the architecture business works.”

  “Oh? The man with the money is always the man in charge. You leave it to me. We’re partners. Right? You always say so.”

  “Right.” I looked at him warily.

  “Okay. I’ve got an idea for a new line of income. We’ll stick with it for the next few years, stash our ill-gotten money in some fat bank accounts, and then we’ll go straight.”

  “That’s what Michael Corleone said.”

  “Cross my heart. We’ll go legit. Just gimme a few years. Then we’ll start buying land and building houses. You’ll get to draw any kind of houses you like. And barns, too. We’ll have the cash to be the Noleene Development Company. Buy us some land. Build some houses to sell. Just like you want.”

  Armand’s ‘new line of business’ turned out to be the old line with bigger paybacks. We gave up stealing cars and took up stealing tractor trailers. Not just any tractor trailers, but loaded ones, full of expensive goods like televisions and that hot new electronic toy, the home VCR. A loaded tractor trailer is the gift that keeps on giving. Drive it to a dark warehouse, unload, then drive the rig to a deserted road in the woods and leave it for the cops to find. And the best part? Armand hooked us up with a multi-state ring that bribed interstate truckers to look the other way when we ‘stole’ their big rigs. No risk, no sweat, nobody got hurt, and we all got rich.

  “If this scam was any easier,” Armand said, “every congressman in Louisiana would want in on it.”

  So we had an easy gig, and I pushed college out of my mind, or pretended to. The next few years of our lives were as heady as they were miserable—miserable only for me, not Armand. We had money. Lots of money. We paid cash for a fine little ranch outside New Orleans. Armand decorated the big-porched house like a cross between a casino bar and Graceland; I set myself up in a three-bedroom doublewide next door and turned one of the bedrooms into an office with a drafting table. We drove brand-new trucks, a Jeep, and a couple of sports cars, entertained a stream of wild women, owned season tickets to all the big sports teams, and spent a small fortune on four purebred quarter horses, which lived in an air-conditioned barn I designed in Frenchie’s honor.

  So what was my big problem, other than being an as-yet-uncaught felon?

  When I dreamed at night, down where I was still Gigi Noleene’s good kid, I saw nothing but failure. Mine.

  Did I want me and Armand to be caught? Hell, no. But maybe we just ran out of the luck that keeps hope free.

  It was a steaming hot night in July. I remember yellow streetlights over the deserted industrial park outside New Orleans, highlighting moths as big as the bats chasing them. Driving a forklift, I was busy moving pallets stacked with hot-from-the-factory boom boxes off one of our borrowed tractor trailers. The driver turned his Redman tobacco cap backwards and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette as he yakked with the driver of a second truck, which was being unloaded by a couple of our ‘associates,’ as Armand called our fellow thieves.

  Armand lounged between the two big trailers, grinning and rocking on the heels of fine leather loafers, his hands inside the thousand-dollar pants pockets of a nice tan suit. When we finished he’d head into the city for a late dinner with a blues singer in town to work on her new album. Me, I was in old jeans and would head back to the ranch to read a book on architecture and catch a Knicks game on TV. Armand’s newest sports car waited nearby, with a polished Glock laying on the hood. My brother loved guns the way he loved his cars an
d Rolex watches. The shinier the better.

  Suddenly the night went crazy. A small army of cops came running out of the shadows, all of them wearing flak jackets and black camo jumpsuits with FBI on the back in big neon letters. All of them yelling “Down, Down, don’t move!” All of them pointing major ammo our way.

  Armand had always had a plan for this kind of emergency. He’d drilled me on it—even made me swear on Mama’s memory. If we ever get caught, bro, you head for the nearest woods and don’t stop ‘til you hit Canada, but me, I’ll stay as a decoy. I can stand doing time as long as you’re not locked up, too.

  So of course when we got caught I jumped off the forklift and headed straight for Armand. “You swore!” he yelled, waving both arms at me like I was a horse he could shoo away. I saw one of our associates grab Armand’s pistol. About that time somebody cut the lights and war broke out. Hell, I’ll never know who was shooting at who. Our guy was shooting wild, and the FBI guys returned the favor. All I knew was I couldn’t let Armand get hurt. I grabbed him in a bear hug.

  The hand of God punched me on the right side, just below my ribs. The next thing I knew I was on the ground, gasping for air and living in a world of hurt. “Boone!” Armand yelled, then flattened himself over me like a mother hen hiding a chick, his arms around my head, his body shielding mine. The details are a little fuzzy to me, since I was involved in trying to breathe deep enough to suck the blood back inside my body. When I’d been shot in the foot as a kid I’d been able to laugh about it, even though it hurt like hell. This time I couldn’t laugh, couldn’t think, couldn’t even have told you where my mouth was located if you asked me to fake a smile. The yellow street lights came on and I saw a blurry herd of faces looking down at me. I heard Armand yelling, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot anymore, he’s my brother, he took a bullet for me,” like that was the be-all and end-all of our world, which, yeah, it was.

  Everything quieted down after that, with Armand in handcuffs and me on a stretcher, FBI agents telling him to just shut the fuck up they weren’t going to hurt me they’d take me to a hospital. Mostly I remember a sound I hadn’t heard from my brother since we were kids running for our lives after Mama died.

  The sound of him crying.

  I celebrated my 23rd birthday with a pink bullet scar in my side, sitting in a cell with a steel toilet, no windows, a hard bunk, and gray concrete walls. Somewhere else in Angola Federal, Armand, just 27, was locked in his own cell, caged in the belly of one of the toughest prisons in the country. That’s what happens when you steal from a trucking company that, it turned out, is owned by the governor’s cousin. Armand refused to roll over and play dead, however, so he was already working the system at Angola to our benefit, setting up schemes to make hell a little cooler for us. He sent a scribbled message through a lifer who could be bribed.

  I can get you anything you want in here. Books, women, cable TV. Just swear you won’t die.

  I sent a note back. All I want is an open door, and that’s one thing you can’t get for either one of us. But I’ll live as long as you do. Just swear YOU won’t get killed.

  Don’t let any tough ass tell you he’d never cry in a prison cell. I cried a lot of tears that first night and during a lot of nights over the next nine years. I only had a few options: go crazy, take drugs, turn mean—or learn something. I decided to come out of prison smarter than I went in. During the darkest nights I spent hours holding some book or other to my chest while tracing the outline of an imaginary house on the cell wall. I put mountains behind it to make a landscape different from flat Louisiana, somewhere else, somewhere new, where I’d make good, fit in, not fail. I traced pastures, barns, trees. Honest, clean, decent. Saved and humble. And underneath I traced the words of an invisible prayer for me and Armand. God, just let us live. I promise I won’t let you down, again.

  I never drew a woman who looked like Grace Vance in my imaginary blueprints for the good life.

  But, all along, I knew she was there.

  HERO

  DIRECTOR’S NOTES AND SCRIPT

  PRIVATE PROPERTY OF

  STONE SENTERRA PRODUCTIONS

  I KNOW SOMEBODY’S TRYING TO GET INTO MY COMPUTER. TOUCH THIS FILE AGAIN AND I’LL MAKE MEL GIBSON’S CREEPY GUTS SCENE IN BRAVEHEART LOOK LIKE A MICKEY MOUSE CARTOON.

  SCENE: A dirty alley, downtown Atlanta. Night. Two bad-ass gangstas pin GBI agent Siam Patton to a graffiti-covered brick wall. Pressing against her, they lean in, leering.

  GANGSTA ONE

  We don’t know nothing about no Turn Key Bomber, bitch. But we know what we want from you.

  SIAM

  Oh, yeah, ass wipes? Then let me give it to you.

  Siam explodes into action. Takes out Gangsta One with a kick. Takes out Gangsta Two with several chops to the neck. Stands over their unconscious bodies.

  SIAM CONT’D

  As we say in the south, Y’all come back now, ya hear?

  Chapter 6

  Harp had never worked with a woman agent named Siam Patton. She existed only in the imaginations of Stone and Diamond Senterra, and that’s where she should have stayed. Siam! Patton! What was that, an appeal to the Thai and George C. Scott demographic? All so Stone’s knuckleheaded sister could play Kung-fu Barbie in yet another of his dim-bulb movies.

  “Look at this way, Aunt Grace,” Mika soothed. “At least they’re not letting that body-fat-deprived Amazon play you.”

  Thank God for small favors.

  Diamond Senterra hated me. The feeling was mutual, and worse now that the Enquirer’s cover was one big color photograph of her brother doing a back flip into mountain laurel. Diamond had already issued a statement through her publicist.

  Everybody knows that when you dis my big brother, you dis me. Grace Vance is in trouble. Big trouble, with me.

  So on the day Diamond Senterra arrived in Dahlonega my mood nose-dived from grim to combat ready. It didn’t help that I was still brooding over Stone Senterra’s amazing bodyguard, this Boone Noleene. I’d won a battle but lost the war to remain aloof in my grief and devotion. Menopausal women with yeast infections were less dangerous than me.

  It was a good day to shovel some shit.

  I worked my way along a side street in Dahlonega, unloading premium horse manure from one of the Down’s farm trailers. The manure came from three horses Harp had rescued from bad lives. Now they lived at the Downs, fat and happy and intestinally productive, and I donated their droppings to all the local shops and restaurants, especially Harp’s favorites.

  In the parking lot, waiting for me patiently, was old T-John, who snoozed behind the wheel of a silver gray pick-up truck in front of the trailer. He and Mettie, the farm managers at Bagshaw Downs when I was a child, were now semi-retired. T-John was nearly deaf. I could only get his attention by walking up to the truck’s open window and shouting. I could barely see him while I worked. The trailer was a towering wooden box with enclosed plywood sides and roof, the perfect vehicle to haul the dry, blow-away manure compost. Inside, the trailer looked and smelled like its load. Imagine stepping inside the Trojan Horse’s wooden colon.

  “Bring it on,” I muttered to Diamond Senterra, as I shoveled manure onto pink azaleas and giant snowball bushes. Around me, the town bloomed in all its late-spring glory.

  My cell phone rang. I frowned at the in-coming number, pulled it from a pocket of the dirty overalls I wore with a UGA t-shirt—mine and Harp’s alma mater. “Candace?”

  “Honey!”

  My stepmother and I had a warm if distant relationship. I had barely spoken to Dad in the two years since Harp died. He and Candace now lived in Birch River, a gated golfing community east of town. He’d given up trying to apologize to me, and I’d shut him out. In my mind, Harp had died trying to prove his worth to my father’s world. For that, I would never forgive Dad.

  “Please, Grace,” Candace said, “let your daddy send some of his lawyers to talk to Mr. Senterra. There might be one last chance for an injunction agains
t Mr. Senterra’s movie. Please don’t do anything else to that man. He may be a Yankee and an actor, but he’s a guest in this town, too.”

  “Tell Dad thanks, but no.”

  “He wants to help, honey. Please. He worries about you all the time.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure there aren’t going to be any repercussions?”

  “None. Stone’s people know it would be bad publicity to file charges against me.”

  “But what about this . . . this ungodly, unladylike sister of his? She practically threatened you in her public statement to the media.” Although nearly sixty years old, Candace still spoke like a tidewater debutante steeped in white-glove decorum. She busied herself working as a consultant for up-and-coming beauty queens, though the task was trickier than my era. How did one artfully hide a contestant’s arm tattoos?

  “I’m not afraid of a woman whose biggest talent is flexing her breasts and selling pastel barbells on the Home Shopping Network.”

  “Please keep your distance. Please stay calm. And please, please, call your daddy if you need a lawyer.”

  I needed Dad’s help more than I could admit, but not as a lawyer. “I’ll be fine,” I repeated.

  Fine, as long as I kept my head down and my shovel full of horse poop. I put the phone away and went back to work. Shoveling shit was just my hobby. My real job was managing a five-million-dollar Harp Vance College Scholarship Fund. Donations had poured in after Harp’s death, and new ones arrived every time CNN replayed the footage of him fighting to the bitter end against the Turn Key Bomber on the roof of Piedmont Hospital. Blood money, Harp’s blood. Even after two years I couldn’t bear to watch the tape. I’d seen it live, the first and only time, sitting on the set of a TV show that prided itself on cooking demos and celebrity gossip. I still had nightmares.