The producers of Giant, a husband-wife team, owned a fabulous Arabian horse ranch outside Camarillo, near the coast. I planned to spend the weekend as their houseguest, discussing the script and meeting with the director. Gerald had kissed me goodbye at the hotel on his way to board our Lear jet. He was headed to London to meet with some of our Flawless investors.
My right foot cramped as I pressed the Trans Am’s accelerator. High-heeled, skintight ostrich leather boots are not meant for driving a muscle car. I had a garage filled with Mercedes and Jaguars, but I loved my classic, redneck wheels. Clearly, I’d inherited some fast-car genes from my Grandpa Nettie. He died young—murdered in a fight at a mountain roadhouse, but Granny said he’d been a bootlegger and stockcar racer in his youth. Another notorious Nettie legacy my father hadn’t liked. Now, as a kind of karmic compensation, I owned the Nettie farm. My business people managed it, per instructions left by Daddy’s will. I kept meaning to check on the old place, but I was always too busy. Apparently, if I wouldn’t go to Granny’s farm, Granny and her farm would come to me. In mirrors. I shivered. Don’t think about that vision.
I glanced at the Trans Am’s speedometer. Only eighty mph. By California highway standards, I was just coasting. “Hey, Granny Nettie, watch this,” I said aloud. I wiggled my foot, pressed harder, and smiled as the needle crept toward ninety-five. The wind curled in through the car’s open T-top, whipping my hair. It was a perfect spring day, the temperature in the seventies, the smog just a pretty, lavender-blue mist on the horizon. I crested a hill and grinned at a vista laced with the lime-green outlines of large vegetable fields. Open horizons. I could fly.
Lights flashed in my rear-view mirror. I scowled when I saw a familiar blue mini-van behind me. A hand came out of the van’s passenger window, waved gleefully at me, disappeared, then returned clutching a large video camera. A shaggy, gray-blond guy poked his head out and fitted the videocam’s viewfinder to one eye.
“Damn.”
I knew him. A jerk, even by the aggressive standards of showbiz paparazzi. We had a long acquaintance, most of it annoying to me and profitable to him. He’d videotaped me as I walked through airports all over the world, trailed me on the outskirts of movie sets, hopped out of the bushes around nightclubs and restaurants, and once snapped photos of me sunning topless in Spain, which the world could still view for five dollars per download on the Internet.
And now he intended to tape me driving on the Ventura Highway? It must be a slow week in the celebrity scandals business. Were Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight that desperate for footage?
I wasn’t in the mood. Bitch. Bad role model for girls. Those words kept echoing through my mind.
And biscuits. Granny Nettie’s gravy-covered biscuits. Suddenly I could almost taste them again, just as I had in the hotel suite, almost hear her ghost whispering in my ear. Take comfort, now. Rejoice. You’ll want to die but you’ll be glad you lived.
Strange thoughts. A chill on my skin. I shook it off, glared at the photographer in the rearview mirror, and stomped the Trans Am’s accelerator.
For months afterwards, I would try to remember every detail of that moment. To remember every nuance, everything I felt and did, everything I should have done differently. I would be haunted by everything I did wrong in that split-second of eternity, when my life changed forever.
The toe of my boot slipped sideways off the pedal. The boot’s long, narrow heel went under the pedal and jammed there. My foot was trapped for maybe two seconds, three at the most. Just enough time for the Trans Am to slow down, just enough time to encourage the clueless driver in the lane to my left. He whipped his small, aged hatchback in front of me. I stared in horror at the car’s taillights, which I was about to rear-end.
I jerked my foot free and stomped the brake. The Trans Am hunched down like a horse trying to slide to a stop from a full gallop. The tires screamed. I was still closing in on the hatchback with no hope of not hitting it. I swung into the emergency lane. The Trans Am began sliding sideways, and I couldn’t straighten it.
The rear right bumper clipped a guard rail. The car spun full-circle. I couldn’t hold onto the steering wheel. The front bumper slammed into the guard rail, plowed it down, and the Trans Am went airborne, riding the guard rail at high-speed, its underbelly ripping open. The roar and shriek of metal filled my ears. So did my screams.
The Trans Am shot off the road near a strawberry field. I didn’t see the field’s hogwire fence before I plowed through it. I didn’t see the shallow irrigation ditch, either. The Trans Am hit it at an angle, tilted, and rolled completely over.
My head slammed into the steering wheel. Thank God for the wheel’s padded leather cover. And thank God I was wearing a seatbelt. The car flopped to a halt in the ditch, upright but tilted, with the passenger-side wheels resting on the slope.
Quiet. Everything suddenly went so quiet, and so still. My head throbbed, but otherwise, I was unhurt. Dazed, I managed a few deep, shaky breaths. I heard people yelling, but for some reason, none of them came over to help me. I fumbled for the door handle. It wouldn’t work. I shoved. There was no give. The door was jammed. My head began to clear, and I felt a little panicky. What was that scent?
Smoke. That’s smoke. And gasoline. Get out of this car. Climb out the T-top.
I scrambled to my knees on the bucket seat. My boot heels snagged on the gear-shift on the center console behind me. I grabbed the window sill with both hands. The metal was warm. Acrid smoke flooded my nose and throat. A coughing fit doubled me over.
“Beautiful,” the photographer called. “Beautiful, Cathryn. Work it, Cathryn.”
The photographer who’d chased me now stood a few feet away, videotaping me.
“I need help. Help me, you cretin!”
“Come on, Cathryn, you can make it! You’re a star, baby! And stars are always happy to perform! Think of the publicity you’ll get! ‘Wow. Look at Cathyrn Deen, doing her own stunts!’” He crept closer, the camera never wavering. I shoved myself headfirst out the window and tumbled to the ground. “Nice technique!” he called, laughing.
I staggered to my feet, but my left boot heel sank into the soft earth, and I tripped. I landed hard on my right side. Hair, face, right arm, right hip, right leg. Into the wet muck. What was this slick fluid on my hands? This smell? Oh, my God. Gasoline. The ground was soaked with it. And now, on my right side, so was I.
“Hurry, Cathryn! I think your catalytic converter’s about to catch the weeds on fire! I want to see you run in that tight sweater and high heels! Raise your head so I can get a good shot of those beautiful eyes. Come on, hustle! Give your fans some jiggling tits to look at, doll!”
I scrambled out of the ditch on all fours. At that point my deepest desire was to reach the guy, wrap my hands around his throat and strangle him.
Behind me I heard a soft, sinister whoosh.
A fireball went up my right side.
Some victims of violent accidents say time seems to slow down. They say they felt disconnected, almost like a spectator. Not me. Imagine sticking your upper body into a hot oven. Imagine plunging your hands into the glowing coals of your backyard grill.
Imagine. That’s how it felt.
You’re incredible, Cathryn!” the photographer yelled. I would never forget the thrill in his voice.
I wasn’t incredible. I was burning alive.
Roll. Get down on the ground and roll. I threw myself face down by the Trans Am, flailing, screaming, rolling. The heat retreated, the flames vanished. I went limp, gasping, peeing on myself, vomiting bile.
Four or five seconds. I was on fire for no more than four, maybe five, seconds, witnesses said later.
Shock began taking hold. Now, yes, I felt weirdly calm, pleasantly detached. It’ll take a week of spa treatments to get this smell off me, I thought.
I heard sirens, I heard people still shouting. Some of them were even crying. One of them moaned, “Ohmygod, Ohmygod, look at her. I want to
puke.” Which struck me as incredibly rude.
I managed to lift my head. The photographer crouched less than an arm’s length from my face, breathing hard, excited. I could see him through the smoke, I could hear him gulping for air, like a man about to come. Was he giving off that nauseating scent? It smelled like burned hair, and . . . burned . . . meat. He aimed the wide, black eye of his lens directly at my face. I looked into the glassy black mirror of that eye, the world’s eye, and saw a grotesque, charred, sickening reflection.
And then I realized it was me.
Daddy and his sisters began entering me in beauty contests when I was old enough to toddle. As upper-class Southerners they generally looked down their noses at beauty competitions, which they considered lowbrow and tacky, but given my spectacular allure, they couldn’t resist showing me off. “We’re just honoring an old Southern tradition of exhibiting our prize livestock,” one of my aunts told her friends. “You just watch. Cathryn will take more blue ribbons than a pretty sow at the state fair.”
By the time I was six, I was a veteran with a roomful of trophies and tiaras. By the time I was eighteen, I was crowned Miss Georgia. I would have competed for Miss America, but I got my first movie role and handed the Miss Georgia crown to the runner-up, instead.
You don’t spend your childhood on stage, duking it out with other ambitious little girls and their vicious stage parents, without learning to soldier on, no matter what. Once, when my music and costume had been sabotaged, I sang the entire theme song from Annie without accompaniment, wearing a plain black leotard and a skirt made from my aunt’s pink cashmere scarf. I won the talent competition, and I won that pageant. I was four years old.
Strong Southern belle and Twenty-First Century steel magnolia, that was me. Coddled, blessed, praised, protected, then launched into the world of movies as a full-fledged glamour girl and sex symbol. Until now.
In the ambulance, I heard the paramedics talking about me.
I can’t believe this is Cathryn Deen. Cathryn Deen. Do you know how many times I’ve jerked off to pictures of her?
Me, too. But not after this, man. Jesus. Look at her. Not anymore.
As my world faded to black, I hoped I’d die.
Thomas
At night, the Cove and the mountains around the Crossroads turn deep-green, almost black. You can feel the potential for evil in the darkness then, the surveillance of arrogant trees, the deadly lure of the cliffs, the subversive hollows, the drowning charm of the whitewater creeks, the hunger of wild animals slipping through the shadows, just waiting for you to become their next meal.
Around midnight I stretched out on the pew, too drunk to play another round of poker. The yard was lit only by the faintly illuminated café sign beside the Trace. The café’s parking lot was empty. A few lights burned in the side dining room, where Delta and her quilting gang were stitching, gossiping and sipping sweet iced tea mixed with good mountain wine. The richest grapes thrive even in the wildest places. I watched the universe sprinkle its streetlights across the sky above Ten Sisters.
Bring it on, I told the evil. I know you’re out there.
All those far-away threats, unknown. But here, in the light of the Crossroads, the world was safe and familiar, an old world, an illusion like all safe places, but still. As an architect, I appreciated illusions. Grief steals all the beauty in the world, then gives it back one piece at a time until the house you call your life is built on more hope than sorrow. So far, I’d only reclaimed a window here, a door there, hanging onto those small pieces of faith with my fingernails.
A brilliant, brief sparkle caught my eye.
Drawn down to earth, a star flashed and vanished over the western horizon.
Chapter 2
Thomas Wild Woman Ridge
I had fallen in love with Cathyrn Deen’s farm on my first day in the Cove, four years earlier. I arrived one rainy summer morning around dawn on a big Harley I bought when I left Manhattan. Just driving, looking for the next place to spend time among strangers who’d leave me alone while I drank and grieved. The North Carolina mountains swayed their hips and seduced me as I rolled down the East Coast intending to spend the summer chugging vodka on the beaches of Florida. I’d never suspected the Blue Ridge Mountains of the South could rival the Adirondacks of upstate New York for sheer, jaw-dropping scenery.
When my brother and I were kids, our old man took us along on his jobs at the Adirondacks’ grand old resorts and turn-of-the-century “camps,” those rustic log mansions created by gilded-age barons like the Vanderbilts. Our father, a master carpenter, was a tough S.O.B., not given to much sentiment and not all that likable. He bullied John for being overweight and called me a sissy because I had a knack for art as well as architecture. All in all, he did his best to make us spit in his face.
But he loved the memory of our mother, who died too young for me or John to remember, and we never doubted he’d throw himself in front of a runaway train to protect us. He respected his craft. To him, the historic camps of the Adirondacks epitomized it. Love him or hate him, we respected his dedication. He taught us to take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings and peckers, and he taught us to create whole worlds with a hammer, a saw, and our bare hands. He only had an eighth-grade education, so he couldn’t put his appreciation for fine architecture into the sissy words he claimed to despise, but it showed in his reverence for the old places, his attention to every detail.
When I rolled into the Crossroads Cove that first day and saw the café welcoming me like an outpost in the wilderness, I thought of my old man and felt less alone. Smoke came from the café’s chimneys, and cars already filled the parking lot, but I didn’t stop for breakfast. Ruby Creek Trail, the old dirt road that crosses the Trace near the café, led me off the pavement and into the woods that morning.
I was just looking for an isolated place to throw down a sleeping bag. I didn’t know it then, but I was following ghosts along a path so old the earliest French explorers had written about it in the 1700’s. Before that, the Cherokees had carved its trail markers on rocky outcroppings. The petroglyphs that still remained—on boulders too big to steal—mesmerized me, and before I knew it I was deep in a fairytale hollow full of ferns, riding alongside Ruby Creek.
Lost.
I parked the bike and hiked up a ridge to get my bearings. When I reached the top I was surprised to find an abandoned pasture. Head-high pine saplings dueled with the tall grasses. Dew gleamed on sagging chestnut fence posts, worn gray by the weather. The pasture vanished around a curve in the forest like a green river going around a bend; I couldn’t resist following it.
I walked for a long time before I crested a rise and halted. There, looking back at me at the far end of an alley lined with huge oaks and poplars, shimmering in the opalescent light of the sunrise, among old gray barns and fallen sheds and the faintest hint of flower beds in a forgotten front yard, gleaming pink and gold in the magic light, was a classic Craftsman cottage.
You’ve seen these bungalows in movies, you’ve seen versions of them in every neighborhood in America; they’re the strong, small, proud children of efficiency and grace. Some are elaborate, and some are not; this one, hidden in the middle of a high-mountain farm, was the crown jewel of its kind.
I ran to it like a deranged lover, plowing through the weedy grass and the small pines. I bounded up wide stone steps and stood, awed, in the curving arch of the deep stone porch. I circled the house a dozen times, admiring the heavy, exposed rafters and their braces, that vaguely Asian touch that makes one think of a friendly pagoda. I caressed the thick stone chimney and foundation and pulled down a long tangle of vines that had climbed all the way to the roof, threatening to cover the wide, gabled dormer above the porch.
I didn’t give a damn in anyone caught me trespassing or not. I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked through the windows at the maple floors and wormy chestnut wall boards, the built-in cherry cabinets and columned doorways. I chanted, “Look
at that. My God, look at that,” as if all the ghosts had followed me off the trail for a house tour.
Finally, dazed with appreciation, I stood back and gazed at the windows themselves. Stained glass bordered each one with intricate, geometric patterns. Sunlight glinted off coarse, pea-sized rubies and sapphires tucked in the soldered intersections. The house wore a necklace of hand-made windows decorated with local gemstones. My old man would have cringed at my artsy descriptions, but he would have appreciated the house as much as I did. It badly needed repairs. A fallen oak limb had gouged a hole in the roof. Several windows were cracked. Termites had ruined several rafters.
The house needed me.
The Nettie place up on Wild Woman Ridge, it was called. I found out when I went to the café and asked for information. A crowd of tourists cringed as I walked in the front door of the main dining room that day. The beard, the hair, the old jeans, the bloodshot eyes, the scarred biker jacket. I looked like trouble, I know. Someone slipped around back and warned Delta that a Hell’s Angel had slithered into her dining room.
She came up front to see for herself. This sweet little woman grinned at me, handed me a steaming cup of coffee, and said loudly, so all the timid customers could hear, “Hoss, you look like you’ve been rode hard and put up wet. You better sit down with me and have a biscuit.”
I loved her platonically from that moment on.
She sat across from me at a checkered table and answered every question I asked about the abandoned farm and its incredible house. Mary Eve Nettie had been a rebel, a maverick, an early feminist who kept her maiden name even after marriage, a legend. She’d inherited the farm from her parents, who’d made their fortune bootlegging the best homemade rum and bourbon in western North Carolina.