Charming Grace by Deborah Smith Page B

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