She Walks in Beauty (30 page)

“And nobody did until about six o’clock, when Claude drove up in his big black car. He had his black curls all oiled down. And he was wearing a black suit and a black string tie. Danielle thought he looked like the devil, and she didn’t mean that nicely, either. He hadn’t cleaned beneath his fingernails and he smelled like hair oil. She found him truly disgusting. She didn’t think she’d be able to eat any gumbo, much less do any dancing.

“‘Aren’t you going to bring your fiddle along?’ Claude asked slyly. Like he had something up his sleeve. Which he did.

“Oh, okay, she would. What difference did it make? What difference did anything make? Life with Night of the Living Dead, she’d probably commit suicide on her wedding day anyway, have it over with. She certainly wasn’t going to
sleep
with this creature with dirty fingernails.

“So they drove to the square, and Claude was squiring her about. Danielle was such a favorite, and, after all, Claude was the mayor, even if he was a creep, everyone’s paying their respects. But behind their hands, the little old ladies were saying Danielle was looking peaked.”

“What is peaked?” asked Lana, who was redoing her hair with a curling iron now.

“Pale. Wormy. Tired. Anemic.”

“So, everybody’s eating gumbo and drinking beer and dancing to beat the band and having a
good
time, except Danielle, of course, who’s searching the crowd for Jean-Paul. But he’s not there. Claude pulls her by the hand to dance a Cajun two-step, and Danielle, who’s a wonderful dancer, finds she can barely keep up with the
chank-a-chank
beat. She’s
so
tired and depressed. Claude says maybe she ought to eat some gumbo. But she says no, she just couldn’t. No, no beer, either. She sits herself down on a bench, and Claude says to wait right there, he’s going to get her some gumbo anyway. Oh, okay, she says. And she watches all the people she’s grown up with and loved her whole life having a wonderful time, and wondering how
her
life came to such a pass. One minute she was a carefree girl enjoying life and good looks and the next thing she knows she’s a beauty queen, and her life has turned to shit.”

Rae Ann and Connors and Lana
all
howled. Indeed, beauty-queening was a heck of a lot harder than it looked like.

“She reaches in her bag and pulls out the velvet sack her grand-mère had made for
her
fiddle, and in it is the fiddle Jean-Paul gave her. The silent fiddle. She sits staring at it with a miserable look, and suddenly into the square rides Jean-Paul on his palomino. He’s carrying a bag of mushrooms that he’s gathered in the woods, and he throws them in the gumbo.

“The pot bubbles up and the most wonderful smell fills the air, and everybody wants seconds.

“Then he pulls to a halt in front of Danielle and says, ‘Play for me, most beautiful lady.’

“Forget the compliments. ‘I can’t,’ she pouts. ‘This fiddle you gave me is no damned good.’

“‘Play.’ This time he said it like a command. So Danielle stood, tucked the fiddle under her chin, and pulled back her bow. She’d show him. She’d show him what cheap goods he’d given her as a gift, making her promises. Men!

“She laid the bow on the strings, pulled, and the sound that poured out of the violin was pure honey. It was filled with such radiant sweetness that the people first laughed, and then they wept, the tears pouring down their faces to make puddles on the ground. The tone was centered and vibrant as a bell. The tone was golden, the absolute essence of Danielle’s soul. And the tune she played was one no one had ever heard. It was an air filled with light and angel wings and tinkling bells and wonder. The tone told of all the beauty in the world. It spoke of walks through forests filled with delight. It sang of magic.

“And everyone danced to Danielle’s Air, as it was thereafter known, though no one could even hum it, but they
knew
they’d heard it. Grandmas danced with grandpas who danced with their sons and daughters and small children and babes-in-arms and dogs and cats and raccoons and twittering birds. Oh, it was a grand waltz and two-step and gavotte and get-down boogie and tango and cha-cha-cha. For part of the magic of it was, every time the rhythm changed, the people followed it with their feet like flowing water. Everyone danced as nimbly as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

“Except Claude. Claude stood on the sidelines with a frown on his face and his arms crossed. And then, in a particularly magic moment, Jean-Paul leaned over to Danielle and told her to let go of the fiddle and let go of the bow. She did, and that fiddle and that bow went right on playing without her. Then Jean-Paul, the most handsome young man in the world, took the most beautiful Danielle in his strong arms, and he hugged her and swung her, and they do-si-doed.

“At that, Claude, the little man whom Jean-Paul should not have crossed, reached up his sleeve and pulled out a pistol. When Danielle and Jean-Paul whirled past, breast-to-breast, he fired, one, two, three, four, five, six, and all six bullets found their targets. They entered Jean-Paul’s back, passed through their two hearts beating as one, and flew out between Danielle’s shoulder blades.”

“Oh, no!” cried Rae Ann.

“And on they danced, on they whirled, out of the square and into the swamp. All the people cried and raced after them, hoping to save them, this most handsome of men and the most beautiful of girls. Behind them, the fiddle still played Danielle’s Air, though the song grew slower and softer and sadder with each note.

“Whereupon the people searched and searched, but they couldn’t find Danielle and her Jean-Paul. They couldn’t find the slightest trace of their blood. Until finally one little boy cried, Look! And they all looked, and there were the tracks of two wolves on the muddy bayou bank. The tracks led to a live oak, and there it looked as if the wolves had stood on their hind legs and had done a little jig. And there the tracks stopped.”

“The bullets went right through them,” breathed Rae Ann.

“That’s right,” said Magic. “When Jean-Paul, who was a loup-garou, bit Danielle, he turned her into one, too. And they ran off into the swamp to be loup-garoux together and forever.”

“And what about Claude?” Lana demanded, forgetting that she wasn’t supposed to scowl.

“Oh, Claude. He took himself back to his office and sat in his great big chair until he felt important again and commenced to waiting for next year’s Miss Abbeville Pageant. You know those beauty queens. They’re like streetcars. You wait long enough, another one’ll come along.”

“That is
not
how that story ends,” Rae Ann protested.

“Nawh, you’re right. It’s not. It ends when they go off together to be the most gorgeous loup-garoux in the bayou. I made that last part up for Lana.”

Lana just kept looking at herself in the mirror. See? See what Magic said?

It wasn’t bad enough that the two
girlfriends
came butting into her story about the Jersey Devil and made it seem like
nothing.

And that Connors had taken swimsuit too and thought she was hot stuff.

But on top of all that, they were making fun of her. Making fun of her and Billy Carroll.

She’d seen them watching her and Billy when they were dancing Monday night at that club,
perfectly
innocent. But that’s what this story was all about. Dancing and a beauty queen and a short man in a powerful position.

You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.

28

The pressroom was pandemonium, former Miss Americas everywhere, reporters milling about: Who’s she? Is she somebody? Who’s that?

As far as Sam could tell, the former Miss A’s looked like any bunch of overdressed doctors’ or lawyers’ wives. Not a bit prettier. In fact, if you were going by looks alone, she had better-looking friends—though they didn’t wear as much makeup. Nor did they sport such huge rocks.

But it
was
fun to see, up-close-and-personal, faces that she remembered from pageants of her girlhood.

Mary Ann Mobley, Gary Collins’s wife, Miss A 1959, was a tad hollow-eyed but still pretty, if you liked them on the real thin side. Donna Axum, 1964, had blossomed out. Now what was that about her husband, or was it her ex, the Texas legislator who had run into some trouble…

“That’s Yolande Betbeze.” The
Inquirer
was pointing at a short brunette with a wide sensuous mouth, deep into her fifties. In a white blouse and navy slacks, she was the only former Miss A who wasn’t dressed for a cocktail party. She was the one Malachy had talked about, his favorite from Alabama who’d told the pageant to take a hike because they didn’t like her liberal politics. Sam dug for Malachy’s autograph book.

She’d almost reached Yolande when she ran smack into Dr. Mary Frances DeLaughter and her tape recorder.

Mary Frances’s color was high, her red halo atremble. “Isn’t this exciting, all these artifacts in one room?”

“I don’t think I’d say that aloud, Mary Frances.”

“Well, they
are!
You just hardly ever see so many American icons simultaneously! I don’t know where to begin.”

Sam backed off, not wanting to be anywhere close to Mary Frances when she did.

“And by the way”—Mary Frances whirled just before Sam escaped—“last night I checked a bibliography, and you’re right, you didn’t write that book I was thinking of.”

“Gee, Mary Frances. You know, I didn’t think I did.”

“But I did find that series you did on the serial murderers in San Francisco. The one you won a prize for.”

“Yes?”

“I read it all and didn’t like it one bit.”

“Hey, thanks, Mary Frances. Thanks a whole bunch.”

But Mary Frances was gone, hot on the trail of Marian Bergeron, Miss A 1933. Marian was the one who at 16 had almost punched out the backstage director who had tried to remove her swimsuit in his rush to get her into an evening gown. Maybe she’d punch out Mary Frances.

“Is Dr. DeLaughter your new best friend?” The
Inquirer
laughed.

“My latest candidate for burning at the stake. Except she’d love it. I’m sure the woman’s into pain.”

“Come on over here.” The
Inquirer
grabbed Sam’s arm. “You
don’t
want to miss the Cheryl Prewitt Salem Show.”

She certainly didn’t. She’d been hoping for a peek at Miss America 1980 and Rae Ann’s idol. And there she was, holding court at a table against the wall. Four reporters were already hunkered in, bug-eyed.

It was easy to see why. For starters, there were the diamonds. Rocks sparkled at her ears, her neck, her shoulder, her wrists, and, most of all, her fingers. Sam looked over the shoulder of one young blonde reporter who wore jeans and not a smidge of makeup to see that she had sketched into her notes the had-to-be-10-carat marquise-cut hunk of ice on Cheryl’s left hand, surrounded by smaller diamond paving stones.

Cheryl was explaining about her work with the Oral Roberts ministry. She’d always sung for the Lord, ever since she was a little girl. She was already doing that when she was in the car wreck, she and some neighbor kids, that threw her right through the windshield and cut up her left leg so bad it was two inches shorter than the right.

A girl with a limp, she kept right on singing and witnessing for the Lord. Then when she was a teenager and decided she wanted to enter beauty contests back home in Mississippi, it occurred to her one evening to ask the Lord, in a prayer meeting, to heal her leg.

And He did. Cheryl can prove it, can show you the medical reports, because she had just been for a checkup a little while before the healing. The reports show that left leg, two inches shy of the right.

But even with both feet firmly on the ground, the way had not been easy for Cheryl. No, sir, she’d started out trying to win Miss Choctaw County, and try as hard as she might, she never did. But she kept on and eventually won Miss Starkville. Then there was no stopping her. Miss Starkville streaked right on through to Miss Mississippi and the Atlantic City crown.

Sam could see why Cheryl was Rae Ann’s heroine. They had a lot in common.

Except whereas Rae Ann had decided that she wanted to repay the pageant system, which had done so much for her, by designing evening gowns for other pageant girls, with Cheryl it was swimsuits.

This very minute Cheryl was explaining the suit designed by Ada Duckett, which was worn by four swimsuit winners in a row at Miss America—and two of them, Debbie Maffett and Cheryl herself, actually won the crown. The Supersuit, they called it.

And when Cheryl went into the swimsuit business herself, not only did Ada Duckett (who offered a two-hour seminar on how to put on a suit) come to work for her, but she gave Cheryl the Supersuit—now one of her very proudest possessions.

Did Cheryl do anything else with her time? Other than take care of her two children, her husband—who was also with the Oral Roberts Ministry—write inspirational books, make inspirational tapes, cut inspirational recordings in Nashville? Why, yes, she did. She also produced a line of pageant shoes—the clear acrylic ones girls wear with swimsuits. There’s a pump, a sandal, and a sandal with rhinestones.