Talk of the Town (14 page)
This spate of bad news about our little hometown singing sensation might affect the need for paint. It surely might.
After spending all morning attending the Friday logistics and production meeting via phone, I’d anticipated that a drive through the countryside to scope out Amber Anderson’s childhood home would feel like a minibreak. A little fresh air and sunshine were just what I needed. I left well supplied with leftover pecan rolls, and even the lack of adequate directions and a maze of twisting, curving, poorly marked country roads did little to dampen my spirits. I wandered through the hills, taking in the landscape of clear-running streams and craggy limestone bluffs towering high over the road. At a river crossing, I slowed on an old bridge, listened to the music of the tires clicking over the weathered wooden deck, sending a soft
ping, ping, ping
along the rusted metal girders.
Near a farmhouse in the distance, a trio of young boys were wading and skipping stones. The dappled shade of overhanging live oaks and sycamores slid over their tanned skin as they ran through the water, sending up showers of sunlit drops. For a moment, I had the strongest urge to pull the car off the road, abandon my work, and join them.
Laughing at myself, I shook off the notion. I’d finally found Caney Creek Road, which meant I couldn’t be far from the Anderson place. Letting my foot off the brake, I allowed the car to drift onward, up the hill and past a field where longhorn cattle grazed in a sea of blue wild flowers that seemed to stretch on forever. What a beautiful day. What a quietly breathtaking place. On camera, it would be incredible. . . .
Fifteen minutes later, stopped on a rocky slope in front of what I’d guessed was my intended destination, I experienced a wave of conflicting emotions that thickened the air in the car until it was oppressive. Opening the window might have helped, but the odor of a poultry farm down the road blanketed everything with a noxious smell. I rubbed my eyes, looking for a name on the offkilter mailbox, an obvious victim of a drive-by box bashing that had left the door hanging permanently open, like a lolling metal tongue. There was mail inside, but without breaking a half-dozen federal laws, I couldn’t check the recipient’s address.
Even if this was the Anderson house, where Amber’s grandfather and her brothers still lived, did we really want to bring a film crew here? It was worse than I’d ever imagined. What Amber had described as a little farm by Caney Creek was actually an ancient mobile home with faded aqua paint and a sag in the middle. The windows were covered with aluminum foil and dirt, blocking out the sun. A combination of plastic sheeting and tarps, held in place by silver tape and weighted down with twenty or so old tires, covered the roof, presumably to keep out the rain.
Behind the trailer, an old barn listed to one side like a slowly sinking ship, its damaged hull patched with road signs, scraps of plywood, metal sheeting, cardboard. A goat alternately chewed on remains of a grocery store banana box and paused to chase away a curious chicken. The entire spread, perhaps four acres or so, bounded by a chain-link fence that had seen better days, was a cacophony of dogs, cats, and farm animals. Goats, sheep, and chickens roamed freely around the place, and a black and white calf played on the front steps, climbing up, then jumping off and cavorting through the yard. The only place the animals didn’t seem to be welcome was a small orchard and garden separated by a fence covered with honeysuckle and blackberry brambles.
My mind drifted to one of Amber’s previous background interviews. I could picture her sitting in the confessional set we affectionately called
The Box
, smiling for the camera and, for America’s viewing pleasure, painting a rosy picture of her childhood.
“In the summertime we had blackberries, and fresh lettuce, and homegrown tomatoes.” The melodiousness of her voice made the words sound lyrical. “My grandaddy’d help us pick tons and tons of berries and divide them all up, and we kids would head off to town with a wagonload of the freshest blackberries, and sometimes tomatoes, and we’d sit on the street corner down by the old bank building with a sign. Folks were always so nice when they’d stop to buy some. You just haven’t really lived until you’ve had homegrown fruits and vegetables. Those old store tomatoes are all pink and hard, and store-bought blackberries, even if you can find ’em, don’t taste like anything. The wild kind taste lots better, and you know, most folks don’t even know that anymore. They’ve never had anything but the store-bought stuff that’s all sprayed with chemicals to make it grow faster. I always did feel sorry for folks like that—ones who don’t know how things taste when they just have air and sunlight. And kids—I feel sorry for kids who have to live in places where they stay inside and everyone’s scared of their neighbors and stuff.”
Sighing, Amber looked at her shoes, kicked a stray sound cord back and forth underneath a silver cowboy boot someone in Wardrobe had given her to wear. “If I had a million dollars, I think that’s one thing I’d do. I’d make a place for kids to go out in the country—all kinds of kids—little black kids, and little Chinese kids, and little kids from Iraq and other places. Kids ought to know what it’s like to pack a lunch and hike off down the creek looking for good swimmin’ holes, and pick wild blackberries and hog plums, and take the honeysuckle flowers and pull out the stems to taste the honey inside. When the honeysuckle blooms around our house, you can close your eyes and think you’re in heaven. Every little child ought to know how that feels.”
Amber’s big blue eyes fell closed, and she took in a long breath of climate-controlled studio air. She looked like a little girl, her full lips pursed in a slight smile, dark lashes fluttering against her cheeks. Finally, she shook her head and opened her eyes, tucking her hands between her knees and shrugging. “I guess that sounds kind of silly.” She paused, as if she were waiting for the cameraman to answer, which of course, he wouldn’t. “I can’t help it, I’m a dreamer.” She let her hands slide further between her thighs, as if she might fold herself up and disappear. “I spent a lot of hours up and down Caney Creek, imagining things and making up games of let’s pretend so we all wouldn’t be bored.”
Amber’s giggle jingled through the studio. “Three boys can get in a lot of mischief if they’re bored. Our house doesn’t have ninetyseven TV channels to watch. Just four—five if the wind’s from the east and you hold your tongue just right.” She giggled again, and the camera operator glanced sideways covertly, as in,
Is this girl for real?
Amber didn’t seem to notice. Most of the time, Amber didn’t get the drift of what was going on around her. She didn’t see the hidden eye rolls of the other contestants when she said hi to the folks back home in Daily every week or blew kisses to her younger brothers. She remained blissfully unaware, as far as I could tell, of the ongoing Amber pool, predicting her downfall.
The camera operator to whom she was pouring out her heart in The Box had the official Amber pool spreadsheet on his BlackBerry. He looked as if he felt mildly guilty about it as Amber waxed nostalgic about life back home.
“I miss home sometimes at night—I don’t want to go off the show or anything, because I want to go all the way—but it’s really bright here at night. Back home, sometimes we’d sit out in the yard and it’d be so dark you could see a million and one stars. On Wednesdays and Sundays we could hear the singin’ from the little country church just down from my house—we weren’t members there or anything, because it’s a black church and all—but sometimes I’d sit in when they had choir practice. Goodness, their choir can sing. They got a gospel band and everything. Sometimes during Sunday night service, I’d lay on the grass at home and look up at that big old blanket of stars and listen to the music, and it was like my heavenly Father was rockin’ me off to sleep.”
At that point, one of the grips handling a boom buried his face in his shoulder to stifle a guffaw. He turned away, his eyes bulging and his cheeks growing red. Amber was completely oblivious. She took a deep breath, smiling as if she were listening to the music and drinking in the scent of honeysuckle.
When Ursula saw the tape, she growled under her breath, then slammed a freshly manicured hand against her desktop, crimson fingernails extended, slowly scratching backward across the wood in a way that made my spine crawl. “We must eliminate this hayseedt. She izz makingk a mockery of my show. This izz
American Megastar
, not the Hee-Haw Hillbilly Hour. She izz gone this week, either way….” The frustration-induced accent was so thick, I missed a few closing words, but the gist was unmistakable.
At the time, I’d sat there with my clipboard, vaguely wondering what
gone this week, either way
meant. I knew better than to ask. Much of my job performance depended on my ability to quietly wait for Ursula’s moods to pass. The elimination of contestants from the show was determined by an equal combination of the judge’s scores and votes from the viewing public, which meant there was no way Ursula could ensure that Amber would be leaving next week, or any particular week, for that matter.
Fortunately for Amber, her viewer votes soared the week after her interview stint in The Box. Even the judges couldn’t deny the quality of her rendition of “A Letter From Heaven,” a song she dedicated to her parents, who’d died in a car accident when Amber was just eleven. Numbers for the show that week were up a whopping thirty percent, and two focus groups logged Amber’s performance as a significant reason for continuing viewership of
American Megastar
.
Ursula was suddenly in love. If Hee-Haw Hillbilly worked for the viewers, it worked for her. “At least this izz good for now,” she said. The last part,
for now
, stuck in my head.
It came back to me again as I looked at Amber’s house. The place smelled like anything but honeysuckle, and there was no way Amber or anyone else could have lain in the grass and looked at the stars. There
wasn’t
any grass. With so many animals running loose, anyone lying in the yard would have been reclining in a variety of poop.
Ursula would not like this. Assuming I was in the right place, this didn’t fit cleanly into the Amber story we’d sold to the public. The sparkling creek she’d talked about was little more than a muddy ditch. No chance of filming there. Ursula wouldn’t like the rotting trailer home, either. Amber had described her home as tiny, but kept up real nice, and it was anything but. When Ursula had said she wanted to show Amber’s humble beginnings, I doubt a junkyard filled with old boxes, farm animals, used tires, and a decaying pink porcelain toilet on the porch were what she had in mind. The place belonged in some third-world country. Ursula would never want to air this in conjunction with an
American Megastar
Final Five show. We’d be laughed out of LA.
We’d have to make the most of filming Amber in town and at the fairgrounds . . . and maybe at the little church across the creek. From my vantage point, I could barely see it through a border of overgrown cedars I assumed marked the Andersons’ property line, but the church looked picturesque enough—a sturdy antique white wooden building with a simple four-sided steeple rising upward into the overhanging branches of enormous trees. A lovely place, actually. As I let the car roll forward to get a better view of the church, it occurred to me that the church would make a nice postcard, with its expansive lawn and heavy, ancient pecans and live oaks. A foundation for some new construction had been plowed out back, but we could film at an angle so as to avoid that. In the front flower beds, a bright array of spring irises flew multicolored flags, and tulips were blooming around a wooden sign by the road.
HARVES CHAPEL
, the crudely cut metal letters read. Sort of an unglamorous name for a church, but other than that, the place was perfect for a location piece.
A young man in orange sweat pants was mowing the grass out front, the mocha-brown skin of his arms glistening with a sheen of perspiration as he pivoted the mower. He was wearing an orange tank top, which made me think of Carter in his SPCA shirt last night. I wondered where he was today. He’d been gone by the time I’d awakened this morning. I was amazed that I’d slept so late, with the room lights blazing. It was wimpy of me to leave them on, but even after two episodes of Bonanza, I still had the creeps, and I’d hollered through the door when Carter flipped the light switch.
He’d laughed and turned it back on. “You’ll be tired in the morning, Hollywood.” Sometime during our conversation about my mother’s career as a movie extra and my short stint as a child actor, he’d taken to calling me
Hollywood
. It occurred to me after the fact that I probably shouldn’t have divulged so much information about where I was from, especially since Carter wasn’t as equally forthcoming.
I pictured myself in the exercise area with him last night, chattering on and on about
Bonanza
, and my childhood crush on Little Joe, and my latent desire to take a dude ranch vacation one of these days when my schedule wasn’t so packed. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but reviewing the evening in my mind, I could see that it had been a one-sided yack fest—Carter making what seemed like harmless inquiries and me babbling on and on because I didn’t want to go upstairs to Graceland. All I’d learned about Carter was that he’d recently moved back to Austin after living out of state for fifteen years, and he had some kind of a business appointment in Daily.