High Fall

by Susan Dunlap

“No! You go!”

  “Greg, we don’t have time. Outside, you can stop the trailer; I can’t. Go on!”

  She pushed with all her strength. The awning gave; the cabinet door smashed back into her fingers. The smoke stung her eyes. Beneath her, flames crackled through the floor mat.

  Greg hesitated, then thrust his head and shoulders through the opening. His legs dangled over the sink, then disappeared into the hole and his feet were gone.

  Her fingers shrieked with pain. She could barely see for the smoke. A new spout of flame shot up from the floor, singeing her hamstrings. She had to let go. No! The floor was blazing. The trailer bounced but didn’t slow. She couldn’t get air through the smoke. Her fingers were going numb. She had to get across the aisle, across the counter, and out through the space that looked four inches wide.

  She’d get only one chance. If she miscalculated, she’d fall butt-first to the burning floor.

  She coughed against the smoky air. Her eyes watered. She could feel the heat of the fire on her legs. Pushing with all her strength, she shoved her feet and legs fast through the opening, pushed off hard, and grabbed for the side of the awning, pulling it toward her, narrowing the opening. Her legs slid through thigh-high. Her face smacked into the hot metal. She pressed her free hand against the ceiling, pulled her chest against the hot metal awning, exhaled, and pushed her legs down the side of the trailer.

  The awning scraped her legs, her hips stuck. The ceiling was out of reach.

  Something pulled on her legs. Her face scraped down the metal.

  The night air hit her like a cool cloth after a fever. Her butt struck the ground momentarily, then Greg pulled her up.

  The edge of the bluff was twenty feet away.

  The trailer rattled over it. An explosion lit up the jagged knuckles of the bluff.

  Greg wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “I have never in my life been so scared.”

  She let out a squeak that she’d meant to be a laugh. “Me neither.”

  The guard was running toward them. In the distance a siren cut the night air. Greg said, “Did you really think I could stop that trailer?”

  She didn’t, she realized. Why had she insisted he get out first? Stubbornness? Gift to an old idol? No. In the safety of the cool air, on hard ground, it seemed ridiculous, but she knew the reason: She couldn’t have borne losing him again, not without knowing who he had become. “You did pull me out in time.”

  “I … called in … his plates,” the guard panted. “I seen him pushing the canteen. I gave chase, but he moved fast for an old guy with a gut on him. Was burning rubber before I could catch him. But I got his plates.”

  “We could have died in the trailer while you were chasing after him,” Greg said.

  “You were in the food trailer! Hey, no one’s supposed to be in there now. You had no business being in there.”

  Kiernan and Greg looked at each other and laughed. “The chase,” she said, “so much more rewarding than the save.”

  The guard glared, turned, and strode back toward the parking lot.

  “And you,” Greg said, “you’re not worried about chasing McCafferty? You don’t think he’ll escape?”

  She considered a minute. “No. I barely know Liam, but he’s so much like my relatives. And he’s not you, Greg. He couldn’t go off and leave his life behind like a shed skin. For him, there’d be nothing left. Movie people think ‘the business’ is all that matters. They’re right; they just don’t realize theirs isn’t the only business. Liam could no more imagine life without his picture between Kennedy and the Pope than Dolly could envision a career managing the local motor vehicle office. He won’t run, because there’s nothing to run to. The police will find him at home, in his chair by the picture window overlooking Mission Bay, with one of his Waterford crystal glasses on the table beside him, and a bullet through his brain.”

  Greg shivered, and she had the sense that the reaction was not just for McCafferty but for the path not taken.

  CHAPTER 36

  IT WAS AFTER SUNRISE when Kiernan answered the last question and signed her statement at the police station. “Mr. Gaige finished his a full hour sooner,” Officer Melchior chided her as he held open the front door for her. “I want you to be clear on this, Ms. O’Shaughnessy. I’m pleased you did not go off the bluff. I just wish you’d go off … somewhere—out of my district.”

  She patted his arm. “Life is fraught with disappointment, Melchior.”

  She should have been exhausted. She would be in an hour or two. But now she was running on adrenaline, and the still-startling realization that Greg Gaige was alive. Without gymnastics, but alive. And waiting for her at Gliderport. Her stomach quivered, and the smile on her face was so wide, she felt silly.

  She forced herself to stop at home to change out of her soot-streaked jeans and sweatshirt. The sleeves were singed, and there were fire holes in the backs of the legs. She doffed her clothes and was in and out of the shower in three minutes. Then she put on her forest-green running suit, brushed beige eye shadow on, and rubbed it off twice before it looked good enough. Looping by the Pannikin, she picked up two double cappuccinos and an assortment of scones, and muffins, and, suddenly unsure of Greg’s taste, added two chocolate-covered croissants, and headed to Gliderport.

  Winding through the curves of Torrey Pines Road, she grinned at the magenta bougainvillaea cascading over stucco walls, and the orange birds of paradise that seemed poised to take off into the fog. Traffic was still light going toward San Diego, and northbound ahead of her the road was empty. When she turned onto the entrance to Gliderport, patches of fog hung in the branches of the Torrey Pines like discarded illusions. But over the ocean slivers of light slit the fog for an instant before it resealed around them.

  There was almost no sign now that the movie set had ever been on the bluff. Only the two trailers remained.

  Greg wasn’t by them. For an instant she feared he’d disappeared again, or she’d dreamed his reemergence. Then she spotted him, across the warning chain—at the far edge of the bluff, a shin’s length from the brink of nothingness. Her breath caught; she started to run, then, taking in his stance, slowed herself to a walk. Greg looked like he was in a gale—the wind was snapping his shirt and hair, breaking off mouthfuls of the bluff itself and spitting them at his legs. But there was nothing unsteady or tentative about his stance—his firm, muscular legs were planted solidly apart. Kiernan couldn’t help thinking of Lark Sondervoil—her lithe body wavering, eyes wide in terror, hands grappling for ground that wasn’t there. The rise where Lark had gone over was less than forty feet to the north. Slowly Greg turned toward it, and his eyes, already tightened to slits against the wind, pressed shut as if the sight, the memory, the grief, were more than he could bear to take in.

  She stopped, unwilling to intrude. Was this, she wondered, as much of a memorial as Lark Sondervoil would get? Then she started forward again, knowing that the acknowledgment from Greg was what would have mattered to her.

  Greg opened his eyes, slowly turned toward land. When he spotted Kiernan, he waved. He had changed his shirt. The wind fingered his curly gray hair, whipping a strand loose from the rubber band at the nape of his neck. He had washed his face, but the residue of soot had settled in the crevices across his forehead and formed black lines between his eyes.

  She slowed, drinking him in. Her chest felt so full, she could hardly breathe. She barely knew Greg, she warned herself. And emotion was something she’d never trusted. But she brushed all that aside as she came up beside him. She smiled, then laughed to cover the illogic of it all. “You smell like a barbecue pit.”

  He ran his fingers down the side of her neck, made a show of checking them for soot, and grinned. “You’re no perfume ad yourself, briquette.”

  Three feet from the edge of the bluff she stepped down into the ridge trail worn by the wind and the daring, and sat back on the bare sandy rise, and felt around in the paper bag until she found her coffee
. When Greg sat down next to her, she gave him a cup, and rested a hand on his knee. “I’m still so astonished you’re alive.”

  “Astonished as in ‘pleased’?”

  “Real pleased.” Suddenly embarrassed, she removed her hand and passed him the bag of pastries. “There’s so much I want to know—about you, who you are, and how you’ve lived. But first tell me what happened the day of the fire on Bad Companions.” She had a good idea how McCafferty had orchestrated the result, but she wanted to know what Greg had seen and what he’d deduced after a decade of pondering.

  He picked a scone and turned to half face her. She could barely see the blue of his eyes. Earlier he had been squinting against the wind. But now the wind had let up and what he was fighting back was inside himself. “Kiernan, some of what I’m telling you I saw, some I read in the paper; it’s all jumbled together for me by now. There’ve always been questions, but of course, I’ve never been able to talk about them.”

  She bit into a croissant and nodded for him to go on.

  “In all my time in the business, I’d never once missed a call or been late. But that morning I didn’t even wake up until I heard the shouting outside. Even then, I felt sluggish. Normally, if I’d woken up late and heard shouting, I’d have been out of the trailer before the second syllable. But that morning I just felt dazed.”

  “Drugged?”

  “That’s what I figured. It would have been no problem to dump a dose of sleepytime into a drink. The location out there in the desert was so small and isolated, we were all in and out of the catering truck, and for dinner there was only the motel cafe.” He chomped down on the scone.

  Kiernan sat feeling the post-dawn chill cut against her skin. Something was amiss with that reply. It took her a moment to realize what was lacking. “You’re not bitter?”

  “It was another life back then. Besides, what good would it have done me?”

  A splash of sun came through the clouds from behind them. In an hour the light and heat would press the fog back over the sea, but now it merely turned the sand from dun to red-brown, lightened the lines in Greg’s face, and added the first tentative wash of color to his exhaustion-paled skin. “You shared your day wagon—”

  “Honeywagon. It was supposed to be a place to relax. Dratz made it X-rated. There was almost no privacy on that set. So when they needed it, Carlton and Jane used my honeywagon. More than once I walked in on them.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t a crisis. That’s Hollywood, too, and everyone’s expected to be cool about it. Still, the idea of me wandering in at the moment of orgasm probably wasn’t an aphrodisiac for either one of them. A couple of times Carlton lent me his Corvette—like movie money, you know? It was a helluva car. Car crashes were one of my specialties, so I knew cars, and that was a beaut. Out there in the desert there were no cops or speed traps. I could get that baby up over a hundred on the straightaways and lean into the curves at the last moment.” Now his eyes sparkled the way she remembered them, and his cheeks bunched in a grin.

  She who had been to traffic school twice for speeding understood his glee only too well. “Cut out everything but you and the road, huh?”

  “Yeah, exactly. Not a thought in my head, just me and the car and the wind and sun and the next curve coming up fast.”

  “Didn’t Dratz care?”

  “About the speed? Had he known”—he grinned again—“he wouldn’t have. If I’d crashed the ’Vette he’d have been put out by the inconvenience. His father would have bought him another—and canned me. An insignificant price for him to pay for an afternoon in the sack,” he added. “But the day before the fire, he had had a blowout with Jane. He came storming out of the trailer across the hill to the car park, and voilà! No ’Vette! Of course, he had lent it to me, but in the middle of his tantrum he forgot about that. When I got back, he was pacing around, screaming and shaking his fist, yelling about me stealing his car. I should have ignored it, but I didn’t. I just blew up at him.” He sighed. “Well, the bigwig’s kid wasn’t used to that. He couldn’t let that go unanswered, not with half the crew standing around watching. He carried on and on about how it made sense that Bleeker would get an old broken-down stunt man to do a simple gag like the fire gag. He was pulling out all stops.”

  Old, broken down. She wanted to rub out the memory for him; instead, she said, “So on the morning of the fire, you heard the screams and jolted up … ?”

  He took a long swallow of coffee and chewed on the last piece of scone. The sun had gone in behind the fog now, the wind picked up. It flicked the strands of his ponytail like minute lashes on his back. “When I saw the time that morning, I panicked. I’d left my car with Jason, but I still had the keys to Dratz’s. I drove to the location; I was lucky it was just dawn and no one was on the road. I was still real woozy, and it’s a miracle I made it up that hill at all. Probably just instinct from all the car gags I’d done.

  “I could see the smoke before I got out of the car. The whole set was a madhouse. Something had gone wrong with the gag, I could tell. In the state I was, I was sure it was my fault. If I hadn’t overslept … Cary Bleeker was yelling. The flames, huge, fat flames—no wonder they’re called tongues of flame. These could have licked up that little house on the set and swallowed it like a canapé. I couldn’t figure what was going on. How could they be doing the stunt without me? Bleeker was shouting for people to help. I remember someone saying, ‘Where the hell is Dratz? For once the little bastard could be of some use.’ And someone answering, ‘Gone off with Jane. I saw her drive out of here last night.’ Then I heard a voice, guttural, scared: ‘The cabin, it’s collapsed! Greg’s in there! Get it off him!’ And Bleeker: ‘Call a doctor.’ And then they were all quiet. I could hear birds chirping. It seemed so unbelievable that the birds were starting a day like any other day. Then Bleeker said, ‘Oh, my God, what a way to die. God, poor Greg.’”

  Kiernan realized she was shaking with Greg’s decade-old horror. She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. The paper sides squeezed inward; she had to look down at her hands to ease her grip.

  “Closer, someone whose voice I didn’t recognize—probably one of the gaffers—was saying, ‘It’s a damned shame Greg died and Dratz took off. Damned shame it wasn’t Dratz burned to an ember. Greg probably could have killed him, the way he was lighting into him yesterday. Real pity Greg’s dead.” Greg shook his head slowly. “I couldn’t take it in. It was like the words were in Technicolor, but I could only process them in black and white. Me dead? I remember actually thinking ‘I’m not dead.’ And then wondering if Carlton had gone off with Jane after all.

  “But it wasn’t me on the set. It was someone else. I wasn’t thinking clearly—still, I knew that body was Carlton Dratz. After all, he was gone. But I also knew enough about Hollywood to realize how convenient it would be to lay the blame for his death on me. No one would care that he was dead, but his father would make a fuss and need a scapegoat. The studio—Dolly—would jump to join him. She’d sacrifice anyone. Cary Bleeker would be scurrying not to be that lamb. And me, a stunt man at the end of his career, I was real expendable. I panicked. I ran back to the Corvette and coasted down the hill because I was afraid to turn on the engine. No one would have noticed that, of course, not with all the commotion. I was in town before I passed another vehicle—the fire truck.” He shook his head slowly, his face as ashen as it must have been back then.

  Kiernan stared out at the ocean. Beyond the breakers it looked like old green silk, here faded by time, there in the distance one great fold, swelling almost yellow. She lifted her cup and drank slowly, letting the coffee warm her. “Then what did you do, Greg?”

  “I drove east. I was going slowly, carefully. I got near Yuma. I still felt fogged; I didn’t dare get stopped by the police, and the idea of the state line checkpoint freaked me out. I turned around and headed back toward El Centro and then north. Sometime in the afternoon, it hit me that if I’d thought I looked guilty earlier on the location, it was n
othing to how guilty I’d made myself appear by running off in Carlton’s car. I pulled onto a side road and parked out of view and just sat there till it was dark.

  “Later, it occurred to me that there were advantages to being ‘dead.’ There was a hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy that would go to my mother; I’d know she was okay financially. I wouldn’t have to make work for Jason anymore. And most appealing, I’d be clear of me.” He stared out toward the ocean, pulling his arms in defensively against his sides. “I had lived with a brother who got more paranoid, making up wilder and wilder tales, each year. And I was so absorbed in my art that I didn’t even notice until he began to impinge on my practice time. Then I disengaged myself from him tentacle by tentacle, had him barred from sets, got a new practice space, and left him alone to nourish his delusions.” He glanced at her and then quickly away. “But being dead meant I could get rid of Jason. And—and I could escape from being the guy who’d stooped to stealing Trace Yarrow’s job. It was like someone offering you cash for the smelly sweat shirt you wanted to throw out anyway. Burned to black ash was a real fitting end for Greg Gaige.”

  Kiernan lifted her coffee, but halfway to her mouth she knew she wouldn’t be able to swallow it.

  Greg hurried on, as if there had been a break in a levee that was never meant to hold back this volume of distress. “In the foggy, panicked state I was in then, that was enough to assure me I shouldn’t go back to the set. After dark I drove to the San Diego airport and left Dratz’s car with the keys in it.”

  “What did you do for money?”

  “Money? I never thought of that when I was deciding to escape. I had maybe a hundred dollars on me. I hitched a ride north with the type of guy I wouldn’t have trusted to change my oil before. But, you know, you can take chances when you’re ‘dead.’ What’ve you got to lose?” He laughed. “What’s who got to lose? Once you don’t have any real identity, you ride along in a truck cab or talk to a guy you’re painting houses with, and you think you’re playing a game with them, hiding behind the mask of the moment. But when you can’t talk about gags, or gymnastics, or movies, or L.A., or Baltimore, or anything else at all personal, you lose your grasp on who really is behind the mask.”