Power Slide

by Susan Dunlap

  “Thanks!” I yelled before anyone could disagree. “Mo, you’re the best!” I eyed the cameraman, still standing behind his camera on the cart, hoping to pull him in. But he wasn’t committing. He was heading to the monitors, where Jed was already running the coverage from the dolly. The other guys crowded in behind, and we all watched each camera’s take. My hands were burning. “This a wrap, Jed?”

  “Unless we’re going to do it in the dark. You’re shivering. Check with me in the morning, just in case, but I have a good feeling about this one. Good work, Darcy. You’ll be at dinner?”

  I glanced over at Guthrie. “We might be late.”

  “What the hell happened, Guthrie? You were supposed—”

  “I could have killed you!” The words exploded from him as soon as the crew moved off. His face was stiff with horror. “Omigod, I just can’t—You know I would never, ever—”

  “Of course, I do. It’s over. Fine, now.” I looked away, blocking out his fear. I couldn’t go there. “Could have been killed” will kill you. Mistakes are for learning. “But still, how come—”

  “Stupid! You’re lucky to be in one piece.” He hoisted me into the cab and thrust my hands into his ice chest. “I blew it! They all know it. No reason to drag yourself down with me!”

  “They knew it when you blew the jackknife, but once the shots were good, you’re the great wheelman again. Maybe Jed noted me reacting mid-gag and making it work, and that can’t hurt. So, all good.”

  “Yeah, ’cause they’d be thinking you’re using your balls for brains.”

  “So to speak.” I caught his eye and grinned. It was an effort, but when his mouth twitched and he fought back a laugh, I relaxed.

  Suddenly he looked almost like himself, the guy always ready with the quick comeback, up for the next impossible challenge, ready to go all out, then shrug it off if he failed.

  “Using my balls for brains?” I said. “I must really be losing it, or else you are?”

  It was the wrong thing to say, and I saw him just as quickly sink back down. I felt bad, puzzled, worried, and then just pissed. My hands throbbed. “The hell with you. What do you have for burns?”

  “Lemme see those hands.”

  I’m not superstitious, or at least no more than anyone else in the business, but now I had to fight the urge to shut my eyes, as if refusing to see my scabrous red palms would keep them from being reality. I held them up to what was left of the light. “Backs are fine. Skin’s still on the palms. Fingers are better than I thought, as long as I don’t have to bend them. Won’t be too bad. But I’m glad I don’t have another call for a few days.”

  He looked closer. “You could take those hands to the emergency room, but you happen to be with the all-time expert on undercarriage burns. When something’s gone wrong in the middle of a shoot, there’s no time to wait for things to cool.”

  “Yikes.”

  He shrugged.

  “Yeah, I know. You gotta do what you gotta do. But still . . . So, welcome to the Guthrie cut and burn clinic. Healing faster than the eye can see.” He laid my hands gently on his own and bent close. “You must’ve let go fast.”

  “Well, yeah!” I kind of snorted, but it turned into a laugh and then he grinned, too. I couldn’t tell whether he was truly coming out of his funk. I’d forgotten how tender he could be, how seductive in the way he cupped my hand as he moved it closer to his eyes. But I did have a good idea where all this was headed.

  “I’ve got some good stuff in the back.”

  “Burn ointment?”

  “That, too.”

  The odors in the cab seemed homey, as if welcoming me back into our past. There was always the smell of gasoline—I liked that—and the wood chips he kept handy, and the pistachios I’d seen him shell with one hand while driving. A bottle of Plymouth gin had been a staple behind the seat till a close call with the Highway Patrol made him stash it in the trailer. But enough had been spilled over the years, in my presence alone, that the smell of juniper and fruity aromatics hung on. And coffee, good strong coffee brewed in one of those old metal drip pots.

  An aspiration of Zen students is to be not so much in the moment but an integral part of the moment. There was no such blending with him. If the Zen student were a dollop stirred into the mix, Guthrie was a marble added to the bowl, touching everything but still the marble, banging around, popping up, instantly recognizable as itself and nothing else.

  He’d pulled into a parking slot near the dock, turned off the engine. “I wasn’t kidding about the ointment. Your hands don’t look bad, but that stuff’ll have ’em working fine tomorrow. You won’t even remember you had a worry. Step this way.”

  In the trailer it was, of course, dead black, and the lamp cut a small circle in the dark. Carefully he slipped palm-only gloves over my fingers. “I told you this was the best clinic.” He got out a jar of salve.

  “You sure about this stuff? These are my hands here! My career!”

  “Trust me. I’ve burned my mitts on this truck more than any sane guy should and all ten fingers are still working, sensitive as ever.” He grinned. “Let me show you.”

  I had questions—big questions—about the stunt, about my hands that now felt cool, and about him. In the end, though, as I leaned back against his shoulder and he bent over for the first teasingly soft caress to the back of my neck, I decided to postpone them.

  3

  IT WAS LATER, when we were still in the back of the truck, leaning against the pillows, his arm around my shoulder, that I said more pointedly, “So what happened with the gag? I mean, why didn’t you do the jackknife?”

  He shrugged.

  “Did the gear jam?”

  “Hell, no!”

  “Electrical—”

  “No. The truck’s always ready. I make sure of that.”

  Whoa! I’d sure hit a nerve there. Any decent stunt double keeps his equipment geared up; it’s an insult to suggest otherwise. But if the problem wasn’t the truck . . . “Then what was it?”

  “Just a bad day.”

  “Come on! We’re both pros. Bad day equals last day.”

  “I got distracted.”

  “Distracted by what?”

  “I don’t know. The traffic, the cranes, the containers.”

  “The shipping containers!” I couldn’t believe he’d more than glanced at something so peripheral to the gag.

  “Doesn’t the script have a stowaway? Hides out to where, Shanghai?”

  “That got cut.”

  “Too iffy?”

  “No, something financial.” I shifted away so I could look at him. “And this, is this another distraction? From my question? You’re not getting a pass from me!” I could have been killed! “I have to know I can trust you the next time.”

  “Let it go. I’m dealing.”

  “Not very well if—”

  He pulled me to him. “I thought we had something special.”

  “We do. Odd, but special. We see each other as often as the geese fly south and it works fine.”

  “Birds of a feather?”

  “I guess.” When he was gone I thought of him with more of a feeling than with specific memories or hopes, much less plans. I rarely called. And vice versa. But when he was here—like now—it was like the return of the hero in the last reel—heart pounding, Gone with the Wind music, a slo-mo race to embrace. And it was more than that. There was something unspoken, not thought out. The other men, the ones who’d loved me, ended up complaining that I was preoccupied, that there was a wall between us they couldn’t breach. But Guthrie understood. He had a wall of his own, and that was fine with me; I’m not big on dragging forth secrets. I leaned back against his chest. “You know, I’m into Zen.”

  He laughed. “The number of times you’ve sprinted out of this very truck before dawn to go meditate, a lesser man would be insulted.”

  “The focus of Zen is the present, this moment, perpetually this moment. The past is stuff in the mind,
the future illusion. But now—”

  He ran his hand down my back. “Yeah, now!”

  I had meant to say that that was the allure of being with him. We never talked past or future. The time with him was the intense now, magnified by its isolation. By knowing that, demands would never come. But this time that didn’t hold. This time I needed to know. “Jed’s toying with using us for another gag here, the one up on the crane—”

  “How come they’re not blue screening that back in the studio?”

  “You’d think having me, or even the lead, trot across a beam on the ground and them plunk in the background later would make sense. But Jed’s hot to see what more we can get out of it live.”

  “Great! More work for us!”

  I nodded. In a shrinking profession, with animation taking big bites out of the live gag action, any chance we got to be indispensable was one we had to take, for ourselves as well as every other stunt double. “My point is, if you’re driving below that crane arm, I need to know you’re not going to be distracted. That happens and your rig taps the base of the crane, I’m dead.”

  “Look, today was a fluke. I wanted to find out . . .”

  “So there wasn’t any accident on 980.”

  “Nah. Sounded good at the time, right?” He seemed hesitant. Shit.

  “Find out what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What, dammit?” I’m not letting you off the hook.

  He pulled his arm back, skidding it along my shoulder, chafing my skin as it went. He turned to me, his eyes narrowed in an expression I couldn’t categorize—shock, sorrow, calculation, fear? “My old phone died and I needed to call a guy. So I had to pull off the road and then I had a helluva time getting back on.”

  “It took you hours to get back on?” In the realm of no pressure, I’d gone from zero to a hundred! He was looking at me as if I were a stranger. I felt like one now, for sure. And so did he. “What is it? You’ve never let anything get in the way of work! Are you okay? What could possibly be so important?”

  “I can’t tell you. I don’t want to keep making up excuses—not to you! But right now, I just can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t not tell me.” I pulled away, now kneeling on the bed, facing him in the dimming light.

  “Dammit, Darcy, lay off.”

  “No!”

  A horn honked. He jumped for the door.

  I grabbed his arm. “No! Tell me!”

  “I can’t talk about this, not yet.” He sank back. “All the time I’ve known you . . . I’ve been as close to loving you as any woman ever . . .” His voice caught. “I’ve never asked anything. But now, can’t you just trust me? I will never put you in danger again. Please . . . please trust me.”

  Could I? If I couldn’t . . . I had to. “Okay.”

  He leaned over and kissed me in a way he’d never done before, so hard and sudden he pressed my lip into my teeth. I could feel him shaking. Then, as suddenly, he let go. “That nagging horn out there for you?”

  “Omigod, is it eight already? That’s my sister. If I don’t move, she’ll be in here in a minute.”

  “Don’t you have a car?”

  It was such a California reaction. “I live downtown. Couldn’t find parking if I had one.”

  “Go, then. I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, getting up to open the door. Then, with a glance at my injured hands, he swung me to the ground.

  Automatically, I headed for the driver’s door of Gracie’s old station wagon and almost said, “Shove over,” as I and any sane person who’d driven with her did. But no way could I drive with my hands burned and covered in goo. “Pop the passenger side, will you?”

  “Hey, there’s a handle.” But she leaned over and shoved obligingly.

  I slid in and closed it with a yank that was over before I felt the pain. “We should move before the fog gets worse,” I said, to keep her from noticing my hands. Gracie’s a doctor, an epidemiologist. If she saw my burns, her only question would be which emergency room. She’d have the best intentions; she’d dig her heels in halfway to India.

  She’d stand over the ER doc. I’d get the best medicine in the Bay Area. But on this I was trusting Guthrie, the guy who knows what it takes to be back on the job in a couple of days.

  In the rearview mirror I could see him sliding behind the wheel of a big black convertible. Where’d he get that?

  “Stunt go okay?” Gracie asked.

  “Single take. In the can.” In fact, she hadn’t asked her real question: Are you okay? But we were doing the kind of stylized greeting that, were we Japanese, would have been a series of ever lower bows. In her mind, stunt work was akin to walking naked into a level 4 lab. She didn’t want to know the details—they just made the danger more blatant. And yet, in a way she could never admit, she was impressed.

  But she didn’t sound impressed now. “Didn’t you hear me honking?”

  I didn’t answer, but instead just eyed the rearview mirror, watching Guthrie drive off. “Are you going to sit here, or are you going to drive?”

  “So give!”

  I stared out the windshield at the slabs of port buildings across the vacant roadway, trying to figure how to divert Gracie from whatever details she was after. Most of the second unit guys had already cleared off, but Jed Elliot was headed in this direction. “That’s the second unit director. I’d better see what he wants.”

  Opening that wretched door sent a new wave of scalding pain through my hand. I shut my eyes against the pain and when I looked up, Elliot was almost in front of me.

  His normally creased brow was rutted deeper, his jaw tight. “That’s it for Guthrie. He’s not worth the risk.”

  “What? But the gag was a take,” I said, stunned.

  “No thanks to him. I only called him on your say-so. We could have lost a whole day. You could have been run—”

  “But I wasn’t. I’m fine. The gag’s fine. We’re on schedule. We’ve just got the clean-up end to do.”

  “I can’t chance it with him.”

  I couldn’t let Guthrie get canned, not in the middle of a shoot. Not now! “At least talk to him. It was fluke. You’ll see. You’ve got to give him a chance to explain.”

  “There’s no point—”

  “Hey, I trust him with my life! You want a rerun of the gag tomorrow, I’m ready.”

  “I don’t . . . Okay. But he calls me. ASAP. Gives me the kind of explanation that lets me sleep tonight.”

  “Sure.” Before he could reconsider, I turned, hurried back to Gracie’s car, and slid in the still-open door.

  “That your guy, in the convertible? He waved,” she added.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not half bad.”

  I couldn’t let him get canned. Word would spread like a virus. Then no one would hire him without a triple-check. A career killer, and not great for me either. I pulled the seat belt as near to buckled as I could manage.

  “What?” Gracie prodded. “What’s going on?”

  That was the last thing I wanted to discuss with Gracie. I felt like Guthrie ten minutes ago when he’d been facing me, reaching for excuses.

  Suddenly the words just burst out of me. “Omigod, Gracie, he said he was as close to loving me as any woman ever.”

  Gracie jolted back in her seat. “You close to loving him, too?”

  “Maybe. Probably. I have to catch him.”

  Gracie shot me a look like I was a teenager, and grinned.

  “No, listen, this is serious. He’s going to get himself canned. I don’t have his new cell number. When we called this morning about the gag, we had to use his land line. Now I don’t know where he’s going. We’ve got to catch him before he gets out of here, before he’s on the freeway and gone.”

  4

  GUTHRIE WAS ON the freeway on-ramp before we cleared the port gate.

  “He’s heading north. Can’t you make this thing go any faster?” I demanded, though I knew the answer only too well. Gracie down
shifted—somewhere she’d heard that lower gears produced more power. The car lurched and we shot onto the freeway.

  “He’s up there, second to left lane.” He was six or seven car lengths ahead. “We’re lucky it’s rush hour.” Otherwise he’d have been long gone.

  She nodded.

  Ahead, Guthrie veered west toward the converging lanes of the toll plaza for the Bay Bridge. Why was I surprised? Guthrie’s having some private thing to do in the city didn’t bother me. What struck me was that black convertible. Where’d he come by that car? Surely he didn’t tow it up here, though it would explain why he’d gotten to the set so late. Ditto, driving it into his truck and then having to find a loading dock to off-load it before using the truck in the gag. And chance holding up the entire production? I just couldn’t believe that. But it sure would explain why any lame excuse beat the truth.

  If the convertible wasn’t his, what did that mean? There was more I didn’t know about this man than I’d realized, and that was already a lot.

  Gracie’s car was no match for his, but she knew the tricks of the bridge plaza. By the time we cleared the toll booths we were only two cars back, though three lanes apart. “Get closer so we can honk.”

  “Relax. There’s nothing we can do till we clear the bridge. Meanwhile, what’s with your hands?”

  “Just a little burn. No problem. I’ve got salve—”

  “Let me see.”

  “You’re driving!”

  “I’m a doctor, let me—”

  “Keep your eyes on the road!”

  Gracie’s number five in the Lott family. I’m number seven. All my older siblings view me as a daredevil whose risky ventures end up affecting them. Gracie sees me as a potential disaster for her to clean up, stitch up, or pull out of a hole. John, the cop (number two), is personally offended at my challenging any law, even gravity. And Gary, a year older than Gracie and a lawyer, sees me as a way to find out what he can’t. Only Mike, who’s four years older than me and was my buddy and protector the whole time I was growing up, totally approved. He disappeared twenty years ago, and none of us has really gotten over that, least of all me.