High Fall (36 page)

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 nothing 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.”

She let a beat pass before she asked, “And what is there behind the mask?”

He laughed dismissively. “Nothing special. Or at least, someone who’s a lot less special than I thought I was—and all the time I was the great stunt man, I
thought
I was a pretty modest guy.” The paper bag rattled in the wind; he stuck his hand in and came out with a muffin.

The picture of him in the gym flashed in her mind, flushed with the glow she’d painted on it year after year. The awkward Greg Gaige visiting the gym who’d made a special effort to encourage her; not much else in her life had been that special. It was wrenching to give that up. But this new Greg Gaige—she liked him. Greg Gaige grown up. She could almost not believe she was about to get an answer to her question: “You made your decision to be ‘dead’ off-balance, too suddenly. But once you got over the shock, what was it like? You were the best in the business. You’d created a Move that no one could copy. What was it like to walk away?” She swallowed hard. “What was it like to live without the thing that mattered to you most?”

Greg took a long swallow of coffee and crumpled the paper cup but didn’t let go of it. “Hard,” he said slowly. “Hardest thing I’ve ever done. Stunt work was my life, more important than eating, sleeping, sex. Way more important than sex. It shaped what I did, who I was with, and, more than that, how I thought of things that weren’t even connected to it. I never just watched a woman move; I watched
how
she moved, in case there was something about it that I could incorporate in a gag when I was doubling a woman. Not doing, not
thinking about
gags was like being plopped down in a foreign country with a language you can’t quite understand and customs that don’t make sense. Or like being shunned—you know, the Amish punishment.” He stared down at the crushed paper cup and ran his finger along the broken lip. “A hundred times a day I saw something—a movie poster, a wooden horse like the one my father had covered for me to practice on when I was six, or just chalk—and it was like my cells screamed out for the life I couldn’t have anymore .”

When she’d gotten to India after being fired from the coroner’s office, she’d felt utterly “other.” Then she’d ascribed it to culture shock. Now she felt the bond of worn-out regret between them. She longed to reach out to him, but she couldn’t, not the way other people did. Instead she nodded in understanding.

“I guess I did the whole grieving bit—anger, bargaining, et cetera. Then for months I just spaced out. Didn’t think, didn’t exercise—unless you call long glassy-eyed walks exercise. Didn’t talk to anyone I didn’t have to. I was more out of shape than I’d ever been in my life; it was like being in a stranger’s body. I got a labor job up around Redding. Later, I got some jobs helping a couple with remodeling—even out of shape, I’m stronger than the average man and not afraid of climbing up on slanting second-story roofs.” He flashed a wry smile. “You wouldn’t believe how rare a quality that is. I took any odd job that wasn’t connected to movies or gymnastics. I was real careful not to blow my cover. My cover—it was like that was all I had from my old life. I realized later I was protecting that cover. As long as it shielded my old life, I believed at some level that I could get that life back someday. Ridiculous, of course.” He caught her eye and shrugged.

She held his gaze, afraid to let him escape into shrugs and asides. “And the stint of teaching at High Country gym, what about that?”

He put the last piece of muffin into his mouth and chewed deliberately. When he’d swallowed, he said, “It was a mistake. I should never have taken that chance.”

A mistake or a death wish?
But she didn’t ask that.

“I was up in Alturas to see if there was any work with the wild horses. I spotted the gym, like I did every place gymnasts practiced. But this time I went in. I didn’t want to teach, I just wanted to smell the chalk and the sweat, to feel the intensity of practice. But before I could stop myself, I was correcting a girl in her uneven bar dismount. I knew from the moment I took the job there, I was courting danger. I kept having to come up with new lies about my ‘past.’ Kids ask ten times more questions than an adult would. They wanted to know which tournaments I’d been in, which I’d won, which of the great gymnasts I knew, why I hadn’t made the national finals. I made the Olympic trials, and I was just lucky that none of them found photo coverage of it, or the poster. Pitfalls were everywhere. And then there was Lark.” Greg nodded slowly, his face paling back to gray. “Lark—God, how can she be dead? It’s not my fault, you’ll say; everyone will say. But—”