by Susan Dunlap
CHAPTER 9
“FIVE OF THE PEOPLE on the set when Greg Gaige died were here today, Yarrow?” Kiernan repeated, amazed. “Who?”
“Besides me? Bleeker was the second unit director. Dolly was the line producer, the one responsible for the day-today budget of the movie. And Liam.”
“Liam McCafferty, the city media liaison?”
“Yeah, I got him the job as accountant on Bad Companions, not that he’d thank me. The production coordinator was a ditz, and the location set was so small and isolated, he ended up saddled with all the office work. Poor guy was running twelve hours a day.”
“And who else?”
“There was word of a spotting of the odious Dratz.”
She made a “come” sign with her fingers.
Yarrow flopped in his chair. “Dratz. I can’t remember the kid’s first name, but he was the son of some studio bigwig. The wig had sent him down to the set to get rid of him. And I’ll tell you, the kid hadn’t been there an hour before—well, it was clear that the wig would have shot a movie he hadn’t a prayer of selling if it meant getting his son out of his hair.” Yarrow shook his head slowly back and forth. “Dratz was like a greased piglet, snuffling into everything, chattering on the set when the cameras were running—I can’t tell you how many takes he ruined. He told the actors how to act, the directors how to direct. Christ, he even had suggestions for the Gaige Move! He couldn’t touch his toes with a yardstick, but he carried on like the great expert. Like any fool off the street could do a high fall, or a car jump, or a stair fall. He couldn’t understand why the star didn’t do the fire gag. Dratz was so odious, his name moved into the vernacular: Dratz stuff.”
Another time, Kiernan would have leaned back in her chair, gotten a beer, and listened to every one of Yarrow’s stunt-war stories, or at least all that dealt with Greg Gaige. But there wasn’t time now; she had to focus Yarrow. “Greg was the best in acrobatic stunts, right?”
Yarrow got up—not so much stood up as burst up—winced, and instantly covered that acknowledgment of pain. He leaned on the back of the chair, his foot tapping softly, as if he had chosen that pose for comfort rather than support, as if his weak-side foot were responding to a melody meandering through his head instead of kicking at the pain receptors.
If he could have paced, Kiernan was sure he would have. But in this tiny box of a room, pacing would have been akin to spinning. Still, he wasn’t left sitting face to face with his thoughts. He had been able to handle memories of Lark unprotected, but not of Greg Gaige. Kiernan felt her skin prickling. She leaned forward as if to see into Yarrow more clearly.
“Yeah, O’Shaughnessy, when it came to acrobatics, Greg was the best once. He went straight from the Olympic trials in gymnastics to doing the Move as a stunt in his first movie. He was short for a guy, but he wasn’t a pixie like you. No offense.”
“None taken. Being short isn’t offensive to me,” she said with a bit more edge to her voice than she had intended. She didn’t resent being short; what got to her was the towering world’s belittling assumptions.
Yarrow hurried on, “Greg was probably about my height, or almost.”
Five foot eight. She remembered that.
“He was incredible. He had muscles—there was no part of his body he hadn’t toned. I saw him once—he was talking to a couple of us. He flipped up into a handstand, lifted one arm, balanced on the other—and never altered the cadence of his speech. And he could bend—it was like he was made of rubber. The man bent where other people didn’t realize they had joints. He could touch his chin to his knees.”
Kiernan resisted a shrug. A tight forward bend was nothing special. Even in medical school, when she hadn’t worked out for months, she could place her palms flat on the floor.
“Greg would drop into a backbend and bring his hands to his ankles. It was like he just folded back.”
Kiernan nodded in approval. That was impressive for a man, even a male gymnast. It meant stretching all the anterior muscles—the quads, the abdominals, the pecs—that he’d tightened with endless reps and lifts, and the scissor kicks and planches that made up the routines. It pleased her to hear he hadn’t lost it. “How old was Greg then?”
“When he died? Hmm …” He stroked his chin from the sides, pulling his thumb and fingers down along the jawbone. “Early forties, maybe a few years older. Most stunt people don’t do gags that long. By that time your knees are shot, you’ve messed up your legs and feet from landing wrong, or you’ve cracked ribs from the force of the falls, and you’ve spat up enough blood to keep a vampire for a month.” He caught her eye and grinned, more relaxed now.
She smiled back, wondering what he’d managed to bypass. In a minute he’d be telling jokes about his operations. Still, it beat bemoaning them, or like Tchernak, pretending they’d healed two hundred percent. In an hour he’d be offering to show her his scars.
“See, O’Shaughnessy, there comes a point in your thirties when you realize that you won’t last forever. After another trip to the emergency room or another six weeks in a cast, you discover that you don’t heal as fast anymore, and that no matter how much you sweat in the gym, you’re never going to get back to where you were before. You know it in your head, but you still don’t believe it. So you negotiate another job on the basis of how well you did your last gag, and once you start practicing it, you realize that you can’t manage the sudden moves as well, that you’re just a hair less agile, a wink slower, and the moves that were second nature—well, now they take the concentration you used to save for the new stuff. No one says anything. You tell yourself they don’t notice the difference, not yet.”
Kiernan kept her gaze steady, pushing back the memory of Greg saying: This is where you live. She couldn’t let her memories of Greg color Yarrow’s. And she needed a good assessment of Yarrow himself, to evaluate those memories. Had one of the brakes he was talking about resulted in his shortened leg? She would have guessed the cause to be a congenital scoliosis, or if not a curved spine, at least compensation for the nerve damage and muscular imbalance that can accompany ruptured discs.
Yarrow pulled the chair toward him and balanced his elbows on the top rung of the ladder back. His hair was thick, dark, and wavy atop his sun-toughened face, but his tan torpedo arms sported a coating that had been bleached blond. And blond on his legs—any sensible person would have changed from shorts as the night cooled, but Yarrow, she was willing to bet, would freeze his hard-muscled right leg and its thinner mate to create the deception that he was unconcerned about the atrophied muscles. It was a foolish bravado, but for her it had the appeal of a wild card.
“In this business,” he said, “what you’ve learned over the years—your experience—is your capital; when you get to the point that you’re living off your capital alone, your days are numbered. If you’ve got any smarts, you start looking for a job coordinating the stunts, or maneuvering to direct the second unit.”
“Wasn’t Greg smart?” There was a time when even to mouth that question would have been heresy.
“Smart?” His foot tapped louder. “I’m not much with words; action’s my thing. But smart: that’s just not right. Greg was sharp in a quiet, cut-to-the-core kind of way. See, most of us athletes, we’ve gotten through school on sports alone. I played every sport. I’m five foot eight; I was the star of the basketball team, and the top-scoring wide receiver in football for the entire county. I didn’t have to waste time with books. Most of us are like that. Some have the sense to study, too. We’re not dummies, that’s not what I mean at all. The irony is that after that free ride through school, we end up doing gags and having to learn about physics and mechanics so we can figure out what Special Effects is up to, so we can second-guess the stunt coordinator, and make sure we stay alive and with our bones in the places they started out.”
“And Greg?”
“I never got the sense he’d been a bookworm. It wasn’t like he read Shakespeare on the set. But he underst
ood how the gags were planned. He didn’t hesitate to make changes. And he always insisted on doing all his own prep.”
Kiernan smiled. That was the Greg she’d known. She gave Yarrow an extra point for fair observation. “But he didn’t try to move into coordinating?”
“No.” His foot stopped tapping, and he slid the toes back and forth in an arc. “He wasn’t interested in that.”
She nodded; so Greg hadn’t changed since he stood awkwardly with the seniors in the Baltimore gym. “Was he married? Did he have kids? Was he doing anything besides stunts? Back in school? Or working for some cause?”
Yarrow shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe someone who spent more time with him—” she said, disappointed.
“No!” The front legs of the chair hit the floor. “Look, I watched him work, I hung out with him on the set. I should know.”
Why so protective? But she understood; there was something about Greg that made his fans protective. The lion with the burr in its paw? “What did he talk about? Besides stunts.”
“That’s tough,” Yarrow said, repositioning the chair. “If he talked about people, it was how they did the gags.”
Like Lark Sondervoil did, she noted. “Besides gags?” she insisted.
“The business. He laughed about that. I mean, there’s plenty of weird stuff on a set, lots of crises and pseudo-crises, actors ‘Camille-ing around,’ Greg called it. Then there’d be the union rep racing down when we were on location to make sure all their working members were on the master list, and the producer’d be having a fit because the studio execs were on his ass. I remember Greg laughing that a movie set would be a great spot for an anatomy class. Students would get to see every body part in individual motion: asses balanced one on top of another sky high, heads rolling, tits in wringers, and balls”—he laughed—”balls in more danger than on any gridiron.”
Headlights shone on and diffused in the clear glass bricks that passed for an alley-side window. The car roared past, leaving on the glass bricks a mottled pattern of blues. The glass bricks shielded more than they showed. Like Yarrow’s laugh, she thought. His description of Greg warmed her heart; this was the man she’d hoped for, the stunt man who stood back and looked awry at the compulsions of the powerful. When she’d met him in San Francisco she’d hoped to find that kind of man. But … she hadn’t.
She stared at the glass bricks, navy against black, like an empty night sky. Silently, she beckoned another car to splash the dark with color and life, Yarrow to offer something that would keep her from asking: “Are you sure it was Greg who said those things? Or was he the one who laughed at them, politely, halfheartedly, because he was watching how you moved rather than listening?”
Yarrow’s head tilted to the right. He leaned more heavily on the chair back, the pretense of not needing it rousted from his mind by the question. Finally, he said, “It was Greg who said them. I think.”
She nodded. Memories, she’d learned, were malleable animals. Wishes blended with facts and cemented into histories that people were shocked to find untrue.
“Greg was almost ten years older than me,” he said too quickly, as if to block out the altering memory. “He was an old hand when I was still green. I sat at his feet and admired him. You may have thought I was a pain in the ass with my motorcycle—”
Kiernan grinned. It was exactly what she’d thought.
“But back then, when I’d done a couple of gags, bought my first Harley, and figured I was the decade’s James Dean, if my head had been any more swelled, I’d have burst my skull. And even I admitted that Greg Gaige was something special. He was the best,” Yarrow said, softly. “When he was planning a gag, the rest of the world fell away. And when he was doing it, his whole body changed. It was like under his skin the energy was so compressed, so controlled, that there would be no way to stop it. But when he was doing a gag, his eyes shone, his jaw set, and it was like he wasn’t just doing the gag, he was a part of it. No, that’s not right. He was the gag.”
Yes.’ she thought. Of course, Greg Gaige would have enmeshed himself in the gags, just as he did the gymnastic routines. He would have been always working out, practicing, figuring how to add new levels of difficulty, or so the legends in the gym had proclaimed. “And the rest of the time?”
“It was like he didn’t belong. Like he didn’t know how to fit in. Like he’d put so much into his craft that there was nothing left for normal life.”
She could have asked Yarrow to elaborate, but she didn’t need to. She knew. And when she had first learned that, the shock had slapped her the same way it did him. She, too, had assumed that the man who perfected the Gaige Move would rate a ten in every other aspect of life. She could see the residue of disillusionment on Yarrow’s face a decade after Greg Gaige’s death. She could feel it in her gut like a swirl of crushed ice.
“He’d wander around the set like he had a day pass. On Bad Companions, I remember people saying he spent his time sitting in the shade of the catering truck, talking—or more likely listening—to whoever came by, from the grips to the line producer. If I hadn’t known him and you’d told me this guy was a tennis pro or a ski instructor waiting for the season to start, I wouldn’t have questioned it, except I’d have expected them to be more savvy socially. But then he’d start discussing stunts, and it was like someone pushed the plug in the socket. He just lit up.” He shook his head. “I was up and coming then, hot stuff. Figured that beam of attention was just for me.”
“And?”
“I grew up.” He let go of the chair. The front legs jumped and banged to the floor. Yarrow walked to the door in three uneven steps.
Behind him, headlights glowed white in the glass brick window. Kiernan realized with a start that she hadn’t noticed the engine roar worthy of Cape Canaveral. What had it been about Greg Gaige that called people to nurture illusions about him? Was it his total commitment? His innocence? The odd purity of the combination? Most people could never attain that purity, and if they were like her, they were very thankful they couldn’t. She forced herself to lean back in her chair and said, “You told me Greg died in a fire gag. But he did high falls and acrobatic stunts. Why was he doing the fire gag at all?”
“The stunt business is a small world, O’Shaughnessy,” Yarrow said, easing back into the comfort of pedantry. “Everyone’s got his specialty, but if you want to work, you’ve got to be able to do it all. Take me—I did great motorcycle gags, but if they needed a double for a cycle crash and a stair fall and it was a location picture, they’d have taken a guy who couldn’t handle the cycle as well but who could do both, before they’d pay two doubles.”
Kiernan nodded. “The bottom line is the bottom line.”
“And Greg, well, he was over forty. I’m sure when they called him in the middle of the movie, he told himself he couldn’t afford to turn down a job. And this one offered him the chance to do the Gaige Move—not in the fire gag, in an earlier scene. He hadn’t done that onscreen since his first picture. It was one more time to do the thing that he did better than anyone else in the world. Fire scared him shitless, but he wouldn’t have let that opportunity go even if it meant doing the fire gag nude.”
Kiernan shivered. “One last chance to say it’s not just a memory, that you’re not a memory, yet.”
Yarrow was staring at her. She realized she’d spoken out loud, and words he didn’t want to hear. But retirement wouldn’t have meant just the loss of fame, she felt sure, or even surrendering a way of life. For someone as consumed as Greg, it would have meant abandoning the rationale for living, watching what makes life make sense slip away. Leaving him with … nothing. She swallowed and forced out the words: “How exactly did he die?”
Yarrow trekked back, and as he was taking up his post behind his chair, he said, “I wasn’t on the set then.”
“But you think it’s suspicious. Why?”
“Why? I don’t know. It’s just that he was too good to die like
that.”
“Too professional?”
“Yeah.”
“Like Lark?”
His eyes widened. “Exactly. Like Lark.”
“Then you think one of those five people killed him?”
His eyes widened in surprise. “I never considered that.”
“Yarrow! What the—”
“Greg was meticulous about his preparations. He put everything he would need in that cabin the night before so it would be ready at whatever ungodly hour of the morning he needed to start smearing the fire-resistant gel—very pricey stuff—on every inch of his skin. You can’t get that stuff in your eyes, and it tends to run, so you’ve got to be real careful. Then he put on a Nomex suit over it—he should have put more than one on. Each suit is an extra layer of protection. I’ve seen guys use six suits in a ninety-second fire drop. But Greg never did; he couldn’t stand being confined like that. He dabbed flammable gel on the parts of the material farthest from his body. He should have …” He closed his eyes against the decision Greg had made. “Look, he should have been wearing three or four suits. He decided to wear only one. He had an oxygen bottle right there in the cabin and didn’t use it. What does that make you think?”
“What did the autopsy find?”
“I don’t know. Honestly. If they came up with anything fishy, it never made the trades—the papers—or the rumor mill.”
“Yarrow, what is it you think happened?”
He swallowed. “There’s nothing like doing gags. You’ve got friends you trust with your life, literally. Working gags are fun. Lots are challenges. There are always new skills to learn, vital things to figure out. Every day is different. I know what it’s like to leave. My job now, computer troubleshooting, is fine. I don’t hate it. Some days are more interesting than others, but none of them matter.”
A truck roared down the alley. Yarrow didn’t look up. “What would Greg have done if he retired? Sell real estate in San Bernardino? He’d been the best; how could he live without—”