No Footprints

by Susan Dunlap

  A gag I’d done five years ago: a cannon roll. Suddenly, I was back there, in the stunt car with the explosive canister welded to the floor. I was harnessed in behind the wheel, staring through the breakaway windshield, doing eighty, ninety, hitting the ramp, plunging the button that set off the fireworks. Metal shaking like a can full of pennies, rattling like I was one of the coins, the blast so loud it blew out my earplugs, the car shooting up, hanging forever in its own eternal now, flipping over, banging down, flipping again, eternal slo-mo. No way to control it, just hope—flip—terror—bang. Along for the ride.

  I’d landed upright. The guy who tried it the next year hadn’t. Hadn’t walked away. I could still see his car crunched down—

  I gave my head a hard shake. In the bay the junker was shimmering. "Get out!” I yelled.

  Already it had floated too long. If he pushed the door open the motion would break the stasis. Enough to sink it?

  What was the choice? He couldn’t just sit there.

  If this had been a gag we’d have had an all-crew safety meeting beforehand. There’d be a big crane squatting next to me. We’d have welded heavy metal loops on the car. The safety crew’d be in the water, hidden from camera view; the instant it went under and Jed Elliot yelled, "Cut!” they’d be grabbing for the lines, hooking them to the loops. The crane would be grinding, yanking up line, and before the driver could exhale, he’d be breaking the surface. He’d be grabbing a line to be hoisted up to the dock amid the cheers of the crew. Otherwise, the crew’d get him up pronto and into the waiting ambulance.

  The car was quivering, as if it were cold. I couldn’t see through the back window. Frantically, now, I turned around, stared down the pier. No one was running toward us. The pier was too long. On shore they hadn’t even seen what happened.

  "Mac! There’s no one here! No one to help! You’ve got to get out yourself! Mac! Push the door open! Now!”

  The car shimmied. Was he getting loose, pushing to open the door? Or was it settling?

  I reached for my phone. My phone that was in my bag. My bag was—shit!—in the car.

  "Mac! Say something!”

  Nothing!

  He should be yelling. There should be people running out the pier. Boats, windsurfers, someone! How could this be? Us alone here?

  Then the car sank.

  Just like that.

  I stared, gauged how many strokes it’d be from the pier. I ripped off my sweater, yanked off my shoes, piled my jeans on them. I almost dived when I remembered how shallow the bay was, so shallow they had to dredge shipping channels. Shallow everywhere but under the Golden Gate. I jumped.

  Shallow is relative.

  I thought my feet would hit bottom and I’d push back up. They didn’t. There was nothing to push against. I hung there under water for what seemed like forever—suddenly here I was under the Golden Gate, down two hundred forty feet, down farther than I could ever get back up from, bones broken, organs punctured, breathing in water, water, with no chance of, no hope, the current smacking me into—

  I kicked like mad for the surface, coming up so hard I popped out to my waist, gasping, coughing, squinting to see light. I was so relieved I couldn’t move, until I sank back and in panic kicked again.

  "Tessa!” I yelled before I realized what I was saying. "Mac!”

  "Mac! Dammit, answer me!” What was the matter with him? Hit his head? Blacked out? Floating in the coffin of the car?

  Where was the junker? Water covered it. I kicked hard, pushed up, looked for bubbles. Repeating it, I looked the other way.

  There! I swam toward it. The water was freezing. The air iced my wet skin. Water splashed in my eyes and I kept blinking it away. I started to yell to him again and water sloshed in my mouth.

  I could see it! The front bumper was sticking up, maybe ten feet below. The car was balanced like it was sitting on its trunk. Mac was lucky, so very lucky. He’d be there in the air pocket.

  As long as it lasted.

  Not long in that old car, in that position. Any movement I made—or he made, especially him—could knock it off whatever it was balanced on and slam it down to the bottom. If that happened—

  I took a deep breath and dove.

  The water was thick, muddy still. I couldn’t keep my eyes open long enough to find the door. Had to surface.

  I shot up, gasped, breathed, then dove again. I forced my eyes open despite the mud and the stinging. I kept squinting. The car was to my left; I dove farther, felt for the handle on the driver’s side, couldn’t find it.

  I could see him inside, knocked out. Floating like a corpse. His head was by the passenger door. I’d never—

  I shot up, burst out gasping. My lungs burned; my eyes were blurry. They hurt. I inhaled again, headed down on the other side of the car. At least I knew the passenger door was unlocked; I’d slammed it myself.

  Something hit me. Knocked me into the car. Knocked the wind out of me.

  Was it him? No. Too high up. Debris, something big. A hunk of the pier?

  No air! I had to surface—now!

  I gasped, fighting the panic of no oxygen. I couldn’t let myself—How much air did Mac have? I’d have to get him free this time. I was still gasping. I had to get under control. Focus! I spent precious moments making myself focus on my breathing. When I felt my heart slow, I dove. Opening my eyes, I grabbed the bumper and pulled myself down, drew my feet down, braced them against the bumper and propelled myself toward the door handle.

  The water had rushed inside since my last dive. It was up to the dashboard. Mac floated—out cold—head against the windshield.

  I grabbed the handle and pulled.

  The door didn’t move.

  I pulled again.

  Nothing.

  My breath was gone. I had to surface.

  But I couldn’t.

  Pulled.

  Nothing.

  I shot up, gasping.

  Noise. People shouting.

  No time. I inhaled and went down again, going through the same maneuver again. The water was up to Mac’s nose. He had only seconds! I braced my feet, grabbed the handle, and pulled.

  The door sprang open.

  Water rushed into the car. The car jerked, slipped fast down to the bottom. Mud shot up. The recoil flung me back.

  I couldn’t see the car. It’d be full of water. There’d be no air pocket at all.

  Everything in my body screamed: Get air! Gasp! My lungs ached. My vision was blurring. The mud turned the world brown.

  I had to—

  No time!

  I moved downward, frantically squinting. No chance of spotting the bumpers now. I was going by feel. I circled my hands, kicked again. My lungs compacted to stones.

  Metal! The roof? I circled my arms wider.

  The door! Still open! I grabbed it, pulled myself down, in between the door and the car.

  Coffin of a car.

  My lungs screamed.

  I grabbed Mac around the middle and pulled him out, pushed off the car, and sent us up to the surface.

  A woman and a guy were there, treading water. "Here! We’ll take him!”

  Gasping, coughing, I let him go. I felt like I was going to throw up.

  Was he dead? Were they working on him? I couldn’t see.

  Suddenly I was shivering all over, knees pressing into chest, eyes fogged. I couldn’t . . . couldn’t even think.

  Someone lowered a rope—the same one they’d used for Mac’s body?—and gratefully I slipped it under my armpits and let myself be dragged upward like a body found floating under the bridge.

  34

  By the time I was lifted to the dock, an emergency vehicle—the one from the set, no doubt—had arrived and Macomber Dale’d been deposited in it. It was making an oh-so-careful three-point turn. In a few minutes the entire crew would be out here.

  The sun hadn’t even broken through the fog yet. It wasn’t quite eleven o’clock!

  "Is he alive?” I asked the co
p standing over me.

  "Yeah. Friend of yours?”

  It took me a moment to see things from her point of view. I was still shivering despite the blanket the EMTs had wrapped around me. My head felt like it had ballooned inside my skull, making it hard to process any thought at all. Of course, she didn’t know what had happened before the car went in. No one did but me. "Acquaintance. Do you have any coffee?”

  She walked over to a pack and extricated a thermos. "Peet’s,” she said. "My own emergency supply.”

  Make this woman chief! "Thanks.” I opened it and let the steam warm my chin. I wanted to jump inside. Sipping slowly, I pondered how much to tell her. What I needed was to get Jed out there so he could get the car hauled out, and not screw up our chance of using the location here, when and if we did do the shoot. Assuming there was still adequate backing without Mac, assuming we could get the car out of the bay. What about Dale’s connection to Varine Adamé?

  "Did he say anything?” she asked.

  "Suicidal, you mean? It’d be a stupid way to go. And, frankly, yet another expense for our budget, not that that’d be something he’d consider.”

  "You don’t sound very sympathetic.”

  I looked down at my wet cold body. "Maybe I’ll learn something that will make me. But right now, I was supposed to be setting up a stunt here. We’re on a tight schedule. The city’s only given us this spot for a couple hours. He’s wrecked the set-up, wrecked the car, and my spare clothes are in the fucking bay!”

  She started to reply, then turned toward the crowd now thundering at us.

  I hadn’t considered Mac’s moronic behavior as a suicide attempt. He might as well’ve used the bathtub. But now I wondered. Maybe not planned; maybe spur of the moment. Nothing I’d seen suggested an ability or even a desire to control his impulses. But, then, that was the guy’s MO. Maybe—Oh shit!—his driving off the pier had been spurred by my mention of Varine Adamé!

  I drank the coffee, and, all the while continuing to shiver, watched Jed, the camera crew, the gaffers jog out along the planks. I assured them all that I was fine. That disposed of, the issue became the car.

  "We could get a crane,” Jed proposed.

  "It’d sink the pier if it could even maneuver onto it.”

  "Barge?” the cop suggested.

  Jed stared at her like she’d lost her mind. "That’d be our whole budget.”

  She stared back. "Don’t even think of leaving that vehicle in our waters. This is the city of Berkeley you’re dealing with. We take illegal parking very seriously.”

  I smiled and took another swallow of her coffee, and let them work it out. Finally, they settled on a marina tow truck.

  I wasn’t smiling, though, when the truck arrived and it became apparent someone had to dive down to help hook the car to the pontoon arrangement, then wait around—wet!—till the truck dragged it ever so slowly to the shore and up over the rocks onto dry ground.

  "Paint’s okay,” Jed mused when the car was at last settled on dry land. "How many more scenes do we have with it?”

  "Interiors?”

  "We can do those in studio in a mock-up.” He paced as he considered. I’d seen him go at it for half an hour, driving other guys as high-strung as he was crazy.

  "Exteriors? Distant shots, not a problem”—I was thinking, too. "So we’re talking close exteriors. How many? How many essentials?”

  "If we—”

  "Where d’you want me to take this piece of crap?” The tow driver motioned to our junker.

  Jed strode toward it, turned back toward us. "I need to look at the storyboard again. Got to check with—”

  "Hey! I have to get this thing out of here. So where you want me to take it?”

  "I don’t know if we absolutely have to have it at all. Maybe—”

  "You’re not leaving it here.” The cop had a one-track mind.

  It was going to take longer to arrange, and—dammit—going to involve me longer, but there was no other alternative. "Let’s haul it back to the garage where it was in the city and let it dry out while we decide.”

  "San Fran? Shit, I can’t drag this over the bridge. I’m going to have to get a trailer for that.”

  "Yeah, sure. Do it.” To me Jed said, "You can handle this?” He looked toward the cameras, lights, all the equipment brought over here, unused, needing to be schlepped back to the city. Naturally, he was calculating how much this wasted day cut into our budget.

  "Yeah, I’ll deal with the car. You going to go to the hospital and check on Mac?”

  "Hospital! Yeah, I suppose. One more pain-in-the-ass problem the . . . pain-in-the-ass’s adding to this pain-in-the-ass of a day. If he’d planned it he couldn’t have screwed things up more.”

  "Do you think he did?”

  "Planned it? Anything’s possible, with him.”

  Not the tack you took when you were hot for me to give him driving lessons. But it wasn’t the time to go into that. Particularly when I had much worse to put on the table. "On the drive here he said he had money problems. He sounded like his deal with the Adamés is falling through.”

  "Shit! Shit! Oh shit!” Jed glared at me. "Why didn’t you let the bastard drown? We’ve got insurance. He’s dead, he’s golden.”

  Did Mac know that? Was that what he was doing? His own "one decent thing”? Or, like he said, was it all about feeling used?

  "Did he clue in Harmon?”

  The real producer? "Doubt it. Sounded like he was blurting it out for the first time.”

  "Shit!” he repeated. "Yeah, okay, I gotta call Harmon. He can go over to the hospital with me. He can sort out this mess.”

  I nabbed some dry clothes from costumes—a halter top and cargo pants—caught Jed before he headed off, and guilted him out of his black jacket. "I have to get some soup before I deal with the car. You want to come?” But he only scowled, not even bothering to answer.

  I stopped to buy the thickest T-shirt in the tackle shop—Berzerkely Marina it said under a drawing of a boat with hippies on the deck and protest signs for sails. I wondered how many decades they’d been praying for some tourist to take it off their hands. I inside-outed it and hoped the colors would run in the wash.

  After that, I downed a bowl of clam chowder. Shane, the tow driver, was waiting for me.

  "You know that tow lot on Folsom—the wrecking yard?”

  "Granger’s? Yeah, we got an arrangement with them. You want to—”

  "Our garage is a couple blocks from there.”

  He shrugged. As I climbed into the cab he said what I’d already learned: "Most people have no idea how shallow the bay is.”

  It was a lousy, stupid ending for Mac. Maybe if I’d known him before I would have suspected he was flipping out these last couple days when he plopped into the car on the set and refused to leave, when he offered me a fortune that he knew he didn’t have—sheesh!

  But now, as I leaned back against the padded seat in the warm tow truck cab, with the faded tobacco smell and Elvis strumming through the speakers and the San Francisco skyline growing larger as we crossed the bridge, there was nothing separating me from a long hot bath and a very big meal other than getting home. Well, except for opening the garage and guiding Shane as he lowered the sodden old Civic into it. So I could toy with compassion. Now, instead of Macomber Dale, the annoying threat to my employment, and Jed’s and my relationship with the city film commission, the threat to my whole future, I dipped my toe in the picture of a man losing not only his money but his self-image. A guy facing humiliation, helplessness, ridicule. A man sufficiently unhinged to lock onto the only escape he could find—to drown himself in the bay.

  The problem was, I wasn’t through with being pissed off. I looked out the windshield at the streets of the outer Mission and felt myself at one with universal grumpiness. You couldn’t get more cranky than I felt. But this strange contract with Varine, I needed to get to the bottom of that. Despite his many infuriating qualities, Dale did not seem th
reatening, dangerous, hardly worth killing yourself for.

  Then again, a couple hours ago I wouldn’t have been able to imagine him undermining the movie or driving into the bay.

  "This is it?” Shane stopped across the street from the ramshackle garage. "I thought there was money in filmmaking.”

  There’s nothing like seeing something through the eyes of a stranger to make you realize how well you’d been deluding yourself.

  "Yeah, well, my dad got a deal on it years ago and every so often it comes in handy. Like now.”

  He was staring. "Even this, you could sell it. I mean, property in San Francisco . . .”

  "Shane, I’ve got six brothers and sisters, and a mother. Making a decision about anything at all, ever, is a miracle. Trust me, it’s not worth the effort.”

  I opened the door, jumped down to the sidewalk, and walked across the street, pausing only momentarily to let a truck by. Next to our garage on one side was an auto repair shop—closed and dark. The stucco block on the other side—a mate in decrepitude to ours—hadn’t been occupied in ages. If my brother Gary didn’t need to park one of his extra cars here, I could leave the junker to rot through eternity.

  I jiggled the lock, the doors fell open, and I motioned to Shane. I had the feeling he wanted me to turn on the light, but we hadn’t paid for electricity here for, well, ever. As I watched him backing up the truck, I realized that the garage’s main function in our family was as a talisman to my father’s memory.

  The taillights outlined the piles of dried-up paint cans and cardboard boxes.

  "Wait a minute!” I didn’t remember the stuff being so far into the room. If I shoved—

  "Omigod! Omigod! No!”

  35

  I bent down over the body, squinting against the dim light and deep shadows in the back of the garage. Time slowed like cells in a reel of film. I saw a person lying face down in the pile of rags. A woman in a latte-brown suit. Just a woman—it didn’t have to be her. Her knees were bent, her shins covered in black boots with brown trim. The clothes Marc, the bellman, had described—anyone could have walked through the hotel lobby, spotted them, bought them. It didn’t have to be her.