High Fall by Susan Dunlap

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 understood 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