Hammer was not letting up. I edged over to Maggot, scared out of my mind. I could lose my footing and slide in. I squatted next to him and leaned close. “What’s going on?”

  “Hammer said to get his naked ass down here because he had a crow to pick. And then he said the girl wasn’t worth either of their trouble. He was trash-talking Emmy up there.”

  Shit.

  Hammer carried on screaming, and Fast Forward ruled in silence, standing above us with his head cocked back in his everlasting question: Is that all you’ve got? I couldn’t see Hammer’s face but his body was shaking, hands and arms. From the cold, from the crank wearing off, from the pin pulled out of the Hammer grenade. Maggot leaned towards me till our shoulders touched.

  “Remember that dog Stoner had? How he’d shake meat in its face to get it in a rage?”

  “Hammer’s not Satan,” I said. I had to believe it. Frothing at the mouth at this moment, but not a killer. I spoke to him the way I would talk to a dog, saying his name as level as I could, over and over. Hammer. Chill out man. Hammer. He’s got nothing. This will be okay. Hammer. We’re getting out of here. Hammer. But there was so much sound, the roaring falls and thunder. My own blood rushing my ears. I have no idea what Hammer heard. If he heard me at all.

  What happened in the next ten seconds is so clear in my head. Hammer looking back at us, then shifting his weight. Losing his balance I thought, but no, just slinging that heavy rifle off his shoulder and lifting it in both hands. Then, the red flag of a shirt appearing out of the woods way off to the right of Fast Forward. A person, big, scared, nowhere and then there, just in time to see the man and the rifle and scream, “Drop! Fucker’s going to take you out!”

  The terror in that voice is what did it. Coming from Big Bear, steadfast guard of his blind side. Nothing we could have done would have rattled Fast Forward, not words or even gunfire, but that voice warning him from offsides jolted the naked QB a quarter turn, enough to lose his footing and start to slide. The coordinated body going for its longest shot, center of gravity automatically dropping, arms close in, knees in a half crouch, Jesus, the terrible beauty of it, and then he lost control. As a rolling ball of limbs he could have saved himself, bones and flesh flailing down that slope of rock onto more rock, maybe a branch to break the fall, it would have been ugly and might have worked, but pride in the end made the call. He opened and pushed off in a dive, piked, head down, arms open, a reach for the water, fumbled. The contact sounded not very different from a watermelon on pavement.

  After that, I don’t know. I must have tried to get to Hammer and hold him back. Big Bear was still up in the cliffs. And Fast Forward, across the water from us, was a naked nothing facedown on rock. Legs in the water, one thigh-deep and the other slung out, submerged to the knee. An ugly arrangement of limbs he would not have allowed in life. That’s how I knew. All the magic that made him had gone out of him. And Hammer now was yelling at me. His face was a flat wall of shock and he was talking about the rifle, saying he was just going to put it down. Jesus, did he think I was going to shoot? I wasn’t going to shoot, I was laying it down, I was going to climb up there. Jesus, Demon. Saying it was his fault, saying the guy was hurt, sliding in over there, unconscious, we had to get him back from the water. I told Hammer to stay where he was. I could see more of the broken head I think than the others.

  But Hammer was having no dead men here. He couldn’t let that be. He said it three times, maybe four, I’m not letting a man die, and then he was in the water while Maggot and I screamed no and no and no. No to all of it. Hammer in that white roar like an explosion and the rest of us losing everything, time, hope, our frothing wrecked minds. He was close to these rocks he’d jumped off of, and then he wasn’t. His head and shoulders bobbed up out of the water, went down, and came up again, once I saw Hammer’s eyes open wide, straight at me, he came up and then he didn’t. We heard thunder, far away. And then Big Bear was there with us, he’d gotten down the slope and across some way, he must have run back downstream to a place he could get over because now he was here, panting like a wild animal. All of us making those kinds of noises, howling at the water and death and Hammer, begging him to show up again.

  He did, on the rocks downstream. I saw his white T-shirt down there, the broad back, legs pummeled by the current. The push of the water was slowly turning his long body like a compass needle, from sideways to straight downstream, aligned with its terrible force.

  The other body didn’t move. The naked one. I made myself look, and it must have scarred my eyes because I can still see every goddamn line of it, the unnatural angle of arm, the smooth, hard quads, glutes like a pair of onions. The well-oiled machine he’d worked so hard to keep, a long time after it really mattered. What a waste, a dead body, with most of its parts still ready and eager to work. The final humiliation of a man, that last layoff.

  There was no arguing about who would go for help. Maggot and Big Bear could pound the trail and the crossings, double time. There was somebody’s phone in the Lariat. They could drive out and find a signal. The emergency rescue team that arrived, because in time it did, close to nightfall on the longest of all my days, would bring three stretchers. One for each of the bodies, one for me. I was reported among the casualties. I did the hard part, staying behind.

  As soon as they were gone, I edged myself over to the Marlin and kicked it down the devil’s damn throat. It sank like the carbon steel pipe it was. All the careful hours Hammer spent waxing and bluing that piece, what a waste. I actually thought that. A blown brain will reach for any sideshow to dodge the main event. The rifle had played no real part, but a weapon hanging around these situations never helps, so. I kicked that one down the road.

  With the Marlin drowned, I scooted back down the cliff path to a spot where I could crab-walk over boulders to the other side. Then made my way to the gravel shoal where I could drag Hammer onto dryer land. All I could see were the years that body still had in it, should have had. For all the people that counted on his help. For finding some sweet girl to have his kids. He would have been the best imaginable dad. All the Hammer I could see, backs of his arms, hands, the back of his neck, was the color of carbon steel. I made myself feel his wrist. The flesh felt too hard, not human anymore. Like if a pulse had even been in there, it wouldn’t get through. Dead bodies are nothing new to me, I kept telling myself. This is no hill for a climber. My mom in her white casket. Dori in our bed. I’d sat alone with Dori for over an hour before I let the rest of the world come. But however heartbroken I’d been that day, I knew Dori was where she needed to be. Hammer was not. This was a body robbed of all its righteous goods.

  I hauled the waterlogged bulk out of the water, then stopped to take off my shirt and slip it under his head because I didn’t want his face sanded off by the dragging. Mrs. Peggot would have to see him. June, Ruby, all of them. I had to save his face. Eventually I got him over to the same stone ledge where the other body was. Hammer’s enemy. I hated them being on the same rock, once I had him there. By no means laid out side by side, still ten feet apart, but even that was too close. It felt like the one might contaminate the other. Different materials.

  I didn’t have the guts to turn them faceup. I knew their eyes would be open, and it felt possible they might watch me huddled up on that ledge, choking out pieces of lung, it felt like, such was my rage and grief and stupid regret. I think I knew, even then, such things are not survivable. For any of us. Nobody could have seen what was coming next for Maggot. But I’d spent enough seasons on the field to know what Big Bear was in for. The peace he might never make with himself. All because he had to take a piss. He’d gone up into the woods and got lost. Beat around the laurel hells, then emerged at a crazy wrong moment. Followed his best instincts to the worst of all possible ends.

  I should have been the one to jump in the water. If it had to be done, then me, not Hammer. I’ll never believe anything else. It’s the one good promise I ever got. Not drowning.

  59

  The world had turned some by the time they got us all out. The sheriff drove over to tell Ruby in person. Hammer’s dad would have to be called, wherever he lived. Texas. Maggot called June, and she drove over to tell Mrs. Peggot. Fast Forward had no next of kin, so I can’t say who got the call, but Rose Dartell was waiting beside the Lariat to see him come down the trail. She went crazy and threw herself on the men she thought were carrying him, but they actually had Hammer. The bodies were well wrapped up.

  Rose seemed not to realize one of the stretchers was me. My face wasn’t covered but they had a thermal blanket over me, so I passed for a body. The first responder that carried my head end was named Nathan. Rock-solid guy, talked me down from the spookiness of being strapped in like that, levitating over rocky ground and roaring water. Embarrassing. I wasn’t technically injured, just a lot worse for wear. They had two ambulances, and Nathan said I was going into one of them, period. They were duty bound to send me to the hospital and get me treated for exposure. I didn’t know what all that entailed. I definitely had been exposed to some shit.

  Both bodies went in the other ambulance. Different timetables, no rush on those guys. So Hammer had to take his last ride with the bastard that stole his woman and ruined his life. I was sick over that, and shaken up, and trying to get my keys to somebody that could drive my Impala out of there. That was the point where Rose figured out I was body number three and came at me, screaming while they were loading me into the ambulance. Banging her flat hands on the windows after I was inside. They had to pull her off the vehicle.

  Maggot rode with me in the ambulance, both of us shaking hard, coming down from our different places. He slipped me a Xanax to tide me over. Then after I got to the hospital, what do you know, the nurse asked me for my pain number and brought me an oxy in a little frilly white paper cup. VIP service. God bless her. She said they were keeping me overnight for observing, but I did very little worth watching. Drank a gallon or so of Gatorade, put a very similar output in a plastic measuring cup. I did such an excellent job with my pain numbers, they doped me out for a cracking good night’s sleep. Easiest test I ever aced.

  In the morning a different nurse checked on me, and said I had a visitor. Was I up for seeing my sister, she wanted to know, and my heart jumped up, thinking that would be Angus. Shit. It was Rose. All set to go hunting, from the look of her. Camo pants, black windbreaker. She pushed back the hood and hissed at me: “Fucking murderer.”

  I hit the nurse button to report an impostor, but they must have had people around there to save. Rose strode back and forth, in dire need of a cigarette, I could tell. After about ten trips around the room she shucked off her rain jacket and dumped herself into the La-Z-Boy they had for visitors. “Tell me exactly what happened,” she said.

  “Sounds like you’ve already got your version worked out.”

  “Where’s the rifle,” she asked.

  I said what rifle, and reminded her nobody got shot. Terrible accident, period.

  She jumped up and started pacing again. I had cravings of my own, to go anyplace on earth other than back there in my head. It was easy enough here in the hospital, complete other world that it is. Clean as a whistle, all the drugs without the dark underbelly. I’d only ever been in the waiting room part of a hospital before, waiting for a stomach to get pumped. In here it was crowded and empty, clean and smelly, all at once. Pine-Sol, locker room, traces of pee. Rose had her own smell, flinty and sour with cigarette smoke, like she’d been pacing like this all night.

  “I need to know exactly how it happened,” she said. “How it was for him at the end.”

  I was too woozy for a fight. I told the truth, but just the point plays, like a football game recap. He climbed up a high cliff. Big Bear yelled and surprised him. He slipped and fell.

  “Why would Big Bear do that?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Because he’s gone over to Turp Trussell’s and drank himself into a coma.”

  I suggested she should do the same. She stared at me. Then shook her head and looked out the window. There wasn’t any view, just gray sky and clouds. I could hear the cackly gossip of some crows outside, making their deals on the roof somewhere close by.

  “That wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen,” she finally said.

  “What the hell does that mean? You’ve got it all written out, how everybody dies?”

  She went on staring at me until I felt my feet and hands go cold.

  “Son of a bitch. You’re saying it was planned. You knew he was not at the house. What the fuck, Rose? I never wanted to go to the Devil’s damn Bathtub. I mean never, in my life.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to turn into Noah’s goddamn ark.”

  “Why? He knew I hated that place.”

  She shrugged her skinny shoulders. But he did. Stoned boys tell their secrets, and Fast Forward had long known mine. I tried to get more out of her, what the hell he’d wanted from me, some proof-of-manhood thing, facing down my father’s death, nothing there made any sense, and she wasn’t giving it up. Maybe she didn’t know. None of us ever would, now.

  “You guys screwed it up by bringing Hammer,” is all she would say. Then she jumped up to pace around some more. Interrogation over. She went to the other side of the room and nosed around without touching anything. They had somebody else in the room with me, hidden behind a brown curtain, but I’d heard zero out of them all night. Another dead body, for all I knew. Rose came back and dropped into the chair. “You all are accessories to a death.”

  “He fell, Rose. Climbed too high for his own good, end of story.”

  “Not him. I mean Hammer.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The deceased had taken illegal drugs. Supplied to him by you.”

  “You weren’t even there. Get over yourself.”

  “Oh, I saw. Earlier in the day.”

  I made myself sort back through it. Okay, that. “You saw me helping a stranded motorist.”

  “I saw him hoovering meth in your Camaro.”

  I laughed out loud. “Star witness, doesn’t know an Impala from a Camaro.”

  “Whatever.” She chewed on her thumbnail, watching the door. “I know what I saw. If you’re the supplier of drugs and somebody dies, it’s a felony. I know that for a fact.”

  “What you saw was me out in the rain trying to change my friend’s tire. If anybody goes looking, they’ll find a drug in Hammer that I haven’t touched but once in eighth grade. Anybody around here can back that up, so don’t try lying. Just leave me out of it.”

  I rolled over and turned my back on her. I’d heard of this, about supplying drugs to somebody that gets in trouble. The trouble being in this case death. She had nothing on me, but she could nail Maggot. I felt rage building up in my gut. She didn’t leave. Nobody came to take my temperature. It came down to whether I could hold off exploding longer than Rose could go without nicotine. I lost. I sat up and yelled at her. “Why do you have to kick the fucking hornet’s nest? You think the Peggots aren’t punished enough? Hammer died trying to fucking save that snake-assed bastard. You want to cry over him, knock yourself out. But you’re not good enough to clean Hammer’s shoes.” She sat through all this with no expression at all. Asked if I was done. Said this was not about Hammer, it was about the rest of us. She’d lost everything, and now she had to make sure we all knew how that felt. And then she got emotional, pulling out wads of Kleenex and blowing her nose. She said losing Fast Forward was like dying herself.

  I tried to pull up the sheet. They had me wearing a stupid dress thing with snaps. “For fuck’s sake, Rose. Look how he treated you. He was cruel to everybody that ever knew him.”

  She said I didn’t understand him. But I did. Fast Forward had a beautiful poison inside him that infected people and got them hooked. I told her it was bound to end this way because Fast Forward was a dangerous animal, and they aren’t known to have long lives.

  Rose didn’t deny that. But she could have been the one to save him. She looked straight at me with her wrecked face full of tears and madness and swore that’s what she believed. That the scar he’d put on her was his way of making sure Rose would belong to him for life.

  I’d watched Hammer Kelly die, and now I had to see it all over again with every Peggot that came through the door saying, Lord, it can’t be true, having to hear that it was. I dreaded coming back from the hospital to face the family. But I understood. They needed somebody alive to tell the tale. They were grateful, and didn’t blame me, and we all agreed there would be no getting over this. Hammer was the Peggots’ MVP.

  June came to stay with us at Mrs. Peggot’s, padding around all week in her gray sweatpants, making coffee, making soup beans, running a hand over her mother’s rumpled head. Mrs. Peggot sat dazed at the kitchen table. The rest of the family rolled back and forth in waves between the Peggot house, which was home base, and Ruby’s, where he’d lived. They couldn’t plan a funeral, still waiting for final say from Hammer’s Texas relatives as to where the body was to end up. Hammer’s dad hadn’t visited in an age, and we’d pretty much forgotten about him having blood kin. But that’s who holds the cards in the end. The Peggots were stuck, not able to move forward with the normal death matters of cooking and drinking. It was all just loose ends and talk. Like if they hashed through it enough times, they might get to a different ending.