I yelled and yelled at Maggot to wait up, but he’d taken his shirt off and wrapped that and his ponytail around his head like a turban, for reasons only a Maggot brain could know, and didn’t hear me. Hammer I couldn’t even see anymore.
I started looking for an escape hatch from all the water, but options were slim. Drown, or fly. Cliffs rose on both sides of the trail, walls of layered rock like giant sandwiches piled with their hard black ham and cheese. Down here it was all woods and creek, and up on top of the cliffs, more woods, deep and dark. Pines and laurel slicks, poison mushrooms, pillows of moss.
I would have turned around then, if not for two guys that came running down the path towards me. Not Hammer, not Maggot. They were shirtless and shoeless, carrying their bundled wet clothes and running in that dicey crisscrossed way people do over rocky ground, whooping. At each other or the rain or the windmills of their minds, whoop-whoop. I recognized them from the days of dragging Main and Fast Forward trotting me out to meet his former General brothers. One had the praying hands tattoo on his shoulder. They stopped whooping and yelled at me that my friends were up ahead. Thanks, guys. I thought they might have raptured.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Is Fast Forward with you?”
“He’s still back at the waterfall,” the one said, and Praying Hands clarified that it was two of them still back there, Fast Forward and Big Bear. And I said, Where goest the QB, there goes his left tackle, and they laughed and said, Yeah, still married, those two. Praying Hands was squinting at me through his wet eyelashes.
“I’ve seen you on the field, right? You used to be like a backup receiver or something, years ago. Cornerback?”
I didn’t have the heart to go into it. Plus, this bee was in my brain about it being a trap laid by Fast Forward, versus pure accidental nightmare pileup of bad choices. I asked what made them come swimming on a day like this. They said four guys with shit for brains are stupider than one, and laughed like that was the best joke ever, which it wasn’t. It’s a well-known fact. Signs pointing to accidental nightmare pileup.
I couldn’t get a lot more out of them. Only that Fast Forward was still messing around at the waterfall, wanting to climb some ridiculous rock face. First he’d stripped naked and said he was going to dive in, which was madness, it was too much flood for swimming. Then he started climbing the cliff. They got fed up with him peacocking his ass around and were going back to the truck where they had dry dope. Fast Forward stayed, and Big Bear wouldn’t leave him. Ever-faithful Big Bear. They invited me to come with them to the land of dry dope, and believe me the call was strong. But Maggot and Hammer were out in this mess. I’d spent half my life trying to save Maggot from his nonsense, and now we’d gotten Hammer tangled up in it. I was the responsible party.
I finally caught up to them, even though it came down to scooting on my butt. The last stretch of trail was no more than a slick, butt-wide track in the damn cliff face above the roaring creek. Then it took me a second to understand this was it, I was there. Maggot was sitting on the bank ahead of me, rocking, holding his big wet shirt-wrapped head in his hands. Hammer was screaming. Standing on a rock with the water roaring around him like some type of Moses shit, the rifle still slung over his shoulder aimed at the sky, not a person, thank God. But Hammer himself was cocked, ready to go off. I saw nobody else around, no Big Bear, no Fast Forward, and couldn’t get why he was screaming his lungs out at this roaring bathtub of hell. Of all the tubs I’d feared in my day, none came close. This was a giant round hole carved out of smooth rock, maybe forty feet across, with water pouring in. A long, high waterfall at the back end was spraying at us full blast down a long stone chute like a freaking waterslide. But water also flooded in from the sides and roiled around in the hole like a giant washing machine. A rope swing dangled above the roar, suggesting happier times where this was a place to swim. Right now you wouldn’t wish it on your dirty clothes. And into that madness, Hammer was pouring all the hate he could get out of his lungs, Fucking asshole you’re not good enough to touch a hair on her head you don’t deserve to breathe the same air you fucking animal.
The animal was Fast Forward. It took me that long to work out there was a waterfall here above the waterfall. And high above that on the cliff stood the spectacle of him, naked, sure enough. The dark wet mop of hair and ripped abs and pubes and dick, that careless showoff attitude of body-flaunting that comes out of years in a locker room. He was a lean, pale slash balanced high over us in the dark woods. Behind him, black trees and sky and thunder having its war around us. I wondered if his friends had run off with his clothes, but no, I saw the jeans and shirt down below in a wet pile. He’d stripped, probably just peacocking like they said and not really planning to swim, and then got excited about something to mount.