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.