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.
