Page 105 of Demon Copperhead

I rolled down the window and yelled hey.

Not sure why rain makes you yell across six feet of distance, but it does.

Poor Hammer, a drowned cat could not have looked more pitiful.

Rain dripping off his nose, white T-shirt soaked like a second skin so his nipples and chest hair showed through.

He pushed the wet flop of hair out of his eyes and stared at us, and I saw he was not a sober man.

He had tools out but seemed stuck as far as next steps.

I got out, assuming Rose would go on and leave us.

She must have been watching her rear view, because she backed up.

I yelled at her that we’d have to make it some other time.

But she said no, she’d wait, because how long could it take for three stooges to change one tire.

It was quickly down to one stooge. I sent Hammer looking for something to wedge the tires on the opposite side, which he did, while I set the jack.

But then Maggot yelled for him to come get in the Impala, and he did.

I could see Maggot getting out the goods in there.

Of all casualties of the Emmy/Fast Forward disaster, the sorriest one was Hammer.

He’d said he wasn’t going to get over her, and was keeping his word.

Getting ripped with him had become one of our pastimes, to the point of Hammer being one woeful, weepy shitfaced fucker.

The guy did not hold his liquor. The downside to his keeping so much on the straight and narrow through his formative years: no conditioning.

I’d warned Maggot against getting him into anything stronger, at least till he got his training wheels off.

But at that moment while I was pulling the lug nuts off his flat, I saw him snorting crank from the dash of my Impala.

Rose saw it too. She never missed a trick.

I was unthrilled to be out there by myself changing Hammer’s tire in a frog-strangling rain, and coming to understand why this was called Dry Creek Road.

It was a creek bed. Not dry at this time.

Muddy water gushed all around me and under the car, getting me worried about whether the jack would hold.

I got the tire off and the spare on, lickety-split, but then, goddamn it to hell, the lug nuts.

I’d set them out in a neat line right next to the hubcap, as you do.

Now they were nowhere, and the hubcap was bobbing away like a fucking duck.

I got frantic, cursing the rain, feeling around with both hands under the rushing water, trying to find lug nuts in the wet rolling gravel.

Shit, shit, shit, shit. I was aggravated to the point of murder.

Threw open the door of the Impala and yelled for them both to get out there and help me find the fucking lug nuts.

But even if any of us had been sober, it was a lost cause.

Like noodling for crawdads. Our chance of finding crawdads actually in that mess would have been better.

We ended up having to abandon Hammer’s truck.

He could come back later with fresh nuts and a clear head.

At the last second, he remembered to go back and get his rifle off the rack in his truck.

Probably the firearm had more value than the vehicle.

I told Rose we were taking Hammer home, but she said we were only a couple of miles from Fast Forward’s so we could stop there on our way and dry out, smoke a joint to calm our nerves, etc.

Then she took off, throwing a wake like a speedboat.

Hammer lived in Duffield. I wasn’t entirely sure where we were, only that I should get the hell out of that roaring creek, so I followed Rose.

Hammer was in the back seat, in no way clued in to our plan.

He and Fast Forward had only ever met one time, as far as I knew, at June’s party.

That brief shiny moment of Emmy belonging to Hammer, before she was stolen away.

I remembered Fast Forward afterward laughing with Mouse, calling Hammer a chucklehead knuckle dragger.

Nothing good could come from a reintroduction.

The last sober shreds of my brain were saying this: Go home.

And for the thousandth time in a month I answered back: Go home where, to what person?

Useless fuck that I am, who cares. The night I’d found Dori, I hate to say, some part of me was relieved, thinking now I wouldn’t have to worry every minute about her dying.

I thought I’d be better off without the fear.

I was so wrong. Even with nothing else good left between us, that dread made me a person still attached to another person. Nobody needed me anywhere now.

The rain got worse. I’d never seen the like.

We turned onto a side road that was not a running river, but the windshield was blinded out.

I saw the faint red glow of Rose’s lights pulling over and I did the same, thinking she meant to wait out the blitz.

Then her lights went out and I saw the outline of Rose running from her truck towards the outline of a house, and next thing I knew, Maggot was out and running for it too.

We all went. The car felt like a fishbowl we could drown in.

We got to the porch and somebody let us in.

Rose had said the house of “some lady,” and I’d thought, housedress, rent check.

Nope. Her name was Temple, total and complete hotcake.

Short shorts, long blond hair. No love lost between her and Rose, that was plain to see.

But she made over us guys like rescue pups, went and got towels, made hot coffee, set us up in the living room with her bong that was a hippie pottery type of thing.

It turned out she made these herself. Interesting lady, interesting house.

Big old place, not a whole lot of furniture.

Maybe they’d just moved in together. I thought of the Emmy wreckage, and wondered how long he’d take to chew this pretty girl up and spit her out.

She and Rose discussed something in code which obviously was drug business, and Temple said he wasn’t there, he’d gone out driving with Big Bear Howe and some other guys.

She hadn’t gone with them because it was boring as hell, those boys never talked about a thing other than football.

And I thought, Huh, maybe there’s hope for this one.

She said Fast Forward was still catching up with his homeboys since moving back to Generals territory.

They’d gone over to this place on the river they always liked to go, Devil’s Bathtub.

My stomach did a somersault over those words.

Over behind the bong, Hammer’s eyebrows went high, late to the party but finally catching on to who we were discussing.

Rose said it was a hell of a day to go swimming.

Temple said for sure, but it had been pretty as a picture that morning, these summer storms could just blow up out of nowhere. True, all that.

Hammer stood up, knocking over an empty coffee cup, and said we needed to go.

Temple was a little shocked, reaching for the cup.

She said we were welcome to wait out the storm.

And he said, “We’re going now.” Just like that, the whole lifetime of Hammer, polite, bashful boy loved by all, for always doing just what they asked, was over.