"Be careful, baldy! Be damn careful! It's really loose underfoot."
Glen came down slowly, moving with great deliberation from one hold to the next. Stu tensed every time he saw loose dirt start to slide out from underneath Glen's battered Georgia Giants. His hair blew like fine silver around his ears in the light breeze that had sprung up. It occurred to him that when he had first met Glen, painting a mediocre picture beside the road in New Hampshire, Glen's hair had still been salt-and-pepper.
Until the moment Glen finally planted his feet on the level ground of the mudflat at the bottom of the gully, Stu was sure he was going to fall and break himself in two. Stu sighed with relief and clapped him on the shoulder.
"No sweat, East Texas," Glen said, and bent to ruffle Kojak's fur.
"Plenty here," Stu told him.
Ralph came next, moving carefully from one hold to the next, lumping the last eight feet or so. "Boy," he said. "That shits just as loose as a goose. Be funny if we couldn't get up that other bank and had to walk four or five miles upstream to find shallower bank, wouldn't it?"
"Be a lot funnier if another flash flood came along while we were looking," Stu said.
Larry came down agilely and well, joining them less than three minutes after they had started down. "Who goes up first?" he asked.
"Why don't you, since you're so perky?" Glen said.
"Sure."
It took him considerably longer to get up, and twice the treacherous footing ran out beneath him and he nearly fell. But finally he gained the top and waved down at them.
"Who's next?" Ralph asked.
"Me," Glen said, and walked across to the other bank.
Stu caught his arm. "Listen," he said. "We can walk upstream and find a shallower bank like Ralph said."
"And lose the rest of the day? When I was a kid, I could have gone up there in forty seconds and registered a pulse-rate under seventy at the top."
"You're no kid now, Glen."
"No. But I think there's still some of him left."
Before Stu could say more, Glen had started. He paused to rest about a third of the way up and then pressed on. Near the halfway point he grabbed an outcrop of shale that crumbled away under his hands and Stu was sure he was going to tumble all the way to the bottom, end over arthritic end.
"Ah, shit - " Ralph breathed.
Glen flailed his arms and somehow kept his balance. He jigged to his right and went up another twenty feet, rested, and then up again. Near the top a spur of rock that he had been standing on tore loose and he would have fallen, but Larry was there. He grabbed Glen's arm and hauled him up.
"Nothing to it," Glen called down.
Stu grinned with relief. "How's your pulse-rate, baldy?"
"Plus ninety, I think," Glen admitted.
Ralph climbed the cut-bank like a stolid mountain goat, checking each hold, shifting his hands and feet with great deliberation. When he reached the top, Stu started up.
Right up until the moment he fell, Stu was thinking that actually this slope was a little easier than the one they had descended. The holds were better, the gradient a tiny bit shallower. But the surface was a mixture of chalky soil and rock fragments that had been badly loosened by the wet weather. Stu sensed that it wanted to be evil, and he went up carefully.
His chest was over the edge when the knob of outcropping his left foot was on suddenly disappeared. He felt himself begin to slide. Larry grabbed for his hand, but this time he missed his grip. Stu grabbed the outjutting edge of the turnpike, and it came off in his hands. He stared at it stupidly for a moment as the speed of his descent began to increase. He discarded it, feeling insanely like Wile E. Coyote. All I need, he thought, is for someone to go beep-beep before I hit the bottom.
His knee struck something, and there was a sudden bolt of pain. He grabbed at the gluey surface of the slope, which was now speeding past him at an alarming rate, and kept coming away with nothing but handfuls of dirt.
He slammed into a boulder sticking out of the rubble like a big blunt arrowhead and cartwheeled, the breath slapped from his body. He fell free for about ten feet, and came down on his lower leg at an angle. He heard it snap. The pain was instantaneous and huge. He yelled. He did a backward somersault. He was eating dirt now. Sharp pebbles scrawled bloody scratches across his face and arms. He came down on the hurt leg again, and felt it snap somewhere else. This time he didn't yell. This time he screamed.
He slid the last fifteen feet on his belly, like a kid on a greasy chute-the-chute. He came to rest with his pants full of mud and his heart beating crazily in his ears. The leg was white fire. His coat and the shirt beneath were both rucked up to his chin.
Broken. But how bad? Pretty bad from the way it feels. Two places at least, maybe more. And the knee's sprung.
Larry was coming down the slope, moving in little jumps that seemed almost a mockery of what had just happened to Stu. Then he was kneeling beside him, asking the question which Stu had already asked himself.