Fireball Read Free Page A

develop by pumping tons of weights without actually doing anything else. One wore a pair of shiny Diesel swim trunks that probably cost about five hundred bucks. The other had on this raunchy little Speedo, so tight you could practically see his balls popping out the sides. I glanced over at Chris, just to see what he thought. He sat and watched them, the smoke dangling from his lips, his face totally blank.
    In the shallows across from us these Barbie-doll blondes were cheering them on.
    â€˜That’s wicked, guys!’
    â€˜Come on, just one more!’
    It wouldn’t have been so bad, except you could tell they were only shouting to get everybody else’s attention. So their boyfriends were jumping Cooks. So fucking what? It wasn’t like they were the first people to ever jump it. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the girls pulled a camcorder out of their beach bag, to record this great event. Every time the guys swaggered out of the water following a jump, they’d give each other a high-five and say something stupid into the camera, something like, ‘How about another one, babe?’ It was like watching two guys masturbate in public. Seriously. There was no stopping them.
    Finally, Chris decided to put an end to it.
    He stood up. He didn’t look like those guys at all. He was almost scrawny, his skin pulled tight over hard knots of muscle. Without saying anything, he flicked his smoke in the water and made his way up the cliffs. Everybody was already looking that way. Now the audience was all his. The steroid monkeys and their girlfriends stopped goofing around to watch. When he reached Cooks, he climbed up onto the stump. There was a moment – this moment when everybody sensed that something insane was going to happen – and then it did.
    â€˜Holy shit!’
    He jumped stomach first, his arms and legs spreadeagled like a skydiver. He hung in that position as he dropped through the air. At the last possible second, he bent at the waist and pulled his arms and legs in, pointing them straight down at the water. That was how he hit: jacknifing through the surface without making any splash at all. When he surfaced, there was no hooting or cheering or applauding. The canyon suddenly went all quiet, like a funeral parlour – just the way Chris liked it. He’d pulled a suicide off Cooks. Nobody did that. Superfly, sure. Logs, maybe. But Cooks? You’d have to be insane to try it. That’s what all those people were thinking as they watched Chris slosh over to the bank. The thing is, Chris didn’t give a shit about impressing them. Like I said, he hated show-offs almost as much as he hated turtlenecks. He was just sick of those guys and their screeching girlfriends.
    One of them said, ‘That was pretty slick, man.’
    Chris looked at him, in that way of his, and the guy shut up.
    After that they put their camera away.

    The rest of the afternoon was perfect. By ‘perfect’ I mean that nothing spectacular happened at all. We burned a fat one and joked around – totally mellow. A couple of girls came over, wanting to get high. They were pretty cute, actually, but they turned out to be harsh gnats. Eventually we gave up talking to them and just made fun of them until they left. Then we munched out on this giant bag of nachos. Also, I think we went to get some pop from the gas station on the way home. I don’t really know. But basically, that’s the last time I can remember feeling normal. The next day we went down to the beach at Cates Park instead of the river. We did that sometimes, for a change. Now I wish we hadn’t, of course.
    But there’s no use thinking like that.

    5

    After everything that had happened to us, there was no way Chris was going to let Bates arrest him. Fuck that. It all seems sort of inevitable now, but it wasn’t like we planned it or anything. We didn’t know Bates was going to turn up at the beach