Deliverance (3 page)

Thad asked the girl to stand up. Her feet were strong-toed and healthy and a little tomboyish; I would have bet money that she came from a farm. She had a fine, open, gray-eyed face with a few freckles. She was somebody I didn’t mind looking in the eyes. And straight into them, too, so that if she’d permit it, the look would go deep. I did this, because on the spur of the moment I wanted to. There was a peculiar spot, a kind of tan slice, in her left eye, and it hit me with, I knew right away, strong powers; it was not only recallable, but would come back of itself. One hand, also strong and quiet, was holding the throat of her robe closed, and she put her head back — very far back, almost like an acrobat — and shook her hair so that it hung free of her neck. All at once two more secretaries materialized like nurses or prison matrons, all revolving around the model. Thad had her stand in the chalk marks from around which we had cleared the newspapers. Her feet gripped the cold cork floor. She held out her arms, and Wilma slipped off her robe. She had soft long legs, not as muscular as I would have thought, with those feet, but very shapely and harmonious, though it struck me that they were not firm enough to last for long. Her bare back had a helpless, undeveloped look about it, and this seemed to me more womanly and endearing than anything else about her except her eye. She filled the Kitt’n Britches well enough, but there was nothing especially provocative about the way she did it; she might have been
Someone’s sister, and that was not at all the effect we wanted. Not knowing exactly how I wanted to change the pose, or if it could be changed, I stepped over and touched her.

She turned and looked into my face at close range, and the gold-glowing mote fastened on me; it was more gold than any real gold could possible be; it was alive, and it saw me. Standing this close, she changed completely; she looked like someone who had come to womanhood in less than a minute. Her hands were folded across her breasts in a way that managed to give the effect of casualness, and Max was not quite sure of how to hand her the cat. She took it with one hand, and in doing so, protecting herself with the other, she simply took her left breast in her hand, and the sight of that went through me, a deep and complex male thrill, as if something had touched me in the prostate. She fixed her feet in the marks, wavering for a moment throwing light off her shoulders, the filaments of the bulbs spitting and buzzing about her, and then seemed to settle.

We got what Thad thought might be some good stuff, though he really didn’t believe, he said, that the girl was good enough to use again. I went back to the office and did something I hadn’t done since the early days of the studio. I brainstormed with myself for the rest of the afternoon. Nothing much came of it, but my mind was jumping quickly from one thing to another, and the associations were very good ones. I left a sheaf of roughs with Thad and told him I needed Friday off to do some work around the house. He didn’t argue with me. We had made it as it was; we had made it.

          T
HERE WAS SOMETHING
about me that usually kept me from dreaming, or maybe kept me from remembering what I had dreamed; I was either awake or dead, and I always came back slowly. I had the feeling that if it were perfectly quiet, if I could hear nothing, I would never wake up. Something in the world had to pull me back, for every night I went down deep, and if I had any sensation during sleep, it was of going deeper and deeper, trying to reach a point, a line or border.

This time the wind woke me, and I dragged upward and tried, with the instinct of survival, to get clear of where I had been, one more time. I was used to hearing Martha’s breath bring me back, for she breathed heavily, but this time it was the wind. First the wind by itself and then the wind ringing a little set of metal figures on strings that Martha had put out on the patio — bronze figures of birds surrounding an owl which, because of a long wind vane attached to him, moved when the air moved and touched the others, making a chiming sound something like the one made by the Chinese glass wind-bells that everybody used to have in the thirties, when
I was growing up. It was a small, inconstant sound, a lovely sound, I always thought, and as I came up from the sleep-dark to the real dark of the room, I had an idea that it might evoke something, and I lay with the room becoming actual around me, in the dark, beside my wife, in a body.

I reached for Martha, as I always did, and her head stirred under the towel she wore at night. I held her shoulder lightly, and it was then I remembered I was going with Lewis. The routine I was used to pulled at me, but something in me rose daringly above it, full of fear and feeling weak and incompetent but excited. I took Martha in my arms to see if she would try to get away and back to sleep, or come to me for warmth, and then go back.

She was a thin girl whom I had married fifteen years before; she had been working as a surgical nurse. The fact that she might or might not be pretty did not occur to me at all, though friends, without great enthusiasm or conviction, used to tell me she was. But the question of beauty, beyond certain very obvious considerations, never really interested me in women; what I looked for and felt for was the spark, the absolutely personal connection, and when I found a genuine form of it, small but steady, I had married it. There was nothing to regret about this, and I didn’t regret it. She was a good wife and a good companion, a little tough, but with a toughness that got things done. She was genuinely proud of my being vice-president of a company, and she insisted on believing that I had talent as an artist, though I had none. I was a mechanic of the graphic arts, and when I could get the problem to appear mechanical to me, and not the result of inspiration, I could do something with it. On this principle
I had done a few big collage-things for the living room, made from torn-up posters, movie magazines, sports headlines and the like. And that, as far as art was concerned, was it. Remembering these, I thought that it might be that Martha cared for them not so much because I had done them, but because they represented some side of me she didn’t know. But it was a wrong faith on her part, and, though I never told her how I felt, I never encouraged it. I drew on her, and she slid to me.

“What time is it?” she said.

“Six,” I said, looking at the frail hands of the clock by the bed as they pulsed and glowed. “Lewis is coming by at a little before six-thirty.”

“What do you have to do to get ready?” she asked.

“Not much. Just throw on my old nylon flying suit and put on some tennis shoes. And, when Lewis comes, load up the back of his car with my stuff. There isn’t much, but I’ve got it all ready. I piled it out in the living room after you went to bed.”

“Do you
really
want to go, baby?”

“It’s not something I’m dying to do,” I said. “And I won’t die if I don’t do it. But the studio is really bugging me. I had a terrible time yesterday, until I got down to doing some work. It seemed like everything just went right by me, nothing mattered at all. I couldn’t have cared less about anything or anybody. If going up in the woods with Lewis does something about that feeling, I’m for it.”

“Is it my fault?”

“Lord, no,” I said, but it partly was, just as it’s any woman’s fault who represents normalcy.

“I wish you didn’t have to go off like this. I mean, didn’t
want
to. I wish there was something I could do.”

“There is.”

“Have we got time?”

“We’ll make time. There’s nothing Lewis has to offer that matters all that much. He can wait. I don’t feel like I can.”

We lay entangled like lovers.

“Lie on your back,” she said.

She had great hands; they knew me. There was something about the residue of the nursing in her that turned me on: the practical approach to sex, the very deliberate and frank actions that give pleasure to people. The blood in me fell and began to rise in the dark, moving with her hands and the slight cracking of the lubricant. Martha put a pillow in the middle of the bed, threw back the covers with a windy motion and turned facedown on the pillow. I knelt and entered her, and her buttocks rose and fell. “Oh,” she said. “Oh yes.”

It was the heat of another person around me, the moving heat, that brought the image up. The girl from the studio threw back her hair and clasped her breast, and in the center of Martha’s heaving and expertly working back, the gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.

    I went to the bathroom and stood with my eyes closed and flowed. When my bladder was empty I pulled a robe around me, looking in the side-lighted mirror, which shone far up into the thinnest of my hair, unerringly finding the part of it that was receding the most rapidly and shadowed the under-part
of my eyes in a way that made me know that they would never again be as they had been. Aging with me was going to come on fast. And yet I had good shoulders, and my hips and belly were heavy but solid. The hair was thick on my chest and across the top of my back, like an oxbow, and in the light some of it glowed a soft gray, like monkey fur.

If I had had my choice of looking like any man, or combination of men on earth, or in history, I would not have known how to make it. I suppose I got some of this attitude from Lewis, who exercised incessantly but only had two or three suits for each season. Clothes were not a mystique with him, but his body was. “It’s what you can make it do,” he would say, “and what it’ll do for you when you don’t even know what’s needed. It’s that conditioning and reconditioning that’s going to save you.” “Save me?” I asked Lewis. “Save me from what? Or
for
what?” And yet Lewis approved of me at least enough to associate with me; I was probably his best friend. He had taught me how to shoot a bow, and I was fairly good. Lewis said I was unusually steady, and I could hold on a point almost as well as he could. My trouble was in judging distances, and Lewis didn’t believe that archery with a sight, that is, archery that was not purely instinctive, was really archery. On a field round I scored consistently in the 160’s for fourteen targets. Lewis was around 230, and had gone as high as 250. It was a real pleasure to watch him shoot, and to see the care that he took with his equipment, which he made himself, strings and all.

In the living room it was half-lit dark. The moon was gone from the floor and windows. I stood looking at one of
the few dawns I had seen in the last ten years, and Martha came softly into the room in a frilled gown and continued on past me into the kitchen. She paused at the door.

“Have you seen Dean anywhere?” she asked.

“What do you mean? Isn’t he in his room?”

My equipment, piled on the floor and dark as solid shade, laughed like Dean, and he rose up from behind it. He had a big Bowie knife in his hand, in the case.

It was odd. It was as though he both knew what the knife was and didn’t know at all, and as he waved it around and threatened me with it — with the greatest love — I was caught in the same curious dance as he, knowing what the knife would do and not believing it for a minute. Finally I took it away from him and pitched it down where he had got it, in the dark of the rest of the stuff. It was only then that I felt the chill of the room, and realized that the air was cold as it came from the floor, up from the pile carpet, and that under the robe I was naked.

On top of the air mattress and sleeping bag and thin nylon rope lay the knife and my bow and four arrows. The rope I had bought on impulse at an army surplus store, mainly because Lewis had once told me that you should “never be in the woods without rope.” I picked the bow up off it, enjoying the cold, smooth feel of the recurves. It was a good one; better, probably, than I deserved. It was not one of the standard makes — a Drake, for example, or a Ben Pearson or a Howatt or a Bear — but was homemade from what seemed to be a kind of composite design that ended up by looking and shooting like none of these. The handle section was heavy, and it actually looked like an experimental bow. I had
come to like the weight and depth of the handle, though, and wouldn’t have felt comfortable with anything smaller. Lewis had got it for me secondhand from a former state champion who’d made it, and who shot the same kind of bow, and he kept telling me of advantages which began, as I remember, by seeming completely psychological, but gradually came to seem real ones. There was, in fact, very little hand shock on release. The arrow went off very smoothly, and quietly, too. It had nothing like the snap or kick of Lewis’ bows. The initial tip speed was nothing extra; the first time I shot it I thought it was terribly slow until I checked my point of aim and found that the bow was point-blank at sixty-five yards. When the string was released, the bow seemed to hesitate, and then the limbs gained speed at a terrific rate, and the arrow left the string with the feel of being not so much shot as catapulted. The trajectory was as flat as any bow I’d ever seen, and the left-right problem was not nearly so pronounced as it was in Lewis’ bows. Now, as I held it and looked at it, with its white Gordon-Glas inner and outer faces, it seemed exactly the bow I ought to have. I depended on it and believed in it, though the laminations were beginning to tire a little, letting a few fiber glass splinters half-rise from the edges of the upper limb. I had a new string, too. Unlike Lewis, I used a peep sight in the string, and there I had something really good. Martha and I had separated the Dacron strands, put snap fasteners between them, and Martha had wrapped the separated halves with orange thread. It was a very handsome bowstring, and I enjoyed using it. When the bow was at full draw, the peep sight came naturally back to the eye and the target came to
rest within it, trembling with the effort of the body to keep still. The effect of framing the target was a big advantage, at least to me, for it isolated what was being shot at, and brought it into an oddly intimate relation with the archer. Nothing outside the orange frame existed, and what was inside it was there in a terribly vital and consequential way; it was as though the target were being created by the eye that watched it.

The arrows were not so good, though they would do. They were aluminum, for I shot aluminum target arrows, and I knew from experience that arrows of this spine and length — twenty-nine inches — would shoot accurately out of my bow. They were in a bow quiver taped to the bow, for I wanted to be able to carry everything in one hand, and I had no back quiver anyway. They looked deadly, with their two-bladed Howard Hill broadheads and long yellow helical fletches. I had tried to camouflage them with black and green house paint, making random slashes up and down the shafts, and I had sharpened the heads on one of my neighbors’ emery wheel. That was one thing I had done well, for they were nearly as sharp as new razor blades. They would shave hair, and I had also put on them, with a file, a slight burring roughness, very good for deep cutting, so said the archery magazines. I felt the edge of one of them with a thumb, and then drew back into the light of the hall to see if I had cut myself.

I hadn’t, and I went back to the bedroom, got twenty dollars from my wallet, then walked back out through the living room to the kitchen, where Martha was moving barefooted back and forth in front of the stove, her glasses winking,
and stared out into the backyard. I had my tennis shoes in my hand and sat down on the floor to put them on, still looking out behind the house. The trees there seemed perfectly wild, free objects that only by accident occurred in a domestic setting, and for some reason or other I felt strangely moved. Dean came up behind me and pulled at the leg-back of my flying suit. I picked him up, still looking out at where I lived. Usually children are bored with that sort of thing, not understanding how someone can look where nothing is moving. This time, though, Dean was as quiet as I was, observing what existed. I kissed him and he held me close around the neck. He was not ordinarily an affectionate child, and his acting this way made me nervous. Martha also came up, her face warm from the upcast heat of the stove. I got up, and we stood like a family group.

“Do you know where you’re going?” she said.

“Not exactly. Lewis does. Somewhere up in the northeast part of the state, where he’s been fishing. If everything goes off OK, we ought to be back late Sunday.”

“Why wouldn’t it go off OK?”

“It will, but you can’t predict. Listen, if I thought there was anything dangerous about it, I wouldn’t go. Believe me, I wouldn’t. It’s just a chance to get out a little. And they say the mountains are really beautiful this time of year. I’ll get some pictures, come to think of it.”

I went back to the bedroom once again and picked up a Rolleiflex that belonged to the studio. I also got another bowstring and put it in the leg pocket of my outfit. When I came back, Lewis had driven in. I put one arm around Martha as around a buddy, and then changed and held her
with both hands, locking them, while Dean went around behind her and tried to get them loose. I opened the door, and by that time Lewis was already out of the station wagon, coming and coming at us. His long wolfish face was flushed, and he was grinning. He grinned continually, but other people never got the grin directly, but always just sidelong parts of it, so that there was always an evasive, confident and secret craziness in his look; it was the face of a born enthusiast. He had on an Australian bush hat with a leather chin strap, and I could not help feeling that the occasion was a good one. I picked up the bow and the camera and went out with him to the car.