Deliverance (23 page)

  On each side the cliffs began to fall; to fall away. They fell and then got back up again almost as they had been, but their authority was leaving them. Every time they rose it was not quite as high.

  The sun was behind us, and the pressure on my back shoved us forward. I was glad for it; gladder than it is possible to be. But I could not keep my head up. My side was stiff and sopping with blood, and my chin kept ending up on my chest and my eyes were blurring into the bottom of the canoe where Lewis lay with one hand over his eyes. I put a hand on my forehead and tried to pull up my eyelids by lifting the skin of my forehead and keeping it lifted, but I was still asleep, looking at the world as though my eyes were closed. I've got to lie down somewhere, I thought; if I don't I will fall back into the river.

  That seemed not such a bad prospect, to tell the truth. It would have been wonderful to give all my weight to the water one more time, maybe for good. This was too hard; this was just too hard. It was, and I knew it. Anyone would have known it.

  We went over some little rapids that shook us and picked up our speed a little, but not much. They were deep and powerful, but the channels were clear and we rode through them without much maneuvering. I was sure we didn't have much farther to go. Where would we come out? What was there to see, that men had made, that would tell us? What would we see when we got off the river forever?

  Lewis lay quietly on the floor with his pants unbuttoned and belt undone; he looked like some great broken thing. I could see the huge muscles of his thigh around the break; they were turning blue. With his free hand, the one that had nothing to do with his face, he was bracing up under the inside of the gunwale, and I thought that perhaps this was a new system, a way to make his leg go to sleep and keep it asleep by putting pressure on it in a special manner; his bracing arm was rigid; the tricep muscle quivered continually with the river, and in it you could see every rock.

  The whole stream now was running fast, without rapids. It was deep, and deep green. It was easy going, the easiest of all, and whenever I could get my head up I superimposed a picture of a highway bridge over the river; but I could never match them up; the bridge would hover and disappear.

  Far off there was what looked like a stretch of rapids with a few big rocks -- the sound was low-throated and pleasant rather than frightening -- and beyond that, another wooded turn. We were moving toward the white, light water and were very close to it when I saw Drew's body backed up between the rocks and looking straight at us.

  I told Bobby, but he could not get his head up to look. He could not, and I knew he could not, and I didn't blame him. But somebody had to look, had to do something, and it would be better if both of us tried.

  "Listen," I heard myself say. "Wake up and help me."

  I headed for Drew, for his place in the rocks, pulling hard against the current that wanted to take us past him. I turned the canoe as broadside as I could and asked the rocks to catch us, to help us. They did. We stopped, we lodged lightly, and I got out onto the sandy soil blowing with underwater. I walked up the canoe on two exhausting steps drawn through the river and hit Bobby hard on the side of the shoulder; as hard as I could, but not hard enough for the situation. To help I put the other hand on the knife.

  "Did you hear me?" I said, not loudly. "You help me with this or I'll kill you, just as you sit there on your useless ass. Now come on. We've got to finish it."

  He got slowly out into the water, swaying with the current, his eyes looking at everything but me.

  Drew was sitting up, facing upstream, in a kind of rough natural chair made of two stones where part of the river ran through, split off from the main current by a flat rock. Though he was sitting, it was a very easy, careless -- even carefree -- position, partly on the base of his spine. Water ran up and fell back from the top part of his chest, and a thin continuous spray of it went into his open mouth, making a quivering sensitive silver bell around his lips where one gold filling glinted. His eyelids were also kept propped open by the current, seeming to see out of the open water back up into the mountains, around all the curves of the river, infinitely. The pull of the water on his mouth gave him a cretinous, loose-lipped look, but the eyes had nothing to do with that; they were blue and all-seeing and clear.

  I stumbled forward to him like meeting him in a drunken bar. I tried to pull him out of his seat by the straps of his life jacket, but for a moment he wouldn't come. He seemed to settle deeper into the rocks. Then he rose with no muscles into my arms, against the current. Bobby came around to the other side of him, and the three of us trudged through two worlds, water and air, toward the canoe, tripping over the whole river, the undercurrent tangling our feet with his and with each other's. I had not realized he was so big. All three of us fell and he got away eddying with his head back, turning slowly from the waist in his jacket, his crushed face as placid and washed and blank as the sky.

  I went after him, stepped in a hole under him, finally wrestled and floated him back to the rock nearest the canoe and laid him over it on his stomach. I looked at his head. Something had hit him awfully hard there, all right. But whether it was a gunshot wound I didn't know; I had never seen a gunshot wound. The only comparison I had to go by were the descriptions of President Kennedy's assassination, the details afforded by eyewitnesses, doctors and autopsy reports which I had read in newspapers and magazines like most other Americans had, at the time. I remembered that part of Kennedy's head had been blown away. There was nothing like that here, though. There was a long raw place under the hair just over his left ear, and the head there seemed oddly pushed in, dented. But there was no brain matter showing, nothing blown away.

  "Bobby, come here," I said. "There's something we've got to decide about."

  I pointed at the place on Drew's head. Bobby peered, his eyes reddened more, and he leaned away. We hung on the rock, panting.

  "Is this a gunshot wound?

  "Ed, you know I wouldn't know. But it sure doesn't look like it to me."

  "Look here, though."

  I showed him the scratch under the hair. "Knowing what we know, it looks to me like he might have been shot and just grazed. But whether this place killed him or not, I don't know."

  "Or whether it was made by a rock, after he'd gone in," Bobby said.

  "If we work this right, well never have to explain to anybody but ourselves," I said. "But I'd like to know. I think we ought to know."

  "How can we know?"

  "Lewis would come nearer knowing than we would. Let's take Drew over to him and give him a good look."

  We picked Drew up again and dragged him to the canoe. We sank down with him until the back of his head was level with the gunwale and was leaning on it.

  "Lewis," I said quietly.

  He didn't answer; his eyes were closed and he was breathing hard.

  "Lewis. Give us just a second. It's important. It's very important."

  He turned his head and opened his eyes. Bobby and I held Drew with three hands, and I turned Drew's head and went under his hair to the place I wanted Lewis to see.

  "Lewis, was he shot? Did a bullet make this?"

  A flicker of the old interest crossed his eyes. He raised his head as much as he could and stared into Drew's hair.

  "Well, was he shot? Was he? Was he, Lewis?"

  He shifted, very slowly, over the center of the stream, his eyes to mine. My brain flinched; I did not know what was coming. He nodded, hardly a motion at all, and then sank back. "Grazed," he said.

  "Are you sure? Are you sure?"

  He nodded again, and retched weakly, almost in the same movement. He kept on nodding, and Bobby and I looked at each other. We peered at Drew's wound again.

  "Maybe," Bobby said.

  "Maybe, is it," I said. "It'll have to be. But we can't have anybody examining him. We can't tell, but there are those who can, and if we have to explain a man with a gunshot wound the whole thing'll come out."

  "Are we going to get out of this? I don't see how we can. I really don't."

  "We're almost out of it now," I said.

  "What are we to do with Drew?"

  "We're going to sink him in this river," I said, "forever."

  "O Lord. O Lord."

  "Listen; it's exactly like I just said. Exactly. We can't afford for somebody who knows about these things to examine him. If we go back without him, we just had some bad luck. We're a fucking bunch of amateurs, anyway. And let 'em try to disprove that! We came up here to run this river without knowing what we were getting into, which is also the God's truth. We did all right for a while, then we spilled. We lost the other canoe. Lewis broke his leg in the rapids, and Drew drowned. Anybody'd believe that. But we can't explain somebody killed with a rifle."

  "If he was."

  "That's right: if he was."

  A faint light came through Bobby's eyes, then either darkened or died. "There's no end to it," he said. "No end."

  "Yes there is," I said. "This is the end. This is all we have to do, but we've got to do it right. Everything depends on it. The whole works."

  I fumbled around in my lower leg pocket and got out the extra bowstring. I tied it around a good-sized rock and then around Drew's belt, square-knot on square-knot. We put the rock in the canoe, and I took Drew's body in the kapok jacket and laid it back in the water, wading forward with him past the rapids, hauling and bullying him gently along.

  When the water deepened, Bobby stepped into the canoe and picked up the paddle. Drew and I moved off the end of the rapids and I took slow flight in my life preserver. I looked at Drew's hand floating palm-up with the guitar calluses puckered and white and his college class ring on it, and I wondered if his wife might not like to have the ring. But no; I couldn't even do that; it would mean having to explain. I touched the callus on the middle finger of his left hand, and my eyes blinded with tears. I lay with him in my arms for a moment weeping river-water, going with him. I could have cried as long as the river ran, but there was no time. "You were the best of us, Drew," I said loud enough for Bobby to hear; I wanted him to hear. "The only decent one; the only sane one."

  I undid his life belt and let him fall away under me. On his knees beside Lewis in the canoe, Bobby heaved the stone overboard. One of Drew's feet flew up and touched my calf, and we were free and in hell.

  I stayed in the water behind the canoe, holding the jacket in one hand. Made weightless, my legs hurt twice as bad. I wanted to sleep, to sink, not have to breathe. I lay and moved with the river, with all nightmares and night sweats to come, but not here, not on me yet. When we came to another shallow place, I got up from the gravel and the crawfish, took up my full weight and half again more, and got into the rear seat with the sun hot and heavy-wet on my shoulders and back as though packed there in layers.

  For a long time nothing happened but fatigue and heat. Insects danced over the canoe between Bobby and me, a singing haze I was not sure wasn't inside my head. But the walls were dropping steadily on both sides. In a few more miles the cliffs gave out on the right, and there was only a low fence of rock on the other side. Then it too slanted to the river, and we were level with the woods again. I knew I must have misjudged the distance we had to go, for there seemed to be no end to it. Bobby's head was down; the most I could hope for from him was to keep steady in the canoe and not fall and tip us over. If we spilled in deep water or rapids now it would be a real problem to get back in, and we would never get Lewis in.

  I had put on Drew's life jacket over mine. It was awfully hot that way, but the extra collar came up higher on the back of my neck and kept the sun off it, and I was grateful for that. My mind danced for minutes on end like gnats around the image of the long, tumbling voyage down the rapids the jacket had taken, trying to keep Drew from drowning when he was already dead, probably, from something else.

  I could feel my lips swelling with the sun. I was coming slowly up against an absolute limit, but I did not know where it was, or where we would be on the river when I got to it, or what I would do when I did. Was there anything I could say to myself, or even to Bobby, that would help?

  "Bobby," I said suddenly, "hang on. If we can stay with it for ten miles we'll be out. I know we will. We've come an awful goddamned long way, and it can't be much longer."

  He tried to nod, and partly did.

  "Don't rock us, baby. And if you see anything I can't see, tell me. If we hit any rapids, call the rocks for me. If you can't do that, get down with Lewis and pray, but try to help us stay level."

  There was a low new tone in the river: an old one, something I recognized.

  "God," I said. "Do something for us."

  We went toward it, but when we came around the next turn there was nothing but another turn about a half mile ahead. The sound came from there, or through there.

  "I think I hear some rapids, Bobby. I know I do. If we can walk the canoe through, let's do it. We can do it. But if we can't, we'll have to run them."

  We went down, picking up speed, and the step-up in sound, like a dial being tuned, brought up the old terror, but also excitement: the sensation Lewis was always describing; I felt it, tired as I was.

  We went into the next turn, and I knew, with the sound I was hearing, that if the rapids were on the turn or even within sight when we straightened out, they would not be as bad as some we had been through. But we came off the turn moving still faster, without falls or rapids, with no white water and none in sight, and I knew they would be bad. It was more likely that I was listening to a falls, and I got ready to die again. The sound jumped higher all at once; there was a foaming seethe in it, a hoarse desperation. We turned again. The land to the left broke away, and I looked down a set of rapids steeper -- a lot steeper -- than any we had been through, and longer, all stepped down toward a funnel that disappeared between two huge boulders that turned the air between them white.