Deliverance (25 page)

  He hung up, finally, and said there'd be somebody along toreckly.

  I sat down and tilted back in a chair and was perfectly still, getting my story together one more time, the most important time. But back of the story was the reason for the story, and the woods and the river, and all that had happened. There must be some way for me to get used to the idea that I had buried three men in two days, and that I had killed one of them. I had never seen a dead man in my life, except a brief glance at my father in his coffin. It was strange to be a murderer, especially sitting where I was sitting, but I was too tired to be worried, and didn't worry, except about Bobby's ability to remember what I had told him.

  A car or two went by, and I waited to hear one slow down. My side hurt, but the pain was in repose, and lay there under my arm, a part of me that I had made, and could live with. I wondered if I should tell whatever doctor dressed it that I had gored myself on my own arrow, or that I had cut myself on the canoe when we turned over, since there were several places on it where the banging around it had taken on the rocks had forced the metal apart and made flanges and projections that might conceivably cut. I decided to go with the arrow, for there might still be some paint in the wound, and some parts of the wound were clean-cut by the razorhead, and the jagged aluminum wouldn't have done that.

  I began to take on so much weight that I could not get up, and then I could not even get my head up. I could feel my still body still trying to make paddling movements. I thought I was stiff, but I must not have been, for when someone touched my bare arm at the shoulder where I had cut off the sleeve the muscles jumped tight again. It was a Negro ambulance driver.

  "Have you got a doctor with you?"

  "We got one," he said. "We got a good one; he young and good. What in this world happened to you, man? What in this world? Somebody shoot you?"

  "The river," I said. "The river happened to me. But I'm not the one; I'm just the only one who can move. We've got a man back down across the bridge who's bad hurt, and the other fellow had to stay with him. Also one was killed, or I guess he was. We couldn't find him."

  "You want to come show us where your man is at?"

  "I'll come if I can get up. If I sit in this chair much longer I'm going to fall out of it."

  He went to my good side and I rose like a mountain into the air of fan belts, where a few cheap cockeyed pairs of dark glasses formed on a piece of yellow cardboard.

  "Hold on to me, man," he said.

  He was slight and steady, and I put my good arm around his shoulders, but my knees were going; the world was going.

  "You can't make it," he said. "You sit right back down."

  "I can make it," I said, as the glasses focused again.

  I told the boy at the store to tell the police where we were going, and the driver and I walked out into the sun where the little white county ambulance sat. The doctor was in the front seat writing something. He looked up and got out all in the same motion.

  He opened the back doors. "Bring him around here and let him lie down."

  I crawled onto the stretcher and turned on my back. It was hard to do; I didn't want to turn loose the driver. He not only felt good to me, but he felt like a good person, and I needed one bad; just that contact was what I needed most. I didn't need myself anymore; I had had too much of that for too long.

  The young doctor, sandy haired and pale, crouched beside me.

  "No, no," I said. "It's not me. I can wait. Go back across the bridge. There's a man in a canoe who's got a bad fracture. It may have hemorrhaged in some way. Let's get him looked after first."

  We drove down the highway -- a land-motion of machines, and peculiar -- to the bridge, and I got out one more time. I probably didn't have to, but I thought it would be best.

  Lewis was still in the canoe, stretched out and sweating, his shirt half-dark and his arm over his eyes, and Bobby was talking to the man and boy who had been fishing. I knew Bobby must have been testing his story out on them, and I hoped he had made good use of the time to get it straight; the others looked as though they believed him. It is hard to disbelieve injured, exhausted men, and that was a great advantage.

  The driver and the doctor helped Lewis out of the canoe and onto the stretcher. The County Hospital was in Aintry, about seven miles off. We got ready to go, but while we were standing around the ambulance the highway patrol drove up, the siren droning faintly. A short fellow stepped out, and then a rough-looking blond boy. I got ready.

  "What's going on?" the blond officer said.

  "We've had a bad accident," I said, swaying a little more than I was actually swaying. I cut that out; acting might ruin the whole thing. "One of our party drowned in the river about ten miles upstream."

  He looked at me. "Drownded?"

  "Yes," I said. I believed I had got past the first of it, like the first of a bad set of rapids. But there was no way out except to keep on.

  "How do you know he drownded?"

  "Well, we capsized in the rapids, and it was just every man for himself. I don't know what happened to him. He may have hit his head on a rock. But I don't know. We just couldn't find him, and I don't see how he could not be drowned. I hope he's not, but I'm afraid he is; he has to be."

  While I was talking I looked him in the eyes, which was surprisingly easy to do; they were sharp but sympathetic. As I went through some of the story that Bobby and I had rehearsed on the river, I made it a point to try to visualize the things I was saying as though they had really happened. I could see us searching for Drew, though we never had. I saw these things happen at the place near the yellow tree, and for me they were happening as I talked; it was hard to realize that they had not taken place in the actual world; as I saw him taking them into account, they became part of a world, the believed world, the world of recorded events, of history.

  "Well," he said, "We'll have to drag the river. Can you show us 'bout where it was?"

  "I think so," I said, not wanting to appear too sure, but fairly sure. "I don't know if there's a road in there, but I believe I'd know the place if I could get to it. We've got a hurt man, though. We've got to get him to a hospital."

  "OK," he said, a little reluctant to have the situation pass from his jurisdiction to the doctor's. "We'll check in on you at the hospital later."

  "Fine," I said, and crawled back into the ambulance beside Lewis.

  We rode, and this kind of riding, though it wasn't what I had got used to, was never better. The tires crunched at last and we stopped. I sat up, a little at a time. We were off in a field, and alongside us was a long flat building that looked like a rural high school. A warm wind was blowing over it. The doctor opened my vision wide, a door in each hand. "This is it, buddy," he said. "Take it easy; we'll get your friend out. Just go along with Cornelius."

  I took hold of the driver again, and we went through some glass doors, up a ramp, into a long hall that appeared to run out of sight, ending in a window the size of microfilm, way off and across.

  "Second door to the right," the driver said, and we went there. I sagged down on a white, tight table, the sheets straining under me. In a minute or two they brought Lewis, but didn't bring him into the room. They put him on a table outside the door, and then noiselessly rolled him on, toward the faraway window. I lay and held my old friend, my side.

  The doctor came back on soft feet. "Let's see now, buddy," he said. "Can you raise up just a little bit? Does this zipper still work?"

  "I think so," I mumbled. I tried to sit up, and made it easily, and even zipped the zipper down with my good hand. He took off my tennis shoes and I slithered out of the remains of the flying suit. My shorts were stuck into the wound like the nylon I had bound up in it, but he put something painless out of a bottle in the whole mass of cloth and flesh, and the shorts began to come away. He threw what I had been wearing into a corner, and started working on my side.

  Things were dissolving there. Piece after piece of cloth, or of me, softened, softened, and came away, and he kept throwing them down below me, in the bare room. My side was breathing like a mouth, and it did not feel at all bad anymore, only stranger and more open.

  "Good Lord, fellow," he said. "What's been chopping on you? Looks like somebody hit you in the side with an ax."

  "Does?"

  Then more professionally, "How'd you do this?"

  "We were trying to do a little illegal bowhunting up and down the banks of the river," I said. "It's not such a good thing to be doing, but we were doing it. We were going to miss the regular season, and we wanted to try it this way."

  "How in hell did you manage to shoot yourself with an arrow? I didn't think it could be done."

  He was working and looking into my blood all the time, very busy and talking calmly.

  I talked calmly. "I had the bow and arrows in the canoe with me when we dumped. I tried to hold on to the bow because I didn't want to be in the woods without any weapon at all, and it sliced up my hands." I held up the hand the arrows had sliced up, just as I said, "and the next thing I knew I had tangled with a rock and something was going through my side and the bow was gone. I don't have any idea where it went. Downriver; that's all I know."

  "Well, it made a good clean cut," he said, "that got ragged. Part of it is real clean, and part of it is hacked up and looks sawed. You've got some kind of foreign matter in here, that I'm going to have to get out."

  "There was some camouflage paint on the arrows," I said. "That's what it is. But there might be something else in there, too. God knows what's in there."

  "We'll get it out," he said. "Then we'll sew you up like a quilt. You want a shot?"

  "Yeah," I said. "Scotch."

  "You can have another kind, before you get the Scotch," he said. "You might have to wait awhile for the Scotch; this is a dry county."

  "You mean you don't have any moonshine in this here hospital? And you way off in the country like this? What the hell is north Georgia coming to?"

  "No white lightning," he said. "We advise against it. Contains lead salts, most of it."

  He gave me a shot in the hip, and started working again. I looked out the window at the closing green of the day. There was nothing to see but the changes of green.

  "You want to stay here with us tonight? There's plenty of room. We've got a whole hospital. And you'll never get another chance like this one; I can tell you. It's peaceful here. No shotgunned farmers. Nobody who tangled with a tractor. Nobody on glucose from a drunk smashup. Nobody but you and your buddy, and a little boy, a snakebite case. And he'll be gone tomorrow. Copperhead poison is not such hot poison."

  "No thanks," I said, though I would have stayed with Lewis if I thought there was any use in it. "Get me sewed up and tell me where there's a rooming house I can stay in. I'd like to call my wife, and I'd like to be by myself. I wouldn't like sleeping in a ward, if I can help it, or in a hospital room if I don't absolutely have to."

  "You've lost some blood," he said. "You'll be pretty weak."

  "I've been weak for days," I said. "Give me whatever you need to give me, and I'll get going."

  "I sent your friend, the other fellow at the canoe, to Biddiford's, down in town. They'll treat you OK. But if I were you I'd stay out here tonight."

  "No thanks," I said. "I'll be all right. Tell the police where I am. Just drive me over there and take care of Lewis."

  "The other doctor's working on him. It looks like a complicated situation, with him. He'll be lucky if there's not some gangrene building up around that place. That's a hell of a break."

  "We're lucky we've got you," I said.

  "You're fucking aye," he said. "Hands of an angel."

  He drove me in his own car down through town, and in the main filling station were sitting Lewis' station wagon and Drew's Olds. I went in, up tight in my side but not having to hold it together anymore, and talked to the owner, and got the addresses of the Griner brothers so that we could send them the rest of the money. Lewis had arranged it all, and I had to have the owner of the station give back to me what I was supposed to do. I didn't have enough money, but I could either get it from Lewis or mail it in when I got back to the city. The main thing was that the keys were there. I said good-bye to the doctor, told him I'd come out to the hospital the next day. Then I called Martha and told her something bad had happened, that Drew had drowned and Lewis had broken a leg. I asked her to call Lewis' wife and say he was in the hospital up here and would be for some time, but that he was going to be OK. If Mrs. Ballinger called her or Lewis' wife they were just to say that we'd be back in a couple of days. I wanted to tell Mrs. Ballinger about Drew's death myself. I said I thought I'd be home about the middle of the week.

  I drove Drew's car down to Biddiford's, a big frame house booming and knocking with people and light. Everybody was at supper around a long swaybacked pine table with strips of flypaper hanging down to within a foot of it. Bobby was there with his face working around a mouthful of food, and I winked at him and sat down. They made a place for us -- farmers, woodsawyers and small merchants -- and I lost interest in everything but eating. Fried chicken came around me -- came at me from every angle -- again and again, and potato salad, and heavy coarse biscuits and gravy and butter and collards and lima beans and big hominy and turnip greens and cherry pie. It was good; it was all good.

  Afterwards a woman showed me upstairs to a room with a big double bed, which was all they had left; Bobby was somewhere else. But for some reason I was too dry; my mouth was dry, and my skin. So I went down and took a shower in the basement, in the blue-green country night, where I stood with the river-water pouring over my head, making my tight new bandage grow like a heavy side pack, making it bleed a little with the warm water. I nearly went to sleep there, but woke up as the water gradually turned cold. Then I went upstairs, my hair and side wet, and got in bed. It was over. I lay awake all night in brilliant sleep.