Deliverance (8 page)

  All at once the road fell away and slid down a kind of bank. I didn't see how it would be possible to get back up.

  "Hold on," Lewis said, and tipped the car over forward. Rhododendron and laurel bushes closed in on us with a soft limber rush. A branch of something jumped in the window and stayed, lying across my chest.

  We had stopped, and I sat with the pressure of the woods against me; when I looked down I saw that one leaf was shaking with my heart.

  Lewis held up a finger next to his ear. "Listen," he said.

  I listened, not pushing away the limb. At first I didn't hear anything. Yet the silence sounded like something was coming up under it, something steady and even and unendable. Lewis started the engine, and I helped the branch off me and out the window as we crawled down, rustling with many leaves. A high bank rose up, and the road went straight to it and quit. There was a gully in front of the bank. I got out, looking at the ground for snakes. Why on God's earth am I here? I thought. But when I turned back to the car to see what Lewis was doing, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear window. I was fight green, a tall forest man, an explorer, guerrilla, hunter. I liked the idea and the image, I must say. Even if this was just a game, a charade, I had let myself in for it, and I was here in the woods, where such people as I had got myself up as were supposed to be. Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.

  Lewis went forward from me and jumped the gully. He climbed the bank and then stood for a moment the tallest man in the woods, his hands on his hips, looking down the other side. I started up, too; I wanted to see what be was seeing. He went down the other side as I came up, feeling dirt on my hands for the first time in years. At the top there was nothing to see but more woods, and Lewis in his camouflage and Australian hat going through them. I went down in two or three soft, collapsing jumps that filled my tennis shoes with leaf mold. There was water at the bottom. Trees with thin leaves, like willows -- maybe willows -- were growing thickly there; I couldn't see beyond the puddle at the bottom, but it was stirring faintly, not stagnant. And then I realized that there was plenty of sound going on; we had come into it almost imperceptibly, and now it seemed all around us.

  Lewis crow-hopped over the water and I followed, holding on to saplings when I could. He stopped and I came up beside him. He pulled an armload of arrowy leaves out of the way. I edged up more, looking out -- or in -- through the ragged, ashen window he made.

  The river opened and was there. It was gray-green, very clear and yet with a certain milkiness, too; it looked as though it would turn white and foam at rocks more easily than other water. It was about forty yards wide, and shallow, about two and a half or three feet deep. The bed was full of clean brown pebbles. We couldn't see very far upstream or down because of our position and because of the willows, but just watched the part in front of us going by and by carrying nothing, not even a twig, as it lay in the branches and leaves in Lewis' arms. He let the limbs fall; they swept in gracefully and closed the river off again.

  "There she is," Lewis said, still looking straight ahead.

  "Pretty," I said. "Pretty indeed."

  It took us a good long time to get the canoes off the cars and over the gully and the bank. Lew and Bobby pulled the canoes up the bank by the nose, hauling on the bow ropes, and Drew and I shoved from behind. Finally we slid them out through the willows. We put the wooden canoe in first. Lewis got down in the water, up to his knees in the bank mud, and supervised the loading. Both canoes had floorboards, though they were held in only by gravity and by the seats. We put in the perishables first and then the waterproof tents over everything, lashing them to the floorboard slats. Drew slid down into the water, and finally so did I. Then Lewis left.

  "How about your guitar?" Bobby hollered from the top of the bank.

  "Bring it," Drew said, and then to me, "I don't mind losing that old Martin in the river, but I'll be goddamned if I want those characters to run off with it."

  "I hope we don't ruin it, by spilling our foolish asses in this river," I said.

  "I don't know about you," Drew said, as mock-country as he could talk, "but I ain't planning to spill in this-here river. I'm a-goin' with you, and not Mr. Lewis Medlock. I done seen how he drove these roads he don't know nothin' about."

  "OK," I said. "Fine. But you probably ought to know that he can handle a canoe pretty well, and I can't. He's strong as the devil, too, and he's in shape. I'm not."

  "I'll take my chances," he said. "So will Miss Martin."

  Lewis and Bobby kept coming through the willows, carrying stuff, and Drew and I kept cramming it under the lashed-down tents, any way we could. Lewis should have stayed down here in the water with us, I thought. He could surely have done a better job of loading than we were doing. We floundered around in the slime, our feet deep in the mud.

  Finally Bobby came through the leaves for the last time. "We're ready," he said.

  "Everything all set about the cars?"

  "Far as I can tell," he said. "Lewis is dealing with those guys now. I'm sure glad we're getting rid of them."

  Far off we heard a car start. It occurred to me that I had no idea at all of who the third driver in the truck was; I had not seen his face, or not noticed it.

  "Personally," Bobby said, "I damn well doubt whether they can get the cars back up the road we came down."

  "That's a nice thought," Drew said. "What if they can't?"

  "We'll be gone," I said. "Then it's their problem."

  "Damned if it's their problem," Bobby said. "What're we going to do if we come off this river, and there're no cars, down at what's-its-name?"

  Lewis spoke through the branches. "They'll be there," he said. "Don't worry about a thing."

  We now had our life jackets on and I held the wooden canoe steady for Bobby to get in. He swayed out over the river and got into the bow seat. Lewis followed. The weight sank the canoe far enough into the water to make it as stable as it ever could be.

  "OK," Lew said. "Turn loose."

  I did; they floated free. I stood watching over my shoulder. My feet were pointed toward the bank; I was mired down so far that I began to wonder how I was going to get out. I stayed rooted, holding on to the aluminum canoe while Drew got into the front and picked up the paddle.

  "This how you hold this thing?" he asked me.

  "I reckon," I said. "You hold it ... like you hold it."

  I got one foot out of the mud by driving the other one about twice as far down, and then grabbed a long branch and pulled myself up as best I could with the river holding on to me hard by the left leg.

  "It's got me," I said.

  "What's got you?"

  "It."

  I scrambled and pulled on the branch until I was out. I kicked a foothold into the bank and stepped wide from it into the stern of Lewis' canoe and was in, everything rocking and wallowing. We pushed out with the paddles from the bank.

  A slow force took hold of us; the bank began to go backward. I felt the complicated urgency of the current, like a thing made of many threads being pulled, and with this came the feeling I always had at the moment of losing consciousness at night, going toward something unknown that I could not avoid, but from which I would return. I dipped the paddle in.

  Movies and pictures of Indians on calendars gave me a general idea of what to do, and I waved the paddle slowly through the water, down and along the left side of the canoe. The nose with Drew in it -- I saw now that moving him to one side or the other, to turn the canoe, was going to be a big part of the problem -- swung heavily out toward midstream, where the current began to pick us up and move us a little faster. The sensation of pure riding could not have been greater though we were doing not much more than drifting, bogged with the weight of gear, and with uncertainty. Downstream, Lewis and Bobby were hardly any better off, their strokes uncoordinated and helpless, though Lewis was trying. I supposed that he was letting Bobby get the feel of the water, and find which side he would rather paddle on. I told Drew to keep his paddle on the right, and we tried a few sweeps together, running over a very shallow place where the water quickened and broke and foamed over gray-brown gravel. We rocked and scraped on the stones.

  "Go ahead and try a little stronger pull," I said. "We've got to find a way to make this thing move like we want it to."

  He dug in, and I swept with him. We settled into a good motion that moved us toward a curve. Once or twice my paddle hit the bottom-rocks; this put an odd, dissonant, intimate feeling into my hands. We started into the curve just as the other canoe disappeared around it. I plowed a little harder to turn us exactly with the current. Drew glanced back, his glasses flashing, the life preserver not turning. His face-side had a big grin. "Hey, hey," he said. "How about this?"

  "How about it, is right."

  As we straightened out of the curve I had a quick sensation of something wrong. Either the river was wrong or the green canoe was. Lewis and Bobby were traveling broadside to the gentle water, and Lewis was doing his best to bring the bow around. Bobby was totally confused, as nearly as I could tell, though he was trying to help. But they were going down the river backward. Drew put his hand over his face. I thought of hollering something to Lewis, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Sometimes I could laugh at him, but I felt that it wouldn't be right to do it now. Drew and I rested, the paddles pulled up, keeping our mouths shut. The stream was with us, and we could watch. Bobby quit trying to paddle, and Lewis, by the sheer desire to do it, managed to swing the canoe broadside again, but just as he lifted it side-on to the current a paired set of rocks stopped it. Lewis banged and shoved at the rocks with his paddle and with his hands, and then tried to hunch the canoe free with his weight. Finally, though, he stepped off into the river and took hold of the canoe. Drew and I came alongside and I backwatered. On impulse I got out to help. Lew and I hauled and shoved, with Bobby sitting in the bow with his face absolutely perfect as an expression of dead weight.

  Loading the canoe, I had not really been aware of the water, but now I was. It felt profound, its motion built into it by the composition of the earth for hundreds of miles upstream and down, and by thousands of years. The standing there was so good, so fresh and various and continuous, so vital and uncaring around my genitals, that I hated to leave it.

  "Let's have a beer," I said.

  Lewis wiped off the sweat and rummaged around under the tents and the tarps. He came up with four twelve-ounce cans of beer from a polyethylene sack of melting ice, and we hung our forefingers in the rings and dragged them open. We were all thirsty from the work and anxiety of the loading, and my thirst and Lewis' went all the way back to the Griner Brothers' Garage, where I had shed more liquid than I thought I had in my system. I drank the whole can in one long, unhurried epical swallow.

  I looked around. We were in the middle of a farm that backed steeply up on the river on two sides, one more than the other, and seemed to be battling the woods for existence. In a gully to my right as I faced downstream a cow was drinking; on top of a little grassy bluff others were lying down. Cow dung shone in the late heat, and there was a small misty, insane glimmering of insects wherever it had fallen.

  I held the wavering color of the can under water until it filled enough to sink, and let it go, down and on past my ballooning nylon legs.

  Lew and I started the canoe off the rocks with one three-armed shove, and I climbed back in with Drew. We entered a long straight stretch, moving with the fresh sweat that had sprung up from the beer as much as with the current.

  The land on both sides climbed, and the river pulled us steadily toward a silver highway bridge. We went under, and the bridge clattered its boards as a pickup truck went over.

  We were civilized again. On the right bank some tin sheds backed down to the water; the mud was covered with rusted pieces of metal, engine parts and the blue and green blinks of broken bottles. But there was something worse than any of this; some of the color was not only color; it was bright, unchangeable. Drew had been hit the same way, for another reason. "Plastic," he said. "Doesn't decompose."

  "Does that mean you can't get rid of it," I said, "at all?"

  "Doesn't go back to its elements," he said, as though that were all right.

  In the dark light the broken plastic pitchers shot out their rays like batteries. One was orange, one was yellow, and a water container was blue; what Martha, referring to clothes, would have called electric blue. The plastic throwaways were invulnerable in their colors, amongst the split, splintering boards and the brown-gold tin cans in the mud flats under the town, their lids prised-up and cruel, but going back to the earth.

  The sky was beginning to smoke up with night, with complete, unlighted night. For a little while I thought that was the reason the water didn't have the clean sparkle, the deep milk-but-clear that it had had when we got on it. The current lacked the arrowy drive, the sense of purpose that bad been part of it in the willow woods. There was something in the texture of it.

  I pulled my paddle out of the water; a white feather was stuck to the end of it. I shook it off and peered into the river. Off to the right and getting ready to go by under water was a vague choked whiteness. It was a log completely covered with chicken feathers, with all the feather-hairs weaving and wavering in a perfect physical representation of nausea. When you are sick enough, I said truly to myself, that is the thing you feel.

  "There must be a poultry processing plant in this town," Drew half turned and said.