Deliverance - James Dickey [1]
go. But you have to let me know right now, so I can get the other canoe." I liked Lewis; I could feel myself getting caught up again in his capricious and tenacious enthusiasms that had already taken me bow-hunting and varmint-calling with him, and down into a small, miserably cold cave where there was one dead, crystalline frog. Lewis was the only man I knew who could do with his life exactly what he wanted to. He talked continuously of resettling in New Zealand or South Africa or Uruguay, but he had to be near the rental property he had inherited, and I didn't much think he would ever leave. But in his mind he was always leaving, always going somewhere, always doing something else. These techniques and mystiques had built up in him something that impressed me a good deal, even so. He was not only self-determined; he was determined. He was one of the best tournament archers in the state and, even at the age of thirty-eight or -nine, one of the strongest men I had ever shaken hands with. He lifted weights and shot arrows every day in a special kind of alternating rhythm and as a result was so steady that he could easily hold a sixty-pound bow at full draw for twenty seconds. I once saw him kill a quail with an aluminum target arrow at forty yards, the arrow diving into the back feathers at the last possible instant. So I usually went with him whenever he asked me. I had a bow that he helped me pick out, and a few tags and odds of secondhand equipment, and it was enjoyable walking in the woods with Lewis, when the weather was good, as it usually is in our part of the South in hunting season. Because it took place in such pleasant country, and because of Lewis, I liked field archery -- with its faint promise of one day killing a deer -- better than golf. But it was really Lewis. He was the only man I knew determined to get something out of life who had both the means and the will to do it, and it interested me to see how, as an experiment, this turned out. I was not much on theories, myself. But I had a good feeling about this trip. After so much shooting at paper images of deer, it was exciting to think of encountering a real one. "How, exactly, do we get to the river in the first place?" Drew Ballinger asked. "There's a little nothing town up here, just past the high ground," Lewis said, "name of Oree. We can put in there and come out in Aintry a couple of days later. If we get on the water late Friday, we can be back here the middle of Sunday afternoon, maybe in time for the last half of the pro game on TV." "There's one thing that bothers me," Drew said. "We don't really know what we're getting into. There's not one of us knows a damned thing about the woods, or about rivers. The last boat I was in was my father-in-law's ChrisCraft, up on Lake Bodie. I can't even row a boat straight, much less paddle my own or anybody else's canoe. What business have I got up there in those mountains?" "Listen," Lewis said, knocking on the air with his foreknuckle, "youll be in more danger on the four-lane going home tonight than you'd ever be on the river. Somebody might jump the divider. Who knows?" "I mean," Bobby said, "the whole thing does seem kind of crazy." "All right," Lewis said. "Let me demonstrate. What are you going to be doing this afternoon?" "Well," Bobby thought a minute. "Most likely I'll see a couple of new people about mutual funds. I have to draw up some papers and get them notarized." "How about you, Drew?" "See some more route salesmen. We're making a cooler count to figure out who's doing what, and where we're falling short. We're trying to find ways to up the cold-bottle sales, the same as always. Sometimes they're up, sometimes they're down. Right now they're down." "Ed?" "Oh," I said. "Take some photographs for Kitts Textile Mills. Kitt'n Britches. Cute girl in our britches stroking her pussy. A real cat, you understand." "Too bad," Lewis said, and grinned, although talk about sex was never something be seemed to enjoy. He had made his point without saying anything about the afternoon. He looked around the suburban