Deliverance - James Dickey [101]
"I fell on one of my arrows, and I had to cut it out with a knife. There was not any other way; I couldn't get us downriver with an arrow sticking through me. So I cut. I'm glad the knife was sharp, or I'd probably still be hacking." "Go to sleep, honey. I'll let you know if anything happens. I'm right here with you. There's no more woods and no more river. Go to sleep." But I couldn't. We live on a dead-end street, so that any car that comes down it either belongs to the people who live on the street or has some business with them. I watched the few cars I recognized come in, and turn into the various driveways. About ten o'clock one stopped in front of our house. The lights swung slowly around and enveloped us, and Martha closed my mouth with a warm hand as I sat there blinded. Ours was the last driveway, and the driver was just using it to turn around in. He went away, and finally so did I. I woke up and Martha was still with me. It was light. The crooked part in her hair was very precious. She was asleep, and gently as I could I got up from under her, put her head in the chair, picked up a glass and the whiskey and went into the bathroom. I turned around and Martha was standing there too. She kissed me, and then sat on the toilet seat and pulled the bandage-tape off my side with quick, surgical rips. "Better," she said. "It's going to be fine. Jesus, you're healthy." "I don't feel so healthy, I can tell you. I'm still tired." "Well, you rest up." "No, I'm going to the office." "No you're not; that's the damned silliest idea I ever heard. You're going to bed." "Really, I want to go down there. I want to and I need to. For lots of reasons." "All right, dum-dum. Go ahead and kill yourself." "Not a chance," I said. "But if I don't keep busy I'll fall apart. I can't stand any more of this car-watching." She re-dressed my side and I went downtown. The main thing was to get back into my life as quickly and as deeply as I could; as if I had never left it. I walked into my office and opened the door wide so that anybody who wanted to look could see me there, shuffling papers and layouts. At lunch I went out and bought a paper. There was a notice of Drew's death, and an old picture of him from his college annual. That was all. I worked hard the rest of the day, and when I drove the freeway home it was like a miracle of movement and of freedom. And so it ended, except in my mind, which changed the events more deeply into what they were, into what they meant to me alone. There is still a special small fear in any strange automobile headlights near the house, or any phone call with an unfamiliar voice in it, either at the office or at home, or when Martha calls me at the office. For a long time I went through both daily papers from column to column every day, but only once did the word Cahulawassee come off the page at me, and that was when the dam at Aintry was completed. The governor dedicated it, there was a ceremony with college and high school bands, and the governor was said to have made a very good speech about the benefits, mainly electrical and industrial, that the dam would bring to the area, and touching on the recreational facilities that would be available when the lake filled in. Every night as the water rose higher I slept better, feeling the green, darkening color crawl up the cliff, up the sides of rock, feeling for the handholds I had had, dragging itself up, until finally I slept as deeply as Drew was sleeping. Only a few days after I saw the story in the paper I knew that the grave of the man we had buried in the woods was under water, and from the beginning of the inundation Drew and the other man were going deeper and deeper, piling fathoms and hundreds of tons of pressure and darkness on themselves, falling farther and farther out of sight, farther and farther from any influence on the living. Another odd thing happened. The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it