Deliverance - James Dickey [12]
equipment, almost all of it different shades of green. Before he put it in, Lewis turned my bow over in his bands. "You're losing glass," he said, thumbing the edge of the upper limb. "It'll hold up, I think. It's been like it is for a good long time." "You know," Lewis said, "I like this bow. You stand holding it after you turn loose the string, thinking, what the hell. And then you look yonder and the arrow's sticking in the target." "You get used to it," I said. "It's very relaxed." "Now you see it, and now," Lewis broke off. "And now and now." "Let's go ahead," I said. "The sun's coming up. We can eat on the road. Up north the water's running." He spread his thin face crookedly. "You sound like me," he said. "How about that," I said, and went back one last time and got a bag of clothes I'd thrown together: a sweat shirt and a couple of T-shirts and a pair of long jolms for sleeping. We turned and waved good-bye to Martha and Dean, who were drawing together in the door. Martha's glasses were orange in the rising sun. I got in and clashed the car door. The bows and the woods equipment were heavy behind us, and the canoe clamped us down. We were not -- or at least I was not -- what we were before. If we had had an accident and had to be identified by what we carried and wore, we might have been engineers or trappers or surveyors or the advance commandos of some invading force. I knew I had to live up to the equipment or the trip would be as sad a joke as everything else. I thought of where I might be that night, and of the snakes that would be out in the unseasonable warmth, and of being among the twigs and insects of remote places in the woods, and I was tempted -- I must say I was -- to back out, get sick, make some sort of excuse. I listened for the phone to ring, thinking of what I might say to the paper boy or my insurance agent, or whoever it might be, so that I could get out of the car, make a believable excuse to Lewis and take off my costume. What I really wanted was to go back in the house for a little sleep before driving to work. Or maybe, since I had the day off, to go out and play nine holes of golf. But the gear was in the car, and Lewis looked near me with his longest smile, showing plainly that I was of the chosen, that he was getting me out of the rut for a while or, as he put it, "breaking the pattern." "Here we go," he said, "out of the sleep of mild people, into the wild rippling water." With the canoe beaked over us, we slid down the driveway, turned left and picked up speed, then turned left again and cruised. I propped up a foot and waited for the last of the downhill, and when we leveled out we were at the shopping center. Drew's Oldsmobile was parked about fifty yards this side of the four-lane. An old wooden canoe, something that looked like it belonged on a lake instead of a river, was webbed onto the top of the car with a lot of frayed rope; it had an army blanket under it to keep it from scratching the car. Lewis gunned past the Olds and up the ramp onto the freeway. As we went past, I gave the others the Churchill V-sign, and Bobby replied with the classic single-finger. I faced ahead and stretched out on the seat and watched the rest of the light come. It came, steadying on my right arm stronger and stronger, lifting up past the Texaco and Shell stations and the hamburger and beer drive-ins that were going to fly and shuttle on the highway for the next twenty miles. I had no particular relation to any of these; they were sealed from me and slid by on the other side of a current of cellophane. But I had been here, somewhere; my stomach stirred and I knew it. Moving up at us on the right was a long line of white concrete poles, a red-and-white drive-in whose galvanized tin roof made the sun flutter and hang and angle, and my half-shut eyes singled out one pole from the rest, magnifying it like a hawk's. I had leaned there, Christmas before last. I had leaned and leaned, until the leaning turned into a spinning round and round the pole, and then I had come to a slow stop and vomited, spilling