Deliverance - James Dickey [18]
in the garage, one of them an XKE, a wife and three children watching 'Star Trek' as he hes trying to get his breath under a bush. The old human body is the same as it always was. It still feels that old fear, and that old pain. The last time I was near here ..." "You know that old broken-leg thing, don't you, buddy?" "I know it," he said. "I broke it like a goddamned fool, up here by myself. There was a trout stream I wanted to fish, and it was hard to get to. I took thirty feet of rope and let myself down to the creek and fished ... well, I fished. It was one of the best afternoons I ever had with man or woman or beast. I was climbing back up when the rope worked into my right hand and began to hurt like hell, and I slacked up on that hand and tried to wrap the rope around it a different way, and the next thing I knew, the damned rope slicked through the other hand and I was going down. In fact, I was already down. I hit on one leg, and I could hear something go in that right ankle. I had a hard time getting up from the bottom of the creek, with those waders on, and when I tried to stand up, I knew I had it to do." "How'd you get out?" "I went up the rope. I just armed it out, hand over hand, and then started hobbling and hopping and crawling. And you damned well better hope you never have to one-leg it through any woods. I was holding on to every tree like it was my brother." "Maybe it was." "No," Lewis said. "But I got out, finally. You know the rest." "Yeah. And now you're going back." "You better believe it. But you know something, Ed? That intensity; well, that's something special. That was a great trip, broken ankle and all. I heard old Tom McCaskill, the night before. That was worth it." "Who is that?" "Well, let me tell you. You come up here camping in the woods, on the river in some places, or back off in the bush, hunting or whatever you're doing, and in the middle of the night you're liable to hear the most God-awful scream that ever got loose from a human mouth. There's no explanation for it. You just hear it, and that's all. Sometimes you just hear it once, and sometimes it keeps on for a while." "What is it, for the Lord's sake?" "There's this old guy up here who just gets himself -- or makes himself -- a jug every couple of weeks, and goes off in the woods at night. From what I hear, he doesn't have any idea where he's going. He just goes off the road and keeps going till he's ready to stop. Then he builds himself a fire and sits down with the jug. When he gets drunk enough he starts out to hollering. That's the way he gets his kicks. As they say, don't knock it if you ain't tried it. You tried it?" "No, but maybe on this trip. I doubt if I'll ever get another chance. Maybe we don't even have to go down the river. Maybe we should just go off and drink and holler. And Drew could play the guitar. I'll bet he'd just as soon. I'll bet he'd rather." "Well, I wouldn't. Would you?" "Don't knock it if you ain't tried it," I said. "But no, I wouldn't. In fact, I'm looking forward to getting on the river. I'm so tanked up with your river-mystique that I'm sure I'll go through some fantastic change as soon as I dig the paddle in the first time." "Just wait, buddy," he said. "You'll want to come back. It's real." I looked off at the blue forms of the mountains, growing less transparent and cloudlike, shifting their positions, rolling from side to side off the road, coming back and centering in our path, and then sliding off the road again, but strengthening all the time. We went through some brush and then out across a huge flat field that ran before us for miles, going straight at the bulging range of bills, which was now turning mile by mile from blue to a light green-gold, the color of billions of hardwood leaves. Around noon we started up among them, still on the highway. At an intersection we turned off onto a blacktop state road, and from that onto a badly cracked and weedy con-crete highway of the old days -- the thirties as nearly as I could tell -- with the old splattered tar centerline wavering onward. From