Deliverance - James Dickey [20]
energies have been taken by some other thing than old age. It was humiliating to be around him, especially with Lewis' huge pumped-up bicep shoving out its veins in the sun, where it lay casually on the window of the car. Out of the side of my eye I saw the old man's spotted hands trembling like he was deliberately making them do it. There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought. In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment, maybe. But there was something else. You'd think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn't have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong; I never saw one who was physically powerful, either. Certainly there were none like Lewis. The work with the hands must be fantastically dangerous, in all that fresh air and sunshine, I thought: the catching of an arm in a tractor part somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but that the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one's screams. And so many snakebites deep in the woods as one stepped over a rotten log, so many domestic animals suddenly turning and crushing one against the splintering side of a barn stall. I wanted none of it, and I didn't want to be around where it happened either. But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-fingered people. I looked off into the woods, then, and shot an eye corner back at my bow. This trip would sure be the farthest off in the woods I had ever been; there would be more animals than I had ever been close to, and they would be wilder. Lewis said he believed there were even a few bears and wild hogs in the mountains, though he said that the hogs were more likely to be domestic pigs that had run off. But they revert fast, he said; they grow that ruff up the back of the neck and the snout stretches out and the tushes get long, and in six or seven years you can't tell them from the ones in Russia, except maybe by a notch in the ear or a ring in the nose. I knew there was not much chance of our running into a bear or a hog; that was romance. But then, the idea of hunting, for me, was also a kind of romance. The death of a real deer at my hands was just a vaporous, remote presence that hovered over the figure of the paper deer forty-five yards away at target six of our archery range, as I tried to hit the heart-lung section marked out in heavy black. "Man, I like the way you wear that hat," Bobby said to the old man. The man took off the hat and looked at it carefully; there was nothing remarkable about it, but when it was on his head it had the curious awkward-arrogant tilt that you find only in the country South. He put the hat back on the other side of his head with the same tilt. "You don't know nothin'," he said to Bobby. Drew said, "Can you tell us something about the land around here? I mean, suppose we wanted to get down the river to Aintry. Could we do it?" The man turned away from Bobby, and the finality with which he did it made me glance at Bobby to see if he had disappeared as a result. Bobby was smiling the kind of smile that might or might not come before a mean remark. "Well," the man said, "it's right rocky, on down a piece. If there's been a rain it raises way up, but it don't come over the banks, leastways in most places. There ain't no danger of the valley floodin'; ain't nothin' in it anyway. Furthest down I been is Walker's Point, about fifteen miles, where the land starts gettin' high. In a dry spell the river drops on down out of sight; you got to lean way out over the rocks to see it. And they say there's another big gorge on down south, but I ain't never been there." "Do you think we can get down the river?" Drew asked. "In what?"