Deliverance - James Dickey [24]
to shake bands with us never occurred to me until years later. I still wonder what would have happened if we had tried. Drew's car came into sight from behind us. We told them what the arrangements were. The brothers and another man -- who just simply materialized -- got into an old Ford pickup with the paint seared off in patches clear down to the naked metal, and followed us. It seemed to me that we should have been following them, but from the filling station Lewis had the information he wanted; it was not much, but it was enough for him. He knew where the river was, approximately, he knew that the land flattened to the north and that there had been logging in the woods near the river. That all this might possibly be misinformation did not make the slightest difference to him. He was going there. After a while he turned off on a dirt road. We ran along on this for a time, covering the truck behind us with ocher dust swirling up in a thick cloud from Lewis' too-fast driving. We ran past some farms and out over the crest of an open field on a section of road as straight as a plow furrow through two stands of rotten corn on either side, and then into some hot pinewoods that dropped off and kept dropping off. The road got worse. It began to curve back in the general direction of the highway, and Lewis craned his head out the window, trying to make the road bend back toward where he believed the river was. When he turned I was not expecting it, and thought we had hit something. We swayed off the road and down, everything going with us rattling. Lewis rose a little higher in the seat. Bushes whacked up under the car. I turned to look back. The other cars weren't behind us, as far as I could tell. I thought perhaps Lew's speed had lost them at the turnoff, but if they'd turned off with us they'd surely be in sight by now, and they weren't. The road slung in a tight half-circle and gave out. In front of us were a few blackened boards on the ground and a rock chimney sinking into the weeds. A lizard ran over the biggest stone, and stopped with his head up. A dead sawhorse stood, off by itself in what looked like a sandpit. "Well," Lewis said, "we screwed up." "Maybe we'd better let them show us where the river is." "We'll see." He backed into the weeds and manhandled the car around until we could get back on the track we had come down. When we reached the other road, the truck was waiting for us, with Drew's car behind it. I had wondered why Drew hadn't followed us, but it was like him to drop behind the truck; he didn't know anything about where he was going, and he was willing to listen to somebody who did. The first Griner leaned out of the cab. "Where you goin, city boy?" Lewis flushed. "Get on with it," he said. "Naw, naw," Griner said. "Go on ahead. You'll find it. Ain't nothin' but the biggest river in the state." Lewis gunned ahead again. We swung with the road to the right, then back to the left and down. Suddenly it hit me that there were some stumps among the trees going by. "Maybe this is where they were logging," I said. Lewis nodded. "This land has been sawmilled, all right," he said. "I figure we're getting there." The road kept dropping and failing. Finally it was only the ghost of a road; it was hard to believe that there had ever been any vehicles on it; it was almost like the rest of the woods. We eased on down. Once we had to crawl over a washout with the wheels barely balanced on each side. It would have been tough going in a jeep, even. All at once the road fell away and slid down a kind of bank. I didn't see how it would be possible to get back up. "Hold on," Lewis said, and tipped the car over forward. Rhododendron and laurel bushes closed in on us with a soft limber rush. A branch of something jumped in the window and stayed, lying across my chest. We had stopped, and I sat with the pressure of the woods against me; when I looked down I saw that one leaf was shaking with my heart. Lewis held up a finger next to his ear. "Listen," he said. I listened, not pushing away the limb. At first I didn't hear anything.