Deliverance - James Dickey [26]
drove these roads he don't know nothin' about." "OK," I said. "Fine. But you probably ought to know that he can handle a canoe pretty well, and I can't. He's strong as the devil, too, and he's in shape. I'm not." "I'll take my chances," he said. "So will Miss Martin." Lewis and Bobby kept coming through the willows, carrying stuff, and Drew and I kept cramming it under the lashed-down tents, any way we could. Lewis should have stayed down here in the water with us, I thought. He could surely have done a better job of loading than we were doing. We floundered around in the slime, our feet deep in the mud. Finally Bobby came through the leaves for the last time. "We're ready," he said. "Everything all set about the cars?" "Far as I can tell," he said. "Lewis is dealing with those guys now. I'm sure glad we're getting rid of them." Far off we heard a car start. It occurred to me that I had no idea at all of who the third driver in the truck was; I had not seen his face, or not noticed it. "Personally," Bobby said, "I damn well doubt whether they can get the cars back up the road we came down." "That's a nice thought," Drew said. "What if they can't?" "We'll be gone," I said. "Then it's their problem." "Damned if it's their problem," Bobby said. "What're we going to do if we come off this river, and there're no cars, down at what's-its-name?" Lewis spoke through the branches. "They'll be there," he said. "Don't worry about a thing." We now had our life jackets on and I held the wooden canoe steady for Bobby to get in. He swayed out over the river and got into the bow seat. Lewis followed. The weight sank the canoe far enough into the water to make it as stable as it ever could be. "OK," Lew said. "Turn loose." I did; they floated free. I stood watching over my shoulder. My feet were pointed toward the bank; I was mired down so far that I began to wonder how I was going to get out. I stayed rooted, holding on to the aluminum canoe while Drew got into the front and picked up the paddle. "This how you hold this thing?" he asked me. "I reckon," I said. "You hold it ... like you hold it." I got one foot out of the mud by driving the other one about twice as far down, and then grabbed a long branch and pulled myself up as best I could with the river holding on to me hard by the left leg. "It's got me," I said. "What's got you?" "It." I scrambled and pulled on the branch until I was out. I kicked a foothold into the bank and stepped wide from it into the stern of Lewis' canoe and was in, everything rocking and wallowing. We pushed out with the paddles from the bank. A slow force took hold of us; the bank began to go backward. I felt the complicated urgency of the current, like a thing made of many threads being pulled, and with this came the feeling I always had at the moment of losing consciousness at night, going toward something unknown that I could not avoid, but from which I would return. I dipped the paddle in. Movies and pictures of Indians on calendars gave me a general idea of what to do, and I waved the paddle slowly through the water, down and along the left side of the canoe. The nose with Drew in it -- I saw now that moving him to one side or the other, to turn the canoe, was going to be a big part of the problem -- swung heavily out toward midstream, where the current began to pick us up and move us a little faster. The sensation of pure riding could not have been greater though we were doing not much more than drifting, bogged with the weight of gear, and with uncertainty. Downstream, Lewis and Bobby were hardly any better off, their strokes uncoordinated and helpless, though Lewis was trying. I supposed that he was letting Bobby get the feel of the water, and find which side he would rather paddle on. I told Drew to keep his paddle on the right, and we tried a few sweeps together, running over a very shallow place where the water quickened and broke and foamed over gray-brown gravel. We rocked and scraped on the stones. "Go ahead and try a little stronger pull," I said. "We've got to find a way to make this thing move