Deliverance - James Dickey [3]
with her by means of the newspaper and the chamber of commerce and taken her up to Kitts Mills, where they'd liked her. The agency Kitts used had also liked her well enough, though to the account man she hadn't seemed "quite professional," and now we were going to use her. She would be the half-conventionally-beautiful focus of a thousand decisions and compromises that would eventually end up in a small-circulation trade magazine, looking much like the other ads in it. I saw what she would be and what we would do with her, and the layouts I would mess with for hours, and the endless hassles with the agency, the billing, the paraphernalia of bookkeeping and the rest of it, and I was glad I was going with Lewis. In a curious connection between my time with Lewis and my ordinary time, I looked down at the map again, but now as though it were a layout. It was certainly not much from the standpoint of design. The high ground, in tan and an even paler tone of brown, meandered in and out of various shades and shapes of green, and there was nothing to call you or stop you on one place or the other. Yet the eye could not leave the whole; there was a harmony of some kind. Maybe, I thought, it's because this tries to show what exists. And also because it represents something that is going to change, for good. There, near my left hand, a new color, a blue, would seep upward into the paper, and I tried to move my mind there and nowhere else and imagine a single detail that, if I didn't see it that weekend, I never would; tried to make out a deer's eye in the leaves, tried to pick up a single stone. The world is easily lost. "I'll go," Drew said, "if I can bring a Martin along." "Sure, bring it," Lewis said. "It would be kind of good to hear, way off up in there." Without having any talent, as he would be the first to tell you, Drew played mighty well, through sheer devotion. He had been at it with guitar and banjo -- mostly guitar -- for twelve years, and went in for all the really hard finger-picking stuff; Reverend Gary Davis, Dave Van Ronk, Merle Travis, Doe Watson. "I've got a stove-in reconditioned Martin I picked up from some school kid," Drew said. "Don't worry, I wouldn't bring my number one." "OK, fellow primitives," Bobby said. "But I insist on some creature comforts. Namely liquor." "Bring all you like," Lewis said. "In fact, the sensation of going down white water about half-drunk is not to be missed." "You taking your bow, Lewis?" I asked. "You know it," he said. "And if one of us stabs a deer we can eat the meat and pack the hide and the head out, and I'll cure the hide and mount the head." "Atomic-survival stuff, eh?" Bobby said. "The best kind." It sounded fine to me, though I knew it would be poaching, this early in the fall. But I also knew Lewis would do what he said; these were some of the other things he had learned. Waitresses in sheer net tights and corsages kept staring down into the map. It was time to go. Lewis took off the weight of two steins and the map leapt shut. "Can you get your car, Drew?" Lewis asked, as we stood up together. "Sure," he said. "One of 'em's mine, and my boy's not old enough to drive it." "Ed and I'll meet you-all early Friday, around six-thirty, where Will's Ferry Road runs into the four-lane, at the big new Will's Plaza Shopping Center. I'll call Sam Steinhauser this evening and see what shape his canoe's in. Most of the other stuff I've got. Wear tennis shoes. Bring liquor and an open mind." We went. I was walking in the sun and thinking. I was a little late, but it didn't matter. Thad and I ran a no-sweat shop, as Thad once said in a phrase that he was happy to see get around town and get back to us in a short time. We had had the studio about ten years, having bought it from the fellow -- now about seventy -- who'd founded it, and who was now realizing a lifelong ambition of making drawings of tourists in Cuernavaca. It was, in a way, a pleasure to work at Emerson-Gentry, at least compared to the way things were in the other studios around town. Thad had developed into a reasonably