Deliverance - James Dickey [77]
I talked to my hands continually, and to every stone I came to, for they were all standing out in my face with beautiful clarity, things never looked at -- never witnessed or beheld -- so closely before. I had to stop in a couple of places, near death and looking deeply at sand grains, and hung out over the river in its high, flowing space, concentrating on seizing it in the mind so deeply that it would always be with me as it was just then: always, night and day and maybe after death too. I braced and panted with the cliff, inbreathing the rock-dust that my outbreathing had stirred up. The last place I rested was a kind of saw-toothed ledge about six inches wide where I was on it; holding to the rope with both hands, I could almost sit comfortably there. I could see the corpse below me turning with my grip on the rope, terribly heavy-looking and full of dead weight, his head on his chest in midair, pensive and reposeful. I could also see Bobby, though neither of us had tried to speak yet. He had the canoe in an eddying pocket of water against the bluff face, and was just holding it there gently with a few slight pressures on the river. I started down again, anxious to get rid of my weight. The corpse appeared to be about thirty-five feet above the shore-rocks, and I had no clear idea of what to do when the rope gave out. Both of us would still have a good way to go. I supposed I would have to cut him loose and then leap for the river, myself, but I reckoned I would find out about that when I got down to him. I was almost on top of the corpse, holding on and bracing out from the cliff with a foot and a knee, trying to figure out a way to get around him or clear of him without having to clamber all over him like Harold Lloyd in an old movie. The rope broke, and we were gone. Suddenly there was no weight, and nothing to plan for. The plan of the night before saved me though; I got a good kick against the cliff with the foot I had braced there and a knee-shove with the other leg, and this moved me out a few feet from the wall. The rocks were coming, and so was I. When my head came around I could see I was clear, and that was all that mattered, at all. I had no further control, though. There was an instant of sunny nothing, and of drifting and turning. Where was the river? There was green and blue, in some kind of essential relation, and then the river went into my right ear like an ice pick. I yelled, a tremendous, walled-in yell, and then I felt the current thread through me, first through my head from one ear and out the other and then complicatedly through my body, up my rectum and out my mouth and also in at the side where I was hurt. I realized that I was in something I knew, in the slow unhurried pull of current. Then the water took to the wound, and nearly took it from me. It had been so many years since I had been really hurt that the feeling was almost luxurious, though I knew when I tried to climb the water to the surface that I had been weakened more than I had thought. Un-consciousness went through me. I was in a room of varying shades of green beautifully graduated from light to dark, and I went toward the palest color, though it seemed that this was to one side of me rather than above. An instant before I broke water I saw the sun, liquid and transformed, and then it exploded in my face. I was hurt in a couple of new ways, especially in the hands, but after trying my arms and legs against the water I knew I was not hurt so badly that I could not function. I lay forward in the current, thinking vaguely of how to swim, and the thought made me move, for I was doing it. I came out at the side of the canoe, and pulled up as carefully as I could. My face was no more than eight inches from Lewis'. His eyes were closed, and he looked both resting and dead, but his head turned. His eyes opened. He gave me a long serious glance, closed his eyes again tiredly and settled farther down on his back. His part of the canoe, particularly around his head, was full of vomit, the chunks of steak and all the stuff we had brought from