Deliverance - James Dickey [80]
forever? Lewis lay quietly on the floor with his pants unbuttoned and belt undone; he looked like some great broken thing. I could see the huge muscles of his thigh around the break; they were turning blue. With his free hand, the one that had nothing to do with his face, he was bracing up under the inside of the gunwale, and I thought that perhaps this was a new system, a way to make his leg go to sleep and keep it asleep by putting pressure on it in a special manner; his bracing arm was rigid; the tricep muscle quivered continually with the river, and in it you could see every rock. The whole stream now was running fast, without rapids. It was deep, and deep green. It was easy going, the easiest of all, and whenever I could get my head up I superimposed a picture of a highway bridge over the river; but I could never match them up; the bridge would hover and disappear. Far off there was what looked like a stretch of rapids with a few big rocks -- the sound was low-throated and pleasant rather than frightening -- and beyond that, another wooded turn. We were moving toward the white, light water and were very close to it when I saw Drew's body backed up between the rocks and looking straight at us. I told Bobby, but he could not get his head up to look. He could not, and I knew he could not, and I didn't blame him. But somebody had to look, had to do something, and it would be better if both of us tried. "Listen," I heard myself say. "Wake up and help me." I headed for Drew, for his place in the rocks, pulling hard against the current that wanted to take us past him. I turned the canoe as broadside as I could and asked the rocks to catch us, to help us. They did. We stopped, we lodged lightly, and I got out onto the sandy soil blowing with underwater. I walked up the canoe on two exhausting steps drawn through the river and hit Bobby hard on the side of the shoulder; as hard as I could, but not hard enough for the situation. To help I put the other hand on the knife. "Did you hear me?" I said, not loudly. "You help me with this or I'll kill you, just as you sit there on your useless ass. Now come on. We've got to finish it." He got slowly out into the water, swaying with the current, his eyes looking at everything but me. Drew was sitting up, facing upstream, in a kind of rough natural chair made of two stones where part of the river ran through, split off from the main current by a flat rock. Though he was sitting, it was a very easy, careless -- even carefree -- position, partly on the base of his spine. Water ran up and fell back from the top part of his chest, and a thin continuous spray of it went into his open mouth, making a quivering sensitive silver bell around his lips where one gold filling glinted. His eyelids were also kept propped open by the current, seeming to see out of the open water back up into the mountains, around all the curves of the river, infinitely. The pull of the water on his mouth gave him a cretinous, loose-lipped look, but the eyes had nothing to do with that; they were blue and all-seeing and clear. I stumbled forward to him like meeting him in a drunken bar. I tried to pull him out of his seat by the straps of his life jacket, but for a moment he wouldn't come. He seemed to settle deeper into the rocks. Then he rose with no muscles into my arms, against the current. Bobby came around to the other side of him, and the three of us trudged through two worlds, water and air, toward the canoe, tripping over the whole river, the undercurrent tangling our feet with his and with each other's. I had not realized he was so big. All three of us fell and he got away eddying with his head back, turning slowly from the waist in his jacket, his crushed face as placid and washed and blank as the sky. I went after him, stepped in a hole under him, finally wrestled and floated him back to the rock nearest the canoe and laid him over it on his stomach. I looked at his head. Something had hit him awfully hard there, all right. But whether it was a gunshot wound I didn't know; I had never seen a gunshot wound.