Deliverance - James Dickey [84]
and under us, then sand, then rocks, changing colors into each other as we streamed through. I half rose out of my seat; nothing else could be said to me but this, in this way. It was unkillableness: the triumph of an illusion when events bear it out. I looked to see what was coming to me next. "Hold on, baby," I hollered. "We're going home." Ahead was a tilted flange of rock with water sculpted over it in a long, curling forelocked curve that broke at us and then away from us past the rock, and then a low wall of rocks that looked like they shallowed out on both sides. I dug for the rock to go straight over, to have the thing whole. We went up, like the beginning of an incline; the nose lifted; a powerful surge caught up with us from the rear. We lost weight completely. We rolled out over the top of the rock in one unstoppable motion. I closed my eyes and screamed with Lewis, mixing my voice with his bestial scream, blasting my lungs out where we hung six feet over the river for an instant and then began to fall. I waited for the upward revengeful smash of the river, but the nose rode down with an odd softness and into the back-scrolled smashed water at the foot of the rock, quivered straight back through the spine of the canoe into mine and into my brain, where I saw a vision of burning jackstraws or needles, and we were back down onto the bedded river in two almost simultaneous stepdowns. I listened for my cry hanging in the wet air above the blue-and-white flag colors of the rock -- I still listen for it -- and we were down and slowing forward, back on green water, solid and heavy on it, and it solid and heavy under us. The bed-rocks fell away; another curve, one without rapids, began to open in front of us a hundred yards farther on. I looked at Bobby. He was still hanging back from his seat, but struggling to sit on it again. He turned half around back to me, and opened the eye on that side. He started to say something but didn't, and I started to and didn't. Now, in calm water, I began to collect everything we needed to make the future with. "Right back there is where it all happened," I said. He looked at me without any understanding at all. "Somebody is going to ask us things. When that happens tell him that right back there was where Drew fell out -- we all fell out. That was where Lewis broke his leg and we lost the other canoe." "OK," he said, without conviction. "Look around," I said. "Let's pick out some things we can agree were here. All this is so they don't go looking for Drew farther upstream. So look. Look." He looked dully from side to side, from bank to bank, but I could tell that nothing was registering. "See that big yellow tree," I said. "That's going to be the main thing. That, and the rapids, and that big rock we went over. We can put them together, and that'll be all we need to do." I concentrated on the tree, looking at it from all the angles the river gave us as we went by, making it blot out everything else in my mind and leave a deep, recoverable image there. It was about half-dead, with the bark scaled off one side in a jagged pattern. It must have been struck by lightlung at one time; the fire had ripped it deep. That was the kind of image I wanted in my mind: like that, the whole tree. "Listen, Bobby," I said. "Listen good. We've got to make this right. Drew was drowned back there. I'd say -- I'm going to say -- that the best place to look for his body is about where we are now. There's no way for him to get down here from where he really is. There are no roads back in to the river where he is, and nobody'll go up there looking for him if we don't give them a reason to." "He's here," Bobby said, putting his hand over his eyes and then raising the outer edge of it to make an eyeshade. "He's here, down under us. I can say that. I can say it, OK." It was exactly what I wanted. Lewis didn't say anything; either he was out or it would have been too much of an effort to answer. "We spilled at that bad place we just came through," I said. "We can even tell them that we spilled going through all