Deliverance - James Dickey [85]
that spray between the rocks. We spilled, and Drew was drowned. Since our watches have stopped, we won't be able to say exactly when it was. But we can say where. Where is at that yellow tree." Bobby looked a little less tired. I said, "There's not anything unbelievable about the story, if we remember the way we want it to go. There's nobody -- nobody -- but us left. Nobody saw, nobody knows. If we don't mess up on the details, we're all right. We're as all right as we're ever going to be, but at least nobody will be messing with us: no police, no investigation, no nothing. Nothing but us." "I hope not." "So do I. But as Lewis would say, we've got to do more than hope. Control, baby. It can be controlled. So give me back the story." He did, and he was accurate. I was pleased; I began to feel safer, for I was dreading going back to men and their questions and systems; I had been dreading it without knowing it. I was heavy-bodied but light-minded, and felt, as I hadn't for the last few hours, that I could go on for a while. More and more I just let us drift, paddling only enough to keep the nose downriver. The land on both sides was wooded, but it was not the wild, tangled woods of the gorge, nor the dark, still growth before it. We were not far from men. I expected to see something human at every bend we cleared. There it was. A cow was lying under a tree at the edge of the river. It swung its head, and came to be gazing at us over the flow. We drifted toward it. "It's a farm, Bobby," I said. "We're here. We can turn in anytime." But I didn't want to have to walk a long way over pastures and fields, looking for a farmhouse. I decided to go downriver for a little while yet, where there was a bridge or a road. The cows increased, vivid white and dead, living black, lying along the watercourse and up its banks, chewing, drinking, lifting themselves off the river with a heavy toss of horns, eternally stupid, huge, and useless to themselves. One more curve, I was sure, and we would be back. We went around the same turn -- I could not have told you how they differed -- eight or ten more times. After about another hour, which would have made it, from the heat and the height of the sun, about noon or early afternoon, we came around another turn like the others, but across the river was a plank bridge set in a steel frame. just beyond it was a gentle spillway; a man and a boy were fishing with cane poles below it. We muscled the canoe laboriously cross-river to land. When we touched the bank, Bobby got to his feet in the canoe and swayed for a minute, then stepped out into the kudzu. I got into the slime and waded out of the river, and never touched it again with my feet or legs. We beached the canoe and took off our life preservers. Lewis lay there beyond us, with his hands crossed over him. He was terrifically sunburned; flakes of skin came off his lips when he moved them. "Lewis," I said from land. "Do you hear me?" "I hear you," he said calmly and strongly, but with his eyes closed. "I hear you and I've been hearing you. You've got it figured; we can get out of this. They won't ask me anything, and if they do I've got the word, same as you gave Bobby. You're doing it exactly right; you're doing it better than I could do. Hang in there." "Do you feel anything in your leg?" "No, but I haven't moved it or fooled with it or thought about it for a long time. I kept trying to put it to sleep, back yonder, and now I can't wake it up. It doesn't matter, though. I'm all right." "I'm going to get somebody," I said. "Can you hold out a little longer?" "Sure," he said. "My God, those falls must have been something, back there." "They were something. We could have done a lot better if we'd'a had you, buddy." "You had me," he said. "You should have seen the water between those rocks." "I don't know," he said, getting faint again. "I had it another way. I felt it in my leg, and I tell you, I know something I didn't know before." There was a good smile on his face. He tried to get his head up from the dried vomit, then sank back in it. "Are you