Deliverance - James Dickey [86]
sure about Drew?" he asked. "They can't find him?" "They won't find him," I said. "Not if I have anything to say about it." "That's it, then, I guess," he said. "Go and get somebody. Anybody. I want to get out of this goddamned roasting oven. I want to get out of my own coffin, this fucking piece of tin junk." "Lie still. We're home free. Lie still and don't worry." I told Bobby to stay with the canoe and climbed up the kudzu of the bank to the road that ran across the bridge. It was a thin blacktop state highway, and about a half a mile along it was a country gas station, a store with two stark yellow pumps, probably Shell. I stood, wondering how I could get there without killing myself, and also waiting for the road to unfreeze and begin to flow around me. The stillness underfoot was disturbing, but it stayed, and from it I looked back down at the river. It was beautiful, and I was sure I would feel all my life the particular pull of it at different places, the weight and depth and speed of it; they had been given to me. I was heavy in the air now, and floundered a little, walking. My side was caked shut, and the part of the flying suit I had tied around me had clotted into the wound; I could not have gotten it out without fainting, so I let it stay, holding it in with an elbow and leaning over it a little, away from the road. I went toward the station, crossing the bridge over the spillway. The station moved off in the sun and shimmered like an oil slick, and I went after it as best I could. My side hurt badly, but it seemed to have moved off from me a little bit; the rags seemed to go around it instead of through it, so that it was like carrying a painful package or ball under my arm. I had a quick dry period between the time when the river water dried off my legs and the close nylon began to flap with sweat; by the time I got to the station I was striped with my own darkness. A country teen-ager was sitting on the backless bottom of a kitchen chair just inside the screen door, which was shifting and tapping with flies. Though he had probably been watching me come, he could not believe me at close range. He got up and opened the door. "Is there a phone here?" I asked. He looked as though he didn't know whether there was or not. "I've got to get an ambulance out here," I said. "And I've got to get to the highway patrol. People are hurting, and one's dead." I let him make the calls, because I didn't know where on earth the station was. "Just tell them there's been an accident on the river," I said. "And tell them where to come, but tell them to come quick. I don't think I can last, and there's another man hurt worse than I am." He hung up, finally, and said there'd be somebody along toreckly. I sat down and tilted back in a chair and was perfectly still, getting my story together one more time, the most important time. But back of the story was the reason for the story, and the woods and the river, and all that had happened. There must be some way for me to get used to the idea that I had buried three men in two days, and that I had killed one of them. I had never seen a dead man in my life, except a brief glance at my father in his coffin. It was strange to be a murderer, especially sitting where I was sitting, but I was too tired to be worried, and didn't worry, except about Bobby's ability to remember what I had told him. A car or two went by, and I waited to hear one slow down. My side hurt, but the pain was in repose, and lay there under my arm, a part of me that I had made, and could live with. I wondered if I should tell whatever doctor dressed it that I had gored myself on my own arrow, or that I had cut myself on the canoe when we turned over, since there were several places on it where the banging around it had taken on the rocks had forced the metal apart and made flanges and projections that might conceivably cut. I decided to go with the arrow, for there might still be some paint in the wound, and some parts of the wound were clean-cut by the razorhead, and the jagged aluminum wouldn't have done that. I began