Deliverance - James Dickey [88]
and I had rehearsed on the river, I made it a point to try to visualize the things I was saying as though they had really happened. I could see us searching for Drew, though we never had. I saw these things happen at the place near the yellow tree, and for me they were happening as I talked; it was hard to realize that they had not taken place in the actual world; as I saw him taking them into account, they became part of a world, the believed world, the world of recorded events, of history. "Well," he said, "We'll have to drag the river. Can you show us 'bout where it was?" "I think so," I said, not wanting to appear too sure, but fairly sure. "I don't know if there's a road in there, but I believe I'd know the place if I could get to it. We've got a hurt man, though. We've got to get him to a hospital." "OK," he said, a little reluctant to have the situation pass from his jurisdiction to the doctor's. "We'll check in on you at the hospital later." "Fine," I said, and crawled back into the ambulance beside Lewis. We rode, and this kind of riding, though it wasn't what I had got used to, was never better. The tires crunched at last and we stopped. I sat up, a little at a time. We were off in a field, and alongside us was a long flat building that looked like a rural high school. A warm wind was blowing over it. The doctor opened my vision wide, a door in each hand. "This is it, buddy," he said. "Take it easy; we'll get your friend out. Just go along with Cornelius." I took hold of the driver again, and we went through some glass doors, up a ramp, into a long hall that appeared to run out of sight, ending in a window the size of microfilm, way off and across. "Second door to the right," the driver said, and we went there. I sagged down on a white, tight table, the sheets straining under me. In a minute or two they brought Lewis, but didn't bring him into the room. They put him on a table outside the door, and then noiselessly rolled him on, toward the faraway window. I lay and held my old friend, my side. The doctor came back on soft feet. "Let's see now, buddy," he said. "Can you raise up just a little bit? Does this zipper still work?" "I think so," I mumbled. I tried to sit up, and made it easily, and even zipped the zipper down with my good hand. He took off my tennis shoes and I slithered out of the remains of the flying suit. My shorts were stuck into the wound like the nylon I had bound up in it, but he put something painless out of a bottle in the whole mass of cloth and flesh, and the shorts began to come away. He threw what I had been wearing into a corner, and started working on my side. Things were dissolving there. Piece after piece of cloth, or of me, softened, softened, and came away, and he kept throwing them down below me, in the bare room. My side was breathing like a mouth, and it did not feel at all bad anymore, only stranger and more open. "Good Lord, fellow," he said. "What's been chopping on you? Looks like somebody hit you in the side with an ax." "Does?" Then more professionally, "How'd you do this?" "We were trying to do a little illegal bowhunting up and down the banks of the river," I said. "It's not such a good thing to be doing, but we were doing it. We were going to miss the regular season, and we wanted to try it this way." "How in hell did you manage to shoot yourself with an arrow? I didn't think it could be done." He was working and looking into my blood all the time, very busy and talking calmly. I talked calmly. "I had the bow and arrows in the canoe with me when we dumped. I tried to hold on to the bow because I didn't want to be in the woods without any weapon at all, and it sliced up my hands." I held up the hand the arrows had sliced up, just as I said, "and the next thing I knew I had tangled with a rock and something was going through my side and the bow was gone. I don't have any idea where it went. Downriver; that's all I know." "Well, it made a good clean cut," he said, "that got ragged. Part of it is real clean, and part of it is hacked up and looks sawed. You've got some kind