Deliverance - James Dickey [9]
with my stuff. There isn't much, but I've got it all ready. I piled it out in the living room after you went to bed." "Do you really want to go, baby?" "It's not something I'm dying to do," I said. "And I won't die if I don't do it. But the studio is really bugging me. I had a terrible time yesterday, until I got down to doing some work. It seemed like everything just went right by me, nothing mattered at all. I couldn't have cared less about anything or anybody. If going up in the woods with Lewis does something about that feeling, I'm for it." "Is it my fault?" "Lord, no," I said, but it partly was, just as it's any woman's fault who represents normalcy. "I wish you didn't have to go off like this. I mean, didn't want to. I wish there was something I could do." "There is." "Have we got time?" "We'll make time. There's nothing Lewis has to offer that matters all that much. He can wait. I don't feel like I can." We lay entangled like lovers. "Lie on your back," she said. She had great hands; they knew me. There was something about the residue of the nursing in her that turned me on: the practical approach to sex, the very deliberate and frank actions that give pleasure to people. The blood in me fell and began to rise in the dark, moving with her bands and the slight cracking of the lubricant. Martha put a pillow in the middle of the bed, threw back the covers with a windy motion and turned facedown on the pillow. I knelt and entered her, and her buttocks rose and fell. "Oh," she said. "Oh yes." It was the heat of another person around me, the moving heat, that brought the image up. The girl from the studio threw back her hair and clasped her breast, and in the center of Martha's heaving and expertly working back, the gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance. I went to the bathroom and stood with my eyes closed and flowed. When my bladder was empty I pulled a robe around me, looking in the side-lighted mirror, which shone far up into the thinnest of my hair, unerringly finding the part of it that was receding the most rapidly and shadowed the under-part of my eyes in a way that made me know that they would never again be as they bad been. Aging with me was going to come on fast. And yet I had good shoulders, and my hips and belly were heavy but solid. The hair was thick on my chest and across the top of my back, like an oxbow, and in the light some of it glowed a soft gray, like monkey fur. If I had had my choice of looking like any man, or combination of men on earth, or in history, I would not have known how to make it. I suppose I got some of this attitude from Lewis, who exercised incessantly but only had two or three suits for each season. Clothes were not a mystique with him, but his body was. "It's what you can make it do," he would say, "and what it'll do for you when you don't even know what's needed. It's that conditioning and reconditioning that's going to save you." "Save me?" I asked Lewis. "Save me from what? Or for what?" And yet Lewis approved of me at least enough to associate with me; I was probably his best friend. He had taught me how to shoot a bow, and I was fairly good. Lewis said I was unusually steady, and I could bold on a point almost as well as he could. My trouble was in judging distances, and Lewis didn't believe that archery with a sight, that is, archery that was not purely instinctive, was really archery. On a field round I scored consistently in the 160's for fourteen targets. Lewis was around 230, and had gone as high as 250. It was a real pleasure to watch him shoot, and to see the care that he took with his equipment, which he made himself, strings and all. In the living room it was balf-lit dark. The moon was gone from the floor and windows. I stood looking at one of the few dawns I had seen in the last ten years, and Martha came softly into the room in a frilled gown and continued on past me into the kitchen. She paused at the door. "Have you seen Dean anywhere?" she asked.