Deliverance - James Dickey [93]
had been loud enough. "Everything went," I said. "Drew was killed; you remember me telling you?" "I think so," he said. "I don't remember him in the canoe, after that. I don't remember." "You remember all that spray?" I asked. "I remember, sort of," he said. "Was that where it was?" "That's where it was for Drew," I said slowly. "You and Steinhauser's tub bought it in the first spill, upriver." "I couldn't see anything," he said. "Looking straight up, I couldn't even see the sky." "No sky," I said. "No sky at all." I rounded my hurt side, back to the patrolman. "Wait'll you see it," I said. "You'll understand what the man's talking about." "Y'all want to wait, on down here a ways?" one of the policemen, a new one, said to us. We pulled back, down along the corridor. But Lewis had got the message; I was sure he had, and not too soon. Bobby and I walked along in our new clothes. Neither of us had had a chance to shave, and we were pretty grubby, but clean. A shave would have made me a completely new person, but I was half-new anyway, and half-new was very good; it is better to come back easily. After about fifteen minutes the new officer walked ordinarily along to us. "Why'ont we go on back into town?" he said. "All right," I told him. "Whatever you say." I got into the front seat of the patrol car with him, and we started back. I didn't say anything and he didn't either. When we reached town he went into a cafe and made a couple of calls. It frightened me some to watch him talk through the tripled glass -- windshield, plate glass and phone booth glass -- for it made me feel caught in the whole vast, inexorable web of modern communications. I was not sure that this was not the beginning of the enormous, unfathomable apparatus of crime detection, from which no one is entirely free: I could imagine stupendous filing systems, IBM machines tirelessly sorting punch cards, one thing being checked against another: I was not sure he was not talking to J. Edgar Hoover. Our story could not stand up against that, I was sure. And yet it might, even so. The patrolman came back and sat with me, with his door open. In a little while two more patrol cars showed up. A small crowd started to drift together; a head turned toward us, and another: eventually, all heads looked at us at least once, and most of them more than once. I sat still, in my clothes of the country. I could prove where I had bought them. My hurt was good in the midst of the general unhurt. One of the police from another car was talking to a local fellow about roads going up the river. A few minutes after this, we all got ready to start out. I looked for Bobby; he was in one of the new highway patrol cars. As we left, another police car, very local-looking, drove up and by, and I saw my man, an old fellow, rusty and quiet. There was going to be a meeting, somewhere upriver. My beard tingled at the roots, and I started to calculate, yet once again. We turned off the highway and drove down a little road that swung through a farmer's yard and then through his chicken yard. A woman was feeding chickens, muffled up against the sun as though against cold. We moved on, slower and slower. Nothing had happened yet; nothing had happened to any of us yet. There had been no accusations made, nothing discovered. My lies seemed better, more and more like truth; the bodies in the woods and in the river did not move. We were the lead car. We took off through some glaring cornfields and then into poor-looking woods, second-growth pines like turpentine trees. I listened for the river, but saw it before I heard it. The road got worse and worse the nearer we got; it figured. At the river's edge we were crawling. "This about where it was?" the cop asked me. "No," I said, waking from a half-sleep I didn't know I was in. "It was farther up. We wouldn't have come down here all the way from Oree if we wanted to turn the canoe over in calm water." He looked at me oddly, or I suppose he did, for I was watching straight ahead for the yellow tree, and listening -- one more time -- for the falls; it seemed