Deliverance - James Dickey [94]
curious to be going toward them from this direction. It was an hour of slow going, over gullies and washouts with just enough track for regular cars -- if it had got any worse it would have been jeep or Land Rover country -- before we saw the tree. I saw the color and then the lightning jag, and my heart jumped like a whole being, inside me and nearly out. The rapids were roaring, upstream about a quarter of a mile; I could see some of them now, and they were a lot worse, even, than I remembered. The falloff was a good six feet, and the only place where a canoe could get through was a funnel of water into which the whole river cramped and shot, blizzarding through the stones and beating and fuming like some enormous force chained to the Spot. The policeman pointed. "He'd be right in here?" "I'd say so," I said. "He may be downstream farther, though. Or he may be caught in the rocks. But we probably ought to start here." We all got out and moved toward each other. I watched Bobby over the hoods and backs of cars. He was not moving among the men. They were wandering rather freely around him, and his stillness in the midst of them suggested that he was not able to move as freely as they, or at all. I don't think anyone noticed this but me, or put this interpretation on it, but it made me nervous; he already looked like a prisoner; for an instant I actually thought he was in leg shackles. I started toward him, but the police from the three cars always came between us, which must have been intentional, though they managed to give the impression it wasn't. Then Bobby moved like everybody else, toward the river. Meanwhile other cars were creeping up to us, and pretty soon they filled up the bank all the way out of sight downriver. The men who got out of them were farmers, mostly, and small merchants, or so I supposed. Some of them brought long ropes with hooks -- grapples -- on them, and I understood the full horror of the phrase I was always seeing in the newspapers, especially in the summer: "drag the river for the body." Drag was right. "This the place?" the patrolman asked me again. "It's the best I can do," I said. "As far as I'm concerned, this is it." The men began to deploy with their ropes and hooks. The stream was not deep at this point, about up to their waists or lower chests. The river ran through them easily. I watched the chains and ropes and wire cables come up from the water empty, in a certain rhythm. They always seemed to have grasped something when the hooks were underwater, and just to have let it go when they were pulled back up. I sat under a bush with the patrolman who had driven me out, watching each of the men in waders do what he was doing at the moment, and remembered the ring on Drew's finger and the dead guitar calluses on his hand as he fell from my arms. Someone was coming, casually but deliberately. I turned to say something to the patrolman, so that I would seem unaware of the other person's approach. "Say, buddy," the new man said. "Can I talk to you for a minute?" "Sure," I said. "Sit down." He did. We shook hands. He was an old seam-faced lightbodied man with hazel eyes. He wore his hat at the prescribed country tilt, which always amused me wherever I saw it. I almost smiled, but instead took a cigarette he offered and lit up. "You sure this is the place?" I repeated, "Not all that sure. But I can't do any better. He's either in those rocks up there, or here, or downstream. How far downstream I don't know." "You say youus coming down this-yere river in a canoe?" "Two canoes, we started with." "How come?" "How come what?" "How come you to be doing this, in the fust place?" "Oh," I said, hesitating and not really knowing the answer, even now. "I guess we just wanted to get out a little. All of us work in the city, and it gets pretty tiresome, just sitting in an office all the time. The fellow who broke his leg's been up here before, fishing. He said we ought to see it before they dam the river and make a public park out of it. That's all. No really good reason, I suppose. Just boredom." "I kin