He turned his head and opened his eyes. Bobby and I held Drew with three hands, and I turned Drew’s head and went under his hair to the place I wanted Lewis to see.
“Lewis, was he shot? Did a bullet make this?”
A flicker of the old interest crossed his eyes. He raised his head as much as he could and stared into Drew’s hair.
“Well, was he shot? Was he? Was he, Lewis?”
He shifted, very slowly, over the center of the stream, his eyes to mine. My brain flinched; I did not know what was coming. He nodded, hardly a motion at all, and then sank back. “Grazed,” he said.
“Are you sure? Are you sure?”
He nodded again, and retched weakly, almost in the same movement. He kept on nodding, and Bobby and I looked at each other. We peered at Drew’s wound again.
“Maybe,” Bobby said.
“Maybe, is it,” I said. “It’ll have to be. But we can’t have anybody examining him. We can’t tell, but there are those who can, and if we have to explain a man with a gunshot wound the whole thing’ll come out.”
“Are we going to get out of this? I don’t see how we can. I really don’t.”
“We’re almost out of it now,” I said.
“What are we to do with Drew?”
“We’re going to sink him in this river,” I said, “forever.”
“O Lord. O Lord.”
“Listen; it’s exactly like I just said. Exactly. We can’t afford for somebody who knows about these things to examine him. If we go back without him, we just had some bad luck. We’re a fucking bunch of amateurs, anyway. And let ’em try to disprove that! We came up here to run this river without knowing what we were getting into, which is also the God’s truth. We did all right for a while, then we spilled. We lost the other canoe. Lewis broke his leg in the rapids, and Drew drowned. Anybody’d believe that. But we can’t explain somebody killed with a rifle.”
“If he was.”
“That’s right: if he was.”
A faint light came through Bobby’s eyes, then either darkened or died. “There’s no end to it,” he said. “No end.”
“Yes there is,” I said. “This is the end. This is all we have to do, but we’ve got to do it right. Everything depends on it. The whole works.”
I fumbled around in my lower leg pocket and got out the extra bowstring. I tied it around a good-sized rock and then around Drew’s belt, square-knot on square-knot. We put the rock in the canoe, and I took Drew’s body in the kapok jacket and laid it back in the water, wading forward with him past the rapids, hauling and bullying him gently along.
When the water deepened, Bobby stepped into the canoe and picked up the paddle. Drew and I moved off the end of the rapids and I took slow flight in my life preserver. I looked at Drew’s hand floating palm-up with the guitar calluses puckered and white and his college class ring on it, and I wondered if his wife might not like to have the ring. But no; I couldn’t even do that; it would mean having to explain. I touched the callus on the middle finger of his left hand, and my eyes blinded with tears. I lay with him in my arms for a moment weeping river-water, going with him. I could have cried as long as the river ran, but there was no time. “You were the best of us, Drew,” I said loud enough for Bobby to hear; I wanted him to hear. “The only decent one; the only sane one.”
I undid his life belt and let him fall away under me. On his knees beside Lewis in the canoe, Bobby heaved the stone overboard. One of Drew’s feet flew up and touched my calf, and we were free and in hell.
I stayed in the water behind the canoe, holding the jacket in one hand. Made weightless, my legs hurt twice as bad. I wanted to sleep, to sink, not have to breathe. I lay and moved with the river, with all nightmares and night sweats to come, but not here, not on me yet. When we came to another shallow place, I got up from the gravel and the crawfish, took up my full weight and half again more, and got into the rear seat with the sun hot and heavy-wet on my shoulders and back, as though packed there in layers.
*
For a long time nothing happened but fatigue and heat. Insects danced over the canoe between Bobby and me, a singing haze I was not sure wasn’t inside my head. But the walls were dropping steadily on both sides. In a few more miles the cliffs gave out on the right, and there was only a low fence of rock on the other side. Then it too slanted to the river, and we were level with the woods again. I knew I must have misjudged the distance we had to go, for there seemed to be no end to it. Bobby’s head was down; the most I could hope for from him was to keep steady in the canoe and not fall and tip us over. If we spilled in deep water or rapids now it would be a real problem to get back in, and we would never get Lewis in.
I had put on Drew’s life jacket over mine. It was awfully hot that way, but the extra collar came up higher on the back of my neck and kept the sun off it, and I was grateful for that. My mind danced for minutes on end like gnats around the image of the long, tumbling voyage down the rapids the jacket had taken, trying to keep Drew from drowning when he was already dead, probably, from something else.
I could feel my lips swelling with the sun. I was coming slowly up against an absolute limit, but I did not know where it was, or where we would be on the river when I got to it, or what I would do when I did. Was there anything I could say to myself, or even to Bobby, that would help?
“Bobby,” I said suddenly, “hang on. If we can stay with it for ten miles we’ll be out. I know we will. We’ve come an awful goddamned long way, and it can’t be much longer.”
He tried to nod, and partly did.
“Don’t rock us, baby. And if you see anything I can’t see, tell me. If we hit any rapids, call the rocks for me. If you can’t do that, get down with Lewis and pray, but try to help us stay level.”
There was a low new tone in the river: an old one, something I recognized.
“God,” I said. “Do something for us.”
We went toward it, but when we came around the next turn there was nothing but another turn about a half mile ahead. The sound came from there, or through there.
“I think I hear some rapids, Bobby. I know I do. If we can walk the canoe through, let’s do it. We can do it. But if we can’t, we’ll have to run them.”
We went down, picking up speed, and the step-up in sound, like a dial being tuned, brought up the old terror, but also excitement: the sensation Lewis was always describing; I felt it, tired as I was.
We went into the next turn, and I knew, with the sound I was hearing, that if the rapids were on the turn or even within sight when we straightened out, they would not be as bad as some we had been through. But we came off the turn moving still faster, without falls or rapids, with no white water and none in sight, and I knew they would be bad. It was more likely that I was listening to a falls, and I got ready to die again. The sound jumped higher all at once; there was a foaming seethe in it, a hoarse desperation. We turned again. The land to the left broke away, and I looked down a set of rapids steeper — a lot steeper — than any we had been through, and longer, all stepped down toward a funnel that disappeared between two huge boulders that turned the air between them white.
The water glassed out for fifty yards ahead of us and went through an almost formal-looking series of steep little cascades, changing to a lighter color to go faster, and then into an even faster half-white half-green color, then through a short hook to the left where it shot between the big rocks. I couldn’t see any farther than that; it was as though the river were being fed into fog. We might have made it to the bank, but I didn’t have the strength for it. The current had us; we were going there.
“We can’t walk,” I yelled. “Get your ass down as low as you can.”
He didn’t look back, but moved rearward and down and held to the gunwales, letting his knees break over the front seat. Our center of gravity was as low as we could get it, though I also hunched forward myself; I could not control the canoe if I had been any lower than I was, and we were going hard down th
e water all drawn together like threads running into a loom. The main roar came back in our faces, and then from the sides, and we were in it, hitting the little jolting ripples before the first drop-off. We went over; the nose tipped, the canoe grated under my tailbone, and we went down another, shorter step, a rough shove up through the spine that knocked me up off the seat and drove the canoe partway over on its side. Our speed righted us, and I made an all-out plunge — one stroke with all I had left — on the right to keep us straight with the current. We swung and ran over two more stepdowns, hard shocks at the base of the brain, and in the midst of this I heard a faint, then a quick loud shout or singing or call from somewhere and thought it might be Lewis screaming. Then we were down on level rushing water. We had lost a little speed to the rocks but we picked it up again immediately, then picked up more than that, and were going for the spray and the dark white of the passage. I dug in hard, then tried to backwater on the other side, saw it was useless, dug in on the right again as hard as I could to turn the bow, and we swung, swung and jumped shooting into the hole.
For a second I couldn’t see anything at all, and rode like I was standing still with aerated water filling my mouth and little fluttering bumps coming up through the canoe shell. With nothing to see go past, motion died. It was like being in a strange room in a cold building or a shaking cave filled with cold steam. I was wet clear through before I could think: the sun was killed on my shoulders in an instant. I lanced out again to the right with the paddle, mainly because that was the last place I had taken a stroke, and if it was right then it might be right now. I was sure that we had to turn, keep turning left if we could; the right felt like death, and if I couldn’t keep it away from us we would spin broadside and the whole river and all the mountains it came from would fall on us, would pour into the canoe ton after ton, never-ending. I dug again, but couldn’t tell what I had made us do. Something snatched at the paddle and I pulled it out and dug again, and again. The river showed in front in a blinking leap, and we came shooting forward as though launched to take off into the air. We were going faster than I had ever been in anything without an engine. The force of water around the paddle blade was stupendous; I felt as though I had dipped into some supernatural source of primal energy.
It was like riding on a river of air. The rocks flickered around and under us, then sand, then rocks, changing colors into each other as we streamed through. I half rose out of my seat; nothing else could be said to me but this, in this way. It was unkillableness: the triumph of an illusion when events bear it out. I looked to see what was coming to me next. “Hold on, baby,” I hollered. “We’re going home.”
Ahead was a tilted flange of rock with water sculpted over it in a long, curling forelocked curve that broke at us and then away from us past the rock, and then a low wall of rocks that looked like they shallowed out on both sides. I dug for the rock to go straight over, to have the thing whole.
We went up, like the beginning of an incline; the nose lifted; a powerful surge caught up with us from the rear. We lost weight completely. We rolled out over the top of the rock in one unstoppable motion. I closed my eyes and screamed with Lewis, mixing my voice with his bestial scream, blasting my lungs out where we hung six feet over the river for an instant and then began to fall. I waited for the upward revengeful smash of the river, but the nose rode down with an odd softness and into the back-scrolled smashed water at the foot of the rock, quivered straight back through the spine of the canoe into mine and into my brain, where I saw a vision of burning jackstraws or needles, and we were back down onto the bedded river in two almost simultaneous stepdowns. I listened for my cry hanging in the wet air above the blue-and-white flag colors of the rock — I still listen for it — and we were down and slowing forward, back on green water, solid and heavy on it, and it solid and heavy under us.
The bed-rocks fell away; another curve, one without rapids, began to open in front of us a hundred yards farther on. I looked at Bobby. He was still hanging back from his seat, but struggling to sit on it again. He turned half around back to me, and opened the eye on that side. He started to say something but didn’t, and I started to and didn’t.
Now, in calm water, I began to collect everything we needed to make the future with.
“Right back there is where it all happened,” I said.
He looked at me without any understanding at all.
“Somebody is going to ask us things. When that happens tell him that right back there was where Drew fell out — we all fell out. That was where Lewis broke his leg and we lost the other canoe.”
“OK,” he said, without conviction.
“Look around,” I said. “Let’s pick out some things we can agree were here. All this is so they don’t go looking for Drew farther upstream. So look. Look.”
He looked dully from side to side, from bank to bank, but I could tell that nothing was registering.
“See that big yellow tree,” I said. “That’s going to be the main thing. That, and the rapids, and that big rock we went over. We can put them together, and that’ll be all we need to do.”
I concentrated on the tree, looking at it from all the angles the river gave us as we went by, making it blot out everything else in my mind and leave a deep, recoverable image there. It was about half-dead, with the bark scaled off one side in a jagged pattern. It must have been struck by lightning at one time; the fire had ripped it deep. That was the kind of image I wanted in my mind: like that, the whole tree.
“Listen, Bobby,” I said. “Listen good. We’ve got to make this right. Drew was drowned back there. I’d say — I’m going to say — that the best place to look for his body is about where we are now. There’s no way for him to get down here from where he really is. There are no roads back in to the river where he is, and nobody’ll go up there looking for him if we don’t give them a reason to.”
“He’s here,” Bobby said, putting his hand over his eyes and then raising the outer edge of it to make an eyeshade. “He’s here, down under us. I can say that. I can say it, OK.”
It was exactly what I wanted. Lewis didn’t say anything; either he was out or it would have been too much of an effort to answer.
“We spilled at that bad place we just came through,” I said. “We can even tell them that we spilled going through all that spray between the rocks. We spilled, and Drew was drowned. Since our watches have stopped, we won’t be able to say exactly when it was. But we can say where. Where is at that yellow tree.”
Bobby looked a little less tired.
I said, “There’s not anything unbelievable about the story, if we remember the way we want it to go. There’s nobody — nobody — but us left. Nobody saw, nobody knows. If we don’t mess up on the details, we’re all right. We’re as all right as we’re ever going to be, but at least nobody will be messing with us: no police, no investigation, no nothing. Nothing but us.”
“I hope not.”
“So do I. But as Lewis would say, we’ve got to do more than hope. Control, baby. It can be controlled. So give me back the story.”
He did, and he was accurate. I was pleased; I began to feel safer, for I was dreading going back to men and their questions and systems; I had been dreading it without knowing it.
I was heavy-bodied but light-minded, and felt, as I hadn’t for the last few hours, that I could go on for a while. More and more I just let us drift, paddling only enough to keep the nose downriver. The land on both sides was wooded, but it was not the wild, tangled woods of the gorge, nor the dark, still growth before it. We were not far from men. I expected to see something human at every bend we cleared.
There it was. A cow was lying under a tree at the edge of the river. It swung its head, and came to be gazing at us over the flow. We drifted toward it.
“It’s a farm, Bobby,” I said. “We’re here. We can turn in anytime.” But I didn’t want to have to walk a long way over pastures and fields, looking for a farmhouse. I decided to go downriver for
a little while yet, where there was a bridge or a road.
The cows increased, vivid white and dead, living black, lying along the watercourse and up its banks, chewing, drinking, lifting themselves off the river with a heavy toss of horns, eternally stupid, huge, and useless to themselves. One more curve, I was sure, and we would be back.
We went around the same turn — I could not have told you how they differed — eight or ten more times. After about another hour, which would have made it, from the heat and the height of the sun, about noon or early afternoon, we came around another turn like the others, but across the river was a plank bridge set in a steel frame. Just beyond it was a gentle spillway; a man and a boy were fishing with cane poles below it.
We muscled the canoe laboriously cross-river to land. When we touched the bank, Bobby got to his feet in the canoe and swayed for a minute, then stepped out into the kudzu. I got into the slime and waded out of the river, and never touched it again with my feet or legs. We beached the canoe and took off our life preservers.
Lewis lay there beyond us, with his hands crossed over him. He was terrifically sunburned; flakes of skin came off his lips when he moved them.
“Lewis,” I said from land. “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” he said calmly and strongly, but with his eyes closed. “I hear you and I’ve been hearing you. You’ve got it figured; we can get out of this. They won’t ask me anything, and if they do I’ve got the word, same as you gave Bobby. You’re doing it exactly right; you’re doing it better than I could do. Hang in there.”
“Do you feel anything in your leg?”
“No, but I haven’t moved it or fooled with it or thought about it for a long time. I kept trying to put it to sleep, back yonder, and now I can’t wake it up. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m all right.”
“I’m going to get somebody,” I said. “Can you hold out a little longer?”
“Sure,” he said. “My God, those falls must have been something, back there.”