Deliverance (9 page)

I was awfully tired, though not sore. As the sun lost energy, so did I, and the edge of night-cold clinched it. I wanted to let go of the river.

We drifted slowly. The current entered my muscles and body as though I were carrying it; it came up through the paddle. I fished up a couple of beers from our pack and opened them and passed one to Drew. He twisted back and took it, one lens of his glasses dark with the sunset.

“It’s a hard life with us pioneers,” he said, and whistled a line from “In My Birch-Bark Canoe.”

I lifted my beer and drank, keeping the beer coming in as fast as I could get it down. The nylon of my legs was drying out and clinging to my calves and shins. I pulled the cloth legs loose from me and took up the paddle again. I felt marvelous.

We were about even with the other canoe. Like that we went down more drifting than paddling, into the dark coming upriver to meet us. There were no rapids — though we kept hearing them — and we were riding through rocky banks and tall mournful long-leaf pines. Once a little road, overgrown with weeds and bushes, ran along the left bank for a few hundred yards and then gave out at a fallen tree. A hawk circled in the dying blue, the trailing edge of his wings standing out sharply in the deep intensification of the evening sky.

It was beginning to be very wild and quiet. I remembered to be frightened and right away I was. It was the beautiful
impersonality of the place that struck me the hardest; I would not have believed that it could hit me all at once like this, or with such force. The silence and the silence-sound of the river had nothing to do with any of us. It had nothing to do with the town we had just left, with its few streetlights in the mountain darkness, its cafes and the faces of farmers in the tired glow of rigged wires in the town square, and the one theater showing a film that was appearing on late television in the city. I dozed, much as I had done with Lewis in the car in the morning, and I saw again our approach to the blue hills, the changing shapes and colors and positions as we came toward them, except that in some way or another my mind got turned around and I was going backwards, away from the hills and through the Clabber Girl signs and away from the country Jesuses and back to the buildup of road-houses and motels and shopping centers around the city. Martha was there, and Dean, and it was a shock for me to realize, all of a sudden, that I was not with them; that I was looking onward into curves of water. Martha was worrying now, watching TV with Dean. She was not used to being without me at night, and I could see her sitting with her hands folded, in the position of a woman bravely suffering. Not suffering badly, but suffering just the same, her feet in hot mules.

I backwatered a little, and drove us with a long stroke up alongside the green canoe. An insect hit my lips like a bullet.

“Don’t you think we ought to make camp pretty soon?” I said to Lewis.

“Yeah, I do. I’m afraid if we go any farther the banks might begin to get too high for us to get out on. You-all look
for a place on the left, and we’ll look over here.”

We ran some small rapids, phosphorescent in the twilight, feeling hardly more than a slight alteration of the stream under us, but it was enough to remind us of the trouble that would result if we were to dump the equipment in the water in the dark. The trees and bushes where I was looking were connecting, becoming one solid thing; it was very hard to make out what the details were like. But there did seem to be a kind of shelf about four feet up from the water. I pointed this out to Lewis, and he nodded. I swung the canoe toward the place, working eater-cornered against the bias of the stream. We hit the bank with a soft yielding bump. I got squeamishly out into the water and held the canoe, the sliding cold around me full of the presence of night-creatures. Drew scrambled out and tied us to a sapling. I pulled myself up and out as Bobby and Lewis maneuvered alongside; the hair on my shoulders crawled with discomfort.

We unlashed the stuff and began to make camp. Lewis had brought some long flashlights, and he set these up on stumps and in the forks of bushes to form an area of concentrated light. In and out of this we moved, working at strange duties. Lewis seemed to know where everything was, and went around placing articles on the ground in the positions from which he expected them to rise and create a camp: the two tents, the grill, the air mattresses, the sleeping bags. They tried to be useful, but Drew and Bobby did not seem to be getting much done, and I saw the folly of just standing around and letting Lewis do everything, though it would have been all right with him if I had. I was sleepy, and I went to the equipment that had to do with that. I blew up
the air mattresses with a hand pump, all four of them; it took a good half an hour, and I was pumping steadily all the time, while the river lightened in front of me and the woods at my back got thicker and thicker with blackness.

Lewis pitched the tents and Bobby and Drew made a show of looking around for firewood. When we had the tents up and the air sacks and sleeping bags inside them, with a flashlight in each tent and the snake guards up, I felt a good deal better; we had colonized the place. I went out with a flashlight to pick up some wood. Whenever I met one of the others I would shine the light into his chest or to one side of him so as not to shine it in his eyes, but I didn’t like that. The upcast light gave Bobby’s face a greased, Mongoloid cast; Drew’s looked sand-blasted, with pins of deep shadow stuck all through it in the places where he’d had acne. Lewis’ face didn’t change much, and somehow this did not surprise me at all. The long shadow of his nose crawled upward between his eyes, his brow-ridges hung forward more, but his low voice seemed to come from the right place in the light, or from the right place just beside it.

He and I stood shining our beams out onto the river, the light curling and foaming like white water at the surface of the calm current. It was a lovely, melancholy camp. I liked standing there with the light going out of my hand for no reason and sliding up and down along the current, but I thought I probably ought to be doing something more useful, so I got my unstrung bow and hung it on a branch to make the spot look like a real hunting camp, first greasing the broadheads against the dew. Lewis came over and ran his palm over the handle section.

“The old catapult, eh?”

“Sure enough,” I said.

“You like these Howard Hill broadheads?”

“Yeah, I think they’re fine. The last archery magazine I read said a two-bladed head has better penetration. That’s good enough for me. Those guys know.”

“These don’t windplane?”

“I’ve only shot ’em at stumps and earthwork targets, but they go straight, nearly as I can tell. They do out of this bow, anyway.”

Bobby poured everybody a stiff drink of bourbon, and we drank while Lewis made a fire against a bank of stones he had pulled up out of the ground or gathered from around the tents. He had brought steaks. He built up a big blaze, let it die down some and then put the meat on in a buttered pan.

The smell of the meat-smoke was wonderful. We all had another drink and sat on the bank, watching the firelight uncertain and persistent on the water. Fear and excitement and the prospect of eating all became forms of each other in my mind. There was a kind of comfort in knowing that we were where no one — no matter what issues were involved in other places — could find us, that night was around us and there was nothing we could do about it.

The pale fire on the water was not subject to the current, and this seemed wonderful to me. It played and danced where it was, an invulnerable spirit that would die. We all sat without saying anything, and I was proud of us for that, and especially proud of Lewis, who I was afraid was going to expound. I stretched out on my back, paralleling the river.

There was a darkness on my inland side when I opened my eyes; I thought I had been lying there a long time. But then something filled the space again. It was Drew with his guitar. I sat up, and the water, though it still swarmed weightlessly with the cave-images of fire, now seemed on the point of swirling them down.

Drew tuned softly, then raked out a soft chord that flowed and floated away.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said. “Only I didn’t know it.”

He moved up the neck, drawing out chord after chord. These built and shimmered on each other in the darkness, in lonely harmony. Then he began to pick individual notes, and put the bass under them.

“It’s woods music,” he said. “Don’t you think so?”

“Sure do.”

I loved the powerful nasal country clang, the steely humming and the strings hit like hammers on rails. Drew played deep and clean, and neither of us could have been happier. He played “Expert Town” and “Lord Bateman”; he played “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Shaggy Dad” and Lead-belly’s “Easy, Mr. Tom.”

“I really ought to have a twelve-string for this one,” he explained, but it sounded good anyway.

Lewis brought over the cooked steaks while Drew played, and then we ate, two little steaks apiece and big wedges of cake that Lewis’ wife had made. We all had another drink. The fire was leaving us; in the river it had already died.

“You know,” Lewis said, “we don’t have too many more years for this kind of thing.”

“I guess not,” I said. “But I can tell you, I’m glad we came. I’m glad to be here. I wouldn’t be anywhere else, the way I feel.”

“It’s true, Lewis,” Bobby said. “It’s all true, what you said. It’s great. And I think we did real good on the river. I mean, for amateurs.”

“Yeah, good enough, I reckon,” Lewis said. “But I’m sure glad you and I didn’t get that damned sluggish wood canoe turned around backward just before we hit some white water. That might have been bad.”

“We didn’t though,” Bobby said. “And I don’t think it’ll happen again, do you?”

“I hope not,” Lewis said.

“Well, to the sleeping bags, men,” I said, stretching.

“Had my first wet dream in a sleeping bag,” Lewis said. “I surely did.”

“How was it?” Bobby asked.

“Great. There’s no repeating it.”

I stood up, finally, and creaked and stooped into the tent. I was massively tired, and hated the laces of my tennis shoes which had hardened in the water until I couldn’t untie them. I pulled the shoes off by mainstrength, shucked off everything else as well and got into the bag and zipped it up. Drew was still playing, out on the bank; I could hear him trying out some high minor, far away. I lay back in the soft down, crinkling into the elastic resistance of the air mattress. I snapped out the flashlight and closed my eyes.

I was out and in. I was stone dead and also, for a while, lying there listening, not knowing what I was listening for. It might have been a human voice with fire in it, an unearthly
drunken man-howl; it might have been old Tom McCaskill screaming into the night from his fire.

Then there was nothing. I turned and saw Drew now beside me with his hand down along the seam of the bag.

I could hear the river running at my feet, and behind my head the woods were unimaginably dense and dark; there was nothing in them that knew me. There were creatures with one forepaw lifted, not wanting yet to put the other down on a dry leaf, for fear of the sound. There were the eyes made for seeing in this blackness; I opened my eyes and saw the dark in all its original color. In it I saw Martha’s back heaving and working and dissolving into the studio, where we had finally decided that the photographs we had taken were no good and had asked the model back. We had also gone ahead with the Kitts’ sales manager’s idea to make the ad like the Coppertone scene of the little girl and the dog. There was Wilma holding the cat and forcing its claws out of its pads and fastening them into the back of the girl’s panties. There was Thad; there was I. The panties stretched, the cat pulled, trying to get its claws out of the artificial silk, and then all at once leapt and clawed the girl’s buttocks. She screamed, the room erupted with panic, she slung the cat round and round, a little orange concretion of pure horror, still hanging by one paw from the girl’s panties, pulling them down, clawing and spitting in the middle of the air, raking the girl’s buttocks and her leg-backs. I was paralyzed. Nobody moved to do anything. The girl screamed and cavorted, reaching behind her.

Something hit the top of the tent. I thought it was part of what I had been thinking, for the studio was no dream. I
put out a hand. The material was humming like a sail. Something seemed to have hold of the top of the tent; the cloth was trembling in a huge grasp. The sickening memory of where I was took hold of me from the inside of the heart. I groped down for the cold shank of the flashlight between the air sacks and snapped it on, running the weak glow up from the door of the tent. I kept seeing nothing but gray-green stitches until I got right above my head. The canvas was punctured there, and through it came one knuckle of a deformed fist, a long curving of claws that turned on themselves. Those are called talons, I said out loud.

I lay with the sweat ready to break, looking up through almost-closed lids, full now of a dread that was at least partly humorous. There was nothing, after all, so dangerous about an owl. Its other foot punctured the tent slowly and deliberately, and it shifted its weight until I could feel it come even. The claws did not relax, but the tent quivered less. Still, it shuddered lightly, as though we were about to be carried away in it. I dozed for a minute and tried to see what the tent must look like from the outside, with the big night bird — surely it was very big, from the size of the nails and feet — sitting in its own silence and equilibrium, holding us fast inside what it took to be our sleep.

The nails tightened a very little, the canvas tore slightly and then beat in a huge tent-beat; it seemed strange that we were still on the ground. I fell back, realizing that I had heard the first downstroke of the owl’s wings, urgent and practically soundless; the stroke that hung it in the air as it set out.

Sometime later, from some deep place, I heard the woods
beating. In the middle of this sound the tent shook; the owl had hold of it in the same place. I knew this before I cut the light on — it was still in my hand, exactly as warm as I was — and saw the feet, with the heel talons now also coming in. I pulled one hand out of the sleeping bag and saw it wander frailly up through the thin light until a finger touched the cold reptilian nail of one talon below the leg-scales. I had no idea of whether the owl felt me; I thought perhaps it would fly, but it didn’t. Instead, it shifted its weight again, and the claws on the foot I was touching loosened for a second. I slipped my forefinger between the claw and the tent, and half around the stony toe. The claw tightened; the strength had something nervous and tentative about it. It tightened more, very strongly but not painfully. I pulled back until the hand came away, and this time the owl took off.