James Dickey - Deliverance

“What if he hadn’t done it?”

“It wouldn’t make any difference,” Lewis said. “He went, and he tried. He didn’t have to. Or rather he did have to. But anyway, he went, and Shad would have been in a bad way if he hadn’t.”

“I saw Shad at a better business meeting last month,” I said. “He may be a friend of yours, but I can’t see that anything so much was saved, up there in the woods.”

“That’s pretty callous, Ed.”

“Sure it is,” I said. “So what?”

“As it happens, I agree with you,” be said after a moment. “Not a good man. Drinks too much in an uncreative way. Talks too much. Doesn’t deliver enough, either on the river or in business or, I’m fairly sure, in bed with his wife or anybody else, either. But that’s not the point. His own life and his own values are up to him to make. The boy went and hauled him out of the woods because of his values. And his old man and his old man’s way of life, both of them ignorant and full of superstition and bloodshed and murder and liquor and hookworm and ghosts and early deaths, were the cause of it. I admire it, and I admire the men that it makes, and that make it, and if you don’t, why, fuck you.”

“OK,” I said, “fuck me. I’ll still stay with the city.”

“I reckon you will,” Lewis said. “But you’ll have doubts.”

“I may, but they won’t bother me.”

“That’s the trouble. The city’s got you where you live.”

“Sure it does. But it’s also got you, Lewis. I hate to say this, but you put in your time playing games. I may play games, like being an art director. But I put my life and the lives of my family on the line. I have to do it, and I do it. I don’t have any dreams of a new society. I’ll take what I’ve got. I don’t read books and I don’t have theories. What’d be the use? What you’ve got is a fantasy life.”

“That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really—really—in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantqized. I don’t know what yours is, but I’ll bet you don’t come up to it.”

“Mine is simple,” I said. I didn’t say, though, what forms it had taken recently, nor anything about the moon-slice of somebody else’s gold eye in the middle of my wife’s back as she labored for us.

“So is mine, and I work for it. A gut-survival situation may never happen. Probably it won’t. But you know something? I sleep at night. I have no worries. I am becoming myself, as inconsequential as that may be. I am not something somebody shoved off on me. I am what I choose to be, and I am it.”

“There’re a lot of other kinds of people to be, than what you are,” I said.

“Sure there are. But this is my kind. It feels right, like when you turn loose the arrow, and you know when you let go that you’ve done everything right. You know where the arrow is going. There’s not any other place that it can go.”

“Lord,” I said. “Lewis, you’re out of sight.”

“Who knows,” he said. “But I believe in survival. All kinds. Every time I come up here, I believe in it more. You know, with all the so-called modern conveniences, a man can still fall down. His leg will break, like Shad Mackey’s. He can lie there in the woods with night coming on, knowing he’s got two cars in the garage, one of them an XKE, a wife and three children watching ‘Star Trek’ as he hes trying to get his breath under a bush. The old human body is the same as it always was. It still feels that old fear, and that old pain. The last time I was near here …”

“You know that old broken-leg thing, don’t you, buddy?”

“I know it,” he said. “I broke it like a goddamned fool, up here by myself. There was a trout stream I wanted to fish, and it was hard to get to. I took thirty feet of rope and let myself down to the creek and fished … well, I fished. It was one of the best afternoons I ever had with man or woman or beast. I was climbing back up when the rope worked into my right hand and began to hurt like hell, and I slacked up on that hand and tried to wrap the rope around it a different way, and the next thing I knew, the damned rope slicked through the other hand and I was going down. In fact, I was already down. I hit on one leg, and I could hear something go in that right ankle. I had a hard time getting up from the bottom of the creek, with those waders on, and when I tried to stand up, I knew I had it to do.”

“How’d you get out?”

“I went up the rope. I just armed it out, hand over hand, and then started hobbling and hopping and crawling. And you damned well better hope you never have to one-leg it through any woods. I was holding on to every tree like it was my brother.”

“Maybe it was.”

“No,” Lewis said. “But I got out, finally. You know the rest.”

“Yeah. And now you’re going back.”

“You better believe it. But you know something, Ed? That intensity; well, that’s something special. That was a great trip, broken ankle and all. I heard old Tom McCaskill, the night before. That was worth it.”

“Who is that?”

“Well, let me tell you. You come up here camping in the woods, on the river in some places, or back off in the bush, hunting or whatever you’re doing, and in the middle of the night you’re liable to hear the most God-awful scream that ever got loose from a human mouth. There’s no explanation for it. You just hear it, and that’s all. Sometimes you just hear it once, and sometimes it keeps on for a while.”

“What is it, for the Lord’s sake?”

“There’s this old guy up here who just gets himself—or makes himself—a jug every couple of weeks, and goes off in the woods at night. From what I hear, he doesn’t have any idea where he’s going. He just goes off the road and keeps going till he’s ready to stop. Then he builds himself a fire and sits down with the jug. When he gets drunk enough he starts out to hollering. That’s the way he gets his kicks. As they say, don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it. You tried it?”

“No, but maybe on this trip. I doubt if I’ll ever get another chance. Maybe we don’t even have to go down the river. Maybe we should just go off and drink and holler. And Drew could play the guitar. I’ll bet he’d just as soon. I’ll bet he’d rather.”

“Well, I wouldn’t. Would you?”

“Don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it,” I said. “But no, I wouldn’t. In fact, I’m looking forward to getting on the river. I’m so tanked up with your river-mystique that I’m sure I’ll go through some fantastic change as soon as I dig the paddle in the first time.”

“Just wait, buddy,” he said. “You’ll want to come back. It’s real.”

I looked off at the blue forms of the mountains, growing less transparent and cloudlike, shifting their positions, rolling from side to side off the road, coming back and centering in our path, and then sliding off the road again, but strengthening all the time. We went through some brush and then out across a huge flat field that ran before us for miles, going straight at the bulging range of bills, which was now turning mile by mile from blue to a light green-gold, the color of billions of hardwood leaves.

Around noon we started up among them, still on the highway. At an intersection we turned off onto a blacktop state road, and from that onto a badly cracked and weedy con-crete highway of the old days—the thirties as nearly as I could tell—with the old splattered tar centerline wavering onward. From that we turned onto another concrete road that sagged and slewed and holed-out and bumped ahead, not worth maintaining at all.

It was still about forty miles to Oree. We had to get there, hire two men to drive the cars back down to Aintry and then go downriver and find a campsite and set up camp. If possible, we also wanted to buy some more supplies. We had time, but we didn’t have any to waste. Lewis speeded up; a bad road always challenged him. The canoe bumped and grated overhead.