James Dickey - Deliverance

When we broke into the sun in the half-grass and gray dirt of the yard, he was standing spread-legged looking at his hand, which was cut in the thin webbing between the left thumb and forefinger. He was a huge creature, twenty pounds heavier than Lewis, dressed in overall pants and an old-fashioned sleeveless undershirt, with a train engineer’s cap on and cut-down army boots. He held his hand low in the sun, right at his waist, turning it one way and then another. He held it like he was having to keep it down by all the strength in his other hand and the rest of his body.

There is no very good way to start a conversation under conditions like that; all I wanted to do was disappear, so as not to have to explain what I was doing there, but Lewis walked up to the man and asked, very civilly for him, if he could help.

“No,” the big man said, looking squarely at me instead of Lewis. “It ain’t as bad as I thought.”

He pulled a gray handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it around his hand, jerking the knot tight with his teeth.

Lewis waited until the second half of the knot was tied and said, “I was wondering if you and somebody else, maybe your brother, would drive two cars down to Aintry for us for twenty dollars. Or if you wanted to get a third fellow to drive another car so you’d have a way to get back to Oree, we’d give all three of you ten dollars apiece.”

“Drive them down there for what?”

~We want to take a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee, and we’d like for our cars to be in Aintry when we get there day after tomorrow.”

“A canoe trip?” he said, looking back and forth between us.

“That’s right,” Lewis said, narrowing his eyes a little. “A canoe trip.”

“You ever been down in there?”

“No,” Lewis said. “Have you?”

Griner set his heavy-hanging face on Lewis; they battled in midair; the sound of crickets in the grass around the garage clashed like shields and armor plate. I could see the man was insulted; Lewis himself had told me that the worst thing you can do is to throw something back at these mountain people.

“No,” Griner answered slowly. “I ain’t never been down in there much. There ain’t nothing to go down there for. Fishing’s no good.”

“How about hunting?”

“Never been. But I don’t believe I’d go there if I was you. What’s the use of it?”

“Because it’s there,” Lewis said, for my benefit.

“It’s there, all right,” Griner said. “If you git in there and can’t get out, you’re goin’ to wish it wudn’t.”

My chest felt hollow, and my heart was ringing like iron. I wanted to back out; just go back to town and forget it. I hated what we were doing.

“Listen, Lewis,” I said, “to hell with it. Let’s go back and play golf.”

He didn’t pay any attention. “Well, can you do it?” he asked Griner.

“How much did you say?”

“Twenty dollars for two men, thirty for three.”

“Fifty,” Griner said.

“Fifty, my ass,” Lewis said.

Good God, I thought, why is he like this? I was scared to death, and I resented insanely Lewis’ getting me into such a situation. Well, you didn’t have to come, I told myself. But never again. Never.

“How about forty?” Griner said.

Lewis kicked the ground and turned to me. “Are you good for ten?”

I took out the money and gave it to him.

“Twenty now,” Lewis said to Griner. “Well send the rest to you. If we’re good for this, we’re good for the rest. Take it or leave it.”

“Good enough,” Griner said, but it was hard not to believe he was saying something mean. He took the bills and looked at them and put them in his pocket. He went across the yard toward the house, and we went around front, back to the car.

“What do you think?” I asked Lew. “You reckon we’ll ever see these cars? This is a rough son of a bitch. Why wouldn’t he and his brother just go off and sell them?”

“Because we know who he is,” Lewis said matter-of-factly. “And he doesn’t come by twenty dollars so easy as all that. Sure, the cars’ll be right there when we get there. Don’t worry about it.”

After a few minutes Griner came out of the house with his even bigger brother alongside. They were like two pro football linemen in their first season after retirement when they are beginning to soften up, working as night watchmen. We didn’t try to introduce ourselves; the thought of asking them to shake bands with us never occurred to me until years later. I still wonder what would have happened if we had tried.

Drew’s car came into sight from behind us. We told them what the arrangements were. The brothers and another man—who just simply materialized—got into an old Ford pickup with the paint seared off in patches clear down to the naked metal, and followed us. It seemed to me that we should have been following them, but from the filling station Lewis had the information he wanted; it was not much, but it was enough for him. He knew where the river was, approximately, he knew that the land flattened to the north and that there had been logging in the woods near the river. That all this might possibly be misinformation did not make the slightest difference to him. He was going there.

After a while he turned off on a dirt road. We ran along on this for a time, covering the truck behind us with ocher dust swirling up in a thick cloud from Lewis’ too-fast driving. We ran past some farms and out over the crest of an open field on a section of road as straight as a plow furrow through two stands of rotten corn on either side, and then into some hot pinewoods that dropped off and kept dropping off. The road got worse. It began to curve back in the general direction of the highway, and Lewis craned his head out the window, trying to make the road bend back toward where he believed the river was. When he turned I was not expecting it, and thought we had hit something. We swayed off the road and down, everything going with us rattling. Lewis rose a little higher in the seat. Bushes whacked up under the car. I turned to look back. The other cars weren’t behind us, as far as I could tell. I thought perhaps Lew’s speed had lost them at the turnoff, but if they’d turned off with us they’d surely be in sight by now, and they weren’t.

The road slung in a tight half-circle and gave out. In front of us were a few blackened boards on the ground and a rock chimney sinking into the weeds. A lizard ran over the biggest stone, and stopped with his head up. A dead sawhorse stood, off by itself in what looked like a sandpit.

“Well,” Lewis said, “we screwed up.”

“Maybe we’d better let them show us where the river is.”

“We’ll see.”

He backed into the weeds and manhandled the car around until we could get back on the track we had come down. When we reached the other road, the truck was waiting for us, with Drew’s car behind it. I had wondered why Drew hadn’t followed us, but it was like him to drop behind the truck; he didn’t know anything about where he was going, and he was willing to listen to somebody who did.

The first Griner leaned out of the cab. “Where you goin, city boy?”

Lewis flushed. “Get on with it,” he said.

“Naw, naw,” Griner said. “Go on ahead. You’ll find it. Ain’t nothin’ but the biggest river in the state.”

Lewis gunned ahead again. We swung with the road to the right, then back to the left and down. Suddenly it hit me that there were some stumps among the trees going by.

“Maybe this is where they were logging,” I said.

Lewis nodded. “This land has been sawmilled, all right,” he said. “I figure we’re getting there.”

The road kept dropping and failing. Finally it was only the ghost of a road; it was hard to believe that there had ever been any vehicles on it; it was almost like the rest of the woods. We eased on down. Once we had to crawl over a washout with the wheels barely balanced on each side. It would have been tough going in a jeep, even.