James Dickey - Deliverance

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 Leadbelly’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 main strength, 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 graygreen 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.