James Dickey - Deliverance

I ran my right hand over the limbs, feeling for broken pieces and splinters of fiber glass. Part of the upper limb seemed a little rougher than it should have, but it had been that way before. I took out the arrows I had left. I had started with four but had wasted two on the deer. One of the remaining ones was fairly straight; I spun it through my fingers as Lewis had taught me to do, feeling for the passing tick and jump a crooked aluminum arrow has when it spins. It may have been a little bent up in the crest, just under the feathers, but it was shootable, and at short range it ought to be accurate. The other arrow was badly bent, and I straightened it as well as I could with my hands, but there was not much I could do in the dark. Holding it at eye level and pointing it toward the best of the light places in the sky, I could not see even well enough to tell exactly where and how badly it was bent. But the broadhead was all right.

I walked back to Bobby and leant the bow against the spur of stone that overhung the canoe. Bobby stepped over to me as I paid out and recoiled the thin rope that had been at my waist the whole time. I had made a lucky buy—considering that a cliff I had not counted on being involved was involved, and a rope was a good thing to have in such a situation—and I had a brief moment of believing that the luck would run through the other things that were coming. I ran the rope over and over my left thumb and elbow until I had a tight ring. I tied the ends and passed the belt that held the big knife through the coil.

“Don’t go to sleep,” I said to Bobby.

“Not likely,” he said. “O God.”

“Now listen. If you go at first light, you’ll make a damned hard target from the top of the gorge. You should be safe as long as you’re running these little rapids along here. If I’m going to get on top of the cliff, I’ll be there by then, and the odds will be evened out a little, if our man the Human Fly really does find a way to climb up there. I’ll do everything I can to see that he doesn’t crack down on you. From the little I was able to tell about the cliff before it got dark, it’s rough as hell up there, and if he misses you at one place—or if you can slip by him without his seeing you—he won’t be able to keep up with you; all you have to do is get by him and get around one turn and you’re home free.”

“Ed, will you tell me one thing? Have you ever thought there might be more than one?”

“Yes, I’ve thought of it. I must say I have.”

“What if there is?”

“Then we’re likely to die, early tomorrow morning.”

“I believe you.”

“I don’t believe, though, that there’s more than one man. I’ll tell you why. It’s not a good idea to involve somebody else in a murder if you don’t have to. That’s one thing. The other is that I don’t think there’s been time for him to go and get anybody else. He’s got all the advantages; he doesn’t need anybody to help him.”

“I sure hope you’re right.”

“We’ll have to figure I am. Anything else?”

“Yes, I’ve got to say it. I don’t think we’re going about this the right way. We may have the whole thing wrong.”

“I’m staking my life on being right. Lewis would do it. Now I’m going to have to. Let me get going.”

“Listen,” Bobby said, grabbing at me weakly, “I can’t do it. I won’t make a sitting duck out of myself so you can go off in the woods and leave us to be shot down. I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Listen, you son of a bitch. If you want to go up that cliff, you go right ahead. There it is; it’s not going away. But if I go up it we’re going to play this my way. And I swear to God that if you don’t do exactly what I say I’ll kill you myself. It’s just that goddamned simple. And if you leave Lewis on this rock I’ll do the same thing.”

“Ed, I’m not going to leave him. You know I wouldn’t do that. It’s just that I don’t want to go out there in plain sight of some murderous hillbilly and set myself up to be killed like Drew.”

“If everything works right—and if you do what I tell you to do—you won’t get killed. just listen to me. I’m going through this one more time, and it’s got to stick. I’m going to tell you what to do no matter what should happen.”

“All right,” he said at last.

“Number one, move out as soon as you can see the river well enough to get through the next set of rapids. It’ll probably still be too dark to shoot from the top. Even if it isn’t he doesn’t stand much chance of hitting you when you’re in the rapids. Whenever you’re in calm water, pull like hell for a while, then slack off; don’t hit a constant speed. If he does shoot at you, try your goddamndest to get to the next set of rapids, or around the next turn. If you see you can’t possibly get away—that is, if you see he’s got you bracketed, and the shots are coming closer and closer—dump the canoe and let it go. Try to get Lewis out, then stay with him and wait for a day, and I’ll try to bring back help. If nothing happens by that time, you’ll know I didn’t make it. Then leave Lewis and try to get downriver the best way you can, even if you have to swim part of the way. Take all three life jackets and float yourself down. We can’t be more than fifteen miles from a highway bridge. If you have to do that, though, for God’s sake remember where you left Lewis. If you don’t remember, he’s going to die. And that’s for sure.”

He looked at me, and for the first time since the sun had gone down I could see his eyes; they had some points of light in them.

“That’s about it, then,” I said. I picked up the bow and went over to the canoe near where Lewis was lying, tirelessly grinding the back of his head into the sand. I crouched down beside him; he was shaking in a certain matter-of-fact way, with the false cold of pain, and some of it came into me as he reached up and touched me on the front of the shoulder.

“Do you know what the fuck you’re doing?”

“No, creature,” I said. “I’m going to try to make it up as I go along.”

“Don’t let him see you,” he said. “And don’t have any mercy. Not any.”

“I won’t if I can help it.”

“Help it.”

I held my breath.

“Kill him,” Lewis said with the river.

“I’ll kill him if I can find him,” I said.

“Well,” he said, lying back, “here we are, at the heart of the Lewis Medlock country.”

“Pure survival,” I said.

“This is what it comes to,” he said. “I told you.”

“Yes. You told me.”

Everything around me changed. I put my left arm between the bowstring and the bow and slid the bow back over my shoulder with the broadbeads turned down. Then I walked to the gorge side and put a hand on it, the same hand that had been cut by the arrow in the river, as though I might be able to feel what the whole cliff was like, the whole problem, and hold it in my palm. The rock was rough, and a part of it fell away under my hand. The river sound loudened as though the rocks in the channel had shifted their positions.

Then it relaxed and the extra sound died or went away again into the middle distance, the middle of the stream.

I knew that was the sign, and I backed off and ran with a hard scramble at the bank, and stretched up far enough to get an elbow over the top side of the first low overhang. Scraping my sides and legs, I got up on it and stood up. Bobby and Lewis were directly beneath me, under a roof of stone, and might as well not have been there. I was standing in the most entire aloneness that I had ever been given.

My heart expanded with joy at the thought of where I was and what I was doing. There was a new light on the water; the moon was going up and up, and I stood watching the stream with my back to the rock for a few minutes, not thinking of anything, with a deep feeling of nakedness and helplessness and intimacy.