James Dickey - Deliverance

Before we began to struggle with the boat, I chanced to look up across the river, and there were some men moving among the trees. There was a little cemetery there, so well bidden among the trees and bushes that I would not have seen it at all except for the human forms moving there.

I asked one of the children what was happening. “Is it a funeral?”

“Naw,” one muddy little girl said. “They’re gonna move them people ‘fore they finish the dam. They’re diggin’ ‘em.”

I had known that it was no funeral; there was too much movement. But I wasn’t quite prepared for this. I looked closer, and there were some green coffins stacked together, and a couple of the men were disappearing below the ground and coming back up together, heaving at something.

“Like TVA, I guess,” I said to Bobby.

“I guess,” he said. “Come on, for God’s sake. Let’s leave this place.”

We wrestled the canoe through the kudzu and strapped it to the roof of the wagon.

“Go ahead, Bobby,” I said. “You know where Lewis lives. Tell Mrs. Medlock what happened, and remember to tell it like it was. She’ll take care of you. And call Martha when you get in and tell her I’ll be right along.”

“I’ll remember what to say,” he said. “How could I forget?”

I went back down to the spillway and stood next to the water for the last time. I stooped and drank from the river.

Going back was easy and pleasant, though I was driving a dead man’s car, and everything in it reminded me of him: the good shape the engine was in, the neatness of it, the little decal of the company he worked for on the windshield. The thing to do was to get outside the car into the landscape, and to watch my own world develop from it as I went toward the city. After four hours I passed slowly from the Country of Nine-Fingered People and Prepare to Meet Thy God into the Drive-ins and Motels and Homes of the Whopper, but all I could see was the river. It came at me between rocks—and here the car would involuntarily speed up—it came at me in slow loops and green stillnesses, with trees and cliffs and lifesaving bridges.

And I could not leave off worrying about the details of the story we had told, and what the ramifications of any one of them might be. I was sure about Lewis, as sure of him as I was of myself, but who could be that sure of either, of any man? But I was not sure of Bobby. He drank an awful lot, and a person will say, a lot of times, exactly the most perverse and self-incriminating thing he can think of when he is drunk enough, and when he is like Bobby. But what would keep his mouth shut about the truth was himself kneeling over the log with a shotgun at his head, howling and bawling and kicking his feet like a little boy. He wouldn’t want anybody to know that, no matter what; no matter how drunk he was. No, he would stay with my version of things.

The version was strong; I had made it and tried it out against the world, and it had held. It had become so strong in my mind that I had trouble getting back through it to the truth. But when I did, the truth was there: the moon shone and pressed down the wild river, the cliff was against my heart, beating back at it with the pulse of stone, and a pine needle went subtly into my ear as I waited in a tree for the light to come.

I was on the final four-lane now; I had eaten in almost every drive-in along here. I had shopped in about half the stores in the shopping center where I was now turning off, and Martha had shopped in them all. I went up the long residential hill, away from the moan of the great trucks and Amoco rigs. I turned off again, and went curving easily home.

It was about two o’clock. I drove into the yard and knocked on the back door. They were going to save me, here. Martha opened the door. We stood for a while feeling each other closely and then went in. I took off my brogans and stood them in the corner and walked around on the wall-to-wall carpeting. I went out to the car and took the knife and belt and slung them off deep into the suburban woods.

“I could use a drink, sugar,” I said.

“Tell me,” she said, looking at my side. “Tell me. What happened to you? I knew something like this would happen.”

“No you didn’t,” I said. “Not anything like this.”

“Come lie down, baby,” she said. “Let me have a look.”

I went with her to the bedroom, where she put an old ragsheet on the bed, and I lay down on it. She pulled off my shirt and looked, with pure, practical love, and then she stepped to the bathroom for three or four bottles. The whole medicine cabinet looked like a small hospital itself, packed into the wall. She came back shaking bottles.

“Give me that drink, love,” I said. “Then we can get into all this playing doctor.”

“All doctors play doctor,” she said. “And all nurses play nurse. And all ex-nurses play nurse, especially when they love somebody.”

She brought me the bottle of Wild Turkey, and I turned it up and drank. Then she started soaking through the bandage with some household mystery from the bathroom. It came off me shred by shred, and the inside was bloody indeed. The stitches were slimy with blood and some other bodily matter; whatever I had at that place.

“You’re all right,” she said. “It’s a good job. The edges are pulling together.”

“Good news,” I said. “Can you fix it up again?”

“I can fix it,” she said. “But what happened to you? These are cut wounds, clean edges, most of them. Did somebody get you with a knife? An awful sharp one?”

“I did,” I said. “It was me.”

“What kind of an accident …?”

“No accident,” I said. “… Look, let me go see Drew’s wife. Then I’m coming back and sleep for a week. Right with you. Right with you.”

She was professional and tender, and tough, what I would have hoped for; what I knew I could have expected; what I had undervalued. She put antibiotic salve all over the place and then several layers of gauze, and then tape, expertly, letting the air come through. When I got up, the wound was not so stiff, and my side bad begun to be a part of me again; though it still hurt, and hurt badly, it was not pulling against me at every move.

“Will you follow me over and drive me back?”

She nodded.

At Drew’s house his horned little boy in a cub scout uniform opened the door. I went in with the car keys in my hand while Pope went to get Mrs. Ballinger. I stood there, surrounded by Drew’s things, the walls full of tape recorders and record cabinets, the sales awards and company citations. The keys in my hand were jangling.

“Mrs. Ballinger,” I said, as she came at me, “Drew has been killed.” It was as though I had said it to stop her, to keep her from getting at me.

It stopped her. One hand came up slowly, almost dreamingly, from her side and went to her mouth, and the other came over it, to hold it down. Behind her fingers her head shook in a small, intense movement of disbelief.

“He was drowned,” I said. “Lewis broke his leg. Bobby and I were just lucky. We could have all been killed.”

She held her mouth. The keys jangled and rang.

“I brought the car back.”

“So useless,” she said, her voice filled with fingers. “So useless.”

“Yes, it was useless,” I said. “We shouldn’t have gone. But we did. We did.”

“Such a goddamned useless way to die.”

“I guess every way is useless,” I said.

“Not this useless.”

“We stayed as long as they needed us up there, looking for the body. They’re still looking. I don’t think they’ll find it, but they’re looking.”

“Useless.”

“Drew was the best man we had,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so goddamned sorry. Is there anything I can do? I mean that. Can I …”