by James Dickey
“How about it, tiger?” I said to Bobby.
“OK,” he said. “How far can we get today, do you reckon?”
“Beats me,” I said. “We’ll get as far as we can. Depends on the water, and how many places we have to walk through. Everybody including the map says there’s a gorge down below here, and that sort of bothers me. But there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Bobby and I got in and shoved off, and right away I could tell I was in for a hard time. I was not in awfully good shape myself, but Bobby was wheezing and panting after the first hundred yards. He had no coordination at all, and changed the canoe from what it had been with Drew’s steady, serious weight in front to a nervous, unstable craft that seemed bound and determined to do everything wrong, to get rid of us. I was sure that Lewis was disgusted with Bobby, and just as sure that I would be, also, before much longer.
“Easy,” I said. “Easy. You’re trying too hard. All we want to do is hold this thing straight. We don’t need to be pulling our guts out to get there. Just let the river do it. Let George do it.”
“George ain’t doing it fast enough. I want to get the hell and gone out of this goddamned place.”
“Ah, now. It’s not all that bad.”
“It’s not? Mosquitoes ate me up last night. My bites have got bites. I’m catching a fucking cold from sleeping on the fucking ground. I’m hungry as hell for something that tastes good. And I don’t mean sorghum.”
“Just steady down a little, and we’ll get there… when we get there. It’s not going to do your cold any good to dump in this river, you can bloody well bet.”
“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get on with it. I’m tired of this woods scene; I’m tired of shitting in a hole in the ground. This is for the Indians.”
After a while he settled down a little, and the back of his neck lightened its red. We dug a couple of strokes for every twenty-five yards, and the river moved us along. But I thought that the chances were pretty good, with my high center of gravity and his nerves, that we would spill before the day was out, especially if there were any fast stretches with lots of rocks. With the equipment and with Bobby and me, who were at least fifty pounds heavier than the other two, we were riding far too low in the water. We had too much stuff with us for the way we were teamed, and I signaled back to Lewis to pull over to the bank. He did, and we wallowed alongside the other canoe and tied up.
“Getting hot.” Lewis said.
“Hot as the hinges,” I said.
“Did you see that big snake back yonder?”
“No. Where?”
“He was lying up in the limbs of that old oak tree you went under about a mile and a half back. I didn’t see him till you were right under him, and he lifted his head. I didn’t want to make any fuss; thought it might make him nervous. I’m pretty sure it was a moccasin. I’ve heard of them dropping in boats.”
“Shit fire,” Bobby said. “That’s all we need.”
“Yeah,” said Lewis. “I can imagine.”
“Can you take on some of the stuff in our canoe, Lewis?” I asked. “We’re awful low and logy.”
“Sure. Go get the cooking equipment and the bedrolls. That ought to equalize us, just about. You can also let us have about half the beer that’s left.”
“Happy to. Everybody’s going to need something to cool off with, today.”
“Why do it just with beer?” Lewis said, unbuttoning his shirt. “It’s shallow and slow here. I’m going to get wet.”
I transferred the bedrolls and beer and the primus and other cooking equipment to the other canoe. Lewis was already in the water naked, booming overhand down the current with a lot of back showing, like Johnny Weismuller in the old Tarzan movies. He swam as well as he did everything else, and outran the current easily. Then he came back, his eyes glaring with effort at water level. I shucked off my coveralls and dived in, and so did Drew.
The river was very cold; it felt as though it had snow and ice in it, and had only just turned then to water. But it was marvelously clear and alive, and broke like glass around you and came together unhurt. I swam a little way into the current, and would gladly have given up all human effort — I was tired of human efforts of all kinds, especially my own — and gone on downstream either dead or alive, to wherever it would take me. But I swam back, a hard forty yards against the subtle tearing and downstream insistence, and stood up next to Lewis, who was waist deep with water crumpling and flopping at his belly. I looked at him, for I have never seen him with his clothes off.
Everything he had done for himself for years paid off as he stood there in his tracks, in the water. I could tell by the way he glanced at me; the payoff was in my eyes. I had never seen such a male body in my life, even in the pictures in the weight-lifting magazines, for most of those fellows are short, and Lewis was about an even six feet. I’d say he weighed about 190. The muscles were bound up in him smoothly, and when he moved, the veins in the moving part would surface. If you looked at him that way, he seemed made out of well-matched red-brown chunks wrapped in blue wire. You could even see the veins in his gut, and I knew I could not even begin to conceive how many sit-ups and leg-raises — and how much dieting — had gone into bringing them into view.
He dropped a hand on my shoulder and stirred the fur around. “What do you think, Bolgani the Gorilla?”
“I think Tarzan speak with forked tongue,” I said. “I think Lord of Jungle speak with tongue of Histah the Snake. I think we never get out of woods. He bring us here to stay and found kingdom.”
“Yeah,” said Bobby from the bank. “Kingdom of Snakes is right.”
Drew came out of the river near us. “Gosh that feels good,” he said. “It really does. I never felt anything more wonderful in my life. Refreshing. You know, that’s just what it is. I feel like I can go all day, now. You better come on in for a minute, Bobby.”
“No thanks. Whenever you’re ready, me and the other Fatso will just Fatso on down, the washed and the unwashed.”
He sat with his knees drawn up, self-protective in the sun against the water-chill he could see on us. Our nipples were blue and drawn up, and my stomach muscles were beginning to heave against the moving underwater freeze. I climbed out and pulled on my sweaty coveralls. My head was fresh and cool while my body heated up, and I wanted to get back on the river before I began to melt again.
Bobby and I went over to our canoe and tried to figure out what else we might be able to transfer to the other one. We finally ended up taking only one tent, my bow, a six-pack of beer and Drew’s guitar, for the wooden canoe was leaking a little and ours was more or less dry. We wrapped the guitar in the tent, got in and pushed off.
We rode a lot better now, and Bobby’s paddling improved a good deal because of this, and maybe because he had convinced himself that the less trouble he was the quicker we’d get off the river.
The water was calm for a long time. We made turn after turn, sometime near one bank, and sometime near the other. I tried not to go under any more limbs, and this was easy enough to do. The river spread and slowed and quieted, and we had to paddle more than we had been doing. We could hardly feel any current at all; it was very faint, and when we rested it was as though we were drawn forward by something invisible underneath us, while the water around us stood still. We could hear sound far off in front, but it kept retreating downstream. Each turn opened out only on another stretch of river, gradually unfolding its woods along both banks. A heron of some kind flushed on the right. He swept downstream in front of us, going left, then right, then left-right, dipping quickly and indecisively. He would disappear around the next turn, then, as we came around it, would spring up again from leaves where we had not seen him and muscle himself into the air on long blue wings, giving a hoarse agonized inhuman cry and making a magnificent half-turn over the river ahead of us, then start downstream again with long wingbeats, the tips of his wings all but touching the water, so that wherever he was his shadow started up u
nder him at each downstroke, vague and misshapen with the river. This continued through four or five turns, until we came around another one like the others and did not see him. He may have veered into the woods, but I thought that most probably he had learned to sit still, maybe nearing hysterical flight once again as we approached and went past, but managing to keep that long-necked, desperate cry in his throat until we had gone.
In the new silence the river seemed to go deeper and deeper under us; the colors changed toward denser greens as the sun got higher. The pace of the water began to pick up; we slid farther and farther with each stroke. I thought to myself that anyone fighting the brush along the bank could not keep up with us.
Every now and then I glanced down at the bow at my feet, big-handled and tense-looking, and at its two arrows slathered with house paint. The big orange feathers spiraled out of them, and the emery-wheeled edges of the broad-heads shone in the sun like radium. Though I would have had to do a good deal of curious balancing to string the bow, I keep looking on both sides of the river for deer, hoping that we might float in on a big buck drinking. It was something to do.
We went through some deep, quickened water and floated out into a calm broad stretch of a long turn that slid us into a dim underpass of enormous trees, conifers of some kind, spruce or fir. It was dark and heavy in there; the packed greenness seemed to suck the breath out of your lungs. Bobby and I lifted our paddles clear of the river as by a signal, and we eased through the place the Way the river wanted to go. Intense needles of light shook on the ripples, gold, hot enough to burn and almost solid enough to pick up from the surface like nails.
We came out among some fields grown up six or seven feet high in grass. A mottled part of the bank slipped into the water, and it took me a minute to realize it was a snake. He went across about twenty feet in front of us, swimming as if crawling, his head high, and came out on the opposite bank without changing his motion at all, a thing with a single spell, a single movement, and no barriers.
We went on, taking long slow swings at the water. I had fitted my stroke to Bobby’s the best I could; I moved when he moved, and had got to the point where I could put my paddle in the water and lift it out at the same time he did. I thought he must surely be taking some satisfaction in the improvement, but I didn’t say anything for fear of upsetting the rhythm.
After two hours from the time the heron left us we had drunk all the beer we had. The sun was eating my bald spot, and my nylon outfit was soaking with me. My tongue began to balloon in my mouth, and my backbone was splintering through the skin; I kept touching it between strokes to see if anything had given way. The edge of the seat was digging into my right thigh, for that was the only position in which I could get a good grip on the river. All the pains began to try to link up with each other and there was nothing I could do about it.
I looked back. The other canoe was just coming around. Lewis had lagged behind us because, I suppose, he wanted us in sight in case we got into trouble. Anyway, they were about half a mile back and disappeared as we rounded another curve, and I pointed with my paddle to the left bank. I didn’t know whether they saw me or not, but I figured to flag them in when they came by. I wanted to lie up in the shade and rest for a while. I was hungry, and I sure would’ve liked to have had another beer. We dug in and swung over.
As we closed in on the left bank, a pouring sound came from under the trees; the leaves at a certain place moved as if in a little wind. The fresh green-white of a creek was frothing into the river. We sailed past it half-broadside and came to the bank about seventy-five yards downstream. I put the nose against it and paddled hard to hold it there while Bobby got out and moored us.
“This is too much like work,” Bobby said, as he gave me a hand up.
“Lord, Lord,” I said. “I’m getting too old for this kind of business. I suppose you could call it learning the hard way.”
Bobby sat down on the ground and untied a handkerchief from around his neck. He leaned down to the river and sopped it, then swabbed his face and neck down, rubbing a long time in the nose area. I bent over and touched my toes a couple of times to get rid of the position that had been maiming my back, and then looked upstream. I still couldn’t see the other canoe. I turned to say something to Bobby.
Two men stepped out of the woods, one of them trailing a shotgun by the barrel.
Bobby had no notion they were there until he looked at me. Then he turned his head until he could see over his shoulder and got up, brushing at himself.
“How goes it?” he said.
One of them, the taller one, narrowed in the eyes and face. They came forward, moving in a kind of half circle as though they were stepping around something. The shorter one was older, with big white eyes and a half-white stubble that grew in whorls on his cheeks. His face seemed to spin in many directions. He had on overalls, and his stomach looked like it was falling through them. The other was lean and tall, and peered as though out of a cave or some dim simple place far back in his yellow-tinged eyeballs. When he moved his jaws the lower bone came up too far for him to have teeth. “Escaped convicts” flashed up in my mind on one side, “Bootleggers” on the other. But they still could have been hunting.
They came on, and were ridiculously close for some reason. I tried not to give ground; some principle may have been involved.
The older one, looming and spinning his sick-looking face in front of me, said, “What the hail you think you’re doin?”
“Going downriver. Been going since yesterday.”
I hoped that the fact that we were at least talking to each other would do some good of some kind.
He looked at the tall man; either something or nothing was passing between them. I could not feel Bobby anywhere near, and the other canoe was not in sight. I shrank to my own true size, a physical movement known only to me, and with the strain my solar plexus failed, I said, “We started from Oree yesterday afternoon, and we hope we can get to Aintry sometime late today or early tomorrow.”
“Aintry?”
Bobby said, and I could have killed him, “Sure. This river just runs one way, cap’n. Haven’t you heard?”
“You ain’t never going to get down to Aintry,” he said, without any emphasis on any word.
“Why not?” I asked, scared but also curious; in a strange way it was interesting to cause him to explain.
“Because this river don’t go to Aintry,” he said. “You done taken a wrong turn somewhere. This-here river don’t go nowhere near Aintry.”
“Where does it go?”
“It goes… it goes…”
“It goes to Circle Gap,” the other man said, missing his teeth and not caring. “’Bout fifty miles.”
“Boy,” said the whorl-faced man, “you don’t know where you are.”
“Well,” I said, “we’re going where the river’s going. We’ll come out somewhere, I reckon.”
The other man moved closer to Bobby.
“Hell,” I said, “we don’t have anything to do with you. We sure don’t want any trouble. If you’ve got a still near here, that’s fine with us. We could never tell anybody where it is, because you know something? You’re right. We don’t know where we are.”
“A stee-ul?” the tall man said, and seemed honestly surprised.
“Sure,” I said. “If you’re making whiskey, we’ll buy some from you. We could sure use it.”
The drop-gutted man faced me squarely. “Do you know what the hail you’re talkin’ about?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“You done said something about makin’ whiskey. You think we’re makin’ whiskey. Now come on. Ain’t that right?”
“Shit,” I said. “I don’t know whether you’re making whiskey or hunting or rambling around in the woods for your whole fucking life. I don’t know and I don’t care what you’re doing. It’s not any of my business.”
I looked at the river, but we were a little back from the
bank, and I couldn’t see the other canoe. I didn’t think it could have gone past, but I was not really sure that it hadn’t. I shook my head in a complete void, at the thought that it might have; we had got too far ahead, maybe.
With the greatest effort in the world, I came back into the man’s face and tried to cope with it. He had noticed something about the way I had looked at the river.
“Anybody else with you?” he asked me.
I swallowed and thought, with possibilities shooting through each other. If I said yes, and they meant trouble, we would bring Lewis and Drew into it with no defenses. Or it might mean that we would be left alone, four being too many to handle. On the other hand, if I said no, then Lewis and Drew — especially Lewis — might be able to… well, to do something. Lewis’ pectorals loomed up in my mind, and his leg, with the veins bulging out of the divided muscles of his thigh, his leg under water wavering small-ankled and massive as a centaur’s. I would go with that.
“No,” I said, and took a couple of steps inland to draw them away from the river.
The lean man reached over and touched Bobby’s arm, feeling it with strange delicacy. Bobby jerked back, and when he did the gun barrel came up, almost casually but decisively.
“We’d better get on with it,” I said. “We got a long ways to go.” I took part of a step toward the canoe.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” the man in front of me said, and leveled the shotgun straight into my chest. My heart quailed away from the blast tamped into both barrels, and I wondered what the barrel openings would look like at the exact instant they went off: if fire would come out of them, or if they would just be a gray blur or if they would change at all between the time you lived and died, blown in half. He took a turn around his hand with the string he used for a trigger.
“You come on back in here ’less you want your guts all over this-here woods.”
