by James Dickey
“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 he down, baby,” she said. “Let me have a look.”
I went with her to the bedroom, where she put an old rag-sheet 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 had 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…”
“You can get out of here, Mr. Gentry. You can get out of here and go find that insane friend of yours, Lewis Medlock, and you can shoot him. That’s what you can do.”
“He’s pretty badly hurt, himself. And he’s just as sorry as I am. Please understand that. It’s not his fault. It’s the river’s fault. It’s our fault for going with him.”
“All right,” she said from far off, from the future, from all the years coming up, and from the first night alone in bed. “All right, Ed. Nobody can do anything. Nobody can ever do anything. It’s all so useless. Everything is useless. It always has been.”
I saw she was becoming speechless, but I tried one more thing.
“Can I have Martha come over and stay with you for a couple of days?”
“I don’t want Martha. I want Drew.”
She broke, and I started toward her, but she shook her head violently and I backed off, turned, put the keys on the coffee table beside the company history, and went out.
As we drove home I wondered if it would have been any bet
ter if I’d been able to tell the truth. Would it be easier for her if I could tell her that Drew was lying in a wild stretch of the Cahulawassee with part of his head bashed in either by a bullet or a rock, sunk down with a stone and a bowstring, eddying a little back and forth, side to side with the motion of the water? I did not see how knowing that would help. The only possibility was that it might spark in her the animal mania for revenge, if he truly had been shot, and nothing more could be done about that than had already been done: no electric chair, no rope or gas chamber could avenge him better, or as well.
Back at home I put an easy chair in front of the picture window and got a blanket and a pillow and sat looking out onto the street with the phone beside me all afternoon. I was shaking. Martha sat on the floor and put her head in my lap and held my hand, and then went and got a bottle of whiskey and a couple of glasses.
“Baby,” she said. “Tell me what it is. Is somebody after you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. But I’m not sure. Somebody may be after me. Also, the law may be after me. I’ve just got to tough it out. If nothing happens for a couple of weeks, I think we’ll be all right.”
“Can’t you tell me?”
“No, I can’t tell you now. Maybe I can’t ever tell you.”
“Who cut you, Ed? Who cut my good man?”
“I did it,” I said. “I fell on one of my arrows, and I had to cut it out with a knife. There was not any other way; I couldn’t get us downriver with an arrow sticking through me. So I cut. I’m glad the knife was sharp, or I’d probably still be hacking.”
“Go to sleep, honey. I’ll let you know if anything happens. I’m right here with you. There’s no more woods and no more river. Go to sleep.”
But I couldn’t. We live on a dead-end street, so that any car that comes down it either belongs to the people who live on the street or has some business with them. I watched the few cars I recognized come in, and turn into the various driveways. About ten o’clock one stopped in front of our house. The lights swung slowly around and enveloped us, and Martha closed my mouth with a warm hand as I sat there blinded. Ours was the last driveway, and the driver was just using it to turn around in. He went away, and finally so did I.
I woke up and Martha was still with me. It was light. The crooked part in her hair was very precious. She was asleep, and gently as I could I got up from under her, put her head in the chair, picked up a glass and the whiskey and went into the bathroom. I turned around and Martha was standing there too. She kissed me, and then sat on the toilet seat and pulled the bandage-tape off my side with quick, surgical rips.
“Better,” she said. “It’s going to be fine. Jesus, you’re healthy.”
“I don’t feel so healthy, I can tell you. I’m still tired.”
“Well, you rest up.”
“No, I’m going to the office.”
“No you’re not; that’s the damned silliest idea I ever heard. You’re going to bed.”
“Really, I want to go down there. I want to and I need to. For lots of reasons.”
“All right, dum-dum. Go ahead and kill yourself.”
“Not a chance,” I said. “But if I don’t keep busy I’ll fall apart. I can’t stand any more of this car-watching.”
She re-dressed my side and I went downtown. The main thing was to get back into my life as quickly and as deeply as I could; as if I had never left it. I walked into my office and opened the door wide so that anybody who wanted to look could see me there, shuffling papers and layouts.
At lunch I went out and bought a paper. There was a notice of Drew’s death, and an old picture of him from his college annual. That was all. I worked hard the rest of the day, and when I drove the freeway home it was like a miracle of movement and of freedom.
And so it ended, except in my mind, which changed the events more deeply into what they were, into what they meant to me alone. There is still a special small fear in any strange automobile headlights near the house, or any phone call with an unfamiliar voice in it, either at the office or at home, or when Martha calls me at the office. For a long time I went through both daily papers from column to column every day, but only once did the word Cahulawassee come off the page at me, and that was when the dam at Aintry was completed. The governor dedicated it, there was a ceremony with college and high school bands, and the governor was said to have made a very good speech about the benefits, mainly electrical and industrial, that the dam would bring to the area, and touching on the recreational facilities that would be available when the lake filled in. Every night as the water rose higher I slept better, feeling the green, darkening color crawl up the cliff, up the sides of rock, feeling for the handholds I had had, dragging itself up, until finally I slept as deeply as Drew was sleeping. Only a few days after I saw the story in the paper I knew that the grave of the man we had buried in the woods was under water, and from the beginning of the inundation Drew and the other man were going deeper and deeper, piling fathoms and hundreds of tons of pressure and darkness on themselves, falling farther and farther out of sight, farther and farther from any influence on the living.
Another odd thing happened. The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it — I can feel it — on different places on my body. It pleases me in some curious way that the river does not exist, and that I have it. In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality. I had a friend there who in a way had died for me, and my enemy was there.
The river underlies, in one way or another, everything I do. It is always finding a way to serve me, from my archery to some of my recent ads and to the new collages I have been attempting for my friends. George Holley, my old Braque enthusiast, bought one from me when I hired him back, and it hangs in his cubicle, full of sinuous forms threading among the headlines of war and student strikes. George has become my best friend, next to Lewis, and we do a lot of serious talking about art; more than we should, with the work load the studio has been accumulating.
I saw Bobby only once or twice in the city, just nodding to each other in public places. I couldn’t tell from looking at him how he was, but he had returned to the affable, faintly nasty manner he had always had, and I was as glad as not to leave him alone; he would always look like dead weight and like screaming, and that was no good to me. I later heard that he quit the company he was working for and tried to go into business with a partner running a Chicken-in-a-Basket drive-in and carry-out near a local engineering college, but it failed after a year and he moved to another city, and then, I heard, to Hawaii.
Thad and I are getting along much better than before. The studio is still boring, but not as boring as it was. Dean is growing up well, though he is a strangely silent boy. He looks at me sometimes from the sides of his eyes, and seems about to speak in a way he has not spoken before. But that is probably only my imagination; he has never said anything except the things any boy would say to his father. Otherwise he is sturdy and uncomplicated, and beginning to be handsome. Lewis is something of an idol to him; he is lifting weights already.
Because of the associations she had for me, I looked up the girl in the Kitt’n Britches ad and took her out to dinner a couple of times. I still loved the way she looked, but her gold-halved eye had lost its fascination. Its place was in the night river, in the land of impossibility. That’s where its magic was for me. I left it there, though I would have liked to see her hold her breast once more, in a small space full of men. I see her every now and then, and the studio uses her. She is a pleasant part of the world, but minor. She is imaginary.
Martha is not. In summer we sit by a lake where we have an A-frame cottage — it is not Lake Cahula, it is over on the other side of the state, but it is also a dammed lake — and look out over the water, maybe drinking a beer i
n the evening. There is a marina on the other side; we sit and watch the boats go out, and the water skiers leap from the earthside to their long, endless feathery step on the green topsoil of water. Lewis limps over from his cabin now and then and we look at each other with intelligence, feeling the true weight and purpose of all water. He has changed, too, but not in obvious ways. He can die now; he knows that dying is better than immortality. He is a human being, and a good one. Sometimes he refers to me as “U.C.,” which means — to him and me — “Unorganized Crime,” and this has become a kind of minor conversation piece at parties, and at lunch in the city with strangers.
Sometimes, too, we shoot archery at the lake, where Lewis has put a bale and a field target in a beautiful downhill shot, about fifty-five yards, between trees. We shoot dozens of aluminum arrows, but I have never put another broadhead in the bow. My side wouldn’t allow it; I can feel it cry out at the idea. Besides, there is no need to; the bow I use now is too light for hunting.
Lewis is still a good shot, and it is still a pleasure to watch him. “I think my release is passing over into Zen,” he said once. “Those gooks are right. You shouldn’t fight it. Better to cooperate with it. Then it’ll take you there; take the arrow there.”
Though Lake Cahula hasn’t built up like the one we’re on, there are indications that people are getting interested in it, as they always do any time a new, nice place opens up in what the real estate people call an unspoiled location. I expect there are still a few deer around Lake Cahula — deer that used to spend most of their time on the high ground at the top of the gorge — but in a few years they will be gone, and perhaps only the unkillable tribe of rabbits will be left. One big marina is already built on the south end of the lake, and my wife’s younger brother says that the area is beginning to catch on, especially with the new generation, the one just getting out of high school.
A Delta Book
Published by
Dell Publishing
