Deliverance

September 14th

There was something about me that usually kept me from dreaming, or maybe kept me from remembering what I had dreamed; I was either awake or dead, and I always came back slowly. I had the feeling that if it were perfectly quiet, if I could hear nothing, I would never wake up. Something in the world had to pull me back, for every night I went down deep, and if I had any sensation during sleep, it was of going deeper and deeper, trying to reach a point, a line or border.

This time the wind woke me, and I dragged upward and tried, with the instinct of survival, to get clear of where I had been, one more time. I was used to hearing Martha’s breath bring me back, for she breathed heavily, but this time it was the wind. First the wind by itself and then the wind ringing a little set of metal figures on strings that Martha had put out an the patio—bronze figures of birds surrounding an owl which, because of a long wind vane attached to him, moved when the air moved and touched the others, making a chiming sound something like the one made by the Chinese glass wind-bells that everybody used to have in the thirties, when I was growing up. It was a small, inconstant sound, a lovely sound, I always thought, and as I came up from the sleep-dark to the real dark of the room, I had an idea that it might evoke something, and I lay with the room becoming actual around me, in the dark, beside my wife, in a body.

I reached for Martha, as I always did, and her head stirred under the towel she wore at night. I held her shoulder lightly, and it was then I remembered I was going with Lewis. The routine I was used to pulled at me, but something in me rose daringly above it, full of fear and feeling weak and incompetent but excited. I took Martha in my arms to see if she would try to get away and back to sleep, or come to me for warmth, and then go back.

She was a thin girl whom I had married fifteen years before; she had been working as a surgical nurse. The fact that she might or might not be pretty did not occur to me at all, though friends, without great enthusiasm or conviction, used to tell me she was. But the question of beauty, beyond certain very obvious considerations, never really interested me in women; what I looked for and felt for was the spark, the absolutely personal connection, and when I found a genuine form of it, small but steady, I had married it. There was nothing to regret about this, and I didn’t regret it. She was a good wife and a good companion, a little tough, but with a toughness that got things done. She was genuinely proud of my being vice-president of a company, and she insisted on believing that I had talent as an artist, though I had none. I was a mechanic of the graphic arts, and when I could get the problem to appear mechanical to me, and not the result of inspiration, I could do something with it. On this principle I had done a few big collage-things for the living room, made from torn-up posters, movie magazines, sports headlines and the like. And that, as far as art was concerned, was it. Remembering these, I thought that it might be that Martha cared for them not so much because I had done them, but because they represented some side of me she didn’t know. But it was a wrong faith on her part, and, though I never told her how I felt, I never encouraged it. I drew on her, and she slid to me.

“What time is it?” she said.

“Six,” I said, looking at the frail hands of the clock by the bed as they pulsed and glowed. “Lewis is coming by at a little before six-thirty.”

“What do you have to do to get ready?” she asked.

“Not much. Just throw on my old nylon flying suit and put on some tennis shoes. And, when Lewis comes, load up the back of his car with my stuff. There isn’t much, but I’ve got it all ready. I piled it out in the living room after you went to bed.”

“Do you really want to go, baby?”

“It’s not something I’m dying to do,” I said. “And I won’t die if I don’t do it. But the studio is really bugging me. I had a terrible time yesterday, until I got down to doing some work. It seemed like everything just went right by me, nothing mattered at all. I couldn’t have cared less about anything or anybody. If going up in the woods with Lewis does something about that feeling, I’m for it.”

“Is it my fault?”

“Lord, no,” I said, but it partly was, just as it’s any woman’s fault who represents normalcy.

“I wish you didn’t have to go off like this. I mean, didn’t want to. I wish there was something I could do.”

“There is.”

“Have we got time?”

“We’ll make time. There’s nothing Lewis has to offer that matters all that much. He can wait. I don’t feel like I can.”

We lay entangled like lovers.

“Lie on your back,” she said.

She had great hands; they knew me. There was something about the residue of the nursing in her that turned me on: the practical approach to sex, the very deliberate and frank actions that give pleasure to people. The blood in me fell and began to rise in the dark, moving with her bands and the slight cracking of the lubricant. Martha put a pillow in the middle of the bed, threw back the covers with a windy motion and turned facedown on the pillow. I knelt and entered her, and her buttocks rose and fell. “Oh,” she said. “Oh yes.”

It was the heat of another person around me, the moving heat, that brought the image up. The girl from the studio threw back her hair and clasped her breast, and in the center of Martha’s heaving and expertly working back, the gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.

I went to the bathroom and stood with my eyes closed and flowed. When my bladder was empty I pulled a robe around me, looking in the side-lighted mirror, which shone far up into the thinnest of my hair, unerringly finding the part of it that was receding the most rapidly and shadowed the under-part of my eyes in a way that made me know that they would never again be as they bad been. Aging with me was going to come on fast. And yet I had good shoulders, and my hips and belly were heavy but solid. The hair was thick on my chest and across the top of my back, like an oxbow, and in the light some of it glowed a soft gray, like monkey fur.

If I had had my choice of looking like any man, or combination of men on earth, or in history, I would not have known how to make it. I suppose I got some of this attitude from Lewis, who exercised incessantly but only had two or three suits for each season. Clothes were not a mystique with him, but his body was. “It’s what you can make it do,” he would say, “and what it’ll do for you when you don’t even know what’s needed. It’s that conditioning and reconditioning that’s going to save you.”

“Save me?” I asked Lewis. “Save me from what? Or for what?” And yet Lewis approved of me at least enough to associate with me; I was probably his best friend. He had taught me how to shoot a bow, and I was fairly good. Lewis said I was unusually steady, and I could bold on a point almost as well as he could. My trouble was in judging distances, and Lewis didn’t believe that archery with a sight, that is, archery that was not purely instinctive, was really archery. On a field round I scored consistently in the 160’s for fourteen targets. Lewis was around 230, and had gone as high as 250. It was a real pleasure to watch him shoot, and to see the care that he took with his equipment, which he made himself, strings and all.

In the living room it was balf-lit dark. The moon was gone from the floor and windows. I stood looking at one of the few dawns I had seen in the last ten years, and Martha came softly into the room in a frilled gown and continued on past me into the kitchen. She paused at the door.

“Have you seen Dean anywhere?” she asked.

“What do you mean? Isn’t he in his room?”

My equipment, piled on the floor and dark as solid shade, laughed like Dean, and he rose up from behind it. He had a big Bowie knife in his hand, in the case.

It was odd. It was as though he both knew what the knife was and didn’t know at all, and as he waved it around and threatened me with it—with the greatest love—I was caught in the same curious dance as he, knowing what the knife would do and not believing it for a minute. Finally I took it away from him and pitched it down where he had got it, in the dark of the rest of the stuff. It was only then that I felt the chill of the room, and realized that the air was cold as it came from the floor, up from the pile carpet, and that under the robe I was naked.

On top of the air mattress and sleeping bag and thin nylon rope lay the knife and my bow and four arrows. The rope I had bought on impulse at an army surplus store, mainly because Lewis had once told me that you should “never be in the woods without rope.” I picked the bow up off it, enjoying the cold, smooth feel of the recurves. It was a good one; better, probably, than I deserved. It was not one of the standard makes—a Drake, for example, or a Ben Pearson or a Howatt or a Bear—but was homemade from what seemed to be a kind of composite design that ended up by looking and shooting like none of these. The handle section was heavy, and it actually looked like an experimental bow. I had come to like the weight and depth of the handle, though, and wouldn’t have felt comfortable with anything smaller. Lewis had got it for me secondhand from a former state champion who’d made it, and who shot the same kind of bow, and he kept telling me of advantages which began, as I remember, by seeming completely psychological, but gradually came to seem real ones. There was, in fact, very little hand shock on release. The arrow went off very smoothly, and quietly, too. It had nothing like the snap or kick of Lewis’ bows. The initial tip speed was nothing extra; the first time I shot it I thought it was terribly slow until I checked my point of aim and found that the bow was point-blank at sixty-five yards. When the string was released, the bow seemed to hesitate, and then the limbs gained speed at a terrific rate, and the arrow left the string with the feel of being not so much shot as catapulted. The trajectory was as flat as any bow I’d ever seen, and the left-right problem was not nearly so pronounced as it was in Lewis’ bows. Now, as I held it and looked at it, with its white Gordon-Glas inner and outer faces, it seemed exactly the bow I ought to have. I depended on it and believed in it, though the laminations were beginning to tire a little, letting a few fiber glass splinters half-rise from the edges of the upper limb. I had a new string, too. Unlike Lewis, I used a peep sight in the string, and there I had something really good. Martha and I had separated the Dacron strands, put snap fasteners between them, and Martha had wrapped the separated halves with orange thread. It was a very handsome bowstring, and I enjoyed using it. When the bow was at full draw, the peep sight came naturally back to the eye and the target came to rest within it, trembling with the effort of the body to keep still. The effect of framing the target was a big advantage, at least to me, for it isolated what was being shot at, and brought it into an oddly intimate relation with the archer. Nothing outside the orange frame existed, and what was inside it was there in a terribly vital and consequential way; it was as though the target were being created by the eye that watched it.

The arrows were not so good, though they would do. They were aluminum, for I shot aluminum target arrows, and I knew from experience that arrows of this spine and length—twenty-nine inches—would shoot accurately out of my bow. They were in a bow quiver taped to the bow, for I wanted to be able to carry everything in one hand, and I had no back quiver anyway. They looked deadly, with their two-bladed Howard Hill broadheads and long yellow helical fletches. I had tried to camouflage them with black and green house paint, making random slashes up and down the shafts, and I had sharpened the heads on one of my neighbors’ emery wheel. That was one thing I had done well, for they were nearly as sharp as new razor blades. They would shave hair, and I had also put on them, with a file, a slight burring roughness, very good for deep cutting, so said the archery magazines. I felt the edge of one of them with a thumb, and then drew back into the light of the hall to see if I had cut myself.

I hadn’t, and I went back to the bedroom, got twenty dollars from my wallet, then walked back out through the living room to the kitchen, where Martha was moving barefooted back and forth in front of the stove, her glasses winking, and stared out into the backyard. I had my tennis shoes in my hand and sat down on the floor to put them on, still looking out behind the house. The trees there seemed perfectly wild, free objects that only by accident occurred in a domestic setting, and for some reason or other I felt strangely moved. Dean came up behind me and pulled at the leg-back of my flying suit. I picked him up, still looking out at where I lived. Usually children are bored with that sort of thing, not understanding how someone can look where nothing is moving. This time, though, Dean was as quiet as I was, observing what existed. I kissed him and he held me close around the neck. He was not ordinarily an affectionate child, and his acting this way made me nervous. Martha also came up, her face warm from the upcast heat of the stove. I got up, and we stood like a family group.

“Do you know where you’re going?” she said.

“Not exactly. Lewis does. Somewhere up in the northeast part of the state, where he’s been fishing. If everything goes off OK, we ought to be back late Sunday.”

“Why wouldn’t it go off OK?”

“It will, but you can’t predict. Listen, if I thought there was anything dangerous about it, I wouldn’t go. Believe me, I wouldn’t. It’s just a chance to get out a little. And they say the mountains are really beautiful this time of year. I’ll get some pictures, come to think of it.”

I went back to the bedroom once again and picked up a Rolleiflex that belonged to the studio. I also got another bowstring and put it in the leg pocket of my outfit. When I came back, Lewis had driven in. I put one arm around Martha as around a buddy, and then changed and held her with both hands, locking them, while Dean went around behind her and tried to get them loose. I opened the door, and by that time Lewis was already out of the station wagon, coming and coming at us. His long wolfish face was flushed, and he was grinning. He grinned continually, but other people never got the grin directly, but always just sidelong parts of it, so that there was always an evasive, confident and secret craziness in his look; it was the face of a born enthusiast. He had on an Australian bush hat with a leather chin strap, and I could not help feeling that the occasion was a good one. I picked up the bow and the camera and went out with him to the car.

It was full of gear: two pup tents, ground sheets, two bows, a box of arrows, life preservers, a fly rod, groceries. He was a fanatic on preparedness—it was the carry-over from this part of him that had made me get the rope that was now looped at my side, when I knew I’d never use it, and the flying suit as well, because “nylon dries out quick”—and yet he’d take off up some logging road that hadn’t been used in fifteen years, bashing over logs and jumping gullies with no regard for himself, for the car or for whomever was with him. I hoped there wouldn’t be much of that, for standing there in the light-shift of early morning, I felt genuinely close to him. He had the appearance of always leaping to meet something, of going forward with joy and anticipation. I was tired of dragging; I felt a great deal lighter and more muscular when I was around Lewis.

Now he was hauling my gear out to the car and stowing it up. The rear window filled with equipment, almost all of it different shades of green. Before he put it in, Lewis turned my bow over in his bands.

“You’re losing glass,” he said, thumbing the edge of the upper limb.

“It’ll hold up, I think. It’s been like it is for a good long time.”

“You know,” Lewis said, “I like this bow. You stand holding it after you turn loose the string, thinking, what the hell. And then you look yonder and the arrow’s sticking in the target.”

“You get used to it,” I said. “It’s very relaxed.”

“Now you see it, and now,” Lewis broke off. “And now and now.”

“Let’s go ahead,” I said. “The sun’s coming up. We can eat on the road. Up north the water’s running.”

He spread his thin face crookedly. “You sound like me,” he said.

“How about that,” I said, and went back one last time and got a bag of clothes I’d thrown together: a sweat shirt and a couple of T-shirts and a pair of long jolms for sleeping.

We turned and waved good-bye to Martha and Dean, who were drawing together in the door. Martha’s glasses were orange in the rising sun. I got in and clashed the car door. The bows and the woods equipment were heavy behind us, and the canoe clamped us down. We were not—or at least I was not—what we were before. If we had had an accident and had to be identified by what we carried and wore, we might have been engineers or trappers or surveyors or the advance commandos of some invading force. I knew I had to live up to the equipment or the trip would be as sad a joke as everything else.

I thought of where I might be that night, and of the snakes that would be out in the unseasonable warmth, and of being among the twigs and insects of remote places in the woods, and I was tempted—I must say I was—to back out, get sick, make some sort of excuse. I listened for the phone to ring, thinking of what I might say to the paper boy or my insurance agent, or whoever it might be, so that I could get out of the car, make a believable excuse to Lewis and take off my costume. What I really wanted was to go back in the house for a little sleep before driving to work. Or maybe, since I had the day off, to go out and play nine holes of golf. But the gear was in the car, and Lewis looked near me with his longest smile, showing plainly that I was of the chosen, that he was getting me out of the rut for a while or, as he put it, “breaking the pattern.”

“Here we go,” he said, “out of the sleep of mild people, into the wild rippling water.”

With the canoe beaked over us, we slid down the driveway, turned left and picked up speed, then turned left again and cruised. I propped up a foot and waited for the last of the downhill, and when we leveled out we were at the shopping center. Drew’s Oldsmobile was parked about fifty yards this side of the four-lane. An old wooden canoe, something that looked like it belonged on a lake instead of a river, was webbed onto the top of the car with a lot of frayed rope; it had an army blanket under it to keep it from scratching the car.

Lewis gunned past the Olds and up the ramp onto the freeway. As we went past, I gave the others the Churchill V-sign, and Bobby replied with the classic single-finger. I faced ahead and stretched out on the seat and watched the rest of the light come.

It came, steadying on my right arm stronger and stronger, lifting up past the Texaco and Shell stations and the hamburger and beer drive-ins that were going to fly and shuttle on the highway for the next twenty miles. I had no particular relation to any of these; they were sealed from me and slid by on the other side of a current of cellophane. But I had been here, somewhere; my stomach stirred and I knew it. Moving up at us on the right was a long line of white concrete poles, a red-and-white drive-in whose galvanized tin roof made the sun flutter and hang and angle, and my half-shut eyes singled out one pole from the rest, magnifying it like a hawk’s.

I had leaned there, Christmas before last. I had leaned and leaned, until the leaning turned into a spinning round and round the pole, and then I had come to a slow stop and vomited, spilling half-solids first and then color after color of powerful liquids, all from an office Christmas party. As I remembered, Thad had thought that driving me out for a last beer might help sober me up, but be was more horrified than any stranger when he saw what shape I was in. A lot of times when drunk I’ve felt things that seemed to share the drunkenness with me—friendly tables and sofas and even trees—but the pole in that drive-in was thing-cold, set in all that concrete, in the southern winter. It had no movement and I couldn’t give it mine, drunk as I was, spinning among the disgusted people in overcoats in their cars, their faces going blue and red with neon—that tired, never-dying color-changing—and something colder than the metal in my hand touched the very bottom of my stomach, the blood heaved, and I held to the pole and let it come. I could hear the cars near me starting, and I tried with every muscle to bring up my stomach. I might also have hit my head a couple of times against the pole, for there were some lumps on my forehead, over one eye. Now as we passed I swiveled to look at the post, half expecting to see something special about it: the ground around it bleached, maybe, or some other indication that I had taken a stand there. There was nothing of that sort, of course, but an inhuman coldness touched me, my stomach clenched, and we were past. The highway shrank to two lanes, and we were in the country.

The change was not gradual; you could have stopped the car and got out at the exact point where suburbia ended and the redneck South began. I would like to have done that, to see what the sense of it would be. There was a motel, then a weed field, and then on both sides Clabber Girl came out of hiding, leaping onto the sides of barns, 666 and Black Draught began to swirl, and Jesus began to save. We hummed along, borne with the inverted canoe on a long tide of patent medicines and religious billboards. From such a trip you would think that the South did nothing but dose itself and sing gospel songs; you would think that the bowels of the southerner were forever clamped shut; that he could not open and let natural process flow through him, but needed one purgative after another in order to make it to church.

We stopped in a little town named Seluca and had breakfast at a restaurant called the Busy Bee. It was great, I thought, a big meal with grits and eggs and lots of butter and biscuits and preserves. My gut heaved and rubbed against the slick nylon I was wearing and the sun, as I got back into the car, drained from my face down into some central part. I barely remember Lewis starting the car, but I do remember thinking of Martha and Dean just as I drifted out, recalling that they were mine, that I was always welcome in that house.

I was dead, and riding, which is a special kind of sleep not like any other, and I heard Lewis saying something that strove in and out of my consciousness. Later in the trip I asked him to repeat it.

“… and was there in the Grass Mountain National Game Management Area; gone up after trout. That’s not too far from where we’re headed, either. Bad roads in there, but my God Almighty, the little part of the river I’ve seen would knock your eyes out. The last time I was near there I asked a couple of rangers about it, but none of them knew anything. They said they hadn’t been up in there, and the way they said ‘in there’ made it sound like a place that’s not easy to get to. Probably it isn’t, but that’s what makes it good. From what I saw, the river is rough but not too rough just south of Oree. But what’s on down from that, I don’t have any idea. What we’ll do first is to find a place to put in. Oree is on kind of a bluff, and most likely we’ll have to get on the other side of it to put in. We might want to get some more supplies in Oree first, though.”

My eyes kept hazing open and shut without seeing anything; things were in them but didn’t have the power to stay or be remembered. The world was a kind of colored nodream with objects in it. Then, one of the times that my eyelids lifted without any command, I stared straight out with my brain asleep but my eyes wide. We were going out the far edge of a little town, swinging to the right through the twiggy grayish stuff that is always growing near southern highways. Up ahead, the road ran between two hills. Lined up dead center between them was a mountain, high, broad and blue, the color of concentrated woodsmoke. There were others farther back from it, falling back, receding left and right.

“Funny thing,” Lewis said.

I leaned around, hearing him. “What?”

“Funny thing about up yonder,” he said. “The whole thing’s different. I mean the whole way of taking life and the terms you take it on.”

“What should I know about that?” I said.

“The trouble is,” he said, “that you not only don’t know anything about it, you don’t want to know anything about it.”

“Why should I?”

“Because, for the Lord’s sake, there may be something important in the hills. Do you know what?”

“No; I don’t know anything. I don’t mind going down a few rapids with you, and drinking a little whiskey by a campfire. But I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about those hills.”

“But do you know,” he said, and his quietness made me listen, although with the reservation that it had better be good if be put that much emphasis on it, “there are songs in those hills that collectors have never put on tape. And I’ve seen one family with a dulcimer.”

“So, what does that prove?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe a lot.”

“I’ll leave that to Drew,” I said. “But do you know something, Lewis? If those people in the hills, the ones with the folk songs and dulcimers, came out of the hills and led us all toward a new heaven and a new earth, it would not make a particle of difference to me. I am a get-through-the-day man. I don’t think I was ever anything else. I am not a great art director. I am not a great archer. I am mainly interested in sliding. Do you know what sliding is?”

“No. You want me to guess?”

“I’ll tell you. Sliding is living anti-friction. Or, no, sliding is living by anti-friction. It is finding a modest thing you can do, and then greasing that thing. On both sides. It is grooving with comfort.”

“You don’t believe in madness, eh?”

“I don’t, at all. I know better than to fool with it.

“So what you do …”

“So what you do is go on by it. What you do is get done what you ought to be doing. And what you do rarely—and I mean rarely—is to flirt with it.”

“We’ll see,” Lewis said, glancing at me as though he had me. “We’ll see. You’ve had all that office furniture in front of you, desks and bookcases and filing cabinets and the rest. You’ve been sitting in a chair that won’t move. You’ve been steady. But when that river is under you, all that is going to change. There’s nothing you do as vice-president of Emerson-Gentry that’s going to make any difference at all, when the water starts to foam up. Then, it’s not going to be what your title says you do, but what you end up doing. You know: doing.”

Then he waited, and I woke up fully, where I had not been before.

“I know,” he said. “You think I’m some kind of narcissistic fanatic. But I’m not.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly,” I said.

“I just believe,” he said, “that the whole thing is going to be reduced to the human body, once and for all. I want to be ready.”

“What whole thing?”

“The human race thing. I think the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over.”

I looked at him. He lived in the suburbs, like the rest of us. He had money, a good-looking wife and three children. I could not really believe that he came in from placating his tenants every evening and gave himself solemnly to the business of survival, insofar as it involved his body. What kind of fantasy led to this? I asked myself. Did he have long dreams of atomic holocaust in which he had to raise himself and his family out of the debris of less strong folk and head toward the same blue hills we were approaching?

“I had an air-raid shelter built,” he said. “I’ll take you down there sometime. We’ve got double doors and stocks of bouillon and bully beef for a couple of years at least. We’ve got games for the kids, and a record player and a whole set of records on how to play the recorder and get up a family recorder group. But I went down there one day and sat for a while. I decided that survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors and not in the marbles of Chinese checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you can’t fake; it’s just got to be there.”

“Suppose there was a lot of fallout, and there was no way to breathe? Suppose the radiation didn’t have any respect for your physique?”

“In that case, buddy,” he said, “I’d be prepared to throw in the jock. But if it comes to a situation where I can operate, I don’t want to crap out. You know me pretty well, Ed. You know I’d go up in those hills, and I believe I’d make out where many another wouldn’t.”

“You’re ready, are you?”

“I think I am,” he said. “I sure am, psychologically. At times I get the feeling that I can’t wait. Life is so fucked-up now, and so complicated, that I wouldn’t mind if it came down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive. You might say I’ve got the survival craze, the real bug. And to tell the truth I don’t think most other people have. They might cry and tear their hair and be ready for some short hysterical violence or other, but I think most of them wouldn’t be too unhappy to give down and get it over with.”

“Is this just something you think about on your own? Does your wife know all this?”

“Sure. She was very interested in the shelter. Now she’s learning open-air cooking. She’s doing damned good, too. She even talks about taking her paints along, and making a new kind of art, where things are reduced to essentials—like in cave painting—and there’s none of this frou-frou in art anymore.”

I had the clear sense that he’d both talked this up too much with his wife and maybe a few other people, and had never really talked about it at all.

“Where would you go?” he asked. “Where would you go when the radios died? When there was nobody to tell you where to go?”

“Well,” I said, “I’d probably head south, where the climate would be better. I’d try to beat my way down to the Florida coast, where there’d be some fish around, even if there wasn’t anything else to eat.”

He pointed ahead, where the hills were moving from one side of the road to the other, and growing solid. “That’s where I’d go,” he said. “Right where we’re going. You could make something up there. You could make something, and not have to build it on sand.”

“What could you make?”

“If everything wasn’t dead, you could make a kind of life that wasn’t out of touch with everything, with the other forms of life. Where the seasons would mean something, would mean everything. Where you could hunt as you needed to, and maybe do a little light farming, and get along. You’d die early, and you’d suffer, and your children would suffer, but you’d be in touch.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “If you wanted to, you could go up in the hills and live right now. You could have all those same conditions. You could hunt, you could farm. You could suffer just as much now as if they dropped the H-bomb. You could even start a colony. How do you think Carolyn would like that life?”

“It’s not the same,” Lewis said. “Don’t you see? It would just be eccentric. Survival depends—well, it depends on having to survive. The kind of life I’m talking about depends on its being the last chance. The very last of all.”

“I hope you don’t get it,” I said. “It’s too big a price to pay.”

“No price is too big,” Lewis said, and I knew that part of the conversation was over.

“What’s the life like up there, now?” I asked. “I mean, before you take to the mountains and set up the Kingdom of Sensibility?”

“Probably not too much different from what it’s liable to be then,” he said. “Some hunting and a lot of screwing and a little farming. Some whiskey-making. There’s lots of music, it’s practically coming out of the trees. Everybody plays something: the guitar, the banjo, the autoharp, the spoons, the dulcimer—or the dulcimore, as they call it. I’ll be disappointed if Drew doesn’t get to hear some of that stuff while we’re up here. These are good people, Ed. But they’re awfully clannish, they’re set in their ways. They’ll do what they want to do, no matter what. Every family I’ve ever met up here has at least one relative in the penitentiary. Some of them are in for making liquor or running it, but most of them are in for murder. They don’t think a whole lot about killing people up here. They really don’t. But they’ll generally leave you alone if you do the same thing, and if one of them likes you he’ll do anything in the world for you. So will his family. Let me tell you about something that happened two years ago.”

“All right.”

“Shad Mackey and I were running Blackwell Creek. The creek was low and things got sort of dull. We were doing nothing but paddling and it was hot as hell. Shad said he’d rather take his bow and hunt rabbits downstream. He got out, and we said we’d meet where the creek comes into the Cahula River, way down below where we’re going to be. He took off into the woods on the east side, and I went on down the creek. Saw a wildcat drinking that day, I remember.

“Anyway, I got on down to the river and pulled the canoe up on the bank and stretched out on a rock to wait for him. Nothing happened. I kept listening, but outside the regular woods noises, I couldn’t hear a thing. It started to get dark, and I was beginning to get worried. I didn’t want him out there by himself in the dark, and I didn’t want to be out there either. I wasn’t ready for it. You know, I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have anything to eat. I didn’t have a bow with me, like a damned fool. I had a pocketknife and a ball of string, and that’s all.”

“You should have looked on that as a challenge, Lewis,” I said, not able to resist.

He was not touchy about these things at all; he knew he couldn’t be swayed. “It wasn’t the right kind,” be said.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I was lying on a big rock, and the cold was coming up into me, bone by bone. I happened to look around, and there was a fellow standing there looking at me. ‘What you want, boy, down around here?’ he said. He was skinny, and had on overall pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I told him I was going down the river with another guy, and that I was waiting for Shad to show up. It wasn’t easy for him to believe that, but gradually we got to talking. Sure enough, he had a still near there. He and his boy were working it. He took me back about a quarter of a mile from the river. His boy was building a fire.

“We sat down and talked. ‘You say you got a man back up there hunting with a bow and arrow. Does he know what’s up there?’ he asked me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s rougher than a night in jail in south Georgia,’ he said, ‘and I know what I’m talking about. You have any idea whereabouts he is?’ I said, no, ‘Just up that way someplace, the last time I saw him.’“

I felt like laughing. For all his fanaticism about preparedness, Lewis was forever getting himself and other people into situations like this. And I was damned well hoping that this wouldn’t be another one. “What happened then?” I asked.

“The fire was blazing up. The shadows were jumping. The fellow stood up and went over to his boy, who was about fifteen. He talked to him for a while, and then came about halfway back to me before he turned around and said, ‘Son, go find that man.’ The hackles on my neck stood up. The boy didn’t say a thing. He went and got a flashlight and an old single-shot twenty-two. He picked up a handful of bullets from a box and put them in his pocket. He called his dog, and then he just faded away.”

“He did? Just went off?”

“He went off where I pointed. That’s all he had. That and his father. That’s the something I’m talking about. I don’t care bow much you argue with me. I know it. Dependability. The kind of life that guarantees it. That fellow wasn’t commanding his son against his will. The boy just knew what to do. He walked out into the dark.”

“So?”

“So we’re lesser men, Ed. I’m sorry, but we are. Do you think Dean would do something like that when he’s fifteen? First of all, he won’t have to. But if he did, he couldn’t do it, couldn’t be that boy walking off into the dark with his dog.”

“He could have been killed. And maybe the father was an asshole, anyway,” I said.

“Maybe he was, but the boy didn’t think so,” Lewis said. “This kind of thing is just as hard on the parents as on the children. If both of them recognize it, it works. You know?”

I didn’t quite, though I didn’t say so. “Does the story have any end?”

“It does,” Lewis said. “About two o’clock in the morning, when the fire was about burned out and I was leaned up against a tree asleep, the boy came back with Shad. Shad’d broken his leg and was in the bushes in the dark, trying to do something for himself, when the boy found him. God knows how he did it.”

“What if he hadn’t done it?”

“It wouldn’t make any difference,” Lewis said. “He went, and he tried. He didn’t have to. Or rather he did have to. But anyway, he went, and Shad would have been in a bad way if he hadn’t.”

“I saw Shad at a better business meeting last month,” I said. “He may be a friend of yours, but I can’t see that anything so much was saved, up there in the woods.”

“That’s pretty callous, Ed.”

“Sure it is,” I said. “So what?”

“As it happens, I agree with you,” be said after a moment. “Not a good man. Drinks too much in an uncreative way. Talks too much. Doesn’t deliver enough, either on the river or in business or, I’m fairly sure, in bed with his wife or anybody else, either. But that’s not the point. His own life and his own values are up to him to make. The boy went and hauled him out of the woods because of his values. And his old man and his old man’s way of life, both of them ignorant and full of superstition and bloodshed and murder and liquor and hookworm and ghosts and early deaths, were the cause of it. I admire it, and I admire the men that it makes, and that make it, and if you don’t, why, fuck you.”

“OK,” I said, “fuck me. I’ll still stay with the city.”

“I reckon you will,” Lewis said. “But you’ll have doubts.”

“I may, but they won’t bother me.”

“That’s the trouble. The city’s got you where you live.”

“Sure it does. But it’s also got you, Lewis. I hate to say this, but you put in your time playing games. I may play games, like being an art director. But I put my life and the lives of my family on the line. I have to do it, and I do it. I don’t have any dreams of a new society. I’ll take what I’ve got. I don’t read books and I don’t have theories. What’d be the use? What you’ve got is a fantasy life.”

“That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really—really—in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantqized. I don’t know what yours is, but I’ll bet you don’t come up to it.”

“Mine is simple,” I said. I didn’t say, though, what forms it had taken recently, nor anything about the moon-slice of somebody else’s gold eye in the middle of my wife’s back as she labored for us.

“So is mine, and I work for it. A gut-survival situation may never happen. Probably it won’t. But you know something? I sleep at night. I have no worries. I am becoming myself, as inconsequential as that may be. I am not something somebody shoved off on me. I am what I choose to be, and I am it.”

“There’re a lot of other kinds of people to be, than what you are,” I said.

“Sure there are. But this is my kind. It feels right, like when you turn loose the arrow, and you know when you let go that you’ve done everything right. You know where the arrow is going. There’s not any other place that it can go.”

“Lord,” I said. “Lewis, you’re out of sight.”

“Who knows,” he said. “But I believe in survival. All kinds. Every time I come up here, I believe in it more. You know, with all the so-called modern conveniences, a man can still fall down. His leg will break, like Shad Mackey’s. He can lie there in the woods with night coming on, knowing he’s got two cars in the garage, one of them an XKE, a wife and three children watching ‘Star Trek’ as he hes trying to get his breath under a bush. The old human body is the same as it always was. It still feels that old fear, and that old pain. The last time I was near here …”

“You know that old broken-leg thing, don’t you, buddy?”

“I know it,” he said. “I broke it like a goddamned fool, up here by myself. There was a trout stream I wanted to fish, and it was hard to get to. I took thirty feet of rope and let myself down to the creek and fished … well, I fished. It was one of the best afternoons I ever had with man or woman or beast. I was climbing back up when the rope worked into my right hand and began to hurt like hell, and I slacked up on that hand and tried to wrap the rope around it a different way, and the next thing I knew, the damned rope slicked through the other hand and I was going down. In fact, I was already down. I hit on one leg, and I could hear something go in that right ankle. I had a hard time getting up from the bottom of the creek, with those waders on, and when I tried to stand up, I knew I had it to do.”

“How’d you get out?”

“I went up the rope. I just armed it out, hand over hand, and then started hobbling and hopping and crawling. And you damned well better hope you never have to one-leg it through any woods. I was holding on to every tree like it was my brother.”

“Maybe it was.”

“No,” Lewis said. “But I got out, finally. You know the rest.”

“Yeah. And now you’re going back.”

“You better believe it. But you know something, Ed? That intensity; well, that’s something special. That was a great trip, broken ankle and all. I heard old Tom McCaskill, the night before. That was worth it.”

“Who is that?”

“Well, let me tell you. You come up here camping in the woods, on the river in some places, or back off in the bush, hunting or whatever you’re doing, and in the middle of the night you’re liable to hear the most God-awful scream that ever got loose from a human mouth. There’s no explanation for it. You just hear it, and that’s all. Sometimes you just hear it once, and sometimes it keeps on for a while.”

“What is it, for the Lord’s sake?”

“There’s this old guy up here who just gets himself—or makes himself—a jug every couple of weeks, and goes off in the woods at night. From what I hear, he doesn’t have any idea where he’s going. He just goes off the road and keeps going till he’s ready to stop. Then he builds himself a fire and sits down with the jug. When he gets drunk enough he starts out to hollering. That’s the way he gets his kicks. As they say, don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it. You tried it?”

“No, but maybe on this trip. I doubt if I’ll ever get another chance. Maybe we don’t even have to go down the river. Maybe we should just go off and drink and holler. And Drew could play the guitar. I’ll bet he’d just as soon. I’ll bet he’d rather.”

“Well, I wouldn’t. Would you?”

“Don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it,” I said. “But no, I wouldn’t. In fact, I’m looking forward to getting on the river. I’m so tanked up with your river-mystique that I’m sure I’ll go through some fantastic change as soon as I dig the paddle in the first time.”

“Just wait, buddy,” he said. “You’ll want to come back. It’s real.”

I looked off at the blue forms of the mountains, growing less transparent and cloudlike, shifting their positions, rolling from side to side off the road, coming back and centering in our path, and then sliding off the road again, but strengthening all the time. We went through some brush and then out across a huge flat field that ran before us for miles, going straight at the bulging range of bills, which was now turning mile by mile from blue to a light green-gold, the color of billions of hardwood leaves.

Around noon we started up among them, still on the highway. At an intersection we turned off onto a blacktop state road, and from that onto a badly cracked and weedy con-crete highway of the old days—the thirties as nearly as I could tell—with the old splattered tar centerline wavering onward. From that we turned onto another concrete road that sagged and slewed and holed-out and bumped ahead, not worth maintaining at all.

It was still about forty miles to Oree. We had to get there, hire two men to drive the cars back down to Aintry and then go downriver and find a campsite and set up camp. If possible, we also wanted to buy some more supplies. We had time, but we didn’t have any to waste. Lewis speeded up; a bad road always challenged him. The canoe bumped and grated overhead.

We were among trees now, lots of them. I could have told you with my eyes closed; I could hear them whish, then open to space and then close with another whish. I was surprised at how much color there was in them. I had thought that the pine tree was about the only tree in the state, but that wasn’t the case, as I saw. I had no notion what the trees were, but they were beautiful, flaming and turning color almost as I looked at them. They were just beginning to turn, and the flame was not hot yet. But it was there, beginning to come on.

“You look at these trees,” Lew said. “I’ ve been up here in April when you could see the most amazing thing about them.”

“They look pretty amazing now,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Have you ever heard of the larva of the linden moth?”

“Sure,” I said. “All the time. Tell you the truth, no.”

“Every year when the larvae are ambitious—larvas is larvae—you can look at the trees and you see something happening.”

“What?”

“You can see a mass hanging. A self-hanging of millions of ‘em.”

“Is this another put-on?”

“No, buddy. They let themselves down on threads. You can look anywhere you like and see ‘em, wringing and twisting on the ends of the threads like men that can’t die. Some of them are black and some are brown. And everything is quiet. It’s so quiet. And they’re there, twisting. But they’re bad news. They eat the hardwood leaves. The government’s trying to figure some way to get rid of ‘em.”

It was a warm day. Everything was green, and through the green there was that subtle gold-coming color that makes the green hurt to look at. We passed through Whitepath and Pelham, towns smaller than the others, and Pelham smaller than Whitepath, and then began to wind and climb. The woods were heavy between the towns, and closed in around them.

“Look for deer,” Lewis said. “When there’s not much mast, they come down to the cornfields and along the roads.”

I looked but didn’t see any, though at one curve in the road I thought I saw something dart back into the woods to the right. But the leaves where I thought it had gone in were not moving, so probably it was my imagination.

Finally we came to Oree. It was evidently the county seat, for it bad a little whitewashed building it called the town hall; the jail was part of it, and an old-fashioned fire engine was parked at one side. We went to a Texaco station and asked if there was anybody there who’d like to make some money. When Lewis killed the engine, the air came alive and shook with insects, even in the center of town, an in-and-out responding silence of noise. An old man with a straw hat and work shirt appeared at Lewis’ window, talking in. He looked like a hillbilly in some badly cast movie, a character actor too much in character to be believed. I wondered where the excitement was that intrigued Lewis so much; everything in Oree was sleepy and hookwormy and ugly, and most of all, inconsequential. Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. It was nothing, like most places and people are nothing. Lewis asked the fellow if he and somebody else would drive our cars down to Aintry for twenty dollars.

“Take two of you to drive this thing?” the man asked.

“If that was the case we’d need four,” Lewis said, and didn’t explain. He just sat there and waited. I glanced up at the prow of the canoe, the book coming at us from above.

After a long minute Drew and Bobby drove up beside us.

“See what I mean?” Lewis said.

The other two got out and came over. The old man turned as though he were being surrounded. His movements were very slow, like those of someone whose energies have been taken by some other thing than old age. It was humiliating to be around him, especially with Lewis’ huge pumped-up bicep shoving out its veins in the sun, where it lay casually on the window of the car. Out of the side of my eye I saw the old man’s spotted hands trembling like he was deliberately making them do it. There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought. In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment, maybe. But there was something else. You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong; I never saw one who was physically powerful, either. Certainly there were none like Lewis. The work with the hands must be fantastically dangerous, in all that fresh air and sunshine, I thought: the catching of an arm in a tractor part somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but that the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one’s screams. And so many snakebites deep in the woods as one stepped over a rotten log, so many domestic animals suddenly turning and crushing one against the splintering side of a barn stall. I wanted none of it, and I didn’t want to be around where it happened either. But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-fingered people.

I looked off into the woods, then, and shot an eye corner back at my bow. This trip would sure be the farthest off in the woods I had ever been; there would be more animals than I had ever been close to, and they would be wilder. Lewis said he believed there were even a few bears and wild hogs in the mountains, though he said that the hogs were more likely to be domestic pigs that had run off. But they revert fast, he said; they grow that ruff up the back of the neck and the snout stretches out and the tushes get long, and in six or seven years you can’t tell them from the ones in Russia, except maybe by a notch in the ear or a ring in the nose. I knew there was not much chance of our running into a bear or a hog; that was romance. But then, the idea of hunting, for me, was also a kind of romance. The death of a real deer at my hands was just a vaporous, remote presence that hovered over the figure of the paper deer forty-five yards away at target six of our archery range, as I tried to hit the heart-lung section marked out in heavy black.

“Man, I like the way you wear that hat,” Bobby said to the old man.

The man took off the hat and looked at it carefully; there was nothing remarkable about it, but when it was on his head it had the curious awkward-arrogant tilt that you find only in the country South. He put the hat back on the other side of his head with the same tilt.

“You don’t know nothin’,” he said to Bobby.

Drew said, “Can you tell us something about the land around here? I mean, suppose we wanted to get down the river to Aintry. Could we do it?”

The man turned away from Bobby, and the finality with which he did it made me glance at Bobby to see if he had disappeared as a result. Bobby was smiling the kind of smile that might or might not come before a mean remark.

“Well,” the man said, “it’s right rocky, on down a piece. If there’s been a rain it raises way up, but it don’t come over the banks, leastways in most places. There ain’t no danger of the valley floodin’; ain’t nothin’ in it anyway. Furthest down I been is Walker ’s Point, about fifteen miles, where the land starts gettin’ high. In a dry spell the river drops on down out of sight; you got to lean way out over the rocks to see it. And they say there’s another big gorge on down south, but I ain’t never been there.”

“Do you think we can get down the river?” Drew asked.

“In what?”

“In these two canoes.”

“I wouldn’t want to try it,” he said, and straightened up. “If it rains, you’re liable to be in bad trouble. The water climbs them rock walls like a monkey.”

“What the hell,” Lewis said. “It’s not going to rain. Look up yonder.”

I looked up yonder. It was clear, hazy-hot blue with no clouds. It seemed all right, if it stayed that way.

“If it rains, we’ll just find us a place and hole up,” Lewis said. “I’ve done it before.”

“You’ll have a time holing up if you get down in that gorge.”

“We’ll make out.”

“All right,” the old man said. “You asked me. I told you.”

Drew and Bobby turned to go back to the Olds, and the Texaco man walked back alongside of Drew. I heard him ask, “Whose guitar is that-there yonder?” Then he was jumping like a dog on its hind legs back into the filling station. “Lonnie,” he hollered, “come on out here.”

He came back and behind him was an albino boy with pink eyes like a white rabbit’s; one of them stared off at a furious and complicated angle. That was the eye be looked at us with, with his face set in another direction. The sane, rational eye was fixed on something that wasn’t there, somewhere in the dust of the road.

“Git yer banjo,” the old man said, and then to Drew, “Come on, play us a little something.”

Drew grinned, rolled down the back window of the wagon, got out the big cracked Martin and put on his finger picks. He came back to the front of the Olds and hiked himself onto the bood with one leg up to hold the guitar. He tuned for a minute, and Lonnie came back holding up a five-string banjo with a capo made out of rags and rubber bands.

“Lonnie don’t know nothin but banjo-pickin’,” the old man said. “He ain’t never been to school; when he was little he used to sit out in the yard and beat on a lard can with a stick.”

“Whaere we going to play, Lonnie?” Drew asked, his glasses opaque with pleasure.

Lonnie stood holding the banjo, looking off from us now with both eyes, the eyes splitting apart and all of us in the blind spot.

“Anything,” the old man said. “Play anything.”

Drew started in on “Wildwood Flower,” picking it out at medium tempo and not putting in many runs. Lonnie dragged on the rubber bands and slipped the capo up. Drew started to come on with the volume; the Martin boomed out and over the dusty filling station. I had never beard him play so well, and I really began to listen deeply, moved as an unmusical person is moved when he sees that the music is meant. After a little while it sounded as though Drew were adding another kind of sound to every note he played, a higher, tinny echo of the melody, and then it broke in on me that this was the banjo, played so softly and rightly that it sounded like Drew’s own fingering. I could not see Drew’s face, but the back of his neck was sheer joy. He eased out of the melody and played rhythm, and Lonnie took it. He emphasized nothing, but through everything he played there was a lovely unimpeded flowing that seemed endless. His hands, full of long scratches, took time; the fingers moved only slightly, about like those of a good typist; the music was just there. Drew came back in the new key and they finished, riding together. For the last couple of minutes of the song, Drew slid down and went over and stood beside Lonnie. They put the instruments together and leaned close to each other in the pose you see vocal groups and phony folk singers take on TV programs, and something rare and unrepeatable took hold of the way I saw them, the demented country kid and the big-faced decent city man, the minor civic leader and hedge clipper. I was glad for Drew’s sake we had come. Just this incident would be plenty to satisfy him.

“Goddamn,” he said as they finished.

“Come on, Drew,” Lewis said. “Put that thing away. We got to get water under us.”

“I could play with this guy all day,” Drew said. “Can you wait just a minute? I’d like to got his name and address.”

He turned to Lonnie, then quickly to the old man; he was, I guess, afraid that Lonnie didn’t know his name and address. They walked together a few steps, almost out of the area of the filling station, and stood talking. Then Drew passed the Martin to the old man and took a pencil and his wallet out of his pocket and wrote carefully what the old man told him.

Once the man touched Drew’s shoulder. Drew came back, and the old man and Lonnie went inside.

“You know,” Drew said to all of us, “I’d like to come back up here, just to hear some more music. I thought all the real country pickers had long since gone to Nashville.”

“How about the river?” Lewis asked.

“He tells me you can’t get down to the river anywhere in town here. It’s too steep. But eight or ten miles north of here the land’s flat. We might be able to find us a road through the woods. There was a logging operation up there a few years back, and he thinks there are still some roads that go down to the river, or somewhere around it.”

“How about drivers?”

“He doesn’t have anybody here, but there are a couple of brothers who run a garage out the way we’re going to have to go, and they might be able to do it.”

We drove out of town. We were higher up than I thought. We went over a bridge, and through the whirling girders of the supports the river was flickering. It was green, peaceful, slow, and I thought, very narrow. It didn’t look deep or dangerous, just picturesque. It was hard to imagine that it flowed through woods anywhere, or that animals drank from it, or that it was going to be dammed up and become a lake.

North of town about half a mile we stopped. Lewis thought it would be a good idea for Drew and Bobby to buy supplies while Lewis and I made the deal about the cars. We could see the Griner Brothers’ Garage from where we were, and Lewis told Drew to meet us there in half an hour. We drove up to the garage and parked.

There was a frame house connected to the garage, and we went to it and knocked on the door. No one answered. A doghead came around a jamb inside. We could hear hammering from the galvanized tin garage, but when we went over there we saw that the front of it was locked with a big chain and padlock. We walked around to the back. Half of the double door was sagging open. We went in, Lewis first.

It was dark and iron-smelling, hot with the closed-in heat that brings the sweat out as though it had been waiting all over your body for the right signal. Anvils stood around or lay on their sides, and chains hung down, covered with coarse, deep grease. The air was full of hooks; there were sharp points everywhere—tools and nails and ripped-open rusty tin cans. Batteries stood on benches and on the floor, luminous and green, and through everything, out of the high roof, mostly, came this clanging hammering, meant to deafen and even blind. It was odd to be there, not yet seen, paining with the metal harshness in the half-PAJOKAda.A.

We went toward the hammering, which seemed to be done also on the outside of the shed, on the roof and tin sides and us at the same time, who got it all. We were close enough to the source of the sound to flinch each time it came, when it stopped. The air around our heads closed in. By this time we could see a few more things, though it was actually darker there than where the batteries and anvils were. The hub of what looked like a truck wheel was on a table, and a big figure was bending over it. We were still invisible. I was about to say something when the figure straightened and turned.

Not saying anything and holding one hand in the other, the man stepped forward between us and went toward the slant light that stood for the door. I instinctively let him go by, though for a second I thought I saw Lewis move toward his path, and my heart-blood jumped in place, not able to understand what was happening or about to happen. Lewis’ move toward blocking the man, if it was a move, appeared as instinctive on his part as my own move away, but I can’t to this day remember if it really happened; it might have been just a trick of perspective or darkness. We followed the man out.

When we broke into the sun in the half-grass and gray dirt of the yard, he was standing spread-legged looking at his hand, which was cut in the thin webbing between the left thumb and forefinger. He was a huge creature, twenty pounds heavier than Lewis, dressed in overall pants and an old-fashioned sleeveless undershirt, with a train engineer’s cap on and cut-down army boots. He held his hand low in the sun, right at his waist, turning it one way and then another. He held it like he was having to keep it down by all the strength in his other hand and the rest of his body.

There is no very good way to start a conversation under conditions like that; all I wanted to do was disappear, so as not to have to explain what I was doing there, but Lewis walked up to the man and asked, very civilly for him, if he could help.

“No,” the big man said, looking squarely at me instead of Lewis. “It ain’t as bad as I thought.”

He pulled a gray handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it around his hand, jerking the knot tight with his teeth.

Lewis waited until the second half of the knot was tied and said, “I was wondering if you and somebody else, maybe your brother, would drive two cars down to Aintry for us for twenty dollars. Or if you wanted to get a third fellow to drive another car so you’d have a way to get back to Oree, we’d give all three of you ten dollars apiece.”

“Drive them down there for what?”

~We want to take a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee, and we’d like for our cars to be in Aintry when we get there day after tomorrow.”

“A canoe trip?” he said, looking back and forth between us.

“That’s right,” Lewis said, narrowing his eyes a little. “A canoe trip.”

“You ever been down in there?”

“No,” Lewis said. “Have you?”

Griner set his heavy-hanging face on Lewis; they battled in midair; the sound of crickets in the grass around the garage clashed like shields and armor plate. I could see the man was insulted; Lewis himself had told me that the worst thing you can do is to throw something back at these mountain people.

“No,” Griner answered slowly. “I ain’t never been down in there much. There ain’t nothing to go down there for. Fishing’s no good.”

“How about hunting?”

“Never been. But I don’t believe I’d go there if I was you. What’s the use of it?”

“Because it’s there,” Lewis said, for my benefit.

“It’s there, all right,” Griner said. “If you git in there and can’t get out, you’re goin’ to wish it wudn’t.”

My chest felt hollow, and my heart was ringing like iron. I wanted to back out; just go back to town and forget it. I hated what we were doing.

“Listen, Lewis,” I said, “to hell with it. Let’s go back and play golf.”

He didn’t pay any attention. “Well, can you do it?” he asked Griner.

“How much did you say?”

“Twenty dollars for two men, thirty for three.”

“Fifty,” Griner said.

“Fifty, my ass,” Lewis said.

Good God, I thought, why is he like this? I was scared to death, and I resented insanely Lewis’ getting me into such a situation. Well, you didn’t have to come, I told myself. But never again. Never.

“How about forty?” Griner said.

Lewis kicked the ground and turned to me. “Are you good for ten?”

I took out the money and gave it to him.

“Twenty now,” Lewis said to Griner. “Well send the rest to you. If we’re good for this, we’re good for the rest. Take it or leave it.”

“Good enough,” Griner said, but it was hard not to believe he was saying something mean. He took the bills and looked at them and put them in his pocket. He went across the yard toward the house, and we went around front, back to the car.

“What do you think?” I asked Lew. “You reckon we’ll ever see these cars? This is a rough son of a bitch. Why wouldn’t he and his brother just go off and sell them?”

“Because we know who he is,” Lewis said matter-of-factly. “And he doesn’t come by twenty dollars so easy as all that. Sure, the cars’ll be right there when we get there. Don’t worry about it.”

After a few minutes Griner came out of the house with his even bigger brother alongside. They were like two pro football linemen in their first season after retirement when they are beginning to soften up, working as night watchmen. We didn’t try to introduce ourselves; the thought of asking them to shake bands with us never occurred to me until years later. I still wonder what would have happened if we had tried.

Drew’s car came into sight from behind us. We told them what the arrangements were. The brothers and another man—who just simply materialized—got into an old Ford pickup with the paint seared off in patches clear down to the naked metal, and followed us. It seemed to me that we should have been following them, but from the filling station Lewis had the information he wanted; it was not much, but it was enough for him. He knew where the river was, approximately, he knew that the land flattened to the north and that there had been logging in the woods near the river. That all this might possibly be misinformation did not make the slightest difference to him. He was going there.

After a while he turned off on a dirt road. We ran along on this for a time, covering the truck behind us with ocher dust swirling up in a thick cloud from Lewis’ too-fast driving. We ran past some farms and out over the crest of an open field on a section of road as straight as a plow furrow through two stands of rotten corn on either side, and then into some hot pinewoods that dropped off and kept dropping off. The road got worse. It began to curve back in the general direction of the highway, and Lewis craned his head out the window, trying to make the road bend back toward where he believed the river was. When he turned I was not expecting it, and thought we had hit something. We swayed off the road and down, everything going with us rattling. Lewis rose a little higher in the seat. Bushes whacked up under the car. I turned to look back. The other cars weren’t behind us, as far as I could tell. I thought perhaps Lew’s speed had lost them at the turnoff, but if they’d turned off with us they’d surely be in sight by now, and they weren’t.

The road slung in a tight half-circle and gave out. In front of us were a few blackened boards on the ground and a rock chimney sinking into the weeds. A lizard ran over the biggest stone, and stopped with his head up. A dead sawhorse stood, off by itself in what looked like a sandpit.

“Well,” Lewis said, “we screwed up.”

“Maybe we’d better let them show us where the river is.”

“We’ll see.”

He backed into the weeds and manhandled the car around until we could get back on the track we had come down. When we reached the other road, the truck was waiting for us, with Drew’s car behind it. I had wondered why Drew hadn’t followed us, but it was like him to drop behind the truck; he didn’t know anything about where he was going, and he was willing to listen to somebody who did.

The first Griner leaned out of the cab. “Where you goin, city boy?”

Lewis flushed. “Get on with it,” he said.

“Naw, naw,” Griner said. “Go on ahead. You’ll find it. Ain’t nothin’ but the biggest river in the state.”

Lewis gunned ahead again. We swung with the road to the right, then back to the left and down. Suddenly it hit me that there were some stumps among the trees going by.

“Maybe this is where they were logging,” I said.

Lewis nodded. “This land has been sawmilled, all right,” he said. “I figure we’re getting there.”

The road kept dropping and failing. Finally it was only the ghost of a road; it was hard to believe that there had ever been any vehicles on it; it was almost like the rest of the woods. We eased on down. Once we had to crawl over a washout with the wheels barely balanced on each side. It would have been tough going in a jeep, even.

All at once the road fell away and slid down a kind of bank. I didn’t see how it would be possible to get back up.

“Hold on,” Lewis said, and tipped the car over forward. Rhododendron and laurel bushes closed in on us with a soft limber rush. A branch of something jumped in the window and stayed, lying across my chest.

We had stopped, and I sat with the pressure of the woods against me; when I looked down I saw that one leaf was shaking with my heart.

Lewis held up a finger next to his ear. “Listen,” he said.

I listened, not pushing away the limb. At first I didn’t hear anything. Yet the silence sounded like something was coming up under it, something steady and even and unendable. Lewis started the engine, and I helped the branch off me and out the window as we crawled down, rustling with many leaves. A high bank rose up, and the road went straight to it and quit. There was a gully in front of the bank. I got out, looking at the ground for snakes. Why on God’s earth am I here? I thought. But when I turned back to the car to see what Lewis was doing, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear window. I was fight green, a tall forest man, an explorer, guerrilla, hunter. I liked the idea and the image, I must say. Even if this was just a game, a charade, I had let myself in for it, and I was here in the woods, where such people as I had got myself up as were supposed to be. Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.

Lewis went forward from me and jumped the gully. He climbed the bank and then stood for a moment the tallest man in the woods, his hands on his hips, looking down the other side. I started up, too; I wanted to see what be was seeing. He went down the other side as I came up, feeling dirt on my hands for the first time in years. At the top there was nothing to see but more woods, and Lewis in his camouflage and Australian hat going through them. I went down in two or three soft, collapsing jumps that filled my tennis shoes with leaf mold. There was water at the bottom. Trees with thin leaves, like willows—maybe willows—were growing thickly there; I couldn’t see beyond the puddle at the bottom, but it was stirring faintly, not stagnant. And then I realized that there was plenty of sound going on; we had come into it almost imperceptibly, and now it seemed all around us.

Lewis crow-hopped over the water and I followed, holding on to saplings when I could. He stopped and I came up beside him. He pulled an armload of arrowy leaves out of the way. I edged up more, looking out—or in—through the ragged, ashen window he made.

The river opened and was there. It was gray-green, very clear and yet with a certain milkiness, too; it looked as though it would turn white and foam at rocks more easily than other water. It was about forty yards wide, and shallow, about two and a half or three feet deep. The bed was full of clean brown pebbles. We couldn’t see very far upstream or down because of our position and because of the willows, but just watched the part in front of us going by and by carrying nothing, not even a twig, as it lay in the branches and leaves in Lewis’ arms. He let the limbs fall; they swept in gracefully and closed the river off again.

“There she is,” Lewis said, still looking straight ahead.

“Pretty,” I said. “Pretty indeed.”

It took us a good long time to get the canoes off the cars and over the gully and the bank. Lew and Bobby pulled the canoes up the bank by the nose, hauling on the bow ropes, and Drew and I shoved from behind. Finally we slid them out through the willows. We put the wooden canoe in first. Lewis got down in the water, up to his knees in the bank mud, and supervised the loading. Both canoes had floorboards, though they were held in only by gravity and by the seats. We put in the perishables first and then the waterproof tents over everything, lashing them to the floorboard slats. Drew slid down into the water, and finally so did I. Then Lewis left.

“How about your guitar?” Bobby hollered from the top of the bank.

“Bring it,” Drew said, and then to me, “I don’t mind losing that old Martin in the river, but I’ll be goddamned if I want those characters to run off with it.”

“I hope we don’t ruin it, by spilling our foolish asses in this river,” I said.

“I don’t know about you,” Drew said, as mock-country as he could talk, “but I ain’t planning to spill in this-here river. I’m a-goin’ with you, and not Mr. Lewis Medlock. I done seen how he drove these roads he don’t know nothin’ about.”

“OK,” I said. “Fine. But you probably ought to know that he can handle a canoe pretty well, and I can’t. He’s strong as the devil, too, and he’s in shape. I’m not.”

“I’ll take my chances,” he said. “So will Miss Martin.”

Lewis and Bobby kept coming through the willows, carrying stuff, and Drew and I kept cramming it under the lashed-down tents, any way we could. Lewis should have stayed down here in the water with us, I thought. He could surely have done a better job of loading than we were doing. We floundered around in the slime, our feet deep in the mud.

Finally Bobby came through the leaves for the last time. “We’re ready,” he said.

“Everything all set about the cars?”

“Far as I can tell,” he said. “Lewis is dealing with those guys now. I’m sure glad we’re getting rid of them.”

Far off we heard a car start. It occurred to me that I had no idea at all of who the third driver in the truck was; I had not seen his face, or not noticed it.

“Personally,” Bobby said, “I damn well doubt whether they can get the cars back up the road we came down.”

“That’s a nice thought,” Drew said. “What if they can’t?”

“We’ll be gone,” I said. “Then it’s their problem.”

“Damned if it’s their problem,” Bobby said. “What’re we going to do if we come off this river, and there’re no cars, down at what’s-its-name?”

Lewis spoke through the branches. “They’ll be there,” he said. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

We now had our life jackets on and I held the wooden canoe steady for Bobby to get in. He swayed out over the river and got into the bow seat. Lewis followed. The weight sank the canoe far enough into the water to make it as stable as it ever could be.

“OK,” Lew said. “Turn loose.”

I did; they floated free. I stood watching over my shoulder. My feet were pointed toward the bank; I was mired down so far that I began to wonder how I was going to get out. I stayed rooted, holding on to the aluminum canoe while Drew got into the front and picked up the paddle.

“This how you hold this thing?” he asked me.

“I reckon,” I said. “You hold it … like you hold it.”

I got one foot out of the mud by driving the other one about twice as far down, and then grabbed a long branch and pulled myself up as best I could with the river holding on to me hard by the left leg.

“It’s got me,” I said.

“What’s got you?”

“It.”

I scrambled and pulled on the branch until I was out. I kicked a foothold into the bank and stepped wide from it into the stern of Lewis’ canoe and was in, everything rocking and wallowing. We pushed out with the paddles from the bank.

A slow force took hold of us; the bank began to go backward. I felt the complicated urgency of the current, like a thing made of many threads being pulled, and with this came the feeling I always had at the moment of losing consciousness at night, going toward something unknown that I could not avoid, but from which I would return. I dipped the paddle in.

Movies and pictures of Indians on calendars gave me a general idea of what to do, and I waved the paddle slowly through the water, down and along the left side of the canoe. The nose with Drew in it—I saw now that moving him to one side or the other, to turn the canoe, was going to be a big part of the problem—swung heavily out toward midstream, where the current began to pick us up and move us a little faster. The sensation of pure riding could not have been greater though we were doing not much more than drifting, bogged with the weight of gear, and with uncertainty. Downstream, Lewis and Bobby were hardly any better off, their strokes uncoordinated and helpless, though Lewis was trying. I supposed that he was letting Bobby get the feel of the water, and find which side he would rather paddle on. I told Drew to keep his paddle on the right, and we tried a few sweeps together, running over a very shallow place where the water quickened and broke and foamed over gray-brown gravel. We rocked and scraped on the stones.

“Go ahead and try a little stronger pull,” I said. “We’ve got to find a way to make this thing move like we want it to.”

He dug in, and I swept with him. We settled into a good motion that moved us toward a curve. Once or twice my paddle hit the bottom-rocks; this put an odd, dissonant, intimate feeling into my bands. We started into the curve just as the other canoe disappeared around it. I plowed a little harder to turn us exactly with the current. Drew glanced back, his glasses flashing, the life preserver not turning. His face-side had a big grin. “Hey, hey,” he said. “How about this?”

“How about it, is right.”

As we straightened out of the curve I had a quick sensation of something wrong. Either the river was wrong or the green canoe was. Lewis and Bobby were traveling broadside to the gentle water, and Lewis was doing his best to bring the bow around. Bobby was totally confused, as nearly as I could tell, though he was trying to help. But they were going down the river backward. Drew put his hand over his face. I thought of hollering something to Lewis, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Sometimes I could laugh at him, but I felt that it wouldn’t be right to do it now. Drew and I rested, the paddles pulled up, keeping our mouths shut. The stream was with us, and we could watch. Bobby quit trying to paddle, and Lewis, by the sheer desire to do it, managed to swing the canoe broadside again, but just as he lifted it side-on to the current a paired set of rocks stopped it. Lewis banged and shoved at the rocks with his paddle and with his hands, and then tried to hunch the canoe free with his weight. Finally, though, he stepped off into the river and took hold of the canoe. Drew and I came alongside and I backwatered. On impulse I got out to help. Lew and I hauled and shoved, with Bobby sitting in the bow with his face absolutely perfect as an expression of dead weight.

Loading the canoe, I had not really been aware of the water, but now I was. It felt profound, its motion built into it by the composition of the earth for hundreds of miles upstream and down, and by thousands of years. The standing there was so good, so fresh and various and continuous, so vital and uncaring around my genitals, that I hated to leave it.

“Let’s have a beer,” I said.

Lewis wiped off the sweat and rummaged around under the tents and the tarps. He came up with four twelve-ounce cans of beer from a polyethylene sack of melting ice, and we hung our forefingers in the rings and dragged them open. We were all thirsty from the work and anxiety of the loading, and my thirst and Lewis’ went all the way back to the Griner Brothers’ Garage, where I had shed more liquid than I thought I had in my system. I drank the whole can in one long, unhurried epical swallow.

I looked around. We were in the middle of a farm that backed steeply up on the river on two sides, one more than the other, and seemed to be battling the woods for existence. In a gully to my right as I faced downstream a cow was drinking; on top of a little grassy bluff others were lying down. Cow dung shone in the late heat, and there was a small misty, insane glimmering of insects wherever it had fallen.

I held the wavering color of the can under water until it filled enough to sink, and let it go, down and on past my ballooning nylon legs.

Lew and I started the canoe off the rocks with one three-armed shove, and I climbed back in with Drew. We entered a long straight stretch, moving with the fresh sweat that had sprung up from the beer as much as with the current.

The land on both sides climbed, and the river pulled us steadily toward a silver highway bridge. We went under, and the bridge clattered its boards as a pickup truck went over.

We were civilized again. On the right bank some tin sheds backed down to the water; the mud was covered with rusted pieces of metal, engine parts and the blue and green blinks of broken bottles. But there was something worse than any of this; some of the color was not only color; it was bright, unchangeable. Drew had been hit the same way, for another reason. “Plastic,” he said. “Doesn’t decompose.”

“Does that mean you can’t get rid of it,” I said, “at all?”

“Doesn’t go back to its elements,” he said, as though that were all right.

In the dark light the broken plastic pitchers shot out their rays like batteries. One was orange, one was yellow, and a water container was blue; what Martha, referring to clothes, would have called electric blue. The plastic throwaways were invulnerable in their colors, amongst the split, splintering boards and the brown-gold tin cans in the mud flats under the town, their lids prised-up and cruel, but going back to the earth.

The sky was beginning to smoke up with night, with complete, unlighted night. For a little while I thought that was the reason the water didn’t have the clean sparkle, the deep milk-but-clear that it had had when we got on it. The current lacked the arrowy drive, the sense of purpose that bad been part of it in the willow woods. There was something in the texture of it.

I pulled my paddle out of the water; a white feather was stuck to the end of it. I shook it off and peered into the river. Off to the right and getting ready to go by under water was a vague choked whiteness. It was a log completely covered with chicken feathers, with all the feather-hairs weaving and wavering in a perfect physical representation of nausea. When you are sick enough, I said truly to myself, that is the thing you feel.

“There must be a poultry processing plant in this town,” Drew half turned and said.

“Sure.”

The river was feathering itself night and day. The rocks were full of feathers, drift on drift; even the downriver sides were streaming and bannered with them. Every shape under the river was a sick off-white; the water around us was full of little prim, dry feathers curled up like things set sail by children, all going at about the same speed we were. And out among them to the right, convoyed by six or eight feathers, was a chicken head with its glazed eye half-open, looking right at me and through me. If there had been more heads it would not have been so remarkable, but I saw only the one, going with us, turning its other eye as though the result of a movement of its gone body, drinking the sad water with a half-opened bill, pinwheeling and floating upside down, then turning over downstream again. I half hit at it with the paddle flat, but it only moved off a foot or so and settled back into the current beside us.

On a patchy flow of feathers we went down, over the unplucked rocks and logs in the deep, slow water, and I was resigned to going along that way for a while until I noticed, for no particular reason, that the depth of my ears was increasing in some way. I concentrated, and the sound of water both deepened and went up a tone. There was another bend ahead, and the river seemed to strain to get there, and we with it.

Around the turn it came into view, and broadened in white. Everywhere we were going was filled with spring-bubblings, with lively rufflings, not dangerous-looking but sprightly and vivid. There was not the sensation of the water’s raging, but rather that of its alertness and resourcefulness as it split apart at rocks, frothed lightly, corkscrewed, fluted, fell, recovered, jostled into helmet-shapes over smoothed stones, and then ran out of sight down long garden staircase steps around another turn.

I looked for a way through. Drew pointed straight ahead, and it was better done that way than saying it. I sank the paddle into the river. The main current V’d ahead of us, and looked to be straight, as far as I could tell, though the V that indicated the fastest water disappeared about halfway along down the rapids.

“Call the rocks,” I hollered. “We want to go straight down the middle.”

“Ay, ay,” Drew said. “Let’s go there.”

We headed into the waist of the V. The canoe shifted gears underneath, and the water began to throw us. We rode into the funnel-neck and were sucked into the main rapids so suddenly that it felt as though the ordinary river had been snatched from under us like a rug, and we were tossing and bucking and banging on stones, trying to hold the head of the canoe downriver any way we could. Drew bobbed in front of me, leaping toward a place that could be reached in no other way. He was incompetent but cool; no panic came back from him. Every time he changed sides with his paddle, I changed to the opposite side. Once we began to go catercornered; the water began to swing us broadside like mania, and I felt control sliding away, off somewhere in the bankbushes looking at us, but Drew made half the right move and I made the other half, and we righted. The hull scraped and banged over rocks, but we hung straight in the current, trembling with force and luck, past the deadly, vibrant rocks we overflowed.

I yelled to Drew to keep his paddle on one side or the other. He chose the right—the biggest rocks seemed to be there; they kept looming up, through the water and just under it—while I alternated between sweeping us forward, adding to our speed wherever I could, and pulling backward on the river whenever we got too close to the rocks on the right. Already it was beginning to be like work I knew, and I felt safer because of that.

Now I could look on past Drew and see the white water lapse and riffle out into green and dark. There was a short flourish of nervous rippling that took us between two black boulders, and we were through.

Drew hiked up his hand on the gunwale of the canoe and looked back, with a surprised pleasure.

“Old Lewis,” he said. “He knows something.”

I looked for the other canoe, which was not far ahead of us. Bobby and Lewis were plowing away at water that looked curiously dead, after the rapids.

But it was evening water. There was no sun on it, and the light that made the reflections was going fast. Far off ahead was the pouring of another set of rapids or falls with—I was already ready to bet—a curve in it.

I was awfully tired, though not sore. As the sun lost energy, so did I, and the edge of night-cold clinched it. I wanted to let go of the river.

We drifted slowly. The current entered my muscles and body as though I were carrying it; it came up through the paddle. I fished up a couple of beers from our pack and opened them and passed one to Drew. He twisted back and took it, one lens of his glasses dark with the sunset.

“It’s a hard life with us pioneers,” he said, and whistled a line from “In My Birch-Bark Canoe.”

I lifted my beer and drank, keeping the beer coming in as fast as I could get it down. The nylon of my legs was drying out and clinging to my calves and shins. I pulled the cloth legs loose from me and took up the paddle again. I felt marvelous.

We were about even with the other canoe. Like that we went down more drifting than paddling, into the dark coming upriver to meet us. There were no rapids—though we kept hearing them—and we were riding through rocky banks and tall mournful long-leaf pines. Once a little road, overgrown with weeds and bushes, ran along the left bank for a few hundred yards and then gave out at a fallen tree. A hawk circled in the dying blue, the trailing edge of his wings standing out sharply in the deep intensification of the evening sky.

It was beginning to be very wild and quiet. I remembered to be frightened and right away I was. It was the beautiful impersonality of the place that struck me the hardest; I would not have believed that it could hit me all at once like this, or with such force. The silence and the silence-sound of the river had nothing to do with any of us. It had nothing to do with the town we had just left, with its few streetlights in the mountain darkness, its cafes and the faces of farmers in the tired glow of rigged wires in the town square, and the one theater showing a film that was appearing on late television in the city. I dozed, much as I had done with Lewis in the car in the morning, and I saw again our approach to the blue hills, the changing shapes and colors and positions as we came toward them, except that in some way or another my mind got turned around and I was going backwards, away from the hills and through the Clabber Girl signs and away from the country Jesuses and back to the buildup of roadhouses and motels and shopping centers around the city. Martha was there, and Dean, and it was a shock for me to realize, all of a sudden, that I was not with them; that I was looking onward into curves of water. Martha was worrying now, watching TV with Dean. She was not used to being without me at night, and I could see her sitting with her hands folded, in the position of a woman bravely suffering. Not suffering badly, but suffering just the same, her feet in hot mules.

I backwatered a little, and drove us with a long stroke up alongside the green canoe. An insect hit my lips like a bullet.

“Don’t you think we ought to make camp pretty soon?” I said to Lewis.

“Yeah, I do. I’m afraid if we go any farther the banks might begin to get too high for us to get out on. You-all look for a place on the left, and we’ll look over here.”

We ran some small rapids, phosphorescent in the twilight, feeling hardly more than a slight alteration of the stream under us, but it was enough to remind us of the trouble that would result if we were to dump the equipment in the water in the dark. The trees and bushes where I was looking were connecting, becoming one solid thing; it was very hard to make out what the details were like. But there did seem to be a kind of shelf about four feet up from the water. I pointed this out to Lewis, and be nodded. I swung the canoe toward the place, working cater-cornered against the bias of the stream. We hit the bank with a soft yielding bump. I got squeamishly out into the water and held the canoe, the sliding cold around me full of the presence of night-creatures. Drew scrambled out and tied us to a sapling. I pulled myself up and out as Bobby and Lewis maneuvered alongside; the hair on my shoulders crawled with discomfort.

We unlashed the stuff and began to make camp. Lewis had brought some long flashlights, and he set these up on stumps and in the forks of bushes to form an area of concentrated light. In and out of this we moved, working at strange duties. Lewis seemed to know where everything was, and went around placing articles on the ground in the positions from which he expected them to rise and create a camp: the two tents, the grill, the air mattresses, the sleeping bags. They tried to be useful, but Drew and Bobby did not seem to be getting much done, and I saw the folly of just standing around and letting Lewis do everything, though it would have been all right with him if I had. I was sleepy, and I went to the equipment that had to do with that. I blew up the air mattresses with a hand pump, all four of them; it took a good half an hour, and I was pumping steadily all the time, while the river lightened in front of me and the woods at my back got thicker and thicker with blackness.

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.

I lay with the sweat ready to break, looking up through almost-closed lids, full now of a dread that was at least partly humorous. There was nothing, after all, so dangerous about an owl. Its other foot punctured the tent slowly and deliberately, and it shifted its weight until I could feel it come even. The claws did not relax, but the tent quivered less. Still, it shuddered lightly, as though we were about to be carried away in it. I dozed for a minute and tried to see what the tent must look like from the outside, with the big night bird—surely it was very big, from the size of the nails and feet—sitting in its own silence and equilibrium, holding us fast inside what it took to be our sleep.

The nails tightened a very little, the canvas tore slightly and then beat in a huge tent-beat; it seemed strange that we were still on the ground. I fell back, realizing that I had heard the first downstroke of the owl’s wings, urgent and practically soundless; the stroke that hung it in the air as it set out.

Sometime later, from some deep place, I heard the woods beating. In the middle of this sound the tent shook; the owl had hold of it in the same place. I knew this before I cut the light on—it was still in my hand, exactly as warm as I was—and saw the feet, with the heel talons now also coming in. I pulled one hand out of the sleeping bag and saw it wander frailly up through the thin light until a finger touched the cold reptilian nail of one talon below the leg-scales. I had no idea of whether the owl felt me; I thought perhaps it would fly, but it didn’t. Instead, it shifted its weight again, and the claws on the foot I was touching loosened for a second. I slipped my forefinger between the claw and the tent, and half around the stony toe. The claw tightened; the strength had something nervous and tentative about it. it tightened more, very strongly but not painfully. I pulled back until the hand came away, and this time the owl took off.

All night the owl kept coming back to hunt from the top of the tent. I not only saw his feet when he came to us; I imagined what he was doing while he was gone, floating through the trees, seeing everything. I hunted with him as well as I could, there in my weightlessness. The woods burned in my head. Toward morning I could reach up and touch the claw without turning on the light.