Deliverance

September 16th

With my cheek on one shoulder, I lay there on my side in the crevice, facing out, not thinking about anything, solid on one side with stone and open to the darkness on the other, as though I were in a sideways grave. The glass of the bow was cold in my hands, cold and familiar. The curves were beautiful to the touch, a smooth chill flowing, and beside the curves the arrow lay—or stood—rigidly, the feathers bristling when I moved a little, and the points pricking at me. But it was good pain; it was reality, and deep in the situation. I simply lay in nature, my pants’ legs warm and sopping with my juices, not cold, not warm, but in a kind of hovering. Think, I said, think. But I could not. I won’t think yet; I don’t have to for a while. I closed my eyes and spoke some words, and they seemed to make sense, but were out of place. I believe I was saying something about some bank advertising Thad and I were not in agreement on, but it might not have been that at all; there is no way to tell.

The first words I really remember were said very clearly.

What a view. What a view. But I had my eyes closed. The river was running in my mind, and I raised my lids and saw exactly what had been the image of my thought. For a second I did not know what I was seeing and what I was imagining; there was such an utter sameness that it didn’t matter; both were the river. It spread there eternally, the moon so huge on it that it hurt the eyes, and the mind, too, flinched like an eye. What? I said. Where? There was nowhere but here. Who, though? Unknown. Where can I start?

You can start with the bow, and work slowly into the situation, working back and working up. I held the bow as tightly as I could, coming by degrees into the realization that I was going to have to risk it again, before much longer. But not now. Let the river run.

And let the moonlight come down for a little while. I had the bow and I had one good arrow and another one I might risk on a short shot. The thought struck me with my full adrenaline supply, all hitting the veins at once. Angelic. Angelic. Is that what it means? It very likely does. And I have a lot of nylon rope, and a long knife that was held at my throat and stuck by a murderer in the tree beside my head. It is not in the tree now; it is at my side. It is not much duller for having been in the river, and if I wanted to shave hair with it, I could. Does it still hurt, where that woods rat, that unbelievable redneck shaved across me with it? I felt my chest, and it hurt. Good. Good. Am I ready? No. No. Not yet, Gentry. It doesn’t have to be yet. But soon.

It was easy to say I don’t understand, and I did say it. But that was not really relevant. It just came down to where I was, and what I was doing there. I was not much worried.

I was about 150 feet over the river, as nearly as I could tell, and I believed that if I could get that far I could get the rest of the way, even though the cliff was steeper here than it was lower down. Let me look, now. That is all there is to do, right at this moment. That is all there is to do, and that is all that needs to be done.

What a view, I said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence. What was there?

Only that terrific brightness. Only a couple of rocks as big as islands, around one of which a thread of scarlet seemed to go, as though outlining a face, a kind of god, a layout for an ad, a sketch, an element of design. It was a thread like the color of sun-images underneath the eyelids. The rock quivered like a coal, because I wanted it to quiver, held in its pulsing border, and what it was pulsing with was me. It might have looked something like my face, in one of those photographs lit up from underneath. My face: why not? I can have it as I wish: a kind of three-quarter face view, set in the middle of the moon-pit, that might have looked a little posed or phony, but was yet different from what any mirror could show. I thought I saw the jaw set, breathing with the river and the stone, but it might also have been a smile of some kind. I closed my eyes and opened them again, and the thread around the rock was gone, but it bad been there. I felt better; I felt wonderful, and fear was at the center of the feeling: fear and anticipation—there was no telling where it would end.

I turned back. I turned back to the wall and the cliff, and into my situation, trying to imagine how high the cliff had seemed to be the last time I had seen it by daylight, and trying to estimate where I was on it. I thought I surely must be three quarters of the way up. I believed I could stand upright in the crevice, and this would give me three or four more feet.

Why not? Was there a bulge above me? If I could get on top of that, who knows what might not be possible? I let my hand go up, and it felt the top of the crevice. What are you sending me? I said. It feels good. It feels like something I might be able to work up on top of, if I went to the left, and took one moment of pure death. There is going to be that moment, but that is not bad. I have had so many in the past few hours: so many decisions, so many fingers groping over this insignificant, unwatched cliff, so many muscles straining against the stone.

Where was Drew? He used to say, in the only interesting idea I had ever heard him deal with, that the best guitar players were blind men: men like Reverend Gary Davis and Doc Watson and Brownie McGhee, who had developed the sense of touch beyond what a man with eyes could do. I have got something like that, I said. I have done what I have done, I have got up here mostly by the sense of touch, and in the dark.

Are they below? Is Lewis still twisting into the sand? Is Bobby sitting on the rock beside him trying to think what to do? Is his head in his hands? Or has his jaw set, believing that we can all get out, even now?

Who knows that? But we have laid a plan, and that is all we have been able to do. If that doesn’t work, we will probably all be killed, or if I can get back down the cliff when nothing happens, we will all just go a few miles downriver in the canoe, take a few days in the city to recover, report Drew as drowned and get back into the long, declining routine of our lives. But we were cast in roles, and first we must do something about them.

I was a killer. There were deaths involved: one certain murder and probably another. I had the cold glass of the bow in my hand, and I was lying belly-up in a crevice in a cliff above a river, and it could be that everything was with me.

I could get there, in my mind. The whole thing focused, like an old movie that just barely held its own on the screen. The top of the gorge was wild and overgrown and lumpy, and I remembered it also thickly wooded. I wanted to give myself something definite to do when I got to the top, and lying there, I tried to fix on what would be the best thing and the first thing to do when I got there.

I had to admit it: I thought that there was really no danger involved, at least from anything human. I didn’t actually believe that the man who had shot Drew would stay around all night for another shot at us, or that he would come back in the early light, either. But then I remembered what I had told Bobby, and I was troubled again. If it were me was the main thing I thought. I went over everything in my mind, and as far as I could tell, I was right. There was a lot more reason for him to kill the rest of us than there was for him to let us go. We were all acting it out.

I turned. Well, I said to the black stone at my face, when I get to the top the first thing I’ll do will be not to think of Martha and Dean again, until I see them. And then I’ll go down to the first stretch of calm water and take a look around before it gets light. When I finish that, I’ll make a circle inland, very quiet, and look for him like I’m some kind of an animal. What kind? It doesn’t matter, as long as I’m quiet and deadly. I could be a snake. Maybe I can kill him in his sleep. That would be the easiest thing to do, but could I do it? How? With the bow? Or would I put the hardware store knife through him? Could I do it? Or would I like to do it? I asked this.

But the circling—what about that? If I got too far from the river, and the sound of the river, I would almost surely lose myself. And then what? A circle? What circle? What principle guides you, when you try to make a circle—a circle—in the woods? I didn’t have it. Suppose I got inland from the river far enough to lose track of myself? Had I shot the whole thing, right there?

But I could see myself killing, because I had no real notion I would have to. If he was close to the cliff edge, as he would at some place and time have to be, the high-rising sound of water would help me get close enough to him for a killing shot. I wanted to kill him exactly as Lewis had killed the other man: I wanted him to suspect nothing at all until the sudden terrible pain in his chest that showed an arrow through him from behind, come from anywhere.

Oh what a circle, I thought. All in the woods, with the leaves waiting, the wind waiting, for me to draw it. That is leaving too much to chance. It won’t work, I knew as I considered it. It will never work.

What then, art director? Graphics consultant? What is the layout? It is this: to shoot him from behind, somewhere on the top of the gorge. He almost certainly would get himself into the prone position in order to shoot down onto the river. There are these various kinds of concentration. While he was deep in his kind, I would try to get within twenty or thirty feet of him and put my one good arrow through his lower rib cage—for what would save the shot would be exactness—and then fall back and run for it into the woods, and sit down and wait until he had time enough to die.

That was as far ahead as I could think. In a way, it seemed already settled. It was settled as things in daydreams always are, but it could be settled only because the reality was remote. It was the same state of mind I had had when I had hunted the deer in the fog. These were worthy motions I was going through, but only motions, and it was shocking to remind myself that if I came on him with the rifle I would have to carry them through or he would kill me.

I slid farther into the crack to draw from the stone a last encouragement, but I was already tired of being there. It would be best to stand up and get on with it.

I got on one knee and went cautiously outward, rising slowly with both hands palm-up on the underside of the fissure top. I was up, slanting backward, and I felt along and around the bulge over my head. To the right there was nothing I could do, but I was glad to be back. To the left the crevice went on beyond where I could reach, and the only thing to do was to edge along it, sidestepping inch by inch until only my toes, very tired again, were in the crack. But I was able to straighten from my back-leaning position to an upright one—really upright—and then to lean surprisingly forward at the waist, as I edged to the left. This was unexpected and exhilarating. The stone came back at me strong. I got on the rock with my knees instead of my toes and fingertips, and had a new body position. With it, I wormed. I went to the left and then to the right, and the river-pit blazed. It was slow going, for the handholds were not good, and the broadheads gored me under the arms a good deal, but there was a trembling and near-perfect balance between gravity—or my version of it—and the slant of the stone: I was at the place where staying on the wall and falling canceled each other out in my body, yet were slightly in favor of my staying where I was, and edging up. Time after time I lay there sweating, having no handhold or foothold, the rubber of my toes bending back against the soft rock, my hands open. Then I would begin to try to inch upward again, moving with the most intimate motions of my body, motions I had never dared use with Martha, or with any other human woman. Fear and a kind of enormous moonblazing sexuality lifted me, millimeter by millimeter. And yet I held madly to the human. I looked for a slice of gold like the model’s in the river: some kind of freckle, something lovable, in the huge serpent-shape of light.

Above me the darks changed, and in one of them was a star. On both sides of that small light the rocks went on up, black and solid as ever, but their power was broken. The high, deadly part of the cliff I was on bent and rocked steadily over toward life, and toward the hole with the star in it, where, as I went, more stars were added until a constellation like a crown began to form. I was now able to travel on knees—my knees after all—the bow scraping the ground beside me.

I was crying. What reason? There was not any, for I was really not ashamed or terrified; I was just there. But I lay down against the cliff to get my eyesight cleared. I turned and propped on my elbow like a tourist, and looked at it again. Lord, Lord. The river hazed and danced into the sparkle of my eyelashes, the more wonderful for being unbearable. This was something; it was something.

But eventually you have to turn back to your knees, and on cliffs they carry you better than any other part of the body, on cliffs of a certain slant; I got on my knees.

It was painful, but I was going. I was crawling, but it was no longer necessary to make love to the cliff, to fuck it for an extra inch or two in the moonlight, for I had some space between me and it. If I was discreet, I could offer it a kick or two, even, and get away with it.

My feet slanted painfully in one direction or another. Guided by what kind of guesswork I could not say, I kept scrambling and stumbling upward like a creature born on the cliff and coming home. Often a hand or foot would slide and, then catch on something I knew, without knowing, would be there, and I would go on up. There was nothing it could do against me, in the end; there was nothing it could do that I could not match, and, in the twinkling of some kind of eye-beat. I was going.

By some such way as this, I got into a little canyon. Yes, and I stood up. I could not see much, but it felt like the little draw where I had hunted the deer in the fog. The bottom underfoot—under foot—was full of loose rocks and boulders, but I was walking it. At each shoulder, the walls were wanting to come down, but they did not. Instead, they started to fill with bushes and small, ghostly, dense trees.

These were solid, and I came up to them, little by little. Then their limbs were above me. I was out.

I picked up the bow, out of the crook of my arm. Everything was with me; the knife at my side said what it was. And there was rope, for nothing, or for something. And I looked out, on the mindlessness and the beauty.

Upriver, I could see only the ragged, blinding V of the rapids that had thrown us, and there was nothing to look at there, except only the continual, almost-silent pouring of the water, through and through. I faced around and for what I judged an equal amount of time looked into the woods. I went back into the pines growing on solid ground, leaned my forehead on a tree and then put my forearm between the tree and it.

Where? I went back to look down on the river. Trees, fewer and fewer, were growing to the edge of the cliff. The moon shone down through their needles on the Cahulawassee. I thought for the first time seriously of the coming destruction on the river, of the water rising to the place I was standing now, lifting out of its natural bed up over the stones that had given us such a hard time in the white water, and slowly also up the cliff, the water patiently and inevitably searching out every handhold I had had, then coming to rest where I was standing in the moonlight. I sat on a cold rock at the edge, looking down. I believed, in the great light, that if I fell I could instinctively reach to the cliff and catch on to something that would hold: that, among all the places in the world that could kill me, there was one that could not.

I came back by degrees to the purpose.

First, I assumed that the man who had shot Drew knew that he had shot him. That was a beginning. I also assumed that he knew we hadn’t all been killed in the rapids. What then? He might be waiting above the calm where Bobby and Lewis were—where I was, more or less—planning to draw down on them when they started out. If that were the case he would kill them both, though if Bobby gauged the change in the light well enough and set out when there was enough visibility to use the canoe but not enough to shoot by, they might have a chance to get past him, through the next stretch of rapids—the ones now a little downstream from me—and on down. Our whole hope rested on our being able to second-guess the man, and, now that I was on top of the gorge, it seemed to me that we had guessed right, or as right as it was possible for us to do. If Bobby moved out in the very early half-light, the chances of making a good shot down onto the water would be greatly reduced, and big gaps in the upper part of the wall, small deep ravines such as the one I had come up, would keep him from getting downstream at anything like the speed the canoe could make. I counted on his knowing this, and on the idea that he would try to solve the problem by setting up his shots downstream at calm water, where the target would be moving at a more constant speed and not leaping and bobbing. Below me, except for one rush of whiteness cramped between two big hedges of stone, the rapids seemed comparatively gentle, in places—so far as I could tell—scarcely more than a heavy-twilled rippling. But even this would be disconcerting for a marksman because of the bobbing it would cause. If I were going to kill somebody from this distance and this angle I would want to draw a long bead. Under those conditions, and if he was a good shot, there was no reason he couldn’t get Bobby and Lewis both, and within a few seconds of each other, if he took his time and dropped the first one cleanly. That would take calm water, as slow as possible, and it would have to be downstream, out of sight around the next turn.

That’s it then, I thought. I had to ambush him in some way, if possible from behind, and this depended on my being able to locate the place he would pick to shoot from, and on luck. And I would have to get him as he was steadying down to fire, which cut the margin of safety for Bobby and Lewis very thin.

I had thought so long and hard about him that to this day I still believe I felt, in the moonlight, our minds fuse. It was not that I felt myself turning evil, but that an enormous physical indifference, as vast as the whole abyss of light at my feet, came to me: an indifference not only to the other man’s body scrambling and kicking on the ground with an arrow through it, but also to mine. If Lewis had not shot his companion, he and I would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to him, but we would have been together in the flesh, there on the floor of the woods, and it was strange to think of it. Who was he? An escaped convict? Just a dirt farmer out hunting? A bootlegger?

Since I needed to be in a place where I could see the river, and as much of it as possible, in order to know whether or not the canoe was in sight of the man, I wanted to get as high as possible, and out of sight, and that meant a rock with an overlook, or a tree. I remembered that when the bow-hunting of deer from tree stands first hit our state, a lot of hunters who had never been near an animal in the woods bagged deer the first time they tried it. Deer are supposed to have no natural enemies in trees, and so seldom look up. This was not much to go on, but there were plenty of trees growing near the edge of the cliff. First, though, I would have to get down the river and find the right spot.

I began to make my way over the boulders at the edge, paralleling the rapids, which went on and on as far as I could see. Most of the time it was not as hard going as I would have thought. The rocks were very big ones, and I stepped and jumped from one dark mass to another with a sureness of foot that astonished me, for there seemed nothing at all to be afraid of. The only thing that bothered me now and then was the harshness of my breath, in which there was still the sound of panic, and this appeared to have nothing to do with the actions of my body. It took me a good while—at least an hour, maybe two—to get down past the rapids. When the moon smoothed out below me, and the rising sound fell back, I had the river where I wanted it. What now?

The top was mostly boulders, and there were a lot of them I could have hidden behind, but I would have had almost no visibility. I decided to go downstream a little farther just to get a look at what was there, and then to come back to about where I was now standing.

This time the traveling was much rougher; there were some very bad places: big hacked-feeling boulders with fallen trees wedged between them, and at one spot there was a kind of natural wall, high like a stone barricade, that I didn’t think I’d be able to get over. Both going downriver and coming back I had to feel my way inland twenty or thirty yards to find a way to get over it. There were saplings growing near it on both sides, though, and with the help of these—which gave me something to hold on to as my feet were climbing the rock—I got on top of it and slid down the other side. All the time I was traveling I was looking at the river, and unless the man lay on top of the stone wall—where visibility was not good, the river showing only as a faint movement like the leaves of a tree seen through another tree—he would have to get somewhere on the edge itself to have a wide enough view of the stream to sight and lead accurately. Of the part of the calm water I had been back and forth over, there was only one place that looked right for this. It was surrounded on the upstream side by jumbled rocks, but was easier to get to from inland, as far as I could tell. There was a pale sandy platform at the very edge that looked down on the river through a thicket of grass about a yard high. As far as I was concerned, this was it. We were still far enough from houses and highways not to be heard, but I was fairly sure that we were not awfully far, even so, and the closer we were the less likely he would be to take a chance. If he doesn’t come here, I thought, but picks another calm place downstream, Bobby and Lewis have had it.

Yes, I thought with a cowardly but good feeling, they’ve had it. After all, I would have done all I could, and as a last resort could work my way out of the woods, following the river down to the first highway bridge. I was not particularly afraid of the man’s hunting me down after killing the others—though I was afraid to some extent, imagining suddenly his moving along my uncertain tracks in the windless underbrush and dark foliage—for he wouldn’t know where I was. Though he most likely recalled that there’d been four people in the canoes, one of us could easily have been drowned in the rapids; after all, the three of us nearly had drowned there. My life was safer than anyone’s unless the toothless man and I came on each other by chance.

Or unless I took a shot at him and missed. That chilled me; I felt my tongue thicken at the possibility. I thought about starting the trek out of the woods now, but the back of my mind told me that I had not gone through enough of the right motions yet; if Bobby and Lewis died, I wanted to be able to say to myself that I had done more than just climb up a gorge side and leave them helpless. But if the man I was looking for didn’t come where I expected him to after I had done my best to find him and kill him, that was not my fault. And there was not much chance that I had really guessed right. It was just the best that I could do.

There was still no light in the sky but moonlight. I turned away from the river where the land shelved back to some boulders and low trees, and felt around. Among the trees, which held the light from me, I could tell nothing except by touch. I put out a foot because I could reach farther that way. Something solid was there. I took a step toward it and was enveloped at once in branches and the stiff pine-hairs. I set the bow down and climbed into the lower limbs, which were very thick and close together, and went up until the tree swayed.

There was a little visibility through the needles, a little flickering light off the river, which the tree set twice as far off as it had been when I looked at it from the grasses at the

edge of the cliff. I finally figured out that the part of the river I could see was where it came out of the turn from the last of the rapids below Lewis and Bobby, and calmed and smoothed out, losing its own thready silver for the broadlying moonlight.

I went back down and got the bow and began to do what I could about setting up a blind in the tree. I had never shot anything—or at anything—from a tree before, not even a target, though I remembered someone’s telling me to aim a little lower than seemed right. I thought about this while I worked.

Moving as though I was instructing myself—where does this hand go? Here? No, it would be better over here, or a little lower down—I cleared away the small-needled twigs between myself and the platform of sand. It was not hard to do; I just kept taking things away from between the riverlight and my face until there were not any. When I was back against the hole of the tree, I was looking down a short, shaggy tunnel of needles; I would shoot right down that; it even seemed to help me aim. All the time I was clearing, I was aided by a totally different sense of touch than I had ever had, and it occurred to me that I must have developed it on the cliff. I seemed able to tell the exact shape and weight of anything at first touch, and had to put out no extra strength to break or strip off any part of the tree I wanted to. Being alive in the dark and doing what I was doing was like a powerful drunkenness, because I didn’t believe it. There had never been anything in my life remotely like it. I felt the bark next to me with the most intimate part of my palm, then broke off a needle and put it in my mouth and bit down. It was the right taste.

I edged around the trunk one way and another to see if I could give myself any more advantages, or a slightly wider angle from which to shoot. I did not want to tear the tree up any more; it must look like a tree, with no danger in it; it must look like the others. I had my clear shot down onto the sand, down the dark tunnel, but I could not swing more than a foot or two either way. For me to kill him under these conditions, he would have to be thinking as I had thought for him, and not approximately but exactly. The minds would have to merge.

I took my good arrow off the bow quiver, nocked it by feel and drew it back, setting my feet firmly on two big branches and getting solid at full draw, leaning to the right a little from the trunk to clear my right elbow to go all the way back. I lined up the shot down onto the open place as accurately as I could, thought for a second about shooting the arrow down into the sand to make sure of my elevation, fought off the idea with a quick springing of sweat and relaxed the broadhead out from the bow, letting my breath come forward at the same time. It bad been close; I had almost done it. Involuntary release would get me killed, and it was also likely to lose or damage the arrow so that I wouldn’t have any chance at all, if the man came. If.

I got as comfortable as I could, and decided to stay in the tree until light. I began to practice stillness, for that was what I was there for.

It was very quiet, almost out of bearing of the river; I heard the rapids upstream from me as no more than a persistent rustle, mixing, I thought as I listened, with another sound that must certainly be coming from downstream: more rapids, I would have bet, maybe even a falls. If that were true, it increased the chances of my being in the right place. Everything about it was logical, though through all the logic I still had no real belief that the man would come; it was far more likely that I had figured the whole thing wrong. I was just going through motions, even though they were the motions of life and death. I was awfully tired and not very excited, except when I thought that I might have guessed right, and I would have to get into the last motions of all and go through them: to turn that broadhead down the tunnel of pine needles on a human body and let it go, forever.

But mainly I was amazed at my situation. Just rather dumbly amazed. It was harder to imagine myself in a tree, like this, than it was to reach out and touch the bark or the needles and know that I actually was in one, in the middle of the night—or somewhere in the night—miles back in the woods, waiting to try to kill a man I had seen only once in my life. Nobody in the world knows where I am, I thought. I put tension on the bowstring, and the arrow came back a little. Who would believe it, I said, with no breath; who on earth?

It was slow waiting. I looked at my watch, but the river had killed it. My head bent forward, and seemed to want to keep on going down. I snapped awake two or three times, but slower each time, with less snap; once I leapt up out of the oldest dream of all—the oldest and most dreamlike—the one about starting to fall. For a second I had no idea what to do or to grab for, and simply put out a hand. I straightened again, wedged back, and tried to take stock once more. There was no arrow in the bow. My God, I thought, I’ve done it now. I don’t think I can get this crooked one even clear of the tree. Without a weapon I knew I would huddle helplessly in the tree, praying he wouldn’t notice me, and stay there while he killed Bobby and Lewis. I knew that I wouldn’t take him on with just a knife, no matter what advantage of surprise I had.

It was as dark as it had been, even darker. I hung the bow on a limb and went down the trunk. The arrow should have been on the ground, probably sticking up, but it was not. I crawled around in the needles, sobbing with fear and frustration, feeling everything and everywhere I could with hands, arms, legs, body, everything I had, hoping the broadhead would cut me, anything, but just be there.

It wasn’t, though, and I could now feel a little light. I would have to go back up the tree. Maybe, when I could see better, I could do some kind of job of straightening on the arrow I had left, but I also knew that the confidence I could hit what I was shooting at was going to be hurt; there is no skill or sport, not even surgery or golf, in which confidence is as important as it is in archery.

But I found the arrow I had dropped, stuck in a limb below where the bow hung, and the plan I had set up locked together and rose up in me like marble. I had everything once more, and I went up to the bow and arranged myself into my shooting position again.

The needles were filling slowly with the beginnings of daylight, and the tree began to glow softly, shining the frail light held by the needles inward on me, and I felt as though I were giving it back outward. I kept looking down the tunnel, now not a massed darkness; there were greens. I opened my mouth so that my breathing would be more silent; so that a nostril would not whistle, or drag with phlegm.

I could see plainly now: the needled and rocky space just beneath the tree, and out from that to the sandy shelf, maybe ten feet wide, with its fringe of tall ragged grass, and beyond that down into space, the eye falling like a body, not dying, but coming to rest on the river. Bobby should be starting now. In a few minutes it would all be over; I would have been either wrong or right, and we would be dead or alive.

Or maybe he had already started, and slipped by me while I was looking for the arrow. There was no way to tell, and I cringed among the branches, waiting to hear a rifle shot from another place, a location I couldn’t have guessed or known about.

None came, though. The light strengthened. My sense of utter concealment began to die out of me, and out of the tree. At the right angle, someone standing on the sandy shelf could look right up my tunnel of pine branches at me, and this could be either deliberate or by chance. A lot was hanging on chance.

I moved cautiously, as much as I could like a creature who lived in a tree, craning my neck and leaning out from the trunk to see a foot or two more of the cliff edge, to see if I could make out the canoe.

Something caught the tail of my left eye, and my stomach froze. I didn’t turn my head at once, but slowly. I knew, though. I knew, and knew.

A rock clicked on another, and a man was walking forward onto the sand with a rifle. He had one hand in his right pocket.

This is it, I thought, but my first hope, one I could not keep off me, was that I could stay in the tree until he went away. My climb up the cliff had left me; all I wanted was my life.

Everything in me was shaking; I could not even have nocked the arrow. Then I looked downward and saw my hands holding the bow, with the broadhead’s two colors, sharpened and unsharpened, separating from each other. This steadied me, and I began to believe, once more, that I would do what I had come to do, in this kind of deadly charade. If he lay down with his back to me, I would shoot. I squeezed the first and middle fingers around the arrow nock, took a slow open-mouthed breath, and leaned back tense and still.

He was looking up the river and standing now with both bands on the gun, but with the attitude of holding it at his waist without necessarily thinking of raising it to his shoulder. There was something relaxed and enjoying in his body position, something primally graceful; I had never seen a more beautiful or convincing element of a design. I wanted to kill him just like that, and I prayed for Bobby to come into sight at that instant, but I could see nothing on the river, and he apparently couldn’t either. He shifted around for some reason, with half of him framed by my tunnel of needles. Wait till he lies down, I said far back in my throat, and then hit him dead center of the back. Make it a problem. Try to break his back, so that even if you don’t hit the spine you’ll still hit something vital.

But he was still standing there, not indecisively or decisively; just standing, part of his body clear for a shot, but his head and the other part, not. I had better try now; he may move out of my line of fire. I tensed my arm to see if the muscles would work. The string took on a small angle. I looked right at him, and he gave a little more of himself to the hole in the needles. He was sideways to me, but if his face came into view, he had only to raise it a little to be looking directly at me. I knew that my next battle would be with hysteria, the wild hysteria of full draw, of wanting to let the arrow go and get the tension of holding the bow out of the body: to get the shot off and get it over with. I began to set up in my head the whole delicate routine of making a good archery shot, all the time aware that the most perfect form goes for nothing if the release doesn’t happen right; the fingers of the right hand must be relaxed, and above all the bow arm must not move.

He seemed puzzled. He kept looking back from the river down at his feet, at the ground there, half sand and half rock, and every time his head inclined and his hidden face bent down he looked at a place farther from the river and nearer to where I was.

I closed my eyes, took a slow three-quarter breath, held it and leveled the bow inch by inch. When it was approximately in the position I wanted, I went to my muscles and drew. My back spread broader, drawing strength from the tree. The broadhead came back to the bow face along the arrow rest, the unborn calf. It chattered there with the unnatural tension of my body and a sound that was a sound only to the nerves in the palm of my left hand. I pulled the barb of the arrow firmly against the bow, and began checking things in the bow and the arrow and in my hands and arms and body, like a countdown.

He was just out of the frame of thread on the string; my peep sight. I had only to move the bow slightly for him to come into the peep sight and the right-left problem, except possibly for the release, was solved. Martha’s orange and the target were now threaded and framed. That left only elevation, always the main problem when shooting downward, and the release. The tip of the arrow appeared, in my secondary vision as I looked at him, to be about six inches under his feet, and I brought it down another inch or so until, as I judged, it looked to me as though I were trying to shoot him through the stomach; looking through the string down the shaft and out the cave of needles, I could see the arrow as being in a plane extending through the middle of him.

We were closed together, and the feeling of a peculiar kind of intimacy increased, for he was shut within a frame within a frame, all of my making: the peep sight and the alleyway of needles, and I knew then that I had him, if my right hand just relaxed and let the arrow tear itself away, and if my left arm did not move, but just took up the shock of the vibrating bow.

Everything was right; it could not have been better. My anchor was good and firm, and the broadhead seemed almost rock-steady. I was full of the transfiguring power of full draw, the draw-hysteria that is the ruination of some archers and the making of others, who can conquer it and make it work for them.

I was down to my last two points, and he was still right there, stooping a little but now facing me just a shade more than he had been. Then he moved, slightly but quickly, and I fought to hold on to the arrow. He stirred the ground once with his foot, and I saw his face—saw that he had a face—for the first time. The whole careful structure of my shot began to come apart, and I struggled in my muscles and guts and heart to hold it together. His eyes were moving over the sand and rock, faster and faster. They were coming. When they began to rise from the ground they triggered my release. I never saw the arrow in the air, and I don’t believe he did either, though he surely must have heard the bow twang. I had been at full draw so long that even in the instant of release I believed that I would no more have been able to move my left arm than a statue would. I was afraid that my concentration had blown apart under the recognition that he knew where I was, and some of it had; but not all. The shot had been lined up correctly; if the left arm had held, he was hit.

What happened next I was not sure about, and still am not. The tree thrummed like an ax had struck it, and the woods, so long quiet around me, were full of unbelievable sound. The next thing I knew there was no tree with me anymore, nor any bow. A limb caught my leg and tried to tear it off me, and I was going down the trunk backwards and upside down with many things touching and hitting upward at me with live weight, like anus. To this day I will contend that I spent part of the fall checking the fingers of my right hand to see if they were relaxed, had been relaxed when the shot went, and they were.

I tried also to turn in the air so as not to strike on the back of my head, and was beginning to turn, I think, when I hit. Something went through me from behind, and I beard a rip like tearing a bedsheet. Another thing buckled and snapped under me, and I was out of breath on the ground, hurt badly somewhere as the gun went off again, and I could not get to my feet but clawed backward, dragging something. The gun boomed again, then again and again; a branch whipsawed in the tree, but higher than my head would’ve been if I’d been standing. There was something odd about the shooting; I could tell that even as I was, and I got to one knee and then to my feet from that, and crouched and crowhopped toward, to, and finally behind some rocks on the upriver side of the tree. I stayed low; the gun went off again. Then I slowly lifted my head over the rock.

He was staggering toward the tree, still ten or fifteen feet from it, trying to get the gun up as though it were something too long, or too limber to raise, like a hose. He fired again, but only a yard in front of his feet. The top of his chest was another color, and as he melted forward and down I saw the arrow hanging down his back just below the neck; it was painted entirely red, and was just hanging by the nack and flipping stiffly and softly. He got carefully down to his knees; blood poured when his mouth opened and seemed to splash up out of the ground, to have the force of something coming out of the earth, a spring revealed when the right stone was moved. Die, I thought, my God, die, die.

I slid down on my right side on the back of the rock and laid my cheek to the stone. What is wrong with me? I asked, as the rock seriously and gravely began to turn, as though it might rise. I looked down at my other side and an arrow, the crooked one from the bow quiver, was sticking through it, and the broken bow was still hanging to it by the lower part of the clip.

I put my head down, and was gone. Where? I went comfortably into the distance, and I had a dim image in my head of myself turning around, disappearing into mist, waving good-bye.

Nothing.

More nothing, another kind, and out of this I looked up, amazed. In front of me a man was down on his hands and knees giving up his blood like a man vomiting in the home of a friend, careful to get his head down or into the toilet bowl. I put my head back and went away again.

The hardness of the rock against my breath woke me; it was too difficult to get air, in the place where I had been. I lifted my head and my eyes again, but there was no man there to see with them. I would have lain there forever but for that, but because of the mystery I slowly struggled back into doing something.

I propped up and looked at myself. The arrow had gone through about an inch of flesh in my side, the flesh that age and inactivity were beginning to load on me. I would either have to cut it out of my side or pull the shaft through. As carefully as I could, but with the pain of every move making my soul shrivel and beg for help, I stripped the feathers off the arrow, and then set my teeth and started to work it through and out. It came slowly, and I thought of the arrow paint I was leaving inside the wound, but there was no way to get away from it. I licked my hand and put saliva on the shaft, hoping that the lubrication would help. It did at first, and then it didn’t; the arrow stuck solidly, and I could not move it at all without coming very close to passing out. I would have to cut.

I took the knife from my belt, sliced away the nylon I was wearing from around it, and looked. Just looked, and that was more terrifying than trying to work the arrow out with my eyes closed. The broadhead had torn my side open, as it was designed to do, and if it had not gone quite as deep it would have just made a bad flesh wound, but that was not the case, and it was in me. In me. The flesh around the metal moved pitifully, like a mouth, when I moved the shaft. I put the knife against the flesh above the wound. Just cut right down, I said aloud. Cut down and cut it loose, and you’ll be able to clean the wound out in the river. It will be a lot better that way, boy.

I cut. My stomach heaved at the pain, and I cut inside the cut I had made. The woods and air were dizzy as with birds flying from all the trees straight into my face. I took the knife and turned it so the curved part of the blade was in the wound, and drove it down with both hands. I felt it grate on the shaft. This will have to be it, I said. I’m not going to cut myself any more even if I have to grab the shaft and tear it loose, and tear myself in half with it. The side of the rock was covered with blood, and I felt in my side to see if the shaft was more or less clear of flesh. The knife fell and rang on the stone. The shaft would come; I moved it through me a little more, and the wound changed. The bloody shaft was in my hands, and my side was oozing and pouring down the rock. I went down after it, the arrow still in my hands, and stood up.

There had never been a freedom like it. The pain itself was freedom, and the blood. I picked up the knife and cut one of the nylon sleeves off, the whole thing at the shoulder, and stuffed it in the wound, and then cut a long strip out of my right pants’ leg and tied it around my waist. I was thinking like a driven creature, but also like a singing one. Could I walk? What else could I do?

Walking was odd and one-sided but not impossible. I went to the edge of the gorge, which was almost straight up and down. There was no sign of the canoe, and I reckoned it had already gone by. Well, too bad. I’d wait for a while, try to find the man I had shot and bury him or get rid of him in whatever way I could, and then try to walk out.

I went back over to the rock where I had bled and threw a lot of sand and dirt on the blood, so that at least it didn’t shine. That was all the blood I planned to leave in the woods; the rest would have to be somebody else’s.

I went over to where the man had been. There was blood on a good many pebbles, and a concentration of it where be had been vomiting. I looked into the forest, and recalled what little I knew about the procedures of deer hunting: after hitting the deer with the arrow, you are supposed to wait half an hour and then follow it by its blood trail. I had no idea of how long ago it had been since I bad shot, but from what I had seen I believed he could not be far away; maybe just a few yards. I got down on my hands and knees to try to find a direction for the blood.

Wherever it had been dropped on loose sand it had sunk, and so immediately I knew that the story, if I could figure it out, would be told by rocks. He had moved toward the woods, as he would have to have done. But when I saw his blood confirming this, my confidence rose; I followed where it went, stone by stone.

At the edge of the woods I found the rifle, flat and long and out of place on the pine needles. I left it there, and drew the knife. I was on my knees, bleeding wherever I looked for his blood. Once I had to go back and try to pick up the trail again, for I could not tell which was my blood and which was his. My side had pretty much soaked the middle part of my outfit, and there was some oozing through the cloth. But I did not feel weak at all. I wondered how the blood would clot, with so much of the wound open, but a kind of numbness had set in on that side, and in the time since I’d cut the arrow out I had developed a hugging-with-my-elbow way of standing and walking that already seemed second nature; I felt I could hold myself together for a while, and didn’t think any further forward than the next pebble I didn’t think I had bled on yet.

There was no path into the woods where I was going. It was dark there, but I could see blood, and when I couldn’t see it I could feel it, and, in some cases, smell it. I tried one last time to think like the man I had shot. He was centershot; it had looked like he was hit just under the throat, though it might have been right through the lower part of the neck. He was dying, he had no weapon, his jugular was probably cut in half. The only thing about him that concerned me was that he was trying to get somewhere he knew about: to some place, or even more pertinent, to someone. I didn’t believe this was true, but I didn’t know that it wasn’t.

And I had to find him. If I didn’t, somebody else might, and that would be the end of us, in one way or another, or at least it would be the beginning of explanations, trials, lawyers and all the other things we had tried to prevent when Lewis persuaded us to bury the first man under the ferns.

It was too dark to see from a standing position; I had to get closer to the blood. I went to all fours with my head down like a dog and the knife between my teeth, going through bush limbs one by one until I came out into an empty clearing about fifty yards wide. I could hardly hear the river now; it was only a distant, down-and-far murmur; every leaf I put between it and me diminished it.

But I had lost all contact with the blood. My head would not come up, and I felt faint without feeling particularly weak. The main trouble was that I could not think clearly. But I knew I had to do something about finding his blood again, or everything was gone.

I got up and walked out into the middle of the clearing. A badly hurt man is not going to want to fight through bushes. If he was trying to reach a definite objective, he would have used the open space. He would probably have used it even if he wasn’t. He was not in the clearing, so he had gone through it. Straight across? How straight could he have gone? I went across to the other edge, ready to look at every leaf on every bush, and began to work slowly around the border. Shafts of early sunlight were everywhere, sensitive and needled, directed at certain places for no reason, moving slightly on the ground with the wind stirring in the tops of the trees. When I was about halfway around the perimeter one of the rays moved and gave back something. It was a reddish-brown rock about the size of a tennis ball that looked exactly as though it had been hastily painted, and I had to wait a minute, my head heavying even more, before I knew what it meant. This time I knew it was not my blood. You haven’t been here yet, I kept saying to myself through the knife; you haven’t been here. I went to the rock.

It was the place where he must have given up the last of the blood that had enabled him to move. A few steps farther on into the woods I found blood on a low leaf; crawling, maybe. I thought of getting down on my hands and knees and smelling for blood like an animal again, but the possibility that he was crawling made me want to stand, and I did, though crouching and leaning over the arm that held my own blood in.

I raised my eyes along the ground over the rocks and leaves and pine needles, and twenty yards away it bunched at the foot of a dead tree. It could have been a bush or a stone, but I knew when I first saw it that it was neither. It was not moving, but the light was playing over it and it seemed not entirely inert, but alive in the same way that most of the things in the woods were alive. I walked over to it, and it was a man lying facedown, holding on to one of the roots of the dead tree. He had long thin dirty fingers, and his back was soaking with blood.

Before there was everything to do there was nothing to do. His brain and mine unlocked and fell apart, and in a way I was sorry to see it go. I never had thought with another man’s mind on matters of life and death, and would never think that way again. I just stood there looking down, breathing with the knife. Then I took it out of my face.

There was nothing in common, in the way he was lying, with any of the positions I had seen him in while he was alive, until I remembered the pose by the river in which I had most wanted to kill him. He now had that same relaxed, enjoying look of belonging anywhere he happened to be, and particularly in the woods.

I turned him over with a foot, and his hand moved around palm-up, still with the shape of the root. His face came clear.

I fell down; the knife fell away. My heart moved into my bad side and beat there, trying to throw my blood away any way it could. I put my hands over my face and went wild with terror; I could not look again. His mouth was open, and full of yellow teeth.

But was it? I crawled over to him and picked up the knife. I put it in his mouth and pried at the gums, and a partial upper plate began to come out. Did that make the difference? Did that make enough difference? I shoved the teeth back in with the handle of the knife, and took a good look. He was dressed like the toothless man in the clearing; whether exactly like him I truthfully couldn’t say, but very much like. He was about the same size, and he was thin and repulsive-looking. And, though my time close to him in the clearing was burned in my mind, I had still seen him under those circumstances, which were a lot different from these; I believe that if I could have seen him move I would have known, one way or the other. But I didn’t, and I don’t.

I took the knife in my fist. What? Anything. This, also, is not going to be seen. It is not ever going to be known; you can do what you want to; nothing is too terrible. I can cut off the genitals he was going to use on me. Or I can cut off his head, looking straight into his open eyes. Or I can eat him. I can do anything I have a wish to do, and I waited carefully for some wish to come; I would do what it said.

It did not come, but the ultimate horror circled me and played over the knife. I began to sing. It was a current popular favorite, a folk-rock tune. I finished, and I was withdrawn from. I straightened as well as I could. There he is, I said to him.

The problems came back, one by one, in sequence. I would rather drag him than carry him, but I knew I could make better time if I carried him, so I put the knife back in the case, dropped down on one knee and wrestled him across my shoulders in the fireman’s carry from boy scout days. I got up with nearly double my weight and started back toward the clearing. I went around the rock of blood that had led me there, stumbled through the bushes I had crawled in, and tried for the river with my side oozing me wet and the top of my left leg wet and drying and moistening again. The man’s body held me to the ground, and I had the feeling that when I got him off my shoulders, I would fly. Blundering through the bushes, I had no idea whether I would make it back to the river. The woods burst slowly open in front of me, across my eyes, and twenty yards ahead dropped off into still, sun-filled space from which the old noise of eternity came back.

I put him down in almost the exact place where I had shot him, and stepped to the edge of the bluff. I looked downriver first, for I was afraid to look upriver and see that unchanging emptiness, but even looking dovrnriver I could tell that the emptiness upstream was not complete, that there was something there like a mote, and I turned to it to be able to face it and make sure. Lewis’ canoe shone there, flashing frankly in the sun, riding grayly like a trout, coming out of the rapids. I looked at the dead man. You’re dead, Lewis, I said to him. You and Bobby are dead. You didn’t start on time; you did everything wrong. I ought to take this rifle and shoot the hell out of you, Bobby, you incompetent asshole, you soft city country-club man. You’d have been dead, you should’ve been dead, right about exactly now. You’re right in line, you’re going slow, you’re going slow, you’re just sitting there. If I hadn’t come up here and did what I did, you’d’ve been floating along now with no brains and no blood, and so would Lewis.

I walked back and picked up the gun, and my craziness increased when I touched it. I sighted down the barrel and put the bead right in the middle of Bobby’s chest. Do it, the dead man said. Do it; he’s right there. But I got around the feeling just by opening my fingers, and letting the gun fall to the ground. I did think momentarily of firing straight up to attract Bobby’s attention, but turned loose of the notion because the sound of a shot might have frightened him into ditching the canoe. Besides, I didn’t want to put the thing to my shoulder again; it had been close; very close.

I took the gun by the barrel, wheeled it once around my head and slung it as far out over the river as I could, where it went from a heavy spinning sail into outright falling, turning slower and slower sideways until it bit the water about fifty yards in front of the canoe. I hoped that Bobby had seen it long enough to know what it was, and that it meant we were safe; a gun falling out of the sky.

After it hit, Bobby pulled his paddle out of the river, but did not look up. I put my thumb and forefinger in my mouth and whistled as loud as I could, a high cutting whistle that nearly deafened me, but I had an idea it failed somewhere in the sound of the banks. I climbed the biggest rock at the edge and stood there. Then I figured I ought to put some motion into myself, and I went into the sidestraddle bop from my old PT class in high school; it had more arm and leg movement in it than anything else I could think of. It almost tore me apart, but I danced away while I could. Bobby looked up, finally, and the blank of his tiny face stayed uptilted, looking more. I did a bloody clog step, my tennis shoes silent on the rock and my side tearing but in joy, then pointed down under me. He pulled up his paddle and dug slowly in on his right to turn the canoe in to the cliff.

I went back to the man on the ground, flopped on his side with one leg drawn up, and rolled him onto his back. He looked lazily straight up into the sky. One open eye had been poked into by a branch or a twig, and was cloudy, but the other was clear blue, delicately veined in a curious, uneyelike pattern; I saw myself there, a tiny figure bent over him, growing.

After carrying him I had no trouble touching him, or going through his pockets. Though I had no real interest in who he was anymore, I thought I had better make some effort to find out, for I might need the information in some way later on. I reached into one pocket and turned it inside out. There was nothing in it; one of his inside buttons made a quick cold place in my hand. In the other pocket were five rifle shells—big ones, and I thought of Drew’s head—and there was also a card of some sort that I had to straighten up and hold to the light in order to read. His name was Stovall, and he was an honorary deputy sheriff of Helms County, which was, I suppose, where we now were. This worried me some, but not too much, for Lewis had once told me that everybody in the hills, or just about everybody, was an honorary deputy sheriff. The main worry in connection with this was that if someone thought enough of him to give him the card, he might conceivably be a person well known, as they say, in the community—whatever that was in Helms County—and consequently might be searched for. I looked at him, though, and it seemed obvious that he was so nondescript, even for Helms County, that he would probably not be missed by more than a few people, and probably not much by them, either. I balled the card up and unballed it again, tore it up, then packed the pieces into another ball and threw it out over the river, where it came apart in a current of air, suspending its pieces incredibly before it moved wanderingly in many directions, all down. I went and got the death-arrow and threw it like a spear into the river, then picked up the arrow covered with my own blood and threw it over too. Then I pitched out my old broken catapult of a bow. I hated to turn it loose. I thought maybe the handle section might be salvaged, and I wanted very much to have it with me for the rest of my life, but in the end I threw it, and threw it hard.

I uncoiled the rope from my belt. I had a lot of it. I didn’t believe I had enough to let the body all the way down to the river, but I could let it down some of the way and after that I was sure I could think of something. I dragged the body to the edge of the cliff and put the rope around it and made it as fast as I could, tying square knot after square knot—the only kind I knew, as it is the only kind that most people know—under the armpits. The head lolled and jerked as I tied, and this irritated me more than anything had in a long time; irritated me more than the set of Thad’s secretary’s—Wilma’s—mouth and her tiresome, hectoring personality posing as duty. The wound in the man’s throat was not painful-looking, particularly—it was nothing like as gruesome as the hacked-at hole in my side—for it had closed over and clotted, and now looked like nothing more than a deep scratch, almost like a bad shaving cut; it was hard to believe that it went all the way through him and out the back, and that it had killed him; that it was his death itself.

I tied the other end of the rope to the tree closest to the edge, and went over and tried to call down to Bobby, but the sound of my voice falling into the abyss frightened me; I knew it would never reach bottom; I could feel the strength and meaning fade from it in the sun that filled the emptiness. There was a kind of crack or fault in the rock, turning green with bushes near the water, and Bobby’s face came up through it. There may also have been a little voice with it, something added to the sound of the river and coming up, but if it was there I couldn’t make out what it said.

I might as well; it was a thing I had prepared. I shoved the body over the edge with my feet, kicking it and rolling it and holding the rope in both hands. just after it went over it seemed to hitch in the air to get its feet down, and then settled into a long, hard, unsure pull against me. I worked along the line back to the tree and braced against it, paying the invisible weight out hand over hand down the wall. It was hard going; I kept having to take turns of the thin nylon around one wrist and then the other, and then both, oftener and oftener. The coil at my feet wore away as I sweated, and the red rings around my wrists cut deeper, nearing the blood. I began to wish I had taken a turn of rope around the tree before I started, but I had to hold: there was something about just turning loose of the rope and letting the man fall free and then bring up and dangle, that was shocking to me; I would not do that, no matter what. I sweated and braced, and tried to imagine what Bobby was now thinking, seeing a man come down like this, inch by inch; a man who had held a gun on him while another one cornholed him, and would have killed him in an instant. I tried also to imagine, from the different tensions on the rope, what the body was doing and how it was doing it, all under a kind of control, undignified and protected by the red rings on my wrists and my pain and work, kneeling on and then falling away from outcroppings, rocks and projections, dangling, sliding, rolling, but even so not falling and bursting apart on the river-rocks like a sack of jellied sticks.

I gave up the last yard of rope I had and stepped back, letting the tree hold the body effortlessly. I had trouble undoing my hands; I tried to undo them as I went back to the edge of the cliff; they still wanted to be holding a rope desperately. As it was, I looked down the green strand going over the sandy edge and over a projecting, dangerously sharp rock on down out of sight, then reappearing, straining in space, catching on something, swaying again, where an invisible body was hanging. Once more I wondered what Bobby could be thinking. I walked back to the tree and checked the knots, then came back to where the rope bent to go down and tried to put my bloody handkerchief under the rope at the edge to keep it from chafing on the stone, but I didn’t have the strength to lift it.

Well, all right, I said. The name of the game is trust; you’ve got to trust things. I looked inland and got down on my knees, took hold of the rope with one hand above and one below the cliff edge, slid my feet over and started down.

It was luxury to know that I knew what to hold on to, and not have to feel around for it, for something that might not be there, something that had never been there or ever would be there. But my hands and arms were almost strengthless; the only way I knew I was still holding, besides the pain in my hands, was that I didn’t fall. I talked to my hands continually, and to every stone I came to, for they were all standing out in my face with beautiful clarity, things never looked at—never witnessed or beheld—so closely before. I had to stop in a couple of places, near death and looking deeply at sand grains, and hung out over the river in its high, flowing space, concentrating on seizing it in the mind so deeply that it would always be with me as it was just then: always, night and day and maybe after death too. I braced and panted with the cliff, inbreathing the rock-dust that my outbreathing had stirred up.

The last place I rested was a kind of saw-toothed ledge about six inches wide where I was on it; holding to the rope with both hands, I could almost sit comfortably there. I could see the corpse below me turning with my grip on the rope, terribly heavy-looking and full of dead weight, his head on his chest in midair, pensive and reposeful.

I could also see Bobby, though neither of us had tried to speak yet. He had the canoe in an eddying pocket of water against the bluff face, and was just holding it there gently with a few slight pressures on the river. I started down again, anxious to get rid of my weight. The corpse appeared to be about thirty-five feet above the shore-rocks, and I had no clear idea of what to do when the rope gave out. Both of us would still have a good way to go. I supposed I would have to cut him loose and then leap for the river, myself, but I reckoned I would find out about that when I got down to him.

I was almost on top of the corpse, holding on and bracing out from the cliff with a foot and a knee, trying to figure out a way to get around him or clear of him without having to clamber all over him like Harold Lloyd in an old movie.

The rope broke, and we were gone. Suddenly there was no weight, and nothing to plan for. The plan of the night before saved me though; I got a good kick against the cliff with the foot I had braced there and a knee-shove with the other leg, and this moved me out a few feet from the wall. The rocks were coming, and so was I. When my head came around I could see I was clear, and that was all that mattered, at all.

I had no further control, though. There was an instant of sunny nothing, and of drifting and turning. Where was the river? There was green and blue, in some kind of essential relation, and then the river went into my right ear like an ice pick. I yelled, a tremendous, walled-in yell, and then I felt the current thread through me, first through my head from one ear and out the other and then complicatedly through my body, up my rectum and out my mouth and also in at the side where I was hurt.

I realized that I was in something I knew, in the slow unhurried pull of current. Then the water took to the wound, and nearly took it from me. It had been so many years since I had been really hurt that the feeling was almost luxurious, though I knew when I tried to climb the water to the surface that I had been weakened more than I had thought. Un-consciousness went through me. I was in a room of varying shades of green beautifully graduated from light to dark, and I went toward the palest color, though it seemed that this was to one side of me rather than above. An instant before I broke water I saw the sun, liquid and transformed, and then it exploded in my face.

I was hurt in a couple of new ways, especially in the hands, but after trying my arms and legs against the water I knew I was not hurt so badly that I could not function. I lay forward in the current, thinking vaguely of how to swim, and the thought made me move, for I was doing it.

I came out at the side of the canoe, and pulled up as carefully as I could. My face was no more than eight inches from Lewis’. His eyes were closed, and he looked both resting and dead, but his head turned. His eyes opened. He gave me a long serious glance, closed his eyes again tiredly and settled farther down on his back. His part of the canoe, particularly around his head, was full of vomit, the chunks of steak and all the stuff we had brought from the city. I worked around the canoe to land, and faced Bobby.

“Is this what you call first light?”

“Listen,” he said, “Lewis has been having a bad time. Once I thought he died. He’s awful bad hurt.”

“You would have died, yourself. He was waiting for you up there. You didn’t do what I told you, and you would have died. He could have shot you fifty times, because you did what you did, and because you didn’t do what you should’ve done. You better look up here at this light, baby. You better look at your own hands and feet, because you liked not to have had them anymore.”

“Listen,” he said again. “Please listen. I couldn’t get him in the canoe at all until I had enough light to see what I was doing. He blacked out two or three times before I ever got him in. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t want to spend another night like that. I would’ve rather been trying to climb up, with you.”

“Fine. Next time, maybe.”

“How did you do it? I never thought you could do it; I never thought I’d see you again. If it’d been me I don’t know but what I’d’ve just taken off, if I’da been able to get to the top.”

“I thought about that,” I said. “But I didn’t.”

“You did exactly what you said you’d do,” he said. “But it’s not possible. I don’t believe it. I cant believe it. I really can’t, Ed. This is not happening to us.”

“Well, we’ve got to make it unhappen. Question is, how?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Do you really think we can? I mean, really?”

“I do really,” I said. “With all this bad luck, luck is running with us.”

“And you killed him? You killed him?”

“I killed him and I’d kill him again, only better.”

“Did you ambush him?”

“In a way. I set the problem up the way it seemed best to do. And he came right to me.”

We walked over to the shattered body on the rocks, with two or three parts of the denture plate beside the head; he had hit the rocks right on his face. We turned him over; the face was unbelievable; more unbelievable than anything else. I could hear Bobby catch his breath. Then I heard the breath speak.

“It looks like you shot him from the front. How …”

“I did,” I said. “I shot straight into him. I was in a tree.”

“A tree?”

“Yes, there are a lot of them around when you’re in the woods, you know. Really quite a lot.”

“But …?”

“He didn’t see me until be was hit, and maybe not even then. I think he was just getting on to where I was when the arrow hit him. He shot a good many times. Did you hear anything?”

“Maybe once; I’m not sure. Probably not; it was just that I was listening so hard. But, no, I didn’t hear anything.”

“There he is,” I said. “Another one.”

He looked at my side. “But he shot you, didn’t be?”

His voice was full of the best stuff I had ever heard in it. “Let me look,” he said.

I unzipped, and the flying suit fell away. My shorts were soaked and dried with blood, with more coming.

“Boy,” he said. “Something really gored you.”

“I fell out of the tree onto the other arrow,” I said. “I wonder if it would’ve made any difference if I hadn’t sharpened it so well before we left home? And I’m sure glad I don’t use four-bladed heads.”

“I tell you,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. That arrowhead is meant to open you up.”

“That’s just what it’s meant for. And it opened me up. But I think it’s a clean wound, and there ain’t many of them. I think the river got most of the paint out of me.”

I looked down at my hurt. The climb down and the fall had torn it all the way open, from the half healing and clotting that it had been trying to do in the woods. I was coming out of me, but not as fast as I might have been. I took off my shorts and stood there bleeding and naked, and took the bloody sleeve I had already cut off and used it to hold the shorts into the wound. Then I put what was left of the suit back on. “Let’s finish up and get going,” I said.

We were standing with the corpse, and it was ready. The rope was piled on and off the body, and the frayed part that had broken was giving off glassy hairs where the thing had happened, high up above.

“Are you sure …?” Bobby asked.

I faced into him, into his open mouth and bloodshot eyes. “No,” I said. “I would say it was, but I’m not that sure. Maybe if we could get him to hold a gun on you, you could tell me. Or maybe if we could give him back his face, we could tell that way. But I don’t know. The only thing I know is that we’re here, like we are right now. Let’s get him in the river. Let’s get him in good.”

We went up and down the bank looking for rocks the right size, going back and forth across each other, dreaming. With both hands I took up part of the river and tried to wash the main rock where his face had smashed and there was a lot of blood. On both knees I washed it, and the blood came. It was on the sand and going into the sand, and there was no more of it. I went back to rock-hunting with Bobby, and we piled up five or six mean-looking stones next to the body. I cut the rope into sections and tied the rocks onto the man with the biggest one around his neck, squeezing the arrow wound together and almost out of sight.

“Not here,” I said. “Out in the middle of the river, where it’s hardest to get to.”

We struggled with him and with each other, and he and the rocks made it, finally, into the canoe with Lewis, who shifted slightly as if to make room for somebody who belonged there, pretty much as a person would shift to let a familiar body get back in bed with him in the middle of the night.

The canoe moved very badly, with all the weight. We left the bank and for a moment were just going downstream, too tired to do anything else. The sound of rapids was somewhere in front of us, carrying terror once more, amongst so much other terror. Bobby steadied the canoe while I got to my knees among the blood, vomit and rocks and lifted two of the rocks clear and shoved them over the side. The canoe yawed and I braced back to equalize the weights. The body was straining to get out, but hung on the gunwale. I lifted out another rock and it pulled one of his legs over the side but he was still with us. I picked up the last rock, the one around his neck, and heaved it out with the last energy of all. The wound of his neck tore open bloodlessly—I thought the head had come off—and he was gone. He was gone so completely into the river that he seemed never to have had anything to do with it, or it with him. He had never been in the world at all. I dipped my hand in the stream and left his blood with him.

We were by ourselves, moving.

We turned a long corner. The river freshened before us and around us, and I drove in the paddle, exerting no strength but digging in anyway. We went through some small rapids without much trouble, and I thought of fun. The canoe just followed the channel of its own accord.

On each side the cliffs began to fall; to fall away. They fell and then got back up again almost as they had been, but their authority was leaving them. Every time they rose it was not quite as high.

The sun was behind us, and the pressure on my back shoved us forward. I was glad for it; gladder than it is possible to be. But I could not keep my head up. My side was stiff and sopping with blood, and my chin kept ending up on my chest and my eyes were blurring into the bottom of the canoe where Lewis lay with one hand over his eyes. I put a hand on my forehead and tried to pull up my eyelids by lifting the skin of my forehead and keeping it lifted, but I was still asleep, looking at the world as though my eyes were closed. I’ve got to lie down somewhere, I thought; if I don’t I will fall back into the river.

That seemed not such a bad prospect, to tell the truth. It would have been wonderful to give all my weight to the water one more time, maybe for good. This was too hard; this was just too hard. It was, and I knew it. Anyone would have known it.

We went over some little rapids that shook us and picked up our speed a little, but not much. They were deep and powerful, but the channels were clear and we rode through them without much maneuvering. I was sure we didn’t have much farther to go. Where would we come out? What was there to see, that men had made, that would tell us? What would we see when we got off the river forever?

Lewis lay quietly on the floor with his pants unbuttoned and belt undone; he looked like some great broken thing. I could see the huge muscles of his thigh around the break; they were turning blue. With his free hand, the one that had nothing to do with his face, he was bracing up under the inside of the gunwale, and I thought that perhaps this was a new system, a way to make his leg go to sleep and keep it asleep by putting pressure on it in a special manner; his bracing arm was rigid; the tricep muscle quivered continually with the river, and in it you could see every rock.

The whole stream now was running fast, without rapids. It was deep, and deep green. It was easy going, the easiest of all, and whenever I could get my head up I superimposed a picture of a highway bridge over the river; but I could never match them up; the bridge would hover and disappear.

Far off there was what looked like a stretch of rapids with a few big rocks—the sound was low-throated and pleasant rather than frightening—and beyond that, another wooded turn. We were moving toward the white, light water and were very close to it when I saw Drew’s body backed up between the rocks and looking straight at us.

I told Bobby, but he could not get his head up to look. He could not, and I knew he could not, and I didn’t blame him. But somebody had to look, had to do something, and it would be better if both of us tried.

“Listen,” I heard myself say. “Wake up and help me.”

I headed for Drew, for his place in the rocks, pulling hard against the current that wanted to take us past him. I turned the canoe as broadside as I could and asked the rocks to catch us, to help us. They did. We stopped, we lodged lightly, and I got out onto the sandy soil blowing with underwater. I walked up the canoe on two exhausting steps drawn through the river and hit Bobby hard on the side of the shoulder; as hard as I could, but not hard enough for the situation. To help I put the other hand on the knife.

“Did you hear me?” I said, not loudly. “You help me with this or I’ll kill you, just as you sit there on your useless ass. Now come on. We’ve got to finish it.”

He got slowly out into the water, swaying with the current, his eyes looking at everything but me.

Drew was sitting up, facing upstream, in a kind of rough natural chair made of two stones where part of the river ran through, split off from the main current by a flat rock. Though he was sitting, it was a very easy, careless—even carefree—position, partly on the base of his spine. Water ran up and fell back from the top part of his chest, and a thin continuous spray of it went into his open mouth, making a quivering sensitive silver bell around his lips where one gold filling glinted. His eyelids were also kept propped open by the current, seeming to see out of the open water back up into the mountains, around all the curves of the river, infinitely. The pull of the water on his mouth gave him a cretinous, loose-lipped look, but the eyes had nothing to do with that; they were blue and all-seeing and clear.

I stumbled forward to him like meeting him in a drunken bar. I tried to pull him out of his seat by the straps of his life jacket, but for a moment he wouldn’t come. He seemed to settle deeper into the rocks. Then he rose with no muscles into my arms, against the current. Bobby came around to the other side of him, and the three of us trudged through two worlds, water and air, toward the canoe, tripping over the whole river, the undercurrent tangling our feet with his and with each other’s. I had not realized he was so big. All three of us fell and he got away eddying with his head back, turning slowly from the waist in his jacket, his crushed face as placid and washed and blank as the sky.

I went after him, stepped in a hole under him, finally wrestled and floated him back to the rock nearest the canoe and laid him over it on his stomach. I looked at his head. Something had hit him awfully hard there, all right. But whether it was a gunshot wound I didn’t know; I had never seen a gunshot wound. The only comparison I had to go by were the descriptions of President Kennedy’s assassination, the details afforded by eyewitnesses, doctors and autopsy reports which I had read in newspapers and magazines like most other Americans had, at the time. I remembered that part of Kennedy’s head had been blown away. There was nothing like that here, though. There was a long raw place under the hair just over his left ear, and the head there seemed oddly pushed in, dented. But there was no brain matter showing, nothing blown away.

“Bobby, come here,” I said. “There’s something we’ve got to decide about.”

I pointed at the place on Drew’s head. Bobby peered, his eyes reddened more, and he leaned away. We hung on the rock, panting.

“Is this a gunshot wound?

“Ed, you know I wouldn’t know. But it sure doesn’t look like it to me.”

“Look here, though.”

I showed him the scratch under the hair. “Knowing what we know, it looks to me like he might have been shot and just grazed. But whether this place killed him or not, I don’t know.”

“Or whether it was made by a rock, after he’d gone in,” Bobby said.

“If we work this right, well never have to explain to anybody but ourselves,” I said. “But I’d like to know. I think we ought to know.”

“How can we know?”

“Lewis would come nearer knowing than we would. Let’s take Drew over to him and give him a good look.”

We picked Drew up again and dragged him to the canoe. We sank down with him until the back of his head was level with the gunwale and was leaning on it.

“Lewis,” I said quietly.

He didn’t answer; his eyes were closed and he was breathing hard.

“Lewis. Give us just a second. It’s important. It’s very important.”

He turned his head and opened his eyes. Bobby and I held Drew with three hands, and I turned Drew’s head and went under his hair to the place I wanted Lewis to see.

“Lewis, was be shot? Did a bullet make this?”

A flicker of the old interest crossed his eyes. He raised his head as much as he could and stared into Drew’s hair.

“Well, was he shot? Was he? Was he, Lewis?”

He shifted, very slowly, over the center of the stream, his eyes to mine. My brain flinched; I did not know what was coming. He nodded, hardly a motion at all, and then sank back. “Grazed,” he said.

“Are you sure? Are you sure?”

He nodded again, and retched weakly, almost in the same movement. He kept on nodding, and Bobby and I looked at each other. We peered at Drew’s wound again.

“Maybe,” Bobby said.

“Maybe, is it,” I said. “It’ll have to be. But we can’t have anybody examining him. We can’t tell, but there are those who can, and if we have to explain a man with a gunshot wound the whole thing’ll come out.”

“Are we going to get out of this? I don’t see how we can. I really don’t.”

“We’re almost out of it now,” I said.

“What are we to do with Drew?”

“We’re going to sink him in this river,” I said, “forever.”

“O Lord. O Lord.”

“Listen; it’s exactly like I just said. Exactly. We can’t afford for somebody who knows about these things to examine him. If we go back without him, we just had some bad luck. We’re a fucking bunch of amateurs, anyway. And let ‘em try to disprove that! We came up here to run this river without knowing what we were getting into, which is also the God’s truth. We did all right for a while, then we spilled. We lost the other canoe. Lewis broke his leg in the rapids, and Drew drowned. Anybody’d believe that. But we can’t explain somebody killed with a rifle.”

“If he was.”

“That’s right: if he was.”

A faint light came through Bobby’s eyes, then either darkened or died. “There’s no end to it,” he said. “No end.”

“Yes there is,” I said. “This is the end. This is all we have to do, but we’ve got to do it right. Everything depends on it. The whole works.”

I fumbled around in my lower leg pocket and got out the extra bowstring. I tied it around a good-sized rock and then around Drew’s belt, square-knot on square-knot. We put the rock in the canoe, and I took Drew’s body in the kapok jacket and laid it back in the water, wading forward with him past the rapids, hauling and bullying him gently along.

When the water deepened, Bobby stepped into the canoe and picked up the paddle. Drew and I moved off the end of the rapids and I took slow flight in my life preserver. I looked at Drew’s hand floating palm-up with the guitar calluses puckered and white and his college class ring on it, and I wondered if his wife might not like to have the ring. But no; I couldn’t even do that; it would mean having to explain. I touched the callus on the middle finger of his left hand, and my eyes blinded with tears. I lay with him in my arms for a moment weeping river-water, going with him. I could have cried as long as the river ran, but there was no time. “You were the best of us, Drew,” I said loud enough for Bobby to hear; I wanted him to hear. “The only decent one; the only sane one.”

I undid his life belt and let him fall away under me. On his knees beside Lewis in the canoe, Bobby heaved the stone overboard. One of Drew’s feet flew up and touched my calf, and we were free and in hell.

I stayed in the water behind the canoe, holding the jacket in one hand. Made weightless, my legs hurt twice as bad. I wanted to sleep, to sink, not have to breathe. I lay and moved with the river, with all nightmares and night sweats to come, but not here, not on me yet. When we came to another shallow place, I got up from the gravel and the crawfish, took up my full weight and half again more, and got into the rear seat with the sun hot and heavy-wet on my shoulders and back as though packed there in layers.

For a long time nothing happened but fatigue and heat. Insects danced over the canoe between Bobby and me, a singing haze I was not sure wasn’t inside my head. But the walls were dropping steadily on both sides. In a few more miles the cliffs gave out on the right, and there was only a low fence of rock on the other side. Then it too slanted to the river, and we were level with the woods again. I knew I must have misjudged the distance we had to go, for there seemed to be no end to it. Bobby’s head was down; the most I could hope for from him was to keep steady in the canoe and not fall and tip us over. If we spilled in deep water or rapids now it would be a real problem to get back in, and we would never get Lewis in.

I had put on Drew’s life jacket over mine. It was awfully hot that way, but the extra collar came up higher on the back of my neck and kept the sun off it, and I was grateful for that. My mind danced for minutes on end like gnats around the image of the long, tumbling voyage down the rapids the jacket had taken, trying to keep Drew from drowning when he was already dead, probably, from something else.

I could feel my lips swelling with the sun. I was coming slowly up against an absolute limit, but I did not know where it was, or where we would be on the river when I got to it, or what I would do when I did. Was there anything I could say to myself, or even to Bobby, that would help?

“Bobby,” I said suddenly, “hang on. If we can stay with it for ten miles we’ll be out. I know we will. We’ve come an awful goddamned long way, and it can’t be much longer.”

He tried to nod, and partly did.

“Don’t rock us, baby. And if you see anything I can’t see, tell me. If we hit any rapids, call the rocks for me. If you can’t do that, get down with Lewis and pray, but try to help us stay level.”

There was a low new tone in the river: an old one, something I recognized.

“God,” I said. “Do something for us.”

We went toward it, but when we came around the next turn there was nothing but another turn about a half mile ahead. The sound came from there, or through there.

“I think I hear some rapids, Bobby. I know I do. If we can walk the canoe through, let’s do it. We can do it. But if we can’t, we’ll have to run them.”

We went down, picking up speed, and the step-up in sound, like a dial being tuned, brought up the old terror, but also excitement: the sensation Lewis was always describing; I felt it, tired as I was.

We went into the next turn, and I knew, with the sound I was hearing, that if the rapids were on the turn or even within sight when we straightened out, they would not be as bad as some we had been through. But we came off the turn moving still faster, without falls or rapids, with no white water and none in sight, and I knew they would be bad. It was more likely that I was listening to a falls, and I got ready to die again. The sound jumped higher all at once; there was a foaming seethe in it, a hoarse desperation. We turned again. The land to the left broke away, and I looked down a set of rapids steeper—a lot steeper—than any we had been through, and longer, all stepped down toward a funnel that disappeared between two huge boulders that turned the air between them white.

The water glassed out for fifty yards ahead of us and went through an almost formal-looking series of steep little cascades, changing to a lighter color to go faster, and then into an even faster half-white half-green color, then through a short hook to the left where it shot between the big rocks. I couldn’t see any farther than that; it was as though the river were being fed into fog. We might have made it to the bank, but I didn’t have the strength for it. The current had us; we were going there.

“We can’t walk,” I yelled. “Get your ass down as low as you can.”

He didn’t look back, but moved rearward and down and held to the gunwales, letting his knees break over the front seat. Our center of gravity was as low as we could get it, though I also hunched forward myself; I could not control the canoe if I had been any lower than I was, and we were going hard down the water all drawn together like threads running into a loom. The main roar came back in our faces, and then from the sides, and we were in it, hitting the little jolting ripples before the first drop-off. We went over; the nose tipped, the canoe grated under my tailbone, and we went down another, shorter step, a rough shove up through the spine that knocked me up off the seat and drove the canoe partway over on its side. Our speed righted us, and I made an all-out plunge—one stroke with all I had left—on the right to keep us straight with the current. We swung and ran over two more stepdowns, hard shocks at the base of the brain, and in the midst of this I heard a faint, then a quick loud shout or singing or call from somewhere and thought it might be Lewis screaming. Then we were down on level rushing water. We had lost a little speed to the rocks but we picked it up again immediately, then picked up more than that, and were going for the spray and the dark white of the passage. I dug in hard, then tried to backwater on the other side, saw it was useless, dug in on the right again as hard as I could to turn the bow, and we swung, swung and jumped shooting into the hole.

For a second I couldn’t see anything at all, and rode like I was standing still with aerated water filling my mouth and little fluttering bumps coming up through the canoe shell. With nothing to see go past, motion died. It was like being in a strange room in a cold building or a shaking cave filled with cold steam. I was wet clear through before I could think: the sun was killed on my shoulders in an instant. I lanced out again to the right with the paddle, mainly because that was the last place I had taken a stroke, and if it was right then it might be right now. I was sure that we had to turn, keep turning left if we could; the right felt like death, and if I couldn’t keep it away from us we would spin broadside and the whole river and all the mountains it came from would fall on us, would pour into the canoe ton after ton, never-ending. I dug again, but couldn’t tell what I had made us do. Something snatched at the paddle and I pulled it out and dug again, and again. The river showed in front in a blinking leap, and we came shooting forward as though launched to take off into the air. We were going faster than I had ever been in anything without an engine. The force of water around the paddle blade was stupendous; I felt as though I had dipped into some supernatural source of primal energy.

It was like riding on a river of air. The rocks flickered around and under us, then sand, then rocks, changing colors into each other as we streamed through. I half rose out of my seat; nothing else could be said to me but this, in this way. It was unkillableness: the triumph of an illusion when events bear it out. I looked to see what was coming to me next. “Hold on, baby,” I hollered. “We’re going home.”

Ahead was a tilted flange of rock with water sculpted over it in a long, curling forelocked curve that broke at us and then away from us past the rock, and then a low wall of rocks that looked like they shallowed out on both sides. I dug for the rock to go straight over, to have the thing whole.

We went up, like the beginning of an incline; the nose lifted; a powerful surge caught up with us from the rear. We lost weight completely. We rolled out over the top of the rock in one unstoppable motion. I closed my eyes and screamed with Lewis, mixing my voice with his bestial scream, blasting my lungs out where we hung six feet over the river for an instant and then began to fall. I waited for the upward revengeful smash of the river, but the nose rode down with an odd softness and into the back-scrolled smashed water at the foot of the rock, quivered straight back through the spine of the canoe into mine and into my brain, where I saw a vision of burning jackstraws or needles, and we were back down onto the bedded river in two almost simultaneous stepdowns. I listened for my cry hanging in the wet air above the blue-and-white flag colors of the rock—I still listen for it—and we were down and slowing forward, back on green water, solid and heavy on it, and it solid and heavy under us.

The bed-rocks fell away; another curve, one without rapids, began to open in front of us a hundred yards farther on. I looked at Bobby. He was still hanging back from his seat, but struggling to sit on it again. He turned half around back to me, and opened the eye on that side. He started to say something but didn’t, and I started to and didn’t.

Now, in calm water, I began to collect everything we needed to make the future with.

“Right back there is where it all happened,” I said.

He looked at me without any understanding at all.

“Somebody is going to ask us things. When that happens tell him that right back there was where Drew fell out—we all fell out. That was where Lewis broke his leg and we lost the other canoe.”

“OK,” he said, without conviction.

“Look around,” I said. “Let’s pick out some things we can agree were here. All this is so they don’t go looking for Drew farther upstream. So look. Look.”

He looked dully from side to side, from bank to bank, but I could tell that nothing was registering.

“See that big yellow tree,” I said. “That’s going to be the main thing. That, and the rapids, and that big rock we went over. We can put them together, and that’ll be all we need to do.”

I concentrated on the tree, looking at it from all the angles the river gave us as we went by, making it blot out everything else in my mind and leave a deep, recoverable image there. It was about half-dead, with the bark scaled off one side in a jagged pattern. It must have been struck by lightlung at one time; the fire had ripped it deep. That was the kind of image I wanted in my mind: like that, the whole tree.

“Listen, Bobby,” I said. “Listen good. We’ve got to make this right. Drew was drowned back there. I’d say—I’m going to say—that the best place to look for his body is about where we are now. There’s no way for him to get down here from where he really is. There are no roads back in to the river where he is, and nobody’ll go up there looking for him if we don’t give them a reason to.”

“He’s here,” Bobby said, putting his hand over his eyes and then raising the outer edge of it to make an eyeshade. “He’s here, down under us. I can say that. I can say it, OK.”

It was exactly what I wanted. Lewis didn’t say anything; either he was out or it would have been too much of an effort to answer.

“We spilled at that bad place we just came through,” I said. “We can even tell them that we spilled going through all that spray between the rocks. We spilled, and Drew was drowned. Since our watches have stopped, we won’t be able to say exactly when it was. But we can say where. Where is at that yellow tree.”

Bobby looked a little less tired.

I said, “There’s not anything unbelievable about the story, if we remember the way we want it to go. There’s nobody—nobody—but us left. Nobody saw, nobody knows. If we don’t mess up on the details, we’re all right. We’re as all right as we’re ever going to be, but at least nobody will be messing with us: no police, no investigation, no nothing. Nothing but us.”

“I hope not.”

“So do I. But as Lewis would say, we’ve got to do more than hope. Control, baby. It can be controlled. So give me back the story.”

He did, and he was accurate. I was pleased; I began to feel safer, for I was dreading going back to men and their questions and systems; I had been dreading it without knowing it.

I was heavy-bodied but light-minded, and felt, as I hadn’t for the last few hours, that I could go on for a while. More and more I just let us drift, paddling only enough to keep the nose downriver. The land on both sides was wooded, but it was not the wild, tangled woods of the gorge, nor the dark, still growth before it. We were not far from men. I expected to see something human at every bend we cleared.

There it was. A cow was lying under a tree at the edge of the river. It swung its head, and came to be gazing at us over the flow. We drifted toward it.

“It’s a farm, Bobby,” I said. “We’re here. We can turn in anytime.” But I didn’t want to have to walk a long way over pastures and fields, looking for a farmhouse. I decided to go downriver for a little while yet, where there was a bridge or a road.

The cows increased, vivid white and dead, living black, lying along the watercourse and up its banks, chewing, drinking, lifting themselves off the river with a heavy toss of horns, eternally stupid, huge, and useless to themselves. One more curve, I was sure, and we would be back.

We went around the same turn—I could not have told you how they differed—eight or ten more times. After about another hour, which would have made it, from the heat and the height of the sun, about noon or early afternoon, we came around another turn like the others, but across the river was a plank bridge set in a steel frame. just beyond it was a gentle spillway; a man and a boy were fishing with cane poles below it.

We muscled the canoe laboriously cross-river to land. When we touched the bank, Bobby got to his feet in the canoe and swayed for a minute, then stepped out into the kudzu. I got into the slime and waded out of the river, and never touched it again with my feet or legs. We beached the canoe and took off our life preservers.

Lewis lay there beyond us, with his hands crossed over him. He was terrifically sunburned; flakes of skin came off his lips when he moved them.

“Lewis,” I said from land. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he said calmly and strongly, but with his eyes closed. “I hear you and I’ve been hearing you. You’ve got it figured; we can get out of this. They won’t ask me anything, and if they do I’ve got the word, same as you gave Bobby. You’re doing it exactly right; you’re doing it better than I could do. Hang in there.”

“Do you feel anything in your leg?”

“No, but I haven’t moved it or fooled with it or thought about it for a long time. I kept trying to put it to sleep, back yonder, and now I can’t wake it up. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m all right.”

“I’m going to get somebody,” I said. “Can you hold out a little longer?”

“Sure,” he said. “My God, those falls must have been something, back there.”

“They were something. We could have done a lot better if we’d’a had you, buddy.”

“You had me,” he said.

“You should have seen the water between those rocks.”

“I don’t know,” he said, getting faint again. “I had it another way. I felt it in my leg, and I tell you, I know something I didn’t know before.”

There was a good smile on his face. He tried to get his head up from the dried vomit, then sank back in it.

“Are you sure about Drew?” he asked. “They can’t find him?”

“They won’t find him,” I said. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“That’s it, then, I guess,” he said. “Go and get somebody. Anybody. I want to get out of this goddamned roasting oven. I want to get out of my own coffin, this fucking piece of tin junk.”

“Lie still. We’re home free. Lie still and don’t worry.”

I told Bobby to stay with the canoe and climbed up the kudzu of the bank to the road that ran across the bridge. It was a thin blacktop state highway, and about a half a mile along it was a country gas station, a store with two stark yellow pumps, probably Shell. I stood, wondering how I could get there without killing myself, and also waiting for the road to unfreeze and begin to flow around me. The stillness underfoot was disturbing, but it stayed, and from it I looked back down at the river. It was beautiful, and I was sure I would feel all my life the particular pull of it at different places, the weight and depth and speed of it; they had been given to me.

I was heavy in the air now, and floundered a little, walking. My side was caked shut, and the part of the flying suit I had tied around me had clotted into the wound; I could not have gotten it out without fainting, so I let it stay, holding it in with an elbow and leaning over it a little, away from the road. I went toward the station, crossing the bridge over the spillway. The station moved off in the sun and shimmered like an oil slick, and I went after it as best I could. My side hurt badly, but it seemed to have moved off from me a little bit; the rags seemed to go around it instead of through it, so that it was like carrying a painful package or ball under my arm. I had a quick dry period between the time when the river water dried off my legs and the close nylon began to flap with sweat; by the time I got to the station I was striped with my own darkness.

A country teen-ager was sitting on the backless bottom of a kitchen chair just inside the screen door, which was shifting and tapping with flies. Though he had probably been watching me come, he could not believe me at close range. He got up and opened the door.

“Is there a phone here?” I asked.

He looked as though he didn’t know whether there was or not.

“I’ve got to get an ambulance out here,” I said. “And I’ve got to get to the highway patrol. People are hurting, and one’s dead.”

I let him make the calls, because I didn’t know where on earth the station was. “Just tell them there’s been an accident on the river,” I said. “And tell them where to come, but tell them to come quick. I don’t think I can last, and there’s another man hurt worse than I am.”

He hung up, finally, and said there’d be somebody along toreckly.

I sat down and tilted back in a chair and was perfectly still, getting my story together one more time, the most important time. But back of the story was the reason for the story, and the woods and the river, and all that had happened. There must be some way for me to get used to the idea that I had buried three men in two days, and that I had killed one of them. I had never seen a dead man in my life, except a brief glance at my father in his coffin. It was strange to be a murderer, especially sitting where I was sitting, but I was too tired to be worried, and didn’t worry, except about Bobby’s ability to remember what I had told him.

A car or two went by, and I waited to hear one slow down. My side hurt, but the pain was in repose, and lay there under my arm, a part of me that I had made, and could live with. I wondered if I should tell whatever doctor dressed it that I had gored myself on my own arrow, or that I had cut myself on the canoe when we turned over, since there were several places on it where the banging around it had taken on the rocks had forced the metal apart and made flanges and projections that might conceivably cut. I decided to go with the arrow, for there might still be some paint in the wound, and some parts of the wound were clean-cut by the razorhead, and the jagged aluminum wouldn’t have done that.

I began to take on so much weight that I could not get up, and then I could not even get my head up. I could feel my still body still trying to make paddling movements. I thought I was stiff, but I must not have been, for when someone touched my bare arm at the shoulder where I had cut off the sleeve the muscles jumped tight again. It was a Negro ambulance driver.

“Have you got a doctor with you?”

“We got one,” he said. “We got a good one; he young and good. What in this world happened to you, man? What in this world? Somebody shoot you?”

“The river,” I said. “The river happened to me. But I’m not the one; I’m just the only one who can move. We’ve got a man back down across the bridge who’s bad hurt, and the other fellow had to stay with him. Also one was killed, or I guess he was. We couldn’t find him.”

“You want to come show us where your man is at?”

“I’ll come if I can get up. If I sit in this chair much longer I’m going to fall out of it.”

He went to my good side and I rose like a mountain into the air of fan belts, where a few cheap cockeyed pairs of dark glasses formed on a piece of yellow cardboard.

“Hold on to me, man,” he said.

He was slight and steady, and I put my good arm around his shoulders, but my knees were going; the world was going.

“You can’t make it,” he said. “You sit right back down.”

“I can make it,” I said, as the glasses focused again.

I told the boy at the store to tell the police where we were going, and the driver and I walked out into the sun where the little white county ambulance sat. The doctor was in the front seat writing something. He looked up and got out all in the same motion.

He opened the back doors. “Bring him around here and let him lie down.”

I crawled onto the stretcher and turned on my back. It was hard to do; I didn’t want to turn loose the driver. He not only felt good to me, but he felt like a good person, and I needed one bad; just that contact was what I needed most. I didn’t need myself anymore; I had had too much of that for too long.

The young doctor, sandy haired and pale, crouched beside me.

“No, no,” I said. “It’s not me. I can wait. Go back across the bridge. There’s a man in a canoe who’s got a bad fracture. It may have hemorrhaged in some way. Let’s get him looked after first.”

We drove down the highway—a land-motion of machines, and peculiar—to the bridge, and I got out one more time. I probably didn’t have to, but I thought it would be best.

Lewis was still in the canoe, stretched out and sweating, his shirt half-dark and his arm over his eyes, and Bobby was talking to the man and boy who had been fishing. I knew Bobby must have been testing his story out on them, and I hoped he had made good use of the time to get it straight; the others looked as though they believed him. It is hard to disbelieve injured, exhausted men, and that was a great advantage.

The driver and the doctor helped Lewis out of the canoe and onto the stretcher. The County Hospital was in Aintry, about seven miles off. We got ready to go, but while we were standing around the ambulance the highway patrol drove up, the siren droning faintly. A short fellow stepped out, and then a rough-looking blond boy. I got ready.

“What’s going on?” the blond officer said.

“We’ve had a bad accident,” I said, swaying a little more than I was actually swaying. I cut that out; acting might ruin the whole thing. “One of our party drowned in the river about ten miles upstream.”

He looked at me. “Drownded?”

“Yes,” I said. I believed I had got past the first of it, like the first of a bad set of rapids. But there was no way out except to keep on.

“How do you know he drownded?”

“Well, we capsized in the rapids, and it was just every man for himself. I don’t know what happened to him. He may have hit his head on a rock. But I don’t know. We just couldn’t find him, and I don’t see how he could not be drowned. I hope he’s not, but I’m afraid he is; he has to be.”

While I was talking I looked him in the eyes, which was surprisingly easy to do; they were sharp but sympathetic. As I went through some of the story that Bobby and I had rehearsed on the river, I made it a point to try to visualize the things I was saying as though they had really happened. I could see us searching for Drew, though we never had. I saw these things happen at the place near the yellow tree, and for me they were happening as I talked; it was hard to realize that they had not taken place in the actual world; as I saw him taking them into account, they became part of a world, the believed world, the world of recorded events, of history.

“Well,” he said, “We’ll have to drag the river. Can you show us ‘bout where it was?”

“I think so,” I said, not wanting to appear too sure, but fairly sure. “I don’t know if there’s a road in there, but I believe I’d know the place if I could get to it. We’ve got a hurt man, though. We’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

“OK,” he said, a little reluctant to have the situation pass from his jurisdiction to the doctor’s. “We’ll check in on you at the hospital later.”

“Fine,” I said, and crawled back into the ambulance beside Lewis.

We rode, and this kind of riding, though it wasn’t what I had got used to, was never better. The tires crunched at last and we stopped. I sat up, a little at a time. We were off in a field, and alongside us was a long flat building that looked like a rural high school. A warm wind was blowing over it. The doctor opened my vision wide, a door in each hand. “This is it, buddy,” he said. “Take it easy; we’ll get your friend out. Just go along with Cornelius.”

I took hold of the driver again, and we went through some glass doors, up a ramp, into a long hall that appeared to run out of sight, ending in a window the size of microfilm, way off and across.

“Second door to the right,” the driver said, and we went there. I sagged down on a white, tight table, the sheets straining under me. In a minute or two they brought Lewis, but didn’t bring him into the room. They put him on a table outside the door, and then noiselessly rolled him on, toward the faraway window. I lay and held my old friend, my side.

The doctor came back on soft feet. “Let’s see now, buddy,” he said. “Can you raise up just a little bit? Does this zipper still work?”

“I think so,” I mumbled. I tried to sit up, and made it easily, and even zipped the zipper down with my good hand. He took off my tennis shoes and I slithered out of the remains of the flying suit. My shorts were stuck into the wound like the nylon I had bound up in it, but he put something painless out of a bottle in the whole mass of cloth and flesh, and the shorts began to come away. He threw what I had been wearing into a corner, and started working on my side.

Things were dissolving there. Piece after piece of cloth, or of me, softened, softened, and came away, and he kept throwing them down below me, in the bare room. My side was breathing like a mouth, and it did not feel at all bad anymore, only stranger and more open.

“Good Lord, fellow,” he said. “What’s been chopping on you? Looks like somebody hit you in the side with an ax.”

“Does?”

Then more professionally, “How’d you do this?”

“We were trying to do a little illegal bowhunting up and down the banks of the river,” I said. “It’s not such a good thing to be doing, but we were doing it. We were going to miss the regular season, and we wanted to try it this way.”

“How in hell did you manage to shoot yourself with an arrow? I didn’t think it could be done.”

He was working and looking into my blood all the time, very busy and talking calmly.

I talked calmly. “I had the bow and arrows in the canoe with me when we dumped. I tried to hold on to the bow because I didn’t want to be in the woods without any weapon at all, and it sliced up my hands.” I held up the hand the arrows had sliced up, just as I said, “and the next thing I knew I had tangled with a rock and something was going through my side and the bow was gone. I don’t have any idea where it went. Downriver; that’s all I know.”

“Well, it made a good clean cut,” he said, “that got ragged. Part of it is real clean, and part of it is hacked up and looks sawed. You’ve got some kind of foreign matter in here, that I’m going to have to get out.”

“There was some camouflage paint on the arrows,” I said. “That’s what it is. But there might be something else in there, too. God knows what’s in there.”

“We’ll get it out,” he said. “Then we’ll sew you up like a quilt. You want a shot?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Scotch.”

“You can have another kind, before you get the Scotch,” he said. “You might have to wait awhile for the Scotch; this is a dry county.”

“You mean you don’t have any moonshine in this here hospital? And you way off in the country like this? What the hell is north Georgia coming to?”

“No white lightning,” he said. “We advise against it. Contains lead salts, most of it.”

He gave me a shot in the hip, and started working again. I looked out the window at the closing green of the day. There was nothing to see but the changes of green.

“You want to stay here with us tonight? There’s plenty of room. We’ve got a whole hospital. And you’ll never get another chance like this one; I can tell you. It’s peaceful here. No shotgunned farmers. Nobody who tangled with a tractor. Nobody on glucose from a drunk smashup. Nobody but you and your buddy, and a little boy, a snakebite case. And he’ll be gone tomorrow. Copperhead poison is not such hot poison.”

“No thanks,” I said, though I would have stayed with Lewis if I thought there was any use in it. “Get me sewed up and tell me where there’s a rooming house I can stay in. I’d like to call my wife, and I’d like to be by myself. I wouldn’t like sleeping in a ward, if I can help it, or in a hospital room if I don’t absolutely have to.”

“You’ve lost some blood,” he said. “You’ll be pretty weak.”

“I’ve been weak for days,” I said. “Give me whatever you need to give me, and I’ll get going.”

“I sent your friend, the other fellow at the canoe, to Biddiford’s, down in town. They’ll treat you OK. But if I were you I’d stay out here tonight.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll be all right. Tell the police where I am. Just drive me over there and take care of Lewis.”

“The other doctor’s working on him. It looks like a complicated situation, with him. He’ll be lucky if there’s not some gangrene building up around that place. That’s a hell of a break.”

“We’re lucky we’ve got you,” I said.

“You’re fucking aye,” he said. “Hands of an angel.”

He drove me in his own car down through town, and in the main filling station were sitting Lewis’ station wagon and Drew’s Olds. I went in, up tight in my side but not having to hold it together anymore, and talked to the owner, and got the addresses of the Griner brothers so that we could send them the rest of the money. Lewis had arranged it all, and I had to have the owner of the station give back to me what I was supposed to do. I didn’t have enough money, but I could either get it from Lewis or mail it in when I got back to the city. The main thing was that the keys were there. I said good-bye to the doctor, told him I’d come out to the hospital the next day. Then I called Martha and told her something bad had happened, that Drew had drowned and Lewis had broken a leg. I asked her to call Lewis’ wife and say he was in the hospital up here and would be for some time, but that he was going to be OK. If Mrs. Ballinger called her or Lewis’ wife they were just to say that we’d be back in a couple of days. I wanted to tell Mrs. Ballinger about Drew’s death myself. I said I thought I’d be home about the middle of the week.

I drove Drew’s car down to Biddiford’s, a big frame house booming and knocking with people and light. Everybody was at supper around a long swaybacked pine table with strips of flypaper hanging down to within a foot of it. Bobby was there with his face working around a mouthful of food, and I winked at him and sat down. They made a place for us—farmers, woodsawyers and small merchants—and I lost interest in everything but eating. Fried chicken came around me—came at me from every angle—again and again, and potato salad, and heavy coarse biscuits and gravy and butter and collards and lima beans and big hominy and turnip greens and cherry pie. It was good; it was all good.

Afterwards a woman showed me upstairs to a room with a big double bed, which was all they had left; Bobby was somewhere else. But for some reason I was too dry; my mouth was dry, and my skin. So I went down and took a shower in the basement, in the blue-green country night, where I stood with the river-water pouring over my head, making my tight new bandage grow like a heavy side pack, making it bleed a little with the warm water. I nearly went to sleep there, but woke up as the water gradually turned cold. Then I went upstairs, my hair and side wet, and got in bed. It was over. I lay awake all night in brilliant sleep.