After

When I woke up I was holding on to my side again, a tight, glowing package. I came awake fairly fast, because the midmorning sun, or so it looked and felt, was beginning to sting my eyelids. I was in a big country room with loud reddish curtains and a huge mirror on the wall opposite me, a little bathroom behind me, a dresser with all the knobs missing on one side, and a hooked rug on the floor under the bed and all around.

I lay and thought. I wanted to see Bobby first, and then Lewis. I got up, naked except for the bandage, which felt very much like clothes of some sort, and picked up what was left of my flying suit from the floor, clotted, armless and ragged. I sure didn’t want to put it back on, but I did, and felt for some money. I had a couple of bills that appeared to have been made and issued by the river, but they were still money, and we needed it. I left the knife and belt in the room, and started to go after Bobby. There, in the mirror, I was the survivor of some kind of explosion, with a shirtsleeve ripped off and a pants leg blown open, bearded and red eyed, not able to speak. Out of this I smiled, very whitely, splitting the beard.

When I found out from the lady clearing away breakfast where Bobby was, I went up to his room and knocked on the door. He was still asleep, but it would be better to settle the new things I had been thinking about with him now than later. I kept knocking, and after a time he came.

I sat down in a rocking chair and he sat on the bed.

“First of all,” I said, “I need some clothes. You probably ought to have some too, if we’ve got enough money. Your clothes are in better shape than mine, so you go out and get me some pants—blue jeans are all right—and a shirt. Get yourself whatever you need, and, if you’ve got anything left, buy me some shoes. Brogans.”

“OK. There ought to be a hardware store right around here. In this town, everything is right around here.”

“Now listen, one more time. We’re all right so far; we’re golden. Lewis is getting taken care of, and our stories—or maybe I should say our story—is going over. I didn’t see a flicker of doubt in anybody’s eye. Did you?”

“I don’t think so, but I’m not as sure as you are. Did that one guy ask you about the canoes?”

“No. What guy? What about the canoes?”

“The little old guy who’s some sort of local lawman. He asked me about the other canoe: where was it, when did we lose it, what was in it.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him what we agreed to tell him: that we lost it in that last bad place.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“No, I don’t have any idea what he was getting at.”

“I do,” I said, “at least I think I do, and it could be trouble; maybe not real trouble, but trouble.”

“Why, for the Lord’s sake?”

“Because we lost the green canoe the day before yesterday and it, or part of it, might even have been found before we got to the place where we said we lost it.”

“Jesus!”

“We’ll have to try to patch it up, then. It’s likely that this little guy is going to get the word around to the state police that something doesn’t jibe in our story, and then they’ll be asking all of us questions. Remember your movies; police like to separate suspects and try to get them to contradict each other. So we’ve just got to sit here right now and become contradict-proof.”

“Can we do it?”

“We have to try. I think we can. Let’s go back. We lost the other canoe when Drew was really killed, right?”

“Right. There’s nobody who can argue with that. But if we take them up there, or if they go up there …”

“Now wait a minute. We’ll say we spilled first a long ways upriver and that’s where we lost the green canoe and Lewis was hurt. But we all survived and tried to make it downriver in Lewis’ canoe. We were overloaded and taking chances trying to get Lewis out and just couldn’t control the canoe when we hit the bad rapids. That last half-mile of falls got us, and Drew didn’t make it. Now stay with that. Stay with it. If we do we’ll make it home tomorrow night, or—maybe even tonight.”

“Suppose they don’t believe us? What am I going to say when that little rat-faced bastard faces me up to telling him where I said we lost the canoe?”

“Tell him—and anybody else around—that he misread you. Was there anybody else listening to you when he was talking to you yesterday?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“That’s good. And I don’t think I let it slip to that first trooper. Anyway, it’s more likely than not that he won’t ask you, but will come around and ask me. When he does, I’ll let him have it. I’m ready for him. I’m sure glad you told me about him. I sure am.”

“Is that all we have to change?”

“As far as I can tell,” I said.

“Again, Ed, what if they don’t believe us? What if there’s just enough doubt so that they go looking farther up?”

“Then, like I said, we may be in some trouble. But I don’t think they will. Look, there are an awful lot of falls and rapids we came down day before yesterday. It could have happened anywhere up there. And the place where Drew was killed—and the part where we sunk that other guy—was right where the banks of the gorge are the highest and steepest. The only three ways to get there are upriver, which would make the whole search party have to fight rapids after rapids for hour after hour and probably day after day, searching the river in the rapids and between them foot by foot, and they’re not going to want to take that on, just because one local guy disbelieves a survivor’s story. An outboard wouldn’t stand a chance in that stuff, and anything else’d be too heavy for the shallows. The other way is downstream, and if they came that way they’d have to run the same rapids we did, and you know what they’re like. How’d you like to have to do that again? They’d be risking their lives, and it just wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, how could they be doing that and searching too?”

“They could search in the calm places, and that’s where Drew is.”

“Right; in one of them. But which one?”

“All right,” he said. “I guess all right, anyway.”

“The only other way in is to come down the cliff. But they’d have to go down and come up it time after time, and they wouldn’t do much of that, I can tell you. They might start out doing it, but they wouldn’t keep on.”

“What if they went that far back and found the broken rope?”

“Chances are they wouldn’t. The rope broke at the very top and there’s a lot of cliff. Anyway, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

“Is that all, now?”

“Yes; all but one thing. We didn’t see anybody on the river. Not since we left Oree have we seen another human being. That’s awfully important, and we can’t vary from it.”

“I’m not going to vary from it, I can clue you. We haven’t seen anybody. I wish we hadn’t.”

“We didn’t. The only other thing is whether somebody was reported missing in that area, and people knew more or less where the person was going. That bothers me a little, but not so much as some of the other problems. Those were awful-looking men; who’d care where they were?”

“Somebody might.”

“That’s right. Somebody might. But whether the person would know where they went, or the area or direction they went in, we just can’t have any idea. That one is beyond us. That’s where we’ve got to ride on luck. And I feel lucky; the odds is good.”

Bobby laughed, and some of it was really laughter. “Do you reckon this room is bugged? Or that someone could be listening?”

“It’s not bugged,” I said, “but that sure is a thoughty notion of yours, cousin.”

I slid off my tennis shoes and went to the door sock-footed, and listened. “Keep talking,” I whispered back to Bobby. “Keep talking, and give me time to listen, too.”

I listened; I listened for the nose-whistle of breath, and maybe it was there. But then you always can hear breath, anywhere, when you want to. I couldn’t hear enough, though, for it really to be breath. Or at least I didn’t think I could. I took hold of the knob and jerked the door inward. Nothing. Was there any sound going down the stairs? No. I was sure. No. I turned back to Bobby and held up a circle of fingers.

“I’ll be in my room,” I said. “Go get us those clothes and then we’ll hustle our asses over to the hospital. Lewis’ll still be knocked out, I bet, and I doubt they’ll pump him too hard anyway, but we better try and get the change in story across to him or see what he remembers of the first one.”

I went back to my room, shucked off the nylon and lay thinking again. I was looking forward to the encounter with the local sheriff, or whatever he was; I was looking forward to his local species of entrapment.

The sun came up more, and I pushed back the covers and lay in it. I was still tired, but the main tiredness had pulled back from me, and the bright light held it off me. It was very good, lying there wounded and stronger. Not so badly wounded now—the stitches were pulling me together—and a lot stronger. Yes indeed.

Bobby came back with the clothes, and I pulled on dry blue jeans, a work shirt, white socks and a pair of clod-hopping brogans that linked me to the earth with every step. But I was not that tired anymore, and I enjoyed lifting them just enough.

I wadded up the nylon in my hand, and we went downstairs together, both in farm clothes. It was exhilarating, now, to be so dry.

The woman who owned the place was dusting.

“Would you get rid of these for me?” I asked her, holding out the nylon outfit full of my blood.

She looked at me. “Be glad to,” she said. “Ain’t but one thing to do with them.”

“I can’t think of anything more to do with them,” I said, “except to burn them.”

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Can’t use them for rags.”

She smiled; we smiled.

Bobby and I got into Drew’s car and drove out to the bospital. There were two highway patrol cars there. “Here we go,” I said. “Hold on.”

We went in, and a fellow in white showed us to the ward where Lewis was. There were three highway patrol officers there, talking quietly among themselves with toothpicks in their mouths, and Lewis was lying either asleep or under sedation in a comer of the empty ward with a sheet medically levitated over his legs. The sandy-haired doctor was beside him, inclining his head and writing something again. He turned as he heard my heavy new steps.

“Hello, killer,” he said. “How’d you sleep?”

“Good. Better than the riverbank.”

“Stitches holding?”

“You know it; holding me together, like you said. There ain’t nothing getting in or out.”

“Good,” he said, in his way of going serious I liked.

Lewis came to us before I had a chance to say anything else. He moved a little, up from the waist; he came like a muscular act; the veins of his biceps jumped clear, clear as anatomy, and he opened eyes.

I turned to the patrolmen. “Have you been talking to him?” I asked.

“No,” one of them said. “We’ve been waiting for him to come around.”

“He’s around, I expect,” I said. “Or he will be soon. Give him a minute.”

He was looking straight at me. “Hello, Tarzan,” I said. “How’s the world of the Great White Doctor?”

“White,” he said.

“What’ve they been trying to do to you?”

“You tell me,” he said. “I’ve got a heavy leg, and there’s some pain in there rambling around. But we got clean sheets, and there ain’t that grating sound when I move. So I guess it’s all right.”

I got in between Lewis and the nearest patrolman—got in close, almost head to head—and winked. He winked back, though anybody who didn’t know it was a wink, wouldn’t have. “Just don’t let’s get on that last stretch of water again, buddy,” he said. “Not today, anyway.”

He had given it to me without knowing it; I took it hoping that it had been loud enough.

“Everything went,” I said. “Drew was killed; you remember me telling you?”

“I think so,” he said. “I don’t remember him in the canoe, after that. I don’t remember.”

“You remember all that spray?” I asked.

“I remember, sort of,” he said. “Was that where it was?”

“That’s where it was for Drew,” I said slowly. “You and Steinhauser’s tub bought it in the first spill, upriver.”

“I couldn’t see anything,” he said. “Looking straight up, I couldn’t even see the sky.”

“No sky,” I said.

“No sky at all.”

I rounded my hurt side, back to the patrolman. “Wait’ll you see it,” I said. “You’ll understand what the man’s talking about.”

“Y’all want to wait, on down here a ways?” one of the policemen, a new one, said to us. We pulled back, down along the corridor. But Lewis had got the message; I was sure he had, and not too soon.

Bobby and I walked along in our new clothes. Neither of us had had a chance to shave, and we were pretty grubby, but clean. A shave would have made me a completely new person, but I was half-new anyway, and half-new was very good; it is better to come back easily.

After about fifteen minutes the new officer walked ordinarily along to us. “Why’ont we go on back into town?” he said.

“All right,” I told him. “Whatever you say.”

I got into the front seat of the patrol car with him, and we started back. I didn’t say anything and he didn’t either. When we reached town he went into a cafe and made a couple of calls. It frightened me some to watch him talk through the tripled glass—windshield, plate glass and phone booth glass—for it made me feel caught in the whole vast, inexorable web of modern communications. I was not sure that this was not the beginning of the enormous, unfathomable apparatus of crime detection, from which no one is entirely free: I could imagine stupendous filing systems, IBM machines tirelessly sorting punch cards, one thing being checked against another: I was not sure he was not talking to J. Edgar Hoover. Our story could not stand up against that, I was sure. And yet it might, even so.

The patrolman came back and sat with me, with his door open. In a little while two more patrol cars showed up. A small crowd started to drift together; a head turned toward us, and another: eventually, all heads looked at us at least once, and most of them more than once. I sat still, in my clothes of the country. I could prove where I had bought them. My hurt was good in the midst of the general unhurt.

One of the police from another car was talking to a local fellow about roads going up the river. A few minutes after this, we all got ready to start out. I looked for Bobby; he was in one of the new highway patrol cars. As we left, another police car, very local-looking, drove up and by, and I saw my man, an old fellow, rusty and quiet. There was going to be a meeting, somewhere upriver. My beard tingled at the roots, and I started to calculate, yet once again.

We turned off the highway and drove down a little road that swung through a farmer’s yard and then through his chicken yard. A woman was feeding chickens, muffled up against the sun as though against cold.

We moved on, slower and slower. Nothing had happened yet; nothing had happened to any of us yet. There had been no accusations made, nothing discovered. My lies seemed better, more and more like truth; the bodies in the woods and in the river did not move.

We were the lead car. We took off through some glaring cornfields and then into poor-looking woods, second-growth pines like turpentine trees. I listened for the river, but saw it before I heard it. The road got worse and worse the nearer we got; it figured. At the river’s edge we were crawling.

“This about where it was?” the cop asked me.

“No,” I said, waking from a half-sleep I didn’t know I was in. “It was farther up. We wouldn’t have come down here all the way from Oree if we wanted to turn the canoe over in calm water.”

He looked at me oddly, or I suppose he did, for I was watching straight ahead for the yellow tree, and listening—one more time—for the falls; it seemed curious to be going toward them from this direction.

It was an hour of slow going, over gullies and washouts with just enough track for regular cars—if it had got any worse it would have been jeep or Land Rover country—before we saw the tree. I saw the color and then the lightning jag, and my heart jumped like a whole being, inside me and nearly out. The rapids were roaring, upstream about a quarter of a mile; I could see some of them now, and they were a lot worse, even, than I remembered. The falloff was a good six feet, and the only place where a canoe could get through was a funnel of water into which the whole river cramped and shot, blizzarding through the stones and beating and fuming like some enormous force chained to the Spot.

The policeman pointed. “He’d be right in here?”

“I’d say so,” I said. “He may be downstream farther, though. Or he may be caught in the rocks. But we probably ought to start here.”

We all got out and moved toward each other. I watched Bobby over the hoods and backs of cars. He was not moving among the men. They were wandering rather freely around him, and his stillness in the midst of them suggested that he was not able to move as freely as they, or at all. I don’t think anyone noticed this but me, or put this interpretation on it, but it made me nervous; he already looked like a prisoner; for an instant I actually thought he was in leg shackles. I started toward him, but the police from the three cars always came between us, which must have been intentional, though they managed to give the impression it wasn’t. Then Bobby moved like everybody else, toward the river.

Meanwhile other cars were creeping up to us, and pretty soon they filled up the bank all the way out of sight downriver. The men who got out of them were farmers, mostly, and small merchants, or so I supposed. Some of them brought long ropes with hooks—grapples—on them, and I understood the full horror of the phrase I was always seeing in the newspapers, especially in the summer: “drag the river for the body.” Drag was right.

“This the place?” the patrolman asked me again.

“It’s the best I can do,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, this is it.”

The men began to deploy with their ropes and hooks. The stream was not deep at this point, about up to their waists or lower chests. The river ran through them easily. I watched the chains and ropes and wire cables come up from the water empty, in a certain rhythm. They always seemed to have grasped something when the hooks were underwater, and just to have let it go when they were pulled back up. I sat under a bush with the patrolman who had driven me out, watching each of the men in waders do what he was doing at the moment, and remembered the ring on Drew’s finger and the dead guitar calluses on his hand as he fell from my arms.

Someone was coming, casually but deliberately. I turned to say something to the patrolman, so that I would seem unaware of the other person’s approach.

“Say, buddy,” the new man said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure,” I said. “Sit down.”

He did. We shook hands. He was an old seam-faced lightbodied man with hazel eyes. He wore his hat at the prescribed country tilt, which always amused me wherever I saw it. I almost smiled, but instead took a cigarette he offered and lit up.

“You sure this is the place?”

I repeated, “Not all that sure. But I can’t do any better. He’s either in those rocks up there, or here, or downstream. How far downstream I don’t know.”

“You say youus coming down this-yere river in a canoe?”

“Two canoes, we started with.”

“How come?”

“How come what?”

“How come you to be doing this, in the fust place?”

“Oh,” I said, hesitating and not really knowing the answer, even now. “I guess we just wanted to get out a little. All of us work in the city, and it gets pretty tiresome, just sitting in an office all the time. The fellow who broke his leg’s been up here before, fishing. He said we ought to see it before they dam the river and make a public park out of it. That’s all. No really good reason, I suppose. Just boredom.”

“I kin understand that,” he said after a little while. “You didn’t know what you uz agettin’ into, did you?”

“No indeed, we didn’t,” I said. “We sure didn’t know it would be anything like this.”

He thought this over. “You see these big old wide rocks yonder? How come you didn’t get out and drag your canoe over ‘em, ‘stead of trying to come through that-there bad place? How come you to try to ride on through?”

“The river’s running awful fast, up above here. These are just the very last of the rapids. We had too much speed by then. And this part didn’t look as bad as it is; we couldn’t see the drop-off until we were right on top of it and going too fast to do anything but go over it. And when it fell off, we fell out.”

“Then your buddy couldn’t be back up yonder in them other rocks now, could he?”

“No,” I said. “That’s why I suggested that y’all start looking for him right here. He wouldn’t be in the upstream rocks, but he could be hung up under a rock someplace under the drop-off.”

“Wouldn’t be much of him left, would there?”

“I guess not.”

“You say you started out day before yesterday?”

“We started Friday, at about four o’clock in the afternoon.”

“In two canoes.”

“Right.”

“And you lost one of them right here?”

“No, a long ways upstream. When we came through here, we were all in one canoe.”

This was the silence now. It went on for at least a minute. “Your buddy says different.”

“I’ll be damned if he does,” I said. “Go ask him.”

“I already done asked him.”

“Ask him again, or the one in the hospital.”

“No; no. You done had a chance to talk to ‘em.”

“Your hearing must not be any too good.”

“It’s good enough. We ain’t going to find no body right in here. We’re going to find it farther up.”

“What the hell are you driving at?” I said, and the indignation was real; he was assaulting my story, which had cost me so much time and energy, and, yes, blood.

I leaned to the state policeman. “Look, do I have to put up with this? I’ll be goddamned if I will, I can tell you. Is he authorized to do this?”

“Maybe you better answer a few more questions. Then he can handle it however he wants to.”

“We found that other canoe—or half of it—before you say you even got down in this part of the river.”

“So what? I told you we lost the other one farther up. Back up in a gorge. If you want to try to go up in there, I can take you and show you where it was.”

“You know we can’t get back up in there.”

“That’s your problem. What the hell is all this about, anyway? We’ve been through a goddamned bad time, and I’m damned if I want to put up with this kind of shit. Listen: are you the sheriff here?”

“Depitty.”

“Is the sheriff around here?”

“He’s right over yonder.”

“Well, go get him. I want to talk to him.”

He got up and went over to a beefy, Texas-y farmer with a badge, and they came back together. I shook hands with the sheriff, whose name was Bullard.

“Sheriff, I don’t know what this man has in mind, because he won’t tell me. But from what I can gather he thinks we threw one of our party in the river, or something.”

“Maybe you did,” the old man said.

“For Christ’s sake, for what reason?”

“How would I know that? I know you can’t get your stories straight, and there aidt no good reason for you to be lyin’.”

“Easy, Mr. Queen,” the sheriff said. Then to me, “What about this?”

“What do you mean, what about it? Look, if you can find one person, and I mean one, who’ll back up what he says, I’ll be perfectly happy to do anything you want me to do—go back up in the woods with you, wade up the river, join your crew out there dragging—anything you say. But this man is just confused. He’s got some kind of personal stake in this, he doesn’t like city people, he’s trying to create interest in himself, God knows what. What’s the matter, Mr. Queen? People feel like you’re not earning your money?”

“I’ll tell you what’s the matter, you city son of a bitch,” Queen said, in that country-murderous tone that always bled me white. “My sister called me yesterday and told me her husband had been out hunting and hadn’t come back. They ain’t nobody off in them woods up yonder. I’ll just goddamned well guarantee y’all met up with him somewhere. And I’m on prove it.”

“Fine, prove it.”

“What’s wrong with you, Mr. Queen?” the sheriff asked. “Why jump on these fellows about something in your family? Just ‘cause they’re from the city? Maybe your brother-in-law fell down and got hurt.”

“No, he wudna.”

“Why are you so damned sure that anything happened to him?” I said.

“I just got a feeling,” Queen said. “And I ain’t ever wrong about that.”

“Well, you’re wrong this time,” I said. “Now stop bothering me. Go and do whatever you’ve got a mind to do. But get off my back. I’ve had it with this river, with the woods, with the whole fucking business up here and most especially with you. Unless you’ve got something to accuse us of, and have got some evidence to support what you’re saying—whatever it is—you can goddamned well let me alone.”

He backed off, muttering, and I went over to the patrolman I had been sitting beside. Queen didn’t have a thing on us, and he wouldn’t get anything. I wondered if one of the two men we had killed had really been his brother-in-law, and I tried to think of a way to find out his name, but decided I had better let it go. There was no real reason I needed to know his name, except for my own satisfaction, and I doubted that it would be much satisfaction, either way.

The men in the river were working downstream. Every now and then one of the hooks would snag a rock, and everybody would converge on it. I could see the light in their eyes change, some dreading, some anticipating, some happy. My blood quickened and my side hurt within its hurt when this happened, but it was always for nothing. All day, almost, the wound leapt and subsided, and in all that time the searchers made only about two hundred yards.

Sheriff Bullard came over. “Looks like that’s goin’ to haf to wind it up tonight,” he said. “Getti’ too dark.”

I nodded and got up.

“You boys be staying in Aintry this evenin’?”

“I guess so,” I said. “We’re still pretty tired and beat-up. And I want to see how Lewis is doing, in the hospital. He has a bad break in his leg.”

“Is bad,” the sheriff said. “Doctor said he’s never seen a worst un.”

“We’re at Biddiford’s,” I said. “But you know that.”

“Yeah, I know it. We’ll be coming back out here tomorrow morning. You can come if you want to, but you don’t have to.”

“I don’t see any reason for us to come,” I said. “If the body’s not right in here, I don’t know where it is. Maybe farther downstream.”

“We’re going to try upstream, a little.”

“No use,” I said. “But do whatever you think’s right. If you find any bodies up there, though, they won’t be Drew’s. This is where he went under, and if you find him it’ll be downstream.”

“Maybe we’ll split up, and some work up and some work down.”

“OK. Fine. But this is the place; I’d bet my life on it. I marked it with that big yellow tree, and I kept looking at it all the time we were trying to find him. He’s downriver; there’s not but one way he can go.”

“Right,” said the sheriff. “Not but one way. We’ll let you know if we find him, and I’ll come by to see y’all sometime tomorrow afternoon. Much obliged to you, for your trouble.”

Bobby and I ate another big dinner, and went up to bed. There was no need to talk anymore; all the talking had been done. Now was the time for the finding or the not finding.

The next day we went out to see Lewis, who was much better. His leg was raised in pulleys, and he was reading the county paper, which had a story about Drew’s disappearance, and an account of dragging the river for him, with a picture in which I could recognize myself and Deputy Queen. He had his fist up at my face, and I knew that the picture had been taken during the last part of the time we had been talking. I looked like I was being tolerant, just barely listening out of courtesy. Everything helped; this too.

There were no policemen with Lewis, but he was not alone in the ward anymore, for the night before they had brought in a farmer whose foot had been run over by a tractor. He was at the other end, and asleep. I told Lewis what had happened, and told him that Bobby would drive his car back down to the city and his wife or somebody could come after him whenever he was ready to move. That was all right with him.

Bobby and I walked over to say good-bye to Lewis. He was eased back in the pillows.

“I ought to be out of here in a week or two, myself,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “Lie back and enjoy yourself. This is not such a bad town.”

Bobby and I drove back to Biddiford’s to wait for the sheriff.

He came at five-thirty, and evil little Queen was with him. The sheriff took out a piece of paper. “You can use this for a statement,” he said. “See if it says what you told us.”

I read it through. “It’s all right,” I said. “But I don’t know these place names. Is this the right name of the rapids where I said we capsized?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s the name: Griffin ’s Shoot.”

“OK,” I said, and signed it.

“You’re sure, now,” Sheriff Bullard asked.

“You better believe I’m sure.”

“He ain’t sure,” Deputy Queen said, a lot louder than any of us. “He’s lyin’. He’s lyin’ thu his teeth. He’s done somethin’, up yonder. He’s done kilt my brother-in-law.”

“Listen, you little bastard,” I said, and my voice was really quivering. “Maybe your brother-in-law killed somebody. Why are you bringing in all this talk of killing? The river did all the killing we saw. If you don’t think it’ll kill you, get your stupid ass on it and see for yourself.”

“Now, Mr. Gentry,” the sheriff said. “Don’t talk like that. Ain’t no call for it.”

“Well, this’ll do till there is,” I said.

“He’s lyin’. Sheriff; don’t let him go. Don’t let the son of a bitch go.”

“We got nothing to hold him for, Arthel,” the sheriff said. “Nothing. These boys’ve been through a lot. They want to get back home.”

“Don’t let him go, I’m telling you. Listen, my sister called up last night, and she was just a-crying. Benson ain’t come home yet. She knows he’s dead. She just knows it. He ain’t never been gone this long before. And these fellers was the only ones up in there, when he was.”

“Now, you don’t know that, Arthel,” the sheriff said. “What you mean is, they was the only city fellows.”

I shook my head as though I couldn’t believe such stupidity, which was the case, sure enough.

“Y’all can go any time you want to,” the sheriff said. “Just leave me your addresses.”

I did and said, “OK. Let us know if you find anything.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll be the fust.”

I slept again, as in a place beyond all sleep, around on the other side of death, and came back, floating, when I thought I heard the ringing of the owl on the other birds, in Martha’s wind-toy at home. It was early, and we were free. I dressed and went to Bobby’s room and woke him. The woman who owned the place was up, and we paid her with the last of our money and drove to the filling station to get Lewis’ car. The sheriff was sitting there talking to the owner. We got out.

“Morning,” he said. “Y’all getting an early start, eh?”

“Thought we would,” I said. “What can we do for you?”

“Not a thing,” he said. “Just wanted to make sure you had your keys, and everything you need.”

“We can make it fine,” I said. “There is one thing, Sheriff, though. We owe some fellows up in Oree for bringing these cars down to us. Would you tell them that we’ll send them the money, just as quick as we get back to the city? They’ll believe you before they will us, because you live up here; they know who you are.”

“Be glad to,” he said. “What’re their names?”

“Griner. They run a garage up there.”

“I’ll get word to ‘em. Don’t worry about it. And you say they’re the last people you saw, before you got down here?”

“The last and only. There was also another man with them. I don’t know who he was.”

“Maybe we ought to know who he was. I might even go up there and talk to all of ‘em myself. And you kin be sure I’ll tell ‘em about the money.”

“OK. We’re going along now.”

“Take it easy going home,” he said. “And, buddy, let me tell you one thing. Don’t ever do anything like this again. Don’t come back up here.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” I said. I grinned, and slowly, so did he. “Is this your way of telling me to get out of town and not show my face in these-here parts again?”

“You might say that,” he said.

“Aw, now, Sheriff, you know we ain’t no hired guns,” I said, like Texas. “We’re all bow-and-arrow men.”

“You listen to me, now, boy.”

“You ought to be in the movies, Sheriff. Or go live in Montana. You could probably find worse bad men than me in either one.”

“I might do that,” he said. “Not much action here, I can tell you. A few people stealing chickens, and a little moonshining. Not much action.”

“Not till we came.”

“Yeah; we don’t want no more of that. Dragging that river’s tough.”

“Neither do we; you won’t see us again.”

“OK. So long. Have a good trip.”

“So long. And I hope Deputy Queen finds his brotber-in-law.”

“Aw, he’ll come in drunk. He’s a mean bastard anyway. Old Queen’s sister’d be better off without him. So would everybody else.”

I started to get in Drew’s car.

“‘Fore you go, buddy, let me ask you something and tell you something.”

“Ask me.”

“How come you-all ended up with four life jackets?”

“We had an extra one. In fact we had two. You’re liable to find another one downriver. They float, you know. Now what was it you wanted to tell me?”

“You done good.”

“Somebody had to do something,” I said. “I didn’t want to die, either.”

“You ‘us hurt bad, but if it wudn’t for you you’d all be in the river with your other man.”

“Thanks, Sheriff—I’ll take that with me.”

“You damned fucking ape,” he said. “Who on earth was your father, boy?”

“Tarzan,” I said.

Bobby settled into Lewis’ wagon, and I got a map from the rack at the station and buckled down in the other car.

“Let’s go get the canoe,” I hollered over.

“Jesus, no,” he said. “Leave it. I never want to see it or touch it or smell it again. Leave the goddamned thing.”

“No,” I said. “We’re going to get it. Follow me. It’ll just take a minute.”

Some kids were playing in the canoe, and I thought this was a good sign, indicating that Deputy Queen wasn’t around. Also, they might have washed out Lewis’ vomit, or some of it, anyway. I got the kids out and took a long look at the hull. It was really battered and beat-up, not only along the bottom but on the sides clear up to the gunwales in some places; I felt the rock shocks all over again, just looking at them. There were a couple of holes—small holes—close together in the middle, but it could have stood some more, though maybe not a whole lot.

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

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

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

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

“Like TVA, I guess,” I said to Bobby.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I could use a drink, sugar,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I did,” I said. “It was me.”

“What kind of an accident …?”

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

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

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

She nodded.

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

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

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

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

She held her mouth. The keys jangled and rang.

“I brought the car back.”

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

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

“Such a goddamned useless way to die.”

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

“Not this useless.”

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

“Useless.”

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

“You can get out of here, Mr. Gentry. You can get out of here and go find that insane friend of yours, Lewis Medlock, and you can shoot him. That’s what you can do.”

“He’s pretty badly hurt, himself. And he’s just as sorry as I am. Please understand that. It’s not his fault. It’s the river’s fault. It’s our fault for going with him.”

“All right,” she said from far off, from the future, from all the years coming up, and from the first night alone in bed. “All right, Ed. Nobody can do anything. Nobody can ever do anything. It’s all so useless. Everything is useless. It always has been.”

I saw she was becoming speechless, but I tried one more thing.

“Can I have Martha come over and stay with you for a couple of days?”

“I don’t want Martha. I want Drew.”

She broke, and I started toward her, but she shook her bead violently and I backed off, turned, put the keys on the coffee table beside the company history, and went out.

As we drove home I wondered if it would have been any better if I’d been able to tell the truth. Would it be easier for her if I could tell her that Drew was lying in a wild stretch of the Cahulawassee with part of his head bashed in either by a bullet or a rock, sunk down with a stone and a bowstring, eddying a little back and forth, side to side with the motion of the water? I did not see how knowing that would help. The only possibility was that it might spark in her the animal mania for revenge, if he truly had been shot, and nothing more could be done about that than had already been done: no electric chair, no rope or gas chamber could avenge him better, or as well.

Back at home I put an easy chair in front of the picture window and got a blanket and a pillow and sat looking out onto the street with the phone beside me all afternoon. I was shaking. Martha sat on the floor and put her head in my lap and held my hand, and then went and got a bottle of whiskey and a couple of glasses.

“Baby,” she said. “Tell me what it is. Is somebody after you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. But I’m not sure. Somebody may be after me. Also, the law may be after me. I’ve just got to tough it out. If nothing happens for a couple of weeks, I think we’ll be all right.”

“Can’t you tell me?”

“No, I can’t tell you now. Maybe I can’t ever tell you.”

“Who cut you, Ed? Who cut my good man?”

“I did it,” I said. “I fell on one of my arrows, and I had to cut it out with a knife. There was not any other way; I couldn’t get us downriver with an arrow sticking through me. So I cut. I’m glad the knife was sharp, or I’d probably still be hacking.”

“Go to sleep, honey. I’ll let you know if anything happens. I’m right here with you. There’s no more woods and no more river. Go to sleep.”

But I couldn’t. We live on a dead-end street, so that any car that comes down it either belongs to the people who live on the street or has some business with them. I watched the few cars I recognized come in, and turn into the various driveways. About ten o’clock one stopped in front of our house. The lights swung slowly around and enveloped us, and Martha closed my mouth with a warm hand as I sat there blinded. Ours was the last driveway, and the driver was just using it to turn around in. He went away, and finally so did I.

I woke up and Martha was still with me. It was light. The crooked part in her hair was very precious. She was asleep, and gently as I could I got up from under her, put her head in the chair, picked up a glass and the whiskey and went into the bathroom. I turned around and Martha was standing there too. She kissed me, and then sat on the toilet seat and pulled the bandage-tape off my side with quick, surgical rips.

“Better,” she said. “It’s going to be fine. Jesus, you’re healthy.”

“I don’t feel so healthy, I can tell you. I’m still tired.”

“Well, you rest up.”

“No, I’m going to the office.”

“No you’re not; that’s the damned silliest idea I ever heard. You’re going to bed.”

“Really, I want to go down there. I want to and I need to. For lots of reasons.”

“All right, dum-dum. Go ahead and kill yourself.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “But if I don’t keep busy I’ll fall apart. I can’t stand any more of this car-watching.”

She re-dressed my side and I went downtown. The main thing was to get back into my life as quickly and as deeply as I could; as if I had never left it. I walked into my office and opened the door wide so that anybody who wanted to look could see me there, shuffling papers and layouts.

At lunch I went out and bought a paper. There was a notice of Drew’s death, and an old picture of him from his college annual. That was all. I worked hard the rest of the day, and when I drove the freeway home it was like a miracle of movement and of freedom.

And so it ended, except in my mind, which changed the events more deeply into what they were, into what they meant to me alone. There is still a special small fear in any strange automobile headlights near the house, or any phone call with an unfamiliar voice in it, either at the office or at home, or when Martha calls me at the office. For a long time I went through both daily papers from column to column every day, but only once did the word Cahulawassee come off the page at me, and that was when the dam at Aintry was completed. The governor dedicated it, there was a ceremony with college and high school bands, and the governor was said to have made a very good speech about the benefits, mainly electrical and industrial, that the dam would bring to the area, and touching on the recreational facilities that would be available when the lake filled in. Every night as the water rose higher I slept better, feeling the green, darkening color crawl up the cliff, up the sides of rock, feeling for the handholds I had had, dragging itself up, until finally I slept as deeply as Drew was sleeping. Only a few days after I saw the story in the paper I knew that the grave of the man we had buried in the woods was under water, and from the beginning of the inundation Drew and the other man were going deeper and deeper, piling fathoms and hundreds of tons of pressure and darkness on themselves, falling farther and farther out of sight, farther and farther from any influence on the living.

Another odd thing happened. The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it—I can feel it—on different places on my body. It pleases me in some curious way that the river does not exist, and that I have it. In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality. I had a friend there who in a way had died for me, and my enemy was there.

The river underlies, in one way or another, everything I do. It is always finding a way to serve me, from my archery to some of my recent ads and to the new collages I have been attempting for my friends. George Holley, my old Braque enthusiast, bought one from me when I hired him back, and it hangs in his cubicle, full of sinuous forms threading among the headlines of war and student strikes. George has become my best friend, next to Lewis, and we do a lot of serious talking about art; more than we should, with the work load the studio has been accumulating.

I saw Bobby only once or twice in the city, just nodding to each other in public Places. I couldn’t tell from looking at him how he was, but he had returned to the affable, faintly nasty manner he had always had, and I was as glad as not to leave him alone; he would always look like dead weight and like screaming, and that was no good to me. I later heard that he quit the company he was working for and tried to go into business with a partner running a Chicken-in-a-Basket drive-in and carry-out near a local engineering college, but it failed after a year and he moved to another city, and then, I heard, to Hawaii.

Thad and I are getting along much better than before. The studio is still boring, but not as boring as it was. Dean is growing up well, though he is a strangely silent boy. He looks at me sometimes from the sides of his eyes, and seems about to speak in a way he has not spoken before. But that is probably only my imagination; he has never said anything except the things any boy would say to his father. Otherwise he is sturdy and uncomplicated, and beginning to be handsome. Lewis is something of an idol to him; he is lifting weights already.

Because of the associations she had for me, I looked up the girl in the Kitt’n Britches ad and took her out to dinner a couple of times. I still loved the way she looked, but her gold-halved eye had lost its fascination. Its place was in the night river, in the land of impossibility. That’s where its magic was for me. I left it there, though I would have liked to see her hold her breast once more, in a small space full of men. I see her every now and then, and the studio uses her. She is a pleasant part of the world, but minor. She is imaginary.

Martha is not. In summer we sit by a lake where we have an A-frame cottage—it is not Lake Cahula, it is over on the other side of the state, but it is also a dammed lake—and look out over the water, maybe drinking a beer in the evening. There is a marina on the other side; we sit and watch the boats go out, and the water skiers leap from the earthside to their long, endless feathery step on the green topsoil of water. Lewis limps over from his cabin now and then and we look at each other with intelligence, feeling the true weight and purpose of all water. He has changed, too, but not in obvious ways. He can die now; he knows that dying is better than immortality. He is a human being, and a good one. Sometimes he refers to me as “U.C.,” which means—to him and me—“Unorganized Crime,” and this has become a kind of minor conversation piece at parties, and at lunch in the city with strangers.

Sometimes, too, we shoot archery at the lake, where Lewis has put a bale and a field target in a beautiful downhill shot, about fifty-five yards, between trees. We shoot dozens of aluminum arrows, but I have never put another broadhead in the bow. My side wouldn’t allow it; I can feel it cry out at the idea. Besides, there is no need to; the bow I use now is too light for hunting.

Lewis is still a good shot, and it is still a pleasure to watch him. “I think my release is passing over into Zen,” he said once. “Those gooks are right. You shouldn’t fight it. Better to cooperate with it. Then it’ll take you there; take the arrow there.”

Though Lake Cahula hasn’t built up like the one we’re on, there are indications that people are getting interested in it, as they always do any time a new, nice place opens up in what the real estate people call an unspoiled location. I expect there are still a few deer around Lake Cahula—deer that used to spend most of their time on the high ground at the top of the gorge—but in a few years they will be gone, and perhaps only the unkillable tribe of rabbits will be left. One big marina is already built on the south end of the lake, and my wife’s younger brother says that the area is beginning to catch on, especially with the new generation, the one just getting out of high school.

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