by James Dickey
“What time is it?” she said.
“Six,” I said, looking at the frail hands of the clock by the bed as they pulsed and glowed. “Lewis is coming by at a little before six-thirty.”
“What do you have to do to get ready?” she asked.
“Not much. Just throw on my old nylon flying suit and put on some tennis shoes. And, when Lewis comes, load up the back of his car with my stuff. There isn’t much, but I’ve got it all ready. I piled it out in the living room after you went to bed.”
“Do you really want to go, baby?”
“It’s not something I’m dying to do,” I said. “And I won’t die if I don’t do it. But the studio is really bugging me. I had a terrible time yesterday, until I got down to doing some work. It seemed like everything just went right by me, nothing mattered at all. I couldn’t have cared less about anything or anybody. If going up in the woods with Lewis does something about that feeling, I’m for it.”
“Is it my fault?”
“Lord, no,” I said, but it partly was, just as it’s any woman’s fault who represents normalcy.
“I wish you didn’t have to go off like this. I mean, didn’t want to. I wish there was something I could do.”
“There is.”
“Have we got time?”
“We’ll make time. There’s nothing Lewis has to offer that matters all that much. He can wait. I don’t feel like I can.”
We lay entangled like lovers.
“Lie on your back,” she said.
She had great hands; they knew me. There was something about the residue of the nursing in her that turned me on: the practical approach to sex, the very deliberate and frank actions that give pleasure to people. The blood in me fell and began to rise in the dark, moving with her hands and the slight cracking of the lubricant. Martha put a pillow in the middle of the bed, threw back the covers with a windy motion and turned facedown on the pillow. I knelt and entered her, and her buttocks rose and fell. “Oh,” she said. “Oh yes.”
It was the heat of another person around me, the moving heat, that brought the image up. The girl from the studio threw back her hair and clasped her breast, and in the center of Martha’s heaving and expertly working back, the gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.
I went to the bathroom and stood with my eyes closed and flowed. When my bladder was empty I pulled a robe around me, looking in the side-lighted mirror, which shone far up into the thinnest of my hair, unerringly finding the part of it that was receding the most rapidly and shadowed the under-part of my eyes in a way that made me know that they would never again be as they had been. Aging with me was going to come on fast. And yet I had good shoulders, and my hips and belly were heavy but solid. The hair was thick on my chest and across the top of my back, like an oxbow, and in the light some of it glowed a soft gray, like monkey fur.
If I had had my choice of looking like any man, or combination of men on earth, or in history, I would not have known how to make it. I suppose I got some of this attitude from Lewis, who exercised incessantly but only had two or three suits for each season. Clothes were not a mystique with him, but his body was. “It’s what you can make it do,” he would say, “and what it’ll do for you when you don’t even know what’s needed. It’s that conditioning and reconditioning that’s going to save you.” “Save me?” I asked Lewis. “Save me from what? Or for what?” And yet Lewis approved of me at least enough to associate with me; I was probably his best friend. He had taught me how to shoot a bow, and I was fairly good. Lewis said I was unusually steady, and I could hold on a point almost as well as he could. My trouble was in judging distances, and Lewis didn’t believe that archery with a sight, that is, archery that was not purely instinctive, was really archery. On a field round I scored consistently in the 160’s for fourteen targets. Lewis was around 230, and had gone as high as 250. It was a real pleasure to watch him shoot, and to see the care that he took with his equipment, which he made himself, strings and all.
In the living room it was half-lit dark. The moon was gone from the floor and windows. I stood looking at one of the few dawns I had seen in the last ten years, and Martha came softly into the room in a frilled gown and continued on past me into the kitchen. She paused at the door.
“Have you seen Dean anywhere?” she asked.
“What do you mean? Isn’t he in his room?”
My equipment, piled on the floor and dark as solid shade, laughed like Dean, and he rose up from behind it. He had a big Bowie knife in his hand, in the case.
It was odd. It was as though he both knew what the knife was and didn’t know at all, and as he waved it around and threatened me with it — with the greatest love — I was caught in the same curious dance as he, knowing what the knife would do and not believing it for a minute. Finally I took it away from him and pitched it down where he had got it, in the dark of the rest of the stuff. It was only then that I felt the chill of the room, and realized that the air was cold as it came from the floor, up from the pile carpet, and that under the robe I was naked.
On top of the air mattress and sleeping bag and thin nylon rope lay the knife and my bow and four arrows. The rope I had bought on impulse at an army surplus store, mainly because Lewis had once told me that you should “never be in the woods without rope.” I picked the bow up off it, enjoying the cold, smooth feel of the recurves. It was a good one; better, probably, than I deserved. It was not one of the standard makes — a Drake, for example, or a Ben Pearson or a Howatt or a Bear — but was homemade from what seemed to be a kind of composite design that ended up by looking and shooting like none of these. The handle section was heavy, and it actually looked like an experimental bow. I had come to like the weight and depth of the handle, though, and wouldn’t have felt comfortable with anything smaller. Lewis had got it for me secondhand from a former state champion who’d made it, and who shot the same kind of bow, and he kept telling me of advantages which began, as I remember, by seeming completely psychological, but gradually came to seem real ones. There was, in fact, very little hand shock on release. The arrow went off very smoothly, and quietly, too. It had nothing like the snap or kick of Lewis’ bows. The initial tip speed was nothing extra; the first time I shot it I thought it was terribly slow until I checked my point of aim and found that the bow was point-blank at sixty-five yards. When the string was released, the bow seemed to hesitate, and then the limbs gained speed at a terrific rate, and the arrow left the string with the feel of being not so much shot as catapulted. The trajectory was as flat as any bow I’d ever seen, and the left-right problem was not nearly so pronounced as it was in Lewis’ bows. Now, as I held it and looked at it, with its white Gordon-Glas inner and outer faces, it seemed exactly the bow I ought to have. I depended on it and believed in it, though the laminations were beginning to tire a little, letting a few fiber glass splinters half-rise from the edges of the upper limb. I had a new string, too. Unlike Lewis, I used a peep sight in the string, and there I had something really good. Martha and I had separated the Dacron strands, put snap fasteners between them, and Martha had wrapped the separated halves with orange thread. It was a very handsome bowstring, and I enjoyed using it. When the bow was at full draw, the peep sight came naturally back to the eye and the target came to rest within it, trembling with the effort of the body to keep still. The effect of framing the target was a big advantage, at least to me, for it isolated what was being shot at, and brought it into an oddly intimate relation with the archer. Nothing outside the orange frame existed, and what was inside it was there in a terribly vital and consequential way; it was as though the target were being created by the eye that watched it.
The arrows were not so good, though they would do. They were aluminum, for I shot aluminum target arrows, and I knew from experience that arrows of this spine and length — twenty-nine inches — would shoot accurately out of my bow. Th
ey were in a bow quiver taped to the bow, for I wanted to be able to carry everything in one hand, and I had no back quiver anyway. They looked deadly, with their two-bladed Howard Hill broadheads and long yellow helical fletches. I had tried to camouflage them with black and green house paint, making random slashes up and down the shafts, and I had sharpened the heads on one of my neighbors’ emery wheel. That was one thing I had done well, for they were nearly as sharp as new razor blades. They would shave hair, and I had also put on them, with a file, a slight burring roughness, very good for deep cutting, so said the archery magazines. I felt the edge of one of them with a thumb, and then drew back into the light of the hall to see if I had cut myself.
I hadn’t, and I went back to the bedroom, got twenty dollars from my wallet, then walked back out through the living room to the kitchen, where Martha was moving barefooted back and forth in front of the stove, her glasses winking, and stared out into the backyard. I had my tennis shoes in my hand and sat down on the floor to put them on, still looking out behind the house. The trees there seemed perfectly wild, free objects that only by accident occurred in a domestic setting, and for some reason or other I felt strangely moved. Dean came up behind me and pulled at the leg-back of my flying suit. I picked him up, still looking out at where I lived. Usually children are bored with that sort of thing, not understanding how someone can look where nothing is moving. This time, though, Dean was as quiet as I was, observing what existed. I kissed him and he held me close around the neck. He was not ordinarily an affectionate child, and his acting this way made me nervous. Martha also came up, her face warm from the upcast heat of the stove. I got up, and we stood like a family group.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she said.
“Not exactly. Lewis does. Somewhere up in the northeast part of the state, where he’s been fishing. If everything goes off OK, we ought to be back late Sunday.”
“Why wouldn’t it go off OK?”
“It will, but you can’t predict. Listen, if I thought there was anything dangerous about it, I wouldn’t go. Believe me, I wouldn’t. It’s just a chance to get out a little. And they say the mountains are really beautiful this time of year. I’ll get some pictures, come to think of it.”
I went back to the bedroom once again and picked up a Rolleiflex that belonged to the studio. I also got another bowstring and put it in the leg pocket of my outfit. When I came back, Lewis had driven in. I put one arm around Martha as around a buddy, and then changed and held her with both hands, locking them, while Dean went around behind her and tried to get them loose. I opened the door, and by that time Lewis was already out of the station wagon, coming and coming at us. His long wolfish face was flushed, and he was grinning. He grinned continually, but other people never got the grin directly, but always just sidelong parts of it, so that there was always an evasive, confident and secret craziness in his look; it was the face of a born enthusiast. He had on an Australian bush hat with a leather chin strap, and I could not help feeling that the occasion was a good one. I picked up the bow and the camera and went out with him to the car.
It was full of gear: two pup tents, ground sheets, two bows, a box of arrows, life preservers, a fly rod, groceries. He was a fanatic on preparedness — it was the carry-over from this part of him that had made me get the rope that was now looped at my side, when I knew I’d never use it, and the flying suit as well, because “nylon dries out quick” — and yet he’d take off up some logging road that hadn’t been used in fifteen years, bashing over logs and jumping gullies with no regard for himself, for the car or for whomever was with him. I hoped there wouldn’t be much of that, for standing there in the light-shift of early morning, I felt genuinely close to him. He had the appearance of always leaping to meet something, of going forward with joy and anticipation. I was tired of dragging; I felt a great deal lighter and more muscular when I was around Lewis.
Now he was hauling my gear out to the car and stowing it up. The rear window filled with equipment, almost all of it different shades of green. Before he put it in, Lewis turned my bow over in his hands.
“You’re losing glass,” he said, thumbing the edge of the upper limb.
“It’ll hold up, I think. It’s been like it is for a good long time.”
“You know,” Lewis said, “I like this bow. You stand holding it after you turn loose the string, thinking, what the hell. And then you look yonder and the arrow’s sticking in the target.”
“You get used to it,” I said. “It’s very relaxed.”
“Now you see it, and now,” Lewis broke off. “And now and now.”
“Let’s go ahead,” I said. “The sun’s coming up. We can eat on the road. Up north the water’s running.”
He spread his thin face crookedly. “You sound like me,” he said.
“How about that,” I said, and went back one last time and got a bag of clothes I’d thrown together: a sweat shirt and a couple of T-shirts and a pair of long Johns for sleeping.
We turned and waved good-bye to Martha and Dean, who were drawing together in the door. Martha’s glasses were orange in the rising sun. I got in and clashed the car door. The bows and the woods equipment were heavy behind us, and the canoe clamped us down. We were not — or at least I was not — what we were before. If we had had an accident and had to be identified by what we carried and wore, we might have been engineers or trappers or surveyors or the advance commandos of some invading force. I knew I had to live up to the equipment or the trip would be as sad a joke as everything else.
I thought of where I might be that night, and of the snakes that would be out in the unseasonable warmth, and of being among the twigs and insects of remote places in the woods, and I was tempted — I must say I was — to back out, get sick, make some sort of excuse. I listened for the phone to ring, thinking of what I might say to the paper boy or my insurance agent, or whoever it might be, so that I could get out of the car, make a believable excuse to Lewis and take off my costume. What I really wanted was to go back in the house for a little sleep before driving to work. Or maybe, since I had the day off, to go out and play nine holes of golf. But the gear was in the car, and Lewis looked near me with his longest smile, showing plainly that I was of the chosen, that he was getting me out of the rut for a while or, as he put it, “breaking the pattern.”
“Here we go,” he said, “out of the sleep of mild people, into the wild rippling water.”
With the canoe beaked over us, we slid down the driveway, turned left and picked up speed, then turned left again and cruised. I propped up a foot and waited for the last of the downhill, and when we leveled out we were at the shopping center. Drew’s Oldsmobile was parked about fifty yards this side of the four-lane. An old wooden canoe, something that looked like it belonged on a lake instead of a river, was webbed onto the top of the car with a lot of frayed rope; it had an army blanket under it to keep it from scratching the car.
Lewis gunned past the Olds and up the ramp onto the freeway. As we went past, I gave the others the Churchill V-sign, and Bobby replied with the classic single-finger. I faced ahead and stretched out on the seat and watched the rest of the light come.
It came, steadying on my right arm stronger and stronger, lifting up past the Texaco and Shell stations and the hamburger and beer drive-ins that were going to fly and shuttle on the highway for the next twenty miles. I had no particular relation to any of these; they were sealed from me and slid by on the other side of a current of cellophane. But I had been here, somewhere; my stomach stirred and I knew it. Moving up at us on the right was a long line of white concrete poles, a red-and-white drive-in whose galvanized tin roof made the sun flutter and hang and angle, and my half-shut eyes singled out one pole from the rest, magnifying it like a hawk’s.
I had leaned there, Christmas before last. I had leaned and leaned, until the leaning turned into a spinning round and round the pole, and then I had come to a slow stop and vomited, spilling half-solids first and then colo
r after color of powerful liquids, all from an office Christmas party. As I remembered, Thad had thought that driving me out for a last beer might help sober me up, but he was more horrified than any stranger when he saw what shape I was in. A lot of times when drunk I’ve felt things that seemed to share the drunkenness with me — friendly tables and sofas and even trees — but the pole in that drive-in was thing-cold, set in all that concrete, in the southern winter. It had no movement and I couldn’t give it mine, drunk as I was, spinning among the disgusted people in overcoats in their cars, their faces going blue and red with neon — that tired, never-dying color-changing — and something colder than the metal in my hand touched the very bottom of my stomach, the blood heaved, and I held to the pole and let it come. I could hear the cars near me starting, and I tried with every muscle to bring up my stomach. I might also have hit my head a couple of times against the pole, for there were some lumps on my forehead, over one eye. Now as we passed I swiveled to look at the post, half expecting to see something special about it: the ground around it bleached, maybe, or some other indication that I had taken a stand there. There was nothing of that sort, of course, but an inhuman coldness touched me, my stomach clenched, and we were past. The highway shrank to two lanes, and we were in the country.