Deliverance

by James Dickey

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

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

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

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

  My eyes kept hazing open and shut without seeing anything; things were in them but didn’t have the power to stay or be remembered. The world was a kind of colored no-dream with objects in it. Then, one of the times that my eyelids lifted without any command, I stared straight out with my brain asleep but my eyes wide. We were going out the far edge of a little town, swinging to the right through the twiggy grayish stuff that is always growing near southern highways. Up ahead, the road ran between two hills. Lined up dead center between them was a mountain, high, broad and blue, the color of concentrated woodsmoke. There were others farther back from it, falling back, receding left and right.

  “Funny thing,” Lewis said.

  I leaned around, hearing him. “What?”

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

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

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

  “Why should I?”

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

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

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

  “So, what does that prove?”

  “Maybe nothing, maybe a lot.”

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

  “No. You want me to guess?”

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

  “You don’t believe in madness, eh?”

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

  “So what you do…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What whole thing?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re ready, are you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What could you make?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “All right.”

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

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

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

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

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I was lying on a big rock, and the cold was coming up into me, bone by bone. I happened to look around, and there was a fellow standing there looking at me. ‘What you want, boy, down around here?’ he said. He was skinny, and had on overall pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I told him I was going down the river with another guy, and that I was waiting for Shad to show up. It wasn’t easy for him to believe that, but gradually we got to talking. Sure enough, he had a still near there. He and his boy were working it. He took me back about a quarter of a mile from the river. His boy was building a fire. We sat down and talked. ‘You say you got a man back up there hunting with a bow and arrow. Does he know what’s up there?’ he asked me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s rougher than a night in jail in south Georgia,’ he said, ‘and I know what I’m talking about. You have any idea whereabouts he is?’ I said no, ‘Just up that way someplace, the last time I saw him.’ ”

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

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

  “He did? Just went off?”

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

  “So?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “What if he hadn’t done it?”

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

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

  “That’s pretty callous, Ed.”

  “Sure it is,” I said. “So what?”

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

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

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

  “I may, but they won’t bother me.”

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

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

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