by James Dickey
“How about drivers?”
“He doesn’t have anybody here, but there are a couple of brothers who run a garage out the way we’re going to have to go, and they might be able to do it.”
We drove out of town. We were higher up than I thought. We went over a bridge, and through the whirling girders of the supports the river was flickering. It was green, peaceful, slow, and I thought, very narrow. It didn’t look deep or dangerous, just picturesque. It was hard to imagine that it flowed through woods anywhere, or that animals drank from it, or that it was going to be dammed up and become a lake.
North of town about half a mile we stopped. Lewis thought it would be a good idea for Drew and Bobby to buy supplies while Lewis and I made the deal about the cars. We could see the Griner Brothers’ Garage from where we were, and Lewis told Drew to meet us there in half an hour. We drove up to the garage and parked.
There was a frame house connected to the garage, and we went to it and knocked on the door. No one answered. A doghead came around a jamb inside. We could hear hammering from the galvanized tin garage, but when we went over there we saw that the front of it was locked with a big chain and padlock. We walked around to the back. Half of the double door was sagging open. We went in, Lewis first.
It was dark and iron-smelling, hot with the closed-in heat that brings the sweat out as though it had been waiting all over your body for the right signal. Anvils stood around or lay on their sides, and chains hung down, covered with coarse, deep grease. The air was full of hooks; there were sharp points everywhere — tools and nails and ripped-open rusty tin cans. Batteries stood on benches and on the floor, luminous and green, and through everything, out of the high roof, mostly, came this clanging hammering, meant to deafen and even blind. It was odd to be there, not yet seen, paining with the metal harshness in the half-dark.
We went toward the hammering, which seemed to be done also on the outside of the shed, on the roof and tin sides and us at the same time, who got it all. We were close enough to the source of the sound to flinch each time it came, when it stopped. The air around our heads closed in. By this time we could see a few more things, though it was actually darker there than where the batteries and anvils were. The hub of what looked like a truck wheel was on a table, and a big figure was bending over it. We were still invisible. I was about to say something when the figure straightened and turned.
Not saying anything and holding one hand in the other, the man stepped forward between us and went toward the slant light that stood for the door. I instinctively let him go by, though for a second I thought I saw Lewis move toward his path, and my heart-blood jumped in place, not able to understand what was happening or about to happen. Lewis’ move toward blocking the man, if it was a move, appeared as instinctive on his part as my own move away, but I can’t to this day remember if it really happened; it might have been just a trick of perspective or darkness. We followed the man out.
When we broke into the sun in the half-grass and gray dirt of the yard, he was standing spread-legged looking at his hand, which was cut in the thin webbing between the left thumb and forefinger. He was a huge creature, twenty pounds heavier than Lewis, dressed in overall pants and an old-fashioned sleeveless undershirt, with a train engineer’s cap on and cut-down army boots. He held his hand low in the sun, right at his waist, turning it one way and then another. He held it like he was having to keep it down by all the strength in his other hand and the rest of his body.
There is no very good way to start a conversation under conditions like that; all I wanted to do was disappear, so as not to have to explain what I was doing there, but Lewis walked up to the man and asked, very civilly for him, if he could help.
“No,” the big man said, looking squarely at me instead of Lewis.
“It ain’t as bad as I thought.”
He pulled a gray handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it around his hand, jerking the knot tight with his teeth.
Lewis waited until the second half of the knot was tied and said, “I was wondering if you and somebody else, maybe your brother, would drive two cars down to Aintry for us for twenty dollars. Or if you wanted to get a third fellow to drive another car so you’d have a way to get back to Oree, we’d give all three of you ten dollars apiece.”
“Drive them down there for what?”
“We want to take a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee, and we’d like for our cars to be in Aintry when we get there day after tomorrow.”
“A canoe trip?” he said, looking back and forth between us.
“That’s right,” Lewis said, narrowing his eyes a little. “A canoe trip.”
“You ever been down in there?”
“No,” Lewis said. “Have you?”
Griner set his heavy-hanging face on Lewis; they battled in midair; the sound of crickets in the grass around the garage clashed like shields and armor plate. I could see the man was insulted; Lewis himself had told me that the worst thing you can do is to throw something back at these mountain people.
“No,” Griner answered slowly. “I ain’t never been down in there much. There ain’t nothing to go down there for. Fishing’s no good.”
“How about hunting?”
“Never been. But I don’t believe I’d go there if I was you. What’s the use of it?”
“Because it’s there,” Lewis said, for my benefit.
“It’s there, all right,” Griner said. “If you git in there and can’t get out, you’re goin’ to wish it wudn’t.”
My chest felt hollow, and my heart was ringing like iron. I wanted to back out; just go back to town and forget it. I hated what we were doing.
“Listen, Lewis,” I said, “to hell with it. Let’s go back and play golf.”
He didn’t pay any attention. “Well, can you do it?” he asked Griner.
“How much did you say?”
“Twenty dollars for two men, thirty for three.”
“Fifty,” Griner said.
“Fifty, my ass,” Lewis said.
Good God, I thought, why is he like this? I was scared to death, and I resented insanely Lewis’ getting me into such a situation. Well, you didn’t have to come, I told myself. But never again. Never.
“How about forty?” Griner said.
Lewis kicked the ground and turned to me. “Are you good for ten?”
I took out the money and gave it to him.
“Twenty now,” Lewis said to Griner. “We’ll send the rest to you. If we’re good for this, we’re good for the rest. Take it or leave it.”
“Good enough,” Griner said, but it was hard not to believe he was saying something mean. He took the bills and looked at them and put them in his pocket. He went across the yard toward the house, and we went around front, back to the car.
“What do you think?” I asked Lew. “You reckon we’ll ever see these cars? This is a rough son of a bitch. Why wouldn’t he and his brother just go off and sell them?”
“Because we know who he is,” Lewis said matter-of-factly. “And he doesn’t come by twenty dollars so easy as all that. Sure, the cars’ll be right there when we get there. Don’t worry about it.”
After a few minutes Griner came out of the house with his even bigger brother alongside. They were like two pro football linemen in their first season after retirement when they are beginning to soften up, working as night watchmen. We didn’t try to introduce ourselves; the thought of asking them to shake hands with us never occurred to me until years later. I still wonder what would have happened if we had tried.
Drew’s car came into sight from behind us. We told them what the arrangements were. The brothers and another man — who just simply materialized — got into an old Ford pickup with the paint seared off in patches clear down to the naked metal, and followed us. It seemed to me that we should have been following them, but from the filling station Lewis had the information he wanted; it was not much, but it was enough for him. He knew where the river was, approximately, he knew
that the land flattened to the north and that there had been logging in the woods near the river. That all this might possibly be misinformation did not make the slightest difference to him. He was going there.
After a while he turned off on a dirt road. We ran along on this for a time, covering the truck behind us with ocher dust swirling up in a thick cloud from Lewis’ too-fast driving. We ran past some farms and out over the crest of an open field on a section of road as straight as a plow furrow through two stands of rotten corn on either side, and then into some hot pinewoods that dropped off and kept dropping off. The road got worse. It began to curve back in the general direction of the highway, and Lewis craned his head out the window, trying to make the road bend back toward where he believed the river was. When he turned I was not expecting it, and thought we had hit something. We swayed off the road and down, everything going with us rattling. Lewis rose a little higher in the seat. Bushes whacked up under the car. I turned to look back. The other cars weren’t behind us, as far as I could tell. I thought perhaps Lew’s speed had lost them at the turnoff, but if they’d turned off with us they’d surely be in sight by now, and they weren’t.
The road slung in a tight half-circle and gave out. In front of us were a few blackened boards on the ground and a rock chimney sinking into the weeds. A lizard ran over the biggest stone, and stopped with his head up. A dead sawhorse stood, off by itself in what looked like a sandpit.
“Well,” Lewis said, “we screwed up.”
“Maybe we’d better let them show us where the river is.”
“We’ll see.”
He backed into the weeds and manhandled the car around until we could get back on the track we had come down. When we reached the other road, the truck was waiting for us, with Drew’s car behind it. I had wondered why Drew hadn’t followed us, but it was like him to drop behind the truck; he didn’t know anything about where he was going, and he was willing to listen to somebody who did.
The first Griner leaned out of the cab. “Where you goin’, city boy?”
Lewis flushed. “Get on with it,” he said.
“Naw, naw,” Griner said. “Go on ahead. You’ll find it. Ain’t nothin’ but the biggest river in the state.”
Lewis gunned ahead again. We swung with the road to the right, then back to the left and down. Suddenly it hit me that there were some stumps among the trees going by.
“Maybe this is where they were logging,” I said.
Lewis nodded. “This land has been sawmilled, all right,” he said. “I figure we’re getting there.”
The road kept dropping and failing. Finally it was only the ghost of a road; it was hard to believe that there had ever been any vehicles on it; it was almost like the rest of the woods. We eased on down. Once we had to crawl over a washout with the wheels barely balanced on each side. It would have been tough going in a jeep, even.
All at once the road fell away and slid down a kind of bank. I didn’t see how it would be possible to get back up.
“Hold on,” Lewis said, and tipped the car over forward. Rhododendron and laurel bushes closed in on us with a soft limber rush. A branch of something jumped in the window and stayed, lying across my chest.
We had stopped, and I sat with the pressure of the woods against me; when I looked down I saw that one leaf was shaking with my heart.
Lewis held up a finger next to his ear. “Listen,” he said.
I listened, not pushing away the limb. At first I didn’t hear anything. Yet the silence sounded like something was coming up under it, something steady and even and unendable. Lewis started the engine, and I helped the branch off me and out the window as we crawled down, rustling with many leaves. A high bank rose up, and the road went straight to it and quit. There was a gully in front of the bank. I got out, looking at the ground for snakes. Why on God’s earth am I here? I thought. But when I turned back to the car to see what Lewis was doing, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear window. I was light green, a tall forest man, an explorer, guerrilla, hunter. I liked the idea and the image, I must say. Even if this was just a game, a charade, I had let myself in for it, and I was here in the woods, where such people as I had got myself up as were supposed to be. Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.
Lewis went forward from me and jumped the gully. He climbed the bank and then stood for a moment the tallest man in the woods, his hands on his hips, looking down the other side. I started up, too; I wanted to see what he was seeing. He went down the other side as I came up, feeling dirt on my hands for the first time in years. At the top there was nothing to see but more woods, and Lewis in his camouflage and Australian hat going through them. I went down in two or three soft, collapsing jumps that filled my tennis shoes with leaf mold. There was water at the bottom. Trees with thin leaves, like willows — maybe willows — were growing thickly there; I couldn’t see beyond the puddle at the bottom, but it was stirring faintly, not stagnant. And then I realized that there was plenty of sound going on; we had come into it almost imperceptibly, and now it seemed all around us.
Lewis crow-hopped over the water and I followed, holding on to saplings when I could. He stopped and I came up beside him. He pulled an armload of arrowy leaves out of the way. I edged up more, looking out — or in — through the ragged, ashen window he made.
The river opened and was there. It was gray-green, very clear and yet with a certain milkiness, too; it looked as though it would turn white and foam at rocks more easily than other water. It was about forty yards wide, and shallow, about two and a half or three feet deep. The bed was full of clean brown pebbles. We couldn’t see very far upstream or down because of our position and because of the willows, but just watched the part in front of us going by and by carrying nothing, not even a twig, as it lay in the branches and leaves in Lewis’ arms. He let the limbs fall; they swept in gracefully and closed the river off again.
“There she is,” Lewis said, still looking straight ahead.
“Pretty,” I said. “Pretty indeed.”
It took us a good long time to get the canoes off the cars and over the gully and the bank. Lew and Bobby pulled the canoes up the bank by the nose, hauling on the bow ropes, and Drew and I shoved from behind. Finally we slid them out through the willows. We put the wooden canoe in first. Lewis got down in the water, up to his knees in the bank mud, and supervised the loading. Both canoes had floorboards, though they were held in only by gravity and by the seats. We put in the perishables first and then the waterproof tents over everything, lashing them to the floorboard slats. Drew slid down into the water, and finally so did I. Then Lewis left.
“How about your guitar?” Bobby hollered from the top of the bank.
“Bring it,” Drew said, and then to me, “I don’t mind losing that old Martin in the river, but I’ll be goddamned if I want those characters to run off with it.”
“I hope we don’t ruin it, by spilling our foolish asses in this river,” I said.
“I don’t know about you,” Drew said, as mock-country as he could talk, “but I ain’t planning to spill in this-here river. I’m a-goin’ with you, and not Mr. Lewis Medlock. I done seen how he drove these roads he don’t know nothin’ about.”
“OK,” I said. “Fine. But you probably ought to know that he can handle a canoe pretty well, and I can’t. He’s strong as the devil, too, and he’s in shape. I’m not.”
“I’ll take my chances,” he said. “So will Miss Martin.”
Lewis and Bobby kept coming through the willows, carrying stuff, and Drew and I kept cramming it under the lashed-down tents, any way we could. Lewis should have stayed down here in the water with us, I thought. He could surely have done a better job of loading than we were doing. We floundered around in the slime, our feet deep in the mud.
&nbs
p; Finally Bobby came through the leaves for the last time. “We’re ready,” he said.
“Everything all set about the cars?”
“Far as I can tell,” he said. “Lewis is dealing with those guys now. I’m sure glad we’re getting rid of them.”
Far off we heard a car start. It occurred to me that I had no idea at all of who the third driver in the truck was; I had not seen his face, or not noticed it.
“Personally,” Bobby said, “I damn well doubt whether they can get the cars back up the road we came down.”
“That’s a nice thought,” Drew said. “What if they can’t?”
“We’ll be gone,” I said. “Then it’s their problem.”
“Damned if it’s their problem,” Bobby said. “What’re we going to do if we come off this river, and there’re no cars, down at what’s-its-name?”
Lewis spoke through the branches. “They’ll be there,” he said. “Don’t worry about a thing.”
We now had our life jackets on and I held the wooden canoe steady for Bobby to get in. He swayed out over the river and got into the bow seat. Lewis followed. The weight sank the canoe far enough into the water to make it as stable as it ever could be.
“OK,” Lew said. “Turn loose.”
I did; they floated free. I stood watching over my shoulder. My feet were pointed toward the bank; I was mired down so far that I began to wonder how I was going to get out. I stayed rooted, holding on to the aluminum canoe while Drew got into the front and picked up the paddle.
“This how you hold this thing?” he asked me.
“I reckon,” I said. “You hold it… like you hold it.”
I got one foot out of the mud by driving the other one about twice as far down, and then grabbed a long branch and pulled myself up as best I could with the river holding on to me hard by the left leg.
“It’s got me,” I said.
“What’s got you?”
“It.”
I scrambled and pulled on the branch until I was out. I kicked a foothold into the bank and stepped wide from it into the stern of Lewis’ canoe and was in, everything rocking and wallowing. We pushed out with the paddles from the bank.