Deliverance

by James Dickey

  Either upstream or down, there was nobody in the river but me. I kept watching the last of the falls, for I had an idea that I might have passed the others, somewhere along. There had probably been several places where the water split and came down through the rocks in different ways; all three of them might be back there somewhere, dead or alive.

  As I thought that, Bobby tumbled out of the rapids, rolling over and over on the slick rocks, and then flopped belly-down into the calm. I pointed to the bank and he began feebly to work toward it. So did I.

  “Where is Lewis?” I yelled.

  He shook his head, and I stopped pulling on the water and turned to wait in midstream.

  After a minute or two Lewis came, doubled-up and broken-looking, one hand still holding his paddle and the other on his face, clasping something intolerable. I breaststroked to him and lay beside him in the cold coiling water under the falls. He was writhing and twisting uselessly, caught by something that didn’t have hold of me, something that seemed not present.

  “Lewis,” I said.

  “My leg’s broke,” he gasped. “It feels like it broke off.”

  The water where we were did not change. “Hold on to me,” I said.

  He moved his free hand through the river and fixed the fingers into the collar of my slick nylon outfit, and I moved gradually crossways on the water toward the big boulders under the cliff. The dark came on us faster and faster as I hauled on the crossgrain of the current with Lewis’ choking weight dragging at my throat.

  From where we were the cliff looked something like a gigantic drive-in movie screen waiting for an epic film to begin. I listened for interim music, glancing now and again up the pale curved stone for Victor Mature’s stupendous image, wondering where it would appear, or if the whole thing were not now already playing, and I hadn’t yet managed to put it together.

  As we neared the wall, I saw that there were a few random rocks and a tiny sand beach where we were going to come out; where Bobby was, another rock. I motioned to him, and he unfolded and came to the edge of the water, his hands embarrassing.

  He gave me one of them, and I dragged us out. Lewis hopped up onto a huge placid stone, working hard, and then failed and crumpled again. The rock, still warm with the last of the sun that had crossed the river on its way down, held him easily, and I turned him on his back with his hand still over his face.

  “Drew was shot,” Lewis said with no lips. “I saw it. He’s dead.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, but I was afraid that’s what it was. “Something happened to him. But I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Let’s take his pants down,” I said to Bobby.

  He looked at me.

  “Goddamn phraseology,” I said. “We’re in another bag, now, baby. Get his pants off him and see if you can tell how bad he’s hurt. I’ve got to try to get that goddamned canoe, or we’ll stay here.”

  I turned back to the river. I waded in, feeling the possibility of a rifle shot die with the very last light, moving back into the current like an out-of-shape animal, taking on the familiar weight and lack-of-weight of water. Very clearheaded, I sank down.

  The depth came into me, increasing — no one can tell me different — with the darkness. The aluminum canoe floated palely, bulging half out of the total dark, making slowly for the next rapids, but idly, and unnaturally slowed and stogged with calm water. Nearly there, I ran into a thing of wood that turned out to be a broken paddle. I took it on.

  I swam slow-motion around the canoe, listening for the rifle shot I would never hear if it killed me; that I had not heard when it killed Drew, if it did. Nothing from that high up could see me, and I knew it, though it might see the canoe. Even that was doubtful, though, and the conviction enlarged on me that I could circle the canoe all night, if I chose, in the open.

  The calm was deep; there was no place to stand to dump the water out. I hung to the upside-down gunwale, tipping it this way and that, trying to slip the river out of the factory metal. Finally it rolled luckily, and the stream that had been in it began to flow again; the hull lightened and climbed out of the water, and was mostly on top of it. I pushed on the sharp stern, keeping it going with excruciating frog legs. The current went around me, heading into the darkness downstream. I could see a little white foaming, but it was peacefully beyond, another problem for another time. I turned to the cliff and called softly out to Bobby, and he answered.

  I looked up and could barely make out his face. The canoe went in to him, guided by the same kind of shove I gave Dean when he was first learning to walk. He waded and drew it up onto the sand by the bow rope, and we beached it under the overhang.

  I moved onto land, not saying anything.

  “For God’s sake,” Bobby said, “don’t be so damned quiet. I’m flipping already.”

  Though my mouth was open, I closed it against the blackness and moved to Lewis, who was now down off the rock and lying in the sand. His bare legs were luminous, and the right leg of his drawers was lifted up to the groin. I could tell by its outline that his thigh was broken; I reached down and felt of it very softly. Against the back of my hand his penis stirred with pain. His hair gritted in sand, turning from one side to the other.

  It was not a compound fracture; I couldn’t feel any of the bone splinters I had been taught to look for in innumerable compulsory first-aid courses, but there was a great profound human swelling under my hand. It felt like a thing that was trying to open, to split, to let something out.

  “Hold on, Lew,” I said. “We’re all right now.”

  It was all-dark. The river-sound enveloped us as it never could have in light. I sat down beside Lewis and motioned to Bobby. He crouched down as well.

  “Where is Drew?” Bobby asked.

  “Lewis says he’s dead,” I said. “Probably he is. He may have been shot. But I can’t really say. I was looking right at him, but I can’t say.”

  Lewis’ hand was pulling at me from underneath. I bent down near his face. He tried to say something, but couldn’t. Then he said, “It’s you. It’s got to be you.”

  “Sure it’s me,” I said. “I’m right here. Nothing can touch us.

  “No. That’s not…” The river had the rest of what he said, but Bobby picked it up.

  “What are we going to do?” he made the dark say; night had taken his red face.

  “I think,” I said, “that we’ll never get out of this gorge alive.”

  Did I say that? I thought. Yes, a dream-man said, you did. You did say it, and you believe it.

  “I think he means to pick the rest of us off tomorrow,” I said out loud, still stranger than anything I had ever imagined. When do the movies start, Lord?

  “What… ?”

  “That’s what I’d do. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t…”

  “If Lewis is right, and I think he is, that toothless bastard drew down on us while we were lining up to go through the rapids, and before we were going too fast. He killed the first man in the first boat. Next would have been me. Then you.”

  “In other words, it’s lucky we spilled.”

  “Right. Lucky. Very lucky.”

  It was an odd word to use, where we were. It was a good thing that we couldn’t see faces. Mine felt calm and narrow-eyed, but it might not have been. There was something to act out.

  “What are we going to do?” Bobby said again.

  “The question is, what is he going to do?”

  Nothing came back. I went on.

  “What can he lose now? He’s got exactly the same thing going for him that we had going for us when we buried his buddy back in the woods. There won’t be any witnesses. There’s no motive to trace him by. As far as anybody else knows, he’s never seen us and we’ve never seen him. If all four of us wind up in the river, that’ll just even things out. Who in the hell cares? What kind of search party could get up into these rapids? A helicopter’s not going to do any good, even if you could see into the riv
er from one, which you can’t. You think anybody’s going to fly a helicopter down into this gorge, just on the chance that he might see something? Not a chance in the world. There might be an investigation, but you can bet nothing will come of it. This is a wild goddamned river, as you might know. What is going to happen to us, if he kills us, is that we are going to become a legend. You bet, baby: one of those unsolved things.”

  “You think he’s up there? Do you really?”

  “I’m thinking we better believe he’s up there.”

  “But then what?”

  “We’re caught in this gorge. He can’t come down here, but the only way out of this place for us is down the river. We can’t run out of here at night, and when we move in the morning he’ll be up there somewhere.”

  “Jesus Christ Almighty.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You might say that. As Lewis might say, ‘Come on, Jesus boy, walk on down to us over that white water. But if you don’t, we’ve got to do whatever there is to do.’ ”

  “But listen, Ed,” he said, and the pathetic human tone against the river-sound made me cringe, “you got to be sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure you’re right. What if you’re wrong? I mean, we may not really be in any danger, at all, from anybody up… up there.” He gestured, but it was lost.

  “You want to take a chance?”

  “Well, no. Not if I don’t have to. But what… ?”

  “What what?”

  “What can we do?”

  “We can do three things,” I said, and some other person began to tell me what they were. “We can just sit here and sweat and call for our mamas. We can appeal to the elements. Maybe we can put Lewis back up on the rock and do a rain dance around him, to cut down the visibility. But if we got rain, we couldn’t get out through it, and Lewis would probably die of exposure. Look up yonder.”

  I liked hearing the sound of my voice in the mountain speech, especially in the dark; it sounded like somebody who knew where he was and knew what he was doing. I thought of Drew and the albino boy picking and singing in the filling station.

  There was a pause while we looked up between the wings of cliff and saw that the stars were beginning there, and no clouds at all.

  “And then what?” Bobby said.

  “Or somebody can try to go up there and wait for him on top.”

  “What you mean is…”

  “What I mean is like they say in the movies, especially on Saturday afternoon. It’s either him or us. We’ve killed a man. So has he. Whoever gets out depends on who kills who. It’s just that simple.”

  “Well,” he said, “all right. I don’t want to die.”

  “If you don’t, help me figure. We’ve got to figure like he’s figuring, up there. Everything depends on that.”

  “I don’t have any idea what he’s figuring.”

  “We can start out with the assumption that he’s going to kill us.”

  “I got that far.”

  “The next thing is when. He can’t do anything until it gets light. So that means we’ve got till morning to do whatever we’re going to do.”

  “I still don’t know what that is.”

  “Just let me go on a minute. My feeling is this. You can’t hear a gunshot that far off, with all this goddamned noise down here. After he shot Drew, he might have shot at us some more, and we’d never have known it unless another one of us was hit. I don’t have any idea how well he can see from where he is. But I think it’s reasonable to suppose that he saw well enough to know that he hit Drew, and that the canoes turned over. He might believe that the rest of us drowned, but I don’t believe he’d want to take a chance that we did. That’s awful rough water, but the fact that you and Lewis and I got out of it proves that it can be done, and I’m thinking he probably knows it. Again, maybe the reason he didn’t nail the rest of us was that by the time we got down here where we are now, we’d been carried a good ways past him, and also it was too dark. That’s our good luck; it means we’ve got at least a couple of advantages, if we can figure how to work them.”

  “Advantages? Some advantages. We’ve got a hurt man. We’ve got a waterlogged canoe with the bottom stove in. We’ve got two guys who don’t know the first thing about the woods, who don’t even know where in the hell they are. He’s got a rifle, and he’s up above us. He knows where we are and can’t help being, and we don’t have the slightest notion of where he is, or even who he is. We haven’t got a goddamned chance, if you and Lewis are right. If he’s up there and wants to kill us, he can kill us.”

  “Well now, it hasn’t happened yet. And we’ve got one big card.”

  “What?”

  “He thinks we can’t get at him. And if we can, we can kill him.”

  “How?”

  “With either a knife or a bow. Or with bare hands, if we have to.”

  “We?”

  “No. One of us.”

  “I can’t even shoot a bow,” he said. He was saved for a little while.

  “That narrows it down, sure enough,” I said. “You see what I mean about solving our problems? If you just do a little figuring.”

  It was a decision, and I could feel it set us apart. Even in the dark the separation was obvious.

  “Ed, level with me. Do you really think you can get up there in the dark?”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t. But we haven’t got any other choice.”

  “I still think that maybe he’s just gone away. Suppose he has?”

  “Suppose he hasn’t?” I said. “Do you want to take the chance? Look, if I fall off this fucking cliff, it’s not going to hurt you any. If I get shot, it’s not going to be you getting shot. You’ve got two chances to live. If he’s gone away, or if for some reason or other he doesn’t shoot, or if he misses enough times for the canoe to get away downriver, you’ll live. Or if I get up there and kill him, you’ll live. So don’t worry about it. Let me worry.”

  “Ed…”

  “Shut up and let me think some more.”

  I looked up at the gorge side but I couldn’t tell much about it, except that it was awfully high. But the lower part of it, at least, wasn’t quite as steep as I had thought at first. Rather than being absolutely vertical, it was more of a very steep slant, and I believed I could get up it at least part of the way, when the moon came up enough for me to see a little better.

  “Come here, Bobby. And listen to everything I tell you. I’m going to make you go back over it before I leave, because the whole thing has got to be done right, and done right the first time. Here’s what I want you to do.”

  “All right. I’m listening.”

  “Keep Lewis as warm and comfortable as you can. When it gets first light — and I mean just barely light: light enough for you to see where you’re going — get Lewis into the canoe and move out. The whole business is going to have to be decided right there.”

  I was the one. I walked up and down a little on the sandbar, for that should have been my privilege. Then for some reason I stepped into the edge of the river. In a way, I guess, I wanted to get a renewed feel of all the elements present, and also to look as far up the cliff as I could. I stood with the cold water flowing around my calves and my head back, watching the cliff slant up into the darkness. More stars had come out around the top of the gorge, a kind of river of them. I strung the bow.

  I ran my right hand over the limbs, feeling for broken pieces and splinters of fiber glass. Part of the upper limb seemed a little rougher than it should have, but it had been that way before. I took out the arrows I had left. I had started with four but had wasted two on the deer. One of the remaining ones was fairly straight; I spun it through my fingers as Lewis had taught me to do, feeling for the passing tick and jump a crooked aluminum arrow has when it spins. It may have been a little bent up in the crest, just under the feathers, but it was shootable, and at short range it ought to be accurate. The other arrow was badly bent, and I straightened it as well as I could wi
th my hands, but there was not much I could do in the dark. Holding it at eye level and pointing it toward the best of the light places in the sky, I could not see even well enough to tell exactly where and how badly it was bent. But the broadhead was all right.

  I walked back to Bobby and leant the bow against the spur of stone that overhung the canoe. Bobby stepped over to me as I paid out and recoiled the thin rope that had been at my waist the whole time. I had made a lucky buy — considering that a cliff I had not counted on being involved was involved, and a rope was a good thing to have in such a situation — and I had a brief moment of believing that the luck would run through the other things that were coming. I ran the rope over and over my left thumb and elbow until I had a tight ring. I tied the ends and passed the belt that held the big knife through the coil.

  “Don’t go to sleep,” I said to Bobby.

  “Not likely,” he said. “O God.”

  “Now listen. If you go at first light, you’ll make a damned hard target from the top of the gorge. You should be safe as long as you’re running these little rapids along here. If I’m going to get on top of the cliff, I’ll be there by then, and the odds will be evened out a little, if our man the Human Fly really does find a way to climb up there. I’ll do everything I can to see that he doesn’t crack down on you. From the little I was able to tell about the cliff before it got dark, it’s rough as hell up there, and if he misses you at one place — or if you can slip by him without his seeing you — he won’t be able to keep up with you; all you have to do is get by him and get around one turn and you’re home free.”

  “Ed, will you tell me one thing? Have you ever thought there might be more than one?”

  “Yes, I’ve thought of it. I must say I have.”

  “What if there is?”

  “Then we’re likely to die, early tomorrow morning.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I don’t believe, though, that there’s more than one man. I’ll tell you why. It’s not a good idea to involve somebody else in a murder if you don’t have to. That’s one thing. The other is that I don’t think there’s been time for him to go and get anybody else. He’s got all the advantages; he doesn’t need anybody to help him.”