Deliverance

by James Dickey

  It was luxury to know that I knew what to hold on to, and not have to feel around for it, for something that might not be there, something that had never been there or ever would be there. But my hands and arms were almost strengthless; the only way I knew I was still holding, besides the pain in my hands, was that I didn’t fall. I talked to my hands continually, and to every stone I came to, for they were all standing out in my face with beautiful clarity, things never looked at — never witnessed or beheld — so closely before. I had to stop in a couple of places, near death and looking deeply at sand grains, and hung out over the river in its high, flowing space, concentrating on seizing it in the mind so deeply that it would always be with me as it was just then: always, night and day and maybe after death too. I braced and panted with the cliff, inbreathing the rock-dust that my outbreathing had stirred up.

  The last place I rested was a kind of saw-toothed ledge about six inches wide where I was on it; holding to the rope with both hands, I could almost sit comfortably there. I could see the corpse below me turning with my grip on the rope, terribly heavy-looking and full of dead weight, his head on his chest in midair, pensive and reposeful.

  I could also see Bobby, though neither of us had tried to speak yet. He had the canoe in an eddying pocket of water against the bluff face, and was just holding it there gently with a few slight pressures on the river. I started down again, anxious to get rid of my weight. The corpse appeared to be about thirty-five feet above the shore-rocks, and I had no clear idea of what to do when the rope gave out. Both of us would still have a good way to go. I supposed I would have to cut him loose and then leap for the river, myself, but I reckoned I would find out about that when I got down to him.

  I was almost on top of the corpse, holding on and bracing out from the cliff with a foot and a knee, trying to figure out a way to get around him or clear of him without having to clamber all over him like Harold Lloyd in an old movie.

  The rope broke, and we were gone. Suddenly there was no weight, and nothing to plan for. The plan of the night before saved me though; I got a good kick against the cliff with the foot I had braced there and a knee-shove with the other leg, and this moved me out a few feet from the wall. The rocks were coming, and so was I. When my head came around I could see I was clear, and that was all that mattered, at all.

  I had no further control, though. There was an instant of sunny nothing, and of drifting and turning. Where was the river? There was green and blue, in some kind of essential relation, and then the river went into my right ear like an ice pick. I yelled, a tremendous, walled-in yell, and then I felt the current thread through me, first through my head from one ear and out the other and then complicatedly through my body, up my rectum and out my mouth and also in at the side where I was hurt.

  I realized that I was in something I knew, in the slow unhurried pull of current. Then the water took to the wound, and nearly took it from me. It had been so many years since I had been really hurt that the feeling was almost luxurious, though I knew when I tried to climb the water to the surface that I had been weakened more than I had thought. Unconsciousness went through me. I was in a room of varying shades of green beautifully graduated from light to dark, and I went toward the palest color, though it seemed that this was to one side of me rather than above. An instant before I broke water I saw the sun, liquid and transformed, and then it exploded in my face.

  I was hurt in a couple of new ways, especially in the hands, but after trying my arms and legs against the water I knew I was not hurt so badly that I could not function. I lay forward in the current, thinking vaguely of how to swim, and the thought made me move, for I was doing it.

  I came out at the side of the canoe, and pulled up as carefully as I could. My face was no more than eight inches from Lewis’. His eyes were closed, and he looked both resting and dead, but his head turned. His eyes opened. He gave me a long serious glance, closed his eyes again tiredly and settled farther down on his back. His part of the canoe, particularly around his head, was full of vomit, the chunks of steak and all the stuff we had brought from the city. I worked around the canoe to land, and faced Bobby.

  “Is this what you call first light?”

  “Listen,” he said, “Lewis has been having a bad time. Once I thought he died. He’s awful bad hurt.”

  “You would have died, yourself. He was waiting for you up there. You didn’t do what I told you, and you would have died. He could have shot you fifty times, because you did what you did, and because you didn’t do what you should’ve done. You better look up here at this light, baby. You better look at your own hands and feet, because you liked not to have had them anymore.”

  “Listen,” he said again. “Please listen. I couldn’t get him in the canoe at all until I had enough light to see what I was doing. He blacked out two or three times before I ever got him in. Ill tell you, I wouldn’t want to spend another night like that. I would’ve rather been trying to climb up, with you.”

  “Fine. Next time, maybe.”

  “How did you do it? I never thought you could do it; I never thought I’d see you again. If it’d been me I don’t know but what I’d’ve just taken off, if I’d’a been able to get to the top.”

  “I thought about that,” I said. “But I didn’t.”

  “You did exactly what you said you’d do,” he said. “But it’s not possible. I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I really can’t, Ed. This is not happening to us.”

  “Well, we’ve got to make it unhappen. Question is, how?”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Do you really think we can? I mean, really?”

  “I do really,” I said. “With all this bad luck, luck is running with us.”

  “And you killed him? You killed him?”

  “I killed him, and I’d kill him again, only better.”

  “Did you ambush him?”

  “In a way. I set the problem up the way it seemed best to do. And he came right to me.”

  We walked over to the shattered body on the rocks, with two or three parts of the denture plate beside the head; he had hit the rocks right on his face. We turned him over; the face was unbelievable; more unbelievable than anything else. I could hear Bobby catch his breath. Then I heard the breath speak.

  “It looks like you shot him from the front. How… ?”

  “I did,” I said. “I shot straight into him. I was in a tree.”

  “A tree?”

  “Yes, there are a lot of them around when you’re in the woods, you know. Really quite a lot.”

  “But… ?”

  “He didn’t see me until he was hit, and maybe not even then. I think he was just getting on to where I was when the arrow hit him. He shot a good many times. Did you hear anything?”

  “Maybe once; I’m not sure. Probably not; it was just that I was listening so hard. But, no, I didn’t hear anything.”

  “There he is,” I said. “Another one.”

  He looked at my side. “But he shot you, didn’t he?”

  His voice was full of the best stuff I had ever heard in it. “Let me look,” he said.

  I unzipped, and the flying suit fell away. My shorts were soaked and dried with blood, with more coming.

  “Boy,” he said. “Something really gored you.”

  “I fell out of the tree onto the other arrow,” I said. “I wonder if it would’ve made any difference if I hadn’t sharpened it so well before we left home? And I’m sure glad I don’t use four-bladed heads.”

  “I tell you,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. That arrowhead is meant to open you up.”

  “That’s just what it’s meant for. And it opened me up. But I think it’s a clean wound, and there ain’t many of them. I think the river got most of the paint out of me.”

  I looked down at my hurt. The climb down and the fall had torn it all the way open, from the half healing and clotting that it had been trying to do in the woods. I was coming out of me, but not as fast as I might
have been. I took off my shorts and stood there bleeding and naked, and took the bloody sleeve I had already cut off and used it to hold the shorts into the wound. Then I put what was left of the suit back on. “Let’s finish up and get going,” I said.

  We were standing with the corpse, and it was ready. The rope was piled on and off the body, and the frayed part that had broken was giving off glassy hairs where the thing had happened, high up above.

  “Are you sure… ?” Bobby asked.

  I faced into him, into his open mouth and bloodshot eyes. “No,” I said. “I would say it was, but I’m not that sure. Maybe if we could get him to hold a gun on you, you could tell me. Or maybe if we could give him back his face, we could tell that way. But I don’t know. The only thing I know is that we’re here, like we are right now. Let’s get him in the river. Let’s get him in good.”

  We went up and down the bank looking for rocks the right size, going back and forth across each other, dreaming. With both hands I took up part of the river and tried to wash the main rock where his face had smashed and there was a lot of blood. On both knees I washed it, and the blood came. It was on the sand and going into the sand, and there was no more of it. I went back to rock-hunting with Bobby, and we piled up five or six mean-looking stones next to the body. I cut the rope into sections and tied the rocks onto the man with the biggest one around his neck, squeezing the arrow-wound together and almost out of sight.

  “Not here,” I said. “Out in the middle of the river, where it’s hardest to get to.”

  We struggled with him and with each other, and he and the rocks made it, finally, into the canoe with Lewis, who shifted slightly as if to make room for somebody who belonged there, pretty much as a person would shift to let a familiar body get back in bed with him in the middle of the night.

  The canoe moved very badly, with all the weight. We left the bank and for a moment were just going downstream, too tired to do anything else. The sound of rapids was somewhere in front of us, carrying terror once more, amongst so much other terror. Bobby steadied the canoe while I got to my knees among the blood, vomit and rocks and lifted two of the rocks clear and shoved them over the side. The canoe yawed and I braced back to equalize the weights. The body was straining to get out, but hung on the gunwale. I lifted out another rock and it pulled one of his legs over the side but he was still with us. I picked up the last rock, the one around his neck, and heaved it out with the last energy of all. The wound of his neck tore open bloodlessly — I thought the head had come off — and he was gone. He was gone so completely into the river that he seemed never to have had anything to do with it, or it with him. He had never been in the world at all. I dipped my hand in the stream and left his blood with him.

  We were by ourselves, moving.

  We turned a long corner. The river freshened before us and around us, and I drove in the paddle, exerting no strength but digging in anyway. We went through some small rapids without much trouble, and I thought of fun. The canoe just followed the channel of its own accord.

  On each side the cliffs began to fall; to fall away. They fell and then got back up again almost as they had been, but their authority was leaving them. Every time they rose it was not quite as high.

  The sun was behind us, and the pressure on my back shoved us forward. I was glad for it; gladder than it is possible to be. But I could not keep my head up. My side was stiff and sobbing with blood, and my chin kept ending up on my chest and my eyes were blurring into the bottom of the canoe where Lewis lay with one hand over his eyes. I put a hand on my forehead and tried to pull up my eyelids by lifting the skin of my forehead and keeping it lifted, but I was still asleep, looking at the world as though my eyes were closed. I’ve got to lie down somewhere, I thought; it I don’t I will fall back into the river.

  That seemed not such a bad prospect, to tell the truth. It would have been wonderful to give all my weight to the water one more time, maybe for good. This was too hard; this was just too hard. It was, and I knew it. Anyone would have known it.

  We went over some little rapids that shook us and picked up our speed a little, but not much. They were deep and powerful, but the channels were clear and we rode through them without much maneuvering. I was sure we didn’t have much farther to go. Where would we come out? What was there to see, that men had made, that would tell us? What would we see when we got off the river forever?

  Lewis lay quietly on the floor with his pants unbuttoned and belt undone; he looked like some great broken thing. I could see the huge muscles of his thigh around the break; they were turning blue. With his free hand, the one that had nothing to do with his face, he was bracing up under the inside of the gunwale, and I thought that perhaps this was a new system, a way to make his leg go to sleep and keep it asleep by putting pressure on it in a special manner; his bracing arm was rigid; the tricep muscle quivered continually with the river, and in it you could see every rock.

  The whole stream now was running fast, without rapids. It was deep, and deep green. It was easy going, the easiest of all, and whenever I could get my head up I superimposed a picture of a highway bridge over the river; but I could never match them up; the bridge would hover and disappear.

  Far off there was what looked like a stretch of rapids with a few big rocks — the sound was low-throated and pleasant rather than frightening — and beyond that, another wooded turn. We were moving toward the white, light water and were very close to it when I saw Drew’s body backed up between the rocks and looking straight at us.

  I told Bobby, but he could not get his head up to look. He could not, and I knew he could not, and I didn’t blame him. But somebody had to look, had to do something, and it would be better if both of us tried.

  “Listen,” I heard myself say. “Wake up and help me.”

  I headed for Drew, for his place in the rocks, pulling hard against the current that wanted to take us past him. I turned the canoe as broadside as I could and asked the rocks to catch us, to help us. They did. We stopped, we lodged lightly, and I got out onto the sandy soil blowing with underwater. I walked up the canoe on two exhausting steps drawn through the river and hit Bobby hard on the side of the shoulder; as hard as I could, but not hard enough for the situation. To help I put the other hand on the knife.

  “Did you hear me?” I said, not loudly. “You help me with this or I’ll kill you, just as you sit there on your useless ass. Now come on. We’ve got to finish it.”

  He got slowly out into the water, swaying with the current, his eyes looking at everything but me.

  Drew was sitting up, facing upstream, in a kind of rough natural chair made of two stones where part of the river ran through, split off from the main current by a flat rock. Though he was sitting, it was a very easy, careless — even carefree — position, partly on the base of his spine. Water ran up and fell back from the top part of his chest, and a thin continuous spray of it went into his open mouth, making a quivering sensitive silver bell around his lips where one gold filling glinted. His eyelids were also kept propped open by the current, seeming to see out of the open water back up into the mountains, around all the curves of the river, infinitely. The pull of the water on his mouth gave him a cretinous, loose-lipped look, but the eyes had nothing to do with that; they were blue and all-seeing and clear.

  I stumbled forward to him like meeting him in a drunken bar. I tried to pull him out of his seat by the straps of his life jacket, but for a moment he wouldn’t come. He seemed to settle deeper into the rocks. Then he rose with no muscles into my arms, against the current. Bobby came around to the other side of him, and the three of us trudged through two worlds, water and air, toward the canoe, tripping over the whole river, the undercurrent tangling our feet with his and with each other’s. I had not realized he was so big. All three of us fell and he got away eddying with his head back, turning slowly from the waist in his jacket, his crushed face as placid and washed and blank as the sky.

  I went after him, stepped in
a hole under him, finally wrestled and floated him back to the rock nearest the canoe and laid him over it on his stomach. I looked at his head. Something had hit him awfully hard there, all right. But whether it was a gunshot wound I didn’t know; I had never seen a gunshot wound. The only comparison I had to go by were the descriptions of President Kennedy’s assassination, the details afforded by eyewitnesses, doctors and autopsy reports which I had read in newspapers and magazines like most other Americans had, at the time. I remembered that part of Kennedy’s head had been blown away. There was nothing like that here, though. There was a long raw place under the hair just over his left ear, and the head there seemed oddly pushed in, dented. But there was no brain matter showing, nothing blown away.

  “Bobby, come here,” I said. “There’s something we’ve got to decide about.”

  I pointed at the place on Drew’s head. Bobby peered, his eyes reddened more, and he leaned away. We hung on the rock, panting.

  “Is this a gunshot wound?”

  “Ed, you know I wouldn’t know. But it sure doesn’t look like it to me.”

  “Look here, though.”

  I showed him the scratch under the hair. “Knowing what we know, it looks to me like he might have been shot and just grazed. But whether this place killed him or not, I don’t know.”

  “Or whether it was made by a rock, after he’d gone in,” Bobby said.

  “If we work this right, we’ll never have to explain to anybody but ourselves,” I said. “But I’d like to know. I think we ought to know.”

  “How can we know?”

  “Lewis would come nearer knowing than we would. Let’s take Drew over to him and give him a good look.”

  We picked Drew up again and dragged him to the canoe. We sank down with him until the back of his head was level with the gunwale and was leaning on it.

  “Lewis,” I said quietly.

  He didn’t answer; his eyes were closed and he was breathing hard.

  “Lewis. Give us just a second. It’s important. It’s very important.”