Deliverance

by James Dickey

  When I found out from the lady clearing away breakfast where Bobby was, I went up to his room and knocked on the door. He was still asleep, but it would be better to settle the new things I had been thinking about with him now than later. I kept knocking, and after a time he came.

  I sat down in a rocking chair and he sat on the bed.

  “First of all,” I said, “I need some clothes. You probably ought to have some too, if we’ve got enough money. Your clothes are in better shape than mine, so you go out and get me some pants — blue jeans are all right — and a shirt. Get yourself whatever you need, and, if you’ve got anything left, buy me some shoes. Brogans.”

  “OK. There ought to be a hardware store right around here. In this town, everything is right around here.”

  “Now listen, one more time. We’re all right so far; we’re golden. Lewis is getting taken care of, and our stories — or maybe I should say our story — is going over. I didn’t see a flicker of doubt in anybody’s eye. Did you?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’m not as sure as you are. Did that one guy ask you about the canoes?”

  “No. What guy? What about the canoes?”

  “The little old guy who’s some sort of local lawman. He asked me about the other canoe: where was it, when did we lose it, what was in it.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him what we agreed to tell him: that we lost it in that last bad place.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “No, I don’t have any idea what he was getting at.”

  “I do,” I said, “at least I think I do, and it could be trouble; maybe not real trouble, but trouble.”

  “Why, for the Lord’s sake?”

  “Because we lost the green canoe the day before yesterday and it, or part of it, might even have been found before we got to the place where we said we lost it.”

  “Jesus!”

  “We’ll have to try to patch it up, then. It’s likely that this little guy is going to get the word around to the state police that something doesn’t jibe in our story, and then they’ll be asking all of us questions. Remember your movies; police like to separate suspects and try to get them to contradict each other. So we’ve just got to sit here right now and become contradict-proof.”

  “Can we do it?”

  “We have to try. I think we can. Let’s go back. We lost the other canoe when Drew was really killed, right?”

  “Right. There’s nobody who can argue with that. But if we take them up there, or if they go up there…”

  “Now wait a minute. We’ll say we spilled first a long ways upriver and that’s where we lost the green canoe and Lewis was hurt. But we all survived and tried to make it downriver in Lewis’ canoe. We were overloaded and taking chances trying to get Lewis out and just couldn’t control the canoe when we hit the bad rapids. That last half-mile of falls got us, and Drew didn’t make it. Now stay with that. Stay with it. If we do we’ll make it home tomorrow night, or maybe even tonight.”

  “Suppose they don’t believe us? What am I going to say when that little rat-faced bastard faces me up to telling him where I said we lost the canoe?”

  “Tell him — and anybody else around — that he misread you. Was there anybody else listening to you when he was talking to you yesterday?”

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “That’s good. And I don’t think I let it slip to that first trooper. Anyway, it’s more likely than not that he won’t ask you, but will come around and ask me. When he does, I’ll let him have it. I’m ready for him. I’m sure glad you told me about him. I sure am.”

  “Is that all we have to change?”

  “As far as I can tell,” I said.

  “Again, Ed, what if they don’t believe us? What if there’s just enough doubt so that they go looking farther up?”

  “Then, like I said, we may be in some trouble. But I don’t think they will. Look, there are an awful lot of falls and rapids we came down day before yesterday. It could have happened anywhere up there. And the place where Drew was killed — and the part where we sunk that other guy — was right where the banks of the gorge are the highest and steepest. The only three ways to get there are upriver, which would make the whole search party have to fight rapids after rapids for hour after hour and probably day after day, searching the river in the rapids and between them foot by foot, and they’re not going to want to take that on, just because one local guy disbelieves a survivor’s story. An outboard wouldn’t stand a chance in that stuff, and anything else’d be too heavy for the shallows. The other way is downstream, and if they came that way they’d have to run the same rapids we did, and you know what they’re like. How’d you like to have to do that again? They’d be risking their lives, and it just wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, how could they be doing that and searching too?”

  “They could search in the calm places, and that’s where Drew is.”

  “Right; in one of them. But which one?”

  “All right,” he said. “I guess all right, anyway.”

  “The only other way in is to come down the cliff. But they’d have to go down and come up it time after time, and they wouldn’t do much of that, I can tell you. They might start out doing it, but they wouldn’t keep on.”

  “What if they went that far back and found the broken rope?”

  “Chances are they wouldn’t. The rope broke at the very top and there’s a lot of cliff. Anyway, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

  “Is that all, now?”

  “Yes; all but one thing. We didn’t see anybody on the river. Not since we left Oree have we seen another human being. That’s awfully important, and we can’t vary from it.”

  “I’m not going to vary from it, I can clue you. We haven’t seen anybody. I wish we hadn’t.”

  “We didn’t. The only other thing is whether somebody was reported missing in that area, and people knew more or less where the person was going. That bothers me a little, but not so much as some of the other problems. Those were awful-looking men; who’d care where they were?”

  “Somebody might.”

  “That’s right. Somebody might. But whether the person would know where they went, or the area or direction they went in, we just can’t have any idea. That one is beyond us. That’s where we’ve got to ride on luck. And I feel lucky; the odds is good.”

  Bobby laughed, and some of it was really laughter. “Do you reckon this room is bugged? Or that someone could be listening?”

  “It’s not bugged,” I said, “but that sure is a thoughty notion of yours, cousin.”

  I slid off my tennis shoes and went to the door sock-footed, and listened. “Keep talking,” I whispered back to Bobby. “Keep talking, and give me time to listen, too.”

  I listened; I listened for the nose-whistle of breath, and maybe it was there. But then you always can hear breath, anywhere, when you want to. I couldn’t hear enough, though, for it really to be breath. Or at least I didn’t think I could. I took hold of the knob and jerked the door inward. Nothing. Was there any sound going down the stairs? No. I was sure. No.

  I turned back to Bobby and held up a circle of fingers.

  “I’ll be in my room,” I said. “Go get us those clothes and then we’ll hustle our asses over to the hospital. Lewis’ll still be knocked out, I bet, and I doubt they’ll pump him too hard anyway, but we better try and get the change in story across to him or see what he remembers of the first one.”

  I went back to my room, shucked off the nylon and lay thinking again. I was looking forward to the encounter with the local sheriff, or whatever he was; I was looking forward to his local species of entrapment.

  The sun came up more, and I pushed back the covers and lay in it. I was still tired, but the main tiredness had pulled back from me, and the bright light held it off me. It was very good, lying there wounded and stronger. Not so badly wounded now — the stitches were pulling me together — and a lot
stronger. Yes indeed.

  Bobby came back with the clothes, and I pulled on dry blue jeans, a work shirt, white socks and a pair of clod-hopping brogans that linked me to the earth with every step. But I was not that tired anymore, and I enjoyed lifting them just enough.

  I wadded up the nylon in my hand, and we went downstairs together, both in farm clothes. It was exhilarating, now, to be so dry.

  The woman who owned the place was dusting.

  “Would you get rid of these for me?” I asked her, holding out the nylon outfit full of my blood.

  She looked at me. “Be glad to,” she said. “Ain’t but one thing to do with them.”

  “I can’t think of anything more to do with them,” I said, “except to burn them.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. “Can’t use them for rags.”

  She smiled; we smiled.

  Bobby and I got into Drew’s car and drove out to the hospital. There were two highway patrol cars there. “Here we go,” I said. “Hold on.”

  We went in, and a fellow in white showed us to the ward where Lewis was. There were three highway patrol officers there, talking quietly among themselves with toothpicks in their mouths, and Lewis was lying either asleep or under sedation in a corner of the empty ward with a sheet medically levitated over his legs. The sandy-haired doctor was beside him, inclining his head and writing something again. He turned as he heard my heavy new steps.

  “Hello, killer,” he said. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Good. Better than the riverbank.”

  “Stitches holding?”

  “You know it; holding me together, like you said. There ain’t nothing getting in or out.”

  “Good,” he said, in his way of going serious I liked.

  Lewis came to us before I had a chance to say anything else. He moved a little, up from the waist; he came like a muscular act; the veins of his biceps jumped clear, clear as anatomy, and he opened eyes.

  I turned to the patrolmen. “Have you been talking to him?” I asked.

  “No,” one of them said. “We’ve been waiting for him to come around.”

  “He’s around, I expect,” I said. “Or he will be soon. Give him a minute.”

  He was looking straight at me. “Hello, Tarzan,” I said. “How’s the world of the Great White Doctor?”

  “White,” he said.

  “What’ve they been trying to do to you?”

  “You tell me,” he said. “I’ve got a heavy leg, and there’s some pain in there rambling around. But we got clean sheets, and there ain’t that grating sound when I move. So I guess it’s all right.”

  I got in between Lewis and the nearest patrolman — got in close, almost head to head — and winked. He winked back, though anybody who didn’t know it was a wink, wouldn’t have. “Just don’t let’s get on that last stretch of water again, buddy,” he said. “Not today, anyway.”

  He had given it to me without knowing it; I took it hoping that it had been loud enough.

  “Everything went,” I said. “Drew was killed; you remember me telling you?”

  “I think so,” he said. “I don’t remember him in the canoe, after that. I don’t remember.”

  “You remember all that spray?” I asked.

  “I remember, sort of,” he said. “Was that where it was?”

  “That’s where it was for Drew,” I said slowly. “You and Steinhauser’s tub bought it in the first spill, upriver.”

  “I couldn’t see anything,” he said. “Looking straight up, I couldn’t even see the sky.”

  “No sky,” I said.

  “No sky at all.”

  I rounded my hurt side, back to the patrolman. “Wait’ll you see it,” I said. “You’ll understand what the man’s talking about.”

  “Y’all want to wait, on down here a ways?” one of the policemen, a new one, said to us. We pulled back, down along the corridor. But Lewis had got the message; I was sure he had, and not too soon.

  Bobby and I walked along in our new clothes. Neither of us had had a chance to shave, and we were pretty grubby, but clean. A shave would have made me a completely new person, but I was half-new anyway, and half-new was very good; it is better to come back easily.

  After about fifteen minutes the new officer walked ordinarily along to us. “Why’ont we go on back into town?” he said.

  “All right,” I told him. “Whatever you say.”

  I got into the front seat of the patrol car with him, and we started back. I didn’t say anything and he didn’t either. When we reached town he went into a cafe and made a couple of calls. It frightened me some to watch him talk through the tripled glass — windshield, plate glass and phone booth glass — for it made me feel caught in the whole vast, inexorable web of modern communications. I was not sure that this was not the beginning of the enormous, unfathomable apparatus of crime detection, from which no one is entirely free: I could imagine stupendous filing systems, IBM machines tirelessly sorting punch cards, one thing being checked against another: I was not sure he was not talking to J. Edgar Hoover. Our story could not stand up against that, I was sure. And yet it might, even so.

  The patrolman came back and sat with me, with his door open. In a little while two more patrol cars showed up. A small crowd started to drift together; a head turned toward us, and another: eventually, all heads looked at us at least once, and most of them more than once. I sat still, in my clothes of the country. I could prove where I had bought them. My hurt was good in the midst of the general unhurt.

  One of the police from another car was talking to a local fellow about roads going up the river. A few minutes after this, we all got ready to start out. I looked for Bobby; he was in one of the new highway patrol cars. As we left, another police car, very local-looking, drove up and by, and I saw my man, an old fellow, rusty and quiet. There was going to be a meeting, somewhere upriver. My beard tingled at the roots, and I started to calculate, yet once again.

  We turned off the highway and drove down a little road that swung through a farmer’s yard and then through his chicken yard. A woman was feeding chickens, muffled up against the sun as though against cold.

  We moved on, slower and slower. Nothing had happened yet; nothing had happened to any of us yet. There had been no accusations made, nothing discovered. My lies seemed better, more and more like truth; the bodies in the woods and in the river did not move.

  We were the lead car. We took off through some glaring cornfields and then into poor-looking woods, second-growth pines like turpentine trees. I listened for the river, but saw it before I heard it. The road got worse and worse the nearer we got; it figured. At the river’s edge we were crawling.

  “This about where it was?” the cop asked me.

  “No,” I said, waking from a half-sleep I didn’t know I was in. “It was farther up. We wouldn’t have come down here all the way from Oree if we wanted to turn the canoe over in calm water.”

  He looked at me oddly, or I suppose he did, for I was watching straight ahead for the yellow tree, and listening — one more time — for the falls; it seemed curious to be going toward them from this direction.

  It was an hour of slow going, over gullies and washouts with just enough track for regular cars — if it had got any worse it would have been jeep or Land Rover country — before we saw the tree. I saw the color and then the lightning jag, and my heart jumped like a whole being, inside me and nearly out. The rapids were roaring, upstream about a quarter of a mile; I could see some of them now, and they were a lot worse, even, than I remembered. The falloff was a good six feet, and the only place where a canoe could get through was a funnel of water into which the whole river cramped and shot, blizzarding through the stones and beating and fuming like some enormous force chained to the spot.

  The policeman pointed. “He’d be right in here?”

  “I’d say so,” I said. “He may be downstream farther, though. Or he may be caught in the rocks. But we probably ought to start here.
”

  We all got out and moved toward each other. I watched Bobby over the hoods and backs of cars. He was not moving among the men. They were wandering rather freely around him, and his stillness in the midst of them suggested that he was not able to move as freely as they, or at all. I don’t think anyone noticed this but me, or put this interpretation on it, but it made me nervous; he already looked like a prisoner; for an instant I actually thought he was in leg shackles. I started toward him, but the police from the three cars always came between us, which must have’ been intentional, though they managed to give the impression it wasn’t. Then Bobby moved like everybody else, toward the river.

  Meanwhile other cars were creeping up to us, and pretty soon they filled up the bank all the way out of sight downriver. The men who got out of them were farmers, mostly, and small merchants, or so I supposed. Some of them brought long ropes with hooks — grapples — on them, and I understood the full horror of the phrase I was always seeing in the newspapers, especially in the summer: “drag the river for the body.” Drag was right.

  “This the place?” the patrolman asked me again.

  “It’s the best I can do,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, this is it.”

  The men began to deploy with their ropes and hooks. The stream was not deep at this point, about up to their waists or lower chests. The river ran through them easily. I watched the chains and ropes and wire cables come up from the water empty, in a certain rhythm. They always seemed to have grasped something when the hooks were underwater, and just to have let it go when they were pulled back up. I sat under a bush with the patrolman who had driven me out, watching each of the men in waders do what he was doing at the moment, and remembered the ring on Drew’s finger and the dead guitar calluses on his hand as he fell from my arms.