Deliverance (5 page)

“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.”

“Mine is simple,” I said. I didn’t say, though, what forms it had taken recently, nor anything about the moon-slice of somebody else’s gold eye in the middle of my wife’s back as she labored for us.

“So is mine, and I work for it. A gut-survival situation may never happen. Probably it won’t. But you know something? I sleep at night. I have no worries. I am becoming myself, as inconsequential as that may be. I am not something some-body
shoved off on me. I am what I choose to be, and I am
it.
”

“There’re a lot of other kinds of people to be, than what you are,” I said.

“Sure there are. But this is my kind. It feels right, like when you turn loose the arrow, and you know when you let go that you’ve done everything right. You know where the arrow is going. There’s not any other place that it can go.”

“Lord,” I said. “Lewis, you’re out of sight.”

“Who knows,” he said. “But I believe in survival. All kinds. Every time I come up here, I believe in it more. You know, with all the so-called modern conveniences, a man can still fall down. His leg will break, like Shad Mackey’s. He can lie there in the woods with night coming on, knowing he’s got two cars in the garage, one of them an XKE, a wife and three children watching “Star Trek” as he lies trying to get his breath under a bush. The old human body is the same as it always was. It still feels that old fear, and that old pain. The last time I was near here…”

“You know that old broken-leg thing, don’t you, buddy?”

“I know it,” he said. “I broke it like a goddamned fool, up here by myself. There was a trout stream I wanted to fish, and it was hard to get to. I took thirty feet of rope and let myself down to the creek and fished… well, I
fished.
It was one of the best afternoons I ever had with man or woman or beast. I was climbing back up when the rope worked into my right hand and began to hurt like hell, and I slacked up on that hand and tried to wrap the rope around it a different way, and the next thing I knew, the damned rope slicked through the other hand and I was going down. In fact, I was
already down. I hit on one leg, and I could hear something go in that right ankle. I had a hard time getting up from the bottom of the creek, with those waders on, and when I tried to stand up, I knew I had it to do.”

“How’d you get out?”

“I went up the rope. I just armed it out, hand over hand, and then started hobbling and hopping and crawling. And you damned well better hope you never have to one-leg it through any woods. I was holding on to every tree like it was my brother.”

“Maybe it was.”

“No,” Lewis said. “But I got out, finally. You know the rest.”

“Yeah. And now you’re going back.”

“You better believe it. But you know something, Ed? That intensity; well, that’s something special. That was a great trip, broken ankle and all. I heard old Tom McCaskill, the night before. That was worth it.”

“Who is that?”

“Well, let me tell you. You come up here camping in the woods, on the river in some places, or back off in the bush, hunting or whatever you’re doing, and in the middle of the night you’re liable to hear the most God-awful scream that ever got loose from a human mouth. There’s no explanation for it. You just hear it, and that’s all. Sometimes you just hear it once, and sometimes it keeps on for a while.”

“What is it, for the Lord’s sake?”

“There’s this old guy up here who just gets himself — or makes himself — a jug every couple of weeks, and goes off in the woods at night. From what I hear, he doesn’t have any
idea where he’s going. He just goes off the road and keeps going till he’s ready to stop. Then he builds himself a fire and sits down with the jug. When he gets drunk enough he starts out to hollering. That’s the way he gets his kicks. As they say, don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it. You tried it?”

“No, but maybe on this trip. I doubt if I’ll ever get another chance. Maybe we don’t even have to go down the river. Maybe we should just go off and drink and holler. And Drew could play the guitar. I’ll bet he’d just as soon. I’ll bet he’d rather.”

“Well, I wouldn’t. Would you?”

“Don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it,” I said. “But no, I wouldn’t. In fact, I’m looking forward to getting on the river. I’m so tanked up with your river-mystique that I’m sure I’ll go through some fantastic change as soon as I dig the paddle in the first time.”

“Just wait, buddy,” he said. “You’ll want to come back. It’s real.”

I looked off at the blue forms of the mountains, growing less transparent and cloudlike, shifting their positions, rolling from side to side off the road, coming back and centering in our path, and then sliding off the road again, but strengthening all the time. We went through some brush and then out across a huge flat field that ran before us for miles, going straight at the bulging range of hills, which was now turning mile by mile from blue to a fight green-gold, the color of billions of hardwood leaves.