Deliverance (27 page)

  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.

  Someone was coming, casually but deliberately. I turned to say something to the patrolman, so that I would seem unaware of the other person's approach.

  "Say, buddy," the new man said. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

  "Sure," I said. "Sit down."

  He did. We shook hands. He was an old seam-faced lightbodied man with hazel eyes. He wore his hat at the prescribed country tilt, which always amused me wherever I saw it. I almost smiled, but instead took a cigarette he offered and lit up.

  "You sure this is the place?"

  I repeated, "Not all that sure. But I can't do any better. He's either in those rocks up there, or here, or downstream. How far downstream I don't know."

  "You say youus coming down this-yere river in a canoe?"

  "Two canoes, we started with."

  "How come?"

  "How come what?"

  "How come you to be doing this, in the fust place?"

  "Oh," I said, hesitating and not really knowing the answer, even now. "I guess we just wanted to get out a little. All of us work in the city, and it gets pretty tiresome, just sitting in an office all the time. The fellow who broke his leg's been up here before, fishing. He said we ought to see it before they dam the river and make a public park out of it. That's all. No really good reason, I suppose. Just boredom."

  "I kin understand that," he said after a little while. "You didn't know what you uz agettin' into, did you?"

  "No indeed, we didn't," I said. "We sure didn't know it would be anything like this."

  He thought this over. "You see these big old wide rocks yonder? How come you didn't get out and drag your canoe over 'em, 'stead of trying to come through that-there bad place? How come you to try to ride on through?"

  "The river's running awful fast, up above here. These are just the very last of the rapids. We had too much speed by then. And this part didn't look as bad as it is; we couldn't see the drop-off until we were right on top of it and going too fast to do anything but go over it. And when it fell off, we fell out."

  "Then your buddy couldn't be back up yonder in them other rocks now, could he?"

  "No," I said. "That's why I suggested that y'all start looking for him right here. He wouldn't be in the upstream rocks, but he could be hung up under a rock someplace under the drop-off."

  "Wouldn't be much of him left, would there?"

  "I guess not."

  "You say you started out day before yesterday?"

  "We started Friday, at about four o'clock in the afternoon."

  "In two canoes."

  "Right."

  "And you lost one of them right here?"

  "No, a long ways upstream. When we came through here, we were all in one canoe."

  This was the silence now. It went on for at least a minute. "Your buddy says different."

  "I'll be damned if he does," I said. "Go ask him."

  "I already done asked him."

  "Ask him again, or the one in the hospital."

  "No; no. You done had a chance to talk to 'em."

  "Your hearing must not be any too good."

  "It's good enough. We ain't going to find no body right in here. We're going to find it farther up."

  "What the hell are you driving at?" I said, and the indignation was real; he was assaulting my story, which had cost me so much time and energy, and, yes, blood.

  I leaned to the state policeman. "Look, do I have to put up with this? I'll be goddamned if I will, I can tell you. Is he authorized to do this?"

  "Maybe you better answer a few more questions. Then he can handle it however he wants to."

  "We found that other canoe -- or half of it -- before you say you even got down in this part of the river."

  "So what? I told you we lost the other one farther up. Back up in a gorge. If you want to try to go up in there, I can take you and show you where it was."

  "You know we can't get back up in there."

  "That's your problem. What the hell is all this about, anyway? We've been through a goddamned bad time, and I'm damned if I want to put up with this kind of shit. Listen: are you the sheriff here?"

  "Depitty."

  "Is the sheriff around here?"

  "He's right over yonder."

  "Well, go get him. I want to talk to him."

  He got up and went over to a beefy, Texas-y farmer with a badge, and they came back together. I shook hands with the sheriff, whose name was Bullard.

  "Sheriff, I don't know what this man has in mind, because he won't tell me. But from what I can gather he thinks we threw one of our party in the river, or something."

  "Maybe you did," the old man said.

  "For Christ's sake, for what reason?"

  "How would I know that? I know you can't get your stories straight, and there aidt no good reason for you to be lyin'."

  "Easy, Mr. Queen," the sheriff said. Then to me, "What about this?"

  "What do you mean, what about it? Look, if you can find one person, and I mean one, who'll back up what he says, I'll be perfectly happy to do anything you want me to do -- go back up in the woods with you, wade up the river, join your crew out there dragging -- anything you say. But this man is just confused. He's got some kind of personal stake in this, he doesn't like city people, he's trying to create interest in himself, God knows what. What's the matter, Mr. Queen? People feel like you're not earning your money?"

  "I'll tell you what's the matter, you city son of a bitch," Queen said, in that country-murderous tone that always bled me white. "My sister called me yesterday and told me her husband had been out hunting and hadn't come back. They ain't nobody off in them woods up yonder. I'll just goddamned well guarantee y'all met up with him somewhere. And I'm on prove it."

  "Fine, prove it."

  "What's wrong with you, Mr. Queen?" the sheriff asked. "Why jump on these fellows about something in your family? Just 'cause they're from the city? Maybe your brother-in-law fell down and got hurt."

  "No, he wudna."

  "Why are you so damned sure that anything happened to him?" I said.

  "I just got a feeling," Queen said. "And I ain't ever wrong about that."

  "Well, you're wrong this time," I said. "Now stop bothering me. Go and do whatever you've got a mind to do. But get off my back. I've had it with this river, with the woods, with the whole fucking business up here and most especially with you. Unless you've got something to accuse us of, and have got some evidence to support what you're saying -- whatever it is -- you can goddamned well let me alone."

  He backed off, muttering, and I went over to the patrolman I had been sitting beside. Queen didn't have a thing on us, and he wouldn't get anything. I wondered if one of the two men we had killed had really been his brother-in-law, and I tried to think of a way to find out his name, but decided I had better let it go. There was no real reason I needed to know his name, except for my own satisfaction, and I doubted that it would be much satisfaction, either way.

  The men in the river were working downstream. Every now and then one of the hooks would snag a rock, and everybody would converge on it. I could see the light in their eyes change, some dreading, some anticipating, some happy. My blood quickened and my side hurt within its hurt when this happened, but it was always for nothing. All day, almost, the wound leapt and subsided, and in all that time the searchers made only about two hundred yards.

  Sheriff Bullard came over. "Looks like that's goin' to haf to wind it up tonight," he said. "Getti' too dark."

  I nodded and got up.

  "You boys be staying in Aintry this evenin'?"

  "I guess so," I said. "We're still pretty tired and beat-up. And I want to see how Lewis is doing, in the hospital. He has a bad break in his leg."

  "Is bad," the sheriff said. "Doctor said he's never seen a worst un."

  "We're at Biddiford's," I said. "But you know that."

  "Yeah, I know it. We'll be coming back out here tomorrow morning. You can come if you want to, but you don't have to."

  "I don't see any reason for us to come," I said. "If the body's not right in here, I don't know where it is. Maybe farther downstream."

  "We're going to try upstream, a little."

  "No use," I said. "But do whatever you think's right. If you find any bodies up there, though, they won't be Drew's. This is where he went under, and if you find him it'll be downstream."

  "Maybe we'll split up, and some work up and some work down."

  "OK. Fine. But this is the place; I'd bet my life on it. I marked it with that big yellow tree, and I kept looking at it all the time we were trying to find him. He's downriver; there's not but one way he can go."

  "Right," said the sheriff. "Not but one way. We'll let you know if we find him, and I'll come by to see y'all sometime tomorrow afternoon. Much obliged to you, for your trouble."

  Bobby and I ate another big dinner, and went up to bed. There was no need to talk anymore; all the talking had been done. Now was the time for the finding or the not finding.

  The next day we went out to see Lewis, who was much better. His leg was raised in pulleys, and he was reading the county paper, which had a story about Drew's disappearance, and an account of dragging the river for him, with a picture in which I could recognize myself and Deputy Queen. He had his fist up at my face, and I knew that the picture had been taken during the last part of the time we had been talking. I looked like I was being tolerant, just barely listening out of courtesy. Everything helped; this too.

  There were no policemen with Lewis, but he was not alone in the ward anymore, for the night before they had brought in a farmer whose foot had been run over by a tractor. He was at the other end, and asleep. I told Lewis what had happened, and told him that Bobby would drive his car back down to the city and his wife or somebody could come after him whenever he was ready to move. That was all right with him.