Deliverance (22 page)

  I tied the other end of the rope to the tree closest to the edge, and went over and tried to call down to Bobby, but the sound of my voice falling into the abyss frightened me; I knew it would never reach bottom; I could feel the strength and meaning fade from it in the sun that filled the emptiness. There was a kind of crack or fault in the rock, turning green with bushes near the water, and Bobby's face came up through it. There may also have been a little voice with it, something added to the sound of the river and coming up, but if it was there I couldn't make out what it said.

  I might as well; it was a thing I had prepared. I shoved the body over the edge with my feet, kicking it and rolling it and holding the rope in both hands. Just after it went over it seemed to hitch in the air to get its feet down, and then settled into a long, hard, unsure pull against me. I worked along the line back to the tree and braced against it, paying the invisible weight out hand over hand down the wall. It was hard going; I kept having to take turns of the thin nylon around one wrist and then the other, and then both, oftener and oftener. The coil at my feet wore away as I sweated, and the red rings around my wrists cut deeper, nearing the blood. I began to wish I had taken a turn of rope around the tree before I started, but I had to hold: there was something about just turning loose of the rope and letting the man fall free and then bring up and dangle, that was shocking to me; I would not do that, no matter what. I sweated and braced, and tried to imagine what Bobby was now thinking, seeing a man come down like this, inch by inch; a man who had held a gun on him while another one cornholed him, and would have killed him in an instant. I tried also to imagine, from the different tensions on the rope, what the body was doing and how it was doing it, all under a kind of control, undignified and protected by the red rings on my wrists and my pain and work, kneeling on and then falling away from outcroppings, rocks and projections, dangling, sliding, rolling, but even so not falling and bursting apart on the river-rocks like a sack of jellied sticks.

  I gave up the last yard of rope I had and stepped back, letting the tree hold the body effortlessly. I had trouble undoing my hands; I tried to undo them as I went back to the edge of the cliff; they still wanted to be holding a rope desperately. As it was, I looked down the green strand going over the sandy edge and over a projecting, dangerously sharp rock on down out of sight, then reappearing, straining in space, catching on something, swaying again, where an invisible body was hanging. Once more I wondered what Bobby could be thinking. I walked back to the tree and checked the knots, then came back to where the rope bent to go down and tried to put my bloody handkerchief under the rope at the edge to keep it from chafing on the stone, but I didn't have the strength to lift it.

  Well, all right, I said. The name of the game is trust; you've got to trust things. I looked inland and got down on my knees, took hold of the rope with one hand above and one below the cliff edge, slid my feet over and started down.

  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. Un-consciousness 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. I'll 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'da 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 cant 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.