Loading the canoe, I had not really been aware of the water, but now I was. It felt profound, its motion built into it by the composition of the earth for hundreds of miles upstream and down, and by thousands of years. The standing there was so good, so fresh and various and continuous, so vital and uncaring around my genitals, that I hated to leave it.
“Let’s have a beer,” I said.
Lewis wiped off the sweat and rummaged around under the tents and the tarps. He came up with four twelve-ounce cans of beer from a polyethylene sack of melting ice, and we hung our forefingers in the rings and dragged them open. We were all thirsty from the work and anxiety of the loading, and my thirst and Lewis’ went all the way back to the Griner Brothers’ Garage, where I had shed more liquid than I thought I had in my system. I drank the whole can in one long, unhurried epical swallow.
I looked around. We were in the middle of a farm that backed steeply up on the river on two sides, one more than the other, and seemed to be battling the woods for existence. In a gully to my right as I faced downstream a cow was drinking; on top of a little grassy bluff others were lying down. Cow dung shone in the late heat, and there was a small misty, insane glimmering of insects wherever it had fallen.
I held the wavering color of the can under water until it filled enough to sink, and let it go, down and on past my ballooning nylon legs.
Lew and I started the canoe off the rocks with one three-armed shove, and I climbed back in with Drew. We entered a long straight stretch, moving with the fresh sweat that had sprung up from the beer as much as with the current.
The land on both sides climbed, and the river pulled us steadily toward a silver highway bridge. We went under, and the bridge clattered its boards as a pickup truck went over.
We were civilized again. On the right bank some tin sheds backed down to the water; the mud was covered with rusted pieces of metal, engine parts and the blue and green blinks of broken bottles. But there was something worse than any of this; some of the color was not only color; it was bright, unchangeable. Drew had been hit the same way, for another reason. “Plastic,” he said. “Doesn’t decompose.”
“Does that mean you can’t get rid of it,” I said, “at all?”
“Doesn’t go back to its elements,” he said, as though that were all right.
In the dark light the broken plastic pitchers shot out their rays like batteries. One was orange, one was yellow, and a water container was blue; what Martha, referring to clothes, would have called electric blue. The plastic throwaways were invulnerable in their colors, amongst the split, splintering boards and the brown-gold tin cans in the mud flats under the town, their lids prised-up and cruel, but going back to the earth.
The sky was beginning to smoke up with night, with complete, unlighted night. For a little while I thought that was the reason the water didn’t have the clean sparkle, the deep milk-but-clear that it had had when we got on it. The current lacked the arrowy drive, the sense of purpose that bad been part of it in the willow woods. There was something in the texture of it.
I pulled my paddle out of the water; a white feather was stuck to the end of it. I shook it off and peered into the river. Off to the right and getting ready to go by under water was a vague choked whiteness. It was a log completely covered with chicken feathers, with all the feather-hairs weaving and wavering in a perfect physical representation of nausea. When you are sick enough, I said truly to myself, that is the thing you feel.
“There must be a poultry processing plant in this town,” Drew half turned and said.
“Sure.”
The river was feathering itself night and day. The rocks were full of feathers, drift on drift; even the downriver sides were streaming and bannered with them. Every shape under the river was a sick off-white; the water around us was full of little prim, dry feathers curled up like things set sail by children, all going at about the same speed we were. And out among them to the right, convoyed by six or eight feathers, was a chicken head with its glazed eye half-open, looking right at me and through me. If there had been more heads it would not have been so remarkable, but I saw only the one, going with us, turning its other eye as though the result of a movement of its gone body, drinking the sad water with a half-opened bill, pinwheeling and floating upside down, then turning over downstream again. I half hit at it with the paddle flat, but it only moved off a foot or so and settled back into the current beside us.
On a patchy flow of feathers we went down, over the unplucked rocks and logs in the deep, slow water, and I was resigned to going along that way for a while until I noticed, for no particular reason, that the depth of my ears was increasing in some way. I concentrated, and the sound of water both deepened and went up a tone. There was another bend ahead, and the river seemed to strain to get there, and we with it.
Around the turn it came into view, and broadened in white. Everywhere we were going was filled with spring-bubblings, with lively rufflings, not dangerous-looking but sprightly and vivid. There was not the sensation of the water’s raging, but rather that of its alertness and resourcefulness as it split apart at rocks, frothed lightly, corkscrewed, fluted, fell, recovered, jostled into helmet-shapes over smoothed stones, and then ran out of sight down long garden staircase steps around another turn.
I looked for a way through. Drew pointed straight ahead, and it was better done that way than saying it. I sank the paddle into the river. The main current V’d ahead of us, and looked to be straight, as far as I could tell, though the V that indicated the fastest water disappeared about halfway along down the rapids.
“Call the rocks,” I hollered. “We want to go straight down the middle.”
“Ay, ay,” Drew said. “Let’s go there.”
We headed into the waist of the V. The canoe shifted gears underneath, and the water began to throw us. We rode into the funnel-neck and were sucked into the main rapids so suddenly that it felt as though the ordinary river had been snatched from under us like a rug, and we were tossing and bucking and banging on stones, trying to hold the head of the canoe downriver any way we could. Drew bobbed in front of me, leaping toward a place that could be reached in no other way. He was incompetent but cool; no panic came back from him. Every time he changed sides with his paddle, I changed to the opposite side. Once we began to go catercornered; the water began to swing us broadside like mania, and I felt control sliding away, off somewhere in the bankbushes looking at us, but Drew made half the right move and I made the other half, and we righted. The hull scraped and banged over rocks, but we hung straight in the current, trembling with force and luck, past the deadly, vibrant rocks we overflowed.
I yelled to Drew to keep his paddle on one side or the other. He chose the right—the biggest rocks seemed to be there; they kept looming up, through the water and just under it—while I alternated between sweeping us forward, adding to our speed wherever I could, and pulling backward on the river whenever we got too close to the rocks on the right. Already it was beginning to be like work I knew, and I felt safer because of that.
Now I could look on past Drew and see the white water lapse and riffle out into green and dark. There was a short flourish of nervous rippling that took us between two black boulders, and we were through.
Drew hiked up his hand on the gunwale of the canoe and looked back, with a surprised pleasure.
“Old Lewis,” he said. “He knows something.”
I looked for the other canoe, which was not far ahead of us. Bobby and Lewis were plowing away at water that looked curiously dead, after the rapids.
But it was evening water. There was no sun on it, and the light that made the reflections was going fast. Far off ahead was the pouring of another set of rapids or falls with—I was already ready to bet—a curve in it.