I stumbled forward to him like meeting him in a drunken bar. I tried to pull him out of his seat by the straps of his life jacket, but for a moment he wouldn’t come. He seemed to settle deeper into the rocks. Then he rose with no muscles into my arms, against the current. Bobby came around to the other side of him, and the three of us trudged through two worlds, water and air, toward the canoe, tripping over the whole river, the undercurrent tangling our feet with his and with each other’s. I had not realized he was so big. All three of us fell and he got away eddying with his head back, turning slowly from the waist in his jacket, his crushed face as placid and washed and blank as the sky.
I went after him, stepped in a hole under him, finally wrestled and floated him back to the rock nearest the canoe and laid him over it on his stomach. I looked at his head. Something had hit him awfully hard there, all right. But whether it was a gunshot wound I didn’t know; I had never seen a gunshot wound. The only comparison I had to go by were the descriptions of President Kennedy’s assassination, the details afforded by eyewitnesses, doctors and autopsy reports which I had read in newspapers and magazines like most other Americans had, at the time. I remembered that part of Kennedy’s head had been blown away. There was nothing like that here, though. There was a long raw place under the hair just over his left ear, and the head there seemed oddly pushed in, dented. But there was no brain matter showing, nothing blown away.
“Bobby, come here,” I said. “There’s something we’ve got to decide about.”
I pointed at the place on Drew’s head. Bobby peered, his eyes reddened more, and he leaned away. We hung on the rock, panting.
“Is this a gunshot wound?
“Ed, you know I wouldn’t know. But it sure doesn’t look like it to me.”
“Look here, though.”
I showed him the scratch under the hair. “Knowing what we know, it looks to me like he might have been shot and just grazed. But whether this place killed him or not, I don’t know.”
“Or whether it was made by a rock, after he’d gone in,” Bobby said.
“If we work this right, well never have to explain to anybody but ourselves,” I said. “But I’d like to know. I think we ought to know.”
“How can we know?”
“Lewis would come nearer knowing than we would. Let’s take Drew over to him and give him a good look.”
We picked Drew up again and dragged him to the canoe. We sank down with him until the back of his head was level with the gunwale and was leaning on it.
“Lewis,” I said quietly.
He didn’t answer; his eyes were closed and he was breathing hard.
“Lewis. Give us just a second. It’s important. It’s very important.”
He turned his head and opened his eyes. Bobby and I held Drew with three hands, and I turned Drew’s head and went under his hair to the place I wanted Lewis to see.
“Lewis, was be shot? Did a bullet make this?”
A flicker of the old interest crossed his eyes. He raised his head as much as he could and stared into Drew’s hair.
“Well, was he shot? Was he? Was he, Lewis?”
He shifted, very slowly, over the center of the stream, his eyes to mine. My brain flinched; I did not know what was coming. He nodded, hardly a motion at all, and then sank back. “Grazed,” he said.
“Are you sure? Are you sure?”
He nodded again, and retched weakly, almost in the same movement. He kept on nodding, and Bobby and I looked at each other. We peered at Drew’s wound again.
“Maybe,” Bobby said.
“Maybe, is it,” I said. “It’ll have to be. But we can’t have anybody examining him. We can’t tell, but there are those who can, and if we have to explain a man with a gunshot wound the whole thing’ll come out.”
“Are we going to get out of this? I don’t see how we can. I really don’t.”
“We’re almost out of it now,” I said.
“What are we to do with Drew?”
“We’re going to sink him in this river,” I said, “forever.”
“O Lord. O Lord.”
“Listen; it’s exactly like I just said. Exactly. We can’t afford for somebody who knows about these things to examine him. If we go back without him, we just had some bad luck. We’re a fucking bunch of amateurs, anyway. And let ‘em try to disprove that! We came up here to run this river without knowing what we were getting into, which is also the God’s truth. We did all right for a while, then we spilled. We lost the other canoe. Lewis broke his leg in the rapids, and Drew drowned. Anybody’d believe that. But we can’t explain somebody killed with a rifle.”
“If he was.”
“That’s right: if he was.”
A faint light came through Bobby’s eyes, then either darkened or died. “There’s no end to it,” he said. “No end.”
“Yes there is,” I said. “This is the end. This is all we have to do, but we’ve got to do it right. Everything depends on it. The whole works.”
I fumbled around in my lower leg pocket and got out the extra bowstring. I tied it around a good-sized rock and then around Drew’s belt, square-knot on square-knot. We put the rock in the canoe, and I took Drew’s body in the kapok jacket and laid it back in the water, wading forward with him past the rapids, hauling and bullying him gently along.
When the water deepened, Bobby stepped into the canoe and picked up the paddle. Drew and I moved off the end of the rapids and I took slow flight in my life preserver. I looked at Drew’s hand floating palm-up with the guitar calluses puckered and white and his college class ring on it, and I wondered if his wife might not like to have the ring. But no; I couldn’t even do that; it would mean having to explain. I touched the callus on the middle finger of his left hand, and my eyes blinded with tears. I lay with him in my arms for a moment weeping river-water, going with him. I could have cried as long as the river ran, but there was no time. “You were the best of us, Drew,” I said loud enough for Bobby to hear; I wanted him to hear. “The only decent one; the only sane one.”
I undid his life belt and let him fall away under me. On his knees beside Lewis in the canoe, Bobby heaved the stone overboard. One of Drew’s feet flew up and touched my calf, and we were free and in hell.
I stayed in the water behind the canoe, holding the jacket in one hand. Made weightless, my legs hurt twice as bad. I wanted to sleep, to sink, not have to breathe. I lay and moved with the river, with all nightmares and night sweats to come, but not here, not on me yet. When we came to another shallow place, I got up from the gravel and the crawfish, took up my full weight and half again more, and got into the rear seat with the sun hot and heavy-wet on my shoulders and back as though packed there in layers.
For a long time nothing happened but fatigue and heat. Insects danced over the canoe between Bobby and me, a singing haze I was not sure wasn’t inside my head. But the walls were dropping steadily on both sides. In a few more miles the cliffs gave out on the right, and there was only a low fence of rock on the other side. Then it too slanted to the river, and we were level with the woods again. I knew I must have misjudged the distance we had to go, for there seemed to be no end to it. Bobby’s head was down; the most I could hope for from him was to keep steady in the canoe and not fall and tip us over. If we spilled in deep water or rapids now it would be a real problem to get back in, and we would never get Lewis in.
I had put on Drew’s life jacket over mine. It was awfully hot that way, but the extra collar came up higher on the back of my neck and kept the sun off it, and I was grateful for that. My mind danced for minutes on end like gnats around the image of the long, tumbling voyage down the rapids the jacket had taken, trying to keep Drew from drowning when he was already dead, probably, from something else.