“OK,” he said, without conviction.
“Look around,” I said. “Let’s pick out some things we can agree were here. All this is so they don’t go looking for Drew farther upstream. So look. Look.”
He looked dully from side to side, from bank to bank, but I could tell that nothing was registering.
“See that big yellow tree,” I said. “That’s going to be the main thing. That, and the rapids, and that big rock we went over. We can put them together, and that’ll be all we need to do.”
I concentrated on the tree, looking at it from all the angles the river gave us as we went by, making it blot out everything else in my mind and leave a deep, recoverable image there. It was about half-dead, with the bark scaled off one side in a jagged pattern. It must have been struck by lightlung at one time; the fire had ripped it deep. That was the kind of image I wanted in my mind: like that, the whole tree.
“Listen, Bobby,” I said. “Listen good. We’ve got to make this right. Drew was drowned back there. I’d say—I’m going to say—that the best place to look for his body is about where we are now. There’s no way for him to get down here from where he really is. There are no roads back in to the river where he is, and nobody’ll go up there looking for him if we don’t give them a reason to.”
“He’s here,” Bobby said, putting his hand over his eyes and then raising the outer edge of it to make an eyeshade. “He’s here, down under us. I can say that. I can say it, OK.”
It was exactly what I wanted. Lewis didn’t say anything; either he was out or it would have been too much of an effort to answer.
“We spilled at that bad place we just came through,” I said. “We can even tell them that we spilled going through all that spray between the rocks. We spilled, and Drew was drowned. Since our watches have stopped, we won’t be able to say exactly when it was. But we can say where. Where is at that yellow tree.”
Bobby looked a little less tired.
I said, “There’s not anything unbelievable about the story, if we remember the way we want it to go. There’s nobody—nobody—but us left. Nobody saw, nobody knows. If we don’t mess up on the details, we’re all right. We’re as all right as we’re ever going to be, but at least nobody will be messing with us: no police, no investigation, no nothing. Nothing but us.”
“I hope not.”
“So do I. But as Lewis would say, we’ve got to do more than hope. Control, baby. It can be controlled. So give me back the story.”
He did, and he was accurate. I was pleased; I began to feel safer, for I was dreading going back to men and their questions and systems; I had been dreading it without knowing it.
I was heavy-bodied but light-minded, and felt, as I hadn’t for the last few hours, that I could go on for a while. More and more I just let us drift, paddling only enough to keep the nose downriver. The land on both sides was wooded, but it was not the wild, tangled woods of the gorge, nor the dark, still growth before it. We were not far from men. I expected to see something human at every bend we cleared.
There it was. A cow was lying under a tree at the edge of the river. It swung its head, and came to be gazing at us over the flow. We drifted toward it.
“It’s a farm, Bobby,” I said. “We’re here. We can turn in anytime.” But I didn’t want to have to walk a long way over pastures and fields, looking for a farmhouse. I decided to go downriver for a little while yet, where there was a bridge or a road.
The cows increased, vivid white and dead, living black, lying along the watercourse and up its banks, chewing, drinking, lifting themselves off the river with a heavy toss of horns, eternally stupid, huge, and useless to themselves. One more curve, I was sure, and we would be back.
We went around the same turn—I could not have told you how they differed—eight or ten more times. After about another hour, which would have made it, from the heat and the height of the sun, about noon or early afternoon, we came around another turn like the others, but across the river was a plank bridge set in a steel frame. just beyond it was a gentle spillway; a man and a boy were fishing with cane poles below it.
We muscled the canoe laboriously cross-river to land. When we touched the bank, Bobby got to his feet in the canoe and swayed for a minute, then stepped out into the kudzu. I got into the slime and waded out of the river, and never touched it again with my feet or legs. We beached the canoe and took off our life preservers.
Lewis lay there beyond us, with his hands crossed over him. He was terrifically sunburned; flakes of skin came off his lips when he moved them.
“Lewis,” I said from land. “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” he said calmly and strongly, but with his eyes closed. “I hear you and I’ve been hearing you. You’ve got it figured; we can get out of this. They won’t ask me anything, and if they do I’ve got the word, same as you gave Bobby. You’re doing it exactly right; you’re doing it better than I could do. Hang in there.”
“Do you feel anything in your leg?”
“No, but I haven’t moved it or fooled with it or thought about it for a long time. I kept trying to put it to sleep, back yonder, and now I can’t wake it up. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m all right.”
“I’m going to get somebody,” I said. “Can you hold out a little longer?”
“Sure,” he said. “My God, those falls must have been something, back there.”
“They were something. We could have done a lot better if we’d’a had you, buddy.”
“You had me,” he said.
“You should have seen the water between those rocks.”
“I don’t know,” he said, getting faint again. “I had it another way. I felt it in my leg, and I tell you, I know something I didn’t know before.”
There was a good smile on his face. He tried to get his head up from the dried vomit, then sank back in it.
“Are you sure about Drew?” he asked. “They can’t find him?”
“They won’t find him,” I said. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“That’s it, then, I guess,” he said. “Go and get somebody. Anybody. I want to get out of this goddamned roasting oven. I want to get out of my own coffin, this fucking piece of tin junk.”
“Lie still. We’re home free. Lie still and don’t worry.”
I told Bobby to stay with the canoe and climbed up the kudzu of the bank to the road that ran across the bridge. It was a thin blacktop state highway, and about a half a mile along it was a country gas station, a store with two stark yellow pumps, probably Shell. I stood, wondering how I could get there without killing myself, and also waiting for the road to unfreeze and begin to flow around me. The stillness underfoot was disturbing, but it stayed, and from it I looked back down at the river. It was beautiful, and I was sure I would feel all my life the particular pull of it at different places, the weight and depth and speed of it; they had been given to me.
I was heavy in the air now, and floundered a little, walking. My side was caked shut, and the part of the flying suit I had tied around me had clotted into the wound; I could not have gotten it out without fainting, so I let it stay, holding it in with an elbow and leaning over it a little, away from the road. I went toward the station, crossing the bridge over the spillway. The station moved off in the sun and shimmered like an oil slick, and I went after it as best I could. My side hurt badly, but it seemed to have moved off from me a little bit; the rags seemed to go around it instead of through it, so that it was like carrying a painful package or ball under my arm. I had a quick dry period between the time when the river water dried off my legs and the close nylon began to flap with sweat; by the time I got to the station I was striped with my own darkness.
A country teen-ager was sitting on the backless bottom of a kitchen chair just inside the screen door, which was shifting and tapping with flies. Though he had probably been watching me come, he could not believe me at close range. He got up and opened the door.