After a long minute Drew and Bobby drove up beside us.
“See what I mean?” Lewis said.
The other two got out and came over. The old man turned as though he were being surrounded. His movements were very slow, like those of someone whose energies have been taken by some other thing than old age. It was humiliating to be around him, especially with Lewis’ huge pumped-up bicep shoving out its veins in the sun, where it lay casually on the window of the car. Out of the side of my eye I saw the old man’s spotted hands trembling like he was deliberately making them do it. There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought. In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment, maybe. But there was something else. You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong; I never saw one who was physically powerful, either. Certainly there were none like Lewis. The work with the hands must be fantastically dangerous, in all that fresh air and sunshine, I thought: the catching of an arm in a tractor part somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but that the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one’s screams. And so many snakebites deep in the woods as one stepped over a rotten log, so many domestic animals suddenly turning and crushing one against the splintering side of a barn stall. I wanted none of it, and I didn’t want to be around where it happened either. But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-fingered people.
I looked off into the woods, then, and shot an eye corner back at my bow. This trip would sure be the farthest off in the woods I had ever been; there would be more animals than I had ever been close to, and they would be wilder. Lewis said he believed there were even a few bears and wild hogs in the mountains, though he said that the hogs were more likely to be domestic pigs that had run off. But they revert fast, he said; they grow that ruff up the back of the neck and the snout stretches out and the tushes get long, and in six or seven years you can’t tell them from the ones in Russia, except maybe by a notch in the ear or a ring in the nose. I knew there was not much chance of our running into a bear or a hog; that was romance. But then, the idea of hunting, for me, was also a kind of romance. The death of a real deer at my hands was just a vaporous, remote presence that hovered over the figure of the paper deer forty-five yards away at target six of our archery range, as I tried to hit the heart-lung section marked out in heavy black.
“Man, I like the way you wear that hat,” Bobby said to the old man.
The man took off the hat and looked at it carefully; there was nothing remarkable about it, but when it was on his head it had the curious awkward-arrogant tilt that you find only in the country South. He put the hat back on the other side of his head with the same tilt.
“You don’t know nothin’,” he said to Bobby.
Drew said, “Can you tell us something about the land around here? I mean, suppose we wanted to get down the river to Aintry. Could we do it?”
The man turned away from Bobby, and the finality with which he did it made me glance at Bobby to see if he had disappeared as a result. Bobby was smiling the kind of smile that might or might not come before a mean remark.
“Well,” the man said, “it’s right rocky, on down a piece. If there’s been a rain it raises way up, but it don’t come over the banks, leastways in most places. There ain’t no danger of the valley floodin’; ain’t nothin’ in it anyway. Furthest down I been is Walker ’s Point, about fifteen miles, where the land starts gettin’ high. In a dry spell the river drops on down out of sight; you got to lean way out over the rocks to see it. And they say there’s another big gorge on down south, but I ain’t never been there.”
“Do you think we can get down the river?” Drew asked.
“In what?”
“In these two canoes.”
“I wouldn’t want to try it,” he said, and straightened up. “If it rains, you’re liable to be in bad trouble. The water climbs them rock walls like a monkey.”
“What the hell,” Lewis said. “It’s not going to rain. Look up yonder.”
I looked up yonder. It was clear, hazy-hot blue with no clouds. It seemed all right, if it stayed that way.
“If it rains, we’ll just find us a place and hole up,” Lewis said. “I’ve done it before.”
“You’ll have a time holing up if you get down in that gorge.”
“We’ll make out.”
“All right,” the old man said. “You asked me. I told you.”
Drew and Bobby turned to go back to the Olds, and the Texaco man walked back alongside of Drew. I heard him ask, “Whose guitar is that-there yonder?” Then he was jumping like a dog on its hind legs back into the filling station. “Lonnie,” he hollered, “come on out here.”
He came back and behind him was an albino boy with pink eyes like a white rabbit’s; one of them stared off at a furious and complicated angle. That was the eye be looked at us with, with his face set in another direction. The sane, rational eye was fixed on something that wasn’t there, somewhere in the dust of the road.
“Git yer banjo,” the old man said, and then to Drew, “Come on, play us a little something.”
Drew grinned, rolled down the back window of the wagon, got out the big cracked Martin and put on his finger picks. He came back to the front of the Olds and hiked himself onto the bood with one leg up to hold the guitar. He tuned for a minute, and Lonnie came back holding up a five-string banjo with a capo made out of rags and rubber bands.
“Lonnie don’t know nothin but banjo-pickin’,” the old man said. “He ain’t never been to school; when he was little he used to sit out in the yard and beat on a lard can with a stick.”
“Whaere we going to play, Lonnie?” Drew asked, his glasses opaque with pleasure.
Lonnie stood holding the banjo, looking off from us now with both eyes, the eyes splitting apart and all of us in the blind spot.
“Anything,” the old man said. “Play anything.”
Drew started in on “Wildwood Flower,” picking it out at medium tempo and not putting in many runs. Lonnie dragged on the rubber bands and slipped the capo up. Drew started to come on with the volume; the Martin boomed out and over the dusty filling station. I had never beard him play so well, and I really began to listen deeply, moved as an unmusical person is moved when he sees that the music is meant. After a little while it sounded as though Drew were adding another kind of sound to every note he played, a higher, tinny echo of the melody, and then it broke in on me that this was the banjo, played so softly and rightly that it sounded like Drew’s own fingering. I could not see Drew’s face, but the back of his neck was sheer joy. He eased out of the melody and played rhythm, and Lonnie took it. He emphasized nothing, but through everything he played there was a lovely unimpeded flowing that seemed endless. His hands, full of long scratches, took time; the fingers moved only slightly, about like those of a good typist; the music was just there. Drew came back in the new key and they finished, riding together. For the last couple of minutes of the song, Drew slid down and went over and stood beside Lonnie. They put the instruments together and leaned close to each other in the pose you see vocal groups and phony folk singers take on TV programs, and something rare and unrepeatable took hold of the way I saw them, the demented country kid and the big-faced decent city man, the minor civic leader and hedge clipper. I was glad for Drew’s sake we had come. Just this incident would be plenty to satisfy him.
“Goddamn,” he said as they finished.
“Come on, Drew,” Lewis said. “Put that thing away. We got to get water under us.”