“How about your guitar?” Bobby hollered from the top of the bank.
“Bring it,” Drew said, and then to me, “I don’t mind losing that old Martin in the river, but I’ll be goddamned if I want those characters to run off with it.”
“I hope we don’t ruin it, by spilling our foolish asses in this river,” I said.
“I don’t know about you,” Drew said, as mock-country as he could talk, “but I ain’t planning to spill in this-here river. I’m a-goin’ with you, and not Mr. Lewis Medlock. I done seen how he drove these roads he don’t know nothin’ about.”
“OK,” I said. “Fine. But you probably ought to know that he can handle a canoe pretty well, and I can’t. He’s strong as the devil, too, and he’s in shape. I’m not.”
“I’ll take my chances,” he said. “So will Miss Martin.”
Lewis and Bobby kept coming through the willows, carrying stuff, and Drew and I kept cramming it under the lashed-down tents, any way we could. Lewis should have stayed down here in the water with us, I thought. He could surely have done a better job of loading than we were doing. We floundered around in the slime, our feet deep in the mud.
Finally Bobby came through the leaves for the last time. “We’re ready,” he said.
“Everything all set about the cars?”
“Far as I can tell,” he said. “Lewis is dealing with those guys now. I’m sure glad we’re getting rid of them.”
Far off we heard a car start. It occurred to me that I had no idea at all of who the third driver in the truck was; I had not seen his face, or not noticed it.
“Personally,” Bobby said, “I damn well doubt whether they can get the cars back up the road we came down.”
“That’s a nice thought,” Drew said. “What if they can’t?”
“We’ll be gone,” I said. “Then it’s their problem.”
“Damned if it’s their problem,” Bobby said. “What’re we going to do if we come off this river, and there’re no cars, down at what’s-its-name?”
Lewis spoke through the branches. “They’ll be there,” he said. “Don’t worry about a thing.”
We now had our life jackets on and I held the wooden canoe steady for Bobby to get in. He swayed out over the river and got into the bow seat. Lewis followed. The weight sank the canoe far enough into the water to make it as stable as it ever could be.
“OK,” Lew said. “Turn loose.”
I did; they floated free. I stood watching over my shoulder. My feet were pointed toward the bank; I was mired down so far that I began to wonder how I was going to get out. I stayed rooted, holding on to the aluminum canoe while Drew got into the front and picked up the paddle.
“This how you hold this thing?” he asked me.
“I reckon,” I said. “You hold it … like you hold it.”
I got one foot out of the mud by driving the other one about twice as far down, and then grabbed a long branch and pulled myself up as best I could with the river holding on to me hard by the left leg.
“It’s got me,” I said.
“What’s got you?”
“It.”
I scrambled and pulled on the branch until I was out. I kicked a foothold into the bank and stepped wide from it into the stern of Lewis’ canoe and was in, everything rocking and wallowing. We pushed out with the paddles from the bank.
A slow force took hold of us; the bank began to go backward. I felt the complicated urgency of the current, like a thing made of many threads being pulled, and with this came the feeling I always had at the moment of losing consciousness at night, going toward something unknown that I could not avoid, but from which I would return. I dipped the paddle in.
Movies and pictures of Indians on calendars gave me a general idea of what to do, and I waved the paddle slowly through the water, down and along the left side of the canoe. The nose with Drew in it—I saw now that moving him to one side or the other, to turn the canoe, was going to be a big part of the problem—swung heavily out toward midstream, where the current began to pick us up and move us a little faster. The sensation of pure riding could not have been greater though we were doing not much more than drifting, bogged with the weight of gear, and with uncertainty. Downstream, Lewis and Bobby were hardly any better off, their strokes uncoordinated and helpless, though Lewis was trying. I supposed that he was letting Bobby get the feel of the water, and find which side he would rather paddle on. I told Drew to keep his paddle on the right, and we tried a few sweeps together, running over a very shallow place where the water quickened and broke and foamed over gray-brown gravel. We rocked and scraped on the stones.
“Go ahead and try a little stronger pull,” I said. “We’ve got to find a way to make this thing move like we want it to.”
He dug in, and I swept with him. We settled into a good motion that moved us toward a curve. Once or twice my paddle hit the bottom-rocks; this put an odd, dissonant, intimate feeling into my bands. We started into the curve just as the other canoe disappeared around it. I plowed a little harder to turn us exactly with the current. Drew glanced back, his glasses flashing, the life preserver not turning. His face-side had a big grin. “Hey, hey,” he said. “How about this?”
“How about it, is right.”
As we straightened out of the curve I had a quick sensation of something wrong. Either the river was wrong or the green canoe was. Lewis and Bobby were traveling broadside to the gentle water, and Lewis was doing his best to bring the bow around. Bobby was totally confused, as nearly as I could tell, though he was trying to help. But they were going down the river backward. Drew put his hand over his face. I thought of hollering something to Lewis, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Sometimes I could laugh at him, but I felt that it wouldn’t be right to do it now. Drew and I rested, the paddles pulled up, keeping our mouths shut. The stream was with us, and we could watch. Bobby quit trying to paddle, and Lewis, by the sheer desire to do it, managed to swing the canoe broadside again, but just as he lifted it side-on to the current a paired set of rocks stopped it. Lewis banged and shoved at the rocks with his paddle and with his hands, and then tried to hunch the canoe free with his weight. Finally, though, he stepped off into the river and took hold of the canoe. Drew and I came alongside and I backwatered. On impulse I got out to help. Lew and I hauled and shoved, with Bobby sitting in the bow with his face absolutely perfect as an expression of dead weight.
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.