“Beats me,” I said. “Well get as far as we can. Depends on the water, and how many places we have to walk through. Everybody including the map says there’s a gorge down below here, and that sort of bothers me. But there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Bobby and I got in and shoved off, and right away I could tell I was in for a hard time. I was not in awfully good shape myself, but Bobby was wheezing and panting after the first hundred yards. He had no coordination at all, and changed the canoe from what it had been with Drew’s steady, serious weight in front to a nervous, unstable craft that seemed bound and determined to do everything wrong, to get rid of us. I was sure that Lewis was disgusted with Bobby, and just as sure that I would be, also, before much longer.
“Easy,” I said. “Easy. You’re trying too hard. All we want to do is bold this thing straight. we don’t need to be pulling our guts out to get there. Just let the river do it. Let George do it.”
“George ain’t doing it fast enough. I want to get the hell and gone out of this goddamned place.”
“Ah, now. It’s not all that bad.”
“It’s not? Mosquitoes ate me up last night. My bites have got bites. I’m catching a fucking cold from sleeping on the fucking ground. I’m hungry as hell for something that tastes good. And I don’t mean sorghum.”
“Just steady down a little, and well get there … when we get there. It’s not going to do your cold any good to dump in this river, you can bloody well bet.”
“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get on with it. I’m tired of this woods scene; I’m tired of shitting in a hole in the ground. This is for the Indians.”
After a while he settled down a little, and the back of his neck lightened its red. We dug a couple of strokes for every twenty-five yards, and the river moved us along. But I thought that the chances were pretty good, with my high center of gravity and his nerves, that we would spill before the day was out, especially if there were any fast stretches with lots of rocks. With the equipment and with Bobby and me, who were at least fifty pounds heavier than the other two, we were riding far too low in the water. We had too much stuff with us for the way we were teamed, and I signaled back to Lewis to pull over to the bank. He did, and we wallowed alongside the other canoe and tied up.
“Getting hot,” Lewis said.
“Hot as the hinges,” I said.
“Did you see that big snake back yonder?”
“No. Where?”
“He was lying up in the limbs of that old oak tree you went under about a mile and a half back. I didn’t see him till you were right under him, and he lifted his head. I didn’t want to make any fuss; thought it might make him nervous. I’m pretty sure it was a moccasin. I’ve heard of them dropping in boats.”
“Shit fire,” Bobby said. “That’s all we need.”
“Yeah,” said Lewis. “I can imagine.”
“Can you take on some of the stuff in our canoe, Lewis?” I asked. “We’re awful low and logy.”
“Sure. Go get the cooking equipment and the bedrolls. That ought to equalize us, just about. You can also let us have about half the beer that’s left.”
“Happy to. Everybody’s going to need something to cool off with, today.”
“Why do it just with beer?” Lewis said, unbuttoning his shirt. “It’s shallow and slow here. I’m going to get wet.”
I transferred the bedrolls and beer and the primus and other cooking equipment to the other canoe. Lewis was already in the water naked, booming overhand down the current with a lot of back showing, like Johnny Weismuller in the old Tarzan movies. He swam as well as he did everything else, and outran the current easily. Then he came back, his eyes glaring with effort at water level. I shucked off my coveralls and dived in, and so did Drew.
The river was very cold; it felt as though it had snow and ice in it, and had only just turned then to water. But it was marvelously clear and alive, and broke like glass around you and came together unhurt. I swam a little way into the current, and would gladly have given up all human effort—I was tired of human efforts of all kinds, especially my own—and gone on downstream either dead or alive, to wherever it would take me. But I swam back, a hard forty yards against the subtle tearing and downstream insistence, and stood up next to Lewis, who was waist deep with water crumpling and flopping at his belly. I looked at him, for I have never seen him with his clothes off.
Everything he had done for himself for years paid off as he stood there in his tracks, in the water. I could tell by the way he glanced at me; the payoff was in my eyes. I had never seen such a male body in my life, even in the pictures in the weight-lifting magazines, for most of those fellows are short, and Lewis was about an even six feet. I’d say he weighed about 190. The muscles were bound up in him smoothly, and when be moved, the veins in the moving part would surface. If you looked at him that way, he seemed made out of well-matched red-brown chunks wrapped in blue wire. You could even see the veins in his gut, and I knew I could not even begin to conceive how many sit-ups and leg-raises—and how much dieting—had gone into bringing them into view.
He dropped a hand on my shoulder and stirred the far around. “What do you think, Bolgani the Gorilla?”
“I think Tarzan speak with forked tongue,” I said. “I think Lord of jungle speak with tongue of Histah the Snake. I think we never get out of woods. He bring us here to stay and found kingdom.”
“Yeah,” said Bobby from the bank. “ Kingdom of Snakes is right.”
Drew came out of the river near us. “Gosh that feels good,” he said. “It really does. I never felt anything more wonderful in my life. Refreshing. You know, that’s just what it is. I feel like I can go all day, now. You better come on in for a minute, Bobby.”
“No thanks. Whenever you’re ready, me and the other Fatso will just Fatso on down, the washed and the unwashed.”
He sat with his knees drawn up, self-protective in the sun against the water-chill he could see on us. Our nipples were blue and drawn up, and my stomach muscles were beginning to heave against the moving underwater freeze. I climbed out and pulled on my sweaty coveralls. My head was fresh and cool while my body heated up, and I wanted to get back on the river before I began to melt again.
Bobby and I went over to our canoe and tried to figure out what else we might be able to transfer to the other one.
We finally ended up taking only one tent, my bow, a six-pack of beer and Drew’s guitar, for the wooden canoe was leaking a little and ours was more or less dry. We wrapped the guitar in the tent, got in and pushed off.
We rode a lot better now, and Bobby’s paddling improved a good deal because of this, and maybe because he had convinced himself that the less trouble he was the quicker we’d get off the river.
The water was calm for a long time. We made turn after turn, sometime near one bank, and sometime near the other. I tried not to go under any more limbs, and this was easy enough to do. The river spread and slowed and quieted, and we had to paddle more than we had been doing. We could hardly feel any current at all; it was very faint, and when we rested it was as though we were drawn forward by something invisible underneath us, while the water around us stood still. We could hear sound far off in front, but it kept retreating downstream. Each turn opened out only on another stretch of river, gradually unfolding its woods along both banks. A heron of some kind flushed on the right. He swept downstream in front of us, going left, then right, then left-right, dipping quickly and indecisively. He would disappear around the next turn, then, as we came around it, would spring up again from leaves where we had not seen him and muscle himself into the air on long blue wings, giving a hoarse agonized inhuman cry and making a magnificent half-turn over the river ahead of us, then start downstream again with long wingbeats, the tips of his wings all but touching the water, so that wherever he was his shadow started up under him at each downstroke, vague and misshapen with the river. This continued through four or five turns, until we came around another one like the others and did not see him. He may have veered into the woods, but I thought that most probably he had learned to sit still, maybe nearing hysterical flight once again as we approached and went past, but managing to keep that long-necked, desperate cry in his throat until we had gone.