That seemed not such a bad prospect, to tell the truth. It would have been wonderful to give all my weight to the water one more time, maybe for good. This was too hard; this was just too hard. It was, and I knew it. Anyone would have known it.
We went over some little rapids that shook us and picked up our speed a little, but not much. They were deep and powerful, but the channels were clear and we rode through them without much maneuvering. I was sure we didn’t have much farther to go. Where would we come out? What was there to see, that men had made, that would tell us? What would we see when we got off the river forever?
Lewis lay quietly on the floor with his pants unbuttoned and belt undone; he looked like some great broken thing. I could see the huge muscles of his thigh around the break; they were turning blue. With his free hand, the one that had nothing to do with his face, he was bracing up under the inside of the gunwale, and I thought that perhaps this was a new system, a way to make his leg go to sleep and keep it asleep by putting pressure on it in a special manner; his bracing arm was rigid; the tricep muscle quivered continually with the river, and in it you could see every rock.
The whole stream now was running fast, without rapids. It was deep, and deep green. It was easy going, the easiest of all, and whenever I could get my head up I superimposed a picture of a highway bridge over the river; but I could never match them up; the bridge would hover and disappear.
Far off there was what looked like a stretch of rapids with a few big rocks—the sound was low-throated and pleasant rather than frightening—and beyond that, another wooded turn. We were moving toward the white, light water and were very close to it when I saw Drew’s body backed up between the rocks and looking straight at us.
I told Bobby, but he could not get his head up to look. He could not, and I knew he could not, and I didn’t blame him. But somebody had to look, had to do something, and it would be better if both of us tried.
“Listen,” I heard myself say. “Wake up and help me.”
I headed for Drew, for his place in the rocks, pulling hard against the current that wanted to take us past him. I turned the canoe as broadside as I could and asked the rocks to catch us, to help us. They did. We stopped, we lodged lightly, and I got out onto the sandy soil blowing with underwater. I walked up the canoe on two exhausting steps drawn through the river and hit Bobby hard on the side of the shoulder; as hard as I could, but not hard enough for the situation. To help I put the other hand on the knife.
“Did you hear me?” I said, not loudly. “You help me with this or I’ll kill you, just as you sit there on your useless ass. Now come on. We’ve got to finish it.”
He got slowly out into the water, swaying with the current, his eyes looking at everything but me.
Drew was sitting up, facing upstream, in a kind of rough natural chair made of two stones where part of the river ran through, split off from the main current by a flat rock. Though he was sitting, it was a very easy, careless—even carefree—position, partly on the base of his spine. Water ran up and fell back from the top part of his chest, and a thin continuous spray of it went into his open mouth, making a quivering sensitive silver bell around his lips where one gold filling glinted. His eyelids were also kept propped open by the current, seeming to see out of the open water back up into the mountains, around all the curves of the river, infinitely. The pull of the water on his mouth gave him a cretinous, loose-lipped look, but the eyes had nothing to do with that; they were blue and all-seeing and clear.
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.”