It was like riding on a river of air. The rocks flickered around and under us, then sand, then rocks, changing colors into each other as we streamed through. I half rose out of my seat; nothing else could be said to me but this, in this way. It was unkillableness: the triumph of an illusion when events bear it out. I looked to see what was coming to me next. “Hold on, baby,” I hollered. “We’re going home.”
Ahead was a tilted flange of rock with water sculpted over it in a long, curling forelocked curve that broke at us and then away from us past the rock, and then a low wall of rocks that looked like they shallowed out on both sides. I dug for the rock to go straight over, to have the thing whole.
We went up, like the beginning of an incline; the nose lifted; a powerful surge caught up with us from the rear. We lost weight completely. We rolled out over the top of the rock in one unstoppable motion. I closed my eyes and screamed with Lewis, mixing my voice with his bestial scream, blasting my lungs out where we hung six feet over the river for an instant and then began to fall. I waited for the upward revengeful smash of the river, but the nose rode down with an odd softness and into the back-scrolled smashed water at the foot of the rock, quivered straight back through the spine of the canoe into mine and into my brain, where I saw a vision of burning jackstraws or needles, and we were back down onto the bedded river in two almost simultaneous stepdowns. I listened for my cry hanging in the wet air above the blue-and-white flag colors of the rock—I still listen for it—and we were down and slowing forward, back on green water, solid and heavy on it, and it solid and heavy under us.
The bed-rocks fell away; another curve, one without rapids, began to open in front of us a hundred yards farther on. I looked at Bobby. He was still hanging back from his seat, but struggling to sit on it again. He turned half around back to me, and opened the eye on that side. He started to say something but didn’t, and I started to and didn’t.
Now, in calm water, I began to collect everything we needed to make the future with.
“Right back there is where it all happened,” I said.
He looked at me without any understanding at all.
“Somebody is going to ask us things. When that happens tell him that right back there was where Drew fell out—we all fell out. That was where Lewis broke his leg and we lost the other canoe.”
“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?”