“No, but I haven’t moved it or fooled with it or thought about it for a long time. I kept trying to put it to sleep, back yonder, and now I can’t wake it up. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m all right.”
“I’m going to get somebody,” I said. “Can you hold out a little longer?”
“Sure,” he said. “My God, those falls must have been something, back there.”
“They were something. We could have done a lot better if we’d’a had you, buddy.”
“You had me,” he said.
“You should have seen the water between those rocks.”
“I don’t know,” he said, getting faint again. “I had it another way. I felt it in my leg, and I tell you, I know something I didn’t know before.”
There was a good smile on his face. He tried to get his head up from the dried vomit, then sank back in it.
“Are you sure about Drew?” he asked. “They can’t find him?”
“They won’t find him,” I said. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“That’s it, then, I guess,” he said. “Go and get somebody. Anybody. I want to get out of this goddamned roasting oven. I want to get out of my own coffin, this fucking piece of tin junk.”
“Lie still. We’re home free. Lie still and don’t worry.”
I told Bobby to stay with the canoe and climbed up the kudzu of the bank to the road that ran across the bridge. It was a thin blacktop state highway, and about a half a mile along it was a country gas station, a store with two stark yellow pumps, probably Shell. I stood, wondering how I could get there without killing myself, and also waiting for the road to unfreeze and begin to flow around me. The stillness underfoot was disturbing, but it stayed, and from it I looked back down at the river. It was beautiful, and I was sure I would feel all my life the particular pull of it at different places, the weight and depth and speed of it; they had been given to me.
I was heavy in the air now, and floundered a little, walking. My side was caked shut, and the part of the flying suit I had tied around me had clotted into the wound; I could not have gotten it out without fainting, so I let it stay, holding it in with an elbow and leaning over it a little, away from the road. I went toward the station, crossing the bridge over the spillway. The station moved off in the sun and shimmered like an oil slick, and I went after it as best I could. My side hurt badly, but it seemed to have moved off from me a little bit; the rags seemed to go around it instead of through it, so that it was like carrying a painful package or ball under my arm. I had a quick dry period between the time when the river water dried off my legs and the close nylon began to flap with sweat; by the time I got to the station I was striped with my own darkness.
A country teen-ager was sitting on the backless bottom of a kitchen chair just inside the screen door, which was shifting and tapping with flies. Though he had probably been watching me come, he could not believe me at close range. He got up and opened the door.
“Is there a phone here?” I asked.
He looked as though he didn’t know whether there was or not.
“I’ve got to get an ambulance out here,” I said. “And I’ve got to get to the highway patrol. People are hurting, and one’s dead.”
I let him make the calls, because I didn’t know where on earth the station was. “Just tell them there’s been an accident on the river,” I said. “And tell them where to come, but tell them to come quick. I don’t think I can last, and there’s another man hurt worse than I am.”
He hung up, finally, and said there’d be somebody along toreckly.
I sat down and tilted back in a chair and was perfectly still, getting my story together one more time, the most important time. But back of the story was the reason for the story, and the woods and the river, and all that had happened. There must be some way for me to get used to the idea that I had buried three men in two days, and that I had killed one of them. I had never seen a dead man in my life, except a brief glance at my father in his coffin. It was strange to be a murderer, especially sitting where I was sitting, but I was too tired to be worried, and didn’t worry, except about Bobby’s ability to remember what I had told him.
A car or two went by, and I waited to hear one slow down. My side hurt, but the pain was in repose, and lay there under my arm, a part of me that I had made, and could live with. I wondered if I should tell whatever doctor dressed it that I had gored myself on my own arrow, or that I had cut myself on the canoe when we turned over, since there were several places on it where the banging around it had taken on the rocks had forced the metal apart and made flanges and projections that might conceivably cut. I decided to go with the arrow, for there might still be some paint in the wound, and some parts of the wound were clean-cut by the razorhead, and the jagged aluminum wouldn’t have done that.
I began to take on so much weight that I could not get up, and then I could not even get my head up. I could feel my still body still trying to make paddling movements. I thought I was stiff, but I must not have been, for when someone touched my bare arm at the shoulder where I had cut off the sleeve the muscles jumped tight again. It was a Negro ambulance driver.
“Have you got a doctor with you?”
“We got one,” he said. “We got a good one; he young and good. What in this world happened to you, man? What in this world? Somebody shoot you?”
“The river,” I said. “The river happened to me. But I’m not the one; I’m just the only one who can move. We’ve got a man back down across the bridge who’s bad hurt, and the other fellow had to stay with him. Also one was killed, or I guess he was. We couldn’t find him.”
“You want to come show us where your man is at?”
“I’ll come if I can get up. If I sit in this chair much longer I’m going to fall out of it.”
He went to my good side and I rose like a mountain into the air of fan belts, where a few cheap cockeyed pairs of dark glasses formed on a piece of yellow cardboard.
“Hold on to me, man,” he said.
He was slight and steady, and I put my good arm around his shoulders, but my knees were going; the world was going.
“You can’t make it,” he said. “You sit right back down.”
“I can make it,” I said, as the glasses focused again.
I told the boy at the store to tell the police where we were going, and the driver and I walked out into the sun where the little white county ambulance sat. The doctor was in the front seat writing something. He looked up and got out all in the same motion.
He opened the back doors. “Bring him around here and let him lie down.”
I crawled onto the stretcher and turned on my back. It was hard to do; I didn’t want to turn loose the driver. He not only felt good to me, but he felt like a good person, and I needed one bad; just that contact was what I needed most. I didn’t need myself anymore; I had had too much of that for too long.
The young doctor, sandy haired and pale, crouched beside me.
“No, no,” I said. “It’s not me. I can wait. Go back across the bridge. There’s a man in a canoe who’s got a bad fracture. It may have hemorrhaged in some way. Let’s get him looked after first.”
We drove down the highway—a land-motion of machines, and peculiar—to the bridge, and I got out one more time. I probably didn’t have to, but I thought it would be best.
Lewis was still in the canoe, stretched out and sweating, his shirt half-dark and his arm over his eyes, and Bobby was talking to the man and boy who had been fishing. I knew Bobby must have been testing his story out on them, and I hoped he had made good use of the time to get it straight; the others looked as though they believed him. It is hard to disbelieve injured, exhausted men, and that was a great advantage.
The driver and the doctor helped Lewis out of the canoe and onto the stretcher. The County Hospital was in Aintry, about seven miles off. We got ready to go, but while we were standing around the ambulance the highway patrol drove up, the siren droning faintly. A short fellow stepped out, and then a rough-looking blond boy. I got ready.