“What if they went that far back and found the broken rope?”
“Chances are they wouldn’t. The rope broke at the very top and there’s a lot of cliff. Anyway, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”
“Is that all, now?”
“Yes; all but one thing. We didn’t see anybody on the river. Not since we left Oree have we seen another human being. That’s awfully important, and we can’t vary from it.”
“I’m not going to vary from it, I can clue you. We haven’t seen anybody. I wish we hadn’t.”
“We didn’t. The only other thing is whether somebody was reported missing in that area, and people knew more or less where the person was going. That bothers me a little, but not so much as some of the other problems. Those were awful-looking men; who’d care where they were?”
“Somebody might.”
“That’s right. Somebody might. But whether the person would know where they went, or the area or direction they went in, we just can’t have any idea. That one is beyond us. That’s where we’ve got to ride on luck. And I feel lucky; the odds is good.”
Bobby laughed, and some of it was really laughter. “Do you reckon this room is bugged? Or that someone could be listening?”
“It’s not bugged,” I said, “but that sure is a thoughty notion of yours, cousin.”
I slid off my tennis shoes and went to the door sock-footed, and listened. “Keep talking,” I whispered back to Bobby. “Keep talking, and give me time to listen, too.”
I listened; I listened for the nose-whistle of breath, and maybe it was there. But then you always can hear breath, anywhere, when you want to. I couldn’t hear enough, though, for it really to be breath. Or at least I didn’t think I could. I took hold of the knob and jerked the door inward. Nothing. Was there any sound going down the stairs? No. I was sure. No. I turned back to Bobby and held up a circle of fingers.
“I’ll be in my room,” I said. “Go get us those clothes and then we’ll hustle our asses over to the hospital. Lewis’ll still be knocked out, I bet, and I doubt they’ll pump him too hard anyway, but we better try and get the change in story across to him or see what he remembers of the first one.”
I went back to my room, shucked off the nylon and lay thinking again. I was looking forward to the encounter with the local sheriff, or whatever he was; I was looking forward to his local species of entrapment.
The sun came up more, and I pushed back the covers and lay in it. I was still tired, but the main tiredness had pulled back from me, and the bright light held it off me. It was very good, lying there wounded and stronger. Not so badly wounded now—the stitches were pulling me together—and a lot stronger. Yes indeed.
Bobby came back with the clothes, and I pulled on dry blue jeans, a work shirt, white socks and a pair of clod-hopping brogans that linked me to the earth with every step. But I was not that tired anymore, and I enjoyed lifting them just enough.
I wadded up the nylon in my hand, and we went downstairs together, both in farm clothes. It was exhilarating, now, to be so dry.
The woman who owned the place was dusting.
“Would you get rid of these for me?” I asked her, holding out the nylon outfit full of my blood.
She looked at me. “Be glad to,” she said. “Ain’t but one thing to do with them.”
“I can’t think of anything more to do with them,” I said, “except to burn them.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Can’t use them for rags.”
She smiled; we smiled.
Bobby and I got into Drew’s car and drove out to the bospital. There were two highway patrol cars there. “Here we go,” I said. “Hold on.”
We went in, and a fellow in white showed us to the ward where Lewis was. There were three highway patrol officers there, talking quietly among themselves with toothpicks in their mouths, and Lewis was lying either asleep or under sedation in a comer of the empty ward with a sheet medically levitated over his legs. The sandy-haired doctor was beside him, inclining his head and writing something again. He turned as he heard my heavy new steps.
“Hello, killer,” he said. “How’d you sleep?”
“Good. Better than the riverbank.”
“Stitches holding?”
“You know it; holding me together, like you said. There ain’t nothing getting in or out.”
“Good,” he said, in his way of going serious I liked.
Lewis came to us before I had a chance to say anything else. He moved a little, up from the waist; he came like a muscular act; the veins of his biceps jumped clear, clear as anatomy, and he opened eyes.
I turned to the patrolmen. “Have you been talking to him?” I asked.
“No,” one of them said. “We’ve been waiting for him to come around.”
“He’s around, I expect,” I said. “Or he will be soon. Give him a minute.”
He was looking straight at me. “Hello, Tarzan,” I said. “How’s the world of the Great White Doctor?”
“White,” he said.
“What’ve they been trying to do to you?”
“You tell me,” he said. “I’ve got a heavy leg, and there’s some pain in there rambling around. But we got clean sheets, and there ain’t that grating sound when I move. So I guess it’s all right.”
I got in between Lewis and the nearest patrolman—got in close, almost head to head—and winked. He winked back, though anybody who didn’t know it was a wink, wouldn’t have. “Just don’t let’s get on that last stretch of water again, buddy,” he said. “Not today, anyway.”
He had given it to me without knowing it; I took it hoping that it had been loud enough.
“Everything went,” I said. “Drew was killed; you remember me telling you?”
“I think so,” he said. “I don’t remember him in the canoe, after that. I don’t remember.”
“You remember all that spray?” I asked.
“I remember, sort of,” he said. “Was that where it was?”
“That’s where it was for Drew,” I said slowly. “You and Steinhauser’s tub bought it in the first spill, upriver.”
“I couldn’t see anything,” he said. “Looking straight up, I couldn’t even see the sky.”
“No sky,” I said.
“No sky at all.”
I rounded my hurt side, back to the patrolman. “Wait’ll you see it,” I said. “You’ll understand what the man’s talking about.”
“Y’all want to wait, on down here a ways?” one of the policemen, a new one, said to us. We pulled back, down along the corridor. But Lewis had got the message; I was sure he had, and not too soon.
Bobby and I walked along in our new clothes. Neither of us had had a chance to shave, and we were pretty grubby, but clean. A shave would have made me a completely new person, but I was half-new anyway, and half-new was very good; it is better to come back easily.
After about fifteen minutes the new officer walked ordinarily along to us. “Why’ont we go on back into town?” he said.
“All right,” I told him. “Whatever you say.”
I got into the front seat of the patrol car with him, and we started back. I didn’t say anything and he didn’t either. When we reached town he went into a cafe and made a couple of calls. It frightened me some to watch him talk through the tripled glass—windshield, plate glass and phone booth glass—for it made me feel caught in the whole vast, inexorable web of modern communications. I was not sure that this was not the beginning of the enormous, unfathomable apparatus of crime detection, from which no one is entirely free: I could imagine stupendous filing systems, IBM machines tirelessly sorting punch cards, one thing being checked against another: I was not sure he was not talking to J. Edgar Hoover. Our story could not stand up against that, I was sure. And yet it might, even so.
The patrolman came back and sat with me, with his door open. In a little while two more patrol cars showed up. A small crowd started to drift together; a head turned toward us, and another: eventually, all heads looked at us at least once, and most of them more than once. I sat still, in my clothes of the country. I could prove where I had bought them. My hurt was good in the midst of the general unhurt.