I was floating, not flowing anymore. Turning idly in the immense dark bed, I looked up at the gorge side rising and rising. My legs were killing me, but I could kick them both, and as far as I could tell neither was broken. I lifted my hand from the water; it was nicked and chopped a little in places, but not as badly as it might have been; there was a diagonal cut across the palm, but not a deep one—a long slice.
I floated on, trying to recover enough to think what to do. Finally I started to struggle weakly around to look upstream for the others. My body was heavy and hard to move without the tremendous authority of the rapids to help it and tell it what to do.
Either upstream or down, there was nobody in the river but me. I kept watching the last of the falls, for I had an idea that I might have passed the others, somewhere along. There had probably been several places where the water split and came down through the rocks in different ways; all three of them might be back there somewhere, dead or alive.
As I thought that, Bobby tumbled out of the rapids, rolling over and over on the slick rocks, and then flopped bellydown into the calm. I pointed to the bank and he began feebly to work toward it. So did I.
“Where is Lewis?” I yelled.
He shook his head, and I stopped pulling on the water and turned to wait in midstream.
After a minute or two Lewis came, doubled-up and broken-looking, one hand still holding his paddle and the other on his face, clasping something intolerable. I breaststroked to him and lay beside him in the cold coiling water under the falls. He was writhing and twisting uselessly, caught by something that didn’t have hold of me, something that seemed not present.
“Lewis,” I said.
“My leg’s broke,” he gasped. “It feels like it broke off.”
The water where we were did not change. “Hold on to me,” I said.
He moved his free hand through the river and fixed the fingers into the collar of my slick nylon outfit, and I moved gradually crossways on the water toward the big boulders under the cliff. The dark came on us faster and faster as I hauled on the crossgrain of the current with Lewis’ choking weight dragging at my throat.
From where we were the cliff looked something like a gigantic drive-in movie screen waiting for an epic film to begin. I listened for interim music, glancing now and again up the pale curved stone for Victor Mature’s stupendous image, wondering where it would appear, or if the whole thing were not now already playing, and I hadn’t yet managed to put it together.
As we neared the wall, I saw that there were a few random rocks and a tiny sand beach where we were going to come out; where Bobby was, another rock. I motioned to him, and he unfolded and came to the edge of the water, his hands embarrassing.
He gave me one of them, and I dragged us out. Lewis hopped up onto a huge placid stone, working hard, and then failed and crumpled again. The rock, still warm with the last of the sun that had crossed the river on its way down, held him easily, and I turned him on his back with his hand still over his face.
“Drew was shot,” Lewis said with no lips. I saw it. “He’s dead.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, but I was afraid that’s what it was.
“Something happened to him. But I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Let’s take his pants down,” I said to Bobby.
He looked at me.
“Goddamn phraseology,” I said. “We’re in another bag, now, baby. Get his pants off him and see if you can tell how bad he’s hurt. I’ve got to try to get that goddamned canoe, or we’ll stay here.”
I turned back to the river. I waded in, feeling the possibility of a rifle shot die with the very last light, moving back into the current like an out-of-shape animal, taking on the familiar weight and lack-of-weight of water. Very clearheaded, I sank down.
The depth came into me, increasing—no one can tell me different—with the darkness. The aluminum canoe floated palely, bulging half out of the total dark, making slowly for the next rapids, but idly, and unnaturally slowed and stogged with calm water. Nearly there, I ran into a thing of wood that turned out to be a broken paddle. I took it on.
I swam slow-motion around the canoe, listening for the rifle shot I would never hear if it killed me; that I had not heard when it killed Drew, if it did. Nothing from that high up could see me, and I knew it, though it might see the canoe. Even that was doubtful, though, and the conviction enlarged on me that I could circle the canoe all night, if I chose, in the open.
The calm was deep; there was no place to stand to dump the water out. I hung to the upside-down gunwale, tipping it this way and that, trying to slip the river out of the factory metal. Finally it rolled luckily, and the stream that had been in it began to flow again; the hull lightened and climbed out of the water, and was mostly on top of it. I pushed on the sharp stern, keeping it going with excruciating frog legs. The current went around me, heading into the darkness downstream. I could see a little white foaming, but it was peacefully beyond, another problem for another time. I turned to the cliff and called softly out to Bobby, and he answered.
I looked up and could barely make out his face. The canoe went in to him, guided by the same kind of shove I gave Dean when he was first learning to walk. He waded and drew it up onto the sand by the bow rope, and we beached it under the overhang.
I moved onto land, not saying anything.
“For God’s sake,” Bobby said, “don’t be so damned quiet. I’m flipping already.”
Though my mouth was open, I closed it against the blackness and moved to Lewis, who was now down off the rock and lying in the sand. His bare legs were luminous, and the right leg of his drawers was lifted up to the groin. I could tell by its outline that his thigh was broken; I reached down and felt of it very softly. Against the back of my band his penis stirred with pain. His hair gritted in sand, turning from one side to the other.
It was not a compound fracture; I couldn’t feel any of the bone splinters I had been taught to look for in innumerable compulsory first-aid courses, but there was a great profound human swelling under my hand. It felt like a thing that was trying to open, to split, to let something out.
“Hold on, Lew,” I said. “We’re all right now.”
It was all-dark. The river-sound enveloped us as it never could have in light. I sat down beside Lewis and motioned to Bobby. He crouched down as well.
“Where is Drew?” Bobby asked.
“Lewis says be’s dead,” I said. “Probably be is. He may have been shot. But I can’t really say. I was looking right at him, but I can’t say.”
Lewis’ hand was pulling at me from underneath. I bent down near his face. He tried to say something, but couldn’t. Then he said, “It’s you. It’s got to be you.”
“Sure it’s me,” I said. “I’m right here. Nothing can touch us.”
“No. That’s not …” The river had the rest of what he said, but Bobby picked it up.
“What are we going to do?” he made the dark say; night had taken his red face.
“I think,” I said, “that we’ll never get out of this gorge alive.”
Did I say that? I thought. Yes, a dream-man said, you did. You did say it, and you believe it.
“I think he means to pick the rest of us off tomorrow,” I said out loud, still stranger than anything I had ever imagined. When do the movies start, Lord?
“What …?”
“That’s what I’d do. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t …”
“If Lewis is right, and I think he is, that toothless bastard drew down on us while we were lining up to go through the rapids, and before we were going too fast. He killed the first man in the first boat. Next would have been me. Then you.”
“In other words, it’s lucky we spilled.”
“Right. Lucky. Very lucky.”
It was an odd word to use, where we were. It was a good thing that we couldn’t see faces. Mine felt calm and narroweyed, but it might not have been. There was something to act out.