“What do you think?” I asked Lew. “You reckon we’ll ever see these cars? This is a rough son of a bitch. Why wouldn’t he and his brother just go off and sell them?”
“Because we know who he is,” Lewis said matter-of-factly. “And he doesn’t come by twenty dollars so easy as all that. Sure, the cars’ll be right there when we get there. Don’t worry about it.”
After a few minutes Griner came out of the house with his even bigger brother alongside. They were like two pro football linemen in their first season after retirement when they are beginning to soften up, working as night watchmen. We didn’t try to introduce ourselves; the thought of asking them to shake bands with us never occurred to me until years later. I still wonder what would have happened if we had tried.
Drew’s car came into sight from behind us. We told them what the arrangements were. The brothers and another man—who just simply materialized—got into an old Ford pickup with the paint seared off in patches clear down to the naked metal, and followed us. It seemed to me that we should have been following them, but from the filling station Lewis had the information he wanted; it was not much, but it was enough for him. He knew where the river was, approximately, he knew that the land flattened to the north and that there had been logging in the woods near the river. That all this might possibly be misinformation did not make the slightest difference to him. He was going there.
After a while he turned off on a dirt road. We ran along on this for a time, covering the truck behind us with ocher dust swirling up in a thick cloud from Lewis’ too-fast driving. We ran past some farms and out over the crest of an open field on a section of road as straight as a plow furrow through two stands of rotten corn on either side, and then into some hot pinewoods that dropped off and kept dropping off. The road got worse. It began to curve back in the general direction of the highway, and Lewis craned his head out the window, trying to make the road bend back toward where he believed the river was. When he turned I was not expecting it, and thought we had hit something. We swayed off the road and down, everything going with us rattling. Lewis rose a little higher in the seat. Bushes whacked up under the car. I turned to look back. The other cars weren’t behind us, as far as I could tell. I thought perhaps Lew’s speed had lost them at the turnoff, but if they’d turned off with us they’d surely be in sight by now, and they weren’t.
The road slung in a tight half-circle and gave out. In front of us were a few blackened boards on the ground and a rock chimney sinking into the weeds. A lizard ran over the biggest stone, and stopped with his head up. A dead sawhorse stood, off by itself in what looked like a sandpit.
“Well,” Lewis said, “we screwed up.”
“Maybe we’d better let them show us where the river is.”
“We’ll see.”
He backed into the weeds and manhandled the car around until we could get back on the track we had come down. When we reached the other road, the truck was waiting for us, with Drew’s car behind it. I had wondered why Drew hadn’t followed us, but it was like him to drop behind the truck; he didn’t know anything about where he was going, and he was willing to listen to somebody who did.
The first Griner leaned out of the cab. “Where you goin, city boy?”
Lewis flushed. “Get on with it,” he said.
“Naw, naw,” Griner said. “Go on ahead. You’ll find it. Ain’t nothin’ but the biggest river in the state.”
Lewis gunned ahead again. We swung with the road to the right, then back to the left and down. Suddenly it hit me that there were some stumps among the trees going by.
“Maybe this is where they were logging,” I said.
Lewis nodded. “This land has been sawmilled, all right,” he said. “I figure we’re getting there.”
The road kept dropping and failing. Finally it was only the ghost of a road; it was hard to believe that there had ever been any vehicles on it; it was almost like the rest of the woods. We eased on down. Once we had to crawl over a washout with the wheels barely balanced on each side. It would have been tough going in a jeep, even.
All at once the road fell away and slid down a kind of bank. I didn’t see how it would be possible to get back up.
“Hold on,” Lewis said, and tipped the car over forward. Rhododendron and laurel bushes closed in on us with a soft limber rush. A branch of something jumped in the window and stayed, lying across my chest.
We had stopped, and I sat with the pressure of the woods against me; when I looked down I saw that one leaf was shaking with my heart.
Lewis held up a finger next to his ear. “Listen,” he said.
I listened, not pushing away the limb. At first I didn’t hear anything. Yet the silence sounded like something was coming up under it, something steady and even and unendable. Lewis started the engine, and I helped the branch off me and out the window as we crawled down, rustling with many leaves. A high bank rose up, and the road went straight to it and quit. There was a gully in front of the bank. I got out, looking at the ground for snakes. Why on God’s earth am I here? I thought. But when I turned back to the car to see what Lewis was doing, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear window. I was fight green, a tall forest man, an explorer, guerrilla, hunter. I liked the idea and the image, I must say. Even if this was just a game, a charade, I had let myself in for it, and I was here in the woods, where such people as I had got myself up as were supposed to be. Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.
Lewis went forward from me and jumped the gully. He climbed the bank and then stood for a moment the tallest man in the woods, his hands on his hips, looking down the other side. I started up, too; I wanted to see what be was seeing. He went down the other side as I came up, feeling dirt on my hands for the first time in years. At the top there was nothing to see but more woods, and Lewis in his camouflage and Australian hat going through them. I went down in two or three soft, collapsing jumps that filled my tennis shoes with leaf mold. There was water at the bottom. Trees with thin leaves, like willows—maybe willows—were growing thickly there; I couldn’t see beyond the puddle at the bottom, but it was stirring faintly, not stagnant. And then I realized that there was plenty of sound going on; we had come into it almost imperceptibly, and now it seemed all around us.
Lewis crow-hopped over the water and I followed, holding on to saplings when I could. He stopped and I came up beside him. He pulled an armload of arrowy leaves out of the way. I edged up more, looking out—or in—through the ragged, ashen window he made.
The river opened and was there. It was gray-green, very clear and yet with a certain milkiness, too; it looked as though it would turn white and foam at rocks more easily than other water. It was about forty yards wide, and shallow, about two and a half or three feet deep. The bed was full of clean brown pebbles. We couldn’t see very far upstream or down because of our position and because of the willows, but just watched the part in front of us going by and by carrying nothing, not even a twig, as it lay in the branches and leaves in Lewis’ arms. He let the limbs fall; they swept in gracefully and closed the river off again.
“There she is,” Lewis said, still looking straight ahead.
“Pretty,” I said. “Pretty indeed.”
It took us a good long time to get the canoes off the cars and over the gully and the bank. Lew and Bobby pulled the canoes up the bank by the nose, hauling on the bow ropes, and Drew and I shoved from behind. Finally we slid them out through the willows. We put the wooden canoe in first. Lewis got down in the water, up to his knees in the bank mud, and supervised the loading. Both canoes had floorboards, though they were held in only by gravity and by the seats. We put in the perishables first and then the waterproof tents over everything, lashing them to the floorboard slats. Drew slid down into the water, and finally so did I. Then Lewis left.