pictures. Like selling the house, it was what was needed if he was to find out what it meant to live on his own. Some men could live as ghosts or votaries, hang their fortunes around the throats of the dead, call up the pieties of grief. But Stratton had come close enough to that kind of sacrifice while Liza was still alive. He wouldn’t shoulder it in her death. People who survived shouldn’t have to suffer the curse of common virtue.
HE LEFT for home early, but even so when he got there he saw his professor friend from the college, Josh Callum, sitting in his truck at the end of the driveway smoking a cigar. In the pickup bed his red kayak was stuck in amid a jumble of camping gear. Out here on one of his rescue missions, no doubt.
“Was on the verge of getting the bloodhounds after you,” Josh told him. “You heard the water report?”
“No, I’ve been busy. Some of us are grownups even.”
“Doesn’t excuse negligence, bud. They got a bona fide deluge over in Carolina. Plus, this weekend coming up is Deliverance weekend. The boys just thought we’d hit it a couple of days early. Get the hell out of Dodge, make a run that was worthwhile instead of scraping bottom the whole way. I told them I’d kidnap you if you refused, so they’d think a lot less of my manhood if I turned up by myself.”
Stratton toed the truck’s front tire, thought if there was any way to say that he couldn’t do it, though he knew he had to come out from time to time. Otherwise, people started to notice, and he didn’t want to have to face that.
“Yeah, okay. Let me feed and water the cat and get my boat.”
“You take care of the cat. I’ll grab your boat. How is that old tabby bastard doing, anyhow?”
“About as well as all of us.”
“That bad? Damn.”
For a sane man it was two and a half hours to the river, but Josh slashed a good twenty minutes off that. After they went up the I-40 gorge and passed over the state line they cut through the slim western finger of North Carolina and took Highway 107 through Cullowhee and made the winding shot up into the higher mountains, slowed through the wealthy second homes of Cashiers and then descended the South Carolina grade with its panorama and occasional general store. They were at the Chattooga North Fork put-in by noon and were ready with all their gear stowed in the kayaks and down on the river half an hour after that. They’d beaten their paddling partners, Cliff and James, who had a few domestic chores to tidy up before they’d left Clemson. They checked everything to make sure they could duck into the water at a moment’s notice before they cracked a PBR tallboy and passed it between them.
“Camp beer,” Josh said.
“Damn right.”
“Not for reasons of hipsterdom, mind you.”
“Hell no.”
“Just economic practicality.”
Of all of the river trips Stratton had made, the Chattooga three-day run was his favorite. Josh always referred to it as the Deliverance trip because many of that film’s climactic scenes had been shot along the river and while running the rapids it was easy to recognize some of those landmarks. Stratton had read Dickey’s novel for the first time after his inaugural trip but was disappointed when he saw that the writer had used a fictional name for the river. Since then he had always preferred the movie.
They’d finished the beer can and crushed it when Cliff and James pulled up in Cliff’s battered Cherokee. Though a scholar of Irish literature who had published monographs about Flann O’Brien and Frank O’Connor, Cliff liked to pretend a kind of rustic machismo that included his choice of automobile. Every facet of the vehicle carried knocks and concavities from aggressive off-roading, stripes of pine pitch where he’d blazed trails untried. Cliff said it was the natural product of living a stripped-down existence, close to the bone. James had said it was because Cliff would forget what made him a man without it.
“You tenderfoots ready to take your chances on this goddamn beauty of a river?” Cliff called down from the parking area.
“I think we might be convinced to hazard it,” Josh answered.
They exchanged embraces, stood talking for a few minutes until they walked the paddles, supplies, and kayaks down to the water. With their gear stowed and battened, they lowered themselves into their boats, closed the skirts and pushed down the soft grassy decline. They slipped into the water with the strange grace of smoke.
The river was slow this far up the fork, the wooded banks a constriction of half-tumbled pine pinned back from the waterway by large hanging loops of overgrown poison ivy and a barrier of mixed scrub. Stratton picked up a line behind Cliff, just a few yards off James’s right bow, and paddled softly, getting used to the newly quiet world this close to the weightlessness beneath him. He felt settled by the compliance of water, as if it needed him there to run true.
“Makes you almost feel human again, huh?”
This from James, spoken in his companionably soft voice. Unlike Cliff, he preferred to speak when he had something to say. Stratton had known him for a dozen years and had only a superficial knowledge of his life away from the river, but that didn’t seem to matter. What they knew of each other out here held greater consequence.
Within the first half hour, they scooted over three downed trees, crossed the timber’s wet backs and pivoted through the shallow runs, rocky entrances that required a technical handling of the boats. They made the main branch of the river within two hours, the sun running long fluttering shadows as they moved on toward late afternoon.
As they rounded a deep curve, two herons dropped from a close branch and flapped upstream, passed overhead. Their thin legs were folded up and as they flew their bodies seemed to lope despite their grace. Without being able to name precisely why, Stratton watched them with the sense that it was important he remember every detail he could.
They reached the island where they intended to camp not long after the river fell to late afternoon shadow. There were perhaps two hours of daylight left, but it was a good time to settle and build a cook fire. Stratton dragged his boat up, shucked his life vest, and dug out a length of loose chainsaw with corded grips at each end. He and Cliff crossed the island and forded a brief feather of whitewater before climbing up the mucky shore of the main bank.
“We’re in Georgia now, son,” Cliff said. “You and sister-wife are full legal in this country.”
Cliff was ever testifying to the frequency of incest in Georgia. Stratton suspected that it owed much to his loyalty to the Clemson football program. His mouth kept running until they found a downed white pine straddling a broken hemlock. The end had been sawed off smooth and it didn’t appear anyone had tried it since this same trip the year before.
“Let’s hit this bad boy a few licks,” he said.
Stratton pulled the loose chainsaw to its full length, handed the other end over the log where Cliff took it and they began to cut together, kept tension as they pulled. As they worked the chain tightened in the cut and sawdust snowed into a small mound of powder that collected at their feet. Within five minutes the heavy timber, big around as a man’s waist, cracked and thumped to the ground. They set back three feet farther and did the same thing, working like men born to this life and nothing else. A few minutes later that length too was cut and ready to be hauled back to camp.
Twenty minutes later the mosquitoes got bad. Having had enough, they teamed
