gathered.
When the fire was burning well they all found sturdy branches and opened their Buck and Case knives, whittled cooking sticks, and stuck their steaks on. They seared the meat quickly before putting it between hand-torn hunks of bread. They ate and passed two plastic pint bottles of George Dickel whiskey.
“To that great man of the Volunteer State,” Josh intoned as he raised one of the bottles. “Mister George Goddamn Dickel.”
“Hear, hear.”
“A poor man’s solace, I’m afraid, gentlemen,” Cliff countered, though he did not refuse the bottle when it was passed his way. “You Tennesseans would do better to look to your white liquor and leave the manufacture of brown spirits to your northern neighbors, despite their late lamentable status as a border state.”
Stratton could tell that Cliff had been taking early samples of whatever personal ration of alcohol he’d brought along. When he was into his drink he had the habit of adopting the speech patterns of a wounded Confederate cavalry officer tolerating the ignorance of his benighted lessers. One of his favorite subjects of debate was bourbon.
“Now, Pappy Van Winkle is the beverage of a true Southern gentlemen,” he drawled. “Why, I picked up a bottle the other day for the modest sum of four hundred dollars.”
“That right?” Josh said. “I’d not give a damn for your Pappy Van Winkle up against this Dickel. You want to know why? Because Dickel is here and Pappy ain’t.”
“One doesn’t bring liquor of that caliber amongst heathens like yourselves,” Cliff concluded.
The talked passed around like that a while, half-joking and companionable. James told of a visit he’d made over into Clayton, Georgia, where he’d met the banjo-strumming boy from Deliverance. He was middle-aged now, of course, and worked as a greeter at Wal-Mart. James said that he was pleasant and gave his autograph freely. Stratton thought how strange it must be to be that man, forever famous as something that was as much a part of imagination as fact.
As the whiskey gradually disappeared Josh and Cliff went off to their tents. Stratton sat up with James while the fire thinned. They heard a screech owl and Stratton whistled to it a few times to draw it closer but the bird remained out in the dark somewhere. He tried to remember the last time he’d called one up within sight but it had been too long and his desire to recall doing so may have been a lie to cover the truth of what may never have happened. He wasn’t sure that he’d ever seen a screech owl in the wild at all. Perhaps what he remembered was from some documentary he’d watched as he was falling asleep in front of the TV, National Geographic or Planet Earth. There was no way to be certain. He whistled again.
THE SUN was up under a screen of gray that saddled the valley. From it a fine mist fell. The men all sat in a small circle around Cliff’s camp stove as he heated water for coffee, and they listened to the light rain tap the tarpaulin stretched from the tree branches overhead. Stratton had succumbed to a mere tolerance of the morning, the night without sleep on his shoulders like something that had him in its grasp. He took his canteen cup of coffee and carried down his dry bag of compressed gear to the kayak on the island’s mud shore. Once it was all aboard he sat on the bow and lowered his face to the steam.
They met the braided water and shuttled through the runs. The sunlight flattened everything into a perpetually moving image that drew them toward the best entrances and sometimes the worst. The bottoms of their boats ground over submerged ledges and narrow traps until they rocked free and paddled into stronger water.
It was all as wild as it was supposed to be.
Stratton tailed James, watched his entries closely and tried to match them as best he could. The river was not as high as he had expected and the rapids were toothy with stones normally rounded by the smooth carve of whitewater. Still, they ran hard and fast and true, met the high spray and paddled hard into the laughing riffles as they glided out from beneath the tall figures of white pines and the crows at early roost under a sky that pended storm.
Shortly after noon they entered The Narrows, turned into the currents that pushed them clear of the dangerously undercut boulders to the left and dipped into a pool of calm water halfway down the rapid. Cliff beached first on the sand and stone beach and everyone came in close beside him in the notch, pulled their boats halfway out of the water before they turned out from their dry bags what they would eat and drink. Stratton tipped up his Nalgene bottle of water, felt like he could empty all of it into him as easy as if it were air.
They climbed up to an overhang and sat there overlooking the river while they sheltered from the passing shower, dipped their fingers into peeled-back tins of sardines and tuna with crackers, legs dusty with pale Gatorade powder. Stratton unbuckled his life vest and set his helmet on a flat ledge of stone beside him, felt the breeze touch him with a slight trembling. He sat and ate, though he did not taste anything. He was thinking only of how little difference there must be between him and a man passing through this place a thousand years before, how that man, like him, would have stared into this rushing water with awe and respect.
“You hanging in there, bud?” Josh asked, offered a nip from his leather flask.
“Yeah, I’m good. Boat’s good. Not much else to ask, is there?”
“No, I don’t really guess there is. You know I’m not just asking about the boat though, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“All right. I won’t beat you over the head with it then.”
“I appreciate that.”
Stratton tipped back the flask, felt the burn pass his lips and spread out in his stomach like it meant to colonize him. In the end, it was enough to make him talk.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you something, Josh, if you don’t mind.”
“Hell, you know I don’t.”
“I wanted to know what you think about why we try to keep ourselves away from suffering. We all know it’s coming, don’t we? I mean, there’s really no possibility of avoiding it, but that doesn’t stop someone from trying. And we tell ourselves that we are the only ones who could have possibly hurt from something to the extent we do because it wouldn’t make sense otherwise. Because when it happens it feels so unnatural to us, so specific, that we can’t make sense that everyone has the same thing to deal with.”
“You want to know if I think universal damnation is something to get in a tizzy over? Sure, of course it is. That’s what we do best as people. We bleed. Look, bud, I know what you’ve got on you is something I’ll never understand. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t still yourself inside whatever it is you’re going through. You still exist and you are the only one that will ever get to live inside your skin. You get to build that church of meaning wherever you decide.”
Stratton considered telling Josh that was the coldest kind of comfort but didn’t see any gain in mocking his friend, especially as this friend was doing the best he knew with a question that was unanswerable. He would have done as well to ask the rock beneath him, perhaps better.
They paddled that afternoon, made camp on a broad flat stretch of Georgia shore with many hours of daylight left, hung from a rope swing left there by teenagers. Stratton watched as his friends took turns sprinting and flinging themselves from the bank. They flew like trapeze artists and screamed like happy children. He watched it all with eyes he wished belonged to another.
