“All right.”
“Shad Mackey and I were running Blackwell Creek. The creek was low and things got sort of dull. We were doing nothing but paddling and it was hot as hell. Shad said he’d rather take his bow and hunt rabbits downstream. He got out, and we said we’d meet where the creek comes into the Cahula River, way down below where we’re going to be. He took off into the woods on the east side, and I went on down the creek. Saw a wildcat drinking that day, I remember.
“Anyway, I got on down to the river and pulled the canoe up on the bank and stretched out on a rock to wait for him. Nothing happened. I kept listening, but outside the regular woods noises, I couldn’t hear a thing. It started to get dark, and I was beginning to get worried. I didn’t want him out there by himself in the dark, and I didn’t want to be out there either. I wasn’t ready for it. You know, I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have anything to eat. I didn’t have a bow with me, like a damned fool. I had a pocketknife and a ball of string, and that’s all.”
“You should have looked on that as a challenge, Lewis,” I said, not able to resist.
He was not touchy about these things at all; he knew he couldn’t be swayed. “It wasn’t the right kind,” be said.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I was lying on a big rock, and the cold was coming up into me, bone by bone. I happened to look around, and there was a fellow standing there looking at me. ‘What you want, boy, down around here?’ he said. He was skinny, and had on overall pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I told him I was going down the river with another guy, and that I was waiting for Shad to show up. It wasn’t easy for him to believe that, but gradually we got to talking. Sure enough, he had a still near there. He and his boy were working it. He took me back about a quarter of a mile from the river. His boy was building a fire.
“We sat down and talked. ‘You say you got a man back up there hunting with a bow and arrow. Does he know what’s up there?’ he asked me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s rougher than a night in jail in south Georgia,’ he said, ‘and I know what I’m talking about. You have any idea whereabouts he is?’ I said, no, ‘Just up that way someplace, the last time I saw him.’“
I felt like laughing. For all his fanaticism about preparedness, Lewis was forever getting himself and other people into situations like this. And I was damned well hoping that this wouldn’t be another one. “What happened then?” I asked.
“The fire was blazing up. The shadows were jumping. The fellow stood up and went over to his boy, who was about fifteen. He talked to him for a while, and then came about halfway back to me before he turned around and said, ‘Son, go find that man.’ The hackles on my neck stood up. The boy didn’t say a thing. He went and got a flashlight and an old single-shot twenty-two. He picked up a handful of bullets from a box and put them in his pocket. He called his dog, and then he just faded away.”
“He did? Just went off?”
“He went off where I pointed. That’s all he had. That and his father. That’s the something I’m talking about. I don’t care bow much you argue with me. I know it. Dependability. The kind of life that guarantees it. That fellow wasn’t commanding his son against his will. The boy just knew what to do. He walked out into the dark.”
“So?”
“So we’re lesser men, Ed. I’m sorry, but we are. Do you think Dean would do something like that when he’s fifteen? First of all, he won’t have to. But if he did, he couldn’t do it, couldn’t be that boy walking off into the dark with his dog.”
“He could have been killed. And maybe the father was an asshole, anyway,” I said.
“Maybe he was, but the boy didn’t think so,” Lewis said. “This kind of thing is just as hard on the parents as on the children. If both of them recognize it, it works. You know?”
I didn’t quite, though I didn’t say so. “Does the story have any end?”
“It does,” Lewis said. “About two o’clock in the morning, when the fire was about burned out and I was leaned up against a tree asleep, the boy came back with Shad. Shad’d broken his leg and was in the bushes in the dark, trying to do something for himself, when the boy found him. God knows how he did it.”
“What if he hadn’t done it?”
“It wouldn’t make any difference,” Lewis said. “He went, and he tried. He didn’t have to. Or rather he did have to. But anyway, he went, and Shad would have been in a bad way if he hadn’t.”
“I saw Shad at a better business meeting last month,” I said. “He may be a friend of yours, but I can’t see that anything so much was saved, up there in the woods.”
“That’s pretty callous, Ed.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “So what?”
“As it happens, I agree with you,” be said after a moment. “Not a good man. Drinks too much in an uncreative way. Talks too much. Doesn’t deliver enough, either on the river or in business or, I’m fairly sure, in bed with his wife or anybody else, either. But that’s not the point. His own life and his own values are up to him to make. The boy went and hauled him out of the woods because of his values. And his old man and his old man’s way of life, both of them ignorant and full of superstition and bloodshed and murder and liquor and hookworm and ghosts and early deaths, were the cause of it. I admire it, and I admire the men that it makes, and that make it, and if you don’t, why, fuck you.”
“OK,” I said, “fuck me. I’ll still stay with the city.”
“I reckon you will,” Lewis said. “But you’ll have doubts.”
“I may, but they won’t bother me.”
“That’s the trouble. The city’s got you where you live.”
“Sure it does. But it’s also got you, Lewis. I hate to say this, but you put in your time playing games. I may play games, like being an art director. But I put my life and the lives of my family on the line. I have to do it, and I do it. I don’t have any dreams of a new society. I’ll take what I’ve got. I don’t read books and I don’t have theories. What’d be the use? What you’ve got is a fantasy life.”
“That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really—really—in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantqized. I don’t know what yours is, but I’ll bet you don’t come up to it.”
“Mine is simple,” I said. I didn’t say, though, what forms it had taken recently, nor anything about the moon-slice of somebody else’s gold eye in the middle of my wife’s back as she labored for us.
“So is mine, and I work for it. A gut-survival situation may never happen. Probably it won’t. But you know something? I sleep at night. I have no worries. I am becoming myself, as inconsequential as that may be. I am not something somebody shoved off on me. I am what I choose to be, and I am it.”
“There’re a lot of other kinds of people to be, than what you are,” I said.
“Sure there are. But this is my kind. It feels right, like when you turn loose the arrow, and you know when you let go that you’ve done everything right. You know where the arrow is going. There’s not any other place that it can go.”
“Lord,” I said. “Lewis, you’re out of sight.”
“Who knows,” he said. “But I believe in survival. All kinds. Every time I come up here, I believe in it more. You know, with all the so-called modern conveniences, a man can still fall down. His leg will break, like Shad Mackey’s. He can lie there in the woods with night coming on, knowing he’s got two cars in the garage, one of them an XKE, a wife and three children watching ‘Star Trek’ as he hes trying to get his breath under a bush. The old human body is the same as it always was. It still feels that old fear, and that old pain. The last time I was near here …”