“I was just on my way out for the day, Mr. Bryant, but why don’t you let me buy you a drink so we can discuss your offer.”
A quarter of an hour later they were sitting at the bar of the Bistro at the Bijou Theater drinking whiskey highballs. Stratton had parked his car in an overnight garage and walked down, followed Easterday’s directions. They had the place to themselves this time of the afternoon. Gay Street was all busted concrete and cyclone fencing from some work on the sewer system, so the tourists avoided coming this far down the avenue. Nothing but the dark solitude of the leather stools and the reliable attention of the man behind the bar, the full clash of sun on the facade, while quietness enclosed them.
“You’re making a mistake,” Easterday began. “I hope you realize that. It’s foolish to just give these pictures to us. They’re worth a great deal more than we can afford. Now, I’m not about to turn my nose up at a windfall, but I do want you to explain it to me. Otherwise, my conscience might develop a bit of a rash.”
Stratton felt odd to find himself in defense of his intended charity. It wasn’t what he had expected to have to do.
“It’s about her legacy,” he said finally. “If you were to pin me down about it. I want this part of Liza to have a life of its own. I think it deserves that.”
Easterday absorbed this over a philosophical swallow of his whiskey.
“Yes, well. That certainly sounds good, even if it is only about half of what is going on. Listen. I’ll be willing to take you up on this, get the materials housed here and get you at least an honorarium that saves us from looking like a bunch of cheap criminal bastards. Given one condition. Sleep on it. If this still sounds viable tomorrow morning then I’ll get the wheels turning.”
Stratton could see no reason to not honor Easterday’s request. They agreed over a second round and did not talk of it again.
He made reservations for a room at the downtown Marriott and took a cab over, promised Easterday he would see him the following morning. Though still early, he was exhausted by what he’d accomplished, and he drew a bath for a soak in the deep tub. He turned the water as hot as his skin could endure and eased into it. The heat was like being born into something and it released all that he had carried into the day. He would be glad to be relieved of Liza’s 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.