Deliverance (13 page)

  But there was no need. He crouched and fell forward with his face on my white tennis shoe tops, trembled away into his legs and shook down to stillness. He opened his mouth and it was full of blood like an apple. A clear bubble formed on his lips and stayed there.

  I stepped back and looked at the whole scene again, trying to place things. Bobby was propped up on one elbow, with his eyes as red as the bubble in the dead man's mouth. He got up, looking at me. I realized that I was swinging the gun toward him; that I pointed wherever I looked. I lowered the barrel. What to say?

  "Well."

  "Lord God," Bobby said. "Lord God."

  "You all right?" I asked, since I needed to know even though I cringed with the directness.

  Bobby's face expanded its crimson, and he shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know."

  I stood and he lay with his head on his palm, both of us looking straight ahead. Everything was quiet. The man with the aluminum shaft in him lay with his head on one shoulder and his right hand relaxedly holding the barb of the arrow. Behind him the blue and silver of Lewis' fancy arrow crest shone, unnatural in the woods.

  Nothing happened for ten minutes. I wondered if maybe the other man wouldn't come back before Lewis showed himself, and I began to compose a scene in which Lewis would step out of the woods on one side of the clearing with his bow and the tall man would show on the other, and they would have it out in some way that it was hard to imagine. I was working on the details when I heard something move. Part of the bark of a big water oak moved at leg level, and Lewis moved with it out into the open, stepping sideways into the clearing with another bright-crested arrow on the string of his bow. Drew followed him, holding a canoe paddle like a baseball bat.

  Lewis walked out between me and Bobby, over the man on the ground, and put his bow tip on a leaf. Drew moved to Bobby. I had been holding the gun ready for so long that it felt strange to lower the barrels so that they were pointing down and could kill nothing but the ground. I did, though, and Lewis and I faced each other across the dead man. His eyes were vivid and alive; he was smiling easily and with great friendliness.

  "Well now, how about this? Just ... how about this?"

  I went over to Bobby and Drew, though I had no notion of what to do when I got there. I had watched everything that had happened to Bobby, had heard him scream and squall, and wanted to reassure him that we could set all that aside; that it would be forgotten as soon as we left the woods, or as soon as we got back in the canoes. But there was no way to say this, or to ask him how his lower intestine felt or whether he thought he was bleeding internally. Any examination of him would be unthinkably ridiculous and humiliating.

  There was no question of that, though; he was furiously closed off from all of us. He stood up and backed away, still naked from the middle down, his sexual organs wasted with pain. I picked up his pants and shorts and handed them to him, and he reached for them in wonderment. He took out a handkerchief and went behind some bushes.

  Still holding the gun at trail, as the tall man bad been doing when I first saw him step out of the woods, I went back to Lewis, who was leaning on his bow and gazing out over the river.

  Without looking at me, he said, "I figured it was the only thing to do."

  "It was," I agreed, though I wasn't all that sure. "I thought we'd had it."

  Lewis glanced in the direction Bobby had taken and I realized I could have put it better.

  "I thought sure they'd kill us."

  "Probably they would have. The penalty for sodomy in this state is death, anyway. And at the point of a gun ... No, they wouldn't have let you go. Why should they?"

  "How did you figure it?"

  "We heard Bobby, and the only thing we could think of was that one of you had been bit by a snake. We started to come right in, but all at once it hit me that if it was something like snakebite, the other one of you could take care of the one that was bit just as well as three of us could, at least for a little while. And if there were other people involved, I told Drew I had just as soon come in on them without them knowing it."

  "What did you do?"

  "We turned in that little creek and went up it about fifty yards. Then we shoved the canoe in some bushes and got out; I strung up and nocked an arrow, and we came on up to about thirty yards from where you were. As soon as I saw four people there, I began to shift around to find a place I could shoot through the leaves. I couldn't tell what was going on at first, though I thought it was probably what it was. I'm sorry I couldn't do anything for Bobby, but at least I didn't make a mismove and get his head blown off. When the guy started getting back up on his feet, I drew down on him, and waited."

  "How did you know when to shoot?"

  "Any time that the gun wasn't pointed at you and Bobby would have been all right. I just had to wait till that time came. The other guy hadn't had any action yet, and I was pretty sure they'd swap the gun. The only thing I was worried about was that you might get in between me and him. But I was on him all the time, looking right down the arrow. I must have been at full draw for at least a minute. It would've been a much easier shot if I hadn't had to hold so long. But it was fairly easy anyway. I knew I was right on him; I tried to hit him halfway up the back and a little to the left. He moved, or that's just where it would have caught him. I knew I had him when I let go."

  "You had him," I said. "And now what're we going to do with him?"

  Drew moved up to us, washing his hands with dirt and beating them against the sides of his legs.

  "There's not but one thing to do," he said. "Put the body in one of the canoes and take it on down to Aintry and turn it over to the highway patrol. Tell them the whole story."

  "Tell them what, exactly?" Lewis asked.

  "Just what happened," Drew said, his voice rising a tone. "This is justifiable homicide if anything is. They were sexually assaulting two members of our party at gunpoint. Like you said, there was nothing else we could do."

  "Nothing else but shoot him in the back with an arrow?" Lewis asked pleasantly.

  "It was your doing, Lewis," Drew said.

  "What would you have done?"

  "It doesn't make any difference what I would have done," Drew said stoutly. "But I can tell you, I don't believe ..."

  "Don't believe what?"

  "Wait a minute," I broke in. "What we should or shouldn't have done is beside the point. He's there, and we're here. We didn't start any of this. We didn't ask for it. But what happens now?"

  Something close to my feet moved. I looked down, and the man shook his head as though at something past belief, gave a long sigh and slumped again. Drew and Lewis bent down on him.

  "Is he dead?" I asked. I had already fixed him as dead in my mind, and couldn't imagine how he could have moved and sighed.

  "He is now," Lewis said, without looking up. "He's mighty dead. We couldn't have saved him, though. He's centershot."

  Lewis and Drew got up, and we tried to think our way back into the conversation.

  "Let's just figure for a minute," Lewis said. "Let's just calm down and think about it. Does anybody know anything about the law?"

  "I've been on jury duty exactly once," Drew said.

  "That's once more than I have," I said. "And about all the different degrees of murder and homicide and manslaughter I don't know anything at all."

  We all turned to Bobby, who had rejoined us. He shook his fiery face.

  "You don't have to know much law to know that if we take this guy down out of these mountains and turn him over to the sheriff, there's going to be an investigation, and I would bet we'd go on trial," Lewis said. "I don't know what the charge would be, technically, but we'd be up against a jury, sure as hell."

  "Well, so what?" Drew said.

  "All right, now," said Lewis, shifting to the other leg. "We've killed a man. Shot him in the back. And we not only killed a man, we killed a cracker, a mountain man. Let's consider what might happen."

  "All right," Drew said. "Consider it. We're listening."

  Lewis sighed and scratched his head. "We just ought to wait a minute before we decide to be so all-fired boy scoutish and do the right thing. There's not any right thing."

  "You bet there is," Drew said. "There's only one thing."

  I tried to think ahead, and I couldn't see anything but desperate trouble, and for the rest of my life. I have always been scared to death of anything to do with the police; the sight of a police uniform turns my saliva cold. I could feel myself beginning to breathe fast in the stillness, and I noticed the sound of the river for a moment, like something heard through a door.

  "We ought to do some hard decision-making before we let ourselves in for standing trial up in these hills. We don't know who this man is, but we know that he lived up here. He may be an escaped convict, or he may have a still, or he may be everybody in the county's father, or brother or cousin. I can almost guarantee you that he's got relatives all over the place. Everybody up here is kin to everybody else, in one way or another. And consider this, too: there's a lot of resentment in these hill counties about the dam. There are going to have to be some cemeteries moved, like in the old TVA days. Things like that. These people don't want any 'furriners' around. And I'm goddamned if I want to come back up here for shooting this guy in the back, with a jury made up of his cousins and brothers, maybe his mother and father too, for all I know."

  He had a point. I listened to the woods and the river to see if I could get an answer. I saw myself and the others rotting for weeks in some county jail with country drunks, feeding on sorghum, salt pork and sowbelly, trying to pass the time without dying of worry, negotiating with lawyers, paying their fees month after month, or maybe posting bond -- I had no idea whether that was allowable in a case like this, or not -- and drawing my family into the whole sickening, unresolvable mess, getting them all more and more deeply entangled in the life, death and identity of the repulsive, useless man at my feet, who was holding the head of the arrow thoughtfully, the red bubble at his lips collapsed into a small weak stream of blood that gathered slowly under his ear into a drop. Granted, Lewis was in more trouble than the rest of us were, but we all had a lot to lose. Just the publicity of being connected with a killing would be long-lasting trouble. I didn't want it, if there was any way out.

  "What do you think, Bobby?" Lewis asked, and there was a tone in his voice which suggested that Bobby's decision would be final. Bobby was sitting on the same log he had been forced to lean over, one hand propping up his chin and the other over his eyes. He got up, twenty years older, and walked over to the dead man. Then, in an explosion so sudden that it was like something bursting through from another world, he kicked the body in the face, and again.

  Lewis pulled him back, his hands on Bobby's shoulders. Then he let him go, and Bobby turned his back and walked away.

  "How about you, Ed?" Lewis asked me.

  "God, I don't know. I really don't."

  Drew moved over to the other side of the dead man and pointed down at him very deliberately. "I don't know what you have in mind, Lewis," he said. "But if you conceal this body you're setting yourself up for a murder charge. That much law I do know. And a murder charge is going to be a little bit more than you're going to want to deal with, particularly with conditions like they are; I mean, like you've just been describing them. You better think about it, unless you want to start thinking about the electric chair."

  Lewis looked at him with an interested expression. "Suppose there's no body?" he said. "No body, no crime. Isn't that right?"

  "I think so, but I'm not sure," Drew said, peering closely at Lewis and then looking down at the man. "What are you thinking about, Lewis?" be said. "We've got a right to know. And we damned well better get to doing something right quick. We can't just stand around and wring our hands."

  "Nobody's wringing his hands," Lewis said. "I've just been thinking, while you've been giving out with what we might call the conventional point of view."

  "Thinking what?" I asked.

  "Thinking of what we might do with the body."

  "You're a goddamned fool," Drew said in a low voice. "Doing what with the body? Throwing it in the river? That's the first place they'd look."

  "Who'd look?"

  "Anybody who was looking for him. Family, friends, police. The fellow who was with him, maybe."

  "We don't have to put him in the river," Lewis said.

  "Lewis," Drew said, "I mean it. You level with us. This is not one of your fucking games. You killed somebody. There he is."

  "I did kill him," Lewis said. "But you're wrong when you say that there's nothing like a game connected with the position we're in now. It may be the most serious kind of game there is, but if you don't see it as a game, you're missing an important point."

  "Come on, Lewis," I said. "For once let's not carry on this way."

  Lewis turned to me. "Ed, you listen, and listen good. We can get out of this, I think. Get out without any questions asked, and no troubles of any kind, if we just take hold in the next hour and do a couple of things right. If we think it through, and act it through and don't make any mistakes, we can get out without a thing ever being said about it. If we connect up with the law, we'll be connected to this man, this body, for the rest of our lives. We've got to get rid of him."

  "How?" I asked. "Where?"

  Lewis turned his head to the river, then half lifted his hand and moved it in a wide gesture inland, taking in the woods in a sweep obviously meant to include miles of them, hundreds of acres. Another expression -- a new color -- came into his eyes, a humorous conspiratorial craftiness, his look of calculated pleasure, his enthusiast's look. He dropped the hand and rested it easily on the bow, having given Drew and me the woods, the whole wilderness. "Everywhere," he said. "Anywhere. Nowhere."