Deliverance (13 page)

“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 center-shot.”

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 ant 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?” he 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.”

“Yes,” Drew went on excitedly, “we could do
something
with him. We could throw him in the river. We could bury him. We could even burn him up. But they’d find him, or find something, if they came looking. And how about the other one, the one who was with him? All he’s got to do is to go and bring…”

“Bring who?” Lewis asked. “I doubt if he’d want anybody, much less the sheriff or the state police, to know what he was doing when this character was shot. He may bring
somebody
back here, though I doubt it, but it won’t be the law. And if he does come back, so what?”

Lewis touched the corpse with his bow tip and put his eyes squarely into Drew’s. “He won’t be here.”

“Where’ll he be?” Drew asked, his jaw setting blackly. “And how do you know that other guy is not around here right now? It just might be that he’s watching everything you do. We wouldn’t be so hard to follow, dragging a corpse off somewhere and ditching it. He could find some way to let the police know. He could bring them right back here. You look around, Lewis. He could be anywhere.”

Lewis didn’t look around, but I did. The other side of the river was not dangerous, but the side where we were was becoming more and more terrifying to stand on. A powerful unseen presence seemed to flow and float in on us from three directions — upstream, downstream and inland. Drew was right, he could be anywhere. The trees and leaves were so thick that the eye gave up easily, lost in the useless tangle of plants living out their time in this choked darkness;
among them the thin, stupid and crafty body of the other man could flow as naturally as a snake or fog, going where we went, watching what we did. What we had against him — I was shocked by the hope of it — was Lewis. The assurance with which he had killed a man was desperately frightening to me, but the same quality was also calming, and I moved, without being completely aware of movement, nearer to him. I would have liked nothing better than to touch that big relaxed forearm as he stood there, one hip raised until the leg made longer by the position bent gracefully at the knee. I would have followed him anywhere, and I realized that I was going to have to do just that.

Still looking off at the river, Lewis said, “Let’s figure.”

Bobby got off the log and stood with us, all facing Lewis over the corpse. I moved away from Bobby’s red face. None of this was his fault, but he felt tainted to me. I remembered how he had looked over the log, how willing to let anything be done to him, and how high his voice was when he screamed.

Lewis crouched down over the dead man, a wisp of dry weed in his mouth. “If we take him on the river in the canoe we’ll be out in the open. If somebody was watching he could see where we dropped him in. Besides, like Drew says, the river’s the first place anybody’d look. Where does that leave us?”

“Upstream or down,” I said.

“Or in,” Lewis said. “Or maybe a combination.”

“
Which
combination?”

“I’d say a combination of in and up. Suppose we took him downstream along the bank. We’re heading downriver, and
if we wanted to get rid of him as fast as possible, we’d bury him or leave him somewhere along the way.”

Again, his idea fitted. The woods upstream became more mysterious than those downstream; the future opened only on that side.

“So… we take him inland, and upstream. We carry him to that little creek and up it until we find a good place, and then we bury him and the gun. And I’d be willing to bet that nothing will ever come of it. These woods are full of more human bones than anybody’ll ever know; people disappear up here all the time, and nobody ever hears about it. And in a month or six weeks the valley’ll be flooded, and the whole area will be hundreds of feet under water. Do you think the state is going to hold up this project just to look for some hillbilly? Especially if they don’t know where he is, or even if he’s in the woods at all? It’s not likely. And in six weeks… well, did you ever look out over a lake? There’s plenty of water. Something buried under it —
under
it — is as buried as it can get.”

Drew shook his head. “I’m telling you, I don’t want any part of it.”