Deliverance (14 page)

“What do you mean?” Lewis turned on him sharply and said, “You
are
part of it.
You
want to be honest,
you
want to make a clean breast,
you
want to do the right thing. But you haven’t got the guts to take a chance. Believe me, if we do this right we’ll go home as clean as we came. That is, if somebody doesn’t crap out.”

“You know better than that, Lewis,” Drew said, his glasses deepening with anger. “But I can’t go along with this. It’s not a matter of guts; it’s a matter of the law.”

“You see any law around here?” Lewis said. “We’re the law. What we decide is going to be the way things are. So let’s vote on it. I’ll go along with the vote. And so will you, Drew. You’ve got no choice.”

Lewis turned to Bobby again. “How about it?”

“I say get rid of the son of a bitch,” Bobby said, his voice thick and strangled. “Do you think I want this to get around?”

“Ed?”

Drew put the tense flat of his hand before my face and shook it. “Think what you’re doing, Ed, for God’s sake,” he said. “This self-hypnotized maniac is going to get us all in jail for life, if he doesn’t get us killed. You’re a reasonable man. You’ve got a family. You’re not implicated in this unless you go along with what Lewis wants to do. Listen to reason, don’t do this thing. Ed,
don’t.
I’m
begging
you. Don’t.”

But I was ready to gamble. After all, I hadn’t done anything but stand tied to a tree, and nobody could prove anything else, no matter what it came to. I believed Lewis could get us out. If I went along with concealing the body and we got caught it could be made to seem a matter of necessity, of simply being outvoted.

“I’m with you,” I said, around Drew.

“All right then,” Lewis said, and reached for the dead man’s shoulder. He rolled him over, took hold of the arrow shaft where it came out of the chest and began to pull. He added his other hand and jerked to get it started out and then hauled strongly with one hand again as the arrow slowly slithered from the body, painted a dark uneven red. Lewis
stood up, went to the river and washed it, then came back. He clipped the shaft into his bow quiver.

I handed the shotgun to Bobby and went and got my belt and the knife and rope. Then Drew and I bent to the shoulders and lifted, and Bobby and Lewis took a foot apiece, with their free hands carrying the gun and the bow and an entrenching tool from the loaded canoe. The corpse sagged between us, extremely heavy, and the full meaning of the words
dead weight
dragged at me as I tried to straighten. We moved toward the place where Lewis had come from.

Before we had gone twenty yards Drew and I were staggering, our feet going any way they could through the dry grass. Once I heard a racheting I was sure was a rattlesnake, and looked right and left of the body sliding feet-first ahead of me into the woods. The man’s head hung back and rolled between Drew and me, dragging at everything it could touch.

It was not believable. I had never done anything like it even in my mind. To say that it was like a game would not describe exactly how it felt. I knew it was not a game, and yet, whenever I could, I glanced at the corpse to see if it would come out of the phony trance it was in, and stand up and shake hands all around, someone new we’d met in the woods, who could give us some idea where we were. But the head kept dropping back, and we kept having to keep it up, clear of the weeds and briars, so that we could go wherever we were going with it.

We came out finally at the creek bank near Lewis’ canoe. The water was pushing through the leaves, and the whole stream looked as though it was about half slow water and half bushes and branches. There was nothing in my life like
it, but I was there. I helped Lewis and the others put the body into the canoe. The hull rode deep and low in the leafy water, and we began to push it up the creek, deeper into the woods. I could feel every pebble through the city rubber of my tennis shoes, and the creek flowed as untouchable as a shadow around my legs. There was nothing else to do except what we were doing.

Lewis led, drawing the canoe by the bow painter, plodding bent-over upstream with the veins popping, the rope over his shoulder like a bag of gold. The trees, mostly mountain laurel and rhododendron, made an arch over the creek, so that at times we had to get down on one knee or both knees and grope through leaves and branches, going right into the most direct push of water against our chests as it came through the foliage. At some places it was like a tunnel where nothing human had ever been expected to come, and at others it was like a long green hall where the water changed tones and temperatures and was much quieter than it would have been in the open.

In this endless water-floored cave of leaves we kept going for twenty minutes by my watch, until the only point at all was to keep going, to find the creek our feet were in when the leaves of rhododendrons dropped in our faces and hid it. I wondered what on earth I would do if the others disappeared, the creek disappeared and left only me and the woods and the corpse. Which way would I go? Without the creek to go back down, could I find the river? Probably not, and I bound myself with my brain and heart to the others; with them was the only way I would ever get out.

Every now and then I looked into the canoe and saw the
body riding there, slumped back with its hand over its face and its feet crossed, a caricature of the southern small-town bum too lazy to do anything but sleep.

Lewis held up his hand. We all straightened up around the canoe, holding it lightly head-on into the current. Lewis went up the far bank like a creature. Drew and Bobby and I stood with the canoe at our hips and the sleeping man rocking softly between. Around us the woods were so thick that there would have been trouble putting an arm into it in places. We could have been watched from anywhere, any angle, any tree or bush, but nothing happened. I could feel the others’ hands on the canoe, keeping it steady.

In about ten minutes Lewis came back, lifting a limb out of the water and appearing. It was as though the tree raised its own limb out of the water like a man. I had the feeling that such things happened all the time to branches in woods that were deep enough. The leaves lifted carefully but decisively, and Lewis Medlock came through.

We tied the canoe to a bush and picked up the body, each of us having the same relationship to it as before. I don’t believe I could have brought myself to take hold of it in any other way.

Lewis had not found a path, but he had come on an opening between trees that went back inland and, he said, upstream. That was good enough; it was as good as anything. We hauled and labored away from the creek between the big water oak trunks and the sweetgums standing there forever, falling down, lurching this way and the other with the corpse, thick and slick with sweat, trying to make good a senselessly complicated pattern of movement between the
bushes and trees. After the first few turns I had no idea where we were, and in a curious way I enjoyed being
that
lost. If you were in something as deep as we were in, it was better to go all the way. When I quit hearing the creek I knew I was lost, wandering foolishly in the woods holding a corpse by the sleeve.

Lewis lifted his hand again, and we let the body down onto the ground. We were by a sump of some kind, a blue-black seepage of rotten water that had either crawled in from some other place or came up from the ground where it was. The earth around it was soft and squelchy, and I kept backing off from it, even though I had been walking in the creek with the others.

Lewis motioned to me. I went up to him and he took the arrow he had killed the man with out of his quiver. I expected it to vibrate, but it didn’t; it was like the others — civilized and expert. I tested it; it was straight. I handed it back, but for some reason didn’t feel like turning loose of it. Lewis made an odd motion with his head, somewhere between disbelief and determination, and we stood holding the arrow. There was no blood on it, but the feathers were still wet from the river where he had washed it off. It looked just like any arrow that had been carried in the rain, or in heavy dew or fog. I let go.

Lewis put it on the string of his bow. He came back to full draw as I had seen him do hundreds of times, in his classic, knowledgeable form so much more functional and accurate than the form of an archer on an urn, and stood, concentrating. There was nothing there but the black water, but he was aiming at a definite part of it: a single drop, maybe, as it
moved and would have to stop, sooner or later, for an instant.

It went. The arrow leapt with a breathtaking instant silver and disappeared at almost the same time, while Lewis held his follow-through, standing with the bow as though the arrow were still in it. There was no sense of the arrow’s being stopped by anything under the water — log or rock. It was gone, and could have been traveling down through muck to the soft center of the earth.

We picked up the body and went on. In a while more we came out against the side of a bank that shelved up, covered with ferns and leaves that were mulchy like shit. Lewis turned to us and narrowed one eye. We put the body down. One of its arms was wrenched around backwards, and it seemed odd and more terrible than anything that had happened that such a position didn’t hurt it.

Lewis fell. He started to dig with the collapsible GI shovel we had brought for digging latrines. The ground came up easily, or what was on the ground. There was no earth; it was all leaves and rotten stuff. It had the smell of generations of mold. They might as well let the water in on it, I thought; this stuff is no good to anybody.

Drew and I got down and helped with our hands. Bobby stood looking off into the trees. Drew dug in, losing himself in a practical job, figuring the best way to do it. The sweat stood in the holes of his blocky, pitted face, and his black hair, solid with thickness and hair lotion, shone sideways, hanging over one ear.

It was a dark place, quiet and almost airless. When we were finished with the hole there was not a dry spot anywhere
on my nylon. We had hollowed out a narrow trench about two feet deep.

We hauled the body over and rolled it in on its side, unbelievably far from us. Lewis reached his hand and Bobby handed him the shotgun. Lewis put the gun in and pulled back his hands to his knees, looking. Then his right hand went back into the grave, and he gave the gun a turn, arranging it in some kind of way.

“OK,” he said.

We shoveled and scrambled the dirt back in, working wildly. I kept throwing the stuff in his face, to get it covered up quick. But it was easy, in double handfuls. He disappeared slowly, into the general sloppiness and uselessness of the woods. When he was gone, Lewis smoothed out the leaf mold over him.

We stood on our knees. We leaned forward, panting, our hands on the fronts of our thighs or on the ground. I had a tremendous driving moment of wanting to dig him up again, of siding with Drew. Now, if not later, we knew where he was. But there was already too much to explain: the dirt, the delay, and the rest of it. Or should we take him and wash him in the river? The thought of doing that convinced me; it was impossible, and I stood up with the others.

“Ferns’ll be growing here in a few days,” Lewis said. It was good to hear a voice, especially his. “Nobody’d ever come on him in a million years. I doubt if we could even find this place again.”

“There’s still time, Lewis,” Drew said. “You better be sure you know what you’re doing.”

“I’m sure,” Lewis said. “The first rain will kill every sign
we made. There’s not a dog can follow us here. When we get off this river, we’ll be all right. Believe me.”

We started back. I couldn’t tell anything about our back trail, but Lewis kept stopping and looking at a wrist compass, and it seemed to me that we were going more or less in the right direction; it was the direction I would have followed if I had been by myself.

We came out upstream of where the canoe was. The water was running toward the river, and we went with it, down the secret pebbles of the creek-bed, stooping under the leaves of low branches, mumbling to ourselves. I felt separated from the others, and especially from Lewis. There was no feeling any longer of helping each other; I believed that if I had stepped into a hole and disappeared the others would not have noticed, but would have gone on faster and faster. Each of us wanted to get out of the woods in the quickest way he could. I know I did, and it would have taken a great physical effort for me to turn back and take one step upstream, no matter what trouble one of the others was in.

When we got to the canoe we all got in. Drew and Lewis paddled, and I felt the long surges of Lewis’ strokes move us as I wanted us to move. Drew fended off the low branches, and we went back to the river faster than I thought possible.

The other canoe was where we had left it, softly shaking against the bank.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Bobby said.

“Let me figure a minute,” Lewis said. “This is no time for vanity or hurt feelings. How much work can you do, Bobby?”

“I don’t know, Lewis,” Bobby said. “I’ll try.”

“It’s not your fault,” Lewis said. “But trying is not going to be enough. We’ve got to get the best combinations we can get. I expect I’d better take Bobby with me. Ed, how much have you got left?”

“I don’t know. Some.”

“All right. You and Drew take my boat. Bobby and I will take everything we can in the other one. We’ll try to keep up with you, but it’ll be better if you lead off, so that we can see you if you get into trouble. I hate to tell you, but from what little I know, we haven’t hit the rough part of this river yet.

“The part that was going to be fun,” Bobby said.

“The part that’s going to knock your stupid brains out if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do,” Lewis said, without raising his voice. “Come on; let’s get whatever else we can carry out of my canoe. You want out of this, don’t you?”

We took about ten minutes shifting equipment around.

“Take everything, if you can take it, Lewis,” I said. “If Drew and I have to go through these damned rapids first, I want a boat I can at least halfway handle. And I don’t want things wrapping around me in the water.”