Deliverance - James Dickey [43]
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