Deliverance - James Dickey [44]
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