Deliverance - James Dickey [45]
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