Deliverance - James Dickey [56]
What if you're wrong? I mean, we may not really be in any danger, at all, from anybody up ... up there." He gestured, but it was lost. "You want to take a chance?" "Well, no. Not if I don't have to. But what ...?" "What what?" "What can we do?" "We can do three things," I said, and some other person began to tell me what they were. "We can just sit here and sweat and call for our mamas. We can appeal to the elements. Maybe we can put Lewis back up on the rock and do a rain dance around him, to cut down the visibility. But if we got rain, we couldn't get out through it, and Lewis would probably die of exposure. Look up yonder." I liked hearing the sound of my voice in the mountain speech, especially in the dark; it sounded like somebody who knew where he was and knew what he was doing. I thought of Drew and the albino boy picking and singing in the filling station. There was a pause while we looked up between the wings of cliff and saw that the stars were beginning there, and no clouds at all. "And then what?" Bobby said. "Or somebody can try to go up there and wait for him on top." "What you mean is ..." "What I mean is like they say in the movies, especially on Saturday afternoon. It's either him or us. We've killed a man. So has he. Whoever gets out depends on who kills who. It's just that simple." "Well," he said, "all right. I don't want to die." "If you don't, help me figure. We've got to figure like he's figuring, up there. Everything depends on that." "I don't have any idea what he's figuring." "We can start out with the assumption that he's going to kill us." "I got that far." "The next thing is when. He can't do anything until it gets light. So that means we've got till morning to do whatever we're going to do." "I still don't know what that is." "Just let me go on a minute. My feeling is this. You can't hear a gunshot that far off, with all this goddamned noise down here. After he shot Drew, he might have shot at us some more, and we'd never have known it unless another one of us was hit. I don't have any idea how well he can see from where he is. But I think it's reasonable to suppose that he saw well enough to know that he hit Drew, and that the canoes turned over. He might believe that the rest of us drowned, but I don't believe he'd want to take a chance that we did. That's awful rough water, but the fact that you and Lewis and I got out of it proves that it can be done, and I'm thinking he probably knows it. Again, maybe the reason he didn't nail the rest of us was that by the time we got down here where we are now, we'd been carried a good ways past him, and also it was too dark. That's our good luck; it means we've got at least a couple of advantages, if we can figure how to work them." "Advantages? Some advantages. We've got a hurt man. We've got a waterlogged canoe with the bottom stove in. We've got two guys who don't know the first thing about the woods, who don't even know where in the hell they are. He's got a rifle, and he's up above us. He knows where we are and can't help being, and we don't have the slightest notion of where he is, or even who he is. We haven't got a goddamned chance, if you and Lewis are right. If he's up there and wants to kill us, he can kill us." "Well now, it hasn't happened yet. And we've got one big card." "What?" "He thinks we can't get at him. And if we can, we can kill him." "How?" "With either a knife or a bow. Or with bare hands, if we have to." "We?" "No. One of us." "I can't even shoot a bow," he said. He was saved for a little while. "That narrows it down, sure enough," I said. "You see what I mean about solving our problems? If you just do a little figuring." It was a decision, and I could feel it set us apart. Even in the dark the separation was obvious. "Ed, level with me. Do you really think you can get up there in the dark?" "To tell the truth, I don't. But we haven't got any other choice." "I still think that maybe he's just gone away. Suppose he has?" "Suppose he hasn't?" I said. "Do you want to take the chance? Look, if I fall off this fucking cliff, it's