Deliverance - James Dickey [69]
now not a massed darkness; there were greens. I opened my mouth so that my breathing would be more silent; so that a nostril would not whistle, or drag with phlegm. I could see plainly now: the needled and rocky space just beneath the tree, and out from that to the sandy shelf, maybe ten feet wide, with its fringe of tall ragged grass, and beyond that down into space, the eye falling like a body, not dying, but coming to rest on the river. Bobby should be starting now. In a few minutes it would all be over; I would have been either wrong or right, and we would be dead or alive. Or maybe he had already started, and slipped by me while I was looking for the arrow. There was no way to tell, and I cringed among the branches, waiting to hear a rifle shot from another place, a location I couldn't have guessed or known about. None came, though. The light strengthened. My sense of utter concealment began to die out of me, and out of the tree. At the right angle, someone standing on the sandy shelf could look right up my tunnel of pine branches at me, and this could be either deliberate or by chance. A lot was hanging on chance. I moved cautiously, as much as I could like a creature who lived in a tree, craning my neck and leaning out from the trunk to see a foot or two more of the cliff edge, to see if I could make out the canoe. Something caught the tail of my left eye, and my stomach froze. I didn't turn my head at once, but slowly. I knew, though. I knew, and knew. A rock clicked on another, and a man was walking forward onto the sand with a rifle. He had one hand in his right pocket. This is it, I thought, but my first hope, one I could not keep off me, was that I could stay in the tree until he went away. My climb up the cliff had left me; all I wanted was my life. Everything in me was shaking; I could not even have nocked the arrow. Then I looked downward and saw my hands holding the bow, with the broadhead's two colors, sharpened and unsharpened, separating from each other. This steadied me, and I began to believe, once more, that I would do what I had come to do, in this kind of deadly charade. If he lay down with his back to me, I would shoot. I squeezed the first and middle fingers around the arrow nock, took a slow open-mouthed breath, and leaned back tense and still. He was looking up the river and standing now with both bands on the gun, but with the attitude of holding it at his waist without necessarily thinking of raising it to his shoulder. There was something relaxed and enjoying in his body position, something primally graceful; I had never seen a more beautiful or convincing element of a design. I wanted to kill him just like that, and I prayed for Bobby to come into sight at that instant, but I could see nothing on the river, and he apparently couldn't either. He shifted around for some reason, with half of him framed by my tunnel of needles. Wait till he lies down, I said far back in my throat, and then hit him dead center of the back. Make it a problem. Try to break his back, so that even if you don't hit the spine you'll still hit something vital. But he was still standing there, not indecisively or decisively; just standing, part of his body clear for a shot, but his head and the other part, not. I had better try now; he may move out of my line of fire. I tensed my arm to see if the muscles would work. The string took on a small angle. I looked right at him, and he gave a little more of himself to the hole in the needles. He was sideways to me, but if his face came into view, he had only to raise it a little to be looking directly at me. I knew that my next battle would be with hysteria, the wild hysteria of full draw, of wanting to let the arrow go and get the tension of holding the bow out of the body: to get the shot off and get it over with. I began to set up in my head the whole delicate routine of making a good archery shot, all the time aware that the most perfect form goes for nothing if the release doesn't happen right; the fingers of the right hand must be relaxed, and above all the bow arm must