Deliverance - James Dickey [71]
turn, I think, when I hit. Something went through me from behind, and I beard a rip like tearing a bedsheet. Another thing buckled and snapped under me, and I was out of breath on the ground, hurt badly somewhere as the gun went off again, and I could not get to my feet but clawed backward, dragging something. The gun boomed again, then again and again; a branch whipsawed in the tree, but higher than my head would've been if I'd been standing. There was something odd about the shooting; I could tell that even as I was, and I got to one knee and then to my feet from that, and crouched and crowhopped toward, to, and finally behind some rocks on the upriver side of the tree. I stayed low; the gun went off again. Then I slowly lifted my head over the rock. He was staggering toward the tree, still ten or fifteen feet from it, trying to get the gun up as though it were something too long, or too limber to raise, like a hose. He fired again, but only a yard in front of his feet. The top of his chest was another color, and as he melted forward and down I saw the arrow hanging down his back just below the neck; it was painted entirely red, and was just hanging by the nack and flipping stiffly and softly. He got carefully down to his knees; blood poured when his mouth opened and seemed to splash up out of the ground, to have the force of something coming out of the earth, a spring revealed when the right stone was moved. Die, I thought, my God, die, die. I slid down on my right side on the back of the rock and laid my cheek to the stone. What is wrong with me? I asked, as the rock seriously and gravely began to turn, as though it might rise. I looked down at my other side and an arrow, the crooked one from the bow quiver, was sticking through it, and the broken bow was still hanging to it by the lower part of the clip. I put my head down, and was gone. Where? I went comfortably into the distance, and I had a dim image in my head of myself turning around, disappearing into mist, waving good-bye. Nothing. More nothing, another kind, and out of this I looked up, amazed. In front of me a man was down on his hands and knees giving up his blood like a man vomiting in the home of a friend, careful to get his head down or into the toilet bowl. I put my head back and went away again. The hardness of the rock against my breath woke me; it was too difficult to get air, in the place where I had been. I lifted my head and my eyes again, but there was no man there to see with them. I would have lain there forever but for that, but because of the mystery I slowly struggled back into doing something. I propped up and looked at myself. The arrow had gone through about an inch of flesh in my side, the flesh that age and inactivity were beginning to load on me. I would either have to cut it out of my side or pull the shaft through. As carefully as I could, but with the pain of every move making my soul shrivel and beg for help, I stripped the feathers off the arrow, and then set my teeth and started to work it through and out. It came slowly, and I thought of the arrow paint I was leaving inside the wound, but there was no way to get away from it. I licked my hand and put saliva on the shaft, hoping that the lubrication would help. It did at first, and then it didn't; the arrow stuck solidly, and I could not move it at all without coming very close to passing out. I would have to cut. I took the knife from my belt, sliced away the nylon I was wearing from around it, and looked. Just looked, and that was more terrifying than trying to work the arrow out with my eyes closed. The broadhead had torn my side open, as it was designed to do, and if it had not gone quite as deep it would have just made a bad flesh wound, but that was not the case, and it was in me. In me. The flesh around the metal moved pitifully, like a mouth, when I moved the shaft. I put the knife against the flesh above the wound. Just cut right down, I said aloud. Cut down and cut it loose, and you'll be able to clean the wound out in the river. It will be a lot better that way, boy.