I half-raised my hands like a character in a movie. Bobby looked at me, but I was helpless, my bladder quavering. I stepped forward into the woods through some big bushes that I saw but didn’t feel. They were all behind me.
The voice of one of them said, “Back up to that saplin’.”
I picked out a tree. “This one?” I said.
There was no answer. I backed up to the tree I had selected. The lean man came up to me and took off my web belt with the knife and rope on it. Moving his hands very quickly, he unfastened the rope, let the belt out and put it around me and the tree so tight I could hardly breathe, with the buckle on the other side of the tree. He came back holding the knife. It occurred to me that they must have done this before; it was not a technique they would just have thought of for the occasion.
The lean man held up the knife, and I looked for the sun to strike it, but there was no sun where we were. Even so, in the intense shadow, I could see the edge I had put on it with a suburban grindstone: the minute crosshatching of high-speed abrasions, the wearing-away of metal into a murderous edge.
“Look at that.” the tall man said to the other. “I bet that’ll shave h’ar.”
“Why’ont you try it? Looks like that’n’s got plenty of it. ’Cept on his head.”
The tall man took hold of the zipper of my coveralls, breathing lightly, and zipped it down to the belt as though tearing me open.
“Good God Amighty,” said the older one. “He’s like a goddamned monkey. You ever see anything like that?”
The lean man put the point of the knife under my chin and lifted it. “You ever had your balls cut off, you fuckin’ ape?”
“Not lately,” I said, clinging to the city. “What good would they do you?”
He put the flat of the knife against my chest and scraped it across. He held it up, covered with black hair and a little blood. “It’s sharp,” he said. “Could be sharper, but it’s sharp.”
The blood was running down from under my jaw where the point had been. I had never felt such brutality and carelessness of touch, or such disregard for another person’s body. It was not the steel or the edge of the steel that was frightening; the man’s fingernail, used in any gesture of his, would have been just as brutal; the knife only magnified his unconcern. I shook my head again, trying to get my breath in a gray void full of leaves. I looked straight up into the branches of the sapling I was tied to, and then down into the clearing at Bobby.
He was watching me with his mouth open as I gasped for enough breath to live on from second to second. There was nothing he could do, but as he looked at the blood on my chest and under my throat, I could see that his position terrified him more than mine did; the fact that he was not tied mattered in some way.
They both went toward Bobby, the lean man with the gun this time. The white-bearded one took him by the shoulders and turned him around toward downstream.
“Now let’s you just drop them pants,” he said.
Bobby lowered his hands hesitantly. “Drop… ?” he began.
My rectum and intestines contracted. Lord God.
The toothless man put the barrels of the shotgun under Bobby’s right ear and shoved a little. “Just take ’em right on off,” he said.
“I mean, what’s this all…” Bobby started again weakly.
“Don’t say nothin’.” the older man said. “Just do it.”
The man with the gun gave Bobby’s head a vicious shove, so quick that I thought the gun had gone off. Bobby unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his pants. He took them off, looking around ridiculously for a place to put them.
“Them panties too,” the man with the belly said.
Bobby took off his shorts like a boy undressing for the first time in a gym, and stood there plump and pink, his hairless thighs shaking, his legs close together.
“See that log? Walk over yonder.”
Wincing from the feet, Bobby went slowly over to a big fallen tree and stood near it with his head bowed.
“Now git on down crost it.”
The tall man followed Bobby’s head down with the gun as Bobby knelt over the log.
“Pull your shirt-tail up, fat-ass.”
Bobby reached back with one hand and pulled his shirt up to his lower back. I could not imagine what he was thinking.
“I said up,” the tall man said. He took the shotgun and shoved the back of the shirt up to Bobby’s neck, scraping a long red mark along his spine.
The white-bearded man was suddenly also naked up to the waist. There was no need to justify or rationalize anything; they were going to do what they wanted to. I struggled for life in the air, and Bobby’s body was still and pink in an obscene posture that no one could help. The tall man restored the gun to Bobby’s head, and the other one knelt behind him.
A scream hit me, and I would have thought it was mine except for the lack of breath. It was a sound of pain and outrage, and was followed by one of simple and wordless pain. Again it came out of him, higher and more carrying. I let all the breath out of myself and brought my head down to look at the river. Where are they, every vein stood out to ask, and as I looked the bushes broke a little in a place I would not have thought of and made a kind of complicated alleyway out onto the stream — I was not sure for a moment whether it was water or leaves — and Lewis’ canoe was in it. He and Drew both had their paddles out of water, and then they turned and disappeared.
The white-haired man worked steadily on Bobby, every now and then getting a better grip on the ground with his knees. At last he raised his face as though to howl with all his strength into the leaves and the sky, and quivered silently while the man with the gun looked on with an odd mixture of approval and sympathy. The whorl-faced man drew back, drew out.
The standing man backed up a step and took the gun from behind Bobby’s ear. Bobby let go of the log and fell to his side, both arms over his face.
We all sighed. I could get better breath, but only a little.
The two of them turned to me. I drew up as straight as I could and waited with the tree. It was up to them. I could sense my knife sticking in the bark next to my head and I could see the blood vessels in the eyes of the tall man. That was all; I was blank.
The bearded man came to me and disappeared around me. The tree jerked and air came into my lungs in great gratitude. I fell forward and caught up short, for the tall man had put the gun up under my nose; it was a very odd sensation, funnier than it might have been when I thought of my brain as thinking of Dean and Martha at that instant and also of its being scattered, material of some sort, over the bush-leaves and twigs in the next second.
“You’re kind of ball-headed and fat, ain’t you?” the tall man said.
“What do you want me to say?” I said. “Yeah. I’m bald-headed and fat. That OK?”
“You’re hairy as a goddamned dog, ain’t you?”
“Some dogs, I suppose.”
“What the hail…” he said, half turning to the other man.
“Ain’t no hair in his mouth,” the other one said.
“That’s the truth,” the tall one said. “Hold this on him.”
Then he turned to me, handing the gun off without looking. It stood in the middle of the air at the end of his extended arm. He said to me, “Fall down on your knees and pray, boy. And you better pray good.”
I knelt down. As my knees hit, I heard a sound, a snap-slap off in the woods, a sound like a rubber band popping or a sickle-blade cutting quick. The older man was standing with the gun barrel in his hand and no change in the stupid, advantage-taking expression of his face, and a foot and a half of bright red arrow was shoved forward from the middle of his chest. It was there so suddenly it seemed to have come from within him.
None of us understood; we just hung where we were, the tall man in front of me unbuttoning his pants, me on my knees with my eyelids clouding the forest, and Bobby rolling back and forth, off in the leaves in the corner of my eye. The gun fell, and I made a sl
ow-motion grab for it as the tall man sprang like an animal in the same direction. I had it by the stock with both hands, and if I could pull it in to me I would have blown him in half in the next second. But he only gripped the barrel lightly and must have felt that I had it better, and felt also what every part of me was concentrated on doing; he jumped aside and was gone into the woods opposite where the arrow must have come from.
I got up with the gun and the power, wrapping the string around my right hand. I swung the barrel back and forth to cover everything, the woods and the world. There was nothing in the clearing but Bobby and the shot man and me. Bobby was still on the ground, though now he was lifting his head. I could understand that much, but something kept blurring the clear idea of Bobby and myself and the leaves and the river. The shot man was still standing. He wouldn’t concentrate in my vision; I couldn’t believe him. He was like a film over the scene, gray and vague, with the force gone out of him; I was amazed at how he did everything. He touched the arrow experimentally, and I could tell that it was set in him as solidly as his breastbone. It was in him tight and unwobbling, coming out front and back. He took hold of it with both hands, but compared to the arrow’s strength his hands were weak; they weakened more as I looked, and began to melt. He was on his knees, and then fell to his side, pulling his legs up. He rolled back and forth like a man with the wind knocked out of him, all the time making a bubbling, gritting sound. His lips turned red, but from his convulsions — in which there was something comical and unspeakable — he seemed to gain strength. He got up on one knee and then to his feet again while I stood with the shotgun at port arms. He took a couple of strides toward the woods and then seemed to change his mind and danced back to me, lurching and clog-stepping in a secret circle. He held out a hand to me, like a prophet, and I pointed the shotgun straight at the head of the arrow, ice coming into my teeth. I was ready to put it all behind me with one act, with one pull of a string.
But there was no need. He crouched and fell forward with his face on my white tennis shoe tops, trembled away into his legs and shook down to stillness. He opened his mouth and it was full of blood like an apple. A clear bubble formed on his lips and stayed there.
I stepped back and looked at the whole scene again, trying to place things. Bobby was propped up on one elbow, with his eyes as red as the bubble in the dead man’s mouth. He got up, looking at me. I realized that I was swinging the gun toward him; that I pointed wherever I looked. I lowered the barrel. What to say?
“Well.”
“Lord God,” Bobby said. “Lord God.”
“You all right?” I asked, since I needed to know even though I cringed with the directness.
Bobby’s face expanded its crimson, and he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
I stood and he lay with his head on his palm, both of us looking straight ahead. Everything was quiet. The man with the aluminum shaft in him lay with his head on one shoulder and his right hand relaxedly holding the barb of the arrow. Behind him the blue and silver of Lewis’ fancy arrow crest shone, unnatural in the woods.
Nothing happened for ten minutes. I wondered if maybe the other man wouldn’t come back before Lewis showed himself, and I began to compose a scene in which Lewis would step out of the woods on one side of the clearing with his bow and the tall man would show on the other, and they would have it out in some way that it was hard to imagine. I was working on the details when I heard something move. Part of the bark of a big water oak moved at leg level, and Lewis moved with it out into the open, stepping sideways into the clearing with another bright-crested arrow on the string of his bow. Drew followed him, holding a canoe paddle like a baseball bat.
Lewis walked out between me and Bobby, over the man on the ground, and put his bow tip on a leaf. Drew moved to Bobby. I had been holding the gun ready for so long that it felt strange to lower the barrels so that they were pointing down and could kill nothing but the ground. I did, though, and Lewis and I faced each other across the dead man. His eyes were vivid and alive; he was smiling easily and with great friendliness.
“Well now, how about this? Just… how about this?”
I went over to Bobby and Drew, though I had no notion of what to do when I got there. I had watched everything that had happened to Bobby, had heard him scream and squall, and wanted to reassure him that we could set all that aside; that it would be forgotten as soon as we left the woods, or as soon as we got back in the canoes. But there was no way to say this, or to ask him how his lower intestine felt or whether he thought he was bleeding internally. Any examination of him would be unthinkably ridiculous and humiliating.
There was no question of that, though; he was furiously closed off from all of us. He stood up and backed away, still naked from the middle down, his sexual organs wasted with pain. I picked up his pants and shorts and handed them to him, and he reached for them in wonderment. He took out a handkerchief and went behind some bushes.
Still holding the gun at trail, as the tall man had been doing when I first saw him step out of the woods, I went back to Lewis, who was leaning on his bow and gazing out over the river.
Without looking at me, he said, “I figured it was the only thing to do.”
“It was,” I agreed, though I wasn’t all that sure. “I thought we’d had it.”
Lewis glanced in the direction Bobby had taken and I realized I could have put it better.
“I thought sure they’d kill us.”
“Probably they would have. The penalty for sodomy in this state is death, anyway. And at the point of a gun… No, they wouldn’t have let you go. Why should they?”
“How did you figure it?”
“We heard Bobby, and the only thing we could think of was that one of you had been bit by a snake. We started to come right in, but all at once it hit me that if it was something like snakebite, the other one of you could take care of the one that was bit just as well as three of us could, at least for a little while. And if there were other people involved, I told Drew I had just as soon come in on them without them knowing it.”
“What did you do?”
“We turned in that little creek and went up it about fifty yards. Then we shoved the canoe in some bushes and got out; I strung up and nocked an arrow, and we came on up to about thirty yards from where you were. As soon as I saw four people there, I began to shift around to find a place I could shoot through the leaves. I couldn’t tell what was going on at first, though I thought it was probably what it was. I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything for Bobby, but at least I didn’t make a mismove and get his head blown off. When the guy started getting back up on his feet, I drew down on him, and waited.”
“How did you know when to shoot?”
“Any time that the gun wasn’t pointed at you and Bobby would have been all right. I just had to wait till that time came. The other guy hadn’t had any action yet, and I was pretty sure they’d swap the gun. The only thing I was worried about was that you might get in between me and him. But I was on him all the time, looking right down the arrow. I must have been at full draw for at least a minute. It would’ve been a much easier shot if I hadn’t 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. Lik
e 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 center-shot.”
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.”