by James Dickey
“All right,” Drew said. “Consider it. We’re listening.”
Lewis sighed and scratched his head. “We just ought to wait a minute before we decide to be so all-fired boy scoutish and do the right thing. There’s not any right thing.”
“You bet there is,” Drew said. “There’s only one thing.”
I tried to think ahead, and I couldn’t see anything but desperate trouble, and for the rest of my life. I have always been scared to death of anything to do with the police; the sight of a police uniform turns my saliva cold. I could feel myself beginning to breathe fast in the stillness, and I noticed the sound of the river for a moment, like something heard through a door.
“We ought to do some hard decision-making before we let ourselves in for standing trial up in these hills. We don’t know who this man is, but we know that he lived up here. He may be an escaped convict, or he may have a still, or he may be everybody in the county’s father, or brother or cousin. I can almost guarantee you that he’s got relatives all over the place. Everybody up here is kin to everybody else, in one way or another. And consider this, too: there’s a lot of resentment in these hill counties about the dam. There are going to have to be some cemeteries moved, like in the old TVA days. Things like that. These people don’t want any ‘furriners’ around. And I’m goddamned if I ant 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?” he 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 it. If we connect up with the law, we’ll be connected to this man, this body, for the rest of our lives. We’ve got to get rid of him.”
“How?” I asked. “Where?”
Lewis turned his head to the river, then half lifted his hand and moved it in a wide gesture inland, taking in the woods in a sweep obviously meant to include miles of them, hundreds of acres. Another expression — a new color — came into his eyes, a humorous conspiratorial craftiness, his look of calculated pleasure, his enthusiast’s look. He dropped the hand and rested it easily on the bow, having given Drew and me the woods, the whole wilderness. “Everywhere,” he said. “Anywhere. Nowhere.”
“Yes,” Drew went on excitedly, “we could do something with him. We could throw him in the river. We could bury him. We could even burn him up. But they’d find him, or find something, if they came looking. And how about the other one, the one who was with him? All he’s got to do is to go and bring…”
“Bring who?” Lewis asked. “I doubt if he’d want anybody, much less the sheriff or the state police, to know what he was doing when this character was shot. He may bring somebody back here, though I doubt it, but it won’t be the law. And if he does come back, so what?”
Lewis touched the corpse with his bow tip and put his eyes squarely into Drew’s. “He won’t be here.”
“Where’ll he be?” Drew asked, his jaw setting blackly. “And how do you know that other guy is not around here right now? It just might be that he’s watching everything you do. We wouldn’t be so hard to follow, dragging a corpse off somewhere and ditching it. He could find some way to let the police know. He could bring them right back here. You look around, Lewis. He could be anywhere.”
Lewis didn’t look around, but I did. The other side of the river was not dangerous, but the side where we were was becoming more and more terrifying to stand on. A powerful unseen presence seemed to flow and float in on us from three directions — upstream, downstream and inland. Drew was right, he could be anywhere. The trees and leaves were so thick that the eye gave up easily, lost in the useless tangle of plants living out their time in this choked darkness; among them the thin, stupid and crafty body of the other man could flow as naturally as a snake or fog, going where we went, watching what we did. What we had against him — I was shocked by the hope of it — was Lewis. The assurance with which he had killed a man was desperately frightening to me, but the same quality was also calming, and I moved, without being completely aware of movement, nearer to him. I would have liked nothing better than to touch that big relaxed forearm as he stood ther
e, one hip raised until the leg made longer by the position bent gracefully at the knee. I would have followed him anywhere, and I realized that I was going to have to do just that.
Still looking off at the river, Lewis said, “Let’s figure.”
Bobby got off the log and stood with us, all facing Lewis over the corpse. I moved away from Bobby’s red face. None of this was his fault, but he felt tainted to me. I remembered how he had looked over the log, how willing to let anything be done to him, and how high his voice was when he screamed.
Lewis crouched down over the dead man, a wisp of dry weed in his mouth. “If we take him on the river in the canoe we’ll be out in the open. If somebody was watching he could see where we dropped him in. Besides, like Drew says, the river’s the first place anybody’d look. Where does that leave us?”
“Upstream or down,” I said.
“Or in,” Lewis said. “Or maybe a combination.”
“Which combination?”
“I’d say a combination of in and up. Suppose we took him downstream along the bank. We’re heading downriver, and if we wanted to get rid of him as fast as possible, we’d bury him or leave him somewhere along the way.”
Again, his idea fitted. The woods upstream became more mysterious than those downstream; the future opened only on that side.
“So… we take him inland, and upstream. We carry him to that little creek and up it until we find a good place, and then we bury him and the gun. And I’d be willing to bet that nothing will ever come of it. These woods are full of more human bones than anybody’ll ever know; people disappear up here all the time, and nobody ever hears about it. And in a month or six weeks the valley’ll be flooded, and the whole area will be hundreds of feet under water. Do you think the state is going to hold up this project just to look for some hillbilly? Especially if they don’t know where he is, or even if he’s in the woods at all? It’s not likely. And in six weeks… well, did you ever look out over a lake? There’s plenty of water. Something buried under it — under it — is as buried as it can get.”
Drew shook his head. “I’m telling you, I don’t want any part of it.”
“What do you mean?” Lewis turned on him sharply and said, “You are part of it. You want to be honest, you want to make a clean breast, you want to do the right thing. But you haven’t got the guts to take a chance. Believe me, if we do this right we’ll go home as clean as we came. That is, if somebody doesn’t crap out.”
“You know better than that, Lewis,” Drew said, his glasses deepening with anger. “But I can’t go along with this. It’s not a matter of guts; it’s a matter of the law.”
“You see any law around here?” Lewis said. “We’re the law. What we decide is going to be the way things are. So let’s vote on it. I’ll go along with the vote. And so will you, Drew. You’ve got no choice.”
Lewis turned to Bobby again. “How about it?”
“I say get rid of the son of a bitch,” Bobby said, his voice thick and strangled. “Do you think I want this to get around?”
“Ed?”
Drew put the tense flat of his hand before my face and shook it. “Think what you’re doing, Ed, for God’s sake,” he said. “This self-hypnotized maniac is going to get us all in jail for life, if he doesn’t get us killed. You’re a reasonable man. You’ve got a family. You’re not implicated in this unless you go along with what Lewis wants to do. Listen to reason, don’t do this thing. Ed, don’t. I’m begging you. Don’t.”
But I was ready to gamble. After all, I hadn’t done anything but stand tied to a tree, and nobody could prove anything else, no matter what it came to. I believed Lewis could get us out. If I went along with concealing the body and we got caught it could be made to seem a matter of necessity, of simply being outvoted.
“I’m with you,” I said, around Drew.
“All right then,” Lewis said, and reached for the dead man’s shoulder. He rolled him over, took hold of the arrow shaft where it came out of the chest and began to pull. He added his other hand and jerked to get it started out and then hauled strongly with one hand again as the arrow slowly slithered from the body, painted a dark uneven red. Lewis stood up, went to the river and washed it, then came back. He clipped the shaft into his bow quiver.
I handed the shotgun to Bobby and went and got my belt and the knife and rope. Then Drew and I bent to the shoulders and lifted, and Bobby and Lewis took a foot apiece, with their free hands carrying the gun and the bow and an entrenching tool from the loaded canoe. The corpse sagged between us, extremely heavy, and the full meaning of the words dead weight dragged at me as I tried to straighten. We moved toward the place where Lewis had come from.
Before we had gone twenty yards Drew and I were staggering, our feet going any way they could through the dry grass. Once I heard a racheting I was sure was a rattlesnake, and looked right and left of the body sliding feet-first ahead of me into the woods. The man’s head hung back and rolled between Drew and me, dragging at everything it could touch.
It was not believable. I had never done anything like it even in my mind. To say that it was like a game would not describe exactly how it felt. I knew it was not a game, and yet, whenever I could, I glanced at the corpse to see if it would come out of the phony trance it was in, and stand up and shake hands all around, someone new we’d met in the woods, who could give us some idea where we were. But the head kept dropping back, and we kept having to keep it up, clear of the weeds and briars, so that we could go wherever we were going with it.
We came out finally at the creek bank near Lewis’ canoe. The water was pushing through the leaves, and the whole stream looked as though it was about half slow water and half bushes and branches. There was nothing in my life like it, but I was there. I helped Lewis and the others put the body into the canoe. The hull rode deep and low in the leafy water, and we began to push it up the creek, deeper into the woods. I could feel every pebble through the city rubber of my tennis shoes, and the creek flowed as untouchable as a shadow around my legs. There was nothing else to do except what we were doing.
Lewis led, drawing the canoe by the bow painter, plodding bent-over upstream with the veins popping, the rope over his shoulder like a bag of gold. The trees, mostly mountain laurel and rhododendron, made an arch over the creek, so that at times we had to get down on one knee or both knees and grope through leaves and branches, going right into the most direct push of water against our chests as it came through the foliage. At some places it was like a tunnel where nothing human had ever been expected to come, and at others it was like a long green hall where the water changed tones and temperatures and was much quieter than it would have been in the open.
In this endless water-floored cave of leaves we kept going for twenty minutes by my watch, until the only point at all was to keep going, to find the creek our feet were in when the leaves of rhododendrons dropped in our faces and hid it. I wondered what on earth I would do if the others disappeared, the creek disappeared and left only me and the woods and the corpse. Which way would I go? Without the creek to go back down, could I find the river? Probably not, and I bound myself with my brain and heart to the others; with them was the only way I would ever get out.
Every now and then I looked into the canoe and saw the body riding there, slumped back with its hand over its face and its feet crossed, a caricature of the southern small-town bum too lazy to do anything but sleep.
Lewis held up his hand. We all straightened up around the canoe, holding it lightly head-on into the current. Lewis went up the far bank like a creature. Drew and Bobby and I stood with the canoe at our hips and the sleeping man rocking softly between. Around us the woods were so thick that there would have been trouble putting an arm into it in places. We could have been watched from anywhere, any angle, any tree or bush, but nothing happened. I could feel the others’ hands on the canoe, keeping it steady.
In about ten minutes Lewis came back, lifting a limb out of the water and appearing. It w
as as though the tree raised its own limb out of the water like a man. I had the feeling that such things happened all the time to branches in woods that were deep enough. The leaves lifted carefully but decisively, and Lewis Medlock came through.
We tied the canoe to a bush and picked up the body, each of us having the same relationship to it as before. I don’t believe I could have brought myself to take hold of it in any other way.
Lewis had not found a path, but he had come on an opening between trees that went back inland and, he said, upstream. That was good enough; it was as good as anything. We hauled and labored away from the creek between the big water oak trunks and the sweetgums standing there forever, falling down, lurching this way and the other with the corpse, thick and slick with sweat, trying to make good a senselessly complicated pattern of movement between the bushes and trees. After the first few turns I had no idea where we were, and in a curious way I enjoyed being that lost. If you were in something as deep as we were in, it was better to go all the way. When I quit hearing the creek I knew I was lost, wandering foolishly in the woods holding a corpse by the sleeve.
Lewis lifted his hand again, and we let the body down onto the ground. We were by a sump of some kind, a blue-black seepage of rotten water that had either crawled in from some other place or came up from the ground where it was. The earth around it was soft and squelchy, and I kept backing off from it, even though I had been walking in the creek with the others.
Lewis motioned to me. I went up to him and he took the arrow he had killed the man with out of his quiver. I expected it to vibrate, but it didn’t; it was like the others — civilized and expert. I tested it; it was straight. I handed it back, but for some reason didn’t feel like turning loose of it. Lewis made an odd motion with his head, somewhere between disbelief and determination, and we stood holding the arrow. There was no blood on it, but the feathers were still wet from the river where he had washed it off. It looked just like any arrow that had been carried in the rain, or in heavy dew or fog. I let go.