He looked at the tall man; either something or nothing was passing between them. I could not feel Bobby anywhere near, and the other canoe was not in sight. I shrank to my own true size, a physical movement known only to me, and with the strain my solar plexus failed. I said, “We started from Oree yesterday afternoon, and we hope we can get to Aintry sometime late today or early tomorrow.”
“Aintry?”
Bobby said, and I could have killed him, “Sure. This river just runs one way, cap’n. Haven’t you heard?”
“You ain’t never going to get down to Aintry,” he said, without any emphasis on any word.
“Why not?” I asked, seared but also curious; in a strange way it was interesting to cause him to explain.
“Because this river don’t go to Aintry,” he said. “You done taken a wrong turn somewhere. This-here river don’t go nowhere near Aintry.”
“Where does it go?”
“It goes … it goes …”
“It goes to Circle Gap,” the other man said, missing his teeth and not caring. “‘Bout fifty miles.”
“Boy,” said the whorl-faced man, “You don’t know where you are.”
“Well,” I said, “We’re going where the river’s going. Well come out somewhere, I reckon.”
The other man moved closer to Bobby.
“Hell,” I said, “we don’t have anything to do with you. We sure don’t want any trouble. If you’ve got a still near here, that’s fine with us. We could never tell anybody where it is, because you know something? You’re right. We don’t know where we are.”
“A stee-ul?” the tall man said, and seemed honestly surprised.
“Sure,” I said. “If you’re making whiskey, well buy some from you. We could sure use it.”
The drop-gutted man faced me squarely. “Do you know what the hail you’re talkin’ about?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“You done said something about makin’ whiskey. You think we’re makin’ whiskey. Now come on. Ain’t that right?”
“Shit,” I said. “I don’t know whether you’re making whiskey or hunting or rambling around in the woods for your whole fucking life. I don’t know and I don’t care what you’re doing. It’s not any of my business.”
I looked at the river, but we were a little back from the bank, and I couldn’t see the other canoe. I didn’t think it could have gone past, but I was not really sure that it hadn’t. I shook my head in a complete void, at the thought that it might have; we had got too far ahead, maybe.
With the greatest effort in the world, I came back into the man’s face and tried to cope with it. He had noticed something about the way I had looked at the river.
“Anybody else with you?” he asked me.
I swallowed and thought, with possibilities shooting through each other. If I said yes, and they meant trouble, we would bring Lewis and Drew into it with no defenses. Or it might mean that we would be left alone, four being too many to handle. On the other hand, if I said no, then Lewis and Drew—especially Lewis—might be able to … well, to do something. Lewis’ pectorals loomed up in my mind, and his leg, with the veins bulging out of the divided muscles of his thigh, his leg under water wavering small-ankled and massive as a centaur’s. I would go with that.
“No,” I said, and took a couple of steps inland to draw them away from the river.
The lean man reached over and touched Bobby’s arm, feeling it with strange delicacy. Bobby jerked back, and when he did the gun barrel came up, almost casually but decisively.
“We’d better get on with it,” I said. “We got a long ways to go.” I took part of a step toward the canoe.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” the man in front of me said, and leveled the shotgun straight into my chest. My heart quailed away from the blast tamped into both barrels, and I wondered what the barrel openings would look like at the exact instant they went off: if fire would come out of them, or if they would just be a gray blur or if they would change at all between the time you lived and died, blown in half. He took a turn around his hand with the string he used for a trigger.
“You come on back in here ‘less you want your guts all over this-here woods.”
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 sapli’.”
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 thatn’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.