I looked up and could barely make out his face. The canoe went in to him, guided by the same kind of shove I gave Dean when he was first learning to walk. He waded and drew it up onto the sand by the bow rope, and we beached it under the overhang.
I moved onto land, not saying anything.
“For God’s sake,” Bobby said, “don’t be so damned quiet. I’m flipping already.”
Though my mouth was open, I closed it against the blackness and moved to Lewis, who was now down off the rock and lying in the sand. His bare legs were luminous, and the right leg of his drawers was lifted up to the groin. I could tell by its outline that his thigh was broken; I reached down and felt of it very softly. Against the back of my band his penis stirred with pain. His hair gritted in sand, turning from one side to the other.
It was not a compound fracture; I couldn’t feel any of the bone splinters I had been taught to look for in innumerable compulsory first-aid courses, but there was a great profound human swelling under my hand. It felt like a thing that was trying to open, to split, to let something out.
“Hold on, Lew,” I said. “We’re all right now.”
It was all-dark. The river-sound enveloped us as it never could have in light. I sat down beside Lewis and motioned to Bobby. He crouched down as well.
“Where is Drew?” Bobby asked.
“Lewis says be’s dead,” I said. “Probably be is. He may have been shot. But I can’t really say. I was looking right at him, but I can’t say.”
Lewis’ hand was pulling at me from underneath. I bent down near his face. He tried to say something, but couldn’t. Then he said, “It’s you. It’s got to be you.”
“Sure it’s me,” I said. “I’m right here. Nothing can touch us.”
“No. That’s not …” The river had the rest of what he said, but Bobby picked it up.
“What are we going to do?” he made the dark say; night had taken his red face.
“I think,” I said, “that we’ll never get out of this gorge alive.”
Did I say that? I thought. Yes, a dream-man said, you did. You did say it, and you believe it.
“I think he means to pick the rest of us off tomorrow,” I said out loud, still stranger than anything I had ever imagined. When do the movies start, Lord?
“What …?”
“That’s what I’d do. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t …”
“If Lewis is right, and I think he is, that toothless bastard drew down on us while we were lining up to go through the rapids, and before we were going too fast. He killed the first man in the first boat. Next would have been me. Then you.”
“In other words, it’s lucky we spilled.”
“Right. Lucky. Very lucky.”
It was an odd word to use, where we were. It was a good thing that we couldn’t see faces. Mine felt calm and narroweyed, but it might not have been. There was something to act out.
“What are we going to do?” Bobby said again.
“The question is, what is he going to do?”
Nothing came back. I went on.
“What can he lose now? He’s got exactly the same thing going for him that we had going for us when we buried his buddy back in the woods. There won’t be any witnesses. There’s no motive to trace him by. As far as anybody else knows, he’s never seen us and we’ve never seen him. If all four of us wind up in the river, that’ll just even things out. Who in the hell cares? What kind of search party could get up into these rapids? A helicopter’s not going to do any good, even if you could see into the river from one, which you can’t. You think anybody’s going to fly a helicopter down into this gorge, just on the chance that he might see something? Not a chance in the world. There might be an investigation, but you can bet nothing will come of it. This is a wild goddamned river, as you might know. What is going to happen to us, if he kills us, is that we are going to become a legend. You bet, baby: one of those unsolved things.”
“You think he’s up there? Do you really?”
“I’m thinking we better believe he’s up there.”
“But then what?”
“We’re caught in this gorge. He can’t come down here, but the only way out of this place for us is down the river. We can’t run out of here at night, and when we move in the morning he’ll be up there somewhere.”
“Jesus Christ Almighty.”
“Yes,” I said. “You might say that. As Lewis might say, ‘Come on, Jesus boy, walk on down to us over that white water. But if you don’t, we’ve got to do whatever there is to do.’“
“But listen, Ed,” he said, and the pathetic human tone against the river-sound made me cringe, “you got to be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
“Sure you’re right. What if you’re wrong? I mean, we may not really be in any danger, at all, from anybody up … up there.” He gestured, but it was lost.
“You want to take a chance?”
“Well, no. Not if I don’t have to. But what …?”
“What what?”
“What can we do?”
“We can do three things,” I said, and some other person began to tell me what they were. “We can just sit here and sweat and call for our mamas. We can appeal to the elements. Maybe we can put Lewis back up on the rock and do a rain dance around him, to cut down the visibility. But if we got rain, we couldn’t get out through it, and Lewis would probably die of exposure. Look up yonder.”
I liked hearing the sound of my voice in the mountain speech, especially in the dark; it sounded like somebody who knew where he was and knew what he was doing. I thought of Drew and the albino boy picking and singing in the filling station.
There was a pause while we looked up between the wings of cliff and saw that the stars were beginning there, and no clouds at all.
“And then what?” Bobby said.
“Or somebody can try to go up there and wait for him on top.”
“What you mean is …”
“What I mean is like they say in the movies, especially on Saturday afternoon. It’s either him or us. We’ve killed a man. So has he. Whoever gets out depends on who kills who. It’s just that simple.”
“Well,” he said, “all right. I don’t want to die.”
“If you don’t, help me figure. We’ve got to figure like he’s figuring, up there. Everything depends on that.”
“I don’t have any idea what he’s figuring.”
“We can start out with the assumption that he’s going to kill us.”
“I got that far.”
“The next thing is when. He can’t do anything until it gets light. So that means we’ve got till morning to do whatever we’re going to do.”
“I still don’t know what that is.”
“Just let me go on a minute. My feeling is this. You can’t hear a gunshot that far off, with all this goddamned noise down here. After he shot Drew, he might have shot at us some more, and we’d never have known it unless another one of us was hit. I don’t have any idea how well he can see from where he is. But I think it’s reasonable to suppose that he saw well enough to know that he hit Drew, and that the canoes turned over. He might believe that the rest of us drowned, but I don’t believe he’d want to take a chance that we did. That’s awful rough water, but the fact that you and Lewis and I got out of it proves that it can be done, and I’m thinking he probably knows it. Again, maybe the reason he didn’t nail the rest of us was that by the time we got down here where we are now, we’d been carried a good ways past him, and also it was too dark. That’s our good luck; it means we’ve got at least a couple of advantages, if we can figure how to work them.”
“Advantages? Some advantages. We’ve got a hurt man. We’ve got a waterlogged canoe with the bottom stove in. We’ve got two guys who don’t know the first thing about the woods, who don’t even know where in the hell they are. He’s got a rifle, and he’s up above us. He knows where we are and can’t help being, and we don’t have the slightest notion of where he is, or even who he is. We haven’t got a goddamned chance, if you and Lewis are right. If he’s up there and wants to kill us, he can kill us.”