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.
“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.