“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. Like 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 centershot.”
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.”
“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 want 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?” be 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.”