There was nothing in common, in the way he was lying, with any of the positions I had seen him in while he was alive, until I remembered the pose by the river in which I had most wanted to kill him. He now had that same relaxed, enjoying look of belonging anywhere he happened to be, and particularly in the woods.
I turned him over with a foot, and his hand moved around palm-up, still with the shape of the root. His face came clear.
I fell down; the knife fell away. My heart moved into my bad side and beat there, trying to throw my blood away any way it could. I put my hands over my face and went wild with terror; I could not look again. His mouth was open, and full of yellow teeth.
But was it? I crawled over to him and picked up the knife. I put it in his mouth and pried at the gums, and a partial upper plate began to come out. Did that make the difference? Did that make enough difference? I shoved the teeth back in with the handle of the knife, and took a good look. He was dressed like the toothless man in the clearing; whether exactly like him I truthfully couldn’t say, but very much like. He was about the same size, and he was thin and repulsive-looking. And, though my time close to him in the clearing was burned in my mind, I had still seen him under those circumstances, which were a lot different from these; I believe that if I could have seen him move I would have known, one way or the other. But I didn’t, and I don’t.
I took the knife in my fist. What? Anything. This, also, is not going to be seen. It is not ever going to be known; you can do what you want to; nothing is too terrible. I can cut off the genitals he was going to use on me. Or I can cut off his head, looking straight into his open eyes. Or I can eat him. I can do anything I have a wish to do, and I waited carefully for some wish to come; I would do what it said.
It did not come, but the ultimate horror circled me and played over the knife. I began to sing. It was a current popular favorite, a folk-rock tune. I finished, and I was withdrawn from. I straightened as well as I could. There he is, I said to him.
The problems came back, one by one, in sequence. I would rather drag him than carry him, but I knew I could make better time if I carried him, so I put the knife back in the case, dropped down on one knee and wrestled him across my shoulders in the fireman’s carry from boy scout days. I got up with nearly double my weight and started back toward the clearing. I went around the rock of blood that had led me there, stumbled through the bushes I had crawled in, and tried for the river with my side oozing me wet and the top of my left leg wet and drying and moistening again. The man’s body held me to the ground, and I had the feeling that when I got him off my shoulders, I would fly. Blundering through the bushes, I had no idea whether I would make it back to the river. The woods burst slowly open in front of me, across my eyes, and twenty yards ahead dropped off into still, sun-filled space from which the old noise of eternity came back.
I put him down in almost the exact place where I had shot him, and stepped to the edge of the bluff. I looked downriver first, for I was afraid to look upriver and see that unchanging emptiness, but even looking dovrnriver I could tell that the emptiness upstream was not complete, that there was something there like a mote, and I turned to it to be able to face it and make sure. Lewis’ canoe shone there, flashing frankly in the sun, riding grayly like a trout, coming out of the rapids. I looked at the dead man. You’re dead, Lewis, I said to him. You and Bobby are dead. You didn’t start on time; you did everything wrong. I ought to take this rifle and shoot the hell out of you, Bobby, you incompetent asshole, you soft city country-club man. You’d have been dead, you should’ve been dead, right about exactly now. You’re right in line, you’re going slow, you’re going slow, you’re just sitting there. If I hadn’t come up here and did what I did, you’d’ve been floating along now with no brains and no blood, and so would Lewis.
I walked back and picked up the gun, and my craziness increased when I touched it. I sighted down the barrel and put the bead right in the middle of Bobby’s chest. Do it, the dead man said. Do it; he’s right there. But I got around the feeling just by opening my fingers, and letting the gun fall to the ground. I did think momentarily of firing straight up to attract Bobby’s attention, but turned loose of the notion because the sound of a shot might have frightened him into ditching the canoe. Besides, I didn’t want to put the thing to my shoulder again; it had been close; very close.
I took the gun by the barrel, wheeled it once around my head and slung it as far out over the river as I could, where it went from a heavy spinning sail into outright falling, turning slower and slower sideways until it bit the water about fifty yards in front of the canoe. I hoped that Bobby had seen it long enough to know what it was, and that it meant we were safe; a gun falling out of the sky.
After it hit, Bobby pulled his paddle out of the river, but did not look up. I put my thumb and forefinger in my mouth and whistled as loud as I could, a high cutting whistle that nearly deafened me, but I had an idea it failed somewhere in the sound of the banks. I climbed the biggest rock at the edge and stood there. Then I figured I ought to put some motion into myself, and I went into the sidestraddle bop from my old PT class in high school; it had more arm and leg movement in it than anything else I could think of. It almost tore me apart, but I danced away while I could. Bobby looked up, finally, and the blank of his tiny face stayed uptilted, looking more. I did a bloody clog step, my tennis shoes silent on the rock and my side tearing but in joy, then pointed down under me. He pulled up his paddle and dug slowly in on his right to turn the canoe in to the cliff.
I went back to the man on the ground, flopped on his side with one leg drawn up, and rolled him onto his back. He looked lazily straight up into the sky. One open eye had been poked into by a branch or a twig, and was cloudy, but the other was clear blue, delicately veined in a curious, uneyelike pattern; I saw myself there, a tiny figure bent over him, growing.
After carrying him I had no trouble touching him, or going through his pockets. Though I had no real interest in who he was anymore, I thought I had better make some effort to find out, for I might need the information in some way later on. I reached into one pocket and turned it inside out. There was nothing in it; one of his inside buttons made a quick cold place in my hand. In the other pocket were five rifle shells—big ones, and I thought of Drew’s head—and there was also a card of some sort that I had to straighten up and hold to the light in order to read. His name was Stovall, and he was an honorary deputy sheriff of Helms County, which was, I suppose, where we now were. This worried me some, but not too much, for Lewis had once told me that everybody in the hills, or just about everybody, was an honorary deputy sheriff. The main worry in connection with this was that if someone thought enough of him to give him the card, he might conceivably be a person well known, as they say, in the community—whatever that was in Helms County—and consequently might be searched for. I looked at him, though, and it seemed obvious that he was so nondescript, even for Helms County, that he would probably not be missed by more than a few people, and probably not much by them, either. I balled the card up and unballed it again, tore it up, then packed the pieces into another ball and threw it out over the river, where it came apart in a current of air, suspending its pieces incredibly before it moved wanderingly in many directions, all down. I went and got the death-arrow and threw it like a spear into the river, then picked up the arrow covered with my own blood and threw it over too. Then I pitched out my old broken catapult of a bow. I hated to turn it loose. I thought maybe the handle section might be salvaged, and I wanted very much to have it with me for the rest of my life, but in the end I threw it, and threw it hard.