“Is this what you call first light?”
“Listen,” he said, “Lewis has been having a bad time. Once I thought he died. He’s awful bad hurt.”
“You would have died, yourself. He was waiting for you up there. You didn’t do what I told you, and you would have died. He could have shot you fifty times, because you did what you did, and because you didn’t do what you should’ve done. You better look up here at this light, baby. You better look at your own hands and feet, because you liked not to have had them anymore.”
“Listen,” he said again. “Please listen. I couldn’t get him in the canoe at all until I had enough light to see what I was doing. He blacked out two or three times before I ever got him in. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t want to spend another night like that. I would’ve rather been trying to climb up, with you.”
“Fine. Next time, maybe.”
“How did you do it? I never thought you could do it; I never thought I’d see you again. If it’d been me I don’t know but what I’d’ve just taken off, if I’da been able to get to the top.”
“I thought about that,” I said. “But I didn’t.”
“You did exactly what you said you’d do,” he said. “But it’s not possible. I don’t believe it. I cant believe it. I really can’t, Ed. This is not happening to us.”
“Well, we’ve got to make it unhappen. Question is, how?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Do you really think we can? I mean, really?”
“I do really,” I said. “With all this bad luck, luck is running with us.”
“And you killed him? You killed him?”
“I killed him and I’d kill him again, only better.”
“Did you ambush him?”
“In a way. I set the problem up the way it seemed best to do. And he came right to me.”
We walked over to the shattered body on the rocks, with two or three parts of the denture plate beside the head; he had hit the rocks right on his face. We turned him over; the face was unbelievable; more unbelievable than anything else. I could hear Bobby catch his breath. Then I heard the breath speak.
“It looks like you shot him from the front. How …”
“I did,” I said. “I shot straight into him. I was in a tree.”
“A tree?”
“Yes, there are a lot of them around when you’re in the woods, you know. Really quite a lot.”
“But …?”
“He didn’t see me until be was hit, and maybe not even then. I think he was just getting on to where I was when the arrow hit him. He shot a good many times. Did you hear anything?”
“Maybe once; I’m not sure. Probably not; it was just that I was listening so hard. But, no, I didn’t hear anything.”
“There he is,” I said. “Another one.”
He looked at my side. “But he shot you, didn’t be?”
His voice was full of the best stuff I had ever heard in it. “Let me look,” he said.
I unzipped, and the flying suit fell away. My shorts were soaked and dried with blood, with more coming.
“Boy,” he said. “Something really gored you.”
“I fell out of the tree onto the other arrow,” I said. “I wonder if it would’ve made any difference if I hadn’t sharpened it so well before we left home? And I’m sure glad I don’t use four-bladed heads.”
“I tell you,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. That arrowhead is meant to open you up.”
“That’s just what it’s meant for. And it opened me up. But I think it’s a clean wound, and there ain’t many of them. I think the river got most of the paint out of me.”
I looked down at my hurt. The climb down and the fall had torn it all the way open, from the half healing and clotting that it had been trying to do in the woods. I was coming out of me, but not as fast as I might have been. I took off my shorts and stood there bleeding and naked, and took the bloody sleeve I had already cut off and used it to hold the shorts into the wound. Then I put what was left of the suit back on. “Let’s finish up and get going,” I said.
We were standing with the corpse, and it was ready. The rope was piled on and off the body, and the frayed part that had broken was giving off glassy hairs where the thing had happened, high up above.
“Are you sure …?” Bobby asked.
I faced into him, into his open mouth and bloodshot eyes. “No,” I said. “I would say it was, but I’m not that sure. Maybe if we could get him to hold a gun on you, you could tell me. Or maybe if we could give him back his face, we could tell that way. But I don’t know. The only thing I know is that we’re here, like we are right now. Let’s get him in the river. Let’s get him in good.”
We went up and down the bank looking for rocks the right size, going back and forth across each other, dreaming. With both hands I took up part of the river and tried to wash the main rock where his face had smashed and there was a lot of blood. On both knees I washed it, and the blood came. It was on the sand and going into the sand, and there was no more of it. I went back to rock-hunting with Bobby, and we piled up five or six mean-looking stones next to the body. I cut the rope into sections and tied the rocks onto the man with the biggest one around his neck, squeezing the arrow wound together and almost out of sight.
“Not here,” I said. “Out in the middle of the river, where it’s hardest to get to.”
We struggled with him and with each other, and he and the rocks made it, finally, into the canoe with Lewis, who shifted slightly as if to make room for somebody who belonged there, pretty much as a person would shift to let a familiar body get back in bed with him in the middle of the night.
The canoe moved very badly, with all the weight. We left the bank and for a moment were just going downstream, too tired to do anything else. The sound of rapids was somewhere in front of us, carrying terror once more, amongst so much other terror. Bobby steadied the canoe while I got to my knees among the blood, vomit and rocks and lifted two of the rocks clear and shoved them over the side. The canoe yawed and I braced back to equalize the weights. The body was straining to get out, but hung on the gunwale. I lifted out another rock and it pulled one of his legs over the side but he was still with us. I picked up the last rock, the one around his neck, and heaved it out with the last energy of all. The wound of his neck tore open bloodlessly—I thought the head had come off—and he was gone. He was gone so completely into the river that he seemed never to have had anything to do with it, or it with him. He had never been in the world at all. I dipped my hand in the stream and left his blood with him.
We were by ourselves, moving.
We turned a long corner. The river freshened before us and around us, and I drove in the paddle, exerting no strength but digging in anyway. We went through some small rapids without much trouble, and I thought of fun. The canoe just followed the channel of its own accord.
On each side the cliffs began to fall; to fall away. They fell and then got back up again almost as they had been, but their authority was leaving them. Every time they rose it was not quite as high.
The sun was behind us, and the pressure on my back shoved us forward. I was glad for it; gladder than it is possible to be. But I could not keep my head up. My side was stiff and sopping with blood, and my chin kept ending up on my chest and my eyes were blurring into the bottom of the canoe where Lewis lay with one hand over his eyes. I put a hand on my forehead and tried to pull up my eyelids by lifting the skin of my forehead and keeping it lifted, but I was still asleep, looking at the world as though my eyes were closed. I’ve got to lie down somewhere, I thought; if I don’t I will fall back into the river.