Robert Crews: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  When the HELP sign was at last completed, however, he doubted that even five-foot letters could be seen from very high in the air. A much more conspicuous signal was needed, but he had exhausted his strength by now, and his leg hurt him so much that he groaned aloud. Judging from the position of the sun, it was already late afternoon. He still had no taste for food and felt internally ill, no doubt as a result of the sudden withdrawal from alcohol, but knew he should eat something more for his survival. So he munched on a Cornish-hen leg. No doubt it had been marinated in wine and herbs and carefully broiled, but he was insensitive to all tastes at the moment, despite his new ability to smell, or think he smelled, the normally odorless vodka. He tried to avoid thinking about how long it might be before rescue came. It was clear that he would not soon be able to hike out, in stocking feet and with a bad leg, to the nearest human community, even if one was relatively close by. And he could spare no more immediate concern for the bodies in the airplane. Until help arrived, self-preservation must be his obsession.

  He had to find refuge again before darkness came. The sun, which he had taken for granted his life long, was now the sole available source of light and heat, and gauge of time and direction. As it sank toward the treetops on the far shore of the lake, he looked for alternatives to the sand burial that had served on the previous night but was unattractive to him now, if only in the moral sense: determined to survive, he could not afford the connotation of interment. If defiance was part of this determination, then what he defied was what he had been before the crash. Destroying oneself had a point only under conditions of civilization. The situation was otherwise when your adversary was nature.

  But digging in made sense. He had no tools with which to build much, and no strength to drag back and forth to the woods for materials. After a while he found the pair of plastic cups that nested under the cap of the thermos. Using one as a trowel, he scooped out in the sand a shallow cavity long enough to hold his body. If seeing it as a grave was out of the question, it could be called a burrow or slit trench or the cellar of the structure to come. In the course of this project he soon discovered—or remembered, for he had dug in sand as a child—that there are physical laws ordaining how far you can dig down perpendicularly before the walls of a hole threaten to cave in altogether. Sand in volume has its natural conformations; a cupful on a level surface forms a miniature dune. Therefore he scooped to a depth of no more than a foot and graded the sides of the depression into natural slopes, not walls.

  Given the season, he had enough clothes to survive another night, but he cursed himself for neglecting to bring along extra shoes. In collecting the branches for the HELP sign, he had picked up solefuls of pine needles, some of which pierced the weave of his socks to prick his feet. At the moment he could think of no better countermeasure than putting on a second pair of socks over the first. Were he faced with the need to walk far, and if his leg permitted such, he would have to fashion some version of footgear from the materials available, but it was premature to think of that eventuality, as well as being defeatist.

  They might come for him at any time, though no more tonight; he had to accept that fact as dusk approached, and he worked, as well as he could with a wounded hand that hurt more than his knee, to make a better shelter of the shallow trench. To spare his leg, he crawled to the distress sign and pillaged branches from it and erected them, stems embedded in the sand, around the rim of the trench. Across their tops he tried stretching the empty duffel bag, which was supposed to be waterproof but even when flattened out was only wide enough to protect his head and shoulders. However, the thick canvas proved too heavy to be supported by such slender uprights. After reerecting the latter, he constructed a flimsy roof of whichever garments he was not wearing, mainly extra underwear. The result was not in the least water-resistant should rain fall—the T-shirts would grow more weighty when wet and probably pull the structure down on him—but until then it would provide a ceiling under which one could enjoy the illusion anyway of being less at the mercy of the elements. The sense of irony that had become Crews’s dominant emotion toward his fellow men could serve little purpose in this realm of the literal, where you made the most of what you could get and were grateful for it.

  Before retiring for the night he once again scanned the shoreline for signs of humanity. He had of course been doing as much, periodically, since crawling from the lake after the crash, but what he could discern of the rest of the shore was as deserted as his own patch. It was a sizable body of water, perhaps a mile across in the part he could see, but his view was limited by a headland in the middle distance on his side of the water. Perhaps he was on a kind of bay, and just beyond the headland lay a village full of people.

  He was startled by the sound of a splash and looked just in time to see, in what little light remained, a strand of silver glide beneath the surface of the lake. He knew so little of nature. He had never been a Scout. His swimming had been done always in pools and private areas of beach, not the sort of thing from which you learned to identify species of wildlife or edible plants, or anything of use in his current plight. How helpful it would be if he could make fire! Not only would night be less bleak, but by day smoke would be the most effective way of making his position known. Surely rubbing two sticks together was done only in cartoons. Then there was something called flint and steel. Flint might be found in the woods, when he could walk better—if he could recognize it—and perhaps something of steel might come from the electric razor.

  He had enough food for another day and a lakeful of pure water, and he had a rudimentary shelter for the night, so long as the weather stayed clement. After a day of more physical labor than he had done in years, or ever, he was ready to sleep. He was morally pleased to have drunk no alcohol since the crash—and the vodka bottle was still planted there in the beach, untouched—but in body if anything he felt much frailer than when he had been drunk. He would probably not have damaged his hand if he had not been sober when he fell. Once, in the old life, he had tumbled down a length of concrete steps without sustaining a bruise, and while he had received damages of the face in his car crashes, there had been no lack of policemen and medical personnel to assure him he was lucky to have kept all major organs, including his head.

  Though his little realm received some light from a newly risen slice of moon and the nearby water glistened faintly, the rest of the world was invisible and, since the splashing fish, silent, existing only in theory. He writhingly crawled under the simulated roof and rolled onto his better side. This was not kind to his hipbone: the sand at the depth to which he had dug was too firm for comfort. He had much to learn. He was too exhausted to crawl out, get the cup, and scoop out depressions here and there to conform to bodily protuberances. He turned onto his back. He had neglected to provide a pillow. He reached up and pulled down the nearest of the T-shirts that made his ceiling. The branch that held it came along, too, its grasping needles in his face. He put the balled shirt under his head and, tasting the flavor of pine, spat out the needles that had penetrated his mouth.

  He was realizing a version of the experience he had been denied as a small boy: sleeping all night under the Christmas tree. His aim had been to see Santa Claus for himself, the real one, if such existed, for he could not remember a time, however tender his age, when he believed all those Santas in shops, on street corners, at parties, and on TV were one and the same being in different phases. There had been a Christmas Eve when he was ten or eleven, long past any interest in the matter of Santa Claus, on which his father had sent them a Santa impersonator, driving a big black Lincoln with a trunk full of expensive gifts elaborately packaged. His father had had to stay in Florida, where he was preparing the defense for Tommy Bianchi in the case the government was bringing against the “reputed mob boss,” a term Bobby Crews did not yet understand but associated with “putrid,” the word being much in vogue among the boys at school. Looking back, years later, he suspected—and got some ugly amusement fro
m so doing—that the Santa Claus who came in the Lincoln was probably some thug from Bianchi’s “family” and used the same car trunk for taking bodies to dump, weighted, into suburban marshes.

  When Crews woke up, he had no idea of how long he had slept, but it was still night. In fact, he was not at all sure that he had awakened, for a bear’s head, silhouetted against the slim moon, could be seen through the hole in what was left of the crude roof. As a test, he closed his eyes briefly. Sure enough, the bear was gone when he reopened them. What he had seen was some configuration of the overarching pine branches and/or the nearest garment thereupon in the remainder of his ceiling. Of course, the whole sequence, the test included, could have been, and continued to be, including this reflection upon it, a dream. But the trembling was real. Yet even that took him a moment to understand. It was not a reaction to the mirage in which the bear had figured. He was in the grip of a savage chill. The several layers of cotton were as nothing against the cold. Never before now had he been aware that teeth actually can chatter involuntarily. He tore away the rest of the roof and wrapped it around his upper body, under the thin jacket. He continued all night to shiver violently, and his teeth chattered whenever he unclenched them.

  That he did nevertheless sleep, he understood only on being awakened by the morning light, and not the first light that had woken him the previous day but rather a sun that was already lifting itself above the treetops to the east. The woods were especially dense there. For all he knew, a town might not be very far beyond, but the continuous wall of greenery tended to discourage speculation. Better stranded near open water than wandering in circles through an inland thicket without boundaries.

  He writhed out of his now roofless trench. It would take a while before he tried to stand erect. His knee had stopped hurting during the night, or anyway he had been distracted from it by the cold, but he had to prepare himself for the possibility it would prove worse when used. He crawled, favoring his right hand, some distance from all that he could currently call home, and rising to his feet at last, urinated.

  The place he had chosen to pee was near the edge of the forest. Only when he had finished and was ready to start back did he notice the enormous tracks that led from the woods across the sand to the wretched excuse for a shelter in which he had spent the night.

  3

  CREWS FORGOT HIS KNEE AND RAN TO THE campsite. From the tracks he could see that the bear had in fact paused to stare down at him, but decided to attack not his person but rather what was left of the food, tearing the hamper apart and devouring the remaining sandwiches.

  He shared the area with a wild beast far more powerful than he, armed with deadly natural weapons, and omnivorously voracious by instinct. News reports told of bears that were sometimes hungry enough to bite chunks out of sleeping campers: legs, shoulders, or even, he remembered hearing, heads. At first he could not even imagine what form of defense to mount against the bear’s return. Some sort of pathetic bow and arrow? He had nothing with which to sharpen either arrow or spear, and any missile too feeble to bring such a creature down would only infuriate it.

  He had been thrust into the situation of the first primitive man to face an animal adversary. No doubt it had been the beasts who won the earliest encounters, until the man could effectively bring his mind into play, he who after all was the wiliest of the apes. You could comfort yourself with such reflections, but realizing a natural potential long buried under softer concerns was another matter.

  Fire was the answer. He could not remain another day in this place without fire. There was no animal on earth that was not terrified by fire. Fire would also warm him and cook the food he had to find now, for his larder was empty. With fire you could signal to searchers: smoke by day, flame by night. But how to make fire? He had constantly to face the truth that he was helpless when in the wild. There was not a moment in which he could afford to ignore his vulnerability to the menaces of the world in which he was stranded. Added to them now was a lack of food, and of course, for the first time in many years, he had woken up hungry.

  The bear was the most frightening of his problems, but Crews had a feeling it would not return immediately. He had no authority for that feeling: he was simply basing it on his own disinclination to hang around some place that had run out of what he wanted from it. Any creature would go elsewhere under those conditions. He was pleased to be thinking like an animal, if indeed such was what he was doing; it had no precedent. The bear aside, then, there remained the matter of: a source of food; better means to keep warm; an improved method of signaling to aircraft…

  He broke off here to gather the boughs used ineffectively to roof the trench and quickly reconstructed the HELP sign—while suspecting that a pilot who flew low enough to see letters of this size would be able to spot his person as easily, all the more so if he waved vigorously. But at the time of the flyover he might be underwater or back in the woods, and something was better than nothing. He did need a more conspicuous signal…. A mirror!

  His disloyal knee chose this moment to remind him that its sudden recovery had been a hoax. It began to hurt more than ever. He hopped on the good leg to the duffel bag and took from it the little padded box in which his electric razor traveled. A hand-sized mirror was affixed to the interior of its upper lid. Because it seemed to be cemented firmly in place, instead of trying to pry the mirror off and perhaps cracking the glass, he neatly ripped the entire lid away from the small hinges attaching it to the lower half of the case.

  He caught the sunshine in the mirror, flashing light at the wall of forest. The facade of trees was itself in the sun now, and the reflection could be better imagined than seen, but the principle was sound. For the device to be effective, he would have to manipulate it, focusing the beam at a flying aircraft. It was not the sort of signal that would necessarily work if the glass was static. Nevertheless, remembering movies in which hostile Indians would, at great distances, notice the glitter of a cavalryman’s brass buttons, he broke off a forked piece of branch from the HELP sign, planted its straight end in the sand, and mounted in its fork, angled toward the sky, the half of the box that framed the little mirror. If he was otherwise occupied at the time an airplane flew over, it was at least possible the pilot might see enough of a glint to circle back, and then detect the sign. Again, it was the something that was surely better than nothing, a principle he had consistently disdained in his life before the crash.

  Now something must be done about food. There were fish in this lake. He had heard more than one splash when he was not so distracted as to be deaf to such. He was learning that one alone in the natural world did well to register as many sensory impressions as he could, bringing every practical faculty into play. Moralizing was not only a waste of attention; it could result in a failure of mortal consequence. What he had been in civilization had no useful bearing on what he must do here. He had to continue to think of himself as the man who could put a shaving mirror to emergency use. He was not helpless, even though he could hardly walk, even though added to the light-headedness as a consequence of such a sudden abstention from alcohol was a sense of his fragility with respect to the bear.

  He opened the leather-covered cylinder he had retrieved from the plane and saw sufficient segments to make one of the lengthy rods used for fly casting, a sport of which he knew little beyond being vaguely aware that it was practiced while standing in a rubberized, waist-high, booted garment, halfimmersed in a stream.

  The accompanying tackle box offered a profusion of plastic receptacles full of little artificial flies, most of them showing colors and configurations of no insects Crews had ever seen. Also in the box was a reel. He had no difficulty in figuring out how to fit it to the buttpiece of the assembled rod, and pulled the line, which was thick and heavy and coated with some varnishlike substance, through the ringed guides along the considerable length of the rod, which when planted vertically in the sand was taller than he.

  One artificial fly was as good as
another to him. Obviously, each had its use according to the type of fish sought and perhaps the sort of water at hand, the weather, and the season, but he had no means of acquiring knowledge of this complexity in the absence of experience. He therefore chose the fly that looked least bizarre by his standards, which meant that which was least brightly colored. But the line was too thick to go through the eye of the hook. By now he was too impatient to pursue a better resolution to the problem, and he simply battered the end between two rocks until it had been frayed to a usable diameter, threaded it through the eye, with difficulty made a disorderly-looking knot that would probably not hold for long, and tried to cast the tiny, weightless object into the lake. As he had feared, not being unaware of the physical laws that apply to all forms of motion, the fly was too light to travel far or indeed at all.

  He considered tying a heavier object to the end of the line, along with the fly, so that the latter would be hurled out when the rod was whipped—for he eventually developed a technique of wrist that would seem right—yet if the added weight did not float, it might drag the fly under water and ruin the illusion by which the fish was supposed to be attracted. But once again he noticed the weight of the line. Of course: the lure might weigh nothing, but the cast could be made using the inertia (or whatever it was) of the heavy line. Pull out a generous length and whip it. He put his theory into action and was thrilled to find that it worked. After many efforts he was finally able to cast the light fly some distance from shore.

  Pleasure in this initial achievement was to be the only reward he received from fishing all morning. The pity was that he had no gauge by which to determine what he was doing wrong. Perhaps he had chosen the wrong fly. He tried a series of others. Maybe he was doing a bad job at casting. He tried variations on it, whipping the line out farther, then not quite so far, then in between, retracting it at various rates of speed, sometimes allowing the counterfeit insect to float as if casually, sometimes causing it to jerk and jump along the surface of the water. Could it be that no lake fish was ever attracted by such a lure, that the use of artificial flies must be limited to running streams? Were fish that discriminating? But maybe the trouble was that the area of the lake at which he had started—a hundred yards or so along the beach, so that he was as far from the submerged airplane as he found it convenient to hobble, with his bad knee—was simply not one frequented by fish, who might well have favorite neighborhoods, even as did land animals including man. Therefore he laboriously dragged himself elsewhere, casting out the line at each of a series of places, finally finding himself almost at the point, which as he grew nearer he saw was of more topographical substance than he had supposed from his earlier perspectives. The beach there was terminated by a height the sides of which were sheer stone. On top grew the familiar forest of Christmas trees.