Robert Crews: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  The woman came to confront him, with her noble forehead and eloquent eyes. “We really did camp here, as you can see. But nobody came out of the woods and murdered my husband. I lied about that. I still don’t want to admit it even to myself. He wasn’t killed. It was he who tried to kill me. He’s the one I was running from. He’s got the gun.”

  Crews looked away. He had been so glad to see her that he had not questioned her original story, which only now seemed implausible. After his initial surprise, what immediately occurred to him at this moment was that his adversary was not some veteran backwoodsman to whom the lake and its environs were home turf, someone born with a rifle in his hand, but rather a soft, civilized city guy who except for the expensive equipment furnished by a sporting-goods outfitter would be at the mercy of the wilderness—as he himself had been, but he had proved his mettle. He could take this bastard. He longed to meet him.

  But what he said to her was, “There’s the trail. I’m assuming it leads to the river. Let’s get going. The sooner we get to this Fort Judson, the sooner you can report him to the authorities.”

  But now that she had been able to confess the central truth, she had to say more. “I was ashamed. I still am. He was getting ready to do some target shooting with that pistol of his. He did that every time we made camp, coming down from Judson. He’d blaze away at knotholes in trees or whatever, but his favorite target was something living, a squirrel or even a bird in the air. I hate guns on general principles, but the loud noise is really awful, out here where sounds of that kind would never otherwise be heard, and the possibility that he would wound or kill some creature for no reason at all always infuriated me.” She gasped for air. “I don’t want to be phony about it. I eat meat and wear leather, but I can’t stand the idea of needless destruction of—but here’s what never made any sense to me: he’s the animal lover, even gives money to—oh Christ…” It was as if she were trying to breathe underwater.

  “Take your time,” Crews said. “I’m listening. I’m not going anywhere.”

  After a moment she shrugged and said, in mirthless irony, “What a time to start an argument: when the other guy has a loaded gun in his hand. Maybe I was being suicidal. It seems so dumb now, but that was then, and he had never been violent with me.” She shook her head with force. “But if I start to think of my mistakes, I have to go back a lot further than that. I shouldn’t have come on the trip—I hate camping and canoeing! But I was trying to be fair. That’s always an error.”

  Crews was shocked. “It is?”

  “Not being fair,” she said. “But trying to be, which means the effort will be unnatural. I wanted a divorce, you see. His response was to beg me to come on a trip into the unspoiled wilderness, far from the corruptions of civilization, without which we could surely reconcile our differences. Of course, I didn’t believe that would or could or even should happen. So why did I agree? Maybe it was rather to be unfair: to pretend that I might reconsider while having my mind made up.” She gave Crews a vulnerable half-smile. “Nothing like being shot to stimulate self-examination.”

  “I’m a veteran of marital strife,” said he. “But gunfire goes beyond my experience. Do you think it was his plan from the first to kill you?”

  Her expression grew hard, even hateful. Her answer therefore was a surprise. “No,” she said quickly. “I don’t think that at all. I think the shooting was an impulse. I think the trip was a device to postpone doing anything about the breakup. That’s his style. When things don’t go your way, play for time, delay, postpone. Then regardless of what happens, pretend the delay has settled every question in your favor. My mistake was in making that point to him while he was holding a gun.”

  “You were hit by the first shot and then you ran and he fired again and missed? I’m sure I heard two shots.”

  “I can’t remember those moments very clearly. I was in the thick woods back there, running as hard as I could. I had no idea of where I was going. I didn’t even know I had been hit until I finally looked back for a second, still running, to see if he was chasing me, and turned and slammed my face against a tree and fell down. Only then did I feel a sort of itch at my side, and I looked and saw my shirt was full of blood. I took it off and cleaned the wound with it and threw it away when I stopped bleeding. My face hurt worse than the wound ever did. I kept going until some time later on I found that cave.”

  Now that he had learned more about his adversary, Crews saw no need for undue haste in locating the river. The man was no longer as sinister as he had once seemed. It made sense to stay awhile at this place at which fish could be caught and smoked to take along as rations should food be harder to find where they were going.

  “I want to hear whatever you want to tell,” he said. “But, as you will find before long, the problem of food becomes paramount out here, outranking all others: unless you are preoccupied with it, you’ll never get any. And even if you’re obsessed, you usually won’t find enough. So I should go and catch more fish now. If you feel like it, you might look around for some edible form of plant life. It isn’t healthy to only eat fish, but I haven’t done well at finding much else. I haven’t had the nerve to experiment much. Better to be malnourished than poisoned. But maybe you can do better.”

  He realized that she might be offended by his displacing matters of great moment with banal practicality, but felt there was quite as good a chance that she might rather be relieved. He was, after all, not a destroyer but rather a preserver. And taking the chance paid off. While he fished in the lake with no success, despite trying a variety of bait and moving from place to place along a hundred yards of shoreline, she returned from the nearby grove with a shirttail full of little dark-green coils.

  “I know what those are,” he cried. “Fiddlehead ferns! It never occurred to me to look for them around here.”

  He went to cut a piece of birch bark. When he came back he demonstrated his pot-making technique. “It doesn’t look like much, but you wait: it’ll do the job without burning up.” The woman meanwhile had picked up and assembled the firemaking bow and drill.

  “Am I doing it right?” she asked, but by the time he had completed the making of the crude bark vessel and filled it with water from the thermos, she had a flame going.

  The blanched fiddleheads were delicious, just at the edge of bitterness, more delicate in flavor than spinach, firmer in texture. They blew on the coils but ate them still too warm, handing the knife blade back and forth, sparing their fingers but not their tongues.

  One was so hot that Crews spat it into his hand. He excused himself, remembering Ardis. “I had a wife one time who really hated it when I did that. A leopard doesn’t change all its spots, even under these conditions.” They were sitting side by side on a fallen log. Between them was the birch-bark box, from which he had poured the excess water. He ate the coiled frond from his hand and stood up. “Go ahead, finish the rest. I’m going to take a bath in the lake and then we’ll hit the trail. You can heat enough water in the box for at least a little wash. Maybe it’s too soon for full-immersion bathing, what with your wound. Also it’s sure to be ice-cold out there.”

  “I’ll collect more fiddleheads to take along,” she said. “Maybe they won’t be easy to find where we’re going.”

  “Now you’re talking like a survivor.”

  He went to the lake and stripped, but took all his clothes into the water and washed both them and his own face, hair, and hide as well as he could. The water felt gelid until he became habituated to it. When he emerged, he wrung as much water from his clothing as was possible and put it on damp. Scrubbing had not gone far to improve the chinos, which continued to display the many stains they had acquired from fish oils, rabbit blood, wood ashes, and other souvenirs of his experiences. Nor did washing make spotless the seersucker jacket, though it revealed new tears of which he had been ignorant.

  He had been quicker with his ablutions than she. Forgetting that she had to wait for the water to heat, he
was about to return too soon to the clearing when, en route, he saw, in fragmented form through the trees, the glimmerings of her nude body. He discreetly backpedaled to the beach, where he was chagrined to notice a sizable fish rise to snap at an insect, just offshore of one of the places where he had failed to get a bite an hour earlier. Could they really tell when the food had a hook in it? If that were true, no fish would ever be caught. Maybe like human beings they had their keen days, but no living thing could preserve itself forever.

  He did not want to think of the woman’s body, of which he had seen very little in any event. He could hardly remember the feeling of fleshly desire, yet had he become altogether asexual he would not, or anyway not so quickly, have acted to honor her modesty.

  When he did at last rejoin her, her face was still wet. It was glisteningly lovely that way, but he expressed his regrets at being unable to provide a towel. Dark patches of damp were visible here and there on her clothing.

  “It’s a warm day,” she said, fluffing her hair with her hands. “It feels good to get wet and let everything dry on its own.”

  Crews indicated his own still sopping garments. “I washed my extensive wardrobe while I was at it, something I might have done more when I was alone. But maybe cleanliness is mostly social, like conversation. I never talked to myself—I mean aloud, where you have to be fairly formal, don’t you, in sentences or anyway complete phrases. No doubt I made noises, grunts, et cetera. And I once talked or rather chanted nonsense at a bear. He probably didn’t mean me any harm. He left soon enough, but it’s scary to have one come and stare into your face when you’re lying half asleep. But in the end I guess I scared him or maybe just bored him. He hasn’t been seen since.”

  He had hoped to amuse her with the reminiscence, but it served rather to evoke a grimmer association of her own. “That was why Michael said a gun might come in handy: there were potentially dangerous creatures in the woods, like bears.” Emotion darkened her face, which except for the bruise had stayed pale from the scrubbing.

  He made sure the little store of equipment was stowed away securely at the appropriate places on his person. He had refilled the thermos in the lake. He tried hanging it in a new position on his belt so that it would be less likely to strike him as it swung with his stride.

  He turned back to her. For an instant he saw the unsullied face of a young girl, but that was something of an illusion: the bruised area was still visible as if in shadow, though fading, and while not as old as he, she was an adult.

  “Fine,” he said. “That should do the trick. Now that we’ve got that trail, we should make better time. How far is it from here to the river?”

  “We camped overnight where we left the canoe. We started next morning and got here in late afternoon.” When asked for practical information, she was able to give it without evidence of the feeling it must invoke.

  “Same rules apply: if you want to stop for any reason at all, sing out. I can’t keep looking back.”

  She smiled. “But you do.”

  He was surprised to feel embarrassment. It must be the first such occasion in many years. “That was when I didn’t know if you could make it…. Let me know when it looks to you as if we’re getting near the river, if it seems like I’m unaware.”

  “You think he’ll be waiting there?”

  “That’s a possibility. It’s also possible that he’s just run away. He’s not a professional killer, is he? He doesn’t have any special reason to think you and I have joined forces, but on the other hand, he knows there’s somebody else in an area that he thought was deserted. Has he got the guts to murder two people? When he did such a bad job at trying to kill you?”

  “Obviously, I’m the worst judge of what he’s capable of,” she said. “I hardly ever heard him raise his voice. What I always liked about him was his gentleness. He’s so big, but in four years, until this, I never saw the least hint of brutality in anything he did or even said. He loves animals, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Big?” Crews asked. “Tall, heavy?”

  “Both, but not fat. He’s a weight-training nut. That’s how he got into the health-club business. That’s where we met, in fact.”

  “Let’s go,” Crews said, and started off.

  They hiked through a seemingly endless forest of straight, tall, high-foliaged trees so regularly spaced that it was sentimentally inviting to pretend the planting thereof had been by design. The trees were home to a number of squirrels, not only the familiar gray but a smaller red species that Crews was seeing for the first time. Hitting one of either breed with a projectile, spear, arrow, or rock, would be unlikely. All were much quicker than those degenerated by life in city parks, and the red ones would be tiny targets.

  As a drunk, Crews had especially despised people who did anything at all to make or keep themselves fit, and almost his favorite opponent for a fight was some big inflated guy who thought bulk and physical strength were determining factors in hand-to-hand. Had this been true, the boxing champions of the world would always be the men who had been the largest contenders. But Crews was not his old imprudent, headlong self: he was lost, emaciated, and tattered, and he was defending a woman to whom he had no claim, one furthermore who had seen nothing wrong with this bastard until he tried to murder her.

  The tall trees eventually came to an end and were succeeded by an area of low, brushy growth from which twice within two hundred yards plump white-flecked brown fowl sprang up with commotion and flew frantically away to land somewhere ahead—probably these two were one and the same, and likely it was edible, being grouse or partridge or pheasant, all of which he had eaten in the dressed and cooked form, none of which he probably could have identified in a living bird. He still had no weapon with which to bring down such prey.

  Up ahead, the forest began again, now with pines, on rising terrain. He liked to think that on the far side, the downward slope, glimpses could be seen of the river in the valley below, for they had hiked steadily for hours, covering much ground. Even so, it was considerably more probable that his hopes were without foundation. That kind of ambivalence seemed essential to prevailing over the destructive elements of not just the wilderness but of the self as well.

  He stayed skeptical even after they had toiled up the ascending ground—more taxing than it looked, continuing for a mile or more—and, going down the more acute slope on the other side, he heard the sound of rushing water.

  When they arrived at the bank of the stream he could confirm that however vigorous, a stream was all it could be called.

  He asked her, “This doesn’t look like where you left the canoe?”

  She shook her head. “That was a real river, not so fast-moving, a lot wider. In fact, it’s the Kinnemac.” She raised her eyebrows as if the name might be familiar to him.

  He shrugged. “Don’t ask me…. Did you cross, or pass, a stream that looked like this on your hike to the lake?”

  “No. I didn’t see water in any form. And we were on the lookout. We only had canteens.”

  The ground at the bank seemed dry. Crews found a patch of grass to sit on, and the woman joined him. He was thirsty for fresh water but, with so much at hand, enjoyed the spartan suspense.

  “We’ll make camp here. It’s still early, but that overcast looks like it will stay until the sun goes down, and in fact I have begun to smell rain. But the main thing is that we’re apparently lost again. I remember a couple of places where it might have happened. Somewhere I made a bad decision, took the wrong choice of forks.”

  “I certainly didn’t help,” she said. “After all, I was the one who had been along that way before, and yet I couldn’t recognize anything since we left the lake.”

  Crews smiled ruefully. “I’ve boasted about how I’ve coped out here, building the lean-to and the raft, and getting food. But I don’t have any sense of direction at all unless the sun stays visible, and even then it’s easy to be misled. The other day I went all around the lake with the idea I was
going in a more or less straight line. I thought we were heading north when we started. But the slightest divergence, especially when you’re never sure precisely where you are in the first place, the slightest deviation can grow with each mile.”

  “He had a map and a compass,” she said. “You haven’t done badly with no help at all.”

  That he was pleased to hear such sentiments did not lessen Crews’s chagrin. He had taken what seemed to be the more obvious alternative when they went from the open field onto the long wooded slope: there was a much fainter trail to the left. But then the error might have come much earlier: back in the tall trees, long before they had emerged to disturb the game bird from its home in the brush, he had noticed, perhaps too idly, the suggestion of another trail leading away to the right. Tomorrow they would have to retrace their route to the nearer of the alternative trails, take it, and if by the end of that day they had no good reason to believe it the correct one, come all the way back and take the other.

  He said as much to the woman. “And if neither of them is the right one, then we’ll have to really start all over, go back to your old campsite.” He looked downstream, where the water became shallow, splashing around protruding rocks, a minor rapids. “Meanwhile, this looks like a livable place.” He crawled to the edge of the low bank and filled the thermos cup with water, wetting his hand. “It’s ice-cold.” He gave her the cup and went back to fill the bottle. “Should be trout in here.”

  She was standing. “I’d really like to take a whole bath,” she said. “I can put with up the cold water.”

  Crews frowned. “I don’t know…”

  “I’ll be okay. I really have to begin taking over my own care. Believe me, I need to. It’s no reflection on you.” She smiled. “I’m all right, really. You’ve saved my life.”