Robert Crews: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  When he had come within a quarter mile of the camp he paused to cut and trim a sapling an inch and a half in diameter and about a foot shorter than he was tall. To its end, with the fishing line from his pocket, he lashed the tool fast, its knife blade extended and locked open by means of a tiny wedge of wood. He now had a weapon. He had left to find a spear that would catch a fish and returned with one that could kill a man.

  He could smell the campfire when he was still some distance from it: he was upwind, the superior position as to sound as well as scent, which might determine who was prey and who the hunter. When he got close enough, he stole from tree to tree, careful not to step where he might make noise.

  Finally he could see most of the site. Friday had built the clothes-drying rack near the fire, and on it were all of her few garments, including the shirt he had given her. And he could see the woman herself, alive and obviously unmenaced, or anyway her upper half, placidly bathing in the stream, white in the swirling water, pale against the dark woods beyond the opposite bank.

  He was not embarrassed to find his fears unjustified, but he would have been disconcerted had she known of his presence now. He returned to the woods, and scarcely had he done so when he saw a hearty sapling with precisely the sort of tri-forked crotch he had looked for earlier. He dismantled the man-spear and, with the saw and knife blade of the tool, fashioned an implement for the catching of fish.

  When he arrived at the clearing, Friday was sitting near the fire, drying her hair with spread fingers. She was wearing only his knitted shirt, which looked still somewhat damp but was long enough, her legs arranged as they were, to cover her decently.

  “That looks like a good one,” she said, her head angled so that her hair hung free on one side.

  “It took me forever to find.” He bided his time for the dramatic news.

  “I got the chance to dry my stuff out. As long as it was wet anyway, I washed it first. I grabbed this when I heard you coming. It’s not quite dry. I didn’t want to put it so close it would burn.” She straightened her head. “I’d be glad to do your clothes, maybe a piece or two at a time. It’s warm enough.”

  “As it turns out, I wasn’t as far off the trail as I thought.” He pointed in the direction from which he had come. “A mile, mile and a half. Up a long slope, thickly wooded, but at the top it’s clear, and from there you can see the river.”

  She took her fingers from her hair. “You saw it.”

  “I thought it was the lake at first. It’s the river, all right, too big for a trout stream. Unless there’s another sizable waterway in these parts, that’s the one you came down from Fort Judson.”

  She was still staring at where he had pointed, though there was nothing to be seen but woods. She turned. “I know we could make the roof watertight if we did enough work. And the same thing is true with food. If that deer we saw gets enough to grow as big as a person, and the bear you told me about, who is bigger and fatter, I’m sure, there should be plenty to eat if we really look for it.”

  “Which reminds me,” said Crews. “I’ll bet you didn’t throw the rest of those mushrooms away yesterday. Let’s eat them now, to celebrate.”

  Her expression was both contrite and modestly triumphant, according to whether one looked at her eyes or her eyebrows. She was smiling with her lips. “I can’t promise that a wait of twenty hours is enough! Maybe the poison takes longer to act. How could I know?”

  “Who cares,” Crews said. “We’re a community. Think of its being the last on earth, as in one of those phony movies about the world after a nuclear war.”

  She scowled. “I don’t think I ever saw any.”

  “We’ll eat,” he said. “Then we’ll make plans, now that we know where we are situated geographically, more or less.”

  “The mushrooms are behind that big rock over there…. Oh, not that it matters now that you’ve made a nice spear of your own, but I found mine behind the hut. I am sorry you had to go to all that extra trouble.”

  “But that’s the only reason why I found the river,” Crews said brightly. “I never would have looked for it in that direction.” He rubbed his hands together in a gesture he had rarely if ever used. He was startled by how hard-leathery his palms felt, and in fact sounded. “Let’s eat.”

  He fetched the mushrooms and impaled them, three at a time, on the tines of the new spear and grilled them over coals at the edge of the fire. They would probably have been very good if eaten with knife and fork at a table. Here, plucked hot from the spit, they were celestial fare. He tried to recall some of the gastronomic jargon from his days with Ardis, then applied to cèpes and chanterelles, but drew a blank. Even his more recent life in civilization now felt as remote as if it had been not banally lived but rather exotically imagined.

  “These are marvelous.” He offered Friday the latest smoking spearful. “Take more. There are still lots here.” He shook his head at her, as if in reproach. “You had a hidden supply. All I saw yesterday was a handful. You suspected I might resist?”

  “I gathered more while you were gone just now. They’re right inside the woods over there. A little farther along are a whole lot of those onions, too.”

  “Nice place,” Crews said, chewing. He fitted more mushrooms on the long fork. “Now that it’s stopped raining.” He nodded at the stream. “Maybe that’s a tributary of the river, and does not flow toward the lake. Though you can never tell theoretically. I’ve learned my lesson. Nature can’t be trusted. For all I know, this stream could take a major turn somewhere along the line and head for neither river nor lake. Better play it safe and take the overland route. It’s partly uphill and very likely the longest way, but at least I know where it goes.”

  Friday had retained her civilized manners. She held a mushroom in two fingers and ate it with more than one bite. “I saw a plump bird I think was maybe a grouse—somebody once gave one to my dad. I would be a sissy about killing it, but I wouldn’t have any scruples against cooking and eating it under these conditions. In town I practically live on chicken. I can’t see the moral difference.”

  “There isn’t any,” Crews said. “And we’ve been slaughtering as many fish as we can find, exchanging their lives to keep ours. I just have to figure out a way to get a bird, that’s all. Even if I could make a decent bow and arrows, I think it would be only luck if I hit anything.” He offered her the penultimate mushroom and ate the last himself. “I killed the rabbit with a club, but I had to lie in wait forever. When it came time to perform the act, I did it readily enough as if I had been killing warm-blooded creatures all my life.” He immediately regretted saying as much, but it was too late.

  “That’s how it seemed with Michael when he turned the gun on me,” Friday said. “As if it were routine. I keep remembering that.” She controlled herself and put a hand on his forearm. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you didn’t.” He put his hand over hers and kept it there. “You meant you never had seen that side of him.”

  “If it could be called that, his Mr. Hyde mode, but I think it’s something else, the lack thereof, but of what? Decency? Humanity? Anyway, it’s not the positive quality of evil. Mr. Hyde could not exactly be called a weakling, could he?”

  She was still trying to love the man. Crews knew something about that tendency in women, which was probably maternal. He had seen it in his mother, and in fact, at least at first, in all his wives. “Maybe not,” he said. “But as I recall, it was Dr. Jekyll who won out in the end. Was it not he who killed Hyde?”

  Friday withdrew her hand from under his and glared at him, but he was not the focus of her anger. “If I could once admit that my husband is nothing more than a criminal, there might be some hope for me.”

  Crews could not have put it better himself, but he was glad not to have done so. He rose to his feet. “Now that we’ve dined so sumptuously, I’m not going to fish right away. Instead, I believe I’ll work on the shelter walls. We’ll be spending at least another night here,
don’t you think? I’m sure it will rain again before morning.”

  “We should stay long enough to get a supply of food to take with us,” Friday said firmly.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Crews said, though of course he had. He hesitated. “You turned out to be right about the mushrooms. But please don’t take any more avoidable risks. It’s your right to do with yourself what you will, even to throw your life away, and it’s probably preferable to do that all at once rather than stretch it out, the way I did for so long. But until we get out of here, I need you. I couldn’t make it alone.” He did not want to offend her, and therefore sought to lighten his statement. “Could I have found the river without getting mad at you?”

  She responded in the same tone. “But if I hadn’t taken an unnecessary risk, you wouldn’t have gotten mad and gone off in the first place.”

  “Go ahead, use your unfair advantage in logic. But can you grow as ugly a beard as me?”

  “It’s not ugly,” said Friday. “It’s the height of woodland fashion, and you know it. You cut a dashing figure. When you get back, the youth of America will throw away their shoes and go everywhere barefoot.”

  “And tattered seersucker and stained chinos will become the rage. I’ve finally accomplished something.”

  Friday stopped joking. “The fact is, you have. And you ought to take pleasure in it and stop brooding about me. I won’t let you down. I promise.” She got up and, as he turned away, put on the rest of her clothing, which she said was not altogether dry but at least was not singed. It also smelled of woodsmoke. “But that will be a nice memory on days we can’t have a fire.”

  Crews spoke in earnest. “That’s our biggest deficiency. Not even the bow and drill works when the parts are wet.”

  “We could build a kind of oven, a more elaborate version of the arrangement of rocks you used for the Japanese-style fish. The front part would be roofed over with the biggest flat stone we could haul here.” She gestured. “Mounted on stone walls, stuck together with mud?”

  “Clay would be better, if there’s any around. I might look upstream, where the banks are higher. Each fire we built inside would harden it. Leave space at the back for the smoke to escape, or even build a little chimney. We could keep the fire banked, so it would never go out entirely during the night or if we were away from the campsite for long.” He frowned at her. “The perfect idea. Trouble is, it wouldn’t be portable, and we’d have to stay here to use it.”

  Friday shrugged and abruptly turned away. “Let’s get going on the shelter.”

  “Hey,” Crews said, “what about your shoes and socks?”

  “Not dry enough yet. Besides, I ought to toughen up.”

  “How does the wound look today?” He had seen only her right profile when she was bathing in the stream.

  “Fine. I’m beginning to worry now that I won’t even have a scar to show.”

  “To the police?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t care about that. I meant, to show to myself as a souvenir of my happy marriage.”

  After some experimentation they decided that elaborate interweaving of the panels of the shelter, such as they both had envisioned, would never result in a surface that was absolutely watertight, and that their purpose would be better served by piling on pine boughs to three times the previous thickness, and making sure they were all aligned so that a drop of water might find it more natural continuously to run along them to the ground than to find an interstice through which to fall inside.

  “If we were going to stay for any length of time,” Crews said, “we could cut shingles from bark. I’d do it now if there were any birches around. But this is one area where I haven’t seen any. Other kinds of bark are much thicker and harder to deal with.”

  Friday stood back to survey the results of their efforts, which had been strenuous, for the weightier walls had required the building of a sturdier frame.

  Crews had left the final touches to her while with sharpened sticks he gouged out a deeper drainage ditch than the shallow furrow of the night before, which had overflowed during the heaviest downpour. “We need some poles to lean against the windward side,” he said, raising his eyes. “They’ll hold the thatch in place. That’s another thing I’ve learned to do, to notice the wind. Storms usually come from the same direction, but there are a lot of variations with the normal breezes, and that’s of concern because of how scents travel. It’s always better to have them coming toward you whether you are prey or hunter. But on water, if you’re trying to catch the wind in a sail, completely different laws apply—look out!”

  He was too late. She had taken still another step backward at a point at which he had deepened the trench, which still was too narrow to accept a foot at right angles to it, so her heel went in while her toes were forced back unnaturally close to her ankle. She fell, her leg folding under her, the toes now turning to fit the trench longitudinally and so relieving their bend, but the damage had been done to her foot, and now the ankle and even her knee were twisted.

  When Crews helped her up she could not put weight on her right leg. He lifted her in his arms. She was lighter than he expected. He carried her near the fire, where she first tried again to stand before being lowered to a sitting position on the ground.

  She shook her head at him. “And you say you need my help!”

  “As much as ever,” he said. “This could just as easily have happened to me. Thank God it didn’t: you’re easier to carry than I would be.”

  She gingerly felt her extended right leg, wincing in anticipation, grimacing when her fingers reached her knee. “I maybe broke or tore something here, and my foot hurts too much to touch. Damn it. Of all things to happen.”

  “What can I do for you?” Crews asked.

  “You ought to leave me here.”

  “You could blame me for not reminding you of the trench.” He squatted next to her. “It’s nobody’s fault, and it doesn’t have to change anything. I’ll make you a crutch to get around on, and if we decide to head for the river before you feel better, I can carry you at least part of the way, horseback-style. If we find the canoe, well and good. If not, I’ll make another raft.” He stood up. “Or we can just stay until you can walk normally. We were just saying what a nice place this is.”

  “And I’m not totally incapacitated,” Friday said earnestly. “There’s lot of things I can do sitting down: preparing food if you provide it, keeping the fire going, drying or smoking stuff.” She looked around. “Would you mind handing me my left shoe and one sock? I won’t be wearing the others for a while.”

  He brought them to her. “I think we should use splints to keep your knee and ankle from moving and making the damage worse. It’s probably a sprain or torn ligaments. At least we don’t have to set any broken long bones.”

  She pulled on the sock and grimaced. “I’m not all that fragile! You should have known me when—” She caught herself. “Sorry. You don’t need any more of my whining.”

  “But I haven’t heard any,” said Crews. “You’re the one who knows karate. Your good leg is probably still a lethal weapon.”

  He went into the trees before he said more. He had been almost at the point of confessing that he was in love with her, but she might have taken such a declaration as a response to her vulnerability, and perhaps it was. Crews did not understand himself since he had become honorable.

  10

  FRIDAY’S FOOT HAD TURNED BLACK BEFORE the day was out. Crews built the splint arrangement only around the knee, and since any other kind of fastening might have been uncomfortable against her skin, he used strips torn from the bottom of his T-shirt.

  Employing the Y-topped crutch, she was more mobile than she probably should have been. He performed the longer-distance chores, the fetching of materials, the fishing, and the collection of edible vegetables, but she did the cooking, much of the on-site work of home improvement, and the laundering of clothes. She displayed unfailing good humor. She was even
amused to reflect that this was as domestic as she had ever been: in town, she and her husband had eaten most meals in restaurants or by takeout.

  In fact, though she apparently did not suspect as much, Friday was not much of a cook under the prevailing conditions, tending either to overdo fish by whatever method or, if using a spit, to burn it. She was better at construction work. Sitting on the ground, bad leg extended, she fashioned doors for either end of the shelter, Crews having provided the branches and boughs and also some long tough grasses to use as lashings, the fishline supply having dwindled to what might be needed for its proper purposes. Friday’s finished products, intricate grillworks of intertwined twigs, evergreen foliage plugging the interstices, were neatly framed to fit the triangular openings.

  Once the doors had been hung in place on hinges of twisted grass, and been much admired by her companion, she applied herself to the matter of better-designed beds.

  “The same thing that was done with the doors,” she said, “only with heavier stuff: a frame, crisscrossed with branches, supported off the ground on little Y-shaped stakes driven into the earth. The platforms can be crude so long as they’re sturdy enough to bear the weight. On top we’ll pile the same boughs we used before, but we’ll be off the ground.”

  This work took several days. A moderate rain fell the first night of the new roof and not a drop penetrated to the interior, but it had not yet been tested in a real downpour. Then came a period of sunshine of such heartiness that after a while it seemed eternal. Fire could be made on demand with the magnifying mirror, and after a few sunny days everything inflammable had thoroughly dried.

  In his rovings, Crews had at last found a cluster of birches, and from the bark Friday had made several vessels in which water could be fetched and drunk or used for cooking. They ate more fish, mushrooms, and wild onions, but the supplies of the last two were diminishing, and they both would have welcomed another main course than the first. Crews had eaten little else since the crash. So when he had filled the last of Friday’s orders for building materials, he applied himself to the matter of diet.