Robert Crews: A Novel Read online

  He gathered together his dirty laundry and went to the stream. He had no soap, so the clothes would not get really clean, but on the positive side was the fact that washing them would not befoul the brook, for all the dirt on the garments had come from this quarter mile of wilderness.

  When he had returned from that chore and spread the clothes to dry on the roof of the lean-to, he found that the water in the birch-bark vessel had, when not watched, reached the proper temperature and was simmering with conviction. So it was true that the miraculous sometimes happened in nature. Why the bark failed to burn was not his business. He got his minnows and put them to boil.

  Probably he cooked the little fish too long: they were falling apart when he took them from the pan. But the fact was that they proved to be the most delicious food he had ever put into his mouth. Even most of the bones were edible. The trouble was that the supply proved woefully meager. He devoured the entire catch in hardly more time than it took to empty the steaming contents of the bark kettle onto a bed of clean leaves.

  He put another potful of water on the fire and went to seine up more minnows. By the time the bark vessel boiled again and seconds had been caught, cooked, and eaten, much of another afternoon was gone.

  It was a luxury now to sprawl next to the pond, with a full belly, in benevolent light and warmth, stout lean-to nearby, laundry drying on its roof, breeze stirring the rushes, sun shimmering on the water. It could be that he was less alien here than in society, were the truth known, and, thoroughly sober for the first time in years, he could reflect on what he had been with another and less limiting emotion than self-pity.

  He felt so good that he had the courage to lean over and catch a glimpse of himself on the looking-glass surface of the pond. He was shocked. He knew he had not shaved or combed his hair (which in fact had needed a trim for some weeks before the trip), and though he had bathed his person, willy-nilly, by sporadic immersions, he had not often washed his face nor brushed his teeth, but he was not prepared to see the swarthy derelict who stared back at him. He could have looked at himself at any time since recovering the shaving mirror from the airplane, but he had not considered so doing. The mirror was a tool by which he sought to survive. To see his face in magnification had never been a pleasure.

  At that moment—and suddenly, because the wind was blowing in the wrong direction—he heard a plane hardly sooner than he saw it fly overhead, at an altitude much lower than that of the one that had come the day after the crash.

  He scrambled to his feet and waved. He shouted uselessly. He ran to fetch the mirror and signal with it. He ripped at the nearest greenery and threw it on the fire, which by now, the cooking long since completed, had been allowed to go to embers. Wisps came soon, but a good mass of smoke, enough to be visible from above, was excruciatingly slow to gather, and did not really do so until the craft, after a wide and momentarily promising circle, picked up speed and shot beyond the horizon of treetops. Had he stayed on the shore of the lake, he would have been much more visible, for it seemed likely that the larger body of water was what the plane had circled. Had the pilot seen the wreck through the transparent water? And now gone back to report as much?

  Yet he had not himself been able, that morning, to locate the submerged aircraft by repeated dives to where it had last been visited. Had the searching plane really circled the lake or was he making his own self-serving interpretation of what had been another maneuver altogether? From the ground it was difficult to say with any authority what an airplane was doing thousands of feet in the sky above. The only clear truth was that he still had not devised a means of attracting those who might rescue him.

  All his successes—with food and shelter—supported staying here, not leaving. He was agitated again and had to do something to relieve the tension. He began to collect poles with which to add sides to the lean-to.

  5

  CREWS HAD NOT WORKED LONG BEFORE HE had to quit and go into the woods and vomit most of what he had eaten. He had no way of knowing for sure, but he was convinced that the trouble was not with the quality of the minnows but rather with the quantity he had eaten. He had gorged on too many, too fast, swallowing whole more than he had masticated thoroughly. So finally, after all his efforts, there would be no nourishment in his body.

  The experience so dispirited him that he went to bed even before twilight came, but not before providing himself with a fresh mattress of fragrant, springy pine boughs. This looked better than it felt, but he had to raise himself above the damp ground and at the moment could not come up with an alternative. He eventually squirmed into a position in which no sharp end of branch probed any sensitive place on his person if he remained motionless in sleep. Getting warm, however, was another matter and without reference to the actual temperature. The sun had shone all day and the air was probably warmer now than it had been at noon. The heat he craved was that of an enveloping cover, a blanket, a great big thick wool blanket in which to mummify the entire body from toe to crown, and even keep all one’s exhalations until it was so deliciously, suffocatingly hot inside that, at the instant before asphyxiation, you saved your life only by a quick thrust of the index finger up into the outer world.

  The second night in his sturdy new abode was a disaster. For the first time he was conscious of the nighttime sounds of the wild, which until now—because he had previously slept through the hours of darkness—he had ignorantly believed silent. Whereas this night was all but clamorous, with murmurs, siftings, crashes in the woods; splashes from the pond and drippings and sighs; and from overhead and at a distance and nearby and at hand and almost out of earshot what could be called sobs, groans, moans, yells, shouts of rage, screams of joy. Reason told you they were not really such. There was a range of human emotions of which nature surely did not partake. But the sounds of pain could not be mistaken. Living creatures did not go unprotestingly between the jaws of others even though God had constructed them for that purpose. There were squeals and screeches and violent agitations of limbs, tails, wings. There was insane laughter (the legendary loon?), what could have been a roar, what was undoubtedly a sequence of howls, and from something that was probably dying came ever fainter bleatings.

  To which din Crews was soon to add his own contribution. Until now he had taken little more note of insects (except in the case of the larvae tried as bait) than he did when at home, but suddenly they asserted their claim for his attention. He felt crawled on by tiny things with multitudinous limbs, which often, when he went to arrest their progress, turned out to be inanimate fragments of evergreen bough, manifestly incapable of independent movement, yet which began again to move vigorously as soon as he probed elsewhere. There were squirming beings in the thick of his scalp, in his facial and body hair, and in the farthest toes of his socks, none of which he could find when he went there. Little creatures strolled across his forehead and nose with the same impunity. They were gone before his hand reached them. He slapped himself violently, and whenever he did so, the other sounds of the night were instantly stilled. Could the entire world around him know, by this noise alone, that he alone was alien?

  Then the aggressors went too far. He was finally stung by a mosquito so voracious that it stayed at his blood till it was smashed dead there, and no sooner had it died than an entire flock, a cloud, of others descended on him. In a moment he was driven from the lean-to to look for the patch of clay, but though the night was dry enough, the moon was obscured and very little illumination was available. He had put out the fire with water, lest a spark ignite his nearby home while he slept. In the darkness he did not dare go far. He dipped some water from the pond and made ordinary mud from earth and smeared it on his exposed parts. He stuck his trouser ends in the socks and made sure the other garments were buttoned at throat and wrists.

  He returned to the lean-to and lay down again on the boughs, but as it dried the mud itched him and kept him from sleeping except in fits and starts, and when his stomach had recovered from the heav
es he was hungrier than ever, though not for boiled minnows. He would have sold himself into slavery for a piece of bread—a loaf, a warm loaf, to be torn apart in great chunks, pushed into the mouth, and chewed. A character in a movie did that, but after only a gulp or two forgot about having starved for days, dropped the bread, and went about his business. This was not a French film or, like all the other characters, he would have taken food seriously. With French movies seen in America the subtitles permitted Crews to pretend he understood the dialogue, and everywhere in Paris he and his first wife stayed or ate or bought things, those who served them insisted on replying to Ardis in English, which was not charity but malice. His first wife was too proud to indicate as much to these tourist-spoiled functionaries, she being the sort who got satisfaction from reflecting that they surely did worse to others not fluent in the language, which in fact she was. As Crews was certainly not. But his own pride, though much feebler than hers, was such that he could not come clean on the matter, or in fact on much else. He was capable of admitting to himself that she was brighter than he, but could hardly do so to her, for she would use it against him. The real trouble was that she also had more money than he. They lived in Europe for a while. In the Tyrol, Ardis skied beautifully and he immediately broke his leg and spent the rest of the season at a tavern where expatriates spoke about the other foreign places they had tried and compared Davos with Cortina, St. Moritz with Kitzbühel, Rapallo with Dubrovnik, and Sardinia as opposed to certain little-known isles of Greece. Crews thought he might earn her approbation by mastering German, but of course he did not keep up with his lessons, and anyway Ardis said he spoke like he was chewing excrement. Her foul mouth was incongruous in such a precisely made person, physically incapable of gracelessness. She was a superb horsewoman and as a teenager could have been an Olympian in dressage, but as soon as she was seriously threatened by the possibility of an actual accomplishment, she fled elsewhere, as if in embarrassment with her near failure of taste. They had married young, so young for Crews that he still believed he might eventually do something with himself, like sell wine or high-performance cars. In those days he was relatively sober until nightfall and would even from time to time put in a few teetotaling days to clean out the liver. At just which point Ardis took her first lover he could not have said, but he bore her no ill will for doing so, and in fact he rarely encountered a guy of hers he did not immediately hit it off with.

  His own choice of female intimates at that time favored those with jobs but not professions. He was attracted by a young woman who worked at the counter of a bakery until he discovered that with her husband she owned the business, whereas the daughter of an owner might have been okay. He assumed that for a female to be attracted to him, she would have to be a subordinate in her current situation and unfulfilled. He still had some of his own money in those days, but he also still had enough pride not to reflect on such allure as it might be expected to give him. In this he was, uncharacteristically, justified: none of his women ever tried to put the bite on him until the divorce, and then not they but their lawyers were the sharks.

  What he saw as his principal appeal was good humor. He embarrassed many a woman, but he tried to avoid quarreling with any. Crews reserved his combative feelings for his fellow man. With women he was agreeable even under adverse conditions. He would rather be abused by a woman than admired by a man, perhaps because men dismissively took him as he was, while women expected something more. At least at first, they believed there was a possibility he would prove capable.

  Here in the wilderness he must finally have gone to sleep, for he woke up in daylight, but had no sense of having rested. He drank a lot of water and washed the mud off his face and the backs of his hands. Once again he needed to find food. He had not yet looked for the upstream continuation of the brook that the beavers had dammed to make the pond. He decided to do so now. It was possible he could catch some fish there.

  From the tackle case he took some of the little compartmented clear-plastic boxes of artificial flies. He had never yet delved into the depths of the case. He did so now and belatedly discovered, below the plastic boxes, spools of different sorts of line; a scissorslike thing that proved to be tiny forceps; little bottles identified by label as containing dry-fly spray and fly dressing, whatever they might be; a small folder lined with fleece; a miniature reel of measuring tape; and other clips and tabs and gadgets and oddments the purposes of which he could not have known but which seemed infuriatingly useless to a man in his situation … but then a most precious treasure, an extraordinary tool that would answer every need. In his elation he went too far. He had been sick, weak, starving, lost, but with this instrument could prevail over any challenge of the wilderness. It was, in one small unit of stainless steel, a little saw, a knife, and a pair of pliers, to name only the features of obvious value to him. He might have no bottles to open or screws to drive, but simply recognizing the potential for such civilized services was morale-lifting.

  He enjoyed a burst of emotion for a few moments and then returned to the level of practicality at which he must live or perish. The tool was six inches long. The saw blade itself, when extended, less than five; the knife, even shorter. It was a happy discovery and would enable him to do more effectively and neatly that which he had done with makeshifts, but the multipurpose gadget was not an ax or a full-sized saw, nor was it a gun.

  He returned everything to the tackle case and hung its strap on one shoulder. On the other he slung the tube that contained the segmented rod. He set off on the expedition.

  On circling a growth of rushes, he saw what previously he had not: a dome of sticks and mud rising from the water, looking almost man-made. This was surely the beavers’ lodge, a nice piece of construction for a creature without opposable thumbs and no cutting tools but its front teeth. The roof looked impervious to natural enemies, and the entrance apparently was underwater. The animals probably remained there while he was in residence.

  He found the stream that fed the pond. It was no more than four feet wide, and, obstructed, it was scarcely swift-running. Owing to the trees that overarched it from both banks, he could not have fished there with a long rod. It was difficult to walk along the right bank, which between the trees was thick with undergrowth, but he persisted, stopping now and again to pluck himself or his gear from the clutch of importunate branches. The other bank looked less overgrown but only slightly so, and he was reluctant to wade across, if only because he was completely dry for the first time in days.

  Though the changes of direction were indiscernible as they were happening, the brook obviously bent or even twisted here and there, for the sun was frequently in another part of the sky than where it had been the last time he looked—and then of course the sun itself was in incessant though slow motion. Only now did it occur to him that the sun unassisted could not serve as a reliable directional guide. That it rose in the east and traveled to set in the west was true only in the most general sense. Without better orientation than that, in the absence of any fixed coordinate, you could have no real sense of where you were. He had the courage to make that recognition now, because however crookedly the stream flowed it continued to be the same brook, and so long as he followed its course, he could never be lost—that is, within his immediate area, whatever his situation relative to the greater world. And as long as he knew where he was in this limited way, he was not helpless.

  Eventually the line of trees on his side receded from the bank of the stream. The ground was rising. He climbed for a while and reached a sheer rock face, at the foot of which the water ran with such force as to throw up a spray that misted his face as he paused to rest. If this current was not rapid enough for the legendary trout, then there was none such in the universe. He assembled the eight-foot rod. He opened the tackle case. When fishing the lake, he had chosen flies that to him looked realistic, namely the drabbest of the lot, and had not gotten a bite. Now he plucked up the gaudiest he could find in the plastic boxes. Remem
bering the trouble he had had at the lake in attaching the fly to the thick line, with the knife on his new tool he sliced off a length from a coil of transparent, synthetic twine or thread that for all he knew might well have been designed for the purpose, and knotted one end to the proper line and tied the eye of the fly’s hook onto the other.

  He went to the stream at a point at which, having undergone the worst of the turbulence, the water, though still flowing swiftly, was not frenetic. He knew no more of these matters than he ever had, but it simply seemed to him as a fellow creation of God that when swimming full tilt you would not be searching for food, but you might well be in the market for a snack once the going got easier.

  He cast the fly as deftly as he could. He had learned something of what seemed the correct technique from his experience at the lake. The fly came down to the water with less force than the line, and the light length of clear plastic made little impact and was almost invisible. The bogus insect with the red midsection, orange mane, and long striped tail floated high in the fast-moving water, but not far. Within six feet of where it had reached the surface, it vanished into the snapping mouth of a sleek fish hitherto unseen in water that though in swirling movement was pellucid.

  Crews was unprepared for the speed of this event. He payed out line much too slowly. He had tied the knots to the plastic line not tightly enough: the one attached to the fly instantly unraveled at the onslaught, and the trout, if such it was, disappeared with the imitation insect from which it would get as little nourishment as it would furnish Crews.

  At least he had learned that the fanciest of the artificial flies had been good enough to dupe one fish. Now if he could only find its like. He sorted through the segmented boxes and in fact soon found several examples of what seemed to be the same though with slight variations from each to each that owed, presumably, to their being handmade. In addition to those for whom it was a hobby, there were people in the world who tied flies as a profession, as there were those who carved duck decoys and goose calls, and did other things that until only four days earlier he would have thought foolish if he considered them at all.