Robert Crews (10 page)

A dim memory having nothing to do with his marriages came within reach. In his day he had watched a lot of informational TV, sometimes even when fully conscious: British ornithologists crawling about on the barren rocks of Tierra del Fuego; stout-bellied fishermen in baseball caps, casting lures from shallow-draft boats on Southern lakes; hooded climbers toiling up Everest and K-2. On one such program, a woodsman made the claim that water could be boiled in a container made of birch bark and was about to demonstrate when Crews fell asleep. By no means would he have remembered this had he not been in his current need, so strange were the workings of the mind. Not that he believed the assertion, which defied the physical laws as known to him.

But he anyway went into the trees and again girdled a birch, obtaining a foot-square roll of bark, which, after warming it over the newly made fire, he spread and pounded flat. Next he folded it to make an open box. The crimping and doubling over at the corners would not stay as fashioned until effective fasteners were found: the hooks of artificial flies.

He had earlier found the long, thick conglomeration of sticks and mud that formed the dam by which the beavers had made the pond: at a quick glance it might have been taken for a random mess of dead vegetation that had been washed downstream, but closer inspection established its effectiveness for the intended job. On the downstream side of the dam, the brook reconstituted itself by means of the constant overflow in this season of rain, and probably a certain leakage. Though he would eat the little fish from the pond, because at the moment they were all he could catch, Crews was not keen on drinking its water, which was not all that clear to begin with and was made murkier whenever he waded across the oozy bottom, occasionally snagging his toes on slimy submerged branches that when brought up for examination showed beaver tooth-marks.

He drank from the presumably skimmed and filtered stream beyond the dam. He now went there to fill the birch-bark box with water. Back at the fire, he mounted the container on a grate made of stones, over a modest edge of the fire, where the flames were lowest.

The meal could have been prepared more quickly had he put the minnows into the water at the outset, bringing them to boil with the liquid, but since he could not really believe the unreasonable method would work, he did not dare risk ruining his supply of food: he left the fish where they were and, against tradition, watched the pot. This vigil served only to stop time and ensure that nothing whatever happened, which might be called miraculous in the case of the noninflammatory bark, but after a series of finger testings, the water stubbornly remained cooler than the air.

He was hungry enough by now to swallow the little fish raw, but forced himself into distractions. He examined his hand. The wound had continued to heal, making so much progress, despite all the dirty labor, that it was all but gone.… Because his attention had been elsewhere, he had worn the same pair of pants for many days, and they were a disgrace. He exchanged them now for the jeans from the duffel bag (which already were loose at the waist), and while he was at it, he changed his drawers. He wore socks as little as possible, to save wear and tear on his supply of four pairs. He checked the birch-bark pot once again. It might have been only his imagination, but the water no longer felt positively cool to the fingertip.

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.

C
REWS 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 heaves 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.