Robert Crews: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  Spurgeon grinned in his face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What it says.”

  Still grinning, Spurgeon asked, “Don’t you think I could do better than that?” He was gloating, his victory having been much more sweeping than he had obviously expected.

  Crews thought of punching him, but being out of shape and also in a debilitating moral confusion—whom would he be defending, Nina or himself?—he went to take a shower.

  As if in a diabolical hurry to consolidate his defeat, he was often drunk after that. He could not keep his vow never to visit the Hole again, until, after one of his many quarrels with the bartender, the police enforced it for him. He came to the verge of flunking out in the same semester and so alienated his adviser that he was urged to leave college, which, typically, was the only advice he ever took, but not before making one more effort to avenge himself on Spurgeon, by offering to pay the apartment rent for the rest of the term.

  “How could I let you do that?” Dick asked, as if in genuine indignation. “If you’re not going to be here?” Within a few days he had arranged a proctorship for the semester soon to begin, which came with a free room, in fact a suite, in one of the better dorms.

  The truth was that Crews was liable for the entire semester’s rent anyway, unless he found a tenant to replace him. He thought about prepaying the rent in a lump sum, which would take no more trouble than giving his father’s secretary a call, and then turning the apartment over to Nina, in some remote way, never seeing her again. But even sincere generosity had now begun to seem false to him, at least in his conception of it, and he left the college town without doing anything at all, counting on the confiscating of the two months’ security deposit to satisfy the landlord. It did not, but his father took care of the matter.

  To Nina he had been nobody at all. Yet he had loved her all these years, and was wont to believe, in his weakest moments, that she could have straightened him out. Not until now, truly on his own for the first time in a life in which his excuse had ever been that he was always alone even in a crowd, did he understand that he had been no less to Nina than she had been to him. He had never even learned her last name. She had been nothing to him but a pretext. But in so being she was not even unique.

  6

  BY THE TIME CREWS’S REVERIE CAME TO AN end, the entire supply of smoked trout was gone. Given the current context, his addiction was as bad as ever, with food replacing the alcohol of civilization. It was all he could do not to puke again. But he forced himself not to do so, and thus established at least some difference between what he had been and what he was.

  Too much of another day had come and gone to undertake a project that would carry him very far from camp, but there should be sufficient time before darkness to trace the route of the continuation of the stream that the beavers had obstructed to create their pond.

  With the stream to follow, he could not be lost when returning. But having no knowledge of how long the journey would be or what conditions he would meet en route, he put on his jacket and slipped into its pockets the magnifying mirror (though the sun would soon be beyond the proper angle to make fire, he allowed for the possibility that he would be away till next morning) and lengths of different kinds of fishing line, useful for many purposes, and made sure the multifunctional tool was secure in his pants pocket.

  He put on a pair of socks and over them the new sandal-socks with soles of birch bark. This presumably short journey of exploration would serve also as a trial of the footgear, the potential of which, though he had tested it briefly, strolling alongside the pond, remained theoretical. His bare feet had become habituated to the forest floor by now, so long as the sharper sticks and pine cones were sidestepped, and the grassy shores of the pond had never been a problem. The sandals not only felt awkward; the more or less rigid soles were uncomfortable to walk on. Nor were they altogether flat despite the steaming and weighting.

  But going downstream took less effort than climbing to where he had found the trout, and the terrain was gentler, grassier, with fewer stones. When he got within sight of the lake, the right bank of the stream had broadened into a meadow, where wildflowers bloomed, amid the general greens and tans, in patches of gold and red and vibrant purple. In its farthest reaches, perhaps a quarter mile from him, where the forest began again, a trio of deer continued to graze for a moment after he had come in sight, but soon, probably when his scent reached them on a fitful breeze—they were downwind—the animals had gone, without his seeing, at that distance, quite how or where.

  On his left flank the ground had risen to an acute height: surely this was, on its other side, the headland he had seen from the shore on which he had first been stranded. Within another hundred yards of stream he had reached the greater water into which it flowed, which at first sight seemed so vast as to be oceanic. For a breathless instant he could see no land beyond it. Entranced, he had stared in but one direction. In another moment he decided he had been looking at the length of the lake, and not its breadth, for elsewhere the far shore was visible, in fact closer than it had been from his original camp on the beach. The lake must be long and relatively narrow. It would be within his power to swim across it at this point, less than half a mile by eye, but the unbroken forest over there offered no incentive. The urge to make a longitudinal exploration was, however, irresistible, though maybe unadvisable. He had by now been cold sober long enough to call false hopes worse than none. Furthermore, he could find food and had fabricated shelter and shoes. Prudence would have kept him where he was until rescue arrived, but it was only human to dream of more than that which merely kept body and soul in business.

  To explore the lake would require a means of buoyant transport. He had the ability to build a raft, the materials for which were readily available and the design self-evident. Ready-cut logs were to be had from the beavers’ leavings in the devastated area near the pond, but not being of uniform length, they must be trimmed to size, then bound all together with reeds and rushes of sufficient tensile strength. A pole must be found or an oar made. The former would serve if he hugged the shore, staying in shallow depths, but given the idiosyncrasies of bodies of water, such a route could be overlong. A crow’s-flight voyage, straight up the lake, would get farthest most quickly, but would probably be over a deeper bottom than a manageable pole could reach. But making a paddle or oar would surely be a lengthy and fatiguing job with the undersized blade of the all-purpose tool and the crude chopping stones.

  Before beginning any work, however, he would do well to explore the middle distance by foot: that is, the meadow, which would be easy going, and even pleasant, to traverse. At its farthest lakeside extremity, the grass gave way to a barren point from which it might be possible to see more of the reaches of the water than from where he stood at present.

  He removed the sock-shoes and the extra socks inside them and proceeded on bare feet. The footgear had not passed its test. The longer he walked, the more the bark remembered its cylindrical origins and tried, curling on either margin, to return to that form. In some places the soles had gone brittle as well and cracked, not to mention the peeling caused by the abrasive contact with the ground. He had done better as architect-builder and fisherman than as cobbler.

  With unprotected feet, the field was not as comfortable as the carpet of vegetation had suggested when seen from afar. What had looked to be soft grass proved rather tough weeds, some of which were edged or spiked and few of which were yielding, and the flowers were fewer and farther between than when arranged by eye from a remote perspective. Those he did get near he gave wide berth to, for they were thronged with stout-backed black-and-yellow bees, humming like motors. He had no taste for walking shoeless on overgrown terrain where you might not see a snake before stepping on it. He was halfway through his hike, too far to make it practicable to go back and cut a walking stick, something between a cane and a cudgel, when he realized that was what he needed.

  But the sun, though
low in the sky, was brighter here in the open than when conditioned by the cliff and trees, and encouraged in him a sense of expanse and possibility. The lake was gleamingly calm, with the authoritative serenity available only to bodies of water, for nothing else is so experienced in turbulence. Only endless trees occupied its visible far shore, but who could say what might be offered when he reached the point and could see farther?

  Yet it would be foolish to expect too much—in fact, anything but more forest and water, extending, without a human implication, to infinity…. In which case he could always go back home, thatch his roof watertight, catch and cook more trout, and design better footgear, continuing to survive, not without some satisfactions, until rescued.

  Weeds eventually did give way to a thick-leaved version of grass as Crews approached the point, and then the vegetation was replaced not by sand but by solid rock. The stony promontory was higher above the lake than it had looked in the delusion of distance, and jutted above the true shoreline at this point, a beach ten or twelve feet below, too far to jump with impunity. But he needed to get down there, for from the rock he could see no farther than the cove or bay that began just beyond and curved within banks as high as where he stood, so that there was no hope of seeing uplake without descending to the strand and hiking around to still another point.

  He found a sloping place of descent, but before using it scanned the available horizon once more and learned nothing new except that evening was coming more quickly than he had estimated. He had to get home before dark. All of this would be there the following day, and he had all the time in the world.

  But in fact next day he was delayed by the old need for food. He wondered how long it had been before primitive man became a gardener and a shepherd. Fishing was an uncertain enterprise. Using the same tackle, lures, and technique as in his successful ventures, he suddenly had been unable to get a bite, and not only at the point in the stream where he had previously done so well, but also at every other place he tried. But now that, for two days, he had got used to eating once again, it was much harder to go hungry than it had been when starving seemed natural for a man in his situation. He hacked a living branch off a tree, trimmed it bare, and sharpened the slenderer end into a point, but when he hefted the finished spear, he had little faith in it, and after he hurled it at various arbitrary targets, all stationary, none animate, he had even less.

  He stuck the sharp end of the spear into the ground and bent the shaft into the shape of a bow. The resilient length, cut from a living tree, did not break and, when released, powerfully sprang back to its natural form. He dulled the point, circumscribed each end with a notch, and stretched in place a bowstring made of fishing line. He made arrows of various sizes from the smaller branches of various trees. It was gratifying to put the first of these against the bowstring, pull back, and let go. But when, after at least fifty tries, the projectile failed to get anywhere near the target, a curling square of birch bark that had lately been a sandal sole, he was disheartened. He could hit the mark only when almost on top of it, and not always even then. He came to believe that his energy might be better employed in developing a technique for close stalking than working endlessly on the refinement of his aim.

  As if to tantalize him while he was engaged in this frustrating effort, a pair of ducks—mallards, the only kind he could identify—appeared on the pond. The idea of roast duck was too unbearable to entertain in his current state of impotence: any attempt at a shot with one of his wretched missiles would only drive them away, perhaps permanently. In a moment any movement on his part would have done so, for the birds had paddled near enough to where he sat on the bank, whittling a keener point on an arrow, to come within the ten-foot range he had set as the limit of reasonable effort—only to put even that in doubt with prolonged practice.

  He tried to resist the foolish hope that one or the other would helpfully waddle out of the water to thrust its neck into his clenched fingers. He had yet to kill any living creature but the fish, and they did not quite count in the squeamish sophistry concerning what could decently be slaughtered for food. Not even Ardis, whose favorite meal was roast duck and who was capable of passion with regard to its preparation, liked to think that a living creature had been violently deprived of life (the only way death comes to the healthy). But whenever their disagreements extended to the table, Crews had been happy to remind her of that truth. (Know how geese are stuffed to produce morbid livers? What happened to the pig en route to becoming porc au pruneaux, the duck prefatory to its being eviscerated, plucked, roasted, and squeezed in the silver press?)

  The mallards began to wrestle, duck-fashion. The drake, with much flapping of wings, leaped onto the hen’s dun back, forcing her under the surface of the pond. Hey, was that fair? The male was no larger in size, but his iridescent blue-green head and aggressive manner made him seem the bully, especially insofar as the female accepted the brutalization, her head going submissively under the water as her back accepted his weight. It took him a while to recognize that the ducks were not fighting but copulating. He was a fool to sit there and starve when they were within range of his bow and in a vulnerable state.

  Man lives only by killing something regularly, be it a plant. He would probably miss both ducks, given his equipment and technique. If he hit the more conspicuous, the hen would only be a widow but he would have a much-needed meal, the first since the day before, and he was a unique human being, whereas a mallard was just a bird, easily replicated: in fact, that was what they were doing as he watched, reproducing their own kind, something he had managed to avoid throughout three successive marriages.

  But by the time he had surreptitiously begun to fit an arrow to the string, keeping the bow flat against the ground till he was ready to raise it, the ducks had finished their coupling, the drake being no Crews, who in his heyday, even with all that drinking, could withhold his climax until his partner had more than one: his sole talent as husband, which when gone left him resourceless. As the mallards had not cuddled before, they did not do so after the encounter, but paddled about separately, the hen modest as ever, the male with what might be seen, anthropomorphically, as a new smugness, handsome sleek head at an arrogant angle, yellow beak cocked—but in a moment this attitude proved rather preparation for a new encounter than gloating on a past triumph.

  Another male mallard had come out of the air to set down on the water, halfway across the pond. It was he for whom the first drake now headed, unknowingly saving himself from being a target for an arrow, which might not have struck its mark but was finally ready to be launched from the raised bow.

  Just as Crews had not immediately recognized that the grappling between the male and the female was sexual, he was now slow to see that the two drakes were about the meet in combat. He was also distracted by the moral dilemma of which bird to shoot at first. The hen was an obvious target, being much nearer him and at the moment static in the water. But though ravenous he still had scruples with respect to the sex that produces offspring. In this case she could be presumed pregnant. In another moment, her mate, swimming rapidly toward the newcomer, was out of the effective range of Crews’s poor weapon even if accurately launched. Regretfully, he sighted on the hen and pulled the bowstring back….

  The first drake leaped onto the back of the other, much as when servicing the hen, but this victim was not so serviceable. It struggled, fluttered, and writhed, but its head was restrained by the attacker’s beak, clamped into its blue-green throat, and then forced under the surface and kept there by the upper bird, kicking furiously with spatulate orange feet, to increase the downward pressure.

  Crews was arrested by the spectacle, he who had himself been in so many fights but none of them over a female—at least never on his part, though it was possible that some of his opponents had been avenging an insult to wife or girlfriend. With him what had always been at stake was “honor,” not the genuine article, which of course could hardly be defended dishonorably. Wild animals
were innocent of such abstractions. One drake attacked another for a motive at once deeper in the blood while more superficial in mind, if indeed ducks had minds. They ate whenever they could find food and mated only when their hormones told them to, and drove off rivals, probably in some instinctive obedience to a law of natural selection. He did not believe the loser in this conflict would die. Was it not a fact that only human beings and rats killed their own kind? No, that was applicable only to war, between armies.

  The fact here was that the underduck was killed by the upper after a very short battle, in which all the savagery was exclusive to him who had lately mated, and who, having discharged another of the functions assigned him by the inscrutable God that made and maintained him, swam robustly back to the vicinity of the hen, emitting quacks that were voluble but not loud, but whether or not in triumph Crews could not judge. The longer he tried to cope with nature the more he necessarily learned, but the less he understood in human terms, which might even be an encumbrance.

  In any event, he received a windfall. The dead mallard’s body was floating in the middle of the pond. Crews had gotten his dinner without firing the arrow, which would probably have missed. He dropped the bow and raised himself from his long-held crouch. At this threat the living ducks lunged into the air and desperately winged away. Having so often endured wet clothing since coming to the wilderness, he went to the lean-to and stripped to his drawers, hanging the garments nicely on one of the projecting roof members. When he returned to the pond, a large black crow, in mortician’s swallowtail, was riding the body of the floating dead duck, dissecting its belly with a beak that served first as scalpel, then as hinged utensil with which to pull out and gobble up spaghetti strings of wet red guts.

  “The hell you do!” Crews shouted in fury, his voice in this use sounding even to himself like a deafening feral roar, and plunged into the water. At this moment he would have charged an eagle. The noise alone routed the crow, which did not wait for the arrival of the naked ape but lifted itself effortlessly to a branch of the nearest tree on the far side of the pond, from which it complained raucously at the theft of its meal—impotently, for Crews, bigger and stronger and smarter, and therefore more deserving, claimed the now gory prize and swam back with it.