Robert Crews: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  The legal services ended once his father was dead: the firm was one of the places from which he was permanently barred. Not only had his father never punished him; he had never even been criticized by the man. They had not known each other that well.

  All this self-pity came from the theft of the raft. He hated his enemy for causing him to remember his own failings, which he had begun to forget in his struggle to live off the land.

  Lateral visibility was good, but after a bright dawn the sky had gradually become overcast. Unable to see the sun, he could not have said how long he had been walking. With the usual unvarying topography of beach and forest, he had little by which to mark the gaining of ground until he saw coming into view on the opposite side of the lake a sheer cliff similar to the one he had climbed the day before (and in so doing given somebody an opportunity to steal his raft). The shoreline before it was very like the other as well, and the entire section of terrain, if it had been directly across from the first, might have been taken as a reflection of it, perhaps a mirage, due to some peculiar condition of atmosphere. That is, if the eye was playing tricks. Actually, there were any number of differences: the cliff behind the far shore was not so high as the one he had scaled, and the grove of trees at its base was denser than that in which he had killed and eaten the rabbit and spent the night. Of the nearby stream he could see nothing but its mouth, which emptied into the lake.

  The fact undoubtedly was that granite cliffs pretty much all looked like one another, with trees along their bases and probably streams as well.

  But to see something that reminded him of the raft was unpleasant. He decided to keep going until it was out of sight before halting to look for food, and also attend to a related matter: namely, to pierce another hole in the belt which throughout this time in the wild he had repeatedly tightened lest his pants fall down, and he had begun as a slender man, with a normal waist appropriate to one-sixty on a five-eleven frame. He must be down fifteen or twenty pounds after so much physical labor on a diet much less hearty than that imposed sporadically on herself by Molly, who was capable of regimens of chemical liquid on which she lost a fourth of her flesh, only to gain back more with a return to solid food, as he never tired of pointing out. Pitifully, it had been his only weapon against her. Molly was an exemplary self-made woman, with her own interior-design business, and at the outset she had made the grievous mistake of loving him. At the end he assured her the fault had been hers: she should have known better than to have trafficked with the likes of him. What could she have expected? And she was supposed to be the smart one! If you ever sobered up, she told him, you would understand that all your cynicism is fake. Molly was the one he felt guiltiest about, because though by any standard she was the most admirable of his wives, she was also the one who had attracted him least.

  In the absence of the sun he could not make fire and thus could not cook anything he killed. There was no good reason to stop unless he could eat. While walking he was able to make the new hole in his belt if he held the belt end and the waist of his pants with his left hand.

  When he had closed the all-purpose tool and returned it to his pocket, resuming a normal stride, he glanced across the lake and saw, against the far shore, what was presumably his raft, or anyway a sizable fragment of it. He had pulled it up for repairs just before it was stolen. Apparently it had since partially disintegrated under the strain of further use and been abandoned by the thief, near what seemed to be the mouth of a stream that came down from the forest behind. Farther along, the shoreline rose to a headland.

  The thief had apparently not stayed in the neighborhood. In any event, Crews was too prudent to expend his energy on a swim of that distance. He continued to walk doggedly on. The overcast had begun to be breached by the sun, which seemed to be in the wrong place in the sky, that is, in his face rather than at the back of his head, but without a compass directions would always be imprecise, and natural things were never regular. The lake might well not be the oval he assumed it was; its shore was probably not as straight as it had seemed when walked. It might slant gradually, to a degree that could not be determined on the ground.

  When the sun next appeared, it was on his right side. This made so little sense that it was simply not worth bothering about, and the clouds quickly closed in again, for all practical purposes removing the problem.

  He did permit himself to reflect that, aside from the area of the cliff, he had seen no striking landmarks on the far shore. When the sun next returned, it came at last from the proper direction, behind him, proving he was right not to have worried about its previous shenanigans. But his failure as yet to reach the lake’s end had begun to discourage him. How long could it be?

  That he had in fact encircled the body of water entirely did not occur to him even as suspicion until he had unknowingly passed the beach where he first landed—offshore of which the airplane, with his companions’ remains, presumably still rested somewhere on the bottom—skirted the base of the promontory beyond, and come to the mouth of the stream that flowed down from the beaver dam and the attendant marshland, which looked sufficiently similar to the place where he had built the raft for him to pause and consider the matter and then find fragments of fishline and chips of log.

  So when after hours of hiking he had seen the familiar-looking cliff that morning, he was looking at the very same he had climbed the day before, and when later on he spotted the broken raft across the lake, it had been he who was on the far shore!

  He was back where he had begun, having lost several days of arduous labor and several more of travel, but he had accomplished, willy-nilly, what he had set out to do, namely, explore the length and breadth of the lake. It had proved rather smaller than he expected, and though at any point there might have been, only a mile or so beyond the facade of pines, a village or ranger’s station or even a couple of campers under a tent, he had seen along his shore route no suggestion of a trail leading to such or any other evidence of man save the figure atop the cliff and, earlier on, the gunshots.

  There was now no reason to retrieve the busted raft. He had nowhere to float on it. He headed upstream. There was no place like home.

  He approached the pond so quietly that he saw a beaver on the bank before it saw him and leaped into the water, slapped its tail loudly, and disappeared under the surface. The exterior of his shelter showed no evidence of molestation, but inside, the duffel bag containing his extra clothing had been roughly torn open and the contents pulled out and left so, though they were undamaged. Nothing had been bitten or chewed, but the box of fishing tackle was gone, as was the leather rod case. It was not possible to believe this the work of the bear.

  He had been careless in assuming the man who stole the raft had gone in another direction. While in some ways this wilderness could be seen as vast and undifferentiated, it was marked with obvious routes that any animal, including the human, would take by nature. These followed the banks of bodies or courses of water and skirted the bases of high points. Few living things, except in an emergency, would try to penetrate thick growths in preference to open ground. His enemy had arrived here by a combination of instinct and chance.

  With the ransacking of the hut, added to the theft and wrecking of the raft, Crews knew the feeling of outraged helplessness peculiar to the victim of crime by stealth. That such an offense could take place in the wild, where he and this man should make common cause and not prey on each other, was inexcusable. He could think only of tracking the guy down and punishing him. He would choose the optimum time and place to jump him from ambush. He would not only reclaim his own possessions, but by right of conquest appropriate any of the man’s goods he wished, foremost among them the gun. With a firearm he would not be lost for much longer. He would have a means of making his presence known to searchers on land or in the sky. Meanwhile he could kill all the food he needed, and more humanely than with club and knife.

  It took a moment for him to arrive at what should have taken pr
ecedence: there was no reason to believe that his enemy was lost. Once he had taken away the gun, he could force the man to lead him out of the woods. The problem now was to find him.

  The ground near the hut was clear but not soft, and such faint footprints as had presumably been left by the other were obscured by his own, which, made by bare feet, were distinct and distracting.

  It was too late in the day to cast the search in wider circles. Further tracking should be left for the clear light of morning. Crews returned the clothes to the duffel bag and put it in place as pillow on a bed of freshly gathered pine boughs. Inside the hut he felt snug for the first time since setting out on the raft, though he was aware that the sense of security he took from being there was mostly an illusion. He went to sleep asking himself why the other man was here at all, and why he had twice stolen his property while taking great pains to avoid personal contact. Why had he been roaming the forest and lake for at least two days, on more or less the same route as Crews, if he knew how to get out?

  Next morning a steady rain was falling, which ordinarily would have been regrettable, for he had never been successful when trying to fish in bad weather and he could not have built a fire. He had been careless in the chinking of his roof, and some water had found him inside. Yet he surely would have stayed indoors had he not had the new mission, to find the man who had done him dirty, and for that purpose the rain was a godsend. Tracks could easily be seen on wet ground … unless the other had found shelter in which to wait for clearer skies. But pessimistic reflections, while palliative amid the ironies of cities, could be deleterious here, where failure was the rule.

  The choice of directions in which to go would have seemed infinite only to the tenderfoot. As a woodsman now of some experience, Crews could assume that the other would not plow through the bristly underbrush or dense forest when clearer ways were at hand. The obvious one was along the stream that fed the pond. Its bank on the near side was invitingly passable, by contrast with the other nearby ground.

  Crews went upstream, proceeding cautiously so as not to alert his enemy. The rain helped him, dampening the sounds of his footfalls and, in its bursts of sudden energy, making noise to mask his. What he looked for were not yesterday’s tracks, which would be washed away, but any made since.

  He reached the part of the upper stream where he had caught the trout. He had seen nothing useful en route, and now the rain had picked up in volume and force of fall. Nobody would come out of cover until the cloudburst ended. Though he was by now as wet as if he had been swimming fully clothed, the pelting of water had become so oppressive that he looked for a place of refuge of his own. After having been interrupted by one of the minor stone cliffs characteristic of the region, the forest began again upstream. He headed there, the driving rain blurring his vision sporadically.

  At the base of the cliff was a bush that looked out of place. Crews noticed this though his vision was distorted. No other vegetation grew nearby. Despite the rain, the foliage of the bush was wilting. Had it been altogether dead, it might have broken away from its lifeless roots and blown here. But this one, in this situation, was a contrivance.

  He approached it warily and from the side, hugging the cliff, until he got close enough to see that the purpose of the bush was to conceal a fissure in the rock face. In better weather, that the makeshift door was in place at the mouth of the cave would not necessarily have indicated that anyone was inside, but in such rain as this the occupant was certain to be at home. With a gun. In the dark, with a would-be intruder silhouetted against the light.

  Espaliered against the granite, still being pounded with rain, Crews decided he had no choice but to wait for nighttime, if the man did not emerge before. He could anticipate a miserable vigil, being redundantly soaked, going without food even longer, and suffering from some doubts as to his ability to deal with an armed man when he did flush him out, or even, in the most grandiose projection of all, when crawling into the cave after dark to take him while he slept. But there was no reason to wait against the cliff so long as the rain did not abate. A less uncomfortable place of surveillance was available in the woods farther on. He could move closer when the weather improved. He must be in position to exploit his only weapon, surprise.

  When night came it was uncompromisingly dark. From his place within the trees Crews could not see the bush that obscured the mouth of the cave, but its foliage was not so thick as to block all light from within, had there been any. He saw nothing, no flickers or radiance of fire, flashlight, candle. Which meant either that the occupant had no means of illumination or that nobody was inside the cave.

  He now had to decide whether to wait for morning, and thus lose the advantage of darkness, or, himself without any kind of light, to go crawling, probing, confined within stone walls with an armed adversary.

  But the rain continued to fall, and not much of a shelter could be constructed in the dark. What a fool he would be if he stayed out in the wet while the cave was unoccupied. Not only was it uncomfortable to crouch in falling water; it was morally degrading.

  He went across the open ground and found the bush easily enough, by touch. The rainfall was even heavier against the base of the cliff. Despite the thickness of the now overgrown hair on his scalp, he felt as though he were being incessantly battered. He hurled the bush aside. He felt for the contours of the fissure in the wall of rock. The aperture felt too narrow to admit a human body. There might not even be much of a cavity beyond, but just a shallow crack, leading nowhere.

  But even as he had these defeatist thoughts, he knelt and felt farther. The opening widened toward the bottom. He could slide in on his back, feet forward, if he did not raise his head more than a few inches from the horizontal. Added to the disadvantage of not being able to see anything in the darkness outside and in, he would be helplessly supine. Nor did he know how thick were the walls of the entryway, or indeed whether it was an entrance as such and not simply a shaft that would never broaden throughout its length. Caves were another of the things of which Crews had had no experience, nor was he likely, under normal circumstances, to have sought any, being a selective claustrophobe, liking tight bedclothes and snug-seated high-performance cars, but having a distaste for most other constraints. But after he had slid for no more than half his body length he could no longer touch the sides of the tunnel. He was in fact inside a cave of unknown capacity, but sufficiently spacious to allow him first to sit up, then rise to his knees, and finally to stand and extend his arms overhead without finding a ceiling.

  An instant of apprehension returned him to his knees. He turned and crawled against a solid wall. He had lost the entranceway! He frantically beat his hands on the cold stone and might have surrendered to panic had he not quickly imposed order by remembering the several ordeals he had survived by now: the plane crash, the storm, the bear. Then he found the inside aperture of the cave’s mouth. It would be easy enough to lose again in the darkness unless he devised a means by which to keep its location fixed while his own was mobile. Working by touch in the darkness, he tied the end of one of his coils of fishline to the all-purpose tool and tossed the latter toward the outside air: presumably its weight would keep it in place while he payed out the coil.

  He began to crawl again, following the right-hand wall now, so as to have another reference to his position in space, the darkness being much more disorienting than he had imagined. The surface beneath his knees was not the level floor of tourist caverns but rockily uneven, with sharp points and punishing edges. He stood up again, but this time rose only to some five feet before pressing his head against the ceiling, and as he slowly, gropingly proceeded, the height of the cave gradually diminished, bending him until his back was horizontal with the floor, which felt ever rougher underfoot.

  He had reached the end of the fishline without reaching that of the cave, but after his experience in circling the lake, he allowed for the possibility that he had been following a curved rather than a straight wall. What
was more important was his failure to encounter evidence that any person was or had been within, and surely by now he had produced enough noise to evoke a reaction from a man with a gun.

  He traced the line back to the mouth of the cave, where he could not see the outside world but could hear the rush of the rain still falling there. At least he had found shelter. He scraped away the loose stones from an area large enough to lie on and curled up against the wall, near the entrance tunnel but not blocking it, lest a bear, out for a nighttime forage, came home. The cold, unyielding floor was an uncomfortable alternative to the luxury of his usual bed of boughs, but he soon found the most comfortable contortion of body, and after retrieving the tool and opening the knife blade, he placed it where he could find it in the dark and went to sleep.

  Crews did not believe he was dreaming when he was awakened by a blow to his shoulder and heard an unpleasant voice address him abusively. He assumed rather that it was real enough but that time had been reversed, taking him back to his first marriage, for the voice was female and the unpleasantness in it was by intent, not nature.

  But when he opened his eyes he was staring at a wall of rock, visible in the flare of light that must be coming by way of the constricted entranceway through which he had crawled the night before. So obviously he had been dreaming.

  He rolled over to look. A human figure stood near enough to have kicked him. It held a blazing, smoking torch. In its other hand was his tool, with the extended knife blade.