Robert Crews: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “Well…”

  “But I have to get hold of it.”

  “But let me just see how deep it is,” he said, “and how fast the current is running.” He took off his jacket and dropped it on the bank. He stepped down into knee-deep water, which was so cold as almost to cause his legs to buckle. It came only to his waist in midstream. The current was brisk but not as forceful as it had looked. By the time he had waded back he was over the shock of the initial chill. But as he scrambled out he could say quite truthfully, “It’s even colder than I thought. I wish you’d at least let me make a fire first.” He was so chilled he had to show his teeth. “It’s icy even with your clothes on.” He squeezed as much water from his own as he could while continuing to wear them. “I’ll get going on the fire.”

  He went into the nearby trees. It took a while to cut a selection of branches from which to make the little firemaking bow. He had been improvident in abandoning the rig he had used at the lake but had foolishly counted on the sun to be available next time he needed fire, and it was inconvenient to tote anything that could not be contained in his pockets.

  When he returned to the streamside, he saw the woman’s dark-green knitted shirt, the one borrowed from him, was darker still because it was soaking wet.

  “I see you washed the shirt.”

  “Actually I used it for a towel. I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t have anything else.”

  Crews knelt to assemble his apparatus. He needed her shoelace again, and this time asked her to take it out, if she would, herself. “You went in without your shirt?”

  She gave him the lace, having removed it while balancing nicely on one foot. “I was naked. The freezing water seemed to help the wound, like an astringent, you know.”

  He quickly completed the construction of the rig and put the tinder in place around the socket of the drill.

  She said, “I’ve got an idea I’d like to try. Could I borrow the tool with the knife blade? I waded down to the rapids before. There are lots of fish that swim through the rocks there. The water’s fairly shallow. It really looks like you could catch them with your bare hands, but I tried and failed. I’m just not deft enough. But what about making a spear? What do you think? Didn’t the Indians fish that way?”

  “I tried it early on, in the pond, and got too impatient when it didn’t work. I probably didn’t keep at it long enough. Also I didn’t make a very good spear. But, sure, go ahead.”

  “Any suggestions as to the design?”

  He deliberated for a moment. “If you could make a barb of some kind, like a fishhook. You’ll need something to keep the fish from slipping off after it’s speared.”

  “How about a long stick that has a little cluster of three or more branches at one end, like a hand almost?”

  “That’s a great idea,” Crews said.

  “It’s not original. I saw it in the movies or television. It was being done on some island, I think, by people in sarongs.”

  “Terrific,” Crews said. “Just one minute….” He needed the knife for a couple of small alterations to the end of the drill and the socket in which it would turn, having finished which he presented the tool to her.

  He watched her tall, slender figure go into the edge of the woods. Her hair was still loose. He hoped he was right in his assumption that if they had gone astray en route to the river, her husband would not be anywhere nearby. Crews had nothing but contempt for the man, and knew no fear for his own safety, but to shoot her in the back from a place of concealment would not be beyond the capacity of such a coward. Besides, it was a pleasure, really a joy, to see her graceful movements. She went too far in saying he had saved her life, but it was gratifying to know he had served some purpose.

  He started sawing away with the bow. The process asked for more than muscle: making fire by this unlikely means required the intense concentration of all faculties.

  Before he had succeeded in producing the first wisp of smoke, she was back, carrying a serviceable spear. At one end it had been cut just above the junction of three branches.

  “How does this look?”

  “That was quick,” he said. “I’ve been getting nowhere.”

  “Should I try? And you go spear fishing?”

  “The spear was your idea. The fire was mine. We should stick with our specialties.”

  With the knife blade she sharpened the three branch ends to points and returned the tool to him. He sawed violently with the bow and drill until sweat from his forehead began to fall on that which he wanted to ignite. Taking a breather, he watched her walk along the bank to where the water rushed through the rocks. Balancing on one foot and then the other, she pulled off her shoes and socks, then bent to roll her jeans to the knee. She stepped into the current, which swirled around her calves. Soon she stabbed violently at something, but the spear came up dripping and empty. She did much the same several more times and then turned to look his way and shrug. He waved.

  Like everything else performed with primitive implements, spear fishing was surely much trickier in practice than it seemed in theory. But he probably should have accepted her offer to swap jobs, having by now lost faith in the likelihood that fire could come from his current apparatus. He needed a base plate of drier wood. He looked up to see her raise the spear end triumphantly. A wriggling silvery fish was impaled on its points. She waded near enough to shore to deposit her catch on the nearest land. Crews thought it possible that the fish might writhe to the edge of the bank and fall into the water, but he decided to let her learn by experience.

  Meanwhile, inspired by her success, he returned with vigor to his own efforts, to which he applied himself so obsessively that at first he failed to register that the sky was brightening. He dropped the bow and focused the mirror on the tinder. The sun broke through the overcast just long enough to get an ember going. It was like a special favor to him. By the time the cloud cover closed in on its temporary rent, he had made a hot little blaze.

  During the same period she had mastered the technique and caught fish after fish. At one point she signaled to him with all the fingers of one hand and then shifted the spear to the other so as to display two fingers more. Apparently she did not know the way to signal numbers greater than five using only one hand, or did only boys do that?

  When the fire was in a condition to go unattended for a while, he went along the bank to where her catch lay flopping. Now there were nine, and she caught the tenth as he watched. She waded in to shore and presented it to him on the tines of the spear. He added the fish to the lot on the grassy bank.

  He gave her a hand with which to pull herself from the water.

  “See what I mean?” he asked. “You’re the fisherman in this—in this partnership.” He had almost said “family.” “I was just lucky the sun came out briefly. And by the way, it was over there. Which would mean that what I thought was north was actually way to the east.”

  “But to be really sure about direction, just looking at the sun isn’t enough, is it? You really need an additional point of reference.”

  “Good of you to mention that,” he said. “But I still have a lousy sense of direction, the only sense that hasn’t improved since I’ve been out here.”

  “Maybe because direction according to the compass is a man-made concept. That is, there really is a magnetic pole and a force we call magnetism that affects metals, but what animals care about is light and heat and water and food. Your directional instincts have been fine about those things, even when the sun went in.”

  “Now you’re buttering me up,” he said, “so that I’ll cook your fish on my fire.” He had brought along her shoelace and was about to return it but thought of another use. “Do you mind if I string some of these fish on it, to carry back?”

  “Let me. You’ve got enough to do as it is.” She took the lace and began forthrightly to thread it through the gills and out the mouth of a fish that was still feebly twitching. “I can’t decide what’s more humane: letting t
hem suffocate or killing them in some other way.”

  Crews had known the same feeling. “I’m a coward about that. I just don’t decide, which means they drown in air…. I see you know how to do that. It took me a while to figure it out.”

  She sniffed. “Michael never caught anything. But he talked about stringing up his catch, and I remember a lot of stuff just from listening. Then I’ve cooked whole fish that you buy, and watched the fish-store guy clean them—I think you’re supposed to call him the ‘fishmonger,’ but I’d probably laugh if I did.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a lot better cook than I,” Crews said. “I have got into the habit of just boiling or burning the food as fast as I can and gobbling it up.”

  By now she had strung half the fish on the shoelace. “I can do one or two simple things, but he was the main cook: that is, when we weren’t eating out, which we did a lot.”

  Crews uncoiled some of his fishline. “Here. I’ll take the rest.”

  They walked back together, each with a sagging string of fish. He dropped his on the ground nearby and knelt to inspect the fire.

  He looked up at her. “I’ve never before had this much food at my disposal. I think I’ll go wild and try a new gastronomic treat. Do you know those Japanese restaurants where they bring a hot rock to the table and cook all sorts of things on it, fish, vegetables, thin slices of steak, and so on? I think I’ll try that. Meanwhile I can put a lot of these fellows on to smoke.”

  “Can I get the rocks?” she asked. “Nice big smooth ones?”

  Crews missed her terribly even on such a trivial separation, when she was in sight the entire time. He had not realized he was so lonely until his loneliness was relieved. But she did everything so effectively that he welcomed the help. The rocks she brought back were just what he had had in mind. He put them into the hot coals. He constructed a smoking rack above the fire, hung on it a spitful of eviscerated fish, and threw on the green branches she had gathered.

  “I’ll let the rocks get good and hot,” he said. “You don’t suppose you could find more fiddleheads?”

  “I sure can look.”

  While she was gone he filleted the remaining fish. After a time she returned from the woods carrying something in the denim jacket used as a bag. She dumped it on the ground alongside him.

  There was a mixture in the outspread jacket, representing everything but fiddlehead ferns: some broad green leaves; some slenderer fronds; some delicate shoots that terminated in little bulbs. But most conspicuous were the pale mushrooms.

  “God almighty,” Crews said, with more emotion than he would have expressed had he thought about it. “I’m not going to try those!” He paused. “You do know some are poisonous?”

  “We—he had this book about stuff you could find to eat in the wild, I don’t know why, because he didn’t look for anything. We lived on those freeze-dried packets they make for campers. Anyway, these mushrooms look just like the pictures of the edible ones.”

  “I’ve always heard there are bad ones that are dead ringers for the good kind, and only experts can tell the difference. We can’t take any chances at all—I mean, apart from those that are forced upon us.”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t mean to be disagreeable,” he said.

  “You’re just making your point.” She said this straightforwardly, squatting there next to her jacketful of vegetables.

  He smiled at her. “Do you realize we don’t even know each other’s name?” He put out his hand. “I’m Bob Crews.”

  Her handshake was warm, but the rest of her response came from a greater moral distance. “You’re welcome to inspect my driver’s license, there in the pocket.” She nodded at the spread-eagled jacket. “But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not hear my name. He kept yelling it while he was trying to kill me. He made me hate the sound of it, at least for now. So if you don’t mind calling me something else. I don’t care what.”

  “Of course,” Crews said sympathetically. He was still concerned that he might have been too harsh with her about the mushrooms, even though he had been quite right. “Let’s see….” He smirked. “I’ve been married so often, all the women’s names I can think of have been used up.”

  “How about ‘Friday’?”

  “Pardon?”

  “As a name,” she said.

  “As in ‘Thank God, it’s … ’?” He laughed. “Okay, Friday it is, then. Now, these greens, what do you think, should we cook them or eat them raw?”

  “I’ve already tried a little of one of these.” She held up the sheaf of bulbed shoots. “Some kind of wild onion, I believe.”

  “I remember those things from when I was a kid. I didn’t think they were supposed to be edible.”

  “Maybe these are a different species. They’re not bad.”

  “I’ll chop them up and use them as a condiment,” Crews said. He tore a fragment off one of the broad leaves in her collection and chewed it briefly. It had a mild flavor, in the area of romaine, but was fairly tough. “This should be cooked.” After similar tests with the remaining greenery, he decided, “These will make an okay salad. Are they plants you saw in the book?”

  “I wish I had read the whole thing. Unfortunately I only looked at the part on mushrooms.”

  “I’m sorry about them,” said Crews. “We’ll get back to civilization and find that they not only were edible but of a rare variety highly prized by gourmets, and I will be proved a fool.”

  “No, you won’t!”

  She said this with so much feeling that Crews hastily assured her he had been kidding. “It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong about food. You should be warned that among my distinctions is an unerring instinct to pick the worst establishment from a selection: I even managed on occasion to find lousy restaurants in France—which by the way were not tourist places but where French truck drivers ate. You see, my then wife—” But this was not the time for such reminiscences. “The stones should be hot enough by now. The fish will cook fast once they’re started.”

  He used a pair of green sticks to probe for the rocks, which were buried just inside one edge of the fire above which the smoking rack was mounted. The embers were so hot that the sticks were immediately dried out and ignited, but, working quickly, he worried the two stones out to free ground. Their appearance had not changed, but he could feel the intense heat as high as his face. They were searing the sparse vegetation beneath them.

  The waiting fillets were stacked on a clean rock nearer the woman than he. He tried her name on for size. No doubt it would take a while to sound natural. “Okay, Friday, if you’ll hand me the fish, we’ll have a go at this. Unfortunately, I don’t have any oil or fat. I’m hoping the surface will just be so hot the food will seal up when it hits it.”

  She brought him the fillets, and he rapidly dropped three of them onto each stone, skin down, snapping his fingers back before they were singed by the ferocious heat. The fish cooked so vigorously, with loud sizzlings and copious smoke, that no sooner had he deposited the last than he returned to turn the first piece over. He had had the forethought to provide himself with two crude spatulas, lengths of a broad branch, each shaved flat at one end.

  The first fillet broke in two on his efforts to lift it, but no further, and it left most of its skin behind to blacken and burn. But perhaps it was the oil from that skin that cured the surface of the stone so that, when turned and charred on the reverse, the fish did not stick.

  He grinned at Friday. “It actually works!”

  They ate off two clean stones that were flat and broad enough to serve as plates, but Crews found reason to complain of his own lack of foresight.

  “It didn’t occur to me that these cold rocks would chill the food so quickly. I should have asked you to cut some bark for plates.” He was gobbling the fish as fast as he could, before it lost all heat, and speaking between bites. “On the other hand, if it was too hot we wouldn’t be able to pick it up. Forks would be nice, too. I
t shouldn’t be hard to carve something that would do.” This thought had never come to him when he was alone.

  “I’ll try,” Friday said, eating much more deliberately, and so gracefully with her long fingers that silverware might have been an encumbrance. “Meanwhile, this is delicious. I wouldn’t even use salt if we had any.”

  “I wonder if there’s something in the stones, some minerals maybe, that give the salty effect, because it’s there, or anyway the illusion thereof.” He was eating the middle fillet from the stack of three: it was still warm. “This is as close to stark reality as I’ve ever come, and still I wonder what’s real and what isn’t. And the only way I’ve learned to do anything is by trial and error. You waste a lot of time and effort like that, but when you’ve got nobody around to teach you anything … Until now I haven’t even had anyone with whom to compare notes.”

  The clear stream flowed vigorously just beyond them. It was sufficiently fast-moving to provide what were probably trout, yet shallow enough to wade across should the need or wish come to visit the forest on the far side. It was full of food, and its water was cold and sweet. Likely it flowed toward the same lake the shore of which they had left that morning. If they had not yet found the river, at least they were not really lost within their piece of wilderness. The route from the lake could always be retraced, and they could start over. Meanwhile dinner was very good, and he could see just the spot to construct a lean-to, for which the adjacent woods would provide excellent materials.

  “If it’s okay with you, we’ll stay here for the night. There’ll be enough time, for a change, to make a decent camp.” He was even enthusiastic. “I’ve learned a few tricks on how to make things somewhat comfortable.” He squinted at the sky. “The weather looks good, but I have a feeling rain’s going to come along later on, and a good tight roof might be in order…. I’m about ready for salad.”

  He had not gotten around to boiling the big leaves, which Friday had pushed aside, along with the mushrooms. She had torn the rest of the greenery into pieces, sliced the wild onions over them, and tossed the mixture in her jacket.