Robert Crews: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “Not bad,” Crews said, masticating. “It would only be ruined by oil and vinegar.” The onion got stronger in the aftertaste, or perhaps it was just that his palate was no longer inured to strong flavors.

  Friday ate every shred of her portion, then went to the bank of the stream, leaned down, and rinsed her hands. She crawled back on her knees, a movement he found endearing, something she might have done at a picnic.

  But she did not return his smile. She stared across at the dark woods on the other side of the water. “Whenever I let myself think about it—which is just about every time I get close to accepting that it happened—I begin to worry about where he might be.”

  “I haven’t forgotten him,” Crews said hastily, though in fact he had been trying to do so. “But if he was where we saw that smoke yesterday—and we’ve spent the time since in veering away from due north—then we’re farther from him than ever. On his side of the lake, there isn’t any high ground for miles. We made that little fire last evening, but he wouldn’t have been able to see our smoke from wherever he was in the woods. He’d have had to come out to the shore to get the right perspective. He’s unlikely to have followed us all day to here. If he’s got a compass and map, he knows how to get back to the canoe. I believe that’s where he’ll head. I keep saying ‘we,’ though it’s possible he doesn’t know you’ve joined forces with me. Do you think he might just take the canoe and leave?”

  “I would no longer be surprised by anything he did,” Friday said bleakly. “Unless it succeeded.”

  Crews took a chance and asked, “Is that more or less what you were telling him when he took a shot at you?”

  She stared sharply at him for a moment, but then softened and said, “More or less. I was wrong—and I don’t mean just because of what subsequently happened. I said cruel things to him sometimes, but you have no idea of how hard it is to live with someone for whom you’ve lost all respect.”

  Crews sighed inwardly: he had certainly heard enough on that subject at second hand, but he was not violent with the women who told it to him. He got physical only with men, and then invariably with those capable of damaging him. At least he was not nearly so dishonorable as he could have been.

  “After a while,” Friday said, “the person you despise most is yourself. You shouldn’t let it go that far.”

  Crews was uncomfortable. He could only mutter lamely, “Well…”

  “We’d get to a campsite, and I’d gather firewood and fetch water, and he’d shoot his gun at things,” Friday said. “That infuriated me more than his women ever did, because at least they paid for their fees. He owned a health club until, of course, it went under, taking most of my savings with it. The bank wouldn’t lend him a cent. His typical response as business got worse was to expand, open another branch.”

  “I’ll bet you have your own profession,” Crews said.

  “I’m with a brokerage, in sector analysis.”

  “And whatever that is, I’m sure you do well at it.”

  She modestly lowered her eyes. “Okay.”

  “No,” he said, “better than okay.”

  “I’m a vice-president, but only one of several. Let’s say I earn a living.”

  Crews picked up her denim jacket, which had served as tablecloth, and shook it out. He returned it to her. “Let me get this over with: I don’t know anything much about any kind of work. A person like you will probably find it difficult to understand that somebody like me exists. About all I can say for myself is that I’ve never really lived off a woman—if that’s any kind of criterion for anything. But I did live off my father until I was way beyond childhood, and in fact long after he died, so I can’t call myself a model of independence.” He was suddenly aware that he had always responded favorably to women who had made a go at a profession, while he resented successful men.

  Friday stood up and put on her jacket. “I’m wasting good weather on my whining,” she said, staring into the sky. “I think you’re right about the coming rain.”

  “Can you smell it too?”

  She smiled intimately at him. “I think so because you do, and you’re usually right.”

  Crews realized that he should simply accept the commendation, but the experience was as yet too rare to accommodate readily. So he had to say, “Except when I’m wrong.” But that sounded like a rebuke, so he quickly explained about using one’s nose in the wilderness. “I think maybe smell has a lot to do when you think it’s rather some sixth sense. I’ve learned to breathe harder, by which I mean both deeper and faster, but mostly it has to do with, as it were, listening to what the nose tells you. I’ve tried to take my cue from the animals. Did you notice that deer? For a split second before he took off, his nostrils quivered. He was trying to smell us, even though he could see us well enough, but we were downwind.”

  “You saw that? He was just a blur to me.”

  “Because you weren’t prepared for it,” Crews said. “When you’re out here for a while on your own, you develop the state of mind animals have: you expect to be surprised at any moment. You go about your business, but you’re always on guard. Being alert is a thing of the nervous system. It doesn’t affect you physically until the moment for action comes.” He laughed. “I’d be amazed if you found any meaning at all in those remarks.”

  “I think I do know what you mean,” she said. “It’s like karate. Until you actually make a move, your mind and body are supposed to be in a state of utter relaxation. Then, even while a punch is in the process of traveling toward its target, during that millisecond the fist is resting serenely, only to become like steel at the instant of impact. I hadn’t realized that technique has some basis in natural principles. So much of it seems artificial, the ritual and all.”

  “You do karate?”

  “My purse was snatched. I resisted and got my wrist broken for my trouble. I was sure I could have fought him off if I had known how: he was not that big. So I took karate lessons when my arm was okay….” She was looking at the fish smoking on the rack above the fire. “I wonder if the smoke wouldn’t be more concentrated if a little enclosure was put around it? Maybe a little lean-to, closed in at the ends. Want me to collect the materials?”

  On all previous occasions Crews had used an unenclosed fire, which meant that the fish had to be positioned so that the prevailing breeze blew the smoke their way. It was not that he had failed to think of erecting a wind barrier; it was rather that he had not taken the trouble, what with all else that always needed to be done. But he had a partner now.

  In no time at all, Friday had surrounded and roofed the fire in green foliage, through the multifold interstices of which rose the fragrant smoke from the moist wood atop the hot coals, having first bathed the fish on the spit.

  Crews meanwhile began to build the structure that would shelter them overnight, the grandest one yet, almost seven feet long, more than four feet high at the ridgepole, and at least five feet wide.

  Friday pitched in when her own project was completed. She invariably volunteered for any job he would have, working alone, postponed as long as possible, such as sinking the uprights into the earth, which required dogged excavation with an improvised and inefficient trowel of wood, through roots and rocks, and then leveling them by eye, a miscalculation in which, however minor at the outset, would be magnified as the structure rose with each joint untrue. But she was also more patient than he in the interweaving, the rudimentary thatching, of the freshly cut pine boughs that would, not by luck but with care, make the roof-walls shed rain.

  By twilight they had built a shelter sturdy enough to continue standing when Crews pushed firmly against its uprights. It was positively spacious inside, a good two and a half feet for each, with at least a symbolic barrier between them, suggested by the two additional uprights mounted along the center line to help hold the long ridgepole stretching from front to back posts. Outside, because the structure was erected on level ground, they ringed it with a shallow drainage ditch.


  “We’ll know how sound the roof is only when it starts to rain.”

  “You were right not to make it wider, because that would have flattened the pitch and exposed it more to the rain.”

  “That didn’t occur to me,” he confessed. “I was just concerned with how long such slender poles could be without bending under the weight of the boughs they supported. There’s so damn many things to keep in mind.” He heard a pattering above them and for a moment believed birds were hopping there, then identified the sound as rain. “There it is already. I was right about its coming but didn’t know how soon. We finished just in time.”

  “The fish!” Friday cried, and before scrambling out, said, “Stay here. I’ll get them.”

  She meant those from the smokehouse. Crews had declared them done some time earlier and doused the coals.

  She returned promptly, bringing the spitted fish and the strong scent of the fire. He caught the end of the heavily loaded spit as, crawling in, she tried to extend it with one hand. He hooked its ends into the structure above them.

  “I hope that’ll hold. As long as it does, we’ve got a convenient larder. You get hungry, just reach up. Of course, the whole thing might come down on top of us. Or the bear might show up. But I’m counting on the weather to keep him in his own home.”

  She writhed a little. “With just the right position, this mattress isn’t bad. You gave me the equivalent of a ten-inch innerspring.”

  “And still it won’t be enough,” Crews said. “It’ll be completely flat by morning. I’ve done that night after night for myself, and never yet have piled them high enough. What I miss most is not roast beef or ice cream or even salt: it’s a real bed with a real mattress and sheets and blankets.” The fish, with their smoky fragrance, were tantalizing. He finally reached up and pulled one from the spit. “I’m hungry again, after all that work. Help yourself.”

  “No, thanks. If it keeps raining, we might need them.”

  He had already eaten half the fish. “You’re right. I shouldn’t—”

  “No,” she said hastily. “I didn’t mean that. I meant that I’m just not that hungry yet, so I can wait.”

  He swallowed the remainder of his snack and licked his fingers. “If you do have any criticism of me at any time, don’t worry about offending me. Just sound off. Out here a mistake could be deadly. I’m lucky I survived those I made when alone. It was especially tough in the early days. Looking back, I think I was half out of my mind. I would just curl up in a hole somewhere. I couldn’t even find the wreck of the plane after a while.”

  The light was poor inside the shelter. Her face was in shadow. “I’ve been obsessed with my own troubles ever since we met,” she said. “I’m sorry to say I just vaguely remember your mentioning the crash, I think back at the cave.”

  He related the essentials. “In the first few days a couple of search planes flew over, but I couldn’t attract their attention by spelling out messages on the beach. I think one did come after I could make fire, but I didn’t have a fire going at that moment and couldn’t make one because everything was wet. There haven’t been any airplanes since. The only explanation I can think of is that Dick was way off course for some reason. Maybe his instruments failed. I think that can happen by hundreds of miles, eventually. By now I can speak with considerable experience about being lost on land. It must be even easier to do that in the air, especially if there’s trouble with the radio. I remember he was yelling into the mike.”

  “Did you say that was a week or so ago?”

  “More like a few weeks,” Crews said. “I guess I should have kept a calendar, but I never started one early enough and by now I’ve really lost track. It was late in May, anyhow.”

  “May? It’s almost August now. That’s two months.”

  “God almighty, can that be? Then I’m even more lost than I thought, in more ways than one. I don’t have any idea where the time could have gone. Building the raft obviously took longer than I was aware, and then I had the eternal job of finding food. I tried making sandals and some other stuff, bow and arrow, et cetera. Maybe I was on the beach, out of it, longer than it seemed. God, two months.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “I was back in town then. There was a plane crash in the news, I think. But there were more than two passengers, as I remember.”

  “How about four? Did I forget? Dick brought along a couple of other passengers, business associates.”

  “Four. That’s possible. A prominent businessman, and his party … that’s right. But that was over the ocean, or anyway that’s my memory of where they were searching for them, along the coast. That’s why I didn’t make the connection at first. Could that have been your plane?”

  The rain had slackened off a bit. The roof thus far had not been penetrated, a fact in which Crews, disturbed by learning of the derangement in a basic sense he had never doubted, that was concerned with the duration of time, tried to take comfort. “Could have been,” he answered. “Probably was, if what you say is true. I didn’t know we were supposed to be anywhere near the coast, either by design or accident. But then I didn’t know anything at all. I was drunk. In fact, I had been more or less consistently drunk for years.” No doubt that accounted for his disorientation after the crash: added to everything else, the shock and all, were the effects of the cold-turkey withdrawal from alcohol. “What you say would explain why there hasn’t been much of a search around here. We’re nowhere near the sea, are we? Do you know?”

  “I think it’s more than a hundred miles from Fort Judson.”

  The rain had stopped pattering above them. Looking out the end of the shelter beyond his feet, he could still see as far as the bank of the stream, but the light had begun to fail. That it was so dark inside was due to the dense weave of the roof, which had been mainly Friday’s deft work. They were, of course, vulnerable to any enemy, supine, and blind to any approach not from the brook or from that portion of the woods he could see by rolling on his stomach and looking out the end behind his head, which in fact he had not yet done.

  “It’s really hit me hard, that I lost all track of time.”

  “But isn’t it true of animals that they lack a sense of duration? If you’ve ever had a dog, you know he hates to be alone as much for five minutes as for all day, and will give you as wild a welcome if you just come back from mailing a letter at the corner as if you returned from a month in Europe. You were just telling me what you’ve learned from animals. Maybe you acquired their approach to time as well.”

  “It’s something to tell myself, anyhow,” said Crews. “Thanks. I used to have a great dog when I was a kid, by the way. A golden retriever named Walt. Thanks too for reminding me. I’m going to get another when I get back. I haven’t owned a dog in years. Do you have one?”

  “Not since I’ve lived in a city apartment. But sure, all the way through school, my brother and sisters and I had dogs. Sometimes they were supposed to belong to us all in common, sometimes to individuals, depending on how well we were getting along. We fought a lot, and when we’d be mad at somebody, we were officially mad at their dog too, but in fact never were. We’d actually spoil the other guy’s dog to lure its affection away. This never worked. Dogs never turn against any members of the family to which they belong—at least they don’t if every member spoils them.”

  The rain returned with a sudden rush. Crews put his fingertips to the boughs above him. He could not really believe that the roof would continue to shed water under this downpour. “I think I developed a block against thinking of the past, though I did it for a while until it just seemed to be weakening me.”

  “I was just making talk,” Friday said.

  “God, I welcome it! There was a time when I thought I might never hear another voice. I got used to talking to myself internally, without the responsibility of forming words, let alone connected thoughts. But then my conversation with myself tends to get enmired in one subject alone: my failures. My marriages, my
father. I had to read in the paper that he put a gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. We didn’t get along, but that was my doing, not his. There was a lot of other stuff I didn’t know, either, until he was dead. Some of it was good. He was a trial lawyer. His best-known clients were mobsters, but he did a whole lot of pro bono work too, for otherwise defenseless people, for no fee whatever, many of whom, unlike me, went to his funeral in tribute, I read, including the poor guy who served nine years in prison for a crime he did not commit, losing his business, home, and wife. My father got him out and sued the state and never took a cent of the big settlement. I never knew at the end my father had cancer of the throat and couldn’t talk, and he had had this deep, rich baritone that no jury—and few women—could resist….”

  A drop of water struck his head from behind. He rolled over on his belly and looked out the near end of the shelter. A little pool had formed in a slight depression in the earth between the shelter and the encircling drainage trench, and the rain was splashing in it. He was struck on the forehead and in the eye as he watched. But he was relieved to see the pool had not yet extended as far as Friday’s side.

  “That’s what happens when I take my mind off the here and now,” he said. “It’s coming in over here. I should have made end panels.”

  He crawled out of the shelter, backward, at just the moment the heavens lost all restraint and poured water down in great shimmering sheets, one of which immediately drenched him. Before he reached the line of woods he was struck twice again. He was searching his soaked pockets when, out of another swirl of wind and rain, Friday appeared.

  Her hair was a tight-fitting, sodden cap. She handed him the multipurpose tool, which he had forgotten she had used last.

  “You shouldn’t have!” he shouted. “Now get back.”

  “Why? I couldn’t get any wetter.” She was smiling, water coursing down her face and into her mouth. “You cut. I’ll carry.”