Robert Crews: A Novel

  Comstock proceeded to challenge the theory that the ambient noise would rule out conversation in the cabin. To do so required his leaning as near Crews as his seat belt permitted and raising his voice.

  “Heart’s always in my mouth in these little puddle jumpers.”

  Funny how this expression of a shared fear instantly altered much of Crews’s aversion to the man. He nodded vigorously at Comstock and even smiled in the off-center style that dated from the time of the worst of the several wounds his jaw had sustained from steering wheels and fists. He felt allied to a fellow sufferer, even one with whom he had had nothing else in common. But even under the best of conditions (if such could be imagined), he did not consider words an adequate means of expression for any emotion deeply experienced. For example, so far as anyone else had ever known, he had not mourned for his mother. Because he never told anyone of his grief, he was believed to have none. It was assumed that what was never spoken of did not exist. But he believed he was being loyal to his feelings by concealing them from others, or misrepresenting them through rudeness.

  So he said nothing to Comstock, but did produce and offer the flask.

  Comstock patted himself on his gaunt chest. “Don’t use the stuff. Health reasons.”

  Yet he would travel by puddle jumper. Crews himself never failed to astonish his doctor and, he knew, to disappoint him with a blood pressure that, despite all, was never too high, and neither were his cholesterol and triglyceride counts, nor did he ever show a symptom of cirrhosis or any of the other deplorable systemic effects of excessive drinking. He would not have seen a doctor at all were it not for external damage. To placate the trustee (what a joke: that was the one who later decamped), he had once been interviewed by a psychiatrist, but made short work of that practitioner by insisting he lacked utterly in what was essential for a change of ways: viz., the least wish to be sober.

  Comstock was swallowing dramatically, with a jaw even more elongated. He cried, “Ears hurt? Mine are killing me. I forgot gum.”

  If by now, as was being proved, alcohol had lost its efficacy as a fear-killer, one thing could be said for it: Crews’s inner ears were not affected by the ascent. Once again he offered the flask to Comstock, and in view of his new partiality for the man, went so far as to lean as near him as the belt permitted and shout, “It really works. Try it: too little left to hurt you.”

  But Comstock fended the vodka off again. “Got a wife and three kids.” For the second time he tapped himself pectorally.

  Crews was aware that some people had that kind of idea about booze. That one sip to steady the nerves or relax the inner ear could lead to the utter destruction of an animal large as a human being. It took a lot to ruin a life, on which subject he was surely the best authority on board.

  At that moment the plane struck a bump, and clutching the bottom of his seat should this be the first in a series, he sought distraction by staring at Comstock, but was disappointed when he saw no evidence that the other had registered the impact with what could be imagined as either a gaseous boulder or, worse, a pothole, which, being in the sky, had no bottom all the way to the earth. Huge commercial aircraft sometimes met such and fell helplessly straight down for thousands of feet in a shaft of vacuum, seat belts breaking and all loose objects, including passengers, pressed against the cabin ceiling. Crews was perversely fascinated by the details of all miscarriages of air travel, just as when a child he was addicted to the movies that were certain to give him nightmares. Now he regretted not having taken the seat alongside the pilot, because in that position he could at least have been aware when Spurgeon talked on the radio and got warnings of oncoming thunderclouds in which the little plane could be hit by lightning, exploding into fragments that the wind would distribute across several counties below. Or watched as Spurgeon, in the grip of a heart attack or stroke, steered into a mountainside of sheer granite.

  He shook the flask. The engine noise obscured the sound of the sloshing liquid, but his fingers were sufficiently sensitive to gauge the vodka that remained as not much more than a fluid ounce. If he finished it now, and rougher weather was encountered later on, he would have to resort to the bottle in the duffel bag he had, against Spurgeon’s objections, insisted on bringing into the cabin. However, he had not been able to keep it close enough to reach while seated. Along with the big wicker picnic basket, it was stowed in the rear, not far away, but to get there would be especially hazardous in the rough air to survive which he needed the vodka in the first place. Here was another of those absurdities of the kind that as an undergraduate and still a reasonably good student he assumed was confined to the history of philosophy (how could you prove without looking that an object was there when no one was looking at it? etc.), but that had proved so characteristic of his life at large. For example, the only way he could have endured thinking about giving up alcohol was to drink more of it.

  He leaned toward Comstock. “I guess we’re hitting that rough stuff?”

  The other smiled faintly and shook his head in the floppy-brimmed fishing hat. “Naw. Long way yet.”

  The worst thing about this information was that it made Crews not only realize the little bump was so insignificant that Comstock, by his own assessment no hero, had failed to register it, but also admit to himself that the real turbulence, which after all he had encountered back when one or another of his wives had forced him to travel on big airliners, was massively more than this minor thud, which was probably only the retraction of the landing gear.

  Comstock was staring at him. “Didn’t mean to upset you. Dick just told me we might run into a few bumps: knows I get queasy. If you expect what’s coming, a lot of things aren’t so bad.”

  Now that there was no danger, Crews returned to his earlier disdain for the man, which was intensified by hearing this sophistry. As if anything bad was made good by learning it was on its way! He never looked ahead, unless of course obliged to do so by his companions. But in fact such people were always at hand. And whose fault was that? Yet he could not stand to be alone, without a distraction from himself. In such a situation he invariably became occupied by thoughts in which the desirability of suicide was countered by a conviction that he would do a bad job of any attempt: use a gun that jammed, hit the wrong vein when slashing the wrist and just make a nonlethal mess. Yet he could not bear the thought of anything so certain as leaping from an upper floor or plunging in front of a speeding car.

  It must have been at this point that, in spite of all, he fell sound asleep. True, he had drunk more than usual at this time of day, after staying up all night, drinking, rather than even consider going to bed and trying to get up early. It was also the fact that fear bored him after a while, and when it was particular, must give way eventually to a general lack of hope that was soporific. Sleep is good, said the German poet, and death is better, but best of all is never to have been born. The last cannot really be considered if one is alive to think on the matter, and thus far he personally seemed incapable of doing away with himself. Which by default left sleep.

  It was while sleeping that, as he remembered later, he felt the onset of the promised rough air and realized that it was not so hard to take unless one awakened: the reverse of the situation with a bad dream, in which at the heart of your terror is the fundamental sense that you can escape it by waking up. He could not be touched by what was real so long as he was not, and vice versa. This seemed an all-purpose formula that could not be challenged. Thus he slept harder as the turbulence grew worse, and the more violently the aircraft was agitated, the more gratifying his immunity became.

  How long the rough sky lasted was irrelevant, for time and sleep notoriously lack a common standard of measurement and are given to attempts to hoax each other, but it could have been the calm air that woke him. He had been slumping within the security of the seat belt. He now reassumed the tension of consciousness, straightening his spine, and discovered, with a hand to his mouth, that he had lately drooled. Embarrassm
ent for him was rare nowadays, but this was one of the few effects that might evoke it. Another was pissing in his pants, humiliating even when done in private, but he looked down now and saw that at least he had spared himself in that regard.

  Comstock was staring at him woefully. “Sorry.”

  “For what?” The general noise seemed louder than before, requiring them to raise their voices even further.

  “I almost upchucked.”

  Crews shrugged. Comstock went on, in his oblivious self-concern. “Thought we’d never get out of that alive.”

  Ahead, Spurgeon seemed to be speaking on, or at, the radio, but Crews could not hear what was being said, which anyway would probably be in the jargon of flying. Beckman’s face was turned, frowning, toward the pilot, an arrangement of features that emphasized the folds of his jowls. Beckman was the sort of man in whom you could see the boy, in his case a stocky youngster already getting a gut at age twelve. Spurgeon, however, was fitter today than he had been when in college, but he worked harder at it. He had installed a home gym in the country house, and when in town was dogged about working out at his club. He had also become a crank about what he ingested. The thermos of coffee, for example, was provided for the others: he drank none and had long since given up animal protein.

  That Crews had not wet his pants while sleeping through the turbulence was very well, but he really did have to go now.

  He leaned at Comstock. “Know how much longer?”

  Glancing at a wristwatch that it was a relief to see conventional and not adorned with push buttons and ancillary dials like Spurgeon’s aviator model, Comstock unfastened the belt so as to lean as far forward as he could and cry the question at the pilot, to whom at his angle he had access.

  In a moment he was back, shaking his head in the floppy hat. Crews could see that Spurgeon was still occupied with the radio, yelling at it now (though still incomprehensibly) and tapping at the control panel. Beckman’s frown had grown darker.

  Remembering these moments later on, Crews told himself that he had probably known, in his blood, that the process by which the plane would crash was underway, for he took an utterly uncharacteristic care to put in order the few things at his command. He checked the seat belt; he tightened the cap on the flask in his pocket; he rubbed the remaining sleep from his eyes.

  But on the conscious level he was as yet unstirred. In the absence of information as to their time of arrival, which he assumed would be at some little local airport from which they would then travel to the fishing lodge by Jeep, he could make no rational calculations as to when to fetch the half gallon of vodka from the duffel bag behind the picnic basket. This matter had its medicinal aspect. Unhappy experience had demonstrated that if the alcohol in his system fell below a certain level, he got sick as a dog that had gorged on tainted meat, and had an equivalent reaction. Teetotaling Comstock might have come near retching because of the turbulence, but a Crews who had sobered beyond a certain point was dead sure to vomit all over the place. That such a place might be within the confinement of the cabin of a small airplane was an unpleasant possibility. His companions should be grateful that, though admittedly degraded, he was in several important respects still a responsible citizen.

  All this while the others were showing an ever more marked sense of crisis, though none was dramatic about it: this came back to him later on, after the terrible event, with greater force and more detail than at the time, when owing to his personal state he took it as unremarkable, for another of the phenomena associated with addictive drinking is that the emotions of others lack validity: they seem either to have none or to be flagrantly counterfeiting some. Of course, he could see not Spurgeon’s face, but only that part of the back of the pilot’s capped head that was visible, in the high-backed seat, and Beckman, who alternated between staring out his window and then at the instrument panel, but now had become careful about looking at Spurgeon, and the ashen-jawed Comstock, with his stricken eyes—all these should have had another significance for a Crews not so dehumanized: say at sixteen, when he got several A’s in his studies, ran cross-country, and had a living mother. But the contemporary specimen was not wont to make any but malicious observations of his fellows, and so far as he was superficially concerned, the airplane was cruising confidently along the highway of sky (which he still preferred not to look out at), and even the sound of the engines, so noisy earlier, had gone. Then too he was preoccupied by the stress on his bladder.

  It took a while before he realized that the diminution of noise was due to the apparent fact that the engines were no longer operating. But not even then did he assume that the craft was in terminal trouble. He had finally made the decision that if he could not soon urinate, he would get his mind off the matter by having more to drink, had unfastened the seat belt and risen to go for the bottle in the duffel bag at the rear.

  By chance he noticed Comstock’s face as he went past him: retroactively, days later, he recognized that the man was looking at death and was blind to all else. In the next instant Crews was pressed against the back of the seat he had only just left.

  The airplane was plunging. Contrary to legend, a crisis does not bring immediate sobriety. Terror reduced to nil his already diminished capacities. He prayed at the top of his voice, but could not hear himself. There were no sounds inside the cabin, and even the rushing air outside had gone mute. His head felt an internal pressure that under other conditions might have made him scream, yet even when he discovered that it was surely due to the index finger pushed into each ear, he could not withdraw them and listen to the noise of his dying. In previous thoughts on methods of suicide (a routine subject of his musings), he had wondered what took place in the minds of those who leaped off buildings so high that many seconds passed before the impact with the earth. Or did consciousness quickly go to black? His own situation was different: he had not made the decision to take his life, nor was he falling on his own, naked to the air.

  He was now concentrated on what would happen to his body when the plane reached earth. He kept his ears plugged and squeezed his eyelids shut and locked his jaws. He brought his knees against his chest. He incessantly cried out to God.

  The descent could not be measured by the means available to his impaired senses—it was both interminable and begun and finished between two heartbeats—but simultaneous with its completion, existence converged on him centripetally. He was simply and instantly extinguished, with only a millisecond in which to wonder gratefully at the total lack of pain.

  2

  HE WAS CRUELLY RECALLED FROM THE comfort of the void. His need for breathing had returned, but he could not breathe with a nose and mouth that failed to function. His head hurt badly, and something had happened to one of the fingers that had been in his ears. He struggled to free his ankle from unreasonable bonds.

  … The reason he could not breathe was that he was under water: the cabin of the airplane was filled with it, a truth at which he arrived by using senses other than sight, for it was too dark there to see anything but dim shapes, unidentifiable blobs. He tried to rise above a preoccupation with exhausted lungs and remember where he had been in relation to a possible exit. There had been the door up front, but was there an emergency exit? The window, through which he had avoided looking once they were in the air, with his dread of heights: where was it now? Had the plane turned on its side? He could identify nothing. He groped and pushed and fought the murky and seemingly gelatinous element in which he was immersed, and he kicked and clambered. Then, without understanding how, he was suddenly free of whatever had detained him, but he was obviously still within the general enclosure of the submerged plane, and the need to breathe had become crucial.

  With his remaining physical strength and a savage resolve to survive, he pounded at something and kicked at something else, a bulky but yielding barrier that obstructed his way—later on, he realized that it had been the body of one of his late companions—and pushed strenuously in the direction of a
paler area or phase of the viscous medium that held him, which seemed as if about to solidify, trapping him in an agony that would be eternal: never would he die, but neither could he take another breath.

  All at once, when hope was gone absolutely, he broke through the surface of the water. He spent the next eternity in gulping air, drinking air and puking it out, chewing more, spitting and swallowing. When finally he could remember to open his eyes, he stared at the heavens, a blueness that was empty directly above him, but at the limits of his peripheral vision—there was some reason he could not move his head—the edge of a cloud could be detected, unless it was rather some damage to the corner of his right eyelid. Obviously he was floating on his back. Whatever movements he made to keep afloat had to be instinctive, for he was consciously preoccupied with an awareness that he was not immediately threatened with death. He could breathe free air. He was no longer imprisoned in and by an alien, hostile element. But life had become a privilege, having lost its claim to being a right. He had no resistance left. Had he been in rough water he would not have had the strength to stay up.

  Before rolling over, he had to conquer an obsession that he could not move his head because his neck was broken. When he decided to take the chance at last, for the reason that he could not stay permanently where he was, and got away with it, he became so bold as to lift his chin and try to see where he was situated in the universe. He was stoically prepared to find only a vastness of water, but in fact within fifty yards was a clear beach of what seemed pale sand, beyond which rose a dense forest of dark green.

  Only now did he belatedly register how cold the water was. The light clothing he wore provided no defense. He felt as though bandaged in ice. He swam for the shore, but despite a frenzy of directions to his muscles, they could hardly function. It was all he could do to keep afloat, let alone make any gain…. Yet eventually he recognized that somehow the beach was slowly getting closer, and could only believe that God was moving it toward him, showing mercy to the feeble. When at length the water grew shallow—to him it seemed rather that the bottom rose to meet his knees—he continued to make the movements of swimming, now the paddling of a little child or dog, until there was not enough liquid remaining to provide any lift to his legs, and even then he lay awhile in what was left of the lake, wet sand, for now that it had done its worst without destroying him, the water seemed friendlier than the unpopulated shore, and he had even become habituated to its chill, so that it was remembered as warmer than the air.