Robert Crews: A Novel

  What he least wished to do was climb to his feet and walk. At this moment, now that he had survived, he saw no value in surviving. Had he perished he would now be a comfortable nullity…. What kind of man was he? It was obvious that only he had escaped from the submerged aircraft. All the others were still aboard. Some or all might, like himself, not have been killed, but were trapped within the fuselage, not yet dead but soon to be unless quickly extricated.

  He pulled himself to his feet. Something had happened to his knee: it could not bear its share of his weight. He shivered violently in the slight breeze that felt like rather a winter wind. He limped toward water deep enough for swimming, but when there was only enough of it to cover his toes, he passed out—which event he learned of only when he came to, so much later that the sun, high overhead when he first gained the beach, had sunk almost to the horizon. His body was so sore generally that trying to change its position brought him pain, and his knee throbbed. He dragged himself from the wet sand up into the dry. He had a sense of having vomited while unconscious, given the rawness of his throat and the taste that remained in his mouth along with gritty sand. The side of him that had lain in the water was soaking. He struggled to expose it to what was left of the day, for the sun had dried him elsewhere.

  There could be no question of his swimming out and diving to the plane now. In his state of semidelirium, it even seemed that he had already done so and found nobody on board, a mystery that his weary mind could not cope with. He tried to take refuge in his state of damage, which was worse than those resulting from his car crashes or fistfights, for it partook more of soul than of body, and had to do with fundamental considerations that were at once unbearable but not to be denied. Had he left the others to die? Thus was he tormented, in and out of consciousness, throughout the night, which physically was bad enough, the temperature of the air falling rapidly as the sun sank without drying his wet half, and spiritually it was desolating.

  He managed at last to scoop up the surrounding sand, which retained some faint warmth from the sun, and from both sides to push it over his body so as to constitute the sort of burying-alive of which his latest previous experience had been at age nine or ten with his mother at the beach. In the simulated grave he survived the night. But he had no mental peace and did not sleep so much as continue fitfully to pass in and out of a coma in which he was dead to any feeling but anguish.

  When first light arrived he tried to convince himself of the necessity of meeting the day. It was convenient to remain supine while imagining that one had performed one’s duty. He had often done the like as a boy, without harm except perhaps when, at too advanced an age, he still indulged himself with the dream that he was peeing into the toilet while actually wetting the bed. Considerate of the maid, a recent Irish immigrant, he had balled the sheets and dropped them in his bathtub. Dealing with the mattress, however, was beyond his competence. Mary Frances did not inform on him but did provide a plastic mattress cover, demanding reimbursement for it from his allowance, which she claimed was larger than her wage, though he could never verify that assertion, for his father handled all money matters—to be precise, had the secretary do it, whoever filled that bill at the moment, for they were periodically changed so that his father at any given time had a young woman to minister to his professional and sexual needs.

  Lying in the cocoon of sand now, Crews found it comforting to suppose that it had hardened overnight into a kind of sarcophagus inside which he would eventually mummify, simply dry up, shrinking into a state that would at last be irreducible, the spirit having long since fled to the afterworld and the population of inquiet souls who wander on the shores of Avernus.

  They were all of them dead: his mother and father, his late companions in the airplane, everybody in the world, just look and see whether anybody was visible on this sunny morning in the sand beside the lake. But the three most recent dead were under water and decency and honor and respect for life demanded the recovery of the bodies. No one remained to perform such service but himself. There could be no further shirking of responsibilities, no further flight from humanity. He was trapped now, unless he would truly forsake life: his bluff was being called.

  He struggled out of the mold of sand. There was not a centimeter of his flesh or muscle or bone that did not rage against being brought so rudely into motion. It was not that he could not walk: at first he lacked the ability to crawl. When pressed to the sand his knees felt as though the skin had been flayed from their caps; they could never support his weight. He had every reason to stay put. Nobody would think less of him for not moving. Nobody would know he had not moved. Nevertheless he was in feeble motion, first by snakelike writhing; then rising, in pain, to his knees; finally erecting himself, stripping off his clothes, and managing to stagger the few steps into the lake.

  When he was in deep enough, the buoyancy of the water relieved him of most of the impediment of his body, and he swam to the place, which he identified by instinct, where the plane had crashed and sunk, and after filling his lungs dived for it. But he had not done this sort of thing since he was a teenager. Nothing functioned as it should have, neither his stroke nor his kick, and at first he could retain only enough breath to get within sight of the wreck and back to the surface, even though the roof of the craft was only about ten feet down.

  But after many dogged attempts, rising to the air, gulping, gasping, heaving after each, he succeeded at last in reaching the submerged fuselage, the door of which was open, perhaps as a result of his escape, which he did not understand as it happened and so could not remember now as more than a burst of desperation. The plane had come to rest on the level lake bottom, its body seemingly intact though up ahead the nose was smashed in and the wing nearer him was conspicuously cracked.

  Though the water was pellucid, he had difficulty in habituating his eyes to it, and the light was poor inside the cabin, from which, when at last he was able to reach and penetrate it in one strenuous dive, his importunate lungs forced an almost immediate return to the surface.

  Unless he rested more, his mission was hopeless and would only provide another corpse for the lake. He kicked up to the surface, where he rolled over and floated on his back, using his old childhood ability to remain buoyant with only the occasional flutter of hands. He had been so much better than his cousins at that trick: Johnnie couldn’t float well at all though being a powerful swimmer, and Sandy could do so only with an agitation of limbs. They said he was kept up by a head made of cork, with no room for brains, and they pummeled him for it when they all left the pool. Johnnie, or Jack as he had begun to insist he be called, who at fourteen was the oldest, soon tired of this sport and, with one more slap at Bobby’s face, ran across the lawn in his wet trunks, but Sandy dashed into the poolhouse, where she subsequently ambushed him from one of the dressing cubicles, wrestled him to the tile floor. He got an erection from the abrading of her mobile belly. At thirteen she still had no visible bosom, which was his almost exclusive sexual interest at almost twelve years of age, because no other difference between female and male was consequential and apparent when the subject was clothed. In those days Crews, an only child, had yet to see a person of the opposite sex in the nude, except of course in photographs, and had only a theoretical sense of what was concealed beneath the vee of hair in the female groin. Breasts made much more sense. He was embarrassed to get hard against Sandy, who to him was a kind of boy, and rolled away, but her writhing abdomen was soon right back on him. These many years later, he could still remember her angry red face. Why was she mad, when it had been all her own idea? After a while she leaped up, stripped off her suit without entering the cubicle, and went to shower. Crews just lay there for a while, waiting for his ardor to relax: he had yet to be capable of a physical orgasm. In later years, Sandy married a surgeon and became mother of three. As the result of a contretemps at one New Year’s Eve party, Crews was banned from their home for life.

  He was not going to be able to retr
ieve the bodies from the airplane single-handedly. He could not stay underwater that long. Search efforts must be already in progress: Dick had been shouting into the radio prior to the crash. Those in authority would certainly have been apprised of the plane’s position. And just how far into the wilds had it flown? Insofar as there remained any real wilderness in the age of space satellites which could presumably zero in, from on high, to see minuscule details on earth. He told himself that it would be no time before help arrived, even though the crash had occurred probably in the early afternoon of the day before and nobody had come looking thus far. From the sky the area would be much more vast than when represented on a map, and in this kind of terrain, his lake might well not be unique.

  Spurgeon may have been shouting into the radio because it had ceased to function properly, in which case his position might not have been known. The wait for a rescue might be somewhat longer than one would project on the basis of normal expectations. Crews was striving to be realistic, after many years of refusing to confine himself within standard reality, for that is what he was provided by drink: an alternative to the tedium others called life.

  Having given himself an irrefutable excuse for making no further attempt to bring up the bodies of his late companions, Crews dived again and again to the wreck and tried to do just that. Eventually he was able to remain there long enough to determine that on the impact with the water the instrument panel had been smashed back to crush and imprison the men in the front of the cabin. In back, Comstock was bent over a seat belt with a buckle that when located proved to be locked fast and could not be freed with unassisted fingers, nor was there an available means of cutting the impervious webbing.

  Crews had begun with too few physical resources to exhaust, but if endurance was a matter of sheer will, force was not. He was simply too weak to deal with the problems at hand. He did have the presence of mind, on his final and otherwise ineffectual dive, to scoop up from the compartment behind the rear seats every object with a reachable strap. Some of them floated against the ceiling.

  Impeded by his burdens, not all of which were buoyant, he had only enough remaining strength to swim to the beach and collapse prone on the sand, the sun hot on his bare back. It felt benevolent. Had he still been drunk—a state in which some effects were blindingly swift, but others lingered interminably, and these were no standards but those of caprice—he might have stayed interminably and suffered a severe burn. But now he was unaccountably conscious of threats to his well-being. His skin was in the spring mode, white and vulnerable. He put on his clothes, even unto the seersucker jacket. He had no shoes, having lost them in the frenzy of his escape from the plane.

  He examined the objects he had towed, on their straps, from the airplane. By now the water had ceased to drain through the wickerwork of the big picnic basket. He was interested to see, on unfastening its top, that the interior was stacked with watertight plastic containers and another thermos that, by the heft of it, still held coffee.

  The other three prizes consisted of his duffel bag, a long cylindrical hard-leather case that no doubt contained a segmented fishing rod, and a sizable box covered in olive-green fabric and belted at each end in leather: surely a tackle box. The fishing equipment was of little value to him, but the extra clothing in the duffel might be of use after it was dried. An examination of its contents disclosed that he had forgotten to bring along extra footgear. The absence of toilet articles, however, was not a surprise: he had been out of toothpaste and his old toothbrush was a disgrace. If drugstores were in short supply in the neighborhood of Spurgeon’s rustic lodge, then the host could be counted on to supply such needs.

  He had brought along an electric razor in a padded box and a can of spray deodorant, and there was probably a comb tucked away someplace, though it was not in evidence at the moment. The spray can, when looked at particularly, turned out to be of antiseptic, not deodorant, but would be more welcome if he cut himself before being rescued. The razor was useless at the moment, but then he had no reason to shave so long as he was stranded. He unzipped the case and drained it, but closed it without looking into the little mirror affixed to the inside of the top lid. For years he had had nothing to learn from staring at his own face.

  The remaining contents of the duffel bag were not what they should have been for a weekend anywhere, crash aside, consisting of the half-gallon jug of vodka and too much underwear and socks and too little else, for example sweaters, of which he had neglected to bring a one. When packing, a five-minute event, he had apparently mistaken a couple of navy-blue T-shirts for heavier clothing. Two more knitted polo shirts of the type he was wearing and a pair of blue jeans comprised the only garments for exterior wear.

  He spread the wet clothes to dry on the sand and inspected the contents of the plastic boxes from the picnic basket. The food proved to be the sort that some gourmet catering service deemed appropriate for four men on a fishing trip: little sandwiches of goat cheese and dried tomatoes; Cornish-hen drumsticks; vegetable pâté and sesame-seeded crackers. Probably these things were to be snacked on during the flight and never intended as a proper lunch. But they were a potential source of nourishment and might serve a purpose if he had to wait much longer for rescue. He had not eaten a bite of anything in recent memory, and was still not hungry, but he forced himself now to chew on a triangle of goat-cheese sandwich. He also sipped some coffee from the thermos; it was still faintly warm. Immediately he was nauseated, but with self-discipline not only kept down what he had eaten but continued to masticate until he finished the sandwich. He was suddenly aware of being dehydrated, and poured himself more coffee and drank it all.

  He could see no evidence that any other human being had ever visited this place. But they had hardly been flying long enough to have reached uncharted wilderness, if any such even existed on the continent. Beyond that wall of Christmas trees, it stood to reason that civilization was not too far away, in some form or another. Had he possessed footgear, he might have done worse than choose a direction and hike toward it—if rescue did not come soon, that is. He had to consider the possibility that his position was not known, owing to the failure of the radio. It was now almost a full day since the crash. Could a searching plane have flown overhead while he was buried to his face in the sand?

  Crews was trying to use a brain that had been pickled in alcohol too long to be instantly radiant when teetotaling. The flask had disappeared from the pocket of his jacket: he would not search the fuselage for it. The half gallon of vodka, in its plastic jug, had easily survived the disaster, surrounded by the soft clothing in the duffel bag. Crews had planted this vessel in the sand. He had neither taste for it nor horror of it. He was interested solely now in what would serve him, and alcohol, whatever it had done for him elsewhere, held no promise.

  His pressing need at the moment was for a means of attracting the attention of any airplane that might fly over the lake. A big smoky fire would do it, but he had nothing with which to start one. He decided to make a horizontal sign on the beach, using the branches of trees. He had forgotten his bad left leg until he started to walk toward the forest. He had been immune to pain when in the water, or simply distracted, but could move on land only with gritted teeth and frequent rests.

  When he reached the trees, he had nothing with which to cut the larger branches, ones large enough to be conspicuous from the air, and the minor extremities of the evergreens proved too elastic to be easily snapped with his limited strength. These trees, which he assumed were genetically pines, seemed not to have the readily available dead limbs natural to their distant deciduous relatives, according anyway to his dim boyhood memories. Furthermore, if you did locate a brown branch, what usually came off to the pull was only the moribund needles rather than the shaft.

  But finally he was able to move an armload of materials from the forest to the widest area of the beach and begin to spell out, in letters he hoped were large enough to be seen from the air, the word HELP. Halfway thro
ugh the job, he ran out of branches and had to return to the trees for more. The pain in his knee was worsening with use. He favored it awhile by hopping along on his right leg only, but stepping on a pine cone with a foot clad only in a cotton sock, he lost his balance and fell. Now the instep of his good foot was sore, and in clawing out as he went down, he managed to wound his right hand on impact with a sharp twig on the floor of the woods.

  Before completing the distress sign, he unscrewed the cap and with his left hand hoisted the heavy half-gallon container and splashingly disinfected the wound with vodka. Now that he had not drunk any for an entire twenty-four hours, he discovered that the liquid did have a faint smell: very medicinal, repulsive to him.

  Making the sign was much simpler than exploring the wrecked airplane, certainly less taxing than the dives and swimming out and back, yet he found it tired him, what with the extra expenditure of energy required to avoid further hurt to his left leg and his right hand. The latter impediment, though no doubt temporary, was the more inconvenient. He had never been able to do much with his left, not even eat in the European way without switching the fork after cutting the meat into morsels. In school he had boxed some, but was hampered by this constitutional inability to give his left hand its due. Now he was stuck with it.