Robert Crews (25 page)

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.”

He worked as fast as he could, though as she had pointed out, there was no need for haste. They were both drenched to the bone, with no means of drying out till the sun returned. He would not even be able to find dry materials from which to make fire by bow and drill. Even if their roof held tight against the cloudburst, they would soak the interior merely by reentering. But it was better to work than to lie passively in wet misery. He cut enough pine boughs to give each an armload.

They piled a supply at the head end of the shelter, then entered, inserting themselves backward, in the prone position, at the foot—which thereby became, and stayed, the head, for they had to close that entrance too against the rain, and to do so otherwise would have required their reversing themselves once inside, so as to reach out and pull up the pine boughs. It was Friday who had the foresight to design this maneuver.

The interior was darker than before, and by now the roof had in fact finally leaked, though not badly, considering the force of the rain. And at least the makeshift mattress, though wet, kept them off the ground. They had both now rolled to the supine.

“I don't see how any roof we could make would hold up perfectly against these conditions,” Crews said. “This one's doing a better job than could have been expected.” From time to time a drop fell on his face, and if he felt for the spot of penetration and poked around, rearranging the branches so that it was plugged, one or more leaks were thereby created in the area adjoining.

“One more layer,” Friday said, “and it would be watertight. I know that now.”

“Maybe a steeper pitch,” said Crews. “But a certain amount of width would have to be sacrificed, the higher the ridgepole.”

“How about making it longer, to compensate, with compartments end to end, railroad-style.”

“It wouldn't be as companionable, though.”

“That's true.”

He stayed silent for a moment and had nothing to hear but the falling water. “Where's it leaking on your side?”

“Here and there. I'm twisted, to avoid what I can.”

Crews sat up. “Switch with me. This side's better. There's only a little coming in down by my feet.”

“No, thanks,” she said. “Certainly not. We're in this together.”

“You've still got that wound, haven't you?” He had asked about it when they were building the shelter and had given her the antiseptic can to keep.

“I told you it's coming along fine. Really. It doesn't hurt any more when I move, only if I touch it.”

“We're stuck here until the rain stops. I never have figured out quite how to handle the problem of bad weather—except in the case of that cave. You know, I went in there to get out of the rain. I never asked you, did you hear me come in in the dark?”

“Of course. For a little while I thought it was him. But then, after the noises stopped, I believed it was some animal, some big animal by the sound of it. I didn't sleep all night. I was terrified. And then when morning came outside, and a little light penetrated, there near the entrance where you were, and I saw you, and I saw that knife near your hand, I got the idea, the crazy idea, he had sent you to kill me. I had a box of matches in my pocket. I had just made a campfire and was going to cook lunch when he began his target practice the day he shot me. I had found a piece of dead wood that I thought I might use to defend myself, and brought it along to the cave. When I first made out your form, I almost panicked and considered beating out your brains before you woke up. Fortunately, I decided I ought to see you better before doing that, and I used up all my matches getting that stick ignited.”