Robert Crews (3 page)

“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.

H
E
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.

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.