Robert Crews (5 page)

When the
HELP
sign was at last completed, however, he doubted that even five-foot letters could be seen from very high in the air. A much more conspicuous signal was needed, but he had exhausted his strength by now, and his leg hurt him so much that he groaned aloud. Judging from the position of the sun, it was already late afternoon. He still had no taste for food and felt internally ill, no doubt as a result of the sudden withdrawal from alcohol, but knew he should eat something more for his survival. So he munched on a Cornish-hen leg. No doubt it had been marinated in wine and herbs and carefully broiled, but he was insensitive to all tastes at the moment, despite his new ability to smell, or think he smelled, the normally odorless vodka. He tried to avoid thinking about how long it might be before rescue came. It was clear that he would not soon be able to hike out, in stocking feet and with a bad leg, to the nearest human community, even if one was relatively close by. And he could spare no more immediate concern for the bodies in the airplane. Until help arrived, self-preservation must be his obsession.

He had to find refuge again before darkness came. The sun, which he had taken for granted his life long, was now the sole available source of light and heat, and gauge of time and direction. As it sank toward the treetops on the far shore of the lake, he looked for alternatives to the sand burial that had served on the previous night but was unattractive to him now, if only in the moral sense: determined to survive, he could not afford the connotation of interment. If defiance was part of this determination, then what he defied was what he had been before the crash. Destroying oneself had a point only under conditions of civilization. The situation was otherwise when your adversary was nature.

But digging in made sense. He had no tools with which to build much, and no strength to drag back and forth to the woods for materials. After a while he found the pair of plastic cups that nested under the cap of the thermos. Using one as a trowel, he scooped out in the sand a shallow cavity long enough to hold his body. If seeing it as a grave was out of the question, it could be called a burrow or slit trench or the cellar of the structure to come. In the course of this project he soon discovered—or remembered, for he had dug in sand as a child—that there are physical laws ordaining how far you can dig down perpendicularly before the walls of a hole threaten to cave in altogether. Sand in volume has its natural conformations; a cupful on a level surface forms a miniature dune. Therefore he scooped to a depth of no more than a foot and graded the sides of the depression into natural slopes, not walls.

Given the season, he had enough clothes to survive another night, but he cursed himself for neglecting to bring along extra shoes. In collecting the branches for the
HELP
sign, he had picked up solefuls of pine needles, some of which pierced the weave of his socks to prick his feet. At the moment he could think of no better countermeasure than putting on a second pair of socks over the first. Were he faced with the need to walk far, and if his leg permitted such, he would have to fashion some version of footgear from the materials available, but it was premature to think of that eventuality, as well as being defeatist.

They might come for him at any time, though no more tonight; he had to accept that fact as dusk approached, and he worked, as well as he could with a wounded hand that hurt more than his knee, to make a better shelter of the shallow trench. To spare his leg, he crawled to the distress sign and pillaged branches from it and erected them, stems embedded in the sand, around the rim of the trench. Across their tops he tried stretching the empty duffel bag, which was supposed to be waterproof but even when flattened out was only wide enough to protect his head and shoulders. However, the thick canvas proved too heavy to be supported by such slender uprights. After reerecting the latter, he constructed a flimsy roof of whichever garments he was not wearing, mainly extra underwear. The result was not in the least water-resistant should rain fall—the T-shirts would grow more weighty when wet and probably pull the structure down on him—but until then it would provide a ceiling under which one could enjoy the illusion anyway of being less at the mercy of the elements. The sense of irony that had become Crews's dominant emotion toward his fellow men could serve little purpose in this realm of the literal, where you made the most of what you could get and were grateful for it.

Before retiring for the night he once again scanned the shoreline for signs of humanity. He had of course been doing as much, periodically, since crawling from the lake after the crash, but what he could discern of the rest of the shore was as deserted as his own patch. It was a sizable body of water, perhaps a mile across in the part he could see, but his view was limited by a headland in the middle distance on his side of the water. Perhaps he was on a kind of bay, and just beyond the headland lay a village full of people.

He was startled by the sound of a splash and looked just in time to see, in what little light remained, a strand of silver glide beneath the surface of the lake. He knew so little of nature. He had never been a Scout. His swimming had been done always in pools and private areas of beach, not the sort of thing from which you learned to identify species of wildlife or edible plants, or anything of use in his current plight. How helpful it would be if he could make fire! Not only would night be less bleak, but by day smoke would be the most effective way of making his position known. Surely rubbing two sticks together was done only in cartoons. Then there was something called flint and steel. Flint might be found in the woods, when he could walk better—if he could recognize it—and perhaps something of steel might come from the electric razor.

He had enough food for another day and a lakeful of pure water, and he had a rudimentary shelter for the night, so long as the weather stayed clement. After a day of more physical labor than he had done in years, or ever, he was ready to sleep. He was morally pleased to have drunk no alcohol since the crash—and the vodka bottle was still planted there in the beach, untouched—but in body if anything he felt much frailer than when he had been drunk. He would probably not have damaged his hand if he had not been sober when he fell. Once, in the old life, he had tumbled down a length of concrete steps without sustaining a bruise, and while he had received damages of the face in his car crashes, there had been no lack of policemen and medical personnel to assure him he was lucky to have kept all major organs, including his head.

Though his little realm received some light from a newly risen slice of moon and the nearby water glistened faintly, the rest of the world was invisible and, since the splashing fish, silent, existing only in theory. He writhingly crawled under the simulated roof and rolled onto his better side. This was not kind to his hipbone: the sand at the depth to which he had dug was too firm for comfort. He had much to learn. He was too exhausted to crawl out, get the cup, and scoop out depressions here and there to conform to bodily protuberances. He turned onto his back. He had neglected to provide a pillow. He reached up and pulled down the nearest of the T-shirts that made his ceiling. The branch that held it came along, too, its grasping needles in his face. He put the balled shirt under his head and, tasting the flavor of pine, spat out the needles that had penetrated his mouth.

He was realizing a version of the experience he had been denied as a small boy: sleeping all night under the Christmas tree. His aim had been to see Santa Claus for himself, the real one, if such existed, for he could not remember a time, however tender his age, when he believed all those Santas in shops, on street corners, at parties, and on TV were one and the same being in different phases. There had been a Christmas Eve when he was ten or eleven, long past any interest in the matter of Santa Claus, on which his father had sent them a Santa impersonator, driving a big black Lincoln with a trunk full of expensive gifts elaborately packaged. His father had had to stay in Florida, where he was preparing the defense for Tommy Bianchi in the case the government was bringing against the “reputed mob boss,” a term Bobby Crews did not yet understand but associated with “putrid,” the word being much in vogue among the boys at school. Looking back, years later, he suspected—and got some ugly amusement from so doing—that the Santa Claus who came in the Lincoln was probably some thug from Bianchi's “family” and used the same car trunk for taking bodies to dump, weighted, into suburban marshes.

When Crews woke up, he had no idea of how long he had slept, but it was still night. In fact, he was not at all sure that he
had
awakened, for a bear's head, silhouetted against the slim moon, could be seen through the hole in what was left of the crude roof. As a test, he closed his eyes briefly. Sure enough, the bear was gone when he reopened them. What he had seen was some configuration of the overarching pine branches and/or the nearest garment thereupon in the remainder of his ceiling. Of course, the whole sequence, the test included, could have been, and continued to be, including this reflection upon it, a dream. But the trembling was real. Yet even that took him a moment to understand. It was not a reaction to the mirage in which the bear had figured. He was in the grip of a savage chill. The several layers of cotton were as nothing against the cold. Never before now had he been aware that teeth actually can chatter involuntarily. He tore away the rest of the roof and wrapped it around his upper body, under the thin jacket. He continued all night to shiver violently, and his teeth chattered whenever he unclenched them.

That he did nevertheless sleep, he understood only on being awakened by the morning light, and not the first light that had woken him the previous day but rather a sun that was already lifting itself above the treetops to the east. The woods were especially dense there. For all he knew, a town might not be very far beyond, but the continuous wall of greenery tended to discourage speculation. Better stranded near open water than wandering in circles through an inland thicket without boundaries.

He writhed out of his now roofless trench. It would take a while before he tried to stand erect. His knee had stopped hurting during the night, or anyway he had been distracted from it by the cold, but he had to prepare himself for the possibility it would prove worse when used. He crawled, favoring his right hand, some distance from all that he could currently call home, and rising to his feet at last, urinated.

The place he had chosen to pee was near the edge of the forest. Only when he had finished and was ready to start back did he notice the enormous tracks that led from the woods across the sand to the wretched excuse for a shelter in which he had spent the night.

C
REWS FORGOT HIS KNEE AND RAN TO THE
campsite. From the tracks he could see that the bear had in fact paused to stare down at him, but decided to attack not his person but rather what was left of the food, tearing the hamper apart and devouring the remaining sandwiches.

He shared the area with a wild beast far more powerful than he, armed with deadly natural weapons, and omnivorously voracious by instinct. News reports told of bears that were sometimes hungry enough to bite chunks out of sleeping campers: legs, shoulders, or even, he remembered hearing,
heads
. At first he could not even imagine what form of defense to mount against the bear's return. Some sort of pathetic bow and arrow? He had nothing with which to sharpen either arrow or spear, and any missile too feeble to bring such a creature down would only infuriate it.

He had been thrust into the situation of the first primitive man to face an animal adversary. No doubt it had been the beasts who won the earliest encounters, until the man could effectively bring his mind into play, he who after all was the wiliest of the apes. You could comfort yourself with such reflections, but realizing a natural potential long buried under softer concerns was another matter.

Fire
was the answer. He could not remain another day in this place without fire. There was no animal on earth that was not terrified by fire. Fire would also warm him and cook the food he had to find now, for his larder was empty. With fire you could signal to searchers: smoke by day, flame by night. But how to make fire? He had constantly to face the truth that he was helpless when in the wild. There was not a moment in which he could afford to ignore his vulnerability to the menaces of the world in which he was stranded. Added to them now was a lack of food, and of course, for the first time in many years, he had woken up hungry.

The bear was the most frightening of his problems, but Crews had a feeling it would not return immediately. He had no authority for that feeling: he was simply basing it on his own disinclination to hang around some place that had run out of what he wanted from it. Any creature would go elsewhere under those conditions. He was pleased to be thinking like an animal, if indeed such was what he was doing; it had no precedent. The bear aside, then, there remained the matter of: a source of food; better means to keep warm; an improved method of signaling to aircraft…

He broke off here to gather the boughs used ineffectively to roof the trench and quickly reconstructed the
HELP
sign—while suspecting that a pilot who flew low enough to see letters of this size would be able to spot his person as easily, all the more so if he waved vigorously. But at the time of the flyover he might be underwater or back in the woods, and something was better than nothing. He did need a more conspicuous signal…. A
mirror!

His disloyal knee chose this moment to remind him that its sudden recovery had been a hoax. It began to hurt more than ever. He hopped on the good leg to the duffel bag and took from it the little padded box in which his electric razor traveled. A hand-sized mirror was affixed to the interior of its upper lid. Because it seemed to be cemented firmly in place, instead of trying to pry the mirror off and perhaps cracking the glass, he neatly ripped the entire lid away from the small hinges attaching it to the lower half of the case.