Robert Crews by Thomas Berger Page A

presented to a bartender who had been exceptionally patient with him at a time when he had been ejected elsewhere.
    He carried everything to his new headquarters beside the pond and stowed it in the lean-to, the sight of which filled him with pride and that emotion one is supposed to have when contemplating one’s home but which for him had been rare indeed, time out of mind. It was with reluctance that he left it to go to the lakeshore.
    As the days had gone by, he found it ever less endurable to think of the dead men in the airplane. He was stronger now than he had been when he tried, without success, the morning after the crash, to free Comstock’s body from the seat belt. He could, and no doubt should, before looking for the gas tank or the luggage in the wing compartments, try again to retrieve his late companions from the lake. A general respect for life, as well as his particular connections, demanded as much, yet whenever he considered making a dive for that purpose, he was claimed by a debilitation both physical and moral. And knowing that it took its source in the conflict between a human sense of guilt and a savage instinct for self-preservation made it no easier to overcome. They had been men, and their remains deserved better. But he was alive and lost and hungry. And now, brooding on the matter, he felt the return of the pain in his knee. He quickly stripped to his underwear and plunged into the water. He swam to the area of the lake over the wreck, some forty yards from shore, and taking the maximal breath, dived.
    He kept no count, but he made so many dives that when he finally had to give up the quest, at least for the morning, he was so exhausted he had hardly enough strength to gain the beach, at last crawling on hands and knees up onto the dry sand and collapsing. The plane was no longer where he had last seen it. In fact, it had vanished altogether. And what was worse, he could conceive of no explanation for the disappearance beyond that which simply attributed it to more of the divine malice that had brought the craft down in the first place.
    He rolled onto his back, exposed to the heavens. The sun was too bright even for closed eyelids. He threw a forearm across his face. Where could an entire airplane have gone? Where it had gone down, the lake was no more than fifteen or twenty feet deep, and except when a strong wind made the surface of the water opaque, the top of the wreck anyway should have been visible from the air. Yet it had not been seen by the plane that came looking for it—unless it had not been there at all. Or maybe the aircraft in the sky had not been looking for the one that had crashed. He was confused and demoralized. He had been coping very well with disaster, but had no defenses against altered reality. Could the storm have brought winds so powerful that something as large as an airplane would be moved under water?
    He was rushing toward terror. Lose one vital line to the real and all connections begin to unravel, and what part of existence can then be identified?
    He threw the arm off his face, to stare into the merciless blaze of the sun and thereby either see truth or be blinded … but he found himself in shade. The massive head of the bear was between him and the sky.
    His reason was intact. That the bear was not a hallucination (should there be any doubt) was confirmed by the coarse sounds of its breathing and, even more forcefully, by the feral stench it exuded, which was all but asphyxiating. It sniffed at him with distended nostrils, its little eyes having virtually disappeared in the furry head.
    Crews’s blood had converged behind the pulse in his neck and closed his throat. His limbs were too cold, too brittle, to be moved, lest toes, or a whole foot or hand, break off. Yet he was a man, with a rational mind and a coherent voice. Having no other weapon, he tried to speak to the animal. At first he could make no sound at all. Next he emitted a stream of