Robert Crews by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online

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