9

HEAVY RAIN RETURNED AT DAWN, AND Crews was awakened not by light but by a leak that had gone from drops to a thin but continuous stream of water, which found his face wherever he put it.

Friday’s back was to him. If she could continue to sleep under such conditions, good for her. He rolled over onto his stomach and crawled out of the shelter, pushing before him the pine-bough barricade, but before he was all the way out, there she was, sharing the task.

They compared notes on the night. The fact is that he had slept well until so rudely woken up, whereas her sleep had been fitful.

“I would say the leaks were diabolically precise in finding just the places that would disturb me most. But the truth is that there were so many, they couldn’t help hitting every target.”

“Do you realize,” Crews asked, “that you are cruelly dismissing the theory that has always given me solace? That I am the victim of the malicious rain god, or anyway the deity who is supposed to protect all makeshift roofs.”

They stood there smiling at each other, being rained on. But the weather was warmer than ever, and since they had been wet for so many hours anyway, he found standing far preferable to lying prone and passive.

Friday wrinkled her nose as the water streamed onto it from her high forehead. “I’ve been thinking about the firemaking rig. All that really has to be dry is the socket the drill goes into, and of course the tinder. No, I guess the drill too, or its end anyhow, which creates the friction. Maybe we could locate a big fallen tree trunk, or even a stump that’s thick enough and not so rotten it’s soaked like a sponge. Maybe if we could cut away enough of the wet wood to get down where it would be dry? What do you think?” Somehow, the longer he had known her, the wetter and more bedraggled she was, the more attractive she looked.

“We could try,” he said. He was irked with himself for not having the idea. But then how long had he depended solely on the sun, going tireless on gray days, before making the first bow and drill? No phase of woodsmanship had come easily to him.

They had to hike some distance from the campsite to find a suitable fallen tree. The rain came and went all morning, but fell in such volume that the foliage continued to drip abundantly between cloudbursts. When they finally found their log, its wood was the toughest Crews had yet encountered, and he was afraid he might break the knife blade on it.

But finally the parts were fashioned and assembled, and using Friday’s shoelace as bowstring, he was about to make fire when she asked, “Can I try that?”

Either this was the best bow and drill yet, or she was a more effective user thereof, for her time in getting a mature flame was half his quickest. Once the tinder was ignited, they added on shreds from the dry inner wood of the log from which they had made the apparatus, and when those were burning well, piled on dead evergreen rubbish with incendiary Christmas-tree needles, then wet but thin branches, and on top of all, several logs thick as his forearm: these last sizzled and steamed when the heat reached them, and did not genuinely catch fire until the fuel underneath had been replenished several times. The absence of rain at the most crucial stages helped enormously, for even though, acting on another idea of Friday’s, they had found even larger flat stones of the kind on which Crews had fried the fish the evening before and built a roofed structure around the fire, it would never have defied a downpour of the cloudburst kind that had made a mockery of their shelter during the night.

Once the rocky surround had been constructed and a small fire was going inside, it was self-evident that they also now had a workable stove, on the broad top slab of which, balanced on uprights Stonehenge-style, food could be cooked. It soon grew so hot that the drops from the occasional drizzle to which the rain had now been reduced evaporated on contact, sometimes so quickly as to leave no steam behind.

“I guess I’ll catch some fresh fish,” Crews said, glancing around for the pronged spear. “We might as well stay here until we get in better shape for traveling. It feels to me like the rain’s going to stay for a while. We ought to take advantage of the interim periods to collect food and also we ought to thatch our roof tighter—if we spend another night here, and in my opinion, better that than to be caught somewhere else without any shelter at all.”

“I agree,” Friday said, smiling. How she kept her teeth so white under these conditions he could not explain, and was too delicate to ask. Her cheeks glowed, too. Each was discreet about hygiene, going into the woods or to the stream, depending on the purpose. He had washed various parts of himself the day before, but did not have her stomach for full immersion in the icy brook.

“Just where did you leave the spear? I’m going to give your technique a try.”

She pointed past the sodden black-and-gray ashes of the campfire of the day before. “I thought it was over there. I could have sworn I brought it back, but maybe it’s down by the rapids.”

“Okay. I’m going there…. We might think about making a drying rack for our clothes, only not too close to the fire.”

He walked along the bank of the stream. Even the drizzle had ceased by now, but the sky still looked heavy with water, as if any provocation, a thunderclap or lightning bolt, might cause it to rupture and drop more. The ground was spongy-slick when there was grass and elsewhere muddy, squishing between his toes, but turned to grit and gravel as it sloped to meet the rocky, swift-watered, swirling shallows. No spear was in evidence. He returned to the campsite.

“It probably got into the water somehow while we were stringing up the fish. It’s reached the lake by now.” Friday was stoking the fire. He asked her for the tool. “I’ll cut another.”

She frowned, pushing back her hair. “I could have sworn…” She produced the implement from the back pocket of the jeans.

“You’re continuing to use the antiseptic, right?”

“Of course.” She grinned, an expression he was seeing for the first time.

“I feel responsible for you.”

“I know you do…. How long would you say it’s been since we got the ingredients together for the meal yesterday? That would have been late afternoon, right? And now it’s midmorning.”

“Yeah,” Crews said. “More or less. Why does the time mean so much?”

She poked at the fire with a long stick. It was not green, and the tip caught fire almost immediately. She let it burn. “You’re going to be angry again, as you were when I brought the mushrooms back…. I ate some of them, and—”

“You didn’t!” he cried. “Aw, for God’s sake…”

“That was back when I first found them. If they were toxic, wouldn’t I have felt it by now? It must be eighteen hours ago.”

“How would I know? For God’s sake,” he repeated. “What happens if the poison just takes longer to act?”

“I’ll die,” she said. “I know that. I knew that when I ate them. I’m not that attached to living, any more.”

“Don’t say that.” He shook his head violently. “It isn’t right.”

“It may not be right, but it’s true.” She plunged the burning stick farther into the flames and left it there. “You have to allow me my defiance, which I’ve bought and paid for. It’s not against you. You’re a good person, a fine man. But I tell you what I wish: I wish that Michael’s aim had been better. I could easily stand being dead, but I don’t know what to do with a superficial wound.”

“I won’t protest further,” Crews said. “I suddenly remember what people used to say to me when I was drinking, people who cared about me. I don’t know what to say that wouldn’t sound like them, and I found what they said unbearable, because of course it was true. But it’s not true that everything true is necessarily unbearable. I used to believe it was, but I was wrong. I was dead wrong. Now I’m right because I’m alive, not because I’m wise or good. I grant your privilege to not care whether you live or die, but my business is survival. If you stay with me, I’m going to restrain you by any means at my disposal from doing something self-destructive. You say it wouldn’t reflect on me, but it would. I won’t put up with it. If you don’t agree, then don’t be here when I get back.”

He was genuinely furious. He saw no good reason why the mushrooms could even yet be called harmless. He could not think of her sickening and dying, and still he could think of nothing else. She was addicted to the man who tried to kill her. The phenomenon was not unknown. He hoped she would be gone when he returned.

He roamed amid a forest containing hundreds of trees of all species, from lofty masts to midget saplings, and could not find a single one with the configuration of branches required to make a spear of the sort that Friday had wielded so profitably. With every problem to which she had thus far applied herself, she had done better than he, but then she was obviously a lot smarter. But that was small distinction. The only one of his wives he even approached in intelligence was Michelle, and then probably only when she was stoned. But there had been a day when each was fond of him.

He tripped on exposed roots, and was savagely whipped in the face by wet branches. He trod painfully on pine cones. He was losing his woodsmanship, regressing to the spirit of his early days at the lake. His own survival was now one with hers. He had failed to save his companions in the fallen airplane. If he failed her as well…

He stopped and looked about him. He was lost again. The disorientation was now to the third power: after the crash he had been lost to the world; then they had got lost while searching for the river; now this, at the limits of absurdity. There could be no fourth stage but to perish.

He tried to remember what he could of the terrain as it affected him physically. Where had he been whipped by the recoiling branches, with a spray of droplets? What had been the sequence underfoot? The thick, wet leaf mold, then the pine cones, the moss in the shadow of the fallen tree with rotten bark, the rocky outcropping, the area at which the level ground began gently to slope upward.

He climbed another two hundred yards through thick woods, more in hope than in the sense that the long hill would soon reach its crest. Then all at once he had reached the last line of trees, beyond which there seemed to be nothing but air. He emerged from the forest to stand on a ridge from which he could see the water, far away in the valley below. He was so high above and distant from the lake that it appeared narrower than he had ever known it to be, and also of a different texture or hue … unless it was another lake altogether, or the river that in fact it was, as he recognized in the next instant. Nor was it so far away, probably no more than half a mile.

He had found the river. The discovery should have inspired exultation, but there could be little under the circumstances. Nor was he lost. His trail back would be easy to follow, given the damp ground over which he had traveled. There had been places so spongy that his tracks had filled with water as soon as his feet left them. It was simply that he did not want to return to the campsite and find she was dead or missing. He should have offered her better alternatives. He should have made it clear that he would not forsake her for any cause whatever. If his purpose was to dissuade her from self-damage, he had been quite as negative as she. In so doing he had withdrawn the protection he had furnished, which, aside from managing to keep alive for these weeks, was his sole achievement as a man.

He arrived at an awful explanation for the disappearance of the fishing spear she had used the day before: her husband had found them, had confiscated the potential weapon, had lain in concealment until Crews went into the woods.

He began to run. He did not trip now nor get lashed by low-hanging branches. He was swift and sure, and half the route was downhill. In the light of the new menace, he accepted her argument about the mushrooms: if she had felt nothing untoward in eighteen hours, then they probably were not poisonous. It might still have been foolish to risk eating them, but that was not his worry now. He must return to the campsite as quickly as possible, but when he got near he must do so with stealth. Not only was the man armed with a pistol, but he was apparently some sort of athlete. It had not mattered when a drunken Crews got the worst of brawls he had instigated: nothing was at stake. But this was a battle he must not lose.

When he had come within a quarter mile of the camp he paused to cut and trim a sapling an inch and a half in diameter and about a foot shorter than he was tall. To its end, with the fishing line from his pocket, he lashed the tool fast, its knife blade extended and locked open by means of a tiny wedge of wood. He now had a weapon. He had left to find a spear that would catch a fish and returned with one that could kill a man.

He could smell the campfire when he was still some distance from it: he was upwind, the superior position as to sound as well as scent, which might determine who was prey and who the hunter. When he got close enough, he stole from tree to tree, careful not to step where he might make noise.

Finally he could see most of the site. Friday had built the clothes-drying rack near the fire, and on it were all of her few garments, including the shirt he had given her. And he could see the woman herself, alive and obviously unmenaced, or anyway her upper half, placidly bathing in the stream, white in the swirling water, pale against the dark woods beyond the opposite bank.

He was not embarrassed to find his fears unjustified, but he would have been disconcerted had she known of his presence now. He returned to the woods, and scarcely had he done so when he saw a hearty sapling with precisely the sort of tri-forked crotch he had looked for earlier. He dismantled the man-spear and, with the saw and knife blade of the tool, fashioned an implement for the catching of fish.

When he arrived at the clearing, Friday was sitting near the fire, drying her hair with spread fingers. She was wearing only his knitted shirt, which looked still somewhat damp but was long enough, her legs arranged as they were, to cover her decently.

“That looks like a good one,” she said, her head angled so that her hair hung free on one side.

“It took me forever to find.” He bided his time for the dramatic news.

“I got the chance to dry my stuff out. As long as it was wet anyway, I washed it first. I grabbed this when I heard you coming. It’s not quite dry. I didn’t want to put it so close it would burn.” She straightened her head. “I’d be glad to do your clothes, maybe a piece or two at a time. It’s warm enough.”

“As it turns out, I wasn’t as far off the trail as I thought.” He pointed in the direction from which he had come. “A mile, mile and a half. Up a long slope, thickly wooded, but at the top it’s clear, and from there you can see the river.”

She took her fingers from her hair. “You saw it.”

“I thought it was the lake at first. It’s the river, all right, too big for a trout stream. Unless there’s another sizable waterway in these parts, that’s the one you came down from Fort Judson.”

She was still staring at where he had pointed, though there was nothing to be seen but woods. She turned. “I know we could make the roof watertight if we did enough work. And the same thing is true with food. If that deer we saw gets enough to grow as big as a person, and the bear you told me about, who is bigger and fatter, I’m sure, there should be plenty to eat if we really look for it.”

“Which reminds me,” said Crews. “I’ll bet you didn’t throw the rest of those mushrooms away yesterday. Let’s eat them now, to celebrate.”

Her expression was both contrite and modestly triumphant, according to whether one looked at her eyes or her eyebrows. She was smiling with her lips. “I can’t promise that a wait of twenty hours is enough! Maybe the poison takes longer to act. How could I know?”

“Who cares,” Crews said. “We’re a community. Think of its being the last on earth, as in one of those phony movies about the world after a nuclear war.”

She scowled. “I don’t think I ever saw any.”

“We’ll eat,” he said. “Then we’ll make plans, now that we know where we are situated geographically, more or less.”

“The mushrooms are behind that big rock over there…. Oh, not that it matters now that you’ve made a nice spear of your own, but I found mine behind the hut. I am sorry you had to go to all that extra trouble.”

“But that’s the only reason why I found the river,” Crews said brightly. “I never would have looked for it in that direction.” He rubbed his hands together in a gesture he had rarely if ever used. He was startled by how hard-leathery his palms felt, and in fact sounded. “Let’s eat.”

He fetched the mushrooms and impaled them, three at a time, on the tines of the new spear and grilled them over coals at the edge of the fire. They would probably have been very good if eaten with knife and fork at a table. Here, plucked hot from the spit, they were celestial fare. He tried to recall some of the gastronomic jargon from his days with Ardis, then applied to cèpes and chanterelles, but drew a blank. Even his more recent life in civilization now felt as remote as if it had been not banally lived but rather exotically imagined.

“These are marvelous.” He offered Friday the latest smoking spearful. “Take more. There are still lots here.” He shook his head at her, as if in reproach. “You had a hidden supply. All I saw yesterday was a handful. You suspected I might resist?”

“I gathered more while you were gone just now. They’re right inside the woods over there. A little farther along are a whole lot of those onions, too.”

“Nice place,” Crews said, chewing. He fitted more mushrooms on the long fork. “Now that it’s stopped raining.” He nodded at the stream. “Maybe that’s a tributary of the river, and does not flow toward the lake. Though you can never tell theoretically. I’ve learned my lesson. Nature can’t be trusted. For all I know, this stream could take a major turn somewhere along the line and head for neither river nor lake. Better play it safe and take the overland route. It’s partly uphill and very likely the longest way, but at least I know where it goes.”

Friday had retained her civilized manners. She held a mushroom in two fingers and ate it with more than one bite. “I saw a plump bird I think was maybe a grouse—somebody once gave one to my dad. I would be a sissy about killing it, but I wouldn’t have any scruples against cooking and eating it under these conditions. In town I practically live on chicken. I can’t see the moral difference.”

“There isn’t any,” Crews said. “And we’ve been slaughtering as many fish as we can find, exchanging their lives to keep ours. I just have to figure out a way to get a bird, that’s all. Even if I could make a decent bow and arrows, I think it would be only luck if I hit anything.” He offered her the penultimate mushroom and ate the last himself. “I killed the rabbit with a club, but I had to lie in wait forever. When it came time to perform the act, I did it readily enough as if I had been killing warm-blooded creatures all my life.” He immediately regretted saying as much, but it was too late.

“That’s how it seemed with Michael when he turned the gun on me,” Friday said. “As if it were routine. I keep remembering that.” She controlled herself and put a hand on his forearm. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t.” He put his hand over hers and kept it there. “You meant you never had seen that side of him.”

“If it could be called that, his Mr. Hyde mode, but I think it’s something else, the lack thereof, but of what? Decency? Humanity? Anyway, it’s not the positive quality of evil. Mr. Hyde could not exactly be called a weakling, could he?”

She was still trying to love the man. Crews knew something about that tendency in women, which was probably maternal. He had seen it in his mother, and in fact, at least at first, in all his wives. “Maybe not,” he said. “But as I recall, it was Dr. Jekyll who won out in the end. Was it not he who killed Hyde?”

Friday withdrew her hand from under his and glared at him, but he was not the focus of her anger. “If I could once admit that my husband is nothing more than a criminal, there might be some hope for me.”

Crews could not have put it better himself, but he was glad not to have done so. He rose to his feet. “Now that we’ve dined so sumptuously, I’m not going to fish right away. Instead, I believe I’ll work on the shelter walls. We’ll be spending at least another night here, don’t you think? I’m sure it will rain again before morning.”

“We should stay long enough to get a supply of food to take with us,” Friday said firmly.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Crews said, though of course he had. He hesitated. “You turned out to be right about the mushrooms. But please don’t take any more avoidable risks. It’s your right to do with yourself what you will, even to throw your life away, and it’s probably preferable to do that all at once rather than stretch it out, the way I did for so long. But until we get out of here, I need you. I couldn’t make it alone.” He did not want to offend her, and therefore sought to lighten his statement. “Could I have found the river without getting mad at you?”

She responded in the same tone. “But if I hadn’t taken an unnecessary risk, you wouldn’t have gotten mad and gone off in the first place.”

“Go ahead, use your unfair advantage in logic. But can you grow as ugly a beard as me?”

“It’s not ugly,” said Friday. “It’s the height of woodland fashion, and you know it. You cut a dashing figure. When you get back, the youth of America will throw away their shoes and go everywhere barefoot.”

“And tattered seersucker and stained chinos will become the rage. I’ve finally accomplished something.”

Friday stopped joking. “The fact is, you have. And you ought to take pleasure in it and stop brooding about me. I won’t let you down. I promise.” She got up and, as he turned away, put on the rest of her clothing, which she said was not altogether dry but at least was not singed. It also smelled of woodsmoke. “But that will be a nice memory on days we can’t have a fire.”

Crews spoke in earnest. “That’s our biggest deficiency. Not even the bow and drill works when the parts are wet.”

“We could build a kind of oven, a more elaborate version of the arrangement of rocks you used for the Japanese-style fish. The front part would be roofed over with the biggest flat stone we could haul here.” She gestured. “Mounted on stone walls, stuck together with mud?”

“Clay would be better, if there’s any around. I might look upstream, where the banks are higher. Each fire we built inside would harden it. Leave space at the back for the smoke to escape, or even build a little chimney. We could keep the fire banked, so it would never go out entirely during the night or if we were away from the campsite for long.” He frowned at her. “The perfect idea. Trouble is, it wouldn’t be portable, and we’d have to stay here to use it.”

Friday shrugged and abruptly turned away. “Let’s get going on the shelter.”

“Hey,” Crews said, “what about your shoes and socks?”

“Not dry enough yet. Besides, I ought to toughen up.”

“How does the wound look today?” He had seen only her right profile when she was bathing in the stream.

“Fine. I’m beginning to worry now that I won’t even have a scar to show.”

“To the police?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t care about that. I meant, to show to myself as a souvenir of my happy marriage.”

After some experimentation they decided that elaborate interweaving of the panels of the shelter, such as they both had envisioned, would never result in a surface that was absolutely watertight, and that their purpose would be better served by piling on pine boughs to three times the previous thickness, and making sure they were all aligned so that a drop of water might find it more natural continuously to run along them to the ground than to find an interstice through which to fall inside.

“If we were going to stay for any length of time,” Crews said, “we could cut shingles from bark. I’d do it now if there were any birches around. But this is one area where I haven’t seen any. Other kinds of bark are much thicker and harder to deal with.”

Friday stood back to survey the results of their efforts, which had been strenuous, for the weightier walls had required the building of a sturdier frame.

Crews had left the final touches to her while with sharpened sticks he gouged out a deeper drainage ditch than the shallow furrow of the night before, which had overflowed during the heaviest downpour. “We need some poles to lean against the windward side,” he said, raising his eyes. “They’ll hold the thatch in place. That’s another thing I’ve learned to do, to notice the wind. Storms usually come from the same direction, but there are a lot of variations with the normal breezes, and that’s of concern because of how scents travel. It’s always better to have them coming toward you whether you are prey or hunter. But on water, if you’re trying to catch the wind in a sail, completely different laws apply—look out!”

He was too late. She had taken still another step backward at a point at which he had deepened the trench, which still was too narrow to accept a foot at right angles to it, so her heel went in while her toes were forced back unnaturally close to her ankle. She fell, her leg folding under her, the toes now turning to fit the trench longitudinally and so relieving their bend, but the damage had been done to her foot, and now the ankle and even her knee were twisted.

When Crews helped her up she could not put weight on her right leg. He lifted her in his arms. She was lighter than he expected. He carried her near the fire, where she first tried again to stand before being lowered to a sitting position on the ground.

She shook her head at him. “And you say you need my help!”

“As much as ever,” he said. “This could just as easily have happened to me. Thank God it didn’t: you’re easier to carry than I would be.”

She gingerly felt her extended right leg, wincing in anticipation, grimacing when her fingers reached her knee. “I maybe broke or tore something here, and my foot hurts too much to touch. Damn it. Of all things to happen.”

“What can I do for you?” Crews asked.

“You ought to leave me here.”

“You could blame me for not reminding you of the trench.” He squatted next to her. “It’s nobody’s fault, and it doesn’t have to change anything. I’ll make you a crutch to get around on, and if we decide to head for the river before you feel better, I can carry you at least part of the way, horseback-style. If we find the canoe, well and good. If not, I’ll make another raft.” He stood up. “Or we can just stay until you can walk normally. We were just saying what a nice place this is.”

“And I’m not totally incapacitated,” Friday said earnestly. “There’s lot of things I can do sitting down: preparing food if you provide it, keeping the fire going, drying or smoking stuff.” She looked around. “Would you mind handing me my left shoe and one sock? I won’t be wearing the others for a while.”

He brought them to her. “I think we should use splints to keep your knee and ankle from moving and making the damage worse. It’s probably a sprain or torn ligaments. At least we don’t have to set any broken long bones.”

She pulled on the sock and grimaced. “I’m not all that fragile! You should have known me when—” She caught herself. “Sorry. You don’t need any more of my whining.”

“But I haven’t heard any,” said Crews. “You’re the one who knows karate. Your good leg is probably still a lethal weapon.”

He went into the trees before he said more. He had been almost at the point of confessing that he was in love with her, but she might have taken such a declaration as a response to her vulnerability, and perhaps it was. Crews did not understand himself since he had become honorable.