Robert Crews Read Online Free

that might evoke it. Another was pissing in his pants, humiliating even when done in private, but he looked down now and saw that at least he had spared himself in that regard.
    Comstock was staring at him woefully. “Sorry.”
    â€œFor what?” The general noise seemed louder than before, requiring them to raise their voices even further.
    â€œI 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