Robert Crews Read Online Free PDF

called.
    He struggled out of the mold of sand. There was not a centimeter of his flesh or muscle or bone that did not rage against being brought so rudely into motion. It was not that he could not walk: at first he lacked the ability to crawl. When pressed to the sand his knees felt as though the skin had been flayed from their caps; they could never support his weight. He had every reason to stay put. Nobody would think less of him for not moving. Nobody would know he had not moved. Nevertheless he was in feeble motion, first by snakelike writhing; then rising, in pain, to his knees; finally erecting himself, stripping off his clothes, and managing to stagger the few steps into the lake.
    When he was in deep enough, the buoyancy of the water relieved him of most of the impediment of his body, and he swam to the place, which he identified by instinct, where the plane had crashed and sunk, and after filling his lungs dived for it. But he had not done this sort of thing since he was a teenager. Nothing functioned as it should have, neither his stroke nor his kick, and at first he could retain only enough breath to get within sight of the wreck and back to the surface, even though the roof of the craft was only about ten feet down.
    But after many dogged attempts, rising to the air, gulping, gasping, heaving after each, he succeeded at last in reaching the submerged fuselage, the door of which was open, perhaps as a result of his escape, which he did not understand as it happened and so could not remember now as more than a burst of desperation. The plane had come to rest on the level lake bottom, its body seemingly intact though up ahead the nose was smashed in and the wing nearer him was conspicuously cracked.
    Though the water was pellucid, he had difficulty in habituating his eyes to it, and the light was poor inside the cabin, from which, when at last he was able to reach and penetrate it in one strenuous dive, his importunate lungs forced an almost immediate return to the surface.
    Unless he rested more, his mission was hopeless and would only provide another corpse for the lake. He kicked up to the surface, where he rolled over and floated on his back, using his old childhood ability to remain buoyant with only the occasional flutter of hands. He had been so much better than his cousins at that trick: Johnnie couldn’t float well at all though being a powerful swimmer, and Sandy could do so only with an agitation of limbs. They said he was kept up by a head made of cork, with no room for brains, and they pummeled him for it when they all left the pool. Johnnie, or Jack as he had begun to insist he be called, who at fourteen was the oldest, soon tired of this sport and, with one more slap at Bobby’s face, ran across the lawn in his wet trunks, but Sandy dashed into the poolhouse, where she subsequently ambushed him from one of the dressing cubicles, wrestled him to the tile floor. He got an erection from the abrading of her mobile belly. At thirteen she still had no visible bosom, which was his almost exclusive sexual interest at almost twelve years of age, because no other difference between female and male was consequential and apparent when the subject was clothed. In those days Crews, an only child, had yet to see a person of the opposite sex in the nude, except of course in photographs, and had only a theoretical sense of what was concealed beneath the vee of hair in the female groin. Breasts made much more sense. He was embarrassed to get hard against Sandy, who to him was a kind of boy, and rolled away, but her writhing abdomen was soon right back on him. These many years later, he could still remember her angry red face. Why was she mad, when it had been all her own idea? After a while she leaped up, stripped off her suit without entering the cubicle, and went to shower. Crews just lay there for a while, waiting for his ardor to relax: he had yet to be capable of a physical orgasm. In later years, Sandy