The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  The meadow, when he reached it, was awash in humid air. Nearby the tree branches raked against one another. The grass beneath his feet felt spongy and alive. From the valley behind him came a soft rumbling thunder and the distant hiss of rain moving in his direction. He picked up his pace. In time he could see the glow of his cottage window. Fifty yards closer and he could make out the crown of soft lamplight shining down on his drafting table.

  At worst he would make it back to his cottage with a few thick raindrops puddled in his hair. But what if he didn’t make it back at all?

  Sometimes, not often, it made him unaccountably happy to think of the curtain swinging shut on his life. To be taken in an instant. To have a lightning bolt find him and leave for the staff of Kindermann Forest a stirring artifact: his half-charred loafers steaming in the meadow grass.

  Nothing of the sort happened. The remaining events of his night were small and ordinary. He brushed his teeth (real teeth, not even a crown or bridge). He went to bed. Three hours later he woke to a muted gray dawn and a steady drizzling rain against the cottage window.

  He had every right to feel groggy and drained. A pleasant surprise then that he should feel such unexpected vigor in exchange for so little rest. He washed and dressed. Then he passed from his cottage into the much larger camp office, where he brewed a pot of coffee and sat behind the director’s desk.

  At six-thirty he called Meadowmont Gardens Nursing Home and spoke to Mrs. Davenport, the shift supervisor on Hall 2A, regarding what progress, or lack thereof, had been observed during the previous week. While they talked, a nurse’s aide helped Schuller’s brother, Sandie, shuffle from his room to a lavishly furnished yet sterile parlor, to a leather armchair, to a telephone receiver placed in Sandie’s left hand and guided to a resting place between his neck and chin.

  This was a ritual carefully followed each Saturday morning for the past eleven months, since Sandie’s release from the hospital and his admittance to Meadowmont Gardens. Impossible to know whether these phone calls lifted Sandie’s spirits; on the whole they left Schuller feeling glum. And it wasn’t so much Sandie’s disabilities, his pivoting shuffle and withered left side, his grossly slurred and often impenetrable speech, which eleven months of therapy had done little to improve. No, it was a certain dullness that Schuller had detected in his brother several years before the stroke, a slackening of interest in camp activities, in his model railroad sets, in himself. Difficult to share a life and a cottage with someone so annoyingly mild. All the more troubling because they were twins. Not identical, but fraternal twins who happened to look a good deal alike. Not identical, they’d explained to the unobservant thousands of times during their seventy-eight years as siblings and four decades as codirectors of Kindermann Forest Summer Camp, during their long and unbroken bachelorhood—though, of course, few people would mistake them as identical now.

  “There’s some weather headed your way,” Schuller began. “We got it last night. Wind and showers and whatnot. Nothing dire, but if you’re going out to Holy Infant this afternoon, you’ll want to have Theresa bring along an umbrella.”

  To this a curt reply, not so much a word as a breathy huff of acknowledgment.

  “And you’re adjusting very well to the new blood medication. No dizziness with this one. At least according to Mrs. Davenport. That’s good news, I would think.”

  From Sandie a murmur, a kind of elongated “huuurrummmmmph.”

  They were abrupt and one-sided, these Saturday phone conversations. One always hoped for the solace of family connection, but then again, one was frequently disappointed. At least today Schuller had an interesting topic. He began describing last night’s spectacle, the shock of it, the willfulness involved, and a question came to him: he wanted to know what would cause young women to undress and behave that way. Schuller had grown up in the world of boys and men and knew their tendencies. But women? It was widely known they didn’t have the same appetites as men. So what pressures had been brought to bear on them? Was it alcohol? When it came to the conduct of women, Sandie’s experience extended beyond his own. Certainly, Schuller would have liked to have known, but instead he talked about the strewn clothing and cigarettes and beer bottles, and at last he received a prolonged response, sibilant and damp and plaintive-sounding. Without recognizing a single word, he understood the sum and substance of Sandie’s reply, his primary objection: the location of the swimming pool. Years earlier Schuller had insisted the pool be built twenty yards into the woods, and he was now willing to concede that it wasn’t worth the extra expense, or years of leaf-clogged filters and root damage, not to mention the after-hours enticement a secluded pool presented to young counselors. So, yes, Schuller admitted, an unwise choice all around. He should not have been so stubborn. The problem at hand, though, was the violation of camp rules that had occurred the night before. Schuller had a specific penalty in mind, and when he shared this, he was surprised by both the vehemence of the response and by the fact that he’d not made sense of a single word.

  “All right,” he told his brother. “I’ll certainly take that into consideration. We may just be of the—”

  Another forceful reply, of which Schuller understood the words you and anyway.

  “Very well, Sandie. You’re still my codirector after all. I remind everyone here of that. I do. All the time.”

  “Sal-waze dun hut-chu-like.”

  “I think so, yes. I’m inclined to agree. Now then, Mrs. Davenport says the van to Holy Infant leaves at three this afternoon. That’s an hour early. Theresa knows this. She’ll have everything ready. So, give my best to Father Ed and, well, everyone. Goodbye, Sandie.” He hung up the phone and watched several beaded drops of rain commingle and slide down the office picture window.

  At seven-thirty he convened an emergency meeting of the senior staff: Program Director Linda Rucker, Head Cook Maureen Boyd, Head of Maintenance Reggie Boyd. Normally, a senior staff meeting would have included the head lifeguard and camp nurse and several others. Not so this meeting, which Schuller decided to limit to just himself and the three others: Linda, Maureen, Reggie, each of whom had worked at Kindermann Forest more than fifteen summers.

  They arranged their chairs in a half circle around the director’s desk and then went straight to the strong pot of coffee Schuller had brewed, filled their cups and grimaced at the first sip.

  He said it as plainly and forcefully as he could: “There’s been an incident that requires our immediate attention.” The somber tone he’d used and the careful way he’d assembled his words made Linda Rucker slump down into her chair and then lift her broad face up to Schuller with a wince of trepidation.

  He recounted for them the events of the previous night, along with the pertinent details: the drinking, the discarded clothing, the inflatable hot dog and inner tube. Reckless behavior to be sure. More reckless, more vulgar than the usual indulgences of a summer camp staff. When Schuller revealed his recommended penalty for last night’s violations, he could tell it was not to Linda’s and Maureen’s liking. Quiet, uncomplicated Reggie Boyd, Maureen’s nephew, looked as if he wished he were back in the oily kingdom of his maintenance shed.

  “Let’s think a moment, Schuller,” Linda said. “Let’s slow down just a minute and make sure this is the right step for us to take.”

  He assured them he had thought it through. And it was the right step. No use trying to sort out all the different offenses: curfew, alcohol, trespassing, nudity. Much simpler to apply the same penalty to everyone.

  “But we have to think about the timing, don’t we?” Linda asked. “Is it the best thing to do now, with the training nearly done? With the first and most difficult camp session still ahead of us?” Between Linda and Maureen there was a certain glance, pained and knowing, as if his involvement in this matter was an ordeal to be endured.

  But what could they do, really—except exchange their glances and ask their patient questions? It was up to Schuller to determine what was necessa
ry. He was still founder and owner of Kindermann Forest. The camp bore his name. The fact of it was so obvious it couldn’t be spoken aloud.

  After the meeting, he walked with his senior staff across the meadow to the mess hall for breakfast.

  At least they, his truant counselors, had managed to bring themselves, bleary and uncombed, to the mess hall tables. Schuller stood for Morning Prayer. Afterward platters of scrambled eggs and pancakes were passed from table to table. When breakfast was done, he rose and walked among the benches and finally motioned to a petite, freckled young woman, an arts and crafts attendant. He believed her name was Stacy. “Would you be kind enough to walk with me to the camp office?” he asked. And she nodded and strolled beside him, patiently, as he traversed the length of meadow.

  Inside the office he sat her on the opposite side of the director’s desk and without preamble told her that her employment at Kindermann Forest had ended and she should make arrangements to be gone by dinnertime, if not sooner. She stared at him coolly from across the reach of the desk, a red-haired, pixie-faced college freshman who could pass for fifteen. Perhaps she thought of herself as brave. If so, she would need to revise her opinion. When he slid the phone across the table, when she dialed and spoke the first words to her father, her voice caught in her throat and she let out a loud, blubbering sob. Her father’s remarks seemed to make matters worse. She hung up the phone and cried harder. After a while she stopped. Schuller sent her to her cabin to pack and set out across the meadow to the mess hall.

  It was a round-trip journey he made fourteen more times. Odd, but you could never tell in advance how a counselor would receive the news. Those who trembled and stuttered with anxiety during the walk over sometimes found a well of self-possession to draw upon when the phone was passed to them. Some who were aloof broke down. Kenny Cossman, unit leader for male counselors, cried. Schuller had spotted burly Kenny the previous night bouncing up the pool steps with his clothes in his arms (his penis half-erect and bouncing along with him). Too late now, of course. Nothing could be changed, senior staff member or not. But how odd it was, truly, to observe Kenny and several of the other large young men. They pleaded. They begged his pardon or cursed under their breath. Yet when the phone was handed to them, they huffed and sputtered and wept. Was there a particular frailty to large men when it came to being dismissed? One had to wonder.

  He called upon Head Lifeguard Wendy Kavanagh last. By then, of course, the news was out. As they walked toward the camp office, she asked if it was mandatory that she be packed and out of camp by dinnertime.

  He said it was.

  Because her mother, she explained, would have to drive down from Chicago and wouldn’t reach Kindermann Forest until after dark.

  “Then you may wait on the bench outside the front gate,” Schuller told her.

  In the office she went straight to the phone and placed her call. “Swimming,” she said to her mother. “Swimming at night. After curfew. Oh yes,” she said, as if just now remembering. “Swimming naked. Yes, Mom,” she said. “Right. Wait a minute.” She held the receiver to her chest and turned her gaze across the table toward him. “Why?” she asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are we being fired?”

  He nearly laughed. What a ridiculous girl! Was the whole world a puzzle to her? “As a counselor,” he said, “you have responsibilities, yes? For example, you are in charge of campers. And what if they were to sneak from their cabins—such things happen all the time—and see you and other counselors drinking and parading naked about the pool? What sort of lasting impression would that make? And what would it do to Kindermann Forest’s reputation if they were to return home and tell their parents or guardians?”

  “But there are no campers,” Wendy said. “The campers don’t arrive till Monday.”

  In his mind’s eye he reviewed what he’d seen of her the night before: her paunchy belly and enormous buttocks and thighs, the whistle dangling between her heavy breasts. Of the many reasons he had for firing her and her fellow counselors, the first was simple outrage. Outrage at the stupidity of the young. There was an old-fashioned name for this stupidity: callowness. What they’d been celebrating last night, these callow young men and women, was the oldest and most tedious joke—the penis, the vagina, the spectacle of intercourse. If they couldn’t feel shame at their own callowness, then let them at least feel the humiliation of being fired.

  “Even so,” he said. “Campers or no campers. The principle remains the same.”

  As it turned out, they’d inherited a muggy and slate gray morning. Schuller would have liked to have settled down in his cottage for a nap. Yet to do so would deny his remaining staff an essential loyalty: after all, if he were principled enough to make the truly hard decisions, then he should be equally mindful of helping to deal with the consequences. Inside the mess hall he found what remained of his senior staff in a desultory huddle around the director’s dining table: Linda Rucker, Maureen and Reggie Boyd, Camp Nurse Harriet Foster.

  Of course, it wasn’t anywhere near as hopeless as they thought. He told them so. No time for discouragement, he said. Yes, they had two days to assemble a new staff of counselors before the campers arrived on Monday afternoon, but they would not be alone in the enterprise. He knew of more than twenty professional acquaintances who would begin working at once on their behalf. For instance, a list of potential lifeguards could be obtained from the YMCA. Counselors might be hired from the highest ranks of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts or from seminaries or from more than a dozen midwestern charity organizations. Not so impossible after all, he said, and for the benefit of a defeated-looking Linda Rucker, he raised his soft eyebrows in an expression that he hoped was measured and wise and determined. Nearby, Nurse Foster’s five-year-old son—fatherless, lighter skinned than his black mother—sat on the floor and let an old-fashioned wood top spin inside the corral of his legs.

  Just outside the mess hall, on the pathways leading to and from the cabins, cliques of expelled counselors gathered to commiserate. No one, it seemed, could travel more than a few paces without receiving a prolonged embrace, a teary farewell. Schuller couldn’t help but marvel. What camaraderie, what solidarity of feeling, when, in fact, all they had done was endure a week’s worth of first aid and program training—and perhaps groped one another in the darkened woods.

  And on the patio adjoining the mess hall sat the three counselors who, the previous night, had obeyed camp regulations, honored curfew, and remained clothed and sober in the cabins. They were—it had to be noted—an ungainly bunch, the two girls bony, anxious, unlovely; the boy pale and cloddish and otherwise hopelessly bland. What a shame, too, because these inadequacies were always obvious to the campers’ parents. Even with the tumultuous events of the morning, these three couldn’t seem to manage among them any sort of spirited conversation. Nevertheless Schuller strolled by and gave them a nod of encouragement.

  But inwardly he brooded. Too bad, really. If it were possible, he would dismiss them all and start the summer from scratch.

  Chapter Two

  At that age—nineteen and twenty or a few years older—it was best not to think too hard about the assignments to which they committed themselves.

  They came from towns in Missouri and Arkansas and Illinois, and throughout winter, especially the dismal midwestern months of February and March, they imagined with startling clarity all the bright components that would make up their summertime lives. To think of it! The leisurely jobs they would hold. The weekend road trips taken with friends. The one unforgettable summer party at which they would do or say something daring and hilarious and thereby attract the notice of someone special, someone a mark or two wiser and more beautiful than they deserved. At that age they were the deepest and truest of romantics.

  By the second week of June it was clear that none of this would happen as they’d imagined. It probably wouldn’t happen at all. They couldn’t get over it, this chasmlike difference betwee
n their brightest imaginings and the sodden feel of their actual lives.

  But at church Sunday morning or on a flyer stuck to the door of their YMCA or in an out-of-the-blue phone call from a former teacher or scoutmaster they learned of an extraordinary opportunity.

  Needed Immediately. 12 Summer Camp Counselors. 2 Lifeguards. 1 Horse Wrangler. Work with children and others. Kindermann Forest Summer Camp, Shannon County, Missouri.

  A summer camp job. It set their minds racing. They could picture it all so clearly: the quaint, tree-shaded sleeping cabins, the rowdy and adoring children, the sudden camaraderie of other male and female counselors—the possibilities this entailed for tenderness, for sex.

  Beguiled, they called Kindermann Forest and spoke to Program Director Linda Rucker. They were given only a few hours to decide. That was part of the attraction. They paced around their backyards or up and down their parents’ driveways, and once they’d decided, they rushed back inside and made the announcement to their families. I’m going to camp. Yes, sleepaway camp. For the whole summer. It was all a mad rush after that. They had to first untangle themselves from various obligations—their dull summer jobs at the nursery and grocery store and drive-thru restaurant, which, embarrassingly, they had to quit after just a few weeks of training. Yet it was harder still, or trickier, to break free from their hometown boyfriends and girlfriends, whom they relied upon but did not love, at least not passionately. Yes, I know. I know. We had plans for the summer. Sure we did. But I guess I’ve changed my mind about those plans. I’m going away to camp.

  They spent their last evenings at home talking with close friends on the phone. Given the suddenness and haste of their departure, they could get by explaining themselves with simple platitudes. They were bored, they said. They were ready for a change. So why not give summer camp a try? They didn’t bother asking themselves where this new sense of adventure had come from. Their public reasons for going were all the same. Their private reasons were a different matter altogether.