The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  Marcy Bittman accepted a lifeguard position because after just a week at home she found the sight and especially the sound of her mother, Coco Bittman, almost unbearable. She had no idea why. They adored each other. While away at college Marcy talked with Coco once or twice a day. They were known in Marcy’s sorority as the daughter and mother so young and lively they could pass as sisters. When Marcy took the job at Kindermann Forest, she told her weeping mother that without the services of a certified lifeguard the camp would have to shut its doors and turn away hundreds of heartbroken children.

  Veronica Yordy went to camp because her friend and sorority sister Marcy Bittman was going.

  Wayne Kesterson signed on at Kindermann Forest because he’d been tried in Missouri State Court and found guilty of possessing five and a half ounces of homegrown marijuana. He’d be sentenced, probably to jail time, on the second Monday of September. The Big House. The Slammer. He could joke about it to family and friends. But inwardly he felt a long, steady surge of panic. It was agonizing, really. He needed something to fill the long summer days.

  Stephen Walburn took a job as wrangler because he overheard his drunken aunt Marie say that a skinny man could only be attractive to women if he was seen in full command of a galloping horse.

  Carrie Reinkenmeyer took a counselor position because everyone in her small Arkansas town knew she’d made love to the stupidest and least attractive boy in her high school senior class. The teasing she received, most of it from female friends, was constant and frequently cruel. But the experience itself was tender and not at all unsatisfying—and, if she didn’t leave right away, likely to be repeated.

  Christopher Waterhouse went because those in charge of Kindermann Forest seemed to have changed their minds about him. He’d applied for a lifeguard position in April. After three weeks and no word, he called to see if they’d received his application. They had, a woman said. You’ll just have to wait for your letter. Ten days later the letter came. No thank you. They hadn’t even invited him down for an interview. To hell with them, he thought. He’d work at a better camp. Or start his own.

  Now, when he called to ask about a possible job, the only question put to him was, How soon can you get here?

  There were a dozen others, among them Kathleen Bram and Daniel Hartpence and Ellen Swinderman and Gibby Tumminello and Michael Lauderback and Emily Boehler, all of whom were not in the habit of weighing their private reasons for anything they did. For them it was simple. The offer came to them. A voice inside said, Go.

  A clear voice inside Wyatt Huddy said, Go. But an equally clear and probably wiser voice said, Better stay put. Better stay exactly where you are. It was exhausting to be caught between these two opposites. Yes and No. Go and Stay. A needling ache settled into the corner of his stomach. Throughout the night he flitted in and out of sleep—his thoughts urgent and full of raw feeling.

  It was as if the summer months ahead were being divided into two distinct regions: the land of staying put and being exactly who everyone knew him to be. Or the land of going away and presenting a version of himself that the children and counselors at camp might find agreeable.

  A strange and precarious place, this second land.

  Chapter Three

  Toward morning the ache in his stomach dissolved. His thoughts slowed. For several hours he slept a grateful, unbroken sleep. When he woke, his mind was steady and clear—unstirred by worry. This seemed to Wyatt like a minor miracle. How on earth had he managed it?

  From the window of his back room—a former woodshop and now a bedroom of sorts—he watched the morning light, slanted and grainy, flooding over the depot yard and revealing, in small increments, the long gravel driveway, the donations trucks parked side by side, the twin Dumpsters, the stone fountains and secondhand playground sets, the gifted (and tarnished) camper shells and tractor equipment; all of it settled atop a scrubby, brown lawn. Nothing rare or beautiful about this landscape, except that for a few minutes every day—in the early morning and again in the late evening—what went on outside his back room window was Wyatt Huddy’s to behold, exclusively so.

  He rose from bed and dressed for the coming day: blue jeans, a stretched and spotted XL T-shirt, his socks and work boots. He pried his retainer from the roof of his mouth and placed it, hideous and wet, into its plastic holder. Then he paced down the hall and at the showroom entranceway flipped on every other switch and waited patiently while the long bars of fluorescent lights popped and sputtered and threw their white glare over the center’s enormous showroom floor.

  Lampshades and scuffed bedroom furniture and picture frames and racks of neatly hung dead men’s trousers: it went on forever. Because each item carried some residue, some intimacy, from its former owner, Wyatt had to convince himself that it was all ordinary enough to mark and sell or eventually throw away in one of two mammoth Dumpsters parked in the depot yard. He’d grown used to tossing out toys, particularly dolls, but sometimes the most inconsequential items could provoke him: a shoelace, for example, made in 1953 and perfectly sealed inside its paper and cellophane wrapper. What modest hopes its maker had once had for it. A shoelace. And what a sharp pang of regret for Wyatt to toss it forever unused into the Dumpster.

  Each morning—and this morning was no exception—a caravan of large, canvas-sided bins holding yesterday’s donations was lined up along the center aisle. Wyatt took a moment to rummage through them. No real treasures, of course. A stainless steel desk lamp, a flower vase, a glass certificate frame. To turn such shiny objects over in his hands was to be allowed an elongated view of himself. Impossible to explain this to others, but it was perfectly all right to go about the center’s showroom at 6:17 in the morning looking large and unkempt and Wyatt-like. For nearly two hours he would have sole use of the employee washroom and kitchen. He’d make breakfast and then begin sorting the bins. At eight Mrs. Barnett would come in and help him with the pricing. They’d work until the clerks, Mindy and Janet, arrived and counted up their cash drawers. By then a few bargain hunters might be waiting outside the sliding glass doors, which was fine if they were regular customers or friends of Mrs. Barnett. He would stay where he was and keep on with the pricing and shelving.

  But if they were strangers, especially mothers with small children, then the easiest and most pleasurable part of his workday was over, and he would hurry back to the loading dock, where, for the remainder of the morning and afternoon, he would unload and repair whatever heavy furniture the trucks brought in.

  It was taxing and sometimes hazardous work, which was why he felt such contentment now to stand in the employee kitchen pouring cereal and watching waffles cook in the blistering slots of a donated toaster. At the break room table he set out a magazine to read, a bygone issue of Popular Mechanics. This morning’s article: “Build Your Own Watercraft of the Future!” The illustration was certainly handsome, though the assembly instructions thwarted him at every turn. Align the aft portion of the chine and sheer clamp carefully to allow for the thickness of the transom. The coamings should be cut from 1/2-in. mahogany and rabbetted to the top edge of . . .

  When he glanced up from the magazine, he heard a steady thump-thump-clink, thump-thump-clink that couldn’t have been the ventilation or any of the center’s innumerable objects settling on the shelf. He stood and cocked an ear toward each corner of the showroom. Then he made his way down the center aisle and out the back door to the loading dock.

  There was Captain Throckmorton trudging away atop a rickety treadmill that the donation trucks had brought in the day before. A crown of sweat had beaded around the captain’s bald head. Every few seconds a drop would plunge down his cheek or the back of his neck. He seemed not to know what to do with his arms and, finally, to keep them from bouncing at his sides, rested them on the shelf of his belly, a high-set belly, firm-looking and comically round. From time to time he glanced at Wyatt and rolled his eyes as if to say, I know I look ridiculous. I know I’m a spectacle.

  Ma
ybe others might have thought so. Not Wyatt, who a few years earlier had been rescued by Captain Throckmorton from a steadily worsening family situation. If there was anything truly unusual about the captain, it was that, unlike the other Salvation Army captains or other men who worked at the center, he didn’t appear to have stumbled shaken and pale and weak out of a ruinous past life. He lived across the street and shared an apartment with his best friend, the barber Ed McClintock. They both sang tenor in the St. James choir. Each Wednesday evening they invited Wyatt to their apartment for dinner and board games. Just before they began their game—usually Risk or Yahtzee—Ed McClintock made coffee and poured a single shot glass of Irish Cream into his and the captain’s cups. This would be the only alcohol they’d consume all evening, perhaps all week, and, before raising the cup for his first sip, Ed McClintock would say, “Here’s to our glamorous lives, Captain.”

  Eventually Captain Throckmorton slowed his pace and stepped off the treadmill. He consulted a stopwatch hanging from his neck. For a while he did nothing but breathe deeply. “Eleven minutes,” he said. “And from what I’ve heard some people will torture themselves on these things an hour a day? Could that be true?”

  Wyatt said that yes, he thought it could.

  “Hard to believe,” Captain Throckmorton said. He studied the treadmill as if it had reneged on an extravagant promise. Then he produced a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his brow and chin. “How’d the watch go last night, Wyatt?”

  “Fine.”

  “Nothing out of order?” he asked. “No cat burglars? No safecrackers?”

  Wyatt couldn’t help but grin. It was a joke he’d come to enjoy, that the captain paid him to watch over the depot yard and showroom at night rather than unload the donation trucks during the day. That was part of the joke. The other part, which he’d not quite understood at first, was that few, if any, thieves would be interested in secondhand furniture and clothing in a Salvation Army depot on the outskirts of Jefferson City, Missouri. “No safecrackers,” he reported. “But I was thinking about it some, and I wanted to ask . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it a rule, do you think, that everyone has to swim? Everyone who works at a summer camp?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Captain Throckmorton said. He squinted in concentration. “No,” he said. “Probably not.”

  “Because it seems like it would be a rule. Every time you see a show about a summer camp on TV, people are always swimming.”

  “I’m sure it’s not a rule. I’m sure there are counselors who don’t swim at all.”

  “Yes, maybe,” Wyatt said. From the wide concrete lip of the loading dock he looked out across the depot yard at the donation trucks and Dumpsters, the swing sets and yard fountains, the same fixtures, mostly, that he’d studied a short while earlier, upon waking, from the uncurtained window of his back room. There wasn’t anything he could say by way of explanation. It wasn’t as if he’d been able to reason out a decision. Yes or No. Go or Stay. The best he could do now was take a deep breath and decide on a whim. “All right then,” he said. He filled his lungs with damp morning air. “I’ll go ahead and do it,” he said. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll go ahead and start working at the summer camp.”

  It was rare to see Captain Throckmorton taken by surprise. There was a sharp focus to his gaze. His coloring deepened into something like a blush. “You will?” he said. “I’m very glad to hear that, Wyatt. Very glad. It would have been a mistake, I think, to waste your summer here.”

  “Yes, maybe so.”

  “I’ll get on the phone right away and let Mr. Kindermann know you’re coming. And I’ll have one of the ladies from the St. James auxiliary drive you down.” He smiled hugely. “This is good news,” he said. “You’ve changed your mind. Was it about the swimming all along?”

  Wyatt hardly knew how to answer. “Not just swimming,” he said. “It’s always hard, isn’t it? When you have to go someplace new. And settle in. And introduce yourself a hundred times.”

  “I guess it is, yes.”

  “Especially for me,” Wyatt said. “Plus, I’ve never tried working with children.”

  Once his word had been given, it couldn’t be taken back. He knew that. He packed his clothes and towels and soaps and the retainer he wore at night and a book about American presidents he didn’t much enjoy reading. Mrs. Barnett brought him a flashlight and canteen she’d gathered from the store shelves. She told him to spray for insects and not to stand in direct sunshine. The clerks, Mindy and Janet, who rarely talked to him, stood unseen in the hallway outside his room and called out together in the same tepid voice, “Have a good summer, Wyatt.” Captain Throckmorton hurried to Sears and bought a new sleeping bag. He said, “Choose a bunk bed near a window.” He said, “If you get a cold or sunburn or poison oak rash, go straight to the camp nurse.” He said, “A good way to begin a conversation is to say, ‘Excuse me. I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Wyatt Huddy.’”

  By now the center, which had been entirely and exquisitely Wyatt’s at 6:00 A.M., was alive with the clamor of phones and earnest customers. Both Mrs. Barnett and Captain Throckmorton had matters to attend to. Their goodbyes were rushed and clumsy. “Take care and . . . be careful.” The truck drivers, hard-pressed and often bitter older men, considered Wyatt’s leaving a desertion. Why summer camp? they asked. What’s the point when there are upright freezers and heavy office desks to unload? Wyatt couldn’t think of a reasonable answer, and so, to escape their sourness, he waited out back beside the gravel lane that led from Highway 54 up to the loading dock.

  Ten minutes later a white Ford Galaxie turned into the lane and made a halting progress toward the depot building. It rolled past him. It braked. It backed up. “Excuse me,” a voice called from the driver’s window. “I’m looking for Captain Throckmorton.”

  “He’s in his office,” Wyatt said. “But he’s . . . Are you from St. James?”

  The driver, a middle-aged woman in a sleeveless checkered blouse, had climbed from the car and was rounding its front end. “I’ve been assigned a job,” she said. “And I was wonder—” She stopped in her tracks.

  “I’m Wyatt Huddy,” he said.

  She noticed his duffel bag and turned the whole of her attention toward it. All the features of her ruddy face were pinched in concentration. She furrowed her brow. She grimaced. After a while she said, “The back driveway to the depot, it’s not very well . . .”

  “Known?” he offered.

  “Marked,” she said, still scrutinizing his duffel bag. “I passed the signpost a few times before I saw it and then . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Then you found it.”

  “Yes. I’m Barbara McCauley from the St. James auxiliary.”

  “Thank you for driving me.”

  “Oh,” she said and waved her hand to and fro. “It’s not any . . .”

  “But it is. It’s a long way, there and back. Would you like me to ride in the backseat, Barbara?”

  She appeared to consider the offer, tilted her head in thought, reached a conclusion. “Up front is fine,” she said.

  Yet once they’d buckled themselves in and set out, she seemed unnerved by his close proximity. She gripped the wheel and fixed her gaze on the road ahead. What he felt for her then, what he always felt in these strained circumstances, was a tenderness so acute it nearly pierced his heart. Who better than he to understand her discomfort, her embarrassment? He was, after all, well acquainted with the many flavors of distress people felt upon first seeing him. In Barbara McCauley’s case it wouldn’t improve matters to explain that the displacement of his features—the left half of the face higher than the right, the eyes offset by nearly an inch, the nose a bit mashed, the right side of his mouth sloping down—had a name, and that those unfamiliar with the disorder always assumed its sufferers were mentally retarded, when, luckily or unluckily, they were often of average intelligence.

  He wasn’t retarded, a fact to b
e carefully and painfully imparted to every stranger he met. Not disabled. Not handicapped.

  But not the equal of other young men or women his age, either. He’d earned a high school equivalency diploma from a technical school. He could assist in the repair of lawn mowers and certain automobiles and might have gone further in this career were it not for the machine manuals, which proved either too difficult or too poorly written. But he could weld. He had a good memory. In the two and a half years he’d lived in the depot, Captain Throckmorton had taught him to keep track of stock and pay utility bills and answer telephone inquiries.

  They rode with the windows down to the outskirts of Jefferson City. Once the highway traffic opened up, Barbara McCauley let one hand drop from the wheel and braved a glance in his direction.

  “I bet you’re an athlete,” she said. “I bet you play football. Does the Salvation Army have sports teams?”

  “They don’t, no. Not sports teams.”

  “But you’ve played some football, haven’t you?”

  “Not really. We play field hockey on the dock sometimes, me and one of the other loaders.”

  “Oh, but you should talk to the other boys you work with and get them all together for a football match. You’d be great at it. A young man your size. You’d smash right on through and score a goal.”

  “Thank you, Barbara. I’ll think about doing that.”

  She turned her attention back to the highway, which was arrow-straight and sided by long-drawn fields of squatty soybeans, wavering corn.

  Certain things about the Salvation Army depot he was glad to have escaped. No, not things. Certain people. The register clerks, Mindy and Janet. Wyatt didn’t enjoy their company, though he wasn’t able to share this opinion, since everyone else at the depot—employees and customers alike—thought Mindy and Janet were wonderful. They’d been inseparable best friends since childhood. Between them they’d developed a repertoire of code words and outrageous expressions. Often they goaded one another into hysterical laughter. (Unless, of course, either Mindy or Janet was in a sour mood, and then they would sulk and ridicule and make each other miserable.) But it was widely known that both young women had wild imaginations. For example, they could reach into a donation bin and pull out a random object, a pencil holder say, and pretend it was a blind man’s begging cup. For the rest of the afternoon, Mindy would teeter about the showroom calling out to Janet, Please, madam, please. Spare a nickel for a wretched blind man!