The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

“And you make sure that, when you’re not walking beside him, you got him parked next to something sturdy he can hold on to.”

  “I will, Nurse Dunbar.” Then, thankfully, she was through with him, had turned her broad back and was treading a few heavy paces to the nearest white bus. Up the steps she went, hoisting herself and her dangling white purse. She slumped into the first bench, where she sat waiting, glumly, for the attendants to finish and the bus to whisk her away.

  Wyatt set a course for the mess hall porch. The person she’d pointed to was an odd-looking man—but weren’t they all odd-looking?—who gripped a porch column and swayed to and fro atop his stiff little legs. He was middle-aged with woolly sideburns, but his startled, blinking eyes, windowed behind sharp-cornered glasses, made him look newly hatched.

  “Leonard Peirpont?” Wyatt asked.

  The man set his squinting gaze on Wyatt. “I’m not supposed to cross this early in the year,” he said.

  “Yes? Not supposed to cross what?”

  “Not supposed to cross till July or August. Depends on the weather.”

  Wyatt placed a hand on the man’s shoulder, peeled back his shirt. L. PEIRPONT. “All right then. I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Wyatt Huddy.”

  “Weren’t you one of them boys that got the call to come up . . .” Whatever came next seemed to elude Leonard Peirpont. He closed his eyes and concentrated, pursed and unpursed his lips, as if he were taking tiny, toothless bites of an imaginary fruit.

  “Come up?” Wyatt offered.

  “. . . up onto the stand . . .”

  “To come here to camp, you mean? To Kindermann Forest?”

  “Up onto the judge’s stand and get your ribbon.”

  “No, no. Not me.”

  “Your name on the ribbon and your name in the county ledger.”

  “I don’t think so. Not my name, no.”

  It was a minor shock to discover that Thomas Anwar Toomey was a gaunt old man. Did they let gaunt old men come to summer camp? Apparently, they did.

  Thomas Anwar Toomey had a thick head of closely cropped, black-gray hair and deep hollows in both cheeks that suggested some type of dental collapse. He’d arrived at Kindermann Forest dressed in his pajamas and had found his way from the bus to the wide trunk of an oak tree shading the camp picnic tables. He stood with his sagging face just a few inches from the trunk, as if he and the tree were exchanging intimacies.

  “Thomas Anwar Toomey?” Wyatt asked.

  The old man turned from the tree. His full name was stitched onto the pocket of his pajamas. He kept rearranging his jaw and mouth as if readying to speak, though no words came out.

  A mute, Wyatt thought, though this turned out not to be so.

  Thomas Anwar Toomey had a pillowcase stuffed full of clothing and toiletries and, wedged beneath one arm, several blankets and bedsheets tied together in a knot. He dipped a hand into the loose pocket of his pajama bottoms and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Lucky Strikes. He held a single cigarette out to Wyatt. “Please,” Thomas Anwar said.

  He wanted fire, of course. Wyatt had to flag down a passing attendant and borrow matches. When he set fire to the tip, Thomas Anwar sealed his lips over the cigarette, sucked and gulped, sucked and gulped. A minute later there was nothing left but a wet nub. Thomas Anwar pulled out a fresh Lucky Strike. “Please,” he repeated.

  “No, no,” Wyatt said. “We have to find Jerry Johnston and move to our cabin.”

  “Please,” Thomas Anwar begged, but there was already a mark of defeat in his expression. With his baggy pajamas and knot of bedclothes, he looked like a man accustomed to disappointment, a refugee turned away at every border.

  Along a stretch of gravel pathway, near the opening to the woods, a group of campers had come together in a private little clique. There were seven of them in all, and they could easily have escaped into the scrub. Instead, they stood together in the shade. One of them would speak and the others would nod in recognition, a very stiff and exaggerated nod that required the bowing of their heads, necks, and shoulders. It took time for Wyatt to reach them—to hold Leonard Peirpont by the elbow and allow him his fraught and minuscule steps. Thomas Anwar Toomey shuffled behind. Once they’d drawn close, Wyatt could see the group was made up entirely of Down syndrome campers.

  He asked for Jerry Johnston, and several in the group turned toward a potbellied and middle-aged man in blue jean overalls. His brow was deeply creased, and his hair shot up from the crown of his forehead in a bristly, blond wave. Like the others in his group, he had thickly lidded eyes and a plump tongue that seemed always on the verge of sliding forward between his cracked lips.

  “Are you Jerry Johnston?” Wyatt offered.

  The man smiled in reply.

  “He’s saving up all his stars,” one of the Down syndrome women explained, and whatever this might mean, it set off a chain of raucous laughter.

  “Jerry will trade his stars in for peanut butter cups.”

  “Or TV magazines.”

  “Jerry’s on vacation now.”

  Each of these remarks, voiced by a different camper, drew a round of laughter.

  “Are you Jerry Johnston?” Wyatt asked the man. “If it’s all right, I’ll look at the tag inside your shirt.”

  It made Jerry Johnston laugh to be asked such a question, laugh even harder to have Wyatt peer inside the collar of his white T-shirt. He said to Wyatt, “I’ve been to camp three times in a row, but I haven’t seen you.”

  “I’m new this year,” Wyatt said. “We’re all new.”

  “Do you know my friend, Denny Ballantine?”

  “I don’t think so. Is he here at camp?”

  “He’s here in my pocket,” Jerry Johnston said, and from one of the many folds of his overalls he produced a photograph: a rotund middle-aged Down syndrome man in a bright red life vest crouched rather proudly before a canoe.

  “Denny Ballantine,” Jerry Johnston explained.

  Wyatt considered the photo and nodded, and it was then passed on to each member of the group, who did exactly the same thing, considered it and nodded, until it made its way back to its owner.

  “Will we have chocolate milk for bedtime snack?” Jerry asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Wyatt said. “Was there chocolate milk last year?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know then. Probably not.”

  “Can we choose which grace we say at breakfast?”

  “I guess so,” Wyatt said. “We should go to our cabin, Jerry. We should choose a bed before they’re all taken.”

  This was warning enough for Jerry to grab his bag and set out for the cabins at a fast clip. The rest of them—Wyatt, Leonard, Thomas Anwar—followed behind. They must have made a peculiar sight. Wyatt couldn’t help but wonder which of them was the oddest looking. No easy contest given that the standard had changed: all around them were countless other odd and misshapen campers stumbling toward the sleeping cabins. And as for judges, Wyatt’s fellow counselors looked too harried and miserable to offer an opinion. The same was true of the state attendants, a regiment of lean, uniformed black men who were bearing the last of the bags and bedlinens to the cabins. You could see in their eyes how eager they were to be back aboard their buses, minus their patients, rolling clear of the camp gate. A moment of celebration.

  In preparation for dinner the kitchen staff had swept and mopped the mess hall floor and set out thirty-five heavy wood tables that ran in neat rows from the center of the mess hall out to two adjoining screened porches. On each table fresh-cut dandelions had been placed in paper coffee cups. Beside the cups, folded index cards bore each counselor’s name, pink cards for female counselors, blue for male.

  Platters of food were set out on the enormous metal counter that separated the kitchen from the mess hall, and it was Wyatt’s duty to retrieve dinner—Salisbury steak in brown gravy, real mashed potatoes, canned sweet corn—and bring it to the table for Leonard Peirpont, Thomas Anwar Toomey, and Jerry
Johnston to enjoy. Jerry proved to be the only enthusiastic eater, dredging his steak and potatoes through the gravy and chewing with a tempo that made his stiff head and shoulders bob up and down and his free hand tap, tap, tap against the table. Thomas Anwar hung his head over his plate. Once or twice he bent down close enough to touch his food with his nose or lips but then backed off, as if, on principle, he’d decided to deny himself.

  Leonard Peirpont had to be fed by hand. It wasn’t a matter of physical disability. He could grip a spoon and raise it shakily to his lips. It was just that, in the journey between plate and lips, he forgot his intentions. Midway, he might shake his head, blink naïvely, and say, “She was the one that expected you could grow carrots alongside summer melons.” Each of these musings caused Leonard Peirpont to marvel in wonder. And after his wonderment passed, he tried to reassess whatever action he might have been in the middle of. He gaped, dumbfounded, at the spoon in his hand.

  But there were far stranger happenings unfolding at other tables. There were men and women from the state hospital whose diseases left them in states so pitiful and rare that they could not, on first glance, be believed: a man whose tumored head had doubled in size and whose face had begun to sag and droop as if it were made of melting wax; several creatures, perhaps women, who were small, pale, nearly hairless, and darted about with the energy and nimbleness of monkeys. By far the most striking, or rather the most horrendous, were two elderly twins, the Mulcrone sisters, whose malformation was so astounding it could not be stared at directly or even properly acknowledged. The new counselors of Kindermann Forest, Wyatt included, looked at the sisters and turned away. Later, maybe, he and the other counselors would come to believe and accept. But for now it was better to think that what they saw must be a trick of the sisters’ intense homeliness and the hall’s bad lighting.

  Of course they were not all monstrous. Among the campers were scores of men and women whose syndromes and conditions had rendered them childlike in appearance, and a dozen others who could pass as normal until they drew near and one could see a troubling unevenness in their gaze.

  To be sure, though, they were all of one tribe. There were many of them and few of the counselors. As a tribe, they could do what they pleased. More than a few had risen from the benches, their mouths crammed with food, and stumbled to the nearest porch screen. Step by step, they began feeling their way along the screened perimeter of the mess hall. It was no use at all for their counselors to shout or make threats. These wandering campers couldn’t easily be called back to their tables.

  Wyatt spotted, in the crowded center of the hall, bobbing above the campers’ heads, a large serving tray—a muffin tray held aloft by an upraised hand. The young woman who carried it was slim and dark haired, dark-skinned, too—alert-looking, pretty. She wore an expression of severe concentration that was all the more striking for the mayhem erupting around her.

  Easy enough to guess who she might be: Harriet Foster, the camp nurse. Her muffin tray was filled with medications.

  She went from table to table, from camper to camper, placing pills in their hands, sometimes waiting long minutes until each pill found its way into the cavern of their mouths and was flushed down with water. At Wyatt’s table she had lithium for Thomas Anwar, phenobarbital for Leonard, digoxin and Tagamet for Jerry Johnston. Before they swallowed their pills, she had Wyatt verify and re-verify their names.

  “Do you take any medications, Wyatt?” Nurse Foster asked him. “Did you bring any pills to camp—prescription pills from the doctor or over-the-counter pills from the drugstore?”

  It confused him, this question. For a while he thought Nurse Foster had mistaken him for a camper. “I’m a counselor,” he explained meekly.

  “I know you are,” she said. “I’m asking all the counselors the same question. Did you bring any medications to camp?”

  The only pills he’d brought were fiber tablets to aid his digestion. “Yes. Stomach medicine,” he said to Nurse Foster, and she nodded and told him to bring his stomach medicine to the infirmary for safekeeping. “Thank you, Wyatt,” she said, and before she turned and moved on to the next table, she placed her free hand lightly, briefly, on his shoulder.

  He’d not expected this: the settling of her warm hand on his shoulder—a remarkable happening, at least in Wyatt’s experience.

  Program Director Linda Rucker had scheduled a different activity each evening, and this being Monday, the first evening, she’d made preparations for the Kindermann Forest Welcome Parade. An unusual parade, since the entire camp walked and there was no one to wave from the roadside. Two of the oldest and most tolerant mares were bridled and brought down from the stable to lead the way. Sashes and batons were handed out. The camp tractor was hitched to a flat-top trailer, and those, like Leonard Peirpont, too unsteady to walk the length of camp, were allowed to ride atop the trailer, waving as if from a parade float.

  By nightfall they were back in their cabins, though nearly everything about the cabin interiors—the light and smell and calm order of things—had undergone a vivid transformation. In sleeping Cabin Two, the bunk beds were askew and draped in strewn clothing. Shambling retarded men wandered the aisle ways and porch, some of them half-dressed or undressed. They pressed their faces to the window screen and sent their gruff squeals and barking laughter out into the night. It took courage to step inside the cabin bathroom, breathe the steamy and rank air, make your way past the line of toilets and showers, each with its own pitiful scene to look upon. Worse even to discover what services would be required of the male counselors. Some campers could not wash their own bodies. Others couldn’t wipe themselves after a bowel movement. Wyatt and his fellow male counselors performed these duties, did them quickly and often badly. While in the jurisdiction of the bathroom, they made a point not to look one another in the eye or in any way acknowledge whatever task they’d just performed. They’d been told to have their campers showered by nine, dressed in pajamas and in their beds by nine-twenty. In theory, a sensible plan; in reality, all but impossible because the male campers of Cabin Two were more awake, more charged with the newness of their surroundings, than they’d been at any time throughout the day.

  On a square of concrete just outside the cabin porch, Thomas Anwar Toomey had found a place to do his frantic smoking. He studied the woods as he smoked, leaning one way then another and squinting at some dark shape lodged among the tree trunks and shrubbery. Never once did he step off the square of concrete. After each vanquished cigarette, he’d enter the cabin and trail after Wyatt, sometimes clutching the hem of Wyatt’s T-shirt with his bony fingers. “Please,” he said, meaning another lighted match, another cigarette.

  “But remember,” Wyatt said. “You only have one pack of cigarettes for each day you’re at camp. If you smoke them one after another, you’ll run out. A few days from now you won’t have any cigarettes left at all.”

  This warning settled over Thomas Anwar in crushing increments. His hands trembled. In his stricken demeanor Wyatt glimpsed a life of quaking anxiety.

  “Ahhh!” Thomas Anwar sighed. “But what can I do?”

  “You’ll have to save your cigarettes. Instead of smoking one after another, smoke one each half hour.”

  And so, beginning at nine, Thomas Anwar stood on the porch studying his wristwatch. At nine-thirty, and at ten, he came looking for Wyatt. Thomas Anwar was back again at ten-thirty. Once more they stepped outside onto the square of concrete and Wyatt struck a match. A peculiar sight to watch Thomas Anwar gulping at his cigarette with the desperation of a landed fish. All the while, he kept peering out at the woods, especially at the slanting boundary where the cabin’s floodlights ended and a curtain of deep shadows began.

  “What is it you keep looking for?” Wyatt asked.

  There was no sign that Thomas Anwar had heard the question. Or that he intended to answer it. But then several moments passed and he shook his head mournfully and said, “He’s followed me here.”

&n
bsp; “Followed you? Who?”

  “I told them at the hospital that he’d follow me, but they wouldn’t believe it. And now here he is, sneaking up on me from behind the trees. Ahhh! Right there, yes? Right there. Do you see him?”

  “I don’t,” Wyatt said. “See who?”

  Clearly it was a source of discomfort, of genuine embarrassment for Thomas Anwar to provide a name. He cringed. His cheeks sagged pitifully. “He is Thomas Anwar Toomey. He has followed me here from the hospital.”

  “I don’t think so,” Wyatt consoled him.

  “He’s waiting for me to fall to the floor and die.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Wyatt repeated. “You don’t need to worry anyway. You are Thomas Anwar Toomey. You’re right here. You can’t be two places at the same time.”

  Almost certainly Thomas Anwar had heard such advice before. He smiled a thin and patient smile, an indication that he’d received a lifetime’s worth of similar counsel, all of it worthless. He pulled deeply on his cigarette with trembling lips.

  At a quarter to eleven word passed from cabin to cabin that all counselors should convene in fifteen minutes for a staff meeting.

  This news set in motion a rush of activity. The campers of Cabin Two were sent and, in some instances, dragged to their beds. They wouldn’t stay put for long, of course; they seemed to know this new urgency would be short-lived. Of Wyatt’s three charges, only Leonard Peirpont could be counted on not to stray. He lay on his bunk with the same bolt-straight, fused posture he used when standing. His arms were at his sides. He’d forgotten to remove his glasses, and even when this was done for him—the glasses carefully folded and placed in his pajama pocket—he lay perfectly still, blinking up wide-eyed at the bunk above him.

  Two Kindermann Forest maintenance men appeared on the porch landing. Normally they’d have ended their shift at 7:00 P.M. and gone home. Tonight they had been told to stay late and perform cabin watch. They were hard-looking, scrappy young men, yet the prospect of being left to rule the cabin, with its barracks of noisy retarded men, appeared to fill them with dread.