The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  The meeting took place in The Sanctuary, an oak board cottage that decades earlier had housed the camp office and was now a refuge where off-duty counselors might smoke and gossip and buy cold soda pop from a wobbly vending machine. The furnishings were meager: a pay phone, a refrigerator, three torn and dusty couches. Most of the girl counselors had arrived and settled in. They’d brought with them a climate of distress, of grievance. Counselor Emily Boehler, who’d attended to her camper’s seizures most of the day, had claimed the phone and was curled up on one arm of the sofa, head against the receiver. She seemed to have exhausted herself in describing the day’s ordeal, and whatever advice she was receiving only made her sigh dispiritedly and mumble, “Yes, all right, all right, yes,” into the phone.

  But they were all harried and distraught, especially the young women counselors of Cabin Four. It seemed there’d been an incident. An obese but otherwise docile female camper had, when led into the shower and sprayed with water, gone into a frenzy. She’d turned and seized two tight handfuls of her counselor, Kathleen Bram’s hair and pulled Kathleen down until she was curled up with her face pressed roughly against the shower floor. Then the camper, naked and furious, had sat on her and screamed.

  Kathleen Bram was the one wearing the cheek bandage. At dinner she’d looked sturdy and capable. At the moment, slouched on a dusty couch, she appeared drawn and timid. Her fellow girl counselors hovered around her. They’d come to her rescue in the shower and now, when she repeated the details of her story, they were stricken on her behalf. It was awful, they said. Awful what had happened to Kathleen. She should have been warned about what this camper might do. They put their arms around her and helped her sit up straight. Here, drink this, Kathleen, they said and offered her sips of Fresca. When she cried, they pushed her long brown bangs aside and wiped her forehead and the corners of her eyes with a cool cloth.

  This was, for Wyatt, a startling sight. He couldn’t help but stare. How had they managed it, these girl counselors? To have gone from strangers to confidantes, all in the course of a few hours?

  His fellow male counselors were not on such intimate terms. They did, however, share a moment on the way to the meeting. This had happened after they’d filed from the cabins and onto the dark pathways and were plodding through the thick sand of the volleyball court. They stopped. Together they turned and looked back into the black scrim of the woods from where they’d come. All they could see was the splintered gleam of the cabin porch lights. But they could hear, with a shrill clarity, the howls and grunts of their male campers, sounds that spilled from the cabins’ screened windows and made their way to them through the woods.

  There at the volleyball courts half of the boy counselors lit cigarettes. “Jesus H. Christ,” one of them said. “Can you fucking believe what we’ve got ourselves into?”

  No answer to this, because they couldn’t believe it. So they stood there exhausted, looking back into the woods in numbed wonder.

  At The Sanctuary they had time to take stock of one another: the men sneaking measured glimpses of the women, the women sizing the men up in return. In the corner of the room, sitting primly on foldout chairs, were three unrecognized individuals, a young man and two young women. An unhappy trio. It took a moment to realize these three were all that remained of the original Kindermann Forest counseling staff. They were together but not, apparently, on friendly terms. No one yet knew their names. Everything about them—their closed postures and wooden expressions, their downcast gazes—made knowing them an irksome chore. So much easier to appraise them from across the room and then choose a sly nickname: the Lonesome Three.

  A few stragglers wandered in. The crowd within The Sanctuary had swelled to standing room capacity: sixteen counselors, two lifeguards, one wrangler. Still no sign of Linda Rucker or Mr. Kindermann, and this allowed the murmur of complaint to grow in volume and particularity. Everyone had a point to make: If only they’d known what to expect. If only they could have read their campers’ files ahead of time. If only the state hospital attendants had stayed long enough—a few hours at the very least—to see that the campers had properly settled in.

  Someone said, But they kept the truth from us. On purpose. So we’d show up. You understand that, don’t you?

  The mood in the room darkened by a degree or two. Yes, they were beginning to understand. They were ready now to consider a more serious charge, something beyond mere incompetence.

  At that moment a young man stepped into the center of the room and raised his hand in an appeal for quiet. His name was Christopher Waterhouse. Most of those gathered knew him, in part because he had the lanky swimmer’s build and brown-skinned boyish handsomeness befitting his name and assignment, a lifeguard, but also because rather than sneak away to the quiet of the closed swimming pool, as his fellow lifeguard had done, Christopher Waterhouse had spent his first day helping with the state hospital campers—chasing wanderers, carrying luggage, attending to fits and seizures and the unpleasantness of the showers and toilets, the sort of help that left you stinking, scratched, and shaken.

  “Excuse me,” Christopher Waterhouse said to those gathered. He had a fresh-faced, earnest gaze that might, in other circumstances, have discounted anything he had to say. “Excuse me,” he repeated, and when those who’d been whispering or fidgeting in their chairs fell quiet, he gave a small, half-embarrassed shrug. It wasn’t his intention to be a spokesman for the group. His little shrug made that perfectly clear. “I don’t think anyone who runs this place—Linda or Mr. Kindermann or whoever—has done a very good job preparing us,” he said.

  Around him the new counselors sighed in weary agreement.

  “But it’s worth remembering they’re in some kind of bind. I don’t know what exactly, something serious I’d guess. Serious enough that they’d fire most of the staff.”

  With that the collective interest turned away from Christopher, to the corner of the room, to the Lonesome Three. They wilted noticeably under this scrutiny. It seemed possible they might curl up on their chairs and shrink away to nothing at all. At last one of the three, a bony, inelegant girl, lifted her glum face and said, “Sex games. Sex games at the pool.”

  There was a moment of hushed silence while the new counselors contemplated this news, as strange as anything they’d seen or heard that day.

  “That sounds pretty serious to me,” Christopher Waterhouse said. “The point is that when Mr. Kindermann and Linda Rucker spread the word about this job, they didn’t really make it clear who we’d be taking care of the first two weeks. They said state campers to some of us, but they didn’t explain what that meant. A minute ago I heard someone say it would serve them right if we walked off the job. Probably would. But the ones who’d pay for it would be the campers. They’d get bused right back to the state hospital.”

  To this several of the new counselors groaned in protest. It wouldn’t be their fault, they said, if the campers got bused back to the state hospital. Besides, would the campers even realize they’d been away?

  “Some of them wouldn’t,” Christopher said. “Most would. I mean, this may not look so great to us, but this is their two weeks’ vacation. It’s their idea of fun—walking in a parade, staying up half the night driving us batty.” He surveyed the girl counselors huddled around Kathleen on the couch. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, Kathleen.”

  From behind her tilted gauze bandage, Kathleen Bram looked up. Christopher’s apology, if that was what it was, had sounded personal enough to make her bow her head in acceptance.

  “I’m guessing that tomorrow they’ll behave better,” he said.

  “Or worse,” Emily Boehler replied. “By tomorrow we’ll be exhausted. Then they’ll push us to the limit.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Christopher said. “What we’re doing is training them, aren’t we? To get used to camp and get used to our schedule. They’ll catch on, I think. We’ll have much better days than today. That’s all I’m going to say abou
t it.” With that he took his place against the wall with the other young men. He lowered his head and concentrated, as if he were a stranger at a bus stop wrestling with a weighty dilemma.

  By the time Linda Rucker arrived, the grievous mood within The Sanctuary had lifted somewhat. She’d brought along a thick sheaf of papers to distribute—none of the new counselors had yet filled out an application, a tax or staff health form—and she paused more than once to look about the gathering with a puzzled expression.

  “Is everyone all right here?” she asked.

  A chorus of dull murmurs. A few careful nods.

  Still, something had taken place in her absence. She appeared to sense it, without having any notion of the grievances spoken or the deepening resentment from which she’d been spared.

  They were back in their cabins by midnight. What exactly had the meeting taught them? That it was their duty to stick beside their campers through all manner of seizures, fits, and rages. That they were never to hit back. That they would be paid once a month at the rate of one hundred and sixty-five dollars per week. Wyatt had learned the names of the other male counselors with whom he shared the responsibility of Cabin Two: Michael Lauderback, Gibby Tumminello, Christopher Waterhouse. The four of them made a weary and reluctant return to their cabin. They brushed their teeth at the bathroom sinks and treaded lightly to their beds—Michael and Gibby in the right barracks, Wyatt and Christopher in the left.

  Most of the campers had fallen into an exhausted state of repose that wasn’t exactly sleep. Their eyelids were closed or fluttering, and they seemed to be rocking back and forth in their narrow bunks, drawing their heavy breaths and snoring with an unnerving shrillness.

  This would be the last and perhaps most difficult task of the day: to crawl into their bunks and try to sleep in the close company of retarded men. It was as intimate as any of the other duties they’d performed that day. Best not to listen too closely. Or steal a glimpse of the campers’ collapsed and unguarded faces. One way for Wyatt to escape was to close his eyes and imagine himself in the showroom of the Salvation Army depot in Jefferson City, the racks of clothing and shelves of small kitchen appliances, all the innumerable objects that, if pictured clearly enough, might lull him to sleep.

  And he did sleep, for a while at least. At 3:00 A.M. he woke to Thomas Anwar’s rough knuckles grazing his cheek. “Please,” Thomas Anwar said. “Fire for my cigarette.”

  “No, no. Back to bed. Back to bed,” Wyatt whispered, and Thomas Anwar gave a slumped bow of resignation and shuffled away.

  An hour later another disturbance. Christopher Waterhouse had half-risen from his bunk and was shouting toward the far corner of the barracks. “Back to your beds! Now! Back to your beds!” Ten minutes of relative calm. “God damn you!” Christopher Waterhouse cried. He was out of his bunk, stomping up and down the aisle, wild-haired, frantic, utterly unlike the composed young man he’d been at the staff meeting. “Back to your fucking beds!” he screamed. His voice had gone hoarse in a yelping, childish way. He stepped toward Wyatt’s bunk. “You have any idea what they’re doing back there?” he demanded. “Fucking animals. Fucking disgusting,” he said. “I don’t have to put up with this. I don’t have to stay here another minute.” He had his clothing and sleeping bag balled under one arm, and he rushed from the barracks out to the porch. The screen door slammed, and he could be heard stomping loudly along the gravel path.

  In the corner of the barracks, not far from where Christopher had been sleeping, a group of campers had congregated between bunks. They were standing close together, as men might do in a baseball dugout or the back of a crowded bus.

  “Back to bed!” Wyatt demanded of them. He rose and stumbled barefoot down the aisle. Without expecting to, he came upon Leonard Peirpont’s bunk. Poor stiff-bodied, wide-eyed Leonard, just a few feet from the congregation of men.

  Wyatt reached down and lifted him from his bunk, hoisted him sideways onto his hip, as one might do a large child, and carried Leonard up the aisle and placed him in the bunk beside his own.

  “Back to your beds,” Wyatt called out.

  No acknowledgment from the huddle of men. They’d unfastened their pajama bottoms. In the darkest corner of the barracks they were squeezed together reaching for one another.

  He did not have the determination to bully them back to bed. They were disgusting, he told himself, though it wasn’t exactly disgust he felt. Rather he was deathly afraid of the evidence being shown to him. This was what the unfortunate of the world made do with. This was their tenderness. This or nothing at all.

  Chapter Six

  Here was a new fact of parenting for Harriet to consider: the things she would obscure for her son, James, the half-truths and sentimental fabrications he would eventually pay for. Sooner rather than later.

  Case in point: he was a powerful magnet for the retarded campers from the state hospital. They saw him and let out long, wailing shrieks—shrieks of amazement, shrieks of ferocious longing. Easy enough to understand their reasons for wanting to be near him. James was small and alert and perfectly formed. He was the child they would never be allowed to conceive or raise. They saw in him a version of their own arrested selves.

  All credible explanations. Not one of them mattered when, during the first camp breakfast, Tuesday morning, a gangly female cerebral palsy camper had stood up from a nearby bench, gone into a stumbling run, and seized James as he sat beside Schuller Kindermann at the director’s table. One moment the boy had been spooning jelly onto his French toast, the next he was hoisted up and clutched sideways to her hard bosom while she shook her head violently from side to side and let out a keening screech. Harriet, dispensing meds on the other side of the mess hall, handed off her muffin tray to a counselor and came running. Bad enough if James had burst into tears and cried for his mama. Instead, he’d crossed his hands over his face, closed his eyes, and let the rest of his body go slack—a state of surrender agonizing for Harriet to behold.

  A counselor and lifeguard had stepped in to help Harriet pry the boy loose. But what an effort it had been, and what a dire impression the cerebral palsy camper had made, with her shrill voice and spastic energy. Afterward Harriet had wanted to sit James down and amend her earlier advice: Forget their good hearts, honey. If they come for you, race toward the first normal-looking adult you can find.

  Luckily, the boy seemed to intuit this advice without having to be told. At meals he was ready to duck and fold himself beneath the director’s table at a moment’s notice. If he was playing beneath the apricot trees outside the infirmary, he would carefully track each approaching and departing camper. Whenever a camper broke from the pathway and lurched toward him, he would pivot on his heels and break into a run, a sly little move, almost funny were it not for the boy’s terrified concentration and frantic speed.

  The yard outside the infirmary was a meeting place of sorts. Counselors used its shaded benches as a way station where their campers could rest a few minutes and slurp water from a cast iron drinking fountain. Maureen and Reggie Boyd sometimes took their morning coffee breaks on those same benches, and soon enough Harriet, eager for camaraderie, set up a small first aid station at the yard’s picnic table and treated those who came to her with an assortment of lotions and bandages and stomach remedies. If the problem was more complicated or required disrobing, she would lead her patients inside, but not before she assigned James to sit beside a capable adult guardian.

  Usually this person turned out to be Linda Rucker. Solitary, sturdy, hardworking Linda Rucker. She oversaw every significant detail of daily operations, double-checked every schedule, signed every invoice and check. It had taken her just a day to know all the new counselors and an astonishing number of campers by name. For the State Hospital Session, she organized each evening’s campwide activity: the parade, the talent show, the camp Olympics, the farewell dance. A sizable portion of her mornings and afternoons was spent in the infirmary yard, on a bench near two gravel pathwa
ys, where she did paperwork and chatted with each group of campers as they stopped to rest. Whenever she noticed a counselor at the breaking point, she stepped in to relieve them of their most difficult camper for an hour or two.

  For James she’d made possible a rare and considerate privilege. The boy couldn’t step inside the gates of the swimming pool without being mobbed and terrified. But from four-forty to five o’clock each afternoon, once the pool had closed and the lifeguard staff got busy with cleaning and maintenance, Linda arranged twenty minutes for James to splash about the shallow end with his kickboard and water wings.

  Too bad that most of Linda Rucker’s generous acts went unrecognized. She wasn’t necessarily loved by her staff. For one thing she didn’t have the spry, athletic energy and sunny demeanor of a proper camp director. Perhaps there wasn’t a gracious way to describe her physique. Rugged? Bulky? Her legs were straight and thick, her hips square. From the waist up she was remarkably stout, broad in the shoulders and in the arms. She tended to swagger when she walked. She had a slumped way of lifting her head and looking about. But her eyes were a clear and lovely hazel, and their deep intelligence sharpened a face that might otherwise have seemed too wide and dull in its expressions. Women like Linda—women who carried the burden of an unladylike demeanor—were often the ones you saw working in the back corridors of warehouses and restaurants and nursing homes. They didn’t often rise to the position of camp program director.

  On the shaded benches outside the infirmary, there was time and opportunity for Harriet and Linda to trade, somewhat stingily at first, a few details of their lives. A confidence seemed to be springing up between them, perhaps the makings of a real friendship. A small surprise to learn that Linda had started at camp eighteen summers earlier as a kitchen girl and worked her way up. For the past ten years she’d stayed on during the fall and winter and spring, when the grounds were deserted and Schuller and Sandie Kindermann had relocated to their town house in St. Louis. During the off-season, she kept the office open and twice a day loaded the tractor with hay and grain and took it out to the horses in the pasture. In the coldest stretches of winter these same horses had to be corralled and in the stable by nightfall. The next morning she’d be up by five to make sure their water supply hadn’t frozen.