The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  Among the counselors of Kindermann Forest, Harriet noticed a shift in morale, a lightening of attitude. They were not so moody. Not so ready to throw up their hands in disgust or defeat. They’d been on duty seventy-two hours and were showing signs of a wry humor and toughened nonchalance, as if in the course of three days they’d witnessed in their state hospital campers the full range of unruly behavior.

  In The Sanctuary, where Harriet went each afternoon to buy a cold bottle of Coca-Cola, she came upon off-duty counselors doing boisterous imitations of the campers they cared for. Perhaps the most celebrated and oft-impersonated state hospital camper was Mr. Terrence J. Stottlemeir. Mr. Stottlemeir was an odd case. Just fifty-seven years old and he seemed to have lost his mind. His arms and hands were in a wild and constant state of agitation, darting up out of his lap, flailing about. For this reason the counselors had begun calling him “the mad drummer.” He looked, with his thin, regal face and balding pate, like a straight and narrow tax accountant who’d let himself go to seed. His cheeks were thick with stubble. (It was hard to shave a man so intent on slapping anyone who tried to assist him.) He cursed loudly and with an eccentric vocabulary. Everyone at Kindermann Forest considered him the camp’s crotchety old man.

  Any decent impersonation began by mimicking Mr. Stottlemeir’s single rich expression—part outrage, part horror at the ruined world. Then the cursing: God damn you to hell eternal. God damn you, I say. God damn you. I’ll kick you, you jizzy bastard. I’ll kick you shitless.

  From there the counselors spun out improvised skits: a rock band named Stottlemeir and the Jizzy Bastards. Or an incensed Stottlemeir sharing a White House dinner with President Clinton. God damn you, Billy Boy. God damn you to hell eternal. Or Grampa Stottlemeir reading storybooks to five-year-olds at the local library. God damn you, spoon. God damn you, room. God damn you, cow jumping over the moon . . .

  Was it cruel? An observer who stumbled into camp might think so. Harriet was less sure. Maybe after a long day of close proximity to the retarded, the counselors needed this release. They brought themselves to tears with these skits. They collapsed onto The Sanctuary’s dusty couches, clutching their sides and howling. The best lines they repeated in every corner of camp, especially in the presence of Wayne Kesterson, Mr. Stottlemeir’s counselor. Poor Wayne. By now it was public knowledge that he’d be sentenced in the fall for marijuana possession. His days were numbered. Hard to picture Wayne behind bars. He was such a gangly, forgetful, good-natured young man. Mr. Stottlemeir treated him with particular scorn. If Wayne got too near, Mr. Stottlemeir would shout, Don’t touch me, you stinking puddle of piss! Of course the counselors found this richly hilarious: stinking puddle of piss, an insult Mr. Stottlemeir seemed to reserve exclusively for Wayne. Naturally, it caught on.

  Hands off that last pancake, Wayne, you stinking puddle of piss.

  Wayne, your mother called. She wants you to remember to wear your clean jammies and to never forget—you’re a stinking puddle of piss.

  He laughed along with them, gamely, merrily. It was pleasure, maybe, for Wayne to see those around him roused into such high spirits. He wasn’t the true brunt of the joke after all. Mr. Stottlemeir was. They were laughing at his crotchety demeanor, at the clever mimicry.

  But one afternoon in the infirmary Harriet was audience to the real thing. She’d had to give Mr. Stottlemeir a dose of Benadryl for an outbreak of hives. To do that she and Wayne had needed to pin Mr. Stotttlemeir in a chair and hold down his flailing arms. The scalding look he gave: all the features of his face, once elegant and now mangy, were pinched into an expression of intense hate—a hatred that felt long-held and personal and aimed solely at Wayne Kesterson.

  “You stupid knob,” Mr. Stottlemeir said, wet-lipped and sputtering. “Get your filthy hands off me, you stinking puddle of piss!”

  To this, mild-mannered, hapless Wayne Kesterson lowered his head and shuddered.

  Certainly Harriet had seen her fair share of startling behavior. She’d had campers shriek out strange songs during examinations. One gentleman had crumpled to the floor and played dead while she bandaged his scraped knee. Another woman, in the middle of an oral exam, had leaned forward and wetly licked Harriet’s cheek.

  The most remarkable thing said to her had come from Leonard Peirpont. His counselor, Wyatt Huddy, had noticed Leonard walking slower and with a more pronounced limp than usual and had brought him to the infirmary yard. She’d taken Leonard inside and removed his shoes and socks. An easy enough problem to diagnose; his toenails had grown long and sharp. She trimmed them and then washed and dried his feet. She put his socks and shoes on and helped him stand.

  “Better?” she asked.

  He stood gripping her forearm, swaying atop his stiff legs. There was always a look of wide-eyed surprise about him. At the moment his amazement seemed especially acute. He studied her intently, leaned close. “How ’bout I take you back to Higbee with me,” he said.

  Higbee? This may or may not have been Leonard’s hometown. The funniness of the name and the intensity with which he said it made her laugh. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go to Higbee.”

  “You can come stay in my house and be my little blackie.”

  She was too stunned to do anything but blink in surprise. If only there was another black employee at camp. She’d seek them out and tell them of this offer. To be Leonard Peirpont’s little blackie. With the right black person, she could pass an entire evening repeating this remark and laughing until she cried. (No good sharing it with Linda Rucker or any of the white counselors, since they’d first have to register their shock and disapproval. To them it would be a jolting surprise. Imagine that. Leonard Peirpont had been racist before he injured his brain.) What was more amazing, at least to Harriet, was that he’d been looking at her rapturously when he said it. You can come stay in my house and be my little blackie. She doubted she’d hear another offer this tender all summer long.

  Chapter Seven

  If he had rested well the night before and if the mood so struck him, Schuller liked to set out early from his cottage, a veil of soft light and dampness hanging over the countryside, and walk the camp’s gravel roadway from where it began at the weedy front gate and slipped past the office and open meadow and eventually ran beside the infirmary and mess hall, on past the maintenance shed and parking lot (the two unsightly regions of Kindermann Forest), and then into a long, lovely stretch of cedar and elm trees before dead-ending at the horse stables. That was the journey’s reward: to lean against the wood fence and watch the old mares stomping about the water trough, snorting, raking the ground with their cracked hooves, a liveliness that would be hard to locate once they’d been blanketed and saddled for the day.

  This morning, Thursday morning, walking back from the stables, he happened to survey the parking lot and notice a green pickup truck with a black camper shell. At the moment the rear hatch of the shell was opening so that someone—just a figure from this distance—could climb unsteadily over the tailgate and step down onto the pavement. It was just after 6:30 A.M. The figure stretched: a male figure given that he strolled a few yards to the edge of the lot and peed standing up into a line of scrubby bushes. Afterward he plodded down onto the gravel roadway.

  That’s where Schuller had paused to meet him. The figure turned out to be the lifeguard Christopher Waterhouse. His clothes and hair were sleep-tousled. No need to ask what he was up to. The implication was perfectly clear: Christopher had passed the night in the back of his pickup truck rather than in the cabin to which he’d been assigned.

  At least he didn’t try to pretend otherwise. He bowed his head a moment, a boyish admission that he’d been caught bending the rules. Then, much more cheerfully, he wished Schuller a good morning. “I’m starving,” he said. “Any chance we’ll have biscuits and gravy for breakfast?”

  “No chance whatsoever,” Schuller said. Among other fastidious habits, he was a careful reader of the weekly camp menu.

>   “How ’bout hash browns then? That’d be my second choice. With fried—”

  Schuller brought up his raised hand until it was just inches from Christopher Waterhouse’s face. Sometimes, when addressing the young, a gesture like this could save Schuller valuable time.

  “Why is it, do you think, Christopher, that we ask our counselors to stay in the cabins at night?”

  Instead of a reasonable answer, Christopher Waterhouse bit his lower lip and brooded.

  “Because we need you there,” Schuller said. “Your presence in the cabins at night, whether you’re sleeping or not, is every bit as important as the work you do for us during the day.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then can I take it that we have an agreement?” Schuller said. “You’ll be sleeping in the cabins from now on, because if not . . .”

  But the young man’s attention had drifted up and beyond Schuller, a rather dreamy scanning of the treetops and pale morning light.

  “Christopher?”

  “Do you know what goes on in the cabins at night, Mr. Kindermann?”

  “I know it’s not always pleasant. It’s difficult to sleep, I’m sure.”

  “The men in the cabin . . . I mean the retarded men, sneak out of their bunks and congregate in the back of the sleeping barracks. They get together back there, four or five of them, and then . . . they have sex with one another.”

  Until now Schuller had anticipated each of Christopher Waterhouse’s remarks. Not this one. What a horrible picture it painted in his mind. More distressing yet, the very thing he had gone to such lengths to rid Kindermann Forest of had returned in a different and worse form. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Are you sure?”

  “The other counselor in my barracks, Wyatt Huddy, can back me up.”

  “Then this is awful,” Schuller said. “This is . . . You should have come to us the very first time it happened, you and Wyatt. We can do something about this.”

  “I don’t see how,” Christopher Waterhouse said, almost sadly. “They’re more determined than we are. It’s not like we can stay awake all night.”

  “We can separate the ones who . . . the instigators. If we have to, we’ll send them back to the state hospital. But we can’t begin to fix a problem like this, any problem for that matter, unless we know what’s happening. You really should have come talk to us sooner.”

  For the moment Christopher Waterhouse seemed willing to accept a small part of the blame. His hair was uncombed, his face unshaven. If he had an answer for Schuller, he appeared to be assembling it in private. “It’s not always easy . . . ,” he said at last. He shook his head. “From our perspective, it’s not easy to know if a problem like this will be taken seriously.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake why wouldn’t it?”

  “Because from our perspective, the perspective of the counselors, it doesn’t always seem like things here at camp are in control.”

  Schuller blinked in surprise. “How so?” he asked. “How are things not in control?”

  “From the moment we arrived there didn’t seem to be any planning or any preparation. It’s something we felt right away, and, well, some of the counselors, more than a few, were pretty upset about it. I had to talk to them and get them to calm down. It’s better now, but that’s just because we’re all starting to get used to the way things are.”

  “The way things are,” Schuller repeated, skeptically.

  “I’m not talking about you, Mr. Kindermann. If I understand how things work around here, you’re in charge, but you don’t do the planning and the preparation.”

  Schuller pretended to consider this. Nearby, there were squirrels running in the tree branches and tiny finches hopping along the railroad ties that bordered the gravel roadway. He could actually hear the soft scrape of their clawed toes against the ties. He said, “This has been an unusual summer for us, Christopher. We haven’t been able to plan and prepare as much as we would like. I’m sure you know why. The word must have gotten around by now. Are you telling me we made a mistake by letting our first counselor staff go? It may be worth remembering that you have a position here at camp because of that decision.”

  A small pleasure to see Christopher Waterhouse squeezed by an argument he did not anticipate. He ran a hand through his tangled hair. “I’m very glad to be here, Mr. Kindermann. I really am. But when it comes to something that serious—people having a naked pool party, or what’s going on in the cabins now—then maybe me and the other counselors need to feel like someone’s in charge.”

  It was almost enough to make Schuller smile wryly in appreciation. To be offered this frank appraisal, one that carried with it a prickly thorn of criticism. And to know that it had come from a young man who’d been on the job less than four days and had already broken an important camp rule.

  And yet an appraisal worth considering.

  “These are weighty topics, Christopher. But they’re not part of the discussion I intend to have with you right now. So let’s make it very simple. Do the things you’re expected to do. Or leave camp and find another job for the summer.”

  “Yes. All right. But it’s—”

  “Now go to your cabin.”

  For Christopher Waterhouse, there was a moment of wavering. Beneath his baleful expression you could sense a carefully weighed calculation taking place—a wish, maybe, to amend his comments. Or to press his point further.

  Wisely, he turned on his heels and did as he was told.

  And so Schuller returned from his walk to a camp office and cottage made shabbier by what he’d learned from Christopher Waterhouse. It was too much really.

  Retarded men pressed together like animals in some dark corner of the cabins. You couldn’t shake such a picture from your head; some scenarios were so appalling they sprang to life and crashed lumbering and wretched through every neat boundary of your mind.

  In truth he’d always held an ambivalent view of the state hospital campers. Surely other members of the Kindermann Forest staff were of two minds on the matter. But who could argue against it? The idea was generous and moral and Christian. If you had any imagination at all, you could picture the institutions where these retarded men and women lived out their thin lives and know what two weeks outside in the natural world might mean to them.

  It had, for Kindermann Forest, a very practical meaning as well. The past decade had been an era of declining enrollment at camp. It hadn’t always been so. Throughout the seventies and much of the eighties, they’d run ten straight weeks of children’s camp, from mid-June right to the end of August. But in the last ten years they’d begun cutting two-week sessions from the end of the summer. Ten weeks to eight weeks to six weeks. Seven years ago Schuller’s brother, Sandie, had brokered a deal with the state hospital to bring retarded adults to camp for a two-week session. It wasn’t a moneymaker (or a loser for that matter), but it did lengthen the dwindling camp season by two weeks.

  Still, though, when Schuller saw these campers each summer shambling about the gravel pathways or clustered outside the cabins doing their manic cigarette smoking, or when he heard of the awful mess they left in the bathrooms for the cleaning women, he tended to forget the act of charity and feel as if a purer quality of Kindermann Forest—its pristineness maybe—had been offered up in sacrifice.

  He sat behind his director’s desk and waited for Linda Rucker.

  They had fallen into the habit of calling the fifteen minutes they spent together each morning a meeting, but in truth it was mostly the ritual of coffee and a chance for Linda to share with Schuller whatever details regarding the day-to-day running of camp she saw fit. To her credit she didn’t burden him with problems whose solutions were either simple or obvious. If a horse had not eaten in twenty-four hours, the vet was called in. If one of the kitchen girls quit or didn’t show up for work, an employment ad was placed in the Ellsinore Gazette. Hard sometimes for Schuller to explain to outs
iders his precise role at camp. He was retired. Or semiretired. In most instances camp business went forward without his participation.

  Through the office picture window he could see an otherwise pleasing stretch of the camp roadway and a few older cottages, mainly The Sanctuary, from which Linda Rucker had emerged and was strolling toward the office with a bundle of yesterday’s mail under one arm. She nodded to Schuller upon entering the office and went straight to the coffeepot. There she poured and sugared her coffee and then sat before the director’s desk, her cup balanced on one knee, the mail in a sorted pile on her lap. It wouldn’t be fair to declare Linda Rucker a peculiar person. But often, like this morning, she sat for long minutes in Schuller’s presence without speaking a single word. Wasn’t that peculiar?

  He resolved not to speak until she’d lifted her gaze from the stack of mail. Finally she did. “Linda,” he said. “The men of Cabin Two, the retarded campers, are having sex with one another.” He paused to allow Linda her moment of distress: a low gasp, a straightening of her slumped posture or, perhaps, a sudden, sharp creak from the wheels of her office chair. “From what I’ve heard,” he continued, “they wait till the lights go out at night and then congregate in the back of the barracks. A group of them.”

  Again he waited for a startled reaction. Sometimes, in the sullen cast of her expression and in her closed demeanor, she reminded Schuller of a man; not men in general, but a particular type of stubborn and inward tradesman that was somehow more numerous here in the Missouri Ozarks. Occasionally these tradesmen were called in to do work at camp. There wasn’t anything chatty or charming about these men. Nothing about them invited you into their lives.

  And yet, like Linda, they were meticulous and extremely knowledgeable about their work. (Whatever her faults, she was not, as Christopher Waterhouse implied, unprepared.) But they did lack something significant: a certain openness or personal allure that made you glad you’d hired them.