The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  “Mr. Kindermann. Good morning,” he said and raised a hand to wave. How odd it was, truly, to see his distorted face among so many distorted faces and then have him bark out a clear greeting.

  “Yes,” he said. “Good morning . . . young man.”

  Schuller pressed on, and a hundred yards farther, with the women’s cabins in view, he encountered another unexpected sight: the girl lifeguard, Marcy Bittman, dressed in her swimsuit and blue jean shorts, walking briskly from women’s Cabin Four to women’s Cabin Three with a wicker laundry basket balanced in her arms. She stepped inside Cabin Three just long enough to collect something and put it in her basket. Afterward she trotted down to the pathway and wished Schuller a good morning.

  He was pleased to have remembered her name. “Marcy,” he said. “Nice to see you up early and ready to go.” He asked what she was collecting.

  “Pot lids,” she said.

  True enough. Her basket contained an unruly stack of pot lids, the wide clamorous type that Maureen Boyd used in the camp kitchen.

  “I’m on my way to the men’s cabins to get the rest,” Marcy said, by way of explanation.

  “But why?”

  “In case Maureen needs them to cook breakfast.”

  “No, no,” he said. “Why would you keep pot lids in the cabins?”

  She wrinkled her slender nose and grinned. A pretty young woman, Schuller supposed. She had an open face, and her enthusiasms had a way of sweeping across her petite features, sharpening her dimples and lighting her hazel eyes. “Because of what Christopher figured out,” she said brightly. “About how to use the pot lids to keep the campers in line.”

  “And how, exactly, does that work?” Schuller asked.

  “Well,” she said. “Last night they tried separating the men in Cabin Two. Just like you said. Except as soon as the counselors dozed off, the campers, you know, got together in the back of the barracks. So Christopher Waterhouse snuck up to the kitchen and brought back some pot lids. The next time they tried it, he jumped out and clanged them together.” She made a grand flapping gesture with her slender arms. “Like cymbals,” she said, smiling hugely. She seemed to be waiting for a reply from Schuller—a response of equal exuberance.

  “That’s something,” Schuller said. “I would imagine that . . . that would startle them, certainly.”

  “All it took was one big clang and they let go of each other and ran back to their beds. Stayed there, too,” Marcy said. “Worked so well he went and got more lids, Christopher did, and brought a pair to each of the cabins. We used them last night in Cabin Four, with the women who like to sleep together in the same bed.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” Schuller said. “I wouldn’t have thought of it myself.”

  “It scares them,” Marcy said. “It makes them pay attention.”

  “I’m sure it does. But maybe we should present this idea to Linda Rucker. Yes, that would probably be best. Do me a favor, please, Marcy. Tell Christopher to talk over this idea of the pot lids with Linda Rucker. To let her know what’s going on.”

  At this she winced and let out a small, deflated sigh. “I don’t know about that, Mr. Kindermann. I can ask him, but I don’t think he’ll do it. He and Linda Rucker, they aren’t really talking to one another anymore.”

  This wasn’t exactly news to Schuller, though he’d have liked to know more. And with Marcy Bittman, he wouldn’t have to push very hard. Her reluctance was mostly pretense. The frowning, the creasing of her eyebrows in worry. What she wanted—in spite of these feigned gestures—was to share what she knew.

  “Well?” he said.

  “It’s because she got upset with him,” Marcy said. “But honestly, Mr. Kindermann, there wasn’t any other way Christopher could have done it. She kept coming down to the pool, especially during the first few days of camp. She’d stand next to his lifeguard chair, talking to him while he guarded. I think she got it into her head that there was something between them. An attraction or at least a boyfriend and girlfriend kind of friendship. I’d watch her talking to him, and she looked very . . . persistent. And so she made Christopher an offer, and when he told me—”

  “What offer?” Schuller said

  “Not an offer, really, but a kind of request, something she’d like him to do. And I don’t think it’s fair for me to say what it is because it’s personal, and it embarrassed Christopher. I’m not sure he’d want me repeating it to you. But she asked him to do something and he told her sorry, no. Maybe he said it too directly. But there wasn’t any way around it. I mean, Christopher and I are friends. We talked things over after Linda made her request. He’s not looking for a girlfriend. He has one back in college. And he and Linda Rucker aren’t really very well . . .”

  “What?”

  “Matched,” she said. “They wouldn’t make a logical couple.”

  Schuller was still dazed and blinking from this news. “No,” he said. “They wouldn’t make a logical couple.” He stared off into the ribbons of sunlight pouring through the forest canvas.

  Oh, but he was disappointed. He’d heard all manner of gossip in his forty years as summer camp director. Some things, like this news from Marcy Bittman, had the ring of truth. Other things didn’t. The true things always exhausted him. He took a slumped and weary step back, found his balance, stood a degree or two straighter. But really he’d have liked to have sat down with Marcy on the railroad ties that bordered the pathway and described to her the weight of his disappointment. To explain to Marcy Bittman, with her perfectly combed hair and her freshly scrubbed and eager face, the impossible irony he’d lived with all his life.

  Chapter Eight

  Saturday morning, holding Leonard Peirpont by the elbow and guiding him along a dirt pathway that would lead, eventually, to Barker Lake, Wyatt glanced ahead to a bend in the trail and saw someone stomping toward them. This someone turned out to be a Kindermann Forest maintenance man, a shovel balanced across his shoulder. He dragged behind him a length of clay pipe.

  “Hey,” the maintenance man said. He had the buoyant stride of a young man pleased with the duties assigned to him, and he filed past the four of them—Leonard, Wyatt, Jerry Johnston, and Thomas Anwar Toomey—dragging his pipe in the dirt.

  It was perfectly clear to Wyatt what would happen next.

  “Hey,” the maintenance man said again. He’d come to a stop. “Hey, guys? Where’s your counselor?”

  Wyatt, who tended to hold his breath at such moments, exhaled sharply through the side of his mouth. “I’m looking after them,” he said. “I’m their counselor. We’re on our way to Barker Lake for a ride in the canoe.”

  The maintenance man wavered a moment. “Are you . . . to the lake?” he said. He was squinting as if trying to recognize them from a great distance. “Yes,” he said. “To the lake. All right. Be careful.”

  That was the end of it. The trail took them in separate directions. For Wyatt and his three campers there was a descending pathway choked with hard gray horse turds or crisscrossed with the knuckled roots of cedar trees.

  Here was a puzzle Wyatt kept turning over in his mind: while he’d been mistaken for a retarded camper numerous times by members of the kitchen and maintenance staff and even several times by his fellow counselors, the opposite had not happened. The campers had never confused him for one of their own. Not Leonard or Jerry or Thomas Anwar Toomey. Not any of the dozens of campers he’d had dealings with during this first week of the State Hospital Session. In the crowded barracks of Cabin Two, the male campers didn’t elbow him out of the way or push him from behind, tactics they used generously on one another. Two days earlier, at the stables, Wyatt and his group had been feeding the trail horse handfuls of oniongrass through the corral fence, and a bee-stung horse had suddenly lurched against the fence and gone into a wild bucking stomp. The campers, even those Wyatt barely knew, had reached for him, had grabbed him by the shirttail and belt loops and looked up at him desperate to be reassured.

 
; They knew. He was not sure how, exactly. Either they were quick to recognize the rank of those in charge or they saw in him a sharpness of mind, a capableness that they didn’t see in one another.

  Somewhere ahead, not far into the curtain of underbrush, there were scurrying dogs, yelping in a human pitch.

  “They’ll make themselves a nest in there if you let ’em,” Leonard Peirpont said.

  Wyatt tightened his grip on Leonard’s arm. The pathway dipped. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “You can’t sort ’em out or talk sense to ’em. They’ll do what they like.”

  “Hmmm. Yes. I guess so.”

  “They’ll still be here a hundred years from now . . . after you and I have gone back from where we come.”

  “That’s right,” Wyatt said. With Leonard it felt like the very worst rudeness not to take part in his meandering conversations.

  The trail turned sharply. Some twenty yards later they came upon Barker Lake, or rather the sandy corner of it that Kindermann Forest rented each summer and set with canoes and paddles and tree-hung racks of life vests. The lake water this morning was limpid green, the sunlight bright on the surface, the waves lapping meek against a mossy shoreline. They’d been told that, in a regular week of camp, the children and their counselors would be allowed to paddle out to the main body of the lake before turning back. For the State Hospital Session the procedures were altogether different. An aluminum canoe was hauled up onto the sandy beach. Two campers, fit snugly with life vests, were guided into sitting positions at the bow and stern. Then two maintenance men, Jim and Ronnie, dragged the canoe into the lake as evenly as possible and stood there beside it, up to their thighs in lake water, making sure a camper didn’t rock or stand or otherwise tumble into the lake shallows. The campers floated there in place. After ten minutes Jim and Ronnie hauled them back up onto the beach.

  All of this took time and effort, and so for the State Hospital Session the activity of canoeing was a scheduled activity. Counselors put their names on a list at the mess hall and came with their groups to Barker Lake at the appointed time. Emily Boehler, 9:05. Veronica Yordy, 9:35. Wyatt Huddy, 9:55. He’d arrived with his campers fifteen minutes early, and now, at their own peril, they had to sit in the shade and try not to watch Veronica Yordy persuade her two charges, the Mulcrone sisters, the two most astonishing and unsettling state hospital campers, to rise from the sand and don life vests.

  It seemed to Wyatt that Veronica Yordy had been given an impossible burden in the sisters. But Veronica thought otherwise. During after-hours conversations at The Sanctuary, she was happy to explain herself. You had to look at both sides of the coin, she said. The good and the bad. The night and the day. For example, if you got up in the middle of the night to pee and you came upon one or both of the Mulcrone sisters in the grainy light of the bathroom, or you bumped into either of the sisters, who tended to slink around the dark barracks in their ratty pajamas, they could frighten you so completely that you might feel a part of yourself tearing away. Being that frightened, Veronica said, might be the way a person felt when he or she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  To Wyatt and the other counselors of Kindermann Forest this made perfect sense: because the Mulcrone sisters were as close to real-life monsters as anything they’d encountered in the world. Several counselors had been overheard on the Sanctuary pay phone describing the sisters to relatives. Their accounts were not believed. Perhaps it would have been better to start with what was known about the sisters. They were identical twins. According to Camp Nurse Harriet Foster, they’d been wards of the state hospital at Farmington for four decades. They were haggard and unkempt, though this wasn’t an indication of their age. They might have been forty-five or seventy-five. Both sisters had wiry, near-transparent hair, through which you could see their scabbed and lumpy scalps. They both had faces composed of flat foreheads, noses, and square chins and, of course, the feature that amazed and terrified everyone: each of the sisters had an extra set of pupilless eyes set just above the hard ridge of her brow. These eyes were cast at a slanting downward angle so that the sisters always appeared vexed or in contemplation of a cruel act. They were formed enough, these extra eyes, to turn in their sockets, especially when the sisters slept. Among the female counselors in Cabin Four, it was considered a grave mistake to look upon the sisters’ sleeping faces.

  Really, Veronica had said to anyone in The Sanctuary willing to listen, you can’t get over the sight of them at night. You can’t shake it out of your head once it’s there. So you tiptoe around hoping not to see them. It would be ridiculous, she said, if it weren’t so entirely frightening.

  And yet she could stand to deal with the sisters in the daytime. Mostly because what they wanted above all else was so common and so simple: coffee and cigarettes. In their waking hours they might as well have been a pair of disheveled, housebound old aunts. Each muttered a long litany of complaints too low and garbled to understand. Both sisters drank their coffee scalding hot, smoked countless cigarettes, and breathed out their sour breath. But they weren’t, Veronica said, necessarily hard to manage. If they had or were about to have coffee or cigarettes, they were fairly pleasant people.

  Fortunately, the Mulcrone sisters had been allowed to bring coffee in closed foam cups with them to the lake this morning. They refused to let go of these cups, even for a second, and so Veronica had to thread the various life vest straps over and around their occupied hands. In the clear air and bright morning light, the sisters looked supremely ugly. (At least, for their sake, it was an ugliness they seemed altogether unaware of.) They took seats in the canoe and were eased out into several feet of lake water. Each of the sisters was given a lighted cigarette, and they sat there floating in the canoe, smoking thoughtfully and sipping coffee.

  From the shoreline Veronica Yordy called to them. “Way to go, ladies! Nice job! Look at you both, floating out there on the water.” A burning cigarette was cupped in Veronica’s hand. The same was true of the maintenance men Jim and Ronnie, who both smoked while standing thigh-deep in the lake. Almost everyone at camp, it seemed, had either discovered or renewed their commitment to the habit.

  On the shore, not far from where Wyatt and Leonard Peirpont crouched on a log, another of Veronica Yordy’s charges, a young barefoot woman in jeans and a striped blouse, languished in the dirt. Her name was Evie Hicks, and she inched forward, impossibly slow, on her elbows and knees and belly, her face a few inches above the ground. Whatever stone or twig or grassy bit of debris she came upon, she lowered her head and scrutinized with a myopic fascination. Now and then she turned her face up toward the sunlight and the voice of her counselor.

  At least once every minute Veronica Yordy called out to her. “Evie Hicks, what are you doing there on the ground?” Or “Evie Hicks, don’t even think about putting that dried-up leaf in your mouth.” Or “Evie Hicks, you have no more clean blouses, so what are we supposed to do now, Evie Hicks?”

  These were exactly the sorts of chatty remarks the counseling staff of Kindermann Forest liked to direct at Leonard Peirpont. “How is your world today, Leonard Peirpont?” Or “Leonard Peirpont, what do you make of this hot June weather? Good for growing green beans, isn’t it?” Of course Leonard was incapable of a logical reply. That, Wyatt knew, was part of what the other counselors liked: to see Leonard’s eyes go comically wide and his face tighten in concentration. With his thick black glasses he looked like the most befuddled college professor in the world. “What big plans do you have today, Leonard Peirpont?” they asked him, if only because he, along with Evie Hicks and several others, was considered a favorite among a hundred other state hospital campers who were so much harder to love.

  But Evie Hicks was significantly different from these other favorites. She had—there was no way not to notice—an unusually generous figure, big, obvious breasts that strained the seams of her blouse, wide hips, and a round, overlarge rear end. She walked in a wobbly pigeon-toed shuffle—she had
yet to find a way to properly balance those breasts and hips and her swinging rear end—and unless a counselor was there to goad her along, she would drop down on her hands and knees and begin her close examination of the weeds and tree bark and litter that covered the ground. Most often you could see Evie hunched down in the yard outside Cabin Four, working her way through the carpet of wood-chip mulch that Jerry Boyd and his maintenance men dispersed at the start of each camp season. Evie was capable of a fierce and sustained concentration. It was as if she intended to catalog each item. A twig. A crumbled leaf. An ant or wood snail. As she worked, she’d raise her full rear end each time she felt the need to scoot along.

  At least the female counselors could joke about how they envied Evie Hicks her figure. For Wyatt it was a much more troubling dilemma. To let his gaze linger a moment too long on Evie’s body was to be aroused. To be aroused was to hate himself. Even now, with her sprawled in the dirt near his feet, Wyatt made himself look away, and when he did he found Jim and Ronnie, standing a dozen yards away in the lake, staring back at Evie on the shoreline, their eyebrows raised in appreciation.

  No comfort, really, to know he wasn’t alone in this treachery. They should all be ashamed: he and Jim and Ronnie, all the male employees of camp who were tempted to look. Wyatt more so, maybe, because on the occasions he’d encountered Evie Hicks, he was as struck by her round, girlish face and her sweetly preoccupied expression as he was by her body. She seemed to be a thoughtful young woman. At least he imagined she was. And in truth he liked being around the women campers and counselors of Kindermann Forest more than the men. A better, kinder, more generous atmosphere among the women. Several times he’d led his group down the gravel pathway to the yards of Cabins Three and Four just to be on the periphery of that atmosphere, to see the women campers roaming the yard and hear their counselors calling to them from the porch landing. “Evie Hicks, what are you searching for down there in the wood chips? Have you found gold yet, Evie Hicks?”