The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  Silly to say this—she was retarded after all—but she looked, with her pert, small-featured face and wide green eyes, like she might possibly be an intelligent person, a considerate person.

  It was a selfish thought. He knew it as he sat there at the edge of Barker Lake with Evie Hicks sprawled in the dirt just a few paces away. Yet it seemed to Wyatt that, in the world as it ought to be, Evie should be allowed to come to him as a girlfriend, a wife, a lover. Except that wasn’t enough. (He was greedy in his longings.) She couldn’t be a mindless wife or lover. Evie would have to want to be with him. So let her at least be aware. Give her an intelligence that would allow her to know him for who he was. But at this point he realized he’d carried the fantasy too far. If she were to have this level of awareness, then she would look around at all that was available to her and not want to be with him in the first place.

  It was difficult to know how much he should hold himself responsible for this disgraceful longing. His first and sharpest inclination was that in exchange for his unseemly thoughts about Evie Hicks he should be forced to endure a punishment. But what kind? For the time being he could only guess that it should be powerful. Yet that might not be right, either. Were he to discuss the matter with Captain Throckmorton, the captain would almost certainly see it differently. He would say, “These thoughts, Wyatt, are mostly beyond your control. Best not to dwell on them.” Or he might say, “When it comes to accepting punishment, Wyatt, you may not have a clear notion of what’s reasonable and what’s not.”

  This, of course, would be the captain’s way of referring to the life Wyatt had shared with his sister, Caroline Huddy, before he’d come to live at the Salvation Army depot. Caroline. Caroline Huddy. A real, live, breathing person, and yet he couldn’t think of her without feeling oppressed and bewildered. Worse even, because he supposed he owed her. She’d taken care of him after the passing of Wyatt’s father. They were not a healthy or prosperous family. Their mother had died of ovarian cancer many years earlier, while Wyatt was still a toddler. Yet by all accounts his sister, Caroline, older by fifteen years, had gown up very much in the mold of their mother: stubborn and large, unafraid, angry.

  For a long while most of Caroline’s scorn had been directed at their father. He was, in her view, a fool. True, he could raise a dozen chickens or pigs and manage a large garden, but a steady job outside the farm was beyond him. In terms of income he received exactly two hundred and twelve dollars a month in a government disability payment for a congenital malformed hip and a hopelessly twisted left leg. He shuffled and hopped rather than walked. He’d always been a scrawny, hunched little man, and his pairing with their strapping, hard-tempered mother was a comic mishap all of their neighbors seemed to enjoy. Of equal embarrassment to Caroline was the fact that he traveled about their community in a broken-down pickup truck trading extra produce and livestock and sometimes money for the salvageable parts of antique tractors—machines so corroded and useless that most farmers allowed them to rust away in their fields. He was a collector of these tractors and their various components and, for reasons confounding to Caroline, he brought truckloads of old tractor parts home and arranged them in a huge metal-roof shed.

  Within this tractor shed, Wyatt’s father had a life of his own: tools and solvents and bygone tractor manuals and secret stashes of hard apple cider and cigars. Friends dropped by to see him in the shed. They called him Hoppy, though not with the gruff bark of ridicule that Caroline brought to his nickname whenever he entered the farmhouse and was subject to her rules and grievances. “Hoppy,” she’d say, “don’t you dare think about sitting down anywhere in this house in those greasy overalls.” She’d make him retreat to the front step and undress while Wyatt fetched his father’s house robe. But even the sight of him in that robe grated on her. “How can you stand to look at yourself?” she’d say. Or else she’d order him to carry table scraps out to the pigs or bundle up the trash or any one of a hundred other chores. “Get up, Hoppy. Get up and earn your keep for a change.” If Wyatt had a single image of his father, it would be in the moment or two following an order from Caroline, in which Hoppy, with a subtle wincing frown he kept secret from her, would quietly calculate his options, only to rise from his chair and shuffle off to do as he’d been told.

  Eventually his heart gave out. But even in the hospital’s cardiac recovery unit, Wyatt’s father, in the deep fog of his medication, would overhear Caroline telling a doctor about Hoppy’s failure to listen or eat right and, at the sound of his nickname, he’d put a hand to the bed rail as if to rise up and do what was demanded of him.

  After his passing, Caroline made it clear to Wyatt what behavior would be expected of him inside the farmhouse and what chores he would need to accomplish after school and during his summer vacations. All of this had seemed reasonable to him as a fourteen-year-old boy. Feed the chickens and pigs. Keep the tractor running. Keep his late father’s sprawling vegetable garden watered and free from weeds. But Wyatt was lazy sometimes. For a while he’d had a friend or two in the remedial class at Dutton Junior High School, and he would run with them after school and sometimes forget the chores assigned to him. And so Caroline had said, sensibly enough, “If you won’t look after the garden during the day, try looking after it at night.” At dusk that evening she’d had him stand with his back to a huge walnut tree that faced the garden and she’d begun winding ropes around his legs and under his arms and even through the belt loops of his blue jeans and then tying off the ropes at the back of the trunk, where he couldn’t reach them. He’d had to stay there yoked against the tree all night. Nothing to do but keep still and look out over the garden. Several hours after darkness a possum waddled by close enough that Wyatt could almost touch it with his shoe. It considered him with its black button eyes, then crawled away. It was a mild night. As punishments went, this wasn’t so bad. He could nod off to sleep for short periods of time. Much later the dew began to coat his sweatshirt and hair and, after hours of trying not to, he peed himself. Even so, in the morning when she untied him, it still seemed funny to Wyatt—funny and exactly what he deserved.

  But it didn’t cure him of his laziness, especially when it came to school. By ninth grade the energy it took to walk down a high school hallway—to be jeered at and fake-punched and turned away from in disgust—was too much. Too much for Wyatt. There wasn’t much energy left over that he could use to concentrate on his more difficult school subjects. Caroline wasn’t pleased. Or rather, sometimes she was enraged and other times she shrugged it all off, wearily. For a dismal progress report she might make him stand in a bucket of ice water. Yet when the actual report card came several months later with its columns of failing grades, she declared the whole enterprise of high school a waste of time. She decided he could quit going altogether or transfer to a technical school. Either way, she said, the schoolwork didn’t matter because he was probably an idiot.

  He chose technical school, where his fellow students, if not exactly friendly, were at least mindful of his size and strength. He learned to weld and repair small engines. Neither of these skills mattered much to Caroline Huddy. At thirty-two she’d grown heavyset and haggard-looking. She spent long hours in the bathroom or in bed, where she watched rented movies on a videocassette recorder. It amazed him, this machine. His neighbors had been watching video movies at home for years, and yet it was astounding that Caroline had tracked down a secondhand video machine and arranged for herself such an impossible luxury. She’d had Wyatt move their only television set from the living room up the stairs into her bedroom. He’d unboxed the VCR and connected it to the television. Every other day Caroline, who otherwise shuffled about the house in a robe and slippers, got dressed and drove to Jefferson City to rent movies. The cases for these movies, with their extravagant drawings and photographs, were left lying about on the kitchen counter for Wyatt to consider. The movies she watched alone, two per night, behind the closed door of her bedroom. Then she fell asleep and, aided by medic
ation, slept soundly and late into the next day.

  Wyatt had a keen understanding of the opportunity this allowed. Late one night he took his shoes off, eased her door open, and carried the television and video machine piece by piece into the living room. The movie that had provoked him to take this risk was called Time Bandits. Its case contained a peculiar cartoon drawing of a pirate ship roosted on the top of a man’s head. Very odd. But the movie was infinitely odder. It hardly made sense at all except as evidence that the fantasies that flitted through other people’s heads were much more vivid and strange than his own.

  The TV and video machine he returned to Caroline’s bedroom. She didn’t stir. But later, when she woke and resumed viewing Time Bandits, she found that the movie was not in the place where she’d left off. She brooded over this much of the day. “But how could that happen?” she asked Wyatt, doubtfully. She was aware of his deep interest in the movie’s cassette box. “Did you do something?” she wondered. “Did you maybe sneak into my room and watch a little of the movie while I was sleeping?” He said no, more than a hundred times. Yet she seemed as if she’d be amused to know for certain that this had happened. “Come on. Let’s hear it. What part of the movie did you see?” By then it was well after dark. She’d been going on like this most of the day. Exhausted, he admitted that he’d carried off the TV and video machine and watched the entire film, and her reaction was complicated. She looked dumbfounded and somewhat frightened, but also admiring. “That’s a lot of planning and a lot of work,” she said. “I honestly cannot believe you’d think up a plan like that.” She gripped the matted bangs of her hair and pressed them down against her forehead. “I wouldn’t have guessed it, Wyatt,” she said and began wandering about the house, marveling at his transgression, and rooting through drawers and boxes and considering a variety of tools.

  Eventually, she decided on an X-Acto knife. She had him remove his shoes and socks, and she held him by the ankle and cut him deeply across the bridge of each foot. A ferocious pain, a grisly, deep-to-the-bone burning. He’d have run away screaming if he could. Instead he squeezed his ankles and wept. It wasn’t worth it: such unrelenting agony for a movie that didn’t even make sense. Much of the night he lay on the kitchen floor moaning. When Caroline emerged from her room the next morning, she was much more like herself: slack-faced, irritable, insulted by everything he did. She said she wasn’t going to put up with his carrying on. She packed a grocery bag with items from the cupboard and ordered him out to the tractor shed. He couldn’t walk, of course. Even crawling on his hands and knees proved too painful. So he pulled himself along on his stomach as if he were scaling a mountain precipice. Out the door. Across the porch. Along the trampled front yard. Up the gravel drive leading to the tractor shed. It seemed to take forever, this journey. Through much of it she hovered over him, the grocery bag swinging at her side.

  She left him in the shed. It was early October, cool and clear in the evenings, warm during the day. He found, stuffed beneath the workbench, several dusty blankets his father had once used on the occasions when he’d been exiled from the house. Wyatt wrapped himself in these blankets and searched through the grocery sack Caroline had left him. Orange soda. Ritz crackers. A bottle of aspirin. Two small Band-Aids not long enough to cover his wounds. He chewed several aspirin and sipped from the bottle of orange soda. It wasn’t at all worth it, he decided for the hundredth time. Even more unfair, the X-Acto knife blade she’d used had been crusted with dirt and tar from cutting floor tiles. It would have been better, fairer, to have washed it first. In the deep throb of his wounds and in his shivering limbs, a message was being sent to him: Wyatt, you are going to be sick.

  True enough. He shivered and retched and, late in the night, drenched his clothes in sweat and urine. In the expansive tractor shed, with its countless chassis and bald tires and milk crates of parts, he could cry out all he wanted. He couldn’t sleep, however, even once his wounds had lost much of their sting and his feet had taken on a remarkable weight and thickness. Somehow he’d been granted elephant’s feet. He was miserable, truly. But it didn’t make any sense: the movie or the fact that she’d used a dirty knife blade. Or this: when he was seven years old, she’d taken him to the children’s hospital in Kansas City so that surgeons could separate the fingers on both of his hands. He’d woken up in the recovery room, aching, nauseated, a boy in pain. All through the night and following day Caroline had sat with him, patting his head, wiping his lips when he spit up, wincing in misery every time he cried out.

  The next morning a vehicle pulled up in the driveway. He could hear two people get out. One went to the door of the house and knocked. The other waited in the open bay of the shed—a silhouetted figure, a man who had his hands in the pockets of his coat and was rocking on the heels of his feet.

  There were several moments of a prolonged and impending silence and then the creak of the house door and Caroline’s husky voice. “No, sir. No. Not today,” she insisted. “You can come back and look around another time,” she said. “You there!” she shouted. “You stay out of that shed. You come again some other time!”

  From deep within the piled center of the shed, Wyatt pulled himself forward, dragging his blankets and his swollen feet. He wouldn’t have done so, wouldn’t have called attention to himself, if she’d used a clean knife blade.

  The man who’d been standing in the open bay caught his breath and stepped back. “Sweet Jesus,” he said. “Are you . . . ? Wait a minute now. Terry! Hey, Terry! Get over here!”

  The second man walked over and joined him. And then Caroline, barefoot, in her robe, with a tire iron she kept by the front door. “No, no, no,” she said. “This does not have anything to do with you two. Get back in your truck, you hear? You come back again another time.”

  The man who’d been at the door stood and took in the sight of Wyatt. “Ms. Huddy,” the man said. “Let me make sure I understand you. Are you refusing—”

  “I’ll call the law if you don’t leave right this minute,” she said. She raised her tire iron. “I’ll swing on you if I have to.”

  He was a heavyset man, and he looked at her, his big, bald forehead creased in worry. He said, “Please do. Please do call the law. Let’s have Sheriff Leahey come to the farm and sort this out. But if you decide to swing that tire iron, then understand that my friend, Ed, and I will be swinging back.” He’d braced himself as if ready to lunge in her direction. His name, Wyatt would learn soon enough, was Terry Throckmorton. Captain Throckmorton. He and his friend, Ed McClintock, had been to the Huddy farm before and had purchased several antique iron tractor seats. Ed was a collector.

  It seemed to take Caroline forever to make up her mind. One moment she was speechless in her indignation, the next she was screaming and making threats. Eventually she swung her tire iron, but before doing so she stepped back so that the curved end of the iron cut only through the air. Then she let out a great huffing sob. Was she crying? If so, Wyatt had never seen anything like it. She told Captain Throckmorton and Ed McClintock the story of their parents’ deaths but with nearly all the dates and facts invented or rearranged.

  “We’re very sorry to hear it,” Captain Throckmorton said.

  But she claimed not to believe a word out of his mouth. She said she was going back into the house to find her father’s shotgun and figure out how to load it and then she’d settle the matter once and for all. As soon as she stepped inside, Ed McClintock hurried and drove his pickup truck to the bay of the shed, and he and Captain Throckmorton helped Wyatt climb into the bed of the truck. Within minutes they were speeding out the gates of the farm.

  They went first to the Jefferson City Police Station, where Sheriff Leahey took one look at Wyatt sprawled in the bed of the truck and summoned an ambulance. Sheriff Leahey had been out to the Huddy farm before and had past dealings with Caroline. He knew Wyatt by name. “Wyatt,” he said. “How did this happen to you?”

  And so Wyatt told him about the movie, Time
Bandits, and the borrowing of Caroline’s video machine and her choice of an unclean knife blade. As he spoke, the parked truck seemed to be listing to and fro, lulled by gentle waves. He could barely keep his eyelids open.

  “Well, she’s gone too far this time, hasn’t she?” Sheriff Leahey said.

  “Yes,” Wyatt said from the tangle of dusty blankets in the back of Ed McClintock’s truck. “Too far.”

  He spent a week recovering at St. Mary’s Health Center. Afterward he moved into the Salvation Army depot and began his work on the loading dock. But he declined to press domestic violence charges against Caroline. Or even file for a restraining order. To this day he hadn’t spoken to his sister. Which was not to say that he hadn’t seen her. She came to the depot from time to time, and when she did, he made a point of staying out of sight behind the loading dock’s canvas curtain. Surely Caroline knew he lived there, and yet she didn’t seem to be searching for him. From his vantage point behind the curtain, she looked like any number of slumped bargain hunters. But different, too—more than a little clumsy, stuporous, drained of her anger. Harmless maybe.

  During mess hall dinner Saturday evening, Wyatt observed Mr. Kindermann, whose habit was to sit silent and mostly unnoticed through each meal, rise from the director’s table, and thread his way to the long serving counter at the center of the hall. He raised his hand in appeal for quiet and then announced, over the squall of voices, that they’d reached day six and were now halfway through the State Hospital Session.

  At once a cheer went up. It had begun with the counselors, but more than a few campers, startled by the applause, had begun clapping and shouting in gruff imitation of what they’d just heard.