The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  “For many of us it’s an occasion worth celebrating,” Mr. Kindermann said. He let his gaze travel the mess hall and alight on as many counselors as he could find: Carrie Reinkenmeyer, Daniel Hartpence, Kathleen Bram, Christopher Waterhouse—though his searching glance did not include Wyatt. “I do pay attention,” he continued. “Some of your opinions have made their way to me. And so I know that you’ve been overwhelmed at times and challenged in ways you never expected. This is the seventh year we’ve welcomed campers from the state hospital, and each year we rediscover what a challenge it is. I don’t kid myself. I know the demands are much harder for you, the counselors. But it’s quite a challenge for those of us on the senior staff as well. We have more responsibility. We certainly worry more. The decisions we have to make seem harder. Or at least they feel harder to me.” There was something about this last remark that made Wyatt and the others take pause—an intimacy perhaps, a privateness that they’d not yet heard from Mr. Kindermann. “And still we have another week to get through,” he said. “Whatever this next week brings for us, I want you all to know that we see the hard work and sacrifices you’re making. We’re proud of you. We appreciate your efforts, more than you may realize.”

  There was more still. As a mark of Mr. Kindermann’s appreciation, he would make possible a rare freedom. Once this evening’s activity had ended and the campers had been put to bed, two counselors from each of the four cabins would meet at the camp office. Mr. Kindermann would hand over the keys to the camp van so that they could travel twelve miles to the Dairy Queen in Ellsinore. There they would buy treats for the entire staff. It would be Mr. Kindermann’s great pleasure to pay for this outing.

  Free ice cream? It shouldn’t have lifted their spirits the way it did. They weren’t children after all. But the promise of ice cream got them talking right away. Who would go to Ellsinore in the camp van? (Not Wyatt, since he had cabin watch that night.) What stops might they make along the way? What ice cream concoction would each of them order? To that end, a small notebook began to circulate, and throughout the evening’s activity, a leisurely kickball tournament held in the open meadow, the notebook went back and forth among the counselors as each person inscribed or amended his or her order. It wasn’t until after the evening activity had ended and they were shepherding their campers back to the cabins that one of the counselors, Ellen Swinderman, wondered if anyone had taken Linda Rucker’s order. As it happened, no one had. In fact, they hadn’t seen Linda Rucker at the scavenger hunt or, for that matter, at mess hall dinner.

  No one thought to pursue this mystery. There were a hundred and four state hospital campers to bathe and get to bed. This was easily Wyatt’s least favorite time of day. It required of him a sternness that felt like an elaborate bluff. In Cabin Two, amid the pandemonium of bare bodies and rank odors and casual bullying, he had to order and shove retarded men out of his way. Thomas Anwar Toomey had to be warned and warned again to extinguish his last cigarette and return to his bunk. In the mayhem of the sleeping barracks, Leonard Peirpont seemed especially hapless, especially pitiful. The decent thing would have been to sit awhile at the foot of Leonard’s bunk and listen to a few of his disjointed remarks. No time for that. Wyatt had to be up and moving continuously back and forth between the two barracks and across the screened porch that connected them. It was on the floor of this porch where they’d set out mattresses for Dennis Dugan and Frederick Torbert, both of whom had been caught congregating in the back of the barracks at night with other men. On several occasions during the past few nights both Dennis and Frederick had been startled, traumatically so, by Christopher Waterhouse and his crashing pot lids. These pot lids had been tied together with yellow twine and were now hanging beside the porch door from a nail in the wall. They hung there as a kind of warning and, more than once, Wyatt, crossing the porch on his rounds, caught either Dennis or Frederick awake on his mattress and staring up at these hanging lids with an anxious regard.

  At midnight Christopher Waterhouse appeared at the porch door with a paper bag containing Wyatt’s hot fudge sundae with peanuts. Christopher had been one of the lucky eight who’d traveled by van to Ellsinore, and now he was back at Kindermann Forest bearing ice cream treats for those who’d stayed behind.

  “Nicely done,” he said to Wyatt through the screen mesh of the door. Apparently he meant the lack of noise and commotion in the sleeping barracks, as if this happy coincidence had been brought about by a magnificent effort from Wyatt. “Have you had to crash the cymbals on Dennis and Frederick?” he asked.

  “No, no. They’ve been quiet.”

  “They’re fake-sleeping right now,” Christopher whispered. He opened the door wide enough to lean his head in and study them as they lay on their mattresses. “They’re waiting for their chance.”

  “I guess so.”

  “No guessing about it, Wyatt. Come on now. You’ve earned this,” he said, handing over the bag and a red plastic spoon. His expression was open, generous. He seemed entirely pleased to have this opportunity to stand on the cabin landing and watch Wyatt sample the sundae. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s good stuff. We tried to keep it cold.”

  “I will. I’ll just . . . wait till a little later.”

  “No you won’t.”

  Wyatt turned back toward the darkened interior of the cabin. For a moment he thought he might pretend to hear a noise and investigate. Instead, he said, “I wear a retainer at night. To keep my teeth from going too crooked. I’m wearing it now.”

  “Well, don’t be shy. Plop it out. Toss it in the bag here.”

  After some consideration, he did as Christopher Waterhouse suggested, plucked the retainer from the roof of his mouth, dropped it into the bag—a wet retainer, a thing as dreary and strangely formed as himself.

  “Now try a little bit of this sundae.”

  Wyatt placed a spoonful delicately on his tongue. Even melted, it tasted like a rare prize.

  “Well?” Christopher Waterhouse asked.

  “Yes,” Wyatt said.

  “Yes what?”

  “It’s good stuff.”

  “I told you so,” Christopher Waterhouse said. “Thanks for holding down the fort.” He almost turned to walk away. “Hey,” he said. “Here’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask you for some time, Wyatt. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind,” Wyatt said.

  “You decided to come work here at Kindermann Forest, right? And you did it knowing that for the first two weeks you’d have to take care of people like Dennis and Frederick? Retarded people. You knew it and you decided to come here anyway?”

  He took another modest bite of his hot fudge sundae. “I didn’t know,” Wyatt said. “I thought there’d be children.”

  “And you wanted to work with children?”

  To hear Christopher Waterhouse speak this hope aloud made it seem all the more unlikely. “I thought . . . ,” Wyatt said. “I thought that if we gave the kids a little bit of time they’d get used to me.”

  “That might be true,” Christopher Waterhouse said. He seemed to be thinking the prospect through carefully. “Maybe all we have to do is wait till the kids get here and find out.” Then he tilted his head in what seemed to be a sorrowful direction. “But,” he said, “I happen to know a few things. There’s going to be some changes happening very soon at camp. Good changes, most of them. One of the things that’s being talked about is moving a few people around once the State Hospital Session is over. You’d be one of them, Wyatt. You’d be moved over to the horse stables. You’d become a wrangler. Then they’d find or hire someone else to stay here in Cabin Two and look after the kids.” He squinted apologetically. “What do you think about that?”

  For the moment, Wyatt couldn’t arrive at a conclusion. He was embarrassed to have Mr. Kindermann and Linda Rucker change the work assignments on his account. His first instinct was that it was probably for his own good.

  “Do you even know anything about horses, Wyatt?”

>   “A little bit,” he said.

  “I’m not sure it’s fair,” Christopher Waterhouse said. “I’ll have to think about it some more. I’ll promise you this much, though. If I happen to be around people and they’re talking about moving you to the horse stables, I’ll say, ‘Hold on a minute. Wyatt Huddy did a great job taking care of his state hospital campers, and now we need to give him a chance to work with the children.’ I’ll say that, if it’s all right with you?”

  Wyatt nodded, solemnly.

  “But you’re going to have to think about what it is that you want. What do you want, Wyatt?”

  It nearly made him blush, this question. He wasn’t used to such direct and intimate attention. The questions people put to one another. It amazed him. He made a small show of peering deep into the well of his paper sundae cup.

  “You look ready to say something, Wyatt. Like you have something on your mind.”

  He did, of course. And, really, he should probably go ahead and discuss the matter. Wouldn’t it be better to do so with Christopher Waterhouse, who’d been kinder to him than any of the other counselors?

  “Well, that’s all right then,” Christopher said, after a prolonged and uneasy silence. “I have ice cream to deliver. You take care, Wyatt. I’ll see you around.” He stepped back from the screen door and into the blackness of the walkway.

  Wyatt studied the empty landing where he’d been standing. Too late now. He’d come very close to discussing with Christopher a delicate subject. Not the matter of Evie Hicks, which was too terrible to admit. But another subject, almost equally troubling to Wyatt. It had to do with the meeting Mr. Kindermann had called in the camp office. About the disagreement over the IQ score of a retarded person. Was it seventy? Or was it one hundred? He’d certainly like to know.

  Chapter Nine

  Whatever the satisfactions of being camp nurse might be (and, surely, Harriet could think of several, if given a minute to concentrate), it wasn’t an assignment that allowed much in the way of uninterrupted sleep. At some juncture of the night, in one or more of the four sleeping cabins, there came a point at which a camper’s cough or rash or extremely odd behavior worried a counselor enough that he or she—most often a she, since the male counselors tended to let things slide—would usher the camper by flashlight out of the cabin and through the tunneling woods, up the gravel pathway to the infirmary door. Harriet, who slept in hospital scrubs and T-shirt, would rise to the occasion. Her remedies were simple enough: cough drops, calamine lotion, antihistamines and antacids, aspirin, unless the ailment was more serious and she’d have to unlock her medicine cabinet and retrieve an asthma inhaler or a calming middle-of-the-night dose of Valium. In almost every case the camper would be allowed to pass the rest of the night on an infirmary bed and the grateful counselor would shuffle back to the cabins.

  Harriet would try to return to sleep. But always she was torn between the obligations of two rooms. First and foremost there was the narrow living quarters, where James slumbered away on a cot beside her single bed. All night he wore a pinch-mouthed, determined expression, as if he were being brave in the face of a scolding lecture. In this room she could lie close enough to her son to reach across the narrow aisle between their beds and hold his hand while he slept.

  But in the next room, the much larger and weakly lit infirmary, there were always several or more state hospital campers turning in their bunks. Sometimes they called out in strange, reedy voices. Or they wheezed and belched and staggered to the bathroom, where, invariably, they performed a rushed and messy toilet. More troubling yet, the state hospital campers, while lying in their infirmary bunks, were always a few feet away from cabinets full of potent medications or razor-sharp instruments. Locked cabinets, certainly. But why did the cabinet doors have to be composed of glass panels large enough to smash a hand through?

  And so Harriet became a back-and-forth sleeper: thirty minutes of light slumber beside James, until a worrisome cough or grunt or commotion in the next room would send her into the infirmary to sort out or clean up whatever mess had transpired in her absence. Then she’d settle down on one of the empty infirmary bunks and rest awhile—you couldn’t exactly call it sleep—until the need to check on James moved her back into their living quarters. And so forth. And so on.

  It would almost certainly wear her out, this routine. At some point—not tonight, hopefully—she would be too drained and groggy to trust herself. This was an unsettling thought, and at the moment—an obscure span of time somewhere between Saturday night and Sunday morning—Harriet, collapsed half-awake on an infirmary bunk, decided to ask Mr. Kindermann for an assistant at night. Or rather she’d demand an assistant. Demand. She’d no more than decided this than someone began tapping persistently on the infirmary door.

  She checked her wristwatch: 5:32 A.M. Eventually she stood swaying and washed her face at the sink. She put her hand on the doorknob.

  Outside Linda Rucker stood balanced on the infirmary step. She was cocooned inside an overlarge flannel shirt and gripped a cup of coffee in one hand. She seemed to be waiting, eyebrows raised, for a verdict from Harriet. Just beyond the infirmary yard, on the gravel roadway, sat an idling Chevrolet Nova packed to the ceiling with bedclothes, kitchenware, books, winter coats.

  “Well?” Linda Rucker said.

  “What time is it?” Harriet asked, even though she’d checked a moment ago. She was studying the Nova’s vivid red parking lights glowing against a backdrop of blurred darkness.

  “You don’t know, do you?” Linda said.

  “I . . .” She shrugged and rubbed the corners of her eyes. “I guess I don’t.”

  “But I thought he made an announcement at dinner?”

  “Mr. Kindermann? He did. But it was just about . . . free ice cream.”

  “Free ice cream?” Linda Rucker said. She’d stepped back onto the infirmary yard, rooted in her shirt pocket and found a cigarette. When she set fire to the tip, Harriet could see Linda’s hands shaking. Her face—still a decidedly glum and unlovely face—was in the grip of a naked and agonized expression. “Free ice cream?” she repeated. “Well, no one’s going to squabble about that, are they? But he was supposed to announce something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been let go,” she said and grinned a hard, angry, impossible grin.

  Let go? For a moment Harriet’s confusion felt frozen in time. And then, all at once, it started to make sense—the odd timing of Linda’s visit, the anguished expression, the packed Chevy Nova. She’d been too groggy to understand it at first, but each of these things carried the aura of a slowly unfolding crisis. “Why would he do that?” Harriet asked, incredulous.

  “He seems to believe . . .” Linda shook her head and squeezed shut her eyes.

  “What?”

  “He thinks I have the hots for Christopher Waterhouse,” Linda said. “He thinks I’ve let my . . . feelings for Christopher get in the way of doing my job. That I’ve formed a fixation.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Yes. It is,” Linda agreed, flatly.

  “Do you think he’s going senile? Or maybe suffered a stro—”

  “No.”

  “But the decisions he makes. You can’t make sense of them.”

  “He’s doing exactly what he wants to do,” Linda said. “It’s easier for him now that Sandie’s not around.” With that she let out a long, deflated exhalation, half sigh, half sob. When Harriet stepped forward to steady her, to offer her comfort—but what kind of consoling gesture could you make to someone so closed off?—Linda stepped back and raised her hand, a clear appeal not to be touched. After a while, she said, “You haven’t asked me if it’s true.”

  “Well,” Harriet said. “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “Do you have a fixation with Christopher Waterhouse?”

  “I have a notion that I can’t stop thinking about, a notion that he’s not a good person.”


  “But do you have . . . feelings for him?”

  “I do not,” Linda insisted. She’d raised her voice so that it took on the terseness and hard sputter of a threat. All the more unnerving because with Linda Rucker, always glum, always restrained, you couldn’t imagine what a further escalation of her anger might look like. “I’d be a fool if I did,” she continued. “If I was a grown woman, running a summer camp and getting crushes on pretty lifeguards.”

  At this Harriet stepped down to the yard, bringing the infirmary door almost closed—enough to hear a commotion inside, but enough also to keep her resting patients from overhearing what Linda Rucker might say next. “All right,” she said. “All right, Linda. Take it easy.” She stood, arms folded, listening to the low idling of Linda’s car. “And do you still have your suspicion? About Christopher?” she asked.

  “I do,” Linda said, a hard satisfaction in her voice. “But I’ve been up packing all night and making arrangements. And I’m upset about being let . . . about being fired, and now when I concentrate all I come up with are two things. You’re not going to think much of either of them, Harriet.”

  “Go ahead,” Harriet said. “Try me and let’s see.”

  Linda Rucker pouted her thin lips and shrugged—a self-shielding gesture. She didn’t expect to be believed. “On Monday,” she said, “the first day of State Session, I went down to the pool at closing time, and I saw Christopher at work in the lifeguard stand. There were twenty or so campers who still had to be coaxed out of the water, and he climbed down from the chair and marched into the shallow end and he went straight to Evie Hicks. Pulled her up. Walked her out of the pool. One hand on her back, one on her elbow, very . . . professional. But of all the people in the pool he hurried over and chose Evie Hicks.”

  Between Harriet and Linda there was a look of commiseration. For Evie Hicks. To know her was to be worried on her behalf.

  “The rest comes down to a feeling I have about Christopher. It’s clear he thinks he’s smarter and better than me. That’s no surprise. I’ve been dealing with that attitude all my life. Maybe it’s been the same for you. People can think they’re better than you in all kinds of ways. Some of those ways aren’t so bad. You can tolerate it, if you have to. But I remember meeting Christopher Waterhouse for the first time and thinking to myself, Uh-oh, this guy expects me to be stupid, even though some part of him knows I’m not. He expects me to keep my mouth shut and be grateful for whatever attention he’s willing to pay me.” She let the cigarette, half-smoked, fall from her hand onto the grass, where she pawed at it with the toe of her tennis shoe. “It doesn’t add up to much, does it? Most people in my position would have been smart enough not to make a fuss. This is the only real job I’ve had,” Linda said. “Eighteen summers. Kitchen girl. Counselor. Unit leader. Program director. All that time I knew it wasn’t going to last. I knew it. If a man like Mr. Kindermann owns a summer camp and wants to run in into the ground, well that’s his business, isn’t it? The stupidest thing is that, because of all the time I’ve spent out here in the off-season, I’ve got it in my head that it’s my summer camp. In the middle of winter, when no one’s around, it feels like it’s mine. But I don’t own it. I just know camp better than anyone else. And I know enough about the finances to understand that it’s a money loser now and Schuller can only go a couple of more years. So I tell myself, Okay, all right. I’ll stick around and be the one to watch over camp until it’s shut down. I’ll be the one to sell off the horses—if anyone would have them—and put the chain on the gate and walk away. But this is far worse, Harriet, because I’m not going to be around to do any of those things. I won’t even know what happens.”