by John Dalton
“It’ll be all right,” Harriet said. “You’re too tired right now. But you have your reasons and I’ll . . . Do you know where you’re going? You have someplace to stay, don’t you?”
“Family,” Linda said and rolled her eyes in a reluctant direction. “I have a sister who lives an hour or so from here, in Branson. We don’t like each other much.”
“I can let you know,” Harriet said. “I can call you maybe.”
And so Linda pulled a notepad from her pocket and copied out a name and number and passed it to Harriet. “I have to get out of here before Maureen and the kitchen girls roll in,” she said. “It’s too much, you understand? Explaining myself over and over again.” She walked unsteadily to the Chevy Nova and climbed behind the wheel.
It wasn’t a picturesque farewell. The car had been hastily packed, and all manner of debris—blankets, pillows, stuffed grocery bags and shoe boxes—kept spilling onto her shoulders and lap. She pushed them back, and finally, exasperated, she hung her head over the wheel and began sobbing—an odd, angry, masculine sob. She heaved her head and shoulders up and down, as if agreeing vehemently to some opinion or song coming over the car radio. Then she put the Nova in gear, and it lurched forward and sped along the camp road, bits of gravel popping beneath the tires, until she reached the front gate, turned left, and raced off toward Highway 52.
At breakfast that morning Schuller Kindermann sat at the head of the director’s table chewing his scrambled eggs and waffles and wincing vaguely whenever the babbling noise of the mess hall rose to a clamorous level. There were brown finches hopping along the railroad ties just outside the mess hall’s screen doors, and from time to time Schuller turned in his seat to admire them. He sipped his orange juice. Harriet, winding among the mess hall tables with her muffin tray of pills, would pause and study him. Any moment she expected him to rise and make his announcement. But throughout the whole of breakfast and two leisurely cups of coffee he did no such thing. Nor did he, after the meal, summon the senior staff to the camp office for a meeting. By late morning she could only conclude that he’d decided to let the news of Linda Rucker’s departure circulate among the Kindermann Forest staff as rumor.
But who was supposed to spread this rumor? Had it been assumed that Harriet would do the talking? Or Christopher Waterhouse? The counselors all looked too drowsy and overburdened to carry the news.
An hour before lunch Reggie Boyd stopped by the infirmary yard and with his straw hat pulled down over his eyes asked Harriet if she’d heard anything about Linda Rucker leaving camp. Harriet chose her words carefully. Linda had been let go. She was staying with her sister in Branson. A very bare-boned account, yet it made Reggie Boyd bow his head demurely. “My goodness. That sure takes the cake, don’t it?” he said, before thanking her and wandering away. Ten minutes later the mess hall doors swung open and down the steps toward the infirmary marched Maureen Boyd, red-faced, indignant. “Gone for good?” she asked. “Gone already? This is Schuller’s doing. He’s gone too far this time, hasn’t he?” she demanded of Harriet. And with that Maureen strutted about the yard flexing her elbows and stomping the ground with her scuffed white work shoes. It was a pantomime of outrage Harriet had seen before among several of her backwoods North Carolina neighbors, older women mostly, who wanted to be thought of as feisty and truth-telling. Forces to be reckoned with. It was Maureen’s belief that Linda Rucker had been let go for trying to oppose Schuller Kindermann’s firing of fifteen counselors the week before. “He couldn’t stand to have a woman speak against him, the bastard.” In Maureen’s opinion each member of the senior staff should threaten to quit unless Linda was rehired. Or, she said, barring that, the whole staff should stage a walkout during today’s lunch at the mess hall.
None of this happened. Maureen, whose meager salary helped support two grown daughters and three grandbabies, sat a long while smoking and drinking coffee. “It’s so god damn unfair,” she said. Eventually she returned to work and, with her staff of freckled kitchen girls, served lunch, albeit ten minutes late.
Not one of the new counselors was outraged or offended; no one bothered to wear an expression of sadness on Linda Rucker’s behalf. It seemed they’d never felt much in the way of loyalty to Linda. Her firing was, for them, a foreseeable event. Several of the female counselors who came to the infirmary claimed to know the reasons for Linda’s dismissal. Carrie Reinkenmeyer knew. Kathleen Bram knew. She’d heard it from Marcy Bittman, who, in turn, had heard it from fellow lifeguard, Christopher Waterhouse.
They didn’t mind repeating the story.
It began with Linda Rucker coming down to the pool every few hours during the first days of the State Session and watching, with a supervisor’s alertness, the campers as they rode the surface of the pool on their inflated rings and kickboards. She’d check the maintenance schedule and then she’d stand awhile by the lifeguard chair talking with Christopher Waterhouse. “Well, I can see you’re up to no good,” she’d say. Or “Anybody ever tell you you’re nothing but trouble?” It took a few of these remarks for Christopher to understand he was being teased and to reply in kind. “That’s right,” he’d answer. “Trouble’s my middle name.” They’d share a confidential chuckle. Marcy Bittman, walking the perimeter of the pool deck, overheard several such exchanges.
The next time Linda stopped by she said to him, “Not a bad job, getting paid to sit there and daydream. Don’t you dare tell me what it is you daydream about, either. I don’t need to know.”
Christopher told her she was safe. He’d keep his daydreams to himself.
To be sure they talked about other things, too: pH levels and filter maintenance, but she had a way of steering the conversation toward a wisecrack or pun. One afternoon, just after lunch, she came to the pool, looked up at him in his chair, and said, “You must get bored stiff. Does that ever happen to you, Christopher? Do you ever get bored stiff?”
He looked at her and saw the glint of implication in her gaze and laughed. He told her that getting bored stiff was an occupational hazard for male lifeguards. But the good ones knew how to cross their legs and think about baseball.
His answer seemed to put her in an ecstatic mood. She couldn’t stop laughing her slumped, tight-shouldered laugh. “That’s a good one,” she said. “Baseball. I’ll remember that.”
Later Christopher told Marcy Bittman he regretted this remark. It had complicated his dealings with Linda Rucker. During the school year he waited tables at an Italian restaurant in Cape Girardeau, and there were older female customers, most of them married with school-age kids, who expected a little flirtatious banter. But none of these women had been his supervisor. He should have remembered that.
The next afternoon, Wednesday, she stopped him outside the mess hall and said she had a true story she’d like to tell him. Would he like to hear it? Sure, he said. But she wouldn’t reveal her story there at the mess hall. She said she’d be down to see him at the pool in a half hour.
An hour later she plodded down the pool steps and crossed the deck to his lifeguard chair. “You can’t wait to hear, can you?” she said, as if waiting on her story had made him frantic or miserable. “All right. I’ll quit torturing you. Here it is.”
And then she told him that when she was a counselor, not so many years ago, she had a friendship with one of the maintenance men. A nice guy. Hard worker. But he was always . . . bored stiff. And so, together, they had come up with a solution. A friendly arrangement. She’d meet him behind the arts and crafts pavilion every day during Siesta. She’d unfasten his belt buckle and blue jeans. Then she’d help him relax. With her hand and a little bit of suntan lotion. A favor she was happy to perform. They usually only had ten minutes. And they had to be quiet, given the way sound carried through the woods. One problem, though. The maintenance man was very loud, especially at the moment when the favor she was performing got most . . . intense. So he’d do something funny. He’d take his John Deere cap off his head and bite down on the
bill of the cap to keep from shouting out loud.
She wouldn’t look Christopher in the eye. Instead she stood leaning awhile against the lifeguard stand. “Quite a story, isn’t it?” she said, wistfully, and when Christopher, stunned silent in his lifeguard chair, failed to respond, she said, “Do you know what I’m going to do now? I’m gonna go up the stairs and then to the walkway. But instead of going left, to the meadow, I’m going the other way. Do you know that path?” As it happened, he did. She meant the path that lead to the archery pavilion, closed for the duration of the State Session. “When your break comes up in a few minutes,” she said, “I think you should gather up a few things you might need—a towel and some lotion—and come join me.” She didn’t wait for an answer. She stepped away and announced, loudly, that she’d see him later, and as she crossed the deck, she swung her arm out in a big cheerful wave aimed at Marcy Bittman and several of the campers in the pool. At the top of the stairs Linda turned right, toward the archery pavilion, a path that would take her deeper into the woods.
At once Christopher climbed down from his chair and hurried over to Marcy Bittman’s side of the pool and told her what had happened. They were both astonished.
More important, when his break came, he stayed right there at the pool, beside Marcy Bittman, marveling at the ordeal he’d been through.
He didn’t see Linda Rucker again until the evening activity. One look from her and he knew: not just furious or disappointed or ashamed. He’d managed to offend the fiercest and most vulnerable part of her. In Linda Rucker he’d made a terrible enemy.
Could any of it be believed? The teasing? The bawdy joke? The lurid offer?
At the very least it was a story Harriet would have to weigh carefully. She’d have to view it with the same dispassionate concern she used to evaluate her patients’ symptoms and complaints.
So, in this light, yes, such a thing could be believed. It could have happened. People were driven to do reckless and unseemly things. Harriet knew that.
But could Linda Rucker have said and done these things? Could she have stood beside the lifeguard chair and offered to masturbate Christopher Waterhouse with her hand and a dollop of suntan lotion?
No. Not likely. Or rather Harriet couldn’t imagine a tone of voice or an expression that Linda might employ while making such an offer.
But Kathleen Bram and Carrie Reinkenmeyer and Marcy Bittman believed. They were grave and remarkably consistent in their telling of the story, and over the course of the afternoon most of the Kindermann Forest counseling staff stopped by the infirmary yard to hear the news. Certain details made them cringe. Suntan lotion, for instance. The girl counselors who heard this shivered their arms and wiggled their fingers as if they’d dipped their hands in something unsavory. “Oh, my God,” they said. “She’s so . . .”
Words failed them. But their appalled expressions made it clear. Disgusting. It disgusted them to hear what Linda Rucker had proposed. True, the counselors of Kindermann Forest had joked and gossiped about matters more lurid than masturbation. But Linda’s offer was worse somehow—more blatant and unfair, more offensive.
Harriet stood back and listened to their complaints. She didn’t offer a defense. What offended the counselors most, it seemed to her, was that the offer had come from Linda Rucker. Disgusting to think that the least attractive woman at Kindermann Forest had made a bid for the best-looking young man at camp.
In the mess hall that evening, after Harriet had finished passing out meds, she took a seat at the director’s table and watched an unfazed Schuller Kindermann finish up his plate of chicken fingers, potato wedges, and sliced tomatoes. He seemed to be in the grip of an effusive mood, his manners lively, his conversation uncustomarily eager—the sort of tableside chitchat meant to lift the spirits of those around him.
To Harriet he said: “Excuse me, young lady. Would you steer more of those chicken fingers my way, if you please.”
To Head Lifeguard Marcy Bittman: “You look tired enough to put your head down on the table and sleep. Hectic days. I know, I know. Come Saturday you’ll be able to catch up on your sleep. I promise you that.”
To a sullen Maureen Boyd: “Nicely done, Maureen. Especially the tomatoes. They’re homegrown. I can taste that. But are they local?”
To James: “Did you know the largest tomato in the world was grown south of here in Arkansas? How many pounds do you think it weighed, James? Three pounds? Five? Would you believe it weighed seven pounds, three ounces? Because it did.”
James wrinkled his slender nose. This wasn’t, Harriet knew, a sign of the boy’s skepticism; it was a wince of satisfaction at having a grown man, an important man, speak to him.
“Well, did you know this?” Schuller continued. “There’s a giant tomato tree in China that produces tens of thousands of tomatoes each year?”
James nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I know about that.” And then he looked to his mother for confirmation. But what did Harriet know about giant tomato trees in China? And how to explain something almost as remarkable: Schuller’s popularity with James and—according to Linda Rucker and Maureen Boyd—with all the youngest boys who came to camp, the seven- to ten-year-olds. They revered Schuller Kindermann, supposedly. But once they’d aged a few years, once they were beyond twelve or thirteen, they found him ridiculous.
At the end of the meal Schuller wished everyone gathered at the director’s table a good evening and strolled across the meadow to his cottage. He had not mentioned, one way or the other, who would oversee the evening’s activity: a campfire to be held in the southwest corner of the meadow, a campfire that would feature marshmallows and chocolate bars and a visit from an Indian brave and his loyal squaw, both on horseback.
The counselors were unsure how to proceed. Linda Rucker had always given them clear instructions for each evening event. Were they now responsible? Was it their job to prepare the campfire?
They needn’t have worried. When they arrived at the meadow, they found a waist-high tepee of cedar logs erected and stuffed with newspaper. Ten minutes later Christopher Waterhouse drove up in the camp van and from its rear hatch produced two foldout tables, which he stocked with chocolate bars and marshmallows and thermoses of bug juice. From the edge of the crowd Harriet and James stood and watched the fire set ablaze. Everyone hunted for sticks upon which to spear their marshmallows. Counselor Michael Lauderback uncased his guitar and led the state hospital campers in a raucous and uneven version of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” Such awful crooning. Yet they were wildly happy to sing this song. Several campers who, until now, had spent their week dazed and flat-eyed and stumbling managed somehow to surface from beneath the heavy mantle of their medications and bark out a few words to the song. Live . . . long . . . day, they warbled, as if they were answering a chorus of voices that had traveled a very great distance to reach them.
At twilight two riders appeared on the horizon of the meadow and trotted their horses to within twenty yards of the fire. The Indian brave, a shirtless Wayne Kesterson in cutoff jeans and war paint across his chest and cheeks, folded his arms Indian-style and nodded sagely at their gathering. Beside him, Marcy Bittman, dressed in a buckskin-fringe skirt and blouse, beneath which they could see the outline of her black one-piece swimsuit, glared at them with a fervent gaze, thrusting her chin and breasts forward, an attempt, largely successful, to appear wild and fetching. Together Wayne and Marcy raised their hands as if swearing an oath and said: “We command all who have gathered here at the sacred fire to love the earth and lead honorable lives.” Then they turned their trail horses and galloped off. The campers watched them go. All day long they’d been promised a visit from an Indian brave and squaw, and now those campers aware enough to understand what they’d just seen, the fulfillment of a promise, called after the horses. Come back, come back, come back!
Chapter Ten
I wouldn’t buy an inch of cropland . . . there,” Leonard Peirpont said.
“Where
?” Wyatt asked
“At the . . . Over at the . . .” But by then he’d lost the thread of his thoughts. With Leonard, you could see the gears slipping, the rift in concentration, the soft pursing and unpursing of his lips. “I wouldn’t . . . ,” he muttered.
