The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  Inside the bags were a hodgepodge of items scavenged from the camp office and mess hall: a plastic spoon, a dinner mint, a Kindermann Forest postcard, a camp brochure. Ridiculous items, or so Harriet thought, until she observed the campers, and James, too, sorting through the contents of their bags with blushes of pleasure.

  “A few more left still,” Christopher Waterhouse said, launching bags to various campers in the crowd. “For you and you and you and . . . you,” he said, until all the prizes had been distributed and he held the upturned box over his head as proof. Then he pressed his way back and stood before the snack tables. “A reminder,” he said. “You do know, don’t you, that tomorrow night we have our final evening activity? It’s big. It’s spectacular. Even the name for it is big and spectacular.” He wrinkled his brow, and in a pantomime of concentration he readied himself to pronounce the title. “The Kindermann Forest Talent Show Extravaganza and Farewell Dance,” he said and grinned in relief at having got the name right. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. Practice your special talent—your singing or magic tricks or whatever—and your dancing, too, because . . .” In the middle of this genial advice, he turned and spotted something in the bed of the van that required all of his attention. Whatever it was, it made him blink in surprise. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “My mind must be slipping gears.” And he reached into the van and pulled out a straw hat, the floppy-brimmed kind the maintenance men used when mowing grass. “Look here. Look what I forgot. We have one more thing to do before we end our carnival. A grand ultimate prize to give away.” He looked expectantly out at his audience and said, “Did you know that there’s a town nearby called Ellsinore, and in Ellsinore there’s a Dairy Queen? And when our counselors have done an especially good job, we load them in the van and take them to the Ellsinore Dairy Queen for ice cream. That’s what we do, yes. They love it, too. It’s their reward for a job well done.” He’d balanced the straw hat, bottom side up, in the palm of his hand and held it out, as if raising a toast to his listeners. In the bowl of the hat was a nest of paper slips. He pulled them out and let them trickle through his fingers and fall back into the hat. “Your names,” he explained to the campers. “One of you is going to go with me this evening to Ellsinore, to the Dairy Queen. I’ll do the driving and the buying. You choose the ice cream and do the eating. That’s a good deal, don’t you think?” He waited, grinning, hat in hand, for something—a grunt of reply—from his audience. “Are we ready now to find out who the winner is?” he continued. “Do you understand? Are you ready?”

  They were a difficult crowd to read. They’d pressed in tight around the rear of the van, elbowing for room and looking at Christopher shyly or warily out of the corners of their eyes. Perhaps a few of them had understood. A few of them might have been ready. But mostly they seemed to be looking past Christopher Waterhouse and focusing their attention on the foldout tables, where the cooler of bug juice and little bags of vanilla wafers awaited them.

  “Here we go then,” he said and lofted his right arm straight up in the air, then let the wrist dip and his hand free-fall in a perfect swan dive into the bowl of the hat. He fished about for a name, his lips and jaw set in a grimace of determination but his gaze light and winsome. Then he plucked a single slip of paper from the hat, read the name, wrinkled his nose. He seemed to be searching his memory. At last, he shrugged. “The winner is . . . ,” he said.

  Nearby, the wrangler Stephen Walburn began a drumroll against the rear fender of the van.

  “And the winner is . . . ,” Christopher Waterhouse repeated, this time in a proper announcer’s baritone. The drumroll fell away. He glanced again at the slip of paper. “Evie Hicks,” he said.

  The moments that followed were cheerful and strange. “Evie Hicks,” Christopher Waterhouse said, and right away the counselors applauded, and the campers, seeing their caretakers applaud, brought their hands together clumsily and with great energy; they loved to clap after all. The mood in the crowd seemed to be shifting toward gladness and relief: the counselors pleased to see the long evening draw almost to an end, the campers happy to lurch toward the tables and claim their snacks.

  Harriet, in the rear of the crowd, tightened her hold on James’s hand. She tilted her head to one side, still listening. Evie Hicks.

  In spite of herself, she smiled—an anxious smile, yet there was a current of real satisfaction in it. She sometimes heard television comedians say outrageous and ugly things, and her reaction now was much the same: she smiled in disbelief at the boldness of the joke teller, though not the joke itself.

  And at the same time, from a narrow back corridor of her mind, came a soft but keening exclamation of worry. Oh, for goodness’ sake. Uttered in one quick, breathy exhalation, it was what her elderly female patients at Meadowmont Gardens Nursing Home, the Garden Ladies, said when the gossip they shared was especially dire. Oh, for goodness’ sake, a signal of distress that portended not just sympathy and alarm but an open permission that the news be spread at once through the many corridors of Meadowmont Gardens. “Evie Hicks,” Christopher Waterhouse said, and quietly, even distantly, in the back of Harriet’s mind, a chorus of Garden Ladies sang out, Oh, for goodness’ sake. It wasn’t loud or shrill enough to drown out her clear thoughts. She wouldn’t call herself distracted. Or panicked. Not yet. At least this lament, clear and persistent, did have one advantage: for the first time in days she felt properly awake.

  Above the meadow—and the rolling valleys that surrounded it—stretched a sky of deepening dark blue, a sky in the last stage of dusk. Were Linda Rucker directing the Kindermann Forest Camp Carnival, they’d have finished and been back in the cabins by now. But here it was ten minutes till nine and the dusk-to-dawn lamps that girded the mess hall and infirmary were flickering on. The counselors were the first to realize it. The heavy, plum-colored sky. The glinting floodlights. They were late. And so, hurriedly, the crowd of campers was broken apart, corralled into dozens of small groups, each group pushed eastward toward the lip of the meadow. They had to eat their vanilla wafers while tottering along the gravel pathways into the woods, and once they reached the cabins they’d be rushed through the most unpleasant chores of the day: the use of toilets, the showering, the brushing of teeth and dressing into pajamas. All of this in the name of keeping the state hospital campers on schedule.

  The real schedule, of course, the more pressing schedule, belonged to the counselors. They were more persistent—and more forceful—than usual. In their resolute expressions you could see how badly they wanted to be rid of their campers for the night. Before that could happen, the sleeping barracks would need to be set to order, the campers washed and ready for bed and more or less confined to their bunks. Once these goals had been accomplished, the counselors—except those unfortunate few assigned to cabin watch—would be set free until midnight to do as they pleased.

  What they did in their off-hours, what pleased them, had become, thanks to the lively conversation of the infirmary yard, an open secret. Harriet was privy to what went on. For instance, she knew that Wayne Kesterson had brought a generous supply of marijuana to camp, and that he and Wrangler Stephen Walburn hoped the prospect of free pot would lure one or several girl counselors to their nightly campfire in the horse pasture. So far they’d been disappointed. But there’d been other successful pairings and partnerships. Kathleen Bram and Michael Lauderback spent their nighttime hours strolling hand in hand along the roads and gravel pathways of Kindermann Forest. During the workday they were coolly polite with one another, but to see them in the off-hours, to skirt by them on a darkened path and glimpse the intensity of their attraction, was a bracing and mostly unpleasant experience. And then there was the oddest configuration of all: among Carrie Reinkenmeyer and Daniel Hartpence and Emily Boehler there appeared to be a burgeoning romance. Either that or they had formed the tightest clique at camp, a friendship so passionate that it included long eruptions of wild and exclusive laughter and an intense physical clo
seness. (They group-wrestled in the swimming pool, lounged upon one another on the Sanctuary couches, and often exchanged fierce, sloppy, half-jesting kisses to the cheek and neck.) If one of the three was scheduled to cabin watch, the other two stayed behind with their friend and helped out. If all three were free, they disappeared into the woods and went unaccounted for until midnight and beyond.

  A strange place, summer camp. It was a small enough world that the shape of your private life could be widely known or guessed at. And still everyone managed to cling to their unwise behavior, their private intentions. The counselors. The campers. Harriet, too.

  At the moment she wanted, intensely, to get her son washed and ready for bed. James was willing to oblige her, mostly. Like the campers, he had to chew his vanilla wafers while being towed across the meadow by an impatient caretaker. Inside the infirmary bathroom she stripped him naked and ran a warm washcloth over his face and body. She bullied him into brushing his teeth and dressed him in pajamas. Afterward Harriet carried him to their living quarters and arranged him in his bed. Back at their St. Louis home he would have required a storybook and a glass of water, but here at camp his only real concern, the only thing he insisted on, was that the door leading out of their living quarters into the yard be locked. The other door, to the infirmary itself, could be left unlocked and ajar, as long as his mother could be seen stationed at her work desk.

  For James’s sake, she took a seat at the desk and pretended to pour all her attention into the nearest open file. Yet there was a self-consciousness to everything she did: the way she rolled a pen between her fingers, the studious tilt of her head. She couldn’t keep up this pretense for long.

  At last she stood, pulled back the window curtain, and looked outside.

  In the center of the meadow, at the rear of the camp van, was Christopher Waterhouse, from this distance a lanky and silhouetted figure moving in and out of the van’s interior light. He’d accomplished a good deal in the hurried minutes Harriet had spent inside the infirmary. The remnants of the evening snack had been put away, the tables folded up, the milk crates and the game pieces—everything that constituted the Kindermann Forest Camp Carnival—stowed away in the bed of the van. He was moving out across the meadow now, bent over, trash bag in hand, plucking the first scraps of debris from the trampled and litter-strewn grass. This chore might take him ten minutes or less to complete.

  Then he’d be on his way to the Ellsinore Dairy Queen with Evie Hicks.

  Harriet let the window curtain swing shut. For several long minutes she did nothing but stand there dumbly while, from the back of her mind, the Garden Ladies insisted, Oh, for goodness’ sake, Harriet. For goodness’ sake.

  Behind Harriet a bed frame creaked. A muted cough. A plaintive voice called out, “Here it comes. Ack ack ack.”

  There were patients in the infirmary to care for, a simple fact, but, under the circumstances, it had the force of a long-sought discovery. Patients. Yes, of course. Two of them. Stretched out on a tousled bunk, her head nested in a mound of borrowed pillows, was Miss Mary Ann Hornicker, the freckled, diabetic, and silent woman whom Harriet had met the first day of camp and who, over the last eleven days, for reasons complicated or simple, had come to adore Harriet. Miss Hornicker was propped up on one elbow studying her nurse as if Harriet might at any moment bestow on her the sweetest of blessings. Across the aisle lay Mrs. Nancy Klotter, who came to the infirmary once a day, sometimes more, with an invented condition. Could a person be both retarded and hypochondriac? Absolutely. There were other campers who could be counted in both categories, but Mrs. Klotter was, perhaps, the most committed to her imaginary ailments. “It’s coming back again,” she said now, sitting cross-legged on her bunk, a hand raised to ward off the return of her dry, unconvincing cough. “Ack, ack, ack,” she gasped. “Ack, ack, ack.”

  Here at least was an opportunity for Harriet to lose herself in a few minor duties: a cup of tap water to soothe Mrs. Klotter’s invented cough, a kind word for Miss Hornicker, a quick check of James (tucked perfectly in his bed but still awake), the night-lights in the bathroom and infirmary turned on, the overhead fluorescent lights dimmed, her muffin tray set out on her work desk and ready to be filled. And then what?

  Then she opened the infirmary door and stepped onto the wood stairs. It was irrefutably nighttime now, the woods thickly dark, the air cooler and less muggy. A fractional moon glowed from behind the crowns of the tallest trees. From the vantage of the infirmary step, she could see the camp van lurching across the meadow. Its uneven headlights threw out a muddled brightness. Eventually it reached the roadway, the engine revving, gravel popping from beneath its tires, as it wheeled past the infirmary and made a sharp turn onto a narrow drive. Moments later it had disappeared behind the back corner of the mess hall.

  A small cluster of people waited just inside the screened perimeter of the mess hall porch. The porch light had been turned on and, by benefit of its orange glow, Harriet could recognize each member of the group: the ragged and frightening Mulcrone sisters; their counselor, Veronica Yordy; and, atop a nearby mess hall dining table, half-sitting, half-sprawled, Evie Hicks.

  It was easy enough to guess what was happening here: they were waiting for Christopher Waterhouse, waiting for the camp van to be unloaded and then driven around to the porch so that Evie could be loaded into the passenger seat for her ride to Ellsinore. They looked a little impatient, a little wilted, from the slow lapse of minutes. At least the Mulcrone sisters and Veronica Yordy did. (Veronica rocked on her heels and clapped her hands listlessly together. She was anxious, no doubt, to get Evie installed in the van and the Mulcrone sisters escorted to their cabin, washed and in their beds.) But Evie Hicks was a different case. She was slumped down studying the scratched surface of the mess hall table. You could mistake her slack posture and dawdling movements for teenage indolence, but Evie was the opposite of lazy. Her enthusiasms were myopic and absolute. Harriet had treated the girl for chapped lips and heat rash and given her medication three times a day. This much was clear: Evie was engrossed in whatever existed a few inches before her eyes. And she was altogether immune to the passage of time. One place, one time of day, was as good as any other to Evie. Of course it was a fool’s game to try to guess what any of the state hospital campers might be thinking or feeling. But looking across the infirmary yard to the lit mess hall porch and Evie’s light-haloed figure, Harriet was certain of one thing: the girl had no idea that she was waiting, much less what she was waiting for.

  An engine groaned. From behind the mess hall came a widening spray of headlights. Then the camp van rumbled around the corner of the building, bouncing along the driveway and stopping—a bit too hastily, it seemed to Harriet—at the mess hall porch. The driver’s door swung open. “All aboard,” Christopher Waterhouse called out.

  The eagerness of these two words, All aboard, the inflated cheerfulness, made Harriet suddenly miserable. Without quite meaning to, she stepped back into the infirmary and closed the door. She looked around. A different world entirely here: the air chilled to seventy-five degrees and wrung of its dampness, the smell of Pine-Sol cleaner, the waxy glow of the bathroom night-light. From her shadowed bunk Mary Ann Hornicker peered up wordlessly and adoringly at her favorite nurse. Mrs. Klotter resumed her cough. “Ack, ack, ack.”

  Harriet put her forehead against the closed infirmary door and squeezed shut her eyes.

  A great shuddering wave of misgiving and dread washed over her. And resentment, too, at Christopher Waterhouse and Schuller Kindermann and Linda Rucker. Especially Linda Rucker, who, more than anyone, would expect that Harriet step forward and do something. But on what basis? On Linda’s intuition, her inkling that Christopher Waterhouse harbored a perverse interest in Evie Hicks? On this basis Harriet was supposed to march across the roadway to the mess hall porch and make a persuasive case to Veronica Yordy. (If so, it had better be a brief and utterly convincing account, because among the advocates at camp for Christophe
r Waterhouse, Veronica and her best friend, Marcy Bittman, were surely the chummiest and most loyal.) Maureen Boyd might have been persuaded to join Harriet’s cause, but she and the kitchen girls had gone home for the night. So what did this leave Harriet? The weakest and most ridiculous option of all: she could race to the director’s cottage and make a frantic and useless appeal to her employer, the stubborn and foolish Schuller Kindermann.

  Everyone to whom she might make an appeal was white. And somehow—though it wasn’t charitable or exactly logical to think this way—their whiteness, their alikeness, and the safety of their large community made them easily fooled.

  Fools. Incompetents. Knuckleheads. They’d put her in an impossible situation. Surely she’d earned the right to curse them in the ugliest possible terms, to shout in her mind, Dumb Fucking Crackers. Idiots. Retards. Cruel words. Desperate words. She hoped they might be enough to shock her into action.

  In the end what got her going was so much milder. Oh, for goodness’ sake, Harriet. For goodness’ sake, the Garden Ladies called to her, and she lifted her head from the door and opened her eyes. She was waiting, as she always did, for something small and knowable to present itself in the middle of an emergency. Her hand found the doorknob. Smooth. Round. Cool to the touch. A doorknob. She turned the knob and in an instant was out the door and hurrying across the yard.

  A vehicle was advancing down the road, bouncing along on its carriage in a way that seemed purposeful and jolly. She broke into a run and soon reached the gravelly edge of the roadway. The headlights, waxy and off-kilter, kept coming—fifty yards, twenty yards, then nearer. She stepped into the center of the road and put out her hand. In the glare it was hard to tell if the van was decreasing or maintaining its speed.

  She held her ground, and eventually the driver slowed to accommodate her.