The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  But this, of course, was impossible. It was stupid even to dream this way—stupid and hurtful and unfair. Because there’d be no responding tenderness from Evie Hicks. Everything he might do to Evie—in the name of love or in the spirit of things far crueler—would be done against her will.

  For proof of this all he needed to do was look inside the Kindermann Forest camp van.

  There, within the shell of the van, under the coppery glow of the dome light, she’d been stripped naked and then put back under the harness of her seat belt. What he could see of her at first glance, her bare shoulders and arms and naked breasts—one flattened beneath a belt, one dangling free—was terrible and astonishing. Her knees were pinkly callused from all the crawling she did. Dark hair sprouted from the hollows beneath her armpits. A naked adult woman—or at least a naked Evie Hicks—was a pale and loosely formed creature.

  This was an unexpected discovery, truly. He would have stood gawking at her in dumb wonder were it not for another remarkable sight: Christopher Waterhouse kneeling before Evie on the floor of the van. He’d pressed the side of his face adoringly against her thigh and slid his hands beneath her naked bottom. He was trying, it seemed, to raise her up straighter in her seat, to lift her hips and open wide her legs, which were flexing languidly, as if she were stirring in her sleep. Once her legs were parted, he embraced Evie in a sudden, thrusting hug, writhed against her just a few moments—and stopped. Then he went back to the difficult business of raising Evie up in her seat and adjusting her flailing legs. How very calm, how very patient, his efforts appeared to be. Clearly he knew that the van door had been pushed open and that a person, an observer, was standing behind him. And yet his first craning look up at Wyatt revealed nothing in the way of shame or surprise. The only thing he seemed to want from Wyatt was a nodding admission that what was being done here—this raising and parting of Evie Hicks’s legs—was a complicated and worthwhile endeavor.

  “Stop it,” Wyatt said in a hushed and unweighty voice. “Stop what you’re doing. Right now.”

  It was enough to provoke in Christopher Waterhouse the slow stirrings of a second reaction: he blinked his eyes wetly and let his arms and shoulders go slack. Then he pulled his hands out from beneath Evie Hicks and began to crawl, awkwardly, out of the van. He lowered one foot on the grassy floor of the clearing, then the other. He raised himself up to full height. “Wyatt,” he said. “Wyatt. We were having trouble here. We were having an emergency.” As he said this, he reached down and hoisted up his blue jeans and underwear, which were bundled around his thighs.

  “An emergency?”

  “She was choking on something. A piece of cracker or some candy. She was making an awful sound, Wyatt. I had to pull the van over and get her shirt off to pound on her back. So I could find out where the problem was.”

  To Wyatt it seemed that his first duty was to imagine such a thing: Evie choking, Christopher pulling the van over and crawling back to assist her, removing her T-shirt . . . but also her bra, her pants, her underwear, even her shoes and socks. These articles of clothing had been lined up on the van seat beside Evie, and the sight of her clothing, especially its neat arrangement, made him feel as if he’d been slapped powerfully by a cold hand. Slapped and slapped again. Only an idiot, only a retarded person, would believe such an excuse.

  “I had to get her calmed down, Wyatt. She was acting wild. She was pulling off her—”

  “She wasn’t,” Wyatt insisted. His hand was clenched around the van door latch. He let go and gripped Christopher Waterhouse by the shoulder with an equal prying strength.

  “Hey, hey there . . . easy, Wyatt.”

  “Don’t say things you know aren’t true.”

  There was a fraught and astonished silence, in which it was possible to watch, moment by moment, a deep blush of appreciation bloom across Christopher’s face. Don’t say things you know aren’t true. Yes, clearly, he understood the wisdom of this command. He admired Wyatt so very much. But this didn’t keep Christopher Waterhouse from narrowing his eyes in concentration. Quietly, and after a prolonged deliberation, he said, “You have to understand, Wyatt. She doesn’t mind what’s happening.”

  It was hard to make sense of this. She didn’t mind. But mind what exactly? The choking on a piece of candy? The argument that was taking place in her presence? These notions tangled and untangled themselves in Wyatt’s mind. “What are you saying?” he asked.

  “She likes it well enough. Being in the van. Having her clothes off. That’s the truest thing I can tell you, Wyatt. Go ahead, take a look at her. A close look even. She doesn’t mind.”

  Inside the van, Evie Hicks had ceased the slow pedaling of her legs and was slumped back against the seat. Her head was tipped toward the passenger window. True enough, there was nothing in the languid arrangement of her naked body that signaled a sense of alarm or unease. Her legs were half-parted. Her left hand, clumsy and unshy in its movements, flitted about—over her breasts and round belly, between her legs—and scratched where it pleased.

  “Go ahead and sit inside the van with her awhile,” Christopher Waterhouse said.

  “No, no. I’m not going to—”

  “She’s not embarrassed. Why the hell should you be? Just talk to her, for Christ’s sake. Say a few words. Put her at ease.”

  Wyatt stood rooted before the open door, his mind working furiously and arriving at nothing that resembled a coherent idea.

  “Jesus, Wyatt,” Christopher exclaimed, not a curse or a cry of frustration, but an expression of fondness and wonder. “Think of it, man. Here’s a chance to sit in a van and talk with a pretty naked girl. A girl who’s not embarrassed. A girl who doesn’t mind.”

  He could have withstood other tactics. But this warm cajoling from Christopher Waterhouse, so knowing and friendly, had an unraveling effect on Wyatt’s defenses. He let go of Christopher’s shoulder and braced himself inside the door of the van.

  “How many chances like this are you going to have in your life?” Christopher Waterhouse asked. “A guy like you. With your condition. Just sit and talk for a minute or two. She already knows you’re a gentleman, Wyatt.”

  Accordingly, Wyatt hoisted himself into the van, his head tucked low, his considerable weight rocking the vehicle on its chassis. The cramped interior of the van made him feel like a lurching giant. He squeezed past Evie Hicks. He sat beside her on the first bench, on top of her mounded clothing. At the same time Christopher Waterhouse began drawing the van door shut, a slow, whining pull, until it clicked into place and he double-tapped the van door window to let Wyatt know that his and Evie’s privacy was now complete.

  It was quiet enough inside the van to hear the bending of the springs in the bench, the swish of Evie Hicks’s bare feet on the matted floor. There were movements outside as well. Christopher Waterhouse was climbing the embankment and padding noisily atop the thick gravel of County Road H. It seemed to Wyatt there was nothing else to do but lean a bit closer and examine the shadowed profile of Evie’s face—the tendrils of brown hair that framed her ear and jawline. Beautiful hair. An entirely beautiful cheek and ear.

  “Evie,” he said. “Evie Hicks.” He didn’t expect an answer. “Evie,” he said, more for his own encouragement. Then he reached out and with trembling fingertips touched very gently the underside of her breast. “Evie,” he said tenderly. No spoken reply to this, but in her languid posture he sensed an unmistakable shift, a tightening of her bare limbs, an awareness, a turning away.

  He took back his hand. Were Evie not present, he might have shouted at the top of his lungs, might have howled in shame. If he was alone, then surely he’d have clawed at the van upholstery with his bare hands or used his powerful legs to kick at the benches until they were bent down or snapped free from their moorings. He’d have made a wasteland of the van interior. As it was, he crawled forward to the door, swung it open, and stepped outside.

  He found Christopher Waterhouse walking along the chalky white shoul
der of County Road H. Christopher had traveled only a few dozen yards, and at the sound of Wyatt’s swift approach, he turned and began what might have been an elaborate explanation. “I thought I’d leave you—” He’d half-raised his arms, and this allowed Wyatt to grasp him snugly around the chest and squeeze with all the urgent feeling he’d denied himself moments earlier in the van.

  A rush of air escaped from Christopher’s lungs. There was a snapping of delicate internal bones. He managed to swing out an arm and club Wyatt in the face. It hardly mattered. What did Wyatt know about fistfights? All his adult working life he’d grappled with large and dangerously heavy furniture. He tightened his arms around Christopher Waterhouse and again squeezed with all his might.

  There was more soft popping along Christopher’s rib cage and then a ragged and terrible series of breaths. “Uhhh, uhhh, uhhh,” he cried. Released, he collapsed onto the chalky roadbed. His mouth moved, his lips formed breathy sounds. Wyatt had to bend down close to hear what was being said. “God damn you, Wyatt,” Christopher moaned.

  It wasn’t hard to drag Christopher Waterhouse by the ankle across the gravelly surface of County Road H. He moaned and flailed his arms weakly, but there was nothing he could do to stop the journey he was on—across the roadbed, down the small embankment, back into the center of the clearing beside the Kindermann Forest camp van. By then he’d gone pale in the face. His particular agony was, for Wyatt, infuriating to watch: the way he strained for a single shallow breath, and then the cost of that breath, which made him shudder and writhe in agony.

  Wyatt knelt down beside him and reached for whatever was handy: a big clump of grass, it turned out, which he pried from the earth. He held it inches from Christopher’s face.

  “You . . .” Christopher said, gasping, “ugly . . . fucking . . . re—”

  Wyatt drove the clump of dirt and roots into Christopher’s mouth, into his nose, into his clenched eyes. What a fit Christopher Waterhouse threw, twisting and retching and wagging his head violently back and forth. He raked at Wyatt’s face with his clawed hands. The only way to stop this, it seemed, was to turn him onto his stomach and press his head down hard into the earth, to crawl onto his back, as a wrestler might, and hold his choking face to the ground.

  Nothing accidental about this maneuver, nothing careless. It took time to accomplish. It required a tremendous effort to hold his hostage down and prevent him from drawing another breath.

  What he was left with was sagging and loose-limbed and surprisingly difficult to move. To pull Christopher Waterhouse by the ankle was to have his other limbs—his unattended leg and arms—fold back and scrape the ground at unnatural angles. No good to try to drag him by the collar of his T-shirt, either; the collar stretched wide and long and the shirt threatened to unpeel from his body.

  What a sight it must have made. What a woeful and clumsy spectacle. Worse even, the side door of the Kindermann Forest van was hanging wide open. Evie Hicks had been granted a privileged view of the struggle and its aftermath.

  Wyatt, kneeling over his work, lifted his gaze up and nodded at her. With a raised hand, he pointed into the woods. He hoped the meaning was clear enough: he intended to crawl beneath the low-hanging cedar branches and drag Christopher Waterhouse, burden that he was, into the darkest corner of the forest. Did she understand why this needed to be done? Did she comprehend?

  She was listing forward in her seat, her head low but her gaze open and aware. Hard to guess what her opinion might be—though it was fair to say that she was as interested in the slumped body at Wyatt’s feet as she was in everything else: the twigs and pebbles and other earthly debris which all day long she knelt over and studied from the distance of just a few inches. She was amazed by everything she saw.

  Part Two

  St. Louis

  2011

  Chapter Thirteen

  Some things were just too tricky to talk about. Certain biases, for example. You couldn’t earn anyone’s sympathy by describing the small insults a woman suffered when she reached the age of thirty-seven and remained—through no real effort or fault of her own—quite pretty. Apparently people got tired of it. At least with Marcy Bittman Lammers they did. Often she was aware of her friends—and new acquaintances, too—surveying her lively and delicate face (at the cusp of middle age still a pixieish face), her hazel eyes, her soft brown hair, her trim little body, and after a fickle moment, a bored moment really, shifting their attention elsewhere. Who knew why? People used to be captivated or made sweetly shy by her fine looks.

  None of this for an instant stopped her from welcoming into her home the many friends and associates of her husband, Dr. Dean Lammers. She was honestly glad to do it. In fact she seemed to have a knack for placing her guests into conversational groups that generated a flood of cheerful talk. Yet when it came Marcy’s turn to contribute to the conversation, she could sense people’s interest starting to thin. If she talked on at any length—about a DVD movie she’d seen, about the family of handsome tree squirrels in her front yard—it would evaporate altogether.

  It wasn’t a terrible thing. She wouldn’t call herself crushed by this lack of attention. Still, it was interesting, wasn’t it? With Marcy no one seemed anymore to want to include her in talk that lasted more than a minute or went beyond any of the usual topics.

  All afternoon and evening people had been stomping through Marcy and Dean Lammers’s home in West St. Louis County. The idea was that this year they’d do an open house winter party. People could drop by anytime between 4:00 and 9:00 P.M. They could pile their coats and scarves in the little area off the foyer called the welcome room. Along the front hallway was one of five bathrooms, in case anyone should need it. In the great room there was a stoked fire and three open couches and a fully loaded wet bar. From there a person was likely to head downstairs, drink in hand, to the Lammerses’ wide and lushly carpeted basement. There was a game room—pinball, Ping-Pong, foosball, shuffleboard—and a long serving counter bearing plattered holiday food. On the back wall of the basement was a flat-screen TV so large that one of Marcy’s nephews had called it gi-norm-ous. The label stuck. This evening a crowd of some twenty guests had gathered around the gi-norm-ous television to watch the blustery final quarter of a snow-wrecked college football game. For now these guests were happy to linger awhile in the leather chairs. But at some point during the party they’d migrate, one by one or in pairs, up the stairs to the vast open kitchen with its gorgeously marbled counters and long windows full of wintry outdoor light. In the kitchen they’d take a seat at a hand-me-down oak breakfast table—the only underwhelming piece of furniture in the whole house—and have a talk with Dr. Dean Lammers.

  For at least half the guests, Marcy’s husband, Dr. Lammers, was their immediate supervisor—owner and director of a three-branch ophthalmology practice in greater St. Louis County. Eight interns—the attractive young men and women in the basement game room—called Dr. Lammers their attending ophthalmologist. To many of the other guests he was an essential client for the prescription drugs and medical equipment they peddled. By one means or another, they were beholden to him. So it was easy to assume these kitchen table chats with Dr. Lammers were a calculated obligation. But this most definitely wasn’t the case. Dr. Lammers was widely and sincerely liked. People came to the table because they wanted to. And this, Marcy knew, was a rarer accomplishment than anyone realized: to be highly competent and at the same time to be a modest, funny, personable man.

  But not perfect, of course. He was older than Marcy by twenty-one years—a round-faced, balding, bespectacled gentleman of fifty-eight. Despite Marcy’s best efforts, Dr. Lammers was eighty-five pounds overweight. (One of the reasons he stationed himself at the kitchen table was to hide the full extent of his protruding belly.) It was true: they probably looked a little foolish strolling side by side: petite, pretty, younger-than-her-years Marcy Bittman Lammers and the older, overweight, stiff-jointed, and often hobbling Dr. Dean Lammers. They didn’t ma
ke a logical couple. No doubt there were people—a few of them at this party—who liked to dwell on these differences, who liked maybe to imagine the two of them together in intimate and unflattering bedroom positions.

  That would be cruel, certainly, but not so far off the mark. Tonight being Saturday (the second Saturday of the month no less), they’d convene in their bedroom after the party and clamber up onto their California king and assume a few of those positions. It wasn’t an occasion Marcy looked forward to. Even so, she recognized the relative importance of this schedule: the second and fourth Saturdays of each month. Mark your calendars! People might think this a pathetic marital arrangement. The handsome young newlywed interns downstairs in the game room; easy to imagine them scoffing. But really, what the hell did they know? Let these newlywed interns grow middle-aged and older and stay married. It would be interesting to see what kinds of schedules they ended up keeping.

  Still and all, she enjoyed opening the doors of her home for a holiday party. What happiness to order food and arrange the house, room by room, exactly as she pleased. She really wasn’t a demanding hostess. It was perfectly fine with Marcy if, as they pushed toward late evening, the party atmosphere got a bit loud and lived-in. Perfectly all right if a handful of guests decided to stay until nine o’clock and beyond. In these waning minutes of the party Marcy could wander into the less trafficked corners of her home and pick up an abandoned party cup (though most people were awfully neat at parties these days). She could step out of her pumps a moment and wiggle her toes and stand before the second-floor bay windows and get a bit, well, moony. That was the term she and Dr. Lammers had arrived at after a fierce negotiation. Getting a bit moony. He could say, without ruffling anyone’s feathers, “All right now, sweetie pie. Let’s not get moony over any of this.” By which, generally, he meant: Let’s not get lonesome. Or: Let’s not get melancholy. Or, more specifically, though it couldn’t be spoken aloud: Let’s not waste any more time thinking about Christopher Waterhouse.