The Grounding of Group 6

by Julian F. Thompson

  Everybody else said sure, they’d help, but only Ludi asked when they’d begin.

  They got a pick and shovel from the Lodge and started looking for a site.

  “It’d be easiest to dig into a slope,” said Nat. “But with all the ledge you find up here…I guess we’ll have to try and see.” They marked three spots that looked like possibles, but then decided one of them was much too open, visible to passersby. The other two were fine until the pick hit solid rock, about ten inches down.

  “Hmmm,” said Nat.

  And so they ended up on level ground, atop the knob but near the spruces. A tall poplar had blown over just that summer, and had fallen almost flat. Sometimes poplars rot and snap, but this one was uprooted. That meant its roots had dragged up quite a clod of earth with them, making what was like a little crater, seven feet across and maybe three feet deep. “Already,” as Nat said.

  They both took off their shirts and got to pick-and-shoveling. It wasn’t easy going in the wet and clayey soil, well stocked with good-sized rocks. In about an hour’s time, Nat hollered for a coffee break.

  “Boy,” said Ludi, wiping sweat, “I can’t believe I didn’t even think about a lookout. Talk about relaxed. And you doing all that grunting.”

  Nat shook his head. They were walking back toward the Lodge. “We must have got blissed-out, ma-a-an,” he drawled. “I can’t believe it either. Shows the value of a good talk. Let’s get something to drink and go to the sentry tree, O.K.?”

  They shook up tropi-fruit with cold spring water, one canteen’s worth, and left their shirts and sweat pants in the Lodge. Ludi’s shorts were brilliant red and had a pocket in the back; Nat’s were navy blue, and didn’t. He had a plain gray T-shirt on; hers was yellow, double-thick, and it reversed to green. Both of them climbed up the sentry tree and sat on different limbs.

  “You aren’t saying much about the Plan,” Nat said to her. They’d looked and listened down the slope and hadn’t noticed anything unusual.

  She dropped her eyes and made a little smile, and shrugged. “What’s to say?” she said. “It’s certainly a thing to do. And it seems as if it has a chance to work. Don’t you think?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I think it really will, provided …”

  “Provided we can find the evidence—that always sounds like a story or something—and get away with it,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Nat replied.

  Ludi said, “The whole thing’s so incredible. It’s gotten so I don’t feel any…I don’t know, regular emotions about it at all. Like, really furious, or sad, or sorry for myself. I think my father’s sick; I guess he always was and just got worse and worse after my mother died. So I can’t even hate him. And I certainly don’t want them to put him in a jail and try to punish him. That wouldn’t do anything for anyone. But I don’t like him, either—I really don’t like him. That stuff that Marigold was saying—I don’t even want his money. Unless my mother left him some when she died. I’d take her money.” She smiled a little crooked smile. “I’m not completely pure, am I? But as far as he’s concerned, all I want is to never have to deal with him, or with his wife, or with what either of them thinks or feels or wants. There was a girl from Virginia where I used to go to camp, and she said she wanted to be ‘shut of’ things, or people, all the time. ‘Ah jus’ want to be shut of that woman,’ she’d say—she hated this dance teacher they had. And that’s exactly the way I feel now. Which is why I don’t talk about the Plan too much. I wish I could just forget…oh, all that stuff. Be shut of the whole damn thing.”

  For a moment, Nat thought she might start to cry. But no, she looked at him and made another little smile. “And how about you?” she said. “I don’t hear you saying a whole lot, either.”

  He smiled back at her and shook his head, and waved a hand on down the slope. “I suppose that I’m a lot like you.” Saying that made him feel very good. “That stuff is like a wire to another life. A time that I feel done with—I don’t know, kind of like before you were old enough to go to school, those days. It was O.K.…” He shrugged. “Up here is different. Not that I’d want to hang out on top of this hill for the next hundred years.” He wondered that he had to throw that in. “But I do plan to feel the way I do right now, a lot.” Whatever that meant.

  “Yeah,” she said, and licked her lips.

  Nat wanted to say something confident and optimistic to her. Give her a solution to her problems. Tell her how and why and when they’d work their way around the different obstacles they faced, and reach a stretch of level, peaceful ground. Trouble was, it wasn’t all that clear to him. Nothing ever seemed to be, beyond the answer to the question: “How are you—right now?” And he was feeling very good—right now. He knew that much.

  “You want to get back to work?” he said.

  And she said, “Sure,” and smiled.

  They took turns picking and shoveling and keeping watch, until all the noisy work was done, or all that they had time for that day; later they would frame the cellar up and cover it. He’d asked her how her skin and bones were feeling, and she’d said that everything was fine.

  “It’s more or less as if they’re out there, looking for us, same as always,” she gestured with a hand, “but here I still feel safe. Maybe I’m just kidding myself, because I like it here a lot, or it’s the first place that we came to, or something.” They’d been carrying up rocks from the stream to make a floor for their cellar, and cutting a drainage ditch around it, and away. Both of them were pretty well mucked-up when it was time to stop.

  “I’ll get some brush and sort of hide it, if you like,” said Ludi, “provided you take charge of making lunch.”

  “Deal,” said Nat. “Let’s see, what’ll we have? Maybe I’ll jelly a few eels. Or, no, I think I’d rather a pate. I’ll bet I can snuffle up a truffle somewhere.” He went off, making pig noises.

  But when he saw Spring Lake, he knew a bath was first on his agenda. He went and got a towel and soap. Ludi might be back before he’d finished, but that would be O.K.; everything was cool. He slipped off his clothes and waded into the water.

  It was delicious. Pure and simple, you might say. Nat lay down in the water and wiggled, hands beside his body, feeling like a trout. Or maybe like an eel. He rolled onto his back and paddled to the shallow end. Sitting on a rock, he washed his feet and ankles, and then he stood and soaped himself all over, falling forward in the water when he’d done so, rinsing off. He loved to feel the water all around his body; it made him feel so naked. He stood again and soaped his face and hair, and then, his eyes still closed, he knelt and rinsed his hair off, two, three times, blowing like a monster from the deep. Then he stood up straight and turned toward his towel.

  Ludi was just pulling down her underpants. Her boots and the rest of her clothes were beside her on the grass. She was looking straight at him, and she smiled a proud and happy little smile. What she looked was calm and certain, more than anything. There were smears of dirt on both her round bare arms, on both her muscled legs; there was a mud streak all along her forehead, underneath her curls. She tossed her underpants aside and stepped into the water. Then she made a shallow dive and glided, arms outstretched, head down, across the pool, until her fingers touched his thighs. Oh, yes, she had a gorgeous back, Nat thought. When she touched him, she stood up and shook her head and wiped her face with both her hands. Then she put her arms around his neck.

  His face went down to hers. She smiled enormously, inclusively, and so did he. His arms surrounded her, below her arms; he lifted, and they kissed. He felt her slide one smooth, cool leg around him, then the other; she pulled up with her arms and climbed him easy as she would a maple tree. He slid his own grip down her back and lifted her still higher, holding on to the cheeks of her behind.

  Their heads moved back, eyes at a level now—his locked on hers, and hers on his. Both of them were back to smiling, just so very, very pleased with this, him, her, them, everything about the world,
each other.

  “Oh, my God, I love you,” Nat exclaimed.

  And she said, “Oh, dear God, I love you, too.”

  He set her down and washed her then, carefully, intently, thoroughly. That was how he got acquainted with her body, washing her all over, clean. He loved her perfect little body, and he kissed his work from time to time and made approving sounds. When he was done, she put a hand out for the soap, and then she washed him, too, though he was clean already.

  “Slick,” she said. “You’re just so slick, you know that?” She hadn’t seen or held a man like that before, and it was good.

  They left the water, hand in hand, and dried each other, standing on the grass. Then they spread their towels and sat on them and, putting fingertips to one another’s faces, they kissed again, looking at each other in an almost unbelieving way.

  He took her in his arms, rolled back with her; she slid across him, graceful as an otter. On his back, he pressed her in the air, his arms straight up, his hands upon her hip bones; she split her legs apart then shot them forward—she must have been a gymnast—and sat down on his stomach, straddling. He covered her small breasts with his strong hands.

  “I wish we could make love,” she said.

  “I haven’t any birth control,” he answered, wrinkling his nose.

  “Well, then, let’s not,” she said. “And that’s O.K. I never have, but now I want to. I had to tell you that.”

  He brought her face to his again; she stretched out on his body. He rolled them over on the grass and propped his weight up on his elbows.

  “I want to tell you that I’ve never felt this way,” he said. “Not even close, remotely. I feel as if I’d just been born, but that I’ll never be this wise, or good, again. It’s a crazy feeling, but the best. You know what I want to scream? I want to scream, ‘I get it!’ This must be what it’s like to be inside a miracle.”

  And Ludi shut her eyes and shook her head and didn’t feel herself at all.

  Marigold and Coke got out of bed at last, at eight—and realized they had to rush. They were meant to be above the school at half past ten, which gave them half an hour to have breakfast and get organized.

  Coke said, “It doesn’t matter if we’re just a little late. Sara’ll understand.”

  “You’re such a fuck,” said Marigold. “It isn’t up to them to understand. If we say we’ll be there by a certain time, let’s be there. Suppose you scramble up some eggs, and I’ll pack up a lunch for us.”

  Coke was pleased to do that. Now that he knew how, he liked to scramble eggs, and if he did that, she’d have to wash the pan, which wasn’t all that easy. He wondered if Marigold was going to be a nag when she grew up. He hoped she understood that he did what she wanted most of the time because he chose to, and not because she told him. Being with her certainly made him feel great, as a general rule. He’d never known a woman like her before; all the other girls he’d known were babies compared to her. He was getting a glimmering that “experienced” meant more than having done something a few times. It was more a whole attitude a person had, what you might call a style. It wasn’t something that he always felt about himself, with her, exactly.

  They made it to the watching tree, by Coldbrook Country School, at 10:27, by Marigold’s digital wristwatch, and Sully and Sara handed over the field glasses and the clipboard and helped them get the buildings straight and understand the method they’d been using to keep track of things.

  Sara and Sully were happy to be getting out of that tree. Four and a half hours of staring and counting and making notes was a lot. They both felt a need for movement: running, cartwheels, jumping up and down.

  Sully got an idea for a game that they could play going back to the Robinsons’, a sort of hare-and-hound affair, or straight-line hide-and-seek. One of them would take off, in the general direction of the Robinsons’(no fair going way off line), and have four minutes to get hidden—watches synchronized; after four minutes, that person couldn’t move at all. The other person would then have five minutes to find the first one. If, after five minutes, the hare was still holed up, unfound, he or she would give the blue jay’s call, and the game would then regroup, start over. The name of the game—simplicity itself—was Chase, they said.

  It turned out to be fun—and the perfect antidote for a morning in a tree. In the right terrain the hare might go just a little ways and wiggle into something dense—then watch the hound go whizzing by and chuckle. Or—Sully tried this right away—the hare could flat-out sprint the whole four minutes, and then collapse behind a tree, figuring no flea-bitten hound could ever match that pace.

  About halfway along, they went through a section that the loggers had been in the year before. Hiding places galore. One time, Sully was actually standing on the partly rotted butt-end of a big old beech log, peering all around in search of Sara Cottontail, when his five minutes done ran out. And she had shrieked the blue jay’s call from almost underneath his feet. She’d wriggled into space below that log—held slightly off the ground by two big branches—and he’d never had a clue that she was there.

  The shriek had made him jump, all right, and Sara had rolled out where he could see her, laughing.

  “You dirty snowshoe,” Sully said. He dropped his bow and quiver of arrows and leaped right down on top of her. “You know what happens to people who go around scaring other people? They get a tickling, that’s what. A tickling that they’ll not soon forget.”

  Sara eeked and rolled onto her stomach, elbows tight against her sides. Sully rode her and tried to get his fingertips between her upper arms and ribs. It was hard to believe how strong she was.

  “So,” said Sully, doing his best to sound like Count Dracula, or some such fiend. He made a lousy Transylvanian. “I see that sterner measures may be called for here.” And with his heart pumping wildly in his chest, he brought one open hand down, not too hard, on the seat of Sara’s tight white cotton shorts.

  “Eek, you beast,” cried Sara, laughing still. She made one mammoth upward bucking-bronco heave, followed by a roll away from her tormentor. Sully dove and grabbed her, trying for her shoulders; one he got all right. His other hand came down on Sara’s fine left breast.

  “Oops,” said Sully, more as an apology than anything. But then the only thing that seemed appropriate was just to kiss her, so he did, hitting just the corner of her mouth at first, but sliding quickly over so’s to get things squarely into place. He smelled that sort of sweet and herby Sara-smell he’d noticed in the tree, when they had put their heads together, whispering.

  Sully could hardly believe he was actually kissing her. Her lips felt wonderful under his, and—whoa—he’d forgotten to move his hand from off her breast. He was actually feeling her breast with his hand and it felt just fantastic, and then her lips were moving, and, wow, that was her tongue….

  They stayed like that for quite a time. Sara’d put one hand on the back of Sully’s head, and actually slipped the other one under his T-shirt, right onto his sweaty back. Sully’d finally had to pick his head up, so he wouldn’t drool too much into her mouth.

  “Oh, gosh,” he said, feeling there were some things to say and that he was probably just the guy to say them. “Boy, I’m sorry …” started out, though—that left-over apology from a little while before, and not the thing he meant to say at all.

  Sara smiled and put a hand across his mouth. “Silly. No, you’re not,” she said. “And I sure am not, either.”

  And Sully wanted to just pound his chest and scream. If everyone could see him now!

  “We’ve got to get going,” said Sara, but before they moved, they kissed again—again, at length. This one felt like a promise to Sully: no accident this time, babe. He put his hand under Sara’s T-shirt, in the back this time; he thought his girlfriend’s skin felt wonderful. They walked together for a little ways, now holding hands, but that was hard to do on that terrain, so pretty soon they went back to playing Chase. It was good practice, and it got
them moving fast.

  After Homer Cone had parked his car beside the house Group 6 had named “the Robinsons’,” he got out, walked straight up to the kitchen door, and knocked. After a suitable pause, he knocked again, a good deal harder, and called out, “Anybody home?”

  Satisfied there wasn’t, he got his cap and rifle from the car and made one circle all around the house. The blinds were drawn downstairs, except for in the kitchen, so he didn’t learn too much—except that people from Long Island left their dishes on the drainboard by the sink, instead of putting them away in the cupboard, as his late mother would have done, or any of his aunts. Or, for that matter, Homer Cone himself, although he preferred not to dwell on his involvement with household tasks best left to females.

  He made a second circuit of the house, this one at a greater distance, maybe fifty yards or so; it was then that he was struck by something odd. Not odd, perhaps, but out of order: there was a window open on the second floor.

  It could have been an oversight; Homer Cone knew that. People who left dishes on the drainboard by the sink were certainly capable of forgetting to close a window. But… he walked back to the house and tried the kitchen door. It was unlocked.

  Homer Cone went in. “Halloo!” he caroled cheerfully, his rifle at the ready. “Anybody ho-o-me?”

  Unanswered, he moved quickly through the kitchen. He found three open sleeping bags in bunk room one; that made him start to smile. But when he found three more in bunk room two, he grinned a Cheshire grin. A greedy Cheshire grin that Mrs. Ripple would have found alarming, and unsuitable.

  Mr. Cone went on upstairs, and out onto the big main porch beside the living room, the one that had a nice view down the driveway, and down a wooded slope from which the people from Long Island had thinned out a lot of trees and bushes, creating quite a nice cleaned-up effect, as well as lots of visibility.