The Inverted Forest (11 page)

He’d not expected this: the settling of her warm hand on his shoulder—a remarkable happening, at least in Wyatt’s experience.

Program Director Linda Rucker had scheduled a different activity each evening, and this being Monday, the first evening, she’d made preparations for the Kindermann Forest Welcome Parade. An unusual parade, since the entire camp walked and there was no one to wave from the roadside. Two of the oldest and most tolerant mares were bridled and brought down from the stable to lead the way. Sashes and batons were handed out. The camp tractor was hitched to a flat-top trailer, and those, like Leonard Peirpont, too unsteady to walk the length of camp, were allowed to ride atop the trailer, waving as if from a parade float.

By nightfall they were back in their cabins, though nearly everything about the cabin interiors—the light and smell and calm order of things—had undergone a vivid transformation. In sleeping Cabin Two, the bunk beds were askew and draped in strewn clothing. Shambling retarded men wandered the aisle ways and porch, some of them half-dressed or undressed. They pressed their faces to the window screen and sent their gruff squeals and barking laughter out into the night. It took courage to step inside the cabin bathroom, breathe the steamy and rank air, make your way past the line of toilets and showers, each with its own pitiful scene to look upon. Worse even to discover what services would be required of the male counselors. Some campers could not wash their own bodies. Others couldn’t wipe themselves after a bowel movement. Wyatt and his fellow male counselors performed these duties, did them quickly and often badly. While in the jurisdiction of the bathroom, they made a point not to look one another in the eye or in any way acknowledge whatever task they’d just performed. They’d been told to have their campers showered by nine, dressed in pajamas and in their beds by nine-twenty. In theory, a sensible plan; in reality, all but impossible because the male campers of Cabin Two were more awake, more charged with the newness of their surroundings, than they’d been at any time throughout the day.

On a square of concrete just outside the cabin porch, Thomas Anwar Toomey had found a place to do his frantic smoking. He studied the woods as he smoked, leaning one way then another and squinting at some dark shape lodged among the tree trunks and shrubbery. Never once did he step off the square of concrete. After each vanquished cigarette, he’d enter the cabin and trail after Wyatt, sometimes clutching the hem of Wyatt’s T-shirt with his bony fingers. “Please,” he said, meaning another lighted match, another cigarette.

“But remember,” Wyatt said. “You only have one pack of cigarettes for each day you’re at camp. If you smoke them one after another,
you’ll run out. A few days from now you won’t have any cigarettes left at all.”

This warning settled over Thomas Anwar in crushing increments. His hands trembled. In his stricken demeanor Wyatt glimpsed a life of quaking anxiety.

“Ahhh!” Thomas Anwar sighed. “But what can I do?”

“You’ll have to save your cigarettes. Instead of smoking one after another, smoke one each half hour.”

And so, beginning at nine, Thomas Anwar stood on the porch studying his wristwatch. At nine-thirty, and at ten, he came looking for Wyatt. Thomas Anwar was back again at ten-thirty. Once more they stepped outside onto the square of concrete and Wyatt struck a match. A peculiar sight to watch Thomas Anwar gulping at his cigarette with the desperation of a landed fish. All the while, he kept peering out at the woods, especially at the slanting boundary where the cabin’s floodlights ended and a curtain of deep shadows began.

“What is it you keep looking for?” Wyatt asked.

There was no sign that Thomas Anwar had heard the question. Or that he intended to answer it. But then several moments passed and he shook his head mournfully and said, “He’s followed me here.”

“Followed you? Who?”

“I told them at the hospital that he’d follow me, but they wouldn’t believe it. And now here he is, sneaking up on me from behind the trees. Ahhh! Right there, yes?
Right there.
Do you see him?”

“I don’t,” Wyatt said. “See who?”

Clearly it was a source of discomfort, of genuine embarrassment for Thomas Anwar to provide a name. He cringed. His cheeks sagged pitifully. “He is Thomas Anwar Toomey. He has followed me here from the hospital.”

“I don’t think so,” Wyatt consoled him.

“He’s waiting for me to fall to the floor and die.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Wyatt repeated. “You don’t need to worry anyway. You
are
Thomas Anwar Toomey. You’re right here. You can’t be two places at the same time.”

Almost certainly Thomas Anwar had heard such advice before. He smiled a thin and patient smile, an indication that he’d received a lifetime’s worth of similar counsel, all of it worthless. He pulled deeply on his cigarette with trembling lips.

At a quarter to eleven word passed from cabin to cabin that all counselors should convene in fifteen minutes for a staff meeting.

This news set in motion a rush of activity. The campers of Cabin Two were sent and, in some instances, dragged to their beds. They wouldn’t stay put for long, of course; they seemed to know this new urgency would be short-lived. Of Wyatt’s three charges, only Leonard Peirpont could be counted on not to stray. He lay on his bunk with the same bolt-straight, fused posture he used when standing. His arms were at his sides. He’d forgotten to remove his glasses, and even when this was done for him—the glasses carefully folded and placed in his pajama pocket—he lay perfectly still, blinking up wide-eyed at the bunk above him.

Two Kindermann Forest maintenance men appeared on the porch landing. Normally they’d have ended their shift at 7:00
P.M.
and gone home. Tonight they had been told to stay late and perform cabin watch. They were hard-looking, scrappy young men, yet the prospect of being left to rule the cabin, with its barracks of noisy retarded men, appeared to fill them with dread.

The meeting took place in The Sanctuary, an oak board cottage that decades earlier had housed the camp office and was now a refuge where off-duty counselors might smoke and gossip and buy cold soda pop from a wobbly vending machine. The furnishings were meager: a pay phone, a refrigerator, three torn and dusty couches. Most of
the girl counselors had arrived and settled in. They’d brought with them a climate of distress, of grievance. Counselor Emily Boehler, who’d attended to her camper’s seizures most of the day, had claimed the phone and was curled up on one arm of the sofa, head against the receiver. She seemed to have exhausted herself in describing the day’s ordeal, and whatever advice she was receiving only made her sigh dispiritedly and mumble, “Yes, all right, all right, yes,” into the phone.

But they were all harried and distraught, especially the young women counselors of Cabin Four. It seemed there’d been an incident. An obese but otherwise docile female camper had, when led into the shower and sprayed with water, gone into a frenzy. She’d turned and seized two tight handfuls of her counselor, Kathleen Bram’s hair and pulled Kathleen down until she was curled up with her face pressed roughly against the shower floor. Then the camper, naked and furious, had sat on her and screamed.

Kathleen Bram was the one wearing the cheek bandage. At dinner she’d looked sturdy and capable. At the moment, slouched on a dusty couch, she appeared drawn and timid. Her fellow girl counselors hovered around her. They’d come to her rescue in the shower and now, when she repeated the details of her story, they were stricken on her behalf. It was awful, they said. Awful what had happened to Kathleen. She should have been warned about what this camper might do. They put their arms around her and helped her sit up straight.
Here, drink this, Kathleen,
they said and offered her sips of Fresca. When she cried, they pushed her long brown bangs aside and wiped her forehead and the corners of her eyes with a cool cloth.

This was, for Wyatt, a startling sight. He couldn’t help but stare. How had they managed it, these girl counselors? To have gone from strangers to
confidantes,
all in the course of a few hours?

His fellow male counselors were not on such intimate terms. They did, however, share a moment on the way to the meeting. This had happened after they’d filed from the cabins and onto the dark
pathways and were plodding through the thick sand of the volleyball court. They stopped. Together they turned and looked back into the black scrim of the woods from where they’d come. All they could see was the splintered gleam of the cabin porch lights. But they could hear, with a shrill clarity, the howls and grunts of their male campers, sounds that spilled from the cabins’ screened windows and made their way to them through the woods.

There at the volleyball courts half of the boy counselors lit cigarettes. “Jesus H. Christ,” one of them said. “Can you fucking believe what we’ve got ourselves into?”

No answer to this, because they couldn’t believe it. So they stood there exhausted, looking back into the woods in numbed wonder.

At The Sanctuary they had time to take stock of one another: the men sneaking measured glimpses of the women, the women sizing the men up in return. In the corner of the room, sitting primly on foldout chairs, were three unrecognized individuals, a young man and two young women. An unhappy trio. It took a moment to realize these three were all that remained of the original Kindermann Forest counseling staff. They were together but not, apparently, on friendly terms. No one yet knew their names. Everything about them—their closed postures and wooden expressions, their downcast gazes—made knowing them an irksome chore. So much easier to appraise them from across the room and then choose a sly nickname: the Lonesome Three.

A few stragglers wandered in. The crowd within The Sanctuary had swelled to standing room capacity: sixteen counselors, two lifeguards, one wrangler. Still no sign of Linda Rucker or Mr. Kindermann, and this allowed the murmur of complaint to grow in volume and particularity. Everyone had a point to make:
If only they’d known what to expect. If only they could have read their campers’ files ahead of time. If only the state hospital attendants had stayed long enough—a few hours at the very least—to see that the campers had properly settled in.

Someone said,
But they kept the truth from us. On purpose. So we’d show up. You understand that, don’t you?

The mood in the room darkened by a degree or two. Yes, they were beginning to understand. They were ready now to consider a more serious charge, something beyond mere incompetence.

At that moment a young man stepped into the center of the room and raised his hand in an appeal for quiet. His name was Christopher Waterhouse. Most of those gathered knew him, in part because he had the lanky swimmer’s build and brown-skinned boyish handsomeness befitting his name and assignment, a lifeguard, but also because rather than sneak away to the quiet of the closed swimming pool, as his fellow lifeguard had done, Christopher Waterhouse had spent his first day helping with the state hospital campers—chasing wanderers, carrying luggage, attending to fits and seizures and the unpleasantness of the showers and toilets, the sort of help that left you stinking, scratched, and shaken.

“Excuse me,” Christopher Waterhouse said to those gathered. He had a fresh-faced, earnest gaze that might, in other circumstances, have discounted anything he had to say. “Excuse me,” he repeated, and when those who’d been whispering or fidgeting in their chairs fell quiet, he gave a small, half-embarrassed shrug. It wasn’t his intention to be a spokesman for the group. His little shrug made that perfectly clear. “I don’t think anyone who runs this place—Linda or Mr. Kindermann or whoever—has done a very good job preparing us,” he said.

Around him the new counselors sighed in weary agreement.

“But it’s worth remembering they’re in some kind of bind. I don’t know what exactly, something serious I’d guess. Serious enough that they’d fire most of the staff.”

With that the collective interest turned away from Christopher, to the corner of the room, to the Lonesome Three. They wilted noticeably under this scrutiny. It seemed possible they might curl up on their chairs and shrink away to nothing at all. At last one of the three,
a bony, inelegant girl, lifted her glum face and said, “Sex games. Sex games at the pool.”