The Inverted Forest (16 page)

“All right,” he said. “Separation then.”

“I hate to send anyone back. And at least when it’s between men we don’t have to worry about anyone getting pregnant.”

He would have to let this remark pass. But it irked him nonetheless. There was a reasonable chance she knew his strong opinion on this matter. “The main thing,” he said, “is that the counselors understand this absolutely can’t go on anymore. I don’t want there to be any doubt in their minds. We’re taking the problem seriously. We’re in charge of things. Both of us. I’d like to gather them all together and talk about it directly.”

“I don’t know that we have to do that, Schuller.”

“Oh, I’m sure we do. As soon as we can arrange it. And I’d like you to talk to the counselors of Cabin Two before then. Right after breakfast is over,” he said. “Start with Christopher Waterhouse. Figure out which campers need to be separated.”

“Why Christopher Waterhouse?”

“He’s the one who let me know. I ran into him this morning. He’s so put off by what’s happening in the cabins at night that he’s been sleeping in the back of his pickup truck.”

Here now, at last, were the signs of distress he’d been looking for: she tightened her grip on her coffee cup and shifted forward all at once so that the metal wheels of her chair let out a piercing squawk.

“What?” Schuller asked.

“I wish we were getting word of this from someone else. Not Christopher Waterhouse. I’m not sure about him, Schuller.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what to think of him yet.”

“We have quite a few new counselors here at camp. Are you saying you already have an opinion about each of them?”

“Yes,” she said. “Mostly, I do. I know enough not to worry too much about them. But Christopher Waterhouse . . .” She grinned as if masking a pain prickly and familiar. “Christopher applied for a lifeguard position last spring. We didn’t call him in for an interview. He never made it that far and I couldn’t remember why. So I dug out his application yesterday. We didn’t interview him because his references didn’t check out. He only gave us one. Not even a name. Just his university, Southeast Missouri State, and a general phone number. I remember calling and speaking to the university operator. Christopher Waterhouse is or had been a student there. One of ten thousand. No way for her to put me in touch with anyone who knew him.”

“And?” Schuller said. “So?”

“I’m just saying I wish we could speak to someone who knows him.”

“He’s not the first Kindermann Forest employee to leave lines blank on his application. I’m sure of that.”

“My main worry,” she said. She appeared to be choosing her words with exceptional care. “What worries me, Schuller, is that he may be a very selfish and destructive person. The very worst kind to have working at camp.”

“And what do you think we should do about this worry you have, Linda?”

He didn’t much care for the look she gave him, its seriousness, its open appeal.

“You think we should let Christopher Waterhouse go based on a bad feeling you have about him?”

Until this point she’d been leaning forward in her chair, her eyes sharp and features tense. She wet her lips and sighed and, after turning her unhappy gaze across the room, focused on the deep polish of the director’s desk. She said, “If you’re asking the question seriously, then I’d say, yes, we should fire him. You said he spent at least one night away from the cabins, didn’t he? That would be enough to terminate him and get him out of camp as soon as possible.”

What could he say? He was in no small part astounded by her reaction. “That strikes me . . . I have to say, Linda, that strikes me as an extreme reaction. An overreaction.”

“We’ve fired people for less,” she said.

“I hope you’re not trying to compare your bad feeling about Christopher Waterhouse with the drinking and trespassing and stupidity that began our summer.”

To this no answer. She had gone into a quiet sulk, and after a moment she rose from her chair and turned toward the coffee machine.

“Linda?” he said. Unfortunately, there were times when he had to
step away from his role as retired or semiretired director and assert himself more directly. “I’ll say it again. I hope you’re not—”

“No,” she said, her back to him. “There’s no comparison.”

That, of course, was part of the problem of working relationships that went on for years; eventually they became as contentious—and as sustaining—as family relations. With Linda Rucker some of the blame for her contentiousness could be laid at Schuller’s and Sandie’s feet. They’d indulged her. In the last decade they’d come to overrely on Linda as program director and winter caretaker. Like family, they’d grown used to the sight and sound and everyday fact of her, and they’d overlooked the compartments within her private life that had sharp corners and the power to startle.

Several years back, two and half years to be precise, in the off-season, they’d gotten a glimpse into one of these compartments. It began with an out-of-the-blue phone call that reached Schuller and Sandie in their St. Louis home, a two-story redbrick town house in an elegant and pristinely kept neighborhood known as St. Louis Hills. It was early Saturday morning in March. At the time they were both active and in good health—Sandie, too, a fit, lucid man of seventy-five—and immersed in the world of their choosing, which is to say that they were in their town house basement, perched on rolling metal stools, inching their way around a giant wood platform twice the size of a Ping-Pong table. On the platform was a sprawling model railroad set, backed by a rolling pastureland and set with roads and sidewalks and all manner of miniature homes and buildings, including a model-size baseball park, the tiny mesh-wire fence of which Schuller and Sandie were painting with thin, little brushes and careful daubs of silver paint. The basement phone rang. The call was from Officer David Pressy, chief of Ellsinore, Missouri’s, three-man police department. He had astounding news.

Linda Rucker had been arrested and had spent the night in the holding cell of the Ellsinore Police Station. She was waiting for someone—she had no dependable relatives—to pay her eight-hundred-dollar bond so that she could be released.

Schuller, who’d answered the phone, passed along this information to Sandie. Afterward they set down their paintbrushes and stared at one another dumbfounded.

Then they withdrew eight hundred in cash from their bank and set out in their Impala station wagon for the town of Ellsinore. It was a cold and molted gray morning. The highway on which they traveled, an embanked interstate, offered views of other people’s scattered backyards, their stuffed and rusting storage sheds, their listing playground equipment. A first-time traveler to the state might mistake all this for wintry, midwestern dreariness, but they wouldn’t see, as Schuller did, the satisfying openness of the countryside and, farther south, the rolling hills and winding, tree-bordered two-lane highways that led to the towns of Farmington and Arcadia and eventually Ellsinore, with its single stoplight and fading main street, its police station housed in a modest cinder-block building.

They’d had dealings with Officer Pressy in the past and found him, on the whole, to be fair-minded and honest. A man of tidy habits and mild temperament, he donned his glasses and read for them, in measured voice, the charges against Linda Rucker: harassment and trespassing. “It’s worth adding,” he said to Schuller, “that Ms. Rucker was very
nearly
charged with resisting arrest.” This was the extent of what Officer Pressy was willing to divulge.

They paid her bond. They waited. Twenty minutes later Linda Rucker entered the station waiting room, where she seemed, to Schuller, to have adopted the clothing and quaint manners of another person, a woman whose look, though eerily similar to that of Linda Rucker, came from a different well of experience. This other woman wore a wide black dress and a dark gray winter coat with a fur collar.
Her feet were squeezed into a pair of maroon pumps. She’d applied makeup to her full chin and cheeks and especially her eyes and, even after a night spent in jail, her made-up face looked, if not exactly nice, then at least tastefully done. All of this was remarkable and strange.

On the ride to Kindermann Forest she sat in the backseat of the station wagon, her face to the window, respectfully interested in the passing scenery. They asked if she was hungry, and she said, no, she wasn’t. Coffee then? they asked. No, no, she said and shook her head sadly and with a calm grace that was, for Linda, strangely feminine. Schuller asked if anyone had checked on the horses this morning, and she told them that the first thing she’d done at the police station was call Jerry Boyd and beg him to drive to camp at sunrise and water and grain the horses. They drove the rest of the way to Kindermann Forest in a puzzled silence. When they pulled up outside the camp office, she said she’d make sure that Schuller and Sandie got every penny of their bond money back. She opened her car door. “Thank you,” she said again, as if in farewell.

“Hold on a minute,” Schuller said.

She stopped, one foot out the car door.

“Look here,” he said. “This can’t be easy for you, Linda, but we need to have some idea of the trouble you’ve gotten yourself into.”

She sank back into the fur collar of her coat. She looked ready to endure a long silence.

They could feel the chilled March air seeping into the car. Beside Schuller, Sandie had begun stirring in his seat. “You know what?” he said to no one in particular. He pried open his car door and stepped outside, stretching his shoulders and legs as if readying himself for a jog across the meadow. Instead he strolled around to Linda’s open door.

“You know what I think I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll go ahead and walk Linda to her cottage, Schuller.”

“What now? I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“How ’bout you go and take a drive round camp and come back and pick me up?”

“Well, what could I possibly—”

“How ’bout it, Schuller?” It wasn’t exactly a request. He’d cast an altogether unsparing look at his brother.

And so Schuller relented. What else could he do? He knew all too well what Sandie was up to. They’d bickered about this very situation more than a few times over the years: the way Sandie tended to make himself a confidant of the employees, especially the women. Years earlier, when he’d been a middle-aged codirector of camp, he’d befriended several female counselors. Timid Jennifer. Sweet but peculiar Marion. There were probably others. Eventually these young women had courted and married men their own age. Over time they became moody housewives and mothers, and at least once a year, sometimes more, they’d feel in need of something—pity or compassion—they weren’t getting from their husbands and children, and they’d contact Sandie—quiet, unsuspicious Sandie, with his bottomless patience for other people’s problems. He could waste entire evenings on the phone with these women. He wrote them long letters full of intimate understandings.

Schuller set the car in gear and pulled away. In his rearview mirror he could see the two of them—Sandie with his old man’s stoop, Linda in her elaborate coat and wobbly pumps—treading arm in arm across the meadow patched with ice.

Because there was a haze and cold weight to the air, everything a hundred yards beyond the windshield looked watery and half-formed. A few large, ratty crows had fixed themselves in the branches of nearby elm trees. Ahead Schuller could see the infirmary shuttered up for the winter and beyond that the mess hall, where the windows were glowing with light. A bright, warm, extravagant light.

He stopped the car and went inside.

Ridiculous. Someone had dragged one of the heavy wood dining
tables to the center of the mess hall floor (the rest were stacked away in the corner of the hall awaiting summer) and covered it with a lace tablecloth and then set out candles, fine china, a bottle of wine. Two places at the table had been set, each with silverware and glasses and a domed meal that had long gone cold. Schuller lifted a dome: a glazed trout fillet, rosemary potatoes, a neat pyramid of asparagus spears. All the lights in the hall and in the kitchen blazed away.

He went from switch to switch turning them off. Then he drove to the end of the road, where, from his car window, he could see the mares grazing dry clumps of grass in the pasture and steaming the air with their warm breath.

Driving back, he found Sandie waiting near the road outside the camp office. It wasn’t often that he got to look upon his twin brother from this vantage point, from the perspective a stranger might have in a passing car. How unusual. They were almost always in one another’s company and, though they rarely argued outright, so much of their time together each day was spent on shrewd remarks and subtle gestures meant to remind the other just how predictably he behaved.
See there, Sandie. See there! More evidence that you are unreliable, childish, easily manipulated by others.
Or, in Schuller’s case, overbearing, insensitive. Cold of heart. It seemed they could go on like this for decades more, neither happy nor particularly unhappy. But as Schuller approached him now in the station wagon, there was something in Sandie’s posture, a strength and modesty, a willingness to tackle difficult dilemmas, that made it clear that none of the flaws they’d tagged one another with was exactly right.