The Inverted Forest (17 page)

Together they drove out through the camp gates and onto Highway 52 and eventually through Ellsinore and onto the interstate. Miles went by without either of them speaking. At last Schuller said, “If I feel like it, I’ll go back downstairs after dinner and paint the rest of the ballpark fence. Maybe a few of the bleacher seats, too.”

In the seat beside him Sandie gave a quick, judicious nod.

“I’d sure like to get that ballpark looking right before the weekend’s through.”

“I know you would.”

Schuller relaxed his grip on the wheel. Then he told Sandie about the lighted mess hall and the neatly laid table and the trout fillets. “I guess she was arranging a romantic dinner,” he said and glanced from the road long enough to see his brother’s expression tighten into a frown, a sure sign that this was, for Sandie, a matter of divided loyalties.

“I suppose she was,” Sandie said. He buried his hands in the pockets of his coat and turned his face to the window. “I don’t know that it’s any of our business, Schuller.”

This remark Schuller would have to ignore. But inwardly it was worth noting that they’d paid Linda Rucker’s salary for eighteen years. Ever since she’d become program director, they’d provided her a year-round place to live. More so, they’d entrusted her with the care and running of Kindermann Forest. By Schuller’s reckoning, Linda Rucker’s record of arrest was very much their business. “What strikes me,” he said, “what I’m most confused about, is Linda’s state of mind. The way she’s dressing and behaving. I don’t know what to make of it.”

“She’s going through a rough time.”

“I’m sure she is. I’d like to understand it better.”

“Would you?” Sandie said.

“I would. So we can help in whatever way . . . Oh,
for heaven’s sake.
”

They could push you to your limits, moments such as these: to see Sandie’s face lit with the secret knowledge that Schuller was more concerned with how the arrest would reflect on Kindermann Forest than he was with the pain it had caused Linda Rucker. But such knowledge would be a secret only to the simpleminded or the self-righteous. Anyone who lived and succeeded in the world would have exactly the same priorities.

“Look here,” Schuller said. “You can tell me what you know or I can wait and learn what happened from the police report.”

“All I’m asking,” Sandie said, his head bowed piously, “is that you don’t
pretend
to be concerned when, in fact, you’re not.”

“Fine,” Schuller said. He exhaled an extravagant weary sigh. “No more pretending, Sandie. I have a heart frozen solid. Ice water flows through my veins.”

It was a perfectly absurd end to their little squabble—and yet, enough, somehow, to slacken their intense and long-accumulated aggravation with one another. They both leaned back in the seat and retreated into themselves. A minute or two passed, and Sandie frowned in concentration and said, “She told me a good deal of what happened. The rest I can piece together on my own.”

“All right then,” Schuller said. “I’d certainly like to hear what you know.”

According to Sandie, Linda Rucker had met a local man.

This had happened several months earlier in Ellsinore, at the saloon where Linda liked to socialize Friday nights. This local man lived east of Ellsinore in a trailer with a woman and her child. He wasn’t married to the woman or the father of the child, but he wasn’t exactly single, either. All week long he was something of a family man, but Friday nights were his own, and he liked to go to the saloon. That was where his relationship with Linda, which had begun as a simple bar friendship, intensified into something else.

“What else?” Schuller wanted to know.

“Something between a friendship and a romance, but whatever it was, it was unofficial.”

“You mean secret. A secret affair. No need to make it sound better than it really is.”

This secret affair went on for three months. Sometimes this local
man would accompany Linda back to camp after the saloon closed and stick around long enough to help her feed the horses in the morning.

“Oh, Lord,” Schuller groaned. How it aggravated him to hear this.

According to Linda, this local man was a decent enough fellow—hardworking, trustworthy. He knew how to talk and how to listen. He was handsome. Or at least she’d held these high opinions of him until last night, Friday night. She’d planned an elaborate dinner for the two of them. In her mind it marked the three-month anniversary of the start of their relationship. She sent an invitation to the lumberyard where he worked. She went shopping for clothes and a bit of makeup. She bought food and wine, and tidied up the mess hall. But, of course, when Friday night rolled around, he didn’t show. So she waited a few hours and then she went to the saloon to see if there had been a mix-up. No mix-up. He wasn’t there, either. She came back to camp, waited some more, called his house several times, and hung up when a woman answered. By then she was on the verge of throwing dinner in the trash. Instead she climbed in the camp van and drove to his trailer park, circling round and round until she spotted his car. All the while she was feeling wilder, more frantic. She stormed up to his trailer door and banged away. No one answered, though there were lights on. So she pulled the van right up across their tiny yard to the front steps, turned on the high beams, and began laying on the horn, over and over . . . until the police arrived.

“What in the Lord’s name?” Schuller said. “What was she hoping to accomplish?”

Sandie didn’t know. He said she probably hadn’t been thinking rationally. And now she felt miserable about it all; mostly because when the police were hauling her away, the woman and her little girl came out of the trailer and Linda could see that she’d terrified them.

“Of course she did,” Schuller said.

There was more still. As it happened, the local man wasn’t even
home. The police told Linda he’d gone to Springfield with friends to see a motorcycle rally. Linda said she kept going over it all in her head. He knew about the special dinner. She was certain of it. He’d just chosen to do something else that night. What galled her most was that he hadn’t called or sent back the invitation to let her know he wouldn’t be coming. He wasn’t honest enough to tell her
no.

She’d made this confession to Sandie while standing on the porch of her cottage, smoking a cigarette with an unsteady hand. She said that after a night in jail she’d come to the conclusion that while she may have been a worthy enough friend to drink and talk intimately with each Friday night—and to sleep with, too—she wasn’t the kind of woman he wanted to think of as a girlfriend or a lover. No romance. No tenderness. Or, at least, none that could be acknowledged. In part it was her fault, she said, because she’d fooled herself into thinking it might be otherwise. But not anymore. She knew what she was. She knew how men thought of her, how little of themselves they were willing to give. She’d go back to knowing herself the way she did before this relationship. She promised she would.

For all Schuller knew, every word of Linda Rucker’s confession—as told to him by Sandie—had been utterly sincere, utterly true. Were he a more cynical man, he might have suspected that her story had been softened by Sandie so that Linda Rucker could retain her position as program director. Because it had certainly turned out that way. She’d made all the proper amends, paid back the bond money, written what must have been a convincing letter of apology to the woman she’d terrorized. By summertime the charges of harassment and trespassing had been dropped.

Schuller decided to hold his staff meeting in the camp office, in the hour after lunch, known at Kindermann Forest as the siesta hour. Outside the afternoon had turned humid and hot, and much of this
balminess had found its way inside the office. But the counselors and wrangler and lifeguards seemed not to notice. They’d arrived in a cheerful mood and had lined up against the walls or had sprawled languorously across the office furniture, stretching their suntanned limbs, smoothing the ragged hems of their cutoff shorts. Wherever Schuller turned his gaze, he saw the fussy and preening gestures of the self-absorbed.

“I’m afraid we have a problem,” he began and then told them straightaway. “The male campers of Cabin Two have been congregating in the back of the sleeping barracks at night and having sex with one another.”

Did they appear startled? Yes. Startled to have him say such a thing aloud, yet they seemed to be on familiar terms with the news itself.

“Here’s what Linda Rucker and I want you to know,” he said. “This absolutely will not continue. We are making plans to separate the male campers of Cabin Two, and if anything remotely like this is happening in your cabin, it’s essential that you tell us at once. We are deeply concerned. Do not doubt for a moment that we’re in charge and ready to take action.”

He seemed now to have everyone’s attention, the young women with their carefully brushed ponytails and jaunty postures, the young men, who, under the weight of the matter being discussed, had decided to fold their arms and stand up squarely.

“We began the State Hospital Session in such a rush,” Schuller said. “I would have liked to talk with you right at the start. But I haven’t had the chance, until now, to share a few thoughts with you. Thoughts on the state hospital campers. And so I’ll begin by asking a very simple question. Who are the retarded?”

As he might have expected, the counselors were made bashful by such a question. They pulled at the seams of their clothing. They lowered their heads, frowned in concentration.

“I don’t mean to put you on the spot,” he said. “You can answer however you like. Who are the retarded? Please tell me.”

Together they endured a lengthy silence. Schuller, who’d chosen to stand sentrylike before the director’s desk, was happy to wait them out.

A young woman raised her hand. “Someone with a mental condition,” she said. “A mental condition that causes a low IQ.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s a good start, I suppose.”

“A very low IQ,” someone said. “Lower than a hundred.”

“And behavior problems, too,” a young man offered.

Apparently they’d gotten over their bashfulness, were willing now to offer opinions like so many dull coins pitched into a fountain.

“No, no. Not lower than a hundred. Lower than seventy.”

“Seventy or a hundred. Does it really matter?”

“It does if you have an IQ of ninety-nine.”

“Well let’s just say it’s a hundred then.”

“But it’s not. It’s seventy!”

“Oh, shut up, Wayne, you
stinking puddle of—
”

An explosion of laughter. They pitched forward in their seats and howled. Whatever this joke might mean, the counselors appeared to love it.

Eventually the room ebbed a few degrees quieter. “Let me answer the question a different way,” Schuller said. “Let me answer by telling you who the retarded are
not
. They are not children, not exactly. And not helpless, either. There are many things they can and will do on their own, provided they know what’s expected of them. And provided someone in authority is standing nearby ready to urge them in the right direction.

“But they’re definitely not adults. I’ll say it again.
Not adults.
Even though some supposed experts have complained that you insult the retarded if you don’t pretend they are all independent adults.” He surveyed his audience to see if anyone thought this an idea worth
defending. No one did. “Imagine the questions these experts think we should be asking. For example, do the retarded want to vote and marry and have children? Do they want to sleep with one another? Some would say that they do want these things. Why? Because it is what
we
are supposed to want. We are all human, you and I and the retarded. Therefore we must all want the same things.

“But if you can find a retarded person who hasn’t been influenced by these expectations, they will always be ambivalent about such matters. They don’t care either way. They don’t particularly share our wishes and desires. Our appetites. And yet, like children, they are very good at imitating the things we do. Think of how it is that so many of the campers smoke cigarettes. Where do you suppose they learned this? From their caretakers, of course. And if you look close at the way they smoke cigarettes—that frantic huffing and puffing—then you’ll see they’re acting out a habit they don’t even understand.”