The Inverted Forest (4 page)

Just outside the mess hall, on the pathways leading to and from the cabins, cliques of expelled counselors gathered to commiserate. No one, it seemed, could travel more than a few paces without receiving a prolonged embrace, a teary farewell. Schuller couldn’t help but marvel. What camaraderie, what solidarity of feeling, when, in fact, all they had done was endure a week’s worth of first aid and program training—and perhaps groped one another in the darkened woods.

And on the patio adjoining the mess hall sat the three counselors who, the previous night, had obeyed camp regulations, honored curfew, and remained clothed and sober in the cabins. They were—it had to be noted—an ungainly bunch, the two girls bony, anxious, unlovely; the boy pale and cloddish and otherwise hopelessly bland. What a shame, too, because these inadequacies were always obvious to the campers’ parents. Even with the tumultuous events of the morning, these three couldn’t seem to manage among them any sort of spirited conversation. Nevertheless Schuller strolled by and gave them a nod of encouragement.

But inwardly he brooded. Too bad, really. If it were possible, he would dismiss them all and start the summer from scratch.

A
t that age—nineteen and twenty or a few years older—it was best not to think too hard about the assignments to which they committed themselves.

They came from towns in Missouri and Arkansas and Illinois, and throughout winter, especially the dismal midwestern months of February and March, they imagined with startling clarity all the bright components that would make up their summertime lives. To think of it! The leisurely jobs they would hold. The weekend road trips taken with friends. The one unforgettable summer party at which they would do or say something daring and hilarious and thereby attract the notice of someone special, someone a mark or two wiser and more beautiful than they deserved. At that age they were the deepest and truest of romantics.

By the second week of June it was clear that none of this would happen as they’d imagined. It probably wouldn’t happen at all. They couldn’t get over it, this chasmlike difference between their brightest imaginings and the sodden feel of their actual lives.

But at church Sunday morning or on a flyer stuck to the door of their YMCA or in an out-of-the-blue phone call from a former teacher or scoutmaster they learned of an extraordinary opportunity.

Needed Immediately. 12 Summer Camp Counselors. 2 Lifeguards. 1 Horse Wrangler. Work with children and others. Kindermann Forest Summer Camp, Shannon County, Missouri.

A summer camp job. It set their minds racing. They could picture it all so clearly: the quaint, tree-shaded sleeping cabins, the rowdy and adoring children, the sudden camaraderie of other male and female counselors—the possibilities this entailed for tenderness, for sex.

Beguiled, they called Kindermann Forest and spoke to Program Director Linda Rucker. They were given only a few hours to decide. That was part of the attraction. They paced around their backyards or up and down their parents’ driveways, and once they’d decided, they rushed back inside and made the announcement to their families.
I’m going to camp. Yes, sleepaway camp. For the whole summer.
It was all a mad rush after that. They had to first untangle themselves from various obligations—their dull summer jobs at the nursery and grocery store and drive-thru restaurant, which, embarrassingly, they had to quit after just a few weeks of training. Yet it was harder still, or trickier, to break free from their hometown boyfriends and girlfriends, whom they relied upon but did not love, at least not passionately.
Yes, I know. I know. We had plans for the summer. Sure we did. But I guess I’ve changed my mind about those plans. I’m going away to camp.

They spent their last evenings at home talking with close friends on the phone. Given the suddenness and haste of their departure, they could get by explaining themselves with simple platitudes. They were bored, they said. They were ready for a change. So why not give summer camp a try? They didn’t bother asking themselves where this new sense of adventure had come from. Their public reasons for
going were all the same. Their private reasons were a different matter altogether.

Marcy Bittman accepted a lifeguard position because after just a week at home she found the sight and especially the sound of her mother, Coco Bittman, almost unbearable. She had no idea why. They adored each other. While away at college Marcy talked with Coco once or twice a day. They were known in Marcy’s sorority as the daughter and mother so young and lively they could pass as sisters. When Marcy took the job at Kindermann Forest, she told her weeping mother that without the services of a certified lifeguard the camp would have to shut its doors and turn away hundreds of heartbroken children.

Veronica Yordy went to camp because her friend and sorority sister Marcy Bittman was going.

Wayne Kesterson signed on at Kindermann Forest because he’d been tried in Missouri State Court and found guilty of possessing five and a half ounces of homegrown marijuana. He’d be sentenced, probably to jail time, on the second Monday of September. The Big House. The Slammer. He could joke about it to family and friends. But inwardly he felt a long, steady surge of panic. It was agonizing, really. He needed something to fill the long summer days.

Stephen Walburn took a job as wrangler because he overheard his drunken aunt Marie say that a skinny man could only be attractive to women if he was seen in full command of a galloping horse.

Carrie Reinkenmeyer took a counselor position because everyone in her small Arkansas town knew she’d made love to the stupidest and least attractive boy in her high school senior class. The teasing she received, most of it from female friends, was constant and frequently cruel. But the experience itself was tender and not at all unsatisfying—and, if she didn’t leave right away, likely to be repeated.

Christopher Waterhouse went because those in charge of Kindermann Forest seemed to have changed their minds about him. He’d
applied for a lifeguard position in April. After three weeks and no word, he called to see if they’d received his application. They had, a woman said. You’ll just have to wait for your letter. Ten days later the letter came. No thank you. They hadn’t even invited him down for an interview. To hell with them, he thought. He’d work at a better camp. Or start his own.

Now, when he called to ask about a possible job, the only question put to him was, How soon can you get here?

There were a dozen others, among them Kathleen Bram and Daniel Hartpence and Ellen Swinderman and Gibby Tumminello and Michael Lauderback and Emily Boehler, all of whom were not in the habit of weighing their private reasons for anything they did. For them it was simple. The offer came to them. A voice inside said,
Go.

A clear voice inside Wyatt Huddy said,
Go.
But an equally clear and probably wiser voice said,
Better stay put. Better stay exactly where you are
. It was exhausting to be caught between these two opposites. Yes and No. Go and Stay. A needling ache settled into the corner of his stomach. Throughout the night he flitted in and out of sleep—his thoughts urgent and full of raw feeling.

It was as if the summer months ahead were being divided into two distinct regions: the land of staying put and being exactly who everyone knew him to be. Or the land of going away and presenting a version of himself that the children and counselors at camp might find agreeable.

A strange and precarious place, this second land.

T
oward morning the ache in his stomach dissolved. His thoughts slowed. For several hours he slept a grateful, unbroken sleep. When he woke, his mind was steady and clear—unstirred by worry. This seemed to Wyatt like a minor miracle. How on earth had he managed it?

From the window of his back room—a former woodshop and now a bedroom of sorts—he watched the morning light, slanted and grainy, flooding over the depot yard and revealing, in small increments, the long gravel driveway, the donations trucks parked side by side, the twin Dumpsters, the stone fountains and secondhand playground sets, the gifted (and tarnished) camper shells and tractor equipment; all of it settled atop a scrubby, brown lawn. Nothing rare or beautiful about this landscape, except that for a few minutes every day—in the early morning and again in the late evening—what went on outside his back room window was Wyatt Huddy’s to behold, exclusively so.

He rose from bed and dressed for the coming day: blue jeans,
a stretched and spotted XL T-shirt, his socks and work boots. He pried his retainer from the roof of his mouth and placed it, hideous and wet, into its plastic holder. Then he paced down the hall and at the showroom entranceway flipped on every other switch and waited patiently while the long bars of fluorescent lights popped and sputtered and threw their white glare over the center’s enormous showroom floor.

Lampshades and scuffed bedroom furniture and picture frames and racks of neatly hung dead men’s trousers: it went on forever. Because each item carried some residue, some intimacy, from its former owner, Wyatt had to convince himself that it was all ordinary enough to mark and sell or eventually throw away in one of two mammoth Dumpsters parked in the depot yard. He’d grown used to tossing out toys, particularly dolls, but sometimes the most inconsequential items could provoke him: a shoelace, for example, made in 1953 and perfectly sealed inside its paper and cellophane wrapper. What modest hopes its maker had once had for it. A shoelace. And what a sharp pang of regret for Wyatt to toss it forever unused into the Dumpster.

Each morning—and this morning was no exception—a caravan of large, canvas-sided bins holding yesterday’s donations was lined up along the center aisle. Wyatt took a moment to rummage through them. No real treasures, of course. A stainless steel desk lamp, a flower vase, a glass certificate frame. To turn such shiny objects over in his hands was to be allowed an elongated view of himself. Impossible to explain this to others, but it was perfectly all right to go about the center’s showroom at 6:17 in the morning looking large and unkempt and Wyatt-like. For nearly two hours he would have sole use of the employee washroom and kitchen. He’d make breakfast and then begin sorting the bins. At eight Mrs. Barnett would come in and help him with the pricing. They’d work until the clerks, Mindy and Janet, arrived and counted up their cash drawers. By then a few bargain hunters might be waiting outside the sliding glass doors, which was
fine if they were regular customers or friends of Mrs. Barnett. He would stay where he was and keep on with the pricing and shelving.

But if they were strangers, especially mothers with small children, then the easiest and most pleasurable part of his workday was over, and he would hurry back to the loading dock, where, for the remainder of the morning and afternoon, he would unload and repair whatever heavy furniture the trucks brought in.

It was taxing and sometimes hazardous work, which was why he felt such contentment now to stand in the employee kitchen pouring cereal and watching waffles cook in the blistering slots of a donated toaster. At the break room table he set out a magazine to read, a bygone issue of
Popular Mechanics.
This morning’s article: “Build Your Own Watercraft of the Future!” The illustration was certainly handsome, though the assembly instructions thwarted him at every turn.
Align the aft portion of the chine and sheer clamp carefully to allow for the thickness of the transom. The coamings should be cut from 1/2-in. mahogany and rabbetted to the top edge of . . .

When he glanced up from the magazine, he heard a steady
thump-thump-clink, thump-thump-clink
that couldn’t have been the ventilation or any of the center’s innumerable objects settling on the shelf. He stood and cocked an ear toward each corner of the showroom. Then he made his way down the center aisle and out the back door to the loading dock.

There was Captain Throckmorton trudging away atop a rickety treadmill that the donation trucks had brought in the day before. A crown of sweat had beaded around the captain’s bald head. Every few seconds a drop would plunge down his cheek or the back of his neck. He seemed not to know what to do with his arms and, finally, to keep them from bouncing at his sides, rested them on the shelf of his belly, a high-set belly, firm-looking and comically round. From time to time he glanced at Wyatt and rolled his eyes as if to say,
I know I look ridiculous. I know I’m a spectacle.

Maybe others might have thought so. Not Wyatt, who a few years earlier had been rescued by Captain Throckmorton from a steadily worsening family situation. If there was anything truly unusual about the captain, it was that, unlike the other Salvation Army captains or other men who worked at the center, he didn’t appear to have stumbled shaken and pale and weak out of a ruinous past life. He lived across the street and shared an apartment with his best friend, the barber Ed McClintock. They both sang tenor in the St. James choir. Each Wednesday evening they invited Wyatt to their apartment for dinner and board games. Just before they began their game—usually Risk or Yahtzee—Ed McClintock made coffee and poured a single shot glass of Irish Cream into his and the captain’s cups. This would be the only alcohol they’d consume all evening, perhaps all week, and, before raising the cup for his first sip, Ed McClintock would say, “Here’s to our glamorous lives, Captain.”

Eventually Captain Throckmorton slowed his pace and stepped off the treadmill. He consulted a stopwatch hanging from his neck. For a while he did nothing but breathe deeply. “Eleven minutes,” he said. “And from what I’ve heard some people will torture themselves on these things an hour a day? Could that be true?”

Wyatt said that yes, he thought it could.

“Hard to believe,” Captain Throckmorton said. He studied the treadmill as if it had reneged on an extravagant promise. Then he produced a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his brow and chin. “How’d the
watch
go last night, Wyatt?”