The Inverted Forest (9 page)

Probably they no longer mattered. Because at this late hour in their lives, with the mindless and the comatose of Special Unit C waiting just a few hallways away, the Garden Ladies were no longer interested in judging the personal choices other people made. If anything, they were warning her not to deny herself a worthy experience.

And so on the last day of counselor training, Kenny Cossman, unit leader for male counselors, came to the infirmary and told Harriet there’d be an after-hours bonfire in one of the horse pastures. Already the beer had been bought and iced, and there’d be music and something good to smoke, and, who knew, maybe later they would all sneak down to the pool for a swim? He hoped Harriet would join them. Most likely he was hoping for more than that. During the course of the week, he’d made a few small overtures. One evening before dinner the counselors had played a stupid game. They’d tossed around a soccer ball, and the person who caught it had to name a famous person whom they wouldn’t mind spending time with on a deserted island. Kenny had said he’d like to spend time with R&B singer Toni Braxton, an offering meant for Harriet—a nice offering since Harriet liked to think that her best features were more Toni Braxton–like than Mariah Carey–like or Whitney Houston–like. At least Kenny was paying attention. He was only twenty-two, though his friendliness and his husky build made him seem a bit older. He didn’t inspire in Harriet the hopes for any great romance, but if he were funny and modest, which he usually was, she wouldn’t mind going to the bonfire and getting a bit drunk and letting him lead her to some quiet corner of camp for a kiss. Nothing more than that. Or
maybe a little more. It was pleasant enough to think of treading water beside him in the pool. All that male yearning just a few watery feet away.

The Garden Ladies would have been the first to tell her, yes, go ahead, even if it meant leaving James—truly the soundest of child sleepers—alone in the infirmary for bits of time while she joined the party. She could always run back to check on him. Was that irresponsible?

It probably was, but she’d gone anyway. The gathering in the horse pasture was the very best kind of party, because a week of first aid and program training and side-by-side living had made them intimate enough to know who could be teased or flirted with, who could be counted on to act outrageously.

At some point it was decided that they should go for a swim.
A midnight dip
the boys called it, though by then it was well after midnight.
Straight to the pool
, they said.
No time to stop by the cabin for your suits.
Such weak logic: the girls didn’t argue too hard against it. There’d been rumors the night would end like this, with everyone peeling off their clothes. No doubt, like Harriet, the girl counselors had chosen their underwear carefully when dressing for the party.

She’d stopped by the infirmary and checked on James. He was fine, coiled in his bedsheets, unaware. And yet some of the spell of the bonfire had been broken. She was a mother, after all. She was five years older than most of the counselors. She was black. They were white and, by and large, considerate, even welcoming, people. Yet they thought of her as having lived a reckless, even desperate, urban life. In truth she’d grown up in the countryside west of Durham, North Carolina. Her father, college-educated, worked in the earth sciences labs of Duke University. Her mother trained Sunday school teachers for the Baptist Church.

By the time Harriet got to the pool, nearly everyone had undressed and gone in or lined up at the diving board. They seemed to be acting
out some sort of prank or challenge or drunken dare. Of course Harriet felt ungainly disrobing alone in the shower room, but for a foolish reason: she’d been teased about her name in grade school and thought that somehow it might be true, she might be, well,
hairier
than most young white women. But this wasn’t the case, at least not judging from Eileen Haupt, who ran to the woods to pee, or from Wendy Kavanagh, who patrolled the pool deck naked, sober, and unshy.

How might it have felt to leave the shower house and pad naked across the pool deck with others watching? Awkward. Maybe even humiliating. Or delicious. Hard for Harriet to be certain. She never got that far. Schuller Kindermann appeared at the top of the steps, made his unsteady descent. A sobering moment, but what Harriet felt—and what many of the laughing counselors must have felt, too—was a sense of extreme dislocation. All night long they’d worked hard to create a cabaret atmosphere of sexual daring. Then to see Schuller Kindermann, and be reminded that there were those—the elderly, the soon-to-arrive state hospital campers—who weren’t in on the joke. The night’s rowdiness and camaraderie seemed to deflate all at once. The Garden Ladies, who’d been Harriet’s confidantes, turned their backs on her and resumed their rigid ways.

The next morning Schuller fired fifteen counselors, two of them members of the senior staff, though not his camp nurse. Not Harriet Foster.

N
o time to dawdle. On the gravel pathway, with their belongings for the summer balanced on their shoulders or dragged roughshod at their heels, the new counselors fell into a loose, half-jogging regiment. Enough like an army regiment for someone in the back ranks, a jokester, to shout, “Sound off! One, two. Sound off! Three, four.”

They all laughed, just as the pathway veered into the woods. From high above, a canopy of evergreen branches threw down its shade. An entirely pleasant surprise to be under the roof of this woods, with its dewy air and a spaciousness that felt intimate and many-chambered. Dogs could be heard, panting and furrowing in the underbrush. One moment the pattern of tree trunks looked endless; the next, it was possible to recognize, crouched almost shyly behind a scrim of trees, several hulking, gray cedar buildings: sleeping cabins one through four.

Here the regiment of new counselors broke apart. Young men to the right and up the walkways leading to Cabins One and Two, young
women a hundred yards deeper into the woods, to the walkways and creaking porch doors of Cabins Three and Four.

Later they’d learn that each cabin interior was identical: a screened porch, two long sleeping barracks, a large fluorescent-lit bathroom—a latrine really, with latchless toilet stalls and musky wood showers. There were no counselors’ quarters. Or maybe there had been, but the room for these quarters was now occupied by dismantled bunk beds, worn mattresses, wool blankets. Where then would the new counselors sleep? In the sleeping barracks, apparently, on bunk beds, above or beneath the campers.

Wyatt chose a bottom bunk in the far corner, near a window. There wasn’t time to take stock of the accommodations or negotiate introductions with the other male counselors hurrying past him. He unrolled his new sleeping bag. He placed his travel clock and retainer box on the shelf beside his bunk. From his shirt pocket he withdrew his list of campers:

1. Gerald (Jerry) Johnston

2. Leonard Peirpont

3. Thomas Anwar Toomey

Through the screened window he could hear counselors regrouping on the gravel pathway. The jokester, whoever he might be, was shouting again, “Sound off! One, two. Sound off! Three, four.” By the time Wyatt joined the group, the women counselors were hurrying from Cabins Three and Four—the quick bounce of their steps lovely and painful to look at—and soon the whole regiment was in a full jog toward the heat and bright light of the meadow.

They seemed to have arrived at a crucial moment.

The crowd of campers had disbanded, straying from the white buses in wobbly little groups of three and four to the long open porch of the mess hall, or to the shade of the picnic tables, where they stood
about, each of them in a private reverie of body movement and what looked to be a slowly dawning awareness of the grass and warm air and sunlight. Other campers were not so patient. A dozen men and women, solo wanderers, had, for whatever their reasons, set a zigzagging course out to the very periphery of the meadow. The state attendants, burdened with luggage and bedclothes, could not hold all of these wanderers back. Several had crossed the border and stepped into the shrubby edge of the woods.

Linda Rucker, her bangs stringy with sweat, waved at the counselors with her three-ring binder and shouted, “Go! Go! Go! Bring ’em back! Bring ’em back!”

So this would be their first assignment, to race after these wanderers, to latch on to a belt loop or wrist or shirtsleeve and tug them, step by step, back into the fold. In Wyatt’s case it turned out to be rough work. The man he’d gone after was bullishly large, with a bald head and rolling, half-closed eyes. He seemed to have a single-minded wish to tromp through the underbrush. “Yop, yop, yop,” he panted. When he saw Wyatt coming, he pushed twenty yards deeper into the forest and wrapped his fat arms around a tree trunk. “Yop, yop,” he groaned. There was a bellowing sound to these panted breaths, as if he were a rutting animal.

He was strong. Wyatt was stronger. But was it acceptable to grip the man’s wrists—his flesh felt oddly spongy—and pry his arms from the trunk and then mostly drag him through the brush and back to the center of the meadow? The state attendants didn’t object. Nor did Linda Rucker. So it seemed it was acceptable, given that the campers might be lost in the woods, given that the meadow was in a state of chaos.

All around the buses were small piles of strewn luggage and bedsheets and the remains of paper bag lunches—baloney sandwiches, fruit cups, wax paper bags holding clutches of broken Oreo cookies.

Nearby one of the few younger campers, a skinny teenage girl,
set out running from the picnic tables at full tilt. But then her legs wobbled. Her arms windmilled from side to side. She made it twenty yards before a seizure brought her down and she flailed and trembled upon the thick meadow grass. Her counselor, a portly young woman named Emily Boehler, crouched beside her. “Can someone help me?” Emily pleaded. “Oh, my goodness. Can someone
please
help me?” Other campers and counselors hurried by undaunted. A few minutes later the teenage camper came to her senses, rose, and lurched into another stumbling run. Another twenty yards. Another seizure.

“Find the campers on your list,” Linda Rucker called out. “Check with the attendants. But you must make sure you have the right person. Don’t just ask the camper. Check the clothing tags, if you have to. That’s right,
yes,
step up behind them, peel back their shirt collars or the hems of their pants, and look for their names.”

An awkward practice, this looking into strangers’ shirt collars. Some of the men whose clothing Wyatt looked inside reacted with a dazed and dreamy regard. They craned their heads around to look at him. What rich expressions they had—wide-eyed, addled, incredulous.

But others jumped at the violation of his fingers and turned on him, shrieking, gnashing their crooked teeth, ready to lash out.

What else could Wyatt do but press on with the search? He squeezed through throngs of sweaty men and women. Those who squatted down on the grass or those who lay clutching their duffel bags and bedclothes, he stepped over.

“Can anyone help me find Jerry Johnston?” Wyatt called out. “Does anyone know Leonard Peirpont?”

Several of the attendants merely waved him off. But when he called Leonard Peirpont’s name, he caught the attention of a stout and ferocious-looking woman in a nurse’s uniform. She carried her
mammoth bosom low on her stomach, clutched her purse while stomping toward him across the meadow.

“Leonard,”
she repeated, as if she’d been startled out of a gloomy daydream. She glared at Wyatt. “Who told you to ask for Leonard Peirpont?”

“He’s on my list.”

She wanted to see this list. But even after she’d read the names of Wyatt’s campers, she didn’t appear to approve. More so, she seemed to begrudge him for some personal failing, perhaps the whiff of inexperience he gave off. She said, “When you’re talking to me, you look me in the eye and say, ‘Yes, Nurse Dunbar’ or ‘No, Nurse Dunbar’ or ‘Leonard is on my list, Nurse Dunbar.’”

He raised his gaze to her.

She said, “You as dumb as you look?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “No, Nurse Dunbar.”

“
Christ,
I hope not.” She pointed to the mess hall porch. “Leonard’s up there, in the shade, where I left him. The one with the glasses and checkered shirt. See him?”

“Yes, I do . . . Nurse Dunbar.”

“You hold him by the elbow, understand? Wherever you go. You hold Leonard’s elbow and walk beside him.”

“Yes, Nurse Dunbar.”

“And you make sure that, when you’re not walking beside him, you got him parked next to something sturdy he can hold on to.”

“I will, Nurse Dunbar.” Then, thankfully, she was through with him, had turned her broad back and was treading a few heavy paces to the nearest white bus. Up the steps she went, hoisting herself and her dangling white purse. She slumped into the first bench, where she sat waiting, glumly, for the attendants to finish and the bus to whisk her away.

Wyatt set a course for the mess hall porch. The person she’d pointed to was an odd-looking man—but weren’t they all odd-looking?—who
gripped a porch column and swayed to and fro atop his stiff little legs. He was middle-aged with woolly sideburns, but his startled, blinking eyes, windowed behind sharp-cornered glasses, made him look newly hatched.