The Inverted Forest (15 page)

I
f he had rested well the night before and if the mood so struck him, Schuller liked to set out early from his cottage, a veil of soft light and dampness hanging over the countryside, and walk the camp’s gravel roadway from where it began at the weedy front gate and slipped past the office and open meadow and eventually ran beside the infirmary and mess hall, on past the maintenance shed and parking lot (the two unsightly regions of Kindermann Forest), and then into a long, lovely stretch of cedar and elm trees before dead-ending at the horse stables. That was the journey’s reward: to lean against the wood fence and watch the old mares stomping about the water trough, snorting, raking the ground with their cracked hooves, a liveliness that would be hard to locate once they’d been blanketed and saddled for the day.

This morning, Thursday morning, walking back from the stables, he happened to survey the parking lot and notice a green pickup truck with a black camper shell. At the moment the rear hatch of the shell was opening so that someone—just a figure from this distance—could climb unsteadily over the tailgate and step down onto
the pavement. It was just after 6:30
A.M.
The figure stretched: a male figure given that he strolled a few yards to the edge of the lot and peed standing up into a line of scrubby bushes. Afterward he plodded down onto the gravel roadway.

That’s where Schuller had paused to meet him. The figure turned out to be the lifeguard Christopher Waterhouse. His clothes and hair were sleep-tousled. No need to ask what he was up to. The implication was perfectly clear: Christopher had passed the night in the back of his pickup truck rather than in the cabin to which he’d been assigned.

At least he didn’t try to pretend otherwise. He bowed his head a moment, a boyish admission that he’d been caught bending the rules. Then, much more cheerfully, he wished Schuller a good morning. “I’m starving,” he said. “Any chance we’ll have biscuits and gravy for breakfast?”

“No chance whatsoever,” Schuller said. Among other fastidious habits, he was a careful reader of the weekly camp menu.

“How ’bout hash browns then? That’d be my second choice. With fried—”

Schuller brought up his raised hand until it was just inches from Christopher Waterhouse’s face. Sometimes, when addressing the young, a gesture like this could save Schuller valuable time.

“Why is it, do you think, Christopher, that we ask our counselors to stay in the cabins at night?”

Instead of a reasonable answer, Christopher Waterhouse bit his lower lip and brooded.

“Because we need you there,” Schuller said. “Your presence in the cabins at night, whether you’re sleeping or not, is every bit as important as the work you do for us during the day.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then can I take it that we have an agreement?” Schuller said. “You’ll be sleeping in the cabins from now on, because if not . . .”

But the young man’s attention had drifted up and beyond Schuller, a rather dreamy scanning of the treetops and pale morning light.

“Christopher?”

“Do you know what goes on in the cabins at night, Mr. Kindermann?”

“I know it’s not always pleasant. It’s difficult to sleep, I’m sure.”

“The men in the cabin . . . I mean the retarded men, sneak out of their bunks and congregate in the back of the sleeping barracks. They get together back there, four or five of them, and then . . . they have sex with one another.”

Until now Schuller had anticipated each of Christopher Waterhouse’s remarks. Not this one. What a horrible picture it painted in his mind. More distressing yet, the very thing he had gone to such lengths to rid Kindermann Forest of had returned in a different and worse form. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“The other counselor in my barracks, Wyatt Huddy, can back me up.”

“Then this is
awful,
” Schuller said. “This is . . . You should have come to us the very first time it happened, you and Wyatt. We can do something about this.”

“I don’t see how,” Christopher Waterhouse said, almost sadly. “They’re more determined than we are. It’s not like we can stay awake all night.”

“We can separate the ones who . . . the instigators. If we have to, we’ll send them back to the state hospital. But we can’t begin to fix a problem like this, any problem for that matter, unless we know what’s happening. You really should have come talk to us sooner.”

For the moment Christopher Waterhouse seemed willing to accept a small part of the blame. His hair was uncombed, his face unshaven. If he had an answer for Schuller, he appeared to be assembling it in
private. “It’s not always easy . . . ,” he said at last. He shook his head. “From our perspective, it’s not easy to know if a problem like this will be taken seriously.”

“Well, for
heaven’s sake
why wouldn’t it?”

“Because from our perspective, the perspective of the counselors, it doesn’t always seem like things here at camp are in control.”

Schuller blinked in surprise. “How so?” he asked. “How are things
not
in control?”

“From the moment we arrived there didn’t seem to be any planning or any preparation. It’s something we felt right away, and, well, some of the counselors, more than a few, were pretty upset about it. I had to talk to them and get them to calm down. It’s better now, but that’s just because we’re all starting to get used to the way things are.”

“The way things are,” Schuller repeated, skeptically.

“I’m not talking about you, Mr. Kindermann. If I understand how things work around here, you’re in charge, but you don’t do the planning and the preparation.”

Schuller pretended to consider this. Nearby, there were squirrels running in the tree branches and tiny finches hopping along the railroad ties that bordered the gravel roadway. He could actually hear the soft scrape of their clawed toes against the ties. He said, “This has been an unusual summer for us, Christopher. We haven’t been able to plan and prepare as much as we would like. I’m sure you know why. The word must have gotten around by now. Are you telling me we made a mistake by letting our first counselor staff go? It may be worth remembering that you have a position here at camp because of that decision.”

A small pleasure to see Christopher Waterhouse squeezed by an argument he did not anticipate. He ran a hand through his tangled hair. “I’m very glad to be here, Mr. Kindermann. I really am. But when it comes to something that serious—people having a naked
pool party, or what’s going on in the cabins now—then maybe me and the other counselors need to feel like someone’s in charge.”

It was almost enough to make Schuller smile wryly in appreciation. To be offered this frank appraisal, one that carried with it a prickly thorn of criticism. And to know that it had come from a young man who’d been on the job less than four days and had already broken an important camp rule.

And yet an appraisal worth considering.

“These are weighty topics, Christopher. But they’re not part of the discussion I intend to have with you right now. So let’s make it very simple. Do the things you’re expected to do. Or leave camp and find another job for the summer.”

“Yes. All right. But it’s—”

“Now go to your cabin.”

For Christopher Waterhouse, there was a moment of wavering. Beneath his baleful expression you could sense a carefully weighed calculation taking place—a wish, maybe, to amend his comments. Or to press his point further.

Wisely, he turned on his heels and did as he was told.

And so Schuller returned from his walk to a camp office and cottage made shabbier by what he’d learned from Christopher Waterhouse. It was too much really.

Retarded men pressed together like animals in some dark corner of the cabins. You couldn’t shake such a picture from your head; some scenarios were so appalling they sprang to life and crashed lumbering and wretched through every neat boundary of your mind.

In truth he’d always held an ambivalent view of the state hospital campers. Surely other members of the Kindermann Forest staff were of two minds on the matter. But who could argue against it? The idea was generous and moral and Christian. If you had any imagination at
all, you could picture the institutions where these retarded men and women lived out their thin lives and know what two weeks outside in the natural world might mean to them.

It had, for Kindermann Forest, a very practical meaning as well. The past decade had been an era of declining enrollment at camp. It hadn’t always been so. Throughout the seventies and much of the eighties, they’d run ten straight weeks of children’s camp, from mid-June right to the end of August. But in the last ten years they’d begun cutting two-week sessions from the end of the summer. Ten weeks to eight weeks to six weeks. Seven years ago Schuller’s brother, Sandie, had brokered a deal with the state hospital to bring retarded adults to camp for a two-week session. It wasn’t a moneymaker (or a loser for that matter), but it did lengthen the dwindling camp season by two weeks.

Still, though, when Schuller saw these campers each summer shambling about the gravel pathways or clustered outside the cabins doing their manic cigarette smoking, or when he heard of the awful mess they left in the bathrooms for the cleaning women, he tended to forget the act of charity and feel as if a purer quality of Kindermann Forest—its pristineness maybe—had been offered up in sacrifice.

He sat behind his director’s desk and waited for Linda Rucker.

They had fallen into the habit of calling the fifteen minutes they spent together each morning a meeting, but in truth it was mostly the ritual of coffee and a chance for Linda to share with Schuller whatever details regarding the day-to-day running of camp she saw fit. To her credit she didn’t burden him with problems whose solutions were either simple or obvious. If a horse had not eaten in twenty-four hours, the vet was called in. If one of the kitchen girls quit or didn’t show up for work, an employment ad was placed in the Ellsinore
Gazette.
Hard sometimes for Schuller to explain to outsiders his precise role at camp. He was retired. Or semiretired. In most instances camp business went forward without his participation.

Through the office picture window he could see an otherwise pleasing stretch of the camp roadway and a few older cottages, mainly The Sanctuary, from which Linda Rucker had emerged and was strolling toward the office with a bundle of yesterday’s mail under one arm. She nodded to Schuller upon entering the office and went straight to the coffeepot. There she poured and sugared her coffee and then sat before the director’s desk, her cup balanced on one knee, the mail in a sorted pile on her lap. It wouldn’t be fair to declare Linda Rucker a peculiar person. But often, like this morning, she sat for long minutes in Schuller’s presence without speaking a single word. Wasn’t that peculiar?

He resolved not to speak until she’d lifted her gaze from the stack of mail. Finally she did. “Linda,” he said. “The men of Cabin Two, the retarded campers, are having sex with one another.” He paused to allow Linda her moment of distress: a low gasp, a straightening of her slumped posture or, perhaps, a sudden, sharp creak from the wheels of her office chair. “From what I’ve heard,” he continued, “they wait till the lights go out at night and then congregate in the back of the barracks. A group of them.”

Again he waited for a startled reaction. Sometimes, in the sullen cast of her expression and in her closed demeanor, she reminded Schuller of a man; not men in general, but a particular type of stubborn and inward tradesman that was somehow more numerous here in the Missouri Ozarks. Occasionally these tradesmen were called in to do work at camp. There wasn’t anything chatty or charming about these men. Nothing about them invited you into their lives.

And yet, like Linda, they were meticulous and extremely knowledgeable about their work. (Whatever her faults, she was not, as Christopher Waterhouse implied, unprepared.) But they did lack something significant: a certain openness or personal allure that made you glad you’d hired them.

“What kind?” she asked.

“What?”

She took a sip of her coffee. “What kind of sex?”

“I don’t know exactly. I don’t care to know. Homosexual sex. Beyond that, does it really matter?”

She eased back in her chair and released a long, ponderous sigh. It might have been one of several patient gestures she used exclusively with him. She said, “I’ve seen the men be very . . . affectionate, very physical with one another sometimes. Same with the women. So that’s one thing, isn’t it? But it’s another if they’re taking things further than that.”

“I believe it has gone further. The counselors of Cabin Two say it has.”

“Well, that’s a big problem then. We’ll have to make changes right away.”

“Yes, we will. I’m wondering if we can figure out who the offenders are and send them back to the state hospital.”

“I’d rather try separating them first,” Linda said.

He sighed. By
try,
of course, she meant that this was the solution she’d settled on. Separation. No doubt she was ready to argue stubbornly if necessary. If he wanted to have it his way, a strenuous effort would have to be made.