The Inverted Forest (21 page)

True enough. He shivered and retched and, late in the night, drenched his clothes in sweat and urine. In the expansive tractor shed, with its countless chassis and bald tires and milk crates of parts, he could cry out all he wanted. He couldn’t sleep, however, even once his wounds had lost much of their sting and his feet had taken on a remarkable weight and thickness. Somehow he’d been granted elephant’s feet. He was miserable, truly. But it didn’t make any sense: the movie or the fact that she’d used a dirty knife blade. Or this: when he was seven years old, she’d taken him to the children’s hospital in Kansas City so that surgeons could separate the fingers on both of his hands. He’d woken up in the recovery room, aching, nauseated, a boy in pain. All through the night and following day Caroline had sat with him, patting his head, wiping his lips when he spit up, wincing in misery every time he cried out.

The next morning a vehicle pulled up in the driveway. He could hear two people get out. One went to the door of the house and knocked. The other waited in the open bay of the shed—a silhouetted figure, a man who had his hands in the pockets of his coat and was rocking on the heels of his feet.

There were several moments of a prolonged and impending silence and then the creak of the house door and Caroline’s husky voice. “No, sir. No. Not today,” she insisted. “You can come back and look around another time,” she said. “You there!” she shouted. “You stay out of that shed. You come again some other time!”

From deep within the piled center of the shed, Wyatt pulled himself forward, dragging his blankets and his swollen feet. He wouldn’t have done so, wouldn’t have called attention to himself, if she’d used a clean knife blade.

The man who’d been standing in the open bay caught his breath
and stepped back. “Sweet Jesus,” he said. “Are you . . . ? Wait a minute now. Terry! Hey, Terry! Get over here!”

The second man walked over and joined him. And then Caroline, barefoot, in her robe, with a tire iron she kept by the front door. “No, no, no,” she said. “This does not have anything to do with you two. Get back in your truck, you hear? You come back again another time.”

The man who’d been at the door stood and took in the sight of Wyatt. “Ms. Huddy,” the man said. “Let me make sure I understand you. Are you refusing—”

“I’ll call the law if you don’t leave right this minute,” she said. She raised her tire iron. “I’ll swing on you if I have to.”

He was a heavyset man, and he looked at her, his big, bald forehead creased in worry. He said, “Please do. Please do call the law. Let’s have Sheriff Leahey come to the farm and sort this out. But if you decide to swing that tire iron, then understand that my friend, Ed, and I will be swinging back.” He’d braced himself as if ready to lunge in her direction. His name, Wyatt would learn soon enough, was Terry Throckmorton. Captain Throckmorton. He and his friend, Ed McClintock, had been to the Huddy farm before and had purchased several antique iron tractor seats. Ed was a collector.

It seemed to take Caroline forever to make up her mind. One moment she was speechless in her indignation, the next she was screaming and making threats. Eventually she swung her tire iron, but before doing so she stepped back so that the curved end of the iron cut only through the air. Then she let out a great huffing sob. Was she crying? If so, Wyatt had never seen anything like it. She told Captain Throckmorton and Ed McClintock the story of their parents’ deaths but with nearly all the dates and facts invented or rearranged.

“We’re very sorry to hear it,” Captain Throckmorton said.

But she claimed not to believe a word out of his mouth. She said she was going back into the house to find her father’s shotgun and figure out how to load it and then she’d settle the matter once
and for all. As soon as she stepped inside, Ed McClintock hurried and drove his pickup truck to the bay of the shed, and he and Captain Throckmorton helped Wyatt climb into the bed of the truck. Within minutes they were speeding out the gates of the farm.

They went first to the Jefferson City Police Station, where Sheriff Leahey took one look at Wyatt sprawled in the bed of the truck and summoned an ambulance. Sheriff Leahey had been out to the Huddy farm before and had past dealings with Caroline. He knew Wyatt by name. “Wyatt,” he said. “How did this happen to you?”

And so Wyatt told him about the movie,
Time Bandits,
and the borrowing of Caroline’s video machine and her choice of an unclean knife blade. As he spoke, the parked truck seemed to be listing to and fro, lulled by gentle waves. He could barely keep his eyelids open.

“Well, she’s gone too far this time, hasn’t she?” Sheriff Leahey said.

“Yes,” Wyatt said from the tangle of dusty blankets in the back of Ed McClintock’s truck. “Too far.”

He spent a week recovering at St. Mary’s Health Center. Afterward he moved into the Salvation Army depot and began his work on the loading dock. But he declined to press domestic violence charges against Caroline. Or even file for a restraining order. To this day he hadn’t spoken to his sister. Which was not to say that he hadn’t seen her. She came to the depot from time to time, and when she did, he made a point of staying out of sight behind the loading dock’s canvas curtain. Surely Caroline knew he lived there, and yet she didn’t seem to be searching for him. From his vantage point behind the curtain, she looked like any number of slumped bargain hunters. But different, too—more than a little clumsy, stuporous, drained of her anger. Harmless maybe.

During mess hall dinner Saturday evening, Wyatt observed Mr. Kindermann, whose habit was to sit silent and mostly unnoticed
through each meal, rise from the director’s table, and thread his way to the long serving counter at the center of the hall. He raised his hand in appeal for quiet and then announced, over the squall of voices, that they’d reached day six and were now halfway through the State Hospital Session.

At once a cheer went up. It had begun with the counselors, but more than a few campers, startled by the applause, had begun clapping and shouting in gruff imitation of what they’d just heard.

“For many of us it’s an occasion worth celebrating,” Mr. Kindermann said. He let his gaze travel the mess hall and alight on as many counselors as he could find: Carrie Reinkenmeyer, Daniel Hartpence, Kathleen Bram, Christopher Waterhouse—though his searching glance did not include Wyatt. “I do pay attention,” he continued. “Some of your opinions have made their way to me. And so I know that you’ve been overwhelmed at times and challenged in ways you never expected. This is the seventh year we’ve welcomed campers from the state hospital, and each year we rediscover what a challenge it is. I don’t kid myself. I know the demands are much harder for you, the counselors. But it’s quite a challenge for those of us on the senior staff as well. We have more responsibility. We certainly worry more. The decisions we have to make seem harder. Or at least they feel harder to me.” There was something about this last remark that made Wyatt and the others take pause—an intimacy perhaps, a privateness that they’d not yet heard from Mr. Kindermann. “And still we have another week to get through,” he said. “Whatever this next week brings for us, I want you all to know that we see the hard work and sacrifices you’re making. We’re proud of you. We appreciate your efforts, more than you may realize.”

There was more still. As a mark of Mr. Kindermann’s appreciation, he would make possible a rare freedom. Once this evening’s activity had ended and the campers had been put to bed, two counselors from each of the four cabins would meet at the camp office. Mr. Kindermann
would hand over the keys to the camp van so that they could travel twelve miles to the Dairy Queen in Ellsinore. There they would buy treats for the entire staff. It would be Mr. Kindermann’s great pleasure to pay for this outing.

Free ice cream? It shouldn’t have lifted their spirits the way it did. They weren’t children after all. But the promise of ice cream got them talking right away. Who would go to Ellsinore in the camp van? (Not Wyatt, since he had cabin watch that night.) What stops might they make along the way? What ice cream concoction would each of them order? To that end, a small notebook began to circulate, and throughout the evening’s activity, a leisurely kickball tournament held in the open meadow, the notebook went back and forth among the counselors as each person inscribed or amended his or her order. It wasn’t until after the evening activity had ended and they were shepherding their campers back to the cabins that one of the counselors, Ellen Swinderman, wondered if anyone had taken Linda Rucker’s order. As it happened, no one had. In fact, they hadn’t seen Linda Rucker at the scavenger hunt or, for that matter, at mess hall dinner.

No one thought to pursue this mystery. There were a hundred and four state hospital campers to bathe and get to bed. This was easily Wyatt’s least favorite time of day. It required of him a sternness that felt like an elaborate bluff. In Cabin Two, amid the pandemonium of bare bodies and rank odors and casual bullying, he had to order and shove retarded men out of his way. Thomas Anwar Toomey had to be warned and warned again to extinguish his last cigarette and return to his bunk. In the mayhem of the sleeping barracks, Leonard Peirpont seemed especially hapless, especially pitiful. The decent thing would have been to sit awhile at the foot of Leonard’s bunk and listen to a few of his disjointed remarks. No time for that. Wyatt had to be up and moving continuously back and forth between the two barracks and across the screened porch that connected them. It was on the floor of this porch where they’d set out mattresses for Dennis Dugan
and Frederick Torbert, both of whom had been caught congregating in the back of the barracks at night with other men. On several occasions during the past few nights both Dennis and Frederick had been startled, traumatically so, by Christopher Waterhouse and his crashing pot lids. These pot lids had been tied together with yellow twine and were now hanging beside the porch door from a nail in the wall. They hung there as a kind of warning and, more than once, Wyatt, crossing the porch on his rounds, caught either Dennis or Frederick awake on his mattress and staring up at these hanging lids with an anxious regard.

At midnight Christopher Waterhouse appeared at the porch door with a paper bag containing Wyatt’s hot fudge sundae with peanuts. Christopher had been one of the lucky eight who’d traveled by van to Ellsinore, and now he was back at Kindermann Forest bearing ice cream treats for those who’d stayed behind.

“Nicely done,” he said to Wyatt through the screen mesh of the door. Apparently he meant the lack of noise and commotion in the sleeping barracks, as if this happy coincidence had been brought about by a magnificent effort from Wyatt. “Have you had to crash the cymbals on Dennis and Frederick?” he asked.

“No, no. They’ve been quiet.”

“They’re fake-sleeping right now,” Christopher whispered. He opened the door wide enough to lean his head in and study them as they lay on their mattresses. “They’re waiting for their chance.”

“I guess so.”

“No guessing about it, Wyatt. Come on now. You’ve earned this,” he said, handing over the bag and a red plastic spoon. His expression was open, generous. He seemed entirely pleased to have this opportunity to stand on the cabin landing and watch Wyatt sample the sundae. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s good stuff. We tried to keep it cold.”

“I will. I’ll just . . . wait till a little later.”

“No you
won’t.
”

Wyatt turned back toward the darkened interior of the cabin. For a moment he thought he might pretend to hear a noise and investigate. Instead, he said, “I wear a retainer at night. To keep my teeth from going too crooked. I’m wearing it now.”

“Well, don’t be shy. Plop it out. Toss it in the bag here.”

After some consideration, he did as Christopher Waterhouse suggested, plucked the retainer from the roof of his mouth, dropped it into the bag—a wet retainer, a thing as dreary and strangely formed as himself.

“Now try a little bit of this sundae.”

Wyatt placed a spoonful delicately on his tongue. Even melted, it tasted like a rare prize.

“Well?” Christopher Waterhouse asked.

“Yes,” Wyatt said.

“Yes what?”

“It’s good stuff.”

“I told you so,” Christopher Waterhouse said. “Thanks for holding down the fort.” He almost turned to walk away. “Hey,” he said. “Here’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask you for some time, Wyatt. Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind,” Wyatt said.

“You decided to come work here at Kindermann Forest, right? And you did it knowing that for the first two weeks you’d have to take care of people like Dennis and Frederick? Retarded people. You knew it and you decided to come here anyway?”

He took another modest bite of his hot fudge sundae. “I didn’t know,” Wyatt said. “I thought there’d be children.”

“And you wanted to work with children?”

To hear Christopher Waterhouse speak this hope aloud made it seem all the more unlikely. “I thought . . . ,” Wyatt said. “I thought that if we gave the kids a little bit of time they’d get used to me.”