The Inverted Forest (5 page)

“Fine.”

“Nothing out of order?” he asked. “No cat burglars? No safecrackers?”

Wyatt couldn’t help but grin. It was a joke he’d come to enjoy, that the captain paid him to watch over the depot yard and showroom at night rather than unload the donation trucks during the day. That
was part of the joke. The other part, which he’d not quite understood at first, was that few, if any, thieves would be interested in secondhand furniture and clothing in a Salvation Army depot on the outskirts of Jefferson City, Missouri. “No safecrackers,” he reported. “But I was thinking about it some, and I wanted to ask . . .”

“Yes?”

“Is it a rule, do you think, that everyone has to swim? Everyone who works at a summer camp?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Captain Throckmorton said. He squinted in concentration. “No,” he said. “Probably not.”

“Because it seems like it would be a rule. Every time you see a show about a summer camp on TV, people are always swimming.”

“I’m sure it’s not a rule. I’m sure there are counselors who don’t swim at all.”

“Yes, maybe,” Wyatt said. From the wide concrete lip of the loading dock he looked out across the depot yard at the donation trucks and Dumpsters, the swing sets and yard fountains, the same fixtures, mostly, that he’d studied a short while earlier, upon waking, from the uncurtained window of his back room. There wasn’t anything he could say by way of explanation. It wasn’t as if he’d been able to
reason out
a decision. Yes or No. Go or Stay. The best he could do now was take a deep breath and decide on a whim. “All right then,” he said. He filled his lungs with damp morning air. “I’ll go ahead and do it,” he said. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll go ahead and start working at the summer camp.”

It was rare to see Captain Throckmorton taken by surprise. There was a sharp focus to his gaze. His coloring deepened into something like a blush. “You will?” he said. “I’m very glad to hear that, Wyatt. Very glad. It would have been a mistake, I think, to waste your summer here.”

“Yes, maybe so.”

“I’ll get on the phone right away and let Mr. Kindermann know
you’re coming. And I’ll have one of the ladies from the St. James auxiliary drive you down.” He smiled hugely. “This is good news,” he said. “You’ve changed your mind. Was it about the swimming all along?”

Wyatt hardly knew how to answer. “Not just swimming,” he said. “It’s always hard, isn’t it? When you have to go someplace new. And settle in. And introduce yourself a hundred times.”

“I guess it is, yes.”

“Especially for me,” Wyatt said. “Plus, I’ve never tried working with children.”

Once his word had been given, it couldn’t be taken back. He knew that. He packed his clothes and towels and soaps and the retainer he wore at night and a book about American presidents he didn’t much enjoy reading. Mrs. Barnett brought him a flashlight and canteen she’d gathered from the store shelves. She told him to spray for insects and not to stand in direct sunshine. The clerks, Mindy and Janet, who rarely talked to him, stood unseen in the hallway outside his room and called out together in the same tepid voice, “Have a good summer, Wyatt.” Captain Throckmorton hurried to Sears and bought a new sleeping bag. He said, “Choose a bunk bed near a window.” He said, “If you get a cold or sunburn or poison oak rash, go straight to the camp nurse.” He said, “A good way to begin a conversation is to say, ‘Excuse me. I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Wyatt Huddy.’”

By now the center, which had been entirely and exquisitely Wyatt’s at 6:00
A.M.
, was alive with the clamor of phones and earnest customers. Both Mrs. Barnett and Captain Throckmorton had matters to attend to. Their goodbyes were rushed and clumsy. “Take care and . . . be careful.” The truck drivers, hard-pressed and often bitter older men, considered Wyatt’s leaving a desertion.
Why summer camp?
they asked.
What’s the point when there are upright freezers and heavy office desks to unload?
Wyatt couldn’t think of a reasonable answer, and so, to escape their sourness, he waited out back beside the gravel lane that led from Highway 54 up to the loading dock.

Ten minutes later a white Ford Galaxie turned into the lane and made a halting progress toward the depot building. It rolled past him. It braked. It backed up. “Excuse me,” a voice called from the driver’s window. “I’m looking for Captain Throckmorton.”

“He’s in his office,” Wyatt said. “But he’s . . . Are you from St. James?”

The driver, a middle-aged woman in a sleeveless checkered blouse, had climbed from the car and was rounding its front end. “I’ve been assigned a job,” she said. “And I was wonder—” She stopped in her tracks.

“I’m Wyatt Huddy,” he said.

She noticed his duffel bag and turned the whole of her attention toward it. All the features of her ruddy face were pinched in concentration. She furrowed her brow. She grimaced. After a while she said, “The back driveway to the depot, it’s not very well . . .”

“Known?” he offered.

“Marked,” she said, still scrutinizing his duffel bag. “I passed the signpost a few times before I saw it and then . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Then you found it.”

“Yes. I’m Barbara McCauley from the St. James auxiliary.”

“Thank you for driving me.”

“Oh,” she said and waved her hand to and fro. “It’s not any . . .”

“But it is. It’s a long way, there and back. Would you like me to ride in the backseat, Barbara?”

She appeared to consider the offer, tilted her head in thought, reached a conclusion. “Up front is fine,” she said.

Yet once they’d buckled themselves in and set out, she seemed unnerved by his close proximity. She gripped the wheel and fixed her
gaze on the road ahead. What he felt for her then, what he always felt in these strained circumstances, was a tenderness so acute it nearly pierced his heart. Who better than he to understand her discomfort, her embarrassment? He was, after all, well acquainted with the many flavors of distress people felt upon first seeing him. In Barbara McCauley’s case it wouldn’t improve matters to explain that the displacement of his features—the left half of the face higher than the right, the eyes offset by nearly an inch, the nose a bit mashed, the right side of his mouth sloping down—had a name, and that those unfamiliar with the disorder always assumed its sufferers were mentally retarded, when, luckily or unluckily, they were often of average intelligence.

He wasn’t retarded, a fact to be carefully and painfully imparted to every stranger he met. Not disabled. Not handicapped.

But not the equal of other young men or women his age, either. He’d earned a high school equivalency diploma from a technical school. He could assist in the repair of lawn mowers and certain automobiles and might have gone further in this career were it not for the machine manuals, which proved either too difficult or too poorly written. But he could weld. He had a good memory. In the two and a half years he’d lived in the depot, Captain Throckmorton had taught him to keep track of stock and pay utility bills and answer telephone inquiries.

They rode with the windows down to the outskirts of Jefferson City. Once the highway traffic opened up, Barbara McCauley let one hand drop from the wheel and braved a glance in his direction.

“I bet you’re an athlete,” she said. “I bet you play football. Does the Salvation Army have sports teams?”

“They don’t, no. Not sports teams.”

“But you’ve played some football, haven’t you?”

“Not really. We play field hockey on the dock sometimes, me and one of the other loaders.”

“Oh, but you should talk to the other boys you work with and get them all together for a football match. You’d be great at it. A young man your size. You’d smash right on through and score a goal.”

“Thank you, Barbara. I’ll think about doing that.”

She turned her attention back to the highway, which was arrow-straight and sided by long-drawn fields of squatty soybeans, wavering corn.

Certain things about the Salvation Army depot he was glad to have escaped. No, not things. Certain people. The register clerks, Mindy and Janet. Wyatt didn’t enjoy their company, though he wasn’t able to share this opinion, since everyone else at the depot—employees and customers alike—thought Mindy and Janet were wonderful. They’d been inseparable best friends since childhood. Between them they’d developed a repertoire of code words and outrageous expressions. Often they goaded one another into hysterical laughter. (Unless, of course, either Mindy or Janet was in a sour mood, and then they would sulk and ridicule and make each other miserable.) But it was widely known that both young women had wild imaginations. For example, they could reach into a donation bin and pull out a random object, a pencil holder say, and pretend it was a blind man’s begging cup. For the rest of the afternoon, Mindy would teeter about the showroom calling out to Janet,
Please, madam, please. Spare a nickel for a wretched blind man!

One afternoon the previous fall the trucks brought in a load of castoffs from an estate sale, and there, buried in a pile of old accounting ledgers, was a river otter, stuffed and mounted atop a varnished oak board. It was a strange-looking creature, this otter. When extracted from the water, stuffed and mounted, it looked different than you might expect—not playful or cute but flat-headed and fierce with a mouth full of crooked teeth. This otter was dead, obviously, its gaze
dark and intense, its sleek body frozen in an unattractive forward lurch.

Mindy and Janet couldn’t get over it. “Well for goodness’ sake,” Janet said. “Take a look at this, Wyatt. A stuffed otter. It’s just what you need.”

He squinted at her doubtfully.

“A furry friend. You could use a furry friend, couldn’t you?”

For the rest of the day all their talk was about the stuffed otter and Wyatt. Wyatt and his furry friend. The adventures they would have! They’d wear matching sweaters and travel about the country in one of the depot trucks. Hilarious. Wyatt and the otter would check into expensive hotels and order their meals from room service.
And a cup of French onion soup for my furry friend.

The next evening, a Friday, the showroom phone rang. The depot had been closed for hours. Wyatt wasn’t obliged to answer.

“Excuse me,” a male voice on the telephone said. “I’ve been calling all the stores in Jefferson City because I’m looking for a very special item. A very hard-to-find item. A river otter. Do you happen to have one?”

The voice was sincere and inquiring. To Wyatt it seemed that an honest answer was required. He said that yes, they did have an otter, but that it was stuffed.

“Stuffed is perfect. I already have a stuffed beaver.” Through the phone line Wyatt could hear a swell of merry chatter. The man might have been calling from a party or a crowded restaurant. He asked that the otter be set aside in his name. He’d come to the depot and pick it up first thing Monday morning. The man’s name was Harry S. Truman.

And so Wyatt wrote out and taped the man’s name to the animal’s soft belly and placed the otter behind the front counter. Even as he performed this task, it occurred to him that Mindy and Janet might have arranged this phone call. Which wasn’t so terrible, really. The
things that set Mindy and Janet alight with laughter, the things that sent them shrieking and reeling about the depot showroom, didn’t always make sense to Wyatt. But they didn’t offend him, either.

It wasn’t a great surprise to learn on Monday morning that the phone call had been a prank. Everyone at the depot seemed to enjoy it. Hilarious. A stuffed otter with the name Harry S. Truman taped to its fur.

“But you must have known,” Captain Throckmorton said to him. “The name must have tipped you off, didn’t it?”

Wyatt could only nod vaguely. He could tell he’d missed something important. Harry S. Truman. It was a name he was supposed to recognize.

“Yes,” Wyatt said. “That’s right. I knew it. I knew that name.” But he could tell from the wincing expressions of those around him that he hadn’t been believed, and finally he shrugged and shuffled away. Later, once the depot was crowded with customers, he wandered to the far corner of the showroom and consulted a set of donated encyclopedias. Harry S. Truman was an American president. The thirty-third. He’d come from Missouri, from the not-so-distant town of Independence. To understand this was to feel a sudden flood of humiliation. To be drowned in shame. It required a painful adjustment. He’d had to refigure his opinion of himself, to lower his estimation of what he was capable of.