The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  From behind the steering wheel, Christopher Waterhouse nodded to her and raised his eyebrows expectantly. His window was rolled down, his forearm balanced neatly on the window frame. The effort he’d made loading and unloading the van had left his T-shirt collar and underarms mooned in sweat, and the hair along his temples swept back damply against the side of his face. He was hunched forward in the driver’s seat, the same stiff bearing of his shoulders and neck that he adopted in the high perch of his lifeguard chair.

  “Nurse Harriet,” he said, a term of address that had caught on with the Kindermann Forest staff. Not Harriet, but Nurse Harriet. Maybe the counselors considered it a mark of respect. Whenever they used it, they seemed to wait a moment afterward, as Christopher Waterhouse did now, for Harriet to blush in appreciation.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m glad I was able to catch you before you left.”

  To judge from his open and encouraging expression, he seemed glad, too.

  “Because I need to ask about something,” she said. But this wasn’t right. She shouldn’t have said ask. It wasn’t as if she was seeking permission. “I need to let you know about something,” she amended herself.

  “All right,” he said, patiently. “Sure, go ahead.”

  “See, I’ve been trying to track Evie Hicks down all evening. Didn’t see her at the camp carnival. And I couldn’t find her at her cabin. Then I remembered. She’s supposed to be going with you. To the Dairy Queen in Ellsinore.”

  “That’s right,” he said. He turned in his seat so that he could glance back at his passenger, Evie Hicks, who sat belted into the first of three benches. She wasn’t able to collapse into her usual slack posture. The seat belts, one snugly across her stomach, the other diagonally between her full breasts, held her tight against the seat. Her head was tipped back, her mouth partly open, as if she were awaiting the services of a dentist.

  “But she can’t go,” Harriet explained.

  He wrinkled his brow in consideration of what she’d said. As meditations went, this one was thorough and good-natured. After a while he tipped his head forward, perhaps in agreement.

  And who knew? Maybe this was all it took: a clear and polite request. Until now she’d never had what could reasonably be called a conversation with Christopher Waterhouse, though she’d said hello and thanked him each afternoon for the privilege of allowing James sole use of the swimming pool. If she was to judge Christopher on the basis of these interactions, then it was only fair to say that he’d been cheerful and accommodating. And on one occasion he’d been something more than that. On the second day of camp, when a female camper had snatched James up from his mess hall bench and held him to her hard chest with a terrible spastic energy, Christopher had jumped to his feet and pried the boy loose. On that occasion he’d been more than merely helpful. He’d been alert and brave.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Why is that? Why can’t she go with me?”

  “Because she has a treatment I need to give her. Right away.”

  “A treatment for what?”

  “A problem that ladies get sometimes. A kind of infection.”

  His comely and suntanned face blossomed with understanding. “Ohhhh,” he said.

  “She’ll be feeling better in a day or two.”

  “Good,” he said. He grinned and seemed to wait for a reciprocating smile from Harriet. “So I guess you’ll have to give her the treatment when we get back from Ellsinore.”

  It made no sense. There was an odd little gap in logic between what she’d thought she made clear to him and his incongruent answer. Perhaps, at the bottom of it all, Christopher Waterhouse wasn’t very bright. “No, no,” she said. “It’ll have to work the other way. You’ll have to go to Ellsinore alone and bring the ice cream back for Evie.”

  Again she was struck by how calm and measured his reactions were. Bring the ice cream back to Evie? He seemed to think this an original and complicated notion. He needed to sit in his van awhile and ponder it. But after a few pensive moments he squinted his eyes and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I’m going to have to say no to your idea, Nurse Harriet.”

  She couldn’t quite help herself: she let out a startled humpf of disbelief. “What?” Harriet said. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m saying I thought over your suggestion and I’m saying no.” He placed his hand on the column shift lever and in one quick motion set the van into drive.

  “Christopher,” she said sternly. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  He shrugged. “I’m going to Ellsinore,” he said.

  And apparently he was. The tires of the van began crunching forward on the gravel, a very slow and gradual turning. It was no trouble at all for Harriet to plod along beside the van. “Christopher?” she insisted. She could see into the van’s interior: the sallow dash lights and scuffed door paneling. Evie Hicks, reined tight to the seat, let her head loll to one side so that her gaze flitted dreamily along the windows of the van and settled briefly on Harriet.

  “Stop the van,” Harriet demanded. “Stop the van, Christopher.” And when it was clear that he would not, she shouted, “I will examine this girl very carefully when she gets back!”

  He stepped on the accelerator. The van, which had been rolling along as sluggishly as an old wagon, found its grip on the roadway and bounded forward beyond her reach.

  She jogged after it. A ridiculous effort, really: there’d be no catching up. But still she ran stupidly and persistently along the edge of the open meadow. The van was hundreds of yards ahead of her now, its glinting taillights bobbing along the roadway. She pushed on, past the camp office and Schuller Kindermann’s quaint cedar cottage, past The Sanctuary. The van lights seemed to be slowing—seemed to have stopped—at the entrance to Kindermann Forest. A moment or two of idleness, perhaps of decision. The van turned right onto County Road H.

  It was astonishing to see this: a turn to the right, deliberate, unmistakable.

  She stopped in her tracks, bent over, hands on her knees, gulping air.

  Then she swiveled around and jogged back the way she came.

  There was a flood of coppery light shining out the back window of The Sanctuary. She crossed into the grass and drew close. Inside, in the scuffed and dusty main room, around a Formica-topped kitchen table, the Lonesome Three had settled down for their nightly game of gin rummy. Two homely young women, one ungainly young man; each wedged in close to the table, appraising the neat arrangement of their cards. The Lonesome Three—mopish, aloof, segregated, available. The other counselors would be so much harder to locate at this time of night: by now they’d have slipped away to various safeholds within the forest to smoke dope and commingle and fall in love. Not so, the Lonesome Three.

  She hurried toward the screen door at the front of The Sanctuary. To rouse the Lonesome Three from their game, she’d have to barge in wearing the stark expression of the overwrought. She’d issue stern orders if necessary. Get up from the table! Something terrible is happening!

  None of this, fortunately, was necessary. As soon as she rounded the building another option presented itself: at a picnic table some twenty paces from The Sanctuary sat a lone figure, elbows propped on the tabletop, head bowed over an open book. Reading apparently, or trying to read under the diffuse glow of The Sanctuary’s single outdoor floodlight. She stared at him dumbfounded. And then it made sense. Of course. There’d be another person not included in the after-hours revelry. Another counselor, large and capable.

  “Wyatt,” she called out to him. He looked up from his book, and she hoisted her hand aloft and waved. Certainly, she was panicked. But from the start there was a quality to everything she did—the eager rise of her hand, a high softness in her voice—that was the opposite of panicked, that was assured and intimate and designed, it seemed, to win him over. She rushed to the picnic table.

  “Wyatt,” she said. “Wyatt.” She managed a deep breath, and then—odd under the circumstance—a polite li
ttle nod of greeting. “There’s a serious problem,” she said. “An emergency. Christopher Waterhouse is alone in the camp van with Evie Hicks. They shouldn’t be alone together,” she said. “It shouldn’t be allowed to happen.” By squinting and leaning forward, she could make out the title of the book Wyatt was reading, or trying to read. Lives of the American Presidents. “Because Christopher can’t be trusted,” she said. “He can’t be trusted, Wyatt. He lies. He arranges things the way he wants them. This evening he arranged the hat drawing so that Evie would win. So he and Evie would be alone together in the van.” She studied him in the hope of a startled reaction, a crush of understanding. None came. Perhaps she needed to remember this: quiet, unassuming Wyatt Huddy wasn’t the type to ask questions. It wasn’t enough for her to imply what Christopher Waterhouse might do. She’d have to speak in terms explicit and ugly. “He’ll molest her,” she said. “He’ll molest her. Or worse. He’ll rape her.” She watched him absorb this news: a tightening in his overbroad forehead, a sad pinch in the corner of his uneven mouth. She said she’d tried to stop this from happening. Just minutes ago, she’d halted the camp van in front of the infirmary and tried to reason with Christopher Waterhouse. But he couldn’t be talked out of what he wanted to do. He’d driven away. And she’d run after the van. She’d seen it stop a moment at the front gate. Stop and turn right. The van turned right. Right onto County Road H. A left turn on County Road H would have taken the van to Highway 52. Highway 52 led to Ellsinore. But a right turn? All you got if you turned right was a few more miles of gravel road. Scrubby lots. Creek beds. Dwindling little side lanes that led to nowhere.

  “Wyatt,” she said and, before she could continue, she palmed the sweat off her brow and pushed back her tousled hair. The expression she was wearing felt wrong—too frantic and severe. Much better if she could relax her features and show Wyatt Huddy a composed face, maybe even an affectionate one. “What one of us should do,” she offered. “What you should probably do . . .”

  He rose to his feet, rigidly, gravely, as if his name had been called from a roster. “I’ll take a walk,” he said in a tight, diminished voice. “I’ll see if I can find them.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Wyatt.”

  In each of her encounters with Wyatt Huddy he’d never been able to raise his gaze to the level of her own. He’d never looked her in the eye. The same was true now. His gaze was averted and the emotion in his face was closely reined, nearly unreadable. She could say he looked pained. Or weighted with reluctance. Or proud that she had asked for his help. All three might be true. Before he turned to set out for the front gate, he stretched himself to his full height and drew a large breath of air into his chest. He flexed his hands open and shut. These small physical exertions were possibly the humblest acts of male bravado Harriet had ever seen. And she could tell they were being performed for her benefit, for her assurance. He wanted her to know that he was strong. He was able and ready. It shamed her to think how very little it had taken to win him over.

  Then he bounded away, his strides long and clumsy and surprisingly quick. In just a few moments he’d moved beyond the soft luster of the Sanctuary floodlight, an indistinct shape, then an outline, and then less than that, an obscure stain of darkness where seconds earlier a person had been.

  Chapter Twelve

  At least he had the benefit of a night sky pierced by a million glossy little stars and the brightening presence of an unscreened moon—a pared-down but still prominent moon, fiercely white. It sent its reflected light out like a coded signal. Some things—the looming pin oak trees on either side of the road—had almost no ability to receive this light. Other things fared much better. The white gravel stones that shifted like loose snow beneath Wyatt’s work boots were, it turned out, perfect receivers of moonlight.

  In the unshadowed straightaways, with the full, gleaming breadth of the night sky bearing down, the roadway gave off a soft, pearly white blush of light. To Wyatt it seemed as if the lit corridor of County Road H had been unfurled across the sloping countryside for his benefit.

  He pushed ahead. Clompf. Clompf. Clompf. He’d always been able to march along as fast as most people could jog. Plus he had the advantage of an excellent gravel road. Honestly and truly, a first-rate road. County Road H was broad and chalky white and lushly graded. It appeared to have been built with the notion of teaching the jutting Ozark hillsides a lesson or two about orderliness and hard work.

  If necessary, he’d follow County Road H all the way to its scattered and weedy end. He’d do it for Nurse Harriet Foster. And also, of course, for Evie Hicks. And yet he couldn’t believe Evie was moments away from being molested, from being raped. Or rather he couldn’t imagine that she was. To be convinced of such a thing he’d have to believe that in some people—people like Christopher Waterhouse—there existed an enormous gap between who they pretended to be in public and the selfish and ugly things they schemed to do in private. How awful it would be if this were true. And worse even to wonder if a similar gap might be present in all people, including those he most admired: Captain Throckmorton and Ed McClintock. Present in Nurse Harriet, too. Present in himself even.

  From somewhere ahead, just over the next steep hill perhaps, came the bawl of a straining automobile engine. What a harsh, blustery clamor it made, though this clamor was no louder, really, than the keen of insects that seemed to pulse in steady waves from some dark epicenter of the forest. A minute passed. Then a vehicle slid into view and grew from an obscure trembling blur into a recognizable shape: a wobbly old pickup truck, its headlights off or out of order, piloted by a gaunt male driver. The truck stormed past Wyatt. In the instant or two before a fog of road dust enveloped him, Wyatt saw, in the open bed of the truck, two children, a boy and a girl, perched on ragged lawn chairs. They stared at him. He stared back. They were homely, square-faced children, who seemed to recognize Wyatt as a strolling member of their community. But this appreciation lasted no more than a second: they looked at him and vanished behind a tunneling whirl of dust.

  He clamped a hand across his mouth and nose and stomped forward.

  There were narrow brush-choked lanes angling off County Road H and unwinding a dozen or more yards into the dark woods. Wyatt felt duty-bound to follow each thin lane—most of them little more than rutted tire tracks—even if it meant fumbling along in the pitch-blackness until he could make out the lane’s obscure end point, usually a clutch of tree stumps or a shabby barbed-wire fence. One lane took him much farther: through a wide grove of tall sycamore trees, across a dry creek bed, up a gentle hill, where, in the distance, a fluttery orange lantern light could be seen glowing in the window of a log cabin. An inhabited cabin. It dawned on him then: he was trespassing on somebody’s driveway.

  He hurried back out to County Road H with a richer appreciation for what Harriet Foster had asked him to do. He’d have to stumble down each of these patchy little side lanes and driveways. There’d very likely be yard dogs, unleashed and growling, or outraged homeowners jolted from their beds and reaching for the nearest club or a loaded shotgun.

  It was gratifying somehow to march along with this weighty sense of danger and responsibility. And that, really, was the funny part of it. Because for a short while, for five minutes maybe, or the time it took to march a quarter mile along County Road H, he convinced himself that the task he’d been assigned would require a very brave and determined exploration of the deep woods. Then he rounded a wide corner of the road and stopped in his tracks.

  Right there, just a few yards off the gravel shoulder of County Road H, was the broad, boxy rear end of a stilled vehicle—the Kindermann Forest camp van.

  You could hardly call the van hidden. It had been driven down a mild embankment and parked beside County Road H on a little slip of open meadow that was weedy and tire-rutted and bordered on three sides by a pitch-black frontier of cedar trees. This didn’t appear to be an unusual place to park a vehicle. In the farm country where Wy
att had grown up—and also, it seemed, here in the Missouri Ozarks—you’d see, in the clarifying light of day, a car or pickup truck pulled off the road and onto a small clearing. The driver, you assumed, was napping or checking a survey map or had slipped away into the scrubby woods to fish in a nearby creek.

  But at night the implications of a parked vehicle were different. Or seemed different.

  The van’s interior light had been turned on. There were lines of shadowed movement playing out on the rear windows, and though these windows were too thickly coated in road dust to see through, Wyatt could, by putting his hand against the rear quarter panel of the Kindermann Forest van, feel a tension uncoiling in the vehicle’s undercarriage, a faint indication, maybe, of the gentle movements taking place within.

  All his life he’d been taught to knock softly and wait. This seemed to be an occasion in which the usual rules could be overlooked. He put his shoulder against the van’s sliding side door. His fingers closed around the latch. A few ounces of pressure and the latch unclicked. With a dry, grating screech the van door was swung open.

  In his imaginings, in his vision of the world as it ought to be, he’d pieced together a half-vivid notion of what it would be like to love Evie Hicks. He knew, for instance, that they’d live together. They’d share an apartment in Jefferson City. Wyatt would work at the Salvation Army depot all day, and when he came home, he and Evie would have dinner and watch television and then, as if signaling a new juncture in their evening together, Evie would rise from the couch and go to the bedroom. There she’d dress in a nightgown and wait for him sitting upright on their bed. A few minutes later Wyatt would ease into the room and sit down beside her. (Would they be married? He wasn’t at all sure. Maybe they would be, though the details of their engagement and wedding were nearly impossible to bring into focus.) He’d turn down the bedroom lights, and then he’d reach across and put his hand on the underside of her full breast and hold it there for a long while, feeling the soft weight of it through the cotton of her nightgown. This act, which seemed to him enormously crucial and complicated, would inspire long minutes of intense happiness, hours of happiness. In the world as it ought to be, Evie would be aware enough to welcome the steady pressure of his hand and perhaps to feel a similar gladness.