The Inverted Forest (20 page)

At least the female counselors could joke about how they envied Evie Hicks her figure. For Wyatt it was a much more troubling dilemma. To let his gaze linger a moment too long on Evie’s body was to be aroused. To be aroused was to hate himself. Even now, with her sprawled in the dirt near his feet, Wyatt made himself look away, and when he did he found Jim and Ronnie, standing a dozen yards away in the lake, staring back at Evie on the shoreline, their eyebrows raised in appreciation.

No comfort, really, to know he wasn’t alone in this treachery. They should all be ashamed: he and Jim and Ronnie, all the male employees of camp who were tempted to look. Wyatt more so, maybe, because on the occasions he’d encountered Evie Hicks, he was as struck by her round, girlish face and her sweetly preoccupied expression as he was by her body. She seemed to be a thoughtful young woman. At least he imagined she was. And in truth he liked being around the women campers and counselors of Kindermann Forest more than the men. A better, kinder, more generous atmosphere among the women. Several times he’d led his group down the gravel pathway to the yards of Cabins Three and Four just to be on the periphery of that atmosphere, to see the women campers roaming the yard and hear their counselors calling to them from the porch landing. “Evie Hicks, what are you searching for down there in the wood chips? Have you found gold yet, Evie Hicks?”

Silly to say this—she was
retarded
after all—but she looked, with
her pert, small-featured face and wide green eyes, like she might possibly be an intelligent person, a considerate person.

It was a selfish thought. He knew it as he sat there at the edge of Barker Lake with Evie Hicks sprawled in the dirt just a few paces away. Yet it seemed to Wyatt that, in the world as it ought to be, Evie should be allowed to come to him as a girlfriend, a wife, a lover. Except that wasn’t enough. (He was greedy in his longings.) She couldn’t be a mindless wife or lover. Evie would have to
want
to be with him. So let her at least be aware. Give her an intelligence that would allow her to know him for who he was. But at this point he realized he’d carried the fantasy too far. If she were to have this level of awareness, then she would look around at all that was available to her and not want to be with him in the first place.

It was difficult to know how much he should hold himself responsible for this disgraceful longing. His first and sharpest inclination was that in exchange for his unseemly thoughts about Evie Hicks he should be forced to endure a punishment. But what kind? For the time being he could only guess that it should be powerful. Yet that might not be right, either. Were he to discuss the matter with Captain Throckmorton, the captain would almost certainly see it differently. He would say, “These thoughts, Wyatt, are mostly beyond your control. Best not to dwell on them.” Or he might say, “When it comes to accepting punishment, Wyatt, you may not have a clear notion of what’s reasonable and what’s not.”

This, of course, would be the captain’s way of referring to the life Wyatt had shared with his sister, Caroline Huddy, before he’d come to live at the Salvation Army depot. Caroline. Caroline Huddy. A real, live, breathing person, and yet he couldn’t think of her without feeling oppressed and bewildered. Worse even, because he supposed he owed her. She’d taken care of him after the passing of Wyatt’s
father. They were not a healthy or prosperous family. Their mother had died of ovarian cancer many years earlier, while Wyatt was still a toddler. Yet by all accounts his sister, Caroline, older by fifteen years, had gown up very much in the mold of their mother: stubborn and large, unafraid, angry.

For a long while most of Caroline’s scorn had been directed at their father. He was, in her view, a fool. True, he could raise a dozen chickens or pigs and manage a large garden, but a steady job outside the farm was beyond him. In terms of income he received exactly two hundred and twelve dollars a month in a government disability payment for a congenital malformed hip and a hopelessly twisted left leg. He shuffled and hopped rather than walked. He’d always been a scrawny, hunched little man, and his pairing with their strapping, hard-tempered mother was a comic mishap all of their neighbors seemed to enjoy. Of equal embarrassment to Caroline was the fact that he traveled about their community in a broken-down pickup truck trading extra produce and livestock and sometimes money for the salvageable parts of antique tractors—machines so corroded and useless that most farmers allowed them to rust away in their fields. He was a collector of these tractors and their various components and, for reasons confounding to Caroline, he brought truckloads of old tractor parts home and arranged them in a huge metal-roof shed.

Within this tractor shed, Wyatt’s father had a life of his own: tools and solvents and bygone tractor manuals and secret stashes of hard apple cider and cigars. Friends dropped by to see him in the shed. They called him Hoppy, though not with the gruff bark of ridicule that Caroline brought to his nickname whenever he entered the farmhouse and was subject to her rules and grievances. “Hoppy,” she’d say, “don’t you dare think about sitting down anywhere in this house in those greasy overalls.” She’d make him retreat to the front step and undress while Wyatt fetched his father’s house robe. But even the sight of him in that robe grated on her. “How can you stand to look
at yourself?” she’d say. Or else she’d order him to carry table scraps out to the pigs or bundle up the trash or any one of a hundred other chores. “Get up, Hoppy. Get up and earn your keep for a change.” If Wyatt had a single image of his father, it would be in the moment or two following an order from Caroline, in which Hoppy, with a subtle wincing frown he kept secret from her, would quietly calculate his options, only to rise from his chair and shuffle off to do as he’d been told.

Eventually his heart gave out. But even in the hospital’s cardiac recovery unit, Wyatt’s father, in the deep fog of his medication, would overhear Caroline telling a doctor about Hoppy’s failure to listen or eat right and, at the sound of his nickname, he’d put a hand to the bed rail as if to rise up and do what was demanded of him.

After his passing, Caroline made it clear to Wyatt what behavior would be expected of him inside the farmhouse and what chores he would need to accomplish after school and during his summer vacations. All of this had seemed reasonable to him as a fourteen-year-old boy. Feed the chickens and pigs. Keep the tractor running. Keep his late father’s sprawling vegetable garden watered and free from weeds. But Wyatt was lazy sometimes. For a while he’d had a friend or two in the remedial class at Dutton Junior High School, and he would run with them after school and sometimes forget the chores assigned to him. And so Caroline had said, sensibly enough, “If you won’t look after the garden during the day, try looking after it at night.” At dusk that evening she’d had him stand with his back to a huge walnut tree that faced the garden and she’d begun winding ropes around his legs and under his arms and even through the belt loops of his blue jeans and then tying off the ropes at the back of the trunk, where he couldn’t reach them. He’d had to stay there yoked against the tree all night. Nothing to do but keep still and look out over the garden. Several hours after darkness a possum waddled by close enough that Wyatt could almost touch it with his shoe. It considered him with its
black button eyes, then crawled away. It was a mild night. As punishments went, this wasn’t so bad. He could nod off to sleep for short periods of time. Much later the dew began to coat his sweatshirt and hair and, after hours of trying not to, he peed himself. Even so, in the morning when she untied him, it still seemed funny to Wyatt—funny and exactly what he deserved.

But it didn’t cure him of his laziness, especially when it came to school. By ninth grade the energy it took to walk down a high school hallway—to be jeered at and fake-punched and turned away from in disgust—was too much. Too much for Wyatt. There wasn’t much energy left over that he could use to concentrate on his more difficult school subjects. Caroline wasn’t pleased. Or rather, sometimes she was enraged and other times she shrugged it all off, wearily. For a dismal progress report she might make him stand in a bucket of ice water. Yet when the actual report card came several months later with its columns of failing grades, she declared the whole enterprise of high school a waste of time. She decided he could quit going altogether or transfer to a technical school. Either way, she said, the schoolwork didn’t matter because he was probably an idiot.

He chose technical school, where his fellow students, if not exactly friendly, were at least mindful of his size and strength. He learned to weld and repair small engines. Neither of these skills mattered much to Caroline Huddy. At thirty-two she’d grown heavyset and haggard-looking. She spent long hours in the bathroom or in bed, where she watched rented movies on a videocassette recorder. It amazed him, this machine. His neighbors had been watching video movies at home for years, and yet it was astounding that Caroline had tracked down a secondhand video machine and arranged for herself such an impossible luxury. She’d had Wyatt move their only television set from the living room up the stairs into her bedroom. He’d unboxed the VCR and connected it to the television. Every other day Caroline, who otherwise shuffled about the house in a robe and slippers, got dressed
and drove to Jefferson City to rent movies. The cases for these movies, with their extravagant drawings and photographs, were left lying about on the kitchen counter for Wyatt to consider. The movies she watched alone, two per night, behind the closed door of her bedroom. Then she fell asleep and, aided by medication, slept soundly and late into the next day.

Wyatt had a keen understanding of the opportunity this allowed. Late one night he took his shoes off, eased her door open, and carried the television and video machine piece by piece into the living room. The movie that had provoked him to take this risk was called
Time Bandits.
Its case contained a peculiar cartoon drawing of a pirate ship roosted on the top of a man’s head. Very odd. But the movie was infinitely odder. It hardly made sense at all except as evidence that the fantasies that flitted through other people’s heads were much more vivid and strange than his own.

The TV and video machine he returned to Caroline’s bedroom. She didn’t stir. But later, when she woke and resumed viewing
Time Bandits,
she found that the movie was not in the place where she’d left off. She brooded over this much of the day. “But how could that happen?” she asked Wyatt, doubtfully. She was aware of his deep interest in the movie’s cassette box. “Did you do something?” she wondered. “Did you maybe sneak into my room and watch a little of the movie while I was sleeping?” He said no, more than a hundred times. Yet she seemed as if she’d be amused to know for certain that this had happened. “Come on. Let’s hear it. What part of the movie did you see?” By then it was well after dark. She’d been going on like this most of the day. Exhausted, he admitted that he’d carried off the TV and video machine and watched the entire film, and her reaction was complicated. She looked dumbfounded and somewhat frightened, but also admiring. “That’s a lot of planning and a lot of work,” she said. “I honestly cannot believe you’d think up a plan like that.” She gripped the matted bangs of her hair and pressed them
down against her forehead. “I wouldn’t have guessed it, Wyatt,” she said and began wandering about the house, marveling at his transgression, and rooting through drawers and boxes and considering a variety of tools.

Eventually, she decided on an X-Acto knife. She had him remove his shoes and socks, and she held him by the ankle and cut him deeply across the bridge of each foot. A ferocious pain, a grisly, deep-to-the-bone burning. He’d have run away screaming if he could. Instead he squeezed his ankles and wept. It wasn’t worth it: such unrelenting agony for a movie that didn’t even make sense. Much of the night he lay on the kitchen floor moaning. When Caroline emerged from her room the next morning, she was much more like herself: slack-faced, irritable, insulted by everything he did. She said she wasn’t going to put up with his carrying on. She packed a grocery bag with items from the cupboard and ordered him out to the tractor shed. He couldn’t walk, of course. Even crawling on his hands and knees proved too painful. So he pulled himself along on his stomach as if he were scaling a mountain precipice. Out the door. Across the porch. Along the trampled front yard. Up the gravel drive leading to the tractor shed. It seemed to take forever, this journey. Through much of it she hovered over him, the grocery bag swinging at her side.

She left him in the shed. It was early October, cool and clear in the evenings, warm during the day. He found, stuffed beneath the workbench, several dusty blankets his father had once used on the occasions when he’d been exiled from the house. Wyatt wrapped himself in these blankets and searched through the grocery sack Caroline had left him. Orange soda. Ritz crackers. A bottle of aspirin. Two small Band-Aids not long enough to cover his wounds. He chewed several aspirin and sipped from the bottle of orange soda. It wasn’t at all worth it, he decided for the hundredth time. Even more unfair, the X-Acto knife blade she’d used had been crusted with dirt and tar from
cutting floor tiles. It would have been better, fairer, to have washed it first. In the deep throb of his wounds and in his shivering limbs, a message was being sent to him:
Wyatt, you are going to be sick.