Free The Inverted Forest by John Dalton Page A

quarters. Or maybe there had been, but the room for these quarters was now occupied by dismantled bunk beds, worn mattresses, wool blankets. Where then would the new counselors sleep? In the sleeping barracks, apparently, on bunk beds, above or beneath the campers.
    Wyatt chose a bottom bunk in the far corner, near a window. There wasn’t time to take stock of the accommodations or negotiate introductions with the other male counselors hurrying past him. He unrolled his new sleeping bag. He placed his travel clock and retainer box on the shelf beside his bunk. From his shirt pocket he withdrew his list of campers:
    1. Gerald (Jerry) Johnston
    2. Leonard Peirpont
    3. Thomas Anwar Toomey
    Through the screened window he could hear counselors regrouping on the gravel pathway. The jokester, whoever he might be, was shouting again, “Sound off! One, two. Sound off! Three, four.” By the time Wyatt joined the group, the women counselors were hurrying from Cabins Three and Four—the quick bounce of their steps lovely and painful to look at—and soon the whole regiment was in a full jog toward the heat and bright light of the meadow.
    They seemed to have arrived at a crucial moment.
    The crowd of campers had disbanded, straying from the white buses in wobbly little groups of three and four to the long open porch of the mess hall, or to the shade of the picnic tables, where they stoodabout, each of them in a private reverie of body movement and what looked to be a slowly dawning awareness of the grass and warm air and sunlight. Other campers were not so patient. A dozen men and women, solo wanderers, had, for whatever their reasons, set a zigzagging course out to the very periphery of the meadow. The state attendants, burdened with luggage and bedclothes, could not hold all of these wanderers back. Several had crossed the border and stepped into the shrubby edge of the woods.
    Linda Rucker, her bangs stringy with sweat, waved at the counselors with her three-ring binder and shouted, “Go! Go! Go! Bring ’em back! Bring ’em back!”
    So this would be their first assignment, to race after these wanderers, to latch on to a belt loop or wrist or shirtsleeve and tug them, step by step, back into the fold. In Wyatt’s case it turned out to be rough work. The man he’d gone after was bullishly large, with a bald head and rolling, half-closed eyes. He seemed to have a single-minded wish to tromp through the underbrush. “Yop, yop, yop,” he panted. When he saw Wyatt coming, he pushed twenty yards deeper into the forest and wrapped his fat arms around a tree trunk. “Yop, yop,” he groaned. There was a bellowing sound to these panted breaths, as if he were a rutting animal.
    He was strong. Wyatt was stronger. But was it acceptable to grip the man’s wrists—his flesh felt oddly spongy—and pry his arms from the trunk and then mostly drag him through the brush and back to the center of the meadow? The state attendants didn’t object. Nor did Linda Rucker. So it seemed it was acceptable, given that the campers might be lost in the woods, given that the meadow was in a state of chaos.
    All around the buses were small piles of strewn luggage and bedsheets and the remains of paper bag lunches—baloney sandwiches, fruit cups, wax paper bags holding clutches of broken Oreo cookies.
    Nearby one of the few younger campers, a skinny teenage girl,set out running from the picnic tables at full tilt. But then her legs wobbled. Her arms windmilled from side to side. She made it twenty yards before a seizure brought her down and she flailed and trembled upon the thick meadow grass. Her counselor, a portly young woman named Emily Boehler, crouched beside her. “Can someone help me?” Emily pleaded. “Oh, my goodness. Can someone please help me?” Other campers and counselors hurried by undaunted. A few minutes later the teenage camper came to her senses, rose, and lurched into another stumbling run. Another twenty yards. Another