The Grounding of Group 6 Read online

  “God, I don’t know,” said Sully, still smiling and still shaking his head, but looking all around the porch now.

  “I’m as bad as you are,” Sara said to him. “Maybe”—she checked the other faces—“we could just agree we don’t… have any absolute no-no’s, or whatever you want to say. But that people won’t, well, push it. You know what I mean? Like make a point of trying to catch someone, or something. Not that anybody would.”

  “Sure,” said Marigold. “The point is to be cool. A lot of it’s in what you’re used to, from when you’re growing up and all. Mah people we so po’ that none of us had clo’s,” she drawled, “and Pappy burned up all the doh’s to keep us wohm.” She switched back to her normal voice. “Like I said, I think the main thing is not feeling we absolutely-have-to this, or positively-can’t-do that. That kind of thing’s a bummer. But respecting someone else’s feelings—hell, that’s about the most important thing there is, it seems to me. Like now”—she got up—“I’m going to take my last hot shower until whenever we get back here. Completely by moi-même, if everybody s’il vous plaîts.”

  And that was pretty much that, to Nat’s amazement and delight. It wasn’t that things got a whole lot different, and everyone immediately went skinny-dipping with everybody else; the boys and Sara—so it seemed to Nat—were much too shy for that. What seemed to happen was that now it was O.K. to pass and look at naked people of the other sex, if not to stop and socialize. Or ogle. Mostly, that had to do with being in Spring Lake, or getting in and out of it. Marigold, and sometimes Coke, would go “Eeek!” in those situations, and make a big fuss about grabbing a towel or sinking underwater, but the rest of them (including Nat himself, he noticed) were almost yawningly casual. Quick, too, but casual. Nat found that he couldn’t help noticing, of course, that the girls in Group 6 had pretty excellent bodies, top to toe. Marigold had definitely put on the briefest bathing suit that summer, judging by her tan. She had real long legs and full, round breasts; her arms were sort of skinny, lacking definition, and she still had a little polish left on a few of her toenails. Sara had the big, broad swimmer’s shoulders and those sturdy thighs, just a great athletic figure, hard and sleek and round. She could probably get fat, if she ever stopped exercising and started eating bonbons—not a very likely set of circumstances. Sara did her stretches and her situps every day, and Ludi did them with her (both of them had ropy stomach muscles), and after a couple of days Marigold began to join them, making lots of grunts and jokes so everyone would know she wasn’t serious. Ludi was in excellent condition, weighing maybe ninety-five. She did have small, just barely curving breasts, but still she seemed extremely feminine to Nat. She wore her body easiest of all of them: never bothered, never hurried, never showing off.

  One day, Nat remembered he was looking at the “dregs,” the “lemons” of the Coldbrook Country School enrollment. He almost laughed at loud.

  Homer Cone had not come close to laughing for a good two weeks. Except in class, of course, where certain times you had to laugh to keep from crying. He really doubted if Euclid himself could simplify geometry to the point that some of Doctor’s baby boneheads could contend with it on equal terms. But that was par for the course. Homer Cone was never one to overrate the clients of the Coldbrook Country School. Colleagues sometimes said that they were “teaching” English 4, or first-year Spanish, but Homer Cone preferred to say he was “conducting class,” in business math or algebra—whatever.

  “I cannot call this ‘teaching,’ ” he would say, munching on a jelly donut in the teachers’ smoking lounge. “When someone ‘teaches,’ other people ‘learn,’ and that does not seem possible for this year’s crop of moneyed melon-minds.”

  Older faculty would shake their heads and chuckle at these misanthropic musings. “There goes good old Homer,” they would say. Younger teachers, fresh from Vassar and Purdue, would ask each other why a decent school would keep a moldy, big-domed, prehistoric fart like that around. “Back at Choate, when I was there,” they’d whisper, sneaking sideways looks at Homer Cone, “they had this asshole by the name of Ackroyd. …”

  Yet it wasn’t just his classes that had Homer Cone annoyed; there also was the matter of Group 6. He’d said that he would “comb the woods” until he found them; he’d said they “had a date” with Homer Cone. But at the rate that he was combing, the date was very apt to start off with a “2.” That’s talking year, not month or day.

  And that was only the beginning of his problems.

  Most of all, there were these outside complications. Doctor had mentioned that he planned to get in touch with his so-called leading authority in that particular field, the man who’d recommended Rittenhouse as someone who might…lead Group 6.

  Well, Doctor had done that (he’d called up Homer Cone to tell him so), and (he further told H. Cone) he’d been pretty much unprepared for the “passion and, er, well vulgarity” of that important gentleman’s reaction.

  The leading authority had advised Doctor (so Doctor said to Homer C.) that he had plans to “contact up” a certain relative of his, whom he would urge to travel, with dispatch, to Coldbrook (“… get his ass down there before I start to cut it into steaks and chops …”) and sever all connections with young Rittenhouse as soon as he could find him (“… shoot that college prick right up his nose …”). The relative would be in touch with Doctor in an hour’s time, to make specific plans for his arrival.

  In fact, it was half an hour later (Doctor made that clear to Homer Cone) when he got the call that he expected. The leading authority’s relative’s name turned out to be Emfatico. “Like ‘emphatic,’ with an o,” said Doctor, in his gentle voice. “Arnold B. Emfatico. He’ll be here in the morning…‘oh, what a beautiful day,’ ” sang Doctor.

  To Homer Cone, that was unpleasant news, personified. It meant another hunter in the woods, and not a hunter, really, more a killer. A Mad Dog. A man with pointed, thin-soled shoes and submachine guns—an out-of-stater, even, more than likely. And even worse than all of that, a person who might beat him to his prey.

  Oh, Lord, thought Homer Cone. He really didn’t have a prayer. And then he thought of something else. This man had been assigned to deal with Rittenhouse, but still, that didn’t mean that he would calmly leave Group 6 to him and Mrs. Ripple. Definitely not. Homer Cone had seen Italian movies in his time, and there were certain things he knew, therefore, about Italian people. For instance, they were very big on children. In Italian movies, there were lots of children, always, and Italian adults yelled at them a lot and gestured with their hands in funny ways—but nothing more than that. So, if a person named Emfatico just ever came upon two people like himself and Mrs. Ripple, while they were doing…well, a portion of their job at Coldbrook Country School, why there was no predicting (but there was!) exactly what he’d do.

  Homer Cone had all those thoughts in just a flash of time, but Doctor hadn’t finished talking yet.

  “On top of that,” said Doctor, “there is a further complication. …”

  As Homer Cone emitted sixteen soundless groans, Doctor then proceeded to explain that still another person would be joining them at Coldbrook. It seemed that this Emfatico, besides his duties as an agent for his kinsman, had also had another kind of job. He was, apparently, a bursar’s clerk in Burlington, Vermont, at UVM, and thus a worker for the state. In this capacity, he’d had to deal with students there, and one of them—incredible coincidence—was Rittenhouse. To make a long story short, the two of them (one acting on his own behalf, the other on the state’s) had made a most irregular… agreement. In fact, it was a wager, which made it so irregular there wasn’t any way to enter it in Records and Accounts the Bursar kept. Yet, in spite of all of that, it still was crystal clear that Nat did owe the state a certain sum of money. The Bursar, Mr. Darling, wanted to make good and sure the state collected on this debt; historically, the state had never tolerated welching, he made clear, going back to Ethan Allen’s time. He’d sent a bill to
Nat at home, and got the letter back “Address unknown.” And so he’d run a routine check in nearby states and that way learned that Nat had bought a car, and it was registered at “Coldbrook Country School.” Ah-hah. Mr. Darling ordered this Emfatico, who knew the man by sight, to go with him to Coldbrook, even as his uncle had (not mentioning accompaniment) the day before. The Bursar planned that certain papers would be served on Nat, and possibly arrangements would be made to confiscate his salary at Coldbrook Country School.

  But, said Dr. Simms to this Emfatico (as he told Homer Cone), this Nat had “disappeared” the week before, and so there wasn’t any point in any Mr. Darling coming to the scene with papers. But this Emfatico had said that Mr. Darling told him he was coming, and that Mr. Darling never changed his mind, the little sweetheart.

  So, concluded Doctor, there would be not one but two new faces on the campus in the morning. Would Homer Cone, by any chance, be free to lunch with them? And him, of course, and Mrs. Ripple?

  Homer Cone agreed to be on hand. He did not expect that he would like that lunch, or anybody at it, much; he was correct in all particulars. The meal included Brussels sprouts.

  “I’ve explained to Mr. Darling…‘je vous aime beaucoup …,’ ” Doctor sang under his breath, “and Mr.—er—Emfatico that Rittenhouse was fired late last week. They could have saved themselves the trip,” Doctor said emphatically, addressing Homer Cone, but turning at the end to Mr. Darling. The last thing Doctor wanted was a governmental presence on the scene.

  “But yet,” said Mrs. Ripple sweetly, “Mr. Cone believes he’s probably still here. Not here at school, of course, but in the woods around, someplace.” Mr. Darling seemed like such a perfect little gentleman. He had on horn-rimmed glasses, and he smoked a pipe, and wore a pair of argyle socks with garters. Mr. Ripple, right up to the time he died, believed a gentleman wore garters with his socks, except while playing tennis.

  “Apparently he’s very fond of camping out, and did so, here, all summer,” Mrs. Ripple added.

  Homer Cone directed one swift kick at Mrs. Ripple’s shins. Typically, except when rifles were involved, he missed. The kick connected with the calf of Arn-the-Barn Emfatico. Arn didn’t give the smallest sign that this had happened, but he also made a mental note of where the kick had come from. So, round-face was a bigot, was he? Arn-the-Barn had had to deal with men like Cone before: men who took what he was prone to call “an attitude.” People who figured that every person with an Italian-American surname had to like the opera or Frank Sinatra, one, and have a mother who was fat and made him eat.

  “Well,” said Mr. Darling pleasantly, “that is an interesting thought. Perhaps, just for the fun of it, I’ll start to motor down here weekends, have a look around. I’m quite a Ranger Rick, myself.” He gave a modest chuckle. “And wouldn’t I just love to get this thing cleared up—eh, Arnold?”

  “Oh, you bet,” said Arn-the-Barn to his superior. “In fact, I was just thinking, Mr. Darling. I’ve got some sick days due, and also that full week I didn’t take this summer. I was saving that for deer huntin’ ”—Arn could say that like a native, now—“but this seems more important. In fact, if you could see your way to let me borrow from my next year’s summer holiday, I could keep on hunting Nat until I found him, probably.” His uncle had suggested something very much like that, although in somewhat different and more…urgent language.

  “My word, that’s very thoughtful of you, Arnold,” Mr. Darling said. “Suppose, for now, we just say you’re on furlough. We’ll see how long it takes to get a line on Rittenhouse, and then adjust accordingly, O.K.?” He clapped his open hand on one of Arn’s huge shoulders.

  Arnold didn’t understand what Mr. Darling said, exactly, but he thought it was, again, the same thing that his uncle said, except in Darling-talk. Regular English translation: “Find Rittenhouse, or else.”

  “Fine,” said Arn-the-Barn, and smiled right back at Mr. Darling.

  “I must be getting back to Burlington, today,” said Mr. Darling affably. “But perhaps I’ll see you—one or all—late Friday afternoon. I’ll plan to slip on in and out with just a minimum of fanfare.” Mr. Darling laughed out loud, and Mrs. Ripple joined him merrily. “I’ll park my Rover right outside this building, if I may,” he said to Doctor, “and then climb underneath my pack and disappear. If, by any chance, I, well, get lucky”—(Obviously, he meant: “If my superior skills pay off as I expect they will”)—“I’ll certainly report to you, sir.”

  Doctor nodded, with the shadow of a smile.

  Mr. Darling shortly rose and wrung each hand, and bowed to Mrs. Ripple. Arnold had to drive him back to Burlington, so he, too, took his leave. “But I’ll be seeing you,” he seemed to say to Homer Cone. “Whenever.”

  “Why?” said Homer Cone to Mrs. Ripple, once the two of them were gone, and only three of them remained. “Why? Why? Why? Why?”

  “Why what?” said Mrs. Ripple.

  “Why tell that stupid Darling I thought Rittenhouse was here?”

  “I don’t think he’s a stupid Darling at all,” said Mrs. Ripple. “He seemed like rather a dear. And besides that, it’s the truth. Maybe he can find them, anyway, and if he does, it’s no skin off your nose”—(bouncy-butter-buns)—“’cause all he wants is money.” Mrs. Ripple pouted.

  “I know, I know,” said Doctor. “The thing that gravels me is all this governmental interference in the private sector.” Doctor laid one clean pink fist upon the table. “Even if a fellow looks like a Republican, you still don’t know. Mark my words. Pretty soon, they’ll have their forms and guidelines, rules and regulations. First thing you know, you can hardly recognize your own business anymore. It makes me just see red…‘red robin goes bob-bob-bobbin’ along,’ ” sang Doctor, as he rose and toddled from the room.

  In addition to the competition, Homer Cone had had to face another major problem: his own weakness as a hunter. Not the shooting part, of course; his shooting—it could take your breath away. And often did—that muskrat’s, for example. But as far as having a sense of direction was concerned…well, Homer Cone couldn’t point to the west while standing on Laguna Beach at sunset. And he certainly wasn’t going to trust Mrs. Ripple very far; anyone knew that a woman couldn’t even read a road map.

  So what he thought was, just at first, they’d only search the nearby woods—woods that you could see a road from, or some section of the school. With Mr. Darling entering the hunt, this strategy made even greater sense to Homer Cone. If, by any chance, the Group was near the school, they certainly didn’t deserve to be found by this bird Darling right away—or that Eye-talian, either.

  Here’s the way that Homer Cone explained it to his colleague.

  “My strategy,” he said to Mrs. Ripple, “is simply to eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. Every time I know a place they’re not, I’m that much closer to the place they are.”

  Homer Cone had once misplaced his gold electroplated pen (he said to Mrs. Ripple). What he’d done was take four sheets of graph paper, one for every room in his apartment; he drew a different room, to scale, on each of them. Then, with lots and lots of masking tape, he’d sectioned off each room in three foot squares, and started in to search. Every time he searched a square of room, and didn’t find the pen, he’d make a big black X, right on the corresponding square of paper. Starting in the bathroom, he’d Xed out every square of every single room. Three weeks later, to the day, he’d found the pen.

  “Guess where?” he said to Mrs. Ripple, through his nose.

  She made a certain guess inside her head, but what she said was, “My, I can’t imagine.”

  “It had slipped down in the lining of the jacket I was wearing on the day I looked for it!” said Homer Cone triumphantly. “The system that I used was even better than I thought,” he said. “That pen had been in not just one, but every square I searched!”

  Mrs. Ripple smiled a smile of mere politeness. She wasn’t much impressed by what she’d heard. “Eliminate” meant ju
st one thing to her, and anyway, what worked for pens might fail for people, so it seemed to her. What was to prevent the members of Group 6 from coming back and staying in a place they’d…searched, already? She tried that question out on Mr. Cone.

  “Most unlikely,” said Homer Cone, shaking his considerable head. “They’d be crazy to stay so close to school, where anybody might bump into them. Rittenhouse may look like a freak, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid, too.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Ripple, “it does not. I think that Doctor said his father was at Harvard.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Homer Cone. “I know that Elliott House is.” Homer Cone knew a great deal about Harvard. During his own college days, back in a certain middle-eastern state, he’d ordered all his notebooks from the Harvard “Coop”; he thought that classmates would assume he was a transfer.

  But, in any event, he and Mrs. Ripple combed a lot of woods within a short and easy walk from campus. Almost every day they combed. The huge young man, Emfatico, had come back to the area and stayed in Boynton Falls, at Valivu Motel. He drove a white Trans-Am to school and wore a dark brown canvas field coat with a collar made of corduroy—a rugged kind of garment, often seen in duck blinds down in Maryland. Duck hunters like a loose, full, easygoing jacket that doesn’t bind a fella in the armpits. And so, indeed, did Arn-the-Barn Emfatico.

  “I just realized something,” Marigold said to the rest of Group 6 on the morning of the fourteenth day they’d been together. “I just realized that ever since I met you people, I’ve been in almost constant pain.”

  Everybody laughed, but no one contradicted her. She spoke a universal truth: everybody ached. But less each day.

  “Listen,” said Nat, “on you it looks good. D’you know that people pay real money for intensive physical training courses? It’s a national obsession, fitness. So that makes us the hippest of the hip, and it’s not even costing us a dime. Anyway, did I ever tell you my theory about good pain and bad pain?” Nat babbled on. “Good pain, see, like what you’ve got—while it may hurt, it also grows on you. Your muscles hurt, but not as if there’s something wrong with them—you dig? Good pain’s sort of greenish-blue, where bad pain’s got a lot of red in it.…”