The Grounding of Group 6 Read online

  Nat didn’t know he looked that way. What he did know was that no one in Group 6 was living up to expectations. He’d steeled himself to meet a hateful bunch of kids. “You’ve got the dregs, of course, the ultimate bad seeds,” Dean Luke Lemaster told him. It was the night before he went down to New York. Luke used a lot of other words, as well: obnoxious and belligerent, arrogant, deceitful, shallow, lazy, selfish were a few. Hopeless. Luke used all those words and pulled his nose; he had been at Coldbrook many years. “It’s a type as old as history, I guess,” said Luke Lemaster wearily. “Long before you had Group Six you had that type of kid. Guys like Hitler, for example—they were that same type, I bet. Others of them we can teach up here. They learn. A Six-er never would. Grounding is the only way. It’s not their fault, I guess.” He pursed his lips and nodded, looking off at nothing, looking old.

  They did what Nat called “organize our packs” out on the lawn behind the kitchen entrance. Nat stacked a pile of food and certain pots that he could carry, asked if they would divvy up the rest. They looked at one another, little smiles in place.

  Coke was tallest by a lot. Sully turned and looked at him, and so did Marigold. Sara looked down at the ground, and Ludi picked a piece of grass, and put it in between her thumbs, and cupped her palms and blew in them, and made a raucous, cawing sound.

  “O.K.,” said Coke. He wore a floppy leather hat, and frayed, stained painter’s pants, and beat-up running shoes. “It doesn’t look as if there’s room in anybody’s pack but Sara’s, so—heh, heh—I guess it’s up to her to …” He nodded solemnly in her direction. Her pack was only two-thirds full; the rest of them were stuffed.

  “We-e-ll,” she said, slowly, “I guess I can take a lot of it….” She bent and picked up packages of food.

  “No, wait,” said Marigold. “I can’t believe…If you and Nat have that much room, we must be doing something wrong. God knows I don’t know what.…” She started digging in her pack. “Sara, help me.” She tossed out sweaters, underpants, designer jeans, a pair of sandals, different colored turtlenecks and leotards. She emptied all her stuff out on the lawn, then stood with hands on hips and stared at it. The way she looked, she might have just thrown up. “Will you get a load of that crap?” she said, and slapped herself on the outside of her thighs, and turned to Sara. “What would you take, out of that?”

  Sara kneeled and started to divide the things in piles. The others moved in closer; Coke and Sully saw that Marigold wore skimpy nylon underpants with sunsets, lightning bolts, and rainbows on them.

  “It’s really hard,” said Sara, working fast. “In September you can roast one day and freeze your ass completely off the next. But there”—she moved one pile beside the pack—“that should pretty much allow for anything. It’s only—what?—two, three days, or something? I learned a way to pack stuff I can show you, but still I always seem to need whatever’s on the bottom first.”

  When Sully’d seen what Sara did for Marigold, he said, “Well, shoot, I guess I packed a lot of extra, too.” He looked at Nat. “Have we got time to go back where my trunk is?” He didn’t know the name for where they’d spent the night.

  Nat said he didn’t see why not, and Ludi said she guessed that she’d go, too. “No fair Sara gets to carry all the marshmallows,” she said, and looked at Nat and laughed.

  Coke watched Nat, as he watched Ludi walking after Sully. Then he turned and watched her, too. She sure seemed strong for such a flat-chested little thing. Maybe she was into gymnastics or something, he thought. “Comaneetch,” he said out loud. “Shaposhnikova.”

  “What?” said Marigold. She had her hands back on her hips, and now she lifted up one foot to nudge Coke’s pack frame with her toe. “You’re next, big boy,” she said.

  “Hey, look,” said Coke. “The thing is this, no fooling. My stuff takes up a lot more room, ‘cause I’ve got such long arms and legs and such humongous feet. Counting every article of clothes as one, I bet you still got more things in your pack than I do.” That didn’t count the bottle of white rum he’d rolled up in a towel, or any of the packs of Camels that he’d stuck in here and there. Marigold might thank him later, though with his luck she’d probably turn out to be a pothead. Women were always apt to like whatever you didn’t have, or couldn’t stand, or really were afraid to do.

  “Well, then,” said Marigold, “to make it fair you’ll have to tie some pots and pans outside your pack. Here, gimme thet thar skillet, Sary. This’ll be like Treasure of Sierra Madre.” She laughed. “You see that on TV? With Humphrey Bogart?”

  “Wait a minute. That was on a donkey, wasn’t it?” said Coke. He did like Marigold; she didn’t seem to give a shit, and she had bolts of lightning on her underwear.

  “Close enough,” she said, and grabbed his leather hat and put it on, angled toward the front, across her bangs. Once, when she was plucking on her eyebrows and smoking some outrageous Ghani, Marigold decided once and for all that she really did look like Pat Benatar, but younger, of course, with just a trace of baby fat still, and definitely a softer style. Now she wore a pair of lime-green running shorts that showed her legs from ass to ankle. Her legs were not too bad, she knew. Odetta and herself had pledged preventive war on cellulite, which ran—or, as they giggled, “jelled”—in both their families. “Flab-patrol, flab-patrol,” Marigold would say, jabbing at the back of one of O.D.’s thighs with an iced-tea spoon, as they sunned beside her pool. “I think you’d better send a lard-guard over, on the double.” Both of them did exercises that they’d read in magazines, before they went to bed, but neither of them said so to the other. Who wanted to admit she writhed around on the floor?

  Marigold also wore white leather running shoes with green stripes and green laces, and socks that didn’t go above her shoes, with little green pompoms on the back of the ankles. And a white zippered sweatshirt with green trim, over a white embroidered camisole, and a perfume by the name of Ishtar.

  Sara watched. She’d hunkered down into a comfortable position, sort of like a baseball catcher’s crouch, but weighted to one side, and resting on a heel. Her face was strong and pleasant, deeply tanned, with heavy brows and perfect teeth. She’d done her dark brown hair in braids, drawn down from a center parting, tied with bright red yarn. She always had a piece of rawhide looped around her neck, with special knots in it, and she had just the start of squint lines in the tan around her eyes.

  Sara thought that Coke and Marigold were different from the friends she’d had before, but she’d expected that, and so it didn’t bother her. She’d known the kids at Coldbrook would be…well, alternative. A little wild, most likely. She often told herself she wasn’t into judging her own tribe, whatever it turned out to be. When other kids would ask her, as they had for years, “What do you think of so-and-so?” she’d mostly shrug and smile and say that she or he was “nice,” or sometimes that she didn’t know them all that well.

  What she really thought was quite a bit more complicated—sort of her philosophy of life, she liked to feel. She’d figured out that everybody started out as good, and if they acted bad, that wasn’t really them. There wasn’t any point in saying someone was a jerk, a nerd, an asshole; that wouldn’t be the truth. People’s actions could be bad, unnatural as Sara thought of it, but if you dwelt on what a person did too much, you might confuse the action with the person. That would then be bad of you, and an example of the fact that every bad action grows out of another bad action. The thing that she believed was that if you hung around a person some, and paid attention, well, pretty soon you’d see their real, good self. That’s the way it worked for her a lot. Certainly with kids. Sooner or later, most kids seemed to get to like her; they wanted her to be with them, and even looked at her to help them in certain ways. Their goodness came out in the way they acted, then. It never entered Sara’s mind that people liked her for her looks, or brains, or tolerance, or because she was so good at sports. She noticed older people mostly seemed to think that people changed fr
om good to bad, or that some people were good and others just weren’t. Adults seemed to hate a lot, almost get off on hating someone. A lot of them were so unnatural. Sara didn’t know who she should blame for that, so she blamed civilization.

  Nat now looked at Sara, squatting easily by her pack. She seemed like such a classic All-American—strong and healthy, quite good-looking, really. Her faded blue-jean jacket stretched across her shoulders, her khaki pants pulled tight around her sturdy thighs. He couldn’t understand why she was here at all—and even more why she was in this group. The same with Ludi, even more so with Ludi, come to think of it. And Sully, too—and Coke and Marigold. He realized that all of them, in different ways, reminded him a bit of someone else: Nathaniel Palmer Rittenhouse.

  Whoa. He felt the sweat start on his palms. My God. Could it be that he’d been missing something obvious as hell? With Group 6 taken care of (as the saying goes) would Coldbrook School want N. P. Rittenhouse…well, anywhere?

  Now he walked across the campus, met with the Director, Dr. Simms. “How about I take them up the other side of North Egg Mountain—you know, where all the boulders are, along the brook?” he asked.

  Doctor jotted down the information in an open notebook. “That should be quite fine,” he said. His eyes twinkled behind his rimless glasses. He looked like a family physician in a Norman Rockwell illustration; in fact, his degree was a Doctorate in Occupational Guidance from a nonresidential correspondence university over a dry cleaner’s, in Boca Lustra, California. “‘Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder, ta-tum, ta-ta-tum to the fray,’ ” he sang softly. “And you will…disappear on Monday morning…?” Doctor asked.

  “Yes,” said Nat.

  “Then we can say ‘good-bye,’ then,” Doctor said. He stood and handed Nat the little bottle and offered him his well-made, clean white hand. “I thank you for your services to Coldbrook—and to humankind. And I’ll mail your final check on Tuesday morn.”

  “Yes,” said Nat, squeezing Doctor’s hand with what he hoped looked like a cheerful, righteous smile. He turned and left the office.

  By his rough reckoning, the boulders back of North Egg Mountain, by the brook, were maybe twenty miles from Spring Lake Lodge.

  2

  Kids who don’t have hideouts often grow up fast. A hideout tends to keep a person tethered to his childhood, to a world that isn’t organized and ruled and limited by grown-ups, a world where nothing you can think of is impossible. Children not disposed toward hideouts sometimes get right into “life”; when they say, “Let’s pretend ….,” they are the Teacher, Doctor, Mommy in the game, and everyone gets bossed around. They’re the ones you read about who never had a lesson but just sat down and played the stock market one day, very much as if they’d done it all their lives.

  Nat was not that sort of kid at all. Spring Lake Lodge was number ten or twenty, maybe; the latest and the best of many secret places that he’d had, beginning with his bed. When he was five, he’d taught himself to do a sort of horizontal surface dive: tucking up his legs, he’d make half a sideways somersault and, pulling with his arms and wriggling, go way down deep beneath the sheets and covers, to the cold, black bottom of his bed. That was a cave, and only he knew there was air space under there. In it, he was free from their control, away from all the rules and customs that the older people had. There he could, for instance, take off his pajamas, if he wanted to. Nobody would know, as long as he got dressed again before he came back up. Once his mother almost caught him, and he had to lie there, faking sleep, sure that she could hear his stealthy heart, his bottoms pulled up barely to his knees.

  Later on, there was a tree house, with a Scottish shortbread tin for contraband. The Milky Ways and peanut butter cookies that could see him through disasters of all sorts were stored—say, “stockpiled”—in that tin. It took the sort of discipline and strength a Spartan youth would have to keep from eating them, to save them for a time of greater need—when he had had to run away from home, or if, returning home from school one day, he’d found his house destroyed by an explosion, or a nuclear attack. Or if a friend, or even someone that he hardly knew, like Amy Robinson from down the block (oh, how he loved her: braid and bottom) were ever beaten, badly, with a belt, at home, by some fat, pig-faced person like her father, why, she could come to him for help, and he could give her something good to eat and care for her.

  In his teens, in boarding school, he’d wandered in the woods beyond the soccer fields until he found a newly fallen tree, one branch of which was perfect for a ridgepole. Over that he’d woven lengths of wild grape vine and draped the poncho that his roommate never used and didn’t miss, all camouflaged with brush. A sturdy metal strongbox rested on a sort of shelf he’d chiseled in the trunk. It contained a corncob pipe, and matches, and a pouch of Dutch tobacco. Also, special fruit-nut chocolate chunks, Sur-Vital Bars by name, and a couple of magazines which had a lot of fascinating articles and great cartoons, as well as color photographs of people by the name of Shauna, Reine, and Sylvie.

  College wasn’t all that good for hideouts, other than his room. And rooms were almost public, always sitting right where other people knew they were, and everyone had his or hers, a great deal like your own. About the best that he could do was have a different atmosphere. It helped to have a roommate who thought that everything made just as little sense as he did, but who also didn’t see the point of carrying on about it. The roommate had to like to get up early, give and take a foot massage, and stay in pretty decent shape. A shape which wouldn’t be the same as his, the way a girl’s would not be.

  But Spring Lake Lodge was very much the best he’d ever had. It took the game of hideouts one step further: with it, the world of make-believe became alternative reality. “Why not?” it seemed to say to Nat. “Why not?”

  They used up six full hours getting there. He’d had to start them in the opposite direction, almost, heading up a trail that was the way to go if you had North Egg Mountain as your destination. Doctor watched them go. He knew they’d travel on that trail until they reached a logging road, on which they’d take a right, and go another mile or so. Then, if they were smart, they’d leave the road and travel cross-lots. The road ran up around the hill, and you could save a lot of time and distance cutting through the woods. That was the way to go to North Egg Mountain.

  The people in Group 6 went off the logging road at more or less the place that Doctor would have bet they would. They disappeared into the trees. But then they made an arc along the slope and came back to the road. To say they “dove” across it would exaggerate the matter slightly, but surely they moved quickly. Soon they reached another logging road, on which they took a left. “Oh, what a gorgeous day,” Nathaniel said, and took a big, deep breath, with which he almost trotted down the road. Group 6, still fresh and anxious to be good, and not be left behind and lost the Christ knows where, went with him.

  Nat ignored the pants and grunts he heard behind him for a while, but Marigold’s “Ouch—fuck!” had more than just a trace of angry accusation in it—sounded downright personal, in fact. He took them off the road and stopped beside a brook.

  “Fucking blister.” Marigold limped past him and addressed the brook.

  “I hate myself,” Nat said. “I didn’t think.” He reached into a pocket, then another one. “Um. Shit. It serves me right, I guess. I must have dropped my handkerchief.” Marigold, still staring at the brook, slow-silent-mouthed the words “Poor baby.”

  Nat said it must have been a little while before, when he had wiped his face. He’d just run back and pick it up, he said, slipping off his pack. “You know,” he said to Marigold, “that hanky is a kind of special one. It’s real close to my heart. I wore it with a cowboy hat and six-guns when I graduated. Um. Everyone cracked up, except my parents.”

  Marigold looked at him from the corners of her eyes. He looked so miserable she had to smile. He pursed his lips at her and turned away. The truth was always best: he’d slipped tha
t handkerchief inside his shirt, about a mile before.

  Nat jogged back down the road until he got to where it straightened out and he could see for quite a ways. He lay down on his stomach and peered between some ferns a full five minutes; then he nodded, rose, and jogged back to the Group.

  “Find it?” Sully asked, and Nat could truthfully reply, “Yes, perfect,” and wave it at the five of them. Marigold said, “Gross,” but made it sound like “Good.” They started out again.

  Now Nat led them in an easy circle, slowly back, above, around the school, but even when they’d gotten past it and were heading for the Lodge, he didn’t go directly. Partly, that was habit: all summer he had taken different routes, so as not to make a path. Now there was a greater likelihood of trackers, and a larger, careless group to leave a trail. Then, too, there was his own uncertainty: did he really want these kids to know the way? And so they zigged and zagged—beside, across this brook, along that deer track and stone wall, even on the Old Stage Road a ways, the little you could see of it. “… it ran from Seton down to Mohawk Falls,” he said, “and carried mail and passengers one day a week. It’s hard to realize that there were farms all through these woods, but you can still find lots of cellar holes. Most of this was open pasture then, can you imagine it?” He swung his arm around. It was hard to imagine. He liked it better this way, much.

  Ludi listened, leaning up against a birch, her long-lashed eyelids closed, her cheek against the smooth white bark. She heard again the horses’ hooves, the leather-squeak and rattle of the harness, the clatter of the wheels, the coachman yelling, “Yah-Yah-Yah!” Ever since they’d joined the road, she’d heard the sounds in places; now she could allow them fully, knowing they were real. She opened up her eyes and saw the stage, coming from the uphill side, toward them. It had four horses, not well matched in size or color, and only one man on the driver’s seat. He wore a little soldier’s cap, with a strap around his chin—a thin man, lacking teeth, but not ambition, clearly: “Yah-Yah-Yah!” he shouted at his team, and shook the reins. “Honeytown at sundown, by the Jesus!” Ludi smiled and watched the stagecoach rocking as it passed. All that happened in the merest blink of time.