The Grounding of Group 6 Page 3

  She never mentioned anything she saw or heard. Hadn’t, well, for years, except for times she didn’t think, and just assumed that what it was was there for everyone. When she was small, she thought that everyone was just the same, and saw the same as she did. And she saw lots of different things. Some of them were like the stagecoach, things left over from another time—echoes, shadows of the past that you might stumble on, perhaps the way you’d find an arrowhead, a broken pipe, a piece of pottery. Other things were indications, you might say—things she saw that made her know her stepmother was pregnant (with a boy), or that it wouldn’t be a good idea to walk across that hayloft. Or how to tell the red socks from the green ones in her bureau drawer, even when the lights were out.

  When she was very little, she had told her mother what she saw—except for one thing—and her mother never told her “no,” but only nodded, narrowing her eyes as if to try to see herself, or possibly remember. After Mommy died, she’d told her father certain things. At first, he didn’t seem to mind so much, and said, “Now, there, there. That’s all right,” a lot. But in a while he started to get cross with her and said she’d better “cut that nonsense out.” He told her only crazy people saw things. Did she want to have the neighbors think that she was crazy? She saw some funny things around her father when he said that, but maybe she was seeing things.

  So, starting at that time, she just stopped mentioning the things she saw. She knew that she could make them not appear, and simply see the world her father saw, but she decided not to make that sacrifice. His liking her would not be worth it. That meant she stayed the way she was, a little vague and dreamy. She’d oversleep, or not pick up her room when she was told, or not be waiting by the car when it was time to go, or fail to do her homework—all because she’d been involved with something that she couldn’t mention. She drove her father past the limits of his patience, which weren’t generous or flexible to start with.

  “You are so goddamn out of step with everything!” he shouted at his daughter.

  “That kid just drives me up the fido-fucking wall!” he told his second wife.

  Ludi was the one thing in his house and life that simply didn’t work right, and gradually he came to hate her.

  When they finally got to Spring Lake Lodge, it was late afternoon. Group 6 was draggin’ ass, Coke thought. He wasn’t sure he liked his role as much-the-biggest boy, with three girls in the group. It kind of took away his right to be the bitcher and the drag. Marigold had started in to whine right after lunch—God, he’d been really stiff—but she’d done it in a way that made it not sound serious: “How much longer is it, Daddy? Are we almost there yet? Can’t we get some ice cream now!”

  The other three just chuckled and kept going. For all Coke knew, they liked this sort of thing, this so-called student-centered school that really was a boot camp in disguise. Coke had no illusions. At this point he was pretty sure that any school—shit, almost any place—that he’d have access to would be a place he’d hate. His feet felt really hot. He tried to take his mind off them by watching Marigold’s behind, and fantasizing scenes in which she showed him where the lightning struck. His pack did weigh a ton.

  Then, quite surprisingly, he heard Nat say, “Well, here we are,” and there they were. It hadn’t seemed that they were getting anywhere. And where they’d gotten to was not exactly what he’d thought that it would be.

  Spring Lake Lodge was hidden in a spruce grove, quite a big one, on the top of, oh, perhaps the thirty-fifth small wooded hill they’d climbed, or partly climbed, that day. They hadn’t been on level ground since they had finished the scrambled eggs—or so it seemed to Coke. The Lodge, which Sara had imagined as a Swiss-style building (with a porch) and one enormous room (with a fieldstone fireplace) and maybe even mooseheads on the walls, was just a tiny, squatty little cabin, pretty much the kind that’s called a trapper’s “tilt” some places. Most of it was logs, at least; the ones along both sides stacked up with butt ends heading forward, so as to make the cabin’s front a good bit higher than its back. That way, the flat, unpeaked shed roof would slant from front to back in such a way that water would drain off, presumably. The roof did not impress Group 6. Underneath were slim spruce poles, set close together; over them was plain black roofing paper, double-layered, and other poles lay over it. The roofs the members of Group 6 had known before were either tiled (like Sara’s was) or shingled, using slate or cedar—even asphalt in the case of Ludi’s father’s summer home’s garage.

  “My God, it’s logs and…tar paper!” cried Marigold. “A shack!” She laughed hysterically. O.D. would have a cat with wings! She rolled her head around and stuck one hand upon a hip. “Eighty-five a night for this? There must be some mistake. I told the travel agent ‘rustic,’ yes, but what that means to me is, like, a darling claw-foot tub and no Jacuzzi. And patchwork quilts instead of satin comforters. Maybe, on the tables, nice thick porcelain, and waiters dressed like lumberjacks. But, this…” She flipped the other hand: take it away.

  Nat listened, watched the others look at it, at her, at it again. They all had painted something cheerful on their faces, the sort of smiles that people use to cover major disappointments, even fear. The sort they wear before they cry, sometimes.

  He looked at Spring Lake Lodge. It still looked good to him. He’d framed two windows on the east and west sides of the house—the door was on the south—and covered each of them with double sheets of firm, clear plastic. The door was made of boards he’d fashioned with his chain saw and had a wooden latch; it opened in, because of snow. Inside, there was a small cast-iron stove; he’d brought it up in pieces and assembled it right there, with stove cement. Underneath the floorboards there was insulation, half a foot of it. Likewise, overhead he’d stapled three-foot strips, the kind with silver backing—it was not as deep, three inches only. People could survive a winter in that hideout, if they had to.

  A little ways in front of Spring Lake Lodge, he’d made a nice stone fireplace that he used after dark, but never in the daylight, and down a little slope there was the Lake itself: a vast expanse of water maybe twenty feet by twelve, and fully four feet deep at the far end.

  Spring Lake was his creation, and having never made a lake before he loved it even more than it deserved. Once upon a time, it was a wet spot in the woods, a swampy bit of ground that never dried. Nat was sure that wet spot held a spring, and so each day, when he was finished with his cutting, trimming, hauling, notching, building, or whatever, he’d do an hour’s worth of shovel work, standing naked, save for sneakers, in the muck, digging out the clayey loam and prizing out the rocks. In time, he got to mostly gravel, and the water bubbled sweetly, coldly, out of it. He figured, and was right, the water had run underground and popped out farther down the hill. Now he dug a little channel for it, so it could make its way aboveground. Spring Lake was a water source; he liked that.

  The members of Group 6 had all put down their packs by the time that Nat looked back at them again. Now that there was no more hiking, they were stuck for something else to do. At least nobody cried. Sully shrugged and started toward the Lodge; Sara sat down on the ground, pulled up a leg, and started doing stretches. Marigold and Coke walked down to check the water. Ludi stood right where she was, one hand upon her pack frame. Having seen a place, she liked to feel it, too—“the way it came together” is the way she would have put it. This place seemed very beautiful to her.

  “Can I go in?” Sully called that down to Nat, his hand upon the door latch.

  “Oh, sure. Go on.” Nat smiled and waved him forward. “Make yourself at home.”

  They all heard Sully saying “Wow” from just inside the cabin door—and so they all had something they could do: go and see what he was wowing at. They crowded in the door and soon were saying “Wow” themselves. Spring Lake Lodge seemed almost full of double-decker bunks, or wooden shelves about the size and shape of bunks, as Sully thought of them.

  There was some other space insid
e the cabin, but not too much, if someone had a hoopskirt on, for instance. Two sets of double-deckers took up all the farthest wall, the north side of the cabin; another set was on the left-hand wall, beside the window, which was very near the front. The little stove was on the right-hand side, a good safe yard out from the wall, which also had its window, right behind a good-sized wooden box. So when the five of them were all inside (and also one half-opened slab-wood door) there wasn’t space to swing the smallest cat.

  “It’s twelve by twelve,” said Nat, from in the door frame. “That means the bunks down there are only six feet long. It’s lucky that a lot of us are—um, well—middle-sized. Coke’s the only one that better sleep on this side.” He pointed to his left. “These are six foot six.” Nat heard his voice take on that stupid tone it used when he was filling silence.

  Marigold climbed up into an upper on the end, and stretched out, leaning on an elbow. “Extra-firm, I’d say,” she said, pressing on the rough-sawn spruce with one extended finger. “Well, I’ll say this for Spring Lake Lodge—it’s intimate, all right. Would anybody like to see my vaccination now, just to get it over with?”

  Nat said, hating it, “Well, what I thought was—is—that girls could undress first, and get into their sleeping bags, before we came on in. Then we could take our stuff off in our bunks. And in the morning we could get up first, and dress, and clear on out—you know—like that. Or maybe some of you would rather sleep outside.” He shrugged. “Whatever.” This was not the sort of scene he had imagined, but he didn’t know what was. “I made a little outhouse over there a ways. It’s—um—it’s got a pretty gorgeous view. Every time you use it, toss a scoop of lime down in the hole, O.K.?” He spoke offhandedly, and didn’t look at anyone. Let them find the rubber toilet seat themselves; he’d worn it around his neck to bring it up, of course.

  “I like the signs,” said Ludi softly. After she’d come in, she’d carefully looked all around the cabin. To her left, beside the door, there was a row of wooden pegs; above them was the biggest sign. It said: “Which of your father’s ‘well-known facts’ will be tomorrow’s ignorance?” Like the others, it was written on a nice white piece of birch bark with (perhaps) a magic marker. Next to it was one that said: “Please, please, please grow, but never change.” The one above the door was “First check out your feet, then choose your dance.” The one in the corner, just to the right of the door, seemed to have been badly tacked at the top, so that it had flopped over, and you couldn’t see the words. Ludi lifted it, and looked, and read “Expect surprises.”

  Nat turned in time to see her smiling. She looked completely happy, standing there. He took a long, deep breath and rubbed his hands together.

  “Now, how about we get some supper organized?” he said.

  At the Institute for Basic Motivation, Coke had talked about his life in grade school, where it all went wrong for him. He said he thought he knew the reason why.

  “It was my hair,” he told the people on his Self-Esteem Assessment Team. “I simply couldn’t make it stay in place. That, and the fact that I didn’t have any hips, so my shirttail always came out. Those two things were all it took. They said I was a mess. A mess,” he repeated bitterly. He’d slouched down in his chair and pursed his lips, and shook his head, as if in morbid retrospection. Ms. Pembroke, MSW, the leader of the Team, felt sorry for him, he was almost sure. He thought she maybe had a point. “Once my mother got the maid to sew the front tails of my shirt into the back tail. I had to step into the thing, and, well, you can imagine how …” Coke kept talking till he saw their eyes begin to glaze. “I felt like telling them to stick a hair-ball up their hatch—hey, sorry, Angela, but I said hatch, heh-heh—and blow it out their Azores.” He smiled his evil smile at Angela, a girl with one crossed eye, a member of the Team, who said vulgarity was sinful, mortal-sinful, even for a Protestant, a Jew, or an “acrostic.” “God doesn’t give a hoot who He strikes down,” she told them.

  It had been a fact that, in the second grade, the members of his class had called him Cole-the-(toilet)-Bowl (he’d started “Coke” in adolescence), and that he’d never had the friends his parents wanted him to have. Instead, he’d hung around the fat and silly ones, the other failures, the ones who put the green peas in their nose at birthday parties. He’d hated skating, but his father got him up at three and four A.M. to go to peewee hockey, where he’d spend an hour leaning on his stick and sliding on the leather edges of his hockey boots. According to his father, he was chicken, and so his mother took him to a farm for riding lessons. Colonel Mrs. Atkins took one gander at his bird’s nest of a head, his shirttail, and his slouch and shuddered. Coke cleaned a lot of stalls that year, which wasn’t all that bad. A person with a pitchfork gets respect of sorts, and anyway, the view from Dobbin’s back was not that thrilling.

  The year that he’d enrolled at Coldbrook, Coke’s parents did a funny—not amusing—thing. They left his name out of the Social Register.

  For all his sneering at the Social Register, he’d liked to see his name in there, underneath his parents’ names, with all their clubs and addresses and phone numbers. He’d had a line all of his own. There was a heading: “Juniors,” and then, like, “Coleman, III, at Short Hills Country Day,” or whatever cruddy school had taken him that year.

  He’d found out he wasn’t in almost by chance. The Social Register beside the phone down in the den was still the one they’d gotten in the year before; that had his name in it. The new one, it was buried in a drawer, the second one of Mother’s bedside table. He sometimes looked in there for pornographic novels or his mother’s latest down. This time, instead of dirty books, there was the Social Register, that year’s. Of course he’d opened it to D, and there he wasn’t. It was really quite a shock.

  The year before, his father’d told him he was disinherited, but Coke had figured he was sounding off. Old man with a horn. Like, let him eat somewhere with someone famous also in the place, and later on it’s “Had a bite with Jack and Sally Lemmon down at La Grenouille—he’s an old Exonian, you know—and he said something kinda good about the NRC …” His father’s friend would wait, his fingers on his own trombone, to offer his own score by “Lenny” Bernstein (never -steen). To tell your kid that he was disinherited—well, that implied you had a lot of money, so his father’d like the sound of himself saying it. “You can’t even drink like a gentleman,” he’d said, as part of that same rant-and-rave. Coke had blown a lunch, or actually a brunch, up at the country club, beside (not in) the pool that Sunday noon. Of course someone had told his father. But leaving him out of the Social Register and not saying anything about it—that was different. It didn’t have to do with money, or the future. It was personal, immediate: “You don’t exist; you’re over with,” it seemed to say. Coke hadn’t asked his parents what the story was. He almost didn’t want to know, or think about it, even.

  There was another thing he didn’t like to think about, but had to. That was the future, his, and what he’d do in it. He realized that he was almost seventeen and also (almost) had no skills at all, none that had to do with self-sufficiency, survival. It wasn’t only that he couldn’t shoot a bow-and-arrow or a gun, or fight with any weapon but his sharp-and-dirty tongue. He also didn’t know how you would plant a string bean, skin a rabbit, make some maple syrup, catch a fish. At Spring Lake Lodge, he didn’t know the proper wood to get, or how to start a fire in the stove, or how to cook a meal or even clean up after one. In all his life, he’d never even seen a dish get washed, as far as he remembered. Nat gave them all a lesson that first night, thank God. “I want to show you how to do this when there’s no hot water in the tap,” he’d said. “Otherwise we’ll have a plague of rumble-guts up here.” Coke acted cool, but had never paid such strict attention in his life. Score: skill one. At least a possible. Potential, anyway.

  By after dinner, Nat had cheered up pretty well. Group 6 had gotten used to Spring Lake Lodge with quirky suddenness. One moment they were lookin
g like a coin on edge: unstable, odd, impermanent; the next, they’d got their pads and sleeping bags spread neatly on the bunks, with packs stored underneath the lowers, and towels all hanging on the nails set in the bunk posts. Sara had a way of saying things, Nat noticed. “D’you think we ought to… la-la-la?” she’d ask. Or, “Who knows how (or where) to…cha-cha-cha?” She more or less persuaded them to follow her, by letting them go first.

  When all the supper stuff was washed and put away, they sat around the outdoor fireplace and talked, looking at the tent of sticks, with bark and spruce chips piled inside, that Nat had made but not ignited.

  “Don’t you love to sit around a pile of sticks? I can look at one for hours.” Marigold leaned forward, chin in hands. “They’re so mysterious, romantic—you never see one stick exactly like another, either.” She rolled her eyes at Nat. “Yes, that’s a hint, beloved leader.”

  “Well, um,” Nat said. “The thing is—maybe there’s another group up here some place, and if they see the smoke, well, first thing, they’ll be coming over here, and we won’t have a secret place to, well, hang out in, anymore.”

  Sully asked about the stove, and Nat explained that it made much less smoke—provided that you opened up the draft, and burned dry wood, and had your cabin nestled in a grove of good tall spruces.

  Sara said, “I love it that we have a secret place.” She took a stick and made a tic-tac-toe board on the ground. “I noticed”—she talked a little softer—“that we sort of doubled back and…changed direction quite a bit when we were coming here,” she said. She looked around at Nat and bit her lower lip, and then she smiled and asked, “Was that so other kids—like, other groups—would think that we were somewhere else, or something?”