The Grounding of Group 6 Page 6

  “Betcha a buck the next one is a strike,” said Stefan.

  “I’ll take it,” Nat replied. The pitcher put one in the back-stop.

  “Double or nothing on a ball,” said Stefan, learning fast. The pitcher came back squarely down the middle.

  Twelve times, Stuffy Kinderhof, the fat young millionaire from Stowe, had called the pitch; twelve times he was wrong. And then the game was over; called strike three. Nat had won $2048. That cleared his debts and got him halfway through his senior year.

  And then disaster struck.

  He’d gotten what would be his father’s final check (“forever,” Mr. Rittenhouse had said) and gone to pay his last tuition bill, a little nineteen-hundred-dollar item. When he reached the Bursar’s window, he found he was acquainted with the clerk: a giant of a fellow who, he knew from escapades in town, was not opposed to making little wagers now and then. Nat put down his bill and, clipped to it, his nineteen-hundred-dollar check. In the other hand, he held a twenty-five-cent piece, his thumb beneath it in the “flip” position.

  “How about it, Arnold?” he inquired. “Flip you for the whole half year, double-dip or nada.”

  “Why not?” said Arnold “Arn-the-Barn” Emfatico, the Bursar’s clerk. “The state has got you covered.”

  “O.K., then. Call it for Montpelier,” Nat replied.

  “That’s easy,” Arnold said. “The Governor goes for tail.”

  Nat flipped the quarter in the air and caught it, then reversed it on the bill. The Governor was right.

  “Lucky bastard,” Arnold said. “I always go for head, myself. If I’d been betting, you’da won.”

  Nat sighed and pushed his bill and check across to Arnold. Then he started writing on a pad.

  “What’s that?” said Arn-the-Barn. “An IOU? Look, that won’t work, Nathaniel. The state don’t take no promises, just cash. This isn’t me—but if you can’t pay up, you’ll go to work for all of us up here, like, making license plates at sixteen cents an hour.”

  “How much time can you give me?” mumbled Nat. He could see himself already, dressed in prison denim, turning out such highway ha-ha’s as ICU2 and 4PLAY.

  “It isn’t me,” said Arnold, once again. “It’s the people of Vermont. They’ll let you have a week. No, wait; that’s bush.” He put a finger to his temple, closed his eyes. “Make that the first of June, all right? I’ll fix it up with them.” He paused and dropped his eyes; he seemed to chew the inside of his mouth. “Say, by the way,” he said, as if it just occurred to him. “It just occurred to me…Do you know how to sail a boat? My uncle, see, he needs a guy …”

  Before Nat knew what he was doing, really, he’d said that he would fly to Lauderdale the first day of spring break. There he’d rent a sloop named Lucka-Lee and sail down to the Keys and pick up something—like, a present—that some people had for Arnold’s uncle. All Nat had to do was anchor at this certain bay and then go fast to sleep; the people then could come on board and hide the present on the boat someplace. Then Nat would sail the boat on back to Lauderdale, hop a plane, and fly back up to Burlington, or home, or anywhere, for all that Arnold’s uncle cared. Uncle, meanwhile—he would go and rent this boat, the Lucka-Lee, and have himself the fun of looking for the present. When he found it, he would be so happy that he’d probably tell Am to give this nice guy Nat a present of his own—say, oh, three thousand bucks, less what Nat owed him for the airfare and the charter fee. Like nineteen hundred boffos, cash.

  It sounded oh-so-simple, and it was. Everything worked perfectly, except that Arnold’s uncle didn’t find the present he expected. Instead, he found some pieces of a person who was shaped a lot like Cora’s (Arnold’s uncle’s wife) first cousin, Harry. Harry had been Arnold’s uncle’s agent in the Keys.

  All this put Arnold’s uncle in so bad a mood that he told Arnold there would be “no presents for no Nats,” and furthermore that he expected Nat to pay him back the plane fares and the charter fee. “He said he wasn’t sending no Joe College on no holiday,” said Arn. Which meant another thousand Nat now owed.

  He went to see his father. It seemed as if it should have been a cinch. In less than eight short weeks was graduation; Nat would then become a Person, not a student anymore. As a Person, and an Adult, he would soon pick up a Job and start to make a lot of Money. He’d even offer an indenture to his father: bind himself to work for six months, say, at anything his father chose. His father’d get his money back with interest.

  Mr. Rittenhouse said no-No-NO, quietly and firmly for a while, then even louder as he heard the story A to Z. Nat was nothing but a ne’er-do-well, said Mr. R., a blot on the escutcheon and a dunderheaded twit. Let him find his own way out of this one, if he could. Mr. R. had had it up to here; he put his hand a foot above his smooth gray razor-cut.

  Nat was hurt, and more than hurt: enraged. And more than angry: scared right down to the lug soles on his Dunhams.

  He went on back to Arnold. Arnold, in a way, had got him into this (it seemed to him), or, anyway, the worst of it. Nat felt that with a little luck he could have dodged Vermont, or maybe made a deal with it, whereby he’d send the state, like, three new tourists every year for, say, five years: people who would swear that Nat had talked them into going there instead of to the Catskills or the shore. But Arnold’s uncle was a different matter. Arnold’s uncle wasn’t into cheese or maple syrup. “Do process” was his method, Arnold said: if a person didn’t pay up, Arnold’s uncle would proceed to do some things to him.

  Nat got Arnold to agree to see his uncle, talk to him. He came back smiling.

  “Uncle knows a job that you can get. He’s gotten help for this same guy before. It pays a lot for hardly any work at all; when you get paid, you pay back uncle, and the state. What you gotta do is call this number, see?” Arnold handed Nat a slip of paper. “And tell the guy that you can help him ground Group Six. You got that? That you can help him ground Group Six.”

  “That I can help him ground Group Six,” said Nat. “You sure that isn’t ‘grind’? Well, it sounds easy, anyway. But what does it mean?”

  Arnold cleared his throat. “I’m not entirely certain as to all the details,” he began, “but what I know is this guy is head of this…I guess they call it boarding school, out in the sticks somewhere. Where people send their kids that aren’t shaping up so good, to get ‘em to shape up? And they get rid of the kids for a while, in the bargain. Well, I guess it works out that some people would more or less like to get rid of their kid for good, if you know what I mean. You’ve heard they’re working on this morning-after pill, for birth control? Well, this works just like that, except instead of morning-after, it’s, like, sixteen years or so. And that’s where you come in. Don’t even take a week. And you won’t—I promise—even have to teach a class, or any shit like that.”

  Nat was horrified. “You mean to say they kill these kids? I can’t believe it. That’s grotesque! I couldn’t do a thing like that.”

  Arnold shrugged. “If it isn’t you, they’ll just get someone else. From what my uncle tells me, stuff like that’s been going on for years in different places. The good ones do a nice, quick painless job, he says, but some of them are terrible. They got these military ones, down South—like little West Points, or whatever; even kids that just go there for school are pretty well messed-up, my uncle says.”

  Nat shook his head. “I still don’t know,” he said.

  “Three thousand bucks for one week’s work,” said Arn-the-Barn Emfatico. “Plus getting my uncle off your back. Seems like a deal to me. When it comes to messin’ up, my uncle gives the lessons.”

  Two days later, Nat sat down with Doctor in a restaurant near Keene.

  “It helps to think of them as cars.” Doctor pursed his lips and turned the knife upon his place mat, so that the sharp edge faced his plate. “Sometimes, a person gets a lemon, even if the name is Cadillac, or Rolls. And if you do, it doesn’t seem to do a bit of good to take it back and back and…‘Back
in the sad-die again,’ ” sang Doctor softly. “‘Back where a friend is a friend …’It simply can’t be fixed. No matter how many mechanics you hire, you’ve still got a lemon on your hands. The only thing to do is just get rid of it.” Doctor nodded, speared a shrimp. “We take them off their hands, those lemons. Once and for all. Quick and neat and clean and utterly untraceable. We have these limestone faults quite near the school—these fissures on the surface of the planet. Some of them seem almost bottomless. Drop a lemon into one…we never hear it hit. We call that ‘grounding,’ Mr. Rittenhouse. A natural and wholesome term, I hope you will agree. At Coldbrook, we are definitely…organic.” Doctor smiled. “You needn’t be involved directly with the grounding part of the…curriculum. You’ll offer the…prerequisite, let’s say.”

  Nat didn’t have much appetite for lunch, but he agreed, and folded Doctor’s check inside his wallet. He’d be available on August thirtieth, he promised. Doctor said they’d iron out the details then. “We limit our Group Six to five,” he said. “Some years there’s a waiting list.”

  Nat didn’t tell his father until Graduation Day; Nat’s mother’d made him come to that. Of course his father’d hated all the costumes that the graduates put on—some graduates, that was, a fraction of the class. If there was any jackassery afoot, Nat would always be a part of it, it seemed to Mr. Rittenhouse.

  “But dear, he’s such a sweet boy,” Mother Rittenhouse insisted (she who’d always knock for nine when gin was just a card away). Her husband made a sour face, and Nat, to try and cheer him up, told him that he had a job, at Coldbrook Country School.

  Two days later, Nat was in a panic. He knew he couldn’t kill a bunch of kids—or didn’t think he could. He’d have to wait and see. Maybe he’d be doing them a kindness; maybe they were really, truly evil. (Yeah, just like Arnold’s uncle might be, he remembered.) What he ought to do, he finally figured out, was sort of disappear till it was time. Stay away from places where a state (Vermont) might go, or where an uncle (Arnold’s) might bump into you. He looked up Coldbrook on a map and saw how distant and remote it was: perfect for his purposes, uncle-less and state-free. Within a week he’d gone to work on building Spring Lake Lodge. He was lucky there was such a thing as aunts, and birthdays.

  By seven in the morning (just when Levi Welch and Homer Cone and Mrs. Ripple took their places in the scrubby spruces) Sully couldn’t stand it anymore. Nat had not come back and no one else was up to talk to. Besides that, he was hungry. Whistling, he stomped into the woods, carrying a little ax of Nat’s, a Hudson’s Bay. He found a nice dead cherry tree that he could practice chopping on, not far from Spring Lake Lodge; that made some good loud chunking noises. When he brought an armload back to camp, he kept on standing straight and dropped it by the fireplace; one stick bounced up and hit the coffee pot and knocked it over. Perfect: good loud metal clanging sounds.

  Within a minute, Sara staggered out, with Ludi close behind her, both still running fingers through their hair, and stretching. They smiled at Sully and the day and both of them looked beautiful, to him. He could see their nipples up against their T-shirts.

  “Nat down at the outhouse?” Ludi asked. She must have done a bed check, going through the cabin.

  “No,” said Sully, “and I don’t know where he is, exactly. When I woke up at six, he wasn’t in his bunk. He’s gone. Someplace,” he added.

  Sara wrinkled up her brow. “That’s kind of odd,” she said. “You didn’t hear him getting up, or anything?”

  Sully shook his head.

  Ludi shrugged and went down to the Lake. She knelt and cupped some water, put her face in it and rubbed, and made the sort of noise that seemed to her to go with mountain springs. She felt at home and not deserted, not at all.

  “You think that I should wake up Coke?” asked Sully. Ludi heard the worry in his voice.

  “Sure, I guess so,” Sara said. “What do you think, Lu? You want to wake up Marigold? We better use the stove inside for breakfast, right?”

  With Nat not there, the Group seemed slightly out of synch, but still the members managed nicely. Coke watched with great intensity while Sara scrambled eggs; he was amazed that such a complicated-looking bunch of food just happened, sort of, by itself. “There isn’t anything but eggs in there?” he dared to ask.

  Marigold began to set the floor. “Or shall we eat alfresco?” she inquired. Then she saw Coke’s face and added, “No, don’t say it, Coke.” She took the plates and cups and flatware all outside. “You are so grotesque,” she said, but smiled. Ludi mixed up breakfast drink; it was that tropi-fruit creation.

  Once they’d all sat down to eat, they tried to work out what was going on.

  “My guess is this is part of all the rest of it,” said Coke. “I think it’s kind of babyish. Step one, we walk our asses off, to prove that we can take it, I suppose. Step two, we show that we can get along, and even work together. Now we get step three: a crisis. How do we react without our leader? The thing that I resent is that they’re playing games with me.”

  “Nat doesn’t seem like he’s the type for that,” said Sara. “Though I agree it’s just the sort of thing a school would think of doing.”

  “Well, if it is a test,” said Sully, “what I think we ought to do is figure out the answer—what they’d want for us to do—and then do that. I mean, we might as well get off on the right foot with them, if we can.”

  Coke looked at Marigold and made a minor face. A kid was always meant to do exactly as “they” wanted. Another school, another “they” to tell him what was best for him. Fuck them.

  Ludi said, “I doubt that it’s a test. First of all, it wouldn’t be like Nat to go along with that; I agree with Sara. And second of all, he didn’t take his stuff. That means he’s coming back.” She looked around the Group. “I’m also pretty sure he’s not up in a tree somewhere, just watching what we’re doing.”

  Coke considered that. “I think you’re right, but still, it isn’t Nat who makes the rules down there. He’s just a teacher—and don’t forget, he’s new. I mean, if the school has this routine…this game they play with us, he has to go along with it, like anybody else. You got to admit—if he’s not a part of this, it’s pretty weird he didn’t leave a note.”

  The more the situation sat on Coke, the more that he resented it. What made it worse was that the setup hadn’t seemed so bad at first: the kids were sort of neat, and so was Nat. Everything was pretty cool. But now they’d started in again, trying to make it possible for him to be at fault.

  “Yeah, that’s true about the note,” said Marigold, sounding more disgruntled than she felt. Marigold liked mystery, and complicated plots. As Coke had guessed, she mostly didn’t give a shit, and so she didn’t have a lot of expectations or involvement. Whatever happens, happens; no skin off her pantyhose. Life was like a movie with yourself in it, instead of Brooke Shields or someone, she thought. She loved to watch and see what she might do.

  “But maybe,” she went on, “he didn’t think he’d be away this long. Maybe he’s been, like, held up somewhere. Or maybe, God forbid, he’s had an accident.” She rolled her eyes: a woman close to terror.

  “Well, anything could happen,” Sara said, “but somehow I don’t think …” She wanted to get down to cases, plan out their next move. There didn’t seem to be a lot of sense in trying to guess what other people wanted them to do. They should just decide on what was right and do it. “Let’s see,” she said, “suppose we stayed up here today…?”

  When Nat’s watch read just nine o’clock, there was a movement in the spruces down below; the person dressed in camouflage was standing up and moving. Very quietly.

  He stayed up on the hillside, well above the brook, and sidled noiselessly from left to right (seen from above) downstream. When he got above the place the boulders were, he started down the hill, staying well bent over, using trees and rocks for cover. Finally he reached the boulders, and he disappeared among them.

  Three
-four minutes later, there he was again, now walking tall and noisily along the stream bank, upstream from the boulders, coming back. When he got below the place the other two were hidden, he turned and shouted up the slope.

  “There ain’t no body there at all,” yelled Levi Welch. “And there ain’t no body been there, neither.”

  Homer Cone and Mrs. Ripple both stood up at that bad news, and looked on down at Levi.

  “That just can’t be,” said Homer Cone. “Doctor said they’d be here. Are you sure there’s no one there?”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Levi Welch. “Don’t you think I know a dead kid when I see one?”

  Mrs. Ripple shook her head in tiny shakes, just back and forth about ten times, as if she had a horsefly on her nose and both hands full. She took a deep inhale. “Please!” she said. “I see no reason to be tasteless, Levi. There must be some mistake. Perhaps young Rittenhouse confused one mountain with another.”

  “But Doctor said North Egg, I know he did,” said Cone, who sounded close to tears. “The boulders back of North Egg Mountain. He just as good as promised us.” He pulled his rifle up and squeezed off five aimed shots across the brook, near where the boulders were. There’d been a muskrat basking in the sun back there, and Homer Cone’s five bullets killed it lots more thoroughly than even its worst enemy would want it killed, you might say. Except that Homer Cone was its worst enemy, by far.

  “Please! Mr. Cone! It isn’t Doctor’s fault,” said Mrs. Ripple. All their voices carried clearly up the slope. “It’s that young pipsqueak”—pecker-snicker, she thought—“Rittenhouse who’s probably to blame. People of his sort are…careless in their speech. They don’t give good directions. Levi. Search your mind. Do you know of any other boulders by a brook that would be near the base of any other mountain?”