The Grounding of Group 6 Page 9

  She dialed the operator, gave the number, said “collect.”

  “Who shall I say is calling?” said the operator.

  “Sara,” Sara said, “their daughter Sara.”

  She heard the call go through. Two rings. Her father: “Yes?”

  The operator: “I have a collect call for anyone from your daughter Sara.”

  Pause. Her father’s voice: “I don’t think this is very funny, Doctor.” Pause. “I’m sorry, operator. I have no daughter by the name of Sara.” Click.

  She hung up, too, with the operator’s question in her ear.

  When Ludi first saw Sara coming back across the field, she felt a little happy bounce inside her chest, as if her heart was jumping rope while all the rest of her stayed still. But when she kept on looking, she had another feeling, too: that sense of something being very, very wrong again—and now attached to Sara. She started out into the field.

  Sara raised a hand and brought it down in one strong gesture, palm to Ludi: Go back now. Ludi hesitated, then stepped back into the shadows. Sara knew she had to get the others out of there. The others. Right away. She put her hand inside her jacket pocket, touched her compass: there where it belonged. Knowing she knew how to use the thing made her feel a little better, though she also knew she’d never find Spring Lake Lodge at night. She’d get them moving fast, and cover all the ground they could before it got too dark, and then they’d camp, just like they said they would, and then, at dawn, they’d start right up again and make the Lodge for breakfast. The kids would be some kind of hungry, but they’d make it; they’d survive.

  It was, like, sometimes with her sisters and her brother, when she had to be the grown-up—not let on that she was worried in the slightest (“I know it isn’t broken, Ruth”). She had to just be cool, and not discuss it right away, until she’d made some better sense of it. Right now, it still seemed almost like a joke. Or a game, as Coke would say. Like when you were a kid and you and some friends got together and agreed to pretend that another of your friends was, like, invisible. So no matter what she said or did, everyone pretended there was no one there. (“Did you hear something, Elsie? Did you hear someone saying something?” “No, I didn’t hear anything, Sare. Did you hear something?” And so on, and on and on.) But grown-ups weren’t into jokes like that. It wasn’t their style. It really couldn’t be that her parents, and Sully’s parents, and Coke’s parents, and Ludi’s parents, and Marigold’s parents had cooked up this deal with the school, as part of their orientation—some sort of survival training, or what have you. It couldn’t be that. But what else could it be? It was hard to explain her father’s voice; he’d sounded furious. “I don’t think this is very funny, Doctor,” he had said. What on earth did that mean? If there was a joke of any sort in progress, her father wasn’t part of it, for sure.

  She reached the tree line, and at once the Group surrounded her, everyone just one big grin, except for Ludi. And a million questions, all at once.

  “O.K., what’s the story? Are we where we’re meant to be? Did you see Nat? Well, is it just a game, or what?” And then Marigold said, “I hope you remembered to pick up my mail.” She was all right until Marigold said that; everything was under control. But for some reason… Had Marigold actually asked her to do that, or was she just kidding around? She couldn’t remember. She looked at each of them. She knew that they were very good people. Naturally good. No one moved; everyone was looking at her; her eyes got very big. And Ludi opened up her arms to her, and Sara stepped straight forward into them, and made an awful moaning sound as she began to cry.

  “I know, I know,” and Ludi stroked her hair. “You’ve found out something terrible….”

  When Nat arrived at Coldbrook Country School, he didn’t know if he had gotten there before Group 6 or after. He also didn’t know if Mrs. Ripple and the man in the tweed cap had been collected by the man in the camouflage suit, or whether anyone had told Doctor that there hadn’t been a grounding after all.

  The expression “game called off on account of wet grounds” popped into his mind, and he imagined huge piles of steaming coffee grounds all over a baseball field, with a lot of groundskeepers with brooms standing around them shaking their heads. He hoped that all the Coldbrook Country groundskeepers were shaking their heads, too; their game (himself and Group 6) hadn’t been called off, it just didn’t show up to get played.

  He decided to continue with the no-show strategy. Better, first, to try to figure out—if possible—just who was where and knowing what. He climbed up in a tree that offered him a view of most of Coldbrook’s campus but also let him see the road and fields. That way, supposing that Group 6 had gotten slightly lost and hadn’t made it yet, he’d possibly (most likely) see them coming. He got out his binoculars and slowly panned the area: no sign of them. He focused on the school.

  It appeared that supper had just ended. Kids and staff were exiting the dining hall, in little groups and solo. Nat could see each person perfectly; he even counted them, for no good reason, really, seeing that he didn’t know how many were on the staff or in the student body. But it was something to do, and he sort of thought that if he got to a hundred and twenty-five, say, that that’d be everyone. Alternative schools just had to be small, if they were going to do the job they claimed to do.

  He only got to ninety-eight before the door stopped opening and no one else came out. That was good; Coldbrook might be a better school than he’d thought. At least fifteen or twenty of the people looked as if they could be staff, which meant a student-teacher ratio of maybe 4.5 to 1, or thereabouts.

  Nat gave his head a little shake. The really good thing was that he hadn’t seen anyone he knew come out, except Doctor and Luke Lemaster and one other guy with a beard whose name was Barry Mustinghouse, or something like that, who taught mostly stuff like Social Ecology. And some of the kids on the bus from New York, of course. But no Mrs. Ripple and no camouflage suit and no tweed cap. And no members of Group 6.

  Of course that didn’t mean for certain-sure they weren’t there, he realized. They could be locked in the Infirmary, with Mrs. Ripple (he could see her in a nurse’s uniform) getting, like, their “medication” ready, while the other two leaned back in chairs outside the door, with rifles in their laps. Nat shuddered. “Please.” He said this to the treetop. “Please. Not so.” He decided what he’d do would be to scout around some more: circle through the woods on the north side of the school, where they’d most likely come from. Sara’d said she wasn’t very good at compass work; it really was quite likely that he’d gotten down ahead of them.

  As it turned out, he heard them just before he saw them. All of them were shushing one another, as they got their packs back on their backs and argued whether they could get to Spring Lake Lodge by nightfall. They also said such things as “This is crazy” and “I can’t believe what’s happening” and “Look, there’s got to be a simple explanation” quite a lot.

  When Nat came bolting through the woods, full-speed, they turned and looked at him, at first in terror, then relief.

  “One, two, three, four, five,” he counted them. “Thank God.”

  Of course they started in at once, telling him what Sara saw and heard and said, and asking where he’d been and what (the fuck) it meant.

  He just said, “Look. This all just has to wait. The thing we’ve got to do is walk. Back up to Spring Lake Lodge. As quickly as we can, O.K.? I’ll tell you what I know when we get up there, but now we really ought to move. Let’s stick together and try to keep a nice even pace, but if anyone absolutely has to stop or slow it down, we can. The important thing now is just to get going. Is everybody O.K.?”

  Everybody nodded, but some of them were looking at the ground and not at him: Sara, Coke, Marigold.

  He asked another question: “Do you trust me?”

  He looked at Ludi first, and she just rolled her eyes around; a hugely welcome insult, that, like: “What do you think, stupid?” Everybody else, they nod
ded hard, and if Coke had to add “It doesn’t look as if we have much choice,” he said it with his bitter, vulpine smile.

  It was well after eleven by the time they reached the Lodge, and they’d done the trip nonstop. Nat had flat-out said that he would take each person’s pack for a mile or so, by turns, and no one said he couldn’t when their turn came. When it got dark, they just had Nat’s one flashlight for the six of them, so there was stumbling, all right, and lots of muttered “Shit,” but no one really fell completely down or got an injury beyond a little twist or scrape.

  “O.K.,” said Nat, when they arrived. “I’m going to get some goulash started on the stove inside. I am so incredibly hungry, I could eat”—he searched his memory—“a Brussels sprout, I’ll bet. If someone’ll start an outside fire, too, we can eat out there, and maybe have some coffee or hot chocolate on. …”

  Coke said, “Hey, Nat. I brought some rum with me. Is it O.K. if maybe people had a little drink?”

  “Sure, I guess,” said Nat. He wasn’t used to being asked questions like that. “Provided I’m part of ‘people.’ Just everyone remember we’re real tired and real empty and that alcohol’s a depressant and…shut up, Rittenhouse,” he said. “Isn’t everyone glad I brought my father?” he smiled and asked the floor.

  “How come you asked permission this time, Coke?” teased Marigold, putting on the voice of teacher’s pet.

  “Oh, just fuck you,” he snapped at once, and for the first time sounded like he meant it. Marigold shrugged and turned away; Coke muttered “Sorry,” and she shrugged a second time, not looking at him. But when he’d gotten water from the spring and mixed the tropi-fruit drink and set the pitcher and the bottle on the box beside the stove, she made herself a drink and showed the cup to Coke and told him “Thanks.” Everyone had rum this time, and Sully even shook his head and said, “Hey, boy, I needed this.”

  While the food was heating, people milled around and sipped their drinks and talked about the tiredness they felt, and how good the goulash smelled. It was like their parents’ cocktail parties; no one talked about important things at all. Sully did ask Nat if what was going on made sense to him, but Nat had said he thought they ought to eat first and talk after. Partly, he was stalling: trying to look for ways of saying things that didn’t make them sound so terrible. And also, this way, they could get some food down, anyway.

  And indeed they did; everyone agreed it was great goulash, and by the time that they were done with it, Ludi was feeling/looking sleepy, just as she’d predicted.

  “Look, this can wait till morning …,” coward Nat suggested. There wasn’t any way to tell people something like this, for Christ’s sake. But no one wanted any rainchecks; they thought that he was kidding.

  “O.K. Um, well,” said Nat. “The first thing that I want to say is this. We’re going to be all right. I really believe that, and, um, I think it’s real important you do, too. I think you’re…well, a terrific group. Of people, that is, not just as a group. You know what I mean. Every one of you is great. If I didn’t think that, I’d be fifty miles from here by now, or more.” He looked around the circle, hoping that everyone believed him, even if they weren’t making a lot of sense out of it so far. This really was impossible, he thought. But he had to keep on going. “And from what I’ve seen,” he said, “I think that all of you care for each other, too, in spite of the fact that you’ve just barely gotten to know everybody and all.”

  “Nat,” said Coke. “What is this crap? Will you get to the point and stop babbling?”

  “O.K.,” said Nat. “But none of that was babble. I mean it. Every word. But”—he sighed—“O.K. Fasten your seat belts; this gets pretty rough. Your parents sent you to Coldbrook Country School to have you, um, killed. And the school paid me to do it. I was meant to poison you. And then—I didn’t know this till today—they were going to kill me, too. And bury us together in some deep crevasse or something.”

  They looked at him. “Wait a minute,” Coke said. “You were kind of looking at Sara when you said part of that. Sara’s parents really paid to have her killed?’

  “All of yours,” said Nat. “Yours and Sully’s and Marigold’s and Ludi’s and Sara’s. For one reason or another, all your parents wanted to get rid of you. Cripes, I know that none of you deserves to be killed, or any, um, ridiculous thing like that.” This was coming out absurdly badly. He groped: “Any more than I do, for God’s sake!”

  Everyone was just staring at him now, except for Sara who had dropped her head and was starting to cry. She’d tried so hard and been so good so long, and now she wasn’t even going to get a second chance. Sure, she’d done an awful thing, but she’d been punished and been shamed, and she’d thought that it was over with and that, if she did great at Coldbrook…She wanted to get furious, think up a plan, but all she felt was stunned and sorry for herself.

  “I can’t believe it,” Sully said. “My mother’d never do …” And then he thought: McCorker. He’d do anything, that Louis-Philippe’s penis. “It’s so unfair,” he blurted out, meaning just about everything that had happened in his life so far.

  And Marigold said, “I believe it. Why not? Who said anything is fair? You want to know the truth? I’m not surprised at all. Grown-ups kill each other all the time. Everyone saw The Godfather, right? I mean, doesn’t it make perfect sense that there’d be people who’d kill people’s kids, for a price? What’s so special about kids? In the old days, they’d leave a baby by the side of the road if they didn’t want it. Especially girls. I could see my parents—my mother, anyway—wanting me out of the way. Couldn’t the rest of you? My mother’d have her reasons.” Marigold had dropped the jokes, the imitations. Nat thought she looked, like, ten years older, in the firelight.

  “Wanting, maybe, yes,” said Ludi softly. “But doing it? Going that far?” She turned to Nat. “What about… the rest of it? How did you get into this? You said the school paid you to kill us.” She shook her head. “How come? I mean, why you? I know you’re not”—she did the eyes again—“a ‘hit man,’ or whatever they call it. And where were you all day and all?”

  Nat nodded. “It goes back to my last year at college,” he began—and then he told them all of it. About his debts, his pickle with the state and Arnold’s uncle, his father’s attitude, and how, in desperation, he’d agreed to work for Doctor. And how (of course!) he’d realized right away he couldn’t, and how he got to thinking he might be marked himself, and how, that day, he’d gotten proof of it. It was kind of a relief to tell it all, from top to bottom, as if by telling it he might begin to forgive himself.

  When he was done, he looked around the group, and Coke said, “Bullshit.”

  Nat said, “What?”

  And Coke said, “I said bullshit. I don’t believe a word of it. I still think it’s a game, a test, a gimmick of some sort. I mean, I admit you’ve done a great job of setting the whole thing up. You, and whoever else is involved. For all I know, all of you may be in on it. This whole thing may be all for my benefit. But the thing is: I don’t believe it. Something like this couldn’t happen. My father’s an asshole and my mother’s a moron, but they wouldn’t do a thing like that. People in their…circle—or whatever you want to call it—just don’t kill their kids!” Maybe if he called their bluff, they’d just admit it was a game, and they could all go down and start this stupid fucking school. Not listing your kid in the Social Register was one thing—but killing him?

  “Coke,” said Marigold quietly, “you think Sara’s acting? Does Sully look like an actor? Does Ludi? I could see how you’d think I was—dahling—but the rest of them? And I’m telling you I’m not.”

  Coke looked a little flustered. “Well, maybe you’re not. Maybe no one’s in this but Nat and the school. I just sure as hell know my parents aren’t going to pay to have me killed.”

  Marigold’s voice got really sharp again. “And I know goddamn well my mother’d have me killed in a minute if she was sure that she could get aw
ay with it. You understand what I’m saying? Parents don’t kill their kids for the same reason people don’t do lots of other things: they’re just afraid of getting caught. Proof? In the old days, when it was all right to do it, everybody did. Even kings and shit. Like Moses.” Marigold shrugged.

  “Look, Coke,” said Nat. “I don’t blame you at all for feeling the way you do. And there’s no way in the world you can know that I’m telling you the truth if you think that I’m not.” He paused and scratched his head. “Does that make sense? But you know what I mean, right? So how do I convince you? Is there any way?”

  “Take me down to the school tomorrow,” Coke replied. “I’ll bet you won’t do that.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Nat. He dropped his head and rubbed his eyes. He looked around the Group again. His face was full of shadows and looked gaunt. “I just don’t know,” he said. “Maybe that would work. Maybe if we all went back they’d have to pretend there was some sort of clerical mistake, or whatever they call it, and get in touch with your parents and tell them the deal’s off. And if I accused them of anything—well, they’d just prove I was crazy or something.” He gave a little laugh. “That wouldn’t be too hard, I guess. From what I heard from Doctor, there’s no way in the world to find…well, um, the earlier Group Sixes.”

  “So what are you saying?” said Coke. “Will you do it?”

  “Coke, please,” said Ludi. “It’s just too big a chance. Those people are crazy; I mean, they have to be. Suppose they didn’t decide what Nat just said; suppose they were still out to kill us. We have no idea what they might do, nobody does.”

  Coke shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.

  Sully said, “But if we don’t go to school, and we can’t go home, what are we going to do?”

  Everybody looked at him, and kept on looking.

  “Well, don’t look at me, for Christ’s sake,” said Sully loudly. “I don’t know what to do. I was just asking.”

  “Goddamn them,” Marigold said suddenly. “Goddamn them anyway. We’re in a goddamn trap.” She laughed, not pleasantly. “Anyone see that rerun on TV? The Fugitive? About a guy being chased all over the place for something he didn’t do? Well, that’s us. Except that there’s six of us, instead of one, and nobody’s accused us of doing anything, whether we did or not. And five of us are minors and have no legal rights at all, just about. We can’t vote, or get a full-time job, or buy a drink or probably even fuck, for Christ’s sake.” She turned to Nat. “What are we going to do for the next two years? That isn’t illegal or unsafe, I mean?”