Lucky Turtle, page 2
And off we went.
The reality hit me hard. No contact with my parents for six months. No contact with Dag ever again, though I’d begun in the months since our crime to despise and not love him, stupid, hotheaded man, and to love his brother, Billy, very sorry for him, the boy I should have been dating.
But Elk Creek was something beautiful to see, a river, really, crashing down the mountain as we ascended, sunshine and plains and vast valleys and mountain ridges, peaks more distant, the air like snapping flags, gusts buffeting the van, not a structure in sight until we came to a fence, a wide steel gate. The driver climbed out and opened it, climbed back in and drove through, climbed out again on the other side, closed the gate again with a clang. I thought it was camp security, and not very effective looking, saw myself tramping down that long road by moonlight—escape. But where would I go?
We turned onto a smaller road to follow a smaller river. The air was dry and very clear and even a little cold. Bright lichens hung from the trees. We rumbled over cattle grates embedded in the road. I asked the driver how far we had to go, shouting through the steel mesh as the van banged over gravel—but he gave me no notice. We climbed up out of the barren plain and into the trees, lots of trees, mostly evergreen—trees I didn’t yet know the names of. And wildflowers, some coming up through patches of snow: Indian paintbrush and columbine and that other one, the purple-and-yellow one, very tall. And the constant wind, the van windows cracked open, out of my control, the air chilly, then chillier. The driver braked suddenly, oblivious as I half slid off the big bench seat.
Twelve or more animals like giant deer placidly crossed the road in front of us. The last in line was a big bull with antlers. It stopped and examined the van a long while, finally moved along.
“Elk!” I cried. I’d read of them in one of my library books.
Nothing from the driver. He just continued on. At the top of a long hill, the view opened up to at least eternity, distant mountain ranges, high glaciers, and clouds, and sky. Then a sharp curve and after that a real gate in a real fence, eight feet high, chain link topped with taut strands of barbed wire. The gate was just a steel grid, two sheet-metal turtles riveted onto the face of it, giant turtles communing. We stopped and a guard emerged from the entry booth, an elderly woman who opened the gate dispassionately and waved us through. We pulled up in front of a long log building and stopped again. The driver made no move to get out, to let me out.
A crisp woman in tweeds and sensible shoes, coiffed hair almost black, opened my door. This was Dora Dryden Conover. I recognized her from my obsessive study of the Camp Challenge brochure: founder and director, still a beauty, and let that stand in for warmth. I slid out of the back of the van, stiff legged.
Dora Dryden Conover offered her hand and we shook, firm and dry, just as Daddy had taught me. She said, “Welcome to your new life, Cindra Zoeller.” She knew my name, she’d read my file—but she knew nothing about me, her eyes hard as blue ice. I felt my heart sink, looked away.
The driver collected my duffel bag from the van, laid it on the ground beside me. He stood tall and very still, didn’t look away but kept my eye, and I felt he saw the person I really was. He had no interest in the story I’d arrived with, only in the story that was to come. I saw that he himself had been buried somewhere deep by some disaster. I vowed right there that I would ferret him out, because deep is where the diamonds are made, and I would need something hard as that if I was going to survive.
Chapter Four
Dora Dryden Conover led me inside the long building, knotty-pine everything. Shortly, a knotty-pine door opened and a tall, pallid white man in a rumpled suit appeared. “Well,” he said, “here’s a beauty.”
“Dr. Gilbert,” Dora clucked. “This is Cindra.”
“Cindra,” the doctor said, unchastened.
“We’d better keep this item safe,” said Dora, reaching to unclasp my necklace, the only piece of jewelry I’d ever owned, a pearl from my father. I didn’t protest—how could I? She gave me an appraising look, said, “Well. I’ll leave you to it, Doctor.” And pearl already in her pocket, she picked up my duffel bag, opened a different knotty-pine door, marched up a flight of stairs, further doors shutting behind her, footsteps receding.
Dr. Gilbert was another chest looker and more than that. Leave him to what? I fixed my collar, smoothed my pleated church skirt, safely midcalf.
I was to precede him through yet another knotty-pine door and down a long knotty-pine hallway. He aimed me into an airy, capacious dining room, beams and knots and benches and milk machines and raw tables, pine fragrant, reassuring. At the far end under a Red Cross flag, he gripped my arm and guided me through a dutch door, left the top half open, pushed me back into a warren of hallways and little offices, all of it empty, abandoned. It was late in the day, one of the new long days of spring. He indicated an exam room, steered me in there. No windows, fluorescent lights, knotty-pine walls and floor.
“You’ll undress,” he said. And handed me a cloth hospital gown.
I’d been to a doctor before, complied as modestly as I could. But didn’t they usually step out? He sat me down on the table, looked in my throat, ahh, looked in my ears, hmm, put his stethoscope on my chest, moved it all around. Honestly, in the moment it was only mortifying, but thinking about it now I’m filled with rage, this prodding of my nipples one at a time, these sharp pinches. “Sensitive?” he asked.
“No,” I lied.
He muttered medical words, took notes. “I’ll just palpate,” he said, and basically felt me up, very interested in my belly for some reason, higher and lower, and lower yet, pushing hard above my pubic bone, uncomfortable. “Virgin?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, though of course that wasn’t true by quite a few rugged miles.
He laid me back and put my feet in his stirrups—I mean picked my feet up and put them in—I’d never encountered stirrups. And again, what did I know? He wasn’t brief about whatever exam he was committing, and in fact it seemed truly clinical, terrible pressure, a lot of cold lube and prodding. “Nice and pink,” he said at last. And gave my pubis a pat. “And a real blondie, to boot.”
A double embarrassment in that I knew his words were inappropriate but also, and maybe worse, in that they pleased me, compliments being compliments. I have never told this to anyone. The doctor left, taking the clothes I’d been wearing with him: nice pink skirt, nice pink underpants from Sears, nice pink Keds, all the pink an effort not to seem too criminal. I hadn’t taken my socks off, so at least there was that, nice and pink, too. He locked the door behind him. The doors locked from the outside! I waited, looking for something to wipe with—nothing but a corner of their stupid gown—that steady, discomfiting wind in the trees outside.
Chapter Five
Everything took so long. That was one way that camp was going to be different from life. But after a while the lock clattered and the door opened and a nurse stepped in, crisp uniform, pile of clothes and towels and bedding in her arms, smell of fresh laundry.
“Cindy Zoeller?” she said.
“Cindra,” I said.
“Let’s get dressed,” she said.
The nurse wasn’t going to go away but handed me clothing one item at a time. I dressed in front of her, working around the gown as modestly as I could, plain gray gigantic underpants, loose gray trousers in cotton with sewn-in elastic waist, gray undershirt, gray button-up shirt with a big cc on the back, smaller cc on the breast pocket, gray baseball cap, cc again, gray socks, which I put on over my own. She didn’t notice, thankfully, just handed me a pair of felt clogs, also gray, all while reading the doctor’s notes. “You’ll need regular gynecological exams,” she said. “‘Monthly at ovulation,’ he says here. You’ve got a tipped uterus. The doctor is here Wednesdays and Thursdays.”
“What is a tipped uterus?”
“Nothing. A lot of the girls have it. He can fix it, though. He generally always puts it right.”
Well, it sounded like good news, no idea what she was talking about.
“You look nice in gray,” she said, a welcome joke, delivered deadpan.
“Lucky me,” I said.
“Do you need a bra?”
“No, not really.”
She looked me over, seemed to agree. “Mostly for the flat girls we go with the T-shirt,” she said. “You’re kind of in between. Bras, you have to sign out.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Because what with the straps they’re dangerous.”
“T-shirt.”
“What size for your sneakers, sweetie?”
Sweetie. I relaxed, said, “Eight?”
“Eight, that’s easy. If you’re good, you’ll get boots, too.”
“Great. I’ll be good. Do we get our own stuff back? My clothes? My duffel bag? And I left my parka in the first bus, the blue bus.” The necklace seemed too precious to even mention.
She went all official. “You get your things back when you’re released. You’ll get a sweatshirt when they come in—we’re out right now. Wrap up in your blanket if we get a cold spell.”
“I think it’s cold now.”
She let herself smile. “It’s not cold. Coats we give out in September. Here’s your toilet kit.” She opened it so I could have a look: paper bag with a short toothbrush, tiny tube of Crest, tiny bar of Ivory soap (known to wreck my skin), a hairbrush with no handle, five enormous sanitary napkins with no brand name. “Not exactly a spa,” she said. “When you need more, just ask.”
Just ask: Pops crying in the car, Montana marshal beside me, four airports, one blue prison bus, one Camp Challenge van, fourteen hours, belly rumbling.
Evening was upon us, the daylight stretching as never in New England. I said, “Is there anything to eat?”
“There’s breakfast in the morning.”
“Nothing till then?”
“Like I said, this isn’t a hotel.”
I remembered what Mr. Burnett had told me, how to get along. I said, “I know. You’re absolutely right. I can wait.”
“Terrible about the tornadoes,” the lady said, offhand.
“Tornadoes?”
“Down south—tore up whole cities. Dozens dead.”
Unaccountably, tears started to my eyes: all disasters were my own.
And again, I was locked in the room. The nurse had left her sewing tape and I played with it, rolling it up tight, unspooling it, rolling it up tight, unspooling it, measuring my fingers, the girth of my biceps, the length of my feet, rolling it up tight, unspooling it, what seemed like hours, nodded off.
Suddenly a beautiful young Black woman stood over me, hair tightly braided.
“It’ll get better,” she said, first thing.
“I was asleep,” I said.
“I’m Lioness,” she said.
“Linus?”
She had holes in her earlobes where her earrings should have been. She said, “Lioness. Like the cat. Let’s get you a bite. Poor thing, you missed dinner.”
“I love your braids,” I said.
“You wouldn’t if you knew how they hurt,” she said.
It was like she’d turned off the heat. I’d gotten her name wrong, I’d offered an intimacy I hadn’t earned. My heart sank further, right into my gut, and I was crying again.
“Quiet now,” she said.
She led me down knotty-pine hallways through several doorways to a vast kitchen attached to the grand mess hall, refrigerators like storage rooms. She dug out an enormous can of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, made me a quick sandwich, poured me a scratched glass of milk from a stainless-steel machine. That was going to be it. We sat at the end of a long table. I ate despite tears.
“You’re from back east?” she said, not softening. “What kind of name is Cindra?”
But I couldn’t get the answers out, so hungry, so sad. I ate.
At length, Lioness said, “I’m from Texas. Big farm. My boyfriend and I got busted with a bottle of wine and a bag of weed in his pickup, and naked. He got nothing, not even arrested. I got sentenced. Guess who was white.”
“You?” I said.
She laughed. That was nice. My tears fled. I wanted to say everything about Dag and Billy and me and all that had gone wrong, but I couldn’t get out the first word.
Lioness picked up my plate.
She said, “I’m your cabin sentinel. Which means just a senior inmate. You’ll be a sentinel, too, if you stay. We have a nice group. Pride, we’re supposed to call it, our pride. We’ll meet them later. Are you ready? Let’s get your bedding. We got to hurry. It’s already last bell. Vespers on the mountain tonight.”
I carried my blanket and sheets and my towels, crisply folded, paper bag of toiletries on top. Vespers sounded nice. Lioness walked me under the setting sun through big Ponderosa pines, she called them, orange showing through the bark, sweeping branches that guarded patches of snow. Then almost to the creek and to a well-made cabin in a line of three. “This is Cats,” she said.
Inside, there was a tiny woodstove, cold. I counted nine bunks in all, two left to pick from, one a bottom bunk, the other the top bunk of the only triple-decker. Which reached up into the eaves, a high ladder along the bed frame, perfect. “That one,” I said.
“You sure, hon? The tree fort? It can be hot up there when they let us have a fire. And it’s hot in summer, too.”
I climbed up and tried the mattress, crunch of old-school stuffing. It was warm, all right, but very dry, and private, no other girl at your level. Also, there was a small square window, a screened hatch maybe a hand’s length on a side, trees out there to drift away in. The little crank was hard to budge, but I worked it, the pane like a wing, the citrus-smelling ponderosa pine like forever.
Chapter Six
Camp Challenge was built on Turtle Butte, a massive mountain sawed off at the top and tilted such that if you climbed (and climbed, snow patches deeper and more plentiful) to the end of the property, you came to a cliff, four- or five-hundred-foot sheer drop, whole mountain ranges marching off into the eastern distance, the Great Plains undulating between and beyond, and darkness at that hour, though the sky was still bright. Lioness had me look over the edge in case I wondered why there was no fence. Bras were dangerous but not cliffs?
“Fuck,” I said.
“That’s a demerit,” she said. “Foul language.”
“But.”
“That’s two. Talking back.”
My heart pounded. The trees far below us looked almost soft in the dusk, a warm blanket. “I’m just,” I said.
But Lioness smiled, the slowest, most beautiful moment: no such thing as demerits.
So what else had been a joke?
Vespers took place on a bare plateau as resounding stars emerged, the darkness rising in the east as surely as dawn. The chapel consisted of concentric semicircles of benches around a giant firepit, amphitheater seats aimed out at the view. That first night, they had an immodest fire going, and it lit the beaming face of Dora Dryden Conover. She was older than my parents, that dark and glossy hair, Black Irish, my mother would have announced. Everyone turned to watch as Lioness led me shuffling up the slope, all of them in identical gray sweatshirts, right to Dora Dryden Conover’s side, she in flowing white.
Dora Dryden Conover bowed slightly, took my hand emphatically, announced, “We have a new arrival!”
“Hey,” I said to everyone, and nodded my way around the ring. One hundred twenty girls, I’d read. Sixty on “scholarship,” meaning they were wards of the state, the rest of us paying for the privilege of incarceration.
“This is Cindra,” Ms. Conover said.
Lioness slipped away, found a seat among the benches.
“We were talking about kindness,” Ms. Conover said. Her gaze was compelling. I felt I was falling toward her. She said, “If you’d like to stand, Cindra, that’s fine, but there are plenty of places to sit. Franciella, make some room back there, what do you say?”
There was no need for Franciella to make room. I spotted her immediately, an imposing sourpuss with flattened afro, utterly alone, more alone than I. She patted the bench beside her, not friendly, and I took the long walk of shame, sat beside her.
“No whites,” she whispered.
But I wasn’t taking any more shit, slid a little closer.
Franciella did the same, and suddenly we were touching, knee to knee, hip to hip.
“Kindness,” Ms. Conover resumed. “It’s part of the human contract, one of the ways we can be more like the Lord, who giveth and giveth again and again, who hath given us all this and who, as we know, can taketh again away.”
“Amen,” a couple of girls said, one of them passionately.
Someone scoffed.
No reaction from Ms. Conover, who only said, “As Paul said in his letter to the Ephesians, ‘Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’”
It was night, it was dark, the incessant wind had stopped, the sky was vivid. I didn’t feel I had been forgiven. I noticed that one of the far benches was entirely occupied by pregnant girls, some of them very far along. Well, that wasn’t me.
The passionate girl said, “She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.”
“Proverbs thirty-one, verse twenty-six,” Dora Dryden Conover said.
I was impressed with their knowledge, scoffed anyway.
Franciella whispered, hymn-like, “Please, Cindra, throweth me off the cliffside and into boiling fish oil.”
I gave her a quick smile—terrified of getting in trouble, terrified I’d offend her. Her skin was brown and smooth and freckled, shone in the firelight, her soft arms straining against the sleeves of her T-shirt, maybe no sizes big enough in the camp’s careless supply closet. And then I laughed: the image of my throwing this tremendous girl.
And so she laughed.
