Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  G. Dub and I have always had a cousinly crush on each other, probably more on my side than his. When I was six or seven, I used to think I would marry him when we grew up. But it would be impossible, since it’s probably against the law, and our kids would likely be retards. He was two years older than me, and so good-looking that I always caught my breath when I saw him. His mother, Aunt Juanita, is a full-blooded Cherokee from Vian, Oklahoma. Uncle Ray met her on one of his truck runs—he used to drive an eighteen-wheeler for Atlas until they got married and Aunt Juanita made him quit and start farming. She knew the kind of trouble those truckers get into on long runs. She is little and dark, with the whitest teeth you ever saw. Eats hot peppers right out of the jar like they were peanuts, and has a temper to match. There is no question about who wears the pants in that family.

  G. Dub got all the good stuff from that mix of genes. He is not as big as Uncle Ray—or even me—but where all the rest of us are blond, he has coal-black straight hair and that dark kind of complexion that tans in two minutes.

  Lucille and I used to lie out in the sun trying to get a tan until we were boiled red in our own sweat and had clear blisters all over our bodies. In spite of greasing ourselves up with baby oil and iodine, a mixture Glamour magazine guaranteed would give you a golden tan, we peeled off twice every time, and neither one of us ever got darker than unbleached flour. Then this cream stuff called QT came out that was supposed to tan you without the sun, and I was the first one in line to buy some. Ha. I don’t want to even describe the awfulness of the week it took to wear off. Let’s just say my new nickname was Sunkist for a while.

  When we were little, G. Dub was pretty nice to us, given the fact that we were girls. He played games with us, like touch football, baseball, or tag—even though he was good at everything and Lucille and I were too uncoordinated to walk and chew gum at the same time. It wasn’t our fault. We just grew too fast for our bodies to keep up, and it seemed like my legs got a head start on the rest of me. I looked down one day when I was about twelve and noticed the longest, skinniest thighs I had ever seen sticking out of my Bermuda shorts. They seemed to have sprung out overnight. And let me tell you that growing pains are not a myth. My knees ached and hurt until Mama got scared and took me to see Doc McGuire. He X-rayed and poked and pinched and couldn’t see anything wrong.

  Finally, he said, “Ivanell, the girl’s body is just growing too fast. You can expect her to be another big-boned Marshall.” And I sure was. The rest of my body gradually caught up with my legs, but they are still far and away the longest part of me.

  But G. Dub never made fun of me or Lucille, even when she turned thirteen and her flat chest ballooned out to a size D in what seemed like weeks and everyone called her Boober. He told her she looked like Jayne Mansfield. She did, kind of, but I’m not sure he did her any favors by pointing it out to her.

  G. Dub thought up great games. Every Saturday, we’d go out to his farm and ride horses bareback with just a rope bridle, playing like we were Sky King and Annie Oakley, galloping over the fields screaming like wild Indians. One game G. Dub and me played, when Lucille was not around, was hiding up in the top of the barn loft and playing doctor, or whatever else the excuse was to look at and feel of each other. We would practice kissing with our mouths closed tight, and sometimes we would take off our clothes and he would lie on top of me and put his soft little weenie against my leg, where it lay like a fat worm. Neither one of us knew exactly what we were doing, but it’s funny—even little kids have instincts. Preservation of the species, I guess. When we were eight and ten, we stopped doing it and neither one of us ever mentioned it again. Come to think of it, I wonder if he and Lucille did the same thing. It would be just like her. She would never tell me the truth, though, so I might as well not ask.

  —

  As he turned the crank on the ice cream bucket, G. Dub’s hair swung back and forth, shiny and black, with every rotation of the handle. His hair was almost to his shoulders. His daddy said he was going to catch him asleep and cut it off one night, but I don’t think even Uncle Ray had the nerve to do that. G. Dub worked at Uncle Jake’s Esso station and was in pretty good shape from hefting tires all day.

  “Jim Floyd, would you mind running in the house and getting me a glass of ice tea? I am just parched, and it would take a derrick to get me up off of this.” Lucille already had three empty glasses sitting on the ground beside her.

  She reached down, with some difficulty, to get them, but gave up and fell back.

  “Here, take in these glasses. You don’t have to get a new glass every time.”

  Jim Floyd slowly gathered up the glasses and ambled on into the house. If you ask me, Lucille is lucky to have bagged him. He is the most easygoing man I know—if you can call a nineteen-year-old a man. Nothing ever gets him too excited, and it seems like he moves in slow motion all the time. They used to call him Lightning on the football team, as a joke, and he never got in the game unless we were six or eight touchdowns ahead. He’s not good-looking—he’s a shrimp, not more than five-six, and skinny to boot. He has stringy hair-color hair and a long George Armstrong Custer mustache that droops like the rest of him. But he is wild for Lucille. He can’t believe his luck at getting that blond mountain of woman to fall in love with him.

  A lot of little guys are like that—worker bees buzzing around their queen. They love parading their woman down the street and thinking everyone is admiring them for the sheer guts they have to copulate with all that flesh. I tried not to think about Lucille and Jim Floyd doing it in the funeral parlor. It is just too obscene.

  Sex is such a weird business, isn’t it? I have to confess right here that I am still—you certainly can’t count G. Dub—a virgin. Not that I’m holier than thou or anything. It just hasn’t hit me yet. The closest I ever came was with Ricky Don Sweet our senior year of high school. We had broken up two years before, after that night he tried to drive his truck off the bluff, but there was still that little attraction. It’s a long story . . . but I might as well tell it now. It will explain a lot about Ricky Don and me.

  There has always been a certain kind of guy who really went for me. Not many, because most guys are put off by somebody as big and gawky and strange-looking as I am, but the ones that aren’t—they really aren’t. Ricky Don was one. Maybe it started when we were kids. Until we were twelve or thirteen, I was bigger than him, and he always had to prove that he was the strongest or fastest or whatever. No matter what game we played, he had to beat me. Even after he caught up and passed me in size, he was like that. I don’t know what the big deal was. He never had any trouble beating me at anything, unless it required some brains, like Clue or Monopoly.

  When we were seniors, we started dating again—almost by process of elimination, since Sweet Valley is not that big and we had gone through nearly everybody else around. At first it was just friendly—going to the movies, riding around or out to the Freezer Fresh to get a Coke. I never intended to get in the position of having to take that ring again, and we, of course, never mentioned him trying to kill himself. But somehow, maybe because we were older, this time it was different. We started kissing one night when we were parked up on the bluffs of Nehi Mountain, and before I knew it, he had figured out a way to get my bra off without removing my shirt. It involved unhooking the back and pulling it out through my sleeve. Ricky Don always was good with his hands. I think I let him just to see if he could.

  Then we started getting in deeper and deeper. It was crazy—like I didn’t know my own self. On one hand, I really couldn’t stand him, but when we started kissing it didn’t seem to matter that he wore hair oil or that he laughed too loud when things weren’t that funny. Parked on the bluffs or out at the lake, he would knead my tiny boobs for hours. I couldn’t imagine there was enough there to interest him. I was always as flat as a boy. I sure never got anything out of it except sore nipples.

  Probably it wasn’t enough for him, either, because he started going for mo
re, and we had some real wrestling matches. I’m pretty strong for a girl, and he never once got to third base, though he tried for months.

  Then homecoming came. Baby and I were elected senior maids. That’s not as unbelievable as it seems, because the maids and queen are picked by the football players. Since the captain was Ricky Don and he was still trying with might and main to get in my pants, I’m sure he scared them all into voting for us—he knew I wouldn’t have done it unless Baby got it, too. Of course, Ricky Don was my escort onto the field for the pregame ceremony.

  The queen, Cindy Ragsdale—a cute little cheerleader with bouncy boobs and ratted hair that was sprayed into a concrete-solid, perfect flip—wore a long white satin dress and a rhinestone crown. All us maids wore long dresses with blue velvet spaghetti-strap tops and white satin skirts—Sweet Valley is the Blue Tornadoes, and our colors are blue and white. Under the big, full skirts, I had on seven layers of can-can slips that made me feel like a ringing bell as I swayed across the field with my hand in the crook of Ricky Don’s arm. The slips were so big and fluffy that I had a hard time squeezing into our car. They filled up the whole backseat.

  During the game, we girls sat next to the field up on a float that had taken us weeks to make out of gazillions of squares of blue and white crepe paper, which we stuffed into chicken wire. It spelled out GO, BLUE TORNADOES! and had a blue tornado in the middle with mean eyes and big teeth.

  It was early November, but freezing. The longer we sat on that float, the colder it got. In spite of the mouton coats we had all borrowed from former queens and maids, we turned as blue as our dresses. I must say, though, it really made you feel like something to sit up there and have the whole school—the whole town—come up and congratulate you and stare at you like you are royalty or a movie star. It was especially great for Baby and me, since I was always too spastic to be a cheerleader like the really popular girls. Baby didn’t even try out for cheerleader. They probably would have elected her, but she said she didn’t want to. I think she was just being loyal to me.

  Come to think of it, Carlene came up to the float carrying her baby and talked to us that night. We all said what an adorable baby it was and how we all wished we had one. Of course, none of us meant it, but I think it made her feel a little better. Looking back, I can see how miserable she was, in spite of trying hard to be happy and showing off the baby. She stood by the fence for most of the game and watched the cheerleaders, a lot of whom had gotten friendly with her when she was on the basketball team. They all came over and oohed and aahed, but then they went back and did their routines while she stood there hugging the baby. I felt bad for her, but it was too exciting a night to spend much time thinking about Carlene.

  We were in heaven. We won the game. Of course we won the game. We always schedule to play our sorriest opponent at homecoming, to make sure we win. But Ricky Don made three touchdowns and was feeling full of himself. I sat in his truck and waited while he showered and cleaned up, and then we went to the gym to the dance.

  The homecoming dance theme was the Blue Grotto, and the cheerleaders and pep club had decorated it like an underwater cave, with blue lights, fishnets, and plastic lobsters and crabs. The crepe-paper flowers at all the tables had been sprayed with Tabu, and they smelled so loud you had to strain to get a whiff of the sweat socks. Ricky Don had even washed the Wildroot Creme Oil out of his hair, and it was soft and fell over his eye in a wave, just the way I liked it.

  Baby’s boyfriend, Bean Boggs, was the leader of the Draggons, the band that played, and he looked really cool up on the stage with his Beatles haircut and leather pants, like Mick Jagger wore, and little round rose-colored sunglasses. The Rolling Stones were their idols, and they sounded almost as good as them on “Satisfaction.”

  After we all wore ourselves out dancing to the fast songs, they played “Theme from A Summer Place,” which always turns my knees to jelly. Ricky Don took me into his arms and breathed on my neck. It just about undid me. I begin to think that there might be a sensitive side to Ricky Don, after all. As soon as the crowd started to thin out, we got into the truck and headed for the lake.

  —

  The moon was full, and the water was still and smooth as satin. Little fish came up to sniff the surface and made bubbles that went out in rings and rippled the moonlight. It was cold, but we had the truck windows fogged up in about five minutes. Ricky Don had decided that tonight was going to be the big night. No more wrestling like fifteen-year-olds. We were going to actually do it.After careful consideration and a half hour of hot, sticky kisses, I thought it might not be such a bad idea. I was going to be eighteen in a few months, and in the fall I would be a college girl. In the back of my mind, I was afraid I might go to hell, but it was pretty far back.

  Ricky Don managed to maneuver his pants down in spite of the gearshift, and then went digging through my slips. Under the best of circumstances it would have been a nearly impossible job, and these were not exactly the best of circumstances.

  He still had the same old truck he had planned on driving off Nehi Mountain—a ’53 Plymouth—and one of the springs stuck up through the vinyl seat cover and poked me in my back. Besides being uncomfortable, I was scared it would tear my dress, which poofed out and filled up the truck cab. I had to fight the slips, which kept billowing up in my face. It was hard to focus on romance. But Ricky Don was one determined fellow. He finally found what he was looking for, and I felt something hard punching in the general direction of my you-know-what, but it was missing the mark and hitting the bone. I tried to tell him, but the slips muffled my voice. Or maybe he was just concentrating too hard to hear.

  Then all of a sudden, Ricky Don screamed. He jumped off, flung open the truck door, and grabbed his Jockey shorts, holding them in front of himself. I was a little confused, and by the time I got the dress under control and wedged myself out of the truck, he was down by the water on his knees. He was crying and carrying on like he had just had his weenie lopped off or something.

  “Ricky Don, what’s the matter?”

  “It tore. Goddang! I’m going to bleed to death! It might be broke.”

  It felt like a cold hand went down my neck, and I remembered a book we girls had found buried back in the dusty stacks of the school library. It had a copyright date of 1896 and was so old that all the lettering had faded from the cover. I can’t believe anybody knew it was there, or it would have been burned. It was called Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine.It was a disgusting book, with drawings and photographs of freaks—like Siamese twins, three-legged men, and women who had 135-pound ovarian tumors and things, but one of the worst chapters was on wounds of the penis. We giggled at the horrible stories of men breaking their penises or having them bitten off by donkeys, and thought somebody in the 1800s had a fine imagination, but in this split second, standing on the bank of the lake, with Ricky Don on his knees howling in pain, all the case histories in that book came back to me.

  I looked down at my white satin dress. It was covered with blood, and I realized that my legs were sticky with it. It seems that Ricky Don had never been circumcised, and whatever of mine he was trying to stick his tallywhacker into was too small and tough, and peeled the foreskin back until it split. He was a mess. And so was I. Why oh why didn’t we wait to try this maneuver on a summer night when I was wearing jeans? If I went home in this shape, I would be dead. Mama and Daddy would kill me for sure. I might as well pack my bags and get on the bus.

  The only sensible thing to do was throw myself into the lake. I took a running jump and dove in. Fortunately, there were no logs or snakes where I landed. The water was so cold it knocked the breath out of me, and I gasped for air, bobbing up to keep my feet from miring down in the muck, which was a thick slime of dead leaves and fish poop and Lord knows what else. I treaded water for a minute and then took off, trying to swim, but after a few yards the dress and slips were soaked full of water and started to pull me under. I was headed for the bottom when Ricky Don
jumped in and hauled me out. He was cussing like I had never heard anybody cuss before, and when we finally lay heaving on the bank, I thought he was going to pass out.

  “I think it’s time we called it quits, Highpockets,” he said when he got his breath back. “I just don’t think I’m man enough for you. I’m gonna wind up dead for sure, one way or the other.”

  All I could do was nod. Suppose he had really bled to death? It would be my fault. What would they put on the death certificate? Murder weapon: a too-tight you-know-what.

  “Take me to Baby’s house, will you, Ricky Don? I’ll spend the night with her, and think up something to tell Mama and Daddy in the morning.”

  —

  Ricky Don stuck by his word and never did ask me out again—big surprise—and as far as I know, nobody found out about what happened. Except Baby and Bean, of course, who was at Baby’s house when Ricky Don dropped me off. Or dumped me out, would be more like it. You don’t want to imagine the look on Baby’s face when I dragged in through the door, my satin dress soaked with lake water and blood and my hair looking like the business end of a mop. It took Bean and me both to hold her back and keep her from getting in the car and going after Ricky Don. I don’t know what she thought she was going to do if she caught him, but if it came right down to it, I would put my money on Baby to win that fight. Or any fight, for that matter.

  Finally, after nearly having to sit on her, I got her to settle down so I could get into a hot tub. I told her I was afraid I’d get pneumonia—not much of a stretch—and she made Bean go home, which he didn’t much like, so she could fuss over me.

  We got up early the next morning and went back out there to look for my earrings, which I had lost. Although they were nowhere to be found, we did run across Ricky Don’s bloody shorts. We wrapped them around a big rock and threw them far out into the middle of the lake. Hopefully, they are still on the bottom, unless some fish ate them. Wouldn’t it be wild if somebody caught a big catfish, cut it open, and found Ricky Don’s Jockey shorts?