Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  When we got back to her house, Baby’s mother had somehow cleaned my dress and was pressing it with a warm iron. If you weren’t in a bright light, it looked almost as good as new. I don’t know how she did it, and she never asked—or even said one word to me about what had happened. But I ate second helpings of her cooking with a big smile after that, no matter what it was.

  —

  Anyhow, the point to this story is that more than three years later, I am still a virgin. Of course, I’ve been out with several guys since then, but I never let anybody else get close enough to get maimed. They don’t believe me when I tell them it is for their own good, and unhappily, nobody has lasted more than a couple of months. Sometimes, to tell you the truth, I get scared I will wind up an old maid, like Miss Oatsie at our church, who plays the piano for Sunday school and lives by herself with a pack of cats. I would hate that. I don’t really like cats.

  —

  The astronauts finally walked on the moon. It was nearly eleven o’clock at night, and all of us were pretty worn-out. President Nixon called them on the phone, all the way to the moon, and told them how proud he was. I guess it was worth it, all those hours of watching. It was, after all, pretty exciting. I mean, Star Trekwas great, but this was real.Anyhow, it was something to tell my kids one day.

  Just as the president said, “The heavens have become part of man’s world,” Lucille’s water broke. Right in the living room, all over Mama’s Persian rug. Lucille just stood there and stared at it gushing out, like it was happening to somebody else. Aunt Rubynell ran to get towels, and Jim Floyd danced around, saying, “Honey, what can I do?”

  Mama said, “Jim Floyd, what you can do is go get the car and get this girl to the hospital. She’s fixing to have the baby right here in this living room.”

  I had never seen him move so fast. He took off running, and we got Lucille’s stuff together.

  She seemed real embarrassed. “I’m sorry, y’all. I thought it was all the ice tea I drunk. Aren’t you supposed to have pains or something?”

  Mama and the aunts laughed. “Don’t worry, Lucille,” Aunt Juanita said. “You’ll have a pain or two. I promise.” They seemed to be having a great time.

  Jim Floyd was out front honking the horn like a crazy man, and they finally got Lucille out the door. The aunts and Mama went with her, but I had to go to work.

  It is so strange to think of Lucille having a baby. She’s younger than me—just a kid herself. I probably won’t ever even have a boyfriend—at least not as long as I have to peel these stupid onions. Only a little over a month left until school starts, and I can quit this job.

  I wondered if the astronauts would be able to sleep up there on the moon. On my way out to the car, I stood in the yard and looked up at it. It looked like the same old moon—silver and cool. But it would never be the same again. There were men up there, walking on its face.

  I pulled out of the driveway and headed to the pickle plant, wondering what Baby had done all day. I had tried to call her a time or two during the afternoon, but her mother said she was out, and then when I finally reached her a little while before I left, she didn’t really want to talk, which was not like her at all. Baby said that she hadn’t watched the moon landing; she just spent the day thinking about Carlene.

  That wasn’t really weird or anything. G. Dub had said the whole town was in shock over the murder, and I imagined people would be locking their doors tonight—it was the first murder in Sweet Valley in years, or maybe ever. It was just a little surprising that Baby took it so hard. This morning when I dropped her off after we left the Deep South, I watched her through my rearview mirror and she didn’t even go into the house, just stood in the road staring like a zombie or something until I got out of sight.

  Well, I’d talk to her about it tonight. At a stop sign, I reached over and locked the passenger door. No point in taking the chance of somebody jumping into the car. You never know where the killer might be lurking out in the dark.

  5.Baby

  The morning Ricky Don told them about Carlene, Baby stood in front of her house and watched Cherry drive away in the old green VW. Almost in a trance, she stared as the car boiled up dust and got smaller; stood there a long time after it disappeared around a bend, heading toward town. She wanted to go into the house, but it felt like her feet had grown roots that dug in and held her to the dried-out ground. She was so tired she couldn’t move. The sun seemed to ooze over her head and run down her arms and legs, burning like honey poured from a melting pot. Gnats whined around her face, drinking from the sweat drops on her upper lip. She was too tired to brush them away.

  By an act of will, she managed to go inside, take a shower, and get into bed, but instead of passing into sweet oblivion from fatigue, Baby lay awake. Every time she shut them, her eyelids popped open as if they were attached to springs. Every noise made her jump. It was hard enough to sleep in that house during the night, much less in the daytime.

  Baby was the oldest of seven children, and it seemed like all of her life there had always been a baby crying or somebody screaming. She was the only girl for eight years, until, after three younger brothers, her sister Ana Pilar was born. Pilar was fourteen now, and acted much too grown-up for her age. Baby called her the Pill. She was already sneaking out to neck with boys, and more than once Baby had smelled beer and cigarettes on her breath. Manang and Tatang were oblivious, but they were oblivious to most things that went on right under their noses.

  The brothers, Rosario Ronaldo—or Rocky, as he was known to his friends—Demetrio—Denny—and Juan Jesus, who liked to be called J.C., were nineteen, seventeen, and sixteen. They were always off in their own world, using the house mainly to change clothes and grab food from time to time.

  Denny and J.C. lived and breathed old motorcycles and cars. If they weren’t working on them, they were roaring around the mountain roads or racing down by the river in the middle of the night. One boy or the other nearly always had a cast on some body part.

  Rocky spent all his time practicing with the Draggons, the band Bean Boggs had started back in high school. Rocky thought Baby’s boyfriend was the coolest guy in school, and since he was always hanging around their house, Rocky kept on at him until Bean taught him to play the bass guitar. His one ambition was to join the band, which was just beginning to get a few paying gigs when Bean was drafted in ’66 and sent to Tigerland, the make-believe jungle village in Louisiana where they trained the troops who were headed to Vietnam.

  While he was gone, Rocky practiced day and night until the whole family thought they would lose their minds, but when Bean got back from the army early in ’69, he took Rocky into the Draggons. They had plans to go to Memphis and make a record as soon as they got the money together; they’d try their luck at Sun Records, where Elvis got his start. Or maybe they would head out to L.A., where the Doors had hit it big. They knew they would make it one way or the other. It would just take time and luck.

  The last two of Baby’s siblings were the little girls Carmia Concepcion and Anselma Asuncion—Connie and Sunnie—still practically babies, only two and three. Baby hoped to God that Manang and Tatang were through. There was something embarrassing about a woman and man in their forties still having children.

  But that was just one more thing for Baby to be embarrassed about. It wasn’t easy being Oriental in Arkansas. It hadn’t been all that many years ago that the whole Japanese-American population was forced into internment camps—one of which was not too far away, down at Jerome in the Arkansas delta—for the duration of World War II, and when Baby’s family had first gotten here, most people thought they were Japanese. Now that the Vietnam War was exploding, everyone thought they were Vietnamese. There was no telling these ignorant rednecks anything.

  Maybe being Oriental in Arkansas was better than being colored, but there were days when Baby would have traded places with any of the ten or twelve colored kids she went to high school with. At least they were born in America
. Their mothers and fathers spoke the language. It was horrible that they suffered discrimination from the white world, but they had their own world they could retreat into. They had their juke joints and barbecue shacks, their blues and jazz, their own churches, and their gospel music. Their culture was uniquely American, patched together from the days of slavery to a Jim Crow society that begrudged them a seat on the bus or even a cool drink of water from a fountain. They had a shared misery and a shared joy that bound them together and made them part of something bigger than they would ever be separately.

  Baby had only her family—one small unit—and they were foreign, even to each other. Manang and Tatang tried to maintain their Filipino culture, but it was an ongoing job, what with their kids, who hated that everything was different at their house. Food, for example. None of their friends’ homes had the smells that saturated the Moreno home, like minced garlic, stir-fried with vegetables and shrimp or chicken. Manang cooked the parts of animals that most people threw away. Nobody in Arkansas ate like that. Here, everything—vegetables, meat, and fish—was dipped in flour or meal and fried in lard. Baby and her brothers tried to get Manang to fix food like all their friends ate. She didn’t understand, but she tried. She bought Spam, but then cut it into cubes and stir-fried it with mung-bean sprouts; made hamburgers with sweet-and-sour sauce and served them on a bed of rice with steamed broccoli. She really didn’t get it. No matter how hard they tried, the kids couldn’t get away from their roots—or accept them, either.

  Before it was moved, there used to be a little movie theater on Main Street in Sweet Valley, called the Roxy. The white people sat downstairs, and the colored people sat in the balcony. The first time Baby went there alone with Rocky—they couldn’t have been more than nine and six—the woman at the ticket window didn’t know where to put them.

  “What are you?” the woman asked her. “You ain’t white, but you ain’t exactly colored, either.”

  Rocky didn’t like the woman, and was so afraid she wouldn’t let them see Hopalong Cassidy that he threw a kicking fit. To shut him up, the woman let them sit down front with the white people, so from then on they were more or less part of the white crowd. But it was humiliating.

  “What are you?”

  Baby had never figured it out. Arkansas had been her home for practically her whole life. In a lot of ways, she was southern to the core. She spoke the language with a thick Arkansas accent and dressed like any other girl in Sweet Valley—better than most. Everyone liked her a lot. But in her mind she would never really fit in here any more than she would if she were to go back to the Philippines.

  —

  Baby tossed on the hot sheets. The sun came in through pin-size holes in the green window shade. One shaft hit her right in the eye. Manang was sizzling something in a wok, and Connie and Sunnie chased each other through the house, screaming at the top of their lungs. Cartoons blasted from the old black-and-white TV. Beany and Cecil. “Ship ahoy, Cecil! I see a whale off the starboard deck!”

  Baby put the pillow over her head and got a powerful whiff of onions. There was no way to get rid of the stink. Even after a scalding-hot bath and half a bottle of Jergens lotion, her hands smelled of onions. She was sweating. Her sweat smelled like onions. The old electric fan in the corner was doing its best, but it just smeared the hot air around.

  As she twisted on the damp sheet, she fought back the image of a bloated body caught on a trotline hook right in the very lake that lay outside her door. What had happened to Carlene? Why would somebody do something like that? This was Sweet Valley, Arkansas—not New York City, or even Little Rock. And why did it have to be Carlene, who never hurt anybody? Baby knew Carlene a lot better than Cherry thought she did. Baby felt guilty about hiding things from Cherry. She loved her more than anyone in the world. She would stick her arm into the fire for Cherry, and they were as close as sisters in a lot of ways, but there was a line between them that Cherry was not even aware of—and if Baby had her way, Cherry would never know what was on the other side. Cherry was so good and honest and trusting that sometimes Baby trembled for her, wanted to protect her. Cherry had been raised in the Pentecostal Holiness Church by strict, loving parents, and in spite of her backseat wrestling with Ricky Don Sweet in high school, she didn’t know a whole lot about life.

  Baby had had to grow up fast. Manang still couldn’t speak English with any degree of competency, so from the time she learned to read and write, Baby more or less ran the house. She wrote the household checks and took care of the books for her father, who made a spare living running the boat dock and fish store, a tidy shack built next to their house on the edge of the lake. It was attached to a long rickety pier that stretched out over the green water and had several small rowboats tied to it, waiting to be rented out for an afternoon’s fishing.

  In front of the store, under a tin awning that offered shade in the summer—mostly to old men who liked to sit and swap stories—were a couple of picnic tables, two benches, and a red soda chest full of Cokes and Dr Peppers, which the Moreno children were forbidden to touch. Above the door was a sign that said MORENO’S FRESH FISH AND BAIT in green letters under a picture of a bottle of Coke and the flowing script that said: Drink Coca-Cola.

  Inside, on the cool concrete floors, an ice-filled case was laden with fresh catfish, perch, crappie, and bream that a housewife could buy or a fisherman could take home if he came back empty-handed. Underneath sat big buckets of bait that smelled dank and earthy. There were shelves stocked with picnic foods, like potato chips and sandwich makings, and a case of candy that was also off-limits to the family.

  With the vegetable garden and the fish, they got along all right, but all the kids had to go to work as soon as they were able. Rocky and Denny didn’t go to college. J.C. probably wouldn’t, either. Pilar might if she could get her head on straight. But Baby was different. She was the valedictorian of her high school class, because she had worked harder than anyone else. And the kids liked her in spite of it. She had perfected an act of laughing at herself before anyone else had the chance. She told funny stories about things her parents would do—like the time her mother was drying fish and a cat snatched one and ran away. Her mother had thrown a rock at the cat, and not only did she rescue the fish, they had cat stew for dinner.

  The kids all laughed, but not many except Cherry ever came to visit. Certainly, not to eat. Baby made them believe she didn’t care. She almost made herself believe it. She had gotten a full scholarship to DuVall University, and next year she would graduate. Like Cherry, she wanted to be a painter, but you had to be realistic. She would become a teacher, paint in her spare time. Get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak, and go somewhere else. Anywhere that didn’t smell like fish and onions.

  —

  Baby couldn’t take the noise and heat any longer and got up. Ten o’clock. Less than three hours of sleep. Her eyes were swollen. She stood again under a hot shower and let the water burn her face, burn the puffiness away. Toweling herself, she sniffed her water-pruned fingers. Onions.

  Tatang had brought in a string of frogs, and Manang was cooking them for noontime dinner. Fried frogs’ legs, rice, and egg rolls. The legs jumped around in the hot wok like they were trying to escape and chase down their bodies. Manang clamped the lid down just as a pair made it to the edge, and they fell back into the sizzling oil.

  Sunnie and Connie had taken the little feet out of the garbage and were dipping them into Baby’s good oil paints, making cadmium-yellow frog footprints on the wallpaper.

  “Sunnie! You and Connie get out of those paints! I’m going to skin you and put you in the wok with those frogs! Those paints cost money!”

  In answer, Sunnie grabbed a tube of burnt sienna and squeezed the whole thing out onto her legs. She smeared it onto her shorts and her face and her sister Connie, who was trying to grab it away from her.

  “Manang! Do something with them!”

  Manang looked up with an uninterested glance and kept fight
ing the frogs’ legs. “Clean them, Baby. Dinner soon ready.”

  One under each arm, Baby carried the howling, thrashing girls into the bathtub and scrubbed them with turpentine, then with soap. It took three or four washes and a lot of wrestling to get most of the paint off. By then, her rage had spent itself.

  Now the two of them sat at the table like cherubs, their skin red and rosy—tender, if not nearly burned to the second degree—eating the delicate pieces of fragrant greenish-white meat.

  Baby helped Manang with the dishes and, leaving them all glued to the TV watching the astronauts approach the moon, she went for a walk along the edge of the lake.

  —

  Sweet Valley Lake was man-made, built back in 1950. They dammed up the Arkansas River and diverted the runoff to the low country outside of town. It was stocked with game fish, and Tatang had opened up the boat dock and bait shop the year they moved here. It was funny to see live trees rising out of the water when the lake was first built, but by now the trees had died and all that remained were jagged black stumps. The fishing was good, and so was the boating, if you kept a careful watch. Some of the kids even water-skied, but if you weren’t good at stump-jumping, you could split yourself wide open hitting one at thirty miles an hour.

  Not to mention the fact that the lake was swarming with water moccasins. Rocky had once told Baby that water moccasins nested in big wads pretzeled around each other out in the lake, and he knew for a fact of one skier who fell and landed right in the middle of a nest. When they pulled him out, the boy had swelled up to three times his normal size and was so full of poison that his body turned green before they could even get him to the funeral home to embalm him.