“Or, say your buddy has a big nose. You focus on it, and it gets to be the biggest nose you have ever seen. All you can see is this big nose waving around attached to a tiny face. Sometimes, you can even make somebody’s face turn into somebody else’s. I remember one time when I was with this guy, we dropped acid, and I stared at his face until it turned into George Washington, and then it slowly changed to Abraham Lincoln, and then I could swear it was John Kennedy, big as life sitting there across the couch from me. It went on all night like that.”
“That seems kind of scary.”
“It can be. When you feel fear, it is a fear like you have never experienced before.”
“Why do you keep doing it if it makes you afraid?”
“It’s not that simple. It also makes you believe that you are the most brilliant human being God ever made. You can feel every single nerve in your body. You hear the valves in your heart opening and closing, the blood gushing through your veins. You are exquisitely, painfully aware of yourself and the miracle of life. Even your fear is alive and beautiful. You are a super-human being who can dive into the fear and emerge on the other side. You are the master of the world. There has never been anything like it. It makes you feel a little bit like God.”
I said a quick little prayer for God not to take what he was saying too seriously. “How long does it last?”
“It varies. A few hours. Sometimes more. Sometimes less.”
“Have you done other drugs?” I couldn’t think of the names of any at the moment, but I’m sure he knew all of them. “Have you ever smoked pot?”
“Sure. Haven’t you?”
“No.”
In spite of being an art major, I never really knew anybody who did drugs. Or if they did, they didn’t let me know. Although, of course, I’m sure there were plenty who did. A lot of the kids at school were from out of state. There was even a guy from New Jersey. He probably smoked pot.
“Is that anything like acid?”
Tripp laughed. Not in a mean way, but it made me feel like he thought I was maybe a little ignorant.
“Oh, no. It just makes you feel nice and relaxed. Mellow. No worse than a couple of beers. Would you like to try it? Smoke a joint? There’s nobody up here.” He started to reach into his pocket.
“No! Are you crazy? You can go to jail for that! You mean you have a joint in your pocket right now?” Oh, Lord. What had I gotten myself mixed up in?
“Okay, okay! I’m not going to light up!” He held his hands up in the air like I had pulled a gun on him. “You really are uptight, aren’t you?”
“I’m not uptight. I just can’t see spending the rest of my life down at the women’s prison at Tucker, that’s all. You can do what you want to. Just wait until I’m not around.” I couldn’t believe he had come to church with a joint in his pocket. Ricky Don and his sixth sense.
“I guess you think we’re pretty hickey here in Arkansas,” I continued. “I’m sure San Francisco is much hipper, with Haight Ashbury and the flower children and all. Why did you even come here? Why didn’t you go to Berkeley?”
“I was at Berkeley, but I got bored spending my best young years in classrooms studying stuff I would never use in my life, like chemistry and philosophy, so I dropped out and spent a couple of years in Nam. For the excitement. To find out what all the noise was about.” He smiled a crooked smile to himself.
“Fellow I met in training camp at Fort Benning was from here. He thought this was the most beautiful spot on the planet. Kept talking about Sweet Valley Lake and Nehi Mountain and the red airplane lights and the river, how the people were the nicest in the whole world. He had planned to go to DuVall when he came back home, and eventually to law school at the University of Arkansas.
“When I got back from Nam, I was ready for a change of scenery—someplace smaller, with good air. Sweet Valley sounded like the right place to go. I felt like there was nothing left for me in California. My folks are both dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” He took a ragged breath. “They were killed in an auto accident while I was in Nam. That’s ironic, isn’t it? I was the one who was supposed to be in danger. I was the one dodging bullets out in the rice paddies. They were just driving home with a carload of groceries when a cement truck ran a red light and totaled them.”
He paused. I didn’t know what to say to comfort him, but I felt like I needed to say something to break the silence.
“Don’t you have any brothers and sisters?”
“No. I’m a spoiled-rotten only child.”
“Me too.” I said. He picked up my hand and kissed it. And forgot to let go. There was that electric current again, running from his hand up my arm.
“Anyhow, I felt like there was no home to go back to. So here I am, on the GI Bill, Uncle Sam paying for my education. Couldn’t be simpler.”
“Who was the boy from here?”
“Jerry Golden.”
“Oh my gosh. You must know, then . . .”
“He was in my platoon. I was with him when it happened.”
That was a stunner. “You’re kidding.”
“I wouldn’t kid about something like that.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say you were kidding. I just meant that . . . how did it happen? If you don’t mind talking about it.”
For a minute I thought he wasn’t going to say anything; then he started talking.
“We were on patrol in Son My, which was a heavy booby-trap area in Nam. We’d been out in the field for a couple of months with no break, and if you want to know what that’s like in the rainy season, just imagine jumping in the river wearing all your clothes and a seventy-pound backpack, then walking twenty miles through mud that sucks at your boots and packs on the bottom so that every step you take is like dragging ten pounds on each foot. Your muscles burn like fire. Each step is torture. Then before you start to get dry, a cloud opens up and dumps a load of water on you and you’re soaked again. You go to sleep wet and wake up wet. We’d never take our clothes or shoes off. When we finally did take off our shoes and socks, the skin would come off with them. More GIs were crippled from jungle rot than anything. Sometimes the blood would squish out and leave tracks.
“On this particular day, we had humped more than five klicks through the worst terrain you can imagine—wet and muddy, foliage so thick that visibility was never more than twenty feet. And since it was known to be a bad trap area, you couldn’t relax and let down your guard for even a minute.
“Then the guy right in front of me stepped on a mine. I heard the noise, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on or why the air all of a sudden had a ruby-red mist hanging in it. But shortly I could see that the guy had gotten his right leg blown off. What was left of it looked like hamburger. He lay there screaming, and a medic ran over and applied a tourniquet as best he could. I was operating the radio and called in for a dust-off, then I yelled for Jerry to come help me pick the guy up and take him to the LZ, which was a klick or so away.”
I wasn’t sure what a klick or an LZ was, but it didn’t matter. I got the gist. Tripp went on, lost in some other place, some other language.
“I heard the Hueys overhead, which is the sweetest song you ever heard in the jungle, but before Jerry made it over to where we were, he hit a trip wire and let off a Bouncing Betty. Those are the worst, because they jump up and detonate right at crotch level. If you make it, you have no legs and no balls. It was lucky Jerry didn’t make it. We tried to get him on the slick, but he was already dead.”
His voice had gotten thick. I didn’t say a word.
He shook his head. Picked up a small rock and threw it out over the trees. It racketed through the leaves of the treetops and hit with a soft thud.
“You have no idea what it’s like to be in a place where there’s nothing you can trust. Every step you take might set off a trap. The VC have been known to booby-trap lighters they’ve taken off dead Americans and leave them on bars
. They blow off some guy’s hand when he.s having a drink. Even the kids, the ones who gang around the soldiers looking for a handout—they might be working for the Cong. You know, sometimes the VC actually tape bombs to the kids’ bodies, and they blow up right in the middle of a bunch of GIs who are giving them candy bars. The women who wash your clothes in the daytime might take a gun to you at night. Life is cheap in Nam.”
He threw a couple more rocks.
“Did you know about . . . Carlene?” I asked.
“One of the things I was going to do was look her up. I can’t believe I never got the chance. Unbelievable, isn’t it? Jerry talked about her a lot. If it had been me, I’d never have left and joined the army. But he thought he needed to get away and start over.”
“Did he say anything about their baby?”
Tripp turned and looked at me.
“Their baby? I don’t think he was the father. He said they had never actually gone all the way. That’s not something a guy admits to his buddy if it isn’t true.”
I felt a little guilty. All of us had just assumed it was his and that he was lying. “Look, you didn’t know how close they were. They were with each other every single minute—”
“All I know,” he interrupted, “is what Jerry told me. But I know he loved her. She wrote to him every day. He told me that he had found out some things and he was going to marry her when he got out, and adopt the baby. After he got out of Nam and they got married, he was going to go to DuVall on the GI Bill. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m going there.”
He looked out into the dark, starry sky and was quiet again.
I must say, the story had taken a little of the bloom off the night. But I’m glad he told me. It made me feel more at ease with him. If Tripp was that close friends with Jerry Golden, then he was practically one of us.
I leaned down and kissed him. Just to show him how sorry I was. And to show him that I wasn’t a square about the acid and pot. Big mistake. He pulled me down on top of him, and I felt the hardest bulge in his jeans I had ever encountered. I had to do something fast to stop the wild horses that were dragging me away.
I jumped up and ran to a path that angled down the cliff, dusting some gravel off my butt as I went. Miniskirts were not made for sitting on the ground. Or for protecting your virginity.
Down the path, over to the right, was a big boulder we called Sweet Rock, which leaned into and almost touched the cliff. The space between was called Fat Man’s Squeeze, for the obvious reason. I ran down to it and called over my shoulder. “I bet you can’t get through this!”
He chased me and nearly caught up just before I started through the crack in the rock. But not quite. I slipped through Fat Man’s Squeeze and waited on the other side in a little alcove under the bluff.
Standing there, it hit me—I don’t know what I could have been thinking. Now we would be totally out of sight in a cozy, dark nook.
Cherry, you idiot, I said to myself. You’re asking for trouble. But another part of me knew that already.
The moonlight was pretty bright, but it still was hard to see down under the rocks. Tripp seemed to be having some trouble getting through the crevice.
“I’m going to have to wait a minute before I can make it through!”
Great. It would be just my luck if Tripp broke his pecker in Fat Man’s Squeeze. That would make my record perfect. He flicked his Zippo and lit up the rocks, twisted around, and finally made it through.
The lighter flickered on the rock face. He glanced up at it, then stopped and stared. “What is that?”
I turned. In big red letters, it said IDA RED IS DEAD!! The writing shone in the flicker of the flame; shiny, fresh paint.
“Who’s Ida Red?” Tripp asked. He touched the paint as if it might come off, wet and red, on his hand. It was dry, but it couldn’t have been there long. A feeling of panic washed over me, like some killer had written it. I had to get out of there.
Without a word, I ran back through the Squeeze and up the trail, Tripp right behind me. He didn’t have as much trouble getting through it this time. We got to the car just as Bean and Baby were starting to yodel. Tripp yanked the door open and we jumped in. He gunned the motor and backed out, spinning gravel. Baby and Bean were pulling on their clothes, falling onto the floor.
“What’s got into y’all? Slow down!” Baby was flung back against the seat.
“Baby, somebody painted something on the rocks down under Fat Man’s Squeeze. I don’t think it’s been there for very long.”
Bean pulled on his socks; he looked a little put out. “I wish y’all would give a fellow some warning next time you get scared by a sign somebody painted.”
Baby seemed a little on edge, too, although I can’t really blame her.
“It was probably just kids messing around. Why would something like that scare you, Cherry? What did it say?”
“It said, ‘Ida Red is dead.’ It was in bloodred paint. The letters just screamed at us. Who is Ida Red?”
There was a numb little silence. Then Baby said, “I think maybe that was a nickname Carlene had. It seems like she told me that when we worked together out at the restaurant.”
10.Ida Red
From the time she was born, Carlene was not a baby you rushed to pick up and cuddle or speak to in baby talk. She would squirm when her mother rocked her; she was prickly and serious, sturdy and pale, with freckles sprinkled on her skin like nutmeg on eggnog. Her hair looked like a lit match out in the wind; her eyes, an odd shade of pea-green-gray. She would look deep inside you with those eyes, stare until you looked away first, feeling somehow nervous and guilty. She herself never appeared to be nervous in any way but one: She bit her fingernails. She slowly and methodically gnawed her nails deep into the quick, chewed them so furiously that they never grew. They remained child-size pink crescents embedded in the fleshy ends of her fingers.
She grew up in a trailer on the other side of the lake from Baby’s house. Her father was a strapping, good-looking man named Carl Moore. He worked at the sawmill but never seemed to make enough money to take care of his family. He wasn’t stupid, exactly, but he was a good ol’ boy who never was too sure of the joke—whether he should laugh, or if they were making fun of him and he should get angry. So he usually got angry, just in case.
Carlene didn’t get her red hair from her father. Or her mother. There was a lot of talk, and of course nobody knew for sure, but Alfred Lynn Tucker’s daddy, Walter, had bright red hair the exact same color as Carlene’s. The same color as Alfred Lynn’s. Before Alfred Lynn inherited the job, Walter had been the night foreman at the Atlas pickle plant for twenty years, and Carlene’s mother, Frannie Moore, had worked there nights the summer before Carlene was born.
The evidence was not enough to hang anybody. Nobody ever actually saw the two of them doing anything, although he used to tease her and make her laugh a lot. But Walter teased all the women at the plant. Even after he got older and his barrel chest became a potbelly, he had a way about him that the women liked. Maybe it was because he really liked them—all of them. It didn’t matter if they were old or young, skinny or fat. Even the women packing pickles who had been married for forty years would squeal when Walter pinched them on their broad rear ends and, with pretended outrage, slap his hand while their cheeks turned red with memories of slipping out behind the vats on long-ago hot summer nights.
No, his working at the pickle plant with her mother was not proof that Walter Tucker was Carlene’s father. Sooner or later, everyone in Sweet Valley ended up working there.
But Carl Moore didn’t need much to fire his suspicion. Frannie Jones was a fey Welsh beauty from the Ridge, far back in the mountain woods, with wild-blackberry hair and eyes the color of cigarette smoke. Like smoke, she always seemed to be slipping through his fingers. If she said yes to a date, there was no guarantee she would be there when he went to pick her up. Or if they actually made it to the movies, she was likely to go to the concession stand
for popcorn and never come back to her seat.
He married her thinking that she would finally be all his and would turn into a normal woman who made the beds and washed the dishes, cooked his dinner and sewed his shirts. She married him because she was seventeen and grown—too old for her widowed mama, with five other kids, to take care of—and she didn’t know what else to do with her life. That, and the fact that Carl wanted her more than any other boy ever had. He didn’t give up no matter what she did to him. That’s hard for a woman to resist.
Frannie couldn’t wait to get away from the noise and mess of her family, and she thought marriage would be more freedom, not less; not the unrelenting closeness of a tiny trailer, the sink full of greasy dishwater and the smell of a man’s bowels first thing in the morning—a man who was so jealous that he watched her every move. She couldn’t even take a bath without him checking on her, or go to see her mother without him being there, too. Sometimes she felt as if she were smothering; then she had to get out of that trailer or go stark raving mad.
Even on nights when they were sitting and quietly listening to music on the radio, sooner or later Carl would turn away to glance out the window or fish in his pocket for a cigarette, and when he turned back to her, she would be gone.
She might have gone to bed without saying a word. Or into the kitchen for a piece of pie. Or she might not be there at all. Then he would search through the trailer, calling her name, and run outdoors to find her swimming naked in the lake. Or standing in the yard staring at the stars. Once, she stripped off her dress and danced with the mailboxes; waving the filmy nylon dress in the air like Isadora Duncan’s scarf, she floated up and down the road, moving to some fairy song playing in her head.
“Frannie!” Carl called out. “What’s the matter with you? Get ahold of yourself, woman! Get some clothes on and get on in the house!”
“Oh, Carl. You’re no fun. Come out with me! Don’t be such an old grump-bum!”
Windchill Summer Page 9