Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  “I mean it, Frannie. You’re acting crazy. Come on, now. Get in the house.”

  That time, she gave in and draped her dress over her shoulders, put her hand into his and walked home with him, as if they were lovers out for a stroll. But another time she might run from him and hide in the woods. Then there was nothing for him to do except go back in the trailer, bang his head against the wall, and go to bed. Long after he was asleep, she would creep under the covers, cold and damp, full of the smells of lake and leaves and moss and woods, and curl up as small as she could, against his back.

  He would turn and hold her, then, until she fell asleep, and listen all night to the sound of her breathing, afraid that if he went to sleep, she would be gone again.

  —

  When she was born with a head of bright red hair, it was evident that Carlene Ida Moore didn’t look anything like her black-haired daddy. He told the nurses at the hospital that there had been some mistake and accused them of switching the babies. He threw such a cussing fit that they had to call the guard.

  After they brought her home, he would sit and stare at her, trying to see something of himself in her, and she would stare right back at him with her old baby eyes.

  “What was that story your old grandma Ida Jones used to tell, Frannie, about the elves back in Wales taking somebody’s baby and leaving one of their elf babies in its bed? What was it they were called?”

  “Changelings, Carl. Why’d you want to know that for?”

  “I think they done it to us.” He looked at the baby’s solemn face. “A changeling,” he told her. “That’s what you are. An elf changeling.”

  He used to laugh at Frannie’s grandma for believing in the little people, but now it all made sense. The elves had taken his baby from the hospital in the middle of the night and left this red-haired elf-baby in exchange. Because if it wasn’t that, his wife was a cheat and this baby belonged to Walter Tucker. If he had ever taken a biology class, he might have known that the gene for red hair is a maverick that can disappear for years and show up a few generations down the line. He or Frannie might have had a red-haired great-great-grandfather or something. But Carl knew nothing about that. He was sure the baby belonged to Walter Tucker, and it ate him up.

  “Carl, that’s the silliest thing I ever heard. Of course Carlene is your baby. Why would I have anything to do with that old man Walter Tucker? Hold her now while I fix dinner.”

  “I’ve never seen hair like this on nobody in my family, Frannie, nor yours.”

  He leaned down and whispered to the baby, who looked up at him with her big, stormy eyes. “You ain’t no part of me, you little red elf changeling, and you didn’t have no business being named after me. We should have just called you after your great-grandma, that old Welsh witch Ida Jones. That’s what I’m going to call you. From now on, you’re not Carlene—you’re Ida Red, the changeling.”

  And he never called her anything else.

  11.Cherry

  Ten o’clock in the morning. The phone rang. I need eight hours of sleep, can function pretty well on six, but three drags me out of the deepest part of the sleep cycle and I have a hard time coming to, or even figuring out where I am. It rang three more times, and I jumped out of bed and fell flat on the floor. My left leg was asleep from my foot to my hip, like it wasn’t even there. I tried to stand up, but it was like my ankle was made out of rubber, and I fell down again.

  The phone kept ringing. I crawled across the floor and pulled the hateful thing off the table by the cord.

  “Hello!” I said in a mean voice.

  Lucille. She was all excited. “They brought her in this morning. Jim Floyd is going to help with the embalming, and I have to go down and do the hair and makeup. I need you to take care of Tiffany LaDawn for me. Mama and the aunts have gone up to Morrilville to that discount furniture store. I know you worked last night, but I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t an emergency.”

  “Lucille, what are you doing out of the hospital?”

  “I’m fine. I got tired of all those bossy old nurses telling me when I could or couldn’t see my own baby girl. Besides, they called and told Jim Floyd that Carlene was coming in today, and I couldn’t miss it. Now, can you keep her or not?”

  “Are you crazy? She’s brand-new! I can’t baby-sit her! I don’t know a thing about babies. I might break her or something.” And I might have added that I really didn’t have any desire to learn about those moist little things that cried all the time.

  “I thought of that. You can come with me and take care of her at the funeral home. I’ll be right there in case anything goes wrong, and I can nurse her. I’ll bring her little carry-seat. She can sit in that, and all you’ll have to do is watch her. I got Mr. Wilmerding’s permission, being that you’re family and all. Please? Don’t say no.”

  “Lucille, is there nobody else—”

  “Aren’t you just a little bit curious about what Carlene looks like?”

  “No!”

  “You won’t have to see her, then. I promise. You can keep Tiffany LaDawn out in the grieving room.”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “Great. You’re the best. I knew I could count on you. See you in half an hour.”

  I hung up and started rubbing my leg. The feeling was coming back, and it felt like somebody was sticking a jillion pins into it.

  Why don’t I have more backbone? The last thing in the world I wanted to see was the mutilated body of Carlene Moore. Especially after last night. Baby couldn’t remember who had given Carlene the nickname Ida Red, but she was pretty sure Carlene had told her about it.

  For the two summers before this one, as well as weekends all winter, Baby had waitressed at a place out by the lake called the Water Witch. It was run by a guy named Jackie Lim, and was the only Chinese restaurant in the county. Carlene got a job there after she dropped out and had the baby.

  Love of the pickle plant wasn’t the reason I didn’t try to get a job out there, too. It was because the Water Witch was a private club. That is to say, they had a bar and could serve liquor to you if you were a member. The way to become a member was to buy a membership for five dollars as you came in the door. It was a legal way around the dry-county rule, like the country club was for rich doctors and lawyers, who liked a drink after work or wine with their dinner. Can’t you just see me telling Daddy that I was going to work in a place that served liquor? Thatwould go over like a pregnant pole-vaulter.

  I told Baby she was crazy for quitting that good job and coming to the pickle plant this summer, but she didn’t want to go back. She said she’d had it with carrying heavy trays and being on her feet all night, and she wasn’t that hot at waitressing anyhow. I probably wouldn’t have been, either.

  I must say, I was glad Baby was with me to share in the wonders of onion peeling. Next year, knock wood, we would both be teaching in a nice, clean art department somewhere and out of that stink hole forever. We could spend our summers painting. Maybe we would get an apartment together. It seemed like a long way off.

  —

  The hot water of the shower revived me somewhat. I ran a comb through my wet hair and tied it down with a braided-leather headband wrapped Indian-style around my forehead—there was no time to roll it. It would just have to frizz up. Hopefully, I wouldn’t run into Tripp. I threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, stuck my feet into moccasins, and went into the kitchen.

  Mama had left a note propped up against the sugar bowl on the table telling me about the trip to the furniture store. None of the aunts ever made a major decision without consulting the other two, and Aunt Juanita needed a new living room suite. At the end of the note was Mama’s signature heart with a little arrow stuck through it and a pink lip print where she’d kissed it. She’s cute, that Ivanell.

  I took down a package of Ding Dongs and poured myself a glass of milk, my usual breakfast. I wouldn’t mind gaining a few pounds, if they went to the right places, but nothing I ate seemed to stick
. Mama said I’d fill out after I had a baby or two. She did, and she was as skinny as me when she was a kid. I must admit, for thirty-nine, she still looked pretty good.

  As I unwrapped the foil off the Ding Dongs, last night came back to me. Nothing made any sense. Who would write something so crazy up there on the mountain, back in that hole? I couldn’t let myself even think of the possibility that it might have been the killer doing the writing. Surely the killer had run off to Texas or someplace. And why would he have written it, anyhow? Why would anybody?

  I wished Baby could remember who called Carlene Ida Red. It might have been a kind of joke. Maybe it was based on that old country song, “Ida Red, Ida Red, everybody’s talking about Ida Red.” I used to hear it on the radio when I was a kid and Mama would listen to The Grand Ole Oprywhile she did the ironing. Little Jimmy Dickens or somebody like that sang it. It was corny, but for some reason it stuck in your mind until you went crazy singing it all day long.

  I swallowed the last of the Ding Dong and drained the glass. Nearly ten-thirty. If I was going to do this thing, I had better get at it. I mean, it’s only a body, right? A piece of clay. It can’t get up off the table and grab you, like in the movies. Can it?

  12.Baby and Bean

  Baby didn’t go to bed at all the night after they found the writing on the wall. She didn’t know how many people knew Ida Red was Carlene’s nickname, but that writing must have had something to do with her. It was just too odd a name. Jackie Lim could have known. Maybe Jerry Golden knew and told someone. All night during work, she turned around in her mind every single person who might be capable of killing Carlene and then going up and writing on the rocks in Fat Man’s Squeeze. Nobody she thought of made any sense.

  She felt guilty, too. After Baby quit the Water Witch, Carlene had tried several times to get together with her, but Baby had always put her off, saying she was too busy, until Carlene quit calling. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Carlene anymore. She just wanted to get away from everything that had to do with the restaurant. Maybe if she had tried to keep up the friendship, she could have done something to stop whatever it was from happening to Carlene.

  By the time she got home from work, she was worn-out with worrying but too keyed up to sleep. She went out on the boat dock and dangled her feet in the water until the sun climbed into the sky and burned the early-morning mist off the lake.

  She wondered where Bean and Tripp had gone last night. They had taken her and Cherry home in time to change and get to the pickle plant for work, and then left together. Tripp, apparently, was taking a night off from shoveling salt.

  It seemed like they had made friends awfully fast. First, Baby told Bean about meeting Tripp, and the next thing you knew, they were practically bosom buddies. The whole thing was weird. Bean was usually suspicious of new people. Tripp must have been somebody special for him to get so close, so fast.

  —

  What Baby didn’t realize was that fellow dopeheads always managed to find each other. In the Bible Belt South, law-enforcement officers didn’t have a sense of humor about drugs. Dopers had to stick together to survive. It was amazing how they could always spot each other. Of course, long hair was a clue. That’s why the schools and parents hated it so.

  Bean had learned to smoke pot in Vietnam, and he cultivated a patch of it up on the Ridge, deep in the woods behind his house on the far side of Nehi Mountain. It was risky, but there was no road, and nobody much had a reason to go up there. There were still bears and cougars back in those woods, and a few bobcats—not as many as everyone thought, but sometimes when kids were parked on the bluff, they would hear a cougar scream; it sounded exactly like a woman screaming. It would raise the hair on your neck straight up. And Bean mentioned from time to time—not too often, just enough—that he had seen this or that bear out behind his house. So Bean’s patch was relatively secure.

  He took to marijuana right away when he landed in Nam. Everyone smoked, more or less right out in the open. Technically, of course, you weren’t allowed to do it, but most of the time the NCOs and even some of the officers would look the other way. Maybe once in a while they would have a little inspection and look in your trunk and pat you down, but some friendly sergeant would always know in advance when it was, and you could just stash your stash until inspection was over.

  And what good stuff it was! You could get the finest in Vietnam: Thai sticks, fat joints the size of your biggest finger for a dollar; party packs of ten rolled joints for five dollars; joints soaked in opium that would lay six guys out for the count, for a dollar apiece. You could even buy whole car tons of what looked like Marlboros, filtered and sealed, except the tobacco had been taken out and marijuana put in. Bean got to the point that the first thing he did in the morning on his way to breakfast was fire up a J. In the work he did, it helped to be a little stoned. It leveled out his senses.

  Bean was a tunnel rat. They zeroed in on him right away when he first got there, since he was one of the smallest men in the platoon. They gave him some tests to see if he was claustrophobic. He wasn’t, and passed with flying colors. Then they gave him several tests to see if he had that little bit of craziness you need to spend long hours, without cracking, in tight, dark tunnels full of vicious bugs, snakes, rats, bats, and gooks who are trying to kill you. Out of fifty men, he was one of the five they took.

  He was sent to the big army base at Cu Chi, which had been built right on top of a maze of Viet Cong tunnels—a clever subterranean highway, over two hundred miles long, dug by hand from the dry, loamy earth in the 1940s and 1950s, when the Viet Cong were called the Viet Minh and fought against France. The tunnel system was expanded during the American War, as they called it. The tunnels were loaded with booby traps, intended for any GI that tried to find his way through them, and by late 1966, when Bean arrived, they were just beginning to scratch the surface, so to speak, of tunnel warfare.

  Bean would have probably volunteered for the Rats anyhow, since he actually liked being underground. Back home, Nehi Mountain was honeycombed with caves that not many people knew about, or at least the extent of them, and Bean had spent his childhood exploring those caves and hiding from his drunk daddy. He practiced walking through the dark passages and rooms, trying not to make a sound, feeling his way with all of his senses, until after a few years he developed something not unlike the radar that bats have. He could judge the height of a ceiling by the change in the air; locate a vent by the smell; tell the depth of a pool by the sound a pebble made. He figured if his daddy came looking for him, he would just put out his light and take off.

  That bat sense saved his life more than a few times in Nam. He was a legend among the Rats. From the beginning, he always seemed to know which root was actually a trip wire or if Charlie was around the bend hiding in a nook, waiting to blast an unsuspecting GI. He got so good that he could hear an eyelid blink in the total darkness of the tunnels.

  When Bean first started, he wasn’t sure what he would do when it came to killing a man, but after one of his buddies was lowered into a tunnel and had his legs blown off at the groin by a grenade trap, Bean knew he would be able to kill VC.

  Even so, the first time was still a shock. Not long after his buddy lost his legs, Bean went down the same tunnel, even more cautious than usual at the memory. Pistol in one hand, flashlight in the other, he inched along. He had practiced searching for traps until his fingers were as sensitive as a blind man’s reading Braille, delicately touching the bumps and roots along the tunnel as he looked for a connection, something that didn’t feel quite right.

  He was concentrating on a patch of earth that seemed too even, when it shifted, almost imperceptibly. Before he had time to react, a trapdoor sprang open not a foot in front of his face and he looked into the startled eyes of a VC. Bean’s gun went off, almost by itself. He was nearly blinded by the spray of blood. The VC’s body slipped down the hole, and the trapdoor fell back into place with a solid thud, like a Cadillac door makes wh
en it shuts.

  Bean hugged the ground, frozen, waiting for others to emerge, but the only sound was the shrill ringing in his ears from the gun blast. An anguished disbelief washed over him at his not sensing it coming, and he vowed to never let that happen again.

  —

  Even though killing became a more or less regular occurrence and he was no doubt the best in the Rats, it was still a notably ugly business. Right before he went down, even if he had just smoked a joint, he got a rush like a greyhound gets at the first sight of a rabbit. The guys called him Jumping Bean, because he couldn’t sit still. His leg would start to jiggle up and down, as if of its own accord. One of the officers would say, “Okay, he’s wound up—let him go!” And Bean would enter the tunnel. Only then, when he inhaled the inky, damp air to the bottom of his lungs, would he relax, get deathly still and listen, with all his senses, to what the dark had to tell him.

  The longer he worked, the more he respected the Viet Cong’s intelligence. That they had fought first the French for twenty years and then the Americans and never given up was impressive. Still, Bean never really thought of them as human. Not like Americans, anyhow. Human beings don’t live in burrows like animals or eat rats. Some of the VC spent months underground without once breathing fresh air. If the Cong had souls, he reasoned, they were probably like dog or cat souls—maybe they went someplace after they died, but not to the same place as everyone else.

  Even so, he couldn’t help but admire them. The tunnel system was ingenious. The top levels of the tunnels were the easiest for the tunnel rats to access. That was where the leaders had their meetings, where the food was cooked, and where the makeshift hospitals were located, lined with recovered silk parachute material to keep out the dirt. There were even underground rooms used as theaters, where girls would sing and dance and perform patriotic plays to entertain the troops, and big rooms with printing presses, where they could produce a newspaper. There were holding pens for water buffalo, and once, to their amazement, the Rats found an American tank. It had been scavenged by the Cong, buried, and used as a command center.