Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  Down deeper were the workshops, where the artisans, working by the light of paraffin lamps or flashlights, repaired weapons and made mines and booby traps, chiefly out of the vast leavings of the American army. Coca-Cola cans and unexploded claymores were favorite materials for mine-making. One good ten-kilo homemade mine could take out an entire platoon. There was a hidden civilization right under the Americans’ feet, run to a large extent off the garbage the Americans so casually tossed away. There were always batteries with a lot of juice lying around, and leftover food that was better than the food the VC were able to get in the tunnels, since cooking underground was hard. If the smoke went out one ventilation hole, it was visible; if it was diffused, there were leaks that made the bad air even worse. A major treat for the VC was to be able to cook up in the open, but that got riskier with time, because the Americans learned to spot even a few grains of rice on the ground and know that there was a tunnel nearby.

  Only a few tunnel rats ever got good enough to penetrate the second or third level, where the munitions were stored. Bean was one of them. He once broke through a dividing wall into a room over five meters high, full of big mortars. They were disassembled every night and stored underground, then reassembled in the morning, carried through the tunnel piece by piece. It was a lot of work, but this way it was nearly impossible for the Americans to find them.

  The gooks never ceased to amaze Bean, and he never took them for granted, like he never took for granted the spiders, snakes, scorpions, and chiggers that infested the tunnels and made life a misery—not to mention the foul air. It stood to reason that the VC had to urinate and defecate in the tunnels, and the body odors, sweat, and gases, plus the low amount of oxygen made the air practically unbreathable at times. Bean would get used to it after twenty or thirty minutes down there, but when he came out and sucked fresh air into his lungs, the shock sometimes made him faint. Still, he got to where he could judge how many people had been there and how long, by the smells alone. It was his world, and he knew it as well as he knew the Ridge, which sometimes seemed like a far-off, fading dream.

  —

  After he came home from Nam, readjusting was hard. It was impossible to sleep all night and not be on guard, expecting to be awakened by missile fire. For months, he woke up at every noise—deer running through the woods, dogs barking—and reached for his M-16 and his shoes. And all the men and women he had encountered and killed in the closeness of the tunnels paraded through his dreams almost every night, along with the friends he had lost. They haunted him, with their hideous wounds, until he dreaded to go to sleep.

  It would have been hard, as well, to break the pot habit. Not that he especially wanted to. Why should he quit? He liked it. It sharpened his senses, improved his music. Smoothed all the hairs in the same direction, so to speak. He had smuggled some fine seeds back in a shaving-soap can and scattered a small patch far back in the woods. Bean’s homegrown marijuana was powerful stuff. Everyone said it was the best they ever had. He read an organic-gardening book and kept a compost heap going; made the stingy rock-riddled mountain soil as rich as bottomland. Some of the plants were way higher than his head. He dried them in the old cave, the entrance hidden in a crack in the cliff near his patch, and quietly sold bags of it for ten dollars apiece. Made a nice profit—enough to buy a new guitar, keep his truck running, and have a first-rate stereo system installed.

  He could probably have afforded a new truck, but he didn’t want to be too much of a show-off and draw a lot of unwanted attention to himself. Which, at times, was almost more than Bean could manage, because he wanted to be famous, like the Stones or the Doors. After coming home from Nam, he wanted it more than ever.

  Before he left for Vietnam, Baby had never really seen the wild side of him. She was definitely the beloved, and he was the lover. He tried always to please her, afraid she would get bored and leave him. Now that he was home again, though, the dynamic had shifted. He was centered in a way he never was before, sure of himself. He was crazier than ever about her, it seemed, to the point of obsession, but there were also times now when she had never felt more foreign. He talked about it a lot, comparing her to the Vietnamese women he had seen. It was almost as if he were looking at her through somebody else’s eyes, as if it were her being Oriental—rather than her being Baby—that turned him on. Bean was like a stranger she had to get to know all over again. She wasn’t afraid of him exactly, but if he didn’t get his way, he could be cold and cutting. A time or two, he had raised his hand to her. He didn’t actually hit her, just gritted his teeth and clenched and unclenched his fist. But it was something he never would have done before.

  She blamed it on the pot. There were few waking hours that Bean wasn’t high, and he didn’t want to smoke alone; he wanted Baby to go with him to the mellow place marijuana took him. The first time she tried it, nothing much happened. It took a few tries until it hit, but it didn’t send her to the stratosphere or anything. It just made her horny, hungry, and sleepy. She could polish off a bag of Oreos all by herself when she was high, concentrating for long minutes on the way the black cookie crunched, sticky, between her teeth.

  Unfortunately, Bean wasn’t much good for the horny part, because when he got stoned, all he wanted to do was talk. And he did. On and on and on. Sometimes about his experiences in Vietnam, which Baby hated, since he usually went into great detail about the vermin and the fetid smells in the tunnels. But mostly he talked about music. Baby knew more about the Doors, the Stones, and Jimi Hendrix than she ever needed to know in her lifetime. After he lectured for a while, Bean would get out the guitar and try to teach her the chords and frets or whatever they were called. He would demonstrate how Clapton did it, how Keith Richards did it. She would stuff another Oreo into her mouth and pretend to listen, nodding and saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” as he rattled on for hours. Finally, she would just curl up and go to sleep. He wouldn’t even notice, would just keep talking as though she were still awake and hanging on his every word. She only smoked pot because he insisted. She really didn’t see what all the noise was about.

  Of course, she couldn’t confide in Cherry about this. It was even hard to talk to Cherry about sex, since she was still a virgin. There seemed to be a gulf growing between them, and Baby didn’t know how to stop it. She didn’t know what Cherry would think if she found out that Bean had talked her into smoking pot. Even though she would pretend that it didn’t matter, it would. Things would never be the same between them. Actually, Baby probably wouldn’t smoke pot at all if she weren’t afraid of making Bean angry. It took so little to set him off these days.

  That was why Baby hadn’t said anything more last night about the Ida Red business. She had no idea who might have written that message on the rocks, but she knew she had already said too much by mentioning the restaurant. Every time she brought it up, it reminded Bean about Jackie Lim. Bean hated Jackie worse than poison, because he was convinced that while he was away in Vietnam, Baby had cheated on him with Jackie.

  13.Baby

  Bean had been away in the army for nearly a year when Baby started waitressing at the Water Witch. The summer after graduation, she had worked at the pickle plant with Cherry, but that was only a three-month job, lasting through the fresh pack season, when they ran three shifts. But she really needed a job on weekends during the school year, too, and this was perfect.

  The Water Witch restaurant and marina sat on a spit of land that jutted into Sweet Valley Lake, not too far from Baby’s house. Its picture windows framed the lake in a panorama. Out behind, a deck set with tables under big green umbrellas faced the view, and a wooden walkway stretched across the manicured lawn down to the dock. The lake was connected to the Arkansas River by a deep inlet, and lot of wealthy people from towns up and down the river kept boats and party barges in the protected marina year round. In the summer, every night was party night at the Water Witch.

  The interior was unlike anything else in Arkansas. Jackie Lim had t
he bar shipped in from Hong Kong, as well as the rugs and the tables and chairs. They had once been part of a famous old restaurant. The bar was mahogany, hand-carved in an elaborate design of dragons, burnished by countless hands over time so that it had a dark, satin finish. The mirror behind it, heavy beveled glass, rich and old with crackles in the silvered backing, was framed in antique gold Chinese lacquer and reflected liquor bottles on glass shelves, lit by invisible lights that made them glow from inside with amber fire.

  Countless coats of glossy, deep persimmon-orange paint made the walls seem liquid, and delicate Chinese art floated on them. It was altogether out of place, as if it had been lifted from the China Sea and set down on Sweet Valley Lake. Baby couldn’t believe she would actually get paid to spend her time there.

  At first, Jackie was just a guy who was her boss. He was more than ten years older than Baby—thirty-two—smooth, sophisticated, and the first Oriental man she had ever met outside of her family. He wore his hair greased back in an Elvis pompadour with long sideburns, and dressed only in suits, tailored for him in Hong Kong on his trips back home—sharkskin, for the most part, in pearly shades of gray, green, or blue. His shirts had french cuffs and were custom-made of the softest Egyptian cotton, linen, or heavy silk in eggshell colors. He loved jewelry and wore a thick gold ID bracelet with a diamond dotting the iinJackieand an enormous diamond pinkie ring. Every day of the year, he put on a different pair of cuff links—solid-gold dice with black enamel dots, owls with emerald eyes, fish with scales made of the tiniest seed pearls. Coral. Jade. Countless other kinds.

  He came from a rich family in the export business in Hong Kong, but Jackie was more interested in spending money and partying than in learning the family trade, so in desperation they sent him to America. They checked out schools in different states and finally chose the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, up in the Ozark Mountains, because they thought it was isolated enough to keep him out of trouble. What they didn’t figure was that it was exactly the kind of place that would make Jackie stand out. There was no one at all like him there, and he played the Chinese playboy role to the hilt. He could speak English with very little accent when he wanted, but liked to put on “Chinee-talk” to amuse and throw people off. He would garble a joke, then slap his knee and howl with laughter. Every guy he met was an old “son-a-ma-gun.” He had his own apartment off campus and drove a yellow Triumph. There was always a party going on at Jackie’s place. Twice, his father had to come over from Hong Kong and convince the school not to throw him out. He dropped broad hints that there would be a Lim Library at the university one day if Jackie was allowed to graduate.

  Instead of going back to Hong Kong and the family enterprise when he graduated—magna cum laude in business—he took his graduation gift money and bought a dilapidated restaurant and marina on Sweet Valley Lake, and managed to get a private club license through one of his fraternity brothers, Mark Greer, whose father was a county judge. He found investors, renovated, and advertised, and in nine years had made a nice little fortune. His family was finally proud of him.

  The first time he saw Baby was at the roller rink, shortly after the restaurant opened. In Sweet Valley, there wasn’t a lot to do for entertainment—one movie house, one bowling alley and the roller rink. Even Jackie would get desperate at times and bowl a few games or take a date out to skate. He got good at it, and liked to show off by skating backward with his arms crossed, while everyone had to leap out of his path or get knocked flying.

  On this particular evening, Baby was there with Cherry and several other kids from their seventh-grade class. Except for Cherry, who was already a head taller than everyone else, Baby looked more mature than the others. In fact, she was more than a year older than they were. When she moved to Sweet Valley, Baby was small and didn’t speak any English, so the teachers advised her parents to keep her back a year. By seventh grade, she had already blossomed into healthy puberty.

  Jackie was startled to see an Oriental girl. He skated over to her and struck up a conversation.

  “Hey, beautiful lady,” he said in perfect English. “Where did you come from? Would you like to go out to dinner with a poor old Chinese man?” She couldn’t believe she heard him right.

  “I’m fourteen!”

  “Don’t fourteen-year-olds eat dinner?” He was trying to be funny, but it scared her.

  She looked at him as if he were crazy and skated away. He laughed, like it was a big joke.

  Over the years, though, he became a familiar face. Once in a while they would pass each other in their cars and wave, or say hello if they saw each other standing in line at the movies, have a little conversation in the aisle of the grocery store. Not long after she finished her first year at DuVall, Jackie ran into her at the gas station and offered her a job. Within two weeks, they were lovers.

  Baby wasn’t quite sure why she did it. She had never intended to cheat on Bean, who had been gone nearly a year. Maybe it was that she was lonesome and nobody had ever shown her the kind of attention Jackie did—compliments, gifts, dinners out. He said, gazing into her eyes with the most sincere expression, that only she could speak to his soul, because they were two strangers in a strange land.

  She liked the way they looked together. So did he. They lay naked on a white bearskin rug in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror in his house and stared at themselves—two small, creamy, brown muscular bodies with hair the color of coal. They made love and never took their eyes off the mirror, playing for it as if for a camera. It was an incredible turn-on.

  The trouble was, unbeknownst to Baby, he used the same line, or a variation of it, on an alarming number of woman, most of the waitresses at the Water Witch included. After she had been with him a few times, Baby came down with a raging case of crabs, and when she told him in a panic, he convinced her she must have gotten it off the toilet seat at the restaurant, from one of the other girls.

  It was a holy struggle all summer to get rid of those lice. Just when she thought they were all gone, she would spot some more tiny white eggs and the whole thing would start again.

  That’s how her friendship with Carlene started. Baby went into the storeroom to get a bottle of soy sauce and found Carlene hiding behind the wine cases, scratching. Carlene’s face turned as red as her hair.

  “You wouldn’t have a few friendly visitors, would you?” Baby asked.

  “I wouldn’t call them friendly.”

  “It’s all right. I won’t tell if you won’t.” Baby gave herself a healthy scratch.

  Carlene raised an eyebrow at Baby. “It seems like more than a few of the girls here have been hit with this problem.”

  “Really?” Baby was surprised. “Are they that contagious?”

  “Well, I guess in theory you could get them from the toilet seat, if that’s what you were told, but I would bet that a certain Chinese boss has done more than a little to spread them around. Is that maybe where you got them?”

  Baby’s face turned red. Suddenly, it hit her how naive she had been. Of course Jackie would have slept with all the waitresses. Why not? And what right did she have to get angry? She had no claim on him. She was supposed to be going steady with Bean, who was off fighting for his country. She felt ashamed, but she couldn’t blame Carlene. Maybe Carlene blamed her.

  Carlene waited to see what she would say. When their eyes met, Baby knew it would be all right. Carlene wasn’t mad at her; she had a half smile on her face, like she had seen it all and nothing could surprise her.

  “I guess that white rug must be infested with them, huh?” Baby finally managed to get out.

  Carlene laughed. “It must be. Jackie Lim better watch his butt or that mangy old polar bear will bite a piece out of it!”

  “I think it already got a piece of his pecker!” They looked at each other and laughed; laughed until they were weak, and clung to each other.

  Baby wiped her eyes and sat down on a crate of litchi nuts. “What are we going to do? These littl
e suckers are the very devil to kill. I’m going crazy trying to pick them all off every night.”

  “Get you some Quell, get in the bathtub, and scrub yourself down. It may take a few tries, but that might get rid of them. If all else fails, shave the whole mess off. I am right past the Quell stage, and I am going to do that, myself, tonight. And I think both of us should stay away from the boss, at least after hours. You can bet he’s been out with me his last time.”

  Carlene lived about a mile from the restaurant in a trailer with her boy, Kevin, and her mother, who took care of the boy at night while Carlene worked. Sometimes, if her old pickup was in the shop, Baby gave her a lift, and after work they would sit outside in front of the trailer and smoke and talk. It was nice to have a friend who knew the score. There was so much she couldn’t talk about with Cherry, and Carlene seemed to take to her, trust her. She said she had always thought Baby was one of the nicest girls in their class—not stuck-up, like some of them. For once, Baby felt like the leader in a friendship.

  In a strange way, she felt guilty, too. It was almost like cheating on Cherry. But that was stupid. Being friends with more than one person was not like cheating on your boyfriend. Cherry had Lucille, after all. But still, for some reason, Baby felt like she had to keep the friendship a secret from Cherry. To protect her. From what, Baby couldn’t say.

  14.Cherry

  “The body is the temple of the spirit. Just because the spirit has moved out and gone on to its reward, it doesn’t mean that we treat the body as anything but the temple it is. No matter what procedure we have to do, we do it with solemnity and ceremony. Those are the two key words: Solemnityand ceremony.And dignity. That’s another key word to remember. Dignity.”

  —

  Mr. Wilbert Wilmerding was giving me the lecture on dead people. I had pulled up at the funeral home a minute behind Lucille and Jim Floyd, and Mr. Wilmerding was standing outside by the front door waiting for me. They went on in with Tiffany LaDawn in her little carry-seat, but he wouldn’t let me in the door until he had given his speech.