Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  “It was indeed. He was my friend.”

  “What happened to him, again?”

  “Booby trap. A Bouncing Betty.”

  “Right. Where’d it happen?”

  “Around Son My.”

  “Son My. Seems like I heard something about that place. Didn’t they call it Pinkville?”

  “Yeah. They did.”

  “I was at Chu Lai at the time. It happened around the first part of ’sixty-eight, didn’t it?”

  “Right about then.”

  “March or April, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, right about then. Why do you ask? What did you hear?”

  “Nothing. Just that it was a rough place.”

  “That it was, my friend. That it was.”

  Ricky Don and Tripp locked eyes for a minute too long. I was beginning to get a little uncomfortable, like they forgot I was standing there or something. Then Ricky Don spoke, still looking at Tripp.

  “Well. I got to be going. See you around, Barlow.”

  “’Bye, Ricky Don.” I said. “Be good.”

  “Oh, I’m always good. At whatever I do.” He was talking to me, but his eyes were on Tripp. “I like your hair, Highpockets. Take it easy. Remember what we said.”

  He took his time as he walked toward the door, stopping to look at some of the baskets and things, as if he were thinking about buying them. Tripp seemed a little tense. After Ricky Don left, Tripp stood in the door watching his car drive away.

  “What did he mean?” Tripp asked. “‘Remember what we said’?”

  “I don’t know. We were just talking about high school and stuff. Nothing big.” He looked like he didn’t believe me. “Really. He’s just trying to get to you. Are you going to let him?”

  “He could mess up the whole thing if he sets his mind to it.”

  “Oh, Tripp, he’s not going to do anything. What can he do?”

  He looked like his mind was not with me there for a minute. Then he came back.

  “Oh. Well, he could harass the customers—park across the street to see who comes in and out, that kind of thing.”

  “He won’t have time for that. He has real crooks to chase.”

  But I knew that was exactly the kind of thing Ricky Don would do. And then what? Would he follow them home and search them to see if they had pot? Didn’t you have to have warrants and things to search somebody’s house or car? I had never had to think about this stuff before. Everything I learned was from TV—Perry Masonand Dragnet.Well, there was nothing I could do, so I might as well not worry about it. I went on with the painting, and Tripp got back to work upstairs.

  26.Vietnam

  Until he enlisted in the army, Jerry Golden, like Ricky Don and Bean, had never been on an airplane. The first time it left the ground and started to climb, his stomach lurched, and every time it banked for a turn he popped out in a sweat, clung to the armrest, and prayed it would not go on over and plummet to the ground; but by the time he landed in Hawaii, twenty hours later, he was a seasoned flyer. Soaring above the clouds in the clear blue sunshine gave him some idea how the angels his Church of Christ preacher father was always talking about must have felt.

  His mother was devastated when her only son joined the army, and would have snatched Carlene bald-headed if she could have. In spite of her faith that God would watch over him, she was sick with worry about Jerry going to Vietnam. His father, on the other hand, had been in Okinawa in World War II and knew what combat was like. Having gotten through it, he had no doubt his son would as well. Besides, after God, you owed allegiance to your country, and no Golden had ever shirked his duty—going back to Great-Grandpa John Ben Golden, who fought for the Confederates in the Civil War even though he had never owned a slave. It didn’t matter if you believed in the cause or not; you had a duty to fight for your country.

  Of course, Reverend Golden wished his only son had gone to college instead, but he was young. There would be time enough when he got back for that. The army was a good place to learn discipline, get his head on straight. Then he would come home a man and get serious about his studies. And forget about that little girl who had caused him such aggravation.

  —

  Carlene. High up in the sky on his way to Hawaii, Jerry didn’t want to think about Carlene, but he couldn’t help himself. She haunted his dreams at night, with her tornado-colored eyes and big pregnant belly. He hadn’t said good-bye before he left, and it bothered him a little. But surely she understood that he couldn’t—not after everything that had happened. She would be fine. She was a fighter, full of whatever it took to make a better life for herself. He hoped she would. In spite of everything, he couldn’t wish anything bad for her.

  As he stared out at the cotton-ball clouds, he went over for the umpteenth time how it had gone wrong for them. He still didn’t understand. Before the night he asked her out for the first time, he had never thought much about her. She was just one of the girls who he might say hello to in the hallway. Everyone said hello to him. She was kind of quiet—almost invisible. Then one night at a basketball game, she came alive for him. She played with such fever and spirit that even though they were behind by twenty points, she alone seemed to will the team to win. She scored twenty points that night. Bumping into her in the parking lot afterward, he told her what a great game she had played; asked if she would let him buy her a Coke. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and he didn’t really expect her to say yes. But they had a good time, and he asked her out again. Before they knew it, to all of his friends’ surprise, they became a couple.

  She wasn’t like the cheerleaders and the giggly sorority-type girls with their headbands and Weejuns, their candy-pink mouths and drive-in kisses. She was wise beyond her years in a lot of ways, but unworldly in others. She could cuss like a man or be funny and warm. He never knew what she was going to do or say next. He had the feeling there was something dark in her, but whenever he tried to ask her about her life, she just said, “I had a perfect childhood. Perfect in every way.” Given the little he knew about her past, he thought he knew better, but how could he argue? If he had any reservation at all about her, it was how little she confided in him. But maybe that was the attraction. He never could figure her out, which made her forever interesting.

  Heartbreak was only a word in a song until he found out she was pregnant. He felt like he had been standing there minding his own business and she had kicked him in the gut. How could someone so close to you be such a stranger? It hurt, too, when his friends didn’t believe it wasn’t his. His parents believed him, but that didn’t make him feel any better. They couldn’t resist saying, “I told you so.”

  “You should have known what kind of girl she was when you first went out with her,” his mother said, “living out in that nasty old trailer and all, with no father. Girls like that will do anything with anybody. It doesn’t make you look good. She just wanted to get her hooks into you because you are going to be a lawyer, and she knew a good thing when she saw it.”

  He didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was right there in front of him. While he didn’t consider himself a goody-goody, he was a Christian, and believed you should save yourself for marriage—at least the important part. The rest, he rationalized, didn’t really qualify as a sin.

  Carlene didn’t seem to have any hesitation about sin. Sometimes she had tried to get him to go all the way—really make love to her. It took all the willpower he could muster to resist. Now, looking back, he realized that it was because she was pregnant and she wanted him to believe it was his so that he would marry her. When she started to show, she had to break down and tell him the truth. He couldn’t believe how much it hurt. Men aren’t supposed to cry, even when their hearts are broken. Their hearts shouldn’t be broken at all—they are supposed to be the ones doing the breaking. But that redhead had dug her bald little fingers into him, and even though he tried to forget about her, he still felt them there.

  He hadn’t been in touch with he
r for nearly two years, since he had left and joined the army, but when she heard he was in Hawaii, getting ready for Vietnam, she sent him a letter, enclosing a picture of her and the baby. He carried it around for two weeks, read it a hundred times before he answered it, but finally he did. Then she began writing to him. He looked forward to the letters a lot more than he wanted to. On the page she opened up to him in a way she never had when she was with him.

  In that first letter, she wrote:

  Dear Jerry,

  Don’t get mad at her, but Baby got your address from your mother and gave it to me. You don’t have to answer this letter if you don’t want to, but please don’t throw it away until you read it. I know you will never forgive me for not being honest with you and telling you about the baby until I did, but I just couldn’t. I really loved—No, Jerry, I still love you—and I hoped for the longest time I was wrong about the baby. It will do no good to tell you it wasn’t my fault, because I guess it was my fault, but it had nothing to do with you and me, or my feelings for you. There is nobody else that I love, and there never has been. Anyhow, I am not sorry now that I have Kevin, because he is the sweetest, best, most beautiful little thing you ever saw, and I am trying to be a good mother to him. I know you will never want to be with us or maybe even to see me again, but is it possible for us to be friends, a little? Can I write to you? Will you write back? Maybe you will be so lonesome in Vietnam that you will be happy to get a letter from even me. I hope so. I pray so. I mean, I pray not that you will be lonesome, but that you will be happy to get a letter from me.

  Your friend,

  Carlene

  He read the letter, then studied the picture—a smiling freckle-faced redhead, her hair falling down over her shoulders. The baby she was holding looked like any other—bald and fat. He couldn’t see a resemblance to anybody he knew, even its mother. Instead of returning the picture to the envelope, he put it in his helmet. He answered:

  Dear Carlene,

  Sure, you can write to me. A lot of my friends are writing to me. Mail from home is important to us over here. I will write you back. For the record, I’m no longer mad at you, and in fact, it probably all happened for the best. Like my father says, God has a plan for each of us, and whether we like it or not, what we think we do on our own is really what He wants us to do to in order to fulfill His plan. Maybe Kevin needed to come to you just when he did and couldn’t be my baby because I wasn’t ready to be a daddy. We don’t know. But it no longer matters. We can be friends if you want to.

  It is beautiful here in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen much of the island yet. We are training hard, learning to use weapons, bayonets, hand-to-hand combat, and close-order fighting in preparation to head to Vietnam. The American army has the most concentrated firepower in the world, and the VC don’t stand a chance against it—but we have to be prepared just in case. I got my GED, and figure I’ll breeze through this year and start DuVall in the spring of ’69. I haven’t given up my dream of being a lawyer. I hope you don’t give up your dream, either. You can still be a great actress. Maybe your mother will keep the baby until you go out to Hollywood and get your break.

  Don’t worry about me. Our unit, Charlie Company, was voted Company of the Month. We’re a good, tough unit. I’ve made some great friends, one who is a real cool guy from San Francisco, who has actually been to the Fillmore to see the Grateful Dead in person, and hung out at Haight Ashbury, plus he went to Berkeley! We are taught to appreciate the importance of friends, since they say that once we get to Nam you can’t trust anybody over there but your buddies. We won’t be heading for Nam until sometime in December. Most of the guys will have had their eighteenth birthday by then, and I will be nineteen. I don’t think they like sending seventeen-year-olds over there, although I don’t know what big deal difference a day makes—one day you’re seventeen and a kid and the next you’re eighteen and a man!

  I’m glad you are still my friend, Carlene. Write again, if you want to.

  Your friend,

  Jerry

  27.Carlene and Frannie

  For a year or more after she had killed her daddy, Carlene thought about him all the time, and wondered and worried every day if Walter had done the right thing and whether, somehow, somebody would find out. She played the scene over and over in her head, tried to be honest and know in her heart if she had meant to pull that trigger or not. She honestly didn’t think so, but at that moment she had been so full of hate for him. She had never really hated him before. Not that he had ever given her any love. He was just her daddy—a fact of life.

  She dreamed about him a lot, dreamed that he would come driving up in the yard, all wet from the quarry, gun in hand, looking for her. She would be trying to lock all the doors and windows and find a place to hide when, all of a sudden, the window would fly open and he would stick the rifle in, dripping water over her bed, and shoot her. She always woke up in a sweat, heart pounding, trying to scream but able to manage only small whimpers down in her throat.

  They were just dreams, she told herself, and in spite of them, she had one thing her mother didn’t: She knew he was gone for good and would never be back. No matter how many times Carlene was tempted to tell her mother, she couldn’t find the words.

  At first, Frannie expected him come back without any warning, and she was so on edge waiting for the door to bust open that she put a chair under the knob at night. She waited for him to write a letter explaining himself, but one never came.

  “Reckon we ought to call the sheriff and see if they can’t find out what’s happened to your daddy, Carlene? File a missing-persons report? He might have got in a wreck and been hurt or something.” Privately, she watched and listened in town, to see if she could find out something he might have done to make him have to leave. But she didn’t hear about anybody being beaten up or anything being stolen or even any gossip at all about him. It was like nobody cared enough about him to talk about it.

  “They would have got ahold of us if he had been in a wreck, Mama. He had his address on his driver’s license, didn’t he? I think he just wanted to go off and leave us. If we found him, he might not like it.” Carlene tried not to show how scared she was of going to the law.

  Finally, Frannie stopped haunting the mailbox and propping the chair up against the door. If anything, life without Carl was a lot better, with one less mouth to feed and fill with whiskey, and nobody to fuss or get mad at every last little thing they did. Plus, there was nobody to spy on her every move, nobody to mess up the trailer and leave nasty-smelling socks and underwear lying around for her to take to the Laundromat. She didn’t even miss losing her bed partner, since Carl wasn’t too fond of bathing; there hadn’t been much going on there for years anyhow. One morning she realized that she was actually happy.

  Since Frannie worked all day, Carlene stayed by herself a lot. On nice afternoons, she got into the habit of going to the rock quarry and sitting on the rim, dangling her feet over the edge, smoking and tossing the butts into the water down below. She half thought she might see her daddy looking up at her, see him float up to the surface and spit water at her, but of course he never did. She looked as hard as she could to see if she could see some sign of the truck, but all she saw was black water. She knew he was there, though; felt him down there, like he was parked, watching, waiting for something. She tried to talk to him and find out if he was sorry or mad or what, but she never got an answer. She tried a time or two to talk to God, and never got an answer from Him, either.

  More than once, as she walked up the path toward the quarry, she saw Walter Tucker’s truck, and then she would turn back before he saw her. It seemed he went out there a lot too, but she didn’t like the idea of the old man knowing that she went there. She didn’t want to make light conversation with him at the place where they had pushed her father’s truck over. In fact, if she never had to see Walter Tucker again, it would be a day too soon. But that was impossible, because he had taken to stopping by the house a
nd sweet-talking her mother. They went out together on what would have to be called dates.

  “Hidey, Carlene,” he’d say, coming in the door without even knocking, like it was his house. “Is your mama ready? I’m taking her out to eat catfish. You’re welcome to come with us.”

  “No thank you, Walter. I need to do some homework.”

  “Okay then.” He’d plop down on the couch, flip on the TV, and make himself at home until Frannie came out from the bedroom. Then he’d get up, hat in hand.

  “Well, looky here,” he’d gush. “Who is this movie star? You look good enough to eat with a spoon, Frannie.”

  “Walter Tucker, you silly old thing!” Frannie would giggle as she put her sweater around her shoulders and picked up her purse. “We won’t be out late, Carlene. I’ll bring you home a piece or two of fish for your supper.”

  Carlene wished her mama had another boyfriend. She was so young and pretty—she could have gotten somebody better. Besides the fact that he was old and shaped like a pear and combed his peach-colored hair into a cock’s-comb, there was something about Walter that she didn’t like. It had nothing to do with the fact that he knew all about her daddy. He just seemed fake, like he was wearing a fake, smiling Walter face and underneath was the real Walter, an ugly monster with warts and welts. It was probably just her imagination, but she got nervous around him. And what was worse, she couldn’t say anything to her mother about it. So, mostly, she just tried to be gone when he was there.

  —

  It went on like that for a couple of years, Carlene keeping so much to herself that Frannie began to worry why she didn’t have any friends. Thankfully, when she was fifteen, one of the young coaches watched Carlene play in PE class, saw she had potential, and began to get her interested in basketball. She did real well at it, even though she couldn’t give up her cigarettes.

  Frannie finally let her smoke in the trailer. “I would rather see you not smoke, but if you have to, there’s no sense in your sneaking around like some outlaw,” she said.