Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  —

  “There! Don’t you love it?” Lucille gushed when I came out. “It is so . . . fresh! So . . . kicky.”

  “You’ve been reading too much Glamourmagazine, Lucille. How long will it take to grow out?”

  “Like it used to be? Five years, more or less. Two years down to your shoulders.”

  “Two years. And I have to practice-teach.” I sighed and resigned myself. If it was really punishment, then I would accept it and try to make the best of things.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Three-fifty for the perm. I won’t charge you for the haircut.”

  I nearly bit through my tongue.

  She took my five and handed me change. “I’m through for the day. Do you want to go across the street to the Rexall and get a tuna-fish sandwich or something?”

  “No, thanks. I have to get over to the Family Hand to work.”

  “You’re not mad at me, are you? I mean it—it really looks good. You’ll get used to it.”

  “No, I’m not mad at you. I mean it, too. It was time for a change.” There I was, lying again.

  She hugged me. “Let’s go to the show or something this week, okay? I miss hanging out with you. Midnight Cowboyis playing, and that’s supposed to be good. I’ll get Mama or Aunt Juanita to keep Tiffany LaDawn, and Tripp can live without you for one night.”

  “Sure. That would be fun.”

  We went on out, after all the girls had told me again how wonderful my new hairdo was, said good-bye, and Lucille started walking up the street. I got into the Green Bug and had just started the engine when a cream-colored Cadillac slid by me and pulled up and stopped right beside Lucille, a block away. It had to be that guy from Carlene’s funeral—Franco, or something. The one Baby knew. Nobody else in this town had a car like that.

  Lucille stepped over to the car and leaned in the window. It made me nervous, since she had on a low-cut dress. I sent her a mental message to stand up straight, but she obviously didn’t get it. They talked for a minute, then she opened the door and got inside and they took off down the street. I didn’t like the look of this one little bit. What was she doing getting in the car with some guy she hardly knew? She was a married woman, for Pete’s sake. They were nearly out of sight before I had the presence of mind to follow them. I hated to be a snoop, but I had to see where they went.

  After a mile or two, I realized they were heading for the road that led to the lake. A cold chill went up my back. The lake. Where they found Carlene’s body. My cousin was in the car with a total stranger who had kissed a dead girl on the mouth and might be a murderer, and they were headed for the lake.

  I thought about stopping at the Esso station and picking up G. Dub for protection, but it was at the other end of town and I would lose them if I did that. I had to keep them in sight. At least it was broad daylight. Even if he was the killer, he surely wouldn’t do anything. They turned the corner, and I followed, at a discreet distance.

  38.Baby

  Auwling liked to take walks down by the lake after the little girls were in bed and Dionisio was deep into some television show. The older ones seldom were at home anymore, and she had no idea where they went or what they were doing. When she asked them, they just said, “Out with my friends.” She tried to keep Pilar home more, but it was no use. She couldn’t tie the girl to the bedpost, and punishment seemed to do no good. Their Manang couldn’t be angry at them all the time, and in truth, anger never came easily to Auwling. It was better to just let them do as they pleased. She had allowed all of her own children to call her Manang, as Baby did, even though the correct name for “Mother” was Nanang.

  She didn’t know how she had gotten to be like this. Important things didn’t seem to matter in America. When she was a girl in the Philippines, she dreamed that when she had a family, she would be the calm center and all her children would love and respect her; her husband would honor and take care of her. Instead, the children hardly talked to her anymore. They didn’t have the time or inclination to hear stories of their homeland. They were foreigners—Americans. Southerners. They drove pickup trucks and ate fried chicken and got into fistfights. They couldn’t speak Tagalog, even though she had tried to teach them when they were little. Sometimes she had a hard time understanding them, with all the American slang they used.

  She never again saw her own mother after they left the Philippines. A few times, Auwling and Dionisio made the effort to bring her over to live with them, but Lula didn’t want leave her friends and home.

  Auwling had no friends except her husband. She knew that Dionisio cared for her, but he would never love her as he had loved Maeling. He had only married her because she was Maeling’s sister and it made him feel close to his lost love. Auwling knew this, even though Dionisio would never admit it. There were times, even in the middle of the night when they had just made love, that Auwling felt more alone than if she had been by herself in the bed. Dionisio would pat her on the hand—two quick pats—turn his back, and leave her—to go into his dreams of Maeling, she suspected, running through the fields, singing as she used to do.

  Auwling, of course, never mentioned her fears. She swallowed them, as she swallowed the small hurts and insults from her children, until, over the years, they had made an indigestible ball in the pit of her stomach.

  —

  At night, though, the moist lake air was like a balm to her spirit, and she would sometimes sit, outside of time, on a log at the edge of the water and watch the frogs leap and the catfish splash. This night, Maeling was once again on her mind, a strong presence, as if she was out there waiting for something. Auwling wondered if her sister’s spirit would ever find rest. Since her death, Maeling had visited her older sister many times—not only in dreams, but in the waking hours of the night. When Auwling was alone in the dark, she would only have to sit quietly, empty her mind, and Maeling would appear as if through fine silver gauze, her eyes liquid brown and sad.

  Maeling spoke to her mind, not with words, exactly, but with whole thoughts. She asked her sister to forgive her for taking her own life. She assured Auwling that she had done the right thing by leaving her under the house. It was what she had wanted. There was nothing else to be done with one so unclean. She was full of sorrow that she didn’t live to be a mother to Babilonia and a wife to her husband, but she was grateful to her sister for taking her place. There was also something else Maeling wanted to say that Auwling could not understand. She tried, because she knew that if she could understand, then perhaps Maeling would let go and rise to the next world, but the message eluded her. More and more often, Maeling appeared with an urgency not felt before.

  Even now, Auwling could see her sister’s spirit out over the water, in a silver cloud, hovering above the surface of the still lake as wisps of fog began to rise.

  It was the same now as it had been the night the girl Carlene died. That night in July, Auwling remembered, was also damp with summer fog. The tops of the trees disappeared into the mist, which gave its own light and made the woods closer—sinister, as though they were hiding the Aswang in their branches.

  Almost, she hadn’t gone for her stroll that night, but then decided not to be silly and afraid. Even so, as she walked through the woods near the lake, the feeling of danger persisted, and she decided to listen to her senses and return home. She had just turned toward the house when she heard an unfamiliar noise and stopped, frozen.

  Behind the honeysuckle vines near the edge of the lake, she squatted and listened. She heard the sound of paddles, then the low moan of a woman and the curse of a man. There was a splash, as if a fisherman were throwing a large fish back into the water. There were no more moans then, only the sound of the paddles slapping against the surface of the lake.

  As the sound moved farther away, Auwling parted the vines and saw the silhouette of a man sitting in a small rowboat. He continued rowing and was soon swallowed up in the mist. The surface of the lake was calm and there was no sign
of a woman, but over the water the silver form of Maeling hovered. Perhaps the Aswang mermaid Seriena had already taken the woman to the bottom to feed on her blood and the spirit of Maeling watched.

  Afraid, hidden on the bank, Auwling appealed to her sister.

  “Maeling, tell me what to do. Tell me what it is you want. Who is this woman? What should I do?” But the ghost of Maeling rose higher and then faded, leaving nothing behind, not even a cleft in the fog.

  Auwling went home and told her husband what she had seen.

  “Should we call the police, Dionisio?” she said. “I don’t like to think about the woman alone in the lake with the Aswang.”

  “She is dead, you say?”

  “Now, most certainly.”

  “And you are sure you don’t know who the man was?”

  “No. It was dark, and I could not see him clearly. I have never heard the voice before.”

  “Then there is nothing you can tell the police. They would only question you and disrupt our lives. They wouldn’t trust us, because they think we are like the Vietnamese. They will find out about her soon enough. It has nothing to do with us.”

  “As you say, Dionisio. I will tell no one.”

  And I will tell no one about the ghost of Maeling, either, she thought. Especially not you, my beloved husband. She is enough a part of you as it is.

  39.Vietnam

  February 15, 1968

  Dear Carlene,

  A lot has happened since I wrote you last. We got our first kill. I should be really happy, but for some reason I’m not. I don’t even know if they were Viet Cong or not. Some of our guys were keeping watch on a bridge here in Son My, and there were a couple of Vietnamese out in a little boat fishing. I was back a ways, and it seemed like they were just minding their own business when I heard shots, and they slumped over and fell into the water. I guess they must have been VC, though. We didn’t recover any weapons, because the boat was shot full of holes and sank. Anyhow, we have our first body count.

  It has been a horrible few weeks. We have been on constant patrol, which means you get up in the morning after only half sleeping for a few hours, put on a pack that weighs nearly a hundred pounds, and walk through the jungle in the muggiest heat you can imagine, looking for the enemy. All you hope is that you can get enough air in your lungs so that you won’t pass out, and have the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Nobody ever feels good.

  That, plus there’s the constant tension of looking for booby traps and waiting for somebody to shoot at you, like what happened three or four days ago, when we were attacked near the Diem Diem River and several of our guys were wounded. We never even saw the VC, but got the heck out of there after calling in some support. Then the next day, our a**hole lieutenant leads us right back to the same spot and lo and behold, they’re still there and they hit us again, hard. Nobody knew what they were doing, and we were all running around in circles like chickens with our heads cut off. We called in for support and withdrew from the riverbank, but the lieutenant, with his unerring sense of direction, led us in a circle right back to where we started, right back into the fire, and our radio operator took a hit that ripped out his kidney. It shook us all up—our first to be killed.

  It seems real now, Carlene. Before, death was just something we talked about, but this was a healthy eighteen-year-old kid, not some sick old lady that my father preaches over at church. He was a buddy of ours. His life just ran out on the ground in big gouts of blood, and we were helpless to do anything about it. It’s real to me for the first time that I might not make it back home. You can’t think in those terms or you’d go crazy, but you have to be realistic.

  Through all of this, we haven’t seen any actual VC, but the guys who hit us are part of the 48thwe let escape during Tet. I know they are. I mean I think I know. We don’t even know half the time where the shots come from. It seems like these guys are ghosts or something. They are most likely concentrated a few miles from here in Pinkville, but they slip away every time we try to pin them down. And you can bet the villagers know nothing about anything. It is so frustrating sometimes to try to get information out of them when they always play dumb. “No bic! No bic!” they say, which means “I don’t understand,” and we know good and well that they know exactly where the VC are. Sometimes a shot will come right out of a village, and then when we go and check, there will be nobody there and nobody knows nothing.

  A time or two, some of the guys and even the captain have roughed up some villagers, which isn’t pretty to watch, but it is just so d*** frustrating that they won’t help us. In fact, they seem like they despise us, staring at us with hatred in their eyes when we come by. It’s hard to keep going, I tell you. I guess I’m used to being the good guy. We feel like we are all alone out here, just us guys against the world.

  The rest of the time, it’s like we are walking around in circles for nothing—no destination, just walking and looking, making camp, eating K rations and sleeping in our clothes. Some of the guys haven’t had their boots off in three weeks. You can’t imagine what we smell like.

  To give us a treat, the colonel came out on an APC and brought us ice cream. Can you believe it? Got out in his starched fatigues, with his spit-shined boots, and handed out this stuff that was half melted and ran down our hands and elbows and made everything sticky and even worse than it was. Then he saluted us, went on back to base to his steaks and clean sheets, and left us out here with the snakes and the booby traps and the mud and the heat.

  Some of the guys are getting a little crazy, I think. You can do that over here in a hurry with no trouble. We met up with a renegade bunch of grunts that would make your hair stand on end, Carlene. They were like wild Indians, living in the bush so long that they weren’t even remotely civilized anymore. They had Mohawk haircuts and earrings, and wore necklaces of ears around their necks. That’s right. Ears. They cut the ears off the gooks they kill and string them like dried apricots around their necks. Most of them have already done two tours of duty and are on their third. The army only lets you do three, thinking that if you want to do more than that, you are really one sick puppy. One of those guys told me he had gone home after two and just couldn’t relate to anything back there in the world. He wore his uniform at the airport, and mothers pulled their kids back from him like he had TB or something. His family asked him how many people he had killed, then kept staring at him like they were afraid he was going to murder them or something. He couldn’t hold down any kind of a job, so he went to the recruiting office and begged until they sent him back to Nam. He said he was going to stay until he was killed or they locked him up. Said that all his friends had been killed, and he wasn’t going to leave them out here in the jungle. I don’t know what he will do when this tour is over. The only thing he knows is killing, but he’s very good at that. He must have a hundred ears on his string.

  They hate us back in the States, I guess, for doing our duty, because our duty is to kill people. The protesters are right in a way, but they shouldn’t blame us for the mess of this war. I don’t think half the guys want to be here, or believe in the war. Less. Maybe not a quarter. Surely not the way they are doing things at the top.

  Like this whole business of the search-and-destroy policy. What kind of stupid logic is it to destroy something in order to save it from Communism? I mean, every day we take out our Zippos and burn to the ground what little shelter these people have, run them off their land, poison their wells, kill them, rape them, and what the heck are we saving them from? Would the Communists kill them any deader?

  I know it is not patriotic to say all this, but I am so dispirited sometimes. Our lieutenant doesn’t know his butt from a hole in the ground. I don’t know how he ever made it through OCS. Nobody likes him. We are all afraid he is going to get us killed doing something stupid one of these days, like that firefight. He is only five-foot-four, and constantly has to throw his weight around to make himself seem like a big guy. Even the
captain calls him Lt. S***head. Makes us really confident in him, I tell you.

  All in all, I hate to be so depressing, but there is not much I can say that will cheer you up. Maybe part of it is because I haven’t heard from you in a while. You don’t have to tell me the secret if you don’t want to. But please write. I need to hear from you. I still have the picture of you and Kevin in my helmet. It is my good-luck charm. Please write soon.

  Love,

  Jerry

  40.Cherry

  I let the cream-colored Cadillac get a good distance ahead, then followed it out to the lake road that led to the Water Witch. I had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. It would really be embarrassing for everyone. I mean, what was I doing checking up on Lucille like I was some kind of detective or something? I wondered what Nancy Drew would do in this situation. Not confront them and look stupid, that’s for sure. “Hi, y’all,” I’d say. “Nice day for a drive, huh? Fancy meeting you here. By the way, I thought you might be about to murder my cousin, so I thought I’d come out and try to stop you.”

  So I drove slow and gave them a lot of time to get all the way to the end before I made the turn. I had never been out to the restaurant, even though Baby worked there for a couple of years. I can’t really explain why, except for the obvious reason about them serving alcoholic drinks, but it belonged to a part of Baby’s life that had nothing to do with me—just like she had never gone with me to church. It didn’t mean we loved each other less, but we just couldn’t be everything to each other, I guess.

  Seeing the place was strange. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was a really beautiful restaurant. The views were incredible, and there were flower beds full of deep red and purple velvety flowers. The bushes that lined the turnaround driveway were cut in round shapes that reminded me of fancy poodles. Like my haircut. A striped awning shaded the entrance.