Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  “Thanks, Bean. Whoo, boy, that’s primo stuff. Put hair on your chest.”

  Bean took a toke and handed the joint back. “What are you talking about?” he said in a strained voice as the smoke leaked out of his mouth. “You know you don’t have no hair on your chest, G. Dub.”

  “Naw, I don’t on the Indian part, that’s a fact, but I’m fixing to sprout me some right now on the white part, it feels like.” He took another deep toke.

  J.C. went out to the middle of the road in front of the two cars, holding the white rag he used for a flag in his upraised hands. He stood there for a moment lit by the headlights, as if poised on the end of a diving board, then brought the flag down. The two cars squealed tires and flung dirt as they blasted down the road, one on either side of him.

  “Look at old Barlow! That thing is sweet as a baby’s butt, ain’t it? I bet it is cleaner now than it was when it rolled off the line of the Chevy factory. Whooee! That was a close one! They nearly touched bumpers! Lordy, Lordy!” G. Dub stepped up into the truck bed to get a better look.

  The cars ran neck and neck until the last minute, when Denny gunned the motor and swerved out in front of Tripp. It was crazy, but it worked; Tripp hit his brakes and slowed down.

  “Ha! I could’ve told Barlow he didn’t have no business racing that car if he was afraid to get a little scratch on it! Dang. I lost my two bucks.”

  Tripp turned around and drove back to where the boys were waiting, and another two cars took their place.

  “Hey, Barlow! Don’t feel bad,” Bean called out as Tripp got out of the car. “Denny’s been racing since he had to sit on a cushion to see out over the steering wheel. He don’t care if he wrecks his car, just as long as he wins. How much did he get off of you?”

  “Ten bucks. But it was cheaper than a new paint job would have been. How you doing, boys?”

  “Fine as frog hair.” Bean passed the joint to Tripp. “How’d you get roped into racing the Moreno boys?”

  “Just lucky, I guess. I get a lot of people trying to race with me when I’m stopped at red lights and things. It goes with the ’fifty-seven Chevy.”

  “Well, those gooks are pretty sneaky, and they’re not afraid of nothing, so don’t feel bad that he beat you,” Bean said.

  “Gooks?” G. Dub looked at Bean in shock. Tripp stopped and stared at him, too. “Are you calling Denny and J.C. gooks, Bean?”

  Bean looked at them in surprise. “What are you talking about, G. Dub? Why would I do that?”

  “You just said, ‘those gooks’—didn’t he, Barlow?”

  “That’s what I thought you said, Bean. Maybe I misheard.”

  “Maybe you did,” Bean said in a tight voice. “You know I would never call them that! Denny and J.C. are practically my family!” He looked at them with narrowed eyes. “I think you better apologize right now, G. Dub. You too, Barlow.” Bean had a look on his face that didn’t ask for argument.

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I guess I need to get my hearing checked,” G. Dub said.

  “Yeah, me too, Bean. I’m sorry.”

  There was an awkward silence. Then G. Dub pulled out his wallet and took out a card.

  “Well, my bad hearing can’t save me now. Look at what I got in the mail today, boys. I’m 1-A. My number finally came up.”

  “Let me see that, G. Dub,” Bean said. His tone had changed back to normal, as if nothing had happened. He looked at the card, then handed it back. “Looks like they got you. They’re taking anybody that can see out of one eye and hear out of one ear. You’ll be heading to Nam for sure.”

  “Nope. I ain’t going. No siree, bob.”

  “Now, just how do you think you’ll get out of it? Wear lace panties to your physical?”

  “Ha. No, Canada has said they would welcome anybody who doesn’t want to go to the war. I’m thinking about just heading up there. I know how to work on cars, so I should be able to get me a job.”

  “What will your mama say? She ain’t going to like it.”

  “She knows all about it. It was her that put me up to it in the first place. She don’t feel like our people ought to have to fight in this war. We done fought the army and lost, back in her great-grandpa’s time. Those old feelings die hard with us. If I go to Canada, I can’t never come back here to the States, but at least she knows I’ll be alive, and she can come up there and visit.”

  “I don’t know, G. Dub. Are you sure you know what you’re doing? I mean, it’s only for a couple of years, and the thought of not ever getting to come back home . . . I don’t know.” Bean shook his head.

  “Barlow, you been over there. What would you do if you was me? Would you go back to Nam if you had it to do all over again?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Tripp said with no hesitation. “I would be in Canada in a heartbeat.”

  “What about you, Bean? Think about it hard and tell me the truth. I got to make a big decision. Would you do it all over? Would you go back to Nam if you could?”

  Bean looked out over the river. Somewhere in his mind he was standing by another river, on a hot, muggy night in Vietnam. He could almost hear the water buffalo bellow, and the high silver laughter of slender girls as they paddled wooden boats down the narrow canals that branched like fingers off the river. He took a deep breath of the thick, damp air, then turned back to his friends.

  “G. Dub, knowing everything I know now . . .” He hesitated for another minute. Tripp and G. Dub waited for him to finish the sentence. “No, I wouldn’t. It’s not something you want to get into. Maybe you would do better to just take off.”

  “Well, I have thought hard about it. It ain’t going to be easy. I’ll miss all of y’all, and it goes without saying I’ll miss my family. It’s scary, not knowing where I’ll be or if I’ll have the money to last until I can get a job. I just don’t know.”

  Bean reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money. “If you need a little help, I can loan you a couple hundred.”

  G. Dub stood for a minute deciding, then reached out and took it.

  “Thanks, Bean. I appreciate it. I’ll send this back to you as soon as I can. I’m going to miss you, my friend.”

  “You going to miss me or Mary Jane?” They laughed.

  “Both of you.”

  “When you plan on taking off?”

  “Soon. They’ll be coming after me if I don’t report in ten days.”

  “Let me see that draft card, G. Dub,” Tripp said. He took out his lighter and lit the corner of the card. “You won’t be needing this anymore.”

  The three of them watched it burn until it scorched Tripp’s fingers and he dropped the curled black ash on the ground and stepped on it.

  “You’re doing the right thing, G. Dub. I would give anything in this world if I could turn back the clock and not go, myself,” Tripp said. “You write and let us know how you’re doing,”

  G. Dub shook his hand and then Bean laid his hand on top of theirs. The three of them stood gripping hands as the drag race went on behind them.

  42.Carlene

  Carlene read Jerry’s last letter for the third time, folded it, and put it into the box with the rest, under the movie-star pictures. Then she got out the letter she had written to him with her confession, read it a time or two, changed a word here and there, and added on the bottom: BURN THIS AFTER YOU READ IT. She put it in an envelope and then carried Kevin out and buckled him into his car seat. He was a big boy, nearly three, and didn’t like to be strapped in the baby seat.

  “Stop that crying, Kevin. I’m not having you get thrown through the windshield if I have to slam on the brakes. We’re going to the post office. I’ll stop and get you an ice cream if you don’t make a fuss, okay?” A tear slid down his cheek, but he stopped crying. He liked ice cream.

  Carlene pulled into the post office parking lot and dropped the letter into the drive-by mailbox. She didn’t like to go inside, because she was sure to see Mr. Marshall. Even though it all happened over thr
ee years ago, she had never been able to speak to Mr. Marshall since the day he suggested she go to the revival and she met Brother Dane. If she hadn’t gone in that day to buy stamps, she might never have gone to the revival or gotten pregnant, and both her life and Jerry’s would have been a lot different. He would be in college right now instead of Vietnam. They might even be married. She didn’t blame Mr. Marshall for any of it, because he was trying to do something good for her—and it sure wasn’t his fault about what happened between her and Brother Dane—but it was hard for her to see him and make conversation. So she always put her letters in the drive-by box, and asked Mama to pick up stamps for her from time to time.

  Even the thought of Mr. Marshall handling the letter with the confession she was sending to Jerry was a little scary. Too late—after she had already dropped it in—she thought that maybe there might be censors who read the letters. But surely there weren’t. Jerry had already said a lot of things that a censor would have cut out. Still, she was half sorry she had sent it, and went home with a weight on her chest. Jerry would never understand, and probably would stop writing to her. But no matter what happened, she couldn’t live a lie anymore.

  Now there were four people besides herself who knew the truth. Brother Dane would never tell, because he was bound to her by what they did. Her mother would never tell, either, because she was bound to her by love. Walter couldn’t afford to tell, so that left Jerry. She was putting her life on the line by trusting Jerry, but there was nothing else she could do. The letter was gone.

  She went back home, to wait until she heard from him again.

  43.Vietnam

  March 15, 1968

  Dear Carlene,

  I can’t believe I am sitting here calmly writing you a letter. These last three or four days have been the worst days since we got here. First, I just want to say that I got your letter, and I don’t even know how to start to talk about what you told me. If you had told me all this stuff when I was back in Sweet Valley, I know for sure that I couldn’t have handled it, but the guy who lived back there was a different person than the one who is writing you right now. The first thing I want to tell you is that it is not your fault.None of it. You were thirteen years old, for Pete’s sake. There was no way you could have meant to kill your father, although it sounds like he needed killing, and that SOB Walter should have taken care of it the right way and treated it like the suicide it was instead of saddling you with that guilt all these years. It wasn’t even your fault for getting pregnant, although I sure don’t think much of that preacher. He took advantage of you when you were in a bad place, and I don’t think he should be preaching to other people. I can’t believe what you had to go through all by yourself, honey, and I wish there was some way I could change it, but I can’t.

  I have learned one thing over here, and that is there are times when a person will sometimes do things he wouldn’t think about doing in his wildest dreams under normal circumstances, but it doesn’t mean he is not a good person down under it all. I guess the same holds true for you or anybody else who has their back against the wall.

  The U.S. Army has proved that you can take anybody and turn him into a killer. They brought us over here to kill dinks. That’s our job. And once you kill one, it is easier to kill the next one, then the next one, until finally it doesn’t mean anything at all, like swatting flies. It’s like things you would be sent to the pen for back in the States are commonplace occurrences every day here. I don’t think any eighteen-year-old over here left the United States with the idea of, “Oh, boy. I’m going to become a rapist and killer,” but somehow, when you get out in the jungle, somebody flicks a switch and turns off the old you and a new you takes over. Torture and rape have become everyday facts. Some of the guys have gotten to like it too much, and some of us who don’t—me, for example—don’t have the guts to stop them.

  For instance, not too many of the guys know I’m still a virgin—yes, it’s true, believe it or not, I still am. But my buddy Tripp Barlow knows, and ever since he found out, he has been bound and determined to get me to lose it one way or the other, and in the process, a few of the other guys have found out. They have made it their project. There are always a lot of girls around who will take on ten or twenty guys for a couple of bucks each, but you know me—if I wouldn’t make love to you, I’m not about to go down that slippery slope, so to speak.

  In spite of the easy women, a few of the guys in this company, not all, are known for just raping any woman they feel like, and nobody much says anything. They think of it more or less like going to the toilet. A few days ago, they had one in a hootch and there must have been a dozen guys lined up waiting to go in. I was trying to ignore the whole thing when one of them came over and said, “Golden, we decided it’s time you lost your cherry. This is a prime piece of meat, and clean. Never been touched. You can have the honor of being the first.”

  I said thanks but no thanks, and after most of the guys took their turn, they all came over and dragged me to the hut and shoved me in. They thought it was a big joke. The hut was dark and this little girl—she couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen—was lying on the bed with her legs spread open, half out of it. She looked at me with terror in her eyes, and I tried to tell her that I wasn’t going to do anything, but she started to shake and take on. I got some water and tried to wash her off, but she curled up in a little ball and I couldn’t touch her. I looked back outside and there were a whole gang of more guys from another company waiting to get their turn. I tried to tell her to climb out the window and run for it, but if you have had thirteen guys and you were a virgin, you can’t exactly run too well.

  I picked her up—she hardly weighed anything—and went outside myself, then, and tried to talk some sense into the men, but they took her away from me and put her back in the hootch.

  Carlene, as much as I hate to tell you, I walked away. I left her with them, because I wasn’t ready to shoot my own friends, and I wasn’t ready to fight them all. You never know what a man with a weapon will do, and it doesn’t pay to tick some of these guys off. It’s too easy to get hit by friendly fire out in the bush. It’s so common, there’s even a name for it—fragging.

  I think all of us are beginning to go a little nuts. In the last few weeks, we have taken a lot of losses by booby traps. We wandered into a field of them yesterday, and every single one of us managed to get right in the middle of it before anyone tripped a wire. Then all of a sudden, there was an explosion and then another one and another one. Captain yelled for us to freeze, but people were running around trying to help each other and in the process setting off more and more of them. One guy got split from top to bottom, intestines hanging out and all, but miraculously was still alive, and when the medics went to put him on a poncho to move him, they set him down on top of another mine and blew the poor guy into a thousand bits. Parts of him rained down and landed all over us. We looked like we’d been hosed down with blood. There was a big gob of liver or something on my boot that I kicked off.

  Guys were crying and screaming, crawling around on the ground and going to pieces. Captain had to slap a couple of them who were in hysterics. He had a job getting all of us out of there, I can tell you. We had thirty-two either killed or wounded, out of about ninety of us. When you see your buddies blown to bits, legs blown off, blinded, right in front of you, there is no way you are ever the same again.

  We were all practically in the Twilight Zone when we went back through the village. The people just squatted and watched us with sulled-up eyes. They knew exactly what we had marched into. They didn’t warn us, because they had probably laid the traps themselves.

  This wasn’t the first time this has happened. The 48th is still around this area. Not long ago, we encountered a lot of fire from some villages north of here, called My Lai 4 and My Lai 6—there’s a bunch of little hamlets that make up what we call Pinkville, I may have told you that—and we had one man killed and fifteen injured. By the time we go
t reinforcements and went in, the enemy had just melted away down their tunnels or mixed in with the civilians. We never know how many of them there are, or where they are. You can’t imagine what it is like to fight a phantom army, to see your friends dying one by one, getting their guts ripped out, and be helpless to do anything about it.

  Another horrible thing happened, too. I hate to even tell you this one, but it will show you what we are up against. One of our guys was captured by the VC, and we didn’t even know it. All night long we heard screams from seven klicks away. We thought the VC had amplifiers and were playing a tape to make us crazy, but they weren’t. They had skinned him alive, taking their sweet time, then soaked him in saltwater and tore off his . . . I can’t even say it in a letter without getting sick at my stomach. They’re not human, Carlene. They are worse than animals, because animals at least only kill to survive. But I guess that makes us worse than animals, too.

  We had a memorial service this afternoon for our dead buddies, which was pretty tough, I can tell you. Tonight, we had a pep talk from the new colonel, and tomorrow, we are going to clean out that nest once and for all. We’re going to be dropped into My Lai 4, which we think is the 48th’s stronghold. We have known for a long time that the villages were basically sympathetic to the VC, but there was never any concrete proof. This time, though, our intelligence said they are definitely there, two hundred or more strong.

  By seven in the morning, all of the civilians leave the village and go to the market, so whoever is left behind is bound to be Viet Cong. But this is one trip to the market that will be different for them. When they get back, they’re in for a big surprise: We are going to level that VC pus pocket and turn it into a parking lot. We’ll see where the Cong get their support from then. Our orders are to neutralize the area. That means not to leave one thing the enemy could use, not one hootch or chicken or duck or cow or rice cache. There are some expert tunnel rats coming in to join us, too, so if those suckers try to get away down the tunnels, they’ll know what to do.