Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  “Yeah, I do. He’s right down here in the cave.”

  “In a cave? There’s a cave up here? What’s he doing in there?”

  “He’s stuck and can’t get out. I’m at the point where I need to get some help, but I can’t hardly bring just anybody in to do it. You see the problem.” Bean seemed a little nervous and upset.

  “What do you mean stuck? You mean he’s down in a hole? How long has he been in there?”

  “Since late last night. Me and him came out to get a couple of bags from my stash, and while we were here, we dropped a few tabs of acid. After a while, I guess it hit him the wrong way, because he got scared and grabbed a flashlight and took off down into the cave. It ain’t no big deal for me, but he’s a lot bigger than me and not used to caves, and he fell into a tight place and got his leg stuck.”

  “Why didn’t you try to get him out last night?” An alarm bell went off in my head, like something might be really wrong.

  “I was pretty zonked-out myself, and didn’t know he was in trouble until this morning when he didn’t come back up. I wasn’t at myself enough to go after him until a little while ago, when I heard him calling, and crawled down and found him. He seems to be okay, but his leg is hurt and he’s pretty weak. I was getting ready to go down to town to get some tools and food and ropes and stuff when I heard you yelling.”

  I was thunderstruck. It was hard to grasp what Bean was telling us. He looked awful, all pale and sweaty, so he must have been through something trying to rescue Tripp. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Did you know about this cave, Baby?”

  “I did, but I’ve never been down in it. You know I don’t like tight underground places. Bean is an expert caver, though. There’s miles of them running all under the Ridge. Right, Bean?”

  “Miles. I figure I’ve only explored maybe ten or twenty percent of it, and I’ve been doing it ever since I was a kid.”

  I didn’t like tight underground places, either. I had only been in a cave one time myself, when our seventh-grade class went up in the Ozarks on a field trip to Diamond Cave, near Jasper. It had only been open to the public a little while and they didn’t have it really fixed up yet—just a long wire, with a lightbulb every few feet, and no paved paths or steps or anything. There was one place where we had to all get down on our hands and knees in a line and crawl, which was already beginning to freak me out a little when the line stopped because one of the kids up ahead got scared and couldn’t go on. Actually, come to think of it, it was Baby. There was no place to turn around and go back and no way to go forward. I got so claustrophobic that I went a little buggy and started screaming.

  The teacher finally got through the tunnel and started grabbing kids right and left and pulling them through so she could get me out of there before all of them panicked, too. When I got out into the big room, I still was a little hysterical at the thought that I’d have to go back through that tunnel again, and Baby was not much better, so the teacher took me back by myself and then went and brought out Baby. We waited in the bus for the rest of them. I didn’t even notice the stalagmites, and never had any desire to go back into a cave, especially a wild one like this here on the Ridge, which didn’t even have a wire and lightbulbs.

  “Cherry? Maybe it would be good if you could go in and talk to Tripp for a little bit while I get the tools and supplies. Cheer him up or something.”

  The idea of going into a cave paralyzed me. But Tripp was down there. He was hurt. In spite of everything that had happened, I needed to go to him. Life is full of hard decisions, isn’t it?

  “How far down is he, Bean? Can I walk to where he is?”

  “Part of the way, but you’d have to crawl in a few places to where he is. You don’t have to go all the way in, just far enough for him to hear you. It’ll be easy, skinny as you are. He’s pretty scared, I think. I’ll go with you. It ain’t nothing. I do it all the time.”

  “Baby? Will you go with me too?”

  “We don’t all need to go,” Bean said. “She better stay out here in case I need her when I get back.”

  “Bean will be with you, Cherry,” Baby said. “He’s right. Somebody needs to wait up here, don’t you think?”

  Her eyes were big. I could tell she was even more scared than I was.

  I took a deep breath and squeezed through the crevice leading into the cave. Tripp needed me, and it looked like this was the only way I could get to him, but my knees were shaking. I said a little prayer to God to help me in spite of me being such a sinner. I hoped He heard me.

  58.Baby

  Tatang wouldn’t admit it to anybody, especially Auwling, but Pilar was his favorite child. She was, by a trick of nature, even more like his dead wife than her own child, Babilonia. Pilar was as like Maeling in beauty as if she were her reincarnation, and she had her beautiful voice and mischievous ways, too. Manang despaired that Pilar would ever get a husband, because she had no interest in things of the house, like learning to cook or sew, but Tatang just laughed when she was impudent and said that she had beauty and spirit and would always do well in life.

  Where Baby was studious, Pilar barely passed her exams. She had a good memory and got by from listening in class, but she never read the assignment and seldom did her homework. She preferred to sit in her room and listen to records or talk to her friends on the phone.

  Baby tried to talk sense into her, but Pilar was like the grasshopper, playing through the summer and never thinking of the winter to come, while Baby was like the ant. The two of them couldn’t get along on anything.

  “You’re not my mother, Baby, so just butt out of my life and stop trying to boss me around. I’ll do what I want to and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your boyfriend is not such a goody-goody, either, you know. I know what all he does and what you do with him, so you just better not preach at me.”

  “Yes, Pilar, I know all about it, but I’m a lot older than you are. You’d do better to be a kid for a while. It passes too fast, as you’ll find out, and one of these days you’ll be sorry you wanted to grow up so quick.”

  Before Pilar approached her fourteenth birthday, she began to go out with boys. They were bad boys, older boys, who gave her beer and cigarettes and liked to watch her dance, her long hair swirling around her narrow hips, who didn’t care that she was young, but loved the sparkle in her eye and her giggle and the red lips that were so tender to kiss. No matter what Manang said, Pilar couldn’t be kept at home. She was afraid of no one, especially not her Tatang, who adored her no matter what she did, and in fact was blind to what was happening to his beloved daughter.

  Manang knew well enough, but was helpless to stop her. Now, since the night last summer when that girl Carlene was thrown into the lake, the visits from the ghost of Maeling were becoming more and more frequent and Auwling began to sense that the message she was trying to give had something to do with her wild child, Pilar.

  Manang was not the kind of mother who would search through her children’s belongings—she respected everyone’s need for privacy—but the feeling of disaster got stronger with every visit from Maeling, and one day it was so strong that while Pilar was at school Manang decided to search in her room for something, for anything that would show her what kind of danger her daughter was flirting with.

  Pilar’s room was always untidy. Piled on every surface were glasses with milk dried in the bottom, plates of stale cookie crumbs, and cheese covered with green fuzzy mold. Hamburger wrappers from the Freezer Fresh in grease-soaked bags lay in a mound in the corner, along with hard, dry french fries. Underwear draped a lamp, and most of her wardrobe was in disarray across the floor. In the corner, a salmon pink–and–white hi-fi record player sat on a table with dozens of albums strewn around: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, the Who, and many others that Manang had heard at top volume over and over until even her gentle patience came to its end and she ached to throw them against the wall.

  Auwling
stood in the doorway in despair. She didn’t know where in the chaos to start. She took a deep breath and went in. In the chest of drawers she found packages of cigarettes and matches, but that was no surprise. They weren’t even hidden. Inside a box of Kotex napkins, there were small squares of foil wrapped around circle-shaped objects that Manang didn’t recognize, but she sensed were not something a young girl should have. She would ask Dionisio about them. Maybe he would know what they were for. She didn’t think Dionisio would approve of her snooping in Pilar’s room, but there was nothing else she could do. He would see the necessity once she found something. And she was sure she would, though she didn’t wish it.

  Some of the records were lying on the floor out of their jackets. Manang didn’t want to disturb the room too much, but Pilar would never notice if the records were put away. They were too expensive to ruin by scratching, even if Manang couldn’t stand to listen to them. She picked up one called Rubber Souland began looking for its cover, which she found under the bed, along with several pairs of shoes and a lot of dust. She tried to slide the record into the cardboard sleeve, but something was blocking the way. She reached her hand into the sleeve and pulled out a stack of photographs.

  Manang sat down on the unmade bed and stared at the pictures. They were beautiful—of a girl with long black hair draped over her shoulder, face half in shadow, with small, perfect breasts and graceful, long legs tucked under a round naked bottom. There were other poses in the stack, six in all. The others were more explicit, showing fine pubic hair, and one even displayed the most private part of the beautiful girl as her shapely legs kicked high into the air. It took Manang a few moments before she realized she was looking at Pilar. Her hands began to shake.

  —

  Tatang was beside himself when she showed him the pictures. Auwling had never seen him so distraught, even on that night he had found Maeling dead in the jungle so many years ago. She thought he was going to have a stroke. His eyes bulged and the veins in his neck looked dangerously near to rupture.

  “Please, Dionisio! Calm yourself! You will die if you do not stop this!”

  But Dionisio would not be calmed. “Do not say anything to Pilar. Not yet. She would only lie. Wait and I will find out who is responsible for this, and he will pay.”

  It was hard to look at the girl that afternoon when she came home from school and not allow the sick feelings to show, but Manang was used to swallowing her feelings, and Pilar went into her room, which was exactly as Manang had found it—the Rubber Soulrecord cover under the bed with the pictures, the shoes, and the dust.

  Tatang was not so good at hiding his feelings. He stayed late at the fish-and-bait store, pacing the floor and waiting for nightfall, for Pilar to go out. Then he would follow her. If she did not go tonight to the man who had done this to her, she would go soon enough. Tatang had plenty of patience. He had learned it in the jungles of the Philippines when he was a hunter of men.

  59.Cherry

  I read somewhere that all caves are a constant fifty-four degrees, summer and winter. It was October, but it doesn’t really get all that cold in Arkansas until late in the month, or even November, and then most times you only need a jacket, so it was colder in the cave than it was outside. The air held that kind of damp that oozes into your bones and chills you through and through. Tripp must have been freezing by now. I began to really worry about him. I wished to goodness he had never heard of LSD.

  I could just barely snake my way through the crack that led into the cave. If anything, it was tighter than Fat Man’s Squeeze. Bean slipped through easy enough. He seemed to be like a rat that could dislocate its bones and squeeze through something the size of a wedding ring. It hit me why his outfit in Vietnam called themselves tunnel rats.

  The room we came into was something I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined being there. It was like a weird little apartment. There were kerosene lanterns and candles lit all around the room, and Bean had taken old quilts and pillows and draped them over rocks and made furniture. A big orange carpet remnant covered part of the ground. It smelled of mildew. There was a bed on a shelf of rock up off the floor and a fireplace in the middle, with a circle of stones around it. A rough wooden table sat against the wall loaded with marijuana plants laid out to dry. They gave off a really strong musty smell.

  “How did you get all this stuff through that little crack, Bean?”

  “That ain’t the only way to get in here. There’s a bigger one on down, but this one’s the fastest from where we were.”

  In the flickering light, I noticed a skull set in a niche in the wall. It had a big candle burning on top of it, and the wax from countless other candles had dripped down around the eye sockets and made what looked like long hair flowing onto the floor. It had a grinning mouth of straight white teeth. Propped up next to it was a bundle of old decrepit straw that had been burned at one end and a pair of what might at one time have been moccasins.

  “My Lord, Bean! Who is that!”

  “It’s an old Indian, I reckon. Them’s his moccasins, and they look Indian. I don’t know how long he had been down in there, but I found his skeleton back in a part of the cave that was real hard to get to. I can’t hardly believe he got that far in there himself with just that rush torch, but I guess his light went out and he couldn’t find his way back out and died. I left the rest of him down there, but it seemed like the thing to do to at least take his head back up and give him a little memorial.”

  It was creepy, to say the least, having that grinning, empty-eyed skull holding court over the room. Off to the side, behind the drying table, there was a dark passageway, and another one, in the back of the room, that went into the shadows.

  “Where is Tripp, Bean? Is he down that passage?”

  “Naw, it’s the one back yonder. I feel real bad that I let him go off like that, but before I knew what was happening, he was gone. Come on, and I’ll show you.”

  Bean picked up a little bag and a flashlight and gave me one, and we set out. It wasn’t too bad for the first few yards, in spite of my flapping shoe. I could stand up, at least. Even though I had on a turtleneck sweater, I was cold. I wished I still had my long hair.

  The walls were cold and wet, and I tried not to touch them, but I couldn’t avoid it. I was beginning to get the first tiny feeling of panic, like I had in Diamond Cave, but there was enough fresh air, and it hadn’t gotten too tight yet, so I took a couple of deep breaths and kept on going.

  I followed Bean around a bend, and the passage opened up into a good-size room. I gasped, as my flashlight lit up what looked like a chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

  “Oh, Bean! That’s so beautiful! Is it a stalagmite?”

  “It’s a stalactite. It hangs from the ceiling. Stalagmites grow from the floor. Just think of stalactite—stick tight—to the ceiling, and you can remember the difference.” Bean seemed a lot calmer now than he was outside. His voice had changed, and he seemed strangely unconcerned that Tripp might be in real trouble. If I didn’t know what we were going down in the cave for, he would seem like a tour guide. Maybe Tripp was not in such bad shape, after all.

  We went for what seemed like a half hour or more, through a few more small rooms and passages that were right on the verge of being too narrow and low. A couple, we had to crawl through, and I tried to concentrate on looking down and breathing. My mint-green panty hose had lost their knees a while ago, and my own knees were skinned up and killing me, but I had no choice except to go on.

  This last passage opened up into a big room with a good-size pool of crystal-clear water. I shined my light over it and saw some white fish swimming around. Nearly albinos, like me, poor things. I wondered how they could see, living all the time in the dark, and Bean said they were blind. Hanging above the pond was a rock formation that looked like a bronzed waterfall. It took my breath away.

  “That’s flowstone. It was formed by a waterfall running over it millions of years ago. Before there was
even any pyramids, that flowstone was here.”

  I was frankly amazed at what all was here under the ground. It was a whole lot better than Diamond Cave. If the public ever found out about it, they would take it over and make a theme park out of it, like Dogpatch. Bean could sell the land and be rich. We kept on going, and there were even more wondrous formations—stalactites and stalagmites that looked like lace curtains, like pipe organs, like straws. And everywhere there were big piles of fine-looking dirt.

  “Don’t step in that bat guano, if you can help it.”

  “Bat guano?”

  “Yeah. Them’s bats hanging up on the ceiling. They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.”

  I shone my light up, and the ceiling was a mass of churning black bodies. Great. I was deep under the ground with a piddly little flashlight and hundreds of bats. That’s some feeling, I don’t have to tell you. It made my skin crawl. I started to ask how much longer we had to go until we got to Tripp, when Bean started calling out:

  “Barlow! Barlow? Can you hear me? Cherry is here to see you.”

  “Tripp? Tripp sweetie? It’s me. Can you hear me?”

  “Cherry?” It sounded like he was at the bottom of a well, far away, but he was alive and we would get him out soon if I had anything to do with it.

  60.Carlene

  It was nearly midnight when Carlene and Tripp got to Bean’s house. Tripp insisted they go by before they left the Ridge and see if he was still up. Carlene thought Tripp and Bean would get along. They had a lot in common, both having been in Vietnam, and Bean grew pot—reason enough for Tripp to like him.

  Tripp was having quite an education about Sweet Valley all in one night, and he seemed to love it. Even with all he said about needing to work out some things with his wife, Carlene still couldn’t understand why he didn’t just go back to California and work it out there, since he had the pictures. Sweet Valley was not exactly the ideal place you go to seek your fortune. Maybe he had other things to work out that she knew nothing about. You never could tell; maybe he would really like it here. He could always leave if he didn’t. It was so easy for men with no kids just to pick up and go wherever they wanted to.