Windchill Summer Read online

  “Legs! Baby, it’s a rat!” I have to admit that I screamed my head off. I never was too crazy about mice, much less rats.

  When I started screaming, so did everybody else. Stools went flying, and Baby jumped up on top of me and knocked me over. We both landed on the grimy concrete as the rat drifted by above our heads on the conveyer belt. It was lying on his back, legs stuck straight out of its bloated belly like black twigs. Its mouth was open and a blue, swollen tongue was wedged between its sharp little teeth.

  All of us huddled together and watched in silence as it slipped off the end of the belt into the grinder. There was a sick, soft pop. Foul-smelling pink spew sprayed up. With a gritty screech as the steel blades bit into its bones, the machine stopped. For a minute more we stared, our mouths open, not moving a muscle. Then, like a group of dimwits, we all turned, as one, to see Alfred Lynn thundering down on us like the wrath of God.

  2.Cherry

  The sun had just begun to pink up the sky when the whistle blew for the shift change two hours later. It was already ninety degrees outside, and in spite of the fans blowing fresh air into the onion room, you could barely breathe. My tear glands had long ago drained dry, swelled shut, and quit working, and I guess that was for the best.

  We had gone through two or three of the big piles of onions that were mounded up around the room, and bushel baskets full of them, peeled clean and white, waited on flats for the guys to pick up on their forklifts and carry to the different parts of the plant.

  That’s what I really wanted to do—drive a forklift. Those lucky guys got to whiz in and out of the warehouse on their cute little go-carts that had hard-rubber wheels and two steel forks sticking out in the front like the arms of the Sphinx. They pulled a lever and slipped the forks under wooden flats of pickles or onions, screeched around corners, and scared all the old ladies out of their hair nets with their hotdogging. But girls didn’t get to drive forklifts. Girls—especially summer-hand college girls—peeled onions.

  —

  Baby stood up and stretched. I reached out and picked off an onion skin that was stuck to the back of her leg. Even standing knee-deep in onion peelings, she was cute. I knew I shouldn’t, but I envied her. I am five-foot-eleven-and-a-half—well, all right, five-foot-twelve—and feel most of the time like Big Ethel, the giraffe down at the Little Rock zoo. I stretched, too, and uncurled my fingers from my paring knife. They practically creaked with pain.

  “You look like a big ol’ lazy cat, Cherry, with that wild white hair and those yellow-green eyes of yours. You got eyes just like a lion.”

  “Oh, get out of here, Baby.”

  But I smiled. That’s one of the reasons I love Baby. She thinks I am as beautiful as she is. To her, my size-36-inseam skinny legs are gorgeous, even though I think they look like white ropes with knots for knees. The boys in the fifth grade used to call me Chicken Legs, and Baby, little thing that she was, would put her hands on her hips, get right up in their faces, and say, “She does not have chicken legs! They’re like a deer’s. She has Bambi legs.” Baby has always thought she was my protector.

  We do look kind of strange together. Every once in a while, we’ll be walking down the street and pass a mirror or a store window, and it comes over me how bizarre we must look to people who haven’t watched us grow up together. We get a lot of Mutt-and-Jeff jokes, which we don’t think are the least bit funny.

  —

  “Durn that Alfred Lynn. This smell will never come off my hands. I’ll have to sleep with them under my pillow.” Baby pulled off her hair net and shook out her hair. It fell down like a black satin curtain. I took off my own net, undid the knot I had tied my hair into, and got a strong whiff of onion.

  “Even my hair smells,” I said. “I hope that onion juice didn’t bleach it out any worse than it already is.”

  As if that was possible. I was very nearly an albino when I was little. The only thing that saved me were my eyes, yellow-green instead of pink, but my hair was stone white, and I never had any eyelashes or eyebrows that you could see. My mother started dyeing them when I was six, before I started to school. She didn’t want the kids to make fun of me any more than they had to.

  Mama and I would get it done at Dottie’s Kwik Kurl, in what used to be the old bank, on the other side of the railroad tracks. It was a little weird that the bank was now a beauty shop, but it was kind of elegant, with the marble floors and wooden counters and all. The shampoo bowls were in the front, where the bank customers used to stand in line. There, Miss Dottie would lay you back and scrub your head, digging in with her pointy red fingernails until your scalp tingled and nearly bled, and then she’d towel you off and take you around behind the teller cages, which still had bars on them, where she rolled you up and put you under one of the hair dryers. They looked like silver Martians’ moon helmets and blew out scalding-hot air that burned your ears to nubs and made you deaf from the noise. You had to sit there, no matter how much pain you were in, until the bell went off and Miss Dottie took you out.

  Off in the corner, she had one of those old-fashioned permanent-wave machines—the kind where the hair is rolled onto wires that cook the curl into it. Since they’d invented cold waves, though, hardly anybody wanted the electric kind anymore, so it just sat there like some Dr. Frankenstein contraption. I guess it was expensive and Miss Dottie hated to haul it off to the junkyard.

  Not that I needed a permanent wave. Besides being white, my hair was curly to the point of kinkiness. Miss Dottie used to roll it on the biggest brush rollers she had, to try to tame it down, but it was hopeless. It would be almost smooth for about a minute, then gradually I’d feel it start to draw up and spring back into its old shape.

  Every week Mama went and got a shampoo and set, and every other week I would go with her for my eyelash dye job. While Mama was under the dryer, Miss Dottie would set me on a stack of towels, pump me up high with the foot pedal and, with the tiniest brush they made, she’d paint Dark Eyes dye on my lashes and brows. Sable brown. When she first started doing it, I was scared it would get in my eyes and make me go blind, but it didn’t, and after a few years I learned to do it myself. Not many people know I don’t really have sable-brown lashes and brows. My hair is still Pillsbury white, but I call it platinum blond. Unfortunately, people who haven’t known me all my life think it’s bleached, on account of the dark brows. You never can win.

  —

  We waded through the squishy old onion rinds, out into the sweet-smelling morning, and gulped in that clean air like we had just been pulled from the river. Lord, there’s nothing like watching the sun come up over the mountains. At first, the sky is all kind of dark hazy blue and cool. Then a blush of pink starts to warm it up—like the tail end of Picasso’s blue period, when he finally began to get out of his depression and paint clowns and things in pink instead of those scrawny blue beggar people. I like Picasso a lot. At least his earlier stuff—before he started making women look like monsters with their mouths open, screaming, and sharp, spiked tongues. Even if he offered, I wouldn’t let him paint my portrait for love nor money, but he’s eighty-eight years old now and still going strong, so that says a lot for him. Actually, there’s quite a few painters who have lived to be really old, if you think about it. Not the worst reason to go into it.

  Baby and I are going to be taking our third year of oil painting at DuVail University in the fall. She likes Van Gogh the most. Maybe I do too. I can’t decide. Picasso has more styles to choose from. But Van Gogh’s color is wilder, and I love the way he made all those thick swirls of paint. You can tell from the way he piled on the paint that he was crazy—even then, paint couldn’t have been cheap. The fact that he lopped off his own ear is also a clue. I bet the girl he sent it to was never quite the same after she opened up that little package! Kind of sweet, though, that he loved her so much. I never met a boy who would lop off his ear for me.

  But then, to complicate the issue of who I like best, there is Gauguin! And Rousse
au. And Peter Max. Actually, I like them all. I haven’t really found my own style yet, but then it took Picasso a while before he found his.

  Painting makes you look at things differently. You start thinking of everything in terms of paint colors—the cerulean blue of the sky, the sap green of the trees. The Payne’s gray of the rat.

  —

  “Do you think Alfred Lynn actually threw out that relish?” I asked Baby as I dug around in my purse for the car keys.

  “I doubt it. He probably trucked it out one door and in the other. You can bet I’m eating my hot dogs with just mustard for a few years. Let’s go and get us some breakfast. Smelling onions always makes me hungry.”

  3.Cherry

  We pulled up to the Deep South in my Volkswagen. It was a great car—still painted its original green, and it had a radio that worked and a heater that blew full blast all the time, summer and winter, although in an Arkansas summer the car’s heater felt cool compared to the air outside. Baby had one just like it—same color, same year: ’56. What is really freaky is that we got them on the same day, and neither of us knew the other one had it until we talked on the phone that night. I almost think sometimes that we were twins in a previous life, if you believe in that stuff, and I kind of do. We were always together in one car or the other, and nobody could tell them apart unless they looked close and saw that the dents were in different places. My daddy bought mine for a hundred dollars three years ago, so I could drive back and forth to college. I wanted to live on campus, but we only lived ten miles away, and we couldn’t afford it anyhow. One reason he got the Volkswagen was that it was the cheapest on gas. I could go a whole week on a dollar’s worth.

  At least Daddy gave in about me being an art major. At first he carried on about how I would never be able to support myself by painting and what I really should do was to become a pharmacist. There was always money in sick people. Mama agreed, but she thought maybe I should be a nurse—they stand more of a chance of marrying a rich doctor, being around them all the time. I told her in no uncertain terms that I didn’t plan on having to marry some man, especially a doctor, to make me a living. I figured I’d be able to do that myself. Plus, the very thought of a hospital or medicine makes me gag.

  We fought back and forth, but they finally knuckled under on the condition that I get an art-teaching degree so I would have a steady paycheck. People raised during the Depression are just obsessed with steady pay-checks. Daddy wasn’t even forty-five yet, and talked all the time about saving for retirement.

  Baby’s parents didn’t care what she did. They are great people, but I’m not real sure they even know what an art major is. They’ve tried hard to stay Filipino and not mix too much in modern America. Baby’s father runs a fish-and-bait store out by the lake, and her mother—Baby calls them Tatang and Manang—was all the time drying fish up on the roof or cooking fish-head stew and rice. She’s a good cook, and eating over there is interesting, but you don’t want to inquire too closely what’s on your plate. She makes dishes like barbecued chicken intestines—I kid you not. Once I grabbed a handful of what I thought were nuts and they turned out to be some kind of foul-tasting dried octopus testicles or something. Frankly, if she didn’t look exactly like her parents, I would think Baby was adopted.

  —

  Nestled among all the big trailer trucks in the parking lot of the Deep South was a deputy sheriff’s car. What bad luck. It had to be Ricky Don Sweet. I sure didn’t feel like making light conversation with Ricky Don, looking the way I did and smelling to high heaven of onions. He was enough of a pain without me giving him more ammunition to rag on me with.

  Me and Ricky Don have a history. Besides our going to school together since the first grade, he was my first real boyfriend, in the tenth. He was a big football player—got to be captain our senior year—and had a reputation for meanness on the field. If you ever played against him, you knew that he’d pull your leg hair or twist your arm in a pileup. He was the only one I knew that really wanted to go to Vietnam. “I’m gonna show those gooks what a real American is,” he’d say. “I’m gonna go over there and kick some butt.”

  Whether he kicked any butt, I couldn’t say. He didn’t talk about it much after he came back, at least not to me, but I think he was an adjutant in a two-star general’s office and, as far as I know, never saw any combat. The only scar he had was from football. He got the top of his nose scraped off at the beginning of the football season his junior year, and the scab kept getting knocked off during every game or practice. It was bloody for a whole solid year. Now he had a scar, but it made him look kind of sexy. Dangerous. Like a cougar, with his sandy hair and pale gray eyes. He scared me a little bit then—if I’m honest, he still does—and when he asked me to go steady at Christmas our sophomore year, I took his ring, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. The fact is, I sneaked around and dated other boys, and on at least three occasions that I knew of, he found out and beat the guy up. That cut down on my social life considerably. Every time he’d beat one up, he’d turn up at my house sorry and crying and begging me not to leave him, claiming that he’d kill himself if I did. It was pitiful. There’s nothing worse than a big, scary football player crying around over a girl, especially if it’s yourself.

  Usually, I promised that if he would shut up I wouldn’t leave him, but after a while it got to be kind of a drag. Finally, when he had done it for the second time in a month, I said to go ahead, that I didn’t care if he killed himself. And I didn’t.

  He slammed out the door and got into his old beat-up truck. He was going to drive off the bluff and end it all in a tangled heap of steel on Nehi Mountain. How like him to pick a method of suicide that left a big mess for somebody else to clean up.

  After he left, I sat quietly thinking about what I’d say to his folks at the funeral. I would have to convince them it wasn’t my fault, which might not be easy. They would be mad at me for not trying to stop him, I was pretty sure.

  I had just about decided to call somebody and tell them when he knocked on the door and said he couldn’t get the truck started. He wanted me to come out and give him a push. Can you beat that? I was quite a bit put out, to say the least, that not only was I the cause of him killing himself, but I had to help him get his old truck started so he could go and do the job.

  Needless to say, since he was sitting here this minute in the Deep South, he hadn’t done it. I would have probably thought more of him if he had, and he knew it.

  —

  Baby and I went on in and sat down in the back booth. The Deep South was a truck stop open twenty-four hours a day, and it was the gathering place at one hour or the other for just about everybody. At night, after out-of-town ball games, the buses used to stop off there on their way back to the school, and everyone—football players, cheerleaders, band, and spectators—would take over the whole place. We’d invariably order a Deep South salad and lemon icebox pie. The salad was ordinary iceberg lettuce with tomato, ham, and cheese cut up in it, but the dressing was spectacular—creamy garlic so strong it made your nose run. The bus windows would fog over with the smell of our breath when we got back on.

  The early mornings belonged to the truck drivers, and now, they packed the place. It was pretty rowdy at six o’clock, with all those truckers getting tanked up on coffee for their runs to Tulsa or New Mexico, carrying loads of frozen chickens, TV dinners from the Swanson plant, or crates of Atlas pickles, whose trucks were painted with their red logo of a muscle-bound Atlas holding a giant pickle on his shoulders. Along with the locals, there were a lot of out-of-state guys, on their way through to California or points north. They all gave us the once-over. Some, the twice-over. Ricky Don was at the counter telling jokes in that big loud donkey voice of his. He was swiping at his greasy eggs with a biscuit when he spotted us.

  “’Scuse me, boys. I got to pay my respects to some ladies here.” He popped the biscuit into his mouth, chewing as he got up, and carried his coffee cup wi
th him.

  He swaggered over to our table with that walk they teach them at sheriff school, hitching up his big brass belt buckle. In the three years since we’d graduated, his tight athlete’s body had gone just the tiniest bit to fat. I could see him at our ten-year reunion with a real gut. He still slicked his hair back with Wildroot Creme Oil, even though most of the guys at college were letting theirs grow long and natural. He sure would never be mistaken for a hippie. The shiny name tag on his shirt said SWEET. Sweet Valley was named after one of his great-great-great-grandpas or something, and there were a zillion Sweets living around the county, but in relation to Ricky Don, the name always struck my funny bone.

  “What’re you laughing at, Highpockets?” He started calling me that when I was twelve, and still did.

  “I’m just happy, Ricky Don. Peeling onions all night long always makes me laugh.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re just as nutty as you ever were. Mind if I sit down?”

  I scooted over, and Ricky Don settled his six-foot-two self into more than his share of the red Naugahyde booth.

  “Y’all do smell. Phew! I’ll try to hold my nose long enough to finish this coffee. Although after what all else I been smelling tonight, onions smell pretty good.”

  “What’s that, your left armpit?” Baby never could resist.

  “No, Miss Wiseass. A body.”

  “A body? Whose body? What body?” we said together.

  “You remember Carlene Moore?”

  “Yeah—sure.”

  Of course we remembered Carlene. She was in our class but dropped out in the eleventh grade because she got pregnant by Jerry Golden, the one who was killed in Nam. It was a big scandal at the time.

  “It wasn’t her, was it?” Baby looked scared.

  I guess I did too. “Ricky Don, don’t tell me that.”

  “Yep. It sure was. We found her floating in the lake this morning about four o’clock. Ol’ John Aldridge and some boys were running trotlines and she was snagged on one of the hooks. She hadn’t been in the water for more than a few hours, they think. But even so, I can tell you it was not a pretty sight. We had to take the boys and go get Doc McGuire out of bed to treat them for shock over it.”