Windchill Summer Read online

  I looked over at Baby, who had all of a sudden gotten quiet. She looked a little pale. “Baby? Are you all right?” I said.

  She took a deep breath, like she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs. “I’m okay. What happened to her? Who did it?”

  “Y’all don’t want to know what happened. And if we knew who did it, we’d have him thrown under the jail already. But I will tell you this: She died hard. Horrible as they were, they don’t think she died from her wounds. They think she might have been alive when they throwed her in. She drowned.”

  Ricky Don paused for effect. He got what he wanted. We sat there with our teeth in our mouths, too stunned to say a word. He looked at one of us, and then the other. He smiled, satisfied with himself, and got up, flipping a dime onto the table.

  “Coffee’s on me. I’ll see y’all. Be careful now.”

  He went on out, and the waitress came over to take our order, but it seemed like neither one of us was too hungry. We had known Carlene since we were six.

  —

  She was one of those carrottop flaming redheads with a jillion freckles. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she came to school one day in the third grade with her hair dyed coal black. It made her skin look kind of pale green. The kids started calling her Spook. She acted like she didn’t care, and even seemed proud when she said her mother did it so they would look alike. Her mother’s hair was black. I don’t know if it was dyed or not. Nobody ever saw her but rarely. Frannie Moore was a little odd, bordering on card-carrying crazy. She wore filmy nylon dresses, even in the wintertime—black, with red and yellow flowers. I don’t know where she bought them, but she must have had a bunch, because that’s all I ever saw her wear. She used to cut her old ones down for Carlene, but she wasn’t much of a seamstress, because some of them came down to Carlene’s ankles. I can still see her skinny little white feet in scuffed patent leather shoes sticking out from under the hems. Kind of strange-looking on a third-grader, to say the least.

  Carlene couldn’t run very fast or skip rope or hang from the tommy-walkers in those long dresses. She always had bruises or cuts on her, too, so I guess she was pretty accident-prone, and must have tripped a lot. She mostly stood off to the side at recess, chewing on her fingernails. When we tried to play with her, she just shook her head and kept gnawing. Coming to school, she sat alone on the backseat of the bus, and she ate her lunch out of a brown paper sack, by herself. Maybe she was ashamed of what she brought—usually a cold, greasy biscuit left over from breakfast; once in a while, a pack of Twinkies.

  I remember one time we had to do a book report and Carlene brought in a picture book that belonged to her daddy. The teacher paddled her and locked the book in her drawer, so we never did exactly know what was in it, but the boys said there were pictures of naked women.

  After the black started to grow out, she really did look funny, with red-and-black-striped hair, until one day she came to school with it cropped almost in a burr, and it was totally red again. I guess the kids kind of made fun of her, although I didn’t. I knew what it was like; I’d had all I needed of them laughing at me and my long skinny legs and frizzy white hair.

  But Carlene was pretty tough about the teasing; she ignored it and acted like it didn’t much bother her. Finally, the novelty wore off and gradually we stopped thinking of her as weird. Still, she was quiet and hardly ever spoke up in class unless the teacher asked her a direct question, even though she usually knew the answer. I don’t know who she ran around with, but I don’t think she had many friends. She lived out by the lake in a trailer, and her mother worked. Her daddy ran off and left her and her mother when she was thirteen or fourteen. She didn’t say much about it, but that was the rumor. He wasn’t much account, anyhow, from what they said.

  Once she got to be a teenager, though, she started using makeup to cover the freckles and was really not that bad-looking, given the fact that she was a little too fond of blue eye shadow. Then, to our surprise, in the ninth grade, she went out for the girl’s basketball team and made the squad. She was good at it—a real hustler. The coach loved her, and Carlene made all-district her sophomore year. The coach tried like crazy to get me to join the team, too, for the obvious reason that I was the tallest girl at school. I finally agreed to try it, but after running two miles—and lagging two whole laps behind everyone else—then running up and down the bleachers until I nearly blacked out, I realized I wasn’t cut out to be a basketball player and quit. I was never too sure which goal I was supposed to be shooting at, either, and I felt stupid and ugly in the shorts. But I remember Carlene ran those miles like a sturdy little horse and didn’t seem to be overly out of breath, in spite of the fact that she smoked. She was really kind of a jock, I guess. At least she liked to act like she was—independent and tough.

  So all in all, it was a surprise when she started going out with Jerry Golden, who, as I said, was president of the class, an honor student, quarterback of the football team, and a really great guy: tall, dark, and the proverbial handsome. His dad was the pastor of the Church of Christ, and he was one of the leaders of our in-crowd, so to speak, although I hate that term. I mean—don’t get me wrong—we were happy for Carlene, but they seemed like an unlikely match. All of a sudden, here was a girl we had never thought much about before and she had landed the prize catch of the class. Even if he was going out with her for the obvious reason, we had to give her a second look.

  While she never got to be a close friend of Baby’s or mine, after Jerry hooked up with her, he brought her to a lot of our parties. I remember talking to her at one, and she told me she was a big admirer of Shirley MacLaine—probably because they had the same color hair. In fact Carlene did look a little bit like her—and she said that she wanted to go to Hollywood and be a movie star. Of course I didn’t laugh at her right to her face, but I remember thinking it was a pretty far-fetched dream. I mean, she was cute, but sort of—oh, I don’t know—hard somehow, or something, bless her heart. On the other hand, maybe hard is good in Hollywood.

  The movie-star ambition was short-lived, because they weren’t together more than a year when her luck ran out and she got pregnant. This is where it gets pretty bad, because Jerry, who made straight A’s and talked about being a lawyer, denied that it was his. I mean, you can’t really be sure with anybody, but Carlene told us it was Jerry’s, and she was so crazy about him that it couldn’t have been anybody else’s. We never heard of her going out with anybody else. They were stuck all day like glue, sitting together in assembly, taking all the same classes, eating lunch side by side. He drove out to the lake every morning to pick her up for school. They used to talk to each other nose to nose, like they were about to kiss at any minute. It made you feel uncomfortable, like maybe you should look away. I wondered if they were ever concerned that their breath wasn’t fresh.

  After he denied it, as much as we liked him and wanted to believe him, it was hard to see her at school, getting bigger every day, crying as she walked down the hall, and him just ignoring her. She wore a long brown coat, even though it was nearly May, thinking that it hid her belly or something. Jerry tried to act normal, joking around with all of us and trying to pretend nothing was wrong, but it got to be pretty tense.

  Then the principal called her into the office and “suggested” that she drop out. I guess he figured she was a bad influence on the rest of us, like we were all going to run right out and get pregnant ourselves because we could see how great it was for her. She did drop out, even though there was only a month left of school. Instead of Jerry finishing high school and going on to the university like he planned, he left right after our junior year, bummed around over the summer, and joined the army. Even though he tested really high and could have probably gotten OCS and gone in as a second lieutenant, he didn’t. He just went into the infantry, like anybody who’d been drafted. That was a sure bet he’d be headed for Vietnam, but he didn’t seem to care. It just about undid his parents, plus being the biggest and last
mistake he would make. After Carlene had the baby—a boy, I think—she didn’t come back for senior year, and I kind of lost track of her.

  —

  I couldn’t get over it. The baby was an orphan. He must be nearly four now—not a baby, but a big kid. Amazing. I couldn’t imagine having a four-year-old. I still felt like a kid myself, most of the time. I wondered where the boy was and who was taking care of him. Probably Carlene’s mother, if she could do that and still work. I wondered if Jerry’s mother and daddy would acknowledge now that the baby was his. I hoped so. They’d lost Jerry, but at least she had his son. Assuming it was his son. That was something. In that way, it was good they’d had the baby—a little piece of both of them was still alive. On the other hand, if Carlene hadn’t gotten pregnant, Jerry wouldn’t have joined the army and gone to Vietnam, and she probably wouldn’t have gotten into whatever it was she got into. Both of them dead because of one little moment in time, one wrong choice. That is so scary. Even one sentence can sometimes change a whole life. Gives you something else to worry about, and right then I was starting to worry plenty.

  —

  “The third one of us,” Baby said. “The third one of our class to die. First Bobby, then Jerry, and now Carlene.”

  It was bad enough to have our boys fighting in that insane war clear on the other side of the world, horrible enough that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had both been murdered in cold blood last year, but now some maniac right here in Sweet Valley, Arkansas, had killed Carlene Moore.

  “What do you reckon he did to her, Baby?”

  “Ricky Don is right. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Let’s just keep our car doors locked when we go home and look in the backseat before we get in. No telling who did it or where he is now.”

  We got into my car and headed to Baby’s house, out by the lake. The sun was up and the hot smell of cut grass from the mowers on the highway blew in through our open windows as we turned down the dirt road that ran along the lake shore. Neither one of us had much to say. I dropped Baby off and headed home. I just wanted to take a hot bath and crawl between a pair of cool sheets to sleep. And try not to dream about Carlene Moore.

  4.Cherry

  When I got up later in the afternoon, the whole family was at our house clumped around the TV watching the moon landing. I sat down with them, and we all stared at the screen. For what seemed like hours.

  It was phenomenal that we were able to go that far and try to actually land, but frankly, there was just nothing to see up there. Even on a color TV, all you could make out were some fuzzy black-and-white pictures of rocks and dirt. Although the earth looked pretty cool from that perspective, you couldn’t just keep staring at rocks and dirt forever. They were supposed to get out and walk, but that might not be for ages.

  The aunts had brought over stuff for a picnic out in the backyard, and my mother had custard simmering on the stove to make ice cream. I stirred it for a minute, then wandered outside to see what the cousins were up to. They had burned out on the moon landing a while ago.

  —

  Most of us in my family are big and blond-headed. Daddy—David Marshall—and his brothers, Ray and Jake, are six-five or six-six, and Mama and her sister, Rubynell, are five-ten or more. My mama’s name is Ivanell. Now that I have just said their names, it hits me again how awful it must have been for them to grow up with those names. I don’t think Grandma even had a sense of humor about it. She just liked how they sounded. It’s a good thing they are good-looking women. Can you imagine if they were ugly and had those names? Or, worse, if they had been named some little-girl cutesy names, like Debbie or Tammy? (Cherry, at least, stands for Cheryl Ann, and I never think of it as cutesy.)

  Aunt Rubynell and Uncle Jake only had one girl, a year younger than me, named Lucille Desiree, after some book Aunt Rubynell was reading at the time she had her. We are double cousins, obviously, because Aunt Rubynell is Mama’s sister, and Uncle Jake is Daddy’s brother. They aren’t twins or anything; they just happened to marry brothers and have names that rhyme. In fact, it was a double wedding. The only thing they didn’t do together was have babies. Mama beat Aunt Rubynell to that. Growing up, Lucille and I were like sisters, but now that I am in college at DuVall, we don’t see each other all the time like we used to, although we’re still pretty close.

  Part of the reason, too, is that Lucille got married and pregnant, not necessarily in that order. Her husband, Jim Floyd Hawkins, worked at Wilmerding’s Funeral Parlor, and had ever since he was sixteen. When they were dating, Jim Floyd’s job was to stay all night with the bodies—I think there is a rule in this state that you can’t leave a corpse unattended or something—and Lucille would keep him company. They spent their evenings making out on the couch in the grieving room. The baby was more than likely conceived right there in front of some dead person. It kind of gives you the creeps. Now he had worked his way up to assistant embalmer and was doing so well that Mr. Wilmerding was going to send him to mortuary school in Dallas in the fall to get his diploma.

  After all those years of making out around dead people, Lucille got real comfortable with them, and Mr. Wilmerding gave her a job doing the makeup and hair of the corpses. I can tell you that some of those old ladies would turn over in their graves—if they were in them yet—at the amount of rouge and lipstick she puts on. They look like shriveled-up Las Vegas showgirls. But most of the families don’t complain. Either they are too much in shock or they don’t want to hurt Lucille’s feelings.

  The two of them, Lucille and Jim Floyd, live in a trailer out in Aunt Rubynell and Uncle Jake’s backyard. Lucille was about to deliver any minute, and had spent most of the day lying around in the shade hollering for Jim Floyd to get her glasses of ice tea. Talk about paying for your sins—Jim Floyd sure was.

  —

  “Come on out here, Cherry. Pull you up a chair and tell me what Ricky Don said about Carlene. Jim Floyd didn’t get to see her when they brought her in.”

  Lucille had her legs all splayed out, lying back on the webbed-nylon chaise, and didn’t even care that anybody who looked could see all the way to China.

  I unfolded a blue-and-white lawn chair and joined them in the shade under the pecan trees.

  “Ricky Don didn’t tell us much of anything, just that it was awful. To tell you the honest truth, Lucille, I didn’t ask him any details. I have enough nightmares as it is from the pickle plant.”

  “Do you think he cut off her tits?”

  Lucille herself had just about the biggest boobs I ever saw. They were enormous before, but since she had gained eighty pounds with this baby, they looked like they were going to pull her off the chaise every time she turned over. I didn’t want to think about the sweat somebody would work up trying to cut them off.

  “I don’t know, Lucille. Can’t we talk about something else? I bet whoever did it is long gone from here.”

  “I bet he’s not. I bet it’s somebody right here in this town. I bet it was a sex maniac. Sex maniacs are often the most common, gentle people you know.” Lucille’s eyes glowed just thinking about it.

  “It could be somebody we went to school with, or even somebody like old Mr. McRae down at the post office,” she went on. “On the surface just quietly minding his own business for forty years, but underneath—a raving sex maniac.”

  I didn’t think old Mr. McRae could do much in the sex-maniac department. He worked with Daddy down at the post office, was at least seventy-five years old, and had lost a leg in the First World War. He wore khakis with safety pins pinning his empty pants leg up and hopped back and forth on his one leg from the window to the mail bins. But in a way, Lucille was right. It could be anybody.

  —

  “Don’t y’all want to come in here and see these astronauts? They’re getting closer to getting out,” Mama yelled at us from the back door.

  “No, Mama. Just you watch and tell us when they’re about to.” I felt a little guilty that I was missing one o
f the great moments of history, but enough is enough. After Star Trekand all the wonderful worlds that Kirk and Spock had conquered, the moon, even though it was real, seemed a little bare and boring.

  George Wesley came out carrying the ice cream freezer. G. Dub, as we called him, was my only other cousin. His father was Daddy’s brother uncle Ray, but his mother wasn’t related to Mama or Aunt Rubynell, even though they all acted like sisters.

  G. Dub set the freezer down, poured it full of cracked ice and salt, and started turning the crank.

  “Why ain’t you over at Wilmerding’s, Jim Floyd? I come by early this morning and there was a gang of cars, cops and all, parked outside. What are they doing with her?”

  “She’s gone. They’ve done took her to Little Rock, G. Dub.” Jim Floyd flicked his cigarette butt. “This thing’s too big for these local boys. They’ve called in the state boys. They wouldn’t even let me in to work this morning. Wouldn’t let any of us even see her. This thing is big.”

  “Well, they’ll have to bring her back here to bury her. Her folks are all buried up at Shady Vista.” Lucille drained the last of her ice tea with a slurp and fished out a piece of ice to chew. “I’ll probably have to do her hair. Even if they have her all fixed up, we’ll still be able to see if he cut off her tits.”

  “I wish to goodness we could change the subject.” I probably spoke a little louder than I should have. This whole thing was creeping me out.

  “All right, all right.” G. Dub stopped cranking for a minute. “Let’s talk about something else. Here, Cherry, reach over and get that sack of salt and pour some more in this ice.”

  I got up and gave him the salt bag. G. Dub could see that the conversation was getting to me, and from the way he was turning that crank, it looked like it was getting to him, too. To Lucille and Jim Floyd, dead people are perfectly normal. They don’t mean anything by it. It is just their life.