To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  She felt at once this was one rude remark too many, and so wasn’t surprised when her father turned and said, “Stop it now, Judith.”

  A second or two later the mud porch door swung open and the woman appeared with a tray containing a pitcher of iced tea, a plate of cookies, and a nested stack of tall metal cups, all of which she set out on a crude table that stood in the shade of the cottonwood. She’d also run a brush through her hair.

  The iced tea was okay, Judith thought, but the cookies were peanut butter, which she knew her father couldn’t stand.

  “Yum,” her father said.

  The woman said, “I get sick of peanut butter myself, but it’s about all the boys’ll eat.”

  Judith’s father looked at the woman and said, “I doubt I would tire of these cookies.”

  Judith began to cough and kept coughing until she could finally retch up a brackish liquidy mix of cookie and bile. She expected her father’s arm around her, but the woman got to her first.

  “You okay, darlin’?” the woman said. She smelled soapy clean, or maybe it was perfume.

  “I’m just shaky,” Judith said, and gave her father a weak look. “Maybe we should go home.”

  He was looking at her thoughtfully when a noise took his attention, and they both turned toward the barn, where a pickup truck approached with a rumble. There were two cowboy hats in the cab, and in the truck bed stood something large wrapped with a tarp. The dog was also back there. He seemed now to be grinning.

  “There’re the boys,” the woman said.

  Judith watched them coming and said, “So which one’s Jim?”

  The woman said, “Those two are both mine, though I don’t always like to say so. The big cute one behind the wheel is Patrick and the little cute one beside him is Petey.” Then she offered Judith’s father another peanut butter cookie, which he accepted. Who Jim was Judith still didn’t know.

  The boys really were boys—the driver looked thirteen or fourteen, and his passenger was even younger—but they both wore boots, denims, long-sleeved shirts, and cowboy hats so big their heads looked small. They got out of the pickup slowly, almost somber, like smallish men on big business. The driver went back and pulled the tarp from the washing machine, which looked new.

  “This is it,” he said.

  The other boy silently climbed into the back, sat on the wheel well, and began to scratch the dog, who pushed close with craving.

  Judith’s father put down his iced tea and walked over. He stepped onto the running board, opened the lid of the washing machine, and stared into the tub. It must’ve appeared as unused on the inside as it did on the outside, because he said, “You manufacture it yourselves?” and it came as no surprise to Judith that the farmboys took the question at face value.

  “No, sir,” the younger one said. “We took it in trade for some work we done.”

  The other one said, “From a man who’d himself taken it in trade for work he done.”

  Judith’s father glanced at the half-finished barn roof and said, “Are you sure you don’t want to use it to pay for the work someone else does?”

  The boys silently turned to their mother, who said, “Things are tight. We’ve decided to sell it.”

  Judith couldn’t stand to watch these proceedings, and couldn’t stand not to. At one point, when she’d tilted her head away so she could simultaneously listen and appear bored, she felt the older boy’s eyes creeping all over her, and when she turned suddenly and drilled him with an ice-cold look, he blushed and took his cowboy hat off but kept his eyes on her all the same. His hair was short on the sides, longer on the top and, as was the peculiar local male style, brushed forward into bangs. Living here, she’d thought more than once, was like living in a town full of Captain Kangaroos.

  “I don’t own a truck,” her father said. “Any chance you could deliver it?”

  The older Guest boy turned to the question. “Yes, sir. Hook it up, too.”

  Judith’s father was nodding agreeably when the sound of an approaching vehicle drew Judith’s eyes to a station wagon rolling up the dirt lane in front of its own rush of dust.

  The older boy said, “It’s like Grand Central Station around here today.”

  Judith looked at the boy and said, “Have you ever been to Grand Central Station?”

  The boy stiffened slightly and shook his head.

  “But you know where it is, though, right?”

  The boy lowered his eyes. Judith expected her father to say something to save the situation, or maybe the boy’s mother, but nobody saved him, and in the silence she felt a twinge of remorse.

  The station wagon, a finny, late-fifties Dodge Sierra, was heavily freighted in the rear with plywood, which gave the vehicle’s front lines a sharkish upward cant. The driver, a tall boy with a full sandy blond beard, pulled close, pushed his cap up a bit on his forehead, and took in the gathering with what appeared to be an amused grin.

  He was twenty or twenty-two easy, Judith guessed, maybe even older—he already had the beginnings of crow’s-feet around the eyes. He was wearing the T-shirt that had faded to pink; it was of the sleeveless type that Judith associated with ripe, unfiltered body odor. I suppose this is the roofer, was her first thought, and her sole positive observation was that he at least didn’t have bangs.

  “We’re all set, Mrs. Guest,” he said to the woman, and gave her a little more of his good-humored smile. Judith wondered whether maybe the crow’s-feet came from all the idiotic smiling he felt the need to do. Though the gray-blue eyes were an okay feature, she had to admit. By this time, the roofer turned his attention to the boys. “You amateurs ready for a little sweat and toil?”

  The older Guest boy sneaked a last look toward Judith, then slapped his hat on and headed off toward the barn, with the littler Guest trailing right behind.

  Mrs. Guest turned to Judith’s father. “I’ve got the warranty and stuff inside.”

  Judith watched him follow her in and didn’t stop watching until the door closed behind them. When she turned back, the station wagon was still there and the bearded roofer was looking her way. The red brim of his Purina seed cap was stained dark with sweat, and his amused expression seemed to suggest he knew a little bit more about this county and about this farm and possibly even about her than she ever would. It was quite an irritant. With all the hostility she could muster, she said, “What’re you looking at?”

  The roofer made dropping his gaze seem like an act of deference. “Well, I was looking at you,” he said, then raised his eyes again and let them settle even more fully on Judith. “And I’ll bet I’m not the first.” He was smiling again.

  Judith gave him a stony stare and said, “Are you half-witted or just easily amused?”

  She expected this to send the roofer into retreat, but it didn’t. His smile in fact loosened slightly. He raked his fingers through his beard and said, “Just exactly how old are you, anyway?”

  “Seventeen,” she lied.

  He nodded, stared off for a moment, then turned his face to her again. “Well, then, I’d call you dangerous.”

  His eyes, reaching in, exerted on Judith what felt like a subtle but actual pull, which alarmed her. She put an edge on her voice and said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He shrugged and smiled and was pulling at her again with his eyes, which seemed oddly, pleasantly wintry. She wanted in the worst way to say something to splinter the moment, but she couldn’t, she couldn’t think of anything at all to say, and a not-unpleasant stillness materialized, the kind of quiet calm in which snowflakes might float.

  “Hey!” the older of the Guest boys called out, and the spell was broken. The boy was perched halfway up the ladder leaning against the roof eave. “Barn’s over here!”

  This, like everything else, seemed to amuse the roofer. He shrugged, tapped the bill of his cap back into place, and, after a final look at Judith, began to ease the truck away.

  “Hey!” she said, and he braked and
looked back. She had no idea what she meant to say. “That grin of yours,” she said. “I would have to call it baboonish.”

  If anything, the roofer’s grin stretched a fraction wider. “Peligrosa,” he said with an unhurried drollness nothing in this part of Nebraska had prepared her for. “Muy peligrosa.”

  He drove off then, and Judith went through a quick set of adjectives—unsettling, odd, arrogant—and came to rest on unpleasant, because that’s what he was, and what those little cowboys were, and what Mrs. Guest was, too.

  Judith got into the Pontiac, intending to use the horn if her father didn’t appear soon. He did, though, pushing through the screen door with the farmwoman right behind. Judith studied their faces as they came toward the yard gate, but there wasn’t much to see. Her father carried his checkbook and what looked like an appliance manual in its plastic sleeve.

  At the gate, her father said, “Thank you, Mrs. Guest.”

  Mrs. Guest said, “You’re welcome, Mr. Toomey.”

  Two blank pages, Judith thought. That’s what they want me to see.

  She leaned out the window and said, “Is that roofer named Jim?”

  Mrs. Guest seemed confused for just a second, then said, “Oh, no, darlin’.” She set the gate into its catch. “His name’s Willy.”

  Judith settled back in her seat and noticed Mrs. Guest kept her eye on Judith’s father when she raised a hand in good-bye.

  As her father wheeled the Bonneville around, the older Guest boy was sliding a sheet of plywood up the rails of the ladder toward the littler Guest, who waited above at the roof’s edge. The brown-armed roofer was further up, with his back to the car, pulling a sheet of plywood into place with the claw side of his hammer. The older Guest boy, having gotten his plywood to the roof, gave a wave that Judith pretended not to see.

  “God!” she said, which seemed enough for a while. Then, when her father had turned the car off the dirt lane and onto the relative smoothness of the highway, she said, “So who do you think Jim is?”

  Somebody who wasn’t there, her father guessed.

  Judith said, “I’d say those who were there weren’t all there.”

  Her father smiled and said, “I noticed one of those little cowpokes kept his focus on you. Though I don’t suppose that alone would certify him as crazy.”

  “That’s rich, Dad,” she said, and stared out at the passing fields. She thought of telling her father that the bearded roofer had called her muy peligrosa, which she was pretty sure would amuse him, but some protective instinct—of what, exactly, she wasn’t sure—warned her off. She thought of her father and the farmwoman, and then of the farmwoman’s lacy bra, which, Judith would bet anything, was no everyday farm bra. She said, “Did they know we were coming today?”

  Her father nodded.

  “And did they know you’re a professor?”

  “Mrs. Guest recognized my name when I called, if that’s what you mean. Why?”

  After a second or two, Judith said, “Because she just seemed kind of careful about how she presented herself.” She paused. “How she spoke and stuff.”

  Her father said he hadn’t noticed that. Judith gazed out at the buttes to the southwest and said, “So did you think Mrs. Guest was pretty?”

  Her father seemed to consider it. “She wasn’t conventionally pretty, was she?”

  “But you thought she was kind of pretty?”

  “Yes, I thought she had aspects of beauty.”

  “Kind of pretty, then, in other words.”

  Her father nodded.

  A row of sparrowlike birds rose from the roadside fence and peeled away in a curving line. Judith said, “Prettier than Mom?”

  Her father turned now for a moment and gave her the face that had always been her face to touch with little fingers and to kiss on the nose. “No,” he said, “not prettier than Mom.”

  Judith nodded and turned away. At the base of the buttes, massed pines turned the landscape green. It was more scenic here than she’d expected, and she liked riding along like this, staring out and knowing that her father still thought her mother was more attractive than that farmwoman, Mrs. Guest, who, Judith had to admit, wasn’t a bad total package.

  When another set of the sparrowlike birds peeled off a fence at their approach, Judith asked what kind of birds they were.

  “Lark buntings,” her father said. “I think so, anyway.” Then, a mile or so farther along: “So what did you make of that amusable roofer?”

  Judith tensed slightly and said what did he mean, what did she make of him?

  “Well, here he is, driving an old clunker wagon and about to climb onto a steep roof in stupefying heat and humidity with nothing but green kids for help, and he acted like he was on his way to a picnic.”

  What Judith thought was that the roofer was probably a prime example of somebody who hadn’t given his life enough thought to know how unhappily he ought to view it. “Maybe he’s a simpleton,” she said.

  “You think?” her father said, and Judith said yes, she did.

  And so the Bonneville carried them away, and left behind Mrs. Guest, Patrick Guest, Petey Guest, a dog named Roscoe, and a smiling brown-armed roofer who had called Judith dangerous but didn’t otherwise occupy another moment of her thoughts until one morning a week or so later, when she awakened from an exotic dream with the odd sensation of having seen his pale gray-blue eyes staring down at her, watching her sleep.

  That Wednesday, Judith’s father had to go up to campus in the morning for some kind of meeting. As he left he said, “Those Guest boys might come by with our washing machine. If they do, show them where it goes.”

  This was alarming news. “When’re you going to be back?” Judith said.

  Her father, already at the door, shrugged. “An hour or two.”

  Patrick and Petey Guest appeared a half-hour later. She saw them through the kitchen window and watched as they unwrapped the tarp that covered the washer, but when they knocked and she opened the door, she hitched her chin a little to let them know she regarded them warily.

  “We’re here to set up your washing machine,” the older brother said. He was wearing his big hat and a newish-looking yellow-and-black-plaid cowboy shirt, neatly ironed. Judith didn’t speak. The boy said, “I’m Patrick, if you don’t remember me.” He cast a quick glance at the other boy. “He’s Petey.” When Judith still didn’t speak, his eyes drifted beyond her, and he said, “So where does it go?”

  Judith led them downstairs to the basement. Patrick looked at the hose bibs and drainpipe and said they’d do. A few minutes later they were easing the machine down the wooden stairs. The younger brother had his face turned, hugging the side of the machine, while the other looked steadily over it.

  When they got it roughly situated, the older boy sent his brother off to the truck for specific tools and fittings.

  Judith, standing at some distance, said, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  The boy grinned and said, “Oh, that would be taking it pretty far.” He looked around the basement and saw the door to the partitioned bedroom. “That your room?”

  Judith, who wished she’d closed that door, didn’t say anything.

  The boy said, “I like a basement room. Cool in the summer and warm in the winter. At least ours is. We got a boiler in ours.” He gazed around. “You’re fuel oil, I guess.”

  He looked at Judith, who had no idea what he was talking about. She said, “How old are you, anyway?”

  The boy pushed his cowboy hat back and revealed an arc of white skin the sun never hit. “Almost fifteen.”

  “How come you can drive?”

  “School permit.” He grinned. “Also ’cause nobody stops me.”

  Overhead, the front door was heard to open and close, and a moment later the younger brother came down the stairs carrying a wooden tray of tools and fittings. Patrick looked at them and said, “You forgot the ball valves,” and the little brother again disappeared.

  Pat
rick began to work. Judith wanted to leave, but she didn’t want him snooping around in the basement, peering through the door to her room. There was an old rowing machine down there, parked at the base of the concrete wall near one of the window wells. She sat on it and began idly to row.

  Patrick raised his head from behind the washing machine, watched her rowing for perhaps ten seconds, and said, “Now that’s something.”

  Judith said, “That pronoun had no antecedent.”

  “What?”

  “When you said, ‘that’s something,’ what was the that? The machine, or me, or what?”

  The boy’s face flushed slightly. “I don’t know. I was just trying to talk to you.”

  Judith softened at this. “It’s just…” She paused and then heard herself say, “that I have a boyfriend. He’ll be a senior this year.”

  Patrick took this in.

  Judith suddenly remembered how she’d grilled him about Grand Central Station. She said, “I’ll tell you this, though. I think it’s amazing that someone fourteen years old can set up a washing machine by himself. I couldn’t do it in a million years.”

  Patrick looked at what he was doing, then looked back at her and said, “Yes, you could.”

  The little brother appeared with two valves, one red-handled, the other blue. Patrick looked at Judith and said, “Where’s your water shut-off at?” and when Judith gave him a blank look, he turned to his brother, who went off to find it. “Look on the south side first!” Patrick yelled after him, then, softer, to Judith, “That’s the usual place.” A minute or two later, the younger brother yelled down that he’d found it. “Okay,” Patrick called back, “turn it off and leave it off till I tell you!”

  Patrick resumed work. It was quiet except for the occasional clink of a tool laid on concrete. After a while, Judith said, “So did you finish your barn roof?”