To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  The boy stuck his head up from behind the washer. “Yep. We were done a day or two after you were there. That roofer flat worked. My mother had him do some other stuff, he was so good. He’d wake you up with his hammering about ten seconds after the sun was up.”

  “And you paid that roofer with the money from this machine?”

  The boy gave his head a shake. “We were going to, yeah, but he wouldn’t take money. He said eating my mother’s cooking and enjoying the bountiful vista from up on the roof was pay enough. I think he knew we were up against it.”

  Judith went through this in her mind. “He said he was enjoying the bountiful vista?”

  The boy nodded. “It was a funny way to put it, that’s why I remember it. At night he’d go up on the roof and sit and drink his beer. I didn’t see the attraction. You can see almost as far from the hayloft and it’s lots more comfortable.”

  Judith, trying to imagine all this, had a thought. “So what did he do with the empty beer cans?”

  “Bottles,” the boy said. “Heaved them.”

  “Heaved them,” Judith repeated.

  Patrick Guest nodded. “Heaving the beer bottles seemed to be part of the fun. He heaved them down toward the rhubarb. My mother didn’t like beer bottles in her rhubarb, so in the morning he’d go around and pick them up.”

  Judith said, “Now there’s someone who knows how to have fun,” and Patrick, after smiling and nodding, said, “You know, though, in a way he did.”

  The amusable roofer, her father had called him. She said, “What was that roofer’s name?”

  “Willy Blunt,” the boy said, and Judith said, “So who’s Jim?”

  The boy cocked his head as if to say, What?

  “That day I was at your farm, your mother told that psychotic dog to go get Jim.”

  “Oh,” the boy said, “he was my stepdad.”

  “Was?”

  “Yeah, he got hit by lightning last summer. Petey found him. He was still on the tractor going round and round.” He stopped for a second. “It’s kind of embarrassing. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”

  “What’s embarrassing about somebody getting killed by lightning?”

  “There was an umbrella over the driver’s seat and it was thundering.”

  Judith waited and when the boy still said nothing, she said, “So?”

  “A metal umbrella that he’d clamped to the seat for shade. It was like he was driving around sitting on the bottom of a lightning rod.”

  “Oh.”

  “He was dead but the tractor kept going in a tight little circle. He wasn’t a farmer. He was from Portland, Oregon, and came here to teach school. Band and stuff. I guess he loved my mother, so he tried to be a farmer is all. Lots of people thought it was kind of funny. At the coffee shop I heard a farmer say, ‘Well, maybe a foolish man can last in Portland, Oregon, but he won’t last long in this country.’ I hated that man for saying it. I mean, he was maybe right and all, but I still hated him for saying it.”

  A moment or two passed and Judith said, “So if Jim was your stepdad and he died, how come your mom says ‘Git Jim’ to the dog when she sends him for you?”

  “Roscoe was my stepdad’s dog, but now he just kind of thinks me and Petey are his Jims.”

  Another pause, and the boy went back to work behind the washing machine.

  “What about your real father?”

  The boy poked his head up and said, “He wrecked on a horse.”

  “A horse wreck? Like a car wreck?”

  The boy nodded.

  “You say horse wreck?”

  He stared blandly at her for a second before saying, “I do, yeah.” Then: “My mom said that marriage was about up anyway. After what happened to Jim, she says she’s about through with marriage.”

  Judith said, “My mother says stuff like that, too,” and for a second she and the boy stared at one another, she seeing him and he seeing her. Then the boy ducked his head down and went back to work.

  When the job was finished and Patrick Guest and his brother had packed up and were ready to go, the boy abruptly removed his hat and extended toward Judith a slip of paper on which he’d written his name and telephone number. “Would you call me?” he said. “I mean, if you have any problems with the washing machine or anything,” and then, his face stiff and pink, he made for the door.

  It was funny what episodes and images you remembered in a life. Over the next year or two, Judith exchanged letters with Patrick Guest, and even saw him in fallen circumstances, and yet years later, living in Los Angeles, she could still close her eyes and see him as he had been the day he installed her father’s washing machine. She could see the black-and-yellow plaid of his snap-button cowboy shirt, and she could still call up a clean image of his earnest, stolid face and recall how, when the talk turned to marriage, he couldn’t quite keep the hopeful element from his eyes. On these occasions Judith would always wonder whether Patrick Guest had found a place in the world that honored his ability to do things carefully and well, and whether, too, he’d found a marriage that hadn’t depleted that secret cache of hopefulness he’d been accruing all the way from adolescence, and probably before, Judith guessed, if he was anything like the rest of us.

  July passed, and much of August. Mr. Darcy had won Elizabeth Bennet, and the nights were turning cool. The light had begun to change, and late afternoons, Judith and her father began taking rides in the Bonneville, traveling east or west along Highway 20 before turning onto one of the graded dirt roads that cut through pastures and fields. Her father would stop to photograph abandoned houses and barns, and while he moved from one outside location to another, hunting for the right subject and light, Judith would step warily through a door and into shadow, where she would often find artifacts of extracurricular life—cigarette butts, empty bottles, Dairy Queen wrappers, used condoms, words written on walls. On one old plaster wall, someone had written LLR + ZLL and then partially enclosed the joined initials within a valentine-style heart left incomplete because the artist seemed to have run out of the pink fingernail polish she (he?) was using for the project. On the wood post in the middle of another building, someone had etched the words Why are you here? She felt vaguely accused and left quickly, but when she later mentioned what she’d seen to her father, he released a small puffing laugh. “What we’re here for—there’s a question nobody sober tries to answer.”

  Judith’s failure to think of it as a Big Question annoyed her, and so did the fact that her father made light of it, which somehow felt as if he were making light of her, too.

  “So I suppose you don’t think about what you’re here for,” she said.

  This seemed to chasten him. “I do,” he said. “We all do. I should’ve called it the question nobody sober tries to answer in public.”

  “Now I get it,” Judith said. “You think things, but you won’t say them for fear they might make you look silly.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  They drove awhile in silence.

  “So you’re not going to tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because they would be personal ideas, Judith. I’m the only one for whom they might hold even the smallest significance. And hearing myself say them out loud will only debunk them for me.”

  As they drove on, Judith tried to poison the atmosphere with a steady expulsion of heavy sighs, which her father ignored (he slipped in an opera tape and at selected points sang along). When Judith noticed a looming one-room schoolhouse, she said sulkily, “I need to pee.”

  She used the outhouse and her father used the weeds at a corner of the fence line. As they reconvened at the Bonneville, he said, “You drive.”

  When she just stood staring at him, he said, “Millions do it.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “Within a minute you’ll be driving better than the average Italian.”

  Judith slid uncertainly into the driver’s seat. He pointed out the pe
dals and levers, suggested the adjustment of seat and mirrors, and told her to turn the key. She did, and the first quiet firing within the engine’s cylinders sent a vibratory thrill through her fifteen-year-old body.

  “Now what?” she said.

  He told her to take her foot off the brake, to gradually depress the gas pedal, and not to forget to steer. She inched onto the dirt road.

  “Now what?”

  He sat back and looked out the window. “Go faster.”

  Judith hunched over the steering wheel, and eventually her adjustments in course and speed grew less abrupt. The spell of sullenness had been lifted from her completely. “This is fun,” she said, and her father, staring off at the wide horizon, said, “Yes, it is.”

  This, then, became the customary method of their afternoon excursions—he drove the blacktop highways, she drove the back roads—and the hours passed in this way, Judith exulting in her assumption of responsibility, her father serene in the shedding of it.

  Following these afternoon drives, Judith and her father often stopped to eat a cheeseburger or French dip sandwich at places called the Covered Wagon Inn or Grandma’s Apron or the Food Bowl. Judith had begun collecting menus to commemorate her summer in Nebraska, marking the items she’d ordered with a one-to-five ticking system to denote quality (fives were rare, but so, too, were the ones). Afterward, she would ask the help of a passerby to photograph her and her father standing side by side in front of these establishments, his stout arm slung over her slender brown shoulder.

  One Friday night, in a town thirty miles east of Rufus Sage, Judith and her father stepped out of the Two Sisters’ Café and heard the dim sounds of a marching band carrying from the north. The first pedestrian passing by was an accommodating rancher who seemed to view the thirty-five-millimeter camera he was handed as something newfangled. After he hesitantly snapped two shots, the second with Judith holding her commemorative menu in front of her chest, her father, nodding toward the band music, said, “Football game?”

  “Local boys and Hemingford,” the rancher said. He seemed happy to hand the camera back. Then, grinning and giving a little show of looking over his shoulder: “I wouldn’t bet on the locals.”

  Judith felt a sudden shrinkage of spirit. The drifting sounds of this football game made specific an ending she’d kept vague. “It’s only August,” she said.

  “They end school early in the spring,” her father said, “so they start early at this end.”

  A sense of actual disconnection came over her, a strange floating sensation. In her mind she saw a red kite rising with a cut string trailing behind. The feeling terrified her, and she did something she hadn’t done for several years. She reached over and took her father’s hand.

  He received her hand as if it were an everyday occurrence, and they began walking toward the game. Of the band music, the throb of drums was most pronounced, and now there was cheering, too, evenly spaced, as if introductions were being made. By the time they arrived, the game was under way. They paid their admission and walked around the end zone to the visitors’ bleachers. Many of the visiting Hemingford fans gave them a full stare—nobody had to tell them that whoever Judith and her father were, they weren’t from Hemingford. These looks turned Judith to stone, but her father smiled and nodded as they climbed to the last row, to a spot apart from the small, seated crowd.

  “We are the visitors’ visitors,” her father said, low, to Judith, and settled back against the pipe railing. Judith watched milling boys for a while, then the cheerleaders, then looked idly at the menu she was still carrying (inside, in green ink, the waitress had written, Don’t be a stranger! Your waitress, Darlene). She wished she’d brought a book (or, even more, that they were home and her father was reading to her from The Mayor of Casterbridge, the new book they’d started), but finally she sat back and looked without interest at the game while keeping a peripheral watch on her father, in the hope that he might become bored, too.

  But her father didn’t speak or seem even to move until time ran out on the first half, and then he leaned forward and gave a strange half-smile. He looked off, and Judith followed his gaze past the flagpole, where the last sun had turned a broad expanse of brittle cornstalks a buttery yellow. He turned to Judith and said, “Who could sit here and look at this and not believe in the good intentions of the world?”

  Broad strokes of this type vexed Judith, so she said, “Which in English would mean what exactly?”

  “This.” Her father vaguely swept a hand across the field of vision in front of them. “It’s all so winsome and… unarranged.”

  Judith regarded the halftime marching band and thought that at least some of the unarrangement came from not practicing enough.

  Her father said, “There’s an exquisiteness here, Judith, and the visitors’ visitors have a good seat for seeing it.”

  Judith gazed past the band toward the cornfield, trying to find the exquisiteness he was talking about. She didn’t, but turning back to him, she wondered if she saw something else: that he was here now for good. It began as just a thought, but after a second or two it had become factlike in its hardness.

  She said, “You’re not ever coming back to Vermont, are you?”

  He’d touched his fingertips together and rested his chin on the touching thumbs, but he turned to her now and said in a gentle voice, “Probably not, sweetheart.”

  There was another, unspoken part of Judith’s question, the part about whether her father wanted Judith and her mother to join him so they could be a family again, but she knew he knew that part of the question, and the fact that he wasn’t answering it told her what his answer was. He wasn’t going to talk her mother into anything.

  The second half of the game had by now commenced, and suddenly the Hemingford fans whooped and rose to their feet: their team had scored. Shortly thereafter, the kicker flubbed the extra point.

  “Shanked it,” a farmer in front of them said, and another man got a round of laughs by saying he could kick a dog farther than that.

  It was a one-sided game, but Judith and her father stayed until the end and afterward walked toward their car slowly, among the locals.

  Nearby, a man said, “I love watching that Ross Ray tackle.”

  There was a three-quarter moon in the sky. As Judith and her father drove west along Highway 20 through the night, neither of them spoke, and the dashboard lights gave a ghostly phosphorescent cast to her father’s white shirtsleeve when he leaned forward to put on La Traviata (this was okay by Judith—she’d grown familiar with the opera, and more or less looked forward to the big choral party scene).

  East of Rufus Sage, where a timbered area stretched south just past the highway and seemed to draw dark curtains to each side of the blacktop, her father said quietly, “At dusk there are deer through here.”

  The Bonneville’s high beams formed a tight tunnel of light in the blackness of asphalt and pines, and it reminded Judith of the place in movies that always came with ominous music and preceded some sort of terrible collision.

  “Dad?”

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “What happened that night you and the Irwins were in the accident?”

  After a few seconds, he said, “That was a long time ago.”

  “But what happened?”

  Her father exhaled heavily. “It’s not straightforward.” He shook his head so subtly she wasn’t sure he had. She presumed he would then fall silent, as he’d always done when the subject came up, but she also understood that in telling her that he wasn’t coming back to Vermont he’d taken something away, which might make him more willing to give something back. And she was right. He began to speak. “We’d been out to dinner, then dancing and that sort of thing, and were on our way home. We got to a crossroads. Nobody seemed to be coming in the other direction, and as I made a left turn our headlights caught a black sedan moving toward us with its lights off.” A pause. “I saw that black sedan. I saw it clearly.” Another pause.
“The collision with the banyan tree followed.”

  “The other car had its lights off? I never heard that.”

  Her father didn’t speak.

  “But the Irwins blamed you. Mom did, too.”

  “I was driving.”

  “What about the black car? What happened to the black car?”

  Her father said it kept going, he guessed. Then he said, “I was the only one who saw that black sedan.”

  “What?”

  He said, “We’d been drinking, so the others thought I was seeing things. But I hadn’t been drinking much. Everyone was drinking Cuba libres, but after my first one, I took the waiter aside and told him to bring me straight Coke.” A pause. “I went through a period of my life when I found it more interesting to pretend intoxication than actually to allow it. But the point is, if I was seeing things, it wasn’t from drinking.”

  The Bonneville broke free of the dark timber. Again the moon illuminated the fields and threw shadows from haystacks and fence posts.

  Judith said, “Why was the black sedan driving with its lights out?”

  Her father didn’t answer. Instead, he slowed to turn onto a county road, then accelerated to a moderate speed and, without a word, switched off the headlights.

  In the moonlight, the flat dirt road suddenly seemed a floating white ribbon, and the fields slipping by were shaped by different shades of darkness. Gradually the Bonneville picked up speed. Something small and dark—a rabbit, probably—darted in front of the car and registered a decisive thump on its undercarriage. Judith had the sensation that the road was rising from the horizontal, that they were moving upward through a disorder of black shadows and shapes. Everything—the car, her own face, the shadowy landscape—felt stretched out of one form and into another. She felt violent dread, and yet when her father finally lifted his foot from the accelerator and switched the headlights on and the dirt road was itself again, what she felt was not just flooding relief, though she felt plenty of that, but also the exultation of the unmarked survivor.