To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

She hoped he would say more, but he didn’t. He sat looking at her, or really, as it felt to Judith, looking into her, then he reached across the table, touched a finger to her hand, and said, “Shall we go?”

  At the high school there was little to do but check in books and feel time stretched long by empty waiting. Restrictions loosened, especially for graduating seniors, and during one idle, midperiod stroll through the corridors, Judith passed the trophy cases in the foyer and saw something that drew her attention.

  It was a picture of the man she’d seen in the parking lot, the tall one who’d roofed Patrick Guest’s barn, only the man was younger in the photograph, a boy, his skin almost as white as the basketball uniform he was wearing. An inscription read, Willy Blunt, Second Team All-Conference.

  That was the name, all right, the one Patrick Guest had told her. Willy Blunt.

  Judith stared again at the photograph. He was handsome, sort of, if you looked at him just right, but there was something else. His manner of standing didn’t suggest arrogance or even pride, and the way he was smiling made it seem as if he were amused at his predicament, standing there holding a basketball and smiling at a photographer while wearing a uniform that resembled underwear. And then it occurred to her that this was also the way he’d been smiling in the parking lot at Gibson’s, as if amused not just by her predicament but by his own, too, and that perhaps that was the way he got through his days, with amusement at the predicament that was everybody’s life. This made her think of him differently, or perhaps just more intensely. As she stared at the photograph, notions that had nothing to do with past calculations and future plans slid down to her heart, and lower, beginning at that precise moment the preparation for the extravagant reaction the touch of his hand to her flesh would one day cause.

  Judith next laid eyes on Willy Blunt less than a week later. She and Deena were sitting in a booth at Pizza Hut. Opposite sat two schoolmates, Paul Railsback and Paul Wells, whom Deena referred to as “the Pauls.” Paul Wells was Paul One; Paul Railsback was Paul Two.

  At various times since spring break, Deena had caught each of the Pauls staring at her breasts, and she had been wondering which of them would make the better summer boyfriend. “Neither,” Judith told her, but when Deena’s interest in the Pauls persisted, Judith suggested that they interview for the job. Deena had telephoned the boys and told them that she and Judith wanted them at the Pizza Hut on Tuesday afternoon so they, as she put it, could be questioned. “About what?” Paul One had asked. Paul Two wanted to know who was paying for the pizza.

  The protocol was simple. Judith and Deena would read from a list of questions; the Pauls would respond in writing. The first question was, If you were invisible for five minutes, how and where would you spend your time? Both Pauls had worn nice shirts, and Judith was surprised at how entertaining it was to eat pizza, sip Mr. Pibb, and watch them write down their answers in pencil. They were on question four—You’re remaking the movie Swamp Thing. What Rufus Sage resident gets the starring role and what would you feed him?—when the front door swung open and Willy Blunt walked in.

  He wore old jeans and a white T-shirt, and he was alone. Judith watched him as he said something that made Calvin Haden, the single on-duty employee, laugh out loud, but she averted her eyes when he glanced her way. He took a seat against the wall with his back to the angling sun, so that from Judith’s vantage point he was merely a silhouette. He turned over his paper placemat and hunched over it with a pen, as if writing something.

  “You are a heron with a stomach full of partly digested frog parts,” Deena was saying. “On whose head will you drop your load?”

  The boys hooted and Deena said, “You should decide when, too. Like, just as your candidate has begun taking roll in gym class.” This prompted more juvenile laughter, which was suddenly embarrassing to Judith. To check it, she said, “And supply one onomatopoetic word to describe the sound upon impact.”

  Pauls One and Two stared blankly.

  At the table by the wall, Willy Blunt hunched over the placemat with his pencil, raising his head only now and then for another bite of pizza or a gulp of beer. She thought he might be writing someone an important letter, or maybe just a whimsical one. Either way, to her surprise, she felt a faint twinge of jealousy.

  The Pauls were on question seven—Spell and define spermatozoa—when Judith rose without a word and walked over to Willy Blunt’s table. He had a cupped slice of pizza in one hand and a pencil in the other. As she drew close, he glanced up and his expression, surprisingly intense, broke into a smile.

  “There she is,” was all he said.

  This wasn’t much, but Judith felt sudden heat in her cheeks.

  He said, “You got that big ol’ flower pot home in one piece, I guess.”

  Judith had the feeling her cheeks were paralyzed; possibly her forehead also. She said, “I just wanted to thank you for that day at Gibson’s.”

  He laughed, which had an easing effect on her. She heard him saying he didn’t know he’d done anything worth thanking him for.

  “You helped get me away from that pinkish friend of yours.” To her relief, her voice sounded more or less normal.

  He smiled and nodded. “Boss Krauss isn’t exactly my pinkish friend. He’s my pinkish employer—” Willy Blunt’s blue-gray eyes brightened—“though one of these days that might change.”

  Judith said, “For a perfect stranger, he was pretty cheeky.”

  “Sometimes it works.” The amused smile. “You’d probably be surprised.”

  “I guess I would be,” she said, and dropped her eyes to the table. He was on the last piece of an individual Canadian-bacon-and-pineapple. His small pitcher of beer was nearly empty. And he hadn’t been writing a letter on the back of the placemat at all—he’d been making small, precise drawings of insects.

  He said, “The truth is, I was going to stop by your table if it ever thinned out over there.”

  This was interesting information, though she didn’t want to show it.

  He nodded to the red bench seat opposite. “You could sit down if you wanted to.”

  She made a show of thinking it over before sliding in. When she glanced at her own table, Deena was staring back with disbelief. Judith turned to Willy Blunt. “So what were you going to come over to my table for?”

  “To apologize for the pinkish man who isn’t exactly a friend.”

  A laugh slipped from Judith, an easy, normal laugh. She nodded at the placemat. “So I guess drawing insects is your idea of a good time.”

  His eyes took on a teasing aspect. “That and watching produce trucks unload.”

  Another laugh from Judith. She’d forgotten she’d said that to them. “So do you want to be an entomologist or something?”

  He made a snorting kind of chuckle. “You mean a bug man? Naw. Not me. But that’d be something, wouldn’t it, being a bug man?” He kept grinning. “I could write Here comes the Bug Man backward on the front of my truck, so you could read it in your rearview mirror when I’m breathing down your neck.”

  Judith wasn’t sure whether she was being made fun of or not. “I was just trying to make conversation,” she said. The same words, she suddenly realized, that Patrick Guest had once spoken to her.

  Willy Blunt had a hard time letting go of his grin. “I know,” he said. “It’s just that… I don’t know, being a bug man, it just hit my funny bone.” His voice trailed off and he tried to achieve a more serious attitude. He nodded toward his drawing. “Those’re just fishing flies. I’m just doodling.” Amusement again rose in his eyes. “I’m known far and wide as a big ol’ doodler.”

  The term seemed to hint vaguely at sexual innuendo, but Judith decided the best thing to do was play dumb. “What’re fishing flies?” she said.

  “Flies to fish with. I draw ’em, then I tie ’em, then I catch fish with ’em, or try to. I like to go up to the Madison in the fall.”

  She asked what that was like, and while he told her, she wa
tched his face and let her mind wander.

  He was talking about flies tied with deer hair when he broke off and said, “I think I’m boring you, which I’d rather not do.”

  “No, you’re not,” she said, but she didn’t ask any more about fly fishing. She said, “I’d better get back to my table.”

  He nodded, but she didn’t rise. “We’re giving those boys a quiz.”

  He nodded again.

  “What’s onomatopoeia?” she said suddenly.

  He didn’t break his smile or his gaze. “Squish,” he said. “Slurp. Zip.” He gave the smallest waggle of his eyebrows. “I’m not sure about unzip.”

  Judith laughed in spite of herself. A second or two passed, and she thought he definitely looked better without a beard, softer, smoother, more—she actually thought this—kissable. She said, “You’re Willy Blunt, aren’t you?” and when surprise showed on his face, she said, “I saw your picture in the display case at the high school.”

  He nodded and squinted out the window. It was late afternoon. Dust motes floated yellow. Out of the blue, in a soft flutish voice, he said, “And you’re Judith Toomey,” then said it again: “Judith Toomey.” A full second passed before he turned and let his eyes fall evenly on her. “When I found out your name and said it aloud, I thought it sounded like a little riddle floating inside a soap bubble.” He seemed suddenly self-conscious. “I don’t know why I thought that,” he said, and when he issued a low self-derisive laugh, it blew a small hole in the shaft of yellow floating dust.

  That he’d gone to the trouble of finding out her name was surprise enough, but his saying it out loud to himself, and listening to it as it hung in the air, and coming to his odd (but charming, really) conclusion about it—well, she hardly knew what to think, let alone say. She said, “I’m not that much of a riddle, to tell you the truth.”

  An easy silence fell over the table. His expression seemed genuinely sweet. He said that in his opinion almost everybody was a pretty good-sized riddle, and then, with his eyes on hers, and in a voice just above a whisper, he said, “What I’m really hoping for here is that you’ll write down your telephone number for me.”

  Judith gave him what she hoped was a frisky look. “What for?”

  He laughed. “Not real sure. Something, though.”

  “Tempting, but I don’t know.” She remembered the story of Harold Toomey, whose wife, Christianna, had wanted the bird’s-eye maple furniture; how he had memorized the information before burning it. “Tell you what. I’ll give you the number, but you have to remember it—you can’t write it down.”

  “Ever? I can’t write it down ever?”

  “That’s right.”

  He gave a small disconsolate shake of the head. “That’s a little severe, isn’t it?”

  It did seem severe, now that he said so. Besides, she didn’t really want him forgetting it. “Okay,” she said. “Not here in the restaurant. You can’t write it down here in the restaurant.”

  He closed his eyes while she recited the numbers, then repeated them aloud. All the exchanges in Rufus Sage were 432, she suddenly realized, so when it got right down to it, all he had to remember was the last four numbers. “Two seven three one,” he said.

  “That would be correct,” Judith said. “What wouldn’t be correct is three seven four one or one seven three two.”

  He grinned and said, “You’re kind of a hot tamale, aren’t you?”

  Odd sensations were moving through Judith, sensations she both feared and couldn’t get enough of, so that when Willy Blunt suddenly stood up, it seemed to her that something she’d been waiting for a long time, if not her whole life, having at last been delivered, was now being snatched away. She said, “Where are you going?”

  He picked up his cap from the table, stood looking at her a long second, and then bent forward, within inches of her ear, so that when he spoke in a low voice, it had a feathery effect. “Nice talking to you, Judith Toomey,” he said. Then, after settling his bill with Calvin Haden, he walked straight out of the restaurant to a faded red Chevrolet pickup in the parking lot. It was an old truck, and he opened it by reaching through the window to the inside latch.

  Later, when she climbed into this truck for the first time, she would see that a tightened pair of vise grips served as the interior handle on the driver’s-side door, and that written on the metal dashboard with the thick lead of a carpenter’s pencil were the numbers 2731.

  That evening, while Judith stood in the bathroom towel-drying her hair, the telephone rang. She could hear her father’s footsteps in the hallway, then his deep hello. Beyond that, his words were indistinct, so Judith cracked the door an inch.

  “Ah,” she heard her father say, and then, “I see.” His tone suggested the detachment Judith associated with calls from a college administrator, or from a problem student, so she was surprised when he said, “Well, thank you for that. I’ll pass this on to Judith when I see her.”

  Judith gently closed the door and stood in the bathroom trying to sort it out. Out of the darkness, a mild breeze stirred the white cotton curtain that hung over the bathroom’s open window. It might’ve been a girl on the phone, but no girls ever called her except Deena, and her father had a friendlier tone altogether with Deena.

  Judith left her hair damp and pulled on her clothes. Her father sat on his side of the partners’ desk, writing on a yellow tablet in the midst of stacked and opened books. She picked up her copy of Portrait of a Lady from the mantel, and when her father didn’t look up, she flopped into the floral armchair, sideways, with her back against one arm and her legs hanging over the other. She opened her book, and with as much casualness as she could manage, she said, “So who called?”

  He didn’t need to look up—he’d already been watching her, and now his intense expression gave way to something milder. “It seems the romantic phase of your life has stolen up on us, Judith. I pray to God you’ve assembled the tools with which to defend yourself.”

  Judith, already agitated, felt as if she might explode. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that one Willy Blunt just called. He seems to have the idea of taking you to dinner.”

  In one instant Judith felt herself flush with a deep and penetrating pleasure, and in the next she felt the need to conceal it. She didn’t turn in the chair, or rise from it. She just stared toward the window as if considering it.

  Her father said, “Would you look forward to that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said without turning.

  She could feel her father studying her, but when he spoke, his voice, to her relief, was not the clamped voice he used when anxious or angry. “Well, either way,” he said, “you should telephone him with your decision. His number is by the phone.”

  Judith stared off again and made herself count to a hundred, slowly.

  Then she put her open book down on the seat of the armchair. She could hardly feel her legs as she walked to the telephone in the hallway. Her father had printed the number neatly on the back of an envelope.

  When she dialed it, a man’s voice immediately said, “Hello?”

  “Hello,” Judith said. “Is this Willy Blunt?”

  And Willy Blunt in a loose voice said, “Not if you’re the revenue man.”

  Judith had to laugh. “Do I sound like the revenue man?”

  “That’s what so devious about the revenue man,” Willy Blunt said. “There’s one that can supposedly make himself sound just like Princess Grace.”

  “Like Princess Grace?”

  “Yeah, and another one can sound like Suzanne Pleshette. They use voice transmogrifiers and shit.”

  Judith’s chuckle was cut short by a sudden thought. “You’re not serious, are you?”

  Willy rolled out a deep laugh. “Naw, not very. I was just filling in the space until you tell me whether or not you’ll have dinner with me Friday night.”

  She felt a flush of expectant pleasure that she wanted to prolong. “Why would I want to?”


  “Well, first of all, it would be just you and me, which I would personally look forward to. And second of all, I’ve got something planned the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Again the easy laugh. “Just do, is all.”

  Judith was aware that her father could hear her if she talked loud enough, so she turned toward the wall and said in a lower voice, “Well, there are things I’ve never seen that I might never want to see.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But this isn’t one of them.”

  It registered that he at least wasn’t a user of ain’t.

  “So what is this thing the likes of which I’ve never seen?”

  “Well, I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’d be like going to the end of the book to read the ending before you even started reading.”

  Judith said, “I do that all the time. It doesn’t spoil a thing.”

  Another laugh came rolling out. “You really are a hot tamale, aren’t you?” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m giving away my surprise.”

  She pried further but got nowhere, and finally said, “How about a hint, then?”

  “Wear Levi’s and a jacket. Where we’re dining’s not dressy.”

  “I haven’t even said I’m coming yet,” she said, but she knew she wasn’t fooling anybody.

  “Five o’clock okay?” he said, and after making herself wait a second or two, Judith said, “I guess so, sure. But I’m on record that I don’t like surprises.”

  “Duly noted.” He waited a beat. “Did that surprise you?”

  “What?”

  “Me saying duly noted.”

  Judith had to admit it did, just a little.

  “And you didn’t like that little surprise?” he said.

  After hanging up, Judith wanted to go right downstairs to her room and lie on the Young Man’s Fancy quilt and think about the unimaginable thing that had just happened, but she knew that besides being ridiculous and girlish, it would give too much away, so she walked back to the front room, sprawled again across her father’s floral armchair, and after opening her book fell to wondering what she would wear, and what he would wear, and what it would be like driving with him in his truck, and how close to him on the seat she should sit.