To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  Her mother listened, then regarded the room for another second or two. “So,” she said, “with whom have you united on this quaint bed?”

  Judith felt the color rise in her cheeks. “God, Mom. Somebody should shoot that therapist of yours. Maybe, just to be ironical, use a gun with a silencer.”

  But her mother didn’t forget the question, and she waited for the answer. Judith had always thought of Willy’s role in the history of the bird’s-eye maple furniture as a small secret compartment to open up and look at and think about from time to time, but she was suddenly aware of its accumulated weight, and of the attraction of setting it free.

  She picked up her purse. From her wallet she took the small plastic sleeve that held back-to-back photographs of Camille. She slid them from the plastic case, peeled them apart, and handed her mother the picture of Willy. Her mother held the photograph under the floor lamp and studied it. Judith had taken it with her father’s Leica and developed it herself. In it, Willy was stretched out on a picnic blanket wearing old boots, old denim pants, no belt, no shirt, no hat. He looked asleep except for his grip on a long-necked Schlitz. Judith’s mother said, “Why, he’s as yummy as Christ on the cross.” Then, after watching Judith slip the picture back into its secret place, she added, “Poor Malcolm.” Then: “Poor you. Poor me. Poor every last one of us.”

  She slipped off her shoes and lay down on the bed. “Come here,” she said, extending an arm, and strange as it seemed, Judith tipped off her shoes, too, and lay down beside her, fitting her head into the crook of her mother’s arm, which suddenly held her tighter and closer, and just like that, Judith was overcome, or undone, or whatever it was. It didn’t matter—she’d begun to cry.

  A few days later, from her storage room, with her heart racing like a teenager’s, Judith telephoned Gilbert J. Smith. She gave her name as Edith Winks and explained that she was trying to find several people so they could be notified of an upcoming high school reunion in Nebraska.

  “Lot of trouble to get a couple of old school pals to a reunion,” Gilbert J. Smith said. His voice on the phone was flat, with a faintly plaintive quality—Judith imagined eyes surrounded by squint lines, something in the Harry Dean Stanton mold.

  “Yes,” Judith said. “But there it is.”

  Gilbert J. Smith was quiet for a few seconds, which Judith presumed was meant as an opportunity for her to say more, but she didn’t. Why she wanted to find somebody was her business, whereas finding that somebody was his.

  He said, “And you tried Googling and all that?”

  Judith had, and told him so.

  “Well, I guess we can locate them all right,” Gilbert J. Smith said finally. “What we’ll need are the individuals’ names, dates of birth if you’ve got them, last known address, any other specifics you might have. That and a seven-hundred-dollar deposit.”

  Judith gave him the names of Patrick Guest, Deena Schmidt, and William Blunt, along with what little else she knew about them. Deena’s birthday, which she remembered, and Willy’s, within a range of three days.

  “No middle names or initials?” Gilbert J. Smith said.

  Judith told him that Willy’s middle initial was C.

  “Know what it stands for?”

  “No,” Judith said. Willy would never tell her. To change the subject, she said, “So what does the J in your name stand for?”

  “Jones,” Gilbert J. Smith said. “My father’s idea. My father seemed to think he had a sense of humor. Though I don’t hear you laughing.”

  “It’s kind of funny, though,” Judith said. She’d been distracted. She was thinking of something else. “One other thing,” she said. “If you find William Blunt, could you give him my telephone number?”

  “Your name and telephone number? And nothing else? No message?”

  “No. No message.”

  “Tell him Edith or Edie?”

  “Edie.”

  “All right, then,” Gilbert J. Smith said. “Just as soon as I receive your check…”

  Immediately after concluding this conversation, Judith went to the checkbook that lay on top of the glass-fronted bookshelf. Edie Winks of Toluca Lake. She wrote out the check and stared at it. She almost had to laugh. Money going from a person who didn’t exist to a private investigator she’d never met in order to find three people she hadn’t seen in over twenty-five years.

  Judith slid the check into an envelope, which she addressed and laid next to her keys, where it couldn’t be forgotten. She’d left the studio abruptly after lunch—she’d told Hooper she was seeing a neurologist about her migraines—and now she needed to get back to work, but she was tired, suddenly overwhelmingly tired. A short nap would be good. She wouldn’t sleep long, and she would awaken feeling better, more productive, brand-new almost. She removed her shoes. She turned off her phone. She stretched out on the bed and fell asleep.

  Part Two

  1

  When, five minutes before the appointed hour on that first Friday night, Willy Blunt gave the Toomeys’ door a short set of solid knocks, they not only could be heard in the basement, where Judith sat waiting, but also could be felt resonating through timbers and beams and concrete until finally they reached the bird’s-eye maple bed on which she sat, or so it seemed to Judith. In any case, the knocking sounds indisputably registered on the delicate instruments of her nervous system, and as she stared up at the basement ceiling and traced her father’s footsteps across the hardwood floor, a tiny bulb of sweat broke from one armpit and ran down her rib cage.

  Judith had been ready for almost an hour. The only real decision had been what long-sleeved top to wear with her Levi’s and Frye Boots. It was still May, and thinking of evening coolness, she’d decided finally on one of her father’s chambray shirts, the pale blue one with the cotton worn soft, which she wore tails out. She’d given her long straight hair about a hundred strokes, and then a hundred more, before clipping it into something slightly prim so her father would see she wasn’t trying to give anybody the wrong idea.

  Overhead, the latchwork of the front door.

  Judith slipped off the bed and tiptoed across the Persian carpet toward the stairs. She’d agreed to give her father a few minutes alone with Willy Blunt before she came up, but she hadn’t promised anything about eavesdropping. She crept to the head of the stairs and leaned close to the basement door, which she’d left ajar.

  By this time the introductions were over, and to her horror her father was saying, “Well, Willy, why don’t you just tell me something about yourself that you think it would be in your best interests for me to know.”

  Good God, Judith thought, but Willy Blunt’s laugh didn’t sound nervous. “Well,” he said, “I give a day’s work for a day’s wage, and no complaining.”

  Her father said, “And what else?”

  A second or two passed, and Willy Blunt said, “I take people at their word and expect they’ll do the same with me.”

  That was pretty good, Judith thought, especially since he’d been blindsided by this whole let’s-interview-the-suitor thing, but her father seemed to be reserving judgment.

  “Ah,” he said. “And is there anything else?”

  “That’s about it, really,” Willy said. “I like doing finish carpentry because I’m good at it. Or maybe it’s the other way around—I’m good at it because I like it. I like doing baseboard and wainscoting but what I like best is crown molding.”

  Why her father didn’t say something civil then, Judith had no idea, but he didn’t, and after a few seconds, Willy said, “So do you think Judith’s ready yet?”

  Her father said he would just go see, but he didn’t. He said, “You know, once when I was a boy in San Francisco, there was a little dog in the park who started playing with me. I would chase him and then he would chase me. The game ended when I chased him beyond a hedge and into the street, where he was struck by a car and killed.”

  After a second or two, Willy said, “Now there’s a story for you.
”

  “It is,” her father said. “It really is. Now then, why don’t I just go check on Judith.”

  “God, Dad!” Judith hissed when he opened the door and came a few steps down the basement stairs. “Who made you district attorney? And what’s with the Aesop’s fable?”

  “Ah,” he said mildly. “You heard us chatting.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were planning a bushwhacking! Why didn’t you just shoot him when he came through the door?”

  When she saw that he was swallowing a laugh, she stormed past him up the stairs. She found Willy Blunt standing in the front room staring out the front window with his seed cap in his hand, and she had to admit, he didn’t look especially perturbed. He was wearing a blue-and-black plaid flannel shirt and he stood loose-shouldered at the window, looking out and whistling to himself. The melody was dimly familiar, but she couldn’t name it.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Willy Blunt ceased his whistling and turned. “Whoa,” he drawled. “Stop the presses.”

  She laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The blue-and-black flannel shirt had a soft look, and he was wearing it over a clean white T-shirt. “No idea,” he said. “Just came into my head and I let ’er fly.”

  She laughed again, and after a few last exchanges with her father that Willy handled as best as he could—Good to meet you, Mr. Toomey. Oh, yeah, we can be back by then—the door was closing behind them and Judith and Willy Blunt were out of the house, strolling down the walk toward his truck, small weights lifting from Judith’s body with every step she took. It seemed almost dreamlike—she could hardly remember opening the door and sliding into the cab, and yet there she was.

  The engine rumbled powerfully, but Willy merely eased the truck away from the curb. “The radio’s on the blink,” he said, and gave her a smile. “I can whistle, though, if things get dire.”

  “I like that shirt,” Judith said.

  “It’s my lucky shirt.” He grinned. “I haven’t worn it in a while. When I was playing basketball at the high school, I used to wear it on important game days.”

  “And you always won?”

  “Oh, hell no. I said lucky, not miraculous.”

  She began memorizing the details she meant to keep and never lose.

  The funny mixed smells of sweat and sawdust.

  The pair of vise grips on the driver’s-side door where a handle should be.

  The slow, easy smoothness of the truck’s progress.

  The numbers 2731 written in thick pencil on the metal dashboard.

  “You wrote down my number there?”

  He turned and said, “Yeah, well, I didn’t have my steno pad handy.”

  The gray-blueness—or was it blue-grayness?—of his eyes.

  After turning north on Main Street, Willy pulled the pickup into one of the diagonal slots in front of a bar called the Y Knot.

  “We eating here?” Judith said, alarmed by the prospect.

  “Naw. I’m just picking something up.”

  He jumped out of the truck but stopped on the sidewalk when he saw that she’d stayed put. “C’mon,” he said. “It’s not dangerous.”

  By the time Judith’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the room, Willy was already at the bar, joking with a waitress he knew by name. “Whaddaya mean not ready, Lorraine?” he was saying. “I called it in about two days ago.”

  Judith turned her head and caught a thin balding man with a brushy mustache staring at her from a table by the wall. A dark form at his feet turned out to be a dog—it raised its head to lazily address the presence of a flea.

  “Maybe you called one of our competitors by mistake,” Lorraine said. “I hear you spread your business around.” The waitress was somewhere past thirty, Judith guessed, and thick-waisted, but she had the kind of attitude and breasts that push-up bras were made for, and her presence made Judith feel strangely insignificant. Judith let her eyes drift past the woman to the sparkly waterfall of an illuminated Hamm’s sign hanging on the back wall.

  “What’s your name, sugar?”

  By the time Judith realized the question was for her, Willy had jumped in. “This is Judith Toomey,” he said.

  The waitress was smiling at Judith, but she was studying her, too. “Then this must be the lollapalooza you were talking about.”

  “The very one,” Willy Blunt said, but in a distracted tone. He’d stood on the footrest of his bar stool and was leaning over the bar, craning to see behind. “So where’s my damn package, Lorraine?”

  Lorraine waited a beat before breaking her gaze from Judith and strolling past the black grill top and pyramid of soup cans to the end of the bar, where she slid a large brown paper bag from beneath the counter. She brought it back to Willy, who loosened the neat fold at the top and took a look inside. From the glass-faced refrigerator Lorraine took a six-pack of Budweisers and set it beside the sack.

  “Why don’t you just pay me later?” she said, and Willy shrugged and rolled a few toothpicks from a chrome dispenser. The waitress turned to Judith. “You be careful now,” she said. “Willy only looks normal.”

  Willy shook his head as if in sorrowful disbelief. “Now what is the point of living a model life if all it brings you is ridicule?” he said, but before anybody could comment on his definition of a model life, he slid from the bar stool, picked up his parcels, and, motioning Judith ahead of him, made for the door.

  Outside, Willy packed the beer into a cooler of ice he’d brought in the truck bed. Then they headed south through town, slowly, at what she and Deena, when they’d see boys cruising the streets like this, always called prowling speed. The surprise came when Willy hardly increased his speed as he turned west onto Highway 20, where the limit was 60. He slid a toothpick into his mouth. A couple of cars whooshed past.

  “Lollapalooza?” Judith said as they passed the little airport outside of town. “That your term or that waitress woman’s?”

  “I might’ve used it,” Willy said, “but not very often.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “A lollapalooza?” He seemed as amused by this question as by everything else. “How about ‘something or somebody worth paying attention to’?” He slid her a glance. “You, for example.”

  The remark sent pleasurable waves moving through her, and she gazed out at the passing green fields. Willy had been working a toothpick in the incisor region but pulled it out to say, “Want me to whistle?”

  Judith laughed and said no, she didn’t think so.

  They crossed Deadhorse and Butte Creeks before he swung the pickup onto a dirt road running south and the ride lost its smoothness. She raised her voice a little to say, “So where’re we going?”

  He just smiled. “I think we talked about this. How it was going to be a surprise and all.”

  She recognized Crown and Crow Buttes, but she didn’t know the rest. As they crested a small knoll, the fields and pastures stretched long and flat before finally giving way to timbered hills. The buttes above the hills stood in the late afternoon sun like monuments, black against a luminous blue sky.

  “Pretty,” she said, and after a second or two he said, “That’s the truth.”

  They drew a mile or so closer to the hills and she said, “What did you think of that story my dad told you—the one about chasing the dog into the street?”

  He shot her a quick sideways look. “How’d you know about that?”

  She said it was an old house, with thin walls.

  “Well,” Willy said, “I think that story of your father’s is what you’d call a cautionary tale. Only I think your dad thinks you’re the puppy and I’m the chaser. He doesn’t know who’s the dangerous one here.”

  Judith felt a little thrill of pleasure at these words even while composing her denial of them. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I think it was you asking me for my phone number, not the other way around.”

  He said, “That’s because you probably didn’t t
hink I had a telephone.”

  “Maybe I thought you had a phone but couldn’t remember your own number.”

  Willy let his laugh slide into a grin. “Now you be careful. It’s not like you couldn’t hurt my feelings with a thoughtless remark.”

  He had fun in his voice, and Judith could feel it, there was an easiness in the air.

  A porcupine waddled across the road in front of them and Willy started talking about a dog he’d owned that wouldn’t stay away from a particular porcupine that lived out behind some sheds on their place, and Judith’s thoughts began to drift. She wondered where someone like Willy Blunt would learn a term like cautionary tale, and she remembered how Patrick Guest said that Willy Blunt had claimed to enjoy the bountiful vista from their barn roof. It was hard stacking up those terms with this boy.

  “I know about six different fellas who have girlfriends just like that nasty old porcupine,” Willy was saying, “but do you think they’d learn to stay away?”

  To Judith’s surprise, he seemed to be expecting an answer.

  “I guess not,” she said.

  He nodded amiably. “You’d be guessing right.”

  For something to say, she asked what had become of the dog.

  “Oh, his snout got a lot better after I shot that porcupine. I gave it to an Indian who wanted it. They use the quills for necklaces and shit, and I guess they eat porcupines, too, even old ones.” He slid Judith a cunning glance. “How about you—would you eat a porcupine?”

  Judith said eating a porcupine was a prime example of something she personally would never do in a million years.

  Willy Blunt snorted. “You would, though, if you were hungry enough.”

  He turned the pickup briefly east, then south, then east again onto a road that narrowed and grew rockier and shadowy. Instead of dividing open pasture or farmland, it followed the course of a running creek and began to tunnel through box elder, cottonwood, and hackberry. Thickets of wild plum dotted the roadside (“Some’s sweeter than others,” Willy said). He stopped once and filled a plastic jug with water from a spring that seemed to issue from a mossy stone beside the road. A tin cup hung from a nearby branch, and after Willy used it for a drink, he filled it for Judith.