To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  “Good water,” he said.

  It was good water, Judith had to admit. She held the cup under the spring and drank again.

  Farther up the road, they hit the first of two post-and-barbed-wire gates, which Willy loosened and laid aside, replacing them again once they’d driven through. After the second gate, there was no road at all, and a lot of treefall and other debris.

  “Willy?” she said, staring at terrain that to her looked impassable. It was the first time she’d called him by name.

  “What?” He leaned over the steering wheel and gently accelerated.

  “What if we get stuck out here?”

  Willy kept the truck sliding and bumping around large rocks and fallen limbs, but he found time to cast her a quick sidelong grin. “Who said anything about getting stuck?”

  It was remote up here, remoter than anyplace she and her father had ever ventured, but the truck kept bouncing, swerving, and surging forward. Then suddenly, up ahead and between trees, the ground appeared to give way completely and she yelled, “Stop, Willy, stop!” but he merely grinned and downshifted as the truck careered down a muddy bank and into a wide sandy creek, the rear end fishtailing this way and that before the pickup cocked sideways on the opposite bank and then finally grabbed and pulled forward to flatter ground.

  “God,” Judith said, and was surprised at how exhilarated she felt.

  “Positraction,” Willy said, as if he were speaking the name of a saint, or at least a beautiful woman, and when finally they came to a stop at the base of a wooded hill, Judith felt compelled to ask what in the world he was talking about.

  “Positraction?” he said. “Why, positraction is the reason I bought this truck. They call it a limited-slip differential, but what it really is is a ticket to just about anywhere.”

  Judith stared at him sitting there beaming with satisfaction and said, “Well, I think what it got me is a ticket to the Twilight Zone,” and she was relieved when Willy gave the line a good-natured laugh.

  As they stepped from the truck they were greeted with assorted bird cries, all shrill and alarmed-seeming, as if the intrusion of two humans were real news. Willy strapped on a backpack and carried the ice chest on his shoulder as he led the way up the incline and into the pines. The wind through the trees made a low flutish sound that fell just short of music, and the mat of needles beneath her feet was surprisingly soft and slippery.

  “How you doing?” Willy asked every now and then, and Judith said “Fine,” which was really all she could say, since he was carrying everything.

  In about ten minutes’ time they were overlooking a kind of encampment—a cleared space of ground among the pines and ash. As they descended, a fire pit came into view, and a couple of aluminum-and-canvas camp chairs that were showing their age. There was also a crude wide-plank table, with a plank bench on each side. The surfaces of both the table and the benches were clean. Kindling and small pieces of dry pine had already been laid in the rock fire pit.

  “You’ve been up here recently, I guess,” Judith said.

  It didn’t bother Willy to admit this. “Had to do a little housekeeping, is all. Didn’t want you to find the place a mess.” He set down the cooler and backpack and looked at her. “So tell me this, Judith Toomey. Is this your first first date?”

  “No,” Judith lied at once. “What made you think that?”

  “Well, I knew it was our first date, yours and mine, which made it important—at least to me it did—but I had the feeling it might be your first first date, which might make it even more important, and I wanted it to be, you know, just real nice.” His mouth again loosened into a friendly grin. “Like somebody gave a flying fuck.”

  He offered a bottle of beer to Judith, who thought she ought to refuse it but didn’t. “To Judith Toomey and the big surprise,” he said mildly, and gently clicked the neck of his bottle to hers.

  He busied himself gathering firewood while she sat at the table and sipped her beer and took the place in—the tall ponderosas and the soft carpet of pine needles, the crickets and cicadas and birds and low hollow sound of the wind, which reminded her of that odd day up on Initial Hill. The birds seemed calmer now, as if the alarm had gone out of them and it was again business as usual. She liked it that Willy could identify the birdcalls, and she liked it that he knew the names of the butterflies—red admirals and painted ladies, mourning cloaks and yellow swallowtails.

  “Soapweed,” he said when she asked him what one yuccalike shrub was. “Cows love the stuff—blossoms, seedpods, roots, too, if they can get at them. They’ll just about run from one bush to another when they’re set loose in a pasture with ’em.” He grinned at her. “It’s about the only time a cow can make you laugh.”

  He pulled a red gingham cloth from his backpack and floated it over the plank table. Then he opened the bag of food. There were grilled sandwiches inside, pastrami and Swiss cheese on rye, and Judith never would have thought a grilled sandwich served cold could taste so good.

  When she looked up from her food, Willy was regarding her. “I’ve seen rodeo boys eat daintier than that,” he said. He tore the last sandwich in two and presented both portions. She took the bigger one, and he said, “I knew it.”

  The encampment was part of a large, beautiful, and, he said, agriculturally useless property owned by one of his mother’s cousins. Willy harbored hopes of one day buying the land and building a cabin on it. While he and Judith finished off the last sandwich, he pointed to a draw where, with an earthen dam, a small lake might be formed. Judith could imagine it: the pine trees, the sky, the water, the birdcalls and flutish wind. “It’d be a beautiful place to swim,” she said.

  “Or to fish. I was thinking of stocking it with rainbows and bass.”

  Judith said, “Okay, I’ll fish with you if you’ll swim with me. ’Course, you’d have to teach me to fish.”

  He said, “Well then, that’d make us even.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’d have to teach me to swim.”

  Judith came out with a real laugh. “You can’t swim?”

  He shrugged complacently.

  The shadows of the trees and buttes had been stretching longer, and the light had all but drained from the sky. Willy put a match to the fire he’d already laid, and although the cool that came with the darkness had been refreshing at first, Judith was glad now for the heat.

  He brought over the two old camp chairs and set them up near the fire in locations that seemed important to him. “That one’s yours,” he said, pointing.

  They looked the same to Judith, so she said, “How come that one? Is it booby-trapped or something?”

  “Why, yes, it is,” he said. “What happens when you sit in that particular booby-trapped chair is that all your inhibitions explode and you start dancing naked around the fire.”

  She sat down in the chair and blinked at him. “Liar.”

  He shook his head and pretended mystification. “Well, that was how it worked last time.”

  For dessert, he’d brought graham crackers, chocolate bars, and marshmallows, and while the fire burned down, he whittled skewers from willow branches. Both he and Judith had the same marshmallow-roasting technique, patiently keeping the marshmallows close but not too close to the coals so they skinned a mellow brown before being sandwiched with chocolate and graham cracker. These, too, tasted so good that Judith wondered if she’d fallen under some kind of spell.

  “Were those the surprise?” she said. “Because if they were, I’d be more than satisfied.”

  “Nope,” he said. “That was just part of the dining package. Your big surprise is coming.”

  “Coming when, exactly?”

  “In a little while, plus or minus.”

  For the next half-hour or so, they talked about anything that came to mind, just talking and listening and agreeing, always agreeing. Every now and then, Willy uncapped another bottle of beer or checked his pocket watch or fed wood to the fire.

/>   “Pine’s poor for heat,” he said, “but it’s unbeatable for popping and crackling.”

  When he went off to urinate or gather wood, he’d fall to whistling, and once while he was off, Judith put her head back, closed her eyes, and listened to the sounds of the wind and the fire and the crickets and the frogs and, just beyond those, the manmade whistling of a song she couldn’t quite name. She was a long way from anyone, in a place where nobody could see what she did or what he might do, a fact that ought to have made her cautious or fearful but didn’t. It made her feel a little excited.

  When Willy came back, he sat forward in his chair and began to whittle a new skewer.

  “For the next time you come?” she said.

  He said, “To be truthful, I was thinking for the next time we come.”

  “You’re already planning ahead.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s one of the things I do.”

  “Me, too.” A silence stretched out, and then she said, “Once when I was talking to Patrick Guest, he said you kept working at their place for a while after doing that barn roof.”

  “I did, that’s true.”

  “He told me you stayed out there and ate with them.”

  “That’s right, too. My old man had thrown me out at the time—I can’t remember what for.” A smile formed on his lips. “Boarding with that family was a little different, though. They said they were vegetarians, so for meals we had corn and potatoes and beets, all stuff they grew there, but nothing else, not even chicken. So one day I asked the little one, Petey, how he liked being a vegetarian, and he said it was okay, he guessed, but he wasn’t sure because he’d only been one for about two weeks.” Willy laughed and nodded. “That woman made good rhubarb pie, though.”

  Judith said, “Patrick Guest said you didn’t take money for that job.”

  “Maybe. I hardly remember.”

  “Patrick said you sat on the barn roof at night and threw your empty beer bottles down in the rhubarb.”

  “Sounds like Patrick did a lot of talking.”

  “He also said you called the view from the roof ‘a bountiful vista.’ ”

  “Really? I can’t say I remember that.”

  “Patrick thought the view from the hayloft was just as good as from the roof and a lot easier to get to.”

  Willy said nothing to this.

  Judith said, “So why didn’t you just sit in the hayloft?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the view from the roof was more inspiring.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Willy grinned at her. “You want the truth here?”

  Judith wasn’t sure if she did or didn’t. She nodded yes.

  “Well, the barn roof was about eye level with Mrs. Guest’s second-story bedroom.”

  Judith considered the words Say no more, but she said, “So?”

  “So it was summer, and Mrs. Guest always took her bath at night down the hall, and when she got back to her room she’d turn on the light and sit up in bed reading and smoking. It was some distance, but it was still inspirational.”

  To her surprise, Judith laughed. “I guess it would be to a twelve-year-old.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re not snakes. I’ve thought this many times. Adolescence is a skin we never quite shed. Maybe it’s different for girls.”

  Judith wondered about that. She wondered about something else, too. “So that’s all you did, just watch from afar?”

  Willy seemed now to be picking his course. “Not exactly,” he said. “One day I got up my courage and said to her, ‘Mrs. Guest, one of these nights I could climb onto that little roof off your second story and come through your window, and if I did it would be the highlight of my life.’ ” He laughed a low laugh. “I gave her big eyes and a kind of hangdog look, thinking it would appeal to her maternal instincts, which I’m told sometimes works, but I can tell you it didn’t with her. She looked at me and said, ‘I keep a loaded gun in my room, and if you come near that window, I’ll shoot you where it hurts.’ ” Willy let loose a massive rowdy laugh. “I said, ‘Well, Mrs. Guest, that’s about the most unfriendly invitation I ever received.’ ” Another good-sized laugh burst from him, and Judith laughed, too.

  When they were both still, she said, “And that was that?”

  A second passed. “Oh yeah, that was that. That very night she put a sheet up over her window, and it wasn’t long after that that I was gone.”

  Judith considered telling Willy what had become of Mrs. Guest, but the truth was, she didn’t know what had become of her. She only knew she lost her farm and moved to a crappy little house in Woolcott and looked like a ghost one morning in December when Judith and Deena knocked on the door unexpectedly.

  Willy whistled a few notes from his song, then broke off and checked his watch and the sky. “Okay,” he said. “Time to get you ready.”

  He was holding a red bandanna at each end, twirling it into something vaguely ropey. “This goes over your eyes, but if you promise not to peek, I won’t cinch it too tight.”

  Judith looked at the bandanna stretched between his hands. “You know, if something bad happens to me out here, my father will hunt you down and kill you.”

  “ ’Course he would,” Willy said. “What father wouldn’t?” He laid the bandanna over her eyes and tied it off. “That okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, just sit back and relax.”

  Relaxing implied waiting, which alarmed her. “What do you mean, relax?”

  “It’ll be a minute or two. I’ll tell you when.”

  He began again to whistle, and she said, “What is that song, anyhow?”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I like it okay. It’s just that I feel like I’ve heard it before but can’t name it.”

  “Me either,” he said. “It just always comes to me. It’s one of my mother’s old songs. Maybe sometime you can ask her.”

  “If I live to meet her.”

  “You’re kind of funny,” he said in an amiable voice.

  He resumed whistling, and it soon seemed to Judith that she’d drifted just beyond herself and was hovering there listening to the hollow wind in the trees, the hiss and crackle of the fire, the whistled song.

  And then abruptly the whistling stopped and she couldn’t hear Willy’s breathing or feel his presence, and the other sounds that only moments ago had seemed comforting now seemed disquieting.

  “Willy?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Willy?”

  “Just a damn second,” he said. “Okay, it’s ready,” he said, and the soft flannel of his shirt brushed her face as he unfastened the bandanna. She’d had her eyes closed behind the cloth, and opened them. He was pointing toward the two closest buttes, which were now silhouetted in blackest black against some new and grand source of light. It was a brilliant buttery yellow, and though it at first seemed stationary, it wasn’t, for the light seemed to rise looming from the two buttes, and it gave them each the kind of aura that Judith associated with pictures of Jesus. But this soon changed, too. The illumination slid slowly upward, growing larger, wider, whiter, casting its dazzling light, becoming its entire self: a flush full moon, though, she had to admit it, this was not the moon as she had ever known it. It was a different moon. There was the low resonant wind through the trees, and the crack and pop of the fire, and there was this moon, free now of the buttes, hanging huge and luminous behind a slim filmy cloud. Judith took a deep breath so she could hold it all in.

  “There,” Willy Blunt said in a low voice. “That right there is the moon to watch.”

  Judith said, “If anybody painted that moon exactly as it is right now, right there, everybody would like it, but nobody would believe it. Not one person. They’d think you made it up.”

  In a low voice Willy said, “Maybe tomorrow we’ll think we did, too.”

  She turned suddenly. “No,” she said with vehemence, “we won’t. Because you saw it and I saw it.”
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br />   Willy was nodding and smiling. “ ’Course, one of us might wake up somewhere down the line and begin doubting what we saw.”

  Judith looked at him in the light of the moon and the fire. Then—and even during this moment it felt like something from a movie she’d seen or would like to see—she rose and swung a leg over his leg and settled into his lap so they sat face to face. “It’s not going to be me,” she said in a tight whisper. “It’s not going to be me who doubts it.”

  What she had done and was doing was a surprise to herself, and his expression, too, seemed full of wonderment. He touched a single finger softly to her nose; then he touched her eyelids closed and began smoothing the soft round of his finger across her lips, and just like that she was kissing him, uncertainly at first, and then greedily, teeth clashing with teeth. When his free hand slid up toward her bra clasp, she arched her back to make it easier, and the instant the clasp fell free she felt herself breathe a different kind of air. He made a low murmuring sound and, leaning forward, began kissing her open neck while his hands cupped her breasts, lifting them a little, causing them, or so it seemed to her at that moment, to swell to new dimensions, and he began gently thumbing the nipples until she thought she might burst.

  When the time came to leave, he was the one to dump ice and water onto the fire and shovel dirt over the embers. He gathered the empty beer bottles and their other trash into the ice chest. During this time Judith managed nothing more than standing, fastening her bra, and buttoning her shirt.

  On the way home, once they’d bounced across the creek and rough terrain and were again on a graded road, she stared out at the moon, but it had already become the usual moon, distant, white, the one she’d known her entire life, until tonight. She turned and lay down with her head in Willy’s lap. He drove slowly; she would find that he always drove slowly. Finally she said, “That was my first first date, just so you know. Also my first kiss.”

  He said, “Well, I hope you didn’t find anything disappointing.”