by Tom McNeal
She laughed and burrowed her face into his flannel shirt, and then, to her surprise, she was crying.
“Hey, hey now, what’s the matter? We didn’t do anything you’d call extreme.”
This was true. They’d both kept their hands above the waist.
“That isn’t it,” she said. “I just don’t want it to end.”
Willy Blunt combed his fingers through Judith’s hair. A rock plinked against the undercarriage. When he spoke, his tone had lost its customary looseness. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said. A second or two passed. Then: “The thing is, I think you’re just a lot more interesting than any girl I’ve ever met.”
She snuffled and lifted her head and dabbed a tissue at her nose.
“You do?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“How come?”
He let out a low laugh, as if he hadn’t expected that particular question. He glanced down at her, then back at the road. She had the impression he wasn’t so much searching for an answer as waiting for it to come to him. Finally he said, “Sometimes that’s a hard thing to put your finger on.”
A few minutes later, Willy turned the Chevy truck from the graded road onto Highway 20. In the relative quiet, Judith said, “Will you come by tomorrow afternoon?” and he touched his finger to her nose and said why of course he would.
2
Willy Blunt dropped by early Saturday afternoon, and this time, when Judith led him into the backyard to say hello to her father, the conversation was uneventful. Judith pointed out the lime tree in its terra-cotta pot, and her father pointed out the blossoms that would turn to buds that would turn to limes. Willy stared at it for a moment and said, “Mr. Toomey, if you were to get one more of those little trees, it’d probably make you the biggest citrus grower in the state of Nebraska,” which to Judith’s relief earned him a small, puffing laugh from her father and, better yet, provided them an easy means of going back into the house.
While her father puttered in the garden, Judith sat at the kitchen table letting Willy teach her a card game called casino, until her father, stepping inside for iced tea, accepted Willy’s invitation to join them, both of which—invitation and acceptance—Judith found irritating. Still, with her father there she learned the game, and took spiteful pleasure when the toothpicks they were playing for began to accumulate on her side of the table.
Around 3 P.M., Willy looked at his pocket watch and said he had to drive down south of town to see a farmer about a job. “Joe L. Minnert,” Willy said. “He wants me to build a room on for him.” Willy let his gaze move from Judith to her father. “Would the two of you want to ride along?”
Judith’s father smiled—he seemed to appreciate Willy’s ruse even while seeing through it—and said he was sorry, but he’d already made plans to go to campus this afternoon.
“Would it be okay if I go?” Judith asked.
“With me down to campus?” her father said mildly. “Of course, if you like.”
“You know what I mean. With Willy.”
Her father looked at Willy, then back at Judith. “I don’t see why not.”
It occurred to Judith that if her heart were hooked up to a monitor, a wild spike on the running graph paper would just have been observed.
The Minnert farmhouse was hidden behind a shelter belt of conifers planted along Dead Horse Road, and when Willy parked in front of the house alongside an open orange Jeep, a large woman at once stepped out the front door and stood looking at them. An even larger man soon appeared behind her. Judith supposed these were Mr. and Mrs. Minnert. They just stood silently, as if their mere presence were acknowledgment enough of Willy’s arrival.
“I’m the carpenter,” Willy said as he and Judith approached.
“Who’s she?” the woman said, nodding at Judith.
“A friend of mine.” Willy smiled one of his genial smiles.
The large man and woman stared. The man’s face was stone, and the woman’s was expressionless, too, but there was something wrong with her face. One side seemed to have drooped from its natural place; a terrible sag under that eye exposed wet red tissue.
Joe L. Minnert turned and took his great mass into the house.
His wife started to do the same, but stopped and turned back. “Well, c’mon,” she said.
Judith followed Willy into the house, which was dark and held a smell that went well beyond the fustiness she’d occasionally noticed in farmhouses. She imagined decaying meat she couldn’t see, and what she couldn’t see was almost everything. The heavy shades that covered the windows left the room so dim that she extended her hand to Willy’s shoulder as they advanced.
Finally a hall light was switched on by the large woman, who had somehow gotten behind Judith.
“There,” Joe L. Minnert said, pointing toward a blank wall at the end of a hallway. “That’s where my office goes.”
“He calls it his office,” Mrs. Minnert said in a low voice, and Judith wondered who she was talking to.
The big farmer produced a piece of lined yellow paper containing a drawing of a room. Willy looked at it a few seconds, then began talking about what was and wasn’t a bearing wall and finally got to suggesting what types of windows and doors they might like, to which Joe L. Minnert said, “We ain’t building the Taj Mahal.”
A hard laugh erupted from Mrs. Minnert. In the confined space the meaty smell had grown stronger, and Judith felt a faint wave of nausea. When Mrs. Minnert crowded forward to assert the need for a lock on the new office door, Judith said, “I think I’ll wait outside.”
Willy smiled at her and said that’d be fine, this wouldn’t take too long.
Judith turned, and Mrs. Minnert stepped back so she could pass by. She hurried through the front room toward the light of the mud porch and threw open the door. Outside, she stood and drank in the air.
The yard was weedy and unfenced, but an old wooden chair and side table stood under a hackberry tree among scattered deadfall. Judith went over and sat in the chair. The shade was a comfort. She closed her eyes and listened to the buzz of insects, and she had just begun to feel more or less normal when the snap of a branch gave her a start. She opened her eyes and saw Mrs. Minnert staring at her from a near distance. The woman tried to smile, which only accentuated the division in her face—while one side of the mouth turned up, the other seemed to slide down. “Want a washcloth?” she said.
“No,” Judith said. “I’m better now. I think I must’ve eaten something bad or something.”
“You didn’t eat it here,” Mrs. Minnert said. She drew a bit closer, not too close but close enough that she seemed to bring with her the faint smell of meat. She said, “Are you a nice girl?”
“Yes,” Judith said. “Yes, I am.”
The woman stared at her keenly. “You sure?”
“Yes,” Judith said. “I’m sure.”
“The girly-girl is sure,” Mrs. Minnert said, and stood motionless with a slight forward lean as if clamped onto this thought. Then an abrupt unhappy laugh flew from her mouth. “Are you sure-sure, or just pretty sure?”
Judith squared her shoulders for some kind of answer, but she didn’t have to speak. Mrs. Minnert suddenly said, “We have no issue.” The right side of her face drew into a grimace while the other drooped like warm wax. “We had us one, but he died when he was two.”
Judith tried to make a nod of the kind she would make if this were a normal conversation. Then it was quiet except for the pulsing chorus of cicadas, and Judith heard herself say, “What’s that smell inside the house?”
“What smell?” Mrs. Minnert said, brought back. The suspicion in her face formed in two unaligned columns.
“I don’t know,” Judith said. “I just thought there was a smell.”
“There’s no smell.” Then: “It could be a vermin. He baits for vermin.”
Judith said nothing to this. By vermin, she supposed the woman meant rodents, but it wasn’t rodents—she remembered the rat-and
-mouse smell of the lean-to when she and her father had pulled out the bird’s-eye maple, and this was different.
Mrs. Minnert shuffled closer, and the odor—it was meaty in nature, Judith felt sure of it—grew more potent. The woman glanced behind her and lowered her voice. “He said it was his office your lover boy’s going to build, but it’s not.” The woman’s good eye was gleaming, and the one with the moist pink sag beneath it had brightened, too. “He done something. He thought I wouldn’t see, but I did. So now I’m getting my room.” She looked as if she might laugh, and if she did, it would be something out of a bad horror movie, only it wouldn’t be a bad horror movie, it would be real life. But she didn’t laugh. She said, “It’s my lookout room.”
“It’s your lookout room?” Judith said.
Mrs. Minnert seemed pleased by the question. She leaned close to Judith. “That’s right,” she said. “If you come into it, well, look out!” This time she did laugh, a deep guttural laugh, the joy overflowing her disjointed face, the fetid meaty smell blooming and wrapping Judith close. Mrs. Minnert drew an inch nearer. “And you tell your lover boy it’s got to have a lock on the door, a real stout lock that only I have the key to.”
“Water,” Judith said, to get the woman away from her. “A glass of water.”
At this moment a screen door slammed, and the woman stiffened and leaned away.
Willy and Joe L. Minnert were coming down the wooden steps into the yard, looking like two normal people. Willy was folding a sheet of paper, sliding it into his pocket, saying to Mr. Minnert that once he had a wood and hardware list together, he could get him a firm price, and the massive farmer was nodding blandly and sticking his hands into the deep pockets of his coveralls. “You’ll be glad to know I’m a pay-as-you-go man,” he said.
“I’ll have some numbers in a day or two,” Willy said.
Joe L. Minnert looked directly at Willy. “That’ll be fine,” he said. “And no need for a fancy contract. I prefer a man’s handshake to a fancy contract any day of the week.”
Mrs. Minnert turned to Judith and talked in a low, squeezed voice. “You tell your lover boy,” she said. “You tell him about the stout lock and how it’s me gets the key.”
Judith, nodding, trying to hold herself together, walked toward Willy and Mr. Minnert, who were now talking about the orange Jeep parked out front. “I like all the flat stuff,” Willy was saying. “Flat hood, flat fenders.”
Joe L. Minnert nodded, but his stonelike expression didn’t change.
“I drive it,” Mrs. Minnert said, coming up. “It can go anywhere. They drove one right up the steps of the capitol building with the president in it.”
Without looking at her, the big farmer said, “It wasn’t the president.”
“You drive it?” Willy said to Mrs. Minnert. There was surprise in his voice.
Mrs. Minnert nodded with satisfaction. “He bought it for me.”
Mr. Minnert still didn’t look at his wife, and Judith wondered if he ever did. “It’s a M38,” he said to Willy. “I got it off a widow woman. That’s a Ramsey winch in the back, but the woman didn’t even know it.”
Mrs. Minnert sidled close to Judith and whispered that she could take her for a ride in the Jeep sometime if she wanted.
Judith felt herself nodding her head.
Willy had just asked a question about the Jeep’s black-out lights when Judith said, “We’ve got to go, Willy. I don’t feel well.”
She guessed she didn’t look that great either, because the moment Willy glanced at her, he hurried her to the truck, called to Mr. Minnert that he’d have prices by Tuesday, and put the truck in gear.
“You okay?” he said once they were moving, and she nodded but couldn’t speak. She still felt nauseated. When she leaned her head out her window, he said, “Tell me if we need to stop.”
Judith kept her mouth closed.
After a few minutes she began to feel more settled. She tried experimentally to breathe fully in, out, then in again. “I’m okay now,” she said. “I’m feeling better.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I am.”
Willy’s face relaxed to a smile. “Well, I’m happy to hear it,” he said, “because pretty soon here I was going to try to kiss you, which is a little harder to look forward to after a girl’s been chucking it up.”
Judith managed a small laugh.
“So what hit you?” Willy said.
“That smell,” she said. “Like old meat. I thought it was the house, but it was coming from inside her. That old woman. She should be billed with Vincent Price.”
A chuckle. “Yeah, well, old Mrs. Minnert, she’s a few fractions off in the upper story.”
Judith asked what that was supposed to mean.
“She’s half crazy. Minnert had her committed about five years ago, but then her sister got her out and brought her back to the Minnert place, and that’s how it is. Nobody hardly sees her. I had no idea she could drive.” He thought of something else. “A long time ago they were high school sweethearts. He’s a year older. He took her to his prom one year and to hers the next. My mother remembers it because she wore the same yellow polka-dotted dress both times.”
Judith said, “Are you really going to work for them?”
“Sure I will, if we can agree on a price. I can do it on weekends.”
Judith was quiet. So was he. Then he said, “I don’t want to work for Boss Krauss the rest of my life, you know.”
He didn’t say any more. He just kept driving slowly, looking serious, and then after a while his expression broke and he began to whistle. Judith watched him a little while, then leaned toward him and said in a voice barely louder than a whisper, “Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where were you going to try to kiss me?”
A smile stretched across Willy’s face. “On the lips, unless you had other ideas.”
“Very funny. I mean where were you going to take me to try to kiss me?”
“Oh, that.” He peered forward. “Don’t you worry about that. I know a shady grove.”
“He knows a shady grove,” Judith repeated in a mild voice.
Willy turned the truck east onto a smaller dirt road that before long led to a gate with a sign reading END OF PUBLIC USE AREA. He got out and opened the gate and motioned Judith to pull the truck through, which she did uncertainly. After he secured the gate behind them, she started to slide back to the passenger’s side, but he opened that door and got in. “You drive,” he said, and she did, as slow or slower than Willy but with greater concentration because encroaching trees, shrubs, and rocks made the going tricky. She felt Willy’s eyes on her, and when she flicked him a look he was grinning.
“What?”
“Nothing much,” he said, moving close on the seat. “You just keep two hands on the wheel and we’ll be fine.”
He smoothed a hand under her chin and down her neck, several times, slowly, back and forth, sending what felt like little electrical charges to all the important areas, and then, gently—it reminded her of nibbling—his fingers began to work at the buttons of her shirt. She brushed him away several times, but without the kind of real seriousness she knew she should be using, and she soon felt the shirt front fall away and then he had one hand gentle on her breast and the other hand sliding up her bare back, and when the front wheel caught a rock and spun the steering wheel through her loosened hands, she said, “Oh!”
The truck rolled softly into an embankment. In her movie, she thought many years later, there would not be a sound.
For a moment everything was still, and then Willy burst out laughing, a full-throttle, up-from-the-stomach laugh, and Judith, who’d already formed in her mind a sharp sentence about how this would never have happened if he hadn’t kept pestering her, felt as if a plug had been pulled, and laughter poured out.
When finally they grew quiet, Judith stared at the soft wall of dirt into which she’d driven the truck. “Now what?” she said,
and as she turned to Willy, his easy smile tightened into something serious, and as he leaned forward, Judith seemed to feel his lips even before they touched hers.
These, then, were the beginnings of what Judith later thought of as the Summer of Willy Blunt. All at once her life of latency and quiescence had turned metamorphic. She seemed to live differently within her own body, and if, standing in front of the mirror after a shower, she still couldn’t quite come to regard herself as beautiful, she did find fewer shortcomings than before. She began to think less vaguely of the sexual act, began to think of how easy and, well, fun it might be with Willy, but then her heart would sink with the thought of carrying such a secret into the kitchen where her father sat reading the morning paper. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she routinely tamped down her enthusiasm for Willy in the proximity of her father. She found it easiest to pass on conversations and anecdotes that played into her father’s initial impression of him as the amusable roofer. How, for example, Willy believed in extraterrestrials (“Why not? If God or whatever can create a zillion creatures here, why not one or two creatures somewhere else?”) and didn’t believe in pennies (“If I run for president, that’s my platform. No pennies. Also no Styrofoam peanuts. And no chihuahuas either. I have no use for small furless dogs.”) When she heard Willy say such things, she saved them for her father, who always responded with an appreciative chuckle or nod. What these anecdotes were meant to tell him was that Willy, if not quite simple, was close to it, and someone close to simple could not sustain Judith’s interest and was therefore harmless. And harmless, Judith intuited, was how her father needed to think of Willy.
“When are you and Willy going to fool around with a capital F?” Deena asked one morning on the telephone.
“Who’s saying I’m going to?”
“Who’s saying you’re not?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“But you’ll tell me when you do?”
Judith sat on the floor in the hallway with her back against the wall. It was late morning, drowsy and warm. By the time she’d gotten up, her father had departed in the Bonneville. The note on the kitchen table merely said, Errands in Grand Lake. Back later on. Love, Dad.