To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  “You’ll know after it happens, if it ever does.” The truth was, she was having quite a bit of fun with Willy without actually having sex, and she wasn’t sure why it couldn’t just stay that way.

  “How long after it happens?” Deena said. “Because I don’t want to hear about it five days later or something. I want a fresh report.”

  From Judith’s first date with Willy, Deena had probed for details about their goings-on. Her particular specialty was asking what things were like. What was it like to be out driving with him? What was it like to kiss him? What was it like to have his hand there?

  “God,” she said when Judith had told her how smoothly he’d undone the clasp on her bra, “the only way Paul Two’s going to get to my boobs is if I undress myself.”

  Following the interview at Pizza Hut, Deena had chosen Paul Two, but she was already thinking of changing to Paul One instead. “Let me count the ways Paul Two appalls,” she said after their first Saturday night at the Starlight Drive-in. “He kisses badly, he for some reason wants to lick my ears, and his hands are always cold. Last night they were also sticky. It was like being with a clumsy fifty-fifty bar.”

  Judith said, “You didn’t count. You said you were going to count the ways he appalls.”

  “It was three. I figured you could count that high yourself, being such a math whiz and all.”

  Judith didn’t respond to this. A fly buzzed in the hallway. Judith reached for one of her father’s New Yorkers and rolled it into a swatter.

  Deena said, “I knew a girl over in Harrison who thought she was in big love, but she was diehard RC and afraid of going to hell, so before she went anywhere with her boyfriend she smeared anchovy paste on the crotch of her undies because however carried away she got, she knew she wouldn’t want him to think her private parts smelled like fish.”

  “How’d that work out for her?”

  “Not that great. She got pregnant and the boyfriend dumped her. But I hear now he always orders his pizzas with anchovies.”

  Judith snorted and told Deena she was a really horrible person.

  “Maybe,” Deena said. “But it’s a true story, except maybe for the pizza part.”

  The fly lighted on the lip of the front-door window, just above the mail slot. This past week her East Coast wait-list school had formally turned her down, which left only Stanford, where her chances were beyond remote (Mr. Flood had learned that they never went past the first name or two on their waiting list). She’d told Willy about the rejection, told him it was her last real chance for one of the schools she’d thought she actually wanted to attend, but that the surprise was she didn’t much mind the rejection after all. Willy listened while she jabbered about Princeton and Stanford and Amory Blaine and Viennese waltzes and big-game bonfires and how, really, all those things had seemed to matter a lot more to her before she met him than they did now. She went on a little more and when finally she was done, he said, “So you’ll go to the college here?” Either here or the U in Lincoln, she told him. “I missed the fee deadline at the U, but Mr. Flood wrote a letter and got me an extension,” she said. “Till when?” he asked, and she told him: sometime in mid-July. Willy nodded neutrally.

  The fly landed on the floor close by and then, as Judith slowly raised her rolled magazine overhead, buzzed away.

  Deena said, “Guess Willy’s working?”

  Judith gave a murmur that meant yes. He was out at the Minnert place. The concrete foundation for the new room had already been poured, and the stud walls raised and joined by rafters, if she remembered it right. Saturdays Willy worked there all day, but he quit at two on Sundays and came directly to Judith’s house, carrying with him those commingled smells of sweat and sawdust and beer she remembered from the meeting in the Gibson’s parking lot. They would usually go first thing to a private lake south of town, where Willy stripped to his boxer shorts and without a word walked slowly out into the water until only his head wasn’t submerged, at which point he gave his head a deliberate dip before rotating slowly and walking back out, a procedure he called the White Man’s Ancestral Bathing Ritual or, once, when it applied, the White Man’s Harvesting of the Leeches. On one of these occasions, Judith said, “You know, the white man doesn’t have to be shy on my account,” and without embarrassment he’d hung his boxer shorts from a tree limb before walking in. “What was it like to see him naked?” Deena had later asked, and Judith, remembering the stringy moss attached to his torso as he rose from the water, said, “Like watching the appearance of primordial man.”

  “So,” Judith said now into the telephone, “are you doing something with Paul Two this afternoon?” and when Deena said, “Oh God, no,” Judith asked if she wanted to come with her and Willy. “We’re going to the lake,” she said. “I’m making sandwiches.”

  “What kind of sandwiches?”

  “Extremely droll. Are you in or not?”

  “You sure Willy won’t mind?”

  “Sure I’m sure.” Willy craved Judith’s company, she knew this as a fact, just as she craved his, but beyond that he wasn’t picky about things, and he wouldn’t mind Deena tagging along. It was also true that Deena had a shift at the Dairy Queen that night, so there wouldn’t be any awkwardness about parting company when the afternoon was over and darkness was coming on.

  When Willy pulled up to the house that Sunday afternoon, Judith and Deena were ready for him with a basket of sandwiches. Willy was in good spirits. He’d had a friend helping him that morning, and they’d gotten the room entirely sheeted.

  “Whatever that means,” Judith said. She sat in the middle of the truck cab, which meant straddling the gearshift. Both she and Deena were wearing T-shirts and shorts over their swimsuits.

  “Means I’m that much closer to payday,” Willy said. The arrangement, as Willy explained it, was that Minnert would pay for materials as they went, then pay the accumulated labor charges when the job was finished. “And at the rate we’re going, we’re going to make a nice little chunk of change,” Willy said, shifting easily from third gear to fourth, the graze of his knuckles along her inner thigh setting off a tingling that radiated pell-mell in all directions.

  He drove right past their customary turnoff, and Judith gave him a look.

  “I was thinking about a different swimming hole today,” Willy said. He shot both riders a mischievous look. “Long as you girls are game.”

  Judith mentioned that Deena needed to be at work by five.

  “Or?” Willy asked.

  “Or Mr. Ed has a cow,” Deena said.

  Willy laughed and fell to whistling his signature tune.

  “I know that song,” Deena said. Then, less brightly, “Except I can’t remember what it’s called.”

  Judith said that meant she could join the club.

  After a few seconds, Willy said, “Guy at work’s got a Blaupunkt radiocassette he’ll give me for forty bucks, and I’m going to do it.” He slid out a grin. “My whistling’s something special, I’ll grant you, but sometimes I need a little break.”

  Eventually they turned onto a dirt lane, drove past a farmhouse, then went through a gate marked NO TRESPASSING and across an expanse of pasture until Willy found a gate to a dirt road that curved through elms and ash and willow to a full stream. The narrow road that followed the stream pitched the truck with its rocky shifts and angles, and the more Judith was jostled into Willy, the more she wished Deena wasn’t along for the ride.

  A rocky precipice rose in front of them, with a thin spill of water dropping like a plumb line from its edge. Willy pulled the truck into a space where past parking had more or less subdued the brush. They followed a narrow footpath toward the splash of water and before long found themselves in a wide sandy area split by the shallow stream. Farther on, a cluster of boulders surrounded a pool of water fed by the overhead spill.

  “There you go,” Willy said.

  “How’d you find this place?” Judith asked. The number of private picnic spots he c
ould locate had become a strange source of fascination to her—it was as if he were some kind of oddball geographer whose specialties were shade, water, and seclusion.

  Willy shrugged. “Me and my buddies used to fish here before Weck bought the place.”

  He’d brought his cooler. He cracked an Old Milwaukee, then took off his hat, shirt, and boots. Before removing his pants, he looked at Deena and said, “You may need to avert your eyes if you’re squeamish.” He flicked a grin toward Judith. “I know that’s what Judith usually does.”

  The pool was steep-sided and Willy, wearing his boxer shorts, kept a hand on a willow branch while ducking into the water. Judith turned to Deena and said, “My hero can’t swim.”

  Deena laughed but couldn’t pull her eyes from the spectacle of Willy’s trepidant bathing. “You can’t swim?” she said. “How could you live this long and not learn to swim?”

  Willy looked at her mildly. “Not hard if you set your mind to it.”

  Deena laughed again, and Judith said, “His fear of submersion is what you’d call morbid.”

  Willy gave her an amused look. “If you’re such a swimmer, why aren’t you in here?”

  “Waiting to see if you come out spotted with leeches and blood.”

  “I’ll go in,” Deena said, and stood to unbutton her shirt. The emerald green bikini she was wearing beneath her clothes was either unusually skimpy or—and this was Judith’s opinion—a full size too small. One thing was certain: Deena’s breasts had been through a raucous growth spurt.

  Willy said, “That suit could cause respiratory problems.”

  “For her or for you?” Judith said, laughing. Then, to Deena, “That new?”

  “Bought it last year,” Deena said. “Just never had the nerve to wear it.”

  Judith thought of asking where she’d gone to acquire the nerve to wear it now, but didn’t. She said it looked great on her, because she had to admit, it really did. She turned to Willy and said, “Doesn’t it look great?”

  “It does, yeah. In fact, I think you’d have to call it eye-popping.”

  For some reason this didn’t displease Judith. She merely laughed and cuffed her hand into the water to give Willy a mock-punitive splash while Deena slipped into the water.

  After swimming, they sat on flat rocks eating their ham-and-cheese sandwiches and barbecued chips and drinking the beer that Willy pulled from his cooler of ice. Deena, who tended to burn, retreated into the shade, but not so far away that she couldn’t see and be seen.

  Willy said, “When the Pinneys owned this place, they had a sign up at the front gate that said, Hunt and fish all you damn please, and when the bell rings, come to dinner.” He sipped from his beer. “Old Ralph Pinney was my kind of people.”

  This reminded Judith of Isabel Archer’s cousin Ralph, and for no particular reason she said, “The heroine in this book I’m reading? She says she doesn’t want a lot of money, just enough to satisfy her imagination.”

  “Well, sure,” Willy said. “But what you got to know is the nature of the imagination. I mean, what if you imagine a new wardrobe every fall and spring?” and Deena said, “As opposed, say, to imagining a new hunting rifle every deer season?” and Willy said, “Well, that’s not quite fair, because whereas you can eat a venison steak, you can’t eat silk or wool unless you’re a moth, which none of us is”—a conversation Judith found more entertaining than could be easily explained.

  She went to sip from her bottle of beer and was surprised to find it empty. Willy snapped the cap off another, handed it to her, and began looking for smooth stones to skip on the water. By this time, Judith felt there had been three Judiths on the picnic, each succeeding the other. The first was the Judith who craved Willy’s touch. The second was the one who resented Deena’s company. And the third one, the one she was now, was the Judith who imagined that the ground on which she lay was very slowly breathing in and breathing out.

  When Deena raised her head into the dappled sunlight to take the band off her ponytail and shake out her red hair, Judith said, “Your hair in that light looks like something somebody should paint.” She swung round toward Willy, who was turning a stone in his hand. “Doesn’t she, Willy? Doesn’t she look like she should be painted? I mean, if you were a painter, wouldn’t you want to paint her just like that?”

  Willy regarded Deena for a few seconds. “Problem is, I can’t paint a lick. If I painted her, it wouldn’t come out pretty at all. What you really need is somebody who’d do her justice.”

  “What I’m looking for, then,” Deena said, “is a rugged rodeo boy with an easel in the back of his pickup.”

  “And a big ol’ wad of money to support your imagination,” Willy said. He skipped one last stone, then came over, stretched out, and laid his head in Judith’s lap. She smoothed a finger over his forehead and he closed his eyes. Within a minute he would be asleep. Judith found it endearing. It suggested a satisfaction with his place in the world that she found appealing, and very possibly envied.

  Shortly before five, when Willy pulled into the Dairy Queen parking lot, Deena was still in her suit beneath her shirt and shorts. “Big fun,” she said as she slid out. “Thanks for the invite. I’d ask you in for a discount burger, but—” She nodded toward Mr. Edmundson’s Cutlass parked a few slots down.

  When Judith and Willy were on the road again, heading toward the town of Gordon, where Willy knew a grandmother who made and sold chiles rellenos every Sunday, Judith said, “Well, that was fun.”

  Willy seemed to have nodded, but maybe not.

  “Didn’t you think?”

  “It was fun, yeah.” Then, grinning: “As long as you’re in view, it’s a bountiful vista.”

  “Deena was kind of a bountiful vista, too.”

  Willy’s murmur seemed ambiguous.

  “There something wrong, Willy?”

  He didn’t speak.

  “Something about Deena?” she said.

  They were driving east on Highway 20. At a one-building rendering house just beyond Goodnight, Judith saw a man standing by a dump truck and then averted her eyes when she realized that what was sliding from the lifted bed was a stiffened horse carcass. This was something Willy would normally have commented on, but he didn’t today. Neither did Judith. Finally he said, “One time I was playing cards with some fellas, and I don’t remember the circumstances, but a man named Toby ended a story by saying, ‘What is it about a kicked dog that makes you want to kick it?’ This fella was a grand old storyteller and also a prince of a guy, but there was something about the remark so cruel and yet probably true that it took a second or two before everybody at the table could give it a big laugh, and then they did, myself included.”

  He fell silent.

  “The point here being?” Judith said, and when he didn’t answer, she said, “Are you saying Deena’s like a kicked dog?”

  “I’m saying she looks fine on the outside, but inside is somebody who’s going to need a man a lot more than he’s going to need her.”

  There was more. She could feel it. “So?”

  “So with somebody like that you either feel sorry for them or you despise them, unless you happen to be so weak-kneed you need her more than she needs you, and then she’ll despise you and go find somebody on the side to let you know it. All in all, it borders on misbegotten.”

  Misbegotten? Where did he get these words? She said, “Is that why you said if you painted her, she wouldn’t turn out pretty?”

  “I’d been thinking some of this stuff, it’s true. But it’s also true I can’t paint a lick. In grammar school, I once painted a silage bin and my teacher said it was a very nice teapot but I ought to go ahead and put the spout on it, which I did.”

  He began softly to whistle. The highway slid through the tip of Rushville—grain elevators, municipal park with pool, Co-op service station—before again splitting farmland and pasture. Going 45, as Willy was, this took about a minute, which was how long it took for Judith to feel t
he full weight of the insult paid to her friend. Deena was smart, Deena was funny, and Deena was the one who saw the world more like Judith did than anyone else at Rufus Sage High. For that last reason alone, Judith didn’t believe that Deena was facing the kind of future Willy had outlined, but even if she did believe it, she wouldn’t want it foretold.

  “Take me home,” she said.

  Willy stopped whistling and looked at her. She stared forward, but she could feel him trying to gauge the strength of her anger.

  “Take me home,” she said again.

  At the first farm road, Willy turned the truck around. When they passed by the rendering plant, the dump truck was gone, and so was the man, and so was the dead horse. The next miles passed in swollen silence. Just west of Goodnight, Willy said, “I guess we’re having an argument, but I’m not sure what it’s about.”

  When Judith didn’t comment, he said, “I guess it has to do with the stuff I said about Deena.”

  He pulled up in front of her house, and Judith got out without a word. She didn’t look back before closing the front door behind her, though she knew he hadn’t yet pulled away. When he did go—she was watching from behind the curtains—he went slowly. At the corner, the truck turned out of sight.

  The house was quiet, emphatically empty.

  God, she thought. Comparing Deena to a kicked dog. What kind of mind could ever find its way to a thought like that?

  Downstairs in her bedroom, she found the unsigned letter confirming her intention to enroll at the university in Lincoln. She took out a blue pen and signed the letter with a flourish, then addressed an envelope and applied a stamp. The impulse flagged then—there was no hurry, after all; she had until mid-July to decide—so she slid the unsealed envelope back into the drawer of her nightstand. She went upstairs and looked out. It wasn’t even dark yet, and she didn’t feel like sitting at home. She telephoned the Dairy Queen and asked Deena to call her back as soon as Mr. Ed wasn’t there.