by Tom McNeal
“Not here now,” Deena said. “Where’re you?”
“Home. Willy’s gone. We had an argument.”
“You and…? What about?”
“I’ll be there in five minutes. I’ll tell you then,” she said, but by the time she’d walked five blocks past neighbors trimming hedges and moving lawn sprinklers and kids playing catch and croquet, and then crossed the highway to the Dairy Queen, her mood had softened. She heard herself tell Deena that the argument was over a song.
“Which one?” Deena said.
“ ‘Horse with No Name.’ He kept whistling it, and finally I asked him not to, and he said, ‘You don’t like that song?’ and I said, ‘Worse than that. I hate it, because it’s silly and pretentious,’ and he said, ‘So only somebody silly and pretentious would like it?’ and there we were.” The truth was, they’d had a joking conversation along these very lines. The surprise was how easy it was to make it sound like an argument.
“ ’Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain,” Deena sang, and Judith joined her when she went into the la-la-la’s. She was beginning to feel a little better again, her faith restored in Deena, and for that matter in herself.
Deena brought her a cheeseburger, extra onions, plenty of relish and ketchup, the way she liked it. “It’s a pretty stupid song,” Deena said, “but it’s also a pretty stupid thing to have an argument about. Shouldn’t you better call him?”
Judith took a bite of the cheeseburger—she hadn’t realized how hungry she was—and said, “Maybe. I don’t know.”
It turned eight as Judith was walking home, something she knew because she heard the Bonanza theme song from the open windows of three houses straight. They’d ditched the old theme song—a mistake in Judith’s opinion, not that she’d ever cared for the show. The men all wore the same clothes in every episode, for one thing, and for another thing, any woman dumb enough to fall for one of the Cartwrights was destined for a tragic death before the hour was up. But Willy. Willy had liked the show until Dan Blocker died. “They replaced Hoss,” Willy had told her, “but Hoss wasn’t replaceable.”
When she arrived home, she went straight to the telephone and dialed the number for Willy’s parents, something she’d never done before.
His mother answered.
“Mrs. Blunt? This is Judith Toomey.”
“Oh, yes,” Willy’s mother said. She had a gentle voice, but there was a knowingness folded into it, too, a pleasant knowingness, as if she’d not only heard of Judith but heard nice things.
“I was wondering if Willy is there.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Blunt. “Is something wrong?”
“Not really. I didn’t feel well and he took me home. I just wanted to let him know I’m feeling a lot better now. I guess he’s not there.”
“No, not yet.”
“Well, could you have him call me if he gets in before nine?” Her father wasn’t home yet, but he might soon be, and he had a strict rule about calls after nine.
Mrs. Blunt said she would. “And if he’s later, I’ll leave him a note saying you’re feeling better now and to call you in the morning.”
By nine, Judith’s anxiousness had escalated. She turned on a Mission: Impossible rerun but couldn’t keep her mind on it. She went downstairs to bed, tried to read a little, then turned off the light. She dozed, waking every half-hour or so. Around midnight, headlights swept by the basement windows and the door to the Bonneville slammed. There were footsteps overhead, and then the door to the basement eased open.
“Hi, Dad,” she called.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said from the landing. “Good day?”
“Pretty good. I’m sleepy, though.”
“Sweet dreams, then,” he said, and quietly closed the door behind him.
She couldn’t go back to sleep. She lay under the sheet thinking feverish thoughts about Willy and where he might be and what things he might be doing and who he might be doing them with and how stupid and unfair it was that she wasn’t the one with him doing those things, whatever they were. Her thoughts pinballed from image to image until finally—1:25, according to her Westclox electric—she sat up and turned on the lamp with the vague idea that illumination might dispel her chaotic thoughts. It did. Almost at once she heard a tapping sound. She sat perfectly still, listening, and the sound came again. Tap, tap, tap. She slipped from the bed and tiptoed toward the window.
“Judith?”
“Willy?”
He was lying on his stomach with his head lowered slightly into the window well, smiling down from an odd angle, as if he were peering into a cave. She unlatched the window and pushed it open.
“I missed you,” she whispered.
“ ’Course you did,” he said in a low voice. “I missed you, too.”
“I’m sorry about…”
“Oh, that’s all right. I shouldn’t’ve said what I said about her future being…”
“Misbegotten,” Judith said.
He gave a little chuckle. “Yeah, that. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I was probably wrong. Anyhow, anytime you want to bring Deena along, it’ll be okay by me.”
“And you won’t feel sorry for her or despise her?”
Another quiet laugh. “I told you I’ve begun to think I was wrong about that, and anyhow, she’s your pal, and I know how to play nice.”
The window could be opened only a few inches; it was fastened by small chains at each side. “Wait there,” she said.
She put on her summer robe, the green seersucker, and crept up the concrete stairs that led to the side yard. The only problem was the door. It creaked when she opened it, creaked when she set it closed behind her. Outside, she stood not breathing, listening for sounds from her father’s bedroom, directly overhead, but there was nothing.
She slipped around the house and found Willy sitting at the edge of the window well with his back to her. The sky was clear and there was enough moonlight to cast shadows. “Willy,” she whispered, and when he turned, she retreated toward the garage and motioned him to follow.
“Shhh,” she said when he drew close, “my father…” and she was pointing to his upper-floor bedroom when Willy tugged free the sash that held her robe closed and, pulling her to him, began to kiss her, and what started at the mouth spread through the body, an effusion of feeling coursing through her like warm liquid. When he pressed her against the smooth, cool contour of the Bonneville, she tilted her chin to give him her open neck to kiss, and what followed was one surprise feeding another, up to and including her fumbling urgently at his belt buckle, which was when his whole body suddenly froze.
“What?” she said. She wondered if she’d done something wrong. Broken something, possibly.
“Look.”
The way he said it alarmed her.
She followed his gaze to the lighted upstairs windows of the house. In one of them the profile of her father could be seen, standing in his loose pajamas, staring out. Not at them, maybe, but still, staring out.
“How long has the light been on?”
“Just saw it,” Willy whispered.
They stood together, perfectly still, looking at the lighted window, and then, before their eyes, the silhouetted figure of her father turned, vanished for a moment, then passed before the more easterly window.
“He’s going to the bathroom,” Judith said, pushing Willy away. Already she was pulling her robe tight around her. “I’ve got to go.”
And she went. She didn’t regret leaving. She had to leave. She had to open the creaky door to the basement the moment she heard the flush of the toilet upstairs, because after that she could slip down to her room and into bed without a sound, which she did. Then she lay in bed telling herself that she’d had a narrow miss, that they’d been lucky, that her father had merely been awakened in the night by the need to pee, and had, half awake, glanced out at the yard and evening sky before going to the bathroom. That was what had happened. She had been lucky. She was grateful. Ye
t when she closed her eyes, feelings of gratitude gave way to images of Willy, romantic yet specific images that slipped her back to the kindled feelings of a few minutes before.
Sweet dreams. That was what he’d whispered just before she slipped away.
The next morning, when she came up the basement steps for breakfast, her father was standing at the toaster whistling an unlikely tune.
“ ‘Benny and the Jets’?” she said.
He turned, startled. “Oh,” he said. “I heard that song yesterday and I can’t get it out of my head.” He smiled at her. He appeared complacent, or at least more complacent than a man harboring suspicions about his daughter’s carryings-on seemed likely to be. “So,” he said, setting the toast, butter, and marmalade on the table. “Sleep well?”
3
The following Sunday, Judith went to Willy’s parents’ house for dinner. The Blunt place was just north of town, with a sign at the highway that said F.L. BLUNT and below that, NO SALESMEN ALLOWED THIS MEANS YOU.
Technically Willy lived with his parents, but more and more in the past year or so the house had become merely the place he returned to late at night and departed from early in the morning. He rarely ate meals there, which made this afternoon something of an occasion, and Judith was feeling a little pressure. Willy had bought the used Blaupunkt from the man at work, and it was tuned now to KOMA in Oklahoma City. “All the Way from Memphis” was playing, a song Judith liked, but she hardly heard it.
“Know what I’m hoping for?” Willy said out of the blue.
“Me making a good impression?”
“Pot roast.” He glanced at her. “My mother’s pot roast is outstanding.”
As the truck rattled across a cattle guard, the kind of house you often saw on farms came into view, white, two-storied, mansard-roofed, with a wire fence around it. A barn, corn cribs, and silage bins formed a broad arc on its north side. What was notable was the absence of clutter and rusted implements.
“My mother,” Willy said when Judith mentioned the tidiness. “She likes it neat. Frank couldn’t give a shit.”
“Frank?”
“The old man.”
The house was neat, too, surprisingly free of the common knickknacks, with an enormous braided rug covering more than half of the living room’s clean wooden floor. Nobody seemed to be on the premises, though the smells that poured from the kitchen—it was pot roast, Judith thought, and possibly a pie or some other kind of baked goods—made it clear that somebody wasn’t far off. While Willy went upstairs for something, Judith examined a row of metal-framed family photographs that lined the mantel over the fireplace. One particularly drew her attention; she took a step forward and leaned close to it. It was of Willy, fourteen or so, not quite formed, grinning happily and hoisting to shoulder height a string of good-sized brown and rainbow trout, a lean tall boy with the kind of apple-red cheeks, big ears, blue eyes, and open wholesomeness that Judith associated with Norman Rockwell; a boy who, she would think many years later, again regarding this very photograph, seemed as far from the darker fates as a boy could possibly be.
“That was taken one summer up on the Madison River,” someone said from across the room. A woman’s voice.
Judith, turning, blushing, wondering how silly and smitten she must have looked studying the old picture of Willy and wondering, too, how Willy’s mother—because this had to be Willy’s mother, didn’t it?—could’ve stolen in without her knowing it, said, “He just looks so young.”
The woman smiled. The gentle smile was Willy’s smile, and her gray-blue eyes were his eyes. Her hair, brown but graying, was just-brushed. “Ten years ago,” she said, “but it seems like the day before yesterday.” She was still smiling. “You must be Judith.”
“And I guess you’re Mrs. Blunt.”
“Just Ella, if you don’t mind.”
Judith said she didn’t mind at all. Already she had it in mind that Willy’s eyes would age and soften as handsomely as his mother’s had.
The thumping of boots on the stairs preceded Willy’s appearance through a near doorway, smiling, disheveled, brimming with goodwill. It seemed to Judith that he was as comfortable in this house as he was in his own skin, and it made her wonder why he’d want to leave it.
“So where’s the old man?” he said.
“In the corn, I imagine. But he’ll be in. He’s got both the Whiting boys helping him today.”
Willy grinned. “Always told him it would take two to replace me,” he said, then went outside to wash up.
Before a silence could develop, Judith remarked on the room-sized rag rug.
“It was easy braiding,” Willy’s mother said. “I’d just lay it over my lap and do a little every night while we were watching TV.” When she wasn’t smiling she seemed on the verge of it—something else she might have given Willy. “Cotton like this is easy. I knew a woman, though, who did a rug bigger than this out of old denim.” Mrs. Blunt did smile now. “That rug was something. If you hadn’t known the woman, you’d have thought it impossible, but she was not a quitter. Her name was Frances Moore.”
Not a name Judith knew. Through the window, she could see Willy, who’d stripped to the waist and was giving himself a good going-over with soap and water. She had never seen a pornographic movie, but she had the feeling that if they made one for girls, this is how it might begin. Willy’s mother glanced to see what she was looking at, and Judith felt her skin again begin to flush.
“He was always a clean boy,” she said, and Judith, afraid that Willy’s mother was on to her, tried to think what to say next, but she didn’t have to speak because Mrs. Blunt said, “Willy paid you quite a compliment.”
“He did?”
Mrs. Blunt nodded and looked at her directly. “He said you’re smarter and prettier than all his other girlfriends put together.”
This time the blushing was more pleasurable. “I don’t know about any of that,” she said.
Mrs. Blunt held her gaze on Judith for another second, then broke off. “Want to help me get the fixings into serving bowls?”
Outside, Willy was joined by two boys who looked roughly her own age and who came at him with a swatting of hats that quickly triggered the kind of male horseplay that Judith thought she would never in ten lifetimes understand. Following the boys by a few seconds was an older man, tall and thin and stiff-jointed, and when he said something—Judith couldn’t hear what—the horseplay ceased. The man glanced then toward the window, and Judith quickly looked away.
“That Willy’s dad?” she said, and Willy’s mother, glancing out, said, “Oh, yeah, that’s Frank.”
The pot roast was tender enough to part with a fork, and it came with peas, mashed potatoes and gravy, a green-bean-and-bacon casserole, and a carrot-and-raisin salad. Willy and Judith sat on one side of the table, the two Whiting boys on the other, and Willy’s parents sat at either end. Willy’s mother kept looking for plates in need of filling, but his father hardly spoke—he’d managed only a nod when he and Judith were introduced—and he was soon lost in the steady consumption of the meal in front of him. The Whiting brothers didn’t seem used to female company, and more than once Judith caught one or both of them staring at her.
“Okay, boys,” Willy said finally, “she’s nothing more than a pretty girl. If you speak to her, I’m sure she’ll speak right back.” Which of course only subdued them further, and a few minutes later Willy with exaggerated geniality said, “Well, if you’re going to stare at her like a couple of retardates, for God’s sake stop your drooling,” at which point his father abruptly laid his napkin beside his plate and rose from his chair.
“Thank you, Ella,” he murmured from his end of the table to hers, then passed both Judith and Willy a solemn look before turning to go. The Whiting brothers bolted the last of their food and followed, with Willy’s mother hurrying out shortly thereafter with three pieces of mincemeat pie snugged onto a foil-covered paper plate, and as quickly as that, Willy and Judith wer
e alone at the table.
“What just happened?” Judith said.
“Frank got annoyed. It doesn’t take much.”
For a few seconds, they simply sat. Then Judith said, “I don’t think he likes me.”
“Got nothing at all to do with you. It’s just that the old man wants me to farm.” Willy gave a slow shake of his head. “I think he thinks his last best hope is that a farmgirl will catch my eye and lure me back to the land.”
To Judith, this sounded an awful lot like another way of saying that not only didn’t his father like her, but he never would, which seemed deeply unfair, because she knew for a fact he hadn’t gotten so much as a glimpse into her. Whereas she was pretty sure Willy’s mother in just a few seconds had seen quite a lot of her, and still seemed open to approval.
Then, to her surprise, she heard herself say that she didn’t think living on a farm would be so horrible.
Willy gave her a long stare that might or might not have been deadpan. “Well, that goes down in the book as the first truly misguided thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Then, breaking a smile: “Though I don’t suppose it’ll be the last.”
This brought Judith back. “Well,” she said, “if I do settle on a farm, I’ll put up a sign that says NO CARPENTERS ALLOWED THIS MEANS YOU. Then what would you do?”
Willy scratched his neck. “Well, I could shoot myself, of course,” he said. “Or I could go find me a girl who appreciates a good carpenter. Or I might just tear the sign down and come on in.” He gave her a look. “Which one do you think I ought to do?”
While he grinned at her, the mud porch’s screen door slammed, and Willy’s mother entered the room.
“Okay, now—you kids want dessert?” she said.
Her voice was gently businesslike, as if nothing unusual had occurred with her husband, and perhaps it hadn’t.
Judith helped with the dishes, then walked into the yard with Mrs. Blunt while Willy went out to the barn to do something his father had asked him to do—fix a crack on a cultivator, she thought he said. Before departing, Willy turned his seed cap backward and put on a strange pair of dark glasses with leather blinders on each side. “How do I look?”