To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  “Like a psychopath. What are those things?”

  “Welding goggles. And I’m glad you like them.”

  After he went off, Judith followed his mother beyond the yard gate, where they were immediately joined by two lambs, who trailed right at Mrs. Blunt’s heels as she escorted Judith out to see the sheep. “These’re Somersets,” the older woman said. “I’m the one who got us into sheep, but the price of wool is just pitiful”—she pronounced it pity-full—“so now we’re going with the meat breeds.”

  “Is that a llama?” Judith said, pointing toward a tall-necked animal some distance away.

  Willy’s mother nodded. “His name’s Eldon. He’s supposed to keep the coyotes off, and he does when he feels like it. We team him with a Kangal Dog named Turk. Turk’s work ethic isn’t so hot either. Some people use donkeys, but Frank won’t have a donkey. He thinks mules are smart, but he can’t stand a donkey.”

  There was a lull, and Judith leaned down to pet one of the lambs at the woman’s feet.

  “Ex-bum,” Willy’s mother said, regarding the lamb. “Two months ago, she couldn’t stand up. The other bums were walking all over her, so I put her in her own private stall. We give the bums milk replacement, that’s standard procedure, but after a week went by and this bum didn’t get up, Frank said, ‘That’s it, I’m going to have to put her down.’ But he got busy with something else and didn’t do it that day, and the next day at dinner he says, ‘Remember that little bum I was going to put down? Well, this morning I go into her stall and there she is, standing up tall as you please.’ ” Willy’s mother picked up the lamb and let it nestle its pink nose in her arms. “He was as glad as I was. Frank can be a big softie—he just doesn’t give you many chances to see it.”

  When Judith repeated this conversation as she and Willy were driving away a half-hour later, he let out a little snort. “I guess a porcupine’s soft at the center, too, but finding it out firsthand can be more trouble than it’s worth. I know Frank Blunt and I can tell you that most of the time he’s one prickly individual. And I can also tell you that at least some of his happiness over that lamb came from knowing it wasn’t going to die before getting to market. That lamb won’t live to be eight months old.”

  They fell quiet, except for the radio—Rod Stewart, “Maggie May,” playing low. They were driving into town, toward the high school basketball courts. Willy had told his mother they were going to shoot some baskets, which was true enough, but afterward they were planning to head for one of Willy’s remote locations to picnic. Mrs. Blunt had sent along roast beef sandwiches, mincemeat pie, and a thermos of lemonade, after which they might play casino or just go right straight to kissing. Plenty, in short, to look forward to. Still, Judith came back to the thought of that pink-nosed lamb snugged in Mrs. Blunt’s arms.

  “So how come you don’t want to live there?”

  “On the farm, you mean?”

  She nodded.

  Willy stared down the dirt road. “I guess I always had a hunch I didn’t want to farm, but I didn’t know it for sure until one summer when first it wouldn’t rain at all and then one day we got hailed, and I mean hailed, the royal treatment. Farmers half a mile east got nothing, no damage at all, but our crop was totally wiped out. So the old man took me fishing. It was my mother’s idea, and I still wonder how she got him to do it, but she did. I was eleven or twelve and we loaded everything into our old green DeSoto and drove off to the Madison and fished for a week. You know, by the end of the first day there, my father seemed happier than I’d ever seen him. I mean ever. And me, too. At night at this fish camp there was a big communal campfire, and my father, who was always a teetotaler, would have one or two beers and talk it up with some of the other men. One night one of them asked him what he did back home and he said, ‘Well, I’m a farmer, but our only crop this year was hailstones,’ and there was just a second when nobody knew what to do, but then he broke into the biggest laugh I ever heard come out of him—it was like passing a kidney stone or something—and then everybody else was laughing, too.” Willy paused. “The camp had a smoker to smoke the fish and we had a Dutch oven to bake our biscuits, and I don’t know, it was like I saw for the first time that life didn’t have to be so hard. Then we came back to the farm and his face went wooden again, and that’s the face you see now just about every minute of the week.” Willy gave a small laugh. “I remember I started praying for another hail. Didn’t happen, I’m happy to say, but what did happen was my deciding I wasn’t going to do it the way my father did.”

  By this time, they’d wheeled off Main toward the high school. “Okay,” he said, “I told you a story. Now you have to tell me one.”

  Judith felt the sudden panic she sometimes felt when people started telling jokes and everyone was expected to take a turn. “I will,” she said. “Soon as I think of the right one.”

  They parked and headed toward the courts. As he walked, Willy spun the basketball on the tip of his crooked index finger. “It should have a happy ending,” he said, “like mine did,” and he gave the side of the ball a series of quick tangential taps to keep it twirling.

  4

  One morning Judith climbed the stairs to her father’s bathroom in search of a new tube of toothpaste and found herself staring at something threadlike, almost white, that was stuck to the green tile surrounding the bathtub. She peeled it away, ran her tweezed fingers to its ends, and pulled it straight. It was a shoulder-length strand of white-blond hair. It was not her father’s hair, or the hair of Mrs. Hill, who cleaned every other week, or the hair of anyone else she knew, but a few hours later, in the library, as she was red-stamping Discard onto the squeezed-firm pages of a cartful of books, her wandering thoughts fell on the waitress at the faculty club: Zondra with a Z. Of course, she thought, it had to be her—who else could it be? And when Judith followed this revelation through a sequence of images that ended with her craggy-faced father leaning forward to kiss the pale girl with the smooth translucent skin, she had to give her head a quick shake to dispel the picture. But her more settled reaction, like her reaction to her rejection by Princeton, like her reaction to the boy and girl coupling on Initial Hill, was not what she expected.

  That afternoon, when her father was in the shower and his wallet lay on the dresser, Judith stole in and removed from it the small card where, in the tiniest handwriting, he recorded all the telephone numbers important to him. At the very edge of the card she found it: Z 2323344. Judith didn’t recognize the exchange, but after her father departed, she dialed the operator and was told that the 232 exchange was Grand Lake, and would she like to be connected? No, thank you, Judith said, and set the phone down. Grand Lake was a railroad town about sixty miles south of Rufus Sage. Judith thought of her father, jaunty and soapy clean, gliding south on Highway 385, listening to The Magic Flute or La Bohème—a thought that gently seemed to release her, as if from a clenched hand slowly opened. What she was feeling was relief. There was no other word for it. If her father was happy, well, then, she could be happy. Though what exactly she meant here by happiness she wasn’t quite willing to admit.

  A few days later, Judith and Willy were picnicking in a clearing in the timberland north of Goodnight. They’d finished their sandwiches and begun drinking lemonade mixed with cherry vodka. It was private here, and the late sun was mild. They’d spread a blanket and opened the nearest door of Willy’s truck so they could hear the radio. Judith had rolled her pant legs up and tied her shirt in rabbit ears so her stomach was exposed. Willy was unwrapping tinfoil from a small packet of elk jerky just arrived from a friend in Wyoming.

  “Okay, I’ve got one,” Judith said.

  “One what?” he said.

  “A story. Remember you said I had to tell you one.”

  Willy took off his shirt and rolled it into a pillow, then bit off a piece of jerky. “That’s right,” he said. “One with a happy ending.”

  She told him the story of the bird’s-eye maple, how her great-gr
andfather Harry Toomey had remembered the details of the furniture, “without writing it down on his dashboard,” and had not only purchased it but put the bedroom set in place without his wife knowing about it.

  When she was finished, Willy stared up at the blue-white sky and said, “I like that story.”

  “Me, too,” Judith said. The theme of exceeded expectations fit her mood.

  Willy stood up and went to the truck, where he’d left the tinfoiled package of jerky lying on a fender. He tore off another piece and said, “And you’ve got that furniture in your room now?”

  “Mmm.”

  Even while chewing he had a funny look on his face. “Why?” she said. “What are you thinking?”

  What he said he’d been thinking was how, on account of the unusual privacy here, she might want to sun in her underwear. Judith didn’t believe this was what he’d actually been thinking, but Willy stuck to his story and pressed his case for shedding her clothes.

  “Why not?” he said. “That’s the motto where I come from.”

  Judith said where he came from sounded like a dubious place.

  He grinned. “I mean, who’d see you but me and the magpies and maybe a stray heifer?”

  The Judith of a year before, or even of a month before, would’ve clamped tight against this wobbly line of reasoning, but this Judith didn’t. This Judith felt an unfurling disposition to indulge him.

  “Only humans who’d come here are hunters,” Willy said, “and this is definitely not hunting season.”

  “We’re humans who aren’t hunters and we’re here,” Judith said, but she was already undoing the top button on her shirt.

  Willy fell quiet.

  “American Pie” came on the radio.

  Judith was wearing white underwear from J. C. Penney, thin and minimal but nothing fancy. Still, closing her eyes and stretching out in them here in this remote clearing made her whole body feel lazy; the mild sun seemed to flow through her limbs. Even with closed eyes, she knew he was looking at her, could feel the slow travel of his eyes, could feel the places they rested. The song went pleasantly on, and Judith thought, This must be the eight-minute version. She felt a subtle sensation of buoyancy, as if she lay on a carpet magically suspended the barest inch above the earth’s surface.

  It wasn’t until that evening that she could identify this as the moment that a decision was made, but still, this was the moment. She slowly blinked open her eyes and turned on her side, which she knew would have a plumpening effect on her breasts. While he looked at her, she took another slow sip of lemonade.

  Willy said, “Muy peligrosa.”

  Her sense of waiting for what came next was so keen she couldn’t speak. She wanted to say, How come I’m down here and you’re up there? but after the slightest parting of the lips she got no further. He’d eased next to her and his lips touched her neck and she felt every part of her body rise to meet him. He was wearing clean, creased Levi’s, and their kisses turned fierce—their open teeth pressed together and she was overtaken by the same bodily greed she’d felt in the garage when backed against the Bonneville, the same bodily greed that, no matter how many subsequent times with Willy she might feel it, would always surprise her. But what surprised her now was that when she began to roll off her briefs, everything else stopped.

  She blinked open her eyes. “What’re you doing?”

  He said, “I didn’t come prepared for this.”

  It took a moment for this to sink in. “It’s all right, it doesn’t matter,” she said, and leaned forward, closing her eyes so he might kiss her again, and he did kiss her, but lightly, not as before.

  She opened her eyes, a first strange hint of resentment rising within her. “What?”

  He was just looking at her with his gray-blue eyes. Don McLean had stopped singing. An announcer was reminding them that prices for twelve different models of Case farm tractors would never be lower. Willy was running his hand slowly between her breasts down to a point just short of where she wanted him to go, and where she was pretty sure he wanted to go, too. She stared down below his belt and said, “Your little compadre doesn’t seem to want to wait.”

  Willy said, “Well, if I let him make all the big decisions, my life would be a turmoil.”

  Judith turned away from him in high annoyance, which only seemed to amuse him. In a mild voice he said, “And just so you know, he doesn’t really like to be referred to as little.”

  Judith didn’t really care what his little compadre did or didn’t like. “Will you hand me my underwear, please?” she said in her coldest voice.

  He ran a finger smoothly along her spine. “You know I wasn’t saying we had to stop entirely.”

  And from as little as this—a few words spoken in a genial tone, a soft touch on her bare skin—she was drawn back.

  So they didn’t stop completely. They both waited and didn’t wait. They had fun, as Willy put it, making do. Fooling around with a lowercase f, Judith called it when relating the episode to Deena.

  Of the remainder of the afternoon, Judith would remember only a few details. A game of naked casino, the gradual darkening and massing of clouds, dim thunder, the thick gray sky revealed by sheet lightning, the first fat drops of rain. “Quinn the Eskimo” playing on the Blaupunkt on the way home and Willy saying casually, “You know, when you told me the story of the bird’s-eye maple, I was thinking maybe that would be the right place for”—here he’d given a waggish grin—“doing the actual deal.”

  So that was what he’d been thinking. Willy leaned forward on the steering wheel. The rain sheeted off the windshield and the lightning spread in a wide wondrous arc before them. He’d been right not to do it that afternoon, Judith could see that. The one thing they couldn’t be forgiven—he particularly couldn’t be forgiven, he being the older and more responsible party—would be her winding up pregnant, and besides, once she’d settled down enough to think about it, she didn’t mind Willy’s new idea. She kind of liked it, in fact. They would become a secret footnote in the family furniture history.

  5

  The following week, Judith was working one afternoon in the 700s aisle of the library, reshelving travel, geography, and history books. It was a Thursday; the building was all but deserted. A few minutes before, beyond view of her supervisor, Mrs. Humphrey, she’d browsed Mexico on $5 a Day and fantasized of driving south to El Paso with Willy, so when the actual Willy appeared suddenly before her, it gave her a start. He was stifling a grin.

  “Don’t smile,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, there’s someplace I need to take you right now, but if you smile it might queer the deal.”

  Right now? Judith’s eyes drifted at once toward the circulation desk, where Mrs. Humphrey sat regarding them.

  “I already cleared it with her,” Willy said.

  “With Mrs. Humphrey? What did you tell her?”

  “That somebody ran over your dog but didn’t quite kill it.”

  “I don’t have a dog.”

  “His name is Chance. And at this very moment you’re real worried he’s not going to make it.”

  Judith stared blankly at him for another moment or two, then made a gasping sound and let her body collapse slightly. She leaned against Willy for a comforting hug. Mrs. Humphrey, she noticed, had stepped from behind the counter and was coming their way—to offer solace was Judith’s guess—and she threw some dry snuffling into the performance, but Mrs. Humphrey, moving briskly by, said, “Let’s not overdo it.”

  As they hurried down the long run of stairs to the entrance, Judith felt obliged to keep an expression of intent worry, but once they were outside and around the corner, she burst into laughter. “Not only are you a big barefaced liar, but Humphrey knows you’re a big barefaced liar.”

  Willy was radiant with pleasure. “The reason that lady chose to believe me is because she knows how pitiful little you get done in an afternoon anyway.”

  Judith said a fat lot
he knew.

  “Ha. I watched you a full minute and you didn’t do a thing but stand there reading in a book.”

  Judith felt giddy with the suddenness of being here with Willy, walking beside him, where she wanted to be, instead of in the library, where life stood still. She tried to describe the feeling to Willy, and this was when, nodding, he said, “Well, there’s no joy like the truant’s joy.” It was all part of his larger notion that life didn’t have to be as worn-down and reined in as people might have you believe; that in general, we all deserve a little more than we ordinarily think.

  She said, “So where’s the somewhere you just have to take me?”

  Willy grinned. “Your dad’s gone. Won’t be back for hours.”

  Judith stared at him. “How exactly do you know that?”

  Willy said he had his sources.

  One Judith wondered if his sources were all that reliable. Another Judith, the Judith who called the shots, was alive with excitement. “Drop me off in front of the house,” she said, “then park a couple blocks away and come through the gate off the alley. I’ll leave the side door to the basement open.”

  And so he had dropped her off and she had hurried downstairs and brushed her teeth and waited. At first she’d waited on top of the Young Man’s Fancy quilt wearing all her clothes, then she’d stood and taken most of them off and laid back down, and then she’d taken them all off and slipped under the quilt. She closed her eyes. She placed her hand to her heart to feel what a heart that seemed about to explode felt like. Eventually she heard the turn of the door handle, the prolonged creak of the door, the boots on the concrete steps. She didn’t open her eyes. She waited to smell the mix of sweat and sawdust and alcohol, certainly alcohol, because what else could have taken him so long to park and walk a mere two blocks? When she couldn’t identify the smell on his breath, she asked him.

  “Whiskey,” he said, pulling a flask from his pocket. “Want a snort?”