by Tom McNeal
Prior to this afternoon, and many times afterward, Judith had read or heard of the difficulties of inaugural sex, all of which remained a minor mystery to her. It wasn’t easy, she supposed, but it wasn’t terribly difficult, either. It felt more like a series of pleasant variations rather than a single event. Willy was unhurried, which helped, and he slipped a dark towel under her in case there might be blood, which helped, and he used a prophylactic that was nothing if not slippery, which helped, and once they’d gotten down to the actual matter of admission, which did in fact feel intrusive, he suggested she push, an idea she found both silly and alarming but which, when she tried it, helped quite a bit. Thereafter it was… well, fun.
When they were done, Willy said, “Sound to the deaf, sight for the blind,” and Judith laughed from a combination of happiness and relief not only that it had gone as well as it had, but also that she wasn’t now overcome with remorse. Just the opposite, in fact. She said, “I hope there’s more where that came from.”
He said, “Oh, I imagine there’s more all right.”
They lay with the quilt at their feet and just two shafts of late light from the basement windows intruding into the room’s dimness. She had one hand tucked under his leg, the other over her head, where her fingers ran idly along the curves of the maple headboard. Willy turned on his side, propped his head with his hand, and regarded her for some little while before he said in a quiet voice, “Well, there’s no going back now.”
He lay back then into one of the slanting shafts of light, so that when he began softly to whistle the melody he’d learned from his mother, dust motes stirred and glimmered before him and presented a moment that, when she thought of it many years later, might seem enchanted.
Willy picked up Judith every afternoon after work, and while their outings didn’t adhere to a regular course—they might put in stops at the Dairy Queen or the bowling alley or the stock car races at the fairgrounds—their evenings almost always ended someplace out-of-doors where they could have some privacy. And then there were the Thursday afternoons, which began to be spent in Judith’s room. Willy managed the time off by starting work at sunup and forgoing a break for eating so he could log his eight hours by 1:30, and Mrs. Humphrey reworked Judith’s schedule to free her Thursday afternoons (for which favor Judith took the librarian regular gifts of challah and homegrown tomatoes). Judith always asked Willy if he knew for certain that her father was gone for the day, and Willy always said he was, though how he knew this he wouldn’t tell, and where her father went he claimed not to know. But the pattern became reliable. He was gone in the afternoon and didn’t come home until after dark. Off to some assignation with Zondra with a Z, Judith presumed, not that she needed the details. Her father was gone. That was all that mattered.
“Thursday afternoon’s turned into Saturday night,” Willy said one Thursday, downstairs, lying on the cool bare sheets after sex. “It’s Thursdays I count the days to.”
“Me, too,” Judith said, though when she thought about it, fooling around here, in her room, in the old bed with the Young Man’s Fancy quilt folded down, really felt more like a Sunday afternoon in the kind of life where the domestic side of things didn’t dull the romantic element. This was just the sort of thing that Willy could make you believe in—that you could be wicked and still be… well, good.
The days slid by. Judith and Willy fell into the lazy rhythm of their secret life, carried along by the presumption that all the foreseeable tomorrows would be more or less like the day before them. Years later, most of these days blended into a benign general remembrance, but there were other important days Judith could recall with distinctness, and there was another category, too—brief, disconnected interludes that settled themselves into her memory.
There was the day Judith and Willy and Deena were out driving and stopped at the old white country church that stood at the corner of two graded dirt roads, Eleson and Bethel. Deena and Judith cupped their hands around their faces and peeked through the windows at the dark pews and wood-burning stove. Willy wandered out beyond the privies to the fenced and neatly tended cemetery, and while he walked from headstone to headstone, Deena stepped back from the window and announced, “This is where I’m going to be married.” Judith, going for a joke, said, “Would this be to Paul One, Two, or Three?” (Deena was fresh off switching to Paul One when bad-kissing, button-fumbling Paul Two had gone away for a week to attend something called Fossil Camp.) Deena laughed and said at the rate she was going, it might have to be Paul Nine or Ten, and Willy, ambling up, said, “Paul Nine or Ten what?” but Deena flushed slightly and fell silent, a surprise to Judith, who said, “This is where Deena wants to get married someday,” and Willy, after nodding approvingly, turned to Judith and said, “And how about you, Judy? You want to marry some unlucky jasper here?” which drew a strange collaborative laughter that allowed them all to glide over this subject and on to other things.
And there was the sticky, overcast afternoon when she and Willy challenged a couple of high school boys to a game of half-court basketball, and when Willy kept drawing the boys’ attention and then feeding her the ball for easy shots, the boys were forced to guard her and while doing so kept putting their hands on her just as they might if she were a boy, but she wasn’t a boy, and she knew it and they knew it, and afterward everybody’s face was glowing when they shook hands, even the two boys who had lost to a team with a girl on it, and then when she and Willy got to the place where they were picnicking, the smell of their sweat and the slickness of their skin and who knew what else all added to the frankness of her needs.
There was also the day at the creek on the Weck place when Judith, treading water, tried to lure Willy into the pond for a swimming lesson, which he refused by saying, “What if I drown?” and she said, “You’re not going to drown, you big landlubber,” and they went back and forth like that until she said, “What if I were drowning and you needed to save me?” and he said simply, “Well, then I’d jump in.”
One weekday morning when Judith wasn’t working, Willy stopped by to ask her if she wanted to ride with him up to Hot Springs, South Dakota, where Boss Krauss was sending him to pick up a set of blueprints and to buy a nail gun while he was at it. Deena and Paul One happened to be there, too, when Willy dropped by, and he at once included them in his invitation.
“It’ll be good,” Willy said. “You can bring your suits and go to the plunge while I run my errand.” He turned a grin to Paul Wells. “I guess you’ve seen Deena in her green swimming suit?”
The boy looked at his shoes and murmured that no, he never had.
Judith guessed Paul Wells would probably one day be handsome, but that day was a ways off. The sleeves of his too-short T-shirt rode high on his arms, and Judith remembered his acned back from track season. These considerations, along with the roo do, were more than his angular cheekbones and doe-brown eyes could overcome.
“Well, you’re in for a treat, then, because that suit’s what you’d call token,” Willy said, which made Deena blush a little and Paul Wells more.
Judith looked at Willy and said, “Twenty-four going on twelve.”
They dispersed for suits and gear—Willy said he needed to pick up a few things—then reconvened at Judith’s. On the way up to Hot Springs, they all rode in the cab, Willy at the wheel, Judith in the middle between Willy and Paul One, with Deena turned sideways on Paul’s lap with her back against the door and her legs stretched over Judith’s lap and into Willy’s, a configuration producing just enough discomfort and physical intimacy to enliven the camaraderie. Paul One, at the bottom of it all, got a good laugh when he asked at what point he’d be allowed to breathe, and so did Deena when she said, “When we’re good and ready.”
They had cheeseburgers at the Hardee’s on 385, then Willy bought admission to the Evans Plunge for the others while he went off to pick up the blueprints and locate the nail gun he’d been sent to buy—not much of a task, since he found the exact Bostitch he
was looking for on closeout at the first stop he made. He then stopped at a drugstore to pick up a present for Judith before finding a friendly little place on River Street where he could pass a couple of hours before picking up the swimmers at the appointed time. By then, everyone was in good spirits—the swimmers from their long spiraling slides into the warm spring-fed pool, Willy from his slow, uninterrupted consumption of draft beer.
“I see nobody drowned his- or herself,” he said by way of greeting.
An easy benignity was in operation here. Judith had taken hold of Willy’s hand, and Deena even had an arm slung casually over Paul Wells’s shoulder.
“And nobody popped out of her bathing costume?” Willy said, which prompted complicit laughter. It turned out that when Paul One had executed a particularly reckless headfirst slide, it had sent his suit to his ankles.
“Well, that sounds bawdy,” Willy said, and Judith laughed and leaned into him like a cat might, she was so happy.
Deena said, “We caught sight of his thingie.”
Willy said, “Trolling, that’s called in some circles, though not mine,” and Deena said that she personally would need a more tantalizing lure than that, and then laughed in a boisterous enough way that Paul had to try to laugh, too, but couldn’t, not quite, and Willy said, “Well, there’s a fish for every lure and a lure for every fish.”
Judith appreciated the kindness of the remark—she saw he was trying to give poor Paul a hand up—but that didn’t keep her from saying, “But there isn’t a fish for every lure, though, is there?”
Willy stared at her for a long second, then said, “Anybody hungry but me?”
He’d gotten a recommendation for an Italian restaurant, and on the short ride over, the talk dwelled on the smell coming off the blueprints Willy had set into the gun rack at the back of the cab. “Ammonia,” he explained. “Top-notch for clearing the sinuses.” At the restaurant, they all ordered spaghetti but Judith, who tried the gnocchi with sage, then had to pretend she was glad she did. Willy in his broad mood seemed intent on keeping things lively. Before their food arrived, he showed off his skill in walking a quarter over his knuckles, then asked for Deena’s class ring, pretended to swallow it, showed his open palms, and pulled the ring out of the pocket that lay close to Judith’s left breast. “That your ring or Deena’s?” he said and prodded her into demonstrating that it was too small for her index finger (and middle finger, too, although it did fit her ring finger). And when, over their meal, talk turned to the plunge—the number of people swimming, the new slides installed at the deep end, and the number of weird bathing suits on display—Willy twirled his spaghetti and told them the Sioux and Cheyenne had once fought over the hot springs, because both tribes knew that if soaking in the warm waters couldn’t cure your winter ailments, it could at least make you forget them for a while.
Paul One said, “I heard that a dumb-as-dirt Indian sold the springs to a white man for a horse worth less than thirty dollars,” at which point Judith, who’d spent parts of the afternoon feeling sorry for Paul One, decided it wasn’t worth it. She was glad when Willy said, “I don’t know. I never heard it told that way.”
“Yeah,” Paul One said, sopping meat sauce from his plate with a piece of garlic bread. “Couple people told me.”
To change the subject, Judith looked at Willy and said, “Okay, so what’s your middle name again?” A question she liked to ask because he would never answer it. Except now he did.
“Charlemagne,” he said.
“What?” She knew it started with a C.
“Charlemagne.”
“It isn’t!” Judith said, and he blinked and said, deadpan, “That’s right. It isn’t.” He turned to Deena. “I’ve told Judith a hundred times that the only person who’ll get the exact nature of my middle name will be my blushing bride.”
Deena said, “You’d think that alone would have her proposing,” and Willy, nodding, said, “You would, wouldn’t you?”
Judith said she proposed they pay the bill.
Willy drained the last of his Budweiser, grabbed the check, and pushed his truck key across the table to Paul One, who looked confused. “Drive slow and don’t get us killed,” Willy said.
Judith said she could drive.
Willy turned to her, smiling. “No, you can’t. You got to keep me company in the back.”
She didn’t follow. “You mean the back of the truck?”
He did, and it turned out the idea wasn’t impromptu. Beneath a tied tarp, he’d stashed two old patio cushions and two canvas-backed sleeping bags that had been zipped together into one. “In case we get cold,” Willy said, and she could feel his sly ideas moving through her. It was dark by now, with a coolness coming off the river. They snuggled into the sleeping bag, and there she soon was, lying within the drone of the moving truck, feeling the quickening pulse of her own body, Willy unfastening things. Then, abruptly, the truck began to decelerate.
They both froze for a moment, then sat up and peered into the cab, where Deena was turned toward the rear window yelling something, they couldn’t tell what, while Paul Wells eased the truck onto the dirt shoulder. The instant the wheels stopped turning, Deena jumped out of the cab and said, “The smell from those blueprints, it’s getting in my eyes and nose and I’m getting a terrible headache.”
Paul One, standing now on the other side of the truck bed, said he didn’t think it was so bad.
Judith was suddenly wishing her bra wasn’t unhooked. Willy said, “Well, why don’t you just hand me the blueprints, Paul, and I’ll put them back here with us where they won’t be a bother to anybody?”
But Deena was shaking her head before he’d even finished the thought. “That chemical smell’s already everywhere in the cab. It’s permeated.”
“We put the windows down and I told her we could open the wind wings,” Paul Wells said, and Deena said, “You open the wind wings, Paul. I’m riding back here.”
There was a long still moment before Willy said, “Sure, you can do that. And I’ll just ride up front to make sure those blueprints don’t knock Paul out cold.”
And so the rearrangement was made. When Willy created a slight diversion by jumping out of the truck bed and poking his head into the cab to take a few exaggerated sniffs, Judith secured her bra, which Paul One seemed not to notice but Deena surely did.
“Jeez,” she said as she swung a leg into the back of the truck, “he didn’t waste any time, did he?”
Judith didn’t respond. It seemed to her that the new configuration of people and places had managed to disappoint just about everybody, and who was to blame for that except Deena? She moved over grudgingly as her friend slipped into the bag.
“Sorry,” Deena said. “It’s just that I thought those chemicals might get into my lungs and brain and stuff.”
The truck slowly accelerated from the dirt shoulder onto the smooth pavement.
“Really,” Deena said. “I’m sorry. I guess I should’ve just stuck my head out the window or something.”
After a few seconds, with the rush of the wind accruing, Judith said, “It’s okay.”
“What?” Deena said, loudly.
Judith turned and drew her mouth close to Deena’s ear. “It’s okay,” she said again.
She laid her head back and opened her eyes to the deep dome of black night and white stars. It was nearly as strange and wondrous to Judith as the moon over the buttes, and it did seem okay that she was back here and Willy was up there. It wasn’t like he was going one direction while she went another. They were together, going the same way, at the same speed, and to Judith there seemed enough time for everything. After a few minutes, she turned again to Deena’s ear. “What day of the month is it?”
“July seventeenth,” Deena said.
Which meant that the extended deadline for the U was three days past. So she’d be going to Sage State. Which seemed exactly as it should be.
“Why?” Deena said.
“No re
ason,” Judith said. “I just wondered.”
6
Given its throbbing element, it would later seem odd to Judith that what she remembered as the essence of the Summer of Willy Blunt was its illusion of safe haven and suspension of time. If Rufus Sage was a small world, then she and Willy lived in a small world within a small world, tucked away from all other influences. It wasn’t so much that the outside world didn’t exist, but that it rarely intruded. Late one afternoon, an hour or two before sunset, Judith sat leaning against a tree at the edge of a remote clearing with the sunlight slipping to a softer angle. She was reading Washington Square. Ten yards away, facing the open grass, Willy was tossing himself rocks to hit with an old Louisville Slugger he’d pulled from the back of the truck; the occasional thunk would jump from the relative silence. He would lob a rock into the air, swat it into an upward arc, watch to see where it might come down, then begin looking around for another rock of swattable size, a four-step process Judith thought could be most charitably described as harebrained. During one of these searches, he said, “They’ve got a James Bond double bill playing at the Starlight.” He picked up and examined a rock. “Diamonds Are Forever is one of them. I don’t remember the other.”
Judith turned a page of her book. She and Willy had already fooled around. Judith could never read beforehand—the words kept sliding by without meaning—but afterward it was different. Because she’d liked The Portrait of a Lady, her father had brought home a nice secondhand copy of Washington Square he’d found at a used bookstore in Rapid City. He left the book waiting for her on the kitchen table, carefully wrapped in yellow paper, so carefully she wondered who’d done it. Her father had not only inscribed it—For Judith, with a kiss on each ear, from your father—but also attached a note saying, Parental Warning: Beware Dr. Sloper. It hadn’t taken long for Judith to see why. Dr. Sloper’s daughter, Catherine, was a little plain and a little dull, but her father’s disappointment in these weaknesses deepened the daughter’s awareness of them and converted them to shackles. (More than once, Judith wondered if her father had given her the book to help her appreciate the lightness of his own parental hand.)