To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  “You can be vexatious,” Judith said. “Fairly often, in fact.”

  As Willy wheeled the pickup right onto Tenth, she played her ace in the hole. She told him how that very morning she’d seen the Minnerts in town, Mrs. Minnert at the wheel of the orange Jeep, with Joe L. Minnert slouched in the passenger’s seat, slowly scanning this way and that.

  “No lie?” Willy said. “She was in town and driving?”

  Judith nodded. “And what do you think they were looking for?”

  Willy, turning the truck into the bowling alley lot, offered a grin. “Their missing room?”

  Judith didn’t laugh. “They were looking for you, you idiot. That’s what I think.”

  Willy shrugged. “Not like I’m that hard to find.”

  That was true, she had to admit. Besides, by this time he’d parked the truck and was leaning over and brushing back her hair so he could give her neck a nibbling kiss.

  8

  When Judith tore off the July page of the Alcorn Insurance calendar, it reminded her of those sequences in black-and-white movies meant to indicate the passage of time, the wind blowing free one month after another, and it gave her a wistful turn. July was gone, summer would soon end, and things would change. Classes were to begin at Sage State before the end of the month, and to Judith’s surprise, Willy had himself inquired about admission. He figured he could work weekends and holidays, live at home, and take at least twelve units of coursework.

  “Why?” Judith asked. She supposed she should like the idea, but she didn’t, not really. It wasn’t what she’d planned on.

  Willy shrugged. “Lots of reasons. Not freezing my butt off working construction in the winter would be one. Another is, my mother thinks I should do prelaw.” Then: “ ’Course, my father thinks I should take ag classes.” Then: “They said they’d pay for my books and all that stuff.”

  Which meant he’d discussed this with them and more than once, from the sound of it. “And this is because you want to become a lawyer or a farmer?”

  “Well, not just a farmer. I was thinking farm management, working for one of these big outfits that are buying things up. Some of those boys make a pretty nice living.”

  They were on their way to the timberlands, to a place Judith had named the Thickety Hill, where they liked to picnic and where Willy could shoot tin cans with the .22 rifle he’d brought along for the job. Judith observed him as he drove—he was in his maroon snap-button shirt, whistling softly, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. She couldn’t imagine him as a lawyer and she couldn’t imagine him as a corporate farmer. He’d made buildings out of matchsticks as a boy, progressively elaborate buildings, and after that he’d built a whole fort out of whittled willow branches. If he wasn’t born to build things, she didn’t know who was.

  “So you’re doing this for me, then?”

  “No,” he said. “Well, yes and no. I mean, being with you makes me think about the bigger picture, and then the other thing was you saying you didn’t think a farming life would be that bad.”

  First of all, Judith had said this while under the influence of a pleasant afternoon in the company of Willy’s mother. And second of all, the idea of walking around campus thinking that at any moment she might turn a corner and find Willy carrying books and pretending to be a student seemed odd. More than odd. It seemed slightly creepy, as if he would be there to keep an eye on her or something.

  “I talked to the basketball coach,” Willy said. “I could probably play on the team. Maybe not start, but coach said he’d give me some good minutes if I got in shape. I’d be what’s called a walk-on. That’d put me in line for scholarship money after the first year.”

  They’d gotten into the pines now, and the road had narrowed to a single track, rutted and rocky. From time to time the steering wheel jerked in Willy’s hands, and she shifted a little away from him so he had some room. Gradually the tall pines increased their encroachment from both sides.

  After a while she said, “And you want to do that? Play basketball again?”

  “I think so, yeah. I used to like it.” He seemed to be trying to figure it out. “Going back to it sounds like fun but doesn’t seem quite real. Kind of like going back to an old girlfriend or something.” Then, realizing what he’d just said, he added, “Not that going back to old girlfriends sounds like fun.”

  They fell silent then, and when they reached their clearing, Judith put out the blanket and food while Willy popped open a bottle of beer and canvassed for cans to shoot. On such occasions in the past, the sexual impulse was generally so compelling there would be nothing else they could do first, but today their conversation in the truck had left them in their own separate spheres of private thought. It didn’t surprise Judith when, even before finishing his sandwich, Willy stood to begin his target shooting. He’d only found a couple of rusty cans plus the two Budweiser bottles he himself had emptied. He set them all on a log that lay perhaps fifty yards off against a hilly backdrop.

  “Want first shot?” he said, but she declined and pulled from her bag a library copy of Things Fall Apart, which she’d been meaning to get to all summer long; it was the first book on the Sage State freshman reading list. She’d finished Washington Square the night before, and regretted parting from it. Plain Catherine Sloper’s reward for being wrong about the caddish Morris Townsend was a strange combination of spinsterhood and dignity, not a happy ending exactly, but better than her father’s. For correctly expecting too little from his daughter and even less from her suitor, the good doctor seemed only to grow smaller and bitterer until at last he was dead, and Judith was glad of it. (When she’d mentioned this to her father at the breakfast table that morning, he’d only said, “James was interested in Puritan angularity,” which was not much help, as far as Judith was concerned.) What struck Judith was how the doctor, who was the book’s most dominant force, could seem so cold and yet the book could seem so tender. She loved the final chapters, so much so that she’d reread them this morning, and wished she’d brought the book with her today so she might read them again.

  Willy had finished another beer and mounted a scope to his rifle. He’d taken off his maroon shirt, which was an improvement, in Judith’s opinion. The rifle was something called a Ruger 10/22, he’d told her, with a ten-shot magazine. He’d received the gun on his thirteenth birthday as a gift from his father. Judith had seen rifles that were pleasing to look upon and pleasing, she supposed, to hold, but this wasn’t one of them—its stock seemed to have been made of hard black plastic. She watched as Willy raised the rifle, peered through the scope, squeezed the trigger, and then looked up at the shards the bottle had just become. He then in swift succession hit the two cans, missed once, and dropped the last bottle with his fifth shot.

  “Aren’t you the fancy shooter,” Judith said.

  He turned to her and said, “What’s fun is to pop a watermelon with a fifty-caliber Barrett. You talk about things falling apart.”

  Judith, feeling herself tugged back toward him, feeling that he was becoming again what he always had been, said she could see how, for some types, that would be fun.

  He nodded, evidently satisfied, then took his one empty and on the way out to the log drank another, so he’d have two to shoot, which he did, tink tink, and after grinning through Judith’s jest that this wasn’t so much target shooting as long-distance littering, he did it all over again, tink tink, thereby completing his full-tilt march back into Willyness. He then grabbed the first beer from a second six-pack and said, “Only got one round left. Saved it for the grand finale.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “You pace off a hundred yards and put the bottle on your head.”

  “I do?”

  “Yep.”

  Judith had to laugh. “That sounds like a prime example of something you might do in order to make the national news as the world’s most moronic girlfriend killer.”

  “Whose girlfriend are you calling most moronic?
” he said. Then: “So I guess that means you won’t do it.”

  “That’s right, Willykins.”

  He emptied the bottle, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “Then how about you just hold it out in your hand like this?” he said, and demonstrated the position.

  “Nope.”

  “You can hold it in your left hand, which is not even your writing hand, so even if something did go wrong, which it won’t, you could still do all your homework.”

  Judith nodded. “And yet.”

  Willy chuckled and shook his head. He was definitely in high spirits. “Okay, then, I’ll do it myself,” he said, and without any hesitation whatsoever, he held the empty bottle by its neck at arm’s length, aimed the rifle without quite shouldering it, and fired. The glass shattered and he stood holding the neck just as he had before the shot.

  Judith said, “Well, that was something.”

  He seemed deeply pleased. “Wish I’d brought more ammo,” he said.

  Sometimes after a day with Willy, Judith would wonder how she could possibly have done or said some of the things she actually did and said. Now, for example, she said, “Well, since you are out of ammo, why don’t you put that thing away and come over here? Because if you did, there isn’t much I’d say no to.”

  He swung around, and almost at once his loose grin flattened into an expression she recognized as ardent. He clicked on the rifle’s safety latch, then let his eyes run slowly up her leg. When his gaze reached her breasts and stopped, her eyelids drooped closed, and a feeling passed through her that she would for the rest of her life refer to whenever she heard or read the word swoon.

  Afterward, Willy leaned back and said, “Sound to the deaf,” and waited for her to say “Sight to the blind,” which she did, and then they lay there awhile, letting their heartbeats slip back to their normal rates. Birds chattered and Judith’s mind fell pleasantly blank. She couldn’t have guessed how much time had passed before he said, “May fifth, May eighteenth, and June twenty-eighth.”

  She’d almost been drowsing. She opened her eyes. “What’re those?”

  “Willy Blunt’s famous dates.” He grinned. “All the dates important to me up to now.”

  “Okay, say them again.”

  He did. She had no idea what he was talking about. “What are those, anyhow?”

  Willy gave a dry laugh. “Jesus, Judith Toomey!” he said. “You know what you just did? You just failed the Big Love Quiz.”

  He was laughing, but she sensed that just behind it was some actual sense of affront. She stretched out with her arms behind her head, which afforded a view she knew he liked. “Tell me, Willykins.”

  “Okay then,” he said. “Saturday, May fifth—when you and I talked in Gibson’s parking lot. Friday, May eighteenth—our first date and kiss. And Thursday, June twenty-eighth”—he grinned—“would be our first time on the maple bed.” He went on to tell her what clothes she’d been wearing on each occasion (or which clothes, in the case of June twenty-eighth, she’d put on afterward). Judith was impressed.

  “How do you remember all that stuff?” she said.

  Willy shrugged. “Just do.” They fell quiet. She closed her eyes. Even so, she could feel his gaze on her, and he said, “If you really want to know, I write it on the bottom of my sock drawer in my room. It’s like a permanent record.” A pause. “I thought those days deserved a permanent record.”

  She looked at him. “So are those the only dates written there, just the ones about you and me?” she said, and when he didn’t answer at once, she said, “Ha! You wrote down dates for other girls!”

  Willy drew himself up a little. “What I said was that the dates I gave you were Willy Blunt’s most important dates. I didn’t say they were the only ones.”

  Judith was amused. “Well, one of these days I might just have to go upstairs to your room and look at that sock drawer to see what kind of records you’re keeping up there.”

  Willy began softly to whistle. Then, after a time, he said, “August thirteenth.”

  “You mean last year?”

  “Nope. Coming.”

  Two weeks away. “August thirteenth,” Judith said. “What’s that?”

  Willy smiled. “A Monday.”

  “No, really,” she said.

  “Full moon. Thought we’d go up to the camp and have an egg fry.” He smiled. “Unless you have something else planned.”

  Judith, playing along, said she’d check her appointment book.

  By the time they walked back to the truck, the light had softened and the shadows were stretching long. In the back of the truck, Willy moved a shovel and a Skilsaw to make room for the picnic hamper, then checked each of the tires, as was his custom. Judith closed her eyes for a moment to hear better the flutish sounds of the breeze, the calls of birds, the scrapings of crickets. Somewhere far away the sounds of a revving engine, a motorcycle, maybe, or a chain saw, and beyond that, the dim drone of a plane. Soundtrack for a dream, Judith thought.

  “See something?” Willy said, which retrieved her.

  “No,” she said. “I’m just looking and listening.” The faraway sound of the small engine had suddenly ceased. “Did you hear that before? A motorcycle or chain saw or something?”

  He nodded. “Chain saw,” he said.

  Even the drone of the plane had now receded. The sounds were smaller and closer now, of birds and of insects. It made her think of that little encampment where he’d taken her to see the moon. She said, “I hope someday you make that camp you were talking about.”

  When Willy turned to her, his face caught the soft light and itself looked radiant. “Oh, I just might, if things go right.”

  They drove slowly out of the timber, across a stream, with glimpses down through the pines of the farmland below lying in neat blocks and squares of yellow and brown. Judith leaned against the door and extended her legs across Willy’s lap. The warm air slid across her arms and into her clothes.

  “We should call it Camp Blue Moon,” she said. “I could make you a sign.”

  They fell into an easy silence. She liked Camp Blue Moon. They’d given names to other areas, too—the Thickety Hill, the Eighty-Acre Wood—but Camp Blue Moon sounded like something more enduring. She shifted position and put her head in his lap. He was whistling the song his mother liked and she was drowsing off when he suddenly braked to a stop.

  She sat up and looked.

  A hundred or so yards in front of them, a tree lay across the road, a ponderosa, with its green limbs stretching in all directions. This didn’t alarm Judith, but Willy’s face did. It was set into something tense, and he threw the truck in reverse, the wheels spinning, making the turn in tight quarters.

  By the fallen pine tree, a man peered out from the roadside bushes. She had no idea who. The man ducked back into the brush.

  Willy’s truck was not moving. The engine revved, but the tires spun sickeningly, going nowhere; then all at once—it seemed to Judith a small miracle—one of the tires found traction and the truck jerked forward. They were moving again, headed back toward the thicket from which they’d just come.

  “What’s happening?” Judith said. “What’s wrong?”

  Willy accelerated, and the engine seemed to explode. The whole chassis jumped and careened. The engine had always sounded big, but Willy had never used it. Now he was. She looked at him—his face was stony—then through the back window.

  Nothing.

  And then, from a copse of trees, a vehicle turned onto the road behind them. An open orange Jeep, driver and passenger, man and woman.

  “It’s the Minnerts,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Willy said. The truck flew over the narrow road, scrabbling through a tight turn. As it bounced over one dry creek rut, Judith’s head pressed through the cloth liner and thumped against the metal roof of the cab.

  Judith looked back at the orange Jeep. “She’s driving. He’s got something.” It looked like a rifle, but she didn’t want to
say so. She didn’t want to believe it.

  Willy slid the truck through a long turn.

  “What do they want?” she said.

  Willy was just opening his mouth when she heard a small sound—thip-thip—and saw a hole appear at the top of the windshield. She looked back. There was a hole in the back window, too, a small clean hole with little crackling lines spreading from it.

  “God damn it,” Willy said.

  Judith kept looking back. The orange Jeep, hidden for a moment, rose up over a hill. It was unquestionably a rifle. Minnert had it shouldered and aimed their way.

  “Get down,” Willy said through clenched teeth, and when she crouched low in the seat, he said, “Lower.”

  She squeezed to the floor. The truck kept tearing along. She was too scared to cry. She didn’t know what to say or do, because there didn’t seem anything to say or do, except what Willy was doing, which was to try to get away from these people. From the floorboard she heard metallic noises, thup thup thup. She hoped they were from rocks on the undercarriage. She made a quick set of calculations. They knew about the room and they had a rifle. So did Willy, but he had no ammunition. The truck was fast and had positraction, but it couldn’t go anywhere the Jeep couldn’t. So it was bad. It was bad and it was all because of Willy tearing the room down and thinking that would be that. She thought of her father. She wished she was with him. She felt like crying and she wished her father were here and she wished they hadn’t gone someplace so far away from everything.

  “Okay,” Willy said in a tight voice. “Just up ahead here I’m going to stop, and when I do, you get out and beat it into the bushes and don’t look back.”

  “What?” Judith said. She looked up at him from the floorboards. With one hand he was tugging free the snaps of his maroon shirt; she had no idea why.

  “Just go ahead now,” he said. “Get your hand on the door handle, and when I tell you to go, you just go ahead and go.”

  She could feel the truck sweeping uphill, then suddenly down—they’d crested a little ridge—and just then he hit the brakes hard and the truck fishtailed and skidded to a stop.