To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  “Go!” he yelled.

  She did. She threw open the door and rolled out and got up and at the same time crouching and running broke through the brush until she fell and hid.

  The Jeep was coming. Judith could hear it coming. She raised her head just a little. There was Willy’s red truck sideways in the road, and off behind it, hanging ragged in a bush, was Willy’s shirt.

  “Willy?” she called, but he didn’t answer.

  The Jeep flew over the ridge, and the moment Mrs. Minnert at the wheel saw Willy’s truck, she began to brake, and Joe L. Minnert, half standing, looked over his rifle toward the shirt—in her movie this peering look of Minnert’s would slow almost to stillness—and that was the way he was looking when Willy suddenly rose from his cover at the other side of the road, and holding a shovel stafflike in both hands, he turned his body in a quick compact punching motion, and with shocking abruptness the metal shovel head smashed into the side of Minnert’s skull, and snapped it back.

  Mrs. Minnert, flinching from the shovel, jerked the steering wheel left, and the Jeep crashed through the brush for a second or two and stopped.

  Willy, still carrying his shovel, ran toward the Jeep and with one hand reached into it and dragged Minnert out. Minnert no longer had the rifle. He was clamping both hands to his bloody head as if trying to keep it from coming apart. Willy shoved him onto the ground and kicked him in the stomach and groin, then, stepping back and slipping his grip to the end of the handle, he swung the shovel in a long arc, coming down fully on Minnert’s already bloody head. Judith, who had been running, slowed. Everything slowed. Minnert’s big body was curling into itself. Willy was raising the shovel. Mrs. Minnert was crawling to the back of the Jeep, where the rifle lay. Judith needed to tell Willy this fact, but couldn’t. Her lips parted. Nothing came out. Willy, she said, but it was just her lips—she had no voice.

  Mrs. Minnert had the rifle now.

  Willy stood beating Mr. Minnert. The farmer’s big face, when Judith glimpsed it, looked like freshly skinned meat. Willy saw nothing. Willy’s eyes were stones. He was living in some place where the only thing that mattered was killing this man. The sound of the gun was almost not a distraction to him. He just looked up from the farmer’s moist red pulpy head and regarded Mrs. Minnert holding the rifle. She might have tried another shot then, might have in one quick instant proved him mortal, but his look paralyzed her, and before the next second passed he’d cracked the shovel handle across her hands and the gun was on the ground.

  Willy picked up the rifle. Mrs. Minnert was holding her damaged hands in front of her, staring at them, her eyes wide with fear and confusion. Willy turned to Joe L. Minnert, who was still breathing, who in fact turned and tried to raise himself to his knees. Willy moved close and put the point of the barrel to Minnert’s skull.

  “Willy.”

  This time she said it. This time he heard.

  She said it again. “Willy, don’t.”

  He kept the rifle pointed there, but he had heard, and something in his shoulders loosened and he lifted the rifle away, but even then he was not done. He brought the butt end of the rifle across the back of Minnert’s head so that he lay back down—dead, probably, was Judith’s guess. Willy fired the rifle into the side of the Jeep until no more shots came out. Then he just stood breathing through his mouth.

  Color returned. Sound returned. Birds, a cricket. Judith in a soft voice said, “Willy?”

  “I’m done,” he said, and set the rifle down.

  Mrs. Minnert came over, sat on the ground, and got herself under her husband. His bloody head was in her lap. She’s caressing a dead man, Judith thought, but then she saw blood bubbling at his nose and thought it possible she was wrong, that he was alive after all.

  “You stay here,” Judith said to Mrs. Minnert. “We’ll go get help. We’ll go get the doctor and the sheriff.”

  She didn’t expect Mrs. Minnert to do anything other than what she’d been doing, which was holding the big bloody head in her lap and smoothing her thumb over the one ear that still had its skin. But Mrs. Minnert looked up, her face waxy and unaligned.

  “We seen you,” she said. “We seen what you did out there—”

  Immediately Willy was standing over her, rigid again, fierce again, grabbing Mrs. Minnert’s oily hair, leaning close to her ear, and saying through clenched teeth, “Your fucking husband tried to kill us and why I don’t kill you right now and leave you for the dung beetles I do not know, so maybe you should just be real real quiet,” and of course she was.

  9

  The consequences of the incident were not what Judith expected. After leaving the Minnerts, she and Willy drove back the way they had come. Willy had brought the chain saw he found lying upside-down in the brush near the Jeep. He intended to use it to cut the pine that lay across the road, but it turned out he didn’t need it. He was able to grab the tip of the tree and drag it far enough to get by.

  “What’re we going to do?” Judith said once they were again moving south.

  “Well, if we keep going straight, we hit Mexico,” Willy said, but without any life in his voice. This wasn’t the Willy she’d known, not quite. This was still something left over of the other Willy, the Willy with the shovel, the Willy who stood outside the boundaries she wanted all lives lived within, especially her own. With one tug, this new Willy had pulled taut the lazy line of their life.

  “No, I mean really. What are we going to do?”

  He looked at her. “We’re going to send out an ambulance and we’re going to go see Chief Seers and we’re going to tell him what happened. How when Mr. and Mrs. Minnert tried to kill you and me, I tried to kill him.”

  After a second or two she said, “And might’ve succeeded.”

  He said nothing to this.

  “That didn’t seem to bother you.”

  “What was that, Judith?” A note of exasperation in his voice.

  “How you were turning him into hamburger.”

  He opened his mouth to breathe in and breathe out. “We weren’t playing for pennies out there, Judith. That man was pissed off. He was trying to kill us.”

  Willy steered the truck onto the highway, toward town.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have pissed him off so much.”

  Willy veered onto the mowed shoulder and skidded the truck to a stop. She was suddenly afraid of what he might do next, but he didn’t do anything for a few seconds. He just sat staring forward. Then he turned to her. “Look, Judith, I don’t give a damn about those people, and the truth is, when he was shooting at us, I didn’t give a damn about me. All I thought about was how that spineless son of a bitch might kill you, and I can’t tell you how fucking mad that made me, that somebody so worthless and… puny as Joe L. Minnert might do something to you.”

  “Okay,” Judith said, as much to get him to calm down and start driving again as anything else. “Okay, I get it. I do.”

  It took a while for Willy to pry his gaze from her, but finally he did. Finally he checked the side mirror and eased the truck back onto the highway. Judith was glad to be moving again. She felt as if she’d been on some long reckless vacation and was ready to go home.

  In town, Chief Seers listened to their story without expression, writing a few things down in pencil on a sheet of paper but mostly doodling his way through an enlarging mass of geometric lines. He’d been eating supper at home when they’d called him out, but he didn’t seem to mind. When Willy was finally done, he turned to Judith.

  “Anything else?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. Mr. Minnert shot at us while they were chasing us and then Mrs. Minnert shot at Willy when he had Mr. Minnert down on the ground.”

  Chief Seers looked at her. “When Willy was subduing Mr. Minnert.”

  Judith nodded. The chief stared at her and waited. By this time, Minnert had been taken by ambulance to the hospital. They knew what shape he was in. “Alive, more or less,” was the way Seers had described hi
m.

  “Subdued him and then some, to be honest about it,” Willy said, so she wouldn’t have to. “I might’ve got carried away.”

  Chief Seers swung his gaze to Willy. “Carried away?”

  Willy said, “Minnert bushwhacked us. Bushwhacked us and tried to kill us. That kind of set me off. Once I started beating on him, it was hard to stop.”

  Chief Seers watched him, waiting.

  “He did stop, though,” Judith said. “I said, ‘Willy,’ and he stopped.” Though that was a little later, she realized. That was when he had the rifle at Minnert’s head.

  The chief offered a neutral nod and let a silence stretch out a few seconds before he said, “Truck outside?”

  They went out and took some photographs of the bullet holes, which, it turned out, were seven in number.

  Willy and Judith then signed a statement that, Judith thought later, contained most of the episode’s facts but not quite all of its truths. The statement said that William Blunt and Judith Toomey were the subjects of a premeditated attack from a concealed location by Mr. and Mrs. Joe L. Minnert, and it identified the road and nearest mile marker of the attack. It said that the Chevrolet truck carrying Mr. Blunt and Miss Toomey was subsequently pursued by the Jeep driven by Mrs. Minnert. That Mr. Minnert fired a rifle at Mr. Blunt and Miss Toomey, seven or more shots hitting Mr. Blunt’s truck. That Mr. Blunt then stopped his truck and struck Mr. Minnert with a long-handled shovel, and while Mr. Blunt was subduing Mr. Minnert on the ground, Mrs. Minnert fired one shot at Mr. Blunt but missed. That Mr. Blunt disarmed Mrs. Minnert and discharged the rifle into the Jeep. That Mr. Blunt and Miss Toomey then left the scene to get medical help and report the incident to the police.

  “Sound right?” Chief Seers said.

  Judith and Willy both nodded, and Seers handed them the pen they used to sign.

  By the time they walked out of the station, it was fully dark. Seers followed them into the street without speaking. Nor did he seem to mean to speak. He was just accompanying them in some way that to Judith didn’t seem unfriendly, so she turned to him and said, “What’s going to happen to us?”

  Chief Seers straightened his back. “Not much, if the way you told it is the way it was. Joe L. Minnert isn’t the kind of fella people rally around. Not what you’d call the golden rule type.” The barest hint of a smile appeared on his lips. “If he doesn’t make it, you might get a few thank-you notes.”

  It turned out that Joe L. Minnert did survive Willy’s beating, but not by much. He was “neurologically compromised,” according to the account in the Rufus Sage Record, whose reporter was quoting a doctor. Minnert had been charged with attempted murder, with Mrs. Minnert as an accessory, though neither, according to Chief Ted Seers, “was likely to stand trial, given the circumstances.” The circumstances, citizens understood, had to do with Minnert’s semivegetative state and the need of his slow-witted wife to attend him.

  The larger problem was Judith’s father. He was sitting in his armchair reading when she came in that night, and the moment he peered up over his glasses to say hello, his expression changed. “What?” he said. “What’s happened?” And she made a terrible mistake. She allowed herself to cry. She gave in to the luxury of it, the warmth and pleasure of it, the tears streaming, and her father standing, moving, taking her into his arms, holding her, the years falling away until she was twelve or eleven or ten again, whenever it had been before boys ogling your mother was something you ever thought about. “What, sweetheart?” he said in a gentle coaxing voice. “Tell me what happened.”

  She did tell him. She explained how horrible the Minnerts were, and how Mr. Minnert and his little left-handed crony had shot twice in Willy’s direction when he’d gone to collect the money rightfully owed to him, and how Mr. Minnert had fired a lot more shots while he and his horrible wife were chasing them, and how Willy had tried to get Judith in a safe place when he stopped the truck, but as the succession of explanations and particulars came tumbling out, the events seemed ever more fantastic even to her own ear, and her father’s physical attitude visibly stiffened.

  Early the next morning he went down to the police station and came back with the news that Joe L. Minnert would live, and that without quite meaning to, Mrs. Minnert had corroborated Willy and Judith’s version of events.

  “That’s good, right?” Judith said, but her father’s eyes were dark.

  “The Minnerts were after Willy,” he said. “They believed he’d torn down the room he’d built for them.”

  He looked at her and waited.

  “They didn’t pay him, Dad. They had an agreement and Willy did the work, but Minnert didn’t pay him.”

  “A written agreement?”

  She looked down.

  “They were after him,” her father said, “but they were going to get both of you, set fire to the truck and run it into the ravine. They’d been watching you for days, waiting for you to go someplace private with only one way out.”

  For a moment these words gripped Judith and held her still, but though the idea of her and Willy going someplace private hung there in full view, this wasn’t the element that occupied her father. There was something else, something more important to him. “You were in harm’s way, Judith.” His voice was low and hard. “That boy put you in harm’s way.”

  “That’s not fair!” Judith said. “All he was worried about the whole time was me—I told you that already.”

  Her father spread his hands and touched them to one another. He was heading off into his own thoughts, she could see that, but before he went, he said, “This is Nebraska, Judith. You hit somebody below the belt, they’re going to hit you back.”

  “But that’s what horrid Mr. Minnert should’ve known!”

  Her father had his caged fingers at his lips now, and when he glanced at Judith, it was as if from a great distance. “They both should have,” he said.

  Judith didn’t know what to think. All she knew was that everything had changed. The color of the sky. The air she breathed. How her father’s eyes fell on her. How her eyes fell on Willy. Everything.

  A day went by, then another and another. One day, two hours into her shift at the library, Judith told Mrs. Humphrey she didn’t feel well and would like to go to the infirmary, but instead she just walked home and, finding the house empty, went downstairs and without turning on a light or changing her clothes fell asleep.

  Sometime later—how long, she had no idea—she was awakened by the sound of her father’s voice. He was upstairs talking on the telephone in a voice that had a strange brittleness to it; it made him sound both worried and annoyed. Judith tiptoed up the basement stairs and positioned herself on the landing near the half-closed door. She could hear her father saying, “But you understand the importance of this, don’t you, Rene?” Then, after a few seconds of silence, he said, “Swim? What’s a goddamned swim?” and then, after another prolonged silence, her father in a tone of mild but unquestionable resignation said, “Okay, Rene. I understand. Just let me know.” Judith heard him set the phone down, but she didn’t hear him move, not until, from upstairs, she heard a girl’s voice say, “You coming or not?”

  Judith went back to her room in the basement and lay there in the dark for another hour or two. She could hear an opera she didn’t recognize playing dimly from the uppermost rooms, and then the house was still for a time before she again heard footsteps and low, indistinguishable speech, her father’s and the girl’s. It gave Judith a turn when the door at the head of her stairs slowly opened and she heard her father say, “Not that way,” and the door was pulled closed. Before long, Judith heard the doors to the Bonneville slam, heard the car roll down the driveway, heard its thrum recede down the street, but she lay still on the bed in the dim cool basement.

  Who, she wondered, was the girl upstairs with her father? Was it Zondra with a Z or someone else, and which answer would be better? Neither, she decided. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care. And she didn’t car
e who Rene was either, or what a swim might be other than something done in water. She fell back to sleep.

  As the days went by, Judith kept expecting to feel herself again, and when she didn’t, expectation became craving. She had always thought of herself and Willy as a kind of secret place, safe and exotic and intoxicating, but now it was a place she could no longer find. Some kind of geographical dislocation had occurred—she thought of that goofy musical, Brigadoon, where the village only appeared every eighty years or whatever it was before again vanishing into thin air. But Gene Kelly had somehow found a way back into the village, and Judith had not. She and Willy hardly talked. They hardly touched. He didn’t whistle. She sensed he was always grappling with the episode with the Minnerts without ever quite understanding it. During one of their silences—they were sitting in the truck overlooking the White River—he said, almost to himself, “I don’t know why I couldn’t stop hitting him. That’s the part I don’t get.” And then fell silent again.

  One afternoon he went up to the hospital to see Joe L. Minnert, but the second he got to the room, Minnert became agitated and began making loud noises that weren’t quite words, and then Mrs. Minnert came in and started screaming at Willy, all kinds of crazy things, and although he had gone to the hospital because he meant to say he was sorry about the way things had turned out, he found in those few moments that he wasn’t sorry at all, that he in fact felt like strangling them both with the IV tubes that were dangling everywhere. “Guess that doesn’t help much, does it?” he said to Judith when he finished the account of his visit.

  “You can’t help it, Willy,” she said, and that much was irrefutably true. He couldn’t help how he felt; nor could she. She had the horrible idea that all the fervent sensations she’d savored and clasped tight and believed in had somehow slipped free and vanished as irretrievably as a dream.

  And then one morning snow fell. It started around dawn and wasn’t much—it fluttered down and did little more than cover the ground, really—but it brought a welcome change. What had been dry and hard and dusty the day before was now soft and wet and white. Judith was staring out at it from the front room when Willy’s truck, itself dusted white, pulled up in front of the house. They drove to the park and sat in the cab with the heater on, looking out and eating and drinking the maple bars and coffee he had picked up at Daylight Donuts.