To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  Willy told her how a few years back there had been an August snowfall so severe that county plows were called out to clear the streets, and then he told her how one year they’d had at least a trace of snow in eleven of the year’s twelve months, July being the only one absolutely snow-free from head to toe.

  “Oh, that’s a big fat lie,” Judith said, and was slightly surprised to hear the hint of fun coming into her voice.

  “Wanna bet?” Willy said. “Because I’m willing to, and you name the stakes.” He grinned encouragement. “Go ahead. Take it to the limit.”

  She thought of betting him six kisses but couldn’t quite do it. “No thanks,” she said. “I’m not betting. Not when you know the answer and I don’t.”

  “Maybe I’m a big fat bluffer,” he said.

  Judith said maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t, and took a bite of her maple bar.

  They had a few minutes before Judith needed to be at the library. Willy got out of the truck and walked backward through the snow to the middle of the playing field and then returned within the same footprints. He looked back at his work.

  “That’s quite an achievement,” Judith said, which seemed to please Willy.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Your average tracker will have no choice but to figure those prints for someone dropped straight from outer space.”

  Judith said, “That’d be pretty close to correct.”

  He laughed a full, easy laugh, and as he slipped back into the cab of the truck, Judith realized two things: first, that Willy had been trying hard to get them back into their secret place, and second, that she suddenly already was. It was as if a tenacious, low-grade headache had finally lifted. She felt normal. She felt herself. She leaned over and kissed him on the ear, and found she didn’t want to stop there. Neither did Willy, but he kept his head about it.

  “Whoa, Nellie,” he said, leaning back and grinning. “This is a public park.” His gray-blue eyes were alive, though. “Maybe I should pick you up just a little bit early tonight.”

  “Let’s go to our place near the plunging pool.” She smiled. “Pinney’s Piney Pond.” Where, she knew, it was particularly private, and there was more than one route out.

  By noon the snow had all melted, but Judith’s sense of well-being remained. After work, they drove to Pinney’s pond, parked nearby, and fooled around in the cab of the truck. “Whew,” he said when they were done. “I was beginning to think we’d forgotten how to do that.” They ate the sandwiches she’d packed and he reminded her of their planned egg fry up by the buttes. She’d failed to remember it, not that she said so. Willy, after all, had once thought of it as one of his famous dates. They got out of the truck and went for a walk. Once they stopped to listen when they thought they heard a twig snap behind them, but it was nothing. He said, “What happened with the Minnerts—I guess you know I wouldn’t let that happen again.” He said some other things, and then he said, “My real miscalculation was in thinking all I had to worry about was me and Minnert, but that’s not how it is anymore. What it is now is you and me.” As they’d walked, their hands had come easily together.

  10

  The morning of Monday, August 13, broke dim and cool. From her basement window, Judith could see a wispy line of clouds hanging above the neighbors’ green-shingled roof. She wore wool socks and a heavy robe while ironing the blue shirt of her father’s she meant to wear to work, but by 9:30, the time she set off for the library, the day had grown warm enough for her to wear the smooth-pressed shirt with shorts and sandals.

  There was no denying that her spirits were high. Over the past day or two she had achieved a pleasant equilibrium. She’d grown more accustomed to the idea of Willy’s going back to school, and had even begun a quiet campaign to nudge him toward honing his basketball skills, because really, what would be so bad about sitting with Deena in a warm gym on a wintry night, rooting Willy and the home team on? And tonight she and Willy were going up to the camp for the full moon, and the night before, whispering in his ear, she’d asked him to bring the double canvas sleeping bag so they could snuggle inside it while the moon rose over the buttes. She also had the strange feeling that Willy had something up his sleeve. She’d mentioned this to Deena, who’d grinned and said she’d bet a dollar he was going to pop the question. The suggestion startled Judith, but it didn’t exactly terrify her. Probably Willy wouldn’t ask (it was too soon, she was too young, he wasn’t ready, and so on), but it wouldn’t be unpleasant if he did. She would say no, of course, not right now, but, really, why shouldn’t she marry him? It was true she’d hatched the plan of trying to sneak into moviemaking sideways, quietly, almost before anyone realized she’d done it, but what were the chances of that? And besides, there had to be a career for her right here, or hereabouts, something requiring a plainer briefcase maybe, but a briefcase all the same.

  Idle, meandering thoughts of this type carried Judith through the first few hours of her day at the library. Around 11:30, she was shelving books in the 800s and actually imagining a neat yellow-brick law office with Blunt & Blunt written in black-shadowed gilt lettering across the front window when Mrs. Humphrey appeared.

  “Judith?” The look on Mrs. Humphrey’s face was expectant; her face almost glowed. “You have a phone call. You can take it at my desk.”

  Dead. Someone has died. These were Judith’s first thoughts, she had no idea why, but if she was right, she would never forgive Mrs. Humphrey her strange, luminous look. The librarian’s phone was avocado green. The receiver lay beside its heavy base. Judith picked it up and said hello.

  “Is this Judith Toomey?” A man’s voice, and he didn’t sound grave. He sounded, in fact, almost cheerful.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Daniel Montgomery. I’m an associate in admissions at Stanford University.” He paused, as if to let this information sink in. “I’m very pleased to inform you that you have been chosen for admission as an undergraduate this fall.”

  “Daniel Montgomery?” she said. She needed for him to go on, to convince her that this was real, and Daniel Montgomery did go on, giving her details, letting her know that a formal acceptance letter was being mailed to her home. When she set down the receiver, she turned to find Mrs. Humphrey hovering nearby.

  “I’ve been admitted to Stanford,” Judith said, and though Mrs. Humphrey took a step or two closer and said, “Congratulations,” she didn’t offer a hug or even a hand, but just stood there smiling. Finally she said, “You better call your father.”

  He answered on the first ring. He’d hoped this was what was in the air, he said. They’d called the house first and wouldn’t say why, but he’d had his hunches. It was very good news, he said, but also as it should be. “You’ve earned this, Judith,” he said. “You deserve it.”

  “Oh, Dad,” she said, and began softly to cry. The depth of her happiness surprised her. She knew enrollment at Stanford meant leaving her father and Rufus Sage and Willy, if only for a while, but the truth was, whenever she’d thought about going off to a faraway school, she’d always been a little bit afraid of how she might feel if it ever actually came to pass, whether she’d feel—as she feared she would feel—like a family pet let loose in the wild. But now that it was here and had actually happened, the feeling was more like that of a colt released from its pen. Stanford wanted her. Stanford. She felt frisky and impatient and, to use one of her SAT vocabulary words, ebullient. She seemed to have asked something about Palo Alto, because her father was saying, “A town like that is made for a person like you.”

  She couldn’t wait to tell Willy, or at least she thought she couldn’t wait. Over the course of the afternoon she worked out a plan for managing it all—how she would write to him every day and how they would call every week and how she would come home every holiday, and how, really, this separation would only intensify everything she felt for him, and (this, too, had happily occurred to her) it would give the Minnerts a chance to die or move or at least fade far
enough into public memory that they could not again encroach on the little world that was hers and Willy’s. But when he arrived to pick her up that night wearing his blue-and-black plaid flannel shirt, the one he called his lucky shirt, it didn’t seem like the right time.

  They drove west on Highway 20, and though he was whistling, he seemed in an odd state of preoccupancy. “Something wrong?” she said, and he, as if surprised by the thought, turned and said, “Not a thing,” and fell back into his soft whistling.

  They turned off the highway toward the buttes, and soon turned again onto the shaded lane that tracked the creek and passed the spring where the tin cup hung from a branch overhanging the bank, the one from which she’d drunk on their first date, which now seemed a long time ago. When they reached the barbed-wire gates, Judith opened them for the truck to pass through and secured them again afterward. They bumped across the rough terrain and forded several creeks diminished to a trickle by the long days of summer.

  They parked where they had parked before. Willy shouldered the ice chest, grabbed a deep black frying pan, and led the way. Judith was in charge of the double canvas sleeping bag, which was surprisingly heavy. She hugged it to her chest as they made their way up through the pines toward the encampment. When Judith spied the white full moon already hanging huge and blank in the white-blue sky, she felt a slight dent of disappointment. “Looks like that full moon of yours didn’t wait for us to arrive.”

  Willy looked and nodded. “Still a full moon, though, and even your most basic full moon is nothing to sneeze at.”

  They traveled a little farther and Judith said, “So without a full moon to peek over the buttes, what’re you going to do for a big surprise?”

  Willy pretended amazement. He wasn’t gasping. In fact, he seemed not at all tired. “Here now,” he said, “I thought it was your turn to spring the big surprise.”

  “I’ll see what I can come up with,” Judith said.

  When they went over the ridge and down into the encampment, Judith stood catching her breath and looking at the draw that Willy meant one day to dam for a lake, and the already risen moon notwithstanding, she felt purely happy. There was the gentle fluting wind through the pines, and there were the clicks and calls of birds and insects, and there was Willy getting his fire going and uncapping each of them a cold bottle of beer, and there was the irrefutable fact that both Willy Blunt and Stanford University wanted her.

  “What?” Willy said, and she shook her head, smiling. “I don’t know.” She made a vague wave of the hand. “This.” Then, turning: “You.”

  He nodded and gave his loose smile. “That’s what I’d say, too.”

  He’d brought a full pound of thick-sliced bacon to fry over the fire, and when that was done, he began breaking eggs into what looked like two inches of bacon grease. They plunged into the oil and floated back to the surface.

  “How do you like ’em?” Willy said—a strange question in Judith’s opinion, since the eggs were already poaching in grease.

  “Hard, I guess,” she said.

  She’d never eaten six eggs at one sitting before, but she ate six on the evening of August 13, and might’ve eaten more if there had been any. Willy had brought some of his mother’s buttermilk biscuits and chokecherry jelly to go with the bacon and eggs, and they didn’t leave any of that uneaten either.

  So this was how the evening eased toward its decisive moments: Willy and Judith ate and drank and fed the fire and let the mood turn soft and pliable. There was something afoot, Judith could feel it, if for no other reason than that Willy was holding off on the normal overtures, and so was she. She waited for him to say or do his surprising something, but when he didn’t, she began to wonder if he, sensing something in her, was himself waiting. Finally a sentence formed in her head—The strangest thing happened to me today—but before she could speak, he said, “You know what’s peculiar about that tree?” He was staring at a nearby pine.

  “What?” she said.

  “It’s got a cork in it.”

  She saw nothing like a cork. “A cork?”

  He nodded. “You can’t see it from where you are. You’ll have to get up.”

  She did, and approached warily—this had all the earmarks of a Willy-style practical joke. “Where?” she said, and as she moved to the side of the tree she saw it: an actual wide cork stopper wedged into a silver-dollar-sized hole. She looked back at Willy. His lips had stretched into a wide, brimming grin.

  She said, “If I pull this cork out, is anything going to happen to hurt or humiliate me?”

  “I hope not,” he said.

  She worked it free carefully, and there, inside the freshly cut hole, lay a small velvet pouch, and within the pouch was a silver band with a small diamond inset. She slipped it on, and thought at once of the day in Hot Springs when he’d made her try on Deena’s class ring. The small diamond ring fit perfectly.

  It was growing dusky, and Willy’s eyes in the firelight seemed soft and possibly watery. In a voice with the slightest tremble to it, he said, “Before you came along, I told myself I had a life, but I didn’t, not really, and now I do, and it’s a life better than I ever dared to dream about, and I don’t ever want to go back to the way it used to be ever again.”

  Even before he’d finished, Judith seemed to be floating toward him, feeling the glad release of tears, thinking anything was possible, everything in fact, and saying, “Oh yes, Willy, yes, the answer is yes, definitely yes,” and then, “I do want to marry you, and I will marry you as soon as I’m back from college.”

  They’d been embracing, but his grip loosened.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  In a rush, she told him everything: how she’d just that day been accepted, how it was a big honor, how she would write every day and they would talk every week and she’d come home every holiday.

  She said, “We can get married in June when I’m eighteen.”

  And: “You could do a year at Sage State and then transfer to a school out there.”

  And: “They have all sorts of schools in that area.”

  “In California, you mean,” he said. He was standing back now, looking at her in the dark.

  “I like the ring,” she said.

  His gaze moved from her to the fire. “I’d wanted to get something fancier, but when Minnert didn’t pay…” His voice trailed off.

  “No, Willy, it’s perfect,” she said. “Everything’s perfect.”

  He seemed to be nodding. She couldn’t be sure.

  They did make love that night, but something had slipped into it, something wistful, and when they were done, she laid her head on his outstretched arm and stared up at the night sky. The stars, so many and so white, seemed each to pulse with brightening light, and as the sky darkened, the bland moon grew prettier—it was circumscribed now by a broad band of white and a narrow outer band of yellow.

  Three weeks later Judith would depart by train to Oakland, California, where she could board a bus for the short trip south to Palo Alto. Willy took her to the train station. In the predawn they sat together in his truck listening to KOMA from Oklahoma City at low volume, until after a time Judith thought she heard something and leaned forward to turn down the radio. She cocked her head and listened. There was no sound, but a barely discernible tremble could be felt rising from the earth.

  “It’s coming,” she said.

  Willy didn’t speak or tighten his arm around her shoulder. Since the full moon at the encampment, he’d asked almost no questions and made no arguments; he’d merely fallen into a state of such subdued quiet that it had caused Judith to offer more and more avid lines of reassurance. When she did this, the peering-in quality of his eyes seemed especially keen.

  All summer long they’d taken no photographs of themselves, but one afternoon this past week, with time running out, they finally had. She’d borrowed her father’s Leica and developed the pictures herself. A few of them were surprisingly good—the late afternoon
light had given a glow to their skin and faces. The one she liked of Willy, the one she’d trimmed and tucked into her wallet, pictured him with his shirt off, drowsing, one hand on a beer bottle. Of those he’d taken of her, she liked best the one of her standing on a tree limb in her shorts—her smile seemed natural, and the way she had turned seemed to add a fraction to her bust size. She remembered the photograph now, pulled it from her purse, and gave it to him. He looked at it and nodded.

  “I’ve still got the ring,” she said, and fingered the slender silver chain from which it hung. She softened her voice. “Beneath my sweater, close to the skin.”

  But she had said this before, more than once, and she worried that it was losing its flavor.

  Willy glanced at the necklace and nodded.

  The dim rhythm of the train was soon a heavy throb. Willy slipped his arm from her shoulders and tried to make a smile before touching his index finger gently to her nose. Then he turned and took hold of the vise-gripped handle to his door. She stood by as he lifted her two suitcases from the bed of the truck. They moved to the platform and didn’t try to speak over the noise of the braking train. After he set her bags just inside the train door, where they might easily be snatched back if she were to change her mind, Judith had a moment of indecision. She wished suddenly that there were two of her, one who could go off to college, one who could stay here with Willy Blunt. Perhaps it was more than just a moment. In any case, the whistle blew. The engine pounded and seemed to strain against the brake. She imagined the train actually beginning to move. She reached up and threw her arms around Willy’s neck. Her kiss was so fierce it was almost a collision. The sound of the engine grew louder yet. Into his ear she shouted, “I love you to pieces”; then she broke away and stepped up the stairs into the train. When she looked back through the window, Willy Blunt was standing with his hands in his front pockets, as he’d stood that day she’d talked to him in the parking lot of Gibson’s Building Supply, except then he’d been loose and shambly, and now he was wooden and still. Twenty-seven years would pass before she would lay eyes on him again.