To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I do. I need you to come see me.”

  “When?”

  “Right away. I mean right away.”

  Judith issued a small laugh. “You have no idea how impossible that is.”

  He didn’t speak.

  Judith said, “This really isn’t a good time.”

  “It’s the only time. Honest to God, Judy.” His voice sounded faraway and small. “This is the only time.”

  2

  Judith disliked telling lies as much as the next person, and yet here she was, telling lies right and left. Or rather, telling the same lie right and left. A friend of her mother’s had called from Mexico. Her mother was in the hospital. She’d asked if Judith could fly down. “It sounds somewhere between urgent and life-threatening,” Judith said to Lucy Meynke over the phone, “but I’ve got to go.”

  “Jesus, Judith. Hooper and Pottle’ll go ape-shit. Have you talked to them yet?”

  “No.” She should have called them first, she knew that, and she made a sudden decision. “I’m writing Leo a note.”

  “Couldn’t you send Malcolm or something?” Lucy said. “We’re already behind on two shows and about to get a third, if they give it to us.”

  “I can’t send Malcolm,” Judith said. “And I can’t not go.”

  The silence between them began to lengthen, and Lucy said, “Where do you fly into?”

  This much Judith had prepared for. “León. Then a long taxi ride to San Miguel.”

  “God, Judith. This seems way beyond not good.”

  Malcolm was more understanding. It was no problem, he said. In fact, he could take a couple of days off and go along if she wanted him to. Leave Sonya in charge, she could handle it. When Judith said there was no need for that, he said okay then, but if Kathleen took a turn for the worse, Judith would call him, right? He could fly right down, no problem.

  She mentioned that the cell phone probably wouldn’t work in Mexico, but yes, she would definitely figure out a way to call if there was anything serious to report. They would go on the basis of no news is no news.

  Alone in their room, she first took out the Briggs & Riley carry-on, which was best for flat packing, but decided finally on her leather shoulder bag, because it looked more casual and spur-of-the-moment, the kind of bag a person would throw things into if she was leaving in a hurry to see a sick parent.

  Malcolm had ordered a service to take her to the airport, and the long black town car pulled quietly into the driveway several minutes early. From the entry, Malcolm gave the driver an acknowledging wave. The day was hot and brittle, the morning sun already harsh. Both Judith and Malcolm lingered back in the cooler shadows.

  “I’m sorry this is all such a rush,” Judith said. She glanced into the house, toward Camille’s room, and felt a sudden rush of tenderness. She wished she could look at her and maybe take her hand while saying good-bye, but she was in school. So was Sonya, becoming a nurse. “You’ll tell Milla how much I’ll miss her, okay?”

  “Sure.” He gave her a small smile full of affection. “I’ll also promise her you won’t bring her a shellacked armadillo.”

  They’d done that once, coming back from Zihuatanejo. Camille, eleven or twelve at the time, had called it “a completely inappropriate present,” and for a while it had taken its place on the rail of her balcony, where, especially at night and from a distance, it looked like a mammoth rat. Eventually one of Camille’s girlfriends had cracked its shell by playing on it with drumsticks.

  The driver, youngish, wearing a dark suit, courteously retrieved Judith’s single bag and bore it toward the town car.

  Malcolm turned to Judith. “Got everything? Watch, wallet, spectacles, and testicles?” Another old line of his.

  “Three out of four,” Judith said.

  “Ticket?”

  “Electronic.”

  “Passport?”

  Passport? Why would she need a passport? Mexico. To go to Mexico. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe it,” she said. “I completely forgot it.”

  She glanced at the black car, engine idling, air conditioner running, but Malcolm strode back into the house and quickly returned, passport in hand. “You’re in luck. Still current.”

  Judith tucked it into her purse and shook her head. She was sweating. “God,” she said. “I’m so bad at this.”

  “Maybe,” Malcolm said, leaning just slightly toward her, “but you’re in the very high percentiles at everything else.”

  He seemed to expect something further, but the driver stood in the direct sun near the rear door of the car, taking in the view of the canyon, pretending patience. She couldn’t wait. She had to go.

  “I’ll call when I can,” she said, and she went. The driver, hearing footsteps, pulled open the wide rear door to receive her. It was cool inside, with a faint hint of lilac—it reminded her of the cooling room of that flower shop in Pasadena, Jacob Maarse, where they’d gone once to… but she couldn’t remember why they’d gone there—and then the car began to roll smoothly forward and Judith suddenly understood that Malcolm had been wanting her to kiss him in the moment before she turned away, just lightly, on the cheek, but still a kiss, that was what he’d been waiting for, and she thought of that woman in Nebraska, Cordelia Guest, who as a small girl hadn’t given her father his mouse kisses as he walked off to his last day of farming. Frantically she tried to find the button that would lower her window so she might at least blow him a small kiss, or wave good-bye, but by this time the car was turning onto the road and Malcolm was closing the front door of their house behind him.

  3

  In Los Angeles, the sullen heat had given the morning the clenching feel of summer, but six hours later, emerging from the doors of the small terminal building in Rapid City, Judith seemed to have stepped pleasantly into autumn. The yellowed leaves of the trees lining the grassy median, the vast blue-white sky, the faint sweet smell of cropland—all of it seemed consoling and hopeful. For a moment she could feel that some fantastic temporal elision had taken place, that this day followed by only a sunrise or two the morning twenty-seven years before when she had set out for Palo Alto and Willy Blunt had stood at the platform watching as the train strained forward and away. If Willy appeared before her now, smiling as he used to smile, the fastness of her embrace would be at least partly traced to this strange illusion of having reversed the irreversible.

  But Willy did not step forward. No one did, other than the occasional traveler approaching from the parking lot. It made no sense, but she found herself scanning the scattered cars in the lot for Willy’s faded red truck. She checked the exit before which she stood, and she checked her watch. She was where they had agreed to meet.

  “Excuse me?”

  She turned and saw a bearish man addressing a pretty young woman in her early thirties. “You wouldn’t be Judy, would you?”

  The girl shook her head and moved purposefully away from the man, who stood watching her go.

  Judith said to him, “Judy who?”

  The man turned without surprise. “You Judy?” he said.

  “Judy who?” Judith said again.

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know. My boss just asked me to pick up someone named Judy right here. From California. On Frontier Airlines.”

  “Judy or Judith?”

  The man seemed confused. “Could’ve been Judith, I guess.”

  “Who’s your boss?”

  “Willy Blunt.”

  Judith glanced around. “And where is he?”

  “He couldn’t come.” The man thought suddenly to remove his hat, which revealed a full head of closely cropped gray hair. “You wouldn’t be her, would you?”

  Judith couldn’t help smiling. “Just exactly how did he describe this Judy or Judith, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “He didn’t, not really. That was the problem. He said she was fetching and that’s all. Which you are, of course, if…” His voice trailed off and his face began to flu
sh, which seemed to vex him further. “So are you her or not?”

  Judith smiled professionally. “Yes. I’m Judith Whitman, and I’ve come to see Willy Blunt.”

  The man slapped on his hat and was already reaching for her leather bag. “Thisaway,” he said, and headed toward the lot.

  Judith thought the man would be easy to cartoon since he seemed composed of distinct shapes—big round head, broad sloping shoulders, large pear-shaped trunk. Bearish, really, a cartoon bear, ambling across the grassy median, ducking under a limb of yellow leaves, carrying her soft leather bag into a mostly empty parking lot. He must have heard her following, or just presumed it, because he didn’t look back until he’d reached a yellow sedan parked with its windows down and doors unlocked. The man swung Judith’s satchel onto the back seat, then opened the passenger-side door for her. “How do I know I’m not being abducted?” she said.

  The man gave her a look of earnest confusion. “How do you know you’re not being what, now?”

  “You have the advantage of me,” she said. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

  “Batch,” the man said. “Batch Batten.”

  “Well, Mr. Batten, tell me this. Why didn’t Willy Blunt himself come?”

  “He would’ve,” the man said, and stopped as if this were a complete thought. He walked around the car, settled in behind the wheel, and started the engine. Judith actually considered writing down the car’s license number, but then what? Give it along with a note to an employee inside the terminal? To be opened if… if what? A man in California begins missing his wife who is in Mexico?

  Judith slid into the car, and when Batch put on his seat belt, she did the same. The car was a Buick, and Judith had the sense it had just been to the car wash. Batch lifted open the console, where a half-dozen CDs stood on end in plastic slots.

  “Your pick,” he said.

  There was a little of everything—Steve Earle, Lester Young, Johnny Mathis, Bruce Springsteen, Little Walter, and, preferring atmosphere to distraction, the one she selected, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. A sticker on the case indicated it was the property of the Rufus Sage Public Library. By the time she adjusted the volume and fast-forwarded past the allegro of “Spring” to the slower second movement (which she loved), they were on the highway, traveling south. It was a quiet, smooth-riding car. The cornfields passed by, and so did fields where winter wheat had just begun tinting the brown earth green. Glad, she thought. Glad I am here. She turned to the bearish man beside her. A while ago she’d wondered if he might be taking her captive; now she felt he was helping her escape.

  “So, Mr. Batten, are you a friend of Willy’s?”

  Batch nodded.

  “But Willy’s not feeling good today. Is that it?”

  The man gave her a quick sidelong look. “Yeah. That’s pretty much it.”

  “But he was feeling better yesterday?”

  The man said he wouldn’t say that.

  “Last week? Was he feeling better last week?”

  “You’ll see when you get there.”

  These were curiously similar to Willy’s own words when Judith had quizzed him about the urgency of her traveling out at short notice. You’ll understand when you get here. Judith had said, “But what if I don’t?” and Willy said simply, “You will, though.”

  “Where’s there?” Judith said, and the man said, “What’s that, now?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Oh. Cabin of Willy’s.”

  “Willy’s got a cabin?”

  Batch nodded. “South of Rufus Sage.”

  “Does Willy still build houses?”

  “Not so much anymore.”

  “So what does he do? With his time, I mean.”

  This time Batch gave Judith a look that was clearly discouraging. “You hungry?” he said.

  She was, a little, she had to admit. On the plane she’d had nothing but tomato juice.

  He reached behind the seat, pulled up a small red-and-white cooler, and set it on the console. “Help yourself,” he said. “I already ate.”

  There was a sandwich—grilled pastrami and Swiss cheese on rye—along with a bottle of Budweiser packed in ice. After tasting the sandwich she said, “The Y Knot still in business?”

  Batch nodded.

  “And this came from there?”

  This time he smiled as if he’d received a small compliment. “It sure did,” he said.

  By the time she’d finished the sandwich and the bottle of beer, Judith felt an even keener sense of well-being as she stared out at the countryside. Along this particular stretch of highway the earth looked dark and damp.

  “Yeah,” Batch said when Judith commented on this. “We got nothing at all in Rufus, but they got almost three inches up this way. I was listening to a couple of farmers talking there in the airport, and one of them says, ‘Three inches is okay, but I’d lots rather had an inch a day for three days.’ ” Batch snorted through his nose. “Guess that’s what makes us farmers.”

  “You’re a farmer, then?”

  “Was. I’ve worked for Willy over fifteen years now. You still worry about the weather in construction, but not near so much as farmers.”

  In an hour or so, the car reached Highway 20 and turned east toward Rufus Sage, and a pleasant curiosity began stirring in Judith, so she was disappointed when Batch slowed at a county road and turned onto it, heading south, driving too fast for Judith’s taste.

  “I was hoping to take a quick look at town,” she said. “Maybe pick up a couple of things.” She wanted to see the downtown, and the Dairy Queen, and the park, and the house that had been her grandparents’ and then her father’s and now was hers. She hadn’t seen any of it since her father’s funeral.

  Batch kept driving as if he hadn’t heard her. It was drier here—the dust rose behind them—but the fields and farmhouses looked well tended, nicer than she remembered, in fact. Bethel Church appeared before them—the same graveyard, the same outhouses, the same neatly tended grass, the same beautiful gaunt white church, the place where Deena had wanted to be married, and perhaps had been.

  “Could we stop a minute here?” Judith asked, but Batch didn’t even begin to lift his foot from the accelerator. He said they were fighting time. He turned right, then left, around one farm or another, but their general bearing was south, toward the buttes. Presently they were driving along the remembered creek, through the remembered trees, past the remembered spring in the rocks, still running. The gates they used to open and close had all been swung open. A narrow graded road had more or less tamed the stretch where, years earlier, Willy had dodged trees and boulders and been so proud of his—the odd word suddenly popped into her head—positraction. Batch was finally driving slower now—he had no choice—and Judith lowered her window. The sound of the cicadas, the smell of the pines—it all caused a strange gathering of images and emotions within her. She would’ve liked to have walked. To get out and walk. They forded two more creeks, their streams down to a trickle, the rocks rattling under the tires. And then they splashed through one more slim creek and they were there, in that wide trampled space across the creek and at the base of the slope where they had stopped, she and Willy, that first night those many years before.

  Batch Batten leaned back from the wheel and, turning to Judith, looked like a man who’d had worrisome work that now was done. “Willy said you’d know your way from here.”

  Judith looked up the hill and nodded. She got out of the car, lifted her bag from the back seat, and leaned into the passenger-side window.

  “So are you coming back for me?”

  Batch seemed perplexed by the question. “Why, sure.”

  “When?”

  “Whenever you like, I guess.”

  “How do I get hold of you? Do you have a cell phone?”

  He shook his head benignly. “Nope. Phones don’t work up here at all. But Willy can get hold of me. He’ll let me know.”

  “Okay,” Judi
th said. She was beginning to feel a little funny about this whole enterprise. But before stepping away from the window she thanked Batch for driving her.

  “Nothing to it,” he said, and Judith stood back so he could make his three-point turn. Once reversed, he paused to lean out his window. “How long since you seen him?”

  Judith told him.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Be prepared.” Then, eyes forward, he drove away.

  Judith nudged the strap of her bag tighter to her neck so it bore more directly over her spine. She looked up at the hillside, listened to the low flutish sound of the wind. It wasn’t cold or even cool yet, but it soon would be; she could feel it in the shadows. Prepared for what? she wondered. The pines began slowly to sway. She wondered who, if anyone, might be watching her. Really, she thought, this would make a perfectly serviceable scene in your basic horror flick, but this wasn’t a horror flick, was it? It was her movie. Real life. She began to walk.

  The hill seemed longer than it had seemed in her memory, steeper, the soft covering of pine needles slicker underfoot. Once she slipped and broke her fall with her hand. Twice she stopped to regain her breath. Then something pleasant and reassuring: the breeze began to carry on it the smell of wood smoke and then, as she drew closer, the smell of cooking meat. She slowed as she approached the crest of the hill. Then, for no reason she understood, she crouched and eased forward so she could peer down unobserved.

  What she saw was a surprise. Where there had once been nothing but a rough clearing there was now a sizable encampment containing several small, widely spaced log buildings with steeply pitched tin roofs. The grounds were raked and tidy. Smoke tailed up from a stone grill in the middle of the camp, and Judith’s eyes followed a rock-lined path leading through the trees to a body of water where a red kayak and gray dinghy floated tethered to a wood dock. Mixed with the green pines were the yellowing leaves of cottonwoods and ash. The scene was almost unnatural in its perfection; it might be the cover of a catalogue trading in nostalgia and pricey Adirondack camp gear. But where was anybody? Where was Willy?