To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  Judith knelt there in the pine needles, staring down. The smallest and most peripheral building was clearly an outhouse, and the largest seemed the most cabinlike—he could be in either one, she supposed. She waited. She crouched and listened to the birds and the insects and the low flutish wind, and she waited for something in the camp to move. Nothing did. The sun was lower. In half an hour, it would be dark.

  Then, out of nowhere—it gave her a start—a voice called out: “Nobody’s going to pounce you, if that’s what you’re worried about.” It was Willy, it was unquestionably Willy, and she was happy to hear there was fun in his voice.

  “Where are you?”

  “Sitting down here watching you up there acting real odd.”

  His voice came from the direction of what might be a woodshed. There, in its shadow, there might or might not be someone in dark clothing sitting in a chair.

  “You coming down, then?” he said.

  She picked up her bag, dusted off her pants, and started slowly down the slope. He must have sensed her uncertainty, for as she got a little nearer he stood and stepped into the dusky light. But this if anything increased her confusion. Willy had been lean; this man was bulky. He had been smooth and semihandsome, and this man’s face, what she could see of it, was coarsened and, a bad surprise, bloated looking. This man looked unwell, and old. But then as she drew close he tipped back the brim of his hat, and the smile that formed there made it Willy’s face.

  “Well, look at you,” he said. He reached out a hand and touched her nose, softly, the way he used to do, and then she closed her eyes so he could touch her eyelids, first one, then the other. When she opened her eyes again, his smile was still brimming.

  “So what did you do? Go out west and stop time? You look dangerous as you ever was.”

  She tried to think what to say about him. His skin seemed not only swollen but also to have taken a swarthy turn, as if from too much weather. “Yeah, well, you’ve got kind of a desperado look going there yourself.”

  His eyes slid away. When he wasn’t smiling, he wasn’t easy to look at. She turned and surveyed the camp, beautiful in the late slanting sunlight. “So you did it. Built the camp and filled the lake.”

  “Oh, yeah, I did it and then some,” he said in a soft voice. He looked around, too, now. “Turns out I don’t really like to lake-fish, so whenever I come up, I get to building something.”

  Judith kept scanning the property in wonderment. “Camp Blue Moon. I was going to make you a sign, I think.”

  She was suddenly aware of him standing there, looking at her, drinking her in. She turned to him and he made a smile and said, “You coming all this way…” His voice trailed off, but she knew what he meant. This was all as strange as strange could be.

  Did she imagine that he leaned slightly toward her? It didn’t matter. She stepped forward and he spread his arms and pulled her close and solid, and she felt suddenly different, better, much better in fact, because held close within his smoky smell, she could shut her eyes and imagine his forgiveness and listen to the hollow wind and smell the cookfire and slip back through the days and days and days.

  Finally he relaxed his arms and released her. “Hungry?” he said.

  “I wasn’t until I smelled something cooking.”

  He moved his bulk toward the fire slowly, stiffly, as if bearing a weight just past his capacity. The rock fireplace stood at one end of a shaded retreat composed of a wooden framework and latticed roof, enclosed on three sides by stub walls of stone and mortar. Everything else was open. A small hammered copper bowl on the wooden picnic table was filled with wrapped peppermints. Above the fireplace proper was a grilling area, but the hinged grill had been lifted and secured so that two deep black cast-iron kettles could sit directly in the bed of coals. Hot briquettes had also been patterned on the kettle lids. Willy used long-handled tongs to set aside the coals from one of the lids, then lifted the lid with a doubled length of wire. An extravagant aroma of onions, beef, and tomatoes blossomed in the air.

  “Good God,” Judith said. “What is that? It smells fabulous.” And then realized that fabulous didn’t sound right here. She wouldn’t use it again.

  Willy murmured, “Chili,” and set the lid back into place. Then he turned and was doing it again, drinking her in. “It is you,” he said quietly, “and you are here.”

  Judith laughed. “It is, and I am.”

  A second or two passed, then she said, “This isn’t the same plank table we used the first time I was here, is it?”

  He shook his head. “This is maybe the third one since then, but there’s not much difference one to the other.”

  She looked around. “And what is this structure we’re sitting in, anyhow? Is it a pergola or what? Or a summerhouse? In an Edith Wharton novel, it might be called a summerhouse.”

  Willy looked around at the enclosure as if to see whether Edith Wharton’s ideas might alter his opinion of it, but they didn’t seem to. “We never called it anything other than the plank-table area. If I sent the boys for something, I just said it’s up to the plank table. It seemed simpler that way.”

  The sensibleness of this was unassailable, Judith had to admit, but, still, if it got into her movie, her character was going to call it the summerhouse.

  Willy said, “We eat in five minutes.” He pointed her toward a log building with a covered front porch and its own stone chimney. “That cabin’s yours if you want to get comfortable.”

  The formality of this arrangement was fine by Judith—a relief, in fact. She’d wondered what Willy’s expectations in this regard might be, and for that matter what her own expectations might be, especially in light of the Malcolm-and-Francine situation, whatever it was, but Willy’s deterioration had been a shock, the changes in bones and tissue and muscle and blood so stark that it made the zealous physical element of their past seem almost preposterous, or unimaginable.

  The cabin was a pleasant surprise. Every plane—floor, walls, and ceiling—was composed of wide pine boards, and the room’s three windows were trimmed in a rich, high-sheen yellow. Nailed to the wall close to the door were a couple of coat hooks made from old horseshoes. Vintage suit quilts in browns and grays covered the metal bed. On a small wooden table, a red enamelware bowl sat alongside a white tin pitcher filled with water. A battery-operated lantern stood nearby. The top two drawers of a white chest had been emptied for her use, but Judith closed them and laid her leather bag on top of the chest. She was only staying a day or two. Why not just live out of her bag?

  She brought out her cosmetics case, where she’d put the chargers for her phones, then, after looking around, put them away again. There was no electricity here. And—she checked—there was no signal for either phone anyway. She zipped the case closed and rooted through her soft leather bag for her sweater. Already it was turning cool.

  When she came back out of the cabin, Willy sat by the fire sipping from a tin cup. On the plank table, he had moved aside the little bowl of wrapped peppermints and set out two plates, along with forks and knives, a loaf of bread, and two pie tins, one inverted and set on top of the other to form a closed container. There was also an iced drink in a red tin cup that matched Willy’s.

  “That’s yours,” he said, nodding toward it. “Thought you might like a little pick-me-up.”

  The idea of a predinner drink was appealing, and the iced drink in its red cup stood there prettily, but when Judith took a sip, she gave an involuntary shudder. “Yikes,” she said.

  “Kind of stout?” Willy said.

  “Would be an understatement. What is it?”

  “Scotch and lime juice.” He took an appraising sip of his own drink. “Not enough lime, maybe.”

  She took another sip, then set it back down. She looked at him and said, “So, Willy. How are you?”

  He gave a dismissive kind of shrug. “I’m better here tonight than I was this morning,” he said. Then he turned to his cooking duties in a manner clearly meant to
abandon the subject. He sliced two slabs of bread from the loaf, one thicker than the other, and laid one on each of the plates. He took the plate with the thicker slice over to the black kettle, lifted the lid, and ladled chili generously onto the bread. He handed the plate to Judith and repeated the process for himself with the thinner slice, though he ladled less.

  Judith looked at the generous portion he had given her and said, “Guess you remember my appetite in the great outdoors,” and Willy, with something wry in his voice, said, “Oh, I remember, all right. ”

  When they were seated at the table, he uncovered the pie tin, which was filled with fresh sliced tomatoes. “They’re late, but they’re good,” he said, and when she had taken some, he slid several slices off for himself.

  They ate. Willy ate his tomatoes but otherwise just sipped his drink and watched Judith eat. The chili, the bread, the fresh tomatoes—they were all delicious, and between bites Judith made a point of saying so.

  Willy said he was happy she liked it. “Chili’s kind of bland,” he said. “I used to like it downright tangy, but not anymore.”

  “No, it’s just right.” She leaned back and looked around at the buildings in dark profile, the path parting the forest and giving a line of sight down to the water, already mirroring the half-moon.

  “Tomorrow you’ll have to show me the lake,” she said.

  “It’s not real big,” he said. “But it’s big enough for my uses.” He rose and took her empty plate. When he started to dish her out another portion, she said, “Just a little,” and took another sip of her drink, better now, diluted a little by the melted ice. “How do you get ice up here?”

  He set her plate down full. “Little propane fridge.” He nodded toward another cabin. “That’s where the kitchen is. But that’s the only convenience. The stove’s wood-burning and there’s no running water.”

  There was a wooden cabinet snugged into a corner of the picnic structure. Willy pulled a bottle of scotch from it and made no attempt whatever to hide the size of the drink he poured himself. While he was doing this, he mentioned that he had installed a solar-heated shower. “A fella doesn’t have to get too terrible rank,” he said, “as long as the sun shines.” He didn’t go for ice. That’s what made his drinking quiet. She took another bite of chili and said, “Who made the bread?”

  “Oh, that would be my personal chef.” He looked exaggeratedly around. “Now where’d he go off to?”

  This pleased Judith. It was cornily funny in the way Willy had always been cornily funny. “So I guess the wood-burning stove’s got an oven?”

  It did, Willy said, but he made the bread right here in a Dutch oven. He nodded at the black kettle the chili had been cooking in.

  “That’s a Dutch oven?”

  “Why, sure. What did you think it was?”

  “I don’t know—a black kettle, I guess. I’ve always heard of Dutch ovens, but I never really knew what they were. I always imagined something with a front door on it.”

  This seemed to amuse Willy. He took one of the peppermints from the bowl on the table, tugged each end of its wrapper, watched it twirl open. “My father showed me how to cook with it a little bit that time we went up on the Madison River.” He set the peppermint into his mouth. “You remember me telling you about that?”

  Judith did.

  “Well, my father told me that one summer when he was a boy during the thirties, when everybody’s farms just about blew away, my grandfather stayed on the place to do what he could and my father and his mother went up into the Black Hills to live in a campground, and the only way they cooked was with their Dutch oven. My father told me that was the happiest time of his life, sleeping in a tent and fishing all day and cooking in a Dutch oven every night.” Willy shook his head and made a small snorting laugh. “And then Frankie grew up and became Frank and strapped that fucking farm on his back.”

  So. The feud with his father still simmered. Somehow this was no surprise. “Is he still alive?”

  “I guess. More or less.”

  Seconds built toward a minute, then Judith said, “You know, sometimes I would call your folks’ number and not say anything but just listen to your mother say hello.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I did it, so don’t ask, but what got me was one night your father said hello and when I didn’t say anything, he said, ‘Willy, is that you?’ and there was something terrible in his voice, like you’d gone missing and were presumed dead or something.”

  Even in the dim light Judith could see Willy’s face close down. He gave a low, grudging laugh. “ ‘Presumed dead’ is a good way to put it. Presumed dead was kind of how Frank viewed me there for a long time.” He sipped from his cup. “After you left, he wanted me to come back to the farm worse than ever. Then when I took up with Deena, he went to work on her, and let me tell you, he was a bulldog—he had Deena about half talked into it. And every time I went around there, he’d start up on it and wouldn’t let go, so I stopped going around. Then my mother tried to patch things up and got him to say he wouldn’t talk about it, but then I’d go around and after a little while he’d just turn stone quiet and in the silence it was like I could hear exactly what he was thinking, every argument he had ever made about this being the Blunt family farm and this being a Blunt’s rightful place in the world and there being boys working night and day to get the kind of start that was being gift-wrapped for me, on and fucking on. So one Sunday we drove away from there and I said to Deena that she could do what she wanted, but I was giving my word I was never setting foot on that farm again.”

  The little breeze had quit, and the trees were quiet. Crickets chirped, and a low croaking of frogs carried up from the lake.

  “And you didn’t set foot again?”

  He seemed surprised by the question. “Of course I did not.” He sucked on the peppermint. “Oh, a few times I drove Deena and the boys up, but I didn’t get out of the truck. I just let them out and went into town until it was time to pick them up again. While I sat waiting for Deena to get the boys and their stuff together, my mother would come out to the truck to talk to me through the window, but Frank just stayed back on the porch looking at me, so I stopped even doing that.”

  After a moment, Judith said, “God, Willy.”

  “Yeah, well. It couldn’t hardly be helped.” He sipped from his cup and said, “My mother was a sweetheart, though. She came down to Grand Lake and stayed with us from time to time, always making things easier for Deena and doing things with the boys. They made doughnuts pretty often, I remember.” He began to unwrap another peppermint. “Those were good doughnuts. And summers she’d make peach ice cream. Anyway, she got cancer and that was that. Frank got pretty shaky for a while there. That was probably when you got him to answer the phone.”

  “And you still didn’t go to the farm?”

  Willy just stared off—his way, she understood, of saying no, he never did, he’d given his word. A silence stretched out and filled with the sounds of the night.

  “Deena didn’t try to talk you into it?”

  “Oh, she did, sure, but Deena was never very good at talking me into things.”

  Another second or two passed.

  “Not even marriage?”

  A robust snorting laugh issued from Willy. “Well, you should know something. That was my own misbegotten idea.”

  “And who set the date of the ceremony?”

  “Oh, that was me, too. Deena knew what I was doing. She didn’t care for it much, if I read her right.”

  Judith took this in. “And how is Deena?”

  “All right, I think. Here lately we don’t see a lot of each other, to tell you the truth. But she was a good mother to those boys. Lots better than I thought she’d be. I was okay with them, nothing great, but okay, especially after they could do a few things and before they thought they knew everything. Ages six to twelve, say. Those years were okay. We shot baskets and went fly fishing and I taught them some carpentry—not much, but a lit
tle. For a while there, we were pretty good together. It was a good diversion for me. Then they got into the teenage years. They began to look at me like I was a stranger, and pretty soon I was one. Maybe it’s different with mothers and daughters.”

  “Not much,” Judith said. “My mother told me once that parenting is just ten million baby steps toward estrangement.”

  Willy laughed at this. A silence followed, but it was an easier silence. After a time, he said, “Frank’s been wheedling the boys to go up and work the farm, and they might just do it, though they don’t say so to me.” A pause. “They grew up and got slyer. When they were littler, they were just mean. I understood that better.”

  Willy rose, shoveled the coals into the fireplace, and added kindling, which quickly ignited. He then laid in larger pieces of split pine, and the flames soon took hold and spread. The wood crackled with such clarity it seemed artificially amplified. Pine wood. He’d said something about it back then. All talk but poor heat—something like that. Judith turned up the collar of her sweater, which was too light for the weather. She’d forgotten how the temperature could drop. She pulled her chair closer to the fire, as he had, so that now, when she stretched her legs, their feet lay within inches of one another.

  “Okay,” she said. “This is good.” And it was. The warm stone fireplace, the chorus of crickets and frogs, the rising view of tall pines and stars pulsing in a black sky—it was elemental and good and it produced in Judith a kind of buoyant calmness. As another silence stretched pleasantly out, she said, “Melinda.”

  “What?”

  “I just remembered the name of that statuesque bank clerk in town. Melinda something. Ed Edmundson would”—she thought of saying what he really did—“drool like a rabid dog whenever she came into the Dairy Queen.”

  “Melinda Payne,” Willy said.

  “Right. Deena used to say she had 3-D breasts because they looked like they’d poke your eyes out.” Judith stared into the fire. “I always wondered if they were real.”

  A few seconds passed and Willy said, “They were, yeah.”