To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  “What?”

  “They were the real thing, all right, if that’s what you were wondering.”

  “And you know this how, exactly?”

  “Just do.” He sipped from his cup. “This was after you ceased and desisted, just in case you’re wondering about that, too.” Then: “There’s lots of women who see somebody’s heart run over by a truck and they think they can put it together again.”

  Judith decided to ignore the runover-heart metaphor and said laughingly, “Maybe that’s just your way of explaining away the behavior of a wide-ranging fornicator.”

  Willy said maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.

  After another little while he said, “She married Ed Edmundson, you know.”

  “What? She married Mr. Ed?”

  “Yep. He became a Dairy Queen tycoon of some kind. Well, maybe not tycoon, but he had six or seven of them. That seemed to have some effect on her. I can’t snigger at what he did. For a time there I worked like a dog, thinking if I could just make enough money…” His voice trailed off.

  A shifting of the fire, followed by some crackle and pop.

  “I did make me a pot of money, but by the time I did…”

  Judith felt a terrible ambivalence about this topic. She didn’t know what to say, or, if she tried, what tone to say it in. She said, “What?”

  “I knew it didn’t matter.” Willy had a length of steel rebar he used to poke the fire, which he did now. Then he settled back again. “You know once when Deena and I were having a row, she said, ‘So what would you do if you heard Judith got a divorce? Go out and get one, too?’ and you know how in the heat of the moment you say the kind of true things you normally wouldn’t, and I said, ‘That’s right, I would, by the next business day.’ ”

  Judith waited.

  “Deena laughed. I’ll say this—you will never hear her laugh so hard as when it pops up from pure, one hundred percent scorn. She said that showed her exactly how stupid you had made me, because you would marry ten more bankers before you’d come back here and marry me.” This time Willy was quiet a little longer before he spoke again. “You know what I did? I looked her right in the eye and said, ‘That’s not true.’ ” He drew in a deep raspy breath of air, then expelled it. “ ’Course, that was a long time ago.”

  Judith didn’t say anything. What could she say? That she wouldn’t have married ten bankers before coming back to him? That she would only have married two?

  Willy said, “Deena used to say she saw the actual Judith and I only saw the dream one. I didn’t believe that either.” After another silence, he said, “I’ll tell you the tipping point, if you want to hear it. One afternoon I was in a bar in Grand Lake. We’d been framing a house, but a big old lightning storm came through, so we packed it in. Everybody on my crew had places they wanted to go but me. So I was in this bar I knew. The Elkhorn. The storm had also stopped this fella who was on his Harley-Davidson, headed for Washington State, I think it was. Every now and then he’d go to the front window, look out at the lightning and rain, and come back to the bar muttering. Him and me got to talking, and before long I’m telling him all about you and how I was going to make all this money to win you back, and right then, hearing myself say it out loud, was when I knew it wouldn’t make any difference at all.” Willy breathed heavily in, and the rasp was there, Judith heard it clearly. “It turned out this fella had his own problems, beyond the weather. He was some sort of history buff, and he said that all his life he wanted to publish a book about… hell, I don’t remember, cliff-dwelling Indians or something, and then when he finally did, he wondered what the fuss was all about. He said, ‘You think you’re going to be somebody else, but you’re not. You’re still just you.’ He seemed pretty disappointed about it all. He said, ‘So here I am sitting in a bar halfway between someplace I didn’t want to be and someplace I don’t want to go.’ ” Willy chuckled to himself. “That bird and me got to drinking pretty hard after that.”

  He rose to put a few more pieces of wood on the fire. He adjusted the cushion on his chair, sat back down, sipped from his cup. Judith waited. She had the feeling he wanted to say more. He wanted to speak. He’d been thinking about these things for twenty-seven years and now he wanted to speak. Pretty soon he said, “For a while there, I thought that you took my blood and left me a zombie, but it was different from that. It was more like you took away my right now. You gave me a past, and for a while, when I thought you might come to your senses and wander back, I had a kind of a future to think about, but the right now was gone, the right now was what you’d taken away.” In the light of the fire he seemed to be smiling unhappily. “I substituted alcohol.”

  Blaming her for his drinking didn’t seem quite fair, but the other business, the right-now business, made her too sad to want to refute it. She said, “We were so young, Willy.”

  “No, we weren’t,” he said with a sudden low vehemence. He gazed off toward the trees and the lake. “I wasn’t, anyhow.”

  Perhaps a minute passed, and there was nothing but the sounds of the fire and the night. In a softer voice Willy said, “There’s some way you can compute the temperature by the number of chirps a cricket makes in a minute, but I never can remember it.”

  Judith started to count but saw the hopelessness of it, so they both sat listening, and then Willy said, “Once my folks argued off and on almost all of one winter about whether you could predict the next year’s rain from the size of a woolly worm in the fall. My mother kept politely saying you could, and Frank kept saying you couldn’t. He said all a fat woolly worm could tell you was that there had been plenty of food for a woolly worm to get fat on. I wanted my mother to be right, but I knew she wasn’t.”

  They kept talking and sitting, and Willy kept sipping his scotch and poking the fire and feeding in logs, until finally Judith could hardly hold her head up. She turned her watch to the firelight. “It’s past midnight, Willy.”

  “You should throw that thing away,” he said.

  “I’m turning in.”

  He kept looking at the fire as if his mind were still prowling and he hadn’t quite said all he had to say, but she was too tired for it. She carried a flashlight down to the outhouse, which, to her surprise (and relief), smelled only of damp, freshly dug earth. As she walked back through the encampment, Willy emerged from her cabin carrying a lamp.

  “Got the fire going for you,” he said as their paths crossed. “Just to take the chill off. I meant to do it sooner.”

  She nodded and thanked him and said she was sure it would be fine.

  “Holler if you need anything,” he said, a sentence open to interpretation, so she laughed and said, “I will if I do, but I won’t.”

  She was at her door when he called, “Sleep tight.”

  She looked back at him, reflected there in the firelight, and found to her surprise that already she was almost accustomed to his bulk and change. “Thanks,” she said, “I think I will.”

  In the cabin, she found he’d hung an old Levi’s jacket from one of the horseshoe hooks. The burning wood crackled nicely, and Judith again had the strange sense that everything here was slightly amplified, or was it that her ears were suddenly open to it all? She didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she had come, she was here, and she was glad she was. She undressed in the fitful light of the fire and slipped into bed. The sheets were flannel, freshly laundered, perhaps even new. She pulled them close, and for a pleasant few moments the plank floor and plank walls and plank ceiling allowed her to imagine that she lay within a beautiful toy box, and then, almost before she could have another thought, she had fallen to sleep.

  When she abruptly awakened during the night, the fire was down to embers, the moon through the trees cast swaying shadows onto the cabin walls, and three simple chilling words, years and years in storage, were suddenly upon her: There. It’s done.

  There. It’s done.

  Simple and chilling and brutal.

&
nbsp; But brutal had been the only way, hadn’t it? She didn’t know. It had seemed so. And yet.

  Before she left for Stanford, she and Willy made arrangements to talk by telephone every Sunday night, and initially these calls, along with a regular exchange of letters and cards, afforded Judith a kind of loose, easy lifeline to that time and place that was theirs. But time passed. A metamorphosis had begun in Palo Alto, and the change came at Willy’s expense. Judith loved going to foreign movies at the Varsity or the Park, and talking about books and movies in coffeehouses, and going to lectures in warm wood-paneled halls filled with clever kids and urbane adults. Occasionally, and without really intending it to happen, Judith would allow images of Willy to impose on these settings—of Willy plinking bottles with his rifle, of Willy pulling plywood fast to two-by-fours with bursts of a nail gun, even of Willy standing over Mr. Minnert with the shovel—and these juxtapositions unsettled her, and made her wonder how Willy might fit into the life she saw forming before her. It was not at all that simple, she would later see, but at age eighteen, carried along on the currents of college life, it seemed that simple. The Sunday night conversations with Willy grew more labored, dutiful, irritating even. She felt more like talking to her friends or her roommate, a sweet and smoothly beautiful Chinese girl from Hawaii who spoke in a silky low register and seemed to subsist on little other than fresh carrots and oranges. The difference between conversations with Willy and conversations with her new friends was the difference between hiding and sharing, between crimping down and opening up. Still, through the winter term, Judith was in her room at seven o’clock every Sunday night to take Willy’s call and her roommate would discreetly slip out until the call was over. Then one Sunday afternoon Malcolm Whitman and some friends stopped by to see if Judith and the roommate wanted to ride along to a blues club in Oakland. Judith presumed her exotic roommate had inspired the visit from these jocular, loose-jointed boys and so was surprised when they didn’t retreat once the roommate demurred. The boys stayed on, cajoling her, talking up the band, the place, the barbecued ribs. “A sterling day for a drive,” Malcolm added, and she smiled, not at the remark but at the sudden notion that these boys, in a different time and place, might have run in Amory Blaine’s crowd. Malcolm stood to the side, a tall thin boy with long, beautifully groomed hair, regarding her intently. Judith remembered her scheduled telephone conversation with Willy and said she was sorry, she’d really like to go but she needed to be home early to study. Before this could become the moment in which the boys finally surrendered, Malcolm gently cleared his throat. He was driving, he said, and he was officially putting her in charge of departure time. When his friends murmured in protest, he grinned at them and said, “Oh, shush now.”

  All she could remember of the club was that it was dark and warm and throbbed with music. Eli’s, it was called. Eli’s something, with a mix that night of savvy-seeming black people and two or three tables of white college kids. She liked it there, especially after a while, once she’d begun to feel the repetitive pulse of the music encircle the room and pull it toward what she wanted to believe was a pleasant state of suspended differences. Judith’s group drank draft beer and ate ribs and coleslaw. Malcolm was attentive to her. She had forgotten her watch, but every now and then—between songs, for example—she was suddenly aware that time was passing, lots of it. “Do you need to go?” Malcolm would ask, leaning close enough for his long hair to brush her bare arm. Yes, she did need to go, but what she said was, “Not yet.” Finally she recognized that possibility had hardened to fact: she was staying. Until that moment she had drunk only one bottle of beer so that when she talked to Willy she would seem her normal somber Sunday-night self, but now she ordered another beer, and she remembered how, after quickly drinking half the bottle, she tilted her chair back so that the front legs lifted slightly from the floor.

  It was nearly 2 A.M. when she returned to the dorm, and her roommate was asleep in her twin bed. The room smelled pleasantly of oranges. The phone had been unplugged. On a notepad beside the phone, her roommate had written:

  Your friend Willy called 7 p.m.

  " " 8 "

  " " 9 "

  " " 10 "

  Disconnected phone after last call.

  (blotto-slurry)(him not me!!)

  And this was when, looking at the note from her roommate, Judith had thought, There. It’s done. She had known Willy wouldn’t call again, and wouldn’t write again, and he hadn’t. Perhaps six weeks later, Judith had slipped from her neck the silver chain that held the ring, and then spent a long, teary Sunday afternoon writing a letter that tried, ineffectually she knew, to tell Willy how sorry she was. The next day she had put the letter and the ring into a padded envelope and sat on a bench near a mailbox for more than an hour before finally walking over and pushing the envelope inside.

  Judith tilted her watch to catch the moonlight: 2:40. So she hadn’t been asleep long. She rose from her bed—she felt the cabin’s sharp chill—and stole to the window to peer out. Willy still sat near the plank table, cup in hand, staring into the fire.

  4

  The next morning Judith dressed quickly in the cold, pulled on the denim jacket hanging on the wall—the fit was fine—and found Willy already poking at the coals in the rock fireplace. The effect of the bright morning light on Willy’s appearance was a shock. What had passed for swarthiness the night before now seemed more an odd, unnatural yellow-brown cast. For one preposterous moment she wondered if he’d applied Man Tan, or whatever the current version of Man Tan might be. But of course Willy would never do such a thing, so the odd color must have to do with whatever his unwellness was.

  “So did you stay up all night or finally go to bed?” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I woke up in the night, and when I looked out, you were still down here tending your fire. And now you’re here again.”

  “Oh, I finally turned in.” He shifted to face her directly. It was meant, she guessed, as a frank presentation, so she resisted averting her gaze. Besides everything else, the strange cast extended faintly even to his blue-gray eyes, which now seemed faded. “How about you?” he said. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Fine. The bed’s comfy, and it’s such a beautiful room.”

  He was nodding, but she had the feeling his eyes were looking further, searching, though for what exactly, she couldn’t say.

  On the table he’d set out a slab of sliced bacon in brown butcher paper, a plastic bucket of eggs, and several more fat tomatoes. “I’ll help,” she said, “but first…” She pointed toward the outhouse.

  When she returned, bacon was sizzling in a heavy black skillet, and the aroma was heavenly. She began slicing tomatoes. “So has that privy ever been used?” she said.

  “The privy proper, yes, but that’s a new location for it. Batch and a couple of boys dug the pit day before yesterday. In your honor, you could say.” He nodded at something propped against a post she hadn’t seen the night before: a shovel with a roll of toilet paper slid onto its short handle. “I prefer something a little more portable myself.”

  “Very deluxe,” she said—one of Malcolm’s phrases. She felt a slight pang that until this moment she hadn’t thought of him since she’d arrived here.

  Willy had percolated coffee and she poured herself a cup. “There’s sugar and cream powder in that cupboard,” he said, pointing toward the cabinet where he’d gone the night before to refill his cup. There, besides a small carton of sugar envelopes and another of powdered Coffeemate packets, Judith found two quarts of red-label Johnnie Walker, both full, and a quart of Gilbey’s gin, half empty. At the table, she stirred a packet of creamer into her coffee and said, “So how does it work? Gin before noon and scotch after?”

  “Something like that,” Willy said. He cracked four eggs into the skillet and they began to sputter and bubble.

  “Is that what’s made you sick?”

  He’d been patting the eggs with a spatula but st
opped now to look at her looking at him. “You’re not going to start in on me now, are you? Because it wouldn’t be a good use of our time. I’m way past that.”

  He’d grilled bread in butter, and set a slice on her plate and one on his own, along with the fried eggs and several strips of crisp bacon. He broke off a small piece and began to chew. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was on his mind, some question to which he hoped to find the answer without asking for it.

  “So it’s going to get you?” she said.

  He made a small smile. “Oh, yeah, it’s going to get me all right.” Then: “Look, Judith. My guess is, all of us find our own special ways to do ourselves in.”

  Judith didn’t like the sound of that. “What about the old duffer who’ll be a hundred and eleven this Tuesday? What’s his weapon of choice?”

  Willy sniggered. “Boredom, probably.”

  Okay, Judith thought, I kept my mitts off for twenty-seven years, I can keep my mitts off now. She listened to the soft sounds of the trees for a while, then she said, “When I woke up this morning, it took a second to remember where I was, and when I thought, Oh, I’m at the camp with Willy, my whole body seemed to relax at the thought of it.” Then: “I think happiness is the hardest thing in the world to put your finger on, but for those few seconds, realizing where I was, I felt purely happy.” Their eyes met and he began to nod a little, more at ease, and she thought that, for a second or two, anyway, she’d freed him from his other, more morbid thoughts or questions, whatever they were.

  He said, “So are you going to eat what I cooked you or just look at it?”

  She was surprised at how hungry she was. She ate intently, and finally, after sopping up egg yolk with the last of her bread, she looked up to find him regarding her with what appeared to be amusement.

  “I don’t always eat like that,” she said.

  “Well, if you did, and kept small as you are, people would talk.”

  She laughed. “About what?”