To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  “Bargains with the devil, that kind of stuff.” He finished what was in his cup and stretched his arms. “Want to take a stroll down to the pond?”

  It was far more than a pond, Judith thought, if slightly less than a full-blown lake; the opposite shore seemed suitably distant. The dock, with a flat-bottomed dinghy tethered on one side and a sleek red kayak on the other, still lay in shade, as did a small cabin tucked perhaps twenty yards away among pines. Like all the other little log buildings in the compound, it was simple, unprepossessing, inviting. On its porch, oars and paddles protruded from the top of an old wood barrel. An array of safety vests hung from nails on the wall, most of them bright orange, two or three of them old and faded.

  Judith, touching the fabric of one of the older vests, said, “What’re these? Nautical artifacts?” and was sorry to hear herself sounding like Malcolm.

  But Willy took no offense. “Oh, they’re still functional in their own way. They still work well enough for my purposes, plus Deena thought they were decorative.”

  “I like them,” Judith said. At this moment she decided that if the plank-table area was the summerhouse, then this was the boathouse. She stepped inside and found it as chilly as out-of-doors, and without much in the way of furnishings: a wood-burning stove, some shelves of books and board games, and a pine table and chairs that looked handmade. Nearly the whole of one wall was taken by a set of mullioned windows giving onto the lake. She said, “Well, if this isn’t just about my favorite room in the whole world, I don’t know what is.”

  Willy scanned the room, then rubbed his neck. “I don’t know about that,” he said, grinning, “but I can tell you that if you spend a cold winter’s day in here with just a bottle for company, you can get a helluva lot of brooding done.”

  Judith drifted to the books—lots of titles by Louis L’Amour and Tom Clancy—and the stack of games. “Oh my God,” she said, “you’ve got Pay Day!” She pulled it out from the others. “Let’s build a fire and play Pay Day!”

  “Why not?” Willy said, and though she expected him to, he didn’t add that that was the motto where he came from. While Judith laid out the board, money, and cards, he adjusted the stove damper and began crumpling sheets of an old newspaper. He followed that with cardboard, dry twigs, and slightly larger pieces of wood, then lit a match to the paper and watched the fire work its way up from one element to the next. When he sat at the table to play, she saw that his enamelware cup had again been filled, though from what source, she couldn’t say.

  Still, he didn’t guzzle his liquor. He took small, widely spaced sips, his own alternative, Judith thought, to an IV drip. He began to survey the Pay Day playing board; the days of a month were brightly blocked out with instructions like “Mail” and “Deal” and “Found a Buyer” on random squares. Finally he said, “So what does a fella have to do to win?”

  “Have the most money,” Judith said. “Be the biggest capitalist pig.”

  “All righty then,” Willy said. “I can be every bit as piggish as the next fella.”

  Judith suggested a two-month round for starters, and though Willy had never played the game before, he seemed to find it amusing, the Deal cards in particular, a number of which had been customized by former players. “The Double-Dee Bra Shop,” he announced after looking at one card. And then, smiling, upon completing his purchase: “It’s not every day you get to buy yourself a bra shop.”

  “Guess your sons were the ones tampering with the cards.”

  Willy said it looked like their brand of humor, all right, and she remarked that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

  Pay Day was a game that Milla had received on her sixth or seventh birthday, and in addition to Sorry and Chinese checkers, it was one of the few tabletop activities that Judith, Malcolm, and Milla all enjoyed. Almost immediately Malcolm had recognized that all Deals—offers of something for sale—should be purchased early in the game, and over time Milla and Judith had learned to follow this strategy, too.

  The stove warmed the room quickly, and Judith soon shrugged out of her jacket. “No need to stop there,” Willy said.

  “Think you’ll be making randy remarks from your deathbed?” Judith asked, and Willy said he certainly hoped so. Judith’s next roll landed her on Mail. “Maybe it’s from Deena,” she said.

  Willy said, “Maybe it’s from… what’s your hubby’s name again?”

  “Malcolm.”

  “Maybe it’s from him, then.”

  “Nope,” Judith said, reading the card. “It’s from my semiliterate, make-believe son saying Camp Snakebit is g-r-a-t-e.”

  After the first game, which Judith won handily, Willy said, “Except for losing, I liked that game. ’Course, with you shedding clothes on the other side of the table, I’d probably like tiddlywinks.”

  Judith was enjoying herself. She felt good. She asked him if he wanted to play again but make it a three-month game this time.

  “Why not? Only this time let’s play for something.”

  “Like what?”

  He leaned back and looked out at the water, glinting now in the midmorning sun. “If I win, I chuck your watch in the lake.”

  She glanced at her watch, a Cartier. “My watch cost a little something, Willy.”

  “But you don’t know how much exactly.”

  “No.”

  “Because it was a gift.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell you what, then,” he said. “I won’t chuck it in the drink. I’ll just put it away for safekeeping.”

  She nodded, glad to have the subject of the watch behind her. “And if I win, you tell me a secret.”

  “What kind of secret?”

  She smiled. “Up to you. But it better be good.”

  He shrugged and began shaking the die in his cupped hands. He seemed strangely complacent. Confident, even.

  “Are you gaming me here, Willy? Are you some kind of Pay Day Zen master?”

  “Until a half-hour ago, I’d never played Pay Day in my life,” he said, which was no doubt true, but the game that followed proved him a quick learner. He no longer gambled. He no longer took the high-interest Pay Day loans. At the front end of the game he purchased every Deal available (including those for “Le French Tickler Shoppe,” “Fred’s Food Cuisine,” and “Captain Caveman’s Fossil Beds & Chairs”), and before the thirty-first day of the third month, which marked the end of the game, he’d found a buyer for them all. “Okay,” he said, clearly enjoying himself. “I guess now we count up our cash and then subtract our loans.” He gave her a smirky grin. “Not that I have any.”

  Judith didn’t bother counting. She handed over the Cartier, watched him slip it carelessly into his jacket pocket, and wondered if she’d ever see it again.

  After their noon meal, they went out on the lake. Willy retrieved two of the newer life vests, gave one to Judith, and strapped on the other one.

  “Guess you never got around to those swimming lessons, huh?” Judith said.

  He inhaled to fasten the last snap. “No, I never did.”

  The bright orange of the vest made his skin seem even yellower. “I was going to give you swimming lessons,” she said, “and you were going to teach me to fish.”

  “That’s true. That was how it was going to be.”

  The water lapped against the dock; the boats rocked gently. Willy broke the silence by saying, “Let’s take the kayak.”

  It was a perfect autumn day, cool in the shade, warm in the sun, which cast down on the lake from a southerly angle.

  He sat in the back—“Beauty in the front, weight in the stern,” he said—and held the dock to steady the kayak while Judith settled herself forward. The craft wasn’t what she expected. It had low-slung seats, for one thing, and for another the forward seat was turned to face the rear. The arrangement seemed friendly but impractical. “How do we paddle?”

  “Don’t,” Willy said.

  “Then how do we go?”

  He took hol
d of the lever in front of him, and—this could not have been more surprising—the slender boat gently reversed from the dock and then moved forward into open water. It was almost completely silent. They might’ve talked in a whisper.

  “How do you do that?”

  He nodded toward a wooden housing before him. “It’s called a PowerYak. There’s a little battery-powered motor under there.” He scanned the small lake with evident satisfaction. “I used to like to paddle, but it got to be too much for me. I built a runabout with a little inboard motor, but the noise spoiled things. I like the quiet. So I built this.”

  “You built it?”

  “Yeah. The boys and me built a bunch of little boats. We’d start one out in the garage in the winter, and when things warmed up in the spring, we’d put it in the water. We made a couple of one-man canoes, a sailboat, a drift boat. That dinghy back there at the dock. Once we made a little paddleboat for the two boys.”

  A different life, and peeking into it made her feel both better and worse, relief that he’d had it, regret that she hadn’t. “Sounds like fun,” she said.

  He made a murmuring sound. “The boys don’t come here anymore. Haven’t since they got into their teens.” He gazed off across the lake. “There were good periods there, though, with the boys. And with Deena, too, to be fair about it. But sometimes, I’ll tell you. Last Christmas the boys wanted some fancy video thing—cost a small fortune—and Deena wanted an expresso maker, except she kept telling me it was espresso, not expresso, and it was not just any old expresso maker but an Italian one, and when I said, why in God’s name would we want an Italian expresso maker, she looks at me and says, ‘It doesn’t just make espresso, Willy. You can make cappuccino, too. It comes with a frother.’ ” He shook his head. “I don’t know a lot, but I know this much. The more fancy shit you put in your house, the weirder your life gets.”

  Judith laughed and suggested that Bartlett’s would be all over that one.

  Willy said, “ ’Course, it’s true I brought home a lot of weird fancy power tools.” He seemed to be considering this. “That was my profession, though. Deena wasn’t starting up a damned doughnut shop or something.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “About what?”

  “The fancy video game and the espresso maker?”

  “Oh. Gave them all something else. Coats from Cabela’s. Nice ones. Pretty close to blizzard-proof.” He emitted air that was half wheeze and half snigger. “Those coats weren’t well received. Turned everybody quarrelsome, in fact. I had to go out and find a place to drink in peace.”

  Judith laughed at what was funny in this and discarded the implications of what was not. The kayak cut smoothly through the water. She closed her eyes and after a few seconds said, “We’re like a swan gliding.”

  Perhaps a minute passed. Then from overhead came a sudden muffled shuffling, and Judith snapped open her eyes. Three descending ducks skidded onto the lake, tucked their wings, and settled into themselves. The water rippled, then resumed its calm. Nobody spoke, which added to the effect. She took off her life vest to use for a headrest, then leaned back, tilted her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and said, “Mmm.” She could feel Willy looking at her, but it didn’t bother her. It felt as pleasant as the pale sun. She kept her eyes closed and listened to the calming sound of the kayak moving through the water. The stillness was so deep and ongoing that when Willy finally spoke, it gave her a start.

  “Want to make a stop?”

  He was looking toward a small inlet and a second dock.

  “Whose is that?” she said.

  “Mine. Or really the boys’. They built it. They wanted their own private place.”

  As Willy guided the kayak to the dock, another small building came into view, one that at first seemed to be set back among the trees, and then she saw that it was actually up in a tree, a massive cottonwood, so it was a tree house, and a stylish one at that. On the dock, Willy knelt to secure the kayak to a cleat. She looked away while he pushed himself up onto his feet.

  “The boys called this area Tennessee,” he said. “I don’t know why. They would just say, ‘We’re going to Tennessee,’ and take some bologna sandwiches and get in their canoes and paddle over here.”

  Judith wandered up toward the cottonwood that supported the tree house. The path was overgrown, and though the tree house had been neglected, it seemed unusually attractive. The roof and sides were wood-shingled, and the window openings were crosshatched with slender pieces of wood to suggest windowpanes. They’d cheated a little for support: a long post stilted down to the ground from one floating corner of the platform.

  “How did they get up there?” Judith asked.

  Willy had been following along, stopping every few paces to take a breath or two. He pointed a finger up at something in the tree. “See that? It’s a rope ladder, but it’s hooked over there to the opposite tree so you got to climb up there first and let it swing down. The boys said it was their way of keeping the Indians out.” He smiled. “I went to the trouble of climbing up there one time. Turned out what they wanted to keep the Indians from seeing was their little stash of girlie magazines.”

  After they walked back to the dock, the rasp in Willy’s breath seemed more pronounced, and Judith suggested they sit for a bit. There was one old wooden chair, which she declined and instead walked out onto the sunny dock, took off her shoes, and sat at the edge, dangling her feet in the cold water. Willy positioned his chair back in the shade, and she again closed her eyes and tilted her face to feel the warmth of the sun. Heliotropic. Malcolm had said once that Californians were heliotropic. This was soon after their move to L.A., and he’d meant it metaphorically, that they weren’t just drawn to the sun (though of course many of them were) but were more broadly drawn to money, glamour, fame—the limelight, in other words. She pulled the towel from the kayak, and then the life vest to use for a pillow. She floated the towel onto the dock and began rolling up her pant legs.

  “Be easier to take them off, don’t you think?”

  She looked at him over there in the shadows. “There’s a Willy-sized suggestion if I ever heard one.”

  “Just because it’s my idea doesn’t make it a bad one.”

  Judith gazed at the watery smoothness. She’d packed nice underwear, Bloomingdale’s, not quite immodest. The ones Malcolm called slightly zesty.

  “Nobody here but us chickens,” Willy said.

  Judith scanned the opposite shoreline, then gave him an even look. “And you won’t get any big ideas if I do?”

  Willy gave this a quick, snorting laugh. “Particular medications I’m on, Judith, I’m just about past big ideas.”

  The truth was, she felt oddly at ease slipping her pants off, folding them neatly onto the dock.

  “No need to stop there,” he said, but she left her shirt on and stretched long on the dock, ankles crossed. She closed her eyes. He said nothing. Neither did she. She just lay feeling the sun touching her and listening to the slow, strangely vivid creak of the dock, the watery rocking of the kayak, the occasional cry of a bird, and she wondered what it meant that stripping her life down to as little as this could afford more contentment than anything more complicated ever would.

  Without opening her eyes she said, “My father loved Indian summer. He always wanted me to see it. But the one year I was here at the right time, it didn’t happen. There was no last burst of warmth and color. Summer ended, and presto, winter took hold.”

  After another little while Judith turned onto her side, looked at Willy there in the shadows, and said, “You didn’t come to my father’s funeral.”

  “No.”

  “I was hoping you would.”

  “I would’ve, I think. But I didn’t know about it. We were living in Grand Lake by then. Those who knew about the funeral had no interest in my finding out about it.”

  His father, she supposed he meant. And maybe Deena herself, if she somehow heard of it. But it seemed like someon
e might have wanted him to know. “Your mother didn’t tell you?”

  He shook his head. “My mother liked you, Judith, but then…” He didn’t finish the sentence. “She might’ve seemed like the forgiving type, but she wasn’t really.”

  This time it was Judith who didn’t speak.

  After a second or two Willy said, “You know, for a while there after you left, your father acted kind of funny around me. I’d run into him somewhere in a store and he’d nod and say hello, but as soon as I’d turn away, he’d be gone. Then one night in a bar, same thing, I turned away and he disappeared, but a while later he walked back in and came over and said he needed to tell me something. He said he’d worked against me with you. That’s what he said—he’d worked against me—and then he just stood there stiff and waiting, like I might want to hit him or something. But I told him it was okay and not exactly a surprise. I told him if I’d been in his shoes, I probably wouldn’t have wanted you to marry me either. That interested him. He asked me why. I told him dim prospects and all. No, he said, that wasn’t it. He thought my prospects were fine, all things considered. It was me putting you in danger. I laughed at that one. ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘life puts you in danger,’ but there was no reason to argue the point. He thought what he thought.” He paused. “I have to hand it to him, though, coming up to me and telling me the truth like that.” Another pause. “ ’Course, if you’d cared enough about me, he could’ve talked himself blue and it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  Judith sat up and stared across the water, thinking of telling the truth, and then she did. “It wasn’t anything he said, Willy. It was what he did.” She looked at him, his great unhealthy bulk, back in the shadows. “He got me into Stanford.”

  Real surprise registered in Willy’s face. “You’re shitting me.”

  Judith nodded her head. She understood. She wouldn’t have believed it either. “It’s true. You know how that motorcyclist came into the bar out of the rain and showed you something you hadn’t managed to see for yourself? The same thing happened to me. Only my motorcyclist was a man named Rene. Rene Gassault.”