by Tom McNeal
“You smell like Christmas,” she whispered. She pressed him tighter, trying to keep herself from crying. “Like Christmas when Christmas still meant something.”
They stood like that a long time, not speaking at all, and then finally Willy stepped back. “Better git if we’re going to git,” he said, and pulled the old vest over his flannel shirt, tying the straps, snugging it tight. She glanced at the dinghy with oars fitted into the oarlocks. “We going in that?”
“I was thinking of it, but changed my mind.” He didn’t make a joke about less rowing. He didn’t joke about anything. He merely eased himself into the kayak and held the edge of the dock to steady the boat for her. He reversed the motor, and a moment later—it felt like a kind of exhalation—they were gliding silently out into the water.
They skirted the entire perimeter and came upon a doe, maybe the same one they’d seen before, and she raised her head and swiveled her ears, then went back to browsing. It was cold, but here and there the sun found its way through the clouds. Judith watched as a stand of pines on the far shore shone vividly green, then, as the clouds shifted, dimmed almost to gray. Gradually a space of water toward the middle of the lake took on a kind of preternatural illumination. Willy noticed it, too, and as they moved silently toward it, Judith felt as if they’d found a secret passage into an exquisite painting. When they slipped into the sunlight, Willy switched the motor off, and for a moment it seemed as if the entire world had stopped turning—she thought of the day years before in Rufus Sage when she and her father had stood in the wintry silence on Main Street staring at the building that had once housed Feister’s Western Wear.
Willy’s face was almost glowing. Maybe it was the light. But maybe, she thought, it was the nature of the moment—maybe she seemed radiant, too. They let their eyes settle into one another until at last she was afraid she would say something too big or too rich for the moment, so she said nothing and began to sort through the small cooler at her feet.
“Would you like salami and crackers?” she said.
When she looked up, she caught him gazing back toward the dock, but he turned now to her. “No, but thank you,” he said, softly and almost formal-seeming.
Judith was unwrapping a tube of crackers when the sun slid away and within her mind there occurred something she would always think of as a silent explosion. Something was wrong. She stilled her hands and looked up. Willy sat there staring at her with his radiant smile, and something was terribly wrong.
“Hello!”
A voice from some distance.
A man stood at the dock’s edge. A man who looked like Malcolm.
“Hello!” he called again in Malcolm’s voice.
Judith turned back to Willy.
He still smiled, but it was more than a smile, it seemed some strange expansion of smiles, so that this was the first one and the last one and every one in between. Then his eyelids closed and opened in a long, languid blink, and everything slowed and broke into distinct particular moments: his smile contorting now, twisting into an expression childlike and wanting and wishful, and then the slight parting of his lips to speak, but he couldn’t speak. He closed his mouth and reopened it as if to try again, but nothing passed his parted lips. He drew in air then, a long slow draft of it, and as he slowly released it, he gave up on speech and his eyes, slightly watery now, brightened again, and his smile turned odd and anxious and expectant, the kind of smile, she would think later as she replayed the scene again and again, that you might see when someone is about to present you with a heartfelt gift he isn’t sure you will like or will use or will even understand, and then, smiling in just that way, he spread his arms to his sides and took hold of the gunnels and simply and surely heaved his shoulders and weight to one side.
As the kayak capsized, Judith gasped and squeezed her eyes and mouth closed against the water’s sudden, ferocious cold, then popped back through the surface, drawing great gasps of air. The kayak floated keel up. The gunnels seemed sealed to the water.
“Willy?” she called. “Willy?”
She swam to the other side—nothing, nobody—then inhaled and tried to dive but couldn’t. Frantically she unclasped her vest, shrugged it off, and dipped under the gunnel and felt around in the cavity of air beneath the boat.
He was not there.
She dived again, eyes open, but saw nothing in the dark opaque water, and she resurfaced again, yelling now. Willy. Willy, Willy, Willy.
Again and again she dived, seeing nothing, knowing she would see nothing, until finally, when she burst up through the water, there was the dinghy, and Malcolm in a quiet voice said, “Judith?”
6
Batch Batten arrived while Judith was still trying to warm herself in front of the fire in the boathouse. He had the grasping aspect of a man who had been told to appear at a precise time without being told what to expect when he got there. After taking in the scene—Judith hunched and sopping, Malcolm close and attentive—Batch seemed to be looking around for Willy.
“Willy drowned,” Judith said. Her voice sounded dull and far away, as if it were not her own.
Batch Batten stared at her.
“He’s dead,” she said. “You need to get the police or somebody.”
After he left, Malcolm tried to coax information from her, but she just kept her place by the fire and sat staring out at the lake. Time passed—how much she had no idea—but it startled her when Batch appeared with two policemen, one of whom looked at Judith and said, “Well, well. Judith Toomey.”
She looked at him dully.
“Chief Seers,” he said.
She could see it was true. Gray hair and a little more jowl, but unquestionably Chief Seers.
“So Willy Blunt drowned,” he said, keeping his eyes on her. Malcolm might not have existed.
Judith nodded.
Chief Seers said gently, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
She did, as best she could, while Malcolm stood listening. When she finished, Chief Seers gestured toward the bright orange vest lying wet on the floor. “And you were wearing that life jacket there?”
Judith said yes.
“And he was wearing one, too?”
She nodded. “He couldn’t swim,” she said.
“His was fastened up good?”
Again she nodded. “But it wasn’t like mine. It was an old one with ties instead of clasps.”
She kept the blanket around her and led him to the other old vest, which hung on the exterior wall on the boathouse. Chief Seers took the vest down and experimentally pressed his thumbnail into it. It gave way, and wearing still his imperturbable expression, Chief Seers looked out toward the water.
“What?” Malcolm said.
Seers’s eyes barely grazed Malcolm. He scanned the porch and instructed his deputy to fetch a fishing rod he’d spotted leaning against the rail, then Seers walked with the rod and the old safety vest down to the dock. While the others watched, he hooked the strap of the vest to the line and swung it into the water. It lay momentarily on the surface, darkening, the water wicking quickly through it; then, shockingly to Judith, it was drawn quickly down into the water. When Chief Seers reeled it back up, dripping, the fishing rod nearly doubled with its weight. They all looked at it lying there on the dock. Judith bent to lift it. It felt like a wet rock. It had sucked in the water and kept it.
In a low flat voice, Chief Seers said, “Who picked the life jackets when you went out?”
Judith looked up at him. “Willy.” Then: “He must’ve…”
Chief Seers looked at Judith, then at the smooth surface of the water. So Willy had gone out wearing an anchor, and he had known it. Someone had to say this, and it fell to the chief. “Guess Willy Blunt decided to sink himself,” he said. He looked at Batch Batten, whose expression was stricken. “You got to hand it to him, Batch. Neat and clean like this.”
There was little to discuss or do after that. The only difficulty derived from Judith’s request that t
he body be recovered. Chief Seers took a deep breath and said, “Well, the body’ll float in a few days if it slips that vest. ’Course, that’s a big if.” He told her that her affidavit was really all they needed to confirm the death as accidental. That in a case like this the county wasn’t in a position to pay for dragging a lake.
“I will,” Judith said. She knew she should have said, We will, but she hadn’t.
Seers gave her a look. “Why would you want to do that?”
It was the snapping turtle, that was why, but she said, “I wouldn’t want his family to have any doubts what happened. A death without a body…” She let her voice trail off.
The chief was studying Judith when Malcolm asked how much dragging a lake was going for these days.
Chief Seers seemed to respect Malcolm for asking, and for the first time he gave Malcolm a thorough look. The chief ran a cupped hand over his mouth and chin, considering. “Neighborhood of a thousand dollars a day,” he said. “Can’t imagine more than a day or two on it. Might even get a diver to do it. Finds the body fast, you’d save a little money there.” Then, not looking at Judith, but certainly for her to hear: “Won’t be pretty when we find him.”
A few still seconds passed.
A low wobbly voice said, “Dear God, Willy. Dear God almighty.” It was Batch Batten. He was staring across the water, swaying slightly and hugging folded arms to his chest. He looked cold and abandoned, a man who might fall to his knees in prayer.
Chief Seers turned to Judith and Malcolm. “No real reason for you California folks to stay on here. We’ll take your statements in town. After that, you’re free to go as you please.”
By the time the paperwork was completed, it was after 5 P.M. Malcolm went down the hallway to the bathroom, and while Judith and the police chief stood alone, he said, “You know, Willy was a good fella straight through, even with the drink.” Judith didn’t know what to think or say. She just stood there with her hands in the pockets of the denim jacket and tried to keep from breaking apart. The chief in his low flat voice said, “I ran into Willy a while back. He wasn’t long for this world. He knew he was going to go, and he got to go on his own terms. What you did here was good, helping Willy through and all.”
Judith felt a stiff thinness shell over her face. She couldn’t speak, but she began shaking her head. No, she wanted to say, no, no, no, helping Willy to die was not what she’d come to do, was not what she’d ever intended to do. She heard an opening door, then Malcolm’s heels on the linoleum hallway. Judith kept her face squeezed tight and turned toward the front door of the station house. Behind her she heard Malcolm thanking Chief Seers for all he’d done, saying how impressed he was with the professionalism he’d found out here in the hinterlands, losing, Judith knew, what little credibility he’d gained in asking the price of dragging a lake.
On the curb, Malcolm made a claim for himself. He was hungry, he said. He’d driven all night. He had to eat. When she slid into the car and glanced toward the police building, Chief Seers was standing a few feet back from the window, looking out in his sphinxlike way, but she knew what he saw: two people from California about to drive away in their late-model black Jaguar. His head dipped in a slight nod.
They found a coffee shop on the highway. Malcolm ordered a flatiron steak, and when the waitress said it came with onion tanglers, he said, “But perhaps not on this occasion.” Judith ordered only coffee and toast, then turned and looked across the highway toward the back of the abandoned Starlight drive-in theater, where one summer’s night she and Willy Blunt had gone to watch a James Bond movie. A long time ago.
When Malcolm’s salad arrived, ladled heavily with the blue cheese dressing he’d requested on the side, he looked from it to her in search of a shared distaste for the here and now, but Judith lowered her eyes. She had not asked Malcolm a single question since he’d appeared at the encampment, but now, without looking at him, she said, “How did you get here?”
He had received a phone call. The caller, who had identified himself as one Batch Batten, informed Malcolm that he knew where his wife was. Malcolm in turn had informed Batch Batten that his wife was in San Miguel, Mexico, with her mother. Here Malcolm composed a small rueful smile. “Batch Batten said, and I quote, ‘No, she ain’t.’ He told me you were at a camp near Rufus Sage, Nebraska, and I needed to come pick you up.” Batch had made arrangements to meet Malcolm at the north entrance of the Rufus Sage Municipal Park at 1 P.M. and no later. Malcolm had driven all night and at 12:45 the next afternoon had been waiting for Batch Batten, who drove him close to the camp and, at exactly 1:30, pointed him in the right direction. “Then,” he said, “I hiked to the camp and wandered down to the dock just in time to see my wife and a strange man floating idyllically in a canoe that would shortly thereafter capsize and drown the stranger with whom my wife had been canoeing.”
Judith asked nothing further. The real question—why Willy had wanted Malcolm there—was one only Willy could have answered. For his own amusement? To personally hand back his wife to Malcolm? To force the Malcolm who had glanced past him as he sat on the concrete bench on the Stanford campus to take another look? Or—and this was the one to which Judith was most insistently pulled—to reveal her, though as what and to whom she was not sure.
They left Rufus Sage. By the time they passed through Crawford and Harrison, Malcolm had given up trying to draw Judith into conversation, but in Wyoming, between Lusk and Douglas, he had offered certain information.
He said, “Leo Pottle and Lucy Meynke called every day the first week you were gone, then Leo stopped. Lucy called a few days beyond that, but then she, too, desisted.”
Judith sat enclosed in the denim jacket and stared out at the vast plains, at the stretching shadows and paling light. Dusk soon, she thought, and then dark. The lake would be dark.
Malcolm said, “Milla has a new boyfriend. Theo Lane, by name. He’s an all-state water polo player, some kind of physics whiz kid, and I don’t know what-all.” Malcolm forced a stiff laugh. “After Milla went through the complete résumé, she said, ‘I don’t see how you can objectively disapprove of him.’ ”
Theo Lane, former boyfriend of Torry McQuaid, Judith remembered almost unwillingly.
A mile or two farther down the road, Malcolm said, “There’s something I don’t think I’ve told you.”
Judith said nothing. She wasn’t waiting for what he said next because she didn’t care what he said next. She was merely saying nothing.
Malcolm said, “Francine is no longer working for me. She’s in Boston, working for a bank there. She told me about the job offer a while back. She asked whether I thought she should accept it. I told her she should, and she did.”
After each of these sentences, he had paused to consider the next.
He, too, fell silent then. Judith kept her head turned away from him, toward the window. It was a flat treeless landscape without interest except for the occasional antelope feeding in the day’s last light. Deer can jump fences, but antelope can’t, or won’t, she couldn’t remember which. Willy had told her, a long time ago. How it was a failing that often cost them their lives.
By the time they turned southwest toward Muddy Gap, it was fully dark, and with nothing but the faint illumination of the dashboard, they were able to withdraw into even deeper silence. She should have been sleepy—she’d barely slept the night before—but she couldn’t sleep. Malcolm stared ahead, Judith stared out her side window, and every now and then a distant lighted farmhouse passed through her field of vision, a farmhouse where, she imagined, a family had drawn together at the end of the working day and was sitting down to a meal.
It was after 10 P.M. when they came into Rawlins from the north and pulled into a Conoco station. While Malcolm pumped gas, Judith walked over to an odd car installed along the frontage for promotional purposes. It was long and white and featured two opposing front ends. To Judith, it suggested a kind of vehicular tug-of-war, but painted on its side were the wo
rds Perkins Conoco—Always Moving Ahead.
Judith was cold, and pushed her hands into the pockets of the denim jacket. One day, searching for tissues, perhaps, or for coins, she would notice a small, secured pocket sewn into this jacket’s lining, and find within it the ring with the small diamond inset, the one he had given her long ago, and now had given her again. It would afford her a fleeting sensation of reunion, but that moment was months away. Now she stood, hands in pockets, staring numbly at a car with two front hoods facing in opposite directions.
“Ready?” Malcolm called.
He suggested they find a room, sleep a few hours, and get an early start, but Judith shook her head decisively (the thought of it, asking for single beds or sharing one with Malcolm), so they returned to a public park they had passed and Malcolm found a place for the Jaguar at the dark end of the parking lot. He switched on the door locks, reclined his seat, and fell asleep with his mouth open. Finally Judith dozed, too, and upon awakening was sorry to see where she was and to know why she was there. The comparison to a runaway girl being returned to her foster home came into her head. She opened the door, the dome light flashed on, and Malcolm shot up from his seat. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“Bathroom.” She was surprised how dull and fossilized her voice sounded.
She found a cinder-block bathroom littered with toilet tissue, cigarette butts, and Wendy’s wrappers, the floor wet with who knew what. She hadn’t used a flush toilet since Batch Batten had picked her up at the airport in Rapid City, however many days ago that was, and she took no pleasure in using one now. As she walked back toward the car, she slid her wristwatch over her hand and laid it on the next picnic table she passed.