Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  I thought that was a great answer, but Paddy said, “A person can’t be in probate. What law school did ya go to, ya twit?”

  “He went to the Will Law School,” said Fatty. “When he looks at Lindy, he thinks, I will if you will. But she won’t have anything to do with him!”

  He roared and fell into Pat, while Pat pressed the tips of his fingers together like a spider doing push-ups on a mirror. He did that often, sometimes before a lecture, sometimes before a fight. This time he said, “Drunkenness will get you nowhere, Andy. Take it from me, the sooner you get over her the better.”

  No one noticed Pat’s midsentence shift from his own past drunkenness to Andy’s continued heartache over his wife, save Becky, who put an arm on Andy’s shoulder and kissed him on the ear.

  “She was a really lousy wife,” Andy said. “As bad a wife as Lindy’s ex was a husband, though somehow she managed to stay out of jail.”

  “I was asking why Earl thinks Becky is drawn to Tacoma,” Lindy said. “I’m still here because Fred’s incarcerated, bad husband or not. Fred fucking Kelso. Did any of you know that Fred and I have twins?”

  Earl’s ears perked up, clearly in the hope that she would say “McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary” to him. He tried to answer her question.

  “Tacoma sets Becky free,” he said.

  It wasn’t very enlightening, but Lindy wasn’t very enlightened.

  By the time the french fries were done, all the burgers had been eaten, so Mary collected the plates, wiped bits of meat and crumbs off of them, then loaded them up with fries. Vivian, meanwhile, retreated to the storeroom to refill her Mogen David milk shake container.

  When Ralph came out of the men’s room, which no one had noticed him go into, he sat with the two Omars, who were alone in their booth by then. Ralph hadn’t finished his burger, but Mary’d thought he had and threw what was left of it away. So to make up for it, she gave him extra fries and sat in the booth with him.

  “Becky’s mother was known as ‘The Love Goddess’ back in the forties,” said Earl. His eyes were still on Mary in the mirror. He wanted her back when he was drunk, gone when he was sober. I wanted a beer, and would have poured myself one if Pat hadn’t been watching me, his Irish music turned down. Pat had rheumy eyes, a wife in the storeroom, most of his life behind him.

  Lindy stood, took a look at Earl, then pulled Andy off his stool and went out into the remnants of the evening with him. Earl sat there nodding. No Lindy for him tonight, and no Mary, either, probably.

  “Maybe it’s Pat’s itself that makes you want to stay in Tacoma, Becky,” said Mary. “No one can argue that it isn’t a refuge for us. It’s all for one and one for all at Pat’s.”

  “No one can argue with that,” said Becky, “but I’ve just now been wondering if a town can actually replace a person in someone’s life. Do you think a town can act as a hedge against the unabated loneliness of the human heart, whether mine or anyone else’s?”

  Those were the days when a person could say “the unabated loneliness of the human heart” aloud in a bar.

  Everyone understood that Becky was asking Mary except Hani, who stood out of his booth. “You are talking about Mecca, dearest Becky!” he said. “Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem! Listen to what I am telling you! Your life should have meaning on the day you die! It is place you must put your trust in, Becky; love of place is life’s key!”

  There were tears in his voice, though none in his eyes. Tears were in Pat’s eyes, though, as he stood to pay Jonathan the ten dollars Vivian had promised him.

  Mary said she would stay and close the bar. It was something she often offered after I did most of the work. Lars and Immy left; Sari and Hani pretended they were going to their apartment, though in fact were off in pursuit of the sorts of women who would no longer be available to them when they returned to Saudi Arabia. Earl stayed on his stool until Pat asked him to help carry Paddy and Fatty out to his car. That left Becky, Jonathan, Mary, and me, with Ralph in the booth and Vivian in the storeroom.

  Whose story was this, then? Looking back, I am sure that each thought it was their own…. Mary thought it was hers, Earl and Andy, Lars and Immy … Ralph, Jonathan … whomever you choose likely thought it was theirs, whether principals in the tale I’ve just told or passersby.

  Initially, I thought it was Becky’s story, told by someone who knew her well but briefly, and remembered Hani’s adage when reading her obituary.

  Rebecca Welles Manning, 59, passed away peacefully October 17, 2004, at home in Tacoma, WA. Rebecca is survived by her loving husband, Guy; son Marc; stepchildren Kristine, Michael, Brandi; sisters Yasmin, Christopher, Beatrice; eight grandchildren; and many other family and longtime friends.

  Sixteen people, the very number of those who gathered at Pat’s on that cold Saint Patrick’s night. Sixteen lives branched out back then, and in the stories to follow.

  Or maybe this was Tacoma’s story after all. Maybe Becky understood better than most that place is the secret to not feeling terrorized by everything.

  A Goat’s Breath Carol

  [1958]

  DOWN IN THE CHURCHILLS’ BASEMENT stood a pinball machine that neighborhood kids were allowed to use if they didn’t bother Mrs. Churchill or her daughters, Linda and Winifred—called “Lindy” and “Winnie”—who stayed upstairs. Mr. Churchill was Mexican, a Seventh Day Adventist, and rarely at home. This was back when basement doors were left unlocked and other people’s houses were welcoming.

  Perry White, a kid who lived with his mother in a three-room hovel in the nearby woods—the Churchills had bay-front property—once asked Mr. Churchill what it meant to be a Seventh Day Adventist, but Perry had only been able to understand from his answer that they believed Saturday was Sunday. Perry went to Jason Lee Junior High School with Lindy and Winnie. Every day the school bus stopped by the side of the road between their two houses, between the rich and poor parts of Brown’s Point. Winnie and Perry were seventh graders, while Lindy was in the ninth.

  One morning while they waited for their bus, Lindy called Perry “Chief,” which was what Clark Kent called the other Perry White, from the Superman show on television. A few days earlier, down in her basement, Lindy had asked Perry to pull down his pants and show her his weenie, and when he refused … that was also when she started calling him “Chief.” Perry hated Lindy but had loved Winnie since first grade. Now, however, on the morning in question, since he not only hated Lindy but was afraid of her, he looked at the sister he loved and sang a snide and whiny song—“Old Winnie Churchill waiting for a bus, All puffed up like an old bullfrog. ’long came Hitler and stuck her with a wire, She went poof like an old flat tire!”—causing Winnie to burst into tears.

  Perry was immediately sorry. He’d learned the song from his dad not long before his dad took off. His dad had learned it during World War II, where he was shot in the head, but not by a bullet, as Perry’s mother liked to say. Mussolini was in his dad’s version of the song, but Perry changed it around.

  Perry tried to apologize to Winnie by pulling her hair and otherwise making a nuisance of himself on the bus. During wood shop and in PE, he thought about what he’d done, and came up with the following rule to live by: You shouldn’t wrong the ones you love, but only those who wrong you first.

  The Seventh Day Adventist church stood across the street from their junior high school. Some days Lindy and Winnie didn’t take the bus home but caught a ride with their father, who could be found at the church most afternoons. Perry’s dad had once joked that Mr. Churchill looked like Pancho Villa, making Perry think of Pancho from The Cisco Kid, whom he and Winnie had seen one time on a field trip to the B&I superstore in south Tacoma. So after school he kept his eyes on the church until, sure enough, he saw Mr. Churchill. Pancho Villa had bullets crisscrossing his chest, but Mr. Churchill only wore a regular business suit.

  When Mr. Churchill saw him and called, “Perry, do you want a ride?” Perry called back, “Sure, Mr. Churchi
ll, but where are Lindy and Winnie?”

  “Lindy’s upset,” Mr. Churchill said. “You should have shown her your weenie when she asked you to! You kids have been friends for years.”

  Since the day his dad ran away, over a year ago now, Perry had formed the habit of putting words in other people’s mouths, as a way of calming himself. This time, however, he went too far, and laughed as he walked across the street.

  “What’s so funny, Perry?” Mr. Churchill asked.

  Iglesia Enferma was Churchill in Spanish, his dad had told him once, when they were down on the beach throwing rocks, but when Perry said, “There’s Mr. Iglesia Enferma out fishing,” his dad got mad and cuffed him.

  “I saw you all eating salmon yesterday,” Perry said now. “Was it one you caught?”

  Nothing worked better for changing the subject with adults than asking about something they liked.

  “Got three silvers at the mouth of the Puyallup,” Mr. Churchill said, but then he asked, “Do you know what today is, Perry? It’s an auspicious day for the Adventists.”

  “Monday?” said Perry, since that was the day it was.

  “Not the day, the date. It’s the one-hundred-and-thirty-first birthday of Ellen G. White, the spiritual leader of the Adventists, and an old-time relative of yours, I think.”

  Mr. Churchill slapped him on the back. Perry could see Lindy in the front seat and Winnie in the backseat of Mr. Churchill’s car. “My grandmother’s name is Ellen White,” he said. “But she’s as Presbyterian as a goat.”

  That was a bad thing to say, not because it insulted his grandmother, but because Mrs. Churchill actually kept a goat, named Bountiful. Her hobby was painting abstract pictures of him wearing various hats. She told Perry once that abstract goat paintings were the future of modern art.

  Just as he reached for the door of Mr. Churchill’s car, Winnie pushed down the button that locked it, but when Mr. Churchill glared at her, she pulled it up again, and Perry got in.

  “Perry’s a Seventh Day Adventist, too; he just doesn’t know it yet,” Mr. Churchill told his daughters. “I think you should ask your grandmother to tell you the truth, Perry. It’s a bigger sin to deny your heritage than to call a pretty girl like Winnie Winston Churchill.”

  At first that sounded like something Perry made people say in his head, but Mr. Churchill actually said it. He could feel Winnie watching him and wished he could call Mr. Churchill Mr. Iglesia Enferma, but all he could do was stare at his shoes for the thirty-minute ride back home.

  IT WAS A SMALL THING, MAYBE, but it festered in Perry. The girl he hated had asked to see his weenie, so he’d insulted the girl he loved. In his room that night, he waited until his mother fell asleep in front of the TV, then poured out the beer she’d been drinking, took the half a sandwich she’d been eating with him, and went outside. The sky was clear, the clouds had parted to lay a silver path across the trees, so he loped off through the woods on a shortcut to the houses on the bluff above the beach. He hoped Winnie’s light would be on—if it was, he’d throw a pebble at her window and apologize when she opened it—and failing that, he would sneak into their basement and sit under their pinball machine to wait for her until morning. When he got to Winnie’s house, however, who should he find in her backyard but Bountiful the goat, tethered to the birdbath. It was Winnie’s job to put Bountiful in the garage each night, but tonight she had forgotten him. Perry would do it for her, he decided, and thus make up for putting her name in his father’s World War II song.

  Perry imagined that he was Pancho Villa as he approached the goat. He whispered, “Howdy, Bounty,” while he untied the tether, but Bountiful ran around the birdbath, as if Perry had come to cook and eat him, not to put him to bed.

  “Hey, ya nut, it’s only me,” Perry said, but Mr. and Mrs. Churchill’s bedroom window was right above him and he was afraid if he said anything more, he would wake them up.

  Maybe goats were different during the day than at night, but Bountiful’s fear made him run, not toward the garage, but around the side of the house to the stairs that led to the beach and the bay.

  “No, ya dummy, this way!” hissed Perry, but Bountiful was going so fast by then that he could barely hold on to the tether. They ran to the top of the bank, where Bountiful tore off down toward the beach. Mrs. Churchill took him down there during the summer to paint him amid the driftwood, so he easily maneuvered the stairs, leaving Perry to tumble after him. At the last turn, in fact, if Perry hadn’t let go of the tether, he’d have crashed into Mr. Churchill’s boat.

  It was dark on the beach, the tide so high that water climbed halfway up the Churchills’ bulkhead. Mr. Churchill had a tackle shed down there, too, which was never locked. Perry had the idea to put Bountiful in it, then go home and let the whole thing be a mystery. But he had to catch him first, and he couldn’t even see him in the dark. So he opened the shed and flicked on its light.

  The shed smelled of fish but was clean, like it had been when Perry used to hide in there from his dad. Mr. Churchill’s fishing poles were lined along the wall and there was an icebox with bags of herring in it. Perry thought of using the herring to lure Bountiful into the shed, until he remembered the half-eaten sandwich he’d taken from his mother and pulled it out. And when he looked up again, Bountiful was staring at him from the door.

  “Here, Bounty! Here, boy!”

  He broke off part of the sandwich and tossed it onto the floor. The goat was not a dog and didn’t wag his tail, but he did come in to eat the sandwich, his tether stretching out behind him.

  “Want more?” asked Perry. If he could pet Bounty like he sometimes did when Mrs. Churchill painted him, he might still be able to walk him up the stairs and put him in the garage.

  Bountiful had just taken another step toward him when Perry dived for the tether and the goat ran back outside, catching the tether’s end under the tackle shed’s door. “Ha,” said Perry, “got you now!” but when he reached down to try to free the tether Bountiful ran again, this time straight off the bulkhead, like he thought he’d be able to run along the beach and get away. Perry tried with all his might to jerk the tether loose, but it went taut quickly, making the kind of low thonggg-ing sound that only a hanging goat could make. Perry grabbed two knives from a drawer, leapt out of the shed and down into the bay himself, where he reached above him and tried to cut the tether. Bountiful’s front legs were against his chest as he tried to climb back up to the bulkhead, so Perry dropped one knife while sawing on the tether with the other and also trying to hold Bountiful up.

  “Help me, Jesus!” he yelled, but it was late on a Monday in November and he was alone like he always was, and up to his waist in the freezing water of Puget Sound. Soon he dropped his second knife so he could hoist Bountiful up until the tether went slack. But each time he got him partway over the top of the bulkhead, his strength gave way and Bountiful crashed back down, until he finally said “Maa-aa!” in a terrible little voice, and slumped into silence.

  It was the worst thing that had happened to Perry since his dad left, but he let the goat go and dragged himself out of the bay and crawled back into the tackle shed and closed the drawer that the knives had come from, water dripping from him like it was blood. He turned off the lights and went out to stare at the goat, who was hanging like the mail sack in a Western movie, waiting for a train to come by. The cold and the pain from the wounds Bountiful’s hooves made on him had stayed away till then, but soon he started shivering. And after that the hoof cuts began hurting, like those two lost knives had flown back out of the bay and started stabbing him in the chest.

  “Oh Jesus,” he said again, but Jesus was as silent as He always was.

  “PERRY, IT’S LATE,” called his mother.

  Perry’d been getting himself up for school since third grade, but this morning he stayed in the bathroom until long after he should have been heading to the bus.

  “I know, I’m coming,” he said. He’d been up since dawn, back d
own to the beach to look for the knives, and now he was rubbing his goat-hoof wounds with a concoction he’d made from his mother’s Noxzema plus some crème de menthe from her booze shelf. The concoction stung like fury and seemed to make the wounds form an m and three a’s across his chest. At the beach, he’d found one of the knives, but the tide had taken the other. He hadn’t looked at Bountiful, who still hung like that mail sack.

  Perry went out and slurped some breakfast cereal and left. It was only a five-minute walk to the bus stop, but since the day Lindy asked to see his weenie he’d held back until he saw that the bus was almost there. Yesterday was the first day he hadn’t done that, and now he was a murderer with a goat’s silent scream tattooed on his chest.

  He’d almost reached the bus stop, could hear kids laughing, when Mrs. Churchill’s own scream came up from their house. All the kids froze except for Lindy and Winnie, who dropped their schoolbooks and ran back home to find out what was wrong. At first, Perry ran, too, to catch the bus, but when he saw their schoolbooks, he picked them up. And then he followed them home.

  Bountiful’s funeral was set for late that afternoon, so Perry waited for it, hiding with the schoolbooks in their garage, while his wounds began to swell and fester under his shirt. The garage was a two-story thing with a window in the upstairs part, where Mrs. Churchill kept her goat paintings. Mr. Churchill didn’t go to work that day, and came into the garage twice for shovels, each time muttering curses in Spanish.

  Oh, Cisco. Oh, Pancho! thought Perry.

  It took Mr. Churchill hours to dig the grave, which, Perry heard from his hiding place, had to be three feet deep. Six feet for humans but three feet for animals because animals didn’t have souls—that was what Lindy told her father while he dug. Mrs. Churchill and Winnie stayed inside until 4:00 P.M., then came out dressed in black, while Mr. Churchill and Lindy hurried in to change their clothes. Bountiful was in the corner of their yard in a wheelbarrow, brought up from the beach with the help of the next-door neighbor. Earlier, when all four Churchills were in the house, Perry had sneaked into the yard and lifted the tarp they’d covered him with, found Bountiful’s face, and knelt down in the grass to tell him it was an accident. He started to say, “Heck, Bounty, my whole life has been an accident,” but that was too much of what he really felt, even to tell a dead goat.