Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  Anyway, back to the man who looks at the floor. Late the following Saturday, I saw him again and doubled back to the front desk. The kid who works there was chatting up a couple of girls, so while pretending to read a flyer about the Y’s next squash tournament, I flipped the wooden card box open, rifling through it until I saw a photograph of the top of the head of the man who looks at the floor, in the upper left-hand corner of one of the cards. His name was Jules Rules, of all things, and he lived at 817 North M Street, not very far from Millicent and me. I thought I might say something like “Good luck, Jules” to him when I passed him on the track, but it’s harder than you might think to speak to a man with such a radical physical impairment, so in the end I didn’t say anything. Before our evening stroll that night, however, I told Millicent that I wanted to walk up into Tacoma’s middle-alphabet streets, J, K, L, and M. We lived on G Street ourselves, and below us, toward the bay, were A, C, D, and E, our usual haunts. B Street was missing; don’t ask me why.

  “I thought our purpose was to look at the bay,” she said.

  My purpose had been to get Millicent looking at the boats on the bay, in preparation for suggesting that we buy one.

  “That’s true,” I said, “but let’s walk up the hill tonight.”

  I’d grown up in Tacoma, and my grandmother lived on K Street, so perhaps Millicent thought I wanted to walk by her house, which had gone to the dogs. But let her think what she wanted; 817 North M was my goal. Jules Rules wouldn’t be fooling me much longer!

  “You know, Milly called last evening when you were out. I can’t believe I forgot to tell you,” Millicent said.

  “What’s up with Milly?” I asked. “I hope she didn’t cancel her visit.”

  “Au contraire, she moved it up to next week,” said Millicent, “and she’s bringing someone with her.”

  This she forgot to tell me? It was so unlike Millicent to forget anything regarding Milly that I suspected she’d neither forgotten nor told me everything. Maybe Milly was married, maybe even pregnant. Milly had never been a girl with measured pleasures. Once she brought seven puppies home from a garage sale.

  At the corner where we usually turned toward the bay, we walked up past Yakima Avenue, then headed toward the middle of the alphabet. “Look at the way those oak tree roots are breaking up the sidewalk,” said Millicent. “Nature and human nature both break everything up if you give them enough time. Don’t you think so, Jonathan?”

  “Nature and human nature both break everything up” was my second warning that something was wrong.

  Our strolls weren’t meant to help get us in shape but as a time for us to talk about the regular busyness of our days, even though we were retired. Retirement meant volunteer tutoring for Millicent, and local government watchdogging for me. She wanted Tacoma’s children well educated, and I wanted my hometown’s continued revitalization.

  Millicent dallied beside me, pointing out places where other tree roots had buckled the sidewalk.

  “Is Milly bringing a guy?” I asked. “If so, what are we going to do about the sleeping arrangements?”

  We had worked our way up to Eighth and J, past the house of a girl I had liked in high school. Beautiful girl, a Mary Tyler Moore look-alike.

  “His name is Philip,” said Millicent. “I hope it isn’t Philip Pirrip. And we’ll ignore the sleeping arrangements, Jonathan. She’s thirty-one years old.”

  Philip Pirrip, ha! I loved it when Millicent got literary.

  Once we got to L Street, we headed down to Ninth, then cut up to M and doubled back. Jules Rules’s house was one away from the corner on our left. Someone had put a ladder against his roof, as if repairs were going on.

  “That’s where he lives,” I said. “I got his address at the Y.”

  “That’s where who lives?” Millicent asked before rolling her eyes and saying, “He wasn’t talking about the president of Nigeria, Jonathan!”

  “Maybe not, but you know what happened the week before we left that place. Once fooled, twice … Twice what is it, Millicent?”

  But she wouldn’t tell me. We were still on the corner when Jules Rules’s front door opened and the man himself came out, dressed in overalls and staring furiously at his lawn.

  “At least he isn’t faking it,” I said. “Or he’s very well trained.”

  “He’s not going to climb that ladder, is he?” asked Millicent. “Look, there’s a paint bucket in his flower bed.”

  “I don’t know what he’s going to do, but let’s watch him do it,” I said.

  It was easier to spy on someone who couldn’t look up than on anyone I had ever spied on in my life. On the track, Jules sometimes violated the borders of the lanes, which was fine, considering his condition, but for him to try to climb that ladder really did seem foolish. He might break his already-broken neck.

  “One of us should steady that ladder for him,” Millicent said.

  I couldn’t steady it for him, even Jules Rules would catch me then, but it did give me an idea. “You do it, Mills,” I said. “Go get to know him. Be my mole.”

  Millicent kicked at the broken sidewalk, but she also shot across the street and into Jules’s flower bed before he was halfway up the ladder. “Howdy, partner,” she said. “How about I hold this for you? Don’t want you getting bucked off.”

  Millicent is English, as I’ve said, but good at accents—a natural spy herself.

  “Thanks,” said Jules. “It does get a little shaky. You live around these parts?”

  These parts? Good Christ.

  “Yep,” said Millicent. “How about you? Lived here long? Ever lived in any other country?”

  That was not the way a mole should act! You don’t come right out and ask something. You hang around, glean the information, like you don’t care much about it either way.

  “I have lived abroad, but I grew up here,” said Jules.

  Okay, so once in a while the direct approach pays off.

  “I’ve lived abroad, too,” said Millicent.

  She’d slipped out of her cowboy accent and was British again, but Jules didn’t seem to notice. He’d climbed up as far as his rain gutters.

  “What are you up to?” she asked. “Do you need this paint up there with you?”

  I sprinted to a nearby oak tree, my back against its trunk on the side they couldn’t see.

  “It’s turpentine,” said Jules. “I was spray-painting my house last week when I accidentally sprayed a bit of the roof, and it’s driving me crazy. I thought I’d try to turpentine it off.”

  Sure enough, a few of the roof’s shingles right above where his ladder was had a mist of grayish color on them, fanning out in the pattern that a paint sprayer might make. Oh, he was good! Deep, deep cover, if you ask me!

  “You spray-painted your house?” asked Millicent. “How in the world did you manage that, with mirrors or something?”

  In all the times I’d seen him at the Y, I had never heard anyone ask Jules what made him look down, yet Millicent asked it right away. Milly was like that, too. No bones about anything with the women in my family.

  “I’ve got Bean’s facedown syndrome,” Jules said.

  Millicent picked up the turpentine can and stepped onto the ladder.

  “It’s a rare condition, not life-threatening, but terminal as far as having things look up again,” he said.

  He was a fast-talking con man, that’s what he was, with Millicent standing there on his ladder with him. I edged my way around the oak tree, back still flat against it.

  “Things will look up again!” said Millicent. “Your face might not, but things? Have some faith, Ju—”

  He had climbed onto the roof and hooked his heels on the rain gutter, head between his knees. Millicent put the turpentine can on the spray-painted shingles and scooted up next to him. She gave me a look that said, Get the hell out of here, Jonathan.

  “Just what?” asked Jules. “You were about to say ‘just,’ but stopped.”

 
“Just get on with your life,” she said. “Stiff upper lip and all of that.”

  To get one’s wife on the roof of the house of the man you suspect of spying on you … not bad for someone as completely retired as I.

  MILLY AND PHILIP ARRIVED A FEW DAYS LATER, so for a time I had to put my Jules Rules obsession on hold. We rented a boat and cruised up to the top of Puget Sound, fishing and eating and talking. Milly was different this time, in love with Philip Pirrip, who had rowed at Oxford, finished medical school at Cambridge, and was now a cardiologist, his offices next to Milly’s in London. He was thrilled with the boat adventure and rowed our dinghy each night after we anchored while Milly snorkeled around him like a little wet duck.

  Over drinks one night, Millicent and I listened to Milly and Philip’s plans: a short engagement, marriage at Philip’s parents’ house. We were anchored off Point No Point, sunburned on the deck, and when Millicent went inside to use the loo, as she called it, I asked Philip, “Have you ever heard of something called Bean’s facedown syndrome?”

  “What’s that?” he said. He was flipping burgers on the boat’s tiny grill.

  “Bean’s facedown syndrome.”

  I’d looked for the condition online but hadn’t found it. Milly, who’d been sitting nearby with Fathead, said, “Bean’s facedown syndrome is an interesting condition, Dad. Utterly psychosomatic, and usually connected with feelings of shame over something that happened in childhood.”

  “What?” said Millicent, who had just come back on deck.

  “Bean was the doctor who first observed it,” said Milly.

  Millicent and I told Milly and Philip the whole story, from that first snide “Good luck, Jonathan,” right up to Millicent sitting on the man’s roof.

  “He invited your mom to dinner,” I told Milly. “I think she would have accepted, but we had you coming, and then this boat trip.”

  “Poor guy,” said Philip. “Probably the first time that an attractive woman has taken an interest in him.”

  “Easiest thing in the world to fake, though,” said Milly. “Why doesn’t Mom accept the invitation now and the rest of us can ring that oak tree, Dad. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “I’m not so sure it would be easy to fake,” said Philip. “Think what havoc it would play on one’s back and neck.”

  Milly served the burgers while Millicent fed Fathead. To my surprise, she didn’t scold me for bringing the whole thing up. “I’ll do it as soon as we get back,” she said.

  PHILIP’S FAMILY NAME WASN’T PIRRIP, of course, but Hertweck. I usually said Hartwick, and each time I did so, Milly got this condescending expression on her face. But ask yourself, isn’t Philip Hartwick a whole lot easier to remember than Philip Hertweck?

  Over the next two weeks, Milly and Philip got passes to the Y, and Millicent went back to Jules Rules’s house, where she not only accepted his dinner invitation but helped him rip out some ugly paneling on either side of his fireplace, reexposing two small windows and filling his living room with light. She got so involved with it that a couple of times she even canceled her tutoring obligations. She seemed to have forgotten that the whole thing was a ruse, that she was there to discover the truth, while Philip and Milly took turns shadowing Jules on the track, in search of evidence that he was faking Bean’s facedown syndrome.

  “There are no photos in his house,” said Millicent, “but he was married once, and he did have children. Every time I bring it up, however, he changes the subject.”

  She was sorry now, I think, to have wasted so much time helping Jules Rules, since Milly and Philip’s holiday was drawing to a close. And Milly seemed sorry also. “We should forget this silliness,” she said, but we couldn’t forget it, since we were in two camps regarding everything. Philip and Millicent believed Jules Rules was genuine, while Milly and I grew progressively more suspicious, me because his “Good luck, Jonathan” wisecracking had escalated, and Milly because if he actually did have Bean’s facedown syndrome, she wanted to study him.

  “Most of my patients are dull,” she said. “I mean, how many times can a girl get off prescribing antidepressants?”

  “Not very many,” I said, though I didn’t like her saying “get off” in front of her mother. Or in front of me, either, if it came right down to it.

  “Well, we have to stop this no matter what,” Millicent said. “Jules is falling in love with me, Jonathan!”

  “How does he know what you look like?” I asked. “Did you lie on his floor and look up at him?”

  Philip laughed, but Millicent said she’d stop going up there right now if she didn’t have her dinner date with him the very next night.

  “Honestly, Jonathan, you’re such a boor,” she said. “He’s a lonely man, and a funny one, too, though no one gives him much of a chance to show it.”

  “Right,” said Milly. “So much of humor resides in facial expressions.”

  “I’ll have you know I asked him a bit more about his medical condition,” Millicent said, “and now he’s calling it ‘isolated neck exterior myopathy,’ INEM for short.”

  “But INEM is Bean’s facedown syndrome,” said Philip. “Otherwise, there’d be a specific neuromuscular diagnosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, God forbid, or Parkinson’s disease….” He paused, then added, “I’ve been doing a little research. Haven’t had to think of these things since I did my head rotation.”

  Now I laughed, but Milly didn’t.

  “Do you even care that his wife left him over this thing?” asked Millicent. “Or that he’s conquered his devils, painted his house, and has a bunch of other projects lined up? I sincerely wish that you would conquer your devils, Jonathan.”

  Later that evening, I apologized to Millicent and asked her to cancel her dinner, but she wouldn’t do it. “You always act like this, Jonathan,” she said. “You get some harebrained idea—a man tells you ‘good luck,’ and you think he’s an Agency plant—and then you drag me into it. Only then do you realize your paranoia and try to drag me back out of it again. Well, this time I’m seeing it through. He’s making his special Nigerian hot pepper soup.”

  “What?”

  I leapt out of my chair like he had just poured the soup in my lap. I asked Milly and Philip to go to the Y without me, so Millicent and I could talk.

  “I didn’t tell you because I knew it would make you crazier than ever,” she said. “But Jules was a geologist before he retired, had a couple of contracts with Schlumberger in Nigeria. The last one at about the time you got into your trouble.”

  “Ha!” I shouted.

  “Even if he did somehow recognize you, it was only a joke, a tease to make his exercise time go by.”

  “Did you come right out and ask him?” I asked. “I want to know right now!”

  After my report on Goodluck Jonathan’s cronies was dismissed by the Agency, I got my picture in a few of the Nigerian dailies for something I tried to pull off regarding proving the truth of my report.

  “I didn’t have to ask him,” Millicent said. “He just started talking. What was I supposed to do, tell him not to tell me about his life?”

  “Is that when he said he was in love with you?”

  “That’s enough!” said Millicent. “Really, Jonathan. I didn’t believe it back in Nigeria, but now I think I agree with Porky. You need help.”

  “Porky” was our nickname for the U.S. ambassador, who’d had to bail me out. I once accused Millicent of naming Fathead Fathead because she wanted to have a reminder of Porky in our house. It’s a long and twisted story, that of Millicent’s various crushes.

  “Just tell me what you know,” I said. “Then call this sucker up and cancel on him.”

  I’d gotten thrown in jail in Nigeria because I had tried to blackmail Goodluck Jonathan. Not directly but through channels. I wanted to prove he wasn’t corrupt, in order to defend my report, so I kept very good records on the blackmail. Thus, I was able to clear myself of any real wrongdoing, at least as far as the U.
S. government was concerned. The blackmail had to do with evidence we had concerning true corruption on the Nigerian World Cup soccer team. I had asked for a meeting with Goodluck Jonathan as my price for keeping it quiet, and when I arrived for the meeting, I was arrested for meddling in internal politics. Goodluck suspended the soccer team from international competition and ordered me deported. Langley was so angry that they nearly docked a portion of my pension, until Porky intervened.

  Millicent didn’t respond to my second demand that she cancel her dinner, but went out to our backyard with Fathead. I knew better than to follow her—forcing the issue never worked with Millicent—so I grabbed my gym bag and headed out the door. If Milly was still at the Y, I’d ask her advice, and if Jules was there, I’d stick my head beneath his gaze and demand that he uninvite my wife. A geologist! What perfection! The only job where Bean’s facedown syndrome was an advantage!

  The kid at the front desk had his hands folded over the check-in box, so I couldn’t discover who was there without going onto the track. I usually arrived dressed for exercise, but this time I stepped into the locker room to slip out of my jeans and street shoes. No one was in the locker room proper, but two pairs of shoes lay on the floor. I could hear water running in the shower, and also began to hear voices. A tiled parapet separated the changing room from the showers. The two pairs of shoes were inanimate before the voices came to me but snapped to attention now, like shoes are wont to do in cartoons: a pair of white Adidas that I had seen traversing the deck of the boat we’d rented, and—you guessed it—the gray New Balances that Jules Rules always wore. Jules Rules, who loved my wife, was in the shower with Philip Pirrip, who loved my daughter! I was in my track suit with my street clothes in my bag, ready to run if I heard the shower stop. But even a fervent antieavesdropper would have trouble in a situation like this, don’t you think, not pressing an ear against the parapet?

  “Coronary thrombosis is an ischemic heart disease and can lead to myocardial infarction,” Phillip was saying. “Sometimes the terms are used synonymously, but thrombosis specifically means that a thrombus occupies more than seventy-five percent of the lumen of an artery. So it’s a warning of pending infarction but not the infarction itself. A thrombus, of course, is a blood clot.”