Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  “Frank Sinatra?” asked Mrs. Kant, back with the Cokes, and Mr. Kant said, pretty clearly again, “I want to tell you something, young man. Are you listening to me? Because I don’t want to have to say it twice.” He waved a hand in front of Perry’s face. “This is the day of the reckoning of names. Precious Donna Smiley, Perry Frank White, and Herbert Bilge Kant. From today, we all get new starts.”

  “What about Richie and Mrs. Kant?” asked Precious.

  “I don’t have a middle name,” said Mrs. Kant, “but my maiden name is Thomas.”

  She barked out such a loud laugh that I laughed, too, though I didn’t know what was funny about Thomas. It wasn’t as lame as Darrell, which was my middle name. When Mr. Kant looked at her, the goodwill drained from his face. I nudged Precious. This was why we’d come, to save him from himself.

  “I think it’s time for you to go,” said Mrs. Kant. “Bilge here needs to rest.”

  The corners of her eyes had tears in them. When none of us made a move to leave, she said, “What?”

  “Another book?” I asked, but Perry leaned down to speak into Mr. Kant’s face. “It ain’t true, is it, what you said just now?”

  “What?” asked Mr. Kant, grumpy and garbled as hell.

  “That from today we all get new starts. ’Cause lemme tell you, if I don’t get one pretty soon, I doubt I’ll last as long as you do.”

  The tears in the corners of Mrs. Kant’s eyes moved out to fill them entirely.

  “Richie’s grandpa killed himself, too,” said Perry. “Shot himself in the head with an arrow. If I get around to killing myself, I’m gonna swim out in the bay till I can’t swim no more. I’ll struggle like hell till I go down.”

  “Why don’t we do that, Herb?” said Mrs. Kant. “Struggle like hell till we go down. Life’s not over till it’s over; we shouldn’t have to learn that from a child!”

  We made our way back through their kitchen, all of us ready to get out of there. But Mrs. Kant forced a copy of Huckleberry Finn on Perry and, on Precious, an English novel about sisters trying to get married. She gave me The Grapes of Wrath, with her name on the inside cover, from back when she was a girl: “Eva Sylvia Maria Thomas.”

  So Mrs. Kant had lied. She had two middle names, just like Grandma.

  DAD WAS WAITING FOR ME WHEN I GOT HOME, beer bottles on the coffee table surrounding our phone. “What’s with the binder, mister, and what’s this about Grandma writing stuff down?” he asked from out of the dark.

  I hadn’t seen him, and I jumped, letting the binder slip out from under my shirt. When I gave it to him, he went to the window with it. He was still wearing his running clothes but had pulled Grandma’s afghan from the couch and was wearing it, too, like a shawl.

  “How much of this have you read?” he asked.

  “Just the part about Tiger Lilly’s death,” I said, “but is there something in there about you and Mrs. White?”

  Before he could answer, I realized that “what’s this about Grandma writing stuff down?” was like that “old bird” thing at Perry’s house. Our phone got bigger among the beer bottles. “Did Mrs. White call you?” I asked.

  “She did, and she laid down the law. There’s nothing new about any of this, Richie. I want you to know it happens to a lot of people…. Look, are you sure you didn’t read more? Because Loretta read it all and she isn’t very happy about it.”

  “What are you saying, Dad? Was Perry’s mom your girlfriend?”

  He took off Grandma’s afghan, folding it like Grandma always had. In the car coming home from her funeral, he’d said we shouldn’t let our lives go downhill, that we should honor Grandma’s memory by keeping things the way she liked them, and I guessed folding the afghan was part of it.

  “If you haven’t already read about it, then yes, she was my girlfriend. Ours was one of those deeply painful loves that only kids can feel, as I’m sure you’ll find out in a few years’ time.”

  “I don’t want to find it out,” I said. “I’m doing fine not loving anyone.”

  I didn’t mean that the way it came out.

  “We’ll see, but when Perry’s mom broke up with me, it hurt like taking a bullet,” he said. “I hung around her house every day for a month, until her father chased me off.”

  “If she broke up with you, then how come she gets to lay down the law?”

  “Because for her, it was like taking a bullet, too. We were in love like Romeo and Juliet, Richie, but when World War II broke out and I joined the service, she didn’t want me carrying our love into battle. She thought breaking up with me was the greatest sacrifice she could make. We promised each other we’d meet after the war, but between Pearl Harbor and the end of high school, she started dating this army guy, and a week after we graduated, she married him. That was when I wrote what I wrote on my binder. It made me want to fight like hell during the war.”

  He picked up a beer bottle and drank from it. “But time passed and I met your mom down around Fort Bragg, where I spent the whole damned time.”

  One of Dad’s regrets was that he didn’t get to fight like hell but was trained as a drill instructor instead. “Down around Fort Bragg” was where my mom lived now.

  He sat back down on the couch. “The month after your mom got pregnant with you, my dad died in the crazy accident you read about, and I came home for his funeral … and that’s when Loretta and I suffered a relapse.”

  He tried to find my eyes, but I’d stayed in the darkest part of the room. If “relapse” meant what I thought it meant, I didn’t want to hear more.

  “We met at her house. Her husband was in England, her father in the navy, her mother always working, so we had the place to ourselves. It was Valentine’s Day and I’d taken her flowers from my dad’s memorial service.”

  He went on to say it happened only once, that Loretta was laying down the law because Perry and I both had a right to know, and that while he was telling me, she was telling Perry. More words came out of him, but I ran back outside, jumped on my bike, and zoomed off into the night. Perry’s birthday was November 14, nine months after Valentine’s Day, 1945.

  IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER TEN WHEN I GOT BACK to the Kants’ house, with two beers I had filched from Dad’s stash. Since the tide was high, I couldn’t sit under their deck, so I climbed into a madrona tree in the next-door lot. Their bedroom curtains were closed, but I could see inside over the top of the curtain rod. One of the madrona’s branches was close enough to the house for me to reach over and pry off the beer bottle caps on a protruding nail. “Loretta sucks hind tit!” I yelled into the night.

  Mrs. Kant pushed the curtains aside and cupped her hands against the glass. I was higher in the tree by the time she opened the window.

  “Don’t tell me it was nothing, Herb. I heard what I heard, and I know who said it, too,” she said. “It was Perry White.”

  She stuck her head out. “Perry, go home! Your mother deserves better than to have an ungrateful son calling her names!”

  She closed the window and curtains, and I drank both beers and almost fell out of the madrona.

  The lights were off at Perry’s house. I’d drunk the beers fast, so I wasn’t feeling great, but I still couldn’t help wondering if Perry was buried under his covers in his room, hating the idea that we were brothers. Mr. White had left his mom, which meant his mom was single, and my mom was down around Fort Bragg. I looked over at Precious’s house. If Grandma knew about Dad and Perry’s mom, and therefore about Perry and me, then a lot of the neighbors probably did, too.

  It wasn’t until I looked back at Perry’s house that I finally saw Perry himself, sitting up in his tree house.

  “Hi, Richie,” he said. “Are you happy or sad right now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m still digesting it.”

  “Yeah, well I’ve digested it and what I think we should do is join the band in high school and take up the same instrument, like trombone. My cousin plays trombone and says they have s
word fights with their slides.”

  If Perry had a cousin, did that mean I did, too?

  “Now that I think about it, how about the sax?” he said. “But I get the bigger one, since I’m older’n you are.”

  He wasn’t older; I was, by a month. He jumped down from his tree house, as quiet as a panther in the forest.

  “What’s a saxophone sound like?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Perry. What does anything sound like? You know what a trumpet sounds like?”

  “Course I do,” he said. “Who doesn’t know that?”

  “Well, it doesn’t sound like a trumpet.”

  I nearly said it sounded like a bird in flight—something Dad liked to say about his Charlie Parker records—but Perry’s mom’s car came up the street just then. She parked, got out, and lit a cigarette.

  “She don’t let me smoke but smokes herself,” Perry said.

  In the flash of the lights from her car, I’d seen his beady eyes, like the eyes of someone who would torment a weasel before taking its fur to make a coat. And in what he said next, I saw those eyes again, though it was dark.

  “Listen, dipshit, we ain’t brothers. I ain’t nobody’s brother, and you’re dumber’n a skunk if you think I give a damn about the saxophone.”

  His mother peered into the woods. “You boys come here,” she said. “I don’t guess this’ll be easy, but the truth is better than lies.”

  “Not if it ain’t the truth,” said Perry.

  He stepped into the clearing, like Billy the Kid before a gunfight. “My dad’s my dad,” he said. “I ain’t no Lilly; I’m a White.”

  “Your dad was your dad, for the years we had him,” said his mother, “but now you’ve got me, Richie, and maybe Richie’s dad, if you can come to terms with it. He said he’d like to take us to a Giants game. How would you feel about that?”

  The Tacoma Giants were the AAA club for San Francisco, and Dad had tickets for when the big club came to play.

  I stepped out of the woods, too. “Word is, Marichal’s pitching,” I said.

  “My dad could pitch better’n him,” said Perry. “Who do you think taught me how to throw rocks? He coulda been better if the war hadn’t got him.”

  He looked so forlorn that I thought he might say that thing about swimming out into the bay again, when who should come outside just then but Precious, her father behind her with his hands on her shoulders.

  “Precious, we’re going to a baseball game,” I said. “You wanta come?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” she said. “When’s the game?”

  “Evening, all,” said Howdy.

  No one spoke to him for such a long time that Perry’s mother finally muttered, “Howdy, Howdy,” like the neighbors always did to make him mad.

  “I’ll find out when it is and call you,” I said. “Don’t go to sleep yet; wait by your phone.”

  “And I’ll drive you home,” said Mrs. White. “It’s too late to be riding your bike.”

  It wasn’t too late to be riding my bike; we all rode our bikes anywhere and anytime. But if Dad was as single as Romeo and she was as single as Juliet, a well-timed car ride might be just the ticket. She jangled her keys, not at me but at Perry. “You coming, too?” she asked.

  “What’s in it for me?” he asked. “And what am I s’pose to call Richie’s dad?”

  “We live next-door to Winnie; that’s what’s in it for you,” I said.

  Mrs. White threw her cigarette down, opened her car door again, then looked at Perry and me. Not at the two of us together, but first at one of us and then at the other, like she was seeing if we looked alike.

  Then she got in her car and started it.

  AT OUR HOUSE, even though it was kinda late, Dad had showered, shaved, put back on the clothes he’d worn to Grandma’s funeral, and was waiting for us in our backyard. Behind him, a couple of Grandma’s candelabras sat on our picnic table. There were wineglasses and bunches of flowers from Grandma’s funeral, too. It meant that when Dad and Perry’s mom had their relapse back in 1945, he’d brought her flowers from his father’s funeral, and now, as they were about to have their second relapse, his mother’s funeral provided the floral arrangements.

  When we went up onto the porch, I opened our back door fast so that Perry and I could go where we wouldn’t have to watch their second relapse right before our eyes. We’d watch it, but from behind Grandma’s curtains. That was a whole lot better than being there. If you don’t believe me, just ask Romeo. Once he came out into the open, things went downhill fast.

  As soon as I could drag our phone into the dining room, I called Precious, even though I didn’t know the details of the baseball game yet.

  “Richie?” she said.

  Out the window, I could see Dad and Mrs. White sitting on opposite sides of a plate of little sandwiches, which we’d also brought from Grandma’s funeral.

  Precious said “Richie?” again but I just sat there, with both of us breathing on opposite ends of the telephone line. Do you know how that can be? I knew it, and I swore that Precious knew it, too. But she didn’t, I guess, because she hung up without saying anything more. Perry’d found Grandma’s afghan in our living room by then and was wearing it like a cape. He ran past me a couple of times as Superman, then sauntered by as Clark Kent. The real Clark Kent, George Reeves, killed himself last year, just after Perry and Precious and I finished eighth grade.

  Outside, Dad and Perry’s mom were drinking wine. I had the thought that “Loretta sucks hind tit!” might become a family joke, something we told one another over the years, but the thought went away when our phone rang….

  It was Precious, of course, wanting to know what happened. I let it ring three times, since that was the number of times that Grandma said was necessary for a person not to seem anxious.

  But my anxiety showed anyway, I think, in the tone I used to say hello.

  The Dangerous Gift of Beauty

  [2001]

  MARY FROM THE JAGUAR AGENCY sometimes thought of herself as Gloria Trillo, who sold Mercedes-Benzes on The Sopranos and became Tony’s mistress for a while. She thought of herself that way because men bought Jaguars from her much more readily than they did from any of her male-counterpart salespeople, and because Annabella Sciorra, the actress who played Gloria Trillo, also starred in the movie The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which was filmed at 808 North Yakima Avenue, a few blocks away from Mary’s home, in Tacoma, Washington. During the filming of the movie, in fact, Mary had walked down to watch the goings-on, and once saw Annabella standing in the shade of an oak tree, thinking her actress thoughts.

  Selling Jaguars in Tacoma at first had seemed oxymoronic to Mary, since Jags were expensive and Tacoma was a working-class town, but the agency’s owner said he knew what sold luxury cars and that her look, which was sexy in the way of a trimmed-out librarian, was it. He said, “Let me worry about oxymorons,” gave her the job, and the rest is local Jaguar-selling history.

  Whenever Mary thought of Annabella Sciorra, she also tended to think of Sister Wendy Beckett, the British art-critic nun who said, “God did not give me the dangerous gift of beauty” on TV. Mary, who’d been in bed with Earl, her lover, drinking wine and eating crackers when she heard it, reacted as if Sister Wendy Beckett were speaking directly to her. She had the gift of beauty, dangerous or not, and this semi-cloistered art critic was asking her what she was going to do about it. It was a turning point for Mary, who pointed at Sister Wendy Beckett’s television image. “What if she had been beautiful?” she asked Earl. “How would it have changed her life, and how would the lack of beauty have changed mine? If I were Sister Wendy, would you be here in bed with me, Earl, drinking this wine?”

  She knew she’d said it wrong but let it stand.

  “What?” asked Earl, sopping up the wine she’d spilled. And then he said, quite fatally, “You know as well as I do that in this world, physical beauty dictates.”

  Earlier, he’d said he loved her li
ke Galileo loved the nighttime sky, but this told her that he didn’t so much love her as the shell she lived in. So she got out of bed, pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt, went outside to the “loaner” Jag she often drove, and cruised on over to 808 North Yakima, where she’d seen Annabella Sciorra that time. There were lights on in the house, but she parked at the curb anyway and walked up onto the lawn.

  “Who is the me that I want Earl to see if the me he sees isn’t me?” she asked the wraparound porch.

  She hoped that Annabella might materialize and answer her, but even without it Mary knew that including Earl in her question was inessential to the power of it. Earl was just a placeholder.

  There was a gap in the curtains covering the windows on the left side of the house, beyond a chestnut tree. She glanced back down at the loaner Jag, then stepped into the shadows by the window to peek through the gap in the curtains and think about her question. “Who is the me that I want Earl to see if the me he sees isn’t me?” It was a serious moment, but she couldn’t help noticing that the cadence of her question bore a strong similarity to “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” And that, in turn, caused a lightness of heart to invade her that she hadn’t felt since before the dangerous gift made her the target of men from one side of town to the other. “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Yes, it was identical to her Earl question.

  Mary saw a man sitting reading in the room of the house visible through the gap in the curtains. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, too, with his bare feet crossed at the ankles and, like Mary and Earl at Earl’s house, he had a glass of wine on a table beside his chair, with the nice addition of a few slices of cheese on a plate. He was a handsome man, easily her equal on the beauty scale.