Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  Mrs. Churchill was tall and thin like Olive Oyl, only with a prettier face than Olive Oyl’s. She was taller than Mr. Churchill, and taller than both her girls. Mr. Churchill went to get Bountiful, while Lindy and Winnie leaned against their mother. Mr. Churchill said, “Oof” and “mierda” while he hefted the wheelbarrow, but when he got to the grave and pulled the tarp off Bountiful, he didn’t say anything more. Winnie and her mother both held Bibles, while Lindy and her father did not. All of them stood like a cowboy’s family on Boot Hill, with a late wind blowing and Mrs. Churchill and Winnie praying and Mr. Churchill and Lindy casting their eyes toward the clouds. Things were going according to Mr. Churchill’s plan, Perry figured, until Mrs. Churchill said, “I don’t want you dumping him in there, Carlos; I want him lowered down.”

  Carlos was Mr. Churchill’s first name. Carlos Iglesia Enferma in Spanish.

  How am I supposed to do that? said Mr. Churchill’s look, though his lips stayed pursed, like they were sewn.

  Perry stared at the goat painting next to him in the upstairs part of their garage. It was one in a series Mrs. Churchill had done last summer called “Goat’s Breath Paintings.” In each of them a cartoon balloon came from Bountiful’s mouth, and in the one Perry looked at now, Bountiful was saying, “I am the goat of Christmas yet to come.”

  Mr. Churchill came into the garage for ropes, but if he was going to lower Bountiful down, he’d need help, so when he went back outside, Perry sneaked out a side door, ran down the street, then came back toward the Churchills’ house like he happened to be passing with the books Lindy and Winnie had dropped. He walked into their yard and said, “Hello, everyone. I found these in the street.”

  All the Churchills looked at him, two faces composed, two faces not. When Perry looked at Lindy and Mr. Churchill, his chest wounds hurt, but when he looked at Mrs. Churchill and Winnie, he said what he’d thought about saying when he was hiding in their garage. “Bounty was a good goat, and a great subject for paintings.” He wanted to say more. He wanted to say that Bounty was a better goat than his grandmother was a Presbyterian, but the little he had said brought a smile to Mrs. Churchill’s face.

  Mr. Churchill smiled, too. “Perry, would you give me a hand?” he asked.

  “Sure,” said Perry.

  In death, Bountiful seemed twice the size that he had in life, with the bay water bulking him up. Three feet deep for animals, since animals didn’t have souls. When Mr. Churchill shifted his eyes to the floor of the grave a few times and Perry got the hint and jumped down into it, he felt and then heard his goat-hoof wounds say … maa-aa. Mrs. Churchill seemed to hear it, too, and stepped closer to the goat in the wheelbarrow, to search his glassy eyes. She loved him as much as she loved her husband; that was her secret shame.

  When Mr. Churchill saw the change come over his wife, he believed it was a signal to start the burial. When he lifted the wheelbarrow handles, it felt like it had last summer when he’d tried to pour a concrete patio by himself. He nearly said mierda again, but managed to say, “Are you ready down there, Perry?” instead.

  Perry knew he had to do this right, that he had to be strong, though his body was weak. “Yessir,” he said. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  A tipped wheelbarrow is hard to control if it’s loaded with wet cement, though wet cement can be released in dabs and splashes, while a dead goat clings to it by locks of hair twisted on spikes of the previous cement, now grown hard. Bountiful was hanging on above him, Perry briefly thought, for dear life, and that made him smile, releasing in Winnie enough of a sense of well-being for her to smile back.

  “You can do it, Perry,” she said.

  Mr. Churchill pulled the wheelbarrow handles farther up. Bountiful’s head was nearest Perry, his eyes still open, his mouth twisted sideways, with some seaweed stuck in it. His body seemed as big as the blimps that rode the summer airwaves, like the blimp of a sky shark Perry had seen one time.

  “He’s stuck,” said Lindy. “I think his weenie’s holding on to the wheelbarrow.”

  Perry thought of his habit of putting words into other people’s mouths as a curse. This time, however, he glared up at Lindy like she’d actually said it. What she had said was, “Tip the wheelbarrow up, Dad,” making Mr. Churchill hoist its handles even more, until they were near his armpits.

  Yet Bountiful still hung on, his angle so radical now that he reminded Perry of the bombs his father used to drop on the German villages during the war. His father had told him that if a bomb got stuck, he, as bombardier, had had to climb down into the airplane’s belly and release it with his own two hands. He’d told that story lot of times, and now Bountiful was the bomb about to be released and Perry was the German village.

  Mr. Churchill shifted his grip, so instead of pulling the wheelbarrow handles to his armpits he was pushing them up from underneath, like they were barbells. For a while it seemed that no matter what Mr. Churchill did Bountiful was going to stay there, but then he swung out like a bale of hay from a barn and dropped, covering the distance to Perry and his outstretched hands in no time.

  “Oh, Carlos!” Perry heard Mrs. Churchill say as he took Bountiful’s head against his chest and wrapped his arms around his shoulders.

  He’d jumped toward the descending goat, meeting him in the air, so when they plowed into the muddy grave, they were twisted together like strands of taffy, like the lines on the barber pole in front of the shop where Perry and his dad used to get their hair cut. It felt to Perry like he was being pounded into the earth, like he hadn’t softened Bountiful’s fall, but had propelled him into his final resting place even less gently than if they’d simply thrown him in. He said, “Oof,” like Mr. Churchill had, but his voice was muffled by a mouthful of goat hair.

  To Mrs. Churchill and Winnie, however, it seemed as though Perry had caught Bountiful and executed a heroic pirouette, like Nijinsky when they saw him on TV that time.

  Mr. Churchill and Lindy watched, too, but they saw only two muddy creatures in a hole.

  PERRY WENT HOME TO AN EMPTY HOUSE—his mother was up at the Cliff House Tavern—ate some soup, took a nap, then got up and walked back to the Churchills’ house. He intended to go into their basement, play a little pinball, and hope that Winnie might come down. But for the first time ever, the Churchills’ basement was locked. When he’d left their house earlier, Winnie had been nice to him, but Lindy had been her same old self. He thought about slipping into their garage to look at the “Goat’s Breath Paintings” again, but walked back down to the beach instead. He had changed clothes at his house, putting on one of his father’s old jackets, so he wasn’t as cold as he had been the night before. His wounds still hurt, but he’d put a new concoction on them, this time made of his mother’s Noxzema and a few crushed aspirin. It seemed to be working. His wounds were no longer red, at least, but a shining and satiny white.

  In the tackle shed, Perry took two of Mr. Churchill’s fishing rods, his tackle box, and a dozen packages of herring. The tide was halfway up the bulkhead again. When he shoved Mr. Churchill’s boat into the bay, he was careful to keep a tighter grip on its painter than he had on Bountiful’s tether. At home he’d made himself a sandwich out of peanut butter and jelly and baloney. It said Bologna on the package, but he didn’t like to say it that way.

  Mr. Churchill didn’t use flashers when he fished, only herring and sinkers painted red, so Perry figured he would have to wait till daylight to catch himself a salmon. At first he thought he would row across the bay, under the Narrows Bridge, and past Fox Island to the Nisqually mudflats, where he and his dad had gone one time to run among the wrecks of stranded old ships. But since he didn’t want to find himself in mud again, in the end he decided to row toward Seattle. He knew from last year’s geography class, when he and Winnie had made a plaster-of-paris model of them, that if he was lucky, he’d be able to find the San Juan Islands. He looked at a configuration of stars that formed an interesting pattern in the sky. For a second he thought h
e saw a goat up there, and then he decided it was a shark, and then a goat with a shark’s rear end.

  He could hear the sound of the water coming off his oars. He wouldn’t start Mr. Churchill’s five-horse Johnson until he was far enough out to see the lights of Brown’s Point. He remembered that painting from the garage where the goat was saying, “I am the goat of Christmas yet to come,” and when he looked at the constellation again he somehow understood that it would guide him, that it was a real constellation with a name that other people knew but he did not. He stood up in Mr. Churchill’s boat, raised his hands, and shouted, “What’s yer name?” trying so hard to project his voice that he rocked the boat badly and had to sit back down.

  And then the thought came to him that names can’t be learned by shouting, and that he would try to go ashore tomorrow, find a library, and look his constellation up. And once he knew its name, he would never forget it, any more than he would forget that Winnie’s name wasn’t Winston Churchill and that his name wasn’t Chief but Perry White.

  His dad, Bob White, had been a bombardier during the war.

  A bobwhite was also a bird, a kind of ground quail.

  Home Delivery

  [1977]

  LARS LARSON WASN’T A JUNIOR because of a K that he used in lieu of a middle name. On the sign above the entrance to his company, there was no K; it simply read, LARS LARSON MOTORS. On documents, however, on his mortgage and his driver’s license, Lars K Larson was in evidence, to avoid confusion with his father. It was a completely legitimate K, but with no meaning other than itself.

  One Monday morning in March, Lars stood atop a ladder, cleaning debris from the rain gutters of his house. The milkman hadn’t arrived yet, so Lars was drinking black coffee out of one of his Lars Larson Motors bottom-heavy travel mugs. The mug sat near him on the slanted roof, whose rough gray shingles kept it from falling off. Lars didn’t like his coffee black, but on Monday mornings he often drank it that way, since he usually ran out of milk before the milkman came. This is 1970s America we’re talking about, but contrary to popular belief, milkmen still made deliveries, and Lars was of the opinion that such traditions ought to be supported. So, black coffee or not, he never bought milk at the store.

  From the top of his ladder, Lars could hear cars and trucks passing on the pavement below him, and as he scooped the muck from his rain gutter into a bucket he’d attached to his ladder, he tried to discern without looking whether one or another of them was the milk truck. He had an insulated box on his porch, meant to keep milk cold for the hours when neither he nor his wife, Immy, were home, but Immy had left him three months earlier, so now it was only Lars that the milk sometimes waited for, and only Lars who waited for the milk.

  Lars stepped down to move his ladder every few minutes, and as he was doing so now, and also emptying his bucket into a larger plastic garbage bag, the milk truck pulled up. And when he turned to greet the driver, he got a shock greater than he would have had his Lars Larson Motors bottom-heavy travel mug slid off the roof and landed on his head. The driver was his father, the other Lars Larson, the one without the K.

  “Dad,” said Lars, “what the heck! Did you change your route?”

  “Says here you’re down to two half gallons a week,” said his father. “Didn’t know you could drink that much, Lars, since Immy left.”

  He’d parked his truck behind a Volvo with dealer plates.

  “Dad, does Mom know you’re doing this?” Lars asked. “She doesn’t like you meddling, and neither do I.”

  The appeal of home delivery had lodged itself in Lars’s imagination because that’s what his father had done for as long as he could remember: delivered milk. Even now his father wore the white pants and long-sleeved shirt with a blue necktie that Lars had always loved. Lars didn’t live far from his parents, but he’d stopped going to visit, hadn’t been there, in fact, since the day he went to tell them Immy was moving out.

  “You want a cup of coffee, Dad?” he asked.

  His father got out of the truck with the two half gallons of milk. “Coffee? I don’t think so. I’ve got my schedule. Unless you could maybe splash a little coffee for me into one of those travel mugs.”

  Immy had taken most of the travel mugs, all but the one that still sat peeking at them from the roof. Lars looked up at it, but his father thought the look meant something else. “It hasn’t stopped raining all week,” he said. “Your mother thinks we should move to Arizona after I retire.”

  For some reason, that made Lars climb back up his ladder to get the travel mug. “Come in, Dad,” he said. “There’s coffee in the kitchen. You can spare a minute.”

  The front door of Lars’s house led to a living room that was dusty and silent and orderly, but when they got to the kitchen, Lars began apologizing. Dishes were piled in the sink, leftover food littered the counters, and an absolute torrent of unread mail was dumped all over the floor. Lars had been out cleaning the gutters for the same reason he wore a shirt and tie to work every day: to keep his external house in order, though he was a crumbling wreck inside.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” he said. “It sure doesn’t get any easier. All I ever wanted was a regular life.”

  He washed out the Lars Larson Motors bottom-heavy travel mug for his father and grabbed the last remaining clean cup—a dainty little tea-service thing with roses on it—for himself, filled both with coffee, and handed the mug to his dad.

  “Listen, Son, you’re in a rut,” his father said. “When Immy was here, you were in a rut, and now that she’s gone, you’re in a deeper one. Look at this place. I’m here to tell you, you can wallow in self-pity if you want to, but Immy’s getting on with her life.”

  Lars took a drink from his rose-covered cup.

  “You spoke to Immy?” he said.

  “Spoke to her, saw her, even had her over for dinner. She’s a new woman, Lars, like the girl you brought home to us a decade ago, while you’ve done nothing but stay the same.”

  It occurred to Lars that his father had changed his route solely for the purpose of delivering this awful message.

  “Did she ask about me? Did she go to your house by herself, or what?”

  “She didn’t and she did,” said his father. He poured some milk into the travel mug. “Okay, Lars, you want to talk, we’ll talk,” he said, “but I can’t ignore my route any longer, so we’ll have to do it in the truck. I’ll even let you run the deliveries in, like you did when you were a child.”

  Lars hadn’t said he wanted to talk, but he followed his father back outside. As a child, what he’d liked best about going on his father’s route with him was that the seats in a milk truck were high up off the ground, with a windshield perpendicular to the street. It was like being inside a TV.

  Once they had their seat belts buckled, his father pulled into traffic, but almost immediately slowed again. “Mr. and Mrs. Nix are next,” he said. “Second floor of the Biltmore Apartments.”

  When Lars turned to look into the back of the truck, he saw the Nixes’ order moving toward him on a conveyor belt. Directly in front of their order, against the empty mesh, he saw his own name, Lars K Larson, printed in his father’s neat hand. His father’d never liked that K, but he’d written it down.

  “Apartment two twelve,” said his father. “My notes tell me to knock and wait. Don’t leave the order on the floor. Neither of the Nixes can bend anymore.”

  Lars got out of the truck and ran under the apartment building’s awning. Not only was there no buzzer but the door was propped open by the same junk mail that littered his kitchen at home. As he bounded up the stairs, he worried that the Nixes might be wary of him, since he was still wearing his gutter-cleaning clothes. But their door was open, with both of them waiting for him. Mrs. Nix’s head had fallen down on her chest.

  “Half gallon of whole milk and two pints of strawberry yogurt,” said Lars.

  “Sounds good to me,” said Mr. Nix. “Where do I sign?”

  Mrs. Nix laugh
ed. “‘Where do I sign?’” she said, “Oh, Don, you kill me.”

  Mr. Nix had a smile on his face that Lars would never have. The Nixes were well into their nineties. It made Lars pause to think that he and Immy would never reach that age. Not together anyway.

  Lars went back to the truck, where his father sat drinking coffee. Lars’s dainty rose-patterned cup was on the seat where he’d left it. Its coffee was already cold, but steam still came from the bottom-heavy travel mug.

  “One thing this job has taught me is that you have to be prepared to give people what they want,” said his father. “Take these folks coming next, the Wilcoxes. My notes say that three weeks out of three now, Mrs. Wilcox changed her order when the truck arrived. Johnny, the regular driver, takes milk, she wants orange juice. He takes juice, she wants some other damned thing. Yet she’s down for two half gallons of nonfat, just like you are, Lars.”

  Lars looked at his father. Was he saying that he hadn’t given Immy what she wanted? He reached around and brought the Wilcox order onto his lap, where he could feel the bottoms of the milk cartons, cold against his thighs. They drove along that way for a couple of minutes before arriving at the Wilcox house. It was nicer than Lars’s and on a quieter street. Lars was startled to remember that he and Immy had looked at this house, had actually thought about buying it. Immy had adored the kitchen, he remembered, and had irritated Lars by saying so in front of the real estate agent. It was because of this house, in fact, that she’d claimed to hate the kitchen at their place.

  Through the beveled glass beside the front door, Lars saw someone walking down a hallway, and that gave him the idea that he wanted to see the kitchen again, in light of the wreckage of his marriage. So instead of knocking, he hurried around the side yard to the back of the house. The kitchen had a Dutch door, the top half of which was open, though it was raining and chilly.