Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  “I didn’t know the lighthouse was that old,” said Perry, but I could see that he was talking to himself.

  “‘I’d made some rolls and Tiger was juggling them, roving around and saying that the odds of a girl finding love in a lumberjack bar were about as great as something or other. He was searching for the proper analogy when I said, “About as great as you hitting one of those rolls in midair. I’ll throw it up and you shoot. You’ll miss, of course, and that will show the girl how likely it is that she, too, will miss her mark.”’”

  Perry took out his slingshot and sent a rock into the sky. If there’d been a roll up there he’d have knocked it down.

  “‘Tiger was irritated that I’d said he couldn’t hit the roll. “Throw one up, Flora,” he said, “See if I can’t hit it. I’m good at this, you know.” I did and he missed. A bald eagle nesting in a nearby tree saw the roll and opened its wings, as if thinking about going after it itself. I’d only brought four rolls and fancied eating one, so I told him I’d throw just one more. It was still rising when he steadied his bow and shot. He missed again and said, “Don’t say anything, Flora. Throw up another.” I sighed and bent to get another roll, when the one I’d just thrown came down and hit Tiger on the nose. We both laughed, but then the arrow came down, too, and hit him in the forehead.’”

  “Yer lyin’, Richie, a roll can’t stay up in the air that long,” said Perry. Then he snatched the binder out of my hands and ran down to the beach with it, his butt sticking out behind him like two hams in a sack.

  “Bring that back!” I shouted, but he sent a rock into the dirt at my feet.

  I danced around like a coward in a cowboy movie until another rock flew past my ear, and then I ran into the cave. Five minutes later, when I peeked out again, all I could see was the bay and the limbs of the nearby trees. Both Perry and my grandma’s binder were gone.

  WHEN I GOT HOME, COLD AND SWEATY in my swim trunks, Dad had just come back from his run and was cold and sweaty and irritable, I guess because his run hadn’t gone well. He’d been a champion runner in high school and liked to remember his glory days. New glory days were few and far between for my dad.

  “Go change, Richie,” he said, “I don’t want you dragging that beach crap into the house.”

  He was sitting on our couch with a glass of scotch. When I told him that I’d knocked the beach crap off already, he pinched his stomach and said, “I’m getting fat.”

  “You’re not getting fat, Dad,” I said, “You’re sitting down.”

  I sat beside him, took his glass, and sipped from it. Have you ever tasted scotch? It’s incredibly awful, but the face I make when I sip it usually makes Dad laugh and go get me a Coke. This time when he brought the Coke back, he said, “What are we gonna do now?”

  Grandma was his mother, of course, and he’d loved her as much as I had. At her funeral, he said in front of everyone that he liked the way she died because it kept our “goddamn ordinariness” at bay. I’m not kidding, he said “goddamn ordinariness” just like that. And then he said that all summer long we’d been having trouble with a mole who kept burrowing into our yard and eating Grandma’s chrysanthemums. We’d tried flooding it out, tried blocking its hole with stones, but nothing had worked. So Grandma decided to load her .22 and sit on our porch and wait. The way Dad told it, when he got up at 5:00 A.M., she was already out there, so all he could do was sit beside her. Grandma wouldn’t let him talk, but after a few minutes she said, “Here’s our Mr. Mole, soft shoulders filling up the diameter of his hole”; then CRACK! went her rifle and Mr. Mole slumped down.

  “Here’s our Mr. Mole, soft shoulders filling up the diameter of his hole” were Grandma’s last words, since her heart stopped as soon as the mole’s did.

  MRS. KANT, THE TEACHER I HAD for ninth-grade English, told us that the wherefore in “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” didn’t mean “where” but “why.” So Juliet wasn’t asking where Romeo was, as we all thought, but “Why are you, Romeo? How come you have to belong to an enemy clan?”

  Mrs. Kant was the best teacher I ever had, especially since her other almost full-time job was taking care of Mr. Kant, her husband, over on the other side of the lighthouse. I’d been to see her a few times this summer. Pitiful as it is, she was a pretty good friend. Mr. Kant was a college professor before he started having strokes. The Kants have a daughter, but she lives in a dormitory at Annie Wright, so she isn’t much help.

  I’m saying this now because after Dad and I had dinner, I said I thought I’d take a bike ride. My idea was to go find Perry and get the binder back, but I decided to talk strategy with Mrs. Kant first, since she knew Perry from school.

  The Kants’ house wasn’t large, but it had a deck that faced the beach and they were always out on it. I sneaked around so I wouldn’t have to go into their yard, where they kept a couple of peacocks. I got to the beach okay and was about to announce myself when Mrs. Kant said, “Sit tight, Herb. I’ll go get your ice cream.”

  I slipped down under their deck. Its spotlight cast Mr. Kant in the center of a circle of light on the beach. He was decades younger than my grandma but in ten times worse shape, except for the fact that Grandma was dead. When Mrs. Kant came back with the ice cream, Mr. Kant said, “Ut esy, Ev A brak zel. Ut won ut on.”

  “Let’s leave the seal alone for a while, Herb,” said Mrs. Kant. “We still have hope.”

  Mr. Kant was a burden and Mrs. Kant was the bearer of it, that’s what he was saying. And the seal was on his medicine bottle. I knew it because I’d been there often enough to understand Mr. Kant pretty well. I also knew that that was not the time to show myself.

  ONLY A FEW OF THE BROWN’S POINT HOUSES were on the water, and most of those were like ours, high up on a bank. They’re expensive, but when Grandma built ours, it cost five thousand dollars. It’s been paid off for thirty years, and these days the taxes are higher than the mortgage payments used to be. Dad says that’s ironic, but what I think is ironic is that Perry’s house is worth about one thousand dollars now. It’s an ugly three-room box, plunked down on the roadside like it was moved from somewhere else.

  It only took five minutes for me to ride over there from the Kants’ house, but as soon as I got close, I ditched my bike and cut into the woods, where Perry’s got a tree house his dad built, beneath which, last winter, he set traps to try to catch weasels. He said that in the winter weasels turned white and if he caught enough of them, he was going to make his mother a white weasel coat.

  I needed a plan to get the binder back. I had three bucks in my shoe and thought I might try buying it back, though it would set a horrible precedent. As I went toward his house, I had to wonder why I was bothering to sneak if all I could think of was buying it, but really it was because of this girl I was in love with, Precious Smiley, who lived across from Perry. My dad said her parents should be shot for naming her Precious, but I’m here to tell you she could have been named Dogshit Smiley and every boy in school would have thought it was the coolest name around. When I looked at her place, I could see her father, Howdy, standing in his shrubbery and staring at Perry’s mom, who was sitting in her doorway, drinking beer and reading a book.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked, but quietly enough that Howdy couldn’t hear her. Next she said, “Who’s there?” and this time I knew she was talking to me, since I’d stepped from my hiding place and waved at her.

  “Richie,” she said, “Perry’s not home, but come over here a minute.”

  “Has he been home?” I asked. “I lent him something that I need to get back.”

  “Lent him something, eh?” she said.

  She had a tough manner, Mrs. White, but I had always liked her.

  “Yeah,” I said, “It’s a sort of book.”

  I wanted her to say I should go into his room and have a look, and when she didn’t, I said, “We had my grandma’s funeral,” hoping for a little sympathy.

  “Let me ask you something, Richie, and if yo
u can answer correctly, I’ll see if I can find your book. It’s an easy question. Who sucks hind tit?”

  “Huh? What?”

  She nodded behind her to a flimsy kitchen table. “See that stack of bills in there? Go and get them for me.”

  “Go and get your bills?”

  I thought maybe Perry was hiding behind the door, but I hurried in, scooped up the bills, and ran back out. “Here you go,” I said.

  “Count them for me, will you?”

  “One, two, three, four, five,” I said, “five bills,” but she shook her head. “I think it’s six,” she said. “Count them again.”

  I didn’t need to count them again, but I did finally look at the bills, and right there in front of me, typed out five times, was the name Loretta White.

  “How is old Jack?” she asked. Then she got up and went into the house and came back with the binder. “Here you go, Richie,” she said, “And sorry to hear about the old bird’s death.”

  Once I got my hands on the binder, I figured I’d better get out of there fast, till “old bird” leaked into my head. She must have read what Grandma wrote, since Grandma called it “Old Bird’s Diary” herself.

  “It’s not nice to snoop,” I said.

  Righteous indignation had been Grandma’s specialty, but all the Lillys were good at it. Mrs. White, however, simply got out her keys, locked her door, got into her car, and drove away. And when I turned to look at Precious’s house again, a voice nearby said, “What happened, shithead, my mom bawl you out?”

  “She told me Howdy Smiley wants to get into her pants,” I said.

  It was a dangerous thing to say, but Perry had fewer friends than I did, so he let it pass.

  “Ever been in Howdy’s basement?” he asked. “He’s got this old Ford flathead down there that Precious says he wants to put in my mom’s car.”

  Pants, car. Same difference. “Come off it, Perry,” I said. “Precious won’t give you the time of day.”

  He picked up a rock, always a bad sign, so I followed him into the Smileys’ side yard.

  “That’s Precious’s window,” he said. “See that flower on the sill?”

  I would never admit it, but I knew Precious’s window better than anyone. I knew that the flower was an artificial daisy in a thin brown pot and that when she closed her curtains, she left it between the curtains and the glass. I knew her room had yellow wallpaper, which you could see if you stood on a particular stump. I knew it all from passing by; I was no Peeping Tom.

  “Yeah, I see it,” I said. “So what?”

  “If the flower’s on the left, it means come in, and if it’s on the right, it means her father’s on the prowl.”

  “It does not!” I almost shouted.

  “Okay, smart-ass, which side is the flower on now?”

  “It’s on the left, but I know her dad’s home, ’cause I just saw him. So it doesn’t mean shit what side it’s on!”

  I wasn’t sure why I was so upset, but I was.

  “Yes it does. Her father’s laid off, so he’s always home. The left-side flower means he’s busy, that’s all. Now look again. What else do you see?”

  I saw a muddy yard and a rusted wheelbarrow filled with rain, Howdy’s truck, and a sheet-metal toolshed. I saw Mrs. Smiley’s planters and what used to be a doghouse but now stored wood, since Precious’s dog, Roger, got killed when we were in fifth grade.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  “Is the back door open or closed?”

  “It’s closed—or no, it’s open a crack.”

  Perry was as happy as he ever got. “That means the coast is clear. You go first. Go down in her basement and don’t make any noise.”

  I was scared but stepped into the clearing like I wasn’t. When I got to the house, I pushed on the door, but it caught on a throw rug. I peeked through the crack and saw a light at the bottom of the stairs, so I pushed harder and squeezed inside. The door leading up to their kitchen was closed, and hanging from a hook beside it was Precious’s winter jacket. She was too big for it now, if you know what I mean, if she tried to zip it up.

  “Hello?” I whispered, “Anyone home?”

  “Down here,” said a girl’s high voice. “Hurry up, honey, I’m cold.”

  Christ on His big wooden cross.

  “Hi, Precious,” I said, “it’s Richard Lilly.”

  Why I had to use both my names, I didn’t know. One thing about Precious, she’d been the prettiest girl in school since forever, but she was also kind, with never a bad word for anyone. So when she didn’t speak again, I held on to my faith in her and went down to frame myself in their recreation room’s door.

  “It’s Richie,” I said again.

  “Oh, honey, I’m cold,” said Perry White.

  High on the wall behind him was an open window, level with the ground outside. He was leaning against the wall with tears in his eyes and his mouth open. Precious was in a beanbag chair, wearing an angora sweater.

  “I’m sorry, Richie,” she said. “It was his bright idea, the little dope.”

  She looked like she hoped I’d see the humor in it, but by then Perry’d started to snort. He’d be the richest kid on earth if snot were gold.

  “Quit it, Perry,” said Precious, “If my dad comes down here, I’ll ban you from my basement for life.”

  “Yeah, Perry, quit it,” I said.

  “I saw you talking to Perry’s mom, Richie,” said Precious. “How come you didn’t come over on your own?”

  “I guess because my grandma just died.”

  Precious stood and came across the room to me. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I remember her from your birthday parties.”

  When she put a hand on my arm, I was struck by my best insight of the summer: Precious Smiley was bored! That’s why she let Perry come over. Oh, boredom! What a wonderful thing in the hands of a beautiful girl! But if I was going to use it, I had to act fast.

  “Listen, Precious, do you still have your bike?” I asked. Then I told her that I thought Mr. Kant was going to kill himself.

  Precious looked skeptical.

  “I’m not kidding. He wants to take an entire bottle of medicine,” I said. “He’ll be dead any minute if we don’t help.”

  I wished I hadn’t said it—I felt like one of the Hardy Boys—but once I had, there was nothing to do but tell her how I’d listened to the Kants from under their deck. Precious’s concern grew, neither of us glancing at Perry. This is what you do when you fish for salmon: first you set the hook; then you reel them in.

  “Okay, let’s go over there,” she finally said. “You two wait outside.”

  She pointed to the window, as if we’d have to climb out that way, but Perry understood her better than me and reached up and pulled it closed.

  “I’VE GOT A BOOK I NEED TO RETURN TO HER; that can be our excuse,” I said when we leaned our bikes against the Kants’ garage. I held up the book I’d packed after dinner.

  “What if she won’t let us in?” asked Precious. “Or just takes the book and closes her door?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that without giving away the fact that I’d been going over there all summer. Perry saved me by saying, “Why would she do that? What could be worse than sitting around all the time getting old?”

  That gave Precious courage again, but I’d forgotten to tell them about the Kants’ two peacocks, and when we stepped inside their gate, one of them jumped in front of us with his feathers out.

  “Mother of Jesus!” she said.

  We tried to walk around him, but he pivoted with us, first left, then right, until Mrs. Kant opened her back door. “George! Gracie!” she yelled, since she didn’t know which peacock was bothering us.

  She got some grain and came down into their yard. Once the peacock was out of the way, she put her hands on her hips and said, “Hello, children, to what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “What’s up with Mr. Kant?” asked Perry. “He still alive, or what?”<
br />
  Mrs. Kant’s expression didn’t change, but Precious slugged Perry hard.

  “All right now,” said Mrs. Kant. “It is a little bit late, you know.”

  “I’m bringing back your book,” I said.

  Mrs. Kant loved to talk about books and Mr. Kant used to love to talk about birds, back when he could talk.

  “I only meant if Mr. Kant was home, we’d like to say hi,” said Perry.

  “Lord, son, when is he ever not home?” said Mrs. Kant. Then she led us around the outside path to their deck.

  “Guess what, Herb, Richard Lilly’s here again,” she said. “Isn’t that nice? This time he’s brought Precious Smiley and Perry White with him. They were in Richard’s class at school.”

  When Mr. Kant swung around and started singing, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” we all laughed like crazy.

  “You kids tell Herb what you’ve been up to,” said Mrs. Kant. “I’ll go get some Cokes.”

  Precious and Perry were beginning to look like they wished we hadn’t come, basically because Mr. Kant was drooling all over himself.

  “Precious Smiley, don’t you have a middle name?” he asked, his voice understandable for once.

  “It’s Donna,” she said. “And I’m gonna use it, too, as soon as high school starts.”

  I looked at Perry and Perry looked at me. With a name like Donna, the world would be her oyster, both in high school and beyond.

  “Good,” said Mr. Kant. “We should call ourselves what we feel like calling ourselves. Now you, Perry White, what’s your middle name?”

  Since he was beginning to sound like a strangled cat again, I didn’t think Perry would answer, but he said right away. “I don’t tell no one that.”

  “Ah, a secret middle name. I’ve got one, too,” said Mr. Kant. “Tell you what. I’ll tell mine if you tell yours. Mine’s Bilge, I’m Herbert Bilge Kant.”

  He coughed up something orange, but his middle name wasn’t Bilge; no one had a name like that. I could tell that Perry was worried, because by saying it without waiting, Mr. Kant had held up his part of the nonbargain. Perry knew he could threaten me into silence, but he wasn’t so sure about Precious. He was savvy enough, though, to speak before any more tension built up. “It’s Frank,” he said, “Named after a singer my mom liked.”