Tacoma

Tacoma is the starting point of the Flitcraft story that Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy: the setting of a secure, conventional life broken open by a near-fatal accident, and the place Flitcraft abandons in an attempt to adjust to life’s unpredictability. Its importance lies in the contrast between the orderly world he leaves and the familiar pattern he eventually finds again elsewhere.

A Settled Life in Tacoma

Flitcraft leaves his real-estate office in Tacoma for lunch and never returns. He also misses a golf game scheduled for later that afternoon, an appointment he himself had arranged less than half an hour before leaving. His disappearance cuts across the ordinary rhythm of work and leisure without warning or preparation.

The life he leaves behind appears established and prosperous. He and his wife are thought to be on good terms; they have two young sons, five and three, a house in a Tacoma suburb, and a new Packard. Flitcraft has inherited seventy thousand dollars and built his real-estate business until his net worth is estimated at roughly two hundred thousand. His accounts remain in order, but an attractive deal due to close the next day is among the loose ends left behind. He appears to have had only fifty or sixty dollars with him when he went.

The Accident and Departure

On his walk to lunch, Flitcraft passes a partly built office building. A beam falls eight or ten stories and strikes the sidewalk beside him, close enough to chip it and send a fragment against his cheek, removing a small piece of skin. The scar is still visible when he later recounts the incident to Spade, and he rubs it affectionately as he speaks. The accident does not injure him seriously, but it unsettles his understanding of the life he has been leading.

Flitcraft concludes that a man may be killed at random while going about a respectable routine, spared only so long as chance permits. What troubles him is not chiefly the injustice of that fact. Rather, he feels that his habit of ordering his life sensibly has put him out of step with a world that is not orderly. He decides that he will not regain peace until he adjusts to this new perception. By the end of lunch, he has chosen his adjustment: if chance can abruptly end his life, he can abruptly change it by leaving.

Tacoma as the Point of Rupture

Flitcraft says he loves his family as much as he supposes is usual, but believes they are adequately provided for and that his love will not make his absence painful to him. He leaves without evidence of elaborate preparation: his habits in the preceding months can be accounted for, and his unfinished business does not suggest that he had been arranging a planned disappearance. The break with Tacoma is therefore presented not as the culmination of a concealed second life, but as a sudden response to the falling beam.

He goes first to Seattle, then travels by boat to San Francisco. After wandering for a couple of years, he drifts back to the Northwest and settles in Spokane, where he marries again. His second wife differs in appearance from his first, but the two are more alike than different; the life he builds again resembles the comfortable routine he had left in Tacoma.

The Story’s Frame and Meaning

Spade relates the episode in a steady, matter-of-fact voice, repeating details in slightly rearranged form as though their exactness matters. Brigid initially attends more to why he is telling the story than to its substance, but gradually becomes still and receptive. The account’s deliberate pacing makes Tacoma more than a geographical origin: it establishes the ordinary habits against which Flitcraft’s departure registers as a radical break.

The return to a similar life elsewhere complicates the idea that leaving Tacoma has freed Flitcraft from the pattern that once governed him. Spade’s concluding image is that Flitcraft adjusted first to falling beams and then to their not falling. The story thus links Tacoma to both sides of the change: it is the home he abandons when chance becomes undeniable, and the measure of the familiar social groove into which he later settles again.