Despite my coaxing Ryan into taking the Jungwirth case, he tried to maintain a policy of not representing sexual deviants. When he first received a request from the public defender’s office to represent Randy Foote, who was charged with theft of movable property from the new YMCA, it seemed a no-brainer. What could possibly have been stolen from our community Y—weights, kickboards, soccer balls, hockey sticks? He thought fondly of Derek Green and laughed, but strangely, only ten minutes after Ryan accepted the case, Randy Foote called him, insisting on a meeting, a curiously urgent response to charges of theft. Foote was so persistent that he and his wife materialized in Ryan’s office within seconds after Ryan acquired the file and sat down to read it.
Foote was a young guy, short and slightly hefty, apparently bland. His wife appeared old enough, by a fair margin, to be his mother. Ryan shook both their hands. “So tell me what happened, in your own words,” Ryan said, trying to stall for more time. As Foote began an unwieldy account of his charges, Ryan skimmed the criminal complaint. He had reached a point in his career of speed-reading case files, quickly and judiciously, scanning for key words, to gauge what kind of evidence he was up against, and in the case of State of Wisconsin v. Randy Foote, he felt instinctively unsure about taking on Foote’s case. This guy was no regular thief. He was no Derek Green, stuffing beef jerky into his coat pockets or stealing baby clothes from Walmart. This guy was a pervert and a pig, and a panty sniffer. Randy Foote was not stealing exercise equipment or other sundries from our YMCA. He was sneaking into girls’ lockers and pilfering their panties for his own personal collection.
Up until this point, as our children multiplied, the easiest place for me to let down my guard was the YMCA. When we swam there, the weight of the water slackened our movements, and our frenzied life clicked into slow motion, all of us free from the pressures we otherwise felt when cooped up at home. The swimming instructors at the Y were free-spirited twentysomethings with dreadlocks, mermaid tattoos, and endless supplies of optimism and candy. After swimming, washing off in the communal showers at the nearly defunct downtown Y, Fern and Francis would strip and run through the mist, using the tile floor, rife with foot fungus, as a Slip ’N Slide. The showers served as a walkway between the locker room and pool deck, but I never worried about strangers’ eyes on my children’s nude bodies, as if lulled into a false sense of security by the Y’s Christian mission.
Swimming at the YMCA was so fundamental to our lives that Irie quickly advanced through the skills levels and joined the Oshkosh YMCA Swim Team at age six. Strangers or acquaintances might refer to Irie as “big-boned,” but I would describe her as exceptionally prone to gravity. When she was in kindergarten, she complained for weeks of pain in the arches of her feet. A doctor’s appointment revealed she was just a heavy walker. Everything about Irie was voluminous. Her head, large and bright as a disco ball, seemed to flicker constantly with noise and flashing lights. Granted solos at concerts and in musicals, she’d nearly break the microphones with her lung capacity. Her body was just as solid. We once played a game of trying to knock Irie off her feet, and in spite of our combined efforts, her siblings and I failed, the threads of her leg muscles rooted into the floorboards of our house.
Nevertheless, the magic of pool water transformed Irie into a lithe and dexterous sea creature. Very little gave me more aesthetic pleasure than watching her swim laps, freestyle or the butterfly, her arms, torso, and legs streamlined in a way that was impossible for Irie in tennis shoes. She seemed to inhabit two separate bodies—a bovine body on land and a goddess-like body in water. Perhaps this blessing was just another reason I felt safe about dropping Irie off at both Oshkosh YMCAs, including the new state-of-the-art facility on the west side of town—until Ryan met Randy Foote, and I learned that neither Y facility was immune from real-world perversions of the kind that Ryan encountered every day at work.
It was too late for Ryan to jettison Aloysius Jungwirth, as our paths crossed often with his family’s. Our Oshkosh upbringing put Ryan in the tough position of preserving family allegiances and using his JD to maintain relationships, but maybe this was the perfectly timed moment for telling a guy like Randy Foote to hit the road. Although Ryan always remembered that law, not morality, governs society, and he could uphold a judicial stance even if it meant sacrificing personal beliefs, he could not imagine advocating for Randy Foote, an adult who’d infringed on our daughter’s world; so Ryan ushered the guy from his office under the guise of “needing time to more closely read the complaint.”
Back at his desk, listening to the quiet buzz of street traffic below, he began to study evidence against Randy Foote, looking for a justifiable reason not to accept the case. That was when he discovered the escape hatch, a detail he was able to discern based on parents’ names. One of the girls referred to as a victim was one of Irie’s friends, another eight-year-old girl whose safe haven was the YMCA. He felt sick but ethically absolved of the burden to guarantee Randy Foote’s constitutional rights. For the first time ever, Ryan returned a file to the public defender’s office, and most likely, at the end of the day, he drove our daughter to the YMCA where she would swim, none the wiser, single file between her teammates, fingertips to fins.
When Wes returned with Annie from Seaside and began spending weekends with his father, Zane, he also began seeking intimacy in all the wrong places—first and
