Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Short Shories

by Craig Lancaster

  “Dad!”

  Paul released her, and she fell back onto the bed, laughing.

  After she caught her breath, she sat up again.

  “How was practice?”

  “Really good,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a fun season.”

  “Mendy’s really good, isn’t she?”

  “She is. But you knew that.”

  “Yeah. This town’s going nuts for her.”

  “It’ll die down.”

  “You sure?”

  Paul wasn’t. “Yes.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, sweetie?”

  “Can we go shoot some baskets? Like we used to?”

  Paul looked at his watch. 10:45 p.m. “Now? Really?”

  “Please?”

  In the dreamlike glow of the sleepy gymnasium, with the yellow sodium lights illuminating half the court and darkness lapping at the corners, Paul watched and fetched as Zoe flung basketballs at the hoop. Her form, picture perfect just as he had taught it to her years earlier, ensured that more balls went in than did not. Paul couldn’t help but think that had Zoe’s interests not lain elsewhere, she might have been a terrific player for him.

  And then, on the next shot, he was glad it had never worked out that way. In a different set of circumstances, she might never have asked to be in the gym at this moment. The vision came on like a thunderclap—Paul, seeing himself in his dotage, remembering his life not as a sequential narrative but rather as a series of snippets that whipped through his head faster than he could make out the finer details. Superimposed on the seventeen-year-old girl in front of him now was his memory of Zoe at birth, at one, at two, at three—her mind a sponge even then, her heart full of love and tenderness, her soul old, from the very beginning. He could see that girl, and he could see what she had become, and he felt the depth and fierceness of his love for her. He knew he would treasure this fast-dying day for the rest of his life.

  The fairway split like a broken heart. Valerie’s ball dropped in for a soft landing and rolled to a spot dead center in the brown-flecked grass.

  “Somebody’s been practicing,” Grant Lundquist said, whistling and cupping a hand over his brow as a hedge against an ambitious November sun.

  “What can I say? Business has been very, very good,” she replied, shaking her hips boogie-style as she ceded the tee box to her playing partner. “Lucky break to get such a nice day this late in the year. I’m glad you thought of this.”

  Lundquist’s porterhouse hands and fence-post legs marked him as a former athlete, and the gut spilling over his belt gave away the office-bound years that had followed. After a rickety backswing—Valerie stifled a giggle at how her high school sweetie’s head came up and his shoulders came off the line—he ripped through the release, launching the ball to a spot a good eighty yards ahead of Valerie’s and well off target, into the rough.

  “Damn.”

  Valerie laughed. “Come on, slugger. Let’s get going. I need to hustle if we’re going to get nine holes in.”

  “I need to talk to you about something.” Grant leaned against his passenger-side door. Valerie opened her own car and hung through the window.

  “It’s about Paul and the team,” he said.

  She dug a fingernail into the seal around the window. “I figured.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, I really hate this time of year, okay?”

  Grant peeled back the Velcro on his golf glove and wriggled out of it. “Well, I don’t have to tell you why this year is different—for the team and the whole town.”

  “Mendy.”

  “Yes, Mendy. And what Mendy represents. She’s the closest thing to a celebrity this town has ever had.”

  Valerie shook her head. “She’s just a baby, Grant.”

  “Maybe so, but there’s no putting this thing back in the bottle. Frankly, I’m worried that Paul’s going to muck this thing up. You know what I’m talking about. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn.”

  Valerie waved a hand. “No, you’re fine. I hear you. What do you want from me?”

  Grant moved closer. The hairs on Valerie’s arm stood at attention.

  “Talk to him. Try to get him to play ball, so to speak, with the rest of the town. People are really into this thing, Val. They want to hear from him—and with the first game less than a week away, they should have heard from him by now. They want to have pep rallies and fundraisers and lots of other stuff, too. Between Mendy and this team and the town’s 125th, there’s a whole lot of pride in Burdon City that’s looking to get out. Will you talk to him?”

  Valerie expelled a heavy breath. I’ve been telling him this, she thought. He’s been on autopilot, and I told him it would bite him. Here it comes. “I’ll try. I can’t promise more than that. You know Paul. He does what he wants to do.”

  Grant set a hand on Valerie’s arm. She tingled at his touch, one she knew as a girl and found herself missing as a woman. “I’ll be blunt, Val. He’s been coasting on those eight championships for a long time, running that team like his own kingdom, but people—important people who carry a lot of water around here—are getting impatient, and when Paul acts like the town isn’t a part of this thing, it only makes it worse. I saw Eric Embry at the Stockman last night, and he told me Paul wouldn’t let the Bugle cover practice yesterday. That’s nuts.”

  An instinct to defend seized up in Valerie, surprising her. “He’s never let the paper into practice.”

  “That’s not really the point, Val. It’s different this year. This isn’t just his team, not now. It belongs to everyone. I can’t remember the last time I saw Paul at a Kiwanis meeting or at the Elks. He needs to share this with the town, or the town’s going to turn on him. I’m saying that as respectfully as I can.”

  Valerie pushed her sunglasses onto her nose and started her car. “I’ll talk to him,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Grant said, backing away as she pulled out of the parking space.

  On the drive to her office, Valerie thought of a summer, so long ago and yet so cinematic, even now, when two young men drew her fancy and she chose the one a few years older, the one who stoked that feeling in her—a sort of whoosh that would travel from her head straight to her crotch, dancing along her spine on the in-between—with a nimble, tactical mind on the court and a gentle demeanor away from it. She remembered thinking how she and Paul would be unstoppable together—their similarities converging and amplifying, and their differences fitting together like one hand into another.

  But that had been long ago, before she noticed or cared that Paul could be so unbending to anything but his own sense of things. She remembered thinking once that his coaching acumen would take them somewhere, maybe to a big-time college program, and she scoffed aloud at that memory now. Their life would always be like this. He coached little girls. He taught literature to kids who didn’t care, who would either end up running the family farm in Burdon County or running far, far away—Missoula or Bozeman if they were headed to college, Denver or Salt Lake or San Francisco or Seattle after that. In any case, they would leave and wouldn’t be back, and most of them wouldn’t give a damn about Mr. Wainwright or George Eliot once they were gone.

  At a stoplight, Valerie considered all of this and slammed the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. At forty-two years old and well removed from that girl blossoming into womanhood and making snap judgments about her future with breezy surety, she wondered now, not for the first time, if she had bet on the wrong horse.

  The clamor of the lunchtime crowd in the teachers lounge rippled around him, but Paul scarcely noticed as he fell in deep with a book he had dug out of the basement early that morning. Zoe’s literature assignment had stirred something in his cranium, a remembrance of reading a book about the writing of a Steinbeck biography—a biography of a biography, Paul had once called it. Now, having found the book and renewed acquainta
nce with it, Paul was there in the house in Sag Harbor with the author, rooting through the great man’s freezer and arguing with himself over whether to partake of an instant dinner. The biographer had been given the keys to the house for a weekend, a chance to reconcile with Steinbeck’s ghost, and Paul felt the strum of envy at such an opportunity.

  The uneasy settling of a body into the seat next to Paul broke the trance.

  “Got a minute?”

  Paul closed the book and pursed his lips, looking at Marvin Waddell. The rotund principal wriggled in the hard plastic chair and tugged at the bottom of his shirt, trying to smooth it over prodigious mounds of flesh.

  Waddell leaned forward and clasped his hands on the table. Paul looked down at the man’s knuckles. They were squeezed white.

  “Marvin, you don’t look so good.”

  The principal laughed—but it was small, tentative, as if he didn’t intend for it to get out. He ran his right hand through the hair at his temples, dappled with gray, to the back of his neck. “I’ve got a request from some of the parents.”

  “Oh? Which ones?”

  “Come on now, Paul. This is hard enough.”

  “Okay. What’s the request?”

  “They want to form a booster club.”

  “So let ’em. It’s a free country.”

  “They mean the real deal, Paul. Affiliated with the athletic department, official fundraisers, a weekly meeting with you …”

  Paul picked up his book and opened it again. “Absolutely not.”

  “Now, just hear me out.”

  Paul closed the book and dropped it to the table. The teachers at the nearest table, Matsler and Renfro, ejected from their conversation and looked at Paul and Marvin.

  “I’m not doing it, Marvin.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? A hundred reasons why. This town’s already half crazy about this thing, and we’ve had one practice. Now, you want to endorse this madness by bringing these people into the school under the banner of the athletic department. No way. I won’t do it.”

  “Maybe it won’t be that bad.”

  “Not that bad? Are you kidding me? I can think of no suffering quite so profound as having to listen to those people from the stands twenty-five times a year and then run tape for them every Monday night so they can tell me to my face what I’m doing wrong.”

  Marvin unbuttoned the cuffs on his shirt and rolled up the sleeves.

  “Look, Paul, I’ve stomped on this thing before when it’s flared up, but … well, it’s different now. It’s coming from more places. I was really hoping you might—”

  “I won’t.”

  “—you might at least consider it.”

  Paul had a head of steam behind him, but he eased up. Marvin suddenly looked tired, old. Paul reached across the table and patted his arm. “Marvin, look, you’re my friend, and I’ll never forget the opportunity you gave me. I’d like to think it’s worked out for both of us. But I’m telling you, as a teacher and a coach and a friend, I won’t be able to accept something like this. If this is the way of the world now, I’ll be happy just to be a regular old English teacher and somebody else can have the headache.”

  “Jesus, Paul, nobody’s suggesting that.”

  “I’m just telling you where I’m at on this deal. Can you head it off?”

  Marvin pushed his corpulent body up from the table.

  “I’m going to have to, I suppose.”

  On his way back to the classroom for his final group of the day, Paul stopped by the mailboxes in the main office and retrieved a folded piece of paper.

  The stroke-perfect cursive of Elise Langley was a dead giveaway.

  Mr. Wainwright … With the season starting up again, I expect to see your lesson plans through March by next Monday. As you know, the proper instruction of those students who don’t play basketball is every bit as important as it is for those who do. Thank you, Elise.

  He balled up the note and banked it off the wall into the waste bin.

  Deep into the early hours of the next morning, Paul would ponder the mechanics of cause and effect, wondering and worrying over whether Marvin Waddell and Elise Langley had insinuated themselves onto the practice floor, a place that he considered next to sacred and belonging only to him, Susie and the girls on the team.

  For all his thrashing about, it would remain an open question.

  The punishments and admonitions started with the first drill, when the same freshman as the day before, Oberst, blew a layup. In quick succession, she was joined by the next three shooters, Cash and Mendy included.

  “Unacceptable,” Paul shouted at them, stalking them from sideline to sideline as they made their lap around the court. “Layups and free throws, layups and free throws. Make them and you win. Miss them and you lose. You girls better get your heads into it.”

  Free throws turned out no better. With every miss, the girls set out in circles, at one point leaving only two C-teamers in the middle of the floor. “This team may not win a game,” Paul told Susie.

  As Paul ran through the offense, the whistle rarely left his mouth.

  “Give me the ball,” he told Cash.

  She fired a chest pass at him.

  “Mendy, it’s like this.” He squared up to the basket, squeezing the ball between his hands and planting a pivot foot. “First option: jump shot.” Into the air he went, releasing the ball at the peak of his jump and watching it backspin softly into the net. Cash, her face red, gathered the ball and rifled it back to him. “Second option: drive.” Paul took two dribbles into the lane and then fell back to his spot on the periphery. “Third option: make the next pass.” He slung the ball to Victoria Ford, directly to his left on the wing. “You know better than to just throw the ball over without even looking.”

  Paul turned to the players clumped on the sideline. “Shoot, drive, pass. When you get the ball in this offense, that’s the sequence. I don’t want anybody not following it, you got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” the girls answered glumly.

  “You get the ball. If the defender has collapsed into the middle, you shoot the open shot. If they’re crowding you, drive around them. If you’re covered, make the next pass. This is not difficult. Run it again.”

  Paul blew the whistle, and Cash dribbled into the middle of the floor, veered right, stopped and whipped a two-handed overhead pass to Mendy on the left wing. It soared over the girl’s head and crashed loudly into the bleachers.

  Paul blew the whistle again. “No! Give me the ball.” A freshman tossed the ball over from the sideline.

  “Cash, what was that?”

  “A pass.”

  “That’s the worst pass I’ve ever seen in this gym. You need to be better than that. Give me a lap.”

  The point guard, five and a half feet of angry muscle twitching like a tuning fork, set out running. Paul proceeded to chew on the other girls.

  “I don’t know where your heads are, but if you don’t find them, and I mean quick, things are going to turn out very bad next Tuesday. Do you understand?”

  The girls answered. “Yes, sir.”

  “Get a drink and then come back ready to play.”

  The girls fell out.

  At the fountain, as Mendy slurped from the falling water, Cash said, “Catch the ball, superstar.”

  Mendy wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Make the pass, Cash.” They moved toward each other, ready to escalate matters.

  Before it could go further, Vanessa Samples stepped between them, with enough strength and girth to make her directive stick. “Both of you just shut up and do what Coach says.”

  When the Reverend Grunwald made clear where he was headed with the Sunday sermon, Paul wondered how deep into the pews he could sink before it would be obvious to God and everyone that he was trying to disappear. Not far, he reckoned. The good pastor, Paul’s old hunting buddy, had a clear line of sight to him and seemed to be using Paul as a fixed point on the horizon amid the c
hoppy water he aimed to sail into. Directly behind Paul sat Mayor Dunphy. Two rows back and to the left was Grant Lundquist, to whom Valerie had sent a big smile as they were taking their seats.

  No escape.

  “It seems to me that our fair city is awfully stirred up these days,” the Reverend Grunwald was saying now. “Awfully stirred up. And I do believe that it’s not for the usual reasons, with us so close to Thanksgiving and Christmas. No, I believe it’s something else, and trust me, I am not so dumb as to be unaware that part of that reason dwells under my own roof.”

  A ripple of laughter—more nervous than not, as Paul assessed it—spread hrough the chapel. Paul could feel Dunphy’s laughter on his own neck.

  The Reverend Grunwald went on.

  “I want to say to you now that pride in our town, pride in our school, pride in our children—these are good and worthy things. But pride, as we all know, has an ugly underbelly. It is a deadly sin, and for good reason. It kills slowly, from the inside, poisoning our hearts and minds, sometimes without our even being aware.”

  Paul rolled his chin back and forth against his sternum, working out a knot in his neck. Valerie reached for his hand and squeezed hard.

  “We love our town because we know what it has been and what it can be. We know the sacrifice we’ve given, time and time again when something larger than ourselves demanded it. We are proud of that. At one particular sport, our town has been the best ever in this state, perhaps better than any school in any state. We are proud of that.”

  Paul looked up now and locked eyes with his friend at the pulpit.

  “We should be proud. But let us not ever forget that we are not here to cover our boys in glory on the battlefield or hold our girls above all others on the basketball court. We are here to love one another, and to love God. No matter the time on the clock. No matter the score. That’s why we are here. To love God, as God surely loves us.”

  Paul stood on the sidewalk outside First Lutheran, waiting for Valerie to bring the car around. The previous night had brought the first good freeze of the season, and he set the toe of his wingtip onto the grass to hear it crackle underfoot. He thought of home, north Texas, and the hellacious winter storms that would crash through the region every couple of years, encasing everything—grass, hedges, oak tree leaves, slow-moving children—in perfectly thin ice.