Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Short Shories

by Craig Lancaster

  Susie waited at the bench, the one face he wanted to see. He broke into a lopsided grin as he approached, and they shook hands.

  Now Paul turned to the crowd, seeking orientation points. As usual, Bob Dunphy and Grant Lundquist sat two rows behind the bench, the closest they could get, and Paul knew that those two voices, kept at bay only by his own focus, would scratch at his ear all game.

  Across the way, standing to the side of the visitors’ bleachers—uncharacteristically full—stood Marvin Waddell, whose duty as sentry against the excesses of his own students had ensured that he had never seen a complete game in thirty years at Burd-High

  Next, Paul found Valerie, perched on the top row of the home seats in a futile effort to stay out of earshot of the criticisms against her husband that would begin their annual bloom in minutes. He winked at her, and received a tissue-thin smile in return.

  “Here comes your finest season yet, eh, Paul?” Dunphy was loaded for bear, and loaded.

  Paul turned his gaze to the court and said nothing.

  The disappointment, the rage, didn’t come in increments. As the name of each player rang out over the public-address system, it was greeted with polite applause—restrained almost, as if not to squander genuine cheers on pawns when the queen had yet to come out to play. The names and positions tumbled forth—Sabrina Newman, Victoria Ford, Vanessa Samples, Jana Lundquist and, finally, Reese Cacciola—and it took a couple of beats before everyone in the place realized that Mendy Grunwald wasn’t among them.

  At the scorer’s table, Eric Embry sat agape. In his newspaper report that morning, he’d blithely noted Mendy among the starters, the surest bet in the world, a no-brainer to end all no-brainers.

  Grant Lundquist leaned forward and poked a long finger into Paul’s back. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Paul tossed a reply over his shoulder: “You touch me again, and I’ll have you escorted out.”

  Dunphy stomped to the end of the row, all shits and fucks and assholes, and made a straight line for Waddell.

  As for the rest of them—Dirk Grunwald excluded, and maybe even Valerie Wainwright—they booed, their hunger and their lust and their human frustrations mingling and matching and raining down on their girls, and on the man who would presume to lead them.

  Mendy yanked off her sweats four minutes into the first quarter, with the Broncos behind 8-2 and the stands silent save for the bubbling ire at Paul. Her appearance on the sideline turned the mood. At the next dead ball, the cheers flew to the ceiling as Jana Lundquist trudged to the sideline and Mendy bounded onto the floor.

  “You did great, Jana, good pressure on Number 7,” Paul said as she reached the bench. She, in turn, looked toward her father, who was staring down the coach.

  “It’s about time, Wainwright,” he said. His daughter, at the end of the bench now, buried her head in a towel.

  On the Broncos’ the next possession, Cash broke the Custer County trap and streaked for the middle of the lane. The two Cowgirls planted their feet, watching three Broncos bear down, and played the angles right, cutting off the passing alleys and forcing Cash left. A too-hard shot caromed off the glass and went the other way.

  “Give it to Mendy!” came the cry from the stands.

  Mendy played on to the middle of the second quarter and quickly imposed her talent on the equation. At ten-all, she floated downcourt on the wing, the dribble in her possession. At the three-point line, she pulled up, straight up, and sank the shot, the Broncos’ first lead.

  With three minutes left to go, she had staked them to an eight-point lead, 22-14, and Paul brought her to the bench. Again, the crowd’s mood turned on him.

  “How do you feel?” he asked Mendy, slapping a high-five with her.

  “Amazing.”

  At halftime, Bob Dunphy took it on himself to solve the problem with Burdon County High School basketball. His first solution, to storm the locker room, was turned away by Marvin Waddell. His second idea, hatched with Lundquist in the concession area, was more direct.

  “We’re gonna get this fucking guy fired,” Dunphy said. “He thinks we’re fools. He thinks he’s making fools of us.”

  When the Broncos started the third quarter with the same five players who began the first, Dunphy leaned in to Grant and upped the stakes. “He’ll never coach another game here.”

  Grant turned in his seat and searched out the eyes of Valerie Wainwright. She raised an eyebrow. He shook his head slowly.

  And so it came to this.

  With Mendy sitting, Custer County scrapped and fought the score to a tie. Mendy came in midway through the third quarter, scored six points—giving her twenty-two on the night— and never took another shot.

  On a broken play, a wild chase for a loose ball, Mendy dove and jammed her right wrist, her shooting hand, into the hardwood floor, tearing tendons from bone.

  You could have heard a heart drop in the silence.

  Mendy headed for the hospital, accepting slaps with her good hand from teammates, from Paul, from fans. The Broncos, who scored just seven points the rest of the way, headed for the loss column, a two-point defeat that was sealed when a Cash jumper from twenty-five feet fell short of the basket.

  In the days that followed, as a school and a town tried to pin down exactly what happened in the frantic moments after the game, accounts varied.

  Grant Lundquist said he would swear on a stack of Bibles that Paul initiated contact with Bob Dunphy in the hallway after the game and, unprovoked, punched the red-faced mayor in the nose, breaking it.

  The Lundquist account would come to be the gospel according to the Burdon County school system, which presented Paul with a clear, if unsatisfying, choice: put in for retirement today or be fired for cause tomorrow.

  Vanessa Samples, who was drinking from a water fountain at the moment in question, would tell teammates, her parents, and anybody who would listen that the mayor had said “your career is over, you fucking piece of shit” and that Paul had then punched him in the nose, breaking it.

  Marvin Waddell came late to the scrum. All he could say with certainty is that someone had punched the mayor in the nose, breaking it, and that he saw a hell of a lot of blood.

  The mayor’s official word was appropriately parsed: “Let’s all just move beyond this regrettable incident.”

  Paul Wainwright would say nothing on the record. On a Sunday, let into the building by Marvin Waddell so he could empty out his office, he came across Susie in the gym.

  “It’s your team now, Suze,” he said.

  At home, a clearer picture emerged.

  Paul and Valerie turned invisible to one another. One adrift, the other ashamed.

  Hugh stayed at home for a week, unable to face the mockery he was sure would be waiting for him at school.

  Zoe stayed home for longer than that, all the way to Christmas break.

  Valerie began meeting up with Grant Lundquist for long lunches.

  Paul sat for hours in his study, finally granted time to write, with nothing to say. Dirk Grunwald called and came by. Paul never answered the phone or the doorbell.

  On Christmas Eve, Paul rapped at Zoe’s bedroom door.

  “Go away, Hugh.”

  “Honey, it’s me.”

  Paul interpreted the silence that followed as assent and entered.

  “Hon,” he said. “Merry almost Christmas.”

  Zoe, cross-legged on the bed, said, “We don’t even have a tree. Some Christmas.”

  “Did you ask Santa for what you want?”

  “There is no Santa, Dad. Come on.”

  “I think you should hedge your bets.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe you’ll be surprised.”

  “What, I’m going to magically disappear, like none of this ever happened?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No way.”

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

  “I don’t care. … Wait, no, I do. As long as it’s ju
st asking a non-existent being and I’ll never get it anyway, I’ll just go for it: I want to go to Portland.”

  Paul reached into his back pocket and tossed an envelope on the bed.

  “What is this?” Zoe asked.

  “Look.”

  She opened the envelope and shook out the contents. Plane tickets tumbled onto the bed. Paul Wainright. Zoe Wainwright. Billings to Portland. Round trip.

  “No way!”

  Paul sat down. “You and me, two weeks. We’ll see if we can find a place and a job.”

  Zoe fingered the tickets. “But Mom…”

  “We’ve talked about it. It’s no good anymore, Zoe. It hasn’t been good in a long while. She wants to stay. Hugh wants to stay, too. We can stay if you want, but for me, it won’t be here, in this house. So let’s go take a look. No commitments. Okay?”

  Zoe held her right hand aloft. Paul gave it a high five.

  The inscription on a postcard (“Greetings from Portland”) fished from the Grunwalds’ mailbox on December 30th, 1997:

  Hi, Mend…

  Sorry about your hand. You’re still the best!

  Zoe (and Coach)

  * * * * *

  THIS IS BUTTE. YOU HAVE TEN MINUTES.

  THE OLD COOT shuffled by, his white hair making curlicues like blown smoke. A cinched belt dangled from his right hand, and from the belt loop hung a pillow, a faded quilt and a battered Dan Brown paperback. The old guy’s left hand held up his pants, a position that forced him to adopt a gait that was half walk, half two-step across the dirty linoleum of the depot.

  The man with the BlackBerry, watching from the far side of the waiting area, turned to his keypad and punched out a message.

  There’s the fringe of society. And then there’s the fringe of the fringe of society. Those people ride the bus.

  She was no doubt asleep, unaware that he had been setting messages adrift for the past half-hour. He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his right hand. If she wasn’t asleep, she was ignoring him, and that didn’t fit the narrative.

  He looked across the steadily filling depot–past the hard gazes of men with no reason to care, past two young mothers squeezed into tube tops like sausages, past wary immigrant eyes–and found the old guy again. The man had settled into a plastic seat and thrown his head back into a nap. His Adam’s apple pushed from the inside of his leathery throat, and his ample front teeth protruded from his open mouth as he snored.

  The man with the BlackBerry decided to call him Luther.

  He looked down at the handheld again. 1:07 a.m. His bus—Luther’s bus, too, apparently—wouldn’t load for another twenty minutes or so. He pulled up his email program and began two-thumb typing.

  Luther Threadgill, 82. Retired. On his way to Seattle to visit his daughter, who he hasn’t seen in many years, on account of her running away back in those years when Luther drank heavily. But that was a long time ago, and she has agreed to see him now, and he has everything he needs for the trip–his pillow and blanket and book. He could use another belt. Maybe she’ll buy him one.

  The man with the BlackBerry hit send and watched the message ping into his queue.

  It isn’t so difficult for a man with a BlackBerry to end up in a dingy bus depot at a dead hour. It started with an oil change in Fargo at an insta-lube place, where an aimless young man with faraway eyes—Mike McCann the Meth Head, the man with the BlackBerry surreptitiously called him—failed to fully tighten the drain plug on the oil pan. From there, it was a simple matter of setting down miles and a long, thin trail of motor oil. The warning light illuminated between Miles City and Forsyth, and the man with the BlackBerry pushed on toward Billings, figuring he could make it.

  Thirty-seven miles short of the mark, the Corolla belched forth a metallic grumble and died.

  “Threw a rod,” the tow truck driver told him nearly an hour later, when he finally arrived and crawled under the nose of the car for a look-see. “Son of a bitch went right through the pan.”

  “Oh, hell,” the man with the BlackBerry said as he relayed the news home in a text message. “I just had the oil changed this morning.”

  “Yep,” the tow truck driver said, “and there it is.” He pointed back down I-94 a piece at the last dying cough of oil. “You get it done at one of those in-and-out joints?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I seen this happen a lot. Those guys there don’t take much care.”

  “Bloody hell,” the man with the BlackBerry said. “How long to fix it?”

  The tow truck driver whistled. “Long time. Expensive.”

  The man with the BlackBerry rode the rest of the way in the cab of the tow truck, batting back her electronic invective (How could you not know you were leaking oil? How dumb are you?) with apologies and attempts at placation. In between, he attached a name to the tow truck driver, who hadn’t offered one.

  Jeff Hobbs. 37 years old. On his third marriage. Works the graveyard shift at the refinery in addition to driving the tow truck. Former football star. Oh, and there’s this: He’s gay.

  He hit send, saw the message drop safely into his inbox, tucked the handheld away and stared ahead at the lights of Billings coming into view.

  “That’s insane. I’m not driving six hours to Billings to pick you up.” He winced as her words crashed into his ear.

  “What else can we do?” he protested. “The man here says it will be at least a week before he can fix the car. I can’t just sit here.”

  “No. I’m not coming.”

  “Come on. We could spend a couple of days in Red Lodge or Chico, have a little fun.”

  She said nothing.

  “Please?” he asked.

  Nothing.

  “Why are you being this way?”

  “I’m not being any way. Find another way home. Your problem is not my emergency.”

  “What am I supposed to do, walk? Hitchhike?”

  He waited. She said nothing.

  “Well?” he said.

  Nothing.

  “Huh?” he said.

  The electronic garble of her sigh came back at him. “I don’t really give a shit.”

  The burn spread across his face as the connection went dead.

  The man with the BlackBerry stared at the late-night snack options while a swarthy man (Emile, he would later be dubbed) drummed his fingers and waited for his customer to judge the attractiveness of egg salad on white versus corned beef on rye.

  “Snickers and a Pepsi, I guess,” the man with the BlackBerry said. Emile rolled his eyes and fetched the order.

  A moment later, the balance of the room shifted as the waiting riders herded toward the door. The man with the BlackBerry jammed the candy bar and the soda bottle into the side compartment of his leather duffel bag and hustled to join the gathering crowd. Luther Threadgill, last seen snoozing contentedly, had beaten everyone to the head of the line.

  “Do I just walk my bag over to the other side?” The man with the BlackBerry nodded at the luggage being loaded into the belly of the bus.

  “You don’t have a tag,” the driver said. Lines folded into her forehead and the space between her eyes. Her dirty blonde hair was pulled into a strident ponytail. “No tag, you carry it on.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know. It’s my first time on a bus.”

  She stared at him. “You could have fooled me.”

  Chastened, he scurried up the stairs. Most of the riders ahead of him had made tracks for the back of the bus and the window seats. Luther had found a perch up front, on the aisle. The man with the BlackBerry chose the row opposite Luther and began stuffing his duffel bag into the overhead bin, struggling to squeeze it over the taut mesh.

  “You might ought to put it under the seat,” came the voice from behind him. He turned to see Luther pointing at the bag.

  “They don’t let you put anything much bigger’n a bag of peanuts up there,” Luther said. “More room under the seat.”

  The man with th
e BlackBerry plopped down, retrieved the bottle of soda and shoved the duffel under his legs. “Thanks,” he said, toasting Luther.

  “My pleasure.”

  The man with the BlackBerry drummed his fingers against his bottle. “Ride the bus a lot?” he asked.

  “Yep,” Luther said.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Bozeman.”

  “That where you live?”

  “Nope. I live here. Sister’s there. Dying. Gonna go see her.”

  The man with the BlackBerry dropped his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know … I just … well, I’m sorry to hear about that.”

  “Thanks.”

  Luther wrenched himself away from the aisle and turned to the window. The driver stepped aboard and secured herself in the Plexiglas cage.

  “We’ll be traveling west tonight,” she said over the intercom. “Stops in Livingston, Bozeman, Butte, Missoula, St. Regis. You’ll have time for breakfast in St. Regis. We’ll make brief stops everywhere else. You can smoke there. Don’t smoke on this bus. If you smoke on the bus, it’s zero tolerance. We stop, and you get off …”

  “Can you turn up the heat?” a voice called from the back.

  “It’ll warm up as we get going. Put on a sweater. As I was saying, you smoke, you’re off the bus. Don’t ask me to make any other stops unless it’s an emergency. Don’t cross the yellow line up here. Don’t tap on the glass. Be back on the bus on time at the stops. I will not wait on you. Any questions?”

  Silence.

  “Okay, enjoy the ride.”

  The man with the BlackBerry looked over at Luther, whose chest heaved in slumber.

  Nadine never thought she would drive a bus for a living, but ever since Rob went to prison for negligent homicide, she’s had to do it to keep the family solvent. Her oldest, 17-year-old Robert Jr., just got his 15-year-old girlfriend pregnant. Maddie, 11, needs braces. Little Mace has an inner-ear infection that’s been driving him, and her, nuts. Sometimes, she dreams of driving the bus off a cliff and ending the misery.