Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Short Shories

by Craig Lancaster

  On his way out the door for the last time, Ray grabbed the keys to his mother’s Monte Carlo.

  Ray and Jack loped around the prison yard, jawboning, same as they did damn near every day.

  “You asked me a while ago about why I did it,” Ray said, flinging a pebble across the splotchy ground.

  Jack waited. He dared not speak; if Ray had any hesitation about talking, Jack didn’t want to provide an excuse to clam up.

  “I never told anybody this, but Jeff, he beat the shit out of my little brother that day. A little kid, ten, twelve years younger than him, and he just brutalized him, busted up his face and his eye.”

  “Jesus,” Jack said. “Why?”

  “He was a goddamned animal, that’s why. You meet guys like that in here, guys who don’t have any honor or soul at all. They’d cut you to ribbons as sure as they’d look at you. Nothing there.”

  “Wow. So you just went after him—”

  “—and found him and made certain he’d never do anything like that again, to anybody,” Ray said. “Christ, it feels … damn, it feels like confession to say it to somebody. You know, I was a day away from leaving Billings for good. I was gonna go up to Alaska, make some bucks there on the pipeline, build me a little place in the woods and read and chop wood, live off the fatta the land, like in the book. Be alone. That’s all I ever wanted to do. I was so close. Another day, and I was gone.”

  Jack tried to lick the words he wanted to say, the solace he wanted to offer, off his tongue. Ray kept going. “And I guess I’m gone anyway. The day I met you, you asked if I have regrets. Not about Jeff, I don’t. If you’d seen what he did to that little kid, you’d have wanted to kill him, too. But I am sorry I never saw Alaska. I’ve been there a million times in my head, and then I always wake up here, you know?”

  “That’s rough.”

  “I’ll tell you something else, Jack, and it’s something I’ve never told anybody,” Ray said. “I know in my heart I did the right thing. My conscience is clear. But here’s the part that gives me a little trouble sometimes: when I felt Jeff’s bones breaking in his face and saw everything caving in and knew he was gonna die, I liked it. It felt … God, it felt like the best drug I ever took.”

  “I don’t know how you do it,” Jack said. “All I think about is the time I have left until I can get out of here. You don’t seem bothered by it.”

  Ray looked skyward for several seconds. Jack picked at his fingernails and waited.

  “Well, here’s the thing. I know I did what I did for the right reason. The time in here is hard for everybody. If you think I’m not bothered, it’s only because I’ve had more practice faking it. But I rid the world of a worthless son of a bitch. I can sleep at night.”

  The year turned and pushed through spring to the precipice of summer. Ray persuaded Jack to pursue his general equivalency diploma, telling him that as far away as it seemed, he should be thinking about giving himself the best possible chance once he got out. They shot the bull in the prison yard. They did their part in keeping the state’s roadside signage up to snuff.

  On the solstice, Ray received a postcard.

  “Jesus,” he said, turning it over and reading it again.

  “What?” Jack said.

  “My brother. He’s coming to see me.”

  “No kidding.”

  Ray tucked the card into his waistband. “I haven’t seen Ben since I was sentenced.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “Damn near twenty-three years. I’ve seen pictures. He drops me a Christmas card every few years, depending on how things are going for him. But I haven’t looked in his face since I went away.”

  “Why?”

  Ray’s heart beat fast. “He’s ashamed, I guess. Of me, probably. Of being the reason, indirectly, that I’m here, maybe.”

  He sat down. Jack followed him.

  “What are you going to say?”

  Ray considered the question a while. “I just don’t know. Hello, I guess.”

  Ben had known trouble. Ray gathered that much just from the occasional visits from his mom and Rick. They usually brought pictures, gurgling happily about Kim and her perfect family, replaying in excruciating detail all their university junkets around the world. London. Bordeaux. Athens. Ray always found it curious that they seemed not to grasp how tales of living without a tether could taunt a man who needed permission to take a piss. The joy of seeing his mother made the discomfort worth enduring. Rick was a simple matter of toleration, the same as marking time inside the prison walls. Ray had done it for years. An afternoon was nothing.

  In the pen, a man notices details; he has all the time in the world to do so. Ray learned as much about Ben from what his mom and Rick didn’t say as from what they did. The little boy had grown into a man, and Ray had some concept of the burden he labored under. Ray had done what he could to lighten the load, but he couldn’t do it all.

  He had seen it so many times in other men inside, the way entire branches of their family trees withered and died once they went to prison. For every dedicated mother, wife or girlfriend who arrived on visitation day without fail, a score of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins excised the inmate from their lives, the way a surgeon might cut out a mole. It was as if they didn’t care, or didn’t think their disappearance would be noticed.

  The man on the inside always notices. He has nothing else to do.

  On visitation day, Ray looked deep into the murky image he projected onto polished steel, patting down the incorrigible shocks of hair that kept trying to bolt away from his head. He brushed his teeth twice. He’d bartered for some cheap cologne out in the yard, and he doused himself in it. He chuckled gently at the vanity, and then he redefined it. This was more anticipation than anything else. His palms repeatedly grew sweaty, and he wiped them down on the ass of his cotton pants.

  When Ben came into the waiting area, Ray pegged him immediately. The cherubic face held its ground, even as the rounded corners of the obese man his brother had grown into threatened to swallow it up. Ray stood and rubbed his hands on his hips and tossed a smile to his kid brother, who walked toward him with a small woman a half-step behind.

  “Jesus, Ben, look at you,” Ray said, breaking into a wide smile and walking a few steps toward his brother.

  Ben met Ray’s outstretched hand and shook it vigorously. “Ray, so good to see you. You look … well, you look pretty much the same. A little less hair.”

  “But more than you,” Ray said, pointing at the hairline that had beaten a hasty retreat to the back of Ben’s head.

  Ben pawed the skin up top. “Yeah, well. … Darn, Ray, I’m sorry. This here is my wife, Kara,” he said, ushering the woman forward.

  Her eyes, small and intense and unblinking, set Ray ill at ease, so he looked at Ben while shaking hands with her. “Wife? I had no idea, man. Congratulations.”

  “Just a matter of waiting for the right one,” Ben said. “Kara has been a godsend to me. I mean that literally.”

  “Well, sit down here and tell me all about it,” Ray said. “Damn, it’s good to see you, man.”

  Ben clasped his hands, lacing his fingers, and set his chin on them. “Ray, did you ever wonder why I never came around here to see you?”

  “Sure. It didn’t surprise me. I’d have liked to have seen you, but it’s a tough deal, how all that went down.”

  “Ray, I’m thirty-five years old, and in many ways, I feel like I’m just trying to live. I’m fourteen months sober after being a drunk for nearly twenty years. I’ve been in bankruptcy twice. I’ve been homeless, Ray. When you killed Jeff Fielding, you did a number on me, too. I don’t blame you, Ray, but that’s the truth.”

  Ben’s continual invoking of his name agitated Ray, and he wasn’t sure he liked the direction his kid brother was aiming things. He swallowed the urge to protest and waited for what Ben might say next.

  “Kara has brought me to God, Ray. I was powerless before, but now G
od is with me, and I can do things I never thought possible. I can stay sober. I can be a husband. If it is his will, I will be a father. And God has also shown me that I must forgive you for what your vicious act did to me.”

  “Damn generous of you and God,” Ray said, “considering—”

  “Let him finish,” Kara interrupted. “This is hard for him.”

  Ray drummed his fingertips on the table and looked at his brother, who gobbled some air and started in again.

  “Here’s what I’ve come to find out, Ray. I forgive you. But the burden on me will not be lifted until you forgive me, too. Will you, Ray? Will you forgive me for what I’ve done to you?”

  “Ben, I don’t follow you.”

  Ben grabbed his wife’s hand, and she squeezed his fingers tight. “When I came home that day, I told you I’d fallen against a car bumper. Do you remember that?”

  Ray searched the man’s corpulent face and found the trace of a scar under his eye. “Yeah, I do.”

  “You didn’t believe me.”

  “Nope.”

  “Ray, it was the God’s honest truth.”

  The room went hazy on Ray, and he flattened his palms on the table as Ben bore in.

  “I’d seen Jeff Fielding that day at the mall, that much is true, and he’d taunted me some and called you names, and he told me to tell you that he would be coming for you when he had a chance. When you asked me who did it, I blurted out his name. I figured the worst that would happen is you’d beat him up, or he’d beat you up. But you killed him, Ray. Good God Almighty. You killed him.”

  Ben dropped his head to the table and sobbed. Kara draped herself over him and consoled him, whispering in his ear. Ray held on as the room threatened to spin again.

  “I couldn’t say anything, Ray. I couldn’t,” Ben said. His voice became shrill, small. “I was a little boy. I didn’t even know where to start. Please forgive me, Ray, please, please forgive me.”

  Ray stood up, and the blood assaulted his temples. He intertwined his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes. “I forgive you, Ben.”

  The younger man’s whimpering morphed into full-on blubbering. “Thank you. Thank you.” Tears streamed down his face. “Thank you for giving me my life back. I feel like I can finally live now.”

  Ray turned and walked away.

  That afternoon, Ray sat apart from everyone in the prison yard, his back to the milling crowd of cons. Jack approached his friend slowly.

  “The days are growing shorter now,” Ray said, startling Jack as he came near. “Up in Alaska, on the North Slope, it’s still almost twenty-four hours of daylight, but every day, they lose a little more sun. In six months, they’ll be in a long stretch of twenty-four hours of darkness, but the days will be growing a little longer. It comes and it goes.”

  Jack sat down next to him.

  “I’d be in my twenty-third year of that cycle. Twenty-three years! I bet I’d have never grown tired of it.”

  “I bet not,” Jack said.

  They sat quietly a while longer. Jack swept dust off his chest. Ray stared straight ahead, rigid.

  “Jack, I want you to listen to me. Listen, and accept it, and don’t say a word. Do you understand?”

  Jack swallowed hard. “Whatever you say, Ray.”

  “Things are different for me now. I can’t help you through your time in here. You did what you did, and you have to live with it on your own. I want you to stand up and walk away from me. I don’t want you to speak to me ever again. I want you to act like you’ve never known me. Just leave. I like you, Jack, but I can’t be your friend, and I can’t carry you anymore.”

  “Carry me? What the fuck are you—”

  Ray turned, and Jack saw steel in the older man’s eyes that stopped him cold.

  “Jack, if you say another word, I will cut your heart straight out of your chest.”

  The young man stood and stepped backward, slowly. Ray turned his eyes back to that faraway place. Jack headed for the other side of the yard, looking back once to see if his friend would look at him, but it was no use.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Ray Bingham’s eyes saw only the northern horizon that he had once come so close to catching.

  * * * * *

  SHE’S GONE

  ROSS WATCHED his father step through the scrubby brush, the man’s calloused leather palms gripping a willow branch with both hands turned up as if he were curling dumbbells. After fifteen, maybe twenty yards, the branch, cut to the shape of an outsized wishbone, began to quiver. After a few steps more, the single point up top swung hard toward the ground.

  Dwight Newbry turned to his observers with a gap-toothed smile and pointed at the spot.

  “That it?” shouted the man standing to the left of Ross. Then, under his breath so only the boy could hear, he added, “Jesus, I hope not.”

  “Think so,” Dwight called back. “Lemme walk it out a little bit.”

  “That’s a long damn way from where we’re putting the house,” said the man on Ross’s right, the property owner. He retrieved a hanky from his back pocket and mopped his corpulent, sunburned neck.

  Dwight pivoted and clomped away from the spot at a forty-five-degree angle and turned again, raised the willow branch and traced his steps. Again, the branch shuddered before violently marking the spot. Three more runs from other angles confirmed it, and Dwight took a stake out of his back pocket and pounded it into the earth.

  The man on Ross’s left tugged off his mesh JQ Drilling Co. hat and wiped it across his face. “Well, hell,” he said. “That’s it, then.” He kicked at the dirt, diffusing a sandy cloud. “A long stretch, and it’s gonna be a son of a bitch digging through this.”

  Dwight loped back to them, his lopsided grin exposing every ground-down tooth, looking for all the world like it would break his face in half.

  “I told you, guys,” he shouted at them. “I told you. That there is the place.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ross said on the ride back to town. “A piece of wood tells you where the water is?”

  Dwight held the ’68 Ford tight to the yellow line as the truck bore down on Miles City. “Yep. That’s about the size of it.”

  “How?”

  “It just does.”

  “It’s just piece of wood. What’s so special about a piece of wood?”

  Dwight chuckled at the boy’s show of exasperation. He hadn’t known what to expect when April had called a few weeks earlier. He’s not listening to me anymore, she’d said. It’s time to see what you can do with him. Past time, I’d say. When the boy stepped off the plane a couple of weeks earlier in Billings, he’d come packing two bags and silence. Dwight tried for a few days to draw him out, to get him to talk, and that hadn’t worked. It was only after he started bringing Ross along on the occasional job that the youngster opened up, if only a little. The well witching seemed to have inspired more interest than the posthole digging and the calf branding.

  “Nothing special about the wood, boy,” Dwight said. “A wire coat hanger’d work, too. I just prefer the willow.”

  The kid balled his fists. “Don’t call me boy.”

  Dwight gave him a sly grin and reached over to tousle his hair, but Ross slapped at his father’s hand. Stupid, Dwight silently scolded himself. Too fast.

  “What do you want me to call you, then?” he asked.

  “How about Ross? That’s my name after all.”

  They were almost to Miles City now, the street lights twinkling at the bottom of the hill as dusk ceded to night.

  “It is, at that,” Dwight said. “Your momma ever tell you how we came up with it?”

  “No.”

  “You want to hear the story?”

  Ross squirmed in his seat. Every movement the boy made dripped with aggression, Dwight noted. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t care.”

  “It’s way too good a story to waste on that attitude,” Dwight said. “You think about it, and if you decide you want to know, you ask me proper.�
��

  Ross spoke little through dinner. Only after Dwight put a bowl of ice cream in front of the boy—vanilla, with a hard chocolate shell—did he relent.

  “Tell me the story about my name,” he said.

  Dwight slipped the boy’s dinner plate under the table and swept crumbs onto it. “You’re sure now?”

  “I said I was.”

  “I’m just checking. I—” Dwight choked off the rest of what he was tempted to say; in the two weeks Ross had been bunking with him, he’d noticed a creeping tendency in himself to tease the kid, to try to get under his skin, just because the boy was so damned prickly. Dwight took perverse thrill in puncturing the protective layer. He hadn’t seen Ross in four years, and back then he had been a nine-year-old who was a damn sight easier to entertain than the sullen teenager with whom he now shared nearly every hour. The teasing allowed Dwight to blow off some frustration he might otherwise unload in a more destructive way, but he knew it wasn’t closing the gap between them.

  “Your momma and me, we were living on the Fort Ord Army base in California, right there on the coast,” Dwight said, sitting down with his own ice cream. “I was just a buck private, nothing too special, but when we had a chance, we liked to go exploring. Growing up here, we hadn’t ever seen a place like that. God, on a clear day, the water looked blue, just like in the movies, and it went on forever.”

  “I’ve seen it,” the boy said. “Mom took me there last summer.”

  Dwight cut to it. “Anyways, this one day, we went up north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, in this little town. It was a beautiful day—sunny, warm, even though it must have been late September, early October. We were in a park. Set out a blanket, had some wine, fell asleep. A great day. Anyways, the name of that town was Ross. It was one of our best memories there, so when you came along not too long after that, we figured we had the right name for you.”