Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Short Shories

by Craig Lancaster

  Dwight looked at his son, waiting. Ross didn’t look up.

  “That’s not much of a story,” the boy said, scooping the last bite of ice cream into his mouth.

  “I just figured you’d want to hear it,” Dwight said, a bit too quickly, and he winced as he realized that he’d let the boy know he’d been wounded.

  “No, you said it was too good a story to waste,” Ross said, staring at him. “It wasn’t good at all. It sucked.”

  Dwight tugged at the napkin on the table, straightening it.

  “What are you so angry about, Ross?”

  “I’m not angry. I’m really glad you and Mom had a great day. That’s so awesome. Didn’t really stop you from leaving us, though, did it? You’re here, she’s at home, she doesn’t want me, I’m here, I don’t want to be with you. It really worked out for me, didn’t it?”

  Dwight clasped his hands in front of him. “Ross—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Listen—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Ross, about me and your momma—”

  “Shut up!” The boy threw back his chair, crashing it against the stained-wood wall of Dwight’s trailer. He ran to his room, shaking the doublewide again with a slammed door.

  For a long time, Dwight stared into his bowl, waiting for his heart to thump with less urgency. When he finally scooped out some of the melted vanilla, the sound of his spoon clinking against the bowl reverberated in a house that had gone silent.

  Quillen gave them a brisk wave the next morning as they pulled up at the ranch. Behind him, the mast on the drilling rig stood at attention, ready to seek the water Dwight had zeroed in on a day earlier.

  “Thanks for coming,” Quillen said, shaking hands with both of them. Ross pulled back from the man’s grip; it felt like the mouth of a vise closing on his hand.

  “I tell you, this is gonna be a son of a bitch, trying to dig this out. This ground doesn’t hold up for shit.” Quillen kicked at the dirt.

  “Happy to help. A day’s pay is a day’s pay,” Dwight said.

  “Might be more than that, if I have to take another run at it. Hope not.”

  Ross watched the men in bemusement. Both spread their legs slightly, supporting their torsos with the widened base, like a couple of old football linemen who couldn’t stand up straight anymore. Quillen—Jim was his name, Ross remembered—frowned with nearly every word, as if it caused him pain to speak. Ross’s father reached back and slipped his hand down the back of his jeans, his palm out. A couple of cocks on the walk, they were.

  “Kid,” Quillen said.

  Ross, startled, looked up. “Me?”

  “No, the other kid. Yeah, you. Know how to use a shovel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll give you ten bucks if you keep that hole clear of dirt.”

  Four hours into the dig, Dwight’s divining paid off. Water surged through the pipe and sprayed down onto them. The fat splashes of muddy water tingled on Ross’s skin, baked pink by the midday sun.

  “Hot damn!” Quillen said, leaping from his drilling perch. “Newbry, you’re a goddamned well-witchin’ fool. Look at her go!” The gusher burbled out of the top of the mast, stripping caked-on mud from the back of the rig.

  Dwight looked skyward in an open-mouthed grin.

  “That’s it?” Ross asked.

  “Well, no, not yet,” Quillen said. “Gotta run a pump down into her, but that’s sure as shit a water well.”

  He clapped Dwight on the shoulder, and for the first time, Ross looked at his father with something approaching respect.

  Ross and the men sat under the awning outside the trailer. Even as dusk galloped hard across the sky, the embers of the day broiled anything that dared venture into the light. A bucket of ice holding a six-pack of Pabst and a few root beers for Ross stood sweating on the ground.

  “You need a woman’s touch around here, Newbry,” Quillen said, waving his hand at the junked-out cars scattered across what passed for a front yard.

  “Had one,” Dwight said.

  Quillen tapped his bottle against Dwight’s, and then against Ross’s root beer. “I hear you, partner. I’ve had my own troubles there, too. Still, if you love pussy, what else are you gonna do?”

  “Good point.”

  “I got a cow or two, I guess,” Quillen said, chuckling. “I’ll have to give it some more thought before it comes to that.”

  Ross tried to conjure a memory of Jill’s face. It was no use. He’d met his father’s wife only a couple of times, and she hadn’t made much of an impression on him. Before he left Fargo, his mom had suggested that things had gone badly out here for Dwight and Jill, and so he hadn’t pushed that line of questioning. Truth was, he figured he had trouble enough on his own without worrying about the two of them. Now it was a moot point as Dwight, unbidden, revealed all.

  “I knew it was bad from the start, but I stayed in. I kept thinking if I just hung in there, she’d come around, but she never did.”

  “What do you mean?” Quillen said.

  “I couldn’t make her happy. She would say, ‘Dwight, you’re just a good ol’ boy, you’ll never amount to anything.’ Well, hell, I’m the guy I was the day she met me. I never told her I’d be anything different than that. So she started going to night school, wanted to become a travel agent. So I went with that. Started going to Billings all the damn time for seminars and stuff. Fine, I said. I went to bed alone a lot of nights. I never complained. And then she comes home one day and says, ‘I’m leaving.’ Just like that. It’s over.”

  “When was that?” Ross asked.

  Dwight traced a thumb along the lip of the beer bottle. “Nine weeks ago.”

  “Bitch,” Quillen said. “At least she didn’t clean you out, the way my second wife did. Three years ago, and I’m barely holding on. Job’s gone to shit. Drilling these wells, trying to stay afloat.”

  “Mine didn’t do it only because there was nothing to take.”

  Quillen took a swig, emptying his bottle. “I should have never gotten divorced the first time. I let the best woman I ever had get away.”

  Ross looked at his father, wanting him to say it and bracing himself for the competing emotions—pride and anger—he knew would come if Dwight did.

  “Yeah,” Dwight said. “Me, too.”

  Word quickly got around about the jackpot well up Jordan way, and the next morning, calls started hitting the Newbry house as soon the sun peeked above the eastern horizon.

  “Hell, yeah, we’re interested,” Dwight said, fielding the first one. “Nah, I’m almost certain he can do it. I know I can.” On the couch, across the room, Quillen sat scratching his belly and nodding his head vigorously at the rumor of work.

  By mid-morning, Dwight had lined up nine well-digging jobs—nine witching jobs for him—and Quillen had ciphered out the math and figured that if things broke right, he could get them done inside of a month and be home by September.

  “You got room for me on that couch a few weeks?” Quillen asked.

  “You got room for me on the back of that rig?”

  Standing there in the living room, both of them in their underwear, they shook on it.

  “What grade are you in, sport?” Quillen asked Ross as they watched the rig make easy work on a segment of pipe. They were on their fourth well in a little more than a week and a half, right on schedule.

  Ross, a head taller than the leathery man beside him, glanced at him and said, “I’ll be in eighth.”

  “So you’re, what, twelve, thirteen?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “I’ve got a boy about your age.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Mitch.” Quillen pointed at the pipe’s point of entry. “Better go sweep that out, huh?”

  Ross did as he was told, approaching the back of the rig and slipping the blade of the shovel alongside the pipe and raking away the churned-up earth. The job done, he loped back alongside Quillen.

 
“Where’s your son now?” Ross asked.

  “He lives with his mom out in Washington.”

  “My mom lives in Fargo. She made me come here.”

  Quillen nodded at the back of the rig. Dwight had climbed behind the mast and was lubing some of the mechanical joints. “Adults play a lot of games, kid,” he said. “Might as well get used to that now, but that dad of yours, he’s true blue. I’ve known him for a long time. I trust him. I don’t say that about many people.”

  “I don’t know him,” Ross said.

  Quillen gave Ross a tiny shove, prompting the boy to look him in the eye. “Hey. Listen. He doesn’t know you, either, but he’s willing to try. I’d give anything to see my boy again. Give him a chance.”

  They dragged into Miles City at sundown. A brown sedan sat in the driveway.

  “Shit,” Dwight said. “It’s Jill.”

  “Maybe she’s come back,” Quillen said. “Maybe she misses you.”

  Dwight scoffed. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Well, listen,” Quillen said, “I’m gonna leave you to it. I’ll head into town and get a bite to eat and stay out of your way up here.”

  Quillen whipped a U-turn in front of the trailer, and Dwight and Ross scooted out. Ross walked behind his father as they headed to the door, and he was sure he saw his old man’s shoulders droop with each step.

  They found Jill in the living room, on the couch that had become Quillen’s bed.

  “Ross … wow … I didn’t expect to see you,” she said, standing and pulling the boy in for a hug he stiffly endured. “You’re so big. What are you doing here?”

  “Never mind, Jill,” Dwight said, slipping an arm between them and pulling Ross back. “What do you want?”

  She sat down again. “I was wondering if you’d talked to anybody about the, you know, the divorce.”

  “I haven’t talked to anyone. You’re the one who left, not me.”

  “I was just thinking,” she said, and then she stopped short. “Listen, Ross, would you mind going to your room or outside while me and your dad talk?”

  “Stay here, Ross,” Dwight said. “Don’t you tell this boy what to do. It’s his house. He lives here. You don’t, not anymore. Got that?”

  “Actually—” Ross said.

  “Don’t be like that, Dwight,” she said.

  “Actually, I have some stuff to do in my bedroom,” Ross said. He bolted down the hall but couldn’t outrun the voices that were already beginning to boil over as he breached his door and slammed it shut.

  Later that evening, Dwight and Ross settled into the seat opposite Quillen at the diner. Ross stifled a giggle at their houseguest, who had a clump of mashed potatoes fast drying in his mustache.

  “What’d she want?” Quillen asked.

  “Don’t want to talk about it,” Dwight said.

  The waitress breezed past, and Dwight reached out and tugged on her apron. “Cup of coffee.”

  “What about you?” she said, fixing an eye on Ross.

  “Root beer.”

  “So it was that bad?” Quillen said.

  Dwight rubbed his eyes.

  “Real bad,” Ross said.

  Dwight crashed a heavy elbow into his son’s bicep. “Zip it up, Ross.”

  “Well, it was.”

  “I said, clam up.”

  The rising voices drew the eyes of folks at neighboring tables. “Guys,” Quillen said. “Take it easy.”

  Ross kept going, loudly. “Yeah, you warned her, too, and then you gave her everything you had in your wallet. Why’d you let her push you around? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Ross, so help me—”

  “Big talker.”

  Quillen stood and wrapped a hand around the boy’s wrist, yanking him to his feet. Ross tried to hold him off by digging his feet into the carpeted floor of the restaurant, but Quillen pulled him past the cash register and out the door, twirling him until his back crashed into the grille of the pickup.

  “That’s your father,” Quillen yelled, his face inches from the boy’s. “You don’t embarrass him like that.”

  “He embarrassed himself.”

  “He’s your father!”

  Ross stuck out his chin and jabbed a finger toward Quillen. “Just like that? No way. He doesn’t get to decide that now.”

  Quillen palmed his forehead and ran a hand down his face. “Look, kid, you just spilled a man’s business in there. He has to live in this town, he has to face these people, and you’ve just put a target on him. What do you think people are going to say?”

  Ross stood defiant. “If they say what they heard, it’ll be the truth.”

  “Truth’s got nothing to do with it, son. People believe what they want to believe, hear what they want to hear and pass along gossip like it’s a hot potato. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t give me that. You better know.”

  Behind them, a line of big rigs rumbled into the adjacent truck stop, joining a fleet idling behind the building. Diesel hung in the air, flicking at Ross’s nose.

  “All right,” the boy said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t tell me. Tell him.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  Quillen paced back and forth in short sweeps, like a target in a penny arcade. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “Did he really give her money?”

  “Everything he had on him.”

  “Shit, we’ve done, what, five wells? That had to have been four-fifty, five hundred bucks. Why would he do that?”

  Ross glanced past Quillen through the front window of the diner. He could see the back of his father’s head. The guy couldn’t even muster energy for his own fight. “Because he’s an idiot.”

  “Come on, Ross, cut it out.”

  “She said she was nearly done with travel-agent class but just needed some money to get by. Said she was thinking about moving back. Said she missed him. Said she thought she still loved him.”

  Quillen shook his head. “That whore. She’s not coming back. She’s gone.”

  “Yeah,” Ross said. “Her and the money.”

  Digging went poorly in Ekalaka, leaving them stuck on their sixth well when late August rolled around and Ross traded morning rides with Quillen and Dwight for a seat on the school bus to Washington Middle School.

  His mother called mid-month and asked if he wanted to come home. Ross surprised everyone—her, Dwight and especially himself—by saying he’d stick with it awhile.

  The new routine wedged more distance between father and son. Quillen and Dwight left the trailer at daybreak, forcing Ross to get up with them and eat breakfast. After that, he tried to concentrate on homework for a couple of hours while waiting for the bus. In the afternoons, he returned to an empty trailer, waiting two, sometimes three hours for the men’s arrival, with no company but a TV that had bad reception. After that came dinner downtown and, generally, beer on the porch.

  Dwight struggled at fatherhood, a condition he’d never had to confront before and one that left him out of his depth. Each morning, he put a handful of change on the kitchen counter for the boy, which Ross was to use to get through lunch at school. In the evenings, after the late news signed off, he’d order the boy to bed on those rare nights when he hadn’t succumbed to his own slumber long before. Beyond that, structure didn’t exist. Ross grew lazy in his work, and his grades—never worth crowing about—faltered ever more. Having no friends, and being a stranger who’d been dropped into a new school in a new town without any introduction, the boy descended into loneliness. Homework gave way to brief, intense crying jags in the morning, after Dwight and Quillen cleared out, as he braced himself for the bus.

  And then the beatings started.

  The jocks who Ross delighted in taunting in the classroom—a surreptitious flip-off here, a profane putdown there—caught him behind the gymnasium the first time. The biggest kid, Mike Perry, the son of the football coach, bloodied his nose. Ross
made it home ahead of his father that afternoon and washed the stained clothes before he was found out.

  Other things he couldn’t hide. The black eye. The lip split so badly that Dwight took him to the emergency clinic and had it stitched up. Ross told his father that he’d just been inattentive, walking into open lockers and such, but Dwight knew.

  “I’m gonna talk to your principal,” he said.

  “Dad, don’t do that.”

  “This here’s bullshit, Ross. It can’t go on.”

  Ross came uncorked. He threw his math textbook across the room, crashing it into picture frames festooned on an end table. “If you do that, it’ll be a hundred times worse than this. I’ll never live that down. You might as well put a target on me.”

  “I’m not gonna let you get beat on every day.”

  Quillen, heretofore having watched the debate in silence, waded in.

  “He’s right, you know,” he told Dwight. “The easiest way for this boy to solve this kind of problem is to learn to fight back.”

  Quillen and Ross faced each other, hands wrapped in dish towels that Dwight had cut lengthwise into ribbons after an ineffective protest. “Fighting ain’t gonna solve anything,” he said to Quillen. To that, Quillen replied, “If it stops the beatings, it sure as hell will.” The debate ended there.

  “You got a couple of things going for you,” Quillen told Ross. “You’re a tall kid, which will give you leverage, and you’ve got long arms, which’ll let you hit somebody from a distance without being hit yourself. Now, are you right-handed or left-handed?”

  “Right,” Ross said.

  “Okay, fine.” Quillen positioned the boy in a classic boxing stance, his left foot forward, shoulders square, his left hand tucked into a fist and held level with his left eye, his right hand also in a fist, held parallel to his right jaw. “Tuck your chin down into your chest. No targets,” he said.

  “This feels weird,” Ross said.

  “It will, for a little while. Then it’ll feel natural. Now, stay just like that, watch me and do what I do.”

  Quillen faced the boy and struck the same pose, a mirror image of Ross.