Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Short Shories

by Craig Lancaster

  She cupped her bosom in her hands and admired her endowment once more, and then she dressed.

  At most of the businesses, the proprietors simply shook their heads when asked about a job. Hard times, most of them said. Some intimated that they were barely staying afloat and that an addition to the payroll—even someone as eager to work and as inexpensive as a girl like her—would sink the works.

  At the hamburger place on Twenty-Ninth Street, she sat in agony as the manager went over her application. The smell of french fries and grilling meat teased her nose, and she squirmed when her stomach rumbled.

  “This looks good, Alyssa,” the young man said as he thumped the eraser end of his pencil against the form. “We might be able to throw you a few hours to start, and we’ll see how it works out.”

  “Great,” she said, coaxing a cautious smile. She resisted the urge to tell him that she preferred to be called “Tomato”; this wasn’t the time to go wrecking things with a moniker she would have to explain. Instead, she thought about the remaining cash in her wallet—reaching down yet again to feel the outline of it—and then she thought how irresponsible it would be to spend it here.

  “You didn’t put anything here for an address,” he said, pointing to the empty lines on the sheet of paper.

  “I’m just getting established, you know?” she said. A tight smile laced her face.

  The manager pursed his lips. “Of course. We will need some ID and your Social Security card.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the law. Tax purposes.”

  “I don’t have those things.”

  “Can you get them?”

  “Maybe. Are they really necessary?”

  He creased the application. “Without them, Alyssa, I’m afraid we can’t go further.”

  Alyssa looked into his eyes and searched for a bit of softness, some indication that he could grant her mercy. “Isn’t there any way around it? I really need this bad.”

  He unfolded the application and spread it on the table in front of him. He looked it over for a few moments, repeatedly clicking the pen in his right hand. Click, click, click.

  “How long have you been on the street?” he finally asked.

  Her eyes found the floor again. “Not long.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Sidney.”

  “You’re so young,” he said. It sounded odd to her; he couldn’t have been much more than a few years older than she was. “You’re not really nineteen, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Is it really that bad, then? Maybe it would be better to go home until you’re ready for this.”

  She looked up. “Mister, I’m not ever going home. That’s not happening.”

  Before she left, he gave her a double cheeseburger, fries and a small cola, and he wished her luck. She didn’t cry until she was out of sight, a couple of blocks away.

  She couldn’t find it inside to call on any more businesses; the exchange with the hamburger joint manager had drained her. She disappeared into her own head and wondered and worried that maybe he was right. Perhaps it would be easier to just go home. Her mother, she was sure, would take her back; Pam Tomassio, so inept at finding the balance between necessary tough love and merciful slack, would no doubt consider this all some wonderful journey of self for her elder daughter, and she would be oblivious to what had sent the girl away in the first place. Her mother’s latest boyfriend would no doubt be happy to see her, too, and the idea brought her lunch closer to the surface.

  The biggest draw was Patty. Her heart yearned for the little girl. If she were to go home and bear down on her studies, she might have a shot at catching up to her class and graduating on schedule, and then her life would be hers to make of it what she could, without skulking around and lying so poorly that even a fast-food manager could pick her apart.

  The only problem with that reasoning was the same problem that had existed all along, the very one that had chased her to Billings in the first place. She closed her eyes in the desperate hope that she could block the image, but it was no use. Alyssa, Alyssa, Alyssa, Alyssa, he said again, whispering in the recesses of her head. She smelled the whisky stink of his hot breath on her neck again.

  She rose from the bench. She felt like throwing up.

  “How old are you?” the shelter manager asked.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  The woman sighed and peered through bifocals at the girl, who shifted her weight to her right foot and tried to match the woman’s gaze.

  “How old are you really? I’m not going to ask again.”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Unaccompanied minor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re an unaccompanied minor. We can’t take you without a guardian. Would you like to call someone?”

  “No.”

  “We can’t take you.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “I can call Youth Services.”

  “What happens then?”

  “They’ll call your guardian.”

  The shelter manager picked up the phone, and at that, the girl turned and ran out the door and back onto First Avenue. She crossed the busy street without looking, her heart thumping hard at her breastbone, the sound of squealing rubber as a pickup slammed on its brakes.

  She kept running, the duffel bag in her right hand whipsawing the air. At Second and Third and Fourth, she slowed down just long enough to look for oncoming traffic, and once on the other side, she again fell into a long stride that gobbled pavement. At Sixth, she cut diagonally across the three lanes of traffic stopped at a light and turned east. Finally, she pulled up, aware that no one was chasing her and that the heart of downtown had fallen behind her. She walked on the sidewalk and tried to rein in her breath.

  Ahead, she saw a park. She glanced left and found the rimrock that held Billings in a perpetual embrace. In the fast-approaching dark, she watched in wonder as the clouds swirled in the sky.

  Awash in a vivid dream, the girl broke out in a smile. In the version of herself that she saw, she did nothing particularly exotic or noteworthy, but she had an audience, and in her head, she wore nice clothes and flitted along happily, tending to paperwork coming in and efficiently sending it back out.

  She’s so pretty, a voice said, and Dream Alyssa preened.

  Like a doll, someone else said, and Dream Alyssa’s cheeks went as red as her hair.

  The brush of a hand against her bosom vaulted the girl into consciousness. Scrambling to her feet, she hit her head against the long bench seat of the picnic table she slept under.

  “What the hell?” she squalled. She was on her feet now, and what she saw draped her in fear. Three men stared back at her.

  “Leave me alone,” she yelled.

  “We were just looking at you,” said the one at her far left. A split second behind the words came the sickly odor of malt liquor. Her eyes darted left and right, looking for something she could use as a weapon. She saw only the smudged-ink haze of night and the park’s expanse.

  “Yeah, we were just looking,” another said, advancing on her.

  “I’m serious. I’ll scream,” she said, and the last word came out shrill.

  “Be nice,” the first one said. Alyssa backed up.

  Just as she figured her best move would be to run—she was confident she could get away, but she didn’t want to leave her belongings behind—something flashed between her and the advancing admirers. A bottle of beer hit the ground in its wake and drained out.

  “Fucking Alleycat,” the third one said. The man next to him—the one with the hulking shoulders and huge hands whom the girl had instantly sized up as the biggest threat—threw a bottle at the figure who had interceded, only to take a fist to the back of the head for his trouble.

  “What’d you do that for, idiot? We’ve lost another beer,” said the first, the clear leader of the c
onfederacy.

  Alyssa watched the men jostle each other, and she finally grasped that it had been a man on a bicycle who had coasted through. The one they called Alleycat cackled and spun around, pedaling back toward the men. As he bore down on them, they scattered.

  “You owe us two beers, Alleycat,” the first one called back even as he lit out. Unaccustomed to such exertion, his body thumped and bobbed, like a car with a flat tire.

  Alleycat, who had skidded to a halt in front of Alyssa, cupped his hands around his mouth and answered: “Alleycat don’t owe. Alleycat only take.”

  He watched as the men rambled through the park. They stopped only after they reached the other end, a hundred or so yards away. They were pixilated figures illuminated by the glow of the street lamp now, and from a safe distance, they yelled at Alleycat and jabbed their fingers into the night air.

  Alleycat turned to Alyssa, who just stared back at him.

  “Girl,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

  Alyssa kept her distance. This man on the bike had rescued her, but from the looks of him, she wondered whether she had traded three problems for one that was much larger. He was massive; she, nearly six feet tall, pegged him at six and a half feet, easy. What surely had once been an impressive Afro was now thinning and gone gray, and it clung to his head in a malformed horseshoe of nappy hair. Alyssa looked at him, bewildered, as he extended a meaty hand.

  “I’m Marvin,” he said.

  “Those guys called you Alleycat,” she said.

  “People who know me call me that. You don’t know me.”

  She took another long look at the extended hand, which Alleycat—Marvin—now waggled insistently. She offered hers in return.

  “I’m Tomato.”

  Alleycat giggled. She pulled her hand back.

  “What the hell kind of name is that?”

  “Mine,” she growled at him, shoving her hand into her jeans pocket.

  “What name did your folks give you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Still chuckling, Alleycat said, “Okay, then. Tomato it is.”

  “What the hell kind of name is Alleycat?” she asked.

  He just grinned at her.

  Tomato and Alleycat sat opposite each other at the picnic table. Alleycat left his bike and the attached cart standing nearby and kept his police scanner close.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “I listen in on the cops. Tells me where to go on my rounds.”

  “Rounds?”

  Alleycat smiled and tugged at the front of his windbreaker. The metallic buttons disengaged, revealing a yellow T-shirt underneath. The silk-screen message: North Park is my beat.

  “You’re a cop?”

  “Nah. I just help them guys keep things clean.”

  “Is that why you rescued me?”

  Alleycat looked down and picked at his fingernails. “I guess.”

  “Thank you.”

  He looked up and smiled. “So why are you here, girl?”

  “I left home. I’m trying to get settled, you know?”

  “Where’s home?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “How old are you?”

  She saw no reason to lie. “Seventeen.”

  Alleycat whistled. “Young.”

  “It doesn’t matter, okay? There’s nothing for me at home.” Her eyes dug into him, angry.

  He tried to soothe her with a smile. Her jumpiness spooked him.

  “It’s dangerous out here,” he said.

  “It’s dangerous back there.” Tomato sent the words back at him.

  “See those guys down there,” he said, pointing to the other end of the park at the three who had harassed her. “They’re decent guys when they don’t drink. I don’t like them drinking in my park. I catch them, I take their beer away. If they’re just sitting, that’s okay by me. People’s got to have a place to sit down.”

  The scanner crackled, and he reached over to turn the volume up. He listened intently.

  “Car wreck on Division,” he said. “I gotta go.”

  Halfway to his bicycle, he turned back to Tomato.

  “Stay here. You’ll be safe. I’ll be back.”

  “What about those …” Tomato said, motioning to the other end of the park.

  “You’ll be safe.”

  Alleycat straddled his bike and set off through the park, setting a course to the men, who had slid into a picnic table of their own. Tomato watched him come to a stop and call over the ringleader. Alleycat gestured aggressively as he spoke, and the other man nodded. When the chat was over, Alleycat looked back and waved, and Tomato responded in kind.

  Three times, Alleycat came by the park and checked on the girl, only to be drawn away each time by another scanner call. By the third pass, she was asleep again under the picnic table, wrapped in the blanket she had found in the alley the previous night.

  It was four in the morning when he shook her.

  “Girl,” he said. “Can you wake up and walk?”

  Tomato rubbed her eyes. “Where were you?”

  “Rounds.”

  “What do you mean, walk? Where?”

  “It’s over tonight. I gotta sleep.”

  Tomato pushed herself up and out from under the table.

  “You have a home?” she said.

  “Sort of. You can come if you want.”

  Tomato choked down the uneasiness inside her. She had two options, neither of which thrilled her: There was trust, or there was cold, hard ground under a picnic table.

  She gathered up her things and followed Alleycat, who pedaled slowly.

  Their shadows cast long images against the downtown buildings as they sliced through the heart of Billings. It was just the two of them, the sound of Tomato’s feet and the metallic whirr of Alleycat’s twelve-speed. Tomato was thankful for the company. A walk in the pre-dawn darkness would have been spooky alone.

  As they cut across Montana Avenue, the arms dropped on the railroad crossing. Tomato looked left and saw nothing, then looked right and saw the yellow light of the coming train a couple of hundred yards away.

  “We can make it,” she said, but Alleycat’s thick arm stopped her cold.

  “We wait.”

  The train bore down, the metal-on-metal glide of wheels on the rails emitting a high-pitched wail. Tomato counted the cars rushing past and remembered a time when she and her father would chase trains across the badlands on the edge of Montana. “Count the cars, Alyssa,” he would say. “Count the cars.” She marveled again at how the memories of him would jump on her so quickly and with such random triggers. She found comfort and grief in that, with the two emotions often fighting it out to an unsatisfying draw.

  Finally, the last car spooled past, and the arms lifted to clear the way.

  “Train’s dangerous,” Alleycat said.

  At Minnesota Avenue, they turned right, toward the men’s shelter. A few lost souls who didn’t get beds for the night huddled in doorways and took no notice of Alleycat and Tomato passing through.

  At the corner, they came upon a man hunkered down by a bent parking meter, a beer in his hand and two more, unopened, at his feet.

  Alleycat dismounted his bike—“Hold this,” he said to Tomato—and snapped the beer from the old man’s hand and shook its contents onto the street. In a singular motion, his right foot crashed onto the two uninitiated beers, spraying foam on the sidewalk and on the bum. Tomato flinched.

  “What the fuck, man?” the old guy said as he scrambled to his feet and careened away from Alleycat.

  Alleycat climbed back on the bike and pedaled on, with Tomato skittering along behind. By the time the old man found the voice to start yelling, they were around the corner and across the next street, where they disappeared into the checkerboard of houses on the South Side.

  Tomato hung back on the crumbling sidewalk as Alleycat made his way to the boarded-up door of the house. Weeds, ankle high and beaten b
rown by the heat of August and September, filled the yard.

  Alleycat turned around. “Come on, girl.”

  She inched up the walkway.

  “This is your house?”

  “Ain’t mine,” he said as he tugged at the corner of the plywood. “It’ll do okay for a sleep, though.”

  He gave the wood a mighty pull, and the nails groaned as they broke free from the door jamb. A blast of mildew hit them square in the face.

  Alleycat pushed his bicycle through the door, and then he rolled his shoulders and slipped inside.

  “Come on,” he said, and Tomato followed.

  Inside, Alleycat fired up a camp lantern, and light tumbled into the dark space. The walls of the place had gone yellow with age and neglect, and flooring had been ripped away. In the middle of the room lay an old mattress, a chair whose cloth upholstery had been pressed smooth by wear, and an ancient boom box encased by stacks of CDs.

  “Home,” Alleycat said, grinning.

  Tomato opened her mouth, ready to protest the apparent sleeping arrangements, but Alleycat cut her off.

  “You take the bed,” he said, giving the mattress a name far more dignified than it deserved. He pointed to the chair. “I sleep over there.”

  Wordlessly, Tomato walked to the mattress and set down her duffel bag. She opened the zipper and began unpacking. Alleycat pressed play on the stereo, and the Isley Brothers drifted into the room.

  “‘This Old Heart of Mine,’” Alleycat said with satisfaction, and he began softly singing along. Tomato smiled. He knew it note-perfect.