Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Short Shories

by Craig Lancaster

“I’m gonna show you four punches, and it’ll probably be three more than you’ll ever need. Now, this is a left jab.” Quillen shot out his left hand, making a quarter turn with the fist as his arm reached full extension. Lickety-split, the hand whipped back into its starting position.

  “See that?” he said. “There’s not much body movement. Just the arm and your shoulders as you turn that fist over. Then it pops into place, guarding your face. Now try it.”

  Ross pushed his arm out tentatively, and it dropped to his side as he reeled it back in.

  “Get your hands up. Remember your defense. Now, really throw it.”

  The boy jabbed with more urgency.

  “Again. Your power should come from your feet.”

  Ross threw his hand harder.

  “Again.”

  He threw.

  “Again.”

  He threw.

  “Real good.”

  And so it went the rest of the afternoon, past dinner time, into the dark. With Dwight watching, not saying a word, Quillen showed the boy how to throw a right cross, a taut left hook, an uppercut. He showed him how to move laterally and forward, cutting down an opponent’s space. They finished with Quillen, in his cowboy boots, scruffing side to side in the front yard, holding his palms up and giving Ross a moving target. The boy zeroed in, learned to judge distance, began landing clean punches with a heavy thwap against Quillen’s hands. When Ross got lazy and dropped his hands, Quillen would patty-cake him on the cheek and the chin, letting him know that his defenses were down. Ross learned fast.

  “Shouldn’t I be hitting these guys in the body, too?” Ross said when they ended the lesson, both drenched in sweat. Ross’s T-shirt clung to his back and his ribs.

  “If you were in a boxing ring, sure. You’d have to. But in a street fight, you want to end it fast. Fastest way is to punch a man in the face. Ain’t too many guys who can take that, and a bully gets religion real fast when you hit him hard enough. I’ll tell you another thing. You probably won’t need more than that long left jab. A guy gets in a street fight, he’s liable to load up for bear, come swinging his arm way out wide with a haymaker. You can hit a guy in the nose three times before that fist’ll come around. You do that, and he won’t throw a second punch. Guaranteed.”

  The next day, Ross had his chance to test Quillen’s theory. The coach’s kid cornered him on the far end of the football field and squared off. The bigger boy reared back a right hand, like an arrow in a bow, and Ross let loose a left that crashed into the kid’s nose with a sickening sound, like a hammer pounding a sausage. The right hand that followed knocked out a tooth and put Mike Perry on his ass, and that’s where he stayed.

  Quillen and Dwight finished the wells a few days later, late September, and the old driller packed up and left. The sudden emptiness in the house rattled Ross and left him wishing he could have followed his newfound friend.

  When Quillen moved out, Dwight withdrew into his own sadness. Ross heard his father’s side of the occasional phone call with Jill—the pleading, the cajoling her to come home, which she never did. Ross could read the score, and he wondered why his father could not.

  When Jill caught word of the drilling windfall—Quillen had put a grand in Dwight’s hands on his way out, for services rendered and for room and board—she came back to town, and the three of them had a dinner out, prime rib. Ross couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his father happy like that, chatting and smiling and stopping old friends for a handshake and a clap on the shoulder. The boy was thankful for that moment and fearful of the next one.

  The next morning, he found his father at the kitchen table, in his underwear, his eyes red.

  “Where’s Jill?” Ross asked.

  Dwight gripped his coffee cup with both hands, white-knuckled. “She’s gone.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I just want an answer,” Dwight said, looking up at his boy. “If it’s over, tell me it’s over. If it’s not, come home.” He looked down at the table.

  “Dad, you should tell her how it is.”

  “I did.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her to come home.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she needed some money.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Dwight’s shoulders slumped.

  “Jesus. You gave her the money?”

  “Not all of it.”

  “How much?”

  “Not all of it.”

  Outside, the school bus beckoned with a honk. Ross gathered up his books.

  “Are you all right?” he asked his father.

  Dwight didn’t look up. “Have a good day at school, son.”

  Nine hours later, Ross returned home to a different man. Dwight met him at the door wearing a pressed shirt and tie, western slacks and cowboy boots. He was clean-shaven and smelled of drugstore cologne.

  “Whoa,” the boy said. “What’s this?”

  “Jill’s coming home.”

  “When will she be here?”

  “Any minute.”

  Ross unloaded his backpack on the kitchen table and headed for the refrigerator.

  “Ross, I’ll be in the bathroom,” his father told him. “When she gets here, just let her in, okay?”

  The boy sank his teeth into an apple. He mumbled in the affirmative.

  Ross dallied at the fridge, considering all and finding nothing. He wondered if there was enough money left to go to the grocery store. Two of them had enough trouble finding a decent meal now that Quillen was gone, but they made it work. He wondered how having three people in the house was going to go.

  As Ross cut back across the house to the couch, the impossibility of it all sorted itself out in his mind, and the questions landed in sickening succession. Why’s she coming back? What’s changed? Why now? Ross detoured for the bathroom door.

  “Dad—”

  The response came in a concussive pop, and the boy, shot through with adrenaline, flung his weight into the door. It gave a little and then threw him off, but in that instant, he could see the bathroom mirror and the reflected splash of red on the wall. Tears gathered in his eyes as he again battered the door, yelping, and this time the cheap, hollow-cored door ripped away from the locking mechanism.

  Dwight lay slumped against the wall, head askew, face engorged, eyes dead. All of him, dead. Blood poured from his nose and mouth and ears, onto his shirt, pooling on the linoleum. The pistol he’d placed in his mouth lay now at his side, in his blood.

  The boy picked up the gun. His father’s warm plasma ran along his fingers, into his palm.

  He backed out of the bathroom. He heard the car’s tires on the gravel driveway. Jill honked to let them know she’d arrived.

  Ross cocked the gun and headed for the front door.

  * * * * *

  SAD TOMATO: A LOVE STORY

  THE FIRST TIME he cut her, she felt the endorphins rush her head and she thought, just for a moment, that she was going to die. It felt so fucking good. The blade sliced a clean, straight line above her ankle, and the blood held back until her heart beat again. It came first in a trickle and then a pour. He handled the knife like he was born to do it, the tip of his wet tongue hanging from his mouth as his eyes, immovable, focused on the target and the line. She looked at him and she wanted him so bad, and after he cut himself, too, she had him. She rode him until they collapsed together into the drying blood that stained the sheets. She didn’t wake up until after noon, and then the metallic smell of what they had done with the knife turned her on all over again, so she woke him.

  The second time he cut her, she wanted it to be the same as before, and she acted as though it was, but something had gone missing. The rapt attention that had turned her cotton underwear wet the first time couldn’t be found on his face this time. He cut a jagged edge into the fleshy area near the turn of her elbow, and it hurt. She suppressed the whimper, because she feared that he wouldn’t love her
anymore if he didn’t think she was tough, and if he didn’t love her anymore, then he should just keep cutting until there was nothing left. After he was done, she opened herself to him again, but he fell asleep without finishing. She lay awake, his snoring head on her chest, and she licked away the blood.

  The third time he cut her, she was asleep, and when the knife’s edge slipped below the surface of her calf, she bolted from bed. “What are you doing?” she screamed. He looked back at her with empty eyes and said, “You like this.”

  “Not this way,” she said. He told her that she was a bitch and a whore, and he left into the night and the cold. She cried off and on until morning, when exhaustion finally overtook her, because she was sure he didn’t love her anymore. When she awoke, she cut both calves and prayed that he might accept her sacrifice.

  The fourth time he cut her, she no longer cared. People she had never met came in and out of their place at all hours, and she was sampling the goods they carried, though that was mostly to please him. She didn’t like the stuff, and sometimes she would fool him by feigning as if she were going to partake, and then she would stop when he looked away. All the while, he was falling further and further from her. She could see him, if she focused hard, but he wasn’t really there. She offered an arm and hoped that he might find his way back. He nicked her with the knife and left with a friend, and she hardly bled at all.

  The fifth time he cut her, she had something she needed to say. He hadn’t noticed that she was gone during the day now, that she had gotten her hair fixed, that she was putting on makeup, that she was staying out of the contraband moving through their tenement. He hadn’t noticed that she was eating healthily—which is to say that she was eating at all—or that she was working and putting money away.

  He didn’t know about the letter she had written to herself and to the one who was growing inside her. She promised herself, and her still-gestating child, that she would be a better, happier person. She would be a mother. A real one.

  So when she told him that he was to be a father and he came apart and said she would have to end it, she cut him. She pulled a steak knife from the kitchen drawer and plunged it into his chest, and though it broke her heart to see him writhe and fall to the floor, it was the only way. In his final moments, his throes receding now, a bloody bubble emerged from his nostrils and popped, and she winced. His chest poured forth in a gusher, spreading through his shirt and cascading to the floor, and she just watched. If he wasn’t going to love her, and the one who was growing inside of her, he couldn’t stay.

  When his fight ended—he was valiant, she thought, and that only made her sad because it reminded her of why she loved him—a pale face and sunken eyes stared back at her. Those glassy eyes spooked her, and she felt herself go cold to see him there without seeing him at all. She curled up on the couch and snuggled her head into the cushions, and she could smell him, the man she loved. She closed her eyes, smiled and went to sleep.

  Two dreams came to her.

  In the first, she walked hand in hand with a child across a snowy plain. The boy was small and took small steps, and her own movements through the stubble field were brief and light, as she stepped in rhythm with him. Finally, the boy looked up, and she saw his father in his face.

  “How far, Mommy?”

  She smiled at the boy.

  “We’re almost there.”

  In the second, the field remained, but the boy was gone. Ahead of her, a hundred yards or more, her mother walked. She called out to the woman, who walked without turning back.

  “Mother, please,” she yelled.

  Nothing.

  She woke up.

  In the night, a crevasse had opened in the floor, taking him farther away, but she could still see him. He was drained of color. The dried blood on his shirt had turned black.

  “I love you,” she said.

  He said nothing. She wondered if, wherever he had gone, he understood why it had to be this way.

  The coming and going of night and day seemed trivial. She slept when sleep called for her, and in her waking hours, she sat on the floor, her back against the couch, and she watched him. The clock on the wall kept the time, but she never knew what side of the day she was on. That first night, she had pulled the blinds and turned off the lights. A 40-watt bulb in her reading lamp cut through the darkness and found a way to him. The glint in his eye was gone for good now, as was he. She held the knife, his blood gone dry on the blade. Always she held the knife.

  The knock on the door folded itself into her dream at first, and then, more insistently, it pulled her from sleep.

  “Alyssa. Alyssa, please!”

  Her mother.

  She held her breath, and she looked across the canyon to her love. Please be quiet, she wished. Please don’t let her in.

  The knocks came again, frantic.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Alyssa!”

  She prayed.

  She heard her mother turn and scurry down the outside stairs.

  She opened her eyes and looked at him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  When the next knock came, some time later, she didn’t flinch. Their love had gone sour, and the stench filled the room and the canyon between them. Cajolery didn’t draw her out, and neither did threats. When she was sure they would be coming through the door and would find him there, she walked to the edge of the canyon that had split across the floor between them and dropped the knife to the bottom of it. It would be their secret. Nobody had to know that he didn’t love her anymore.

  * * * * *

  COMFORT AND JOY

  THROUGH A SLIVER in the blinds, Frank watched as the crowd gathered on his neighbors’ lawn. The numbers had been swelling since that morning, when the newspaper hit the streets. The story was so breathtaking, so sad, so redeeming that people from all over town felt compelled to drive, pedal and walk to the sturdy Craftsman-style bungalow to pay their respects.

  Bouquets of roses dotted the yard, put there in multiple, spontaneous gestures of awe and thanks to a man who had left home two days earlier and would never be back. Frank figured the crowd at close to two hundred people now. They lined the sidewalk and stood on the perfectly manicured Kentucky bluegrass of a man who had lived among them for years and had never drawn so much as a second glance. Now, the newspaper called him a hero. Everyone did.

  Frank scoffed aloud when he saw the TV news van pull up. The driver rolled the passenger-side wheels onto the curb and into the boulevard, leaving the van to sink into the grass while the cameraman and reporter grabbed their things and scurried into the throng. Had the guy pulled that stunt on Frank’s side of the street, leaving ruts in his grass, the old man might have gone out there and ripped him a new one.

  Agitated as Frank was, he felt relief at not having to leave the house. That the neighbor he scarcely knew, Kevin Elam, had done a heroic thing was not in question, and Frank resolved to pay his respects in his own time and his own way. When he had read the story that morning, he had marveled at the young pilot’s wherewithal in bringing a crippled MD-80 down in a way that saved most of the people aboard. Just thirty-two of the one hundred and thirty passengers aboard perished, among them Captain Kevin Elam, a man Frank had talked to only a couple of times and one for whom he now wished he could buy a beer.

  Frank knew the final government report wouldn’t be out for months, but he also knew enough about such things to understand how unlikely it was that Kevin Elam could have accomplished what he did. The jet had lost control and come in well short of the runway in Denver, and the pilot—adrenaline surging, knowing that a crash was inevitable and, in all probability, lethal—had put it down about as gently as was humanly possible. Even so, the twisted fuselage and gnarled metal that could be seen in the color newspaper photographs nearly caused Frank to break down. Kevin Elam was a hero. Frank knew it. The people outside knew it, too. They knew that he had saved a mother going home to her own father’s funeral, an an
xious new graduate headed to Dallas for a job interview, a son who had brought his first guitar as a carry-on and planned to play at a program at church, and dozens of others, including sixteen of seventeen members of the Billings Senior High cheerleading squad on their way to Orlando for a national competition. They would never make it to Florida; a chartered bus would bring them back to Billings in a few days. But they would come home alive, and that’s why people stood in Kevin Elam’s yard.

  The crowds will go away, Frank thought. Then I’ll walk over and pay my respects to his wife and that boy. Away from the hullaballoo, I’ll be able to say what needs to be said.

  He closed the blinds and headed upstairs to see if she was awake, to find out if the pain today would be better than it was yesterday. That was all Frank ever asked for when he found himself on his knees and talking to God.

  Not all of the dying on Miles Avenue would bring out the news vans and the public’s adulation. Some of it was happening bit by bit, moment by moment, with few people looking and even fewer caring. In his head and in his heart, Frank had been saying goodbye for two years, silently steeling himself for the day when Lucy would slip away and he would no longer carry her regimen of pills in his shirt pocket and a napkin in his back pocket to wipe her mouth after she swallowed them.

  Frank knew that day was coming, and it scared him.

  The crowds did go away. It took a while. For weeks, flowers and stuffed animals and notes piled up, despite the best efforts of Kevin Elam’s wife and son to keep up with them. In the month that followed the crash, Kevin’s face appeared on the covers of news magazines, every headline including the same word: hero. The city of Billings declared Kevin Elam Day. The mayor smiled big and gave his wife a key to the city. Frank saw that in the newspaper and thought she looked uncomfortable, and that night, he included with his prayer a new request: peace for the woman and child next door.