The Plunge Pool: Stories

By JP Fosterson

In these eleven stories college students confront aggression and racism in rural Pennsylvania, a boy engages in a battle of wits with his father over a package of sliced ham, a married couple rekindle their love at the end of the world, a failed writer takes a film crew on a voyage through the solar system, and a man and woman discover a shared addiction to risk.

Across these stories new author JP Fosterson threads together the exuberance and confusion of youth and the melancholy and ennui of middle age. His characters discover courage in the face of fear and love in the face of loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JP Fosterson
• Release date: Apr 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005129897

JP Fosterson

JP Fosterson began writing fiction in college, but he gave it up for the guitar and the songwriting notebook and aspirations of being a rock star. By day, he established a career as a computer scientist and software engineer, in time getting his doctorate in artificial intelligence under his real name. After his days in rock bands and university laboritories exchanged for big tech, he began writing fiction again as a way to fill the time on long plane flights and in lonely hotel rooms.Most of the time, JP lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and daughter, and still plays guitar now and then.

Book preview

The Plunge Pool

Stories By

JP Fosterson

The Plunge Pool — Stories by JP Fosterson

All stories copyright © 2018-2021 by JP Fosterson

Cover image by Seth Doyle via Unsplash

Cover design by JP Fosterson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

All stories herein are works of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any place, events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Contents

The Plunge Pool

Schrödinger’s Ham

The Shade

Movie Stars and Planets

Like Kohoutek

A Man on a Mission

Artist, Unknown

Renew Online

Racing the Avalanche

The Fall and the Net

Unboxing Rose

Acknowledgments

About The Author

Title Page

Cover

Table of Contents

The Plunge Pool

I

Vin was on the phone. He and Warren and Trace were going swimming on Memorial Day at this quarry out near Perryopolis. Did I want to come? All I can say now is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

It was Saturday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, May 28, 1988. I’d been cleaning the kitchen when Vin called. The window was propped up with a two-by-four and a warm humid breeze blew in, slightly tinged with sulfur from the coke works over the hill. Kitchen cleaning hadn’t been our specialty that year. Now there was a smell inside that wouldn’t go away, like we were culturing penicillin. The open windows helped with that, sulfur or not. The warm weather also meant the radiators had stopped banging.

Vin and I had gotten the apartment so we could skip the long bus commute to campus every day from home. At least, that’s what we told our folks. My year in the apartment had been a blur. Grain punch in red solo cups. Differential equations. FORTRAN code. Loud parties and Aerosmith and Boston and the Cure and R.E.M. and The Violent Femmes. Taking Marci to the top of fire escape to make out. By February I’d been hundreds of dollars in debt to Vin for rent and food and in danger of failing half my classes. My plan for the summer was to work on campus, banking as much cash as I could, and to re-take the second semester of Linear Circuits And Systems, so I would still be an engineering student in the fall. Vin had gone home after finals, and was working in his dad’s plumbing business.

Our apartment crouched in the back of the first floor of a four-story building on the farthest corner from campus that could still reasonably be advertised as walking distance. The three other shitty apartments on the first floor were empty now. So were most of the twelve apartments on the three floors above them. I didn’t mind. It was quieter that way. And safer. One weekend in the fall, the building two doors down from us had burned. Three weeks after that, the dickheads above us knocked over a candle and set their balcony on fire. They put it out with a bucket of water before the firetruck got there. Across the street was the bulletproof KFC, where you could get fried chicken and biscuits through a wall of two-inch-thick ballistic glass. I guess I couldn’t blame Marci when she stopped coming over, not that I had called her either.

So yeah, swimming on Memorial Day sounded great, even if I had to go with Warren.

The last time I’d seen Warren had been at a party at the apartment in April. Not coincidentally, it was also the last time I took Marci to the top of the fire escape. The fire escape was the one treasure in that building. That night she had leaned backward out over the railing, over the dark drop to the parking lot. She dared me to lean in to her, but I balked. She laughed and grasped the open neck of my jacket in both hands and pulled until we were eye to eye, nose to nose, my weight against her, against the steel railing. Then she turned away, suddenly coy, as I tried to kiss her. My hand found the small of her back, that warm smooth spot beneath the rough wool of her sweater. From below us, through an open window, we heard my friends screaming the lyrics to Blister in the Sun.

I kissed her neck, warm in the cool air. Behind her thicket of curls, past the rooftops and trees, all the lights of the city spread out for us. Far to the left was the flare where the Hazelwood coke works burned off gas waste. The last light of the city’s dying steel industry, it whipped in the breeze like a glowing orange pennant at the top of its tall stack. A hundred eighty degrees around from it, to the right, the half-lit glass and steel verticals of downtown peeked over and around the hill. Filling the space between, across the silent black flow of the Monongahela, the rectangular grid of the South Side, dense with low buildings, receded in perspective, then gave way to the jumbled pile of houses that rose up the slopes to Arlington and Mt. Oliver and the starless charcoal sky. In the middle of it all, the great red neon octagon of the clock on the Duquesne Brewery told us it was one-fifteen A.M.

It was hard to keep hold of Marci’s hand as we raced down toward the apartment and my bedroom. Our footsteps clattered and resonated along the steel stairs. The rear fire door opened into the first floor hallway.

As we stepped inside, we stopped. Ahead of us, Warren faced off with Rudy in the open doorway of my apartment. Rudy was wearing a t-shirt with that picture of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. As the door slammed behind us, Warren jammed an index finger right between Einstein’s eyes. The music was loud and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Rudy replied with a shrug and a smirk.

As we came near, Warren turned to me.

Where do you find your asshole friends? he said.

I was going to ask the same question, said Rudy, still smirking.

Warren dipped his shoulder and faked a right cross, almost too fast to see. His fist stopped an inch from Rudy’s nose. Rudy flinched, but far too late to have saved himself. His eyes showed white all the way around. He held up both hands, palms outward, and backed away into the doorway.

That’s right! said Warren. Fuckin pussy.

Hey! I said.

He turned on me. You have something to say?

He looked me in the eye and hot fear spread from someplace above my balls through my belly and up my spine. I looked at the floor.

That instant, Vin loomed tall in the doorway. His boyish face, normally tolerant and welcoming, turned to ice. What the fuck, Warren? That’s not cool. Rudy is our guest. Take it somewhere else.

Warren looked from Vin to me and back to Vin. He turned and punched the wall. Water-damaged plaster crumbled, opening a crater that exposed the lath. Warren stalked off down the hall and out the front door toward the street.

Wow, who was that guy? Rudy asked as we went into the apartment.

A guy we grew up with, said Vin.

Does he go to Pitt?

No.

What’s his problem?

What did you say to him? I asked.

Nothing, Rudy replied. I was telling the story of Bobby Z and the Q-V-cross-B incident, and everyone was laughing, and then he just came up and started calling us stupid.

F = qV × B is a an equation from physics, electromagnetism. It’s important for things like electric motors. They taught us a hand-sign called the right-hand-rule to help remember which way the forces act. In our class this kid Bobby who sat in front of me had turned the right-hand-rule into a gesture for whacking off. The prof saw it and walked out in disgust. Rudy and I thought it was hilarious.

Marci had heard this story before.

I would’ve hit you sooner, she said. Nerds.

Rudy ignored her. He said, Anyway, I told your friend he’d think it was funny if he understood the background, but he just got more pissed off.

Warren was gone now. I told Rudy that he should drop it.

I got Marci in my room and shut the door. When I turned, she was on my bed, sitting with her knees drawn to her chest. She had wedged herself into the corner at an angle that made it impossible to get next to her.

Way to jump in back there, dude, she said.

What are you talking about?

Rudy’s your friend, right?

Yeah?

And Warren too?

More or less.

But you grew up with him. You know him.

Sure.

"Why didn’t you get between them? Why didn’t you… I don’t know… say something?"

She didn’t stay that night. The next week I looked at my grades and my schedule became a death march of all-nighters: library and computer lab, and home at dawn for a few hours of sleep and back again. I was too busy to notice that she hadn’t called. Just before finals, I called her, but got her machine. She left me a message on the morning of the day of her last exam. She apologized for being so busy, and said something half-hearted about staying in touch. Then she was gone.

II

Jesus. How far is this place? Warren asked. He and Vin each had a handle of the cooler. We had been taking turns.

I dunno. Not much farther, I think, said Trace.

You said that five minutes ago.

Trace hadn’t really known where he was going, but after a while we’d found the trail on a road thick with woods, across the Youghiogheny from Perryopolis where the hills started to get steep. The trail started off looking like maybe we could drive down it, but there was a clearing off the side with some cars parked, a couple crappy compacts and one of those lame third-generation Mustangs. Trace parked his Corolla there and we started walking.

The trail descended along the steep side of a valley. On the right side of the trail, the wooded hillside rose above us. On the left it dropped off. Both above and below were too steep, too clogged with trees and undergrowth to be passable, even on foot. Now and then, thick tree roots and huge rocks interrupted the ruts of the trail. Our car would never have made it.

Soon a young couple came along in an old Jeep Wagoneer and stopped when they saw us.

Hey, how far to the swimming hole? Vin asked.

The woman in the driver’s seat answered, A ways. Maybe a mile.

Damn. Can you give us a lift? asked Trace.

We squeezed in the back of the Jeep, between some lawn chairs and a big, friendly black dog named Charlie. Then we all bumped down the rest of the way over the roots and rocks. At the the bottom we could hear music and the sound of rushing water. We tumbled out in a kind of parking lot, a rough clearing where someone had spread a thin layer of large-gauge gravel. Beside the Jeep were other Jeeps and Blazers and Broncos and pickup trucks with raised suspensions. A few yards of trees and growth screened us from the water, with some paths cutting through. We lugged our cooler toward the noise.

Our path came out of the woods on a rocky ledge. In front of us was a deep pond or pool, some sixty feet across, formed where a gushing creek fell over a twelve-foot drop. Ledges and cliffs surrounded the pool on three sides. A jutting rock split the waterfall in two. The falls were on our right and we were level with the top of them. Across the pond the cliffs rose higher, thirty feet or more, then broke backward into steep, tree-covered slopes. The trees themselves reached higher still. Together the cliff and trees gave the impression of a wall a hundred feet high or more. Upstream of the falls, the floor of the valley was a broad, flat stone bed. The creek cut a twisty network of channels in it. You could walk across the stream in the shallows, if you took care to avoid the deep narrow flumes. Across the creek, the cliffs continued up around a bend and out of sight.

In that flat area above the falls, a couple dozen locals sat in lawn chairs or stood, grouped around charcoal grills and coolers. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. They ranged from our age up to early thirties. In bandannas and black concert t-shirts, and cut-off jeans, they looked just like us. Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein was playing on a boom-box. They all ignored us, except for one guy. It was tough to tell his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and thirty-five. He was not tall but broad, with thick muscles in a tight tank top. His most prominent feature was his mustache. It was not the wispy, transparent travesty so popular and so inexplicable among the young men of western Pennsylvania at the time. Dark and impenetrable, this mustache cleared the way for the rest of his face. It announced his presence, and left no doubt that he was there.

Mustache Guy fixed us with a hard stare for a few seconds, unsmiling, like he was taking attendance. Then he turned back to his grill without saying anything.

We turned to find a place to sit. When Vin had told me about this place, I had expected a something like state park, but it was not anything like that. The locals drank beer and grilled burgers right out in the creek bed. Empty beer cans, labels faded half away, lay in the brush. Graffiti spattered the cliffs across the creek: the usual mixture of lame love declarations and swastikas painted by downy-lipped losers.

We didn’t have a grill or chairs, so we tucked our cooler in a shady spot along the ledge a few feet from where we stood. I stuffed my wallet and keys in my high-tops and covered them with my socks. I took off my shirt and looked at the water below us.

This isn’t a quarry, I said. It’s just a pond.

It’s a plunge basin, said Vin.

We all stared at him.

The fuck is that? said Warren.

A plunge pool. Didn’t you take geology? he said. The water and rocks dig out a deep pond under the waterfall.

Warren looked at him like he’d grown another head. Then he said, Whatever. I’m plunging! He backed up, took three running steps, leaped from the ledge, and pulled a cannonball. When he surfaced, he yelled, Jump you losers!

Trace and Vin jumped at the same time and I watched and