Edward Adrift

by Craig Lancaster

  PRAISE FOR CRAIG LANCASTER

  FOR EDWARD ADRIFT

  “Craig Lancaster is a perfect novelist. Not only do his characters and stories seep into your heart with incredible longevity, but he manages to get them there in an unfussy, pure manner. He’s that skilled of a writer. It’s hard to know who I adore more: Lancaster’s character Edward Stanton or Lancaster himself for creating him. It’s rare that I get so attached and invested in a fictional person, but I find that I think about Edward quite often. It brings me indescribable happiness to be able to return to Edward in Edward Adrift, with his endearing eccentricities and his capacity to teach us all more than expected. He’s a reminder that we might miss out on spectacular people should we fail to look past societal expectations of what friends should and shouldn’t be. I wouldn’t miss Edward for the world.”

  —Jessica Park, author of Flat-Out Love

  FOR 600 HOURS OF EDWARD (2012)

  “A nearly perfect combination of traditional literary elements, mixing crowd-pleasing sappiness with indie-friendly subversion. A masterful blend of character and action.”

  —Chicago Center for Literature and Photography

  “This is a wonderful book.”

  —Montana Quarterly

  FOR QUANTUM PHYSICS AND THE

  ART OF DEPARTURE (2011)

  “The success of any short-story collection hinges on the author’s ability to create characters that immediately connect with readers. Lancaster excels on this point, ironically so because the inability to connect is his underlying theme.”

  —Booklist

  “Have you ever felt in your pocket and found a twenty you didn’t know you had? How ’bout a hundred-dollar bill, or a Montecristo cigar or a 24-karat diamond? That’s what reading Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure is like—close and discovered treasures.”

  —Craig Johnson, author of The Cold Dish

  and Hell is Empty

  FOR THE SUMMER SON (2011)

  “A classic western tale of rough lives and gruff, dangerous men, of innocence betrayed and long, stumbling journeys to love.”

  —Booklist

  “Lancaster has crafted a novel that offers readers the most valuable gift any work of fiction can offer: an authentic emotional experience.”

  —Jonathan Evison, author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and West of Here

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Craig Lancaster

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Publishing

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611099058

  ISBN-10: 1611099056

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012918990

  This one’s for those who love Edward and wanted to see more of him. As it turns out, I did, too. And, as always, for Angie and Zula and Bodie, the best home team there could ever be.

  CONTENTS

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2011

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2011

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2011

  FROM BILLINGS TO BOISE: A TWO-DAY ITINERARY BY EDWARD STANTON

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2011

  TECHNICALLY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2011

  OFFICIALLY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2011

  TECHNICALLY MONDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2011

  OFFICIALLY MONDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2011

  TECHNICALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2011

  OFFICIALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2011

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2011

  TECHNICALLY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2011

  OFFICIALLY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2011

  TECHNICALLY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2011

  OFFICIALLY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2011

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

  TECHNICALLY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2011

  OFFICIALLY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2011

  TECHNICALLY MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2011

  OFFICIALLY MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2011

  TECHNICALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2011

  OFFICIALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2011

  TECHNICALLY WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2011

  OFFICIALLY WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2011

  TECHNICALLY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2011

  OFFICIALLY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2011

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2011

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2011

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2011

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2011

  TECHNICALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011

  OFFICIALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2011

  I look at my watch at 3:37 p.m., or actually 3:37 and sixteen seconds—I have the kind of watch with an LED digital display for precision—and stop in the kitchen. I have another fifty-four seconds and could easily make it to the couch, but I stand still and watch the seconds tick off. The six morphs (I love the word “morphs”) into a seven and then an eight and then a nine and then the one becomes a two and the nine becomes a zero, and I keep watching. Finally, at 3:38 and ten seconds, I draw in my breath and hold it. Time keeps going, and I exhale. I look down again and notice that I am standing on top of dried marinara sauce that sloshed out of the saucepan yesterday. And just like yesterday, I don’t have the energy to clean it up, even though it bothers me.

  At 3:38 p.m. and ten seconds, twenty-one days ago, on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Mr. Withers fired me from my newspaper job at the Billings Herald-Gleaner. I know it happened at that time because as Mr. Withers said, “I hate like hell to have to tell you this, Edward,” I looked directly at my Timex watch on my left wrist, where I always keep it. Its display read 3:38:10, and I made a mental note to write it down as soon as possible, which I did exactly fifty-six minutes and fourteen seconds later, as I sat in my car. A phrase like “I hate like hell to have to tell you this” is a precursor to bad news, and I think the fact that I recognized this is what caused me to look at my watch. I was right about the news. Mr. Withers finished by saying, “But we’re going to have to let you go.” He said a lot of other things, too, but none of them are as important. I couldn’t listen very closely, because I needed to concentrate on remembering the time. The time is now logged, but that’s purely academic. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, although I hesitate to say that definitively. I can think whatever I want. It doesn’t mean things will happen that way. It’s easier to stick to incontrovertible (I love the word “incontrovertible”) facts.

  Needing fifty-six minutes and fourteen seconds to get to the car can be attributed to the fact that getting fired is no simple thing. In the movies and on TV, getting fired never seems complicated. Some boss, generally played by someone like Ed Asner, comes out of an office and says, “You’re fired,” and the fired person leaves. But Mr. Withers doesn’t look like or sound like Ed Asner, and he made me sign a lot of papers—things like the extension of my health care benefits through something called COBRA and the receipt of my final paycheck, which included the hours I had worked in that pay period and what Mr. Withers called “a severance,” which was two weeks’ pay, or eighty hours at $15 an hour, minus taxes. The severance check came to $951.01. When I asked Mr. Withers why I was being fired, he said that I wasn’t being fired per se (I love the Latin phrase “per se,” which means “in itself”) but rather that it was what the company liked to call “an involuntary sepa
ration.” He said that often happens when a company needs to cut its costs. Labor, which is to say people, is the biggest cost any company has. Mr. Withers said it was an unfortunate reality of business that people sometimes have to endure involuntary separations.

  “So, Edward, don’t think of it as a firing,” he told me as he shook my hand, after he took my key and my parking pass. “You didn’t do anything wrong. If we could keep you on board, we would. It really is an involuntary separation.”

  I think Mr. Withers wanted to believe what he said, or maybe he wanted me to believe that he believed it. I don’t know. I veer into dangerous territory when I try to make sense of subtext, which is a word that means “an underlying, unspoken meaning.” I would rather people just come out and say what they mean, in words that cannot be mistaken, but I haven’t met many people who are willing to do that. I will tell you this, though—another word I love is the word “euphemism,” which is basically a nice way of saying something bad. The incontrovertible fact is that “involuntary separation” sounds a lot like a euphemism to me.

  Getting fired, or involuntarily separated, from the Billings Herald-Gleaner has made it a real shitburger of a year. Scott Shamwell, one of the pressmen at the Herald-Gleaner, taught me the word “shitburger.” Scott Shamwell was always coming up with odd and interesting word combinations, and most of them were profane, which delighted me. One time, the printing press had a web break—that’s when the big roll of paper snaps when the press is running, meaning they have to shut everything down and rethread the paper—and Scott Shamwell called the press a “miserable bag of fuck.” I still laugh about that one, because the press is almost entirely steel. There’s not a bag anywhere on it that I’ve ever seen, and now that I don’t work at the newspaper anymore, I’ll probably never see the press again. I don’t know. Again, it’s hard to be definitive about something like that. If I ever get a chance to see the press again, I’ll take one last look and see if there’s a bag somewhere. I don’t think there is.

  One of the things I learned from Dr. Buckley before she retired—and that is another thing that makes this a shitburger year—is that when times are difficult, I need to work hard at finding stability and things that bring me pleasure. Dr. Buckley, who helped me deal with my Asperger’s syndrome, is a very logical woman, and in the eleven years, two months, and ten days that I worked with her, I came to learn that I should act on her suggestions. On that note, I guess I should focus on the brighter news that I continue to maintain my daily logs of the high and low temperatures and precipitation readings for Billings, Montana, where I live. I started keeping these logs on January 1, 2001, when it occurred to me that Billings, in addition to having wildly variable weather, has poor excuses for weathermen. Their forecasts are notoriously off base, so I’ve come to distrust what they say. I prefer facts. Every morning, my copy of the Billings Herald-Gleaner provides me with the facts about the previous day’s weather. I then write it down, and my data is complete.

  For example, yesterday, December 6, 2011, the 340th day of the year, saw a high temperature of 34 and a low temperature of 16 in Billings. There was no precipitation, meaning we held steady at 19.34 inches for the year. It’s been a bad year for precipitation in Montana, and a lot of places have had floods, although not Billings. Scott Shamwell lives in Roundup, which is 49.82 miles north of Billings, and his town flooded badly. He said one time that he was going to start driving “a cocksucking rowboat” to work, but I don’t think he ever did. I wasn’t there every day that he was, as our schedules didn’t fully align, so while it’s conceivable that he could have driven a cocksucking rowboat to work, I have to believe that he or someone else would have told me about it. Belief can be dangerous, of course. I prefer facts. We did have an oil spill in the Yellowstone River, which mucked things up, and last year a tornado blew down our sports stadium, so it’s not like Billings is getting off light as far as catastrophes go. I guess everybody is having trouble these days.

  Anyway, tracking the weather data is how I maintain stability, as Dr. Buckley suggested. She also suggested that I find something that gives me pleasure. That has been more difficult, especially since I was involuntarily separated from the Billings Herald-Gleaner. I should just try harder, I guess. But how?

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2011

  From the logbook of Edward Stanton:

  Time I woke up today: 8:23 a.m. The 17th time in 342 days I’ve awoken at that time.

  High temperature for Wednesday, December 7, 2011, Day 341: 37

  Low temperature for Wednesday, December 7, 2011: 22

  Precipitation for Wednesday, December 7, 2011: 0 inches

  Precipitation for 2011: 19.34 inches

  This year just keeps getting worse.

  Harry Morgan died yesterday. I read about it in the Billings Herald-Gleaner.

  It was a small story, on the bottom of page A3. I could quibble with certain things about that story. For one thing, it’s too short. Harry Morgan lived to be ninety-six years old, and he worked steadily in Hollywood from 1942 to 1999. It’s impossible to give a full accounting of that in a seven-inch-long article. I could also make a credible case that Harry Morgan’s obituary should have gone on the front page of the newspaper, but I will concede that this falls into the area of news judgment, and reasonable people and newspaper editors can disagree on that. The one unassailable (I love the word “unassailable”) point I would like to make is that the newspaper editor made a huge error by running a picture of Harry Morgan dressed up as Colonel Sherman Potter from M*A*S*H. That was a nice role for him, don’t get me wrong, but it’s clearly secondary to Harry Morgan’s role as Officer Bill Gannon on the ninety-eight color episodes of Dragnet.

  Let’s examine the facts of this situation:

  Fact No. 1: On M*A*S*H, Harry Morgan’s character was a replacement after McLean Stevenson’s Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake was killed off at the end of the third season. If Colonel Potter was such a great role, why did it come second? (That’s a rhetorical question—I love the word “rhetorical.”)

  Fact No. 2: Before Harry Morgan ever played Colonel Potter, he appeared on M*A*S*H as a character named Major General Bartford Hamilton Steele. Observant viewers, like me, have a hard time reconciling that. Both characters are clearly played by the same man. Did the producers of M*A*S*H think we wouldn’t notice? (That, too, is a rhetorical question.)

  Fact No. 3: At best, Colonel Potter was the number three character on M*A*S*H. Officer Bill Gannon was a clear number two on Dragnet, and he was much funnier than Sergeant Joe Friday, so that made him memorable.

  The facts are on my side. The Billings Herald-Gleaner blew this one.

  I used to watch Dragnet on videocassette, one episode each night at 10:00 p.m. sharp (and then, after I started at the Billings Herald-Gleaner, at 12:30 a.m., because I worked nights). I’d start with the first episode and end with the ninety-eighth, and then begin again. That came to an end on April 19, 2009, when the first of my seven Dragnet tapes was severed in the guts of my VCR during the eleventh episode of the series, called “The Shooting.” Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon were just about to put the pinch on two hoods who gunned down a fellow policeman when my TV screen went snowy and the VCR started making an awful noise, and that was the end of the tape. My friend Donna Middleton (now Donna Hays), before she moved away, showed me that I could still watch the episodes on the computer, but I tried and it wasn’t the same. I threw out my Dragnet tapes, even the good ones.

  I’ve been dreading today since November 15, the day I made an appointment to go see Dr. Rex Helton, my primary care physician at the St. Vincent Healthcare clinic on Broadwater Avenue. When I had my physical a year earlier, on November 15, 2010, Dr. Rex Helton told me that I needed to lose some weight and that my glucose levels were beginning to alarm him. He told me that I should get more exercise and eat better. The spaghetti that I eat nine times a week had to be reduced, he said. He also said that a quart of ice cream a week was not goo
d for me and that I should try some sugar-free gelatin or some fruit.

  For a while I did well at heeding Dr. Rex Helton’s advice. I bought a scale and weighed myself daily—which made for an exciting new entry in my logbook—and took walks and tried to eat more lean meat and vegetables without going so far outside my comfort zone that I became “a granola-eating fucknut,” as Scott Shamwell called me one day when he saw me with a salad at work. By February 1 of this year, I had dropped my weight from 283.8 pounds to 266.3. But February 1 is also the day that Dr. Buckley told me she would be retiring, and (while I hate to admit this, I have to acknowledge that it’s true) I didn’t do a very good job with my new routine after that. I haven’t stepped on the scale since March 8, and I would be afraid to do so now. There are three quarts of ice cream in my freezer right now. The numbers can’t be good. That’s informed conjecture, which I’ll concede isn’t as good as a fact.

  I leave my house on Clark Avenue promptly at 11:15 a.m. for my 11:45 appointment with Dr. Helton. Broadwater Avenue is the next big thoroughfare to the south of my house, which is nice because it means I can get to the clinic by making nothing but right turns in my car. Right turns, statistically, are less risky than left turns, so whenever possible, I plot a course that includes them. I don’t want you to think I’m a freak or something, though. I do make left turns; they’re unavoidable sometimes. But I prefer right turns.

  As I turn right on Broadwater, the R.E.M. song “Losing My Religion” comes on the radio, and I’m reminded anew of the shitburger year. R.E.M. is my favorite band—or, I should say, they were. They are no longer together. On September 21, R.E.M. said it was disbanding. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t, but yet, if I turn on my computer and do a web-engine search for R.E.M., this will be confirmed: the band is no more. I don’t understand it. Earlier in the year, they released a new album, and it was one of my favorites. Michael Stipe, the lead singer, said something about knowing when it’s time to leave the party, which is a euphemism. I can’t begrudge Michael Stipe doing what he wants to do, but I wish I had some way to convince him to keep the party going.