Edward Adrift

by Craig Lancaster

  He’s right. Shit. “I am a grown-up,” I say.

  “So what? If I can’t cuss, you shouldn’t be able to cuss, either. How about if you cuss, I get a dollar?”

  I consider this. It seems reasonable. I shouldn’t curse as much as I do. I take the paper from him and add an asterisked entry:

  * Each time Edward curses, he owes Kyle one dollar.

  “There,” I say, showing it to him. “But I’m going to amend the terms to say that if you curse, you have to give up one dollar, if you’ve accumulated any, and that I will tell your parents.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Yes, it is. You’re the one who’s in trouble, not me. All you have to do is stay out of trouble and collect the money if I say ‘shit’ or something.”

  “You owe me a buck.”

  “For what?”

  “You just said—” Kyle almost says the word but stops. “You just said the s-word.”

  I pull out my wallet and hand Kyle a dollar bill. “You owe me two dollars,” he says.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Look at the paper,” he says. “I can see where you wrote ‘shit.’ Writing it is as bad as saying it.”

  “I’ll keep the dollar,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Because you just said it.”

  “When?”

  “Just now, when you were telling me I’d written it.”

  “Shit!”

  I reach over and pull the first dollar bill out of his hands.

  “You did it again,” I say.

  Kyle’s face gets red, and he starts flopping violently in the passenger seat as he screams.

  This is going to be an interesting trip.

  We’ve gone 17.2 miles when Kyle asks if we can listen to something else. Michael Stipe is singing about a parakeet that is colored bitter lime.

  “I don’t have anything else on the iPhone,” I say. It pains me not to call it my “bitchin’ iPhone,” but I don’t want to lose money. “I put all of the R.E.M. I had on it before I left.”

  “They’re boring.”

  “They’re not boring. They’re great. They were great. They’re my favorite group. You would like them.”

  “You’ve been telling me that since I was nine years old. I’ve never liked them.”

  There’s an old saying: You can’t account for taste. I don’t think this is true. I think if you had the time and access to everyone in the world and could ask them questions about what they like and don’t like, you could account for taste. As I think about it now, that sounds like something I would enjoy doing.

  “Do you have something else we could put on?” I ask Kyle.

  I don’t really want to do this, but Kyle is now my guest, and I will have to try to be accommodating to him, within reason. Fortunately for me, Donna has given me the authority to define what reason is.

  “My mom has my phone.”

  I remember now that Donna took it from him.

  “Too bad,” I say.

  “Can we just turn it off for a while?”

  This seems like a reasonable request. I unplug the bitchin’ iPhone from the auxiliary cable that carries the music into my Cadillac’s sound system.

  “Thank you,” Kyle says.

  He’s almost being polite—I say “almost” because he’s still clearly glum. Still, it is a nice change from him calling me a fucking freak, which I don’t say out loud because I want to hold on to my dollars.

  We drive on, and I hum the downbeat from the R.E.M. song we just cut off.

  Kyle looks at me. “Can we turn you off for a while, too?”

  I stop humming. We wouldn’t want the politeness to come on too strong, would we?

  I just made a sarcastic joke.

  I’m pretty funny sometimes.

  Even though it’s early, only 10:23 a.m., we take exit 211 and drive the 3.8 miles from the interstate into Burley, Idaho, so we can have lunch. As we cut through the southeast corner of Idaho, we’re not going to see many towns until we get into Utah, so it’s best that we eat now. Plus, I have to pee.

  We find a JB’s restaurant that is serving lunch and breakfast, and that works for us because Kyle says he wants pancakes. As we wait for our food, he asks if he can use my bitchin’ iPhone to download some different music.

  “It will cost some money, but not very much,” he says.

  “How much?”

  “Twenty or thirty dollars.”

  I think it’s funny—not ha-ha funny, but interesting funny—that Kyle considers this “not very much” money. When I worked at the Billings Herald-Gleaner, before I was involuntarily separated, I made $15 an hour. It would have taken me two hours of patching concrete or repairing the press or snowblowing the parking lot to earn what he proposes to spend while we’re sitting in a restaurant booth in Burley, Idaho, waiting for pancakes. (I decided to have breakfast, too. I like pancakes, even though they’re not on my approved diabetic diet.)

  “Go ahead,” I say. “I’m fucking loaded.”

  Kyle doesn’t even have to tell me. I take out my wallet and push a dollar bill across the table to him. A stern-faced lady at the table to our left looks at me and shakes her head.

  “He earned it,” I tell her.

  “As long as you have the wallet out,” Kyle says, “you better hand over two more dollars.”

  “Why?”

  “You remember when I jumped out of the blankets in the backseat?”

  This is a silly question. It happened just a little more than an hour ago. Of course I remember it.

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Do you remember what you said?”

  “Not really.”

  “You said—” Kyle stops short. “I almost messed up. You said, ‘What the f-ing f, Kyle?’ That’s two f-bombs and two dollars for me.”

  The woman at the next table is looking over here again.

  “I’m not paying,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “Our agreement was not in force when I said those things, and there is no codicil in our contract that allows you to collect on things said before you signed the agreement. Also, ‘codicil’ is a really good word. It means ‘supplement.’”

  “You still shouldn’t have said it.”

  “That may be true, although I would argue that it was a natural response to your scaring me. In any event, it’s still not covered by our agreement.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “It’s completely fair. Do you think I should be able to mark down nasty things you said to me and your mother yesterday? Or what you said to your teacher last week?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Kyle is stumped. Kyle is also unhappy.

  “This is a big f-ing load of s,” he says. The woman at the next table looks horrified.

  “You shouldn’t use stand-ins for cursing,” I tell him. “It’s not much different than actually saying the real words.”

  He digs into his pancakes, which have just arrived.

  “Yeah? Well, there’s no cod-i-something in our agreement that covers stand-in words. So shove it up your a-word.”

  The woman at the next table picks up her plate and moves to a table at the far end of the row. I don’t blame her. Kyle used to be a nice boy, but he’s gotten sour somehow, as Victor told me that first night. If I weren’t responsible for him, I’d probably move to another table, too.

  As I’m paying for our meal, I ask Kyle what kind of songs he downloaded on my bitchin’ iPhone, although I’m careful not to actually say “bitchin’” so I can remain fucking loaded.

  “Country songs, mostly,” he says.

  I stick out my tongue, which I’ll concede isn’t mature. I will have to be careful about such things, since the question of Kyle’s maturity is now such a hot topic.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “I like rock ‘n’ roll better.”

  “Well, too bad.”

&n
bsp; “I’ll make you a deal,” I say. “We’ll listen to three of your songs, then three of mine, then three of yours, and so on.”

  “We just listened to maybe ten of your songs before we got here, so I think we should get to listen to ten of mine before we start going back and forth.”

  “That’s not the deal I’m offering you. It’s three of yours, then three of mine, as soon as we leave. That way, I can minimize my exposure to bad music.”

  I’m thinking now about when my OCD was out of control and I got in a lot of trouble for writing Garth Brooks forty-nine letters complaining to him that he had ruined country music. The “Garth Brooks incident,” as my father always called it, is what led to my being kicked out of my parents’ house and being put under the care of Dr. Buckley starting in 2000. As it turned out, this was a good thing, as I wouldn’t have met Donna and Kyle if I hadn’t been forced to move, and I wouldn’t have gotten better as quickly as I did with Dr. Buckley. That doesn’t erase the fact that Garth Brooks ruined country music, the detritus (I love the word “detritus”) of which I will now be subjected to, but it’s hard to hold a grudge.

  “It’s not bad music,” Kyle says. “It’s so awesome. Like, I got ‘Honky Tonk Badonkadonk’ by Trace Adkins.”

  I reach over and flick a piece of pancake off Kyle’s shirt.

  “What’s a badonkadonk?”

  Kyle giggles. “It’s a girl’s butt.”

  “They write songs about girls’ butts? It sounds stupid.”

  “Dude,” he says, “it’s an awesome song. It’s the country song answer to ‘Baby Got Back.’”

  “The Sir Mix-A-Lot song?” I am impressed that Kyle knows a song from 1992, and I cannot lie.

  “Yes.”

  “You weren’t even born when that came out.”

  “It’s one of my mom’s favorites.”

  I don’t know where to begin unraveling this young man. Kyle is in the clutches of terrible music, and it sounds like his mother is helping to drive him there. I will have to hit him with strong doses of R.E.M. and hope they have some kind of cleansing effect. I wish now that I had added some Matthew Sweet—my other favorite musical artist—to my collection. If Kyle is in thrall (I love the word “thrall”) to silly words like “badonkadonk,” there may be no rescuing him with just R.E.M. Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck, and Bill Berry are good, but as far as I know they are not miracle workers. Miracles are hard to quantify, anyway. I prefer facts.

  At 7:07 p.m., I’m in my sweatpants and a T-shirt, lounging on one bed in our room at the Holiday Inn in Rock Springs. Kyle is on the other bed, watching something on MTV that is called Jersey Shore.

  This show flummoxes me.

  Kyle tries to explain how it works, that these eight young people—he calls the guys “guidos,” which I guess would make the women “guidesses”—share a house and try to get along with one another, but I watch the show with him and I don’t see much getting along. I see people talking on phones, or yelling at each other, or getting drunk and having sex. In other words, this is quality programming.

  I just made another sarcastic joke. I am pretty funny sometimes.

  Kyle says one of the guys, someone known as “The Situation,” is his favorite.

  “And that one there,” he says, pointing to a very short woman with very tall hair, “that’s Snooki.”

  “What’s a ‘Snooki’?” I ask.

  “It’s not her real name,” he says. “That’s just what they call her.”

  I watch her as she walks up to the “The Situation” and starts yelling at him.

  “Look at the badonkadonk on her,” I say.

  Kyle giggles.

  I was going to propose that we watch the next episode of Adam-12 on my bitchin’ iPhone, but Kyle is having so much fun watching Jersey Shore that I skip it. I’m woefully (I love the word “woefully”) behind on establishing any sort of pattern with Adam-12, and this both surprises me and disappoints me.

  I’m surprised because I’m starting to like the show, even if it’s not nearly as good as Dragnet, and so it stands to reason that I would be eager to view more episodes and become even more acquainted with Officers Pete Malloy and Jim Reed. It disappoints me because a rigorous schedule of show-watching used to be essential to how I went through the day. When I met Kyle and Donna, for example, I was on a strict regimen of watching Dragnet every night at 10:00. I couldn’t even contemplate skipping it. But then work and friends—things I had been without—came into my life, and when my Dragnet tape broke, I stopped watching.

  Now, however, I am adrift. My job is gone. My friends live somewhere else. My mother is in another state most of the year. My father is dead. It seems to me that a little rigor in my schedule would do me some good, and yet I cannot seem to muster the energy to impose that on myself.

  There’s something else, too. I feel a sense of longing, only I cannot identify what it is I’m longing for, and that is worrisome for someone who values precision the way I do. I am not good at thinking in abstract ways, but I will try to describe this. When I had my job, my best friends across the street, and my house on Clark Avenue, Billings, Montana, was where I wanted to be. It was familiar and it was mine. Now, I am in a hotel room in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a place I have never been before, and, because Kyle is here with me, I do not want this moment to end.

  I am scanning through the songs loaded on my bitchin’ iPhone, and I say to Kyle, “How many songs did you purchase?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty or so.”

  This is not close to being the correct answer.

  “Kyle, you purchased one hundred and ninety-three songs.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, you did. And at a dollar and twenty-nine cents per song, that comes to two hundred forty-eight dollars and ninety-seven cents.”

  “It does?”

  “Yes, it does. I think you know that.”

  “I do?”

  I look over at Kyle, and he is trying hard to keep from grinning, but I see him. I think that I should feel entitled to scold him for spending $218.97 more than his upper estimate of what his songs would cost, but I don’t want to scold him. I want to grin, too. This is a conundrum (I love the word “conundrum”) for me, because it seems to me that part of the problem we’ve been having with Kyle is that we let him get away with such things. And yet, I think that if I scold him over what he has done, he will become angry and make things difficult for me on this trip.

  I quickly devise a plan to deal with this.

  “How much money did you get from me today because I cursed?” I ask him.

  “Three dollars.”

  That’s right. There was the buck in Burley, Idaho, when I said “fuck,” and then I had to give him another when I said that the Great Salt Lake looked “pretty fucking awesome,” and finally, I gave him a dollar when I referred to my “bitchin’ iPhone” at dinner. I have to be more careful.

  “OK,” I say. “I figure you owe me two hundred and eighteen—”

  “What? That’s not fair. I don’t—”

  “Just hold on. I’m not going to make you pay it back in actual dollars. But you have to pay it back in deeds.”

  “What do you mean, deeds?”

  “Every time you take a walk with me, I’ll credit ten dollars to your account. You refused to walk tonight, and that wasn’t nice, because I had to stay here with you instead of getting the exercise I need to beat my diabetes.”

  “OK.”

  “Every time you call your mother and tell her you love her, I’ll credit ten dollars to your account.”

  “This will be easy.”

  “It might be. But listen—every time you call me a name I’ll charge ten dollars to your account. Every time you’re rude to someone, like you were with that woman at Wingers when you said, ‘You need to fill my drink more often,’ I’ll charge ten dollars to your account. If you curse, I’ll add ten dollars to your account.”

  Now Kyle looks less sanguine (I love the wo
rd “sanguine”).

  “OK,” he says.

  “Now,” I say, “show me those three dollars.”

  Kyle digs in his pocket and pulls out three crumpled bills.

  “Let me hold them.”

  He hands them between the beds to me.

  “I’ll keep these,” I say. “Now you owe me just two hundred and fifteen.”

  He sits upright. “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “That was a dirty trick, douche.”

  I grab my notebook off the end table and make a notation. “Make that two hundred and twenty-five.”

  Kyle flops onto his back, covers his head with a pillow, and lets out a muffled scream.

  He doesn’t talk to me the rest of the night. He watches his shows, and when I try to talk to him, he pretends not to hear me. I do not like the silent treatment. My father used to do this to me, especially after I became a teenager and he and I did not get along very well. I don’t think it is mature. However, it would be a stretch to say Kyle is being rude about it. He is just sending me a very clear, silent message. I wish now that I had put a codicil in our agreement that would reward him for being sociable.

  At 10:00 p.m., I tell him that it’s lights-out, that we have another long day of driving ahead of us. He doesn’t answer me, but he does turn down his bed and climb in. I shut off the light.

  I lie on my back and stare into the darkness. Tomorrow, we will drive 517 miles to Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, a route that will take us most of the way across Wyoming, down into Colorado near Denver, and then, finally, on smaller roads into southeastern Colorado and to our destination.

  I close my eyes and my brain provides a picture of how I remember Cheyenne Wells from 1978, the last time I was there. Not much comes to mind—grain elevators, a railway line, and a big, wide-open sky that always seemed to hold huge clouds. Southeastern Colorado, in my recollection, has a lot in common with the eastern part of Montana, where I am from. Neither place has the big mountains that outsiders seem to associate with the states they’re in. It occurs to me that it has been so long since I saw Cheyenne Wells, this will be like visiting it for the first time. Even as detail-oriented as I am, I know that memories are imprecise renderings of places and times. I am eager to see it again and to reconcile what I see with what I remember. I hope sleep comes soon. Strangely, I hope my father visits my dreams again. I realize that I find comfort in that.