600 Hours of Edward

by Craig Lancaster

  Regards,

  Edward Stanton

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23

  I am in the driver’s seat of a car. It’s not my car. It is far bigger—a station wagon, from the looks of the inside. I look to my right, and Joy is sitting in the front seat with me. I reach up and tilt the rearview mirror so I can see behind me. Kyle is in the middle of the backseat, flanked to his left by his mother and to the right by Dr. Buckley. In the far back, in the foldout seats, are my mother and father. I scan every face, and each looks back placidly at me.

  I look outside the car, and I see that we are on a bridge—it looks much like the one I have seen in Eastern Montana, on Interstate 94 near Terry, which spans a wide portion of the Yellowstone River. We are not moving.

  “Sorry about that, everyone,” I say as I put the car into gear. I nudge the gas, and the car slips off the road into nothingness, an empty space now occupying an area that I am sure held a road just a moment ago.

  I look again to my right, and Joy’s face is ashen.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  – • –

  My legs kick into the air, my involuntary response to the expectation of certain death. When I don’t hit ground, my eyes open, and I squint as I adjust to the absence of light.

  From the nightstand, the green numbers of my digital clock cut through the dark: It’s 5:12 a.m. I take a deep breath as I wait for my heartbeat to slow, and then I turn away from the clock and clutch my spare pillow. I slip away again, this time into dreamless sleep.

  – • –

  It is 11:51 a.m. when I awake again. My data isn’t ruined—indeed, it has a first-time-ever entry—but my erratic sleep has cut into my day.

  In the bathroom, I pee long—and I’m not talking about distance, but rather, time. This is something I do not keep data on. First, it’s gross. Second, my sleep is ordinarily so reliable—in 297 days this year (because it’s a leap year), my wake-up time has been in a four-minute range for 294 of them—that it has other physiological benefits as well. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my bathroom breaks are as predictable as my wake-up times.

  In the living room, I peek through the front-window curtain and see what yesterday’s Billings Herald-Gleaner foretold: snow. It’s not much—a medium dusting that will be gone as soon as the temperature gets into the high thirties, I would guess, though I don’t like to guess and will instead just wait and see what the facts bear out—but it’s snow, nonetheless. I can add a round of shoveling to my day.

  – • –

  Outfitted in snow boots, gloves, a hat, and a warm coat, I trudge out the back door, through the backyard gate, and to the garage, where I retrieve my snow shovel.

  When I was in Los Angeles two years ago, I told the desk clerk at the Renaissance Hotel at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue that I was from Billings, Montana, and he performed a little mock shiver. They say that everyone is an actor in Hollywood.

  “I couldn’t live there,” he said. “How do you handle the snow?”

  I thought that was a misinformed statement. Billings’s annual snowfall is 57.2 inches, which I will concede is a lot more than Hollywood gets, but it’s also less than Great Falls (63.5 inches) or someplace like Syracuse, New York (115.6 inches). I thought I might tell him this, but he was already handing me the room key and inviting me to “please let us know if you need anything at all.”

  I might further have told him that I enjoy shoveling snow, thank you very much, and that’s why I’m outside, bundled up and grinning.

  I find great appeal in a freshly shoveled sidewalk and driveway. I love how the blade of the shovel forms beautiful, clean lines where the snow once was. I carefully line up the edge of the blade with the edge of the sidewalk, and then I push through to the end of the property boundary with one stroke, then line the blade up against the edge of the swath I’ve just created and repeat the process.

  The driveway, being far wider than the sidewalk, requires several such swaths, and I push the snow out into the street, where the comings and goings on Clark Avenue will compress it and melt it away.

  It takes me less than a half hour to clear away the accumulations that have been building all day. I’ll probably have to come out again later, but I won’t mind.

  – • –

  At lunch, I dine on a Banquet beef enchilada meal. I have missed breakfast in all of my sleeping, and my medication has been pushed off until now. I’m a little off when I finally take it—not light-headed but definitely aware that something is not quite right in my system. As I sit and shovel forkfuls of Spanish rice into my mouth, I can feel the medication take root, and my unease drifts away.

  My father has made the front page of the Billings Herald-Gleaner again, under the headline “Stanton denounces Big Sky EDA board.”

  By MATT HAGENGRUBER of the Herald-Gleaner staff

  Yellowstone County commissioner Ted Stanton, at odds with fellow commissioners and other members of the Big Sky Economic Development Agency advisory board since his pick for director fell through, criticized the panel Wednesday and signaled that the county faces a battle “for the soul” of its economic future.

  “I think the voters and the businesspeople of this region are going to have to take a hard look at this group,” Stanton said in an interview at his office. “I think when people really get into the meat of it, they’re going to see that they’ve been underserved here. Yellowstone County deserves better.”

  The “meat,” according to Stanton, is a series of decisions that have “stunted” economic growth in the county. Among them, he said, is the failed Promenade project that had been slated for the West End and would have brought approximately ninety retail stores in an outdoor, urban-style setting. Backers of the project pulled out last month, citing a contracting economy, but Stanton maintains that Yellowstone County officials and the Big Sky EDA failed to come through with a promised package of tax incentives.

  Stanton said his criticism of the board is unrelated to the candidacy of a friend, Dave Akers, for the economic development agency’s director job. Akers, considered the front-runner for the job, was dropped from consideration after being arrested on suspicion of drunk driving two weeks ago.

  “The way Dave was dealt with is emblematic of how the board works,” Stanton said. “But it’s immaterial to what’s hurting development in this county.”

  Fellow commissioner Rolf Eklund was skeptical of Stanton’s claims.

  “Everybody knows what Ted’s problem is,” said Eklund, who frequently spars with Stanton in county meetings. “He’s never made much of an effort to hide his agenda.”

  To be sure, Stanton has long been a divisive—but also beloved—figure on the Yellowstone County political scene…

  Always needing a fight, my father seems to have found one. Perhaps that will put an end to the one he’s having with me, at least for a while. I can always hope. I prefer facts.

  – • –

  After lunch, I step into the bedroom and consider the clothes I bought yesterday.

  First, as I had determined, I need to try them all on and make sure everything is in order.

  This takes a while, among all the slipping out of my work clothes, shimmying into the new items, looking myself over in the full-length mirror on my closet door, then shedding one set of new clothes for another.

  The fits are all good, and the clothes hang nicely on a body that I know has gone doughy, especially in my thirties. At one point, I step forward to the mirror and press my face up close. A face changes imperceptibly day to day, but on close examination, I can see what has happened through the years. The creases across the bridge of my wide, flat nose are starting to deepen. My eyes are crinkling at the corners. My hair, which has been thinning at the temples for years, has turned gray on the sides.

  I am beginning to look my age.

  – • –

  At 3:02 p.m., I hear the rap-rap-rap of knuckles against the front door. I’ve been in the computer room, reading u
p on Bobby Troup, one of Jack Webb’s ensemble players. (Did you know that he wrote the theme song for Route 66? I didn’t.)

  I take the five steps to the front door and fling it open. Standing there on the front porch are Kyle and his mother, bundled up and beckoning me outside. Behind them, on the sidewalk leading up to the front door, is the Blue Blaster.

  – • –

  Donna Middleton and I are sitting on the front lawn, on folding chairs I dragged out of the garage. With the snow shovel, I’ve built a mound of loose snow in the middle of the sidewalk. The house I live in is the second to last one in the 600 block of Clark Avenue, and Kyle and the Blue Blaster are on the sidewalk at the corner of Clark and Seventh Street W., where the 700 block begins.

  “Are you ready?” he shouts down to us.

  Donna starts pumping her right fist in a forward-and-back motion and chants, “Go! Go! Go! Go!”

  I pump my right fist in unison but do not chant.

  Kyle settles into the Blue Blaster’s seat, and then he starts pedaling furiously, his piston-like legs driving the glorified tricycle to a high speed. When he connects with the pile of snow, it’s like a frozen explosion, the powdery snow blowing out in all directions.

  “Awesome!” Kyle yells.

  “Do it again,” I say as I get up, grab the shovel, and start rebuilding the snow pile while Kyle wheels the Blue Blaster around and goes back to the corner.

  Soon, his mother and I are chanting and fist pumping as Kyle blasts through another mound.

  “I know what,” Kyle says. “I’m going to ride around the block, and you guys make snowballs and try to hit me as I go by.”

  Donna fixes her boy with a wicked grin. “You’re going down.”

  “No, you are,” Kyle yells, and he and the Blue Blaster light out of there.

  Donna and I drop to our knees in the front yard, scrounging up snow and forming it into perfectly round projectiles. As Kyle rounds the corner and bears down on us, we start flinging snowballs at him. A few connect, but mostly we miss, sending little snow skid marks across the sidewalk. He really is fast on that thing.

  While Kyle wheels around the block for another pass, I have an idea. I slip over to the side of the house, where the snow is a little deeper from my neighbor’s shoveling, and I mold a few snowballs. Perhaps if Kyle doesn’t see where they’re coming from, he’ll be easier to tag.

  I see him round the corner and come down the straightaway, and I cock my arm back, try to time my throw, and then let it go.

  The snowball crashes against the back of Donna Middleton’s head, spraying snow on her shoulders.

  She pivots and faces me, her jaw slack.

  I look back at her and want to say I’m sorry, but my mouth moves only a little and forms no words.

  And then she throws a snowball at me, which explodes against my buttoned-up coat.

  She starts laughing, and I throw one back. Now she’s taking evasive action, running erratically in loops around the yard as I give chase. Kyle has left the Blue Blaster, and he’s chasing her, too. We’re throwing snowballs and chasing and laughing, and I cannot remember the last time I did any of these things.

  – • –

  That’s not true. I can remember.

  In November 1974, when I was five years old, my father took me on a business trip. We flew from Billings down to Denver on a Saturday—I remember the day clearly because there was no school, and it was the weekend before Thanksgiving. When we landed in Denver, my father hailed a cab that took us to a downtown hotel. It had been snowing in Denver, and downtown was mostly dead on a weekend. The gray of the day and the snow combined to give downtown Denver an eerie sort of pallor (I love the word “pallor”), one that was both appealing and a little creepy. After dinner, my father and I went outside and built a snowman on a deserted street corner, then pelted it with snowballs. It was fun.

  The next morning, another cab took us to the International Harvester dealer in Denver, where my father signed the paperwork on a new red Paystar 5000. It must take an awful lot of paperwork to close a deal on such a purchase; I remember that we were there for a long while. I amused myself thumbing through glossy brochures that touted the latest in International Harvester machinery.

  After that, we road-tripped in the new truck down to Midland, Texas, where the Mayhew Co. was waiting to put a drilling rig on the back of it. That’s the earliest memory I have of being in a big truck with my father, and I have vivid memories of thinking that he had to be just about the coolest father in the world. He was in a good mood, too, honking the horn for children in passing cars who would hold up their right fists and pull down twice, asking for such an acknowledgment. I can’t account for that good mood, because although I did not know it at the time, my father’s life was in a shambles. The reason I was with him at all was that my mother had left him, something I didn’t learn until years later, 1992, when my mother mentioned it in a fight with my father.

  In Midland, we were met by Grandpa Sid and Grandma Mabel, who picked us up and drove us the seven hours back to Dallas for Thanksgiving. That day, we saw rookie quarterback Clint Longley come off the bench after Roger Staubach got hurt and lead the Dallas Cowboys to an incredible 24–23 victory over the Washington Redskins, still one of the most amazing finishes in Cowboys history. Longley hit Drew Pearson on a fifty-yard touchdown pass with twenty-eight seconds left to win the game.

  “Teddy,” my father said, “as long as you live, you’ll never see another one like that.” (On a Thanksgiving Day nineteen years later, I saw one even more amazing, in a bad way. Leon Lett slid into the ball after a blocked field goal attempt that would have given the Dallas Cowboys a victory over the Miami Dolphins. Miami recovered the ball, kicked again, and won. I wrote Leon Lett four letters that week, castigating [I love the word “castigating”] him for his foolishness.)

  Back in 1974, two days after Thanksgiving, my father and I were on a plane home to Billings. Mother met us at the airport. She had come home, never to leave my father again.

  Things just work out sometimes. I don’t know how or why. It would be easier if there were some hard data about these things.

  – • –

  “Edward,” Kyle says to me. “Do you want to come over and play some Guitar Hero?”

  We have thrown all the snowballs we wish to throw. What had been a pristine blanket of snow on the front yard is now full of three sizes of footprints and tiny valleys where snow was scooped up.

  I don’t want to play Guitar Hero. I don’t want to go to Donna and Kyle’s house. Why, I cannot explain. I also do not want to be rude. Dr. Buckley says it is OK for me to not want to do some things but that I don’t have to “be abrupt” with people. She says one of the keys to getting along socially is being able to say no firmly and gracefully. I try this.

  “No, thank you, not today.”

  “Oh.” Kyle—and even Donna—looks a little sad. Saying no is hard. No wonder Dr. Buckley has spent so much time talking about it with me.

  “But I have a large DiGiorno supreme pizza,” I say. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  “Can we, Mom?”

  “Sure,” Donna says. “Thank you, Edward. We’d be happy to.”

  We agree to meet back here in an hour. At the front door, I look back and watch Donna and Kyle cross the street, hand in hand.

  – • –

  “You don’t have a lot of stuff, Edward.” Kyle, changed out of his playing-in-the-snow clothes, is standing in the living room, looking around.

  He is not entirely correct, but it’s easy to see why he would think so. My furnishings are spare; when my father bought this house, he asked me how I would like to outfit it, and I asked for furniture from IKEA. For one thing, I like how modern it is—it is unadorned Swedish furniture. For another, IKEA furniture is all about utility. What Kyle sees as spare is actually furniture that allows me to make sure everything has its place. For yet another, IKEA furniture has to be assembled by the buyer, and I
like putting things together. My father was not happy about the price—it costs a lot of money to have IKEA furniture shipped to Montana—but he let me have it.

  “Watch this, Kyle,” I say.

  I show him how the small entertainment center holding my TV and stereo system, against the south wall of the living room, has lots of tiny compartments and how I’ve filled them with movies and compact discs and other things. I show him the coffee table, with still more compartments, where I have stored pens and paper clips and rubber bands and batteries and other things I need.

  I take him into the computer room and show him the stackable storage containers, full of seasonal clothing and household items.

  “Wow. I guess you do have some stuff. Do you have a PlayStation Two?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a Wii?”

  “No.”

  “How do you have fun?”

  Before today, that’s a question that would have flummoxed me.

  – • –

  After dinner, Kyle is in the computer room, playing the only game I have on my computer: blackjack. I had spent a few minutes explaining how it worked, how he didn’t want to exceed twentyone with his cards. I showed him how he could split two cards of the same number and double his bet.

  “But only do it with aces and eights,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because with anything else, you’re only building two bad hands. If you split two tens or two face cards, you’ve broken up a hand that will win most of the time. Same thing with two nines. With two sevens, often the best you can do is get two ties, and that’s only if you draw tens on each one. And so on. Do you understand?”

  “Not really.”

  “Just play. You’ll figure it out.”

  Back in the living room, Donna tells me something. “Mike’s going to be in court next week—Monday.”

  “Are you going to be there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you be OK?”

  “I don’t know. But I will be there, for every court appearance and for the trial.”