Edward Adrift e-2

by Craig Lancaster

  I go to the door and lean into it.

  “Who’s there?” I shout.

  “Dr. Asskicker and his band of merry men.”

  That can be only one person. I open the door, and sure enough, Scott Shamwell is standing on my front porch wearing a T-shirt that says “You’re Welcome to Join Me at My Intervention.”

  “Ed!” he says. “What the hell is up, dude?”

  “Scott Shamwell, what are you doing here?”

  “I told you, man. I said after Christmas we’d get together and do some radical shit. Well, it’s after Christmas, hoss.”

  “But you told me to call you,” I say.

  “Come on, man. I knew you wouldn’t. Now check this out.”

  Scott Shamwell stands aside and sweeps his arm toward the street, like one of the pretty women on The Price Is Right showing off a prize. Parked in front of my house is a black motorcycle with a sidecar.

  “Come on, dude,” Scott Shamwell says. “You can be my sidekick. Let’s go get stupid.”

  — • —

  Getting stupid is not what I do.

  Scott Shamwell stretches his arms out as he holds the steering wheel of my Cadillac DTS, locking his elbows.

  “A frickin’ Cadillac,” he says. “God, I hope none of my friends see me in this thing.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I broke my ribs. I can’t sit in a sidecar. Plus, motorcycles are dangerous.”

  “I know, but—”

  “At least I’m letting you drive,” I say. “I’ll still be your sidekick. That sounds like fun.”

  “I know, man, but a Cadillac! It’s so square.”

  “My father always said it’s the greatest negotiating tool ever.”

  “I don’t want to negotiate, dude. I want to get beer and girls.”

  — • —

  We find a place in Stillwater County, on an outcropping that overlooks the Yellowstone River, and we eat chicken wings and drink root beer on the hood of my Cadillac DTS.

  “So the guy just hauled off and punched you for nothin’?” Scott Shamwell asks.

  “Yes. You can still see a little bit of the bruise under my eye.”

  Scott Shamwell peers in and crinkles his nose.

  “I think it’s gone.”

  I walk around to the side-view mirror and take a look. Scott Shamwell just didn’t look closely enough. The bruise is still there. I guess it helps to know where it was in the first place.

  “I wish I’d have been there,” he says. “I would have stomped a mud hole in that dude’s ass.”

  He flexes his freckly arms and gives each bicep a kiss. He’s pretty funny sometimes.

  — • —

  When I tell Scott Shamwell about Sheila Renfro, he becomes excitable. He says, “Oh, yeah, Big Ed,” and then he gallops around the car twice, pretending that he’s slapping a horse on the hindquarters.

  Finally, he stops and says, “Did you screw her, dude?”

  He moves his hips forward and backward.

  “Did you get it on?”

  “No.”

  I say this abruptly. I’m annoyed with Scott Shamwell.

  “Dude,” he says, and he slaps me on the shoulder. “You got to bone it like you own it.”

  I’m more than annoyed. I’m angry.

  “You shut up,” I say. “She’s my friend. You don’t say mean things about her.”

  Scott Shamwell looks shocked. Then Scott Shamwell looks ashamed. More than that, he looks hurt.

  “She’s important to you,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Ed, that’s—I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry.”

  He gathers up our trash and bags it up.

  “Do you want to go home?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “Let’s get stupid.”

  — • —

  We’re on a side road in Carbon County, a long way from the highway, and Scott Shamwell has decided that he wants to see how fast the Cadillac can go. He finds a straightaway and brings the car to a stop.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Well, dude, wish in one hand, shit in the other.”

  He stomps down hard on the accelerator, the back end of the Cadillac drops just a bit, and we’re off.

  “Nice takeoff,” Scott Shamwell says, and then he lets out a whoop. “WEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  He looks over at me. I wish he would look at the road.

  “Yell, Ed!”

  “Woo,” I say.

  “Really yell, dude! WEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  “WEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” I say.

  Scott Shamwell lets off the accelerator.

  “Hundred and fifteen,” he says. “Pretty bitchin’.”

  — • —

  It’s 6:17 p.m. and dark when we get back to my house. Scott Shamwell says he loves my Cadillac and wants to find one of his own and “soup it up.”

  He shuts off the ignition but still holds on to the steering wheel. He is staring at my garage.

  “Edward,” he says, “I need to tell you something, because I think you’re fucking this whole thing up.”

  “OK.”

  “You don’t want to go to work for that donkey-nuzzler Lamb guy, do you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Not really, hell. Not at all.”

  Scott Shamwell is correct.

  “You ought to kick his ass,” he says. “That’s horseshit, man, making you come to work for him while he’s boning your old lady. And it’s horseshit the way they treat you, making you come back from Colorado like you’re some kind of little kid or something.”

  Scott Shamwell’s indignation amuses me, but the image of my getting into a fistfight with Jay L. Lamb, or anyone, is absurd to me.

  “But what if he loves my mother?” I say. “And what if she loves him?”

  Scott Shamwell doesn’t say anything for several seconds.

  “Scott Shamwell?” I say.

  “Love is something else, man,” he finally says. “If she loves him, you gotta let it go, because she’ll never forgive you if you don’t, and you’ll never forgive yourself if it’s real. Love is bullshit and weird and stupid, but shit, man, if you have love, everybody should leave you alone and let you keep it for as long as you can.”

  Scott Shamwell looks sad as he says this. He breathes in, and then he expels his breath in a sigh.

  “If you ever want to sell this car, you let me know, dude.”

  “I will, Scott Shamwell.”

  He opens his door. I open mine. We both step out.

  “Happy New Year, Ed,” he says.

  “In a week, yes. It’s still 2011 now.”

  “Whenever, man. You take care of yourself.”

  I watch as he walks over to his motorcycle, and I wish my ribs didn’t still hurt so I could ride in his sidecar. I think it would make him feel better. I also don’t think I’m going to see him again for a while, and that’s strange. It’s conjecture, which I dislike, and imprecise, which I dislike even more.

  By the time I’ve worked out the uncertainties, Scott Shamwell and his motorcycle are a noisy dot three blocks away on Clark Avenue.

  TECHNICALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011

  A bizarre dream wakes me up at 2:21 a.m. In it, I see Scott Shamwell’s face but hear Sheila Renfro’s voice, and she says one word over and over and over: “Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.”

  When I finally pull out of the dream, I make an instant trip into the clarity of the waking world. For the first time, even as I remember the psychedelic aspects of my dream that would be absurd here in the conscious world, what I saw and heard makes complete sense to me. I can’t believe I didn’t realize this before.

  I’ve worked hard to keep my life contained—in this house, in this town, in my job at the Billings Herald-Gleaner. But no matter how hard I’ve worked, the circumstances of my life have not been as airtight as I would prefer. My job went away. My friends went away. My mother is going
away, and, from the looks of it, so is her new boyfriend.

  And I’m lying here in my familiar bed, in the room I sleep in every night. Outside the door, my things are where I’ve put them and where I expect them to be. My notebooks record all the things I’ve tracked for all these years, and I’m no closer to controlling those figures than I was the day I started them.

  I don’t want to do this anymore. Everyone I know has found where they want to be. I’m still adrift. But there is something I can do about that.

  — • —

  I pull on my shirt and jeans and socks and slip into my shoes. In the garbage bin behind my house, I find my mother’s Keurig. The box is dented and wet, but it’s otherwise OK.

  I put the box into the trunk of my new Cadillac DTS and drive to my mother’s condo, with right turns on Seventh Street West and Lewis Avenue and Broadway. It’s dark and the roads are wet, which makes the reflections from the streetlights look like smudges of yellow paint across the asphalt.

  I ring the buzzer on my mother’s condo once, and then once more.

  Finally, her groggy voice answers: “Yes?”

  “Let me in, Mother.”

  — • —

  Telling my mother that she has violated my sovereignty is not the ordeal I thought it would be. She listens to me intently, her eyes following me as I pace the living room of her condo. I do not like looking people in the eye when I speak to them, especially when the topic is something like this, but I make myself finish.

  “I’m not a child, Mother. I’m not incapable of making my own decisions. And you need to stop treating me as if I am.”

  Her eyes are clear and unblinking. “You’re right.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes, of course you are. I thought I needed to protect you—”

  “I wasn’t in danger. And I’m forty-two years old. I can protect myself. I’m developmentally disabled. I’m not stupid.”

  “I know. You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”

  I had prepared to say more on this topic, but now it seems like piling on, so I don’t.

  “I was wrong about something, though, Mother.”

  “What?”

  “I was wrong about Jay L. Lamb.”

  “No, you weren’t. You deserved to know before this. I just—”

  “Do you love him?” I ask.

  She looks at me as if she didn’t expect the question, which is OK. I didn’t expect to ask it, not like that.

  “Yes. Very much,” she says. “It surprised me. I didn’t think I had it in me to love again. But…yes. I love him.”

  I surprise myself with what I say next.

  “I’m glad.”

  I surprise myself further by realizing that I really am glad. I wouldn’t have chosen Jay L. Lamb for my mother. I have to be honest about this. But I don’t get to choose. If I did, I would want my father back. There are so many things I’ve learned. I would like to tell him about them. I would like to be his friend. I’m good at it now.

  — • —

  We talk about one more thing before I leave, and that is my father. I tell her how he’s been in my dreams, and as she listens, she keeps curling the knuckle of her index finger into the corner of her eye.

  “It upset me that you said you don’t miss him,” I tell her. “I miss him all the time. I wish he hadn’t left us.”

  My mother invites me to sit down next to her on the couch. I do.

  “I was tired,” she says. “It was hard to be married to Ted Stanton. It wasn’t just the drinking, which was bad and getting worse, or what he did to you, although it will take me a long time to forgive him for that.”

  “I forgive him.”

  “You’re a good boy. But, listen, Edward, it was all-encompassing. Being married to your father was like being married to this city, and to every thought he had or word he said. Since he’s been gone, I’ve done what I want to do. Do you understand? I make the rules now. I choose what gets my time and attention. I never did that before.”

  I understand. I should. It was my most common complaint about him when he was alive. How does the saying go? It was his world, and we were just living in it? Something like that.

  “Did you love him?” I ask.

  “Of course I did.”

  “I did, too.”

  “And he loved us,” she said. “He’d be proud of you now, seeing you do the things you want to do.”

  There’s nothing I can say about that except that hearing it makes me happy and sad all at the same time. That’s peculiar.

  OFFICIALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011

  At 6:18 a.m., I walk out to a spot where I can see the city lights below me. I’ve been driving for two hours, and my muscles are stiff. The first hint of sunlight peeks in from the east. The smell of pine and grass, even in late December, teases my nose. My left hand, cold and not yet limber, holds my bitchin’ iPhone.

  I dial the number. Traffic below me slowly rises from the trickle I watched from the parking lot as I ate my breakfast sandwich. Big rigs move east and west across the highway below me.

  The call connects.

  “The Derrick Motel. How can I help you?”

  “Hello, Sheila.”

  There is a pause and then a tiny gasp.

  “Edward?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t call me Sheila Renfro.”

  “No.”

  “Where are you?”

  I look at the city, gleaming in the first light.

  “Sheridan, Wyoming.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Wondering if you have a vacancy.”

  “You’re coming here?”

  “Yes.”

  “But your mother—”

  “My mother says she is looking forward to seeing you in the spring when we go to Texas to see her and her new boyfriend.”

  “You want me to go to Texas with you in the spring?”

  “Yes. We can close up the motel for a few days for that trip.”

  “That means—”

  “Yes.”

  Sheila screams. She says “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” And then she says, “Edward Stanton, you are the special man I’ve been waiting for. You are.”

  “I know I am. You were wrong when you said I wasn’t.”

  “Edward, I am so happy to be wrong about that.”

  “I’ll be there in nine hours,” I say, and the words are hard to form because I’m grinning so widely. “Nine hours depending on the vagaries of traffic and gas stops.” I think my face is going to break.

  “I’m so happy,” she says.

  I begin walking back to the car, which sits alone in the rest area parking lot.

  Sheila talks excitedly into my ear.

  “Now, Edward,” she says, “from now on, when I put my hand on your knee, I want you to put your arm around me. That’s how you make a girl feel good.”

  “I will,” I say. “And I want cable or satellite television at the motel.”

  “OK, but you have to kiss me sometimes, especially when I don’t expect it.”

  “I will.”

  “And please don’t always tell me about how mouths are gross, OK? Because I know that and will try to keep mine clean.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  She gasps again.

  “You called me dear!”

  “I thought I’d try it out. Do you like it?”

  “I like it. I like it very much, Edward.”

  And that’s how it goes for the next four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Sheila instructs me on how to love her and make her happy, and I circle the parking lot and wait for her to finish so I can get there, only I don’t want her to ever hang up, but I know that she must if I am to reach her in approximately nine hours.

  She asks me why I changed my mind, and I say, “Because I asserted my sovereignty.”

  She laughs and says, “I don’t know what that means, exactly, but promise me that you’ll call every time you stop.”


  “I promise.”

  “I don’t want to hang up.”

  “I know. But we have to.”

  “Hurry here to me.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll see you soon, Edward.”

  “Yes, you will, dear.”

  She giggles and then she hangs up, and I leave the parking lot and head for the interstate. I know exactly where I am going. As I guide the car onto the ramp and hit cruising speed, Michael Stipe is telling me that she is beautiful and she is the everything.

  I know she is.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many to thank, so little space.

  The “beta” readers: Jim Thomsen, Celeste Cornish, Jessica Park, Jill Rupert, Amy Pizarro, and R. J. Keller. Your earnest and eagerly offered feedback made this an immeasurably better book. I am indebted.

  Elizabeth Holleran, you’re funny as hell and you provided one key line of dialogue I could have never conjured on my own. You know the one. Thank you.

  Alex Carr, Jessica Poore, and the team at Amazon Publishing: Thank you for believing in Edward and giving him a home. It’s good to be with you again. And Charlotte Herscher, my developmental editor, you made this book so much better than it would have been otherwise. Thank you.

  Chris Cauble, Linda Cauble, Janet Spencer, the team at Riverbend Publishing: It would have never happened in the first place if not for your hard work. I’m so thankful.

  Mollie Glick and Foundry Literary + Media, the finest agent and agency in the land: It all comes back around. Thank you for your tireless work, your wisdom, and your cheer.

  And, finally, to the readers and those who put the books in their hands: Thank you, thank you, thank you. I could never possibly say it enough.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Craig Lancaster is a journalist who has worked at newspapers all over the country, including the San Jose Mercury News, where he served as lead editor for the paper’s coverage of the BALCO steroids scandal. He wrote 600 Hours of Edward—winner of a Montana Book Award honorable mention and a High Plains Book Award—in less than 600 hours during National Novel Writing Month in 2008. His other books include the novel The Summer Son and the short story collection Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure. Lancaster lives in Billings, Montana, with his wife.