Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift
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
FROM BILLINGS TO BOISE: A TWO-DAY ITINERARY BY EDWARD STANTON
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
TECHNICALLY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2011
OFFICIALLY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2011
TECHNICALLY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2011
OFFICIALLY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 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
TECHNICALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011
OFFICIALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011
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 separation.” 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.