Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift (9 page)

I think I will keep going with this series.

After eating a grilled chicken dinner at Perkins, I take a walk around the immediate area. It’s a nondescript place close to the interstate. Tomorrow morning, in fact, I’ll have to go west for 6.6 miles farther on Interstate 90 to get to Interstate 15 South, which will carry me into Idaho.

The sky has gone dark. While the weather is variable, the time of sunset is not. We have not yet reached the winter solstice, when the stretches of daylight will begin growing longer. The sun was down before 5:00 p.m. I pull my coat up to cover my ears. It’s quite cold here—much colder than it is back home in Billings.

I’m adrift. That’s the feeling I’ve had since setting out today—and, really, for much of this shitburger of a year—and I’ve finally found the word to describe that feeling. My home is 223 miles behind me, and my destination is still 463.5 miles away. I don’t feel comfortable here, my feelings are still badly hurt over getting punched, and I’m nervous about seeing Donna and Victor and Kyle again. That seems strange to me. If you’d asked me on any of the 189 days since they moved whether I’d like to see them, I would have jumped up excitedly and said, “Yes, please, that would be very nice.”

Now I’m about twenty-four hours away, and I feel scared.

That flummoxes me. It’s hard to know how much of that feeling is because I’ll be seeing my friends again and how much is because of everything else. I don’t like not knowing things.

TECHNICALLY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2011

I wake up at 2:37 a.m., and I’m discombobulated (I love the word “discombobulated”) and short of breath. As my eyes adjust to the absence of light, I stop fighting for air, and my heart rate slows. I remember now where I am.

I had a weird dream.

In it my father was alive. I frequently have dreams in which my father is alive and with me. Usually, he is showing me how to do something or telling me something he thinks I ought to know. I never dreamed about my father while he was alive. At least, I don’t remember doing so. I’ve dreamt about him often in the three years, one month, and eleven days since he died. It’s odd, but it’s also comforting, so I do not complain.

This dream was strange in that what happened in it also happened in real life, many years ago. I was with my father in a bar in a little town called Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. I was nine years old. I remember that because the Dallas Cowboys had beaten the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XII earlier that year. A few months later, after school was finished, my mother let me go with my father to Cheyenne Wells, where he was going to oversee
some work on the oil pumps that the company he worked for owned there. That’s how we ended up at the bar.

We were sitting on stools. My father was on my left, engaged in an earnest bullshit session with the bartender, and on my right was this old man with long, white whiskers. He had his hands clenched together, and he kept bringing them to his face and peering into them with one eye.

This sparked my curiosity.

“What do you have in there?” I asked him.

“It’s a mouse. Would you like to see it?”

I didn’t believe him. A mouse could not fit into the small space between his clenched hands. Even if it could, it would probably try to bite the man. I thought he was playing games with me.

“No, I don’t want to see your mouse.”

I don’t remember everything—I can’t even guess when the last time was that I thought about this—but I do know this went on for some time, with the old man looking into his hands and inviting me to take a look. I declined every time.

At some point, I got up to go to the bathroom and pee—because I was a young boy with a small bladder, not because I was medicated like I am now. When I emerged from the bathroom, the old man was waiting for me, and he grabbed me by the wrist and tried to hurt me.

I screamed for my father, and he got there in what seemed like a millisecond, although I know that’s impossible. He grabbed the old man’s hand and my wrist and yanked them apart, and then he threw an elbow into the old man’s chest, knocking him to the floor.

“Get the hell out of here,” my father said, and the old man did.

After the old man scrambled away, my father turned to me. He looked concerned. “Teddy, are you all right?”

I nodded. I couldn’t say anything.

My father held out his hand.

“Come on, Son.”

He led me back to the bar and told the bartender to set me up with a fresh root beer.

I have to be honest about my father. He was an inscrutable man sometimes. We got along great when I was a young boy, but in later years, especially when I was a teenager and even older, we fought a lot. There were times when he was cruel to me, like when he directed Jay L. Lamb to write me nasty letters upbraiding (I love the word “upbraiding”) me for what he perceived to be my failures.

When he died, which was quite sudden and unexpected, we had not resolved many of our disagreements, and that left me regretful.

Dr. Buckley said that as I adjusted to my father’s death, the good memories would replace the bad and perhaps I could have a relationship with him in death that I could not manage while he was alive. This has been true for the most part, but not entirely. The truth is, I alternate between happy memories, ones where it almost seems as if he’s by my side, and regretful ones, where we’re still fighting and still finding it impossible to understand each other. The one constant, regardless of memory, is that I wish he were here for real. As I lie on my back in bed, staring into the dark, the blanket pulled up around me, I think that I have never wanted him here more than I do right now.

If my father had been with me yesterday, he would have protected me from the intemperate young man in Bozeman. If he
were here right now, he might be able to tell me why I am suddenly so scared of figuring out how my life is supposed to go. I don’t know anymore. I used to have a job and friends whom I saw every day, or nearly so. I used to have routines and things I could rely on. I don’t have many of those things anymore. I don’t know how to replace what I’ve lost. I don’t know if it’s even possible.

I would want to tell my father this, but I also would want him to know that I am hanging in there. My father admired people who hung in there. Troy Aikman was his favorite football player ever because he seemed to be fearless, even when other teams were hurting him bad. I am not fearless. I cannot even pretend to be. But I am hanging in there. I’m trying to make sense of things. I think that’s why I’m on this trip. Yes, Kyle is in trouble, and I want to help him if I can. Yes, I want to see Donna and Victor again. But maybe I want something for me, too, such as not feeling so adrift. That seems selfish, but I think it’s OK. I think my father would think it’s OK, too.

I’m glad I could think about this, even if it did interrupt my sleep.

OFFICIALLY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2011

From the logbook of Edward Stanton:

Time I woke up today: 2:37 a.m. to deal with the dream about my father. 7:38 a.m. for good. The 208th time all year I’ve been awake at this time.

High temperature for Saturday, December 10, 2011, Day 344: 43 (according to the Butte newspaper)

Low temperature for Saturday, December 10, 2011: 27

Precipitation for Saturday, December 10, 2011: 0.00 inches

Precipitation for 2011: 19.40 inches

New entries:

Exercise for Saturday, December 10, 2011: 47-minute brisk walk after dinner.

Miles driven Saturday, December 10, 2011: 223.4

Addendum: While I had a bowl of oatmeal this morning at the complimentary continental breakfast—where I consumed all of my medicine—I thought a lot about the dream I had early this morning and my fear about where my life is headed. There is nothing I can do to magically make the fear go away. There is no such thing as magic. Maybe the fear means something. Maybe it is guiding me toward something. This is all more touchy-feely than I prefer to be, but perhaps I will stress out about it less if I believe I’m headed toward something new and important. I have nothing against belief, although I will concede that it is not nearly as good as fact.

I’ve also thought a lot about being punched by the intemperate young man in Bozeman. I’m going to try not to stress out about that, either.

I have a long purplish-blue streak that runs vertically along the right side of my nose, and the fleshy area under my right eye is turning black. What a whipdick that intemperate young man is.

Before I leave, I do something smart—I wait for an hour after I’ve taken my medicine before loading up the car and leaving Butte. In that time, I pee twice, which should mitigate (I love the word “mitigate”) my having to pee while in transit. I still manage to gas up and be on the road by 10:02 a.m. My fill-up requires 10.023 gallons of unleaded gasoline at $3.1499 a gallon, for a total of $31.57. By my figures, I got 22.3 miles per gallon yesterday. My projections were way off, and that disappoints me. There is just no way to fully anticipate your costs when you’re at the mercy of oil companies.

It’s a cold, clear morning. The external thermostat on my Cadillac DTS, which displays on the control panel inside, says it’s twelve degrees outside. The external thermostat on this car is not as reliable as the official temperature-gauging machinery used by the National Weather Service, but it is sufficient for my driving needs.

As I pass a weigh station, where the transportation department checks the paperwork and cargo size of large trucks and other commercial vehicles, I remember sometimes being with my father when he would take long drives like the one I am on. He hated weigh stations. His hostility didn’t come from direct personal experience. Only once did I ever see my father driving a large truck, and that was in November 1974, when he bought an International Paystar 500 in Denver and drove it to Midland, Texas, so it could be outfitted with a drilling rig. My mother sent me along with him on that trip. I was five years old. Their marriage was in trouble, although I didn’t know that at the time. I don’t recall that we had any difficulty with weigh stations on that trip. I’d remember it if it had happened.