Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

2. Kyle cannot call me names.

3. Kyle will follow my instructions when I give them. This has to be an absolute rule, because I cannot anticipate every situation that will emerge.

4. Kyle must stay with me at all times.

5. Kyle cannot curse anymore. Each time he curses, I will write it down and I will show these marks to his parents.

6. These are the rules.

7. Stop writing.

8. Stop.

9. Shit.

10. OK, that’s it.

I draw a line through numbers six through ten, and then I hand the notebook to Kyle and tell him to sign it, acknowledging that he understands the rules and agrees to abide by them.

“What if I don’t sign?” he asks.

“I will call your parents right now and they will come get you.”

He signs the paper.

“And what’s this about cussing? You cuss.”

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.”