Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

He looks down. “OK, I’ll stop.”

“OK,” I say, and I sit down on my bed, keeping my distance but also trying to let him know that I will not hold a grudge. “I’ve decided to stop tracking your behavior because it’s none of my business. I think you’re a good young man, and I think no matter how hard things have been for you, you know what’s right and what’s wrong because your parents have raised you well.”

Kyle nods. I keep talking. It’s hard for me to believe these things are coming out of my mouth, because I don’t sound like me. I sound like Dr. Buckley. Again.

“We were friends when you lived in Billings, and in my head and in my heart we will always be friends. But I don’t know what kind of friends we’ll be. A lot of it—most of it—will be up to you. I’m not going to make it hard on you by tracking your behavior. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a new day.”

I really can’t believe I’m saying this, because it’s such a stupid, self-evident phrase; every day is a new day no matter what, and it’s silly to point it out.

Kyle sits on the edge of his bed quietly. I think this is the first time on this whole trip that he is actually listening to me. Not that thinking matters very much. It’s the facts that count.

“Why did we come here?” Kyle asks. “This town is so small and boring.”

I cannot argue with Kyle, even if I wanted to. When we drove into Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, last night, even though it was dark, I recognized this motel and the grain elevators in town, and that was it. It’s funny—and not ha-ha funny—how something can appear to be so precise and vivid when you dream about it and then be so foreign and unrecognizable in the conscious world, when the cones and rods in your eyes are sending electrical impulses to your brain and showing you what things really look like.

The simplest answer to Kyle’s question, the one Occam’s razor would lead us to, is that I don’t have a good reason for why we came here. But I don’t tell Kyle that. I choose a different answer, one that is just as true.

“My father, before he became a politician in Billings, used to work for an oil company, and he was the boss of some crews that worked around here on the oil pumps. Those crews did some pretty neat things. Would you like to see the oil fields?”

“Sure,” Kyle says.

We both stand up and grab our jackets and head for the door. Once we’re in the hallway, the motel owner comes walking past us.

“Storm is coming,” she says, her intense blue eyes looking straight at me. And then she is gone into the room two doors down and across the hallway from us.

She flummoxes me.

“That was weird,” Kyle says.

It certainly was. I’m definitely going to talk to her later.

Kyle and I stand on the side of a dirt road, and I point out across a fallow (I love the word “fallow”) field to an oil pump in the distance. The head of it slowly bobs up and down, like a bird pulling a worm out of the ground.

“That’s an oil pump,” I say.

“I know that.”

Kyle thinks he’s so smart.

“Do you know what cathodic protection is?” I ask.

“No.”

“Do you want me to tell you?”

“Yeah.”

I try to explain this simply, which means I leave out the most interesting parts, like electrochemical potential and cathodic disbonding.

“These oil pumps will corrode over time unless something is done to combat it. That’s what my father’s crew would do. They would attach a power source to the pump with cables that they buried underground, and these cables would also go to something called an anode, which would get corroded instead of the pump, so the pump could keep doing its business. Does that make sense?”

“Not really.”

“You’ll learn about it later in school.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“Nothing is special about it. It’s just something my father did. The men who worked for him were very tough; you had to be, working with cathodic protection. Sometimes, the men would have to splice the cables together, which involved something called epoxy—a kind of glue. They would have these bags of liquid that were divided into two parts, and they would have to squeeze the bag repeatedly to heat up the liquid, then pull apart the divider to mix it, then cut open the bag of liquid, and pour it into a mold. My father said that epoxy, if it got on your skin, would be almost impossible to remove. He told me once when I was a little boy, ‘Edward, I’m thirty-six years old, but my hands are eighty-four.’ I don’t think he meant that literally, because that would be impossible.”

Kyle kneels down and picks up a small rock from the roadway. He throws it sidearm, and it thumps against a fence post.

“Good throw,” I say.

“Can we go over there and look at the pump?” Kyle asks.

“Oh, no.”

“Why not?”

“That would be trespassing.”

My father warned me never to trespass. There was nothing he hated in the world more than disrespect of private-property rights. If you got him talking about those or the shenanigans of Democrats, he would get very angry. However, if you got him talking about tax cuts or Ronald Reagan, he would get very happy. To be honest, none of those subjects interests me very much.

Kyle spreads his arms wide and says, “Dude, there’s nobody for miles. Let’s go take a look.”

“Kyle, no.”

Kyle is not listening to me. He shimmies (I love the word “shimmies”) under the barbed-wire fence while I say “No, no, no, no, no,” and he takes off running across the field, his feet kicking up dust as he goes.

I am too large to shimmy under the fence. I grab a fencepost with my right hand and put my left foot on the bottom strand of barbed wire. The strand goes all the way to the ground as I put my weight on it. I look for Kyle, and he’s now just a dot on the horizon, yards and yards away from me.

Slowly, I straddle the barbed wire, bringing my right leg over to the other side. I am in a precarious (I love the word “precarious”) position now. My balls are hanging directly over the barbed wire. As I find the ground with my right foot, I start bringing my left foot over, and that’s when it happens. I let go of the top strand of barbed wire too fast, and it springs upward, gouging me in my left hamstring. It tears my pants and cuts into my leg, and I fall down on the other side of the fence.

I pick myself up and dust off, and as I limp toward the oil pump, I see that Kyle has climbed up the back of it.

“Kyle, get down!” I scream. He can’t hear me or doesn’t want to hear me. The wind is blowing, and it’s as if my words get scattered away from where I’m aiming them.

“Kyle, get off that right now!” I scream again, and this time I know he hears me, because I’m close enough to see his face.

He waves at me. “I’m a cowboy, Edward, and I’m riding the biggest horse there is!”

“Get down!”

“Make me!”

I am flummoxed. I’m not going to climb on the back of the pump to chase him; that is just asking for trouble and maybe even tragedy. I can’t call his mother, because I left the bitchin’ iPhone way back at the car. I can’t get anyone to help me, because no one else is here.

I’m feeling helpless. I run several steps toward the oil pump and then I stop, because I have no idea what I’ll do once I’m there.

“Get down,” I yell again.

“No.”

I pace back and forth and I run my hands through my hair and I get more and more frustrated. I want to scream.

“Kyle Middleton, you little fucking shitball, you get down off that right now! You’re pretty high and far out, aren’t you? Well, fuck you and the horse you’re riding on.”