Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

“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.

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.