Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift (15 page)

As we wait for Donna to call back, Kyle tells me how he was able to stow away in my car. It turns out that he’s an ingenious (I love the word “ingenious”) little shit. When Donna and Victor were in the basement with me, helping me to collect my belongings and bring them upstairs to be placed in the car’s trunk, Kyle slipped out his bedroom window, ran around to the front of the house, climbed down onto the Cadillac’s floorboards, and covered himself in blankets. When I was at the gas station in Boise and looked
in, I thought the blankets appeared to be a little askew (I love the word “askew”), but I also thought maybe that was just because they had shifted in transit. I will have to begin investigating my observations more rigorously. If I’d found Kyle at the Boise gas station, I wouldn’t have lost much time at all today.

Kyle tells me that he had a hard time staying quiet for almost two hours, especially when I was singing along with Michael Stipe.

“Your voice sucks, dude,” he says.

This hurts my feelings because I did not realize I had an audience and might not have sung at all if I’d known he was listening.

He says he wanted to make sure we were a ways down the road before he revealed himself.

I tell him that it was wrong and mean to reveal himself the way he did and that we’re lucky we didn’t crash. I want to tell him that I also think he’s ingenious, but I suspect that would only encourage more bad behavior, so I remain silent on that point.

Thirteen minutes and seven seconds after Donna and I hung up, the bitchin’ iPhone tells me that she’s calling, and I answer it.

“Edward, I’m going to tell you the truth. We don’t know what to do. We’ve never seen this kind of behavior out of Kyle, and we’re really at a loss here. He says he wants to stay with you for a few days. How do you feel about that?”

I look at Kyle, and he’s looking back at me hopefully.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“That’s our answer, too. It seems like to give him what he wants, after he’s behaved so badly, is the wrong thing to do. But Victor and I also talked about how maybe he’ll talk to you about things he’s scared to tell us, and we need that to happen, somehow. Does that make sense?”

It makes sense.

“Yes,” I say.

“How long do you plan to be in Colorado?”

I tell Donna that if I get to Cheyenne Wells tomorrow evening, as planned, I’ll stay two nights and then head home. I also tell her that I don’t have time in my schedule to go back to Boise on the way home to Billings. She says that’s OK and that she and Victor will meet me in Wyoming to retrieve Kyle.

“Will you do this, Edward? I know it’s a lot to ask. We clearly can’t control him, so maybe it’s just silly to think that he’ll be tamer for you. We’re operating on a gut feeling here. He trusts you, or at least he used to. Maybe he’ll let you in. It’s worth a shot.”

I agree. It’s worth a shot. I feel happiness and fear. I’m happy that I’m being allowed to help solve an adult problem; it’s the kind of thing I’m not often trusted to do. I’m fearful that Kyle will keep being mean to me and will make my trip to Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, frustrating and maybe even dangerous. While I am sympathetic to Kyle’s problems, I have my own struggles, and I’m hopeful—despite all the limitations of hope—that I will find some answers. I don’t want Kyle to mess that up.

“I will take Kyle with me,” I say, and Kyle makes a fist pump.

“Thank you,” Donna says. “And, Edward, I want you to know—if he gives you trouble you can’t handle, you call us. We will come get him, wherever you are. Impose whatever restrictions on him you feel are necessary. You’re in charge of him. Don’t let him manipulate you.”

I think that’s good advice. I also think it’s ironic—the real kind of ironic, not the Alanis Morissette kind. Kyle has been manipulating all of us. That has to end. I decide that I’m not driving another mile with him until I’ve set some rules.

“Reach into the backseat and hand me my notebook,” I tell Kyle, who obliges.

It makes me feel good that he obeys my first order.

RULES FOR KYLE ON OUR TRIP TO CHEYENNE WELLS, COLORADO

1. Kyle is not to do anything that compromises my safe operation of the Cadillac DTS. This includes but is not limited to making loud, scary noises; attempting to cause me to look away from the road, intentionally or unintentionally; grabbing the steering wheel or manipulating any of the car’s propulsive (I love the word “propulsive”) machinery; being in any shape or form a bad kid. “Bad kid” is subject to my definition.
   
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.)