600 Hours of Edward (32 page)

Read 600 Hours of Edward Online

Authors: Craig Lancaster

Tags: #General Fiction

You might be interested to know that Mike won’t have a trial. After that scene in the courtroom, his lawyer advised him to accept a deal from the prosecutor. He will be going to prison for a while. Not forever, but hopefully long enough that he’ll leave us alone when he gets out. I think he will. The prosecutor told me that Mike gets just how much trouble he is in.

Edward, I want you to think about a few things:

If you’re going to be our friend, you have to be our friend all the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t disagree or want some time apart or even get mad at each other. But you can’t shut us out. I don’t have time for friends like that, and I can’t let Kyle rely on a friend who will ultimately let him down. He’s just a little boy, and he’s had enough disappointment.

Also, friends share. You have never been to our house, though we have asked you over. You have never even come to our side of the street. Your house is fine, and we will hang out there sometimes, but you have to come over to our house, too. It’s only fair.

What I’m saying is that our hearts and our door are open to your friendship. But you have to come over here and knock to get in.

We hope you do.

Donna and Kyle

Kyle appears to have signed the letter. Like his mother, he has excellent penmanship.

I fold the letter and put it back in the envelope, and then I turn around and look across the street to Donna’s house.

Her car is there.

The curtains are pulled back.

She is home.

Nothing is moving on Clark Avenue except for the tree branches in the breeze and the leaves pushed down the street by the wind.

All I have to do is look both ways and cross.

THE END

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many people helped shape this book, but a few deserve special mention: my wife, Angela, for her encouragement and her guidance on plotting out Edward’s interactions with Dr. Buckley; Greg Tuttle, my colleague, for expertly guiding me through the workings of the Yellowstone County court system; Janelle Eklund, my high school English teacher, for igniting my love of literature and cheerleading this book; and Matt Hagengruber, Craig Hashbarger, and Stephen Benoit for being good sports and lending their names to the cause.

Edward would never have been on this ride if not for the original endorsement and hard work of Chris Cauble, Linda Cauble, and Janet Spencer at Riverbend Publishing, who believed in his story and were good shepherds, indeed. Alex Carr and the amazing crew at Amazon Publishing have been a joy to work with, and I look forward to seeing where Edward’s story goes from here.

Finally, I’ll just say this: With the exceptions of those who are (or were) obviously real—Jack Webb and the
Dragnet
ensemble, Matthew Sweet, the members of R.E.M., Garth Brooks, and the like—the characters in this work of fiction are just that, fictional. That said, some passages of the book were based on real events. Barack Obama was really elected president. Veteran character
actor Clark Howat (may he rest in peace) really did answer a letter from a fan (me) and describe how
Dragnet
was filmed, and he could not have been more of a gentleman. I don’t know if Garth Brooks’s lawyer ever wrote anybody a cease-and-desist letter, but in this case, it’s immaterial. He/she certainly didn’t write one to Edward Stanton, who is fictional.

Oh, and the 2008 Dallas Cowboys? Sadly, they were all too real.

Edward’s story continues in

EDWARD ADRIFT

Available April 9, 2013

What follows is the first chapter in Edward’s new life.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2011

I look at my watch at 3:37 p.m.—3:37 and 17 seconds, because I have the kind of watch with an LED digital display for precision—and stop in the kitchen. I have another fifty-three seconds and could easily make it to the couch, but I stand still and watch the seconds tick off. The seven morphs (I love the word “morphs”) into an eight and then a nine and then the one becomes a two and the nine becomes a zero, and I keep watching. Finally, at 3:38 and 10 seconds, I draw in my breath and hold it. Time keeps going, and I exhale. I look down again and notice that I am standing on top of dried marinara sauce that sloshed out of the saucepan yesterday. And just like yesterday, I don’t have the energy to clean it up, even though it bothers me.

At 3:38 p.m. and 10 seconds, twenty-one days ago, on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Mr. Withers fired me from my job at the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
. I know it happened at that time because as Mr. Withers said, “I hate like hell to have to tell you this, Edward,” I looked directly at my Timex watch on my left wrist, where I always keep it. Its display read 3:38:10, and I made a mental note to write it down as soon as possible,
which I did exactly 56 minutes and 14 seconds later, as I sat in my car. A phrase like “I hate like hell to have to tell you this” is a precursor to bad news, and I think the fact that I recognized this is what caused me to look at my watch. I was right about the news. Mr. Withers finished by saying, “but we’re going to have to let you go.” He said a lot of other things, too, but none of them are as important. I couldn’t listen very closely, because I needed to concentrate on remembering the time. The time is now logged, but that’s purely academic. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, although I hesitate to say that definitively. I can think whatever I want. It doesn’t mean things will happen that way. It’s easier to stick to incontrovertible (I love the word “incontrovertible”) facts.

That I needed 56 minutes and 14 seconds to get to the car can be attributed to the fact that getting fired is no simple thing. In the movies and on TV, getting fired never seems complicated. Some boss, generally played by someone like Ed Asner, comes out of an office and says, “You’re fired,” and the fired person leaves. But Mr. Withers doesn’t look like or sound like Ed Asner, and he made me sign a lot of papers—things like the extension of my health care benefits through something called COBRA and the receipt of my final paycheck, which included the hours I had worked in that pay period and what Mr. Withers called “a severance,” which was two weeks’ pay, or 80 hours at $15 an hour, minus taxes. The severance check came to $951.01. When I asked Mr. Withers why I was being fired, he said that I wasn’t being fired per se (I love the Latin phrase “per se,” which means “in itself”) but rather that it was what the company liked to call “an involuntary separation.” He said that often happens when a company needs to cut its costs. Labor, which is to say people, is the biggest cost any company has.
Mr. Withers said it was an unfortunate reality of business that people sometimes have to endure involuntary separations.

“So, Edward, don’t think of it as a firing,” he told me as he shook my hand, after he took my key and my parking pass. “You didn’t do anything wrong. If we could keep you on board, we would. It really is an involuntary separation.”

I think Mr. Withers wanted to believe what he said, or maybe he wanted me to believe that he believed it. I don’t know. I veer into dangerous territory when I try to make sense of subtext, which is a word that means an underlying, unspoken meaning. I would rather people just come out and said what they mean, in words that cannot be mistaken, but I haven’t met many people who are willing to do that. I will tell you this, though: Another word I love is the word “euphemism,” which is basically a nice way of saying something bad. The incontrovertible fact is that “involuntary separation” sounds a lot like a euphemism to me.

– • –

Getting fired, or involuntarily separated, from the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
has made it a real shitburger of a year. Scott Shamwell, one of the pressmen at The Herald-Gleaner, taught me the word “shitburger.” Scott Shamwell was always coming up with odd and interesting word combinations, and most of them were profane, which delighted me. One time, the press had a web break—that’s when the big roll of paper snaps when the press is running, which means they have to shut everything down and re-thread the paper—and Scott Shamwell called the press a “miserable bag of fuck.” I still laugh about that one, because the press is almost
entirely steel. There’s not a bag anywhere on it that I’ve ever seen, and now that I don’t work at the newspaper anymore, I’ll probably never see the press again. I don’t know. Again, it’s hard to be definitive about something like that. If I ever get a chance to see the press again, I’ll take one last look and see if there’s a bag somewhere. I don’t think there is.

– • –

One of the things I learned from Dr. Buckley before she retired—and that is another thing that makes this a shitburger year—is that when times are difficult, I need to work hard at finding stability and things that bring me pleasure. Dr. Buckley is a very logical woman, and in the 11 years, two months, and 10 days that I worked with her, I came to learn that I should act on her suggestions. On that note, I guess I should focus on the brighter news that I continue to maintain my daily logs of the high and low temperatures and precipitation readings for Billings, Montana, where I live. I started keeping these logs on January 1, 2001, when it occurred to me that Billings, in addition to having wildly variable weather, has poor excuses for weathermen. Their forecasts are notoriously off base, so I’ve come to distrust what they say. I prefer facts. Every morning, my copy of the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
provides me with the facts about the previous day’s weather. I then write it down, and my data is complete.

For example, yesterday, December 6, 2011, the 340th day of the year, saw a high temperature of thirty-four and a low temperature of sixteen in Billings. There was no precipitation, meaning we held steady at 19.34 inches for the year. It’s been a bad year for precipitation in Montana, and a lot of places have had floods, although not Billings. Scott Shamwell lives in Roundup, which is
49.82 miles north of Billings, and his town flooded badly. He said one time that he was going to start driving “a cocksucking rowboat” to work, but I don’t think he ever did. I wasn’t there every day that he was, as our schedules didn’t fully align, so while it’s conceivable that he would have driven a cocksucking rowboat to work, I have to believe that he or someone else would have told me about it. Belief can be dangerous, of course. I prefer facts.

We did have an oil spill in the Yellowstone River, which mucked things up, and last year a tornado blew down our sports stadium, so it’s not like Billings is getting off light as far as catastrophes go. I guess everybody is having trouble these days.

Anyway, tracking the weather data is how I maintain stability, as Dr. Buckley suggests. She also suggested that I find something that gives me pleasure. That has been more difficult, especially since I was involuntarily separated from the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
. I should just try harder, I guess. But how?

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Photograph by Ashley Stevick, 2011

Craig Lancaster is a journalist who has worked at newspapers all over the country, including the
San Jose Mercury News
, where he served as lead editor for the paper’s coverage of the BALCO steroids scandal. He wrote
600 Hours of Edward
— winner of a Montana Book Award honorable mention and a High Plains Book Award—in less than 600 hours during National Novel Writing Month in 2008. His other books include the novel
The Summer Son
and the short story collection
Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure
. Lancaster lives in Billings, Montana, with his wife.

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