Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift (27 page)

He hands me a slip of paper, which I take in my right hand—I’m learning to avoid using my left arm, which will aggravate my broken ribs—and hold close to my face so I can read it.

I’m being ticketed for my crash on the interstate. The ticket says I was traveling too fast for the conditions and that I was driving recklessly when I ran into the back of the snowplow. The ticket also says I owe the state of Colorado $562. I’d never received a traffic ticket before this trip, so I don’t have the means of comparison, but this seems like a lot of money. I’m fucking loaded, so I can afford it, but that doesn’t mean I can just blithely (I love the word “blithely”) part with $562.

“This is a lot of money,” I say to the policeman, who introduces himself as Officer Jonathon Hunter of the Colorado Highway Patrol.

“It is,” he agrees. “We like to make speeding and reckless driving unpopular violations.”

I giggle, and Officer Jonathon Hunter looks at me quizzically, so I stop. I do not want any more trouble. Policemen also do not appreciate being laughed at. I know this from experience.

It’s just that Officer Jonathon Hunter’s statement reminds me of something Sergeant Joe Friday said in an episode of
Dragnet
. It’s called “The Bank Jobs,” and it’s the fourth episode from the second season, and it originally aired on October 5, 1967. In this episode, Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon are investigating a series of bank robberies in which a man makes random women help him with his crimes. After Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon clear one woman of wrongdoing, she has a question. She has red hair and inspires sultry (I love the word “sultry”) music on this episode of
Dragnet
, but no-nonsense Sergeant Joe Friday doesn’t seem to notice that. When she asks what the penalty is for bank robbery, Sergeant Joe Friday tells her it’s twenty-five years for each offense. She says it hardly seems worth it for a few hundred dollars.

“That’s the idea. They want to make it an unpopular crime,” Sergeant Joe Friday tells her. Sergeant Joe Friday is a very logical man.

And now you can see why I giggled.

Officer Jonathon Hunter puts his sunglasses on and says, “You can pay that at the DMV, or you can mail it in, or you can appear on the court date and contest it.”

Officer Jonathon Hunter is very businesslike. I appreciate that. Maybe he learned something from watching Sergeant Joe Friday, like I did.

“Thank you, Officer Jonathon Hunter,” I say, and he again looks at me quizzically. Then he leaves.

I wanted to ask him what he thinks of Sergeant Joe Friday, but in the end, I’m glad that’s over with.

When Sheila Renfro comes back to the hospital room, she is wearing clean clothes and she looks as though she has had a shower. I guess I hadn’t noticed that she had been wearing the same clothes and pulling her hair back into the same ponytail while I’ve been in this place. I’ll go ahead and admit it, as there’s no denying the situation: I got preoccupied with my own problems, and I didn’t pay as much attention to my friend as I should have. That was wrong. I decide I need to rectify this.

“You look nice, Sheila Renfro,” I tell her, and she smiles again. I am getting better at making Sheila Renfro smile. I’m proud of myself and happy for her. After what I’ve been through on this trip, I’m starting to appreciate the value of happiness.

“Are you ready to go, Edward?” she asks me. “I got some nice bedding material for you to ride in the backseat of my Suburban, and I got some clothes for me, and then I gassed up at a truck stop and took a shower.”

“You smell like Irish Spring,” I say.

“I like Irish Spring,” she says.

“So do I.”

Sheila Renfro smiles again.

I’m pretty talented sometimes.

Sally makes me ride in a wheelchair all the way to the loading area, which is silly. I didn’t break my legs. They still work, and I tell her this.

“Sorry, Edward. Regulations,” she says.

That, of course, changes everything. A society can’t function unless its members obey the rules. It seems to me that we have a nation full of people who think rules are for other people. This
is not an idle observation on my part; I’ve been watching closely. Despite my better judgment, I continue to try to understand politics in America, since I live here and have been entrusted with a vote for more than twenty-four years. I’ll point out here that I’m emphasizing the word “try.” I’ve begun to think that no one understands politics in America except the politicians. I have a fact-loving brain. I think that’s well-established by now. Politics, it seems to me, celebrates the absence of facts rather than the existence of them. I cannot comprehend that. We’re going to elect a president in a little less than a year, and I expect facts to be so marginalized (I love the word “marginalized”) by then that we’ll have to rename our country the United States of Happy Horseshit.

I could say more about this, but I’m done now. I didn’t mean to go off on a political tangent. My point is, I don’t fight Sally about the wheelchair. I follow the rules.

Sheila Renfro has made me a paradise in the back bench seat of her old Suburban. I have a foam bedlike base to sit on and a big beanbag wedged into the corner, where the seat meets the door, so I can remain in a reclined position and ease the stress on my ribs. I have lots of blankets. It’s perfect.

From where I sit, I can see the back of Sheila Renfro’s head, and it’s very easy to talk with her, so I don’t feel left out of the action at all. The Suburban is really old—“It’s my daddy’s nineteen seventy-two model,” she tells me—and thus doesn’t even have a CD player, much less an adaptor that will play songs from my bitchin’ iPhone. As we work our way through Denver, Sheila Renfro sings along with Merle Haggard on an old-time country
music station. Sheila Renfro seemingly has good taste in country music. She prefers the era before Garth Brooks ruined it.

“Why do you keep such an old vehicle?” I ask her. “If you had an adaptor, we could be listening to R.E.M. right now.”

“It’s my daddy’s. I don’t have him anymore, because he’s in the ground with my mother. So I have his Suburban. Besides, I like this music.”

This seems to be a plausible answer, so I don’t intend to ask another question. Sheila Renfro looks in the rearview mirror and makes eye contact with me.

“My daddy bought this before he and Mom started thinking about a family,” she says. “Daddy always wanted a big family, with lots of kids. That’s why they built the motel. It was the kind of place where you could raise a family and bring them into a business.”

She stops talking. I want to ask her questions, but I get the sense that she’s not done, so I wait.

“But Mom found out that she couldn’t have kids—”

“But—”

“At least, that’s what the doctors told her. When she got pregnant with me, I guess it surprised everyone. When I was born, though, she nearly bled to death, and the doctors were saying, ‘OK, you got your miracle baby, so now, no more.’”

“You’re a miracle baby!” I say. This makes me indescribably happy.

“I guess. Daddy just couldn’t bear to part with the Suburban, even though it was way more truck than we ever needed. It’s like it reminded him of what he dreamed about but couldn’t do.”

“He said that?”

“Well, no, not like that. But the way he’d talk about things, I’d kind of know. You know, Edward, I wasn’t very popular in school.
I didn’t have a lot of friends, or any, sometimes. That’s hard on a kid. My daddy was my best friend.”

Sheila Renfro’s story makes me as sad as it does happy. First, it
is
a sad story. Even if she was a miracle baby, her mother and father clearly wanted more children. It’s also sad on a personal level. Sheila Renfro had a relationship with her father while he was alive that I’ve been forced to try to find with mine since he’s been dead. I know for a fact that once my parents found out that there was something different about me—I’m speaking here of my developmental disorder and my obsessive-compulsive tendencies—they decided that they didn’t want any more children. This is not conjecture. My father told me this during the height of the “Garth Brooks incident,” when he and I were fighting all the time. He was drunk; he had been drinking all day. He came into my bedroom after one of our battles and said, “You’re such a fucking idiot, boy. I wish you’d never been born so you wouldn’t fuck everything up.”

That devastated me. First, I’m not a fucking idiot. I have a developmental disorder, but I’m not stupid. Second, it upset my mother terribly. It’s the first and only time I ever saw her really stand up to my father. She told him that he was a cruel and awful man and that he should apologize to me. He never did, at least not while he was alive. Four days later he bought the house where I now live, and I was made to leave my parents’ home and begin seeing Dr. Buckley. I was thirty-one years old, so maybe it was time. I think my parents wanted to keep me close to protect me; that’s what Dr. Buckley said when she diagnosed me. But as my condition worsened, my father came to resent me (and I came to dislike him). I was certainly happier on Clark Avenue than I was in my parents’ house, but it was hard to forget what my father said to me in those last days at his house. The truth is, I’ve never
forgotten it. From time to time, my mother tried to explain my father’s behavior when he was mean to me, telling me that he was struggling at his job on the county commission and that he was under a lot of stress. I think she gave him too much credit, and to be fair, my mother would agree with that. After my father died, and after she saw the way he controlled me through Jay L. Lamb, she made a break with him. She scarcely talks about him anymore.

I don’t like remembering that story about my father, and I don’t like telling it. I’ve never told anyone except Dr. Buckley, not even Donna Middleton (now Hays). I think I would like to tell Sheila Renfro, however, and this surprises me.

I will have to think about it a while before committing to telling her. Instead, I say something else, because it occurs to me that as Sheila Renfro describes her parents to me, she’s telling me about people I never got a chance to know even though I met both of them in the summer of 1978. That’s odd. It’s like they’re more than an anecdote and less than a robust memory.

“I wish I’d gotten to know your parents,” I say. “I’m sorry they’re in the ground.”

“You’d have liked them,” Sheila Renfro says. “And I think they’d have liked you.”

I’m trying to formulate my next question when I actually hear the words coming out of my mouth.

“How did you find out when your parents died?” I can’t believe I just asked it like that. I was too abrupt, but Sheila Renfro doesn’t seem to mind.

“It happened in the middle of a hot summer day, seven miles from home,” she says. “The sheriff and a deputy got there fast, and one of them came to the motel to get me. I was making dinner for us. Grilled chicken. It was too hot to cook inside, so I was on the
patio. He said, ‘Sheila, you’ve got to put that chicken away and come.’ By the time we got there, it was over with. Daddy and Mom were in bags on the side of the road. The guy who hit them was, too. I guess he had a heart attack and lost control of his pickup. He hit their pickup on my daddy’s side at seventy miles per hour. Sheriff said there were no skid marks.”