600 Hours of Edward

the hell was the two-twenty for?”
    “A project.”
    “What kind of project?”
    “A big tricycle.”
    “What?”
    “Like a Green Machine. Do you remember mine?”
    “No. What the hell is this about?”
    “I made it for Donna’s son.”
    “You what?” My father has come around the desk to face me.
    “It’s already done. He has it. No bringing it back now.” I am trying not to smile as my father grows angrier by the second.
    “This, Edward, is why you’re signing this goddamned document.”
    “Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.”
    “You will.”
    “Also, someone hit the car.”
    “When?”
    “Last week, outside Rimrock Mall.”
    “Did you get insurance information from them?”
    “He or she drove off.”
    “Well, Jesus Christ. How bad is it?”
    “It’s hard to tell that anything happened.”
    “Forget it, then. No way I’m paying a five-hundred-dollar deductible and seeing my rates jacked up. Now then, is that it?”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “Then sign the document.”
    “And if I don’t?”
    “You can start looking for somewhere else to live and a way to pay your bills, starting today,” my father says. “Because the gravy train will be gone.”
    “Yes, Father, you’re all heart,” I say. “Anyone can see that.”
    It’s like a flash of lightning my father is so quick as he backhands me across the bridge of the nose. I haven’t even comprehended what has happened when I feel the sharp sting spread across my face. My eyes are watering, and the tinny taste of blood seeps into my mouth from my sinuses.
    “Jesus Christ, Ted,” Jay L. Lamb shouts, jumping up and grabbing my father by the shoulders. My father slumps backward and sits down on Jay L. Lamb’s glass desk.
    I rub the back of my right hand across my eyes to clear away the tears that filled my eyes from the force of the blow. Then I dab under my nostrils and see little spots of blood.
    “I strongly suggest that you sign and leave. We’re not going to have this here,” Jay L. Lamb says to me.
    “You’re paid to give advice to him, not me,” I say. “Give me a pen.”
    – • –
    Before I leave Jay L. Lamb’s office, I say one last thing.
    “I saw your good review in today’s
Billings Herald-Gleaner
, Father.”
    He fixes me with a haggard stare. “Go home, Edward. We’ve had enough bullshit for one day.”
    – • –
    On the drive home, I see that wispy flakes of snow have started to fall, dissolving as they hit the ground.
    I cannot believe what has happened. My father has always yelled at me and ridiculed me. He has never hit me, not until today. My father has broken my heart.
    I hate him. Hate is not a word to be used lightly. I consider this, and then I stick with it. I hate my father.
    – • –
    I can see Donna Middleton in her front yard when I pull up into the driveway at home. I step out of the car, and she gives a big wave and shouts, “How are you?”
    I don’t look at her. I give a half wave back, walk briskly to the front door, open it, and go in.
    – • –
    By 10:00 p.m., I am exhausted. I have spent the day since I arrived back home alternately sleeping and stomping angrily around the house and, at times, crying. I am not ashamed. Crying does not make me a baby. Crying comes from many sources and has many causes: anger, frustration, sadness, lack of sleep. I think I am suffering from all four, and I think that is why I have been crying.
    It’s time for
Dragnet
, and although I don’t have much energy for it, I’ve already skipped one episode of the first season, and to miss another would put me horribly off track. I cue up the tape and press play.
    Tonight’s episode, the ninth of the first season of the color episodes, is called “The Fur Burglary.” It originally aired on March 16, 1967, and it is one of my favorites.
    In it, a furrier by the name of Emile Hartman (played by Henry Corden, who appeared in two episodes of
Dragnet
and nearly every popular TV show of the ’60s and ’70s) has been wiped out by burglars. Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon are called in to investigate, and they soon determine that they will have to pose as buyers in hopes that the burglars will attempt to sell the furs. Emile Hartman teaches Officer Bill Gannon how to be a connoisseur of fine fur, giving him a vocabulary that includes such terms as “gamey” and “split skins.”
    Eventually, Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon arrest the men responsible and get the furs back to