Edward Adrift

have raised you well.”
    Kyle nods. I keep talking. It’s hard for me to believe these things are coming out of my mouth, because I don’t sound like me. I sound like Dr. Buckley. Again.
    “We were friends when you lived in Billings, and in my head and in my heart we will always be friends. But I don’t know what kind of friends we’ll be. A lot of it—most of it—will be up to you. I’m not going to make it hard on you by tracking your behavior. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a new day.”
    I really can’t believe I’m saying this, because it’s such a stupid, self-evident phrase; every day is a new day no matter what, and it’s silly to point it out.
    Kyle sits on the edge of his bed quietly. I think this is the first time on this whole trip that he is actually listening to me. Not that thinking matters very much. It’s the facts that count.
    “Why did we come here?” Kyle asks. “This town is so small and boring.”
    I cannot argue with Kyle, even if I wanted to. When we drove into Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, last night, even though it wasdark, I recognized this motel and the grain elevators in town, and that was it. It’s funny—and not ha-ha funny—how something can appear to be so precise and vivid when you dream about it and then be so foreign and unrecognizable in the conscious world, when the cones and rods in your eyes are sending electrical impulses to your brain and showing you what things really look like.
    The simplest answer to Kyle’s question, the one Occam’s razor would lead us to, is that I don’t have a good reason for why we came here. But I don’t tell Kyle that. I choose a different answer, one that is just as true.
    “My father, before he became a politician in Billings, used to work for an oil company, and he was the boss of some crews that worked around here on the oil pumps. Those crews did some pretty neat things. Would you like to see the oil fields?”
    “Sure,” Kyle says.
    We both stand up and grab our jackets and head for the door. Once we’re in the hallway, the motel owner comes walking past us.
    “Storm is coming,” she says, her intense blue eyes looking straight at me. And then she is gone into the room two doors down and across the hallway from us.
    She flummoxes me.
    “That was weird,” Kyle says.
    It certainly was. I’m definitely going to talk to her later.

    Kyle and I stand on the side of a dirt road, and I point out across a fallow (I love the word “fallow”) field to an oil pump in the distance. The head of it slowly bobs up and down, like a bird pulling a worm out of the ground.
    “That’s an oil pump,” I say.
    “I know that.”
    Kyle thinks he’s so smart.
    “Do you know what cathodic protection is?” I ask.
    “No.”
    “Do you want me to tell you?”
    “Yeah.”
    I try to explain this simply, which means I leave out the most interesting parts, like electrochemical potential and cathodic disbonding.
    “These oil pumps will corrode over time unless something is done to combat it. That’s what my father’s crew would do. They would attach a power source to the pump with cables that they buried underground, and these cables would also go to something called an anode, which would get corroded instead of the pump, so the pump could keep doing its business. Does that make sense?”
    “Not really.”
    “You’ll learn about it later in school.”
    “What’s so special about it?”
    “Nothing is special about it. It’s just something my father did. The men who worked for him were very tough; you had to be, working with cathodic protection. Sometimes, the men would have to splice the cables together, which involved something called epoxy—a kind of glue. They would have these bags of liquid that were divided into two parts, and they would have to squeeze the bag repeatedly to heat up the liquid, then pull apart the divider to mix it, then cut open the bag of liquid, and pour it into a mold. My father said that epoxy, if it got on your skin, would be almost impossible to remove. He told me once when I was a little boy, ‘Edward, I’m thirty-six years old, but my handsare eighty-four.’ I don’t think he meant that literally, because that would be impossible.”
    Kyle kneels down and picks up a small rock from the roadway. He throws it sidearm, and it thumps against a fence post.
    “Good throw,” I say.
    “Can we go over there and look at the pump?” Kyle asks.
    “Oh, no.”
    “Why not?”
    “That would be