The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
The man’s voice took on a wistful note.
If there was ever a moment I was tempted to just walk away from it all it was then. Nineteen fifty-five. I was fifty years old. I stood there for a while, soaking it all up. Then Lem tells me to sit in the engineer’s seat and lean out the window. You’d have to wear a cap and goggles if we were really running, he says. There’d be a stream of hot cinders going past the window. You know what happens if you’re dumb enough to lean out uncovered, he says. Then he bends down and points to the right side of his face. It’s all pocked with little burn scars, like old craters there in his skin. That’s what, he says. But he was grinning like anything. I almost expected to see cinders stuck in his teeth. And from the look on his face I could see he was one of the lucky ones, one of those people who like doing what they’re good at. That’s rare. When you see that in a person, you can’t miss it.
Edgar cautiously let his eyes drift over until the old farmer registered in his peripheral vision. He was standing with his chin dropped to his chest, lost in thought.
Now here’s the thing, the man said, after a long time had passed. When I sat in that seat and leaned out the window into the rain and imagined that stream of red-hot cinders going past my face like fireflies, watching a bridge coming up, which was my lifelong dream, do you know what I thought about?
Your farm?
That’s right. There I was, sitting in a steam locomotive, one of the most beautiful engines ever devised. It was magnificent—big and heavy and it made me think of a giant laid over sleeping. Ever since I was a boy I’d thought running a train’d be the most amazing thing ever—especially out in the open countryside, with the throttle screaming wide open, the whole world split by those two rails you’re hurtling down. I could feel it—even in that cold, dead engine—I could feel exactly what that would be like. And when I leaned out into the rain, and the engineer told me about the sparks flying and he showed me his face, all I could think about was all the mud in the pasture, what cranky bitches the cows were going to be in the morning if they didn’t get to pasture. And whether the mow roof was leaking.
Now, if that isn’t a curse, the man said, what is?
Before Edgar could answer, he heard Henry’s car pulling up the drive. Edgar took off his gloves and walked into the sunshine. He had to kneel next to Tinder and put his hand against the dog’s deep chest to restrain him as Henry climbed out of his car, and he and Tinder watched while Essay and Baboo circled and jumped.
THAT NIGHT HENRY OFFERED to drive them into town. Edgar said no. But Henry had long since deduced that Edgar didn’t want to be seen. He pointed out that they could drive around in relative safety after dark. The idea took Edgar by surprise—he was so used to traveling by day and bedding down at night, it hadn’t occurred to him, not even when he’d stood looking at the car back at Scotia Lake. When nightfall came, he relented. They loaded the dogs into Henry’s car, a brown sedan with a capacious but slippery back seat. Edgar made Tinder sit on the floor up front. Baboo and Essay scrabbled to balance themselves on the back seat.
“How long has it been since you’ve been in a car?” Henry asked, as he eased down the driveway. Then he looked alarmed. “Wait a second. When’s the last time these dogs were in a car? Is this going to make them puke?”
Edgar shrugged, grinning.
“Great,” Henry said. “You’re cleaning it up if they do. Deal? Otherwise I’m turning this thing around right now.”
Before he could gripe any more, Baboo leaned forward from the back seat and slobbered in Henry’s ear.
“Aw, god,” Henry said. “I hate it when they do that.” But he didn’t really hate it. Edgar could see that. Anyone could see that.
Out on the blacktop, they headed toward town. The headlights caught dandelions leaking up through the cracks in the asphalt. They passed a culvert over a creek where the moon’s reflection wobbled between the cattails.
Lute was a crossroads town, its one intersection controlled by a stoplight swinging like a lantern from crisscrossed wires. On each corner sat matching two-story brick buildings, like four old-timers crouched around a pan of beans. A Rexall drug, Mike’s Bar and Grill, a True Value hardware, and the Lute grocery.
“Closed up tight after five,” Henry said, waving a hand at the buildings. “Society life begins at six thirty, when Mike’s opens.” On that night, society life consisted of the three cars in the tavern’s small parking lot, lit by the otherworldly glow of the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign (“finest beer served…anywhere!”) hanging over the door.
On the far side of town, the pale chambered heart of the Lute water tower hovered in the night sky, tethered to the earth by four metal legs and the central stalk of its drainpipe. Once in the countryside, they drove without destination, wherever Henry wanted to go, and Henry wanted to go north. Henry liked to drive fast. That surprised Edgar, but it pleased him, too. He’d forgotten the weight of acceleration. They coursed along a maze of back roads. Essay and Baboo slid across the slick back seat when Henry powered around curves. Marshes and forests and lakes flashed by. Tinder craned his neck to see out the window. Headlights approached like balls of white flame. Their speed compressed the scent of the night into a dense, algal perfume that roared through the windows. Henry spun the radio dial, looking for distant AM stations—Chicago, Minneapolis, Little Rock. The signal cracked with the heat lightning over Lake Superior.
At the outskirts of Ashland, with its downtown lights and police cars, Henry swung the car onto the shoulder and shot away from town by an entirely different route, past shanties set back from the road. He paused by a bog that glowed eerily when he shut the headlights off. When they arrived at the railroad tracks, Edgar looked at the bluff to his right, and realized they’d made the round trip. They retired to a pair of lawn chairs. Henry drank a beer and then another and then he walked to the old wreck of a car.
“Tell you a secret,” he said. “This car was here when I moved in. I may have bought the place just to get the car.”
This was certainly news to Edgar. He’d been walking past the vehicle for days without deeming it worthy of a closer look. It sported a broad hood and headlights shaded by exaggerated brow ridges. The front fender sloped toward the rear wheels in a long arc while a compensating ridge developed into a tail fin. But whatever grace of form the car had once possessed was gone. Its body was so thoroughly dented it looked as if someone had beaten it, savagely, with its own tire iron. Rust had consumed major continents from the rear quarter panels. The chrome of the elaborate, two-tiered front bumper was dull as ore. And of course, the vehicle lacked tires—it levitated above the gravel on shadowy cinder blocks. All in all, the car gave the impression of an animal that had crawled to within inches of its lair before expiring.
“The vehicle at which you are now looking, um, at,” Henry said, sweeping his arm as if addressing an awestruck crowd, “is a 1957 Ford Fairlane Skyliner, the first retractable hardtop convertible ever made in America. No car looked like it before or since. Even the fifty-eight looks different—Ford messed up this beautiful bumper and grill for no reason. This is one of a kind.”
Henry patted the car’s side mirror with pride. It fell away and dropped to the ground. “Darn it,” he said. He snatched up the mirror and jiggled the bolts back into the corroded holes.
“It’s a little dinged up,” he said, “but watch this.” He opened the driver’s-side door and pulled a lever and the trunk popped open, hinged backward, near the rear bumper. Henry wrenched the trunk hood up, casually at first, then applying more effort, grunting and scrabbling his feet against the gravel. He circled the car, unsnapping latches. The metal roof separated from the body. It folded halfway into the trunk and then caught. “This is supposed to be electric,” Henry said over his shoulder, “but there’s no battery.” Then he reached into the back seat, withdrew a hammer, and beat unmercifully on a hinge. The roof dropped into the trunk cavity with a final metallic screech that temporarily silenced the night birds.
“So you see why I can’t just sell this car. There’s so much potential here. Some guy offered to buy it for parts last summer, but I couldn’t let it be torn apart. I explained all that to Belva, but it made zero impression. She said it was an eyesore—which, I admit, okay, it is, now. But ordinary? I don’t think you can say that.”
Henry had gotten himself wound up talking about the Skyliner, but he stopped and shook off the idea with a shake of his head. “Who am I trying to kid,” he said.
No, Edgar signed. You’re right. It isn’t ordinary.
Henry peered at him, gisting the sign.
“You think?”
Edgar nodded.
“I can never tell anymore,” he said. “When my guard is down, I forget. I slide right back to ordinary, and I don’t even see it.”
He walked to the lawn chairs and together they contemplated the Skyliner.
“I almost took you to the police station tonight, Nat,” he said. “You probably should know that.”
Edgar shook his head and smiled. No you didn’t.
“Oh yes. There was a moment when I thought, ‘All I have to do is turn left at the next stop and we’ll be at the Ashland police station.’”
The shed’s not done.
“Yeah, the shed saved you,” Henry said. “This time. Better figure out how to stretch things out, is my advice.”
They’d reached the limit of Henry’s ability to read sign, and Edgar picked up the newspaper.
You couldn’t have forced us inside, he wrote. We’d have just run.
“How could you run with Tinder?”
Edgar didn’t know what to say to that. He wouldn’t have gotten into the car with Henry if he hadn’t trusted him. There were moments when Edgar understood Henry better than Henry understood himself. What Henry couldn’t see was that, ordinary or not, he was trustworthy. That much was clear as day.
ON SUNDAY THEY WORKED in the shed side by side, tackling the items that took two people to move, like the wringer washer and the old furnace. Henry connected a hose out to the spigot on the house and started a fire in the burning barrel. They fed it old newspapers, gray split fence posts with stringers of barbed wire that glowed red, busted-up wooden chairs. Henry chopped the wagon’s tongue in two with an axe and upended the halves, hardware and all, into the barrel. A gout of orange cinders flew into the air. By the time the fire settled, it was late in the day. They sat on the stoop eating potato chips and looking at the remaining debris.
“I know a trailer we can use to haul this stuff away,” Henry said. “Maybe I can get it next weekend.”
Your car doesn’t have a hitch, Edgar wrote on the newspaper. Before he handed it over, he completed 14-down in the crossword puzzle: a ten-letter word for “a short movement connecting the main parts of a composition.” The second letter was N and it ended with O.
Henry looked at the word Edgar had written: intermezzo. He squinted over at him.
“You ever think about entering a contest or something?”
Edgar shook his head.
“Well, you ought to. And a person can rent hitches.”
Tinder limped over. Henry was a soft touch for treats and as soon as Tinder began crunching a chip, Baboo started working Henry over. Edgar finally told them both to stop. A rapport was developing between Henry, Baboo, and Tinder. Only Essay stayed aloof. She didn’t mind Henry, that was just how she was. With Essay, more than with any other dog Edgar had known, trust was something you had to earn.
THAT WEEK HE SCRAPED flakes of paint from the sides of the shed and caulked the holes. Henry had purchased barn-red paint for the outside. Inside, it was to be whitewashed. Applying whitewash was lonely work—the old farmer had stopped appearing as soon as the last of the junk was out. The days were hot and the skies filled with monumental clouds. Late each afternoon, Henry turned his sedan up the driveway. When he got out of the car, he squatted and let the dogs wash his face, then inspected Edgar’s progress. “It’s a pretty good color,” he said, after Edgar finished painting the exterior. “Makes the house look shabby, though.”
Nights, they went on careening drives, Henry glowering and accelerating through curves while tree trunks strobed past and the dogs slid across the back seat. When they returned, Henry cracked a beer and gravitated to the Skyliner. Often he ended up sitting behind the wheel. Tinder would limp over and scramble onto the seat alongside him.
And somewhere along the line, between the crossword puzzles and the records from the library and the beer, Henry asked Edgar to teach him about the dogs. They went out after dinner and Edgar taught him a few signs. Then he and Essay demonstrated something simple: guided fetches. He put two sticks on the ground and asked Essay to go to them. It was a variation on the shared-gaze exercises, and all of the dogs knew how it worked. When Essay reached the targets, she looked back at Edgar. When he looked at the stick on the left, she snatched it and brought it to him, tail swinging. Edgar took the stick and ran a hand across Essay’s cheek. After another demonstration with Baboo, it was Henry’s turn. He chose to work with Tinder, a good choice. Something about the dog’s injury and enforced convalescence had taught Tinder an extra measure of patience, which he needed, because at first, Henry was hopeless. And yet the dog persevered, as if he had decided to take on Henry as a personal project. At times, Tinder even forgot about his foot and stopped limping for a few steps.
To begin with, Henry’s sign was vague, neither a recall nor a release nor a request to go out, but Tinder got the idea and walked to the sticks. There was no skill involved in the next step, and yet somehow Henry managed to confuse the dog, who patiently did not pick up either target but stood waiting. Then, for some reason, Henry gave the release command again. Tinder’s ears dropped. Henry walked forward. He was about to lift the stick up to Tinder’s mouth in desperation when Edgar stepped in and gave the command correctly and looked at the rightmost stick. Tinder snatched it off the ground at once.
Edgar forked two fingers sternly at Henry’s eyes.
Watch the target. They know the difference.
“Okay, okay.” Henry took the stick from Tinder, forgetting to thank him, and set it on the ground. Edgar let this breach of etiquette slide, and they retreated. When Henry started to sign a release instead of a go-out, Edgar grabbed his hands and moved them until the sign had been correctly formed. Henry blushed. But the next time, he signed the request perfectly. Without hesitation, Tinder limped across the lawn, looked at Henry, and brought him the target.
And at that moment, Henry got it, whatever it was—the difference between commanding Tinder and working with him. When Henry had signed that go-out, he’d looked at Tinder instead of his hands; when Tinder checked back, he’d trusted the dog to read his face. And then the cascade of revelations began, just as it had for Edgar. He could tell by the expression on Henry’s face. Edgar thought of all those letters between Brooks and his grandfather, the endless argument about companionship and work, how his grandfather had argued that there was never a difference, how Brooks, in exasperation, had refused to discuss it further. He thought, too, of the question his mother had posed to him a million years before: what were they selling, if not dogs?
And there stood Henry Lamb, beaming. Until that moment, Edgar had never seen the man smile without some fatalistic reserve that said he knew the joke would ultimately be on him. And though Edgar was no closer to putting it into words, for the first time he was sure he knew the answer to his mother’s question.
“WHERE WERE YOU HEADING, anyway?” Henry said. It was later that night, and they sat at the kitchen table. “I’m not trying to pry. Don’t answer if you don’t want to.”
It’s okay, Edgar signed. He jottted Starchild Colony on a sheet of paper and handed it to Henry. What was interesting was that, before the words had appeared on the paper, he hadn’t been sure himself what his answer would be—at least, not to say it so flatly that way. But he
Henry whistled. “The place on the news—Alexandra What’s-Her-Name? Up by Thunder Bay?”
Edgar nodded.
“You know somebody there?”
No.
“Anyone know you’re coming?”
No.
Henry shook his head. “That’s a couple hundred miles. What were you going to do, walk the whole way?”
Edgar shrugged.
“I guess you could. I’m not sure what a person would do for food.”
Edgar scuffled his feet at the memory of looting Henry’s kitchen.