The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  THE

  CRASH

  PALACE

  ANDREW

  WEDDERBURN

  COACH HOUSE BOOKS, TORONTO

  copyright © Andrew Wedderburn, 2021

  first edition

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: The Crash Palace / Andrew Wedderburn.

  Names: Wedderburn, Andrew, 1977- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200156489 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200156500 | ISBN 9781552454053 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770566255 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781770566347 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8645.E27 C73 2020 | DDC C813/.6—DC23

  The Crash Palace is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 625 2 (EPUB) 978 1 77056 634 7 (PDF)

  Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email sales@chbooks.com with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

  for Mom and Dad

  ‘It seems thematic that (Faerie) is all about following permissible paths, not about travelling freely in any direction. You can’t really map Fairyland. It resists definition, and directions and distances are mutable. The way to get somewhere is not to follow a map but to follow instructions: “Follow the setting sun until you get to the Glass Hill, then throw a straw in the air and travel in the direction it points, until you reach the Oracle, who …” etc.’

  – Paul Hughes, Paul’s Dungeon Master Notebook

  Spin that wheel, spin little girl,

  Spin away that grain.

  Cart that gold right out the door,

  Dig that royal name.

  Little Rattle, Little Rattle,

  Little Rattle Stilt!

  No-name No-name

  No-win game.

  Little Rattle Stilt!

  Pound that stilt, pound little man.

  Pound that stilt and grab.

  Grab a handful, yank it up,

  Rip yourself in half.

  (Solo, 4 bars)

  Little Rattle, Little Rattle,

  Little Rattle Stilt!

  (Repeat & fade out)

  The Fish Cans, ‘Little Rattle Stilt,’

  from Nail My Heart to the High Level Bridge

  A&M Records, 1986

  Years later, Audrey Cole bumped into a van on Centre Street, just up from Cash Corner, and thought, This is just like Wrists’ van.

  She bumped into the van’s passenger-side mirror walking head down against the wind, a mid-December wheezing wind blowing over Calgary off the eastern faces of the Rockies. The Beltline street lights glowed orange in the brittle sky, and Audrey, shoulder forward against the cold with both fists in the pockets of her too-thin-for-walking-around jacket, knocked her arm against the glass.

  She shouldn’t have been walking south down Centre Street on a Friday night at ten o’clock. Home was west, the other way along 12th Avenue. At home Shelly was in bed, hopefully had been for hours, herded up the stairs by her grandmother, who would have come back downstairs to put all the colouring books, bead-eyed stuffed bears, plush hedgehogs, and stringy-haired plastic princesses left in front of the television into their Rubbermaid tub.

  Audrey should have been at home, on the couch with her mother for the late cycle of the local news while her daughter slept upstairs, except that she’d seen the Skinny Cowboy.

  She’d got a clear look and she was sure.

  Her first feeling was to run. Turn around and run in the other direction, who cares what anyone looking thought. For two months she’d been telling herself that of course she would never see the Skinny Cowboy, even if she’d wanted to find him, and there he was plain as day, and her stomach dropped and she wanted to run.

  She spotted that worn leather jacket with the flowers stitched on the shoulders and the long silver hair under the wide-brimmed black hat on the other side of 8th Avenue. Her stomach wanted to run.

  I want to talk to him, she reminded herself. I want to talk to him and get it out of the way.

  She stuffed that fear down and didn’t run away. She started to cross 8th, to follow him, but a crowd of partygoers just emptied from the Palliser Hotel flagged down a cab in the intersection, snarling traffic while they haggled with the cabbie, and by the time she’d shoulder-cut her way through the throng, he was disappearing under the train bridge southward on 1st Street.

  You should have shouted at him, Audrey told herself, standing on the sidewalk of 12th Avenue and Centre Street – Cash Corner. The wrong way from the late evening news and her mother and daughter and all the toys in the Rubbermaid tub. Hey, hold up, you should have shouted. Before he disappeared into an alley or down a manhole, into the night.

  She didn’t shout at him but by Cash Corner she’d lost him.

  They called it Cash Corner because in the morning men would lean on the fence and wait for trucks to stop with work. They would hang their tool belts and backpacks from the chain-link. A truck would stop and the driver would say, ‘I need two drywallers,’ and some of the men would pick up their tools, put out their cigarettes, and crowd around the window, and the rest would sit back down.

  You should have shouted at him, Audrey told herself. She walked south down Centre Street, farther the wrong way from home. Then she bumped into the van mirror.

  She jumped, startled at the contact, spun sideways by the lever of her pocketed arm. She put a hand on the van’s window frame to straighten herself out.

  Maybe not like Wrists’ van, she decided after a more thorough look. This was newer. She cupped a hand on the glass to see into the cab through the street-light glare. This van had a proper modern plastic dashboard and a full complement of rear-view mirrors. Seats you’d last in for longer than an hour without losing feeling below your waist. Without thinking, Audrey pulled on the handle. The door didn’t open and she let go of it like a hot pot lid, realizing what she had done. But no alarm sounded.

  Of course it’s locked, Audrey. Every car door is always locked. Some things people aren’t careless about.

  Audrey Cole walked up Centre Street pulling on door handles. Just to be right about the always-lockedness of car doors. She pulled handles and the locked car doors did not open. Sedans and hatchbacks and bulbous, oversized utility trucks all sealed securely. Red lights blinked behind the glass on some dashboards and these she avoided. A station wagon with a ski rack beeped at her when her fingers touched the handle. A boxy old Impala honked once when she was six inches away. Two strikes, Audrey, she told herself, and skipped the next two cars.

  The last car on the street was a sleek grey Audi sedan, washed that day and not yet recoated in winter road salt. A car that lives in a garage, she thought, that never gets snowed on. She pulled the handle and the door opened.

  Audrey stood on the sidewalk looking down into the open door, at the leather seat inside. Cars like this have little fobs with remote lock buttons. People get in the habit of shutting them off, walking away, and then thinking later, Did I lock the car? They press the button that locks the door with a short, sharp click. One day they ask themselves, Did I lock the car? and as a test of trust they say Yes, of course, I always lock the car, and put the keys back in their pocket without touching the button. I always lock the car, it’s silly to think otherwise.

  She shut the passenger door. Walked around to the driver’s side and climbed into the seat. Wrapped her hands around the steering wheel. Ran a pal
m along the dashboard. The car smelled like eucalyptus shampoo and shea butter. Everything felt the right size and scale. Her feet and hands could easily reach everything they needed to. In Wrists’ van, or Joe Wahl’s van, or even her father’s pickup truck years and years ago, she always had to stretch, extend a leg to push a clutch, lean up and ahead, even with the seat pulled all the way forward. She was always two sizes too small for anything she ever drove. But the Audi was all the proper proportions, everything right where she would want it. As if she’d been there in Munich and the robot arms had assembled it around her, fitting each piece to her body.

  Audrey pulled down the sun visor. In the movies when they’re in a hurry to escape the scene of the crime they look under the sun visor, where the car owner has left their keys, because apparently that is where people in movies leave their keys. She opened the glovebox: AMA maps, registration.

  The elbow rest had a flip-up lid, which she opened. She picked through CD cases and a packet of tissue paper, and at the bottom was a set of keys.

  They put out bait cars, Audrey. She’d seen the newscasts: desirable makes and models left by the police in tempting places for someone to come and yank. The cops follow at an easy pace, the work all done. They put cameras in these cars. They run the footage on the six o’clock news. Teenage joyriders smoking joints at eighty kilometres an hour through school zones in the middle of the afternoon.

  ‘Car,’ said Audrey out loud, ‘are you a trap? Or just a what-do-you-call-it. Statistical happenstance?’

  That wide-brimmed, beat-up black cowboy hat: she didn’t know anything about hats but she knew that hat from across a street. People think when they buy a cowboy hat that they’re going to look like Clint Eastwood in Italy, but once it’s on their head it’s too stiff and doesn’t fit right, and they wear it once a year for the Calgary Stampede with boots they can’t walk in and a boxy, wrongly proportioned Navajo print shirt, and they are poorly prepared for Cowboy Hallowe’en. The Skinny Cowboy was not these people. The Skinny Cowboy was Clint Eastwood in Italy.

  First she wanted to run away, flush with that old fear, but she told herself, Track him down and tell him what you want to tell him. And she followed him up Centre Street, the wrong way from her house, until he disappeared.

  She put the keys in the ignition and started the car. Trying to picture that hat from across the street, trying to picture the silver hair and the stitched roses underneath it. The engine made a barely there purring sound. There were only thirty thousand kilometres on the odometer. The street was dark, just Audrey in the car. She felt with her feet and there was a clutch and she gasped with abrupt joy. Pushed in the clutch, put it in gear, and drove away from the curb.

  §

  She drove around the Beltline, looking for the Skinny Cowboy. Up and down tight streets, driving slowly to watch for cowboy hats on the sidewalk. She crossed McLeod Trail into Victoria Park and didn’t see the Skinny Cowboy hanging around any of the self-storage garage doors or lurking in one of the vast Stampede grounds parking lots.

  Up 9th Avenue, the grid city of two-storey houses and four-storey walk-ups thinned and ended. She drove between dark lots and open construction holes rung in rebar-tipped concrete posts, into the irregular east city of oddly angled roads and rail yards. Trains rolled past, flashes of graffiti colour in the occasional light. In Inglewood and then Ramsay the tracks converged into wide switch yards, and the city turned and snaked along these vectors. She opened the window with a button and let in the Ramsay Inglewood smells: the chicken plant up 11th, just-washed cement trucks, idling diesel engines. Flickering gas flares hung in the air above Fleischman’s Yeast, blue candles diffusing the gas of billions of living and dying things, thick and dense, stronger than any morning bakery or skunky beer bottle. She drove past the vacant brewery, through a set of switchbacks out onto Ogden Road, empty in the night, and picked up speed on the long straightaway. Seed-cleaning plants. Western and Chinese Diner. Calgary Metal, huge and red, oversized letters hung on a rusty red fence. Sunday Special All You Can Carry $20. She saw headlights ahead and slowed down, and sped when they passed.

  She didn’t see the Skinny Cowboy. She was a long way past the roaming range of a pedestrian now. She closed the window and sealed herself back inside the eucalyptus-butter engineered air of the sedan cab.

  She followed Ogden south and it was empty for a long way, blocks and blocks of just her headlights in the dark, south and east and south again, and then up ahead lights moved above her in the dark: traffic on Deerfoot Trail over the Calf Robe Bridge. On Deerfoot she could go north or south and be anywhere. Anywhere in Calgary, or anywhere else for that matter.

  The road curved and lights blinked, ahead under the overpass: yellow tow-truck lights and blue and red police lights. She let her foot off the gas. Some kind of accident, thought Audrey. Police cars parked lengthwise across the road made a fence. Must have been serious, she thought. She slowed, staring into the blue and red.

  Audrey, you stole a car, she told herself.

  Formed the words in her mind and blinked, while the car closed toward those red and blue lights. Her foot drove hard into the brake and she lurched forward in a hard stop.

  She put the car in reverse and made a fast three-point turn, then back in a hurry the way she’d come. The tires squealed and the sound startled her and she pushed her foot to the floor, shifting upward quickly. The night yards rushed past: she looked down at the speedometer: eighty-five, ninety kilometres. She took a few long Ogden Road curves at high speed, pushed like salad in a spinner against the car door. Ahead of her, headlights came around a curve and she shifted down again, crunching back toward at least legalish speeds until a yellow cab drove past. She saw the green exit sign up ahead for 25th Avenue, which would get her back to the Beltline. The Skinny Cowboy was long gone, but she should get home anyway.

  Don’t panic, Audrey. Just get home.

  §

  Later she sat parked on 12th Avenue across from her little mustard-yellow house, where the porch light was still on above her door. Her tangle of winter-bare caragana hedge and her brown winter-dead lawn. Technically not hers, but her name was on the lease and she was never late with the rent.

  The car wasn’t hers and she sat inside it feeling the steering wheel. You have to get it someplace, Audrey. Take it up a few blocks and leave. Get it away from here. They don’t dust a car for prints and they don’t interview witnesses when it turns up damage-free, keys back in the elbow rest. Drive it a block, lock the keys inside, and then go home. Hurry back and quietly open your door. Take off your coat and climb the stairs without creaking too much. They are asleep and it’s late so do your best not to wake them when you go in. It’s eleven o’clock: Shelly’s been asleep for hours. Get inside and forget you did this crazy thing and think back months from now and laugh.

  She took the key out of the ignition and put it in her pocket.

  Audrey Cole opened the door and stood inside her little entryway in the dark. Jackets hung from wooden pegs: mother and daughter and grandmother jackets, a denim jacket and raincoat and puffy winter parka, a little red ski jacket and canvas coat, toddler-sized. A pair of red mittens tied together with a length of yarn hung over the doorknob.

  She pulled off her boots and stepped into the living room. Her mother was breathing heavily in the darkness, on the fold-out sofa bed, under just a couple of bedsheets.

  While Shelly was still a baby, Madeline Cole used to sleep in the spare upstairs bedroom. She would come down into the city from her home in Canmore and stay for a week at a time. When Shelly turned two, she said to Audrey, ‘She’s a big girl and she needs her own room. Move her in here and I’ll stay downstairs in the living room.’

  Audrey found the sofa bed in the Bargain Finder. Talked the just-graduating university student down to half the price and even got him to borrow a pickup truck to drop it off. She moved the little wooden bassinet that the baby girl had always slept in down into the basement and covered the spare
upstairs bed with all of the stuffed animals her grandparents had given her over three Christmases and two birthdays. Audrey took the spare bed frame apart so that the box spring could lie on the floor. If she rolls out, she’ll be closer to the ground, she told herself.

  Tonight Madeline breathed thickly and regular in the dark on the folded-out bed. Audrey watched her mother sleep for a while and then walked quietly as she could past her and up the stairs.

  She opened her daughter’s door. Shelly Cole slept still and quiet in her little corner bed, just her face above the covers, surrounded by her stuffed bunnies and bears and ducks. Her nose was clogged and she snoozed thickly in the room, and Audrey leaned on the door frame listening to her daughter’s noisy breathing.

  It’s not so late, thought Audrey. Everyone asleep, pulled under for the night, tucked in, safe. But it’s not so late. There are more hours in a night if you’re awake.

  ‘I just need a little time, baby,’ she said very quietly. ‘I need to go up there and see it so I can stop thinking about it. So I don’t go crazy.’

  She went into the kitchen. Reached up and took a glass jar down from above the refrigerator. Inside was a single key. She tipped the key out into her hand. Held it for a moment, then pushed it into her jacket pocket.

  Audrey Cole went back downstairs and out into the night.

  PART ONE

  THE LEGENDARY

  LEVER MEN

  1

  2001

  CANMORE, ALBERTA

  Audrey Cole passed her driver’s test the day after her sixteenth birthday. One hundred per cent from the Rundle Mountain Driving Academy in Canmore, Alberta, all checkmarks, thanks to two years of constant practise in her father’s old Dodge pickup. Any chance she had, after school, after washing dinner dishes in the sink and stacking them to dry, she would practise putting the truck in gear, shifting the long stick in and out of neutral, though she had to slide down and almost off the seat, leg all the way straightened, to find the tension point on the clutch. She drove up and down their alley, all the way to the end, then in reverse, looking backward over her shoulder, and once the sun was down she ventured out into the neighbourhood, long loops and figure eights through the closest-to-home intersections, excited to be alone.