The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  Sometimes on weekends she and her father would drive to Calgary without her mother: he might need to go to the garden centre or she might send them in to the T&T Supermarket in the northeast for some kind of dried Chinese mushrooms, unavailable at any grocery store in town, that she needed for a recipe she’d seen on TV. Her father would pull off onto the shoulder just past Dead Man’s Flats. They would switch seats, and once she was driving on the highway he’d try not to give too much advice. ‘Listen to your engine and watch the RPM needle on these hills here. Don’t push it too much. Don’t spend so much time looking in your mirrors. It’s the road up ahead you have to pay attention to.’ She would move the seat forward and he’d dig through the glovebox for the right cassette. He liked instrumental surf music: Link Wray, Dick Dale, the Ventures, and she knew every curve and sign on Highway 1 and 1A between Canmore and Calgary in time to reverb-heavy, tremolo-arm chords and space-echo arpeggios. He’d usually flip sides midway up the long, gear-rattling drive up Scott Lake Hill, and at the top he’d always say, ‘This is the highest point on the highway, you know, the whole country, highest point right here.’ Sometimes she would say, ‘Dad, the Kicking Horse Pass sign says 1,600 metres and this is only 1,400,’ but mostly she didn’t bother. ‘Could’ve sworn someone told me this here is the peak of the road, sure of it,’ he’d say, and then he would turn the stereo up and hum along to the riff under his breath, because they were passing Jumpingpound Creek, and ‘Rumble’ was his favourite.

  He taught her to drive, mostly out of town, sometimes on the highway but more often turning down side roads – rural routes, dirt access roads for campgrounds and gravel pits, old two-lane highways that people stopped using after they brought the Trans-Canada through. Roads that you wouldn’t notice going by at highway speed, roads that opened up into a secret alternate grid of pathways, that put you into different landscapes, where the mountains looked a little different, or you saw a river valley that would be hidden from the highway. Just in the space between Canmore and Calgary there were hundreds of these routes and she realized that most people just drove by and never knew any of it existed. He taught her to drive and she found a whole alternate series of overlay worlds, little gravel-covered portals like from science fiction or comic books, trapdoors into secret places that vanished forever if you forgot the specific, unmarked intersection that had brought you there.

  She turned sixteen in July. The week before school started, her mother gave her $200. ‘I know when I was your age, a little spending money sure made all the difference. That should last you a little while.’

  Audrey flipped through the Bargain Finder, finger-scanning prices, ready with a pen, and there it was: 1982 Volvo Station Wagon, Needs Work: $400. She walked across town to see it the next day. A flap of cardboard covered a hole in the passenger-side floor. Yellow was more conjectural than descriptive. ‘You have to be careful,’ said the owner, ‘because the whole electrical system shuts off if you touch the turn signal.’

  ‘I’ll give you $150 for it,’ she said, and drove her new car home.

  ‘No,’ said her mother, standing on the front step, arms crossed, staring at the car in the driveway. ‘No, Audrey.’

  ‘Now you don’t have to drive me around everywhere.’

  The fuel gauge dropped on every hill and the empty light didn’t work. She took experimental drives to learn the range of different gasoline quantities: five dollars took her across the river and up the hill to the new Nordic Centre entrance and back. Ten dollars would get her to Banff, just into town, where she’d turn and head back, draining the last of the tank just past the Welcome to Canmore sign and coasting into the first gas station.

  On weekends she drove up the Spray Lakes Road and practised throwing it into neutral and pulling the handbrake to skid around in the gravel lot above the reservoir. She made full-speed grinding stalls that spun her out in choking clouds of dust, frightening grasshoppers, sparrows, and faraway back-country campers who couldn’t see her and only heard the metal stress and four-cylinder cough echoing, magnified and strange, off the high, sheer Mount Rundle south face.

  The Volvo had a tape deck and she pillaged the cabinet drawers beside the living room stereo for cassettes. She didn’t know which group names went with any given song or sound, and anyway, most of them didn’t have singing, so she chose them based on the covers: irregular slab fonts in vivid colours, purples and turquoises, coral pinks and sunset golds, the letterform serifs zigging and zagging off into arrows and tangents, laid over lurid tiki masks, hourglass-hipped cartoon girls go-go dancing on the hoods of red convertibles, apple-cheeked blond men in red suits posing with their guitars and drumsticks. She filled the glovebox and played the tapes loud, the baritone-saxophone honks and lowest notes in every bass walk crackling and buzzing out of the pushed-past-their-breaking-point speakers.

  Sometimes she drove east toward Calgary, but mainly so that she could turn around and drive back into the mountains, the full view of the front range laid out in front of her windshield. Eastward, as the foothills softened and flattened into uninterrupted prairie, the roads lost their shape and straightened, stiffened into a flat grid of range roads and township roads, the dead edges of long-ago surveying. Impossible to get lost in or surprised by. But westward: heading up and in toward the mountains, zooming up the slow incline of the foothills, into the wide funnel of the Bow Valley, the highway curved and meandered more and more the farther you went, swooping with the contours of the river valley, rippling from the topographical gestures of the mountainsides. You took an exit into Kananaskis or Bow Valley Provincial Park and the road twisted and shook free, gave you switchbacks and hairpins, abrupt drops into meltwater canyons, steep climbs past gravel pits and limestone quarries lurking hidden in the pine forests. She did her best to get lost, looking for forestry roads, laneways for campgrounds and hiking trails. At worst she’d reach a dead end and have to five- or six-point-turn her way around, head back the way she came.

  On one trip back from Banff, she stepped into the clutch and felt it snap. She ground it into first gear with a violent lurch and drove fifteen kilometres an hour the rest of the way into town. Traffic roared past her on the left, windows open for fingers, fists, angry shouts. On the long single-lane off-ramp from Highway 1, a furious slow-moving caravan formed behind her. Drivers veered side to side for a glimpse at whoever was going so goddamn slow. She shuddered into the first truck-stop parking lot. Took everything out of the glovebox, her registration and insurance and her dad’s cassettes, unbolted her licence plate with the tip of her pocket knife, threw it all in her backpack, and left the car there.

  ‘So long, Car,’ she said. ‘It’s been a slice, I guess.’

  She found a Toyota hatchback on three stripped-bald winter tires and a doughnut spare, as is, ninety-five dollars. ‘It was my son’s and he left on his Mormon mission and never came back,’ explained the frizzy-haired woman who took the crinkled bills from her and gave her the keys. ‘I mean, I’m sure he’s fine, he’s just out there somewhere not calling me, too busy knocking on strangers’ doors, I guess, so damned if I’m going to keep his crummy old car around anymore. I just want to make the money back I spent renewing his stupid registration.’ Audrey found a fourth tire in the classifieds and started driving the ten blocks to school every morning, window down if it wasn’t too cold so that the Deltones and Wraymen could spill out into the neighbourhood. On Thursday afternoons she had an hour between afternoon classes. Would put five dollars in the tank and drive to Lac des Arcs. She would sit on top of a picnic table eating her lunch sandwich, bundled up in her jacket and toque for the deepening autumn weather, staring at the flat lake top while she chewed.

  When she wasn’t driving she went to school, where she did algebra and quadratic equations and wrote a group social-studies report about the history of Czechoslovakia. Algebra and quadratic equations were the easy part, and she mostly zoomed through these classes with plenty of time to doodle or stare out the window. Whe
n she was younger she always got the top marks in math. She’d loved the word problems and factors. She’d loved the little thrill of solving the puzzle and getting the answer right.

  When she was sixteen, Audrey didn’t get the top marks or win awards. She put in enough effort to get mostly good marks, and a right answer wasn’t any particular kind of pleasure anymore. When a teacher said, ‘Audrey, you’d do better if you tried harder,’ she’d feel peevish and grouchy for a little while. She’d flush with hot anger, which faded quickly, and then she’d go back to staring out the window.

  She did group projects in social studies with other girls, girls she’d mostly known since kindergarten, girls she’d taken swimming lessons with and ridden bikes after school with when they were eight. Now they were all taller young women who liked to grouse and gossip, and some of them were already planning for university. They’d all survived puberty with varying degrees of acne and awkwardness. Audrey ended up skinny and gangly and not as tall as some of the other girls. ‘Hey, Earth to Audrey,’ one of the other girls said as they sat around the table working on the Czechoslovakia report. ‘Are you going to help with this or what?’ And Audrey felt snappish and mad, but it faded quickly. Most of the feelings faded quickly, and she’d be out of the classroom soon enough anyway.

  On a Saturday morning in November she drove the Toyota east up Highway 1, out of the mountain funnel, the glovebox freshly filled with Thee Midnighters, the Chantays, and Link Wray, who she always brought now that she was familiar enough with the tapes to have favourites. She had a pencil map scribbled on a piece of notebook paper. At fifteen kilometres over the speed limit, it took fifty-five minutes to get to Calgary. In the city she slowed down and kept to the right lane, held her breath every hill that the Toyota struggled to climb, but they made it, up and down Sarcee Trail, then into the heart of the city along the vectors of her map to the graphite star at the end of the last line: MODEL KINGDOM.

  Inside, a grey-bearded man wearing an embroidered sailor’s hat listened to her question and brought different boxes: sailing ships with cloth sails and string rigging, full-colour photographs of the finished models. She pondered the pictures with her tongue between her teeth, and when she eventually put her index finger on the Merchant Royal, El Dorado of the Seas, he nodded in approval. Brought her tubes of glue and tiny jars of enamel paint, each with a two-word name: Sunflower Yellow, Panzer Grey, Raw Umber, Rust Red.

  She gave her father the ship for Christmas. He sat in his armchair Christmas morning and peeled the green-and-red paper off the large box. He held it up and smiled, then turned the box so Audrey’s mother could see it.

  ‘We’ll build it together,’ he said to Audrey.

  In the basement he laid an unused door across two sawhorses underneath a single bulb hung out of the exposed ceiling joists. He brought two stools downstairs and set them on either side of the new table. A desk lamp for more light. She sat on her stool, holding the box. He spread out the instructions and the pieces. All the pieces either beige or brown, linked together in racks by plastic piping, a plastic tab with a letter pressed in to identify them. He had a pad of paper and a pen and made a list while he read the instructions.

  He had tools: sandpaper squares and blocks, a plastic-topped case with a knife handle and different-sized blades, paintbrushes.

  Audrey read the instructions. The pieces had names that she could not recognize or connect to the small plastic shapes. There were belaying pins and bollards, pin rails and topgallant sails. Stanchions, yardarms. She folded the white page up to isolate Step One.

  ‘So we glue these together first?’

  ‘We’re a long way from gluing anything together.’ He reached over and pointed to the page. ‘See this little code here? That’s the colour we paint that piece. We have to paint them before we can glue them.’

  ‘So we’re going to paint them tonight? Did I get all the right paint?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What are we doing tonight then?’

  ‘Preparing.’

  He twisted pieces off the plastic rack and held them under the lamp. Then he fit the knife with a small triangle blade and carefully sliced away the little stub of plastic left from the connection. He sanded it smooth, then wiped it off with a damp cloth.

  Audrey looked at all the pieces spread out on the table. ‘This is going to take a while, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure is,’ said her father.

  §

  ‘Is it all right if I take your truck?’ she asked him sometimes.

  ‘What, you buy and sell your own used car lot and you’ve got to borrow my truck?’ he might answer. ‘Take your own heap if you think it will stay on the road for you.’ Or sometimes he said, ‘Sure, the keys are in my jacket pocket.’ She took her mom’s grocery list down off the fridge and drove his truck across town to pick up sandwich meat and canned tomatoes and peanut butter. His truck was too big and the transmission wasn’t the easiest, a four-on-the-floor shifter that wanted to stick in neutral and actively fought back moving second to third. But it ran great otherwise and she liked the low gear power and the way it growled and grunted leaving a stop sign or climbing an off-ramp. The factory stereo sounded clear and held together at high volumes. Sometimes she took it out of town, on her own routes, down to the Rafter Six Ranch road, or over to highway 1A, past Seebe underneath the flat stone face of Yamnuska, and she passed slower drivers, roaring out into the oncoming lane, enough horsepower in the truck to pass eighteen-wheelers or camper vans and then zip back into her own lane, and each time she grinned knowing that in the Toyota she’d have been flattened by oncoming traffic. Back in town she always stopped and put a few dollars of gas into her dad’s tank, and if he ever noticed the extra time it took her to get two litres of milk and dish detergent, he never said anything.

  They gave her an allowance, a hundred dollars a month, and she mostly put it into her gas tank five and ten dollars at a time. Put aside what she could in an envelope in her dresser drawer. On a Sunday in February after a week of soft weather had cleared the snow off the highway, she took a $20 bill out of the envelope and filled her gas tank all the way. Then she headed north. Took the Icefields highway exit toward Jasper and climbed up into the sky. Up and up, hugging the mountainsides, the young Bow River running the other way between altitude-thinning, shortening pine trees. Close to the treeline, the hatchback chugged and slowed. Audrey dropped a gear to try and get up the last stretch of hill, and thick black smoke coughed out from all the inside vents. She pulled over onto the shoulder, yanked the handbrake, and jumped out of the car.

  She watched it from a few metres back and it didn’t explode, just groaned and smoked. She sighed, took her keys, took everything out of the glovebox. Unscrewed her licence plate, put everything in her backpack.

  ‘Well, Car, I guess this is it. You’ve got a good view up here at least.’

  She ran across the highway so she could face southbound oncoming traffic with her thumb out, shivering in the high mountain mid-winter wind. Eventually an empty Greyhound bus slowed and stopped.

  ‘Should we call a tow truck?’ asked the driver. ‘I’ll do it once I’m home,’ said Audrey.

  ‘It was my grandfather’s. It’s fifteen years old but it has hardly any kilometres on it, mostly it stayed in the garage. I don’t think he did much beyond drive it to the landfill and back every few weeks.’ A grey Nissan four-cylinder pickup truck, automatic, an old canopy back over the box. No tape deck, not even a radio, but it was the only thing for sale in her price range. He opened up the hood and showed her the little engine, and the air filter was piled with old leaves from some previous autumn. She gave him a hundred dollars and he signed the back of the registration for her. She drove it back in the strange silence, listening to the little engine rattle and putter, wondering if it was meant to sound that way.

  §

  ‘I got a phone call about your car,’ her father said. He held a fragile plastic model ship mast. ‘The RCMP called a
nd said they had to tow it down the 93.’

  Audrey put a tiny piece of model glue onto the middle of a yardarm with the tip of a toothpick and pressed it carefully into the centre of his mast.

  ‘I had some problems with the transmission,’ she said, not looking up from the model.

  ‘They sent me a bill,’ he said.

  ‘They probably should have left it there,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty much scrap.’ She set down the pieces and picked up the instructions. Scanned through the diagrams to find the pieces they’d need next.

  ‘Abandoned vehicle removal and disposal. Two hundred and thirty dollars. Give that more time to dry,’ he said. ‘These are pretty brittle.’

  ‘The car isn’t even worth that – how can they charge you more than the car is worth?’

  ‘I think what you mean is “Gee, Dad, thanks for bailing me out and not asking to be reimbursed for my teenage misadventures.”’

  ‘Sorry, Dad.’

  They spent a few nights a week in the basement sanding and cutting and gluing. They painted the two halves of the hull and he showed her how to wipe off the still-wet paint with a solvent-soaked cloth to make the surface look old. She painted stanchions and bollards and they glued them into little holes on the flat deck pieces.

  ‘Look, your mother gets that same phone call, it’s a whole different story, right? “Mrs. Cole, we found your daughter’s car empty on the side of a mountain an hour north of Lake Louise.” She’d lose her mind. Right?’