The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  ‘Anyway, I ought to be dead. But I didn’t die. I got frostbite and lost feeling in a few fingers. I lost toes too. I’ve only got six toes. Audrey, did you know I’ve only got six toes?’

  Audrey shook her head. ‘I did not know that, Wrists,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t die. They had me in the hospital for a while, for the frostbite and the beating, and I had some broken ribs and a broken cheekbone and my eyes were pretty much swollen shut. As soon as I could stand and see, I split the hospital and went back to work. ‘What the hell happened?’ Sid asked me. He was pretty concerned. He gave me cash out of the till, I think whatever was in there, for the time I’d missed. Which, considering Sid didn’t make any money from the bar, was pretty thoughtful.

  ‘Now, when the skinheads nearly murdered me, the bikers were concerned. Sid was concerned. “I’ve had it,” Sid said to the Skinny Cowboy. I’d showed up black-and-blue, missing toes, and Sid pointed at me and said, “I’ve had it,” to the Skinny Cowboy. And the Skinny Cowboy turned on his stool to all the bikers and raised his hands with his palms out and said, “I release you.” Which I did not understand the meaning of until the next Tuesday night, when the skinheads showed up. They were pretty surprised to see me alive, but not as surprised as they were when the bikers followed them up the stairs. I remember that the last biker up the stairs shut the door and locked it behind him.’

  Wrists coughed. ‘I remember the sound,’ he said, ‘that the door made locking.’

  He leaned on the funeral-home podium staring at the back of the room for a while. The woman with the notepad sat staring with her pen hovering above the paper.

  ‘The people-having-sex-in-the-bar problem was the easiest to solve, I guess. I’d just stand over people until they stopped. If people wouldn’t stop just from me standing around, I’d spray them with the table cleaner. There was a cap of bleach per litre of water. You spray someone with that and they stop whatever they were doing.

  ‘Listen, all of this sounds really interesting and cool when you tell it as a story, but it was mostly tiring and dull. Sid, for all his faults, was a sweet guy with a big heart but not much of a businessman, and it wasn’t much after all that went down that whatever money he was running the place on dried up.

  ‘And then one night the Skinny Cowboy showed up with this guy, Alex Main.

  ‘“Sid,” said the Skinny Cowboy, “Alex wants to buy your bar and I believe his offer is fair and equitable.”

  ‘That could have been my out. I could have left with Sid. “Thanks, Sid,” I could have said, and headed out, and got a job in some other bar. Or, hell, a job in someplace that wasn’t a bar. Bruce, you left.’

  ‘I left,’ said Bruce, ‘got a job in some other bar.’

  ‘But I didn’t. I met Alex Main instead.’

  Wrists stood at the front of the room leaning on the podium. He looked over at the pewter urn and the white flowers. He looked around not saying anything and eventually the young man in the suit from the funeral home walked halfway up the aisle and nodded, and Wrists walked off the stage.

  Afterward, she signed the guest book and followed Wrists outside. He lit a cigarette and coughed. He smoked for a while without looking at her and she waited and he smoked.

  Four years ago he’d seemed so old, she thought. When she’d met them on the highway outside Fort Saskatchewan. She was a skinny kid and they’d all seemed surprisingly old to her. She hadn’t thought that men with grey-and-white hair and wrinkles around their eyes should have been driving around in a van full of beat-up old instruments playing rock’n’roll music to anyone who would at least partially listen. He didn’t seem as old to her now, though, standing outside the funeral home smoking.

  ‘I believe that’s the most I’ve ever heard you talk, Wrists,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Yeah, I expect I won’t speak for three days in order to recover.’

  He smoked and didn’t look at her and waited.

  ‘You look like hell, Audrey,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Well, three years single-mothering will do that to a girl.’

  ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘I guess you were just a kid last time I saw you.’ ‘Last time you saw me,’ she said, careful with the words, ‘you were dropping me off at the Blue Goose Motel on 16th Avenue in the middle of the afternoon. That was,’ she counted in her head, ‘April 2006. No, not April, May. I remember there was one of those Calgary May snowstorms, and there was snow everywhere.’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  She waited awhile while he smoked. Part of her wanted to drive away in Joe Wahl’s van, but part of her wanted to talk more.

  ‘Were you planning on telling that story all along?’ she asked. ‘Or just when you saw me?’

  He dropped his cigarette and then lit another. ‘Maybe a bit of both. Maybe when I saw you. Some of the details.’

  She took the cut-out photograph from her jacket pocket. ‘Would you have told that story if the Skinny Cowboy had come?’

  Wrists laughed, a short little snort that ended in a cough. ‘He wasn’t going to come. That woman with the notepad was probably a Calgary Herald reporter. “Disgraced Aiver Petroleum Heir Funeral Closes Book on Seedy Chapter of Local History.” He’ll have known that. He isn’t going to show up someplace that will put him in the human-interest section.’

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ he said. Then after a pause, he said, ‘Maybe not all the details. If he’d been here.’

  She laughed with him this time.

  ‘I had to talk to him, eventually,’ she said. ‘You must know that. When I found out. I didn’t know what to do, and I was so scared, and I didn’t know … I didn’t even know where to start.

  ‘I knew I needed to leave. And I knew … I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I wanted to leave altogether. So I realized I needed to talk to him. So I talked to him. You must have known that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I know that.’

  ‘“I want to leave and never come back,” I told him. “I don’t care about anything else, I just never want to see Alex again.” That’s what I told him. And he said, “We can totally make that happen.” We can totally make that happen. And then the next morning you were there. You showed up out of nowhere and told me to pack everything up and come and meet you down in the van. And you drove me to Calgary through a May snowstorm and dropped me off at the Blue Goose Motel.’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  She folded the photograph back up. Put it back inside her jacket pocket. They stood quietly outside the funeral home for a while.

  ‘Do you still have the van?’ she asked eventually.

  He shook his head. ‘Fuel pump fell apart outside of Wawa, Ontario. I was playing in one of Dick’s punk rock bands and we were headed to Sudbury. No time to get it fixed. We traded it to a body shop for an older Econoline which was a bigger piece of junk but got us the rest of the way home before falling apart completely. I don’t have that anymore either. The new act isn’t on the road as much. When we do go out we mostly rent.’

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  ‘I may have to go in there and see where Bruce disappeared to,’ he said. He coughed into his fist. Then he looked up away from her.

  ‘If you ever want to hang out …’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said.

  Wrists nodded. He stubbed out the cigarette he’d just lit. ‘Well, good seeing you, Audrey. I guess I’ll go see what’s keeping Bruce.’

  ‘Good seeing you, Wrists.’

  PART TWO

  THE ENGINEERS

  FROM MUNICH

  4

  DECEMBER 2009

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  The snow started just past Red Deer on Highway 11. At first it melted on the black asphalt and shone wet under her headlights. The prairie rumpled with hills and thickened with trees and more and more snow as she drove west. By Rocky Mountain House, snow lay heavy on the road surface, cut into black ruts by some unseen up-ahead traf
fic. Everything in the Audi was in perfect shape though, and driving was easy. Brand-new winter tires that stuck to the road. The windshield wipers left no streaks, made no noise, and the headlights were bright and showed her the road through the snow. She turned up the heat and when the car got too warm she turned it down. She looked into the snow and sometimes headlights went past the other way.

  She turned on the radio and turned it off. She listened to the tires on the road and drove with either hand, her arm propped up on the passenger seat or her elbow on the door against the window. Sometimes she opened the window and felt the cold wind and little taps of wet snow.

  Audrey Cole was a small, skinny woman who had always had a hard time reaching and fitting the vans and trucks she’d driven throughout her life, vans and trucks sized for taller, fatter men. But tonight she hadn’t even had to adjust the Audi’s seat. Two hours out from Calgary and her lower back still felt good. The ball joint in her hip didn’t hurt in the place it always did, where her leg swung ten to two between the gas and brake. She downshifted on hill grades and the clutch had a just-right sweet spot that only needed the smallest incline of her ankle. She held the steering wheel with one or two hands and propped one or the other arm on the window edge or elbow rest and could have driven two hours more, no problem. Like the Engineers from Munich had stood her on a stool and measured her, tailors with tape measures, pins in their mouths.

  Headlights came close and receded, but the cars that made them and any people hidden in their glare were far away from Audrey.

  The woman who owns this car takes it exactly on time to each scheduled appointment, thought Audrey. She phones the dealership the first day the Perform Maintenance light comes on. She nods when the mechanic suggests a differential check and a transmission flush on top of the regular oil and filter, and pays for it all without comment.

  She opened the window for shrill, cold air and sucked it into her nose. It felt colder up here, out of the city. Her black leather boots were comfortable but not warm or particularly waterproof, and her cloth jacket had a collar but not a hood. Tail lights grew ahead of her and she passed a logging truck.

  Audrey was alone in the car and alone on the road. Sometimes lights appeared on the horizon and came close, blinked past and disappeared behind, distant white then red, and she was alone then too. A person might be a few yards away for a moment, but she was alone even then.

  ‘Car, you are perfect,’ Audrey said.

  She drove for a long time, and near Nordegg the hills moved tightly around the highway. Night and snow hid the shapes, but she knew the blunt peaks of the easternmost Rockies were low and close now. She drove past the trunk road that would take her north up to Hinton if she followed it. She saw a yellow Junction sign at the base of a hill, and she slowed down and turned onto a heavily snow-covered gravel road. A single pair of tire tracks led north and she drove slowly now into these hills.

  The forest lasted and lasted and then parted into a cut around the village of Two Reel Lake. Dark except for a two-storey house with an old Pepsi sign hung in front and a Canada Post sticker in the window, lit up white by a single street light. One fuel pump and a white propane tank surrounded by unpainted concrete bollards. She’d stopped here with the Lever Men, the first time, years earlier. Wrists bought five packs of cigarettes. ‘You never know how long you’re going to end up being up there,’ he’d explained. She remembered standing in the pale winter sun outside the van while Rodney filled the tank and Wrists bought cigarettes and inside Dick Move bought a scratch-and-win ticket and did not win.

  ‘That’d be – when was that, Car? Three and a half years ago? Four years,’ she said to the car. ‘Haven’t been back in four years.’

  She drove through the village in the snow at two o’clock in the morning and saw no people. The light was on above the door of the aluminum-sided trailer with the RCMP sign in front, but the windows were dark. There were a few houses with long driveways closed in by tall pine trees. At the end of the last driveway was a car with a For Sale sign in the window.

  She stopped the Audi, a hard brake that snapped her seat belt tight.

  ‘It’s my car,’ she said out loud.

  A cherry-red Honda Civic hatchback with black trim. An older model – late eighties, maybe 1990. ‘$600 OBO,’ said the hand-lettered sign in the windshield.

  That can’t be your car, Audrey. Your car was totalled. An absolute writeoff. The RCMP officer who she talked to on the phone had said they’d towed it to a wrecking yard in Red Deer.

  Your car was an ’88. Squarer, boxier. This has a rounder front. This is a 1990, Audrey. Maybe a ’91. But still, it was so close – the same cherry red, same hatchback.

  ‘Car,’ she said to the car she was sitting in, ‘it’s so much like my baby. But my baby is gone. A total writeoff. Towed off to Red Deer to get crushed into a cube.’

  She realized she was stopped in a tiny village in the middle of the night. She gave the Audi some gas and drove out of the village, back into the dark forest.

  ‘That car was my baby, Car,’ she said, driving at a careful pace up the snow-covered road. ‘I mean, it had problems. But it was the first car I’d spent any real amount of money on. It takes a while to scrape together $4,000 bagging groceries. Bagging groceries and bussing tables. That car was my baby.’

  The road made gentle curves ahead of her and she drove into the snow streaks flying past her headlights.

  She drove up the road between the trees, following the slow curves, and the Audi’s headlights lit everything up white. Cast long shadows of the skinny pine trees. She made slow curves and the trees moved past her, their long skinny shadows turning around her as she drove.

  She drove slowly up the road, leaning over the steering wheel. She was pretty sure that she’d remember where to turn. Just the one turnoff, as far as she could remember. Then she saw the sign. She stopped the car.

  A big wooden billboard stood beside a side road leading north into the deeper woods.

  Future Site of

  CLEARWATER HAVEN

  Luxury Wilderness Recreation Resort at

  TWO REEL LAKE

  Fishing – Skiing – Spa – Golf

  COMING SOON!

  A West-Majestic Development

  There wasn’t a picture – no artist rendering of the future resort, no evocative illustration of checker-coated sportsmen fishing luxuriously from expensive speedboats. No elegant blondes in bikinis sipping pink cosmopolitans on their cedar patios. Just the big words in an elaborate script, white on a brown sign.

  There wasn’t a fence. She’d worried there might have been some kind of temporary fence, chain-link with a padlock stretched across the road. But there wasn’t a fence, just the big new sign at the turnoff.

  Somewhere in the trees, the snow stopped. It was thick enough on the road though. She drove very slowly and the tires were good, didn’t slide or stick. The road narrowed and the shoulders dropped off into deeper and deeper snow. It dwindled to a single car width and she slowed to a twenty kilometres an hour, second- and first-gear crawl, and felt her heart surge each time she cut through a low drift. She could miss a turn and slide straight into the snow, or worse, tumble right off a grade into space, falling through the treetops to crash on the rocks underneath.

  The road wound downward and the forest opened up into a deep bowl valley. The sky split for a swollen seven-eighths moon bright enough to show her the long, frozen white surface of Two Reel Lake. Snow-covered granite boulders made a stony beach all along either shore. The lake and valley disappeared as the road curved back into the trees, and opened again when she switched back out, and she did her best to watch the road and not stare through the trees for glimpses of the white snow-covered ice. So when the woods finally opened up at the top of the lake, she wasn’t ready, and stepped heavily on the brake, startled. She’d thought it was farther away yet.

  ‘There it is, Car,’ she said. ‘The Crash Palace.’

  The valley sides drew
down around the dark mass of the building. A six-storey, red-brick building: window-gridded, sandstone-silled, flat-roofed, looming in the valley’s vertex. Two arms opened east and west from a central block, and each of these had its own open-handed side, so that if you were to look down from a helicopter you would see a fatbellied H, a steel I-beam that had swallowed something into its middle gut. Dozens and dozens of skinny windows set in the brick walls reflected Audrey’s car headlights. The highest floor was smaller, a glass-and-steel later addition that had always reminded her of a little glass hat that the building wore. Hillsides and trees and lake surface magnified the building’s scale, like an orange harvest moon just risen above the prairie, and made it taller and steeper than what she knew it was, but even if it were carted brick by slab away to the city and rebuilt on a dense Calgary street, it would still be tall and steep and heavy. Alone on the lakefront, the Crash Palace was huge and old and odd, not least for being so far away from plausible reasons for being built at all.

  She shut off the car and the engine clicked, cooling. Snowflakes fell on the hood and melted.

  She got out of the car and did her best walking across the yard not to step her insufficient shoes too deeply into any of the fresh drifts. Past the outbuildings down by the beach: the tool shed, the garage, and the little boathouse farthest out, where the trees reached the water. The wind was cold and then it cut off when she walked in between the building’s arms.

  The building reached around her, six tall storeys of lightless windows on either side around the narrow courtyard. She crunched through the thinner snowdrifts winding across the old concrete flagstones. There was a single step to climb to reach the eight-foot double door, the frost-dappled windows dark in the heavy brown wood.

  She pulled the key out of her jacket pocket. It wasn’t her house key and it wasn’t her mail key, or the spare key for her mother’s house in Canmore. It wasn’t the heavy security key for the archaeologists’ office. A thick steel key with a square of blackened masking tape stuck to the bow. Audrey Cole put this key into the brass lock and opened the door.