The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  She opened her phone and it said 8:01. Shelly was awake now. Audrey’s mother had been awake for a few hours already. Read the newspaper and boiled water for a plunge pot of coffee. She would put cereal and milk in a bowl and sit across from Shelly while she ate. Madeline Cole would make Shelly eat more cereal than the toddler wanted. They would sit together on the couch and Shelly would watch cartoons.

  She won’t panic, Audrey told herself. She’ll be worried and try to call me but she won’t panic. There’s a voice-mail message waiting on the phone, as soon as you’re back in service. Audrey, where are you? it will ask you. There will be a few of them. She’ll fret but she won’t panic.

  She went floor to floor, walking down the hallways, past closed or opened doors. Rows of evenly spaced doors down the either-wing hallway, staring at each other across the scuff-faded doors. With numbers they’d be hotel room doors, but they weren’t numbered. Some of them still showed a square of back-folded masking tape, a thumbtack or a plastic push-pin that used to hold up a paper picture.

  Bare mattresses lay on the floor or leaned against the wall. Half-made beds, the sheets knotted or pulled half off to the floor from the last person rolling out before leaving. She opened closet doors and found black T-shirts hanging on wire hangers, beer boxes, a crate of records, or nothing but an empty room. Soap slivers and mostly curled-empty tubes of toothpaste. Bottles everywhere: beer bottles and whisky bottles, two-litre pop bottles and mostly beer bottles, all of them empty, probably. A plastic card table with a game of Monopoly, all the cards and piles of money still sitting where they’d been left, about two-thirds into the game, all the property cards sitting out, some green houses on a few blocks, the mid-grade orange and red stretches, everybody still with enough cash to get by, the green and yellow properties split up among a few different players. A game with hours left in it that no one was close to winning.

  Some of the rooms were empty, no beds, no furniture, no detritus or leave-behinds, nothing to indicate anything had ever happened there at all.

  On a third-floor wall someone had written in black lipstick IT’S NOT YOURS.

  On the fifth floor, the door to Alex Main’s old office was open. If it had been closed, she might have weighed going in. Debated, lingered in the hallway. She might have wanted the right circumstances or a carefully prepared frame of mind. The right cold, cutting quip to say out loud in the empty room. But the door was open, so she went in and didn’t think too much about it.

  His desk was buried in loose paper and surrounded on the floor by beer boxes. A fax machine sat on a folding chair, the unplugged cord dangling off the side. There were empty bottles and old coffee cups and cereal bowls full of white ash and cigarette butts. Paper stacked up in piles on the desk and floor, crumpled loose paper, printer-sprocket-reeled invoices, torn-open envelopes, newspapers back-folded to half-finished crossword puzzles. Black-and-white photocopied posters covered the walls: scratchy photographs of rock bands, big black block-letter dates and names: The Salt Licks with the Ugly Fuckers. Cheryl Rae and Her Raenettes. The Mants with the Von Zippers. Bruce News and the No Clues. All with the same footer: The Crash Palace, Two Reel Lake, Alberta.

  ‘Alex, I’m going through your stuff,’ she said.

  She opened the desk drawer and shuffled through stubby pencils and packets of dried-up cigarettes. She found a flashlight. She flicked the switch and the still-alive battery gave her white LED light.

  At the back of the office a wall-sized oak cabinet lined the room wall to wall, full of rows and rows of guns: hunting rifles and shotguns, all of them oil-clean and shiny behind locked, streak-free glass doors.

  She went back to the fifth-floor hallway and looked down the other way to the big door at the opposite end of the hall. Up here there were just two doors: the office and the bedroom.

  You should go over there, Audrey. At least to see what happened to the plants.

  She looked at her phone but the higher elevation hadn’t changed its No Service message. Then she went back downstairs.

  On the main floor, she walked down the back hallway to a steel door with a wire-mesh window. She shone the flashlight into the windowless kitchen. White tile and stainless steel, grill tops and blackened iron burners. Cold black grease stank in the deep fryer. Dirty dishes filled the sink: a cookie sheet with blackened dried cheese and a coffee mug full of grey fuzz. She turned a burner dial and the stove didn’t light. She lifted the lid and the pilot light was out.

  If there was gas, you’d have blown up already, Audrey.

  There was a stack of five-gallon plastic water cooler jugs in the corner, the kind a uniformed man rolls into offices by the dollyful once a week. Full and still sealed. She found a clean pitcher on a shelf, upside down, the inside free of dust. She pulled a heavy cooler jug from the stack and carefully peeled off the plastic top. Splashed water into the pitcher, swished out her mouth and spat in the sink. Then wet her face and took off her shirt to wipe her chest and under her arms. Patted herself dry with paper towel.

  Last of all she went to the ballroom. She opened the double doors on the second floor and stood looking into the large darkness, feeling the space and the stale air. She turned on her flashlight and went inside.

  The hardwood floor ran off a long way in any direction, scuffed and dirty, the muddy prints and scrapes and bits of gravel and cigarette butts casting outsized shadows behind her flashlight beam. Straight ahead of her, a long counter ran most of the wall, stools stacked on top, the shelves behind lined with glasses and bottles. The room stretched out left and right, some high tables on one side, more stools, some of them knocked over on the floor, and the other way the floor reached maybe sixty feet until it stopped at a high stage, with a red curtain pulled tightly across. Along the wall sharing the double doors were banquette seats around lower tables. On the far wall her flashlight beam picked out framed posters. In the middle of the floor the light dazzled back at her from a mess of broken glass, not just glass but mirrors, radiated outward around the stem of a mirrored sphere like a fallen Christmas ornament. She shone up at the ceiling and could see the wire where the mirror ball had hung, the base still up there, the glass fallen, or pulled down. Pulled down, thought Audrey.

  She walked back to the bar and shone the flashlight along the counter. Behind a stack of dust-skinned rocks glasses stood a little plastic hula girl with a plastic red hibiscus in her hair. She played a little plastic ukulele. Audrey reached out and touched her with a fingertip and she bobbed back and forth, wobbling on the spring mounting her bare feet to her green plastic base.

  They’d go through this mess, eventually. West Majestic Developments, whoever they are. This mess was a long way from being Clearwater Haven. There would be men in tailored suits wearing hard hats. They’d have the drawings with them: the blueprints and elevations and plans that they’d turn into estate villas surrounding eighteen holes of golf. Guided bow-hunting excursions. Heli-skiing. Only these piles of trash standing in their way. They’d assess the wreckage while tapping on their smart phones. They’d bring trucks. Temporary fencing. They’d set up an aluminium-sided trailer on cinder blocks and a pair of plastic port-o-potties. They’d bring diesel generators and construction lights to shine on early winter mornings when the crew starts before sunrise. Before all that though, they’ll need to get rid of all of this. Men in gloves and overalls would haul out all the garbage: the mattresses and furniture, the stage lights and tall stools, all the empty bottles. Her empty Christmas cactus pot. They’d pull apart the banquette seats and Koop’s bar with crowbars. Fill their trucks with everything and haul it away, to Rocky Mountain House, where in the landfill it would just be more garbage, and get slowly covered by other construction debris, supermarket cast-offs, tied plastic grocery bags filled with dirty diapers and Kleenexes and potato peelings from a thousand other households, and it won’t mean anything. She picked up the hula girl and took her out of the ballroom.

  Shelly knew how to work the two remotes, one to
turn on the television and one to turn on the cable box. She knew the numbers for the different kids’ stations. Four channels that played her favourite shows at different times, and she knew the schedules well enough to flip from one to another. Her grandmother had probably made herself a pot of coffee and then got distracted by the toddler, making sure she ate her breakfast. Once Shelly had her attention filled up by the cartoons, Madeline would microwave her mug for half a minute, then sit beside the little girl on the couch. Fill in sudoku puzzles, or maybe knit, while the toddler changed channels.

  Audrey turned on her phone and waited while it hunted for a signal before telling her there was none, and then shut it off and put it back in her pocket. She wouldn’t have to go far to get back inside the network range. The highway past the village. She could stop before the junction and make a call.

  ‘Mom, I’ll be there soon, I’m fine, don’t worry,’ she would say. ‘I’ll be home soon and I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll tell you the whole story.’

  You can tell your mother the whole story, all of it, when you get home, Audrey.

  In the meantime, she’s leaving a voice-mail message every twenty minutes, Audrey thought. She put the hula girl in the pocket of her jacket. Zipped it to her chin and went outside. She stopped to lock the door on the way out.

  §

  The car started easily, and she sat with the defrost on full blast, waiting while the air warmed and ate into the skin of ice on the windshield. Still half a tank of gas. Not bad for all that driving last night. She tried the radio but couldn’t find a signal and shut it off. When the air was warm and the window was wet enough for the wipers to clear, she put the car in gear. It turned easily enough in the snow, but the drifts were deeper than last night. She drove away from the Crash Palace.

  She drove slowly up and down the hills through the forest. She was five minutes up the road when it happened. Not quite back to the fork at the billboard. The road rounded the crest of a hill and sloped down through a curve. Audrey turned the wheel, and the tires slid on ice hidden underneath a drift. She downshifted and turned into the skid, but the car slid ditchward. Audrey braked harder than she meant and the wheels locked. The car slid back end out, in a wrong-way spin, and the rear tire dropped over the ditch lip. She lurched forward, caught hard by the locked seat belt. Her stomach contracted. She pushed in the clutch and stepped heavily on the gas – the tires spun. She put it into reverse and gave it gas, turning the wheel toward the middle of the road, but the car didn’t move. The tires spun, whining loudly, and then the car dropped, snow and gravel giving out under the other tire, and she jerked against the seat belt again, head and neck a short shock, only a half-foot of movement down and back but sudden and unexpected.

  Audrey Cole sat in the car staring into tree trunks, hot air blowing into her face from the dashboard vents. She put her foot into the gas and heard the tires spin in free space behind her.

  She was panting. She caught herself panting and grabbed the elbow rest tightly. She made herself take a deep breath and hold it inside her chest, then release it slowly.

  She undid the seat belt and turned to look behind. The back of the car stuck out, downward off the road, in a high drift.

  ‘Car,’ she said, ‘come on, Car. You can do it.’

  She pushed the gas and heard the tires whir in the empty space they’d already cut in the snow. Then the engine stalled.

  She sat in the car for a while, she couldn’t have said how long.

  Audrey, your car is stuck and you are a long way from anywhere. The village is up ahead through the snow. Walk to the village and get help.

  No, the wind is too cold. Wait here a little while. Sheltered from the wind where it’s warm.

  Audrey, you can sit here and the snow will fall and cover the car. White snow will cover the glass and it will get dark. Sunlight will have to work harder and harder to get through the thickening snow covering the car. You will turn the car off and wait ten minutes to conserve the half-tank of gasoline before turning it on again. You will keep the darkening car just warm enough this way until finally it doesn’t turn on again. You will try to open the door but the snow will be too thick. It will be dark and you will go to sleep.

  The Engineers from Munich nodded seriously, sipping their steins. Yes, they said, that is correct. We’re sorry, but yes, that is what will happen.

  Audrey turned off the ignition and put the key into her pocket. She zipped her jacket up to her chin, then got out of the car.

  Her feet sunk into snow up to mid-shin. She took a step for a look at the rear of the Audi, hung up on the ditch edge, a snowdrift furrowed out in two dirty trenches by the rear tires. She stepped out of the ditch onto the road. The snow covered only her feet. The wind cut through her jacket fabric and stung her eyes. The wind made her ears ache.

  How long a drive is it between the village and the lake? Between the lake and the turnoff with the billboard? Between the billboard and the village? There’s the winding hilly stretch of road along the lakeside. Up and down and curving. Then the road from the village into the valley. She tried to remember intersections. Aren’t there driveways or junctions? Forestry service roads? She tried to picture the drive, start to finish. How long, Audrey? How long a drive? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Twenty kilometres an hour she’d been driving. Longer than half an hour. The wind gusted hard and her eardrums ached. How far is twenty kilometres walking uphill in the snow?

  Water soaked through her boots and socks. The tire tracks she’d left last night were already full of snow and each step was ankle deep. She tried to step over deeper drifts. The wind blew through her jacket and drew tears out of her eyes.

  She stopped fifty yards down the hill and looked back up at her stuck car leaning on the lip of the road.

  Maybe someone would be on the road. Maybe they’ll plow it out.

  She walked down the hill with her arms wrapped around her chest and sometimes wide for balance when she staggered in the wind. She looked back up the hill at the car, stuck on the lip of the ditch.

  What happens is you’ll get tired and slow down. You’ll want to sit down eventually, for a rest. She could see the white lake top through the trees. You’ll get tired and sit down.

  We’re so sorry, said the Engineers from Munich.

  She shook her head and slapped her cheeks. Come on, Audrey. You’re no good to anyone dead in a blizzard. Go back and wait it out. You’re not so far, and that will be a whole lot easier. Go back and make a fire in the parlour fireplace. Dry out.

  She turned and walked back the way she’d came up the hill, back toward the Crash Palace.

  PART THREE

  THE SKINNY

  COWBOY

  7

  OCTOBER 2009

  CALGARY

  ‘A man was here,’ her mother said. ‘He left you a letter.’

  ‘A man? What man?’

  ‘Some funny old man dressed up like a cowboy.’

  Audrey stood on the threshold of the kitchen with her jacket still on, staring at her mother. Madeline Cole was chopping up an onion and had a tiny onion tear in the corner of each eye. Shelly sat on the floor, legs spread out, leaning over a pile of multicoloured construction paper. She drew on the pages with a thick washable marker and her hands were smeared with marker ink.

  ‘Some funny old man dressed up like a cowboy,’ said Audrey in as measured and calm a fashion as she could manage. ‘Did he come inside?’

  ‘No, he just stood at the door and asked if Audrey Cole was here. He said he had a delivery and gave me an envelope. That’s it stuck to the refrigerator door there.’

  And there it was, held to the door by a magnet, next to Glen Aarpy’s magic kitten. A white envelope with the name Audrey Cole printed in small type across the front.

  She hung her jacket on the back of a chair and sat down on the floor across from Shelly. The little girl stared up at Glen Aarpy’s kitten and did her best to replicate the drawing. Drew wobbly oval faces with trian
gle ears and poky whiskers. She held the marker in a closed fist and struggled to drag it around on the paper according to the template up on the fridge door. Held her drawing up to squint at it in relation to the original, then grunted and started over on a fresh sheet.

  Madeline looked curiously at the envelope, then at Audrey, then back to the envelope, repeating this several times in increasingly exaggerated fashion to try and elicit a reaction from her daughter. Audrey responded by getting more and more absorbed in her daughter’s drawing.

  Eventually they ate dinner.

  Later, when everyone else was asleep, Audrey stood in the kitchen alone, looking at the envelope.

  You could just throw it out, she thought. You could drop the unopened envelope into the garbage and then take the bag out to the alley and throw it in the dumpster. The truck would come in the morning and hoist it up along with all her old tea bags, orange peels, used paper towels. Crush and squash it all together and drive it to the landfill.

  You could take the unopened envelope to Goetz Environmental Consulting and drop it in the shredder. Let the steel teeth cross-shred it into illegible confetti, impossible to ever reassemble.

  You could drop it in the sink and set a match to it. Turn it into black ash and then wash the ash down the drain.

  She took the magnet off the envelope, opened it up, and unfolded the letter inside.

  Audrey Cole,

  I’m contacting you as the executor of Alex Aiver’s estate. By now you know about the fact and manner of his death, and as an interested party I’m sure you have questions.

  As you well know, Mr. Aiver had been long estranged from his family. You will not be surprised to learn that a battalion of lawyers with immense resources at their disposal endeavoured long and hard to ensure that, prior to his death, he and any of his beneficiaries (in the case that any were to be discovered) were completely cut off from any and all proceeds or entitlements of the family’s collective industries. Similarly, they invested time quietly acquiring and disposing of his numerous debts in order to quarantine themselves from unforeseen risk or unintended consequences. Whatever remained in his own name he’d long ago managed to squander in a manner with which I’m sure you are more familiar than anyone.