Audrey reached into her jacket and the folded-up poster was gone. She had set it down somewhere. Or it wasn’t there. She looked inside her jacket and confetti glittered on the lining.
‘I’m not the one who owes someone something,’ she said, out loud on the corner in the night.
The light changed and she should have gone across, west along 12th Avenue. She went the other way, trying to find the Skinny Cowboy.
16
MONDAY
On the moon, the surveyors drive iron stakes into the grey rock according to their map. The surveyors run long silver string lines between the stakes to mark edges. They fly still steel flags from high poles to mark points.
They leave their tents on the moon and take long floating steps toward the work site. Bounding strides that arc across the black moon sky, loaded down with their burdens: food for the day in galvanized lunchboxes, boots and gloves and goggles, picks and shovels. They bring hammer drills to pierce deep into the moon on the points marked by the surveyors. Explosives to feed into drill holes inserted deeply into the moonskin. The explosive carriers lag behind and take more careful strides, each parabolic step more deliberate at the bottom, loose knees cushioning their burden.
‘From here to here,’ says the foreman, pointing down the line.
They clap gloved hands to the sides of their heads and turn their faces from the noise and shock of each deeply buried explosion. The ground buckles and grey dust puffs out from the shaft. Diffuses out into the moon sky, a dense, free smear against the black behind. The charges break and shatter the rock, free it in tiny pieces to float away from formations hardened into long, long before.
On the moon they cross gloved hands and lean on shovel shafts to look up into the sky. More stars than they’d ever seen wheel above them. Any constellations they may have known in an old life filled and made different by new stars, hidden previously by the fog of atmosphere. Or maybe, someone thinks, they just hadn’t looked for so long. There wasn’t a lot of time before for looking up at night. They look up and the dust of their detonations doesn’t settle back onto their uplifted faces, but floats, finely sifted icing-sugar snow set free in all directions, free of the rock and the air, free from drifting back toward the ground the way snow would, somewhere back below where there are still winters.
§
She went through the rooms looking for clothes. She found five socks in three different colours. A pullover hoodie, a roadrunner with bloodshot eyes embroidered on the chest. A black T-shirt with holes around the hem and in the collar. She found handkerchiefs tied in a long string, as if someone planned to pull them dramatically from a sleeve. A summer dress splashed with dyed flowers. A denim jacket, the breast pocket worn white into a cigarette packet rectangle.
She found a pair of steel-toed workboots and said, Thank god. They were big, bigger than her feet. But big was an easier problem.
There were no gloves. She hoped to find gloves.
She went out back to her pile of empty bottles and found three plastic water bottles that still had their caps. She poured water into them, first to rinse and then to fill. She screwed the caps back on.
Oven mitts, she thought.
The kitchen was dark without the flashlight. She propped open the door and waited for her eyes to adjust to that little bit of light. Then walked, hands out, feeling for counter edges. She pulled open drawers and felt inside them carefully. Watch for knife blades, don’t get cut or stuck. Drawers and drawers of pot lids, skillets, rolling pins, spatulas, aluminum foil, and plastic wrap, and finally, deep in the kitchen, quilted oven mitts.
She felt for the sink and opened the cupboards underneath. Found crumpled plastic bags, folded for space. She felt her way back toward the light with her mitts and bags.
In the parlour she put on four of the five socks. If you have more socks on one foot you will walk funny. It may matter eventually. So she left off one of the socks. She pulled the topmost up over the cuff of her jeans.
She crumpled some of the plastic bags and squashed them up into the toes of the too-big boots. When she pulled them on and laced them tight, they were heavy and awkward but her feet did not move inside them. Her feet sweated in the heat immediately and she thought, That’s good. Bank the heat. Be hot now. She put the T-shirt on top of her own T-shirt and then pulled the dress over her head. It reached down to her ankles but it was large and loose and she could walk freely in it. She lifted her knees up above her waist. Took some practice reaching steps. She put on the hoodie and then the denim jacket. She sweated. She tied a handkerchief around her head, over her ears knotted in the back, and repeated, three handkerchiefs. She pulled the hood over her head and then knotted another handkerchief around that. There were still more handkerchiefs and she wrapped these around the water bottles and put them in her pockets. Then she pulled on the oven mitts.
‘I’m sorry, Kitten,’ she said.
Then she walked out into the morning snow.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Excerpts of this novel appeared in Geist Magazine issue 116, and in The Calgary Renaissance, edited by rob mclennan and derek beaulieu, Chaudiere Books, 2016.
The Tommi Mäkinen dialogue is based on a 2017 video interview from the FIA World Rally Championship.
Thank you to Nicole Kajander, Julia Williams, Samantha Warwick, Tara Scott, Dave Anderson, Sean Dennie, Aaron Booth, Lee Shedden, Eric Kingori, Curtis Marble, and Lorrie Matheson, for being insightful readers, sharing stories (some deliberately and some that I quietly took and stripped for parts), and for answering all my questions and helping me better understand cars, Fort McMurray work camps, crew-driving, rally racing, and rifles.
Over the last twenty-plus years I have been on the road with Aaron Smelski, Joel Nye, Mark Macarthur, Chris Vail, Patrick May, Matt Swann, Lorrie Matheson, and Nicola Cavanagh, none of whom are anything like any of the Lever Men but will probably recognize a few of the bars they played.
The building at Two Reel Lake had a different name in early drafts and we knew we needed to change it. James Lindsay at Coach House suggested ‘the Crash Palace’ which I really liked, and that became both the building and the novel.
Alana Wilcox was tremendously patient and supportive through the thirteen years it took to write this novel, and was instrumental in bringing Audrey and her story to life. Thank you, Alana.
Thank you most of all, Jennifer Tamura, the most important part of my life and the centre of everything I do, always.
Andrew Wedderburn’s debut novel, The Milk Chicken Bomb, was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award and longlisted for the IMPAC Award. Wedderburn’s musical work includes the groups Hot Little Rocket and Night Committee.
Typeset in Albertina and Bourton
Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda, and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover design by Ingrid Paulson
Author photo by Malcolm Overend
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
Toronto ON M5S 3J4
Canada
416 979 2217
800 367 6360
[email protected]
www.chbooks.com
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