The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  ‘Shelly, we need to have breakfast and take you to daycare,’ Audrey said. ‘Eat your toast.’

  ‘Magic magic magic,’ said Shelly, sitting in her plastic booster seat leaning her chin over a plate of peanut-buttered toast. She picked up a piece of toast and squeezed it in both fists, peanut butter oozing between her little fingers. ‘Toast toast toast.’ She squeezed and opened up both palms to show her mother the squished lumps of oily toast. Giggled and licked peanut butter from her fingers.

  ‘Shelly,’ sighed her mother. ‘We have to go to Mirko’s tonight to get a few things for Grandma’s visit. We’ll see Glen then. But now it’s time for daycare.’

  Her daughter threw back her head and wailed, a low to high full-throated tantrum cry that started in her diaphragm and peeled upward like a siren.

  ‘Shelly, stop it or we won’t go at all,’ she said, knowing even as the words came out of her mouth that it was the worst possible thing to say.

  Shelly snapped her head forward and back again and screeched, sliding out of the booster seat down into a puddle of crying toddler on the floor, sobbing and panting and keening. Audrey picked up the pieces of squashed toast and the plate and took them to the kitchen sink. Wet a dishcloth and wiped the table while her daughter cried on the floor.

  She picked up the crying little girl and carried her to the bathroom. Sat her on her little stool and washed the crying girl’s face and hands with a washcloth, then lifted her over a shoulder back downstairs. Pulled her arms and legs into her snowsuit. Pulled a wool toque onto her head. Shelly Cole sniffled and cried and her mom put mitts onto her hands, then led her out the door.

  Reverend Joe Wahl stood on a chair in the corner of the long basement of the 12th Avenue United Church, stretching to fiddle with the volume of the small radio on top of a bookcase. The church was a few disconnected rooms in the basement of an old red-brick community centre. On the wall behind Joe, a table-sized poster listed the Twelve Steps in foot-high type. The long hall was split into little half-rooms by four-foot upholstered temporary walls, all tacked with crayon drawings, bright letters, cheerios, and macaroni glued on construction paper. Christmas tree cut-outs, sheep and angels and shepherd’s crooks, chocolate brown, pine-tree green, vitamin orange. In each little room, red-cheeked babies and toddlers sat or played on the floor or held their plastic sippy cups with two hands at tiny wooden desks. A dozen children babbled and banged or squeaked in pairs and threes. A naked toddler ran across the room holding the diaper someone had been trying to put on him and was scooped up one-armed by a woman walking the other way, a stack of laminated time cards in her other hand.

  ‘Miss Aphra, I have Stuart, where are his clothes?’ she shouted.

  ‘Miss Elba, I was changing him in the kitchen,’ a voice hollered from behind a felt-covered half-wall, ‘and set him down because Doreen threw her porridge at Keaton.’

  ‘Okay, Miss Aphra,’ Miss Elba shouted back, turning on her heel and heading toward a door in the back corner, the naked little boy dangling under her arm grinning at the room behind him.

  The radio speakers crackled and ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ cut in mid-verse out of just one speaker. Babies looked up from their cups and blocks and clapped. Joe climbed down off the chair.

  ‘Miss Anna,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Shelly is here, Miss Anna.’

  Miss Anna was a big-shouldered woman in neon-green yoga pants. She crouched down to touch Shelly’s bright tantrum-red cheek.

  ‘How’s my big girl today?’ she asked. Shelly threw her arms around Miss Anna’s neck.

  ‘Annannannaah,’ said Shelly.

  ‘She’s a brat today,’ said Audrey.

  Miss Anna reached in a pocket for a tissue to wipe the little girl’s nose. Then she picked Shelly up under the armpits.

  ‘Okay, big girl, let’s go have craft time.’

  ‘Her grandma’s going to bring her tomorrow and pick her up,’ Audrey told Joe.

  ‘Her grandma,’ said Joe Wahl. ‘You heading into the office early? Working late?’

  ‘Funeral.’ She took a note out of her pocket with an address and showed it to him.

  ‘That’s down Elbow Drive quite a ways,’ he said. ‘You can take the van.’

  ‘I can take the bus.’

  ‘Take the van,’ said Joe. ‘One less thing to worry about.’

  Joe Wahl’s van was a 1991 Ford Econoline, 240,000 kilometres, red, with a pair of barely-there-anymore soaked-through cardboard flaps on the floor that no one had pulled up since the last time it had been taken for an oil change. Joe, you have to do maintenance on the van, Audrey would say to him, picking up the key before a grocery run. It’s lurching. It’s lurching and I’m worried about the alternator. Sure, sure, Audrey, Joe would say, scribbling something in one of the coil-bound notebooks he kept in his aluminum desk.

  The deal was you got a discount on monthly child care if you volunteered for the church. ‘I have some moms who help with the meal prep,’ Joe had told her over the phone when she first called him, ‘and putting out the coffee for our weekly meal service on Thursday nights, and a dad who helps me run the Tuesday-night men’s fellowship. There’s a mom who helps me with the bookkeeping. I need help doing a deep clean twice a week – floors and windows and all the kitchen equipment. I need help getting the groceries once a week.’

  ‘Getting groceries.’

  ‘Yeah, you head down to the Wholesale Club off Blackfoot and 58th. I’ve got a list, doesn’t take long. You just come down here and pick up the van and take the list. I give you our credit card.’

  ‘Tell me about the van,’ she said.

  She went with him the first few times. Trailed behind him pushing the grocery cart while he slowly walked through the giant supermarket, stopping to squint at a paper list, then looking around the building for the right aisle, repeating this for each new item as if he’d never been in the place before and had no idea where anything might be. He took his time and shopped. He looked at price stickers and said, This plastic wrap is forty cents off when you get three. Maybe we should pick up a few of these. He put things into the cart in the wrong order: filled the bottom of the cart with lettuce and green onions, and then headed to an aisle for cans of tuna and cartons of beef stock. Audrey repacked while he shopped: pulled out the vegetables and laid down a floor of blocks and rectangles. Load-bearing cartons and cans at the corners, then an empty cardboard box on top for vegetables and other damagables. All the while memorizing and mapping the list and the store layout. Drawing up the new path for when she was on her own.

  Now Joe left the key and the week’s list pinned to the bulletin board in the low-ceilinged church kitchen for Audrey to go herself. How many cartons of milk, blocks of butter, cans of coffee. A second envelope had the church credit card tucked inside. Audrey came a few times a month, on Saturday afternoons when her mother was in town to look after Shelly for the weekend. The van struggled up and down Cemetery Hill and shuddered while it idled at the stoplights down McLeod Trail. She picked up groceries for Joe a few times a month and timed it for her own groceries, which she stacked in a separate end of the shopping cart from Joe’s milk and butter and coffee.

  ‘This funeral,’ Joe said to her.

  ‘Out of the blue? Unexpected?’ ‘Out of the blue but not unexpected,’ she said. ‘I’ll take the whole day off work and get the groceries while I’m out.’

  Joe shrugged. ‘I’ll make sure the credit card is in the envelope for you,’ he said.

  §

  Downtown, she rode the elevator up through the silver-skinned glass building where she worked. In the elevator, an LCD television played a short reel of weekly news. Men in suits headed farther up toward law offices and engineering firms stood quietly with their necks craned up at the screens, reading the scrolling price ticker: natural gas per cubic metre, West Texas Intermediate per barrel, Brent Crude per barrel. The doors opened for her floor and she cleared her throat, then pushed between the men in suits when they d
idn’t move out of the way.

  She went straight to Harold’s office without stopping to take off her jacket. Leaned in and knocked on the door frame. ‘Harold, I can’t come in tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a funeral.’

  Harold Goetz sat at his desk staring at the maps on his walls. The maps covered every part of the three walls surrounding him, held on long-ago papered-over whiteboards by magnets or pinned right into the drywall. High-detail maps of property lines, the intersections of farm sections and quarter sections, annotated with legal land descriptions and grid coordinates. A mesh of road and property lines, pinned up in no geographic order, snippets of Northern B.C. or North Dakota or Manitoba jumbled together – the only way you’d know one from the other would be to peer closely until you found a familiar town name, Billings, Weyburn, Minot, and then work outward.

  It took a while for the words to reach the inside of his head.

  ‘Audrey, for chrissake. I need you in here working, the place is falling apart. No one’s here, Audrey, I need you. Have you heard anything from Kim?’

  ‘Kim’s still up above William’s Lake,’ said Audrey.

  ‘Kim phoned this morning from the site in a lather and got four words into telling me she’d found something when her cell service cut out. Haven’t been able to call her back – cellular customer is not in service, over and over.’

  Audrey searched the maps and found the Central Cariboo Plateau, British Columbia. Kim’s site north of Williams Lake was circled in red and surrounded by yellow and blue sticky notes with illegible scrawls in Harold’s handwriting.

  ‘She found something as in she found something? Like there’s a find?’

  ‘She literally said, “Harold, I found a –” and then the call dropped.’

  They stood and looked at the map. Harold reached up from his chair to pull off a sticky note and move it up and to the left of a different sticky note.

  ‘What kind of funeral takes a whole day anyway?’

  ‘Harold.’

  ‘Fine. Fine, Audrey. Go to your funeral, sure. Maybe we’ll even still be in business when you come back. Wait,’ he said, and shuffled through the paper on his desk. He found a pile of printouts and handed them to her. ‘Get those to Thomas, he’s heading into the field tomorrow. These are all the client boundaries. Tell him to keep his shit together.’

  Harold Goetz knew the legal ownership boundaries of every acre of land between Yellowknife and Denver. Exploration firms phoned Goetz Environmental Consulting Ltd. and he would lean back in his chair with the receiver held under his chin.

  Where are you looking? he’d say on the phone. Right, north of the Cypress Hills there, east side of CFB Suffield. Encana has leases on either side of that. Probably sixteen years in that spot. That’s north of the Enbridge pipeline? South. I know the spot. Sure, we can get down there and help you out.

  He made maps for the field archaeologists, for Kim and Thomas and Robert and whatever fieldwork hour-counting MA practicum students the university had lent them for the season. Road maps and property maps and terrain maps, satellite images from the computer giving a pixellated idea of the landscape. They went out into the field with the elevations, with the existing claims and leases marked. Well sites, pipelines, notations telling them who owned what, who got paid what royalty, how long they’d received it, and how long that arrangement would continue.

  The archaeologists took his maps and followed them out into the wilderness. They came back with envelopes and receipts. Motel room receipts with room charges for high-speed internet and adult movies. Dinner bills from chain restaurants: chicken wings, clubhouse sandwiches, beer schooners. All of which they brought to Audrey.

  First she had to smooth all the crinkled slips and printouts, the carbon copies and sprocket-reeled printouts. When she had them sitting flatly, she started by sorting American from Canadian. Sometimes she had to lean into maps of Montana and Idaho pinned to her own wall, looking for a town name. She sorted by states and provinces and then cities and towns. Then she moved into taxonomy: Food, Lodging, Automotive, Equipment, Non-Work-Related, Other.

  She sat between two computer monitors and entered numbers from receipts into a spreadsheet. She propped the receipts on a little stand. Each number on the printed page was marked with a streak of highlighter ink, different colours for different kinds of numbers, and her eyes scanned the page, reading first the pink numbers, then the yellow, then the blue and green numbers. Her fingers typed each number into a spreadsheet field while her eyes stayed on the paper. When she was done a page, she picked it up and checked the numbers on the screen, and when they were right, she set it face down in an open file folder and started the next one.

  ‘Harold, is it okay if I use a highlighter to colour these numbers?’ she had asked him a few weeks after first taking the job.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but make a copy first. Don’t colour the originals.’

  She made copies of the receipts and filed the originals. When she was finished with all the copies she fed them into the electric shredder.

  Sometimes the archaeologists came to her cubicle with explanations.

  ‘Those drugstore charges, Audrey,’ Thomas would say, ‘they’re all above board. I was crazy sick. Some kind of northern muskeg super-virus. Something horsefly-borne.’

  ‘Audrey, that dinner bill is cool,’ Kim would say. ‘Harold knew that we had to take the property owner out for some appreciation and he knows it’s coming. You can’t take these people to Denny’s, you know? You can’t take them to the Husky House.’

  ‘Audrey, have you looked at the hotel bill yet?’ Robert would say. ‘I ordered the wrong movie. That’s a mistake, that charge.’

  She made photocopies of the receipts and then she highlighted the dates and amounts. Green for Routine. Orange for Unusual. Pink and red for Amounts in Excess of $500 and $1,000 respectively.

  Between the movies and chicken wings, they inched over the earth described on Harold’s maps. Digging and looking. Audrey had a limited idea in her head of the actual work. On television, archaeologists marked off squares of earth with stakes and string lines and dusted pottery clumps with little brushes. She imagined Kim and Robert bent down in clumps of prairie grass, blackflies and mosquitos buzzing above them, setting out their stakes and string lines. She didn’t know if this was anything like how they actually worked.

  They looked for signs of Indigenous habitation, for the stopover evidence of overland Hudson’s Bay Company trappers, Catholic missionaries, Northwest Mounted Police camps. Pioneer settlements, red-river carts, or covered wagons. Any debris or refuse left behind, to show a route or datable journey. They looked for history in the marshes or meadow scrubland.

  All clear, Harold would tell the client on the phone when they found nothing. We’ll get the paperwork to you and you’re good to drill.

  At lunch, Audrey googled the funeral home address and plotted an online map to get there from the Wholesale Club. Printed it out and traced it with a red pen. She took the newspaper page out of her jacket. Unfolded it and laid it as flat as she could on the photocopier. She took the map and the grainy copy of the page back to her desk. Took a pair of scissors and cut away the copy columns to leave just the photograph of the three men.

  §

  Later she walked up 12th Avenue holding Shelly’s mittened hand, the busy sidewalk lit by headlights, signal lights, brake lights. She walked slowly, as Shelly took careful steps along the cold sidewalk, her free arm held up for balance. They stopped at intersections and waited for the red hand to turn into the white pedestrian, and Shelly stretched out her little boot to step over grey lumps of the last snowfall still piled against the curb.

  When they reached the ragged caragana hedge, brown and bare, that wrapped the fence around their little mustard-yellow house, Shelly tugged on her mother’s hand and looked up seriously at her.

  ‘Mom. Magic Glen magic,’ Shelly said.

  Audrey nodded. ‘Yes. Let’s go.’
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br />   Now Shelly walked a step ahead, pulling her mother along.

  Her house was in the middle of the block, and down at the end was Mirko Lasko’s Balkan Grocery, with its dusty awning and coloured neon window. In between was the long plywood wall around the hole.

  There’d been houses there when she first moved into the mustard-coloured house a little more than three years ago. Narrow hundred-year-old two-storey houses, just like Audrey’s. Then a couple of years ago they came and knocked them down. Knocked them down with heavy machines, then dug and dug, four storeys down below street level. Knocked down the houses and built the plywood wall around the hole.

  The wall was covered in posters. Nightclub posters with the names of DJs and rock bands and theatre posters with the names of plays. Every day Marnie came by on her bicycle with a satchel full of new posters. Marnie was a razor-thin woman with a tattooed squid on her back, squid arms reaching down her own arms, tentacles wrapping around her shoulders, the squid body hidden under her T-shirt. She came by every day and propped her bicycle against the No Parking sign in the middle of the block. Pulled posters out of her satchel and hit them with a hammer-shaped staple gun, once in each corner. Marnie laid posters out in a grid, new ones up over the recently expired. Over months the paper grew thick and heavy, warping and crinkling in the wind and snow and sun, bulging around the staples. Then a City of Calgary truck would come and park with its hazard lights blinking and a man in overalls would use a claw hammer to peel the thick crust of poster off the wall. The paper came away in a scab strip, which he peeled away and threw in the back of his truck, leaving the plywood bare.

  Every ten yards or so, the wall had a little window cut into the plywood, where you could stand on your tiptoes and look down to see the half-finished concrete and piles of old rubble that would have been an underground parkade.

  They never built a parkade, though, and they never built a building. There was just the hole, and the wall around it.

  At the end of the block, Glen Aarpy sat on his folding chair in front of Mirko Lasko’s Balkan Grocery, under the awning out of the wind. His shabby oilcloth overcoat lit up by the signs in Mirko’s window: neon-tube Open, Lotto 6/49, Orange Crush. On the other side of the big picture window, two white-haired men in aprons were slowly ringing up the groceries for the after-work rush. Morris Wirtz held up plastic tubs of olives and white cheese and Mirko Lasko looked over his black-rimmed glasses at the labels and punched the prices into the till. Morris put the tubs in a white plastic bag: green olives, green-and-black olives, different-sized blocks of cheese in milky brine. Handed the bag to a woman in a heavy felt coat.