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 traffic. 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.
§
Inside, Audrey swam in night, standing in long, wide blackness. Her eyes buzzed in the dark. Windows that could let in the white moonlight were all too deep in the building. She felt at the wall beside the door for the light switch and of course it didn’t work. No one had paid any bills here in years.
Her memory worked to create details in the blank space. Ahead and all around her would be the wide open foyer, reaching out on either side under the high, faraway ceiling. An open mezzanine looked down over a long rail from the second floor. If she walked straight ahead she should reach the brass-railed staircase, wrapped upward squarely around a copper-caged elevator shaft, the back spine of the building reaching up, away to the higher floors. The memories came back to her gradually in the dark.
The dark space stunk, rot and mildew, and damp despite the dry deadness of the air. She felt the cold floor through her boots. She listened for the sounds a building makes: hot water whistling in pipes, buzzing fluorescent lights, the thrum of forced air rushing through ductwork. The Crash Palace was quiet. No drips in sinks, no televisions on faraway floors, no laundry machines or pipes rattling in their brackets.
‘Hello,’ she said loudly in the dark. ‘Hello, it’s Audrey. Audrey Cole. I haven’t been here for a long time.’
She took a few steps in the dark, shuffling her feet, careful of her toes, arms out ahead for obstacles.
‘It’s my key anyway,’ she said, at normal volume, to no one. ‘He left it for me and fuck him anyway and it’s mine now.’
There was a parlour over to the left, she remembered. Bay windows and sofas, and a fireplace. She moved cautiously, anticipating furniture in the darkness, low chairs or tables lurking to trip her. She realized she was trying to be quiet, so she stamped her feet on the stone floor to hear the sound slap in the big space. Listened for responses, for scuttling animals, burrowed into the dry shelter of the walls and floors.
There could be black bears. Grizzly bears. Denned in the basement for their winter sleep. There are different kinds of bears and some of them you have to run away from at first sight, as fast as you can, and for some of them you need to just drop and play dead and hope for the best. Someone once explained to her these different bear responses that a person needs to know and she remembered cold horror in her stomach listening and imagining the fateful meeting someday in the future, face to face with a bear, and how she’d spend her last moments trying to remember which bear required which, making of course the wrong decision.
‘Bears, be fair. Say which sort you are. Give us an honest shot.’
Something crunched underfoot. Tracked-in mud maybe. Dried bird shit. Upstairs there would be broken windows or vents. Chimney flues. Plenty of magpie and crow access for generations of brave bird explorers. The pine trees all around the lakeshore might sport nests lined with beak-stripped copper wire, kitchen silverware, shoelaces, fridge magnets.
In the cold parlour a wide bay window allowed enough light to make shapes. A sofa and heavy easy chairs. A coffee table. Piles of vague junk: bottles, boxes, books. And a brick fireplace, open, lined with black ash. She knelt and put her hand into the maw and felt a cold breeze from the flue. In an iron rack were logs and newspaper, and a box of matches.
Audrey crumpled newspaper into balls and made a little fire. Fed it with wood splinters and shavings until her fire was large enough to put a proper log onto, then stood and walked back to the couch. Rich orange light made the parlour an island of colour in the night. She watched the fire and felt the heat push into the room, chasing the chill that had worked up inside her from the wind, the concrete cold soaked up through her boot soles that had numbed her toes, her heels and calves. A fuzzy knitted afghan was folded in a corner of the couch and she pulled it around her shoulders, staring into the fire, feeling the heat fill the room, drawing dampness out of the wood and plaster, activating the air. The new light shrank the space around her, turned empty mystery into a room with couches and chairs and a view through the arch of a dark, empty lobby.
If there were residents, they stayed away. No small, clever locals drew in to the fire: weasels or porcupines burrowed in cupboards, nested in ducts. Badgers and blackbirds dragging straw, mud, burr bristles, pine-cone scales into the warm corners and dark crawl spaces. Leaving lucky stinkweed or thistle seeds around the building to grow out of any cracks they had the gumption to root down into.
She’d had a Christmas cactus, which sat on the radiator in her room upstairs. She’d had a few plants, she remembered now. She tried to remember the day she left, tried to remember if she’d thought of the plants while packing everything up in a rush. The day she left was a hectic sprawl of memories, but she was pretty certain she didn’t think about the plants. There was a Christmas cactus, and a little ponytail palm, and a sprawly, scrawny thing with pale green heart-shaped leaves. She’d found them around the building in other rooms, and as people came and went she took to watering them and eventually moved them all upstairs to the bedroom.
They’re dead, Audrey. They died long before the power went out and the heat was shut off. Died as soon as you weren’t around to water them. You left with Wrists and that was it. Maybe if you go up to the bedroom you’ll find some sticks of naked wood in a dried-out clay pot.
Outside, a coyote howled. Two notes and the swoop in between, the higher pitch a single solid tone. No vibrato, no waver. It echoed and stayed true, like two harmonics on either end of a just-intonated guitar neck. She shrugged out of the afghan onto her feet.
A second howl answered. Audrey ran into the mezzanine, away from her fire into the dark where she knew the stairs were, and she took the steps blindly. Leaned forward with her hands out, grabbing the upcoming step lips and pulling herself into the dark. She grabbed the bannister to round corners, brass cold in the ball of her palm, and ran up all six flights. At the top she wheezed, her legs and hips burning.
Upstairs the moonlight was sudden and full. An uncovered concrete floor spread uninterrupted to all four walls, the space broken only by a few skeletal steel wall studs at irregular intervals, too sparse to indicate their never-got-built floor plan. A few sheet-metal pillars, big strange polyhedral trunks stretching from the floor that had been the ceiling up into the new roof above them. All around, ten-foot-high windows showed the full panorama of the long valley outside, aluminum grey around the fat moon. In the distance a tiny blue flame wavered in the sky, the only flake of colour in sight – the flare of the gas plant stack over on the far shore of the lake. Audrey stood at the window, looking, trying to catch a glimpse, watching for any motion. The grey cylinder of a theatre spotlight on a steel truss stood in the corner of the room.
Another howl went up into the night. Somewhere west, across the lake. But no motion. Then another call, this one farther out into the hill. A wait and then another. Then long quiet. She waited, but the coyotes were quiet and didn’t show themselves.
She looked down at the beach, at the snow-covered outbuildings and the car, already powder white with snow.
You should build something into the landscape, Audrey. Go out there and install something on the lakeside. Something permanent, or at least as permanent as this heavy, empty building. A little ‘Audrey Cole Was Here’ marker. Before they send the bulldozers.
§
Outside, she picked her way carefully through the snowdrifts with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, down to the lakeshore. The gravel was thick and cold under her boots. She stood at the ice lip of Two Reel Lake. Wind blew off the flat white lake expanse and sanded her with tiny stings of ice.
She took careful steps with her hands out wide on either side for balance, until the gravel gave way to snow-slick rocks, and she stopped, wrapped her arms around her chest, and stared out over the white lake.
There was no sign of morning in the thick dark sky. No sign, but soon. It had taken longer to get here than she’d planned. Longer through the narrow forest road out from the village.
It took you four hours to get here, Audrey. It will take you four hours to get back. You’ll be on Highway 2 in the middle of morning traffic. You will be exhausted. You will fight to stay awake.
She gathered the flattest stones: load-bearing stones and platform stones, and feature stones, flecked and veined, fracture-sided or water-smooth. She stacked up stones into a small inuksuk until the cold pulled the mobility necessary for grasping and stacking from her fingers.
Audrey stood up to admire her marker, but then she was very, very tired. First with light-headed, risen-too-quickly vertigo, and then with deep, thick exhaustion throughout her body. You can’t drive back, Audrey, she realized. You will fall asleep. You won’t even make it back to the highway. You’ll drift away and slip off the ledge of the road. Clatter through space. Crash and over.
‘Car,’ she said, ‘we’ll leave tomorrow. First thing tomorrow after we get some sleep. But we can’t leave tonight because I’ll fall asleep and crash you.’
Inside she stirred and fed the fire. Curled into the itchy blanket on the couch. Sleep for a few hours, Audrey, and then head back. She scrunched up as small as she could under the blanket. East at Highway 11 to get back to Calgary. Back home.
East. If you go west you end up in the mountains. You’d end up at the Athabasca River Crossing, halfway between Lake Louise and Jasper. There’s a truck stop. You could stop for a bottle of water and a sandwich and a full tank of gas. You’ll be able to go a long way on a full tank. The Engineers from Munich pride themselves on it.
Yes, Audrey, say the Engineers from Munich, we pride ourselves on it.
There’s a lake on the way out there, Abraham Lake, she’d only ever seen it on maps, a long cut just inside the front range, and Highway 11 lips the edge for kilometres. She’d always wondered what colour the top of that lake would be on a winter morning driving west.
Did the Audi have a cassette deck? It used to be you parked at a truck stop and they had a swivelling wire rack of cassettes by the door. Today’s Top Country Hits, Countin’ Down the Oldies, K-Tel Presents. Swing through them. Odds are against Link Wray, but you never know.
Audrey, this is a modern luxury car, the Engineers from Munich tell her. It has a CD player. It has bluetooth wireless connections.
Right, says Audrey. Bluetooth.
Audrey, a full tank, you can drive all day, regardless of terrain, the Engineers from Munich tell her. Regardless of terrain or inclement weather. You are a thoughtful, defensive driver, always aware of her changing situation on the road, no?
I am, she tells them.
Then drive as long as you like. Snow, ice, high mountain roads, rapidly shifting conditions – we built this car for you to overcome any of these situations without material impact to your comfort or experience of the road.
Thank you, Audrey tells the Engineers from Munich.
They smile and clank their beer steins. It is nothing, Audrey Cole. Enjoy your drive.