Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen by Glen Huser Page B

probably love it if the Wrinkle Queen could stop griping about how I’m doing for three and a half seconds at a time. Is there anything worse than old L.A. teachers? I finally had to tell her to shut up.
    What’s so great is tearing along the highway and everything flashing by, like in a movie. Green fields and bunches of trees and farms. Some of them even have red barns like you see in picture books when you’re in grade one. Red barns and real cows and horses!
    One time Wilma told me she lived on a farm when she was a little girl. With her grandma. Grandma Schlotter. Feeding chickens, collecting eggs. But then the grandma died and she went back to living with her dad and his third wife in a part of Edmonton where there was a drug house two doors away. Her dad diedwhen she was twelve — got drunk and fell off a fire escape. And her mother — well, Wilma wouldn’t really talk about her. She’d just say, “She’s dead to me.”
    So somewhere I might have a grandmother, but I have a feeling she’s not living on a farm raising chickens.
    When the Wrinkle Queen gets through pouting about not being allowed to sideseat drive, she decides to put on a tape of her opera music. But first, of course, she has to tell me this story about dwarfs and mermaids and a magic ring. I’m thinking this guy Wagner has been drinking more than Rhine water himself. And when the Wrinkle Queen actually quits yattering and turns on the music, it turns out the mermaids are all yodeling and shrieking at one another. God help us.
    We get a break from it all when we stop for lunch. Of course Miss Barclay isn’t into anything normal like going to Wendy’s for a bit of salad. Instead we park ourselves at a picnic table where I get to unload the stuff I packed from the pantry. We snack on petrified toast named after some opera singer who lived a hundred years ago. Petrified toast with some kind of fishy sandwich spread. Good thing I brought a jar of olives.
    The Wrinkle Queen looks like she’s died and gone to heaven, puffing away on one of her skinny cigars underneath a pine tree where a squirrel is running around, up and down branches.
    Back on the road after lunch, I get to hear more of the story of opera number one. The king of the gods and his wife wake up and find out that a couple of giants have built a castle for them.
    â€œWotan has promised his sister-in-law Friea to the giants in payment for the castle,” Miss Barclay is saying. “But then he insists it’s only a joke and there’s a huge fight. That’s when Loge the god of fire shows up...”
    She rattles on for about fifteen minutes. I’m beginning to see mountains in the distance. It’s like the farms — hard to believe they’re real. They grow bigger all the time as we get closer, and by the time we actually get up beside them and there are rocks right beside the road that are a hundred times bigger than the Buick, she has the music going full blast again.
    And there are animals like out of a National Geographic special. Elk walking along the ditches, checking out the cars on the road. In a couple of places, mountain sheep with their curved horns, way up on the tops of cliffs.
    â€œThis is the part where Loge the fire god tricks Alberich into putting on a magical helmet, and he turns himself into a toad.” The Wrinkle Queen cackles like she’s come up with the trick herself.
    â€œWe’re going to have to stop in Jasper,” she says. “Like the rest of me, my kidneys are a bit worn out.”
    To tell the truth, the Perrier water has done a job on me, too. There are washrooms in a big old train station which also has a bunch of Greyhound buses and tour coaches parked outside.
    And one RCMP car.
    There’s nobody in it, though, and when I go back into the station to wait for Miss Barclay to come out of the washroom, I see them. Two mounties buying coffees and joking with the