It was driving along an Oregon highway during the summer of 1961 that we first saw a giant cartoon bug painted on a billboard. Alongside the image were the words: Don’t Be A Litterbug! Pick Up Your Garbage!

We laughed when we saw the sign. “Would you look at that!” We were on holiday and that sign was another thing to roar past on the way to the next motel, the one with the adjoining Frontier restaurant that specialized in steaks the size of saddles.

The litterbug had a black eye patch, green wings, a black and yellow striped body like a bee, and smoked a cigarette. There was a mound of garbage at the litterbug’s feet.

A bug was telling us to clean up after ourselves. We laughed our heads off because the idea was absurd: there was no family cleaner than ours. And as far as we knew, there was no law about throwing garbage from a moving car. If there was garbage, you got rid of it fast. That’s what the outside world was for: dumping your garbage. This was common knowledge.

My uncle Ernie continually stated the obvious. “What are we, bums?” he’d ask, incredulous, if he found empty pop bottles, gum wrappers inside the car. Riding around in a car filled with garbage was a disgusting thing to do, he said, like riding in the back of a garbage truck and being covered with stinking muck. So anything resembling “stinking muck” went out the car window. If I was remiss and left a potato chip bag on the car seat, Ernie would notice right away. Even while driving. Lodged sneakily in the bald back of Ernie’s head was an additional pair of eyes. Elsie, his wife and my aunt—the one who was raising me—said so with pride. “You can’t get away with nothing when Ernie’s around. So do as you’re told and throw that bag out the bloody window.”

Unlike the Litterbug, there was no mound of garbage at Ernie’s feet.

In my mind, Ernie’s vigilance was helped along by the fact that he was a janitor at the Public Library. He was always on duty, twenty-four hours a day, prowling the house and yard, keys dangling from the ring attached to his belt. It things weren’t Spic N Span and reeking of bleach, watch out! “Germs,” he’d say, ominously, “hide everywhere.”

Elsie was the same. She sprayed Raid around the house like air freshener. We had daily battles over the state of my room, the food I left all over. You’d have thought my aunt and uncle’s zealousness would have translated to the outside world. It didn’t. The outside world didn’t matter. It was called “out there” and, sunsets and days at the beach aside, it was a boring place, useful mainly for dumping your garbage.

My father Billy was Elsie’s brother and he thought the same way. He worked on the docks in Vancouver and visited us every other weekend. With Billy everything had to be “squared away”. He said he’d learned this important thing at sea. He also said, “When you live in a stinking mess you can’t see what’s what.” He told me to remember this; it was one of Life’s Truths

Another truth, it seemed, was the importance of tossing cigarette packages out the car window. I was certain Billy saved them to please Ernie on the weekend car rides. Then one package, two, out they’d go like he was performing a fancy card trick.

It was Ernie, though, who was our standard bearer as far as traveling garbage went. He made a big production about tossing his cigarette package out the window. The package went as soon as the last cigarette was hanging off his lip. But first he’d extract the silver foil that the cigarettes were wrapped in, folding the two pieces carefully and then putting them into his wallet next to the thick wad of dollar bills. He did this while driving, lifting his bum off the seat in a delicate move to get at the wallet, and then lifting it again to return it there.

Why Ernie saved cigarette foil was a mystery. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he’d smirk, giving me the idea that janitors were people with secret lives. Casting around for an explanation I guessed he used the foil to make tiny airplanes. This was what he was doing after supper each night when, cranky as usual, he’d lock himself in his workshop off the carport. He was sitting on the stool beside his prized possession, a huge new table saw, and “working away at his hobby”, something grown men were supposed to have. A hobby, I knew, kept a man busy so he wouldn’t always be bothering his wife for sex. I was fourteen that summer and kept a close watch on my aunt and uncle’s marriage for clues about what lay ahead. And a man having a hobby was a crucial thing to know about married life. Another was letting a man think he was in charge, the way Elsie did with Ernie by eagerly throwing garbage out the car window.

Once, on the way home from Ivy Green Park, she emptied the contents of the wicker picnic basket: paper plates, napkins, sandwich crusts, and even some uneaten potato salad that she scooped out with her fingers. Tossing garbage kept Elsie on Ernie’s good side, kept him smiling, at least some of the time. It was a necessary part of his management. “Management” was another thing I was learning. You didn’t want a man going around thinking he had no equipment. That’s what Elsie said: “A man thinking he has no equipment is a recipe for trouble!”

“Eeee uuuu!” my friends squealed when I told them. “Ballzzzzz !”

Later that summer we were in the car on a family outing. As usual, we weren’t paying attention to the scenery, the blur of roadside, everything green and beige. We were looking for the next sign—not the one with the Litterbug—but the one promising a glass castle constructed entirely of embalming fluid bottles. That’s where we were headed, a sweaty two hour drive up-Island from home.

There were six of us jammed inside the Zephyr: Elsie, Ernie, Billy, my other aunt, Maudie, Grandma who lived with Maudie, and me.

Ernie was driving. He always drove because Billy liked to navigate, liked to estimate the times of arrivals and departures, the ETA’s and ETD’s, liked to arrive at a destination without any hitches. He’d studied navigation at sea and could, if required, navigate by the stars. Sometimes at night, out the car window, he’d want me to look at the sky. “There’s Orion. There’s the Big Dipper,” he’d point, pressing his nose to the glass. I wasn’t interested in stars. I preferred the moon, mainly because of its romantic possibilities. But Billy said the moon wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “Never set your sights by the moon,” he told me, another one of his “Truths about Life”.

Elsie was squished between Ernie and Billy in the front seat. It was a hot Sunday in mid-September. “Shoot, we’re stuck together like pigs,” she laughed, pulling a damp arm away from Ernie’s shoulder. Her flesh was as white as lard.

In the back seat Grandma hummed nursery rhymes--Sing a Song of Sixpence, Eeney, Meanie, Miney, Moe--tapping time with her feet which were perched on the hump between the seats. Maudie, her eldest daughter, a widow, sat on one side of Grandma, and I sat on the other.

We were traveling along, and I remember feeling mildly content. Usually the prospect of a drive with my strangely configured family—Nancy, my mother, had been on “a long trip” for nine years by then—brought a flat-out refusal. But not this day; I was as eager to visit the Glass Castle as everyone else. We’d heard there was a glass elephant’s head attached to the outside wall, a glass Coke bottle twenty feet high.

“What’s embalming fluid?” I hollered above the wind.

“It’s used to make dead people look alive,” Elsie said, twisting towards me. “For the funeral. They used it on Fred. Remember that time with Fred, Ernie? He never looked so good. His skin was like wax.”

Ernie grunted.

“Remember Fred?” she asked Maudie.

“Can’t say...”

“You remember! That guy my neighbor Marge ran off with. Worked for the gas company. Ran off to Port Alberni, leaving their families. Lived in a trailer pretending to be man and wife. But nothing came of it. I knew it wouldn’t. He died a year later. Heart attack. Keeled over in the street. But he was a picture in his coffin.”

“Imagine that,” Maudie said.

Ernie grunted again.

“I can’t see it,” Billy said. “Using embalming fluid bottles to make a castle. It doesn’t make sense. There aren’t enough dead people around here. They’d need too many bottles. They probably used pop bottles.”

Grandma, meanwhile, sat clacking her false teeth. It was a pleasant sound, like a horse sauntering down a tree-lined street on a summer’s day. A horse named Daisy wearing a straw hat.

After a while she hummed Three Blind Mice.

Perhaps our casual habit of throwing garbage out the car window gave Grandma the idea for what she did next. In one fluid movement she pulled the teeth from her mouth, reached across me, and flung them out the window. She did this as naturally as if she was getting rid of an empty chip bag. According to the sign we’d just passed, the teeth landed about ten miles south of the Glass Castle.

“Grandma’s thrown her teeth out the window!” I screamed, overcome with delight. “Back there by the sign.”

Ernie screeched to a halt by the side of the road. A cloud of dust plunged into the car.

Elsie hung over the car seat and hollered. “What did you do that for?”

Grandma’s eyes darted about, bright and mad. Then she shrugged. Then she sucked on her cheeks and her whole face collapsed.

Billy pushed the cap back on his head, sighed, and pulled the pencil from behind his ear. Here was a hitch: his ETA would need revising.

“Oh, Ma,” Maudie said, a wretched look on her face.

“Oh, Ma, nothing,” Elsie hissed. “I knew something like this would happen. Something always happens. Didn’t I say those very words this morning, Ernie? Didn’t I say, ‘I hope Ma doesn’t do something stupid and wreck the trip?’ It wouldn’t be the first time, either. Just once I’d like to go someplace and have nothing happen.”

“She should be in a Home,” Ernie said under his breath. But everyone heard.

“Don’t talk stupid,” Elsie said. “We should put you in a Home. You and the bloody TV set.”

We were stopped by a farm field; cars sped by rocking the Zephyr.

I’d seen Grandma’s teeth lots of times when I stayed over at Maudie’s house. At night, on her bedside table. They lay at the bottom of a glass of water, top and bottom joined at the back like a set of castanets. The gum part was mottled pink and grey, the teeth were yellowy-white.

“Ernie!” Elsie suddenly shouted. “Turn the car around! We can’t keep going without those teeth!”

This was something he was already doing. He shot Elsie a murderous look and asked her if she was blind or had she finally gone off her rocker?

Elsie gasped. “Of all the bloody...!”

I yelled, “Hurry up! The teeth might get stolen!” I don’t know why I said this. I felt urgent, caught up in the drama. “Hurry up! Get going!”

Elsie told me to pipe down and quit over-acting. Everything, including me, she said, was getting on her nerves.

Ernie told us both to quit squawking.

Sweat was running down his face.

“Quit yer damn squawking,” is what he said.

Right then I decided I was never getting married, having sex, or having kids. Elsie and Ernie were not a good advertisement for the married life. Neither were my divorced parents. Marriage was a bad moving staring Bette Davis as the heartless wife who poisons her husband and then watches him die. They’re on the porch of their plantation house. “Not feeling well, darling?” Bette asks smoothly, eyes wide with fake innocence. Then stares placidly at the slaves toiling in the cotton fields while her husband writhes at her feet.

“Slow down. There’s the sign!” Billy yelled. He’d been watching the road like a lookout.

It was a homemade sign, white lettering on plywood: Glass Castle—10 Miles. The paint on the ten had dried sloppily leaving a trail that wandered off the sign and down the post that supported it.

When the car stopped I was the first one out. We were parked beside a steep ditch. Beyond the ditch, farm land stretched to a line of trees in the distance. The silence felt eerie. Passing cars left hot wind in their wakes.

“Sheesh!” Ernie said, hauling himself out of the car and looking around. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

Elsie got busy and emptied the car ashtray, heaping cigarette butts and ashes onto the roadside like an offering.

“Now what?” Ernie said, wiping his glasses with a hankie and casting an approving glance at his wife stooped over the road.

Everyone looked to Billy, the navigator, not Ernie, for instructions. Ernie’s expertise was traveling garbage. But making decisions in a catastrophe? That was Billy’s department.

Billy put one foot up on the car bumper, shielded his eyes from the sun, and stared up and down the road. There was something heroic about his gesture. He looked, I thought, like an explorer surveying the New World. Waiting for what he had to say, we gazed about helplessly—at the dry fields, the bleached sky with its few wispy clouds.

Finally he turned to us. “You can head up there,” he said to Elsie and Ernie, pointing north. “You and Maudie look the other way,” he said to me. “I’ll take the ditch by the sign,” a sacrifice, we knew, because there was no way the rest of us could tackle the ditch: Elsie, Maudie and me in dresses; Ernie because he was fat and broke out in a sweat if he had to climb a flight of stairs.

Ernie grumbled. “Ma could at least look for her own teeth.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Elsie snapped. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of.”

Which was true. Ernie was being ridiculous. Grandma was eighty-seven years old and gaga. Deaf and gaga and unpredictable. Maudie was always saying she had to watch her like a hawk. I often forgot she was Elsie, Maudie, and Billy’s mother. She was just my daft old Grandma. You dressed her up and put her in the car. She went everywhere with us.

I watched Elsie head off in a huff. From head to foot she was peeved: another catastrophe; another wrecked outing. Every time a car went by her dress flared up from her knees and she slapped at it angrily. Because of the heat, she’d rolled her stockings to her ankles. She stumbled along in high heels. Ernie put out an arm to steady her but she flung it away.

It was hot searching the roadside. There was just the pounding sun, the dust and, between passing cars, that heavy silence. After we’d walked a quarter of a mile Billy waved at us to return.

When we got to the car, he was sitting sideways in the passenger seat with his shoes and socks off picking gravel from between his toes. Nearby, Ernie was smoking, looking thoughtfully at the barren fields. Elsie was pouring tea from the picnic thermos into six green plastic cups. She’d lined the cups on the hood of the car like a special hood ornament. Inside the car, the teeth sat on the dashboard. Billy had found them at the side of the ditch, not far from the Glass Castle sign. There were chips out of several teeth, but the set was still joined. Maudie said finding the teeth was a miracle. Ernie said he’d walked up the road for nothing and Elsie told him to shut up or she’d throw something at him.

Grandma climbed out of the car. “Where have all the trees gone?” she asked, bewildered.

“Oh, Ma,” Elsie, signed. “Have a cup of tea.”

Maudie handed round the tin of cookies.

Grandma put a cookie to her mouth then stopped. “I’ve got no teeth. Where’s my teeth?”

“You threw them out the window,” Elsie said.

“I did not. You’re fibbing. You’re always fibbing.”

“Oh, forget it,” Elsie said. “What’s the point?” She got the teeth from the car and rinsed them with tea. “Here,” she said, giving them to Grandma. “Put them in.”

Grandma took the teeth. I heard the sucking sound as she put them back in her mouth.

Before driving off Ernie made us search the car for garbage. We tossed out several used Kleenex, two pop bottles, and a couple of scrunched up paper bags. Later we discovered that Grandma had left her purse behind though nobody worried about this when it was first missed. The purse was old and battered, the clasp broken, and it was stuffed with folded newspaper, something Grandma insisted on doing each time she left the house.

We found the purse on the way home, lying beside the Glass Castle sign. Ernie shook it out right away. Watching the newspaper blow like leaves across the nearby field I thought: How beautiful! It was like the times I’d seen paper fluttering from passing cars, gracefully, on the wind, like confetti. That was a beautiful sight, too.

M.A.C. Farrant is the award-winning author of seven collections of satirical and humorous short fiction, most recently, Darwin Alone In The Universe (Talon, May 2003). As well, a novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years, was published by Greystone Books/Douglas & McIntyre in April, 2004. A short fiction collection, The Breakdown so Far, will be published by Talon in 2007.