The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  There were bigger camps, people told her. Huge, sprawling complexes housing hundreds and hundreds of oil-sands workers. They were building camps on the Firebag River that would house over a thousand workers each for the new steam-assisted operations there. She saw pictures of vast industrial tangles of pipes and smokestacks that would pump steam deep into the ground and liquify the hard tar down there into something they could pump out of the ground. She tried to imagine the amount of steam that would need a thousand workers to create.

  Parked all around the camp were rows and rows of trucks. Identical white three-quarter-ton trucks, white Suburbans, cargo vans, each with a long aerial with an orange flag on top.

  ‘This flag is your life,’ Valerie told her the first week. ‘The guys in the big rigs hauling the really heavy gear, that flag is all they’ll see of you out on Highway 63. You haven’t seen trucks this size, kid. No flag and you’re going to get run off the road or run under, and they won’t notice or even slow down.’

  The company flew the crews in and out of the Fort Mac airport and delivered them by the vanful to Moose Leg. Drug dogs sniffed the new hires and inside they submitted urine samples, and if they came up positive they were put right back on the van that had just brought them. Valerie told Audrey that once a whole vanful of new recruits had all tested positive and been shipped back, leaving them short an entire crew until the next cycle.

  ‘Jesus,’ Valerie Murphy said the first time Audrey sat down across the cafeteria table from her. ‘Jesus, you’re just a baby. You’re going to get eaten alive out here. Kid, you do exactly what I tell you and you might get out all right.’ She was a short, ruddy woman with a wind-burned face and strawberry-blond hair chopped into a drill-sergeant crewcut. She ate her way through a plateful of mashed potatoes with gravy and drank chocolate milk through a straw.

  ‘First, you follow all the rules to the letter. We’re a dry camp, so you’re dry. You’re going to figure out fast that it’s “dry” in quotation marks, but it doesn’t matter. You see them boozing, you stay out of it. Smoking only by the blue flags, so that’s the only place you smoke. You smoke, kid?’

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ said Audrey.

  ‘Don’t start.’ Valerie fiddled with the straw in her chocolate-milk carton. ‘You take your boots off when you go to the boots-off lounge and you keep your room clean so when they do the spot searches it’s easy for them to find nothing, ’cause you’ve got nothing in there for them to find. Right? You follow all the rules and if you see any of those other shit-balls not following them, you ignore them. You do your own thing, which is only the thing you’re supposed to be doing.’

  ‘My own thing.’

  ‘And the absolute most important thing, the rule you follow religiously like your life depends on it, is you’re never out of your room after lights-out. Never for a minute, regardless of the circumstances. Lights out, you’re in your room with the door locked. Got me?’

  ‘’Cause they’ll send me back.’

  ‘Well, sure, they’ll send you back, kid, but the reason you stay in there with your door locked is to keep everybody else out.’

  §

  Audrey spent a few days in a small room with the other newbies watching safety videos. You could fall off a ladder, or drop a pipe end onto your boot and crush all the toes inside. You could touch a live electrical panel and fry yourself, or fall off a scaffold, or crash your truck. They made a point of stressing how much easier all of these things were to do when you were drunk or high on cocaine.

  ‘The one thing you’ve got to never do,’ said the safety consultant, ‘is drop anything in the drilling shaft. You’ll wreck the bit. That drilling bit costs way more than you do.’

  She took tests and signed forms and they finally gave her the keys to the truck.

  She waited a few days, to get the feel of the routine, and then one morning, once she’d dropped off her crew, she took a different turn. Turned onto a crossroad on a whim and followed it just to follow it, through a long alley of featureless pine trees.

  ‘Let’s see what’s out here, Truck,’ she said.

  She took side roads when they came up, watching the clock and the digital compass in the console, to not get too lost. Every ten or twenty kilometres she hit a featureless, unmarked intersection, and at first she picked a turn at random, and when none of the choices gave her roads that were any different and the clock had gone on a while, she made her way back toward Moose Leg.

  At the lot, the supervisor checked the odometer.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Wrong turn, I just got a bit lost.’

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, frowning. She waited while he pulled up the floor mats and looked under the seats with a flashlight. Felt inside the glovebox, in the armrest, behind the sun visors. He got out and lay on the ground and ran his hands around the insides of the wheel wells and under the bumper.

  ‘You’ve got a map,’ he said eventually, after failing to find any booze or hard drugs or hidden prostitutes. ‘Follow it,’ he said.

  §

  There were a few other women in the camp. Valerie and a few other tough old crew drivers, who liked to sit together for lunch and complain about the ventilation in their rooms, the water pressure in their showers, the weather, how much they were paid, the length of their shifts. A few of the roughnecks were big-shouldered blond women with tattoos on their forearms, who came down to the boots-off lounge in their white tank tops to play video games or yell at hockey games. A safety analyst from Calgary appeared for a few days at a time, carrying a heavy binder with her everywhere she went. Audrey would see her hunched over paperwork in the farthest-away corner of the camp cafeteria in the afternoon, and when she drove her to a lease to go over the incident reports she liked to sit up in the front and listen to the FM CBC station that played classical music.

  Mostly there were men. Everywhere she went – driving her truck, sitting in the van, sitting in the cafeteria – she was surrounded by men. Big, thick-necked, heavy-bellied men, with ball caps and tattooed forearms, with barbell earrings, with tobacco-stained teeth and bloodshot eyes. They had names that she did her best not to learn, and the best practice for this was not saying anything to them or paying any notice to anything they did.

  In the boots-off lounge there were a couple of TVs, one for hockey and one for video games. On any given night there’d be men from Corner-brook, Newfoundland; North Bay, Ontario; Sydney, Nova Scotia; Shawinigan, Quebec, so Saturday nights, to avoid conflict, they put the names of any hockey game the satellite could pick up into a jar and drew for it. You got an extra slip in the jar if it was your actual hometown team playing, to increase your odds. Mostly they played video games on the other TV, first-person shooter games with space marines, hunting each other four at a time, yelling at the quartered screen, shooting each other with digital space rifles. There was a little bar fridge that the company kept stocked with Pepsi and Sprite, and a vending machine with potato chips and chocolate bars. They poured the Pepsi and Sprite into plastic cups and then topped it up with liquor from the mickeys they kept inside their jackets, and the room stank like a boozy gym locker.

  Water dripped from the not-tight-enough seams in the ceiling into buckets around the room. There was a pool table and a few dumpy couches, and in the other corner, against the wall, the pinball machine.

  PINOCCHIO, said the back glass in bright red letters. A cartoon of the little wooden boy, mouth agape, eyes crossed at his nose, extended several fibs. Above the score counter, Jiminy Cricket had his arms stretched outward, like he was trying to get the puppet’s attention, to warn him about something.

  There were three ramps, one making a long loop around the whole playfield, another that led up to a plastic whale, with a hinged jaw that opened up to swallow the ball. The third ramp ran up to a raised platform with three bumpers, on top of which donkeys wearing baseball caps stood on their front legs, their back legs raised up. When the ball hit the bumpers, the legs kicked an
d the donkeys brayed electronically out of little speakers.

  Audrey came in every night to play pinball. She did her best to come either early or late enough to mostly avoid other people.

  They hadn’t had pinball back at home in Canmore, and outside of a few times on trips to Calgary bowling alleys, she’d never really played. The first few weeks she lost loonie after loonie on low, unmemorable scores, as the bumpers dropped the ball down the gutter after a few weak bounces around the inside of the playfield. She tried to shoot the ramps and missed, and tried to catch the ball on the way back down and lost it down the gutter.

  ‘Geez, Easy Money, look at you work that thing. Look at you work those balls around.’

  She watched an older roughneck from Moncton with a scruffy grey beard hit a high score, and how he squared his shoulders to the machine and kept his fingers on the paddle buttons all the time. She watched one of the cafeteria cooks gently nudge the old machine with the front of his pelvis, not exactly rocking it, just applying a bit of pressure here and there.

  ‘Hit it hard, Easy Money! The balls want it hard!’

  She played pinball, staring down at the machine, and when she was out of loonies she went back to her room.

  If she timed it right, she’d get the washroom with the lock. All the bathrooms were communal: a few urinals and toilet stalls around a gang shower and a trio of small sinks. All except for one, a little water closet at the far end of camp with a toilet and a shower stall, and a door that locked. There was always someone inside. She’d wait in the hall with her backpack over her shoulder, everything she needed inside. Eventually they’d come out, one of the other women staying in the camp, or more likely one of the men, grinning about the stink they’d left behind, or maybe they’d make a point of rolling up the girlie magazine they’d had in there with them. ‘Enjoy it, sweetie.’

  She’d lock herself in and stand in the little shower, hoping she’d get more than a few minutes of hot water.

  Back in her room, locked inside, she had a single bed, a little desk with a chair, a lamp, and a clock radio. It was barely big enough to spread her arms out, but she didn’t have to share it, like most of the men who slept two or four in bunk beds in not much bigger rooms. Audrey would lie on the bed, staring up at the acoustic-tiled drop ceiling, and put on her headphones. She had brought a little portable CD player, and a sleeve with a dozen compact discs. She lay on the bed on top of the sheets for a while listening to the Ventures. Loud enough that she didn’t have to listen to the men come back down the hallway later, fumbling with their room keys, or through the thin walls talking on their cellphones, watching TV, listening to the radio. Grunting in the thin-walled bathrooms or panting on their squeaking bedsprings.

  §

  ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ Valerie asked her over a spoonful of instant mashed potatoes.

  Audrey thought about the question. Not the question so much as whether or not to really answer it. Then she carefully reached into her little leather purse and pulled out a small wallet. She laid this down on the table in front of her plate of macaroni and cheese and opened it up. She pulled out a folded piece of paper. With two hands she unfolded it and pressed it flat.

  Valerie leaned over to look at the picture.

  ‘It’s a car,’ she said. ‘It’s a 1996 Mitsubishi Lancer,’ Audrey said carefully. ‘This is the Evo III. See that moulding in the front? You get more air into the radiator than in previous models. Look at that big spoiler.’

  ‘It’s a … race car?’

  Audrey leaned toward the photograph, which she had cut out of a magazine. The ink had faded to white along the fold lines, like window mullions.

  ‘Tommi Mäkinen won four straight World Rally Championships driving Lancers.’

  ‘Is that where you’ve got the co-pilot who sits there shouting when to turn?’

  ‘A co-driver. Sometimes. You can do those races, yeah. And there’s races where you’re driving on your own.’

  ‘Which kind of races do you drive in?’

  ‘Well, none yet,’ said Audrey Cole. ‘I mean, I’ve gone out to some drifting days with my old Honda Civic. But it won’t work for a real stagerally race. I’d have to get it rebuilt from the ground up. I might as well get out and push. I need the real thing.’

  ‘So you’re going to buy a race car.’

  Audrey pushed the picture into the middle of the table and had a spoonful of macaroni. ‘There’s a shop in Calgary that’s selling a ’96 for $16,000.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem like so much,’ said Valerie through a mouthful of potatoes.

  ‘That’s crazy cheap. Crazy cheap but I need cash upfront. But,’ said Audrey, leaning into the photograph again, ‘but there’s a lot you’ve got to do to get it race-ready.’

  Valerie chewed her potatoes.

  ‘You’ve got to have a roll cage. It’s a safety thing. So that it holds together if you roll it off the road or flip it in the ditch. And tires.’

  ‘Gotta have tires,’ agreed Valerie.

  ‘You have to have all the tires. For every situation. Tires and extra wheels. They make the courses multi-surface and who knows what the weather is going to be, so you’ve got to have tires for everything. That’s a few grand right there.’

  ‘You’ve gotta have a helmet,’ said Valerie.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Audrey, nodding seriously. ‘Yes, you’ve got to have a helmet.’

  ‘Fuzzy dice. Pine-tree air fresheners.’

  Audrey set down her fork. Picked up the picture and carefully folded it back up. Slid the paper into the wallet and the wallet into the purse.

  ‘I might be able to do it all for $25K,’ said Audrey, ‘maybe. Maybe more. So I guess the thing is to sock away as much as I can, as quickly as I can.’

  ‘Well,’ said Valerie, pausing for a slurp of chocolate milk, ‘I guess you’ve come to the right place for that.’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Audrey.

  §

  She spent her four days off at the Four Eagles Motel on the southeast edge of Fort McMurray, a long, low, single-storey strip of rooms sandwiched in between two car dealerships, their vast lots full of row after row of oversized pickup trucks.

  ‘Take the charter back to Calgary,’ Valerie told her before she left. ‘Don’t spend your off days in Fort Mac. What are you going to do, hit the karaoke bars? Go to the strippers? Go home, kid.’

  Audrey shrugged. ‘I’ll probably just sleep the whole time,’ she said.

  She’d thought about going back. Mostly to check on her car. Her baby. Her baby was a cherry-red ’88 Honda Civic and it was parked at the company lot back at the Calgary airport. Sitting under who knows how much snow. She’d spent $4,000 on it, saved carefully from bagging groceries and bussing tables. She thought about flying down to Calgary to clean the snow off her baby. Imagined sitting in her car while it warmed up. Driving up the highway toward the mountains. And turning off anywhere she liked. No one was going to check the odometer when she brought it back to the parking lot four days later for her return flight. She could start it up and be anywhere, any road, just her and her baby.

  In the end, though, she was more worried that she’d lose her nerve. That she’d get back to Canmore and would lose her nerve, wouldn’t be able to get it back to face the men in the boots-off lounge again. That she wouldn’t turn up for the return flight at all. Just go back to the timber-framed hotel restaurant and start filling up the bus bin with empty bottles again.

  She thought about all the hours of filling up the bus bin that $25,000 was going to take. And so she booked four days off in Fort McMurray instead.

  At the Four Eagles Motel she lay in a giant bath and let her legs float, suspended in the hot water, free above the tub bottom. Steam condensed on her face and in her hair. She lay for a long time, letting the steam soften twenty-four days of clenching tension and break down the oily smells built up in her skin: five men in a tight truck, their sweat, cigarettes, and night-before liquor. The sour sme
ll of propane heaters. Never enough hot water in the tiny shower at Moose Leg to cut through it all. The tub water cooled off and she drained it and refilled it and lay awhile longer, until she was pink and pruned all over.

  Audrey sat on top of the bedsheets and squeezed moisturizer out of the little motel-room bottles from beside the tub. Rubbed it into her legs and shoulders. Then she wrapped herself in a towel. Unpacked her little portable CD player and put on Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet.

  She flipped through the stack of driving magazines she kept in her bag, propped up on an elbow in the little bed. The pages marked with little sticky flags, so that she could flip to specific photographs and interviews.

  She opened to a flag on a four-page spread from 2000 about Tommi Mäkinen’s new Evo 6.5. Close-up photographs of the engine, all the tightly packed black hoses and bright steel and red metal. Mäkinen himself in his red jumpsuit and helmet, emblazoned all over in Marlboro and Mitsubishi and Micheline logos. A tight portrait of Mäkinen behind the wheel, frowning seriously before his red microphone headset, lantern jaw set in determination.

  ‘Right now, preparing for 2001, it is mostly preparation,’ Tommi Mäkinen told the magazine. ‘Analyzing different things. Make our car faster, faster. Of course, we are looking for good results soon as possible. But we are realistic. It’s important to prepare.’

  She fell asleep on top of the sheets, wrapped in her fluffy bath towel.