The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  ‘You don’t claim to have invented this idea.’

  ‘People have tried to warn us for decades of the dangers of the Lemurian moon society.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘People you’d expect. Charlie Chaplin. Wittgenstein. Marilyn Monroe. All deeply, deeply coded, of course …’

  ‘Heck,’ said Dick from the back seat, ‘you aren’t making Audrey listen to your crazy moon tapes, are you?’

  ‘So help me, Heck,’ said Wrists, ‘if Audrey walks out on us in Kelowna because of your crazy moon tapes, you are doing all the driving, all day, every day.’

  Hector ejected the tape and put it carefully back into his case. Fiddled with the radio until he found a weather report. ‘We can listen to the rest later,’ he said in a hushed voice. Audrey did her best to nod in what she hoped was a non-encouraging fashion.

  §

  In Kelowna, Wrists had the bartender fill an empty detergent bucket with ice. In between songs he set his sticks on the snare, leaned forward, and plunged his hands into the ice up to the elbows. They played a stage with a stripper pole and mirrored walls to nobody. Occasionally orange-tanned men in muscle shirts came in and said loudly to the bartender, ‘No peelers tonight, eh?’ before turning around and heading back out the door.

  Afterward, in her motel room, she opened her backpack and wrinkled her nose at the smell inside. Unable to tell if the smell of the band had already worked into her T-shirts and extra pair of jeans, or if it was her own body, her chemistry grown dense and musky like the men around her, the way a stick of celery changes colour in a glass full of purple juice.

  §

  She drove them up Highway 97 around the curves of the Okanagan Valley lakes, through little farm towns, past winter-closed fruit stands and old drive-in movie theatres. Rodney scratched a week’s worth of scruff on his cheeks and chin. His self-buzzed hair had grown out in places long enough to show the spots he’d missed, giving his head corners and points. They stopped at a lakeside gas station bait-and-tackle shop with a sign advertising a four-dollar hot beef sandwich. Rodney dug in the back of his van for his tool box and produced an electric barber clipper. He bought a bag of disposable razors in the store, walked around the side of the building, and locked himself in the men’s room. A line of drivers formed after ten minutes, shuffling from foot to foot. At fifteen minutes someone banged on the door with a fist. Rodney emerged with a raw, red cold-water-shaved face, smelling like green gel dispenser soap. His scalp freshly buzzed down to the #1 clipper guard and tiny dark hairs peppering his neck, shoulders, inside his ears. He took off his T-shirt and shook it; he was all ribs and grey tangled chest hair. He pulled a crumple of paper towel out of his back pocket and brushed hair off his shoulders. His movements were all slow and cautious, giving everything he did an exaggerated, slightly unreal quality.

  ‘So we’ve narrowed it down somewhat,’ he said later when they were back on the highway. She looked across at Rodney.

  ‘Narrowed what down?’

  ‘Well, you weren’t going to Edmonton, or Nanaimo, or Vancouver or Kelowna.’

  ‘None of those places,’ Audrey agreed.

  ‘You were coming down from Fort McMurray?’

  ‘Up around there,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a lot of jobs up around there,’ said Rodney.

  ‘Lot of jobs.’

  ‘Not many you’d want to do for any length of time,’ he said eventually. ‘Especially not young, all-alone women, regardless of their ability to drive all night on two hours’ sleep. Or even to keep men twice their size away at screwdriver point.’

  She looked across at him and didn’t say anything. She gave the van gas and passed a pickup truck full of bookshelves and chairs under a tarp.

  ‘I got bored,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Bored?’

  ‘It was boring. “Here’s your map, follow it.” I had …’

  She stopped and stared out the window.

  ‘You had …’ he said.

  ‘This truck, Rodney. You should have seen this truck. Big V8, lots of guts. Off the line or going up hills, nothing. Like …’ And she pulled out into the other lane, to pass a silver Mazda hatchback with a dog staring out the back window. ‘This amazing … and they give you a map. “Follow the map. Stay in your room.”’

  ‘So you left.’

  She passed another car, revving the van’s engine up into the red RPMS.

  ‘It was going to be another few weeks before they rotated me out. But I just couldn’t. I had to leave. Like, then. That minute.’

  He watched her awhile, then said, ‘Smart thinking, bringing that screwdriver.’

  She looked at him. ‘I’m not stupid, Rodney.’

  He shifted in his seat and dug in the pocket of his jeans. Found a white pill bottle, cracked the cap, and shook out two white tablets.

  ‘Headache?’

  ‘They make me better.’

  ‘Better than what?’

  Rodney laughed and leaned against the window. ‘You got it, Audrey. You got it.’

  §

  In Kamloops, they played to a room full of snowboarders who spent the set oblivious to the band, watching televisions above the bar playing videos of people driving snowmobiles off cliffs. The huge machines drove through white powder snow in slow motion, kicking up clouds against a blue sky, hung in space, giant machines, and the men and women driving wore ski helmets and bright jackets and kicked their legs out behind themselves, spread their legs, then brought them back in for landing. Young men and women in the bar drank beer and cheered each flying machine and landing. Someone stood on a chair and hollered when a snowmobile did an improbable leap off a craggy stone ledge and the driver lifted himself right up off the seat, spread his legs in wide splits. Afterward the bartender passed around a hat; a few people dropped loonies or quarters and a couple of five-dollar bills in. Wrists took the hat grimly and counted the money. Wrote the total on an index card and put it back into the envelope in his jacket.

  §

  She was somewhere on the swooping stretch of highway between the green pine-treed slopes around the Shuswap lakes, heading east toward the higher peaks of the Monashees. Wrists turned the radio tuner dial.

  ‘Here’s an old fave from the eighties to start another sixty-minute rock ride,’ said the DJ.

  A power-chord guitar riff started up: big ringing chords with echoey 1980s production values. It was something catchy that she recognized but couldn’t recall the name of.

  ‘Oh,’ said Hector, sitting up suddenly, ‘oh oh oh.’

  ‘The money-maker!’ hollered Dick.

  ‘Turn it up, Wrists!’

  Wrists turned up the volume and the three of them all sang along:

  Spin that wheel, spin little girl,

  Spin away that grain.

  Cart that gold right out the door,

  Dig that royal name.

  Little Rattle, Little Rattle,

  Little Rattle Stilt!

  No-name, No-name

  No-win game.

  Little Rattle Stilt!

  Pound that stilt, pound little man.

  Pound that stilt and grab.

  Grab a handful, yank it up,

  Rip yourself in half!

  And then a short guitar solo, which all three of them knew note for note and sang along with, vocalizing the lines with their own ooh and whee sounds, twisting in their seats to play their air guitars.

  ‘I know this,’ she said as it moved into the fade-out chorus coda. ‘What is this?’

  ‘This,’ said Hector, ‘is “Little Rattle Stilt” by the Fish Cans.’

  ‘An immortal piece of CanCon rock history,’ said Wrists.

  ‘Edmonton, Alberta’s greatest ever one-hit wonder,’ said Dick.

  ‘Whoa whoa,’ said Hector. ‘One hit? What about “Auto Motto Blotto”?’

  ‘Not a hit,’ said Wrists, ‘not a real hit. “Auto Motto Blotto” was in minor late-night Canadian radio rotation when th
ey were a regional fixture. “Little Rattle Stilt” was a bonafide Billboard Chart Topper in the U.S. American rock stations play it to this day.’

  ‘Rodney,’ asked Hector, ‘are the royalty checks you get for “Auto Motto Blotto” comparable to the ones you get for “Little Rattle Stilt”?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Rodney.

  ‘That’s Rodney Leverman,’ Dick said to Audrey, ‘lead guitar player for Edmonton, Alberta’s greatest ever one-hit wonder, the Fish Cans.’

  ‘For six months,’ said Rodney. ‘I was in the group for six months.’

  ‘During which time they wrote and recorded bonafide Billboard Chart Topper “Little Rattle Stilt,”’ said Dick.

  ‘How about we listen to something else,’ grunted Rodney. ‘Put on one of Heck’s moon tapes. We can all hear about how space aliens were responsible for the FLQ crisis.’

  ‘How come you guys never play that?’ asked Audrey.

  Wrists turned the dial and found a country-and-western station. Audrey was going to ask another question but Wrists gave her a look. She slowed down to let a family in a station wagon pass. In the back-seat window a little boy had his face pressed against the frosted glass. Audrey waved and the little boy sank down out of sight.

  §

  In Revelstoke, she walked out onto the street while they set up the gear. Walked into a linoleum laundromat and fished change out of her pocket. She bought a plastic sandwich bag full of powdered soap and put her pants and shirts, underwear and socks into the machine. An old woman in a raincoat watched a television bracketed into the wall above the counter. A man on an all-day news channel moved his mouth silently while small white text, too small to read, scrolled underneath.

  She walked across the block to a thrift store. Bought socks and a new tank top and another pair of jeans. She found a red nylon sleeping bag, the interior fabric printed with red pheasants and grouses on a prairie-yellow background. Little travel bottles of shampoo and conditioner and toothpaste.

  She went outside and walked up the street until she found a pay phone. Phoned the toll-free number on the back of her bank card and listened to a machine voice read her bank balance. She still had most of the Easy Money. She didn’t expect there would be any more coming. Somewhere in the employment agreement there was probably a clause. Her parents had probably got a letter. ‘Termination of employment agreement for Audrey Cole.’ They’d be worked up and fretting, assuming they’d opened the letter.

  She hadn’t phoned home since the week before leaving Moose Leg.

  She plugged a few more coins into the pay phone and listened to the bank balance recording at the bank again. There was still enough, enough to keep going.

  ‘Dick,’ said Wrists, after they’d finished their second set in Revelstoke. ‘Hey hey, Dick.’ He pointed with a drumstick.

  Dick, bent over wrapping his guitar cable around his forearm, looked up in the direction of the stick. ‘Whoa whoa whoa,’ said Dick, dropping his cable.

  Rodney was leaned over his speaker cabinet. He grabbed the handles on either side. Tried to pull it up from his elbows, bent over and extended wrong.

  ‘Hey, boss, whoa whoa,’ shouted Dick.

  Rodney grunted and lifted the cabinet, then staggered and leaned backward, wincing. Dick ran over and moved in behind him, reaching around to grab the handles. He lifted the weight of the cabinet away from Rodney, who gritted his teeth with his eyes squeezed shut, caught in a wide bear hug between Dick and the cabinet.

  ‘Heck, come here and give me a hand,’ shouted Dick.

  Hector took the cabinet and Rodney staggered away from them, eyes still squeezed shut, a hand on the small of his back.

  ‘Boss, boss, what are you doing,’ said Dick. ‘Hey boss, how are you, huh? What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Rodney, ‘I just … just give me a minute.’

  Audrey got up from the table she’d been sitting at and came to the stage to help him down. He reached down and took her hand. His hands shook. His fingers were long and thin and toughly callused, the knuckles swollen, beads on wires. She helped him down and could feel how slight and insubstantial he was. Helped him over to the table.

  ‘I’m okay, just let me sit a bit,’ said Rodney.

  Wrists brought a bottle of beer over. Set it down in front of Levermann, glaring at Dick.

  ‘What are you doing, boss?’ said Dick. ‘Come on. Here, have a drink.’

  ‘Audrey,’ said Rodney. ‘Go get me my jacket.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Audrey.

  He fished in the pocket of his jacket and found his pill bottle. Dick came back from the bar with a glass of whisky and he swallowed back a couple of white pills.

  ‘What are you doing, boss? Come on. Take it easy.’

  Rodney waved them away. ‘Come on, go. We’ve got to tear down. We’re all sick of this bar. Tear down and pack up so we can get out of here.’

  They stood around evaluating him for a few moments and then Wrists nodded and jerked with his chin back toward the stage. The three of them walked back to the instruments they’d been in the middle of packing up.

  ‘They think I’m an invalid, Audrey Cole,’ Rodney said to her. ‘Like I’m made of porcelain.’

  ‘They’ll get packed out and we can get out of here,’ Audrey told him.

  He had a mouthful of whisky. ‘Don’t you get tired of hanging out in empty bars, Audrey Cole?’

  She shrugged. ‘Tomorrow it’s Nakusp. We’ll take the ferry. I’ve never been on that ferry. And then we’ll take the number 6 down through the Slocan Valley to get to Cranbrook. I’ve never driven that number 6. It should be a good drive.’

  ‘A good drive,’ agreed Rodney, finishing his whisky.

  §

  In Nakusp, they played a small stage rimmed in blue-and-peach terracotta tiles at the back of a Mexican restaurant. A few tourists sat at the other end of the room eating enchiladas. The busboy walked back and forth in front of the stage, carrying his bus bin full of sauce-covered plates through the kitchen door just behind Wrists’ drums.

  ‘I was going to get married,’ Rodney said to the handful of people in the crowd. He twisted a tuning peg. ‘There wasn’t a date set or anything and we didn’t have a ring and I hadn’t actually asked her but it was more or less understood that we’d end up married. You know how it is, when it’s more or less understood. This was a long time ago. Before I’d fallen in with these deadbeats here.’

  Hector put two flat palms on the keys for a chromatic squawk.

  ‘I wanted to learn this song. This one we’re going to do next here. I mean, I kind of knew how to play it and a friend of mine was doing a set of shows in Winnipeg and wanted me to come out and play with him. Well, it wasn’t just Winnipeg, come to think of it now, it was across the country out to Newfoundland and back for a solid month with a week in Toronto doing a residency at some kind of Toronto approximation of a honky-tonk off Queen West. We were to start in Winnipeg though.

  ‘Anyway the song has this difficult bit in it. There’s this kind of … It’s hard to explain. Mostly you’re playing slide, so you’re open-tuned with your brass slide on, but in the choruses you trade off the slide lines with this quick finger-plucked chord change, and that trading-off is just a bitch to get right. Uses different parts of your brain, see. But if you can pull it off …’ He ran his fingers quickly over the fretboard, something fast and complicated in a minor blues key. ‘The point is, this song was in the set so I mostly wanted to go on this tour as a means to really nail it down.

  ‘So it came down to me needing to take about six weeks off work – two weeks in Winnipeg to learn the set and then the month on the road and, hell, it would have taken me another week after a trip like that to dry out. Seven weeks. I had a hard enough time meeting my share of the rent with my going-to-be wife. We were saving for the down payment on a house. She liked to drive around on Saturdays and go to open houses. I said I need to go to Winnipeg for about seven weeks so I can learn to
play a song. She told me not to come back and I didn’t.’

  §

  In Golden, the day bartender propped open a back door with a four-gallon plastic pail of dishwasher sanitizer. ‘You’re early,’ she said, wiping her hands on a black apron.

  ‘We could get all loaded in early and be out of your hair before you open up,’ said Wrists. ‘Squeeze in a line check and be tip-top ready to go when folks show up.’

  ‘Pete deals with the bands and Pete isn’t here and there’s people in the bar.’

  ‘How about we just unload then, so we’re not worried about the gear in the van driving around town then.’

  ‘It’s a fire exit. Don’t block anything.’

  The bar was a big old ski tavern attached to a two-storey main-street hotel, with timber-frame beams, neon signs for brands of interior B.C. beer Audrey had never heard of, and old signs from ski hills: Widow’s Peak Double Black Diamond, Runway to Paradise Quad Chair. She sat at the bar and found an unfinished sudoku puzzle in the paper while the Lever Men brought in the gear. She’d gotten to the know the daytime smells of a bar over the last week, before enough people and their bodies and their new cigarettes came in and changed the chemistry of the air. Bleach and kitchen garbage, the previous night’s cigarette smoke, deep-fryer oil, spilled beer. It was different from the hotel restaurant back in Canmore, stronger. The Lever Men finished piling the gear onto a short stage in the corner and Hector went across the street to get them all coffee in paper cups.

  A girl with a blond ponytail and a puffy down-filled ski jacket came in and leaned on the bar. Waved at the busboy in the back of the room scooping ice out of the ice machine. Her mirrored ski sunglasses on her head reflected the bar lights’ orange and gold. She turned to evaluate Audrey and the Lever Men.