The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  ‘What are you guys, some kind of rock band?’

  Rodney turned around slowly on his stool.

  ‘We,’ he said, ‘are the Legendary Lever Men. One night only.’

  ‘Lever men? Like, men with levers? Really?’

  He swept an arm out to indicate something larger than the current room. ‘Famous from the St. Albert Hotel in Winnipeg to the Red Lion Inn in Victoria.’

  She pivoted on her heels and leaned an elbow on the bar. ‘Are you one of those fun bands that play music people like to hear and everybody dances all night and it’s great? Or one of those un-fun bands that play music no one knows and it’s too loud so that you can’t hear your friends and couldn’t dance to it if you wanted to and people have to just wait it out?’

  ‘We play all the funnest music beloved by the young people of today,’ said Rodney.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dick, ‘the funnest.’

  She looked at Audrey. ‘Are you the singer?’

  ‘She’s our manager,’ said Rodney.

  ‘Ah. I see.’

  Around eight o’clock, the bar filled up with off-duty chairlift attendants, between-shift busboys, and just-finished day staff from the other bars and restaurants up and down the strip. They chattered in Australian and Québécois accents and drank pints of dark beer between sticky shots of cinnamon schnapps and Jameson’s whisky. Everyone was wearing down-filled vests and toques despite the increasing heat. Audrey sat at a corner table, watching. Across the bar, Hector and Dick played pool with a group of young women, all of them laughing and drinking. The girl with the ponytail racked up the balls and bent over to break, staring across the table at Hector. He looked back at her with a cartoon fox look, a look she hadn’t seen on any of the Lever Men before. His whole face transformed with the look he gave the girl in the ponytail while she broke, making him into some other, different man that Audrey had never seen before.

  ‘Hector Highwater,’ Rodney’s voice said out of the PA speakers. ‘Richard Move. Hector Highwater and Richard Move to the stage.’

  When he climbed onstage, Hector whispered something in Rodney’s ear. Levermann rolled his eyes. Dick Move held his hands together prayer-style. Rodney sighed and jerked his head toward Wrists.

  The drummer just shrugged when Hector talked to him. Then he stick-counted a quick four and they all started up a country-and-western train beat, Rodney chick-chick-chicking a couple of palm-muted chords. The crowd looked up from what they were doing. Audrey watched. Usually they had about thirty seconds of attention before they lost a crowd.

  Dick Move went to the microphone at the front of the stage, cleared his throat, and started singing ‘Folsom Prison Blues.’

  Someone in the crowd cheered.

  He had a gut-deep easy baritone, and after Johnny Cash they did Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, and Lee Hazlewood. They played these songs effortlessly, like they had been doing them every night for months. People clapped enthusiastically after each tune. In each song during the middle eight Rodney took exactly one step toward the crowd and whipped out a blazing-hot solo, which became more dexterous and complex as the night went on. People cheered when the Lever Men started into songs they knew and they moved some tables at the front so they could dance. The girls from the pool table danced right at the front, waving their arms above their heads.

  They finished with ‘Waiting Around to Die’ and a woman at the bar with skull-tight grey skin and a small dog cradled in her buckskin jacket clapped and cried.

  Later, Dick sat down heavily across from Audrey. His face was flushed, his breath lit up with whisky fumes. He coughed and leaned into the table toward her.

  ‘Audrey, here’s the thing,’ he said, speaking slowly to assemble the words. ‘We’re going to stay late tonight.’

  ‘We have to load out still,’ she said.

  ‘The thing – the thing about that. Heck and I, we talked to them. Talked to them.’

  ‘Talked to … ?’

  ‘The bar. Tender. Talked to him. He’s also,’ Dick paused to grin, pleased with what he was about to deliver, ‘also the day bartender. See? Tomorrow. Day bartender tomorrow. So I’ve talked to him and we’ll leave the gear here and load out in the morning.’

  She watched him and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Okay, so we’re staying late.’

  ‘The thing,’ he said, then paused to figure out how to assemble the next sentence. ‘The thing, Audrey, is it’s better if … they’ve got rooms for us, maybe, maybe you just go to bed early?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll stay,’ she said.

  Hector and Rodney sat down on either side of Dick, each of them with beer bottles. Dick took a beer and drank for a long time.

  ‘Audrey,’ said Rodney, putting an arm around Dick’s shoulder, ‘you’ve got a pretty good thing going right now, correct? Ongoing adventure, getting the van A to B, nothing doing beyond delivering us like mail wherever we’re addressed for the day.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So don’t change the composition. Got me? We’re going to stay late and maybe if you just go back to the room, then tomorrow we carry on and your good thing hasn’t changed.’

  ‘What might change?’

  ‘Let her stay,’ said Hector, looking at her over his bottle. He gave her the cartoon fox look from before over the top of his bottle and she inhaled and sat up straight.

  ‘You guys are going to be so drunk in about half an hour you’ll be passed out before I’m even done brushing my teeth,’ she said.

  Dick chortled and drank his beer. Wrists went back to the bar and leaned over to talk to the bartender, who nodded, then rooted around under the counter and gave him something.

  Wrists came back and put a hotel room key down on the tabletop. A plastic pine tree with the room number embossed on it.

  Dick got up and went back to the pool table, where the girls were doing shots of Jägermeister. Put his arm around the waist of the girl with the ponytail and started laughing at whatever they were laughing at.

  ‘We’ll see you in the morning, Audrey,’ said Rodney.

  ‘It’s Lethbridge tomorrow,’ she said slowly, chewing off the words, feeling her bright red cheeks and hating their bright-redness. ‘Which is stupid because we were in Cranbrook last night and Cranbrook to Leth-bridge is an easy drive, and Revelstoke to Golden to Cranbrook would have been an easy enough drive, but you did everything in the wrong order, so we’ve got to drive all the way back we already came. But whatever. We’ll do it so you can get to Lethbridge in time to play for the dishwasher in the Lethbridge Shithole. We’ll take the number 1 past Banff and then take Highway 22 down to Nanton. We’ll miss Calgary and all the city traffic that way. Then over to Highway 2 and it’ll be a good six-hour drive at least, so sleep in. Load your shit and I’ll meet you later.’

  She got up and then paused.

  ‘If you can play music people actually like, why don’t you?’

  The other Lever Men all looked at Rodney, who thought about it for a while.

  ‘It’s not about people, Audrey. It’s about us. We do things for us. You know how that is.’

  She went up to her room and had a long hot shower. Then lay on the bed with her headphones on, listening to Link Wray as loudly as she could stand. Thinking about Hector’s fox face.

  §

  They left Golden early and she wound the van along the twisting high-mountain ribbon of Highway 1 above the Kicking Horse River in the pre-dawn dark. The road was slick from overnight snow through the pass and she passed trucks in the ditch at Field.

  At Canmore she took the first exit into town and pulled the van into the earliest gas station at the end of a long line of motels.

  She stood filling the tank, looking at the mountains. The east face of Rundle Mountain, square and sheer, and the promontory that always reminded her of a chimney or a lighthouse, staring across at the north peak of Ha Ling. All the mountains surrounding the town looked slightly different, depending on where you were
, the different angles or proximities showing you different characters and profiles of the rock faces.

  She could get back in the van, she supposed, and just drive to her parents’ house. Say, ‘So long, Legendary Lever Men,’ and get out with her backpack and head into the house. Sit at the table and drink hot tea and tell them all the stories over supper: Moose Leg and Valerie, and Wrists’ van and how nothing exciting happens on a Monday night in Vancouver. She’d gloss over the truck driver and the screwdriver. Then she could fall asleep in her old bed, the bed she’d grown up in, and she wouldn’t even need the headphones. No noise to block out. She thought about the surprise on their faces, opening the door and finding her there.

  I could just go home, thought Audrey.

  She paid for the gas and brought the receipt back to Wrists. They all stank, sweating out beer and whisky fumes. Dick and Hector were both curled up in the back, asleep, their balled-up jackets wedged between ears and shoulders for pillows.

  ‘So it’s Lethbridge and then Pincher Creek and then Calgary, and that’s it?’

  ‘Lethbridge, Pincher Creek, and then up to the Crash Palace at Two Reel Lake,’ said Wrists.

  ‘Two Reel Lake? Where’s that?’

  Wrists waved a hand. ‘It’s out, I don’t know, northwest. It’s a ways out from anywhere.’

  ‘It’s not really a place,’ said Rodney. He opened his pill bottle and shook out a tablet.

  ‘You guys draw much of a crowd in not-really-places a ways out from anywhere?’ she asked.

  Rodney swallowed a pill with what might have been a choke or half a laugh. ‘You’ll be amazed, Audrey Cole. You’ll be amazed.’

  3

  OCTOBER 2009

  CALGARY

  ‘Troubled Member of Prominent Local Family Freezes to Death’ was the headline, above a side column on the first page of the Calgary Herald City section. Audrey Cole read it sitting at her kitchen table, in the last beam of the just-about-to-set sun. Freezes to death, thought Audrey, ugh, and had a sip of her tea, then looked down at the picture and choked. She choked like she was on a soap opera receiving surprise news, and brown tea dribbled down her chin onto her chest.

  The caption read ‘Alex “Main” Aiver (pictured, centre), 42, had struggled with substance abuse.’ And there he was. Black-and-white Alex Main, sitting at a bar table, in between two men, all of them holding beer bottles and staring, not smiling, into the camera.

  They hadn’t put his name in the headline. That was the first thing that popped into her head, once something eventually did. ‘Member of Prominent Local Family’ but not his name. That would burn him up. Just squeeze him up inside. Alex Main, relegated to the caption text, second billing to his family history, missing out on his last chance for real recognition.

  She got up, angry, and made a quick jab with her foot like she was going to kick the chair. She didn’t kick anything, just squeezed her fists and pushed them into her temples and took a deep breath. She sat back down and sighed.

  ‘You fucked up a lot of things in your life, Alex, but staying alive should have been the least of it,’ she said loudly. She heard a gasp behind her. She turned and Shelly was standing there with her mouth wide open.

  ‘Sorry, sorry. Come here, baby,’ said Audrey.

  ‘Mommy mad,’ said the little girl.

  ‘Yes, Mommy mad. Come here.’

  Shelly waddled over with her arms spread wide and Audrey knelt and wrapped her up in a hug, stood up with the toddler’s face buried in her hair. She stood up with a grunt – Shelly wasn’t as easy to pick up as she used to be. She buried her face in Shelly’s hair and took deep breaths trying not to cry.

  ‘What matter, Mommy?’

  ‘Just sad, baby,’ said Audrey Cole. ‘Just sad is all.’ And Shelly Cole hugged her back tightly and they stood like that for a while.

  Police identified the body of a man found dead Tuesday morning in the alley of the 200 block of 7th Avenue SW as Alex Aiver. The grandson of Aiver Petroleum founder Dean Aiver, Alex was not involved in the family business but was well known locally as an event promoter and nightclub owner. Often known as Alex Main, he briefly gained notoriety after being fined for operating an unlicenced hotel and bar on a family property northwest of Rocky Mountain House.

  Police would not release more details but said foul play was not suspected. They did note that he was known to them for his ongoing problems with illegal narcotics.

  Aiver is survived by his mother, Susanne Aiver, and sister Catherine LeStrasse and her three children.

  She squinted at the photograph. Alex between two men, in some bar, holding a beer. She knew both of them: Gurt Markstrom and the Skinny Cowboy. Gurt was a big man in a black leather vest with long black hair pulled into a tight ponytail. And the Skinny Cowboy, with his skull-thin face, his bolo tie, and sunken cheeks. The photograph was a tight crop so it was difficult to tell where they were. All three looked unsmiling into the camera lens, their pupils white from camera flash. Audrey pulled the paper close to her nose until the faces abstracted into individual grey printer dots and newsprint negative space. Not Alex and Gurt and the Skinny Cowboy in some unknown bar, up to god knows what. Just grey and black, newsprint and dots.

  There was an address and time for a memorial service. She imagined sitting on a church pew. A photograph in a frame and a cherrywood box, and a vase of white flowers. A lot of people in black suits. She sat in the front row holding the little photocopied bulletin, and then Gurt and the Skinny Cowboy sat down on either side of her.

  ‘How have you been keeping yourself?’ the Skinny Cowboy asked her.

  Audrey shook her head. Closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. Then she got up and stuck the newspaper clipping behind a refrigerator magnet.

  She cooked a pot of spaghetti. Put a tongful of noodles and sauce into a bowl, then flipped it over onto a cutting board. Chopped it up into little half-inch spaghetti bites for Shelly.

  ‘Use your fork,’ she said to Shelly at the table. Shelly held her fork in a little toddler fist and ate fistfuls of chopped spaghetti with her free hand. Later in the bath she splashed with her tub toys while Audrey sat on the tub edge wiping half-inch spaghetti segments out from her hair, from under her chin, and off her chest.

  Once Shelly was in bed, she sat at the kitchen table, holding the newspaper clipping.

  ‘How have you been keeping yourself, Audrey?’ she imagined the Skinny Cowboy asking.

  The Skinny Cowboy is not coming to the funeral, Audrey, she told herself. Why would he come anyway? And who cares if he did? You’re not afraid of him, Audrey. Who cares?

  ‘Who’s going to come anyway?’ she asked herself out loud.

  She picked up her cellphone and called her mother.

  ‘Mom,’ she said. ‘Mom, are you still up?’

  ‘Am I still up? Audrey, it’s only nine o’clock. Hello, Audrey.’

  ‘Mom what are you doing on …’ She looked at the article again. ‘Mom, on Thursday?’

  ‘Hello, Audrey. Good to hear from you.’

  ‘I’ve had something come up Thursday. Can you come in and look after Shelly for the day?’

  ‘How does Shelly like her new blocks? That building-block train set? Is she playing with them?’

  ‘Mom, can you come down?’

  ‘Thursday is the day after tomorrow, Audrey. I can come down tomorrow night, she’s my granddaughter. I’m not doing much else. Wait, I’m volunteering stacking shelves at the library … No, that’s next week. No, I’m not doing much else.’

  ‘Thank you, Mom.’

  She walked around the house. Listening to the floorboards creak in the spots they creaked. Listened to the traffic grunt and rattle through the walls. Stood at the windows staring at the nighttime headlights through the windows. Her dirty windows, which she meant to clean every spring, in their peeling wooden sashes.

  In the kitchen, the plaster on the walls bulged and wrinkled in a snaking curve behind the stove. Up to a discolou
red spot in the ceiling where water had come through sometime in the past. Some old owner, who knows who. She opened the fridge and closed it, careful to give it a good shove to properly seal it.

  She opened the door to the basement. Someone had cut a notch out of the wood at the bottom for a cat door, years earlier, and around the lumpy half oval the top coat of the paint was chipped to show previous colours of the door: taupe, mauve-grey, eggshell blue, milk white. She turned on the light and walked down the wooden steps, ducking her head as she went. Down to stand on the hard-packed dirt floor of the basement. The furnace rattled to life just as she got downstairs, and she stood on a patch of old carpet listening to it shake.

  She needed to change the furnace filters. It was tough – they were an odd size and she’d only ever found them at a hardware store in the southeast, down Blackfoot Trail. She’d need to get them when she was on a grocery run for Joe Wahl, in his van.

  She paid her landlord, Wade Clave, $950 a month for the house, plus her share of the utilities, which would get up to $300 monthly in the winter. Three hundred dollars and most of the heat would just evaporate right out of the badly insulated roof. It was a lot of money for her, but for a whole house downtown it was pretty cheap, all things considered.

  She’d phoned Clave after about a year and asked him about the furnace filters. He never called her back. Eventually she changed them herself.

  You should move out, her mother always said. Why are you paying for all this space in this broken-down old dump anyway?

  It’s a good deal for the size, Audrey would say. Shelly gets her own room. You’ve got space. If Dad ever comes down, there’s space for him. It’s a good deal for the size.

  Her furnace, her steps, her carpet. Her shake, her bulge, her creak. She went back upstairs. Sat on the couch and turned on the TV news. She sat in the blue light of the television not really watching.

  §

  ‘Mum Mum, let’s see magic,’ said Shelly in the morning. ‘Magic Glen magic.’