The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  ‘Audrey Cole and the Legendary Lever Men,’ she said.

  He didn’t laugh at this but nodded seriously in agreement.

  ‘This is your first Alex Main party?’ he asked, staring down and through the window out at the lake.

  ‘I guess so,’ she said.

  ‘I appreciate that he does these rock’n’roll nights still. His bottom line on the electronic music is obviously much better. He can get a medium-name DJ up here for a few nights to do dance music and really pack people in. The summer dance parties you’ll see every room filled and then the whole lakeshore stacked with camping. Tents, RVs, the whole deal. So I appreciate that he sets aside some winter weekends for rock ’n’ roll, which is close to my own heart, for whatever that’s worth.’

  ‘Have you seen Rodney Levermann?’ she asked, after he didn’t continue. ‘They’re looking for him in there.’

  Outside, coyotes were howling their pleading, whining howls. He waited a little while, listening to them.

  ‘When I first met Rodney, he was the guitar player for Sue Father. This was 1980 probably. Sue Father was my favourite singer and her band was my favourite group. They played two hours a night every night for three years before falling apart. They played naked. Before every set they stood out in the alley and took off all their clothes and spray-painted themselves with matte black carpenter’s paint. Each of them put on a pair of safety goggles and spray-painted each other’s faces. They were loved in Calgary by maybe thirty half-psychotic paranoid twenty-year-olds, and hated everywhere else on the entire continent, and they played every night: Golden Nakusp Abbotsford Victoria Bellingham Eugene Eureka Santa Rosa Petaluma San Jose Santa Barbara San Diego. They pulled down water pipes and flooded venues and hung from lighting rigs until they crashed and they stepped though stage monitors, they kicked glasses off bars and threw up on promoters and jerked off on paying customers and after they got kicked out they’d set up in the parking lot and play, Marshall Stacks turned up to ten, until the police came. For this they had all their teeth and limbs broken, and then being on crutches slowed them down significantly so they were easy chasing down for all those thrown-up-on and jerked-off-on hostiles from their previous trip to town, who’d rebreak and run over and generally cripple them, leave them naked, spray-painted black, in ditches from Missoula, Montana, to Charlottetown, PEI. They were banned from every club and bar in every state and province and detained at the border and thrown in holding cells. All of this made them particularly well suited to playing rock ’n’ roll and they were the best band I ever saw.’

  He leaned over the mezzanine railing, looking down, watching through the big windows into the courtyard.

  ‘I saw Sue Father for the last time at a Vietnamese restaurant on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton, a few years back. She’d picked a fight recently and been hit in the face and mouth, and because her gums were weakened by acrylic poisoning from all that spray paint years earlier, her teeth had all fallen out. She had them in a little cloth bag.’

  He reached inside his shirt and pulled out a little cloth bag on a shoelace. Tilted it up and a dozen brown lumps, like little melted sugar cubes, fell into his open palm.

  ‘She said to me,’ and he said a name here that Audrey didn’t quite catch, ‘“The only good these ever did was to keep me from swallowing my own fist up to the elbow. Maybe they’ll be better as a good-luck charm.” I never heard from her again.’

  He poured the little lumps back into the bag and tucked it back inside his shirt.

  Outside, coyotes howled. She looked to where he was watching, and between the building walls past the courtyard she could see there were men outside, running on the lake top. They’d taken off their jackets and shirts despite the cold and were running bare-chested on the snow-covered ice, yowling and whooping along with the whiny shouts of the coyotes. They ran and slid and fell over in the snow, staggered back to their feet, slid and crashed into each other, laughing and shaking and howling in the night.

  The big man in the black leather vest poked his head out the ballroom doors. The thin man in the cowboy hat waved him over.

  ‘Gurt, why are we all standing around in the dark?’

  ‘Breaker went,’ said the big man. ‘I was going to find Alex.’ ‘Don’t worry about finding Alex,’ said the thin man. ‘I’m sure Wrists and Koop are already figuring it out. Let Alex keep at whatever he’s up to. Just go back in there and make sure nobody freaks out in the dark until Wrists and Koop fix it.’

  ‘Sure thing, boss,’ said Gurt.

  ‘Well, it’s been good talking to you, Audrey Cole,’ said the thin man. He drank the last of his whisky and walked past her with Gurt to the ballroom doors.

  She went downstairs and then outside. The howling men had come back to the shore, their wet, cold skin glistening in the moonlight. They ran past her back to the building, shivering and shouting. Audrey stood alone on the lakeshore. She hugged her jacket against the wind, looking around for the nobody that was there. She looked down the snowy beach and saw yellow lights in the houseboat.

  Inside, Rodney sat on an upholstered bench, tilted at the angle of the boat, his brown leather jacket in a heap on the dirty floor. He had rolled up his shirt sleeves and was tracing the faded green lines of his tattoos for a pair of teenage girls. They wore men’s plaid shirts and jeans and passed a crumpled joint back and forth.

  Audrey held her hands up like she was approaching a barn kitten with a sack, palms out. ‘Rodney.’

  ‘That’s a hand drill,’ Rodney said to the girls, pointing at his forearm. The veins high enough to cast shadows under his clenched fist. ‘And that’s our Saviour, prostrate in his grave, before the Assumption.’

  ‘Hey, Rodney, it’s me. It’s Audrey. Hey.’

  ‘What’s the Assumption?’

  ‘Well, every day you and I and your neighbour and the mayor of Regina wake up and start regretting. Regretting all the infinitesimal hurts and harms we inflict in all directions like so much grapeshot.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘But there isn’t a blunderbussload of screws and nails that the Lord won’t step in front of for our sakes.’

  ‘Rodney. Hey, it’s me.’

  Rodney blinked his eyes and smacked his lips to get moisture moving in his face. ‘This here is Audrey Cole. She’s here to make me do things I’m not up to doing.’

  ‘Ha ha. Yep, that’s me.’

  ‘What about that star on your elbow?’

  ‘In Russia, before the …’ He smacked his lips together. There was a whitish crust around the corners of his mouth and his eyes were heavy and mostly closed. ‘Before the revolution, they’d tattoo stars on each other’s knees, in prison. It means “Never again on my knees.”’

  ‘You doing all right, Rodney? Feeling okay?’

  ‘But it’s on your elbow.’

  ‘Well, I’m still on my knees,’ he said. He looked up at Audrey. ‘Right? Things I’m not up to doing?’

  ‘You sure don’t make yourself easy to find.’

  ‘A little too easy, I guess.’

  One of the girls took a deep pull on the joint and the paper crackled. She coughed and exhaled a huge cloud of smoke that filled the tight space. The houseboat had a plasticky damp interior and Audrey felt like she was in a campground shower.

  ‘Hey, kid,’ Audrey said, ‘do me a favour, don’t give him any of that.’

  ‘What I want is a file,’ Rodney said to Audrey.

  ‘He hasn’t really been having any of this,’ said one of the girls.

  ‘What has he been having?’

  ‘A coarse-rasped carpenter’s file. And a teaspoon and a steak knife and a box of strike-anywhere matches. I’ll cut off each match head and put it in a bowl and then eat them, a spoonful at a time. Eat a box of match heads and swallow the file. Bang.’

  The girl shrugged. ‘I didn’t ask.’

  Rodney pitched forward, caught himself, straightened back up.

  ‘A set tonight and then they’ll plo
w us out tomorrow,’ said Audrey. ‘Tomorrow or the day after. Hey, you could play that song with the slide part. The one you played in Revelstoke. I want to hear that one again. The one you learned in Winnipeg.’

  He looked up at her and squinted an eye. He chuckled and shook a finger at her. ‘You’re all right, Audrey. You’re all right. If I weren’t broken down and old enough to be your father, I’d court you. I’d woo you.’

  ‘Come on, we need to go in there. Wrists is tearing the place apart.’

  ‘How would a man go about doing that? Wooing Cole? You’d need to be some kind of timed rally-race titleholder. The fastest time on the Crowsnest Highway the second week of January in a three-speed Hyundai Pony. No heat. Pissing in a cup to keep from stopping. Your picture in the paper next to the timekeeper pointing dumbfoundedly at his stopwatch with the proof. You know anything about these rally races, Audrey?’

  She wanted to open up her wallet and unfold the Mitsubishi Lancer. Explain to him about the tires and the safety cage. She wanted to tell him about Tommi Mäkinen and his consecutive World Rally Championships. And the Elbow Falls Rally Race, and the Athabasca Crossing stage rally. The Sentinel Peak Rally Cross, and the kind of car she needed to enter all of them. And how all those races were just on the other side of the normal world everyone else knew about, and all you needed was to know the right gravel escape hatch to drive your Mitsubishi Lancer down, and you could slip out into a world you made yourself.

  ‘They need you on the stage,’ she said instead.

  One of the girls pulled down the last of the joint and carefully crushed out the cherry against the cold lip of the laminate table. She opened up a mint tin full of ashes and roach ends and put it inside.

  ‘They need you on the stage. Then tomorrow they’ll plow us out, and I’ll take you all back home to Calgary.’

  ‘Home,’ he said, and sighed.

  ‘Come on,’ said Audrey. She kissed him on the cheek, and the rough bristles on his face left salt and an old beer film on her lips. His face was rough and raspy and he smelled like whisky. He focused his eyes on her and took time to work enough moisture into his thick mouth to speak.

  ‘Okay, Audrey, let’s go.’

  When she brought him inside, the lights were back on. She led Rodney into the ballroom, through the crowd to the stage. He put a foot up on the stage and didn’t move for a while. Dick Move reached down and helped him up. They pulled Rodney up onto the stage and he slowly, gingerly, started to sort through his gear, turning on his amplifier, opening up his toolbox. He pulled out his rifle-range ear protectors and spent some time trying to figure out how to get them properly onto his head.

  She looked around for the skinny man in the cowboy hat she’d talked to by the stairs but didn’t see him anywhere.

  Onstage, Wrists started to tap out a shuffle while Rodney slowly put on his guitar. He turned off the amplifier standby switch and stood at the microphone with his eyes half-closed. The other Lever Men joined Wrists’ simple shuffle, a walking bass line padded with short organ chords.

  ‘I’m waiting for the bus,’ Rodney said into the microphone. ‘Over there in Ramsay, in Calgary, across the street from the Shamrock Hotel. Waiting for the number 24 to Ogden.

  ‘That’s when he sat down next to me on the bus bench. The Devil.’

  The volume was up on the Telecaster and it began to feed back as Rodney talked.

  ‘He leaned into my field of vision and said, “I’m going to do some magic.” He held out his hands palms open at this point as people do when they’re doing magic tricks.’

  Wrists shuffled and splashed the floor tom, the ride cymbal. The Tele-caster was feeding back and Hector had picked up a drone note on the organ to match the tone. Rodney talked with his eyes closed.

  ‘He said, “I’m going to permanently change one, and only one, thing about your life.” And then he snapped his fingers. The number 24 rolled up and the Devil stood up and got on the bus. The door shut and I just sat there, stupefied. Had to wait half an hour for the next bus.’

  Rodney’s eyes were open now and he stared into the crowd.

  ‘What did he change?’ someone finally shouted from the crowd.

  ‘That’s how I know he was the Devil,’ said Rodney. ‘The real Devil.’

  10

  DECEMBER 2009

  SATURDAY NIGHT

  Downstairs, she wrapped herself in the blanket and went outside.

  The sun had gone and there was no twilight, only night. But the night was full of light, deep dark greys, brushed-blackboard slate greys, and old highway-top greys that diffused the cloudy sky from the swollen moon somewhere above the sky’s floor. In the bottom-floor windows of the Crash Palace, orange light from her fire flickered and pulsed. Snow fell and cold wind blew on her face, not as harshly as the morning but cold enough, and she squeezed her eyes tightly until tears pressed out of them, tears that sat, wet and warm, then chilly, on her cheeks.

  Audrey walked down to the beach, picking her way between hard snowdrifts, on a swooped path cut down to the bare gravel by wind skipping off the lake. The drifts carried on across the ice, grey crests that snaked into a maze of white lines on a black plane. She put a foot out and swept an arc of powder snow off the black ice. Put weight forward and the ice swelled downward, flexing in a circle and then crack, giving in the centre, like a windshield chip.

  It’s thicker farther out, Audrey.

  She took a breath and then jogged forward, running on the ice, and slid, arms wide for balance, tottering but gliding all the same, and she screamed without meaning to and the sound echoed out and back in the valley bowl. She coasted to a stop, windmilled her arms for balance and stayed upright, then put her hands forward on her knees and laughed, choking for breath while she did. Behind her, two thick black lines of exposed ice tracked back several yards to her last bootprints. Audrey straightened and stood on the hard frozen top of Two Reel Lake.

  She came out to the lake a lot, the six months that she lived here. When the place was crowded for a party, to get away from the press of people. Even in between the parties, there were always people around – someone staying a few nights in one of the rooms, some friend of Alex or Gurt or Looch, passing through, crashing for a night or a week.

  Most of them stayed inside though. So she always had the lakeshore to herself.

  One night in May she saw a little blue plus sign on a stick and she really, really needed to be alone. She stood by herself on the lakeshore, terrified. There may have been a party going on behind her in the building. It was hard to remember. She just remembered feeling so all alone and scared. Scared and anxious, and eventually to open up her lungs and start her heart back up she’d leaned back her head and yowled like a coyote.

  ‘I was so scared,’ she said out loud in the night.

  The steps to execute tomorrow are: the snow will have stopped and the wind will have died and in this new situation you will get home. You will dress for the weather. Making do with what you can scrounge in the building. You will go back to the car better suited for the walk than you were. You will probably not get the car unstuck but you will try. If you can’t get it unstuck, you will find anything useful in the car and then walk to the village. It’s a long, long walk but you’ll prepare and it won’t be snowing. Tomorrow, when the snow stops, all of this will be manageable: steps to execute.

  She leaned back and yowled in the night.

  Coyotes ran out of the trees on the far bank, right through the line of her gaze. Two, four, seven of them. Blue and black in the dark. They slipped out of the dark out onto the ice, far away. She stood and watched them run along the lip of the lake, far on the opposite shore.

  The coyotes stopped across the lake and she wasn’t sure how far away they were.

  She’d never been good at gauging distances. On familiar highway stretches she sometimes passed signs giving distances, odometer test section markers posted by the Canadian Automobile Association, and these quantified the internal
landmark map she’d made herself: the coulee bridges and ranch brands on number 2 south of High River, or the sequence of tourist traps through the Purcells; the Enchanted Forest, Crazy Creek Falls Suspension Bridge, Miniature Land. Watch your dashboard here and do the math as you pass each ordered sign and you’ll know how far a kilometre is in terms of lived experience. She always meant to count or record, but she’d fall behind slower traffic and make a pass in a straightaway when the double line turned dotted, and once she’d regained her speed she’d forgotten to count. She meant to count because she never properly knew how far a kilometre was.

  The coyotes milled around, in and out of the trees. They didn’t yelp or whine, just ran quietly. They felt far. Far enough that she couldn’t tell if their faces were turned toward her. How far can you safely be from a pack of coyotes alone in the dark? Too far to see the white moonlight reflected back in their glassy eyes. She took a step back without turning and put her foot ankle-deep into a snowdrift. Then she turned and took quick walking steps back along her black path. At the shore she turned and the coyotes were running along their original vector, far away, opposite across the lake toward some other point farther up the far shore.

  The ground was solid and she howled in their direction and this time they howled back.

  §

  Inside, she drank whisky out of the bottle and watched her fire, curled up on the couch. She’d pulled off her pants again and hung them to dry on the chair. The whisky hurt her stomach and pulled acid high into her chest but she sipped it anyway. Small amounts into her mouth that warmed her tongue and throat.

  She heard a sound: lapping. Turned to see the kitten licking the tuna tin. She watched the little cat and it stopped licking and looked up at her.

  ‘Kitten,’ said Audrey. The little cat contracted backward but stayed put. It watched her for a while, then lowered its face back into the bowl. Contracted backward again, like it had in the afternoon, but stayed at the bowl.

  ‘I get it, Kitten, don’t worry. Not everyone wants company.’