The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  She limped across the ice, stopping at five or eight steps to turn with the rifle at her hip, sweeping the barrel through an arc of lake top and grey shore shape. They howled sometimes and she stopped walking to swing the barrel held at her hip in the direction. Howled there on the lake against the pale grey treetops. Audrey walked ten, thirteen steps and planted her feet. A coyote watched at eighty yards. She pointed the barrel and it howled in the night. Squeezed her hands around the oiled wood and iron. Planted her feet into the snow, and icy water soaked her feet and stung her toe tips and ankle balls. Her pants wet and heavy stuck to her legs halfway up her shins.

  A coyote at forty metres moving her way and she pulled the trigger at hip height, the rifle jerking backward in her hands. White light crack and the coyote leaped and ran. The rifle yanked in her hands like a tug-of-war rope. The bang hard in her eyes, the smell of burnt powder in her sinuses, lit up in her head with white light flint. The bullet sang and disappeared into the blowing snow like music.

  What did you think was going to happen, Audrey?

  On the shore she stood and shook, slumped shoulders dragged downward by the rifle weight. Pain throbbed in her ass and back from the hard ice. She turned around to look at the Crash Palace. Two trigger pulls and three rounds in the magazine. She pulled the rifle bolt a third time. Raised the barrel and fired at the building. Through the blast she heard a window break. The noises echoed and she heard glass shards falling into snow. She walked back toward the building through these sounds.

  15

  On the sidewalk, Marnie was tearing down posters. Someone had covered the entire plywood wall around the hole with a letter-sized black-and-white Xerox handbill. She’d leaned her bicycle and satchel against the No Parking sign and was tearing the papers down two at a time with either hand. Crumpled them up and threw them over the wall into the hole.

  Audrey stood and read one of the remaining handbills and it said:

  ONE NIGHT ONLY

  Marvel at the Magical

  SUE FATHER featuring THE FATHERS

  with Special Guest

  ELLA VAVUE

  There was an address and a date: next Friday.

  Sue Father. The name rattled around in her head, ringing around memories that wouldn’t quite come together. She tore a handbill free from its staples, folded it, and slipped it into her jacket. Up the block, Marnie pulled handfuls of posters down, tearing the paper out of the staples, crumpling and throwing them into the hole.

  ‘Why don’t you just cover them over?’ Audrey asked.

  Marnie stopped and looked at Audrey, a crumpled piece of paper in either hand.

  ‘Got to make an example,’ she said. ‘Keep other people from getting the same idea.’

  §

  She stopped for a slice of pizza. Ducked into a little by-the-slice place on First Street, the size of a coat-check alcove. The man behind the counter got her a slice of Hawaiian pizza out from the rotating tray under a hot lamp in a glass box. It was cardboardy and she stood at the counter chewing it.

  She took the poster out of her jacket. Double-checked the address. Just a few blocks from here. She finished the pizza and put the poster back into her jacket.

  She crossed 9th and 8th Avenue, heading north. Checked the poster again and then walked into an alley, looking around garbage bins and restaurant grease traps, looking for numbers on doors. Doors were propped open and men and women in kitchen whites sat on overturned ice buckets smoking. Steam heat and white light from inside their tile kitchens lit the alley. She walked down the street and a car rumbled past her. A man and woman inside looked right and left for a parking spot.

  Ahead of her, a giant came out of a shadow. He stood up from a little folding chair, above a flickering light, and she smelled propane. He was giant height, six foot five, but skinny, all head and neck, and wore a reflective green vest over his black fleece sweater. He leaned down to the car and Audrey heard him say, ‘Seven dollars you park all night. Or just dinner five dollars two hours.’ He stood and pointed down a ramp incline to an enclosed lot and the car drove around the tight corner.

  Audrey unfolded the poster. ‘I’m looking for this address,’ she told the giant.

  He nodded. Reached behind and banged on a steel door. It opened and let red light into the alley.

  ‘Have a good time,’ said the giant.

  She walked down a concrete staircase into a low-ceilinged room, hot with a crowd. A brick-and-black-plaster basement full of people, sitting in rows of folding chairs, two hundred packed in a space small enough to put all of their chatter and laughter into everyone’s ears at once. Teenagers in black with gloves, silver jewellery, and thick mascara, men and women in tailored suits and dresses with silver hair and severe, expensive eyeglasses, old men with lank hair and trench coats, sitting by themselves. A man in wire glasses had a camera on a tripod by the brick wall, tightening and loosening the nuts that controlled the angles. Audrey walked through the crowd and the seats were taken, couples and threes and fours, people chatting over red plastic cups of beer and clear plastic glasses of wine. At the front there was a single seat in the middle of the front row. She sat and was close enough to see the scratches and shoe scuffs in the stage surface. She looked for seams in the floor, for borders or hinges. The stage was empty, no set, just a long straight microphone stand, a black curtain across the back wall. The stage lights had coloured gels, orange and red and purple, and made white light where the cones intersected, white light fringed in purple and red and orange.

  The crowd got quiet for the show to start.

  Ella Vavue wore a polka-dot bandana tied around her coal-black hair. When she smiled, the stage lights made her red lipstick and cheeks brighter and redder than they may have been off the stage.

  Audrey leaned forward and stretched her neck. She tried to see back into the wings, around the side of the curtain. She looked from side to side at the aisles.

  A stagehand in head-to-toe black ran out with a decorative tripod table and a brass birdcage, all cast curlicues and leaf details. Set these up for Ella Vavue and then backed quickly off into the wings. Ella Vavue produced a red satin cloth and waggled it in front of the cage, then draped it top to bottom. She spread her fingers and waved her hands. Then pulled the cloth away.

  The cage was empty. Surprise registered on Ella’s face, and she did nothing for a moment. Then she caught herself. Too late, thought Audrey, we saw. We saw that look. Ella Vavue smiled at the crowd and covered the cage again. Her repeated gestures larger and more exaggerated this time. When she pulled off the cloth, a little sparrow chirped inside. People in the crowd shifted and their chairs creaked. People looked at the screens of their cellphones.

  A bushy-bearded man in a black T-shirt came to the microphone when she had finished her routine. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Sue Father and the Fathers will be on shortly.’

  Audrey twisted in her seat, looking around the room. You should have brought Glen Aarpy, she thought to herself. He could have grumbled to himself and later explained how all the tricks were done. She looked around to see if he was back there in the crowd somewhere, but of course he wasn’t. Just expectant faces watching the stage.

  Down the row, a woman stood up. She had hollow cheeks and dark shadows under her eyes and wore a washing-machine grey T-shirt with holes around the neck and hem. She squeezed out of the row, excusing herself, and then she put her hands on the stage and hoisted herself awkwardly up with a grunt.

  She walked into the middle of the stage and wrapped her hands around the long straight microphone stand. And now she was tall and sheer and wore a tight black suit, with perfect straight seams, and a skinny black tie over a half-untucked white shirt. Her black leather boot heels clicked loudly on the wooden stage. She had hollow cheeks and dark shadows under her eyes. Audrey shook her head and blinked. She looked back and forth for the other woman, and the people sitting next to her did the same. Then the crowd exhaled and the auditorium broke into loud applause. The wo
man onstage nodded and adjusted the silver microphone. People clapped and whistled, and in the tight basement the noise crashed and grew until she held up a hand and snapped her fingers, and the crowd was silent.

  ‘Everyone, I’d like you to please meet the band.’

  The curtain pulled back and it was not flush against the back wall like Audrey thought but showed an alcove with a raised floor, on which seven men in black suits stood or sat. An upright bass, a piano, an organist with banks of keys on two sides. Two guitarists, a baritone saxophone, a trumpet, and a drum kit. The crowd clapped and the drummer stick-clicked a four count and they rolled into a tight twelve bars, gunslinger accents, flatted suspended chords, tremolo, and they built steam and volume while the crowd clapped until she held up a hand and they cut out.

  ‘I’ll start small and work my way up,’ she said.

  She showed them all a deck of cards. Held up a card and showed the face to the crowd: the four of diamonds. She placed it in the air and let it go and it stayed there, hanging. She stepped away and put the king of clubs in the air beside it. The two of hearts, jack of spades, six of spades, all hanging in the air above the stage. Then she snapped her fingers loudly and they disappeared.

  The crowd inhaled sharply and then clapped.

  She freed a cloud of butterflies from the inside pocket of her jacket, and it flew around the room making shapes in the air – a heart, a lightning bolt, a star – that flew around the stage where she pointed, and flew back into her pocket.

  She found a bottle in her hat and uncorked it and it sang a song in a cherubic mezzo soprano.

  She made little flames appear on the tips of her outspread fingers, and they bounced and danced and twirled.

  For three-quarters of an hour she did things that seemed simple, that took the audience a few moments to wrap around the impossibility of. She pointed to members of the crowd and they discovered flowers in their pockets. She made a little rainstorm. She pulled an icicle out of a glass of water, then turned it into a sunflower. She commanded their attention with her eyes and hands and drew applause from them exactly when she wanted. The band honked and vamped along, comping along in the lead-ups and ringing big chords and brass flourishes for reveals. The crowd clapped and people stood up and sat down. They flashed photographs with their cellphones. Audrey sat and watched.

  Sue Father stepped back and held an arm out for the band, who picked up tempo and volume. The baritone player stepped forward and took an outside solo, honking and strangling, overblowing the notes and picking uncomfortable pitches that made people shift in their seats. The guitar ran through unpleasant tritone scales and people looked at each other in discomfort. They traded off these increasingly dissonant solos for a long time and people gripped their chairs.

  Sue Father raised a hand then and the music cut cleanly like she’d pulled a cord. The band stood stock-still, posed where she’d stopped them.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you have been an appreciative crowd,’ she said, ‘which is all anyone can expect of anyone. That they be generous and appreciative.’

  Then she disappeared.

  The audience sat as quietly as they could, packed together on folding chairs, too many of them for the basement theatre. They watched the empty space on the stage where she’d disappeared, waiting. Behind, the band stood frozen like mimes. Everyone waited and someone sneezed, loud and stark.

  Someone clapped then, and, taking it as permission, they all did.

  They applauded for a long time, on their feet. Audrey sat forward with her elbows on her thighs, watching the stage. Around her the applause slowed down. Some people sat down and some people stayed on their feet, clapping, the sound of which grew thin and sporadic. People sat back down or reached back to lift their jackets from chair backs, pulled toques and earmuffs onto their heads, purse straps over shoulders, mitts, gloves. People left in bunches and many people stayed sitting, watching the stage, or whispered to the person in the next seat.

  Audrey shifted back and her fold-down seat creaked. She watched the stage, which the band had not left. They still stood where they were, did not pull the instrument cables out of their guitars and wrap them into loops around their elbows. They did not twist the mouthpieces off saxophones, or spin the wing nuts up off each cymbal stand. No one opened a case to put anything back inside. They stood where they had stopped, looking out toward the crowd, orange and yellow stage lights hot on their damp faces. Their faces were wet and none of them had opened their white shirt collars or loosened their black ties. None of them had taken off their black suit jackets.

  None of them moved at all, but stayed frozen, like mimes, where she’d made them stop.

  A couple in fur-collared ski jackets squeezed past the knees out of their row, up the aisle and out of the theatre. Everyone else stayed sitting, each conversation finished. Everyone watched the men onstage.

  ‘Is she coming back?’ someone nearby whispered.

  Someone applauded again. A few people clapped and then they all did, the whole theatre, and then the band broke their pose, they smiled and shook out of the tableau, they raised their instruments, turned to one another, shaking hands and joking. The baritone player raised his saxophone up off the strap toward the crowd and people whistled, the guitar player who’d played the key lines and riffs made a big, sweeping bow, rolling his arm forward, and everyone hooted and cheered. Everyone stood again, Audrey with them, clapping, and the band all bowed and then walked offstage into either wing.

  She clapped in time with the crowd and felt dizzy, her hands coming together loose and flat. She felt dizzy and found her breath uneven. She slowed her hands, tried to take air in with that rhythm, tried to get air into her lungs to fight back that fuzzy, spinning feeling. Her back, neck, shoulders all clenched and knotted, did not relax, and she stopped clapping and sat back down, breathing, feeling tense, feeling however long a time she’d sat hunched, staring at the stage.

  The applause trailed away to silence again. Sue Father did not come back. Then the house lights came on.

  The crowd funnelled up a different set of stairs and out into a snow-cut wind, and they weren’t in the alley but out on 8th Avenue. The wind broke apart knots of people, rushed goodbyes, pushed them to the taxi stand or either way along the sidewalk to wherever they’d parked, and Audrey stood in the jostle pulling up her collar and her jacket tightly around herself, wishing for gloves and a hat. She walked up 8th and the coming-apart crowd mixed with other coming-apart crowds.

  Across the street, in front of the Jack Singer Concert Hall, she saw the Skinny Cowboy.

  He was standing with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, looking in her direction across 8th Avenue. The black hat pushed back a little bit so that the yellow street light showed his face. Audrey saw him across the street and their eyes met and he saw her and she was sure he saw her and he smiled.

  The doors of the Jack Singer opened and people started coming out, a just-finished concert crowd, men in black felt jackets and ladies with white hair and pearls flooding out of the high-ceilinged marble lobby and the noise and bustle and yellow incandescent light spilled into the street. Husbands held up hands for taxi cabs, leaning forward for attention. They spilled all around the Skinny Cowboy and he disappeared.

  She was scared but then she wasn’t scared. And standing there, the thing she wanted most in the world was to tell him that. ‘I’m not scared of you,’ she wanted to tell the Skinny Cowboy. ‘Why would I be? I don’t owe you anything. We don’t owe you anything.’

  Audrey tried to fight her way through the sudden crowd to the other side of the street. Women cupped hands around cigarette lighters against the wind, some of them jacketless, in red and green cocktail dresses, and men in overcoats and banded hats pressed against them to shield the wind and to be close to the women, and they laughed and had confetti on their shoulders and in their pinned hair, paper squares and glitter on their cheeks and in their eyeliner, sipping champagne flutes smuggled out pa
st red-jacketed valets and busboys. Audrey ducked and pushed through grey flannel shoulders and cashmere scarves, around women in sheer dresses pushing into the jacket fabric of more smartly dressed women and men for warmth. The crowd was becalmed now, no movement or flow up or down the street, and she put her hands on shoulders to steer and pull her way through, one step at a time, through wine breath and hot gin laughs.

  She emerged from the crowd at the end of the block and confetti sparkled on the front of her jacket. She opened up her hands and confetti and glitter sparkled in her palms under the street light.

  He was down at the end of the block, walking away from her. The silver hair underneath the hat, above the silver-thread roses. He turned south around the corner, south down 1st Street. She hurried after him, walking as quickly as she could. A knot of people stepped in front of her to flag down a taxi and she sidestepped through them. On 1st Street she saw him disappearing under the railroad underpass.

  She shouted at him but he was gone.

  She waited for the light to change at 12th Avenue. Across the street, music ground out of a dark pub. The door opened and inside she glimpsed a few thin teenagers in black denim vests sitting at a bar. Jean jackets, roughly screened patches sewn on the shoulders with dental floss, unevenly cut hair, dyed and re-dyed. Black eyes and cracked teeth, holding brown bottles or pint glasses. The music stopped, only for a second, and another song started up, ground-glass guitars and rat-a-tat drums. At the bar they hoisted up their drinks and shouted along to the lyrics, the racket all indecipherable, and they clanged glasses and bottles together and shouted.