The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  §

  By her second rotation, she was playing Pinocchio with her hips forward against the machine. Stood straight or put a foot behind herself to lean down closer to the field top. Index and middle finger on either flipper. She fired the ball and made loops and ramps and then shot the ball into the whale’s throat. The red LED display rolled her score. She fed balls into the whale, and when it had swallowed three it spat them back out, the display lighting up for PLEASURE ISLAND MULTIBALL. She worked three balls at once up the ramps and through the loops. She put the balls up into the donkey bumpers, and they kicked it back and forth. A digitized donkey bray from the little speakers with each bumper bounce. The donkeys kicked the balls back and forth and the red lights on the screen animated the little wooden boy himself, growing red-pixel donkey ears.

  In between pinball games, she drove the big white truck from the camp to the lease to the other lease on the routes that they outlined for her. They checked the odometer every day and brought a Labrador retriever to sniff around the seats and tires a few times a week. She called it the truck but it wasn’t one truck, it was whichever of the fleet of a dozen different identical Suburbans was parked in her spot that day. She got to know individual members of the fleet by signature chips and pock-marks in the windshields, by the model year differences in the stereos, by the floor mats and upholstery.

  ‘Hey, Easy Money,’ they’d say on the drive back, piled into the back seats, stinking like engine grease and propane and sweat. ‘Easy Money, hurry it up. Don’t waste our downtime driving like an old lady.’

  ‘Easy Money, let us drive, we’ll show you.’

  ‘Easy Money, you’re a hundred-dollar-a-barrel luxury around here. You’re an OPEC production increase away from being the first pink slip.’

  ‘You just keep ignoring them,’ Valerie told her at lunch. ‘Just like you’re doing.

  ‘Stick around, Easy Money,’ they said when her last ball drained down the gutter at the bottom of the Pinocchio machine.

  ‘Yeah, Easy Money, don’t split. Hang out and work those balls a little longer.’

  ‘Of course, there have been setbacks,’ Tommi Mäkinen reassured her later. ‘Not all results have favoured us. But we persevere. And of course we learn. Persevere and learn as a team. We have a good relationship with the manufacturer. They hear our suggestions and we have a dialogue. So the setbacks will all enable what we are really after: faster and faster times.’

  §

  She drove a crew back from the lease down the empty road, the truck’s high beams flashing against the black trees. Behind her she felt the crew alert and watching, all of them worked up in a state. She watched them in the rear-view mirror, her stomach tight. They craned their necks to see out the window, staring ahead.

  ‘Up there, there it is,’ someone said.

  Ahead of her a pair of red hazard lights blinked on the road shoulder.

  ‘Pull over, Easy Money. Right up there where they’re stopped.’

  ‘What are you guys up to?’ she asked.

  ‘Just pull over, nothing to worry about.’

  She thought about stepping on the gas, passing the car wide, but instead she braked. She came to a stop ten yards from a parked truck, the bed covered in a canopy.

  A woman got out of the truck cab and walked around toward them, shielding her eyes against the headlights. She had teased-up dyed-black hair and long jangly earrings, with raccoon makeup and bright lips. She hugged a heavy parka around herself, underneath which her legs were in sheer black tights and patent leather boots. She squinted at the truck, then pulled a bottle of brown liquor out from the inside of her jacket and waved it at them.

  ‘What the hell have you done?’ asked Audrey.

  ‘Easy Money, listen. We’re going to get out and party here for a little while. Just a little while, see? You’re going to hang out in the truck and wait for us.’

  The woman opened up the truck tailgate and there was a mattress underneath the truck canopy, wrapped in blinking pink and blue Christmas tree lights.

  ‘Jesus Christ, you guys.’

  ‘You’re going to hang out and wait for us and you’re not going to say anything when we get back.’

  ‘No one needs a spoilsport and no one needs a snitch. Right?’

  ‘Right, Easy Money?’

  She didn’t want to turn around, and just looked at them in the rear-view mirror. All of their faces hot and their eyes glistening. They clenched their teeth, staring at her in the mirror.

  ‘You’ve got half an hour,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Come on, Easy Money.’

  ‘I can come up with a story for being half an hour late but not any longer. Everybody out and I’ll honk the horn when you’ve got five minutes.’

  When they’d piled out of the truck, she pulled around and parked thirty yards farther up the road. Face hot, heart racing, stomach still in her throat. She kept the truck running and watched the time. Stared ahead out the window, doing what she could to not look in the rear-view. She turned on the radio and hunted around the dial. After a while she found the classical music station that the safety analyst from Calgary liked. She sat listening to strings and pianos, watching the minutes tick by on the clock. Doing her best to keep breathing evenly.

  She watched the clock, and when enough minutes had ticked by she honked the horn.

  They took their time piling back in, stinking like whisky and sweat and perfume, something with vanilla and chocolate. They didn’t say anything and one of them giggled and another laughed and then they all laughed as she put it in drive and pulled away. One of them rolled down a window. Hung his head outside and howled like a dog in the night. He howled and they laughed and she pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  She made it two days into her third rotation and then she ran away.

  §

  In Edmonton, Audrey sat by herself in a booth, sipping ginger ale, watching the men onstage. She drank four glasses of ginger ale while they loaded scuffed amplifiers and black guitar cases, coated in peeling old stickers, into the cold, sparse Jasper Avenue bar. The hot yellow stage lights were on, and she could see the grey in their hair, the deep crow’s feet in their sun-leather faces. Wrists and Rodney wore old cowboy shirts, the stitched designs worn out and faded. Worn-down boot heels that clopped and snapped on the wooden stage.

  ‘Give me that kick,’ said the soundman from the back of the room.

  Dallas ‘Wrists’ McClung thump-thump-thumped beats on the bass drum. Wrists had the second-whitest hair, after Rodney. Grey-and-white-peppered hair buzzed down to a World War II crewcut, and heavy black-rimmed glasses that sat on swollen, scarred ears. He kicked the bass drum with his arms crossed, a stick in either hand, while the sound man at the back of the room turned dials. Across the floor a few people leaned on the bar and ordered more rye-and-gingers. Then boom-boom-boom, the drum was in the big main speakers.

  ‘It’s too loud,’ yelled someone in a cowboy hat.

  ‘I love this song,’ yelled a girl in a denim jacket smoking at the bar.

  Hector Highwater wore a black-and-red Hawaiian shirt, with hibiscus leaves and silhouetted hula girls, and faded green tattoo ink swirled up the back of his neck from under the collar. He pulled two bar stools up onto the stage and set an old suitcase organ across them. He stood with one hand on the organ keys and pulled cables in and out of different jacks until a grinding organ chord whined across the room.

  Richard ‘Dick’ Move slung a heavy bass guitar over his shoulders, hung down below his belt at the end of a leather strap. He was stocky and short with big shoulders, and wore a faded black T-shirt with little holes around the collar and hem. MARS IS HEAVEN, said the T-shirt in white block letters.

  Rodney Levermann sat on a chair, watching. He had clipper-buzzed white hair that was a week or two grown out from his last shave. He watched them move gear and then stood up carefully and walked toward a big tweed-covered speaker cabinet. Dick dropped his bass and intercepted him.


  ‘Whoa, boss, let me get that.’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ said Rodney.

  ‘Sure you do, sure you do,’ said Dick, pushing himself between Rodney and the cabinet. He hoisted it up with a grunt and pulled it up onto the stage. Rodney followed, pulling himself up gingerly.

  ‘Put it there, closer to Wrists,’ said Rodney, pointing. ‘No, closer.’

  He waited for Dick to position the cabinet properly, then set an old amplifier head, no front faceplate, the tubes and wires naked in the undercarriage, on top. He knelt in the middle of the stage and opened a red tool box. He pulled out a set of pea-green plastic shell rifle-range ear protectors and snapped them over his narrow head. Knocked on either shell with a fist and wiggled them tightly over his ears. Then he knelt again and took an ash half-hollow Telecaster out of its case. The wood around the single f-hole was worn down through the finish by years of pick strokes. He plugged the guitar in and flipped off the standby. Waited while the lights on the front of the head lit up red. He stood up, twisted the microphone in its stand, and sucked in his cheeks.

  ‘Check check. And forgive us our trespasses. Check. One two. As we forgive those huh. One yeah. Trespass. Daily bread. We’re ready when you are.’

  The bar was quiet.

  ‘I guess we’re ready any time, sure,’ said the man at the back of the room.

  And then instead of whatever she’d expected, they played reverb-heavy, tremolo-arm surf chords and space-echo arpeggios – exactly something her father would have had on a cassette, that eyes closed she’d have known in time with fifty-five minutes worth of Highway 1 landmarks – the Exshaw cement plant, the Kananaskis park off-ramp, the all-alone lights of the all-by-themselves reservation houses out on the Morley Flats, the trucker weigh-in station, and in a few minutes the Cochrane overpass Petro-Canada – and then it’s just down one hill and up another into the city limits. None of them sang or spoke into the microphones, they just played fuzzy, echoing surf-rock riffs and vibrato country chords for an hour and a half, by the end of which Audrey was alone in the bar with the band and the staff.

  She sipped her ginger ale and closed her eyes and let the music pour over and into her.

  Afterward, Rodney slumped in the booth, panting, sweat on his lined face and in the clipper-length bristles of his scalp. His washing-machine-thin shirt stuck translucently to his pigeon chest. Dick Move came back to the table with two closed hands full of beer necks, a shot glass of bourbon clasped and spilling between his two upright thumbs.

  ‘Domestic bottles is all they’d give me without paying,’ he said. He stood trying to solve the problem of how to let go of the beer bottles without probably dropping the bourbon. No one at the table made any move to help him out.

  Hector came back from the bar with a bottle of beer and two glasses of whisky. He put one of the glasses in front of Rodney.

  ‘What’s the plan tomorrow?’ asked Hector.

  ‘Tomorrow? You mean tonight. We have to play in Nanaimo tomorrow.’

  ‘So we’ll drive to Nanaimo tomorrow.’ Hector drank a shot of whisky and tilted back his beer.

  ‘We have to be there at seven,’ said Dick Move. ‘It’s what, ten hours?’ He put the beer bottoms flat on the tabletop and focused hard on his fingers, working on which ones needed to release the bottle necks and which needed to stay tight around the shot glass.

  ‘When I was in the Plunging Necklines we used to play in a bar in Nanaimo called the Log Driver. Is that still there?’

  ‘It’s ten hours from Calgary to Vancouver and we’re in Edmonton. There’s a ferry to Nanaimo that’s two hours on its own. We have to drive tonight.’

  ‘Wrists has to drive tonight, you mean,’ said Hector. ‘I’m drinking.’

  Wrists came to the table with two hands full of beer bottles. ‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ he said, ‘we have to drive tonight. Load-in for Nanaimo is seven o’clock. We have to take the ferry.’

  ‘You have to drive to Nanaimo, we’re drinking,’ said Dick Move.

  ‘I’m not driving, I’m drinking. Hector’s driving.’

  They sat around the table looking at each other.

  ‘I mean, I guess I could sober up a bit after I finish these,’ said Hector.

  Wrists sighed, twisted in his seat. Rummaged in the jean jacket hung over the back of his chair. ‘I write all this down for you dough heads. Don’t you read the printouts?’ He pulled out a padded manilla envelope, heavily creased. From this he produced a folded piece of paper, the printer sprocket-reel holes still attached to either side.

  ‘Day Four – Saskatoon to Edmonton. Trap & Grizzly, Jasper Avenue. Load in 6:00 Set Time 10:00 90 minutes.’ He jabbed a finger on the sheet and read slowly, exaggerating each syllable. ‘Leave early drive overnight to make Day Five Nanaimo load-in at 7:00 PM.’

  Hector and Dick both took long pulls at their beer bottles.

  ‘What if we got up, like, really early,’ asked Dick.

  ‘It’s eight hours just to Kamloops from here. Three more past that to Vancouver. Then however much time you wait at the ferry terminal. Even if we left at six we might not make it.’

  ‘If we’re getting up before six we might as well drive tonight.’

  ‘I’m not driving anywhere tonight.’

  ‘I’m going to be too drunk to drive anywhere tonight in about ten minutes.’

  ‘I’m not going to Edmonton,’ said Audrey Cole.

  The men all looked at her.

  ‘I wasn’t going to Edmonton.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Rodney.

  ‘It doesn’t much matter,’ she said. She pushed her ginger-ale glass into the middle of the table.

  They looked at each other and Rodney grinned. He took the shot glass from between Dick’s thumbs and drank it.

  ‘Hey,’ said Dick, ‘that was …’

  ‘What time do you want to get going?’ Rodney asked.

  ‘Once you’re all finished with those,’ said Audrey. ‘We’ll have time.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Wrists.

  Hector clanked his bottle against one of Dick’s and drained it down. ‘Pass me another one of those,’ he said.

  ‘Hold on. Hold on,’ said Wrists. ‘We’re not taking on a teen runaway.’

  ‘I’m not a teenager. I’m twenty.’

  ‘You look like a teenager.’

  ‘You look like a grandfather,’ said Audrey, and Dick and Hector both laughed.

  ‘We’re not popular,’ said Wrists. ‘We’re not popular and we don’t draw and there isn’t going to be any money. We’re not giving you any money.’

  ‘I’ve got money,’ said Audrey.

  ‘Tomorrow at this time you’re going to be a thousand kilometres away in some other shithole that looks more or less like this one. And whether or not you’re going to Edmonton, you’re not going to be anyplace in particular.’

  ‘And that will be just perfect,’ said Audrey. ‘No place in particular.’

  ‘Jesus, Wrists, now you’re talking me out of going,’ said Rodney. ‘Just drink up.’

  ‘Drink up and give me the keys,’ said Audrey Cole.

  §

  On the highway, Wrists flipped through the radio dial from the passenger seat, and songs and voices, waves of guitar clatter and pitchman babble approached and receded in and out of atmospheric fuzz, in occasional time with the oncoming traffic. He found a scratchy country-and-western oldies station playing a George Jones song that sank into hornet buzz under every power line.

  A pine-tree air freshener hung off the rear-view mirror, which had a photograph of a little girl stuck to it with a paper clip. She was outside in a yard, standing barefoot in grass in a little sundress, smiling.

  ‘Whose daughter?’ asked Audrey.

  ‘Mine,’ said Wrists. ‘Take it easy on hills. You aren’t winning any races in this thing.’

  Audrey drove fifteen kilometres over the speed limit, her foot always a little up or down over that dashboard has
hmark, pulling into the other lane to pass slower traffic. White lights flared up and faded behind like the radio swell, old men in long cars, pickup trucks full of teenagers, double trailer trucks that rattled the van and blotted out the radio, spitting mud and gravel against her windshield as she pulled ahead and drifted back right. She drove into the night and the traffic thinned farther from the city, until she was alone rushing into the dark.

  The radio slide guitar took an upswing in a clear reception pocket and the faraway band moved into the middle eight while the band in the yeasty, damp-smelling van with her snored and snorted. She looked down at the speedometer, gave it more gas, held the wheel tight, and passed another transport truck while the radio plunged back to static.

  §

  Wrists’ van was a 1987 Chevy Beauville, 391,000 kilometres, powder blue for the most part, spare tire mounted on one of the outswinging back doors. No passenger-side mirror, no power steering, no shocks, loud as a school bus. Audrey fought it up and down Highway 16, heaving along the alpine roads between Jasper and Kamloops in the early-morning dark. Drove through the night while the Lever Men slept boozy in their seats. The sky turned deep blue, then grey and then pink. Low banks of cloud hung floating between the mountains, just above the treeline. She stopped at a rest stop just out of Tête Jaune Cache at sunrise to stretch her arms and roll her shoulders. Everything was damp and cold. Wrists got out of the van and had a cigarette.

  ‘Spell you off for a while?’

  ‘I’m still good for it,’ she said.

  ‘You’re no good to anybody if you fall asleep on the highway.’

  ‘Another few hours.’

  On the plateau highway past Merritt, the mid-morning sky turned black and a high mountain storm fell on the van. Snow tore against them and she turned on the headlights. Audrey sat up as straight as she could, elbows out, fingers drumming on the wheel. She stared into the swirl ahead for red brake lights or headlight glow, for some sign of another driver. She felt the men, awake, quiet, watching her. The road wound down, twisting through the Coquihalla Pass. They passed a lonely transport truck on a tight corkscrew turn, the headlights blinding, and she squinted and pulled them as close to the right shoulder as she could.