The Crash Palace

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The Crash Palace Page 13

by Andrew Wedderburn


  The room at the far west end of the fourth floor had an old hockey card stuck in the brown wood by a red push-pin. Hakan Loob, said the hockey card. Right Wing, Calgary Flames. Number 12 in red and yellow, leaning forward over his stick, his mouth open in concentration, staring intently from behind a plastic visor. She opened the door. There was a sheetless mattress under the windowsill. A little Christmas cactus grew in a terracotta pot on top of the cast-iron radiator. One purple flower bloomed amidst the spiky green leaves. She put her bag and sleeping bag down on the mattress. She stood at the window, looking out at the pine-tree-green hills and the grey mountains behind them. Then she went to the door and pulled the red push-pin out of Hakan Loob.

  They were bringing in the pig when she came back downstairs. Koop and Wrists carried either end of a long steel pole. Between them a burgundy pig hung tied around the steel, his feet chained together tightly in knots, upside down, mouth open where the pole split through him. A skinny man with black-framed glasses, black hair pomaded high above his head in a towering pompadour, came out of the back hallway.

  ‘I’ve got the rotisserie set up on the back lawn behind the kitchen,’ he said. ‘Take him straight back out there so we can get the fire on him.’

  Audrey followed them through a hallway in the back into a huge kitchen, white-tiled on the walls and floors, with restaurant-sized grill-tops, huge steel refrigerators, gigantic dishwashers fed multicoloured cleansers through long plastic hoses. Stock pots bubbled on grease-blackened gas burners, and the counters were covered in tubs of minced onions and celery, wholesale-sized cans of tomato, stacks of bagged bread and buns. They grunted and bumped, navigating the pig through this maze, and finally got it manoeuvred through a door in the back that led outside. The pompadoured man stood over a row of gerry-rigged gas grills, pulled together and lined up, the lids all removed, wavering heat blasting from blue propane flames.

  ‘Looch, this thing is a monster,’ said Koop.

  ‘Bring it here, bring it here,’ said Looch, waving them forward with two hands inside big quilted grey oven mitts. On either end of the gas-grill battery was a steel strut, and the men heaved the pig up and then dropped the pipe down into these struts. Looch fitted a crank into one end of the pipe and gave the pig a test shove. The whole spit turned above the gas flame and he grinned.

  ‘I wanted to do it Hawaiian-style,’ said Alex Main. ‘You know, dig a hole and cover him up with coals and banana leaves like at a luau. But the ground is frozen. Anyway, Looch figured out this whole rigamarole and it ought to work pretty good. Should still get that long slow heat on him. We’ll get that juice sizzling and smoking out there into people’s noses in a good way all through the place.’

  The Lever Men played while Alex welcomed people. They came in pairs or threes or fives. Audrey found a chair when they started arriving and sat in the corner so the band was between her and the crowd. She watched everything from between Wrists and Hector. Alex shook everyone’s hands, clasped their elbow with his other hand and steered them in. Waved an arm to indicate the bar, the stairs, the musicians. He made this exact sequence of gestures for every person who walked through the door.

  They brought suitcases, hiking packs, sleeping rolls, grocery bags full of potato chips, cheese twists, chocolate cookies. Some of them had guitars in hard cases or gig bags or just carried by the necks. Young people, twenty-year-olds in leather biker jackets and blue Canada Post jackets, poorly fitting thrift-store sport coats. Boys and girls in shapeless thick hoodies and down-filled vests brought suitcases and duffle bags. The tubes inside Rodney’s open amplifier head glowed brighter orange as the afternoon went on. The Lever Men played surf licks or bossa nova chords, or two-chord country-and-western locomotive rhythms. Hector walked away from the organ and came back dragging a wooden chair. He sat down and played a few chords, then got up again and went to Koop’s bar for a drink. Sat back down and picked up with the rest of them.

  She caught glimpses through the window of the vehicles as they rolled to a stop on the long front yard. Pickup trucks, station wagons, Jeeps and SUVs. A yellow-and-black-painted school bus. She saw hockey sticks and skates tied together by the laces slung over shoulders. A van full of women in their forties with grey hair and crow’s feet around their eyes carried milk crates full of records. People brought wardrobe bags for suits and dresses. Snowboards and snowshoes. Someone had a stack of jigsaw puzzles. A bald man with grey hair around his temples gave Alex a ukulele with a red bow tied around the neck.

  A big man wearing a black leather vest and with long black hair pulled into a tight ponytail shook Alex’s hand and pulled him into a tight hug. He hugged Alex and talked into his ear for a while. Alex listened and nodded and listened. Then he shook the big man’s hand again seriously and gestured grandly into the room.

  The big man in the vest looked around, and Audrey saw him make eye contact with Wrists. He waved and smiled a not-warm smile. Wrists did a little drum fill and waved back, not smiling at all.

  Later, Wrists set down his sticks and went to the bar for a drink. Dick went with him. People in denim jackets with patches sewn onto the backs and shoulders came through the door and shook hands with Alex Main. Rodney walked out as far as the length of his guitar cable allowed and sat down on the staircase. He fingerpicked two chords, a drone pattern, no changes, flicked a treble note with his pinky occasionally, but otherwise sitting in the bottom strings. Grey-haired men in Hawaiian shirts, hockey jerseys, cowboy hats, leather ties. Two girls with matching black Bettie Page haircuts wore checkerboard-print dresses and had flames tattooed on the backs of their calves underneath black fishnet stockings. Leather vests and jean skirts. A group of teenagers in thick neon green and orange snowboard jackets, sunglasses up in their bleached hair, dragged an old TV set on a toboggan, hands wrapped in the yellow nylon rope.

  Dick and Wrists came back and they played ‘So What’ and ‘Take Five’ and men with slicked-black pompadours danced with red-haired girls in starched skirts.

  ‘Hey, Audrey,’ said Wrists. ‘Hey.’ He snapped his fingers until Audrey looked at him. Rodney was back to the fingerpicking, the same two chords, same tempo, same static sheet.

  ‘Go get a juice or something from Koop,’ said Wrists. ‘Go get him to pour you a soda water.’

  ‘Wrists, I’m an adult.’

  ‘You’re an adult, Audrey, sure. Get a beer then. Get something to keep your hands full.’

  ‘I think I might go upstairs,’ she said.

  ‘You’re fine. Just stay sitting there. Nothing to be alarmed about.’

  ‘My bag is –’

  ‘Did you take the picture off the door?’

  She took Hakan Loob out of her pocket and Wrists laughed.

  ‘All right, good. There’s rules here, Audrey, don’t worry. There’s rules and everybody knows to follow them.’

  ‘Give us some “Stampede Breakfast,” Wrists,’ Rodney shouted.

  ‘Your bag is fine in your room. Stay down here with us. Okay?’

  ‘Okay, sure. What’s the big deal?’

  ‘Just stick close around.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ she said.

  Wrists started a quick two-beat country-and-western railroad shuffle.

  The crowd laughed and talked, and the racket they made filled the huge stone-and-concrete space with echoes. Beer cans and bottles opened and different smokes filled the air: cigarettes and clove, skunky marijuana, and from down the back hall roasting pork. The older crowd knew Dick and Hector and the even older crowd knew Wrists and Rodney and shook their hands at the bar. People went upstairs in twos and fours with their backpacks and sleeping bags and Audrey thought about her bag in the far room and wished she was upstairs to lock the door from the inside.

  Looch started bringing food out of the kitchen: tubs of potato salad and coleslaw, trays of sliced white buns, all already buttered, and finally tray after tray of hot shredded roasted pork. People crowded around and loaded up paper plates. They ate roast por
k sandwiches and the juice ran down their chins and they grinned and ate, and the smell of the hot roasted meat mixed with the dope and tobacco in the air, making it greasy and electric and alive.

  Alex Main held a champagne flute out toward her. ‘Here, have a mimosa. I know it isn’t breakfast.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ said Audrey.

  He shook his head. ‘No, you have to have it. We use blood oranges. Koop squeezes them. Squeezed them today.’ Bubbles ran up along the glass in the deep red-orange drink.

  ‘I have this soda water,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you do,’ said Alex.

  He stood and waited for her to have a sip and it was fizzy and tart, not too sweet. He nodded approvingly and went back to shaking hands.

  They got louder when the sun went down. Whether or not they turned up the amplifiers, she couldn’t tell. Yellow bulb light replaced white and slowly greyer daylight, and maybe it was what and how they played and not the electric pickups and speaker cabinets reproducing the sounds. Harder and focused, chords and notes struck more tightly together, simpler rhythms, higher tempos. Not the men who’d dropped notes and ambled on and off the beat in Nanaimo and Vancouver. They got louder and the crowd broke apart, back toward Koop’s bar, holding shoulders and shouting into each other’s ears.

  Eventually the Lever Men started playing Lever Men songs. They were same songs she’d been hearing the last two weeks, but they’d never sounded like this. The room and the crowd transformed them into something different. Rodney stood a bit in front of the band, on the floor level with the crowd, hands wrapped around the Telecaster neck and moving as little as possible, just his wrists and fingers and maybe a bit of his elbows. Staring somewhere just above and behind the crowd, and she understood. The Rodney Levermann.

  The Lever Men played E minor and B minor, F and A minor, and the drunk crowd weaved together on the floor, dancing, a few close together with arms around shoulders and hips but mostly alone, their own set of hip and hand movements, nearer to or further from the rhythms in the music, kick drum snare drum, cocking hips, rocking up and down on heels, snare drum bass strings, wrists and necks, Hector’s left hand, back-and-forth shoulders, wiggling and bouncing, bobbing or drifting. Some people covered distance in their dances, little orbits or slow approaches to girls or boys, and some of them stayed rooted, eyes closed, one heel correcting the travel of another. High droning up the neck notes sustained in the air, strings and keys, grinding in and out of phase as they played through the changes. Rodney played with his eyes closed and sweat dripped off his face onto the floor.

  Audrey stood and didn’t dance in the centre of the thick crowd, jostled side to side when shoulders or hips shuffled into her. Damp fabrics, slick arms, everyone’s all-day built-up scents activated by the heat, all the liquor in their hands and guts sweet and tangy, and if the ceiling were nearer, all of their evaporations would recondense and rain salty and oily back to their faces and shoulders. She stood sweating with her head tilted back and her mouth open, close to the amplifiers, the speaker cones, soaking in the rumbles and high stings, letting the ranging waves rattle and shake her, hooks for the soft tissue between brittle ear and cheekbones. Hook and pull and space for all the buzzing, hot rays and pulses loose in the room. People near her kissed loudly, fingers pushed into each other’s faces, eyes closed, tongue mouth lip noises smothered by larger sounds. Audrey rolled her neck back and listened to the landmarks. The Exshaw cement plant, Lac des Arcs, Morley Flats, Jumpingpound Creek.

  §

  She woke up hot in her sleeping bag, tied up in the fabric. She tried to straighten it around herself and couldn’t. Found the zipper and fought it open. She sat up and put a hand on the warm radiator. Steam hissed on and off inside, pulses and gurgles, and a higher sustained tone keened from the copper pipe that fed the coils.

  In the hallway, feet had scuffed and spoiled the long vacuum lines in the carpet pile. On either side of her, the pictures were down off all the doors, and someone had built a little pyramid of empty beer cans against the hallway wall. She heard low talking and giggles behind some doors. In the stairwell she heard someone singing badly on a higher floor.

  Downstairs, she walked to the front door and pushed and it wouldn’t open. She checked the lock. Pushed again and then turned ninety degrees, planted her leg, and pushed the door with her hip and shoulder. The door shoved open an inch and then another and no further. Snow blew in on a chilly wind. Outside, a foot and a half of snow had piled up against the door. She pushed it again, cutting into the drift, and got it wide enough to poke her head out. White snow and white light everywhere. Covering the cars and vans and erasing any footprints the crowd had left. There were drifts built up in the courtyard between the building wings, blown in as far as the door.

  ‘They’ll send the snowplow up the range road first,’ Jerry Kopachek said behind her. ‘That’s west of here. Out to the gas plant on the other end of the lake. Then they’ll do the east-west route off the junction. A couple of people live out there and there’s the Long Twilight Sportsman’s Retreat. But they won’t even start that until tomorrow most likely. If it’s going like this. They’ll get to us in about two days.’

  He smelled like coffee grinds and boot polish and old blue jeans. Maraschino cherries and white soap. A rolled-out-of-bed-and-into-shoes-and-socks smell.

  ‘They’ll call,’ he said. ‘I mean, they’ll call to make sure we’re all right, and we’ll tell them that we’ll be all right. You want a cup of coffee?’

  He had already set up his tables. There were two big steel percolators, the kind you set up in a church basement when you need coffee for a hundred people. He peeled the foil top off a big can of yellow no-name grocery store coffee and filled the top filters of both perks. Then he started to unpack his bar. Pulled liquor bottles and juice cartons out of cardboard boxes. Bowls with cut-up fruit covered in plastic wrap. His knives and zesters, scoops and stirrers. Jars of olives and cherries.

  He must pack it up at the end of the night, she thought. Take everything back to a fridge someplace deeper in the building to keep cool.

  The percolators gurgled. Made steam and the smell of coffee in the cool lobby.

  Alex Main came downstairs wearing a sportcoat over a black T-shirt and striped pyjama bottoms. He pushed the door and widened the opening in the snow farther than Audrey had managed, about thirty degrees. Koop poured him a cup of coffee and he sat on the steps.

  ‘We’re good for a few days, aren’t we?’

  ‘We can do a contingency menu with Looch.’

  ‘What, disaster rations? Everybody gets a scoop of lentils and a cup and a half of water a day? It’ll be a few days, not a few weeks. The menu as is is fine.’

  ‘Shit, Alex, I need to get home,’ Wrists said when he came downstairs. ‘I need to get back to work. I need to see my daughter.’

  ‘It’ll be a few extra days, tops. Koop, they’ll send the plow around tomorrow probably, right?’

  ‘They’ll send the plow around the day after tomorrow maybe,’ said Koop.

  ‘You’re going to run out of material, Wrists?’ said Alex. ‘Come on, we’ll pay you. You’ll make new fans. A hundred bands in Calgary would pay me in blood to get locked up here with this crowd for two extra days.’

  ‘We’ve all got to get back to work. We’ve got jobs, Alex. Lives and jobs.’

  ‘Lives and jobs, sure thing, Wrists. I’ll pay you plenty extra. The additional time at a higher rate.’

  He explained it to people as they woke up and came downstairs, catching them on the stairs before they had a chance to see outside. Food for weeks, booze for months, all utilities intact, he explained. People had red eyes and yawned for the most part, asked if there was coffee and if there’d be enough to drink. They got the door pushed open the rest of the way and people went out into the snow. They scooped up handfuls of snow and threw it, or walked down to the lake and felt the wind and snowflakes. Mostly they stayed around Koop’s bar, and when he de
clared the coffee ready, filled themselves a paper cup. Then Looch started bringing scrambled eggs and hot pancakes and white buns stuffed with leftover pork out of the kitchen by the trayful, and everyone ate and drank coffee.

  The Lever Men sat around a table in front of the fireplace in the west parlour. Someone had started a fire but it had burned down to nothing. Audrey knelt on the cold floor, stirred and blew on the ashes, then put a log in to build it back up. Hector brought beers from the bar for all of them.

  ‘I have to get back, Wrists,’ said Dick. ‘I have to get back to work. Tomorrow is the last day I have booked off.’

  Wrists flipped through the receipts in his jacket envelope, squinting at the numbers and then writing on a blank index card. ‘Yeah, I have to get back to work too,’ he said.

  ‘You have to get back to your daughter or Marla will murder you,’ said Hector.

  ‘I’m fully aware of Marla’s nearness to murdering me at any given time, thank you very much,’ said Wrists.

  ‘We’re starting a new job tomorrow,’ said Dick. ‘We’re wiring a grocery store. The shop has this brand-new contract to wire the panels in all the new grocery stores in southeast Calgary. I can’t miss Day One.’

  ‘Well, unless Alex has a helicopter hidden somewhere in his goddamn lair here, we’re not going anywhere until that plow comes,’ said Wrists. ‘When my ex-wife murders me, you can apply for my job.’

  ‘Look,’ said Hector, ‘we’re stuck. Okay? Take it easy, make the best of it. He says he’ll pay us as long as we keep playing, so we’ll keep playing. Unless you can find a pair of snowshoes and walk back.’

 

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