The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  Dick grunted and stood up. He and Hector went to the bar, where the two women with Bettie Page haircuts were talking to Koop.

  ‘I guess I never really thought about all you guys having, like, day jobs,’ said Audrey eventually.

  Wrists looked up from his index cards and squinted at her. ‘You’ve seen how much we get paid any given night.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘I just hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘Dick is an electrician and Hector is a postie.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A letter carrier. I do some contract labour and I work the doors at a few bars in Calgary.’

  ‘How old is your daughter?’ asked Audrey.

  Wrists put the receipts back into his jacket. He tapped his feet one two one two, alternating on the hard concrete floor.

  ‘I’m not wiring up a grocery store, but I wouldn’t mind getting out of here, Wrists,’ said Rodney. His voice was slow and his eyes were unfixed on the back of the fireplace, somewhere past the slow orange flames.

  ‘You’re fine, Rodney,’ said Wrists.

  ‘I am altogether fine,’ said Rodney. He raised his bottle and kept it near his mouth for two three four breaths before sipping. Staring ahead into the fire. Wrists took the envelope out of his jacket and put it back inside, watching Rodney drink. Then he looked at Audrey.

  ‘She’s six. She’s seven in three weeks. I have to go and find the right princess for her. She’s into princesses, see. Cartoons about princesses, and they make dolls of them and I have to find out which is the newest of these cartoons and which of the dolls she already has.’

  ‘Can you ask Marla?’

  Wrists snorted. His eyes followed Dick and Hector to Koop’s bar, where they leaned on the table laughing. The women with the Bettie Page haircuts had new dresses, the same starchy cut but different patterns, with matching bandanas in their black hair. They laughed and Dick talked with his hands, opening his fingers and framing shapes. The women laughed and Koop put tiki cups with long red straws in front of them. Wrists watched them and pushed back out of his chair.

  ‘It’s going to be fine, Rodney,’ he said. He picked up his beer and weaved through the crowd toward the bar.

  ‘What about you,’ Audrey asked Rodney. ‘Are you an electrician?’

  Rodney watched Wrists disappear into the crowd, then reached into his jacket pocket. Produced an unlabelled orange pill bottle. He winked at Audrey and held a finger to his lips. Shook out four white pills. ‘How old are you, Audrey?’

  ‘I’m twenty, Rodney. I keep telling you that.’

  ‘Right. Right, Audrey.’

  He tipped back and dry-swallowed the pills with a wince and cough. ‘“Little Rattle Stilt” gets played at a remarkably dependable rate by radio stations that do a certain format, for which I get a royalty cheque worth around 3,000, maybe 3,200 bucks every three months. Sometimes a bigger one-time chunk if it gets used in a car ad. There’s an old CBC made-for-TV movie about Doug Flutie that it’s in, and there’s a nice cheque any time that gets rerun.’

  Audrey did the math in her head and didn’t ask him any of the other questions she had. Rodney kept shaking the pill bottle in the same four-four backbeat, staring off across the room at wherever Wrists had vanished away to.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I met the Devil, Audrey?’ Rodney asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Devil. Satan. I met him at a bus stop.’

  ‘You never told me the story about the time you met the Devil, Rodney, no.’

  ‘It’s a pretty good story,’ he said. ‘You’d remember it.’

  ‘Are those your usuals?’

  He looked at the bottle, scrutinizing it like he was seeing it for the first time. ‘These? These are – I have it on good authority they’re a good substitute.’

  ‘Good authority?’

  ‘My … interim … pharmacist.’ He coughed and slapped his chest.

  ‘As long as they make you better,’ said Audrey. ‘Right?’

  ‘Well,’ said Rodney, ‘there’s different sorts of better.’

  §

  Audrey walked aimlessly around the building, up the stairs or the elevator, and everything felt a little smaller in the daytime, the hallways narrower, the brick and concrete thicker and heavier. Upstairs, she stood at the window watching a group take push brooms outside onto the lake top. They shuffled on the ice, pushing snow out of the way in strips. Cleared a long space and slid-stepped back to the shore for their hockey sticks and a tennis ball. Eight of them in ski jackets and toques, no skates, sliding on their shoe soles, passing and batting the ball around. Mostly they chased the ball out into the snow when someone shot it wide and away.

  Down the shore from their game, a houseboat sat half-beached, dragged up onto the gravel, dipping frontward into the ice. A full-sized houseboat with a plastic slide curling down the back, one you’d drive past sunning on a lake in the British Columbia interior some summer afternoon, drifting across the Shuswap or Mara Lake, shirtless drunk men lazily steering or diving from the rooftop into the cold lake water. The Two Reel Lake houseboat was rimmed all around in icicles. A tennis ball missed a pass farther up the frozen lake top and slapped hard against the fibreglass wall.

  She wandered around getting more and more bored – itchy, agitated bored. She started picking up the empty cups on the floor. Stacked the red plastic cups into a long sleeve. Wrapped her fingers around as many beer-bottle necks as she could. Brought them all to the main floor and stacked them behind Koop’s folding table bar while he poured liquor and juice.

  In the kitchen Audrey found an empty coffee can and walked through the lobby emptying ashtrays.

  ‘Hey,’ said Alex Main, crossing the floor toward her. ‘Hey, what are you doing? You’re a guest. Go take it easy. Have a seat, get a drink.’

  ‘Well, I’ve taken it pretty easy all day,’ she said. ‘I’d rather keep busy.’

  ‘Koop and Looch can do all that stuff,’ he said. ‘Get a drink, take a nap.’

  ‘I just get a little nuts if I don’t have something to do,’ she said.

  He furrowed his brow as if this caused him some kind of deep confusion, then sighed and shook his head. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe Koop can show you how to make some drinks. Koop, show Audrey how to make some drinks.’

  Koop shrugged. ‘Make some drinks. Sure.’

  He showed her how to make a Caesar: how to salt-and-pepper-rim a glass. This much vodka and then shakes of hot sauce and Worchestershire sauce. He took the cap off a big bottle of Clamato juice and she sniffed the tomato-and-sea-creature tang. He took the lid off a jar of pickled asparagus and put a vinegary spear in each red drink. People woke up late and trudged downstairs and asked about aspirin, and Audrey made them Caesars, which they stirred groggily with the asparagus.

  Koop showed her how to free-pour liquor, the right up-and-down motion to get an ounce out of the speed spout. He lined up beer bottles for her to practise pulling the caps off. When people walked by, they hollered at them to come take these freshly opened test beers. He showed her how to twist the cork out of a champagne bottle. Peeled off the foil and untwisted the wire cage. He wrapped his big fist around the cork and twisted the bottle until it popped off undramatically in his closed hand.

  The big man in the black leather vest walked through the crowd, chatting and shaking hands. He’d pull people aside and whisper in their ears, and they’d nod. They’d think to themselves, concentrating, like they were counting something in their head, then nod and shake his hand. He had a little notepad in the pocket of his vest. He’d grin and make a few marks on the notepad with a stubby pencil and move on.

  ‘Who’s that guy?’

  Koop followed her gaze around the room. ‘That guy … Oh. No one in particular. Don’t worry about him. Here, I’ll show you how to make a Manhattan.’

  When the sun went down, the Lever Men plugged in and fired up again, and the crowd came back in from outside, stomped snow off
their boots and shoes. They came down in groups from their rooms upstairs, bleary-eyed, men in pyjamas and girls in sweatpants and hooded sweatshirts. A few of the older rockabillies had new suits, and their boot heels clipped on the concrete when they danced. Everyone crowded around Koop’s bar. Koop plunged two hands into the cooler and brought up six bottles of beer at a time, lining them up and snapping off the caps with his opener, pop-pop-pop, the caps flying behind him and clattering somewhere on the floor. Koop scooped ice into plastic cups and stirred rum punches, twisted the half-pulled-already corks out of wine bottles. People took two drinks at a time and milled around while the Lever Men rattled through their songs. Joints were lit and passed around and the air got thick with skunky smoke.

  Audrey helped Koop open beers and rotated new bottles out of boxes into the ice to chill. She cut up limes and lemons for him on a little cutting board, stacked glasses. As the night went on, there was less to do and he was just fine doing it himself. She sat in a chair behind the bar and watched people drink and dance and kiss and drink. Everyone was sloppy and groggy, from drinking all day after drinking all night, and they danced out of time with the music and not for very long. Fewer people danced, and more sat in chairs or on the floor, passing around cigarettes and joints. A group of kids, they seemed like kids, in lumpy sweaters with scraggly hair, sat around on the floor near her and passed a square of tinfoil back and forth. One person held the tinfoil and another held a lighter flame underneath it and they took turns inhaling the smoke from whatever substance sizzled on the hot metal.

  She got in the elevator and pressed the button for six.

  On the top floor, the building was empty, no interior walls other than the middle spine of the elevator shaft, just wide open space, with pipes sticking out of the unfinished concrete floor in places, future plumbing for future rooms. Electrical conduit, the ends capped with plastic plugs, and wires tied off with black electrical tape twisted out of hollow steel posts, like scrubby cacti in a cold desert.

  She wandered into the west wing. Alex and Looch stood in the corner. Everything was white from moonlight. A heavy theatre spotlight stood nose down in the corner, like a cannon, plugged into the wall. A pair of hunting rifles leaned against the window glass.

  Alex opened up a window and the night rolled in heavily. He picked up a rifle and held it up to his cheek, sighting down the barrel into the darkness.

  She followed the barrel line out into the night, and on the white lake coyotes milled in a circle, grey shapes under what must have been a full or nearly full moon.

  ‘They got into the garbage last night,’ said Looch. ‘Even with all the noise in here. Right up to the back door and tore apart the garbage bags in the cans.’

  ‘You’ve got to thin out a scavenger population as a demonstration to the whole what-do-you-call-it,’ said Alex. ‘Biome. Go find your leftovers elsewhere.’

  He fit the stock tightly into his shoulder and pulled the bolt. Behind him Looch hoisted the spotlight up in its strut. It sat on a wheeled base that he rolled back and forth, balancing the light to match the rifle-barrel vector. ‘Hit me with the light.’

  Looch pulled the lever back with a heavy clank and the spotlight turned on, a long beam of white light. He was dead on them: a circle of light on the ring of coyotes, their eyes bright green glass, and they froze for a moment in the sudden unexpected daylight. Alex pulled the trigger and the rifle report cracked hard and loud in their ears, slapped back off the glass at them. The coyotes jumped and scattered and one leapt awkwardly, twisting in the air, then hit the ground and staggered, ran to catch up with the rest. They ran out of the light and Alex fired again. Audrey slapped her hands over her ears too late and the shot banged deep inside her head. Outside, the coyotes howled and their racket echoed with the rifle crack off the hills.

  ‘You missed him,’ said Looch.

  ‘I might have hit him in the tail,’ said Alex. ‘Well, yeah, I missed him. That’s a shock for him though.’

  He handed the rifle to Looch, who pulled the bolt and the empty shell spat and rang on the concrete floor. He pulled more bullets out of his jeans pocket.

  ‘Audrey Cole,’ said Alex Main, ‘come here.’

  The rifle was heavier than she expected. She took it from him and the weight pulled her arms down. She hoisted the barrel and brought the stock against her shoulder, holding it across her body like she’d seen in Westerns and police dramas.

  ‘This is a bolt-action rifle,’ said Alex. ‘It’s going to fire one round at a time. You can have three rounds in the magazine inside there. Like this.’ And he showed her how to slip the bullets into the metal top of the wooden rifle body. ‘Each time you fire, you’ll need to pull the bolt, and that will load the next round from the magazine into the chamber. Pull it.’

  She pulled the bolt and heard the sound the mechanism made, shunt and clank, preparing the bullet and rifle, with a hard backward pull. She put her cheek down against the cold wood and pulled it tighter up into her shoulder. It was already heavy and her arms wobbled under the weight.

  ‘Closer and tighter,’ said Alex, and he reached around her. He reached, and his hand closed around her small fingers and pulled her grip further up the barrel. He enclosed her in a reach to move her arms and she felt the heat moving off him and his chest and diaphragm against her back. He leaned forward to pull the stock back into her shoulder and she felt his breath on her neck.

  ‘Always treat it like it’s going to go off,’ he said. ‘Don’t point it at anything that doesn’t deserve it.’

  She squeezed an eye shut and stared down the grey barrel length out the window into the night. She breathed from her stomach muscles to stiffen her body and hold the weight steady, and her lungs filled and emptied quicker than his behind her. She felt the difference in their size in the length and pace of their breathing. She felt his body all around her own.

  ‘Now it’s going to kick back like a bastard. So you’re only going to squeeze your finger when you’ve got a full breath in you. So steady yourself, feet up to shoulders.’

  She inhaled deeply and squeezed her one eye tightly. Pulled the trigger and the noise and force shook her backward. A tremendous crack, split, and echo, and he squeezed his hands around her fist and shoulder and soaked her up into his own body when the explosion shoved her backward.

  ‘Yes,’ he said beside an ear ringing with gunshot.

  6

  DECEMBER 2009

  SATURDAY MORNING

  Audrey woke up cold and thirsty on the couch in enough grey light to know it was morning. She couldn’t remember falling asleep. The fire was burned down to coals and the room had a blue woodsmoke tinge. Her eyes stung and her sinuses were full. She dug in her jacket pocket for her phone. The phone said 7:45, and three-quarters battery, and No Service. She sat up, pulled on her socks and pants. Stiff and bent from a poorly curled sleep on the lumpy couch. She knelt in front of the fire and blew the embers larger and larger until the flame caught the new kindling.

  She walked into the mezzanine, morning showing her how the space was and wasn’t what she’d remembered in the dark. The car of the birdcage elevator sat behind its sliding brass door. The red carpet on the stairs was mud-tracked and worn out, faded in trails like a schoolyard lawn. Plastic poly sheets lay spread over the floor across the room under the arch of the east wing. A sheet of plywood sat on a pair of sawhorses. A circular saw, extension cords, and a toolbox on the floor. A caged construction lamp hung from a wire hooked over the strut of a stepladder. Everything furred in grey dust.

  How long ago had they all cleared out? Did they think they were coming back? She hadn’t found a specific date in her online searches.

  She went to the bay window and pressed her forehead against the cold glass. Outside, the weather had stirred up, woken in the night, and a quick wind blew ribbons of new snow out of the sky. A skin of snow covered the car. She could hear the wind through the glass, whipping off the lake.

  She hugged the a
fghan around her shoulders. Away from the fire it was cold, cold, cold. If she’d come in July, the floor would be cold, colder than the air. In December, the air and every surface underneath shivered with bone-deep cold, and even if she could stand it for the moment, she could feel the hard blood-thickening limit lurking not so far away.

  She stood near the fire, staring out the window at the white-topped lake. The houseboat was gone, she realized. She hadn’t noticed in the night. The stretch of beach where it had sat before was empty. How big a flatbed truck do you need to take a houseboat away? What kind of crane to hoist it off the gravel? You would have to drive so slow through the switchbacks, up and down those slopes, lowest possible gear, the weight above and below. Pilot trucks with blinking yellow lights and Wide Load signs ahead and behind.

  Maybe they sank it. Scuttled it. Blew it up. Chopped it up with axes. Burned it piece by piece in the fireplace and wood stove. What’s a houseboat made of? You can’t chop up fibreglass and steel with an axe. Can’t burn prefab plastic in a firepit. Maybe they sailed it to the middle of the lake and cut a hole in the floor. Watched it sink from the beach. Maybe it was out there under the ice, cold-water algae and winter lake weeds growing inside, a meltwater reef. She turned from the door. She needed to pee.

  The light in the windowless washroom didn’t work because none of the lights anywhere worked because there was no electricity. She propped the door open with a cylindrical metal garbage can for a sliver of light. The mirror was cracked and balls of old paper towel littered the floor. She twisted the faucet but no water came. The pipes must have frozen and burst during the first winter without heat. Down in the basement there would be slabs of ice. Slick stagnant puddles run down from broken plumbing. How many winters had had their way with the place, without heat and electricity to protect it? Not more than three. Maybe just one. How much time did a winter need to wreck a naked, unheated building? She lifted the top off the toilet tank and there was no water for a flush. She peed anyway.