The Crash Palace by Andrew Wedderburn

Author:Andrew Wedderburn [Wedderburn, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books

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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.

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