Broken Man on a Halifax Pier Read online

  “And night,” she said.

  “And night,” I repeated.

  I should tell you about Tuesday and Wednesday. But I won’t. It’s private and it’s personal and every single thing we did drew us closer together. But so be it. We found each other in a way that went beyond anything I had experienced before. Again, the words fail me as they so often do whenever I want to express in writing something of great importance.

  I got to be the hero in the story for once. My heroic act: taking one minor dope dealer off the street, or, in this case, off the wharf. Ramona assumed the role of lover, mistress, mother, and caregiver. I got to be a man with no past, no guilt, no allegiance to anything but himself and his woman. I think I’ll leave it at that.

  The days passed quickly and suddenly it was Thursday.

  “Now what?” I asked. “More of the same?”

  “No. You can only hide from the world for a limited time.”

  “Why? Who said that?”

  “I did.”

  23

  Thursday. Fucking Thursday. If you leave the world for whatever time you can get away with, you inevitably have to find your way back to it.

  Ramona’s phone rang around eight o’clock in the morning. “Don’t answer it,” I insisted.

  Ramona leaned up on her elbow and looked to see who was calling. I peeped out from under the covers and wondered how any woman could look so damn good when she first woke up in the day.

  “Gotta take it,” she said. All business.

  I could hear the voice. A familiar voice. How did she get Ramona’s number? I wondered. Then I remembered that I’d called her using the phone on Monday.

  Ramona listened. “Okay. I will. I promise.” That’s all she said. Then she hung up.

  “Please tell me this is still a dream.”

  “No dream, champ. We gotta get up. We have to drive to Burnside.”

  “Burnside? In Dartmouth? Why? Is there a sale at Payless Shoes or something?”

  I perhaps forgot to inform you, dear reader, that Ramona had a closet full of shoes. Yes, a shoe closet. A closet for nothing but shoes.

  “Sexist pig,” she said fondly.

  “Did you call me a sexy pig?”

  “Idiot. This is serious.”

  “I was afraid of that. That was Beth Ann, wasn’t it? You girls getting together for coffee at Starbucks this morning or what?”

  “I can’t believe I’ve been sleeping with a man with such insipid thoughts.”

  “Sorry. Listen, I just had the two most wonderful days since …” As my voice trailed off I realized I had no information to complete that sentence. Since? There was no since. I corrected myself. “I just had the two most wonderful days in my life.”

  She lit up like a birthday candle. “Me too. How did we do that?”

  “I don’t know. I give you all the credit.”

  “Well, now we have to stop being carefree sexy teenagers and go back to being responsible adults.”

  “Those are the two worst words in the English language. I hate them both. I don’t know which one I hate more. Responsible or adult.”

  “Tough titty.”

  “I can’t believe you said that.”

  She looked at me, no trace of a smile on her face now.

  “Sorry. This must be serious.”

  “Brody is in Burnside at the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility. That’s where he’s being held. He got roughed up by someone in there. We need to get him out of there before something worse happens. Beth Ann doesn’t have the money. Neither does Joe. We have to post bail.”

  “But I don’t have any money, as you know.”

  “How convenient.” Was that real sarcasm I detected? “I can do this,” Ramona said. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “I think my mother used to use that phrase.”

  “Mine did too,” Ramona said. “It’s been so long since I had a sensible conversation with her, I almost forget what a good mother she was. Let’s do this for her. Besides, my father made the money. Didn’t do her much good. So it should do someone some good.”

  We got up like a couple of normal human beings getting dressed to go to work. Only I was still wearing the same shabby shirt and dirty jeans I’d been wearing for days. And, get this, we brushed our teeth side by side at the twin sinks in her stylish bathroom. “We gotta buy you some new clothes,” she said.

  “I love you,” I said. It was the playful I love you. Or maybe it was the real thing.

  “I love you too,” she said. “We play an old married couple real well.” And then she spat toothpaste into the sink.

  “Old?”

  “Not so old.”

  As we walked into the Burnside jail, all eyes were on Ramona. She was dressed like the movie star that she once almost was. I was dressed a bit like Jed Clampett and I hadn’t shaved for days. I had tried shaving with Ramona’s lady razor, but it tore my cheek and I gave up.

  The desk cop or whatever he was gave her the once-over, me the once-over, and had a puzzled look. I could see how we did that to people, the two of us. I’d seen it already more than once. What the hell is he doing with her?

  I cleared my throat. “We are here to post bail for Brody Myatt.”

  “Ahh. Okay. You related?”

  “I’m his father.”

  He gave me a look of pity. I could read his thoughts: Don’t tell me she is his mother?

  He pulled something up on his computer. “Sorry, it’s a little slow,” he said, then looked up at Ramona. “You look familiar. TV or something?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Okay. Here it is. Let me print this out. You’ll need to sign and take legal responsibility.”

  I nodded.

  The cop handed me a sheet of paper with the amount on it.

  Ramona produced her debit card.

  The cop processed the transaction and handed Ramona her receipt. And then we waited. And waited.

  Then we finally heard doors, metal doors, opening. The desk cop and Brody appeared. He had bruises on his face and one eye was swollen. He took one look at me and nearly exploded. Then he got control, realizing what was at stake there.

  The cop sat him down by his desk and opened up a large Manila envelope, handed him a wallet and a watch. I noticed it was a Mickey Mouse watch. There were some keys and some bills, which the cop counted out in front of him and handed to him, like he was getting change for some purchase he just made.

  Once we were outside, Brody went volcanic. “Look what you did to me!” he shouted, pointing at his face.

  “I didn’t do that to you,” I insisted.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are that you can come into my life and screw it up like this? I should kill you.”

  Patricide again. I was determined to keep my cool, take whatever shit the kid could throw at me, and deliver him to Beth Ann’s doorstep. If he skipped town, Ramona would be out of a shitload of money. Strangely, it seemed that didn’t concern her very much.

  Brody looked around the parking lot. “Where’s my truck?”

  “Impounded probably,” I said. “They wouldn’t have towed it here. Probably down the Shore near where they picked you up.”

  “Take me fucking there, asshole.”

  We were walking toward Ramona’s car at that moment. Her heels were clicking on the pavement. She suddenly stopped, turned to Brody, put her face up to within inches of his. “Look. We’re taking you to your mother. Like it or not. You run and we call your keepers back there at the daycare centre.”

  It was a role perhaps. A good one. Tough-love mother in a movie of the week or something. She was good.

  “Fuck,” Brody said. A boy with a limited vocabulary. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  But the funny thing was, he followed her toward the Lexus and heaved himself into the back seat.

  Brody was hungry and wanted hamburgers. We stopped at the Burger King in Dartmouth. We bought him a big greasy bag of food at the drive-thru window.
I watched as seagulls soared overhead, wondering how they liked their lives inland, searching for garbage at places like Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken. I remembered the first time I’d seen a fisherman shoot a seagull with a rifle just for sport. Seagulls and humans. They both had a bad habit of drifting away from what they were really intended to do in life.

  Someone had made the highway much longer than before. The drive down to Stewart Harbour was interminable. Ramona refused to stop at the RCMP headquarters in Musquodoboit Harbour to find out about Brody’s truck. Better for him to not have wheels. Not that this would stop him if he decided to run.

  Brody settled a little after he finished two Whoppers and a giant bag of French fries. He was about to throw his garbage out the window when Ramona turned around and grabbed his wrist. “Not on your life, buster. You do that and I’ll poke your eyes out.”

  Brody laughed just then. He crumpled up the bag and put it on the floor in front of him. Then he looked up into the rearview mirror at Ramona. He looked long and hard. He laughed again. “Wait a minute. I don’t believe this.”

  Ramona was stone-faced.

  “I thought I recognized you,” he said. Here we go again, I was thinking.

  “You were in that porno film. What was it? Hung Well in Hollywood?”

  “You are so mistaken,” she said.

  “I could swear that was you. A younger you, maybe, but you. A guy doesn’t forget a … well, you know.”

  “I assure you, you’ve made a mistake. You don’t know anything about me.”

  He looked again. “I guess not. I just wondered why a babe like that would be here in Nova Scotia hanging out with this loser.” That would be me.

  “My sentiment, exactly,” she said, ending the conversation.

  Sated on cow meat and greasy potatoes, Brody slumped back in his seat and closed his eyes. “Man, this eye is giving me trouble. Anybody have anything for pain?”

  Ramona opened her purse, took out two Tylenol and handed them to Brody, who wolfed them down. “I was hoping for something a little stronger,” he said.

  “Sorry. Suck it up,” she said.

  The paved stretch of the highway finally gave out and we were nearing the causeway. Beth Ann’s house came into view. As we pulled into the driveway, I watched as she came out the door. She had the look of a worried mother, a distressed mother. But I could still see the high-school girl in her, the one who had been so good to me in my last difficult years of high school. How the hell did we end up in a situation like this?

  Brody opened the door, swung himself out. If I thought a thank you was in order, I was sadly mistaken. “This isn’t over,” he said and slammed the door.

  We sat there for a minute and watched as he walked slump-shouldered to his mother.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “We drive away.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t want to go back to Halifax,” she said.

  “Okay. Where to?”

  “How about out to sea?”

  The wiser part of me thought we should drive off to Cape Breton and check in at the Keltic Lodge for, say, five years. But another part of me was saying that going anywhere right now was still just running away. I guessed we’d have to play this out and see how it went.

  We went to my fish shack. There I remembered that Ramona had asked me politely to stop calling it a shack. We hadn’t come up with a more genteel moniker for it yet.

  It wasn’t locked, of course. We went in.

  We weren’t inside for five minutes when Rolf let himself in the front door. “Heard what you did. Ballsy. Real ballsy.”

  “How’s the boy?” Ramona asked.

  “Scooter? They pumped his stomach. Said it was enough of that drug to kill a horse. I don’t know the full story. It was bad, but he pulled through. His father still wants to kill someone. Him and Joe have a kind of standoff. Might cool down or maybe not. You never know about these things.”

  “I remember grudge matches from my childhood,” I said. “Real doozies. Over much less than this.”

  “Jesus, yes,” Rolf said. “Billy Young nearly killed Kyle McGregor over stealing the lobsters from his lobster traps.”

  “Caught him red-handed if I recall,” I said.

  “Green-handed, really. Lobsters don’t turn red until they’re cooked.”

  “Ah, the good old days.”

  “They was. What about Brody? Where’d they send him?”

  “He was in Burnside, but now he’s back.”

  “Back? How could that be?”

  Ramona cleared her throat, explained to Rolf about the not-so-happy return of the wayward boy.

  Rolf scratched his head. “You young people,” he said. “You play by a whole different set of rules. Crazy upstairs is my guess. I think it’s holding those damn cellphones to your head all the time. Electromagnetic waves twisting about your brain cells or something.”

  “Something,” Ramona echoed.

  “Anyways, I was hoping you’d come back, come hell or high water. I gassed up the Sheer Delight just in case.”

  “Thank you so much,” Ramona said, lighting back up now, dropping the tough-mama role. She walked to Rolf and planted a big sloppy kiss on his grizzled cheek.

  Rolf nearly cracked his face smiling. “That’s it, Jesus. You can take me now,” he said, made a little bow and shuffled backward out the door.

  That’s when I remembered the gun. “You two lovebirds catch up,” he said, “while I go make sure the boat’s ready to go.”

  Rolf winked. Ramona rolled her eyes.

  But that gave me my little window to go the car, tuck the damn thing down into my pants and pull my shirt over it like a bad guy in a car-chase movie. I would have tossed it in the water, but eyes were on me the whole way from the car to the boat. So I hid it inside the cabin, in a tool box, the one my father kept his boat tools in. “Never know when you gonna break down at sea,” he’d say. He had plenty of tools.

  I hoofed it back to the shack and Rolf was already gone.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “The sea awaits.”

  24

  Things were quiet at the wharf and that was good. We walked to the boat, boarded, threw the lines. I fired up the engine and confirmed that indeed we had a good supply of gas. At idle, I slipped away from the wharf and into the channel, past the poles of spruce that marked the deeper water.

  A light wind from the southwest made for some chop and a bit of spray on us, but soon we were at sea, far enough from land that it was just a thin dark line to the north. I cut the engine and dropped anchor. I liked the idea of just drifting, but my father was in my head just then. Drifting could be a funny thing in a wind like this. If you weren’t paying attention, you could hit a current, or an even bigger wind could come up, and soon you’d be a long way from home. And you didn’t want that.

  We hadn’t said a word since I’d started up the engine. Now all was quiet except for the wind and the waves lapping against the wooden hull.

  “Why are you sticking your neck out like this?” I asked as gently as I could.

  “You mean Brody and the bail.”

  “Brody, me, the whole shebang?”

  Ramona sat down on the wooden engine cover. I sat beside her.

  “Well, I had been looking for something to change in my life. One day was becoming a bit too much like the day before.”

  “You could have just hopped on a plane. Gone to Paris. Australia. Rome. Whatever.”

  “Been there. Done that. Not as much fun as you’d think when you’re on your own. I was looking for something more.”

  “Well, lucky me. Right time. Right place.”

  “Something like that. But not quite. You know what you had going for you?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Vulnerability.”

  I had to think about that one. “You felt sorry for me. Standing there all alone by the water.”

  “Not exactly. Vulnerability is a little different.
Not weakness. But possibility.”

  “Explain, professor.”

  “When you are vulnerable, you can be easily hurt, but you are also open to possibility. Perhaps you have some empathy, are willing to let someone into your life.”

  “You saw that in me?”

  “I thought I saw it or the possibility of it.”

  “Funny, I always thought women want to see men who are strong, men who can take charge.”

  “That went out of fashion shortly after people stopped living in caves.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Not many men do.”

  “Okay, so that was my hook. My vulnerability. But you’re still hanging on to Mr. Sensitive. Why?”

  “Because, so far, most of it has been good. Not easy. But good.”

  “You sure don’t scare easily.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “There’s gotta be more.”

  “There is.”

  A fish jumped then. And then another. She seemed surprised.

  “Fish,” I said, “the ocean’s full of them. Or was. John Cabot said the fish were so thick it slowed down his ships. Not quite that many left.”

  “What were they?”

  “Cod, probably. But forget the fish story. I said there’s gotta be more. And you said there is. So what is it?”

  “Commitment.”

  “There’s a word you don’t hear much of anymore, unless you’re about to put your wife or husband into the loony bin. What exactly do you mean?”

  “I decided that you are my experiment.”

  “That’s makes it sound like I’m being used.”

  “You are. It’s a commitment experiment. I’m trying to see if I can stay committed to you even if things get, let’s say, complicated.”

  “And they have.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And?”

  “So far, so good. Like I said, over and over, I would get close to someone and then suddenly just walk away. It would always be that easy for me.”

  “So, you still might do that to me?”

  “Might.”

  I thought about it. But I realized that Ramona was indeed the best thing that had ever sauntered into my life in lady shoes, so what the hell. “I can live with that. How am I doing so far? In the experiment?”