Broken Man on a Halifax Pier Read online

  “No, I really am. Just barely made the rent. I too invested wisely and I had a little nest egg for a rainy day, to mix metaphors. But then, just before the newspaper business folded up and left town, I was infected with philanthropy. I was patting myself on the back, thinking I had it so good and others had it so bad that I should try to help. It did not go well.”

  “Not everyone can handle being a philanthropist. What happened?”

  “Gus, an editor at the paper, had this twenty-three-year-old son, Benjamin. A good kid. I’d known him most of my life. He’d gone through a wild phase but seemed to have settled down. We had a couple of heart-to-heart talks and I was telling him he needed to get out of Nova Scotia, go find some adventure, but also do some good. Something meaningful. Those were my exact words.”

  “So you were a bit of an idealist.”

  “I talked the talk, but didn’t usually ever walk the walk. The pen is mightier than the sword and all that.”

  “And?”

  “And then another earthquake hit Haiti. Benji came to me and said, ‘This is it. I’m going down to help. Gonna raise some money, go down there, help out in any way I can. Just wing it. Do it on my own and find allies along the way.’”

  “How much did you give him?”

  “Forty thousand. My entire savings. I was a believer.”

  No questions, just a sad, pained look.

  “Guess what? He never made it to Haiti. Came close but no cigar.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He decided instead to go to the other half of the island — the Dominican Republic. He and a buddy. They went from one resort to another. Forty thousand didn’t last all that long. Gus said he was really sorry for his stupid, selfish son; that he’d try to make it up to me. But then the paper was kaput and that was that. I’ll accept your pity now.”

  “I’m sorry, Charles. That was a terrible thing.”

  “It’s okay, Ramona. I guess I deserved it,” I said, realizing that we had both just said each other’s name like lines from a cheesy script. “I’m a bad judge of character, I guess, novice at human nature.”

  Another bout of silence put us back into our places. The waiter, an earnest young man, came up and said that he recognized Ramona and knew who she was. Smiling at her, he poured her some more coffee while completely ignoring me. He flattered her with an adoring look and added, “I admire your work.”

  As he shuffled off, I said, “You have a fan club or what?”

  She blushed. “Nothing like that. A few years back, some pimply faced teenage boy found a clip from one of my early films. Some worthless piece of trash I acted in in my first year in Hollywood. It had one bedroom nude scene I foolishly agreed to do. It resurfaced on the internet — just that one scene, not the whole film. I started getting Facebook messages from teenage boys. Just what a woman of fifty needs, right?”

  “Fifty? You said fifty.”

  “It’s a number. Half of one hundred. Happens to be my age.”

  “You can’t be fifty.”

  “They could have made a mistake on my birth certificate but I do believe I am.”

  “You look too young.”

  “I’ll accept the compliment. Thank you, sir. You know what they say. Fifty is the new forty. But then forty is the new thirty, etc., etc. Where do you place yourself on the whole chronology issue?”

  “Five years your senior, schoolgirl. Fifty-five years before the mast. Too old to be young, too young to be old. Forced into an early retirement and pondering each day what will come next.”

  Breakfast was over. We’d set out the portraits of our lives, the bare bones, mostly fragments, but we’d both been brave or foolish enough to reveal things personal and important. Pessimist that I was, I expected our little bubble to burst. That momentary friendship, that flirtation, that chance encounter, it had a certain inevitable ending.

  Or did it?

  “I like a man with no money and loads of time on his hands,” she offered.

  That caught me off guard. “Oh, and why is that?”

  “Because I can probably boss him around. C’mon, we’re going for a drive.”

  3

  She had the car. Mine was sitting in the parking lot of my building, inspection three months overdue, same with registration and, of course, the insurance had run out. But then she’d already said she liked a man with no money. Some people might call that destiny.

  Her Lexus was parked along Lower Water Street. It was black. She unlocked it from half a block away and I saw the lights flash. “Here,” she said, tossing me the keys. “You can drive, right?”

  “It’s been a while,” I said. “But I think I remember. You have to stay on the right-hand side of the road, yeah?”

  “It’s up to you,” she said.

  Sitting down behind the wheel of that beauty made me take a deep breath. I inhaled the new car smell and it suddenly occurred to me that I might be dreaming. But then my dreams were never good, and especially never that good. Ramona flipped the sun visor down and inspected herself in the mirror. “Just checking to see if that’s really me sitting in my car with a strange man I found on a pier.”

  “Strange. You think I’m strange?”

  “Strange and kind of cute.”

  I could not suppress a smile. Where had this woman come from? “Where to?” I asked as I fired up the engine.

  “You choose. Someplace rural.”

  “How much time do you have?”

  “All the time in the world.”

  Yeah, she really said that.

  Well, the someplace rural tweaked. It had been a while since I’d been back there. Back home. At least the fragments that were left of it. Stewart Harbour, way down on the Eastern Shore. The old homestead was gone, but my father’s fish shack out on the water was still there, unused, locked up, empty except for all the dusty memories stored inside. It was abandoned but not forgotten.

  “I want to take you to this place. It’s a kind of pilgrimage. You ever been on a pilgrimage before?”

  “Well, yes, I have. I walked two days on the El Camino de Santiago in Spain.”

  “Was that with Shirley MacLaine?”

  “No, it was with my boyfriend.”

  “So you have gone out with men before?”

  “Gone out with them, lived with them, fell in love with some. It always ended the same way.”

  “And what way was that?”

  “I walked away. Even in Spain. That was Alexander. I just couldn’t take it anymore. So one morning I woke up in the hostel, grabbed my sleeping bag, and caught the first plane home.”

  “Ouch.”

  “He deserved it.”

  “I’m sure he did. Couldn’t have been your fault.”

  “No. It probably was my fault.”

  “You marry any of those chaps?”

  “Not a one. Not the marrying type, I guess. You?”

  I was pulling onto the MacKay Bridge just then. Traffic was light. The sun was coming out. A light north wind was chasing away the clouds. We were headed east. I was happier than I’d been in a long while.

  “Me? Married. I came close. But no one would have me. Too messy. Too disorganized. Too caught up in my own ego.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had an ego.”

  “Well, I used to have one. Not anymore. I don’t hold myself in particularly high esteem.”

  “They say that happens when a man loses his job.”

  “Well, I guess I’m a textbook case. You like fish?”

  “Fish?”

  “There might be fish where we’re going.”

  “Ah. The mystery thickens.”

  She sat back after that and we drove on in silence. Not the uncomfortable kind of silence. The good kind. It felt good to be driving. It felt even better to not be alone. Almost every day the previous month, I had woken up feeling like there was a wall in front of me. A high, thick, ugly wall. Now, instead, there was a door. An open door. And I had already walked through it.
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  The suburbs of Dartmouth gave way to a burned-out patch of forest along the 107 near Lake Echo. It was an ugly scar on the land from a forest fire that had swept through there a few years ago. But in the middle of the charred trees stood two giant, porcelain-white wind turbines. To me they were like monuments of hope in a wasteland of despair. As we drove on, she still never asked me where we were going.

  The big highway gave out near Musquodoboit Harbour and we were back on the old Highway 7. Up ahead I saw cars pulled over on the side of the road, some with their flashers on. A small circle of men and women were standing in the middle of the road and an old guy in a flannel jacket was waving for me to slow down and stop. I pulled the Lexus over to the side. Ramona gave me a look that told me the spell had been broken.

  We got out and walked toward the others. In the middle of the road was an injured deer half-kneeling, trying to stand, then falling back down.

  “I didn’t see it,” a man in a business suit was saying. “I would have slammed on my brakes. But it was just there. All of a sudden.”

  People nodded.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” a largish woman said.

  We’d all hit some creature at one point or another. A bird flies into your windshield, a squirrel dives under your tires. You pray you never hit somebody’s dog or cat. Or kid. The deer looked pretty bad.

  “Three,” someone said. “Three broken legs, for sure. Most likely serious internal injuries.”

  An RCMP car pulled up then. Lights flashing but no siren. A young Mountie, not much more than a teenager it seemed, got out and walked toward us. He looked at the deer, looked at us, then walked back toward his car. He was talking on his radio, asking someone back at headquarters what he should do. I felt bad for the kid. I already knew what they were telling him to do back at the cop shop.

  I thought about getting Ramona back in the car and just turning around, driving away, back toward town — anywhere to get us the hell out of there. But there was an inevitability to the scene and we both must have felt a strange responsibility to stay and see it through.

  I’d interviewed wildlife rescue people before and even spent some time helping out. I knew what you could do to help and what you couldn’t do. I watched the nervous young Mountie unsnap the strap over his revolver and click off the safety.

  “Everybody over to this side of the road, please,” he said, motioning us away from the deer that tried to stand again, only to fall back on its side, panting heavily.

  The Mountie held out his gun, his hand shaking, then wiped his forehead with his other hand.

  “It’s okay,” the old guy in the flannel shirt said. “It’s what you gotta do. We all understand.”

  He was right, of course. There was not a word of protest. Nonetheless, it was a mighty sorry scene.

  The seconds stretched out. The large woman put her hand over her eyes. Someone sniffled. The scene stretched out way too long. Then he lowered the gun. He couldn’t do it.

  Why I walked up to him, I’m not sure. It was more like something my own father would have done, not me. Mr. Responsibility. Do the right thing, even when you hate doing it.

  I held out my hand to the young man.

  Amazingly, he handed me the gun, probably breaking a dozen or more of the rules and regs he’d been trained to follow. I tried not to look at Ramona.

  I took two steps forward, studied the panting injured deer. If you’ve ever looked directly into the dark, beautiful eyes of a deer, you know what that’s like.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Then fired two bullets into his head. The sound of the blasts drew gasps from the people watching. But it was the burnt smell of the gunpowder lingering in the air that gave the whole scene a surreal feeling.

  Ramona’s eyes were wide as she stared at me. The large woman was crying into her husband’s shirt. I handed the gun back to the Mountie. He nodded, flicked the safety on it, put it away. “I’ll call Department of Natural Resources to come clean up,” he said as the old guy in the flannel shirt and another man dragged the carcass to the side of the road.

  The Mountie got back in his car and reported back to his people. Others were getting back in their vehicles and starting up.

  Ramona was staring at me. I couldn’t read the look. Shock. Disbelief. Anger.

  Disgust.

  I held out her keys. She grabbed them, walked back to her car.

  With some difficulty, she made a U-turn and sped off back toward Halifax.

  The Mountie drove off as did the others. No one looked at me. Soon enough, they were all gone and I was all alone. I sat down alongside the fallen animal by the side of the road. I stroked the fur on his flank. I could feel the body was still warm.

  It looked like I had plenty of time to reflect on my bad decision.

  4

  I will admit freely to anyone willing to listen that I have a history of making bad decisions when it comes to women. I don’t mean that I picked the wrong women, although that did sometimes happen. I mean that I would often, well, almost always, end up saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, or simply screwing up what might otherwise have been a fine relationship. I had started to tell myself I just wasn’t cut out for any kind of relationship. Nothing long term. No way. Not me. Not in the cards.

  But that was a first. Ditched by the side of the road east of Musquodoboit Harbour, having shot an ailing animal. What was it she thought of me as I discharged the Mountie’s firearm? Why the fuck did I take it upon myself to do that in front of her, anyway? Why couldn’t I just have let the poor animal suffer? Walk away. Drive away. Leave the schoolboy Mountie to figure things out on his own.

  Fuck it.

  Guns. I always hated guns. My father had guns around the house — a couple of handguns that he liked to sit with and clean while he watched television. One .22 rifle that he walked around with during hunting season, although I can’t say I remember him ever coming home with anything he killed. And a shotgun that had belonged to his father that he used to scare teenagers who would drive out to the fish shacks to party on a weekend night. He was an angry man at times, a kind man at others. But he never shot anybody or anything — other than some tin cans once in a while, a carton of sour milk, and, just once, an old mattress that someone had dumped at the end of the road.

  But I’d been around guns, had handled them on those nights when my father cleaned them, as my mother clucked her disdain over her husband allowing his son to play with guns. That’s partly why, I suppose, I felt a sense of duty in helping the Mountie get the job done.

  But that was enough pondering about my bad decision. I stood up and brushed the dirt off my pants, thinking how appropriate it was that cars just kept driving past me with passengers giving me dirty looks. There I was, a man sitting by a dead deer on the side of the road, and no one slowed down, no one stopped to see if I was okay. Folks just kept driving past. Everyone in their own little bubble of opinion or indifference.

  I couldn’t quite decide which direction to walk. East toward Stewart Harbour or back toward Halifax.

  Right about then, a DNR truck pulled over and two burly men in coveralls got out. It seemed they had been arguing about something. “He should have been thrown out of the game,” the bearded one said. “No one should treat Crosby like that. No one.”

  “The kid deserved it,” the other one said. “He needed to be knocked down a notch or two.”

  “The hell he did,” Beard said as he walked toward me, studying me, trying to figure out my relationship to the dead animal. He looked at the deer, then at me, spit something on the ground off to the side of the road and said, “How long ago did he meet his maker?”

  I shrugged. “Twenty minutes, maybe.”

  Beard grunted. “All righty. Venison steak it is, then. Skid, help me load this sucker into the back of the truck.”

  Skid reluctantly ambled over and the two of them dragged the deer and lifted it into the back of the pickup. They started to get back into the truck. All
in a day’s work, I reckoned.

  I walked over to the truck as Beard was about to start the engine. “You wouldn’t be willing to give me a ride?” I asked.

  Beard looked at me like I’d just asked if I could sleep with his wife. “We gotta deliver this to Stewiacke.”

  “Maybe then just a lift back to Musquodoboit Harbour?”

  “We got all these tools up here. Not much room.” All I saw was a hammer on the seat between the two of them. “But you can ride in the back if you want.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  They dropped me off at the intersection by the RCMP headquarters and turned inland toward Stewiacke. I decided I was already on my way back to Halifax and that would be that. Go back to my crappy apartment and go to sleep. Pretend none of this had happened. I realized I didn’t have the courage to keep going east, all the way down the Shore to revisit the little fishing shack, all that remained of my past down that way. It would just be too depressing.

  I looked around. Across the street, I watched a teenage boy painting a fish and chips restaurant. He wasn’t doing a very good job, splashing white paint on the windows and just slopping it on thick and drippy. I started walking past the old train parked and rusting there by the side of the road for tourists. It looked tired and neglected — I could relate to that. No dignity in disuse, I was thinking. I stuck out my thumb, but it turned out I was invisible to the drivers passing me. So, I kept walking. I couldn’t get Ramona out of my mind. And I couldn’t help thinking how one minute you can be on top of the world and the next minute, you’re back in the doghouse.

  After a bit, I gave up with the thumb altogether and resigned myself to possibly walking all the way back to Halifax, or maybe at least to the Porters Lake Superstore, where I might be able to catch a bus. But then I realized, of course, I might not even have enough change in my pocket to pay for a bus. If that was the case, I’d have to panhandle. It just kept getting better and better.

  That’s when an old Honda passed me by and then pulled over onto the shoulder. A young man got out. Without his uniform, it took me a moment to recognize him, but then I realized that he was the young Mountie from the roadside. He waved. I waved back as I approached him.