Broken Man on a Halifax Pier Read online

  I sucked in my breath, realizing that, unlike my father, there were never any moments in my life when I truly felt at peace. I had written my stories for the paper and I kept trying to write my fucking novel, something more meaningful, something that went beyond the day-to-day events and people I was writing about. But I could never complete it. I made friends, lost friends, fell into relationships with women and then just sort of gave up and abandoned them when I got distracted. And ended up alone.

  Ramona had given me some space and was waltzing around in the main room, humming a tune I didn’t recognize. But I quickly realized my little reverie was going on a bit too long. She poked her head into the bedroom and saw the hangdog look on me. “Maybe this was a mistake,” she said.

  We’d had that bizarre little roller coaster of a morning. She’d walked out of the fog into my life like in a dream. And I was about to blow it yet again. I thought I better say something. “Ernest Hemingway once said, ‘Never mistake motion for action.’ I suddenly just got this feeling that all my life I was just going through the motions.”

  “Hemingway was a bit of a macho turd and a fascist, if you ask me. And probably misogynistic to boot.”

  “Hey, you’re talking about one of my heroes.”

  “Sorry. I admit he wrote a few good books. But then he killed himself, right?”

  “He wanted a clean ending. He didn’t want to just fade.”

  “A shotgun was involved, right? Nothing much clean about that.”

  “Fuck Hemingway, then. But I got one more quote from the old dead bastard. ‘Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.’”

  “Tell that to Francis Macomber.”

  It only took a second to sink in. The short story. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

  “Hah,” I said. I had dozens of Hemingway quotes stuck in my head. But that was the only one with the word love in it. I hadn’t intended it to mean much of anything. But now that I’d said it, a switch threw in my mind. I decided to return to the here and now.

  “The way things have gone for me recently, I may end up having to live here. You mind helping me tidy things up a bit?”

  Ramona smiled again, pulled her long hair back and tied it into a ponytail with a rubber band. “Not at all. I’d love to. I love a good challenge. And this looks like it’s just you and me up against four decades of dust.”

  The hair thing changed her. No longer the movie star, no longer the attractive exotic woman on the pier. More ordinary but still lovely. “Well’s out back,” I said. “I’ll go fetch us a pail of water.”

  “Sure thing, Jack.”

  “Jack?”

  “Jack and Jill. And you used the word fetch.”

  7

  And so our day became one of domesticity. Rural coastal domesticity, if you wanted to be accurate. Me and a woman who once kissed Tom Hanks. Go figure. But she dove right into it. Maybe actors could do that. Switch roles. Switch lives. Maybe that’s why she had so many relationships. Switch on, switch off. I too had gone through a life of serial monogamy, but I recall a degree of suffering, well, agony to be honest, at the end of each and every relationship. In that regard, I think we were different.

  We mopped and dusted and wiped for over an hour. There were dead bugs, dead mice, one dead rat. Ramona had found the offensive carcass. Actually, it was just the bones; the creature must have been dead for decades.

  “There seems to be a lot of dead animals in our relationship,” she said matter-of-factly. Yeah, she used that word. Relationship.

  I decided not to flip it back to her in any clever way. Instead, I said, “I’ll try to turn that around.”

  As we continued to clean, I was in a bit of a muddle. I really didn’t have a clue as to how the day would play out. Why had she been willing to come with me? Why had she run off and then come back? What was she expecting and what was I supposed to do? We’d had breakfast, gone for a drive, she watched me kill a deer, then drove off, came back, then coffee, now we were here. Scrubbing floors and tossing dead mice out the door.

  “Okay,” she said, lifting a shredded, ragged curtain from a window. It had been made from an old feed bag. As she held it up, it simply disintegrated in her hands. She seemed fascinated by this. “So, I still need a few more pieces of the puzzle. Your puzzle. You’re fifty-five. You think your life sucks. You left home when you were young and apparently never looked back. Wanted to be an Ernest Hemingway reporter type. But no war, right?”

  “No war. Never left the province. Wrote about provincial politics, entertainment, car accidents, floods … oh, and stories about odd folks.”

  “How odd?”

  “Man with the largest collection of beer cans in the country, woman who wrote a book about clothesline etiquette, another who taught her dog to play piano. That sort of thing.”

  “Sounds like a grand life to me. Get to meet all kinds of people.”

  “All kinds.”

  “I need more. You asked me about relationships, so now I ask you. What about the women? Or were they maybe not all women?” She was still studying the curtain that was falling apart in her hands.

  “Yes, they were all women.”

  “How many?”

  “I never counted.”

  “Not fair. I had to come up with a number.”

  I shrugged, studied the dirty water in my bucket. “How do you know where to draw the line as to which ones could be called serious and which ones involved just hanging out, fooling around?”

  “Oh, come on. You can do better than that. I drew the line. I knew. I gave you a number.”

  “I’d have to think about it before I could answer.”

  “Thinking is like cheating. Okay, no number. Just begin at the beginning.”

  No way was I going to spend my day working through the tale of my romantic affairs. But I had to give her something.

  “High school,” I said. “Beth Ann LaPierre. We’d been boyfriend and girlfriend when we were younger, then moved on. Then fell back together in our last year of high school.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. Story, please.”

  “I think she was the real thing. I’d had so-called girlfriends before, but she was the one. I could tell that she was really in love with me.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “The look she gave me whenever we were together.”

  “It’s great, isn’t it? That look, I mean.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen it since. Once girls are out of high school, I don’t think they use that look anymore. Makes them too vulnerable or something.”

  “But did you have that look for Beth Ann?”

  “It wasn’t quite the same.”

  “Schmuck. Typical male.”

  “No. I liked her a lot. Maybe I loved her because she loved me.”

  “That can work. It’s not the worst basis for a romance.”

  “But …”

  “Here it comes.”

  “But I had to get out of here. I had this plan.”

  “Your Hemingway dream?”

  “Something like that. Serious newspaper reporter writing about big international stories. Maybe publish a novel or two.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know about the novels.”

  I didn’t want to go there.

  “I shouldn’t have left. Or I should have taken her with me. I was eighteen. She was seventeen. I went off to university and my life had freedom written all over it.”

  “So you ran?”

  “No. I walked.”

  “Still, you left someone who was in love with you.”

  “Well, I sure wasn’t ready to settle down.”

  “But she was?”

  Now I felt trapped. “Hey, I was eighteen. I wasn’t ready for all that.”

  “What happened to Beth Ann? You broke her heart and then what?”

  “We wrote letters to each other for a while. Real letters. She kept asking me when I was coming back to see her. I said I would. Soon. But
I didn’t. I’m not a hundred percent sure why. Then she stopped writing. Life went on.”

  Ramona gave me a hard look. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Where is she now?”

  “I think she’s still here. We don’t stay in touch. But I know she married a guy I went to high school with. Joe Myatt. A fisherman like his father, like my father.”

  “Happily ever after?”

  “I think so. Maybe.” Now I felt guilty. About Beth Ann and how I had acted. I hadn’t thought about her in a long while. And I wasn’t about to continue on with the story about my other relationships, I knew that. I’d said enough. Fortunately, there was a knock on the door.

  A head appeared in the doorway. An old guy. Really old. Reddish puffy face, black ball cap, ZZ Top salt-and-pepper beard. “I don’t believe it,” he said, looking straight at me, ignoring Ramona.

  The years flooded back. “Rolf?”

  “Chisel?”

  “God, no one has called me that in a hell of a long time.”

  Rolf now gave Ramona the once-over. “You finally found the right one, did ya?”

  “Not exactly like that. But this is Ramona. Ramona, Rolf. Old friend of the family. Rolf owns the shack next door.”

  “Old is right. I wake up most mornings and have to pinch myself to see if I’m still alive. Even then I can’t tell for sure until the coffee kicks in.”

  Old Rolf looked plenty alive to me. Damn, it was good to see the old buzzard. “How’s Evelyn?” I asked.

  Rolf dipped his head and tapped his chest. “She passed. It was a while back.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “The way it goes. I’d probably be dead too, but the doctor says I have one hell of a stubborn heart. Had pneumonia three times. They say it’s the old man’s friend, a blessing. Can’t say I found it that kind. More than happy when it decided to pick on someone else. So, what in the name of hell brings you back?”

  “Hard to explain. You might say I’m semi-retired.”

  “You seem kind of young for that.”

  “I don’t feel so young.”

  “Pretty fancy car out there. Must have done okay for yourself.”

  Down there people often judged you by what you were driving. Most folks drove old trucks.

  I nodded at Ramona. “Not mine. Hers.”

  Rolf winked at Ramona. He’d always been a winker. “Come down to see how the other half lives?” he asked, his eyes twinkling.

  “I love it here,” she said. “Any real estate available?”

  “Hell, yeah. A lot of folks have picked up and moved out. Not as much fishing anymore and not much to keep young people here.”

  Ramona nodded. I could tell she liked Rolf immensely. Everybody always liked Rolf and his spirit. He had been my father’s best friend. They both had boats back in the day, both went to sea together each morning. I almost thought Rolf was going to do himself in when my father disappeared.

  “What are you doing here, anyway, Chisel? I’m not trying to pry. It’s just been so long and I haven’t seen you down here. Not once. Not once since …”

  I was hoping he wouldn’t say it. And he didn’t.

  “Shoot, Rolf. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “Pilgrimage,” Ramona said. “It’s a kind of personal pilgrimage, I think.”

  Rolf looked puzzled. He probably didn’t know many people who went on pilgrimages. He nodded, puffed a little air out of his mouth, coughed once. “Whelp,” he said. “You arrived safe and sound in Mecca. I got a big extension cord I can run over from my place. Give you lovebirds some electricity in case you want to listen to music or whatever.”

  I wanted to tell him not to bother, that we’d probably only be around for today and gone by late afternoon. But he had already turned and waved a hand, indicating that his mind was fixed on it and there was no changing it. And then he stopped, turned around, looked at Ramona again and then at me.

  “Oh, and Chisel. About the boat. Your father’s boat. I kept it up. I’ve leased her out a few times over the years so I could keep it in shape. But it’s still down the wharf. It’s yours, I believe. I always hoped you’d come back.” And he was gone.

  8

  Ramona looked at me. “You have a boat?”

  “That’s news to me. If it was my father’s boat, that must be one very old vessel.”

  “You gonna take me out to sea?”

  “I haven’t driven a boat since I was a teenager. We’d have to be crazy.”

  “We are,” she said. “We are crazy. Besides. Boats, cars, bicycles. Once you learn you never really forget, right? This one have an engine or do you have to row?”

  I laughed, realizing she had envisioned something like a little rowboat or a dory. “This one has an engine. Or it did, anyway. A very old engine. I’ll look it over. If it seems safe, maybe we can go out.”

  “Maybe. That’s all I get is a maybe. I still don’t get it. You didn’t know about the boat all these years?”

  I shrugged. Maybe I knew about it, but I just didn’t think about it. After I left, I had really shut down pretty much all of my thinking about this place. In truth, I had just walked away and never looked back. Well, almost never. Some things about my life back in Stewart Harbour haunted me when I least expected it.

  “What about that brother you mentioned? How come he didn’t take over the fishing?”

  “Pete was like me. He left. Went out west. Ended up at Fort McMurray, working in the tar sands. Married a girl out there. Neither one of us wanted to be a goddamned fisherman.”

  “You stay in touch with him?”

  “Yeah. We send each other a Christmas card unfailingly each December.”

  “Christ, you’re a hard one.”

  “Guess there’s some things I’m not good at.”

  “I had a brother once,” she said, looking down at the worn pine floorboards.

  The “once” part threw me. I thought maybe I should just say nothing. Whatever “once” meant, it wasn’t going to be good. But she was looking at me, waiting for me to ask. “What happened?”

  It looked like she was about to explain but she stopped herself. “Let’s save that for another time.”

  “Sure.” We were getting to know each other, one story at a time. The more stories, the more we were becoming linked in that most human of ways. I couldn’t help wondering how far this was going to go. Who would be the first to draw the line? To stop whatever was starting.

  Rolf was banging at the loose pane in one of the windows now, holding up the end of an extension cord. I smiled, lifted the window sash, and he slipped it through. “You got power now,” he said. “Now you can stay the night.”

  I had no intention of staying the night and I’m sure Ramona didn’t. But standing there in the room that was both kitchen and living room, the sunlight spilling in through the open door, I suddenly wished that this little interlude in my otherwise dismal and dim existence could stretch out for a very long time. Lost in thought, I must have had a stunned look on my face.

  “Now what?” Ramona asked. “What do people do when they get to the destination of their pilgrimage?”

  “Pray maybe.”

  “Okay. Who do we pray to?”

  It’d been a long time since I prayed, a long time since I believed in praying. My upbringing had not been very religious. Church was an Easter and Christmas thing. My father was a staunch pragmatist but never would have used that word to define himself. My mother seemed to have her own quiet spiritual sentiments but never spoke about it much. Yeah, who do we pray to?

  I saw an old radio sitting on the counter. Yellow, cracked plastic housing. Shortwave, AM/FM. My father used to tune it in to the marine weather forecast. I could almost hear it in my mind. Forchu. Banquereau. East Scotian Slope. Laurentian Fan. Wind and tide and sea state. I could almost feel the static in the air. Who to pray to? “Let’s pray to the god of sex and drums and rock ’n’ roll,” I said, quoting the lyrics of an old Meatloaf song I remembered
from high school. Then I plugged in the radio and turned the FM dial until I found an oldies station. The song was “Message in a Bottle” by The Police. It seemed somehow fitting.

  Ramona started swaying to the tinny music. I was afraid she was going to try to dance with me and I knew that would be a disaster. I couldn’t dance. Instead, she turned the radio down. “Sorry, I don’t mean to ruin such a pious moment but I have to pee again. All that coffee. Where’s the, um, washroom?”

  I pointed out the big picture window in the bedroom. The old outhouse was still standing. No doubt Rolf had rescued it after a storm or two. But it was still upright and it still had a door. “You got to be kidding,” she said.

  “My father was not big on plumbing,” I said. “He was kind of old school in that way.”

  Ramona looked a little flustered, even a little perturbed as she walked past me and out the door. I wondered if that was it. Maybe the honeymoon was over.

  But when she returned, she had snapped back into her old witty, vivacious self. “Cute spiders out there. Probably had the place all to themselves for quite a while.” Then she rubbed her hands together. “Enough housecleaning. The place looks great. Let’s go get some lunch.”

  “I’m buying,” I said, instinctively.

  “You’re broke, idiot.”

  “Oh yeah. I guess you’re buying. There’s a little café not far off back on the mainland.”

  “No. I have a better idea. Let’s get supplies.” She pointed to the old two-burner hotplate on the counter. “Buy something to cook, maybe a pot and a frying pan. I’ll make you a home-cooked meal. None of that restaurant shit.”

  “I didn’t take you as the cooking type, being a movie star and all that. I figured you had people who cooked for you, cleaned your house and pool, did landscaping.”