Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  “Crazy. But here. Keep mine. Hold it up high in the air or climb a tree or something. Gotta be a signal somewhere around here.”

  “You really gotta go?” I could feel her slipping away. My own cocky and somewhat confident self from yesterday had fled the scene this morning. Mopey man in the aftermath morning. Where was my day-after pill?

  Ramona, on the other hand, was back to looking like the movie star she had once hoped to be. I wondered, with my newly deflated self-esteem, how I could ever have thought she’d want to have a fling with me, let alone a relationship.

  “Charles,” she said, taking my chin in her hand and looking me directly in the eyes. “I’ll be back. Stop trying to read anything into this.” But then she added something that really threw me off. “Some of us have responsibilities, okay? Do you know what happened to my keys?”

  She got a little flustered then and flitted around the little cabin, looking for the keys until I held them out to her. They’d been in my pants pocket. I’d been the one driving the car.

  And then she took her cellphone out of her purse, set it on the table. “I’ve got another one in the car. I thought I had lost this one, but later I found it. I’ll call you later. Or you call me. Number’s in the phone. Thanks for a great day yesterday.” And she kissed me in the middle of my forehead and walked out the door. I sat there stunned as I listened to the car start, the tires churning on the loose stones of the road. And she was gone.

  12

  Alone again. A little dazed. More than a little confused. Broken man? Not quite. What would the headline read? “Man Watches Woman Leave. Picks Up Pieces of Himself.” “Charles: The Human Rubik’s Cube.” “Enigma Man Returns to Boyhood Home. Ponders Life. Wonders About Mystery Woman.” Etc.

  I walked out the door and headed toward the water. The harbour was gleaming in morning sunlight. The wharf looked empty. The fishermen all at sea on a grand morning like this. I wondered how many of these so-called fishermen’s reserves were left in Nova Scotia. It was truly an odd sort of place. Almost no one actually lived out there in the shacks, except for maybe a couple of the fishermen whose wives had kicked them out of the house. And Rolf, of course, who said he’d never survive on the mainland. But most of the men lived a few miles inland, in real houses with real yards and real families, drove their trucks to the wharf and their boats; maybe occasionally they might sleep out in their shacks to get an early start or spend the night having a roaring party, the likes of which you didn’t want to chance on the mainland.

  Life on the land was tenuous. Hurricanes had swept through there, waves right up under the sheds, even floated some of them around. No one actually owned the property their building was on but they could still hand it down to their kids. And it wasn’t just men anymore. I’d written articles about women in the fishing business. Fisherwomen. No, actually they just wanted to be referred to as fishers. Like Ramona. Not an actress, she’d said, but an actor.

  The whole crooked finger of a peninsula, this ridiculously narrow thread of land, was lashed to the mainland by a man-made causeway that would be nearly underwater in a seasonally high tide. The truth of the matter, I admitted to myself, was that global warming and annually higher tides and heavier storms would wash everything away sooner or later. There was no doubting it. Meanwhile, life went on out there, much the same today as it had in my childhood. Fishers out to sea before the sun comes up, back by late morning or noon.

  I sat on the rocks by the shore and let my mind wander back in time; eventually it just wandered off to the day before. To Ramona. Had she truly disappeared from my life as suddenly as she’d appeared out of the fog there in Halifax? Is that the way women did it these days? Nah. She wouldn’t have left her cellphone even if she did have more than one. Leaving a cellphone was a kind of commitment, I tried to convince myself. I wondered if I should call her. Hell no, man, a voice in my head said. Too needy. Women don’t want a man who’s too needy.

  I looked out to sea and saw two Cape Islanders headed back to port. A morning like this, sunrise at sea, would have been grand and dramatic. Thoughts were now swirling in my morning brain like artistic gulls, feathery paintbrushes against the sky.

  What I’d lost over the years of working for a newspaper — chasing stories, interviewing politicians and union leaders and all the rest — was the ability to have meditative moments like this. It just didn’t seem to fit the lifestyle. So, for decades I’d more or less given up on that mode of thinking. No pondering, no real reflection. Just doing. Working. Writing. Socializing at night in bars, even though it was never my thing. It’s what a single man in the city does. Even long after he realizes that hanging out in pubs and meeting new women night after night is the most depressing of routines.

  How come I could never step out of myself for all those years, those decades, and see that life was about something else?

  The wind was coming up off the water now, a cool breeze out of the south, bringing with it the smell of the open sea. I watched as those two boats pulled up to the wharf, their captains tying them up, the gulls arriving to spiral above, waiting for unwanted parts of the gutted fish. I couldn’t quite see the Sheer Delight, but I knew it was docked there, waiting for me.

  I was falling into a kind of a trance, I guess. Had to stand back up, shake my head. I turned to go back inside.

  Worn wood floors, unpainted walls, the black and rusting woodstove, the sink, the little bedroom where Ramona and I had slept. Did I really wake in the middle of the night to find her arm around me? Or did I make that up?

  I’d left the door open, letting the morning sun spill in and paint the floorboards with solar radiance. Welcome home, the walls seemed to say. We knew you’d find your way back here one day. I walked inside.

  I heard footsteps first, then someone was blocking the sun in the doorway. “Knock, knock,” a man’s voice said. All I could see at first was a silhouette. But he was holding something in his hands. What the hell?

  I shifted toward the side of the room and discovered that it was a youngish, heavy-built man holding aloft two live lobsters. “Thought I’d stop by and see who the city boy was,” he said. He had a scruffy beard, long shaggy hair that stuck out from under a Harley-Davidson cap. He wore a dirty flannel jacket and heavy workboots.

  “Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”

  He nodded toward one and then the other lobster. Their claws were working the air. “Wondering if you’d care to buy these two beauties here. Couldn’t get anything more fresh. These guys were scuttling around on the sea floor just an hour ago. Now they’re here wondering what the fuck? Bet you never tasted lobster this fresh.”

  “Probably not,” I said, though I had of course. You couldn’t grow up there without eating so much freshly caught lobster that you became sick of it.

  “So what do you think? Ten bucks for the both of them.”

  “You catch them?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “I bartered.”

  “What did you barter?”

  He just shrugged. It was then I noticed the tattoo on his neck. Some kind of death mask. But then who didn’t have some grotesque tattoo these days? No big deal. No Russian mobster. Just a hangashore with a couple of squirmy lobsters.

  “C’mon, man, what do you say? Ten bucks for the two of them.”

  I laughed. “Funny thing is, I don’t have any money.”

  He was walking around the room now. I hadn’t exactly invited him in but then fish shacks were pretty much public terrain to anyone in the community. He must have spied the little pile of bills on the table at the same time I did.

  I didn’t get it at first. Then it sunk in. Ramona had left me money.

  “Jesus,” I said out loud, picking up the cash. Three twenties and a ten. “‘Up on Cripple Creek.’”

  He kind of snorted. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, nothing. An old seventies song I remember. About a woman. A woman who takes care of her man.”

  “Sounds like my kind of woman.
”

  I handed him the ten and set the rest of the bills back down on the table.

  He placed the lobsters down on the floor, tucked the bill in his top pocket. “They’re all yours.”

  The lobsters started crawling around the room. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do with them.

  “You staying around for a while?” the guy asked.

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “Need a little something to get you through the day? Or night?”

  “Not sure what you mean.”

  “C’mon, man. Everybody needs a little something.” He held out a small plastic bag with some white powder in it. Another with some pills. Lucky me. I’d just bought two lobsters from the local drug dealer.

  “Not just now,” I said. “I’m just settling in.”

  He shook his head. “Understood. Anyway, I’ll let you be. I’m Brody by the way.”

  “Charles,” I said.

  “Like the prince, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, Prince Charles. Nice to make your acquaintance. You need anything, just ask around for me. I’m usually not far.”

  Brody left and the room was suddenly quiet except for the scuttling of the two lobsters scratching away at the floorboards. What the hell to do with them?

  It wasn’t like I was opposed to eating lobster. But I wasn’t about to boil their sorry asses. And I felt kind of bad for them. They seemed so sad, so lost, so out of their element that I totally identified with this pair of crustaceans. I gingerly picked them up, gripping their backs as the claws flayed the air. The memory of being pinched by a big bugger of a lobster came back.

  When I had a decent grip on both, I walked them outside and down to the edge of the water. “Pass it on,” I said to them as I carefully set them down on the pebbly bottom of the shallow water. The water felt cool and soothing. They immediately started poking their way along the bottom into the deeper water. T.S. fucking Eliot, I thought. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” or whatever it was.

  I stayed down on my haunches watching the ripples on the water well after the creatures were gone from my sight.

  When I stood up, I could see that I had an audience on the wharf. Five fishermen had seen me deliver the lobsters back to the sea. The look on all their faces was the same: Who is that crazy fuck and where did he come from?

  When I turned around, I saw Rolf standing there. “I get it,” he said. “I totally get it. Lobster rights activist, right? Bunch of Swedish women came over here a couple of years ago, started protesting. Beautiful women, the whole lot of them. But they hated our guts. Said we all killed things because we had tiny dicks or something like that. They got to you, didn’t they?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Where’s the missus?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Had to go to town,” I said.

  “She coming back?”

  “I sure as hell hope so.”

  Rolf turned to go. “Let me know if you need anything,” he said yet again. “And let me know when you want to take the boat out.” Rolf had it fixed in his mind that I was going to take the Sheer Delight out to sea.

  When I walked back into the shack I noticed the three twenties that I’d left on the table were gone. So much for living in a community where no one locks their doors.

  13

  I think that missing sixty dollars bothered me almost as much as the forty thousand I had given to that young man who was supposed to go help out in Haiti. I stewed on it for a bit. Decided to let it go. Then stewed some more and decided to do something about it.

  That’s when I noticed there was a text message on Ramona’s phone.

  Charles, missing you already. Will see you later today. I’ll bring supplies.

  Love Ramona

  Yeah, she used the word love. Hmmm. Just a word, right? Way to end a message.

  I barely knew how to send a text message. But I fiddled with it until I could.

  Ramona, life’s just not quite the same here without you. Hurry home.

  Love Charles

  I guess if I said those words to her out loud I would have made it sound facetious, like a line from a movie. But there, I did it. And I found myself staring at the phone, waiting to see how she’d respond. But there was nothing.

  So I sat down at the bare wood table and stared off into space. A flood of memories poured over me. My mother and father and long-distance brother. Childhood memories. Charles Howard, the boy who just packed up one day and went to town and never came back until he was fifty-five years old. What kind of person does that?

  The same kind of guy who never maintained a long-term relationship. The same kind of guy who can’t finish the novel he started over ten years ago. Walk-away Charlie. I thought of myself as Charlie when I wanted to poke fun at myself, when I saw myself as a bit of a clown, a laughable fuck-up, a twenty-first-century male buffoon. That’s when I slammed my fist on the table. That bastard with the lobsters. How dare he?

  Rolf was mending a fishing net in front of his shack when I walked back out. And he was smoking a pipe. “Jesus, Rolf, you doing that for the tourists? The province pay you to look like that?”

  “Like what?” he shot back.

  “Like an old weathered fisherman mending a net. Like a postcard from the nineteenth century.”

  “Must be the pants,” he said. “Or the shirt. Both pretty old, worn ’em for a few years. Pretty authentic looking, you say?”

  “And the beard. How long you been growing that beard?”

  “Since I was twelve, I believe. Me and the beard go a long way back and we’ve shared quite a few adventures. The women seem to like it.”

  “I don’t see any women around. You mean those Swedish animal rights girls?”

  “Yeah. Them.”

  I guess we could have gone on like that all day. And I admit it felt good to shoot that kind of shit. Reminded me of the beer talk after working all day at the paper. Gossip. Jokes. Beer and verbal baloney.

  “Rolf, you see that young guy who came by this morning?”

  “Yep. I wondered what that was about. Then I saw you let those lobsters go. Figured there must be a story.”

  “You know him?”

  “Of course. Can’t say I approve of the lad but he’s one of us.”

  “Brody, right?”

  “Brody Myatt, Joe’s son.”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah, ’tis true. But he and his father don’t get along worth shit.”

  “I want to find him. He stole sixty bucks from me.”

  “I thought you were broke.”

  “I was. Ramona left me some cash.”

  Rolf stopped mending and looked up into the sun. “You that good in bed?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “I gotta get me to Halifax one day and find me one of them women. She gave you money?”

  “It’s not like that. So, where can I find Brody?”

  “You’re not gonna like this.”

  “Like it or not. Where’s he live?”

  “He lives with his mother.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “I shit you not.”

  “Beth Ann?”

  “Yep.”

  It kind of hit even harder as it sank in. Beth Ann, who I had dropped like a hot potato when I went off to Dal. “No?”

  “Yep. She and Joe got together not all that long after you walked off the face of the earth, remember? He’d been waiting in the wings so to speak. They had a kid, things seemed to be okay at first, but then something happened. Joe always had a bit of a temper, of course. Beth Ann didn’t never take much shit from anyone, including him. I don’t know if she gave him the boot or he moved out of his own accord. But they haven’t been together for years and years. And, like I said, Brody and his father don’t see things eye to eye. Me, I try to see the good in everybody, but he’s a bad one. It don’t surprise me he took your money. Or your lady’s money, that is.
”

  Rolf was smiling, the old devil. Everything was funny to him. Even this.

  A voice inside me said to give it up. Sixty bucks. Burned, but lesson learned. Give it up. But for some reason I couldn’t. “Where’s she live?”

  “Back on the mainland. Third house in from the causeway.” He left his net and walked past me, looking toward the wharf. “Her boat’s in so she might be home by now.”

  “She fishes?”

  “Pretty much the only work you can get around here. Old Joe Myatt, the skinflint, he wasn’t going to support her and she had to raise that brat mostly on her own.”

  I wished it was anyone but Beth Ann’s kid. But there it was. Grown up, of course, but still hers. He must be in his thirties.

  I just should have dropped it. Maybe Beth Ann would still be pissed off at me for running out of her life. Another good reason not to go there. But I just couldn’t seem to let it go.

  The long walk across the causeway gave me plenty of time for second thoughts. The anger I felt toward Brody eased off and curiosity set in about Beth Ann. In some alternate universe, I knew I had stayed home, married her, taken over my father’s boat, and gone fishing. Lived my life in Stewart Harbour.

  The house was set back from the road. It had bright yellow vinyl siding. Two trucks sat in the driveway. My body kept trying to turn around and head back out the causeway but my feet just kept walking toward her door. I tapped on the aluminum storm door and the glass rattled in the frame.

  A woman came to the door. A good-looking woman who wore her age well. Beth Ann.

  I think she thought at first I was selling something. She had that look. She didn’t recognize me at all. I wanted to say something but my mouth was dry. My brain froze. She kept looking and then it hit her.

  “Charles,” she finally said. “Jesus, God! Charles!”

  “Beth Ann.”

  That couple in the alternate universe probably got dizzy right about then. Worlds were colliding. Maybe suns were imploding, planets being sucked into black holes. I don’t know.

  “Come in,” she said. “Come in.”