Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  I tried to move, but couldn’t. Brody was coughing and vomiting. But he was alive.

  Once we’d rounded the headland, Joe tucked the boat in behind it on the west side, protecting us from the worst of the waves and wind. As the water began to smooth out a bit, he turned the boat and headed us back to Stewart Harbour. As I untied Ramona, I saw the deep welts in her side that the polypropylene rope had caused.

  When he stopped vomiting, Brody wiped his mouth, looked at me, and then crawled to the cabin. Ramona and I sat there on the outside deck of the still-rocking boat, shivering and hugging each other.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” she said.

  “You almost did.”

  “You can’t get away from me that easily,” she said and leaned into me.

  27

  We huddled in the ship’s cabin, none of us speaking on the difficult trip back to Stewart Harbour. Cold and wet and exhausted. There was everything to be said. And nothing to be said.

  Rolf was waiting for us at the wharf, even though the storm was still pounding the rain down on the weathered boards. He led Ramona and me back to my little shack, where he had a fire going in the woodstove. There was a mickey of Captain Morgan on the bare wood table. “You two need anything else?” he asked.

  I shook my head no. Rolf bowed and made his exit.

  Ramona and I huddled in front of the fire and began to unbutton our wet clothes. She undid my shirt. I undid her blouse. We slipped out of our clothes slowly, as if it were some kind of ceremony, until we were both naked. Wet, naked, and smelling like the deep blue sea that had tried its best to kill us. But it was a good smell. I put my arm around her and made a tent of the blanket I pulled around us and over our heads.

  “What now?” Ramona asked.

  “Now we sit here like two naked humans and think about how lucky we are to be alive.”

  “I can do that,” Ramona said within the dark misty confines of our shelter.

  We sat like that for what seemed a very long time. Maybe it was only minutes. Maybe a half hour. Breathing. Warmth coming back into our bodies. I don’t know who moved first, but we found our way back into the bedroom. And we made love the way people do after a crisis, after a deadly ordeal like this. Desperate in a way. But a celebration at the same time. That’s the best I can do to describe it.

  The rum bottle sat on the table unopened. The fire went out in the woodstove. We slept.

  In a movie, the next morning would be bright and cheerful, with sunlight glinting off every glorious wet surface of the coastal community. But for us, it wasn’t like that. It was cold and foggy, and I cobbled together enough paper and kindling to get the fire going again. A dozen eggs were inside the door. I scrambled six of them, cooked them in the old cast iron frying pan and we ate.

  Ramona and I found ourselves strangely shy and quiet. Yesterday’s events had made us turn some corner in our relationship. I thought it might be one of those you-can’t-turn-back-now moments. Or it could be the opposite. Enough of this. Look, we almost got ourselves killed.

  “Ready to go back to being a city girl?” I asked. I thought maybe I should give her an easy way out if that’s what she was thinking.

  “And miss all the excitement?”

  “That was enough excitement to last me a lifetime. I was certain we were all going to die.”

  “Me too,” Ramona said.

  “But you hung on. You didn’t give up.”

  “Did what I had to do. No choice.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes you just don’t have a choice, do ya?”

  She didn’t answer. She smiled a Mona Lisa smile. The kind that people could puzzle over for centuries, trying to figure out what it means. That kind of smile.

  I took the plates over to the sink and started to scrub them. No dish detergent, so I tried using a nub of an old bar of soap that was probably many decades old. Then I worked at the frying pan.

  That’s when it clicked. The frying pan. I held it up to my face. There was the small defect in the rim. It was the same one.

  I held it up in the air. “Look at this,” I said. “What do you see?”

  “I see an old cast iron frying pan. The kind that housewives once slammed their husbands with if they misbehaved.”

  I laughed. “Probably happened more often than you’d think. But it never happened in my home. I can’t believe it ended up here.”

  “It came from your house?”

  “Yes. I’m certain of it. I wonder why he kept that and almost nothing else.”

  “You want to tell me a bit more about what happened to your parents? You’ve given me fragments, but I don’t really have a good picture.”

  “I haven’t really told anyone for a long time.”

  “Women in bars don’t want to hear sad stories about parents?”

  “I told you, I gave that scene up a long time ago.”

  “Could have got you … what do they call it? Sympathy sex?”

  “Really? If only I’d known.”

  “Okay. So. Tell me about the house. Tell me what happened.”

  “My mother always said she had her diabetes under control. She was religious with the insulin shots. Checked her blood all the time. She said we should never worry. But something went wrong. My father was out fishing. I don’t know where Pete and I were, but we weren’t around. Maybe her prescription was filled wrong. Maybe she got the wrong dose. Too high or too low. Nobody every nailed it down.

  “My father was at sea having a good day. A really good day. He’d stayed out longer than usual, and it was well into the afternoon by the time he came home. He found her dead in the kitchen. I think he figured if he had come in at the usual time, she’d still be alive. He blamed himself for not being there.

  “I can’t say my parents were all that affectionate. I’m not sure I even ever understood the relationship. They didn’t argue and they always seemed somehow perfectly in synch with each other. But it didn’t seem to Pete and me to be romantic love. Their whole way together was more like they were a team. People who would get the job done, whatever the job was. They always seemed so practical.”

  “Maybe that’s another version of love. One we don’t see in poems or books or movies.”

  “Maybe. We couldn’t figure it out as kids. They just seemed to be always working at something or doing the things parents were supposed to do. I don’t know when they ever had fun.”

  “Maybe they didn’t care about fun. Maybe other things were more important.”

  “Probably. But when you’re a kid you believe that fun is everything. My parents, though, were the poster pair for hard work, clean living — Mr. and Mrs. Responsibility.”

  “Lucky you,” Ramona said.

  “Yeah, Lucky me. Except I didn’t appreciate it. All I wanted to do was run from there. And did.”

  “But you’re not telling me about the house.”

  “The house. The house that my mother and father built together when they first got married. Yes. After she was gone, my father kept fishing. But his heart wasn’t in it. He’d been the most ambitious man on the wharf in his day. Anxious to get the day’s job done. Catch more than the next man if he could. Work hard and then work harder. But after Mom died, he was just going through the motions.

  “Pete and I were gone by then. We’d talk to him on the phone once a week, sometimes less. I didn’t know what he was up to until I ran into a guy from Stewart Harbour in a pub in Halifax. He told me the whole story. Back home, he said, everyone thought he was maybe losing his mind.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Dismantling our old home and giving away everything. First it was the furniture, the beds, the pictures on the wall. Then it was the doors and windows. He carefully removed them and sold them for cheap or gave them away if he thought someone needed a break.

  “He removed every wooden shake from the walls, every shingle from the roof, made sure someone could use them again — he was that careful. Then, board by board, h
e took apart the house I had grown up in. He even removed all the nails. He stopped asking money for anything and just gave it away. Young couples building their own homes were mostly the ones who took him up on it. Who wouldn’t?

  “Electric wires, plumbing, floors, joists, beams — the works. He was living in the fish shack by then. Soon there was nothing but the loose stone foundation and a hole in the ground. People were certain he’d flipped when he took the foundation apart. Stone by stone. There’s a pile of rocks there on the edge of the woods. Looks kind of like an ancient Irish cairn where they used to bury the dead.

  “Then he used a shovel and filled in the basement one scoop of dirt at a time. By the following summer, wildflowers were growing there. Lupins and daisies and Queen Anne’s lace. Pretty much everyone on the Shore there knew the story. Some called him crazy, some kind of admired him for it. I didn’t get it.”

  Ramona grew quiet for a few seconds. “But you didn’t go home to check on him?”

  It was an accusation and it seemed unlike her, but she had asked the obvious question and I just didn’t have an answer that made any real sense. Guilt was written all over me as I avoided looking straight at her. “No. I didn’t.”

  The silence was thick and leaden. I wanted to try to explain why I felt justified in having cut my ties with him and all of Stewart Harbour, but I knew it would sound like bullshit. The worst kind of bullshit.

  “Why do you think he did it?” she finally asked, breaking the silence. “Why did he tear down the house and try to erase everything?”

  “I don’t know. I think part of it was his way of accepting that his life with my mom was over. I guess I never really understood my father.”

  “I think I would have liked him if I’d known him,” Ramona said.

  “And I don’t think I ever even gave myself a chance to get to know him. I fucked up.”

  “No. You knew his way of life wasn’t yours. You did what you had to do.”

  “But I think he was happy with what he had. I grew up always thinking that just over the horizon or just around the bend there was something more. Something better.”

  “And there wasn’t?”

  “No. Not till now. Not till you.”

  “And look where you are,” she said, stretching her arms out to draw my attention to the palatial surroundings of the fish shack.

  I suddenly realized I’d been holding on to that old black frying pan all this time I told the story. I looked at it and then ever so gently set it down on the counter with the utmost reverence.

  28

  The sound of the cellphone ringing seemed so out of place I didn’t even know what it was at first. Ramona let it ring until it stopped. She waited a full minute and then checked her messages with the speakerphone on.

  “Hi,” I heard Beth Ann say. “Ramona? I’d like to talk to Charles — oh, and you too. You put up Brody’s bail so you should definitely be included. Anyway, I think we need to all get together and do some serious talking. If you’re willing, that is. I think we need to work together on this. Could you come over today at two? I know that sounds crazy. But please. If you will. Call me back.” And she hung up.

  Ramona looked at me. “What do you think she means by ‘all,’ and ‘work together’ on what?”

  “I don’t know. Beth Ann always had a kind of no-nonsense approach to things.”

  “I like her. I trust her. I guess we better go.”

  “I was hoping we would just run off to Paris and visit all the places where Hemingway and Fitzgerald hung out.”

  “And disappoint your old girlfriend?”

  I shrugged. “It’s just that I’ve had so much more practice at running away rather than sticking around. It just seems like the thing to do.”

  “You got me into this. You played the little-boy-lost routine there in the fog in Halifax. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Run. Run far away.”

  “Well, you didn’t warn me.”

  “I should have. My mistake.”

  God, the banter always felt good. Like an old married couple. Like an old happy married couple who love the wordplay, the roles, the gamesmanship.

  Ramona punched a number on her phone. “Hi, Beth Ann. Yes. We’ll be there at two. Sure.”

  When she hung up I said, “We still have time to run. I say Paris.”

  “I say Stewart Harbour.”

  “Paris would be more fun.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to convince me of that. But let’s do Paris right here. Right now.”

  “Mais oui, mademoiselle.”

  And thus we returned to bed, escaped yet again briefly into whatever state that is that takes your mind off problems and puts it entirely on sex. Afterward, we vowed to do something about the bed situation. Creaky old cot, elbows banging each other’s chin, arms and legs all twisted around any time one person moved. Having said that, it was still my version of euphoria, but it was time to at least expand the territory.

  “I think we need to go shopping for a bed,” I said. “No memory foam, though,” I insisted. “I hate memory foam.”

  “No memory foam. Check. King size or queen size?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to see what they have at the general store.”

  She thought I was kidding, but we needed more supplies so I drove us there. The same kid was working the cash register. He recognized us. No. He recognized Ramona. Now I began to understand that look that men gave her. The ones who had seen the sex clip on the internet. And, if Ramona was right, there was a hell of a lot of those horny buggers out there.

  We loaded up on food and a couple more pots and spatulas and such. “You guys camping, or what?” the guy asked.

  “Something like that,” I said. “You wouldn’t have any inflatable mattresses by any chance?” I’d seen some Coleman stoves and fishing rods. They seemed to have a whole department store of goods crammed into this place.

  “Queen or king size?” he asked, with an all-too-self-conscious wink. I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t.

  “Queen,” I said, realizing king probably wouldn’t even fit on the floor of my father’s tiny old bedroom.

  “Queen it is.” He went into the back room and came out a minute later with a big cardboard box. “Electric pump is inside. Keep it away from the woodstove, though.”

  The kid totalled up our bill and Ramona paid with her credit card.

  Two o’clock rolled around all too soon. We pulled into the driveway of Beth Ann’s house and I parked by her truck. Brody’s truck was there. Beth Ann had probably paid the towing bill to get it out. Joe’s truck was there too. It was a family of trucks. Our urban set of wheels looked mightily out of place.

  We crunched up the crushed clamshells of the driveway as we walked up to the door. Beth Ann opened it. “Thanks for coming,” she said and nodded toward the living room.

  Brody and Joe were sitting on wooden kitchen chairs, each holding a can of Keith’s. A big case of Keith’s was sitting open in the middle of the living room. A case of thirty. I had no idea you could buy a case of beer that big.

  There was a young woman there too, sitting beside Brody. She looked shy and embarrassed and just nodded as we came in.

  Beth Ann trailed us in and asked us to sit on the sofa. We sat. She motioned toward the young woman. “This is Mackenzie,” she said. “Brody’s girlfriend. She’s gonna have Brody’s baby.”

  Then things went quiet. So quiet that it was solid and thick. Like you could cut it up with butcher’s knife, box it, and sell it to people who live in noisy cities. Here, you want some quiet? Real quiet? Try this. Just open this up and you’ll get to know what real quiet is.

  “Hi, Mackenzie,” Ramona said. “How far along?”

  Mackenzie placed both hands on her stomach. “Four months.” She gave Ramona a half-smile.

  I wanted to ask the obvious question before we got reeled into something even more complicated than it already was. Are you sure it’s Brody’s baby? But I kne
w that’s just what an asshole would say at a time like this. And I’d left my membership card to that club back in Halifax. Besides, Beth Ann was that no-nonsense person I’d ditched long ago. She hadn’t changed. She would have gotten to the truth. So, yes, it was definitely Brody’s kid. Poor girl. Poor kid. Now what?

  Brody and Joe cracked open another beer. Beth Ann wasn’t drinking and neither was Mackenzie.

  “How are you feeling?” Ramona asked Mackenzie.

  “Okay, I guess,” she said sheepishly. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  I figured she was twenty-one or twenty-two. Quite a bit younger than Brody. But Brody was on the immature side for a guy in his thirties. I had misjudged him early on, thinking he was much younger. I wondered what she saw in him.

  “And how are you doing?” I asked Brody.

  “Just fucking great,” Brody snarled. “I’m so fucking wonderful.”

  More silence followed, then the screen door opened and someone else walked in. Rolf. His eyes lit up when he saw the thirty-pack of beer in the middle of the room. He didn’t speak. Just waltzed in, grabbed a can, and plopped down on the floor in the corner.

  “I invited Rolf to come act as referee if need be. He knows why we’re all here.”

  “Couldn’t turn down an invite for a front-row seat,” Rolf said. He was all smiles.

  Beth Ann brought the meeting to order. “Tell me if I’m wrong, but I’d like to think we are all in this together. I don’t mean we intended things to be the way they are. But this is what we’ve been handed. I think we need a plan.”

  Beth Ann immediately saw the look on my face. “Charles, you can just walk away if you want. I would understand that. And Ramona, one way or the other, we’ll get your money back on the bail. So, if you feel it’s the thing to do, get up now and go. I would understand.”

  That was the door I most certainly wanted to take at that moment. But my gut told me one thing and one thing only: if I got up and walked out of there now, I’d lose Ramona for good.