An Irish Nor'easter
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but two men drowned that day. The old man sat on the shore in his rubber trench coat and indifference, watching as the fools were swept away.”
He stopped and looked me in the eye. “Tomorrow morning there’s a hell of a storm brewing and they’re going to go for the money one more time.”
The first thing I thought to myself was that twenty thousand pounds would go a long way to paying off my mortgage. If I could get that albatross from around my neck, things would be so much better.
“Does this go on every year?”
“No. Thank God. This is the first time the prize money has been put up in five years. The family only puts up the money if the Nor’easter falls on the third week of November, a sort of commemoration of the tragedy. It can’t be a little storm; it has to be the real deal. Bastards.”
“I take it no one likes them?” I thought of my wife and children eating Thanksgiving dinner next week with a fat overstuffed turkey and her home baked pies. And here I was alone in the middle of a rainstorm hearing about other people’s tragedies, my warm comfortable home as inaccessible as that boathouse at the end of the pier.
“Are ya daft man? What kind of people put money up in the hopes that someone will die?”
“Nobody’s forced to walk out on the pier, right?”
“No,” he said, quietly and with a shame that was evident as he slapped his towel slowly along the metal rim of the sink. “This is a small town. There are a lot of poor people around here. That kind of money makes people do strange, dangerous things. Shamus put it in his will that if a Nor’easter comes and the prize money isn’t offered all the money goes out of the trust and into the hands of an animal rescue facility in Dublin. There are a couple of lawyers who would love to get the commission on that transaction so the family makes sure it goes off without a hitch.”
“How rich are they?”
“With all the land and businesses the trust owns, I’d say close to five million pounds. His relatives get an annual stipend from the rent and business income, but they won’t risk losing that bit of pie to a bunch of stray cats and dogs in the city. Besides, Shamus filled them with enough hate to last another century at least.”
I woke next morning at eight o’clock. This surprised me because I had no alarm and I liked to sleep as long as possible when I wasn’t working. I spend a lot of time in bed, pondering more than sleeping or existing in some gray area between the warm, comforting sheets and my cold reality. Raindrops pelted the old beveled glass windowpane like a tiny bits of gravel sprayed by a truck. I could feel the pressure change in the house as the wind buckled the glass. I had to turn on a light because the clouds were so dark.
“Mrs. O’Brien!” I called; hoping by some miracle breakfast would be waiting. The bed and breakfast I was staying in had two floors the whole second floor to myself. There was no one in the house, the doors to all the rooms open and lonely. I grabbed my Gore-Tex jacket, still damp from yesterday’s rain, and walked outside. The cobblestone streets were slick with the soaking they had received; the rain coming down in wavy sheets like the white satin wedding dress my wife wore so long ago. I saw no one walking around the town and for a second a strange feeling crept over my body. I wondered if I was actually having a nightmare and all the people on the earth were suddenly gone. At least I wouldn’t have to pay my mortgage.
As I wandered down the street that led to the ocean, the smell of saltwater mixed with the rain. I could taste the salt as the strong winds carried a little of the ocean with every gust. Around the corner, and past a fisherman’s cottage, I saw a throng of people standing on the shoreline. In front of them, like an arena, the L shaped pier, a hundred yards long and thirty yards to the right, was anchored to the ocean floor. At the end of the pier, blurry and almost unrecognizable, a small boathouse stood with a thirty-foot, engine-powered fishing boat tethered to the final pylon on the leeward side. Near the ocean, the wind seemed to speed up, the fastest drops stinging my cheeks. I had to cinch my hood down so tight that I almost cut off my circulation. I estimated the wind at fifty miles per hour but there were gusts stronger than that I suspected. The clouds were so dark streetlights were still on along the shore road that was now part beach.
I was the worst thing on earth, an account/tax lawyer. Money-grubbing scum mixed with a dash of boredom to boot. When we went to parties during those two years of premarital bliss, my wife always…always mentioned that I was in law school as though some umbilical cord existed between Perry Mason and myself that would somehow transform my career into something she could proudly boast about to all her friends. When I told her I was going into tax and business law I saw the look of disappointment on her face. She had already assumed I would be a trail lawyer or a criminal defense attorney. She only accepted my career choice when I told her that a tax lawyer works with the wealthiest ten percent of the people.
At a party one night, eight years into our marriage, she had a little too much to drink and a woman asked that age-old question, “What does your husband do?”
She answered, like I was some sort of leprous garbage man, “He’s a lawyer (deep breath) and an accountant.” Her hysterical laugh sparked the other woman to laugh and then she said, “Oh, you poor thing”. Her husband was a television executive for one of those teen hooker/cheating spouse/paternity-test talk shows. When my wife and I met, she talked about children and responsibility and a steady man with a good job or was it a good man with a steady job. I can’t remember now.
I lied. I left work early that day because I had to end the deep suspicions that nagged me. The phone disappearing into the other room even when the kids weren’t making noise, the lack of sex during the weekdays, the large number of stamps in her reliquary box. She never left the house at night so I knew something had to be going on in the daytime. I parked the Lexus on the other side of the playground so the engine would not give me away. When I picked out the flowers, I hoped she would be reading a Harlequin romance on the bed, all my fears unfounded. When I opened the door I hoped she wouldn’t be home. The moaning and naked bodies gave way to the pitter-patter of feet on oak hardwood floors I had sanded to a lustrous blonde and varnished with three coats of urethane.
I smiled for the first time in months, the raindrops stinging my fattened, middle-aged cheeks as I tried to look to the west. The postman would never take her to La Vigrata for a two hundred dollar dinner or to Cape Cod for a two-week summer vacation outfitted with a beach house on the shore. They would break up, probably within a year. I guess that was my biggest fear, that they would be truly happy for the rest of their lives, watching my satellite television, living in my house. Or maybe my biggest fear was that my wife had actually fallen in love with a poor guy ten years younger with rock hard abs and for once in her life money didn’t matter.
I walked closer to the stage.
The first man began to walk on the pier, the wind howling in his face. His jacket rippled furiously as he began to make it yard by yard against the wind. He stumbled fifty feet with his coat over his head to stop the rain from pelting his eyes, and slipped on the old pine planks almost ending up in the drink. When he got up, he retreated back to the crowd. They did not cheer or jeer, and I began to sense this was not a contest as much as it was punishment.
“It’s sick,” one man shouted. “Go home for God’s sake.” But he did not leave.
For thirty minutes I watched men try to make it to the corner of the L, but the waves were getting worse as the day wore on. Each man retreated against the powerful winds and, like a losing boxer in the last round of a fight; they all looked tired and bewildered. During a calm day, the waves would have broken gently seven feet under the pier. Today, the waves crashed on the corner of the L four and five feet high, enough to cover the jutting circular pylons that anchored it to the ocean floor. The sea level’s surge was only inches under the wharf, just enough to see to walk on. But I was an account/lawyer, I analyzed things for a living and I watched as the waves broke.
Every s
even seconds, a monstrous wall of water that must have weighed tons broke over the end of the pier. I figured if a man could make it to the turn and hold on as the wave hit, it might be possible to run for the boathouse afterwards because the other waves were not as strong. I debated turning my passport over to one of the onlookers, but I thought better of it. If I didn’t make it, it would be the only epitaph left to me. So I wandered out to the beginning of the pier.
The man was old, grandson of Shamus O’Donahue I guessed. His father and grandfather had fostered this hatred of the townspeople for dozens of years. Only a man who hated people in general would put on a stunt like this.
“Is this open to anyone?” I asked. I knew I was going to go whether he said yes or not by the way he smiled when I asked the question.
“Sure,” he said, grinning at me like I was a virgin on the way to a strip club. His rotten teeth, whiskey-laced breath and week old beard were just as seedy and for a second I felt like a teenager about to go on a carnival ride.
I was only nervous as my foot touched the first wet plank on the pier. The rest was fear. I took one step, and then the next, feeling the decking, looking for slippery spots or loose