Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  Rolf saw us and came our way, waving for us to stay away.

  “Scooter Deacon,” he said. “Overdosed on some drug he took. OxyContin, I think. Just stopped breathing.”

  “He gonna be okay?” Ramona asked.

  “I don’t know. This drug thing is getting kind of crazy. Scooter’s just nineteen. Brian Deacon’s youngest kid from that second wife of his.”

  I remembered Brian. He’d been class president our graduation year in high school. Everybody expected he’d go into politics or get a job at something big. Funny to think that he’d stayed there, became a fisherman like his father. Had a kid who does opioids. “Jesus,” I said, “I guess things have changed around here after all.”

  Ramona was clinging to my arm. I felt her hand squeeze a bit tighter. “Anything we can do?” she asked.

  At that moment, I could see that the paramedics had stopped working on Scooter. They lifted him onto a stretcher and with the help of some of the men on the wharf got him off the boat. I could see he was breathing.

  “Where the hell would he be getting OxyContin?” I asked. I knew all about kids using all kinds of drugs back in Halifax. I’d written stories about the influx of coke, ecstasy parties, doctors who overprescribed painkillers and other meds. But somehow I always thought that was an urban issue.

  “I think you’ve already made his acquaintance,” Rolf said, scratching at his beard.

  I was going to say something but stopped myself. Damn.

  As Scooter was being loaded into the ambulance, a woman who must have been his mother was getting in with him. There was a man there too, standing by the ambulance pounding his fists on the side and letting out an ungodly roar. I barely recognized him. “Brian?” I asked Rolf.

  “Yep.”

  Brian also tried to get into the ambulance with his son, but the paramedics put up their hands and told him no. Brian looked like he was going to smash the man, but he held back and just stood there with his clenched fists and red face.

  The lights continued to flash and the siren let out one loud shriek as the ambulance spit gravel, speeding away.

  There was quite a crowd at the wharf now. It seemed like maybe everyone in Stewart Harbour had come out for the action. Brian was still in a rage. He looked around at those who had gathered — fishermen from the wharf, housewives, and kids as well. “What the fuck are you looking at?” he screamed at them.

  “He’s not the first person to OD here,” Rolf told us. “Pretty soon the shit’s gonna hit the fan.”

  I looked at the faces of the people of Stewart Harbour and I thought I could recognize a few. But, more than anything, they reminded me of the people I’d seen gathered at car accidents and tragedies I once covered for the Tribune. Concerned faces, yes. But also curious faces. The bad kind of curious. People who want entertainment value from others’ tragedies. Fuck ’em all.

  Brian was studying those faces. Then he noticed Joe. Joe Myatt was walking away from the wharf toward his truck. Brian locked onto him and started running. The gawkers were still watching as he caught up with Joe, who was just opening the door to his old Ford truck. Brian slammed the door shut and starting cursing at Joe.

  I didn’t need to hear what he was saying. Nobody did. Brian screamed at Joe. Joe threw his hands up in the air. Brian planted a fist in Joe’s face. Joe just tried to cover his head at first, but then he was fighting back. He shoved Brian up against his truck and started punching him hard with piston-like fists. Four men left the crowd of onlookers and ran over to pull Joe off.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Rolf said. “Pretty lady shouldn’t have to be exposed to a scene like this.”

  Rolf put a hand on Ramona’s arm and one on mine and began to lead us away from the wharf. I knew that it wasn’t Joe that Brian was really after. It was Brody. Brody was nowhere around, but I was pretty sure he was the one who had sold the Oxy. Unless there was more than one drug dealer working the wharf.

  Ramona looked really upset. I mean really upset. I wished so much that we could have missed the drama. Should have stayed at sea.

  “I need a drink,” Rolf declared when we got back to the fish shack. “Damn! I never got a chance to get to the LC this week.”

  Ramona took out her car key and hit the remote that opened the trunk of the Lexus. “No problem,” she said as the trunk lid lifted.

  In the trunk was a case of wine.

  “Holy Mother of God,” Rolf said, looking like he’d just seen the gates of heaven swing wide open.

  “I gotta get me a woman like her,” he told me again as Ramona lifted the box of wine from the car and headed for the house.

  17

  The wine was red and it was from South Africa and the first bottle seemed to empty itself.

  “What’s with the hard drugs?” I asked Rolf. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “When does anything make sense?” Rolf said. “Chisel, everyone thinks that it’s just the young ones, but it’s not. Some of the older guys just go to sea, work hard, make good money, and then want to blow off steam. Used to be a case of Moosehead would do the job. But now the drugs are cheaper and easier to get than the beer. And the game seems to be — what’s up next? What do you have that’s more powerful than what you had last week?”

  “And Brody?”

  “Yeah. Brody’ll get you whatever you want.”

  I took a slug of wine and worried. Only three people alive knew that I was really Brody’s father — the one who’d brought that little son of a bitch into the world. Me, Beth Ann, and Joe. Not even Brody. Not even Rolf. And, God help me, not Ramona. Did I really have some responsibility there? I was beginning to think it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. Before Ramona found out.

  “Someone’s gonna get killed,” Rolf said. “Could be another one like Scooter or it could be Brody.”

  “Somebody’s gotta do something,” I found myself saying.

  “Oh, somebody will. But it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

  Rolf left us after that and Ramona and I sat in silence. This whole thing seemed to have hit her pretty hard. “Do you know this Brody?”

  I told her about the lobster, about the money. I didn’t tell her anything else. I wanted to change the subject. “I think we should go see your mom tomorrow. I’d really like to meet her.”

  “Sure,” Ramona said. “I’d like that.”

  I tried my best to bring back some of the magic from earlier in the day, but it was no use. And the wine didn’t help. We gave it up and walked behind the house to sit on the stones and watch the sun going down across the water. When the sun slipped below the horizon we went back inside.

  It was looking like a sombre, quiet, suddenly all-too-sober evening until Beth Ann arrived. I heard the knock on the door and opened it.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to say. I let her in.

  “This is Ramona,” I said. “Ramona, Beth Ann.”

  Ramona was wide-eyed.

  “Hi, honey,” Beth Ann said.

  I think Ramona winced at the word honey but she remained polite. Trying to break the ice, Ramona offered a few kind words about the village and asked Beth Ann some innocuous questions. The two women exchanged a short, decidedly stilted back-and-forth of small talk. Then it suddenly stopped.

  Beth Ann turned now and looked directly at me. “Does she know?”

  I shook my head.

  “Know what?” Ramona asked.

  Beth Ann looked at me again. I nodded. It all had to come out, I knew. One way or the other. I figured it was better if I spoke first. “Brody’s my son,” I admitted. “I’m his biological father.”

  Sorry, but I don’t have the proper adjectives to describe the look on Ramona’s face. I don’t think anyone in the room was breathing right then.

  Beth Ann was first to speak again. She looked straight at Ramona, not me. “Listen, Joe and I raised Brody. After Joe left, I did most of the raising. I take the full responsibility for how he
turned out. Brody doesn’t even know who his real father is. But that doesn’t really matter. Joe and I knew what we were getting into and it really didn’t matter to us, well not at first, who the real father was. Truth is, after a few years, we never expected to see Charles ever again. Family all gone here. Not a trace. Kind of a shock to see him back here.”

  “But now I’m here,” I said. What label could you put on me at that moment? Deadbeat dad? Father of a monster? Ill-fated, stupid-ass man who chooses the perfectly wrong time and place to be?

  I was wondering if Ramona was about to jump back into her Lexus and make a run for it again. I wouldn’t blame her.

  Instead, she took Beth Ann’s hand and then gave her a hug. Beth Ann began to sob and a tear fell down her cheek before she pulled away.

  “You have to do something,” Ramona said to me.

  “Talk to him,” Beth Ann said, wiping her face with a Kleenex. “You tell him who you really are. Tell him why he’s got to stop what he’s doing. I’ve talked to him. Joe’s talked to him. When that didn’t work, Joe beat the crap out of him. But he doesn’t listen. He thinks he’s untouchable. He’s been accused before, but he’s never even been charged. And he just won’t stop.”

  I remembered what Rolf had said. Yeah, someone was going to get killed there.

  The funny thing about that moment was, I was remembering the afternoon of smoking weed with Brody, getting high with my son, and I really liked him. We had, in our own stoned way, bonded. I had to at least talk to him.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Home watching television.”

  “Does he know what happened today?”

  “He knows. Says it wasn’t his fault. Says he explained to Scooter what was a safe amount to take. Says that it was Scooter’s own damn fault for never doing what he’s told.” Beth Ann threw her keys at me. “Take my truck. Better if I’m not there.”

  We all have zombie moments in our lives and this was one of mine. I caught the keys. I held them in my hand. I walked out the door in slow motion, leaving behind the first real girlfriend I ever had and Ramona to get acquainted with each other while I drove off to give my son the first serious disciplinary lecture he’d had from his real father.

  Brody was watching a movie when I walked in. I didn’t knock. I recognized the film. 127 Hours with James Franco. “Good film?” I asked by way of salutation.

  He nearly jumped out of his skin. “Jesus, man!” Brody said. “What are you doing here?”

  I sat down across from him, grabbed the remote, and switched off the TV. Brody looked nervous now. Scared maybe. Then he gave a little hint of a smile like this was some kind of joke. “No. Really, man, what’s up?”

  So I told him who I was and how he came into the world. I told him I didn’t know all these years about it, but that I was still one of the world’s biggest assholes and had a plaque on my wall at home that said so.

  He wasn’t nearly as shocked as I thought he would be. In fact, he laughed out loud. “I knew it, man. I knew all along that Joe Myatt was not my real father. I could feel it in my bones.” He got up and walked around the room. “This explains quite a bit. But why are you telling me this now?”

  “Your mother asked me to talk to you.”

  “She’s always yammering away at me about something, but I don’t pay that much attention to her.”

  “You should. She’s a wise woman.”

  “So where did you two do it? In a car? Out in the woods?”

  “It was my old bedroom. One afternoon. No one else was at home.”

  He puffed out a little burp of a laugh. “Too bad the old place is torn down. I’d like to go there and take a look at the scene of the crime, so to speak.”

  “Yeah, too bad.”

  Then I got to the point. Yes, he knew what happened to Scooter. And yes, he had warned him. In fact, given him a serious lecture. “You see, this was some new stuff,” he said. “It wasn’t really just Oxy. It was mixed with some new shit. Fentanyl. Comes from China. Dirt cheap and it puts a real pop onto whatever it’s mixed with. You just have to go light on how much you take. I told him that.”

  “But Scooter didn’t listen?”

  “Scooter never listens to anyone. That’s his problem.”

  “And you don’t feel responsible?”

  “I feel bad, yeah. But you know, buyer beware. If he didn’t buy it from me, someone else would come along and sell the shit. Hey, I would have been happy to keep selling weed for the rest of my life. But Justin fucking Trudeau came along and legalized bud and I got to keep up with the times.”

  “Even if it kills someone.”

  “Scooter didn’t die. He just fucked up.”

  It was like talking to a brick wall, as my father used to say when he lectured me. I began to see that Brody really didn’t hold himself to blame. And he couldn’t get it into his head that someone, primarily Brian Deacon, might take it upon himself to come seek revenge.

  “I think, given the circumstances, that you should take a little vacation.”

  The smirk. The laugh. “Great,” he said. “Where to?”

  I pulled a key out from my pocket. The key to my rathole apartment. “Halifax,” I said. “Go stay at my apartment for a bit.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Brody reached out and took the key. I told him the address. Then I watched as he put on his running shoes and picked up a grey hoodie. He looked at me with a crooked grin. “Thanks, Dad,” he said. “Tell Mom I won’t be home for dinner.”

  And he was gone. I listened as his truck pulled out of the driveway and I sat there, stunned. Totally stunned at what had just happened. I flicked on the TV and saw James Franco, still trapped in a deep Utah chasm with his fingers locked in place by the rock that wedged them to the wall. The words on the screen said he’d been stuck there for seventy hours.

  18

  Okay, so I probably was not thinking entirely rationally. It was a short-term solution that would probably come back to bite me in the ass. But I at least got him out of town before he killed someone or someone killed him. I’d read about how many people were dying from overdoses of fentanyl in Vancouver. It wasn’t that they wanted to die. They just didn’t know they were taking a drug many times more powerful than what had been on the street before. Buyer beware was not good enough.

  And I really didn’t care if I ever lived in my old apartment again. Rent was overdue. I didn’t know how long my kindly landlord would let me hang on to it without paying. Maybe Brody would have a party and trash the place. Maybe he’d try to set up shop and deal in the city. If so, that would definitely get him killed. Dealers guarded their turf and would make short order of a wharf rat like Brody.

  Hell. The guy was a walking accident waiting to happen.

  All this and more was on my mind as I drove Beth Ann’s truck back to the wharf, grinding the gears like a high-school kid with a learning permit. Shit. Fuck. I said the words out loud. The windshield was not the least offended. What next?

  I reluctantly opened the creaky door to the fish shack. There was Beth Ann and Ramona sitting at the bare wood table drinking tea. I could not read the look on either of their faces.

  “Tea?” Ramona asked.

  “Please.”

  Ramona looked around the sink but couldn’t find another cup. She poured me some tea from the old cracked teapot into an old jam jar. I sat on a wooden crate and sipped it Japanese-style. I explained that I’d packed Brody off to Halifax.

  “Did you convince him to stop selling drugs?” Beth Ann asked.

  “I tried. I don’t think I got through. But at least I got him out of Stewart Harbour for a bit.”

  “Brian won’t let it go. He and Joe already had a bad thing going. Both of them had a hate-on for each other.”

  The tea was bitter. Right at this moment, life was bitter. And just a few hours ago, it had all been so sweet.

  “Brody has to be stopped,” Ramona insisted.
/>   “I know that. I just don’t know how.”

  “Problems have solutions,” Ramona added.

  Beth Ann got up. “I’ll leave you two alone. Ramona, it was good getting to know you. I’m gonna go find Joe, if he hasn’t had his face bashed in, and see what he has to say about this. But he and Brody don’t really talk much, so I doubt he has any clout. Still, he helped me raise the kid when he was little.”

  Beth Ann looked tired. There was a hint of defeat in her voice. A weariness in her eyes. She pulled the door closed behind her as she left and then drove off.

  A numbing silence fell over the room. Ramona nailed me to the wood I was sitting on with a look. I was expecting anger, rage maybe. I stared at the Lexus keys on the table. All she had to do was pick them up and drive off. That would be the end of it.

  Instead, Ramona cleared her throat and gave me a hard look. “I find it hard to believe you never found out that you had a son all these years.”

  “I didn’t know until we came back here,” I said in my own defence, the voice echoing in my head like that of a guilty little boy.

  Ramona just looked at me.

  “It’s true. Beth Ann and Joe were the only ones who knew. And they told no one.”

  “This is a weird little place you grew up in.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  She picked up the keys and threw them to me. “Let’s get out of here. I think I need to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

  Not more than ten minutes later we were driving across the causeway, past Beth Ann’s house and headed back toward Halifax.

  “I like her,” Ramona said, breaking the silence. “She’s had it tough, but she’s made a life of it. She stuck with it.”

  “I don’t know what was wrong with me. Leaving like I did. Never looking back. How could anyone do that?”