Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  “It’s not just you. It’s us. And we are doing more than okay for a couple of human lab rats.”

  “Lab rats. I like that.”

  We were good talkers, she and me. Our conversations had rhythm and content. The very opposite of bar talk and pickup lines. I think part of it still had to do with her being quite the fine actor who could shift her roles in conversation. All I had going for me was that I was a word man, looking for nuance, thinking about what was peeking out from under the meaning of a word based on how she used it. But enough musing about that.

  “Okay, I remain curious. Can I ask more about you?”

  “Absofuckinglutely.”

  “Back in Burnside, the cop seemed to recognize you. Then, while driving home, Brody said something.”

  “I was afraid you were going to ask.”

  “You weren’t really in a porno film?”

  A few more fish jumped into the air and splashed back down. “Yes and no,” she said.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Do I have to tell you the whole sorry tale?”

  “Yes. We stay out here until you do.”

  “Hey, I could stay out here forever. So, no threats. But, yes, I will tell.”

  I got up and walked to the gunwale, leaned back in front of her so I could see her face. She was more than a little embarrassed.

  “I had just arrived in California. I did a couple of commercials. I auditioned for some indie producers who were working on art films. A so-called agent had latched onto me and said there was a hot young filmmaker working on some very non-commercial projects — all character driven, all about relationships. Did I want to be in one?

  “I was wary, believe me. I was pretty good at detecting all the bullshit lines of film people. But I said I would meet with the director. And did. He was intellectual. He showed me some clips of his work. He didn’t try to hustle me or put the make on me.”

  “I take it that was rare where you were.”

  “Very rare. So I read the script. Said yes. Practised my lines. And he shot a very low-budget film about a young couple falling in love who came from completely opposite worlds.”

  “Romeo and Juliet?”

  “Romeo and Juliet in New Jersey was sort of the drift. My romantic interest was a young and upwardly mobile investment hotshot headed to Wall Street. I was, get this, a young ingenue from the sticks. He decided I could be a young ingenue from Nova Scotia.”

  “No?”

  “Yes. So we shot it. I got paid. But then I never saw an edited version. I’d call him up and ask, and he told me he couldn’t afford to finish editing it or that the time wasn’t right to release it or some other bullshit line. And after a while I forgot about it.

  “A couple of years later, one of my actor friends, a gay guy named Julian, told me that he’d seen me in a film, a porno film involving bis and straights.”

  “But wait. Did you do, um, sex scenes that you thought were tasteful?”

  “No. Not even that. It was strictly clothes on. Romantic buildup. Two strangers falling in love. But no sex.”

  “What happened?”

  “Film is all smoke and mirrors, right? So he took what he shot of Romeo and me and, I don’t know quite how to explain this, but used other actors for the body shots.”

  “So those were not your boobs on the screen?”

  “And not my private parts either, shall we say.”

  “You mean some woman got hired to stand in as the most intimate portions of your anatomy?”

  “Yes. And thank you for using polite language.”

  “Couldn’t you sue or something?”

  “Could, but what’s the point? But it gets worse. The film ends up on the internet. Not the whole film, just the seedy parts. But, of course, it looks like me with the bare bum, the voluptuous breasts, and the fully shaved you know what. And so I started to get Googled, tagged, and tracked down, and, best of all, get slobbering emails from teenage boys.”

  “That’s terrible. What did you do?”

  “I actually wrote back to some saying it wasn’t me. I tried to locate the director, but he’d moved to Peru and was making nature documentaries for Animal Planet. I talked to internet privacy consultants. All to no avail.”

  “That was a violation of your human rights. The fucking bastard.”

  “Calm down, champ. I did all I could do and then I gave up. I still get men looking at me, thinking it was me in those video clips. But I ignore it. I hold my head high and get on with my life.”

  I stood silently for a moment looking at her. Then, as usual, I shared a sliver of my sparkling wit. “I never thought I’d be out at sea like this in my father’s old fishing boat with a porn queen.”

  She mugged a look of disgust and then came to stand beside me on the rail of the boat. When a small wave pushed up against the hull, she dipped her hand over, scooped some water and as I leaned toward her, she splashed the cold salt water into my face.

  “Let’s never speak of this again,” she said. And kissed me on my wet salty lips.

  25

  I took Ramona’s story about being conned into acting in a porno film at face value. I got it. She with a pretty face had been lured into acting in a movie and then a lass with a lesser ethical code was lured into doing the dirty parts. Clearly there was no honour or dignity in the movie business. Surprise, surprise.

  Each time we told stories about ourselves, our bond deepened. She hadn’t heard all about me yet. Nor had I heard all about her. Maybe that would take a lifetime. If so, I was in for the long run.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pulling me back from staring at the water.

  I looked up and east. Dark skies, bumpy horizon.

  “A little weather coming this way,” I said.

  “Should we be worried?”

  “Not yet. It’s a long way off. Wind’s still light. We’re okay.”

  “Isn’t that what they said in The Perfect Storm?”

  I’d seen the movie a dozen times. Much of it didn’t ring true. But some of it did. The fear of an ocean gone mad.

  “Ever kiss George Clooney?”

  “No. Now I’m sorry I told you about Tom Hanks.”

  “Don’t be. I was just asking. Shall we pull anchor?”

  “Weigh anchor, isn’t that what they say?”

  “Only in the movies, sweetheart.” My best Bogart.

  At that moment, the wind dropped entirely. Both of us wanted to stop all clocks from ticking, seize the moment. Freeze it and live it. Quiet. Peaceful. Two people breathing almost in synch. Doing nothing but being here and now. Total Buddhist blissed-out behaviour.

  Weather. Fisherman’s friend or foe? I understood this stillness. Calm before the storm, city people say, but fishermen have a lot more understanding. Like my father, I could feel it. You didn’t need a barometer. Pressure dropping. Low pressure system moving in from the northeast. Old wharf rats could tell you a day or so in advance. Back would hurt, bad knee would announce it like a finely tuned weather instrument.

  Along the coast of Nova Scotia, some things are written like laws in the sky. Southwest wind at morning. Raining in Yarmouth. Get out your umbrellas in Halifax by noon. Rain in Stewart Harbour by evening. Cape Breton by midnight.

  Wind from the east was another matter. Starts with a bright tingly morning and a glass sheen on the sea. Whole thing bright as a shiny penny. Back in the days when we still had pennies. Clingy, coppery morning. Then the ripples. Then a still patch again.

  Like now.

  Then increments of wind puffs from the east. If you’re tucked in on the west side of a finger of land like Prosper Point, you don’t notice it at first, but pretty soon, the wind, the storm will hit. Then you wonder, holy shit, where’d all that rain come from. But at sea, you’re given fair warning.

  Like now.

  For the moment, we had time. Plenty of time. Storms like that tend to be slow moving. My father never came in early if there was still fishing to do. “Al
ways just keep your eyes on it. Keep steady. Know the wind. Know the boat. Don’t take shortcuts in the harbour or you’ll kiss your keel on the ledges, do some serious damage.”

  I had forgotten altogether about the radio in the cabin. About how my father would always turn it on at a time like this, even though he claimed he never trusted marine forecasts. “Just use your eyes. And your nose,” he’d say. My father could sniff out a storm within two hundred miles before Environment Canada even knew the wind had changed.

  So I turned on the radio. It crackled. I fiddled with the dial. There it was. That familiar voice. Damn if it didn’t sound like the same monotone announcer from fifty years ago. I left it on but went back to Ramona, who was still looking toward the darkening sky.

  “Write me a poem,” she said. “Write me a poem about all this.”

  “I want to write about you instead.”

  “Then do it.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t written a poem since college.”

  “Bullshit. You said you were writer.”

  “But not a poet.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s no money in poetry,” I said.

  “But there’s no poetry in money,” she countered. “Somebody said that. I remember it from my university poetry course.”

  A thought blipped in my head. “Wow. What if we had met back then?”

  “Hmm. You are forgetting. You would have been twenty. I would have been fifteen.”

  I laughed. “At twenty I would have been so full of myself you wouldn’t have liked me.”

  “At fifteen, I would have been so teenage gorgeous that you couldn’t have resisted me.”

  And that led to me grabbing her and planting a kiss to end all kisses. No poem could have captured it properly.

  I heard it before I saw it. A boat. Headed this way. At first, I assumed it was just somebody from the Harbour out to top up the day’s catch with a little afternoon handlining. Common enough.

  But the thrum of the engine was a pitch too high. And nobody, absolutely nobody did any joyriding with their meal ticket. Boys who liked to cowboy, if they struck a good lobster season, would buy a big, wanking Cape Islander with a big Volvo engine, blast away for a season, and then let it go with failed payments.

  I went looking for my father’s old Bushnell binoculars and there they were, hanging on the same nail as when I was eleven. Man, this boat was like a museum of my childhood.

  The first big whiff of the easterly wind lifted Ramona’s hair, touched her cheek like a gentle finger of air. Maybe I did have a poem in me.

  “What, pray, dost thou see?” she asked.

  I held the binoculars up to my eyes, but then had to wipe the dust off. “Better not go the Romeo and Juliet route. Remember, that got you in trouble last time.”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “Whoever it is doesn’t care about saving fuel.” I didn’t want to say until I knew.

  It didn’t take long. It was Joe Myatt; he was barrelling this way in a boat much newer than this one and with an engine almost big enough to compensate for his limited intellectual abilities. I thought about the gun in the tool box. No way would it come to that. Clearly, Joe would understand what I did was for Brody’s own good. Besides, I’d been told the two of them didn’t get along.

  I thought of at least heading back toward land, arcing wide around Incoming Joe. But it wouldn’t look good. Probably burn him even more.

  “Joe Myatt,” I said. “You mind if I ask you to go in the cabin, just lay low and see how this plays out? Joe and I go way back. I think we can work this out.”

  Ramona was reluctant to play the school marm role and get out of the way like a good little lady. She scowled and said, “You want to do your boy thing, I’ll acquiesce.” Yeah, she used that word. It was a hint. “But I’m not far. And I’m part of whatever this is. Don’t tell me I’m not.”

  As the sky darkened more, the wind was rising and there were shafts of sunlight stabbing down from the broody clouds, painting silver swords on patches of the sea.

  Joe cut his engine and turned his boat sideways, till he smacked up against Sheer Delight on the port side. He let his engine idle as his boat nudged us against the waves. He quickly tied the two boats together and yanked on the knot.

  Joe wasn’t in a pretty mood. Fortunately, though, Rolf was on board with him also. Joe snarled something at Rolf and Rolf went into the wheelhouse and took the wheel, held the boat steady. I waited for whatever was coming my way.

  Joe jumped over onto my deck. It wasn’t a social call.

  “You fucking sent my son to jail,” he snarled.

  “I did. For his own good.”

  “They sent him to Burnside for God’s sakes. A boy like that could have been raped. Or worse.”

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  “You leave here decades ago. Don’t give a shit about any of us, including Brody, then come back to town and fuck everything up in just a couple of days.”

  In his mind, I had brought pain into paradise. But things had not been pretty in that dysfunctional family for a long time. Anger produces its own perverse logic, however.

  “Scooter almost died,” I said. “Brody was dealing stuff so strong he didn’t even understand what he was doing.” I didn’t know yet exactly what was in those drugs. Brody had said it was fentanyl, which was bad enough, but it could have been almost anything. It was all over the news. But now wasn’t the time to lecture a guy like Joe on pharmacology.

  “Yeah, and that was pretty typical of Scooter, or his old man, for that matter. Never able to know when enough is enough.”

  “This wasn’t backwoods hooch Brody was selling.”

  “Scooter knew what he was doing.”

  I couldn’t believe Joe Myatt was saying that. Beth Ann had admitted to me that Brody just kept moving on to the next thing and the thing after that, never questioning what he was selling.

  We were still sparring with words. But I was pretty sure that wouldn’t last. I didn’t stand much of a chance against Joe. I’d been punching keys on a computer for thirty years. He’d been hauling traps and nets.

  I could see Rolf giving me some kind of hand signals. “I see you brought Rolf,” I said to Joe.

  “I was gearing up to go. Coming after you, dickhead. I didn’t see him get on board. When I turned around and saw him standing on my deck, I was ready to heave him in the channel. But I knew the stupid old fuck couldn’t swim a stroke. I had no choice.”

  I nodded to Rolf. Not sure he had anything helpful in mind, but maybe he’d have a plan to stop Joe from killing me.

  “On the way out, I decided that if I succeeded in killing you, I’d be willing to drown the old dimwit and the world would not have lost much.”

  “I get it. Two men lost at sea. Death by natural causes, I suppose.” I nodded to the dark skies still on the horizon and heading our way. “Mother nature doing her thing, they would say. Me, inexperienced at sea in his father’s old tub. Rolf, well, he was just along for the ride and not much use.”

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  I kept waiting for Joe to take a swing at me. Instead, he jumped back into his own boat. But he wasn’t about to sail away. He picked up a crowbar and climbed back into Sheer Delight.

  My radio was crackling away, repeating the storm warning. But I could hear a different radio on Joe’s boat. Shortwave? Marine band?

  Rolf looked worried. He was biting his lip. I thought about Ramona. What was she making of all this?

  I was beginning to think that words as weapons against a crowbar was not a good enough plan. Joe was serious.

  “Your boy. My boy. Sweet Jesus, he needs help. Not this. Put the fucking crowbar down, Joe.”

  “You know, I don’t really give a shit what happens to me anymore. You fucked it all up for me at the very beginning. Beth Ann could never quite get over you leaving. I could never quite feel right ab
out us raising your kid. But I tried, goddamn it. I tried. I was good to him. Brody fought me the whole way. But I still hate the fact you ambushed him and let the cops arrest him. The only thing I hate more than you is the fucking cops.”

  And that’s when Joe made his move. He swung the crowbar in a short arc that would have smashed my skull had I not ducked and darted. I shifted to the other side of the boat so I had the engine between us. He leaned forward and took another swing. I felt the steel nick my earlobe as it swept by.

  Rolf was shouting something now. Screaming at Joe at the top of his lungs.

  Joe had been an angry violent kid in school. Beaten by his father on a daily basis. I think he’d always tried to pretend it didn’t happen. But he carried it in everything he did. School. Business. Marriage. Life. He had enemies and he treated them just like that. I was Enemy Number One right now and nothing I could say or do would change that. And, I understood that he really didn’t care what happened after this. He wanted me punished.

  Swing number three was low. And that was a surprise. It caught me in the gut and I toppled. Once down on the deck, I wouldn’t stand much of a chance. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Rolf had left Joe’s wheelhouse and was scrambling to come save my sorry ass. But I’d heard what Joe had to say. Rolf would get it too.

  And that’s when I saw Ramona open the cabin door and point Brody’s gun at Joe. “You move, motherfucker, and I’ll pull this fucking trigger.” The line was not original, but the acting was good.

  Joe just looked at her and laughed. Ramona didn’t know anything about guns, I was pretty sure of that. And I knew she was holding an empty gun. I’d taken the bullets out of the gun and hidden them in a drawer. Fuck.

  Just as Joe started walking toward her, she raised the barrel up into the air and pulled the trigger. The blast was deafening. I guess she had found the ammunition. She aimed the gun at Joe and he froze in his tracks.

  “Go ahead, bitch. Shoot me. I bet I can still get to your boyfriend before I go down.”

  I was ready to dive for Joe’s feet. I figured he’d get in another blow with the damn crowbar, but I had to do something. A strange silence settled for a split second. But, before I could get up the courage to make my move, there was a voice on the radio. Not mine, but the one from Joe’s boat.