Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  “Guess we’re staying,” I said. “What’s next?”

  “Have another beer,” Joe said and threw me a second can, even though I’d barely touched my first. I looked at him sitting there beside Brody, both of them looking like they’d been caught stealing candy or something. But they seemed to have made up. Father and son. They had the very same way of slouching down in the chair and they were both in their socks, no shoes, wiggling their toes.

  Brody suddenly grew animated. “What’s next is you guys helping me figure out how to get the charges dropped.” He glared at me now. “You got me into this.”

  Beth Ann gave him a look that could fry meat. “Brody.”

  He slumped back. “Sorry,” he said to me. “But it was a really shitty thing to do. Why the fuck did you do it?”

  Beth Ann was about to say something to him but Ramona jumped in. “My brother died of an overdose of a drug he didn’t even know he was taking.” She was looking right at Brody. As she spoke, the fire seemed to go right out of him.

  “Scooter’s out of the hospital,” Brody said. “They said it wasn’t as bad as it seemed.”

  “Jesus, Brody,” Joe said. “The boy wasn’t breathing.”

  Brody just shrugged. I was convinced he knew what he’d done and felt bad about it even though his mouth was still speaking the lines his former self would have said. Something had changed about Brody, although I couldn’t quite pin it down. Something about nearly drowning in the ocean would do that to you. Mackenzie leaned forward then and put a hand on Brody’s shoulder. She seemed quite tender but also protective. I saw that there was strength in her.

  Beth Ann let Joe’s words hang there in the air a minute. “Well, we all sort of knew why Charles did what he did. The question is where do we go from here?”

  Brody touched Mackenzie’s hand on his shoulder. He was looking at the floor when he said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try running again. Where the hell would I run to anyway? This place is all I know.”

  No one blinked.

  Rolf must have felt the tension needed to break. He cleared his throat. “World’s not safe out there, anyway. Why the hell would you want to leave here? No person in his right mind would want to be out there, with terrorists and whatnot. They say they’re everywhere and are just waiting to blow off your arms and legs. I seen it on TV. Joe, would ya toss me another of them Keith’s like a good fella?” Rolf had always listened to too much news, I recalled, and had a xenophobic streak a mile long.

  “Brody goes before the judge next week,” Beth Ann jumped in, bringing the discussion back to what needed to be done for Brody. “He needs a lawyer, so I contacted one. He’ll be here any minute. We have questions we should ask him. Not too many criminal lawyers around here, but they say he’s good. Maybe the best. Alan Romaine.”

  The name rang a bell. I couldn’t keep quiet. “You got to be kidding?” I looked at Joe. “Alan Romaine from school? The kid we called Lettuce?”

  Joe nodded and threw up his hands. “He became a lawyer. Who would have guessed? Won some big cases. Made some serious money.”

  “Lettuce?” I repeated. Alan had been one of those kids whose mother had stitched a label on his shirt that read “Victim.”

  Joe piped up. “They say Alan Romaine could have gotten Hitler off scot-free at the Nuremberg trials. They say he makes Robert Shapiro look like a pussycat.”

  “Who’s Robert Shapiro?” Brody asked.

  “He got O.J. Simpson off,” Joe answered.

  “Knock, knock,” someone said through the screen door. And, sure enough, there was Lettuce, right on cue.

  I wouldn’t have recognized him. Slightly grey, close-cropped hair. Five-hundred-dollar glasses if my reckoning was correct. Black shiny shoes. Expensive suit. Briefcase like you’d expect a successful lawyer to be carrying. He saw the look on our faces when he walked into the room. Here was a man completely out of place.

  “Hi everyone. Don’t let the monkey suit fool ya. You have to dress for success, they say.” Brody lobbed him a beer, but Alan didn’t quite understand the gesture of hospitality. He saw the projectile headed his way and held up the briefcase in defence. The unopened beer bounced off it onto the floor. “Oops,” Lettuce said. “Wasn’t expecting that.” He picked up the beer and set it unopened on a small table. “Folks ready to get down to business?”

  We were.

  Brody started to squirm a bit as Alan Romaine explained the legal situation, summing it up this way: “We’re not going to win, but we are going to get the charges reduced. It’s that simple. Plead guilty to a lesser offence, save a big court battle and a lot of money on the part of the Crown. Do the time and move on.”

  “Do the time?” Brody asked.

  I think, deep down, he was hoping this whole thing would blow over.

  “I don’t see any other way,” Alan said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “I say we put it all out in the open. I especially want to know why Charles here turned him in.”

  I didn’t mention Ramona’s role in this, but I told Alan the obvious reason. As he studied my face, I could see the kid who had been bullied in the schoolyard by bigger kids, like Joe. But I could see he’d overcome the victim label and turned it into something else. Something that had made him stronger, more confident.

  “No. There’s more,” Beth Ann insisted.

  “Don’t go there,” Joe said. “That doesn’t need to be part of this.”

  “Yes, it does,” Beth Ann replied. “Alan, Charles here is Brody’s biological father.”

  “Fuck,” Joe said.

  Beth Ann held her ground. “Does it really matter if it comes out?”

  “It will come out,” Alan confirmed.

  “Well, it does matter,” Joe insisted. “All these years people believed Brody was my kid. When this comes out, what will they think of me then?”

  Beth Ann’s voice rose a half octave higher. “Why would you care what anyone has to say about you, Joe? You’re still who you are and that’s all that matters.” It was a kind of backhanded compliment maybe. Or some kind of code between them.

  “Fuck it,” Joe said, admitting defeat.

  “What about you, Brody?” Alan asked. “You okay if this is part of the story?”

  “Let ’em talk. No big deal to me. But I’ll always think of Joe as my real father.” Truth was, Joe wasn’t such a hot father, and everyone knew that. But it was a Hallmark card moment and I knew there weren’t too many of them around the Harbour these days. Joe shook it off, although I almost thought he was going to blubber.

  “Okay then,” Alan said. “Now we have a narrative. Caring father — that’s you, Charles, in this case — turns in his own son. To save others. But to save his son as well. Tough love. That sort of thing. Charles, you need to get this all down in writing for me to present to the judge, and the wording is of the utmost importance. We need to make sure the judge understands that. Might leak out in the papers, though.”

  Funny thought. Me in the papers: Father has his son sent to jail. I could see the legal proceedings page copy now. Only it wouldn’t be in the Tribune. “I’ll do whatever’s needed.”

  “Then we have something to work with. We have a story. A narrative. And that’s gonna reduce the charges.”

  It was then Beth Ann jumped back into the conversation. “It may come up that Brody was charged with assault before. Twice. What about that?”

  “Charged but not convicted,” Brody interjected.

  “If no conviction, then it shouldn’t come up in the case at all. No big deal.”

  Brody let out a notable sigh of relief.

  “Then we’re good,” Alan said. He looked like he’d already won the case, even though there was no win to be had. As he looked around the room, it seemed that he noticed Mackenzie for the first time. “Sorry, little lady, I was just wondering how you fit into this.”

  Beth Ann touched Mackenzie’s hand and then spoke on her behalf. “She’s pregnant with Brody’s baby.”r />
  “No. Really?” Lettuce asked.

  “Really,” Beth Ann said.

  “I think we just knocked some more time off the sentence. We just improved the narrative.” Without missing a beat, he opened up his briefcase. “I took the liberty of doing up a client agreement, with what I think is a fairly accurate estimate of my fees.”

  He handed the single sheet of paper to Joe. His eyebrows shot heavenward. He handed the paper to Beth Ann. The blood drained out of her face. She leaned forward and handed it to me. I could see what the shock was about. Not too long ago you could buy a house for that price in this part of Nova Scotia. Maybe this was Lettuce’s way of getting back at all of us for not treating him better back at school.

  Ramona plucked the paper from my grip. She took one look and nodded.

  “In for a penny,” she said.

  “You can’t do that,” Beth Ann interjected. “This isn’t your problem.”

  “What else are you going to do?” Ramona responded.

  No one had to speak. The silence did the talking.

  “Settled then,” Ramona concluded.

  There were some pleasantries after that and then Alan’s watch beeped and he was gone. We all heard his tires crunching clamshells as he left.

  Rolf was the first to speak. “Bleed you dry, the shysters. Never knew one that I liked or trusted. Mr. Shiny Shoes was pretty full of himself, I’d say. Still, if you want to save this boy’s ass, I think he’s your man. Fill up his pockets with enough loot and maybe he’ll be able to do the job. Joe, toss me another beer, would ya?”

  29

  After Alan left, Joe, Brody, and Rolf seemed to forget about the big issue of the day. They were well into that case of beer and their talk turned to other topics. Fishing, hockey, beer, assholes and assholery seemed to be the mainstays.

  I ended up following Ramona to sit on the sofa with Mackenzie and Beth Ann. Mackenzie seemed a little more relaxed.

  “Brody’s gonna straighten himself out,” she said. “I know it. He just needs someone to give him a break.”

  “Well, I think he just got one,” Beth Ann said. “Still, it seems there’s a good chance he’s going to be spending some time away. Are you going to be okay, Mackenzie? How do you feel about it all?”

  Mackenzie looked sad but then her face brightened a little. “I’m excited about becoming a mother,” she said. “I know this wasn’t planned or anything, but I feel like it was meant to be. I know it’s the right thing.”

  Naive girl. Nice girl. Tough life ahead, I thought. It looked like Beth Ann and Ramona were trying to avoid rolling their eyes.

  “What do your parents have to say about it?” Ramona asked.

  “My parents don’t really give a shit,” Mackenzie replied, with a vehemence that surprised me. “About me or about anything but themselves. I’ve been staying with my grandmother for the last three years. She thinks I should give the baby up when it’s born. But I won’t do that.”

  She was referring to a baby that was technically my grandchild. Good God, I was going to be a grandfather. That is one thing that I never in my life envisioned.

  Mackenzie now turned to me. It was like the girl was reading my mind. “You can come visit the baby whenever you like. I think that would be just fine. Kind of like family, right?”

  “Right. And thank you for being so gracious about it.”

  She laughed. “Nobody ever called me gracious before.”

  Ramona sat silently on the way back to our little home on the water.

  “We got a mattress to blow up,” I said. “Gonna be like sleeping on air.”

  “It will be sleeping on air,” she reminded me, then added, “Grandpa.”

  I shook my head.

  “Better get used to it,” she said.

  I cobbled together a not-so-great meal after that. I blew up the mattress and put it on the floor of the bedroom. Ramona lit a smelly candle she’d bought from the general store.

  “How do you feel about being a grandfather?” Ramona asked.

  “Jeez, I don’t know. I didn’t exactly do an award-winning job as a father, did I?”

  Ramona looked like she didn’t know what to say to that. Instead, she said, “You haven’t finished telling me what happened to your father after your mom passed on and after the house was all gone.”

  “Well, he moved out here, as you know. He kept fishing. They say he kept more and more to himself. Folks were worried about him.”

  “Including you?”

  “I’d call him and he’d say everything was fine. Don’t worry about him. Said he’d always known he’d end up all alone as an old fisherman, that he’d planned for it all his life. All he wanted to do was keep up the routine: go to sea, fish, watch TV at night, and then get up the next morning and do it all over again.”

  “But something happened.”

  “Something. Yeah. He went to sea one fine day — calm seas, clear sky — and he never came back. Rolf went looking for him and found the boat, drifting. No sign of my father. Not a trace. No note, no sign of any problem on board. He’d put out lobster traps that day. Everything looked normal. He was just gone.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know. I blamed myself for not coming back to check on him. Truth was, I didn’t want to return here for any reason. I should have. And then after he was gone, I had even less reason to come here.”

  “And you just walked away?”

  “I just stayed away. Pete was out west. Beth Ann and I were over. I had finally gotten rid of the smell of fish on me — figuratively speaking.”

  “Was there a will?”

  “Yeah. A real basic one. Pete had told everyone he was never coming back here and didn’t want any property so it all went to me. Pete got some savings. I would have got the house — if there was a house — but I got the land there on the mainland and I got this little fisherman’s palace where we now reside. Only problem with this shack is that I own the building but not the land it’s on, since it’s technically in the tidal zone. And someday soon, it may just wash away.”

  “Could we make it float away?”

  “What?”

  “Like the way they moved those houses when they closed down the Newfoundland outports. Maybe we could float it off somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “You mentioned Paris.”

  I laughed. “Well, we’d have to cross the Atlantic first.”

  “We get a tow. Hitch a ride behind a container ship.”

  “Maybe. I can just picture us floating down the Seine.”

  “I can see it too.”

  We were lying on our backs now on the fully inflated mattress. We were watching the light from the candle dance on the ceiling. Despite the complications and confusion around us, we kept finding moments like this. Moments when the world just went away and left us all on our own.

  Grandpa and his girlfriend on a blow-up mattress far down the Eastern Shore, planning to float a little fish shack to the Left Bank where he’d write a great literary novel and she’d tend house. A fantasy world without time or conflict.

  30

  When you walk away from your everyday life, things are left hanging. Dangling maybe is a better verb. After losing my job and all my saved money, I had isolated myself; there is no denying it. First there was some UI coming in, but that ran out. I had copped a couple of freelance writing jobs producing articles for trade publications, but that never amounted to much. Two hundred dollars here, three hundred there for writing articles about men and their bulldozers or the latest news in the world of firefighters’ equipment. I could have made that work, maybe. Hustled like in my early years as a journalist. But my heart wasn’t in it.

  Maybe everyone hits a wall at some point. Things fall apart and you have to pick up the pieces and somehow put Humpty Dumpty back together again, or you have to start over. I slogged through a depressive state back there and didn’t see any future. I started to have much more empa
thy for people who were down and out. If I could have helped those around me, I would have. But I could barely help myself.

  Spent whole days in my rathole apartment where I couldn’t tell you a single thing that I did. I think I napped a lot. I did some reading. That helped. Maybe it was the Halifax Regional Library that got me through the worst of it. Autobiographies of Neil Young, Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen. They’d all struggled some. They all got through it. I drifted back to Hemingway and Fitzgerald and filled in some books on my bucket list that I’d missed. I read Pat Conroy’s book about his father and realized again how lucky I had been to have the parents I had. Why was I so willing to abandon them?

  If I ever won the lottery or fell into money, I’d give a stack of it to the Halifax Library for getting me through those days of gloom. On some days, I believed that my unlucky streak would end. But then I lost hope.

  And, sometime well after that, Ramona dropped out of the sky.

  But …

  Things got complicated. And it looked like they were going to get even more complicated.

  Right now, though, it was one hell of a life out there at the fish shack.

  It was summer.

  Ramona and I had the ability to make the world go away when we wanted.

  Brody would have his day in court. He would have his narrative. Things would go one way or the other. But all of that was still a long way away. The court date was not until August 25. A long way away.

  This was summer. The one you want to never end.

  We fixed up my father’s fish shack. Ramona had taken to calling it a shack as well. We could have called it a cabin or a cottage or something respectable. But shack sounded just right.

  “So, is this what you call shacking up with someone?” she asked one morning while we were washing dishes in the old iron-stained sink where my father had once cleaned hundreds of fish.

  “Absolutely. You and me shacking up down at the Beach Shack, the Sugar Shack, the Hop in the Sack shack. You remember Conway Twitty?”

  “Nope. Must have been before my time.”

  “He sang ‘Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.’ It had the lyric, Gonna lay around the shack till the mail train comes back, rollin’ in my sweet baby’s arms.”