Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  “I haven’t seen you do one single thing that indicates you have memory problems of any sort,” I said.

  “I’m good at covering up. That’s one of the first signs.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’ve been to three specialists. They all confirm it’s true. No one can give me a timeline, but they all swear it is inevitable. They say I need to plan for what’s ahead. A five-year plan.”

  I was angry now. Denial and anger make a fine emotional cocktail. “Fuck the doctors.”

  Ramona gave one last good blow into her Kleenex. “If I thought it would help, I would,” she said and forced a smile. “Now let’s forget about it and change the subject.”

  There was a lot more I wanted to say just then. I wanted to speak philosophically about how we now needed to live each day as if it were our last good day before things started to slide downhill. A five-year plan, what the hell was that? So there was a number attached to this. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but within five years. What about medical breakthroughs and all that? But I realized Ramona was way ahead of me on the research there. She read me the riot act because that’s what the facts were saying. I doubted there would be an announcement any time soon on the CBC about a wonder drug that cured dementia.

  A few years ago, I’d interviewed a doctor at Camp Hill Hospital, a researcher into Alzheimer’s and dementia. He said the science had moved ahead by leaps and bounds, but when he took me around the hospital to meet some of his patients, some old and some not so old, I was not impressed.

  “The money all goes into cancer,” he told me. “That’s where the drama is. Old folks and senility is just something that the public accepts. We’re not expecting any big breakthroughs in the near future.”

  Back in Ramona’s apartment, we curled up on her sofa and I held her. She fell asleep in my arms and I sat there with her, looking out the big window onto the harbour. I could see the Dartmouth ferry crossing to Halifax and watched a couple of tugboats heading to sea. There was George’s Island, stark and unwelcoming, and beyond it, the wide, wide ocean. The one where my father had sailed on his last day on earth.

  When Ramona awoke, she seemed like her old self. She showered and put on fresh clothes. She sat down at the kitchen table and picked up her landline phone. “I’m going to check my messages,” she said. “I haven’t checked this since, um, since you came along.”

  I went into the bathroom and took a shower myself. The water felt good. My clogged brain started back in with thoughts about the days ahead. What had I gotten myself into? I knew I was still capable of walking away if I wanted to. Walk away from Ramona while I still had an open door. Walk away from Brody and Joe and Beth Ann. Alan Romaine already had my deposition. I need never go back to Stewart Harbour. I had no job and no responsibilities. I really could just disappear into thin air. Move out west? Start over? Go crash at Pete’s until he kicked me out, maybe.

  By the time I turned the water off, I felt physically ill. That’s my report from the purgatory shower stall. Only problem is that heaven did not await. I was fairly certain of that.

  Ramona was still sitting at the kitchen table with the house phone up to her ear. I sat down across from her. “Listen to this,” she said and clicked the speakerphone button. It was a message that had been recorded.

  “Ramona. I’m calling as a representative of Christian Women Against Pornography. I’m calling to let you know that you are on our blacklist of those who are responsible for corrupting our boys. We’ve seen your films on the internet, the ones our sons have easy access to. We want to expose you to the world for the whore that you are.” And then the caller had hung up.

  “Is that some kind of crude joke?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ramona said. “I told you about that film. And that was a long time ago.”

  “Things last forever on the internet. But I’ve never heard of this Christian Women organization.”

  Ramona was already walking across to her computer. She seemed rattled. After a minute, she found what she was looking for. “There they are. It looks like they’re based in the States. Looks like they call themselves C-WAP. They have a hit list of women they’ve targeted. Looks like I’m the latest.”

  I looked at the computer screen and there was a photo of Ramona. Beneath it was her address here in Halifax. And her home phone number. “Looks like this just got posted recently.”

  “Jesus. Why you? Why now?”

  “No reason. Maybe one of them saw their teenage boy looking at that damn footage from that damn movie. Tracked me down. It’s not like I was hiding.”

  “I think it’s all bluster,” I said. “Bunch of redneck fundamentalists with nothing better to do.”

  “I hope so.”

  But even as we had finished listening to that first message, a second one had come in. Another one from the C-WAP. It was clear Ramona really was on some kind of hit list.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said. I looked at the number displayed on the phone. “I’m calling them back. Both of them.”

  “No,” Ramona said. “That will only make things worse.” Then she looked at me with a soft sad look of defeat. “Now you have one more reason to walk out the door. Over-the-hill porno star who’s about to lose her mind. C’mon, Charles, time to run.”

  “I say we both get out of Dodge. Every time we come to Halifax, something bad happens. Let’s get our sorry asses back to the simple life on the Eastern Shore.”

  “Every time we show up there something bad happens too,” she added.

  “Yeah, but at least the air is clean and we have free fish. And if those C-WAP women come looking for you, Rolf will chase them out of town with a pitchfork or something.”

  “I certainly seem to have made your life more complicated,” Ramona said.

  “And it all seemed so simple at first. Woman walks up to me out of the fog and offers to buy breakfast. Before I know it, we’re all up to our earlobes in deep shit.”

  “You really should have been a poet.”

  “I wanted to be one back at Dal. Thought I could be the next Lord Byron.”

  “For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.”

  “How’d you do that?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Pull that line out of the air.”

  “Memorization, my dear Watson. Remember, when I wasn’t fornicating for the big screen I actually had to memorize lines. The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.”

  The house phone was ringing now. I was about to pick it up and raise bloody hell if it was another of those C-WAP women. Ramona grabbed my hand. The phone stopped after three rings and the answering service kicked in. Ramona waited and then checked the message on speakerphone. It was her father. “Ramona, honey. I’m so sorry you got upset today. We really need to talk. About your mother. About you. About us. I promise. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

  She clicked off the speakerphone. “When my father says he wants ‘the right thing,’ he’s always talking about what’s right for him. Selfish bastard. I won’t let him move her out of the home. He’s not doing it.”

  She picked up the phone and called Bedford Manor. She spoke to the manager there and told her the situation, gave her strict orders not to allow her father to even take her mother anywhere off the property. This was the take-charge side of Ramona that I’d only seen a few times. Considering what her day had been like, I was a little surprised she could muster strength to play the role.

  “Let’s go pick up that manuscript of yours and go.”

  I tried to persuade her to forget about it, but she was insistent.

  As we walked out of the building, we discovered someone had spray-painted graffiti on the side of the building. The graffiti read “Home of Ramona Danforth, the whore of Halifax.”

  “Looks like the C-WAP folks have a local chapter,” Ramona said as we walked to the park
ing lot.

  Jimmy was surprised to see me knocking on his door. He was wearing a paint-stained T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. Despite the fact I owed him money for unpaid rent, he seemed happy to see me. “Well, if it isn’t Charlie Howard,” he said. “Back from the dead.”

  When I told him I’d come for the novel, he said, “Good,” and went to fetch it. When he returned, he looked me in the eye and said, “No story like this should ever go unfinished. If there’s anything I’ve learned in life, it’s that once you start a job, you have to finish it. It’s no fucking good if you get lazy or give up. It’s just no fucking good.”

  I was about to leave when he said, “Hold on. Don’t go yet.” He disappeared back into the building as I stood on the steps waiting.

  When he returned he had an old black Remington manual typewriter. “You’ll need this,” he said and set it on top of the box holding my manuscript.

  33

  We were quiet for a while as I drove us east. The whole C-WAP thing seemed like a bad joke. The return of Ramona’s father was definitely a problem. Even more disturbing was the news about what might become of Ramona. I was in denial about that. There was this lively, beautiful, intelligent woman beside me. It simply could not be.

  What had become of the broken man on the Halifax pier? Well, he was still a work in progress, a project undergoing repair. And, despite the grenades being lobbed at him by the world, he was doing fairly well, thank you.

  I was not ever in my recollected life an optimist. But I had become, against all my better judgment, hopeful. Ours was an unfinished story, just like that three-hundred-page manuscript sitting in the back seat alongside the old typewriter.

  I remembered interviewing Farley Mowat a long time back at his home in River Bourgeois in Cape Breton. Farley showed me his own old Remington typewriter. “There,” he said gruffly. “That’s what I write on. You can’t write shit on a computer. It sucks the spirit out of you. If you want to write anything worth your salt, you have to pound on the keys.” He put a piece of paper into his old machine, hammered away, and then scrolled the paper out and handed it to me. On it were the words, “Writing should be hard work!”

  Not long after that, Farley had been up on a ladder when one of his favourite dogs had knocked the ladder and he’d fallen and gotten injured. But he recovered and I lost track of him after that until I heard of his death in May of 2014.

  Farley had been one of the last of that dying breed of writers that I admired. A truth-teller. A masterful bullshitter. A guy who didn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thought about him. A man who defended whales and wolves and shot at American military planes flying over his house. I wondered if there was still room for a Farley Mowat in the world we now inhabited.

  Ramona had drifted off as we drove. I found myself deep in some kind of reverie. I stopped and bought her an ice cream and we sat by the highway and ate it.

  “I was serious about what I said,” she said, yet again. “I’ve complicated your life enough already. If you want out, all you have to do is say it. I would understand. And I would still respect you.”

  “As in R-E-S-P-E-C-T? Shut up, Aretha, and eat your ice cream.” And I kissed her long and hard, our tongues mixing vanilla and chocolate in a most delightful way.

  Back in the car, I felt giddy. Despite everything that was being dumped on us, I felt light-headed and optimistic. Don’t ask me to explain it.

  “I always wanted to have a demented whore for a girlfriend,” I suddenly said.

  At first Ramona looked stunned. Then she tossed it back. “Well, now your dreams have come true.”

  “I don’t believe the dementia story,” I said soberly. “I just don’t.”

  “It’s called denial.”

  “Call it what you want. But even if you could convince me it’s true, I have a cure.”

  “What’s your cure, doctor?”

  “Live. Live every moment. Every day. Live it till you’re dead.”

  “Or until you lose your mind.”

  “Whichever comes first.”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Ramona said, ending the conversation.

  Before we headed out on the causeway, I drove us to the field where my parents’ house once stood. We got out of the car and walked the property, grown thick with daisies, vetch, lupins, wild rose bushes, and tall grasses. I led Ramona to the location where the house had been and pointed to the pile of rocks on the edge of the field. “Stone by stone,” I said, still trying to make some sort of sense of it all. Memories swept over me. I’d hidden in what was once a cellar here and smelled the cool damp smell of the packed dirt floor. I’d played outside in the yard. I grew up there and it was there that I had dreamed my dreams of escaping to the great wide world beyond this place.

  And now I was back.

  “How much money did you say you had?” I asked boldly.

  “I never said.”

  “You have enough to build a house?”

  Ramona blinked hard into the sun. “What kind of a house?”

  “A nice house,” I said.

  “You want to use my money to build a house? A nice house? Here on your old family property?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’d build it myself, but I don’t have a cent.”

  “Same old excuse,” she said.

  “So? Are you in?”

  “Yes, I’m in. When do we start?”

  “Soon,” I said. “Very soon.”

  I’d never in my entire life thought about building on that old property. Once my father had torn down the house, I figured the land would just sit there and be like a thousand other properties on the Eastern Shore where homes had burnt down, or been left to rot. The abandoned property would just go back to its natural state.

  Ramona had changed everything in my life. Broken man turned into a potentially promising work in progress. A man with an agenda. An unfinished novel, a house to be built, a life to be woven around a woman who might one day in the not-too-distant future lose her memory and maybe even forget who I was. But, goddamn it, she had given me back a reason to live. She had given me a life.

  Summers are short in Nova Scotia. All too short. The warm days of July rolled by. Ramona and I went to sea on good days in my father’s old boat. I started to reread my novel as we drifted with the engine off. It was like something written by a stranger. It was all about loss of innocence and disappointment. Corruption and failure. But there were some fine passages, some eloquent sentences written by a somewhat younger man who had a passion for language. I hadn’t yet mustered the courage to start hammering away at what came to be known as the Farley Mowat Memorial Typewriter. It sat in the corner of the fish shack, waiting for me to come pound the keys hard enough to finish a long story that should someday, hopefully, make sense.

  By the third week in July, there was a new hole in the ground where the old house once stood. Concrete was poured for a foundation and a contractor was ready to build a two-storey, Cape Cod–style house. A nice house.

  The coming of August meant that Brody’s appointment with justice was also coming up. There had been several “coaching” sessions with Alan Romaine for the upcoming courtroom date. Brody and I met with him together. At first, Alan had been so confident, but he seemed less so as the court date approached.

  The plan was that Brody would plead guilty to the drug dealing charges and Alan would have Brody and me tell our story — the whole father and son narrative and the satisfying conclusion of Brody “turning a corner in his life.” We went over the story again and again; it felt like we were being coached to death.

  34

  Romaine decided that a good way to help enforce the father and son story was for Brody and me to spend some quality time together. “Invite him to the house worksite some evening,” Romaine suggested. “Just you and him. Take some beer.”

  So I did.

  We had a full foundation by then. The house was moving al
ong quicker than I would have thought. There wasn’t a lot of new construction going on at this end of the Eastern Shore, so it wasn’t as hard as I expected to get workers on site. Rolf had turned me onto a guy known simply as Big Carl from Wine Harbour who had a small construction company. Big Carl was salt of the earth, straightforward, and had a team of two young, bearded, tattooed men who looked like killers from a bike gang. But they were ultra-polite, especially around Ramona, and damn good workers. Rolf hung around them quite a bit, offering advice and telling stories.

  So there I was one August evening, sitting on the first set of joists anchored into the concrete walls of what would be the basement wall of my new home. Even though it was a little ways along, it was still a pipe dream. The land was mine, but the house, well, it would be the house that Ramona built. I had just cracked open the first bottle of Propeller IPA and was watching the sun glint off the bottle when I had the thought, if a woman builds a house on your property, is that what you call a commitment?

  Hell, yes, the sun and the Propeller bottle answered. Bloody hell, yes.

  “Hey,” Brody said, as he ambled up the driveway.

  “Hey. You walked.”

  “Beth Ann told me to walk. She said you’d have beer and didn’t want me to drive.”

  “When was the last time you listened to your mother?”

  He laughed. “Never.”

  I held out a beer.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “IPA. They call it craft beer.”

  “No Keith’s?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  Brody took the beer. “That’s okay.” He held the neck of the bottle up to the top edge of the foundation and hammered it lightly with his fist, making the beer cap fling off into the unfinished basement. Brody sat down on the wall and we stared at each other.

  All the piss and vinegar seemed to have evaporated. Father and son sitting together at a house-to-be. The exiled writer in me kept thinking this was a very literary moment.