by Alan Doyle
We arrived at the spot along the guardrail where the Gulch was the closest and the deepest. Without hesitation, we popped over the guardrail and lugged our gear down to the cliff’s edge. I tried not to look down. Instead, I looked to the first step only, the pine tree on a nearby ledge. Sure enough, there was a ring worn out of the bark—rope burn. This was relieving—Bart was not shagging around. Someone had been here and found a way down.
We fed the rope through a knothole in the plank and tied it securely with three half hitches around the pine tree. Then we slid on our backsides and pushed the plank to the edge of the ledge. With our legs outstretched, we gave it a kick to send it over the chasm. But it got hooked on debris at the very lip of the gulch. We would have to go closer.
We looked at each other without saying a word. We flipped over onto our stomachs and pulled ourselves away from the safety of the pine tree and towards the edge of the cliff where the plank was lodged. We reached forward gingerly and laid our hands on the rough wood. Then we gave a quick push. But the plank did not budge. We had to move closer still, close enough that we could peer right over the horrifying edge.
We had never had the guts to fully hang over that edge and stare down into the hole, the hole that dropped straight away to cragged rocks and the whitewash of the cold, angry Atlantic below.
“Look!” Perry said as he pointed to the churning waters beneath us. The surf was violent, but we could make out two plastic kitchen garbage bags. One had landed intact on the rocky shore, just out of the reach of the water. The other hadn’t fared as well. It had ripped to shreds on the way down, probably catching on the sharp rock faces, and the full-colour pages were strewn along the mossy ledges at the bottom of the Gulch, the pages dancing in the wind. We couldn’t make out images from that distance, but we were certain: these were skin mags.
And once we were on the edge, we could see the problem with our plank. It was caught on a small twig. We wiggled the board and the twig broke instantly, sending the plank careening into a free fall and the two of us scrambling backwards as fast as we could, trying not to get tangled up in the rope. For the first time in our lives, we realized the true danger of the Old Woman’s Gulch. But we realized as well the treasures she held.
We were going in.
We assumed the early steps in the path would be easy to navigate. We were wrong. The narrow stones and worn cracks were slimy with moss and mist. At times we faced the rock wall and inched along the ledge; other times, we pressed our backs to the wall and were paralyzed as we watched the crashing waves and foam beneath.
“Don’t look down,” Perry said, and we continued our descent until we reached the gap where the plank awaited us at the impasse. There was a wide enough spot for us to stand next to each other and catch our breath. And we needed to, because the gap in the rock ledge in front of us was well over ten feet, with nothing below but white water and foam. From this vantage point, there was not even a glimpse of shore or rock. One slip here and you plunged into Davy Jones’s locker for sure.
We gathered ourselves and hoisted the rope till the plank peeked through the chasm. We carefully levered it up and across the void until, clunk, it caught the edge of the far side. We gave it an extra push for safety but then realized we didn’t have much extra length to play with. The plank barely spanned the gap, less than a foot touching ground on either side.
Perry evaluated the situation. “This is crazy,” he said quietly. “Circus crazy.”
I coiled the rope neatly in a circle as I had been taught to do by Jack on the wharf. It was still attached to the plank. I looked at Perry. “We are walking this plank. I’ll go first.”
I took one step onto the plank and it bent ever so slightly. I kept my gaze straight ahead at the target of terra firma. A step or two later, I was past the point of no return. The plank was bowing quite a bit at the midpoint, so I made the decision to hurry it up. I should not have. I pushed a little hard with my left foot and slipped. Down I went on one knee.
“Jesus Christ!” Perry shouted.
I outstretched my arms like a tightrope walker as I lifted myself and carefully took the last few steps to the other side.
“Nothing to it!” I yelled across to Perry, who looked doubtful. And terrified.
“I don’t know, b’y!” he shouted. “You were almost shagged!”
“Too scared? Fine, then. I’ll go see the skin mags myself.”
With that, Perry took one step back and ran as fast as he could at the plank. It was as if he was a lizard and was crossing the entire length without touching the board at all. The wood barely bowed, barely moved.
“Hmm,” I said when he made it across, triumphant. “Looks easy if you do it that way.”
We slid down a couple of easy mossy ledges till our feet finally touched beach rocks. Our rubber boots were washed with sea water each time a wave made its way up the small shore, but we had arrived, safe upon the shore. And the treasure lay before us.
The full bag of Simpson’s magazines was within arm’s reach. But instead of starting with that, Perry got caught up by the stray pages that had been cliff-battered and were now wet and clinging to the rocks. It didn’t matter to us that they were tattered and soaked, not if there was a naked lady somewhere on them.
And that’s when Perry’s eyes went wide. He found a whole series of photos of a lady strewn across boulders on the bank. In the first one he came upon, she was on all fours and had more makeup on than we’d ever seen before. She stared right off the page with her mouth slightly open and her eyes kind of sleepy-looking.
“She’s got a friggin’ nightie on!” Perry said.
He was right. And it was a small nighty, a frilly see-through housecoat kind of thing covering what appeared to be dark underwear and high socks with a garter, kind of like the garter we wore playing hockey but way more flimsy. I scoffed. “They wouldn’t last two games,” I said.
Perry and I followed that series of photos up the rock. Even though the pages were torn, we could see there was some kind of progression happening with each new photo. The lady seemed increasingly surprised by something, as her eyes and mouth opened wider in each shot. To be honest, her expression was a bit confusing. She seemed amazed and even shocked but at the same time uncontrollably curious about whatever was being presented in front of her just out of the frame. Also odd was the fact that she seemed to get less comfortable in her nightie and attempted to tear it off herself, picture by picture, until … we made it to the last photo in the series.
This was the photo we wanted to see the most, but it was also the photo most damaged by the rocks and sea. Perry picked it up, puzzling over the shapes.
“Is that a boob?” he asked.
We were transfixed. We moved our faces closer and closer to the page. We put our fingers on the outline of the undefined body part and tried to trace what we thought we saw.
“Not sure, b’y.” I said, as we stared blankly for what could have been ten seconds or ten minutes, I really could not say.
Perry finally broke the spell. “Forget this. Let’s get to the real goodies in the bag.”
We took one step towards the bounty when a scraping of wood on rocks turned us back to the side we’d scrabbled down. To our horror, the plank had slipped and was now suspended by the rope. But that wasn’t all. It appeared the plank was floating back up towards the top of the cliff. We traced the rope with our eyes and there at the highest edge stood Bart, heaving and hauling for all he was worth.
“Two arselickers!” he called down, cigarette in his mouth. The plank now lay at his feet. “Bring me up one of those bags right now or I’ll take this plank and go home with it, ye friggin’ idiots!”
“That’s not fair!” I yelled.
“All’s fair in love and skin mags, b’y! Bring me up a bag or I’m gone. And I’ll tell your fadders that ye’re stuck down there up to no good. Can’t wait to hear what ye tells your mudders about what ye were doing down there in the first place.”
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br /> We knew he had us. Perry didn’t say a word. He just grabbed the intact bag of treasure and started up the path. I followed. We slowly made our way back up the mossy ledges while Bart lowered the plank once more when we arrived at the chasm. Our walk across the plank seemed easier this time. We were back up to the top in minutes, even though we were laden with a garbage bag full of magazines, the magic fading in a hurry.
The moment we reached the top, Bart grabbed the bag.
“Thanks, arselickers,” he said.
“Let us see one,” Perry said.
“Nah, ye’re too young for this stuff. Might rot your minds. Sorry.”
“We were friggin’ old enough to send down the Gulch,” I said.
“Yeah, sorry about that. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure the plank business would work. Dreamt it up one night but never tried it. I’m not so stunned as ye, apparently.”
“But what about the rope burn on the tree?” I was sure that part of Bart’s story was true.
“Oh, that. It’s from a fishing seine Dad ties on there every summer. Nice touch, isn’t it?” Bart laughed, as if congratulating himself.
“You don’t even have an Uncle Jerry, do you,” Perry said.
“Not that I knows of, b’y. Not that I knows of.” Bart flicked his cigarette at our feet, turned and was gone up the path and down the road. And so was the treasure.
Perry and I walked back towards Petty Harbour. Barely a word was spoken the whole way. When we arrived at Perry’s house, we didn’t even exchange goodbyes.
“Frig sakes” was all Perry said as he climbed the steps to his house, his wet boots leaving dirty footprints in his wake.
I walked home with only two thoughts in my head. The first was “I’ll never trust another story about someone’s Uncle Jerry.”
Turns out I was right about that.
The second was “I’ll never work that hard to see a girl again.”
Turns out I was wrong about that.
Petty Harbour was a tough place for a boy to be indoctrinated into the wooing of the fairer sex. This difficulty was partly due to the isolation and innocence of the place and also to the fact that almost all the girls my age were out of the courting market because they were my cousins. And, of course, there was no texting or Facebook to hide behind; no internet to consult; no virtual ways to locate, approach or eventually land a date for the Hockey Dance. On the other hand, the courtship mystery of my young life in Petty Harbour also smashed headlong into grown-up, capital-A Adult territory thanks to a few of the town’s more colourful characters.
Consider Billy.
Billy was an older fisherman, in his late fifties. He stood out physically for two reasons. First, he was much taller than most. He stood around six-foot-five. His ever-present rubber boots and his orange toque made him seem even taller. Second, he had a very large bulbous nose, rounded at the tip and longer than average. When Billy drank, which was always, his nose turned a reddish purple and even seemed to grow. It looked like the long neck of a bottle, one which started between his tiny beady eyes and ran down, ever widening, till it reached just above his upper lip. Bottle-Nosed Billy he was called, and we younger fellas abbreviated that to “The Bottler.”
The Bottler was a great source of entertainment for the young lads of the wharf, myself included. He regaled us with stories about the prostitutes he regularly hired to come to his little house in Petty Harbour and avail of their services. There was no shame in it at all as far as he was concerned, and he was quick to tell us little fellas what services the ladies provided. He had a slight lisp, so his s’s sounded like th’s. This, combined with the usual Petty Harbour accent, made for some fascinating pronunciation: “girls” became “girlth” and “wonderful” became “wanderful.” And “wanderful” was the adjective he most often used when detailing his adventures, many of which involved more than one lady for hire and all of which involved these ladies giving him a good scrub in the tub first. “Jethuth, if thath not the betht wath ye ever got in yer life, I don’t know what ith,” he’d tell us kids as we helped him carry his catch from his fishing boat to the gutting table.
We were in awe of The Bottler, at once captivated and terrified by his vivid accounts of what he got up to on one of his nights in the company of prostitutes—or the “whorth” as he called them (I kid you not). But at some point, the stories weren’t enough anymore and we grew very curious about the facts.
“Perry, you think The Bottler really gets them women from town to wash his pickle?” I asked during a break in the action on the wharf.
“Tough to say, b’y. They don’t come out for nothing. Dad saw a taxi from town dropping them off one night. Imagine! A taxi come all the way from town.”
Perry looked at me. I looked at Perry. “We’re gonna have to check it out,” we said simultaneously.
The next time word got around town on a Saturday evening that The Bottler had ordered up whorth, Perry, me and a bunch of the other boys defied our mothers’ warnings to stay clear of Bottled-Nosed Billy and we crept over to his house. Once outside, we began negotiations.
“All right, Mikey, you’re the smallest,” I said. “Get up on Perry’s shoulders and look in the window.”
Perry hoisted Mikey till his face touched the glass of the bedroom window.
“What’s on the go?” Perry asked, balancing Mikey like a Cirque du Soleil gymnast.
“I … I don’t know.” Young Mikey’s eyes were as big as saucers.
“Come on, b’y!” the rest of us down on the ground said. “Tell us something!”
“They, uh, probably got their shirts off and are, uh, lyin’ down and dancing, or something I s’pose, I don’t know. I just don’t know. Let me down. I wants to go home.”
Mikey jumped off Perry’s shoulders and ran back across the bridge to Catholic safety.
I was determined. “We gotta get up there,” I said.
“The beer bottles!” Perry was always smart and had come up with a great plan. The Bottler stored empties in a nearby shed, so we broke in and grabbed four or five cases, building a makeshift ladder up to the window. Two of us scrambled up.
“Frig! The friggin’ steam!” Perry couldn’t see a thing, the single-pane glass was so fogged by the action inside.
My turn. I scaled the beer-case ladder and peered in. I can’t truly say I ever saw anything other than shadows, but there’s no doubt we could hear things going on in there, even over the Elvis Presley records with the volume maxed.
Smack!
Out of nowhere, two sweaty hands, a big Bottler-sized one and a small woman-sized one, slapped against the steam on the inside of the window and pressed hard on the glass about a millimetre in front of my face.
“Ahhh!” The two-handed monster frightened a loud squeal out of me and I tipped backwards and sent empty Dominion Ale bottles crashing down the bank.
We were had, and we did what any respectable young kids would do in a situation like this. We threw rocks at The Bottler’s house and shouted, “Ye bunch of whores!” and ran as fast as we could back home, fortunately without getting caught.
Billy enjoyed his company on a weekly or biweekly basis. Everything seemed to go well for him, except for one small ongoing problem: he was married. And it turns out that his scandalous adventures took place only when his wife was away in the Goulds tending to her ailing mother. The moment she was out the door, The Bottler would call in the ladies. It was a regular occurrence to see The Bottler walking on the main road on Monday with his recently returned wife behind him screaming and yelling and pointing in protest of his weekend escapades. Billy all the while strode casually in front of her and seemed to not even notice her ranting. My mother would sometimes run into The Bottler and his shouting wife in the post office on a Monday, and The Bottler would immediately include my poor mother in the conversation.
“Listen to her going on like that, Jean. Now what do you think of that? Ranting like a savage ’cause some fella found a little bit of
pleasure in this hard life. Is she cracked or what, Jean?”
My mother would collect their mail and try to get them out the door as quickly as possible.
When I was in my twenties, I met Paul, a friend of a friend in St. John’s. I got to telling some stories, and eventually The Bottler came up.
Paul’s eyes went wide. “Holy frig! Are you talking about Billy?” Paul explained that he’d been sent to Petty Harbour when he was a student in fisheries college. At one point, he had an appointment with a fisherman to see about a loan application for a modification to a fishing boat. Paul was to go to the fisherman’s house at the appointed time, one o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday, but in his eagerness he arrived a little early. He knocked on the door just after twelve thirty. Paul described the man who smiled at him, a man with a fiery-red, bulbous nose—The Bottler. They exchanged a few pleasantries, and Billy invited him to sit on the front porch. Then, whap, something golden and shiny struck the wall just behind The Bottler’s head.
“You lousy prick!” a woman shouted from inside the house, and then whap, another golden tinfoil bomb just missed The Bottler’s head. Paul had no idea what he’d just walked in on. Then the woman came to the front porch. Paul smiled and said hello, but she barely took notice of him. All her rage was directed at The Bottler, and she carried something in her hand, another golden package.
“I told you to never bring them dirty whores into this house again!” the woman yelled.
The Bottler didn’t even turn around. Paul was terrified.
After more yelling and screaming, the woman turned to Paul and said, “You know what I came home to find this morning? My husband putting two whores into a St. John’s taxi in front of my f—king house!”
Billy calmly said to Paul, “Isn’t that shocking? A woman her age using language like that with a guetht in the houthe. And on a Thunday! Tsthk tsthk.”