The Only Café

by Linden MacIntyre

  He heard an engine and turned in time to see Angus Beaton drive away in his half-ton. He tried to remember the line from the book, Ulysses, from long ago in university. The line about dark places and secrets. Secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned. Or was it dark palaces. How many secrets was this Angus Beaton carrying?

  Back on the boat he briefly considered a glass of wine, but then filled the kettle. Tea for now. He dialled home. No answer. Visualized his wife, missed her, missed the intimacy, longed for the once predictable sensation of arousal. It was gone, of course. The doctor had reluctantly agreed that blocked testosterone could help. Chemical castration. A cruel description, but a small sacrifice in his fight against the silent cancer cells. No big deal, considering the alternatives. The kettle squealed and he turned off the stove and sat, suddenly overwhelmed by weariness. He considered crawling back into his bunk, but knew the ache that felt so much like fatigue was from a specific place, a place of inescapable awareness.

  The journal was open, face down on the table, and he told himself that he should make an effort to resume the writing, but the impulse was blocked by a feeling of—and the word came out of nowhere—impotence. He smiled at himself and thought of Lois and the mystery she carried in her body. Something to anticipate. Creation. The potential of a new life, a second chance.

  By early evening the sky was clear, the sun shimmering. Beaton’s truck had not returned and Pierre was not surprised. Even when he was physically present Angus seemed to be adrift, wallowing in memory. Pierre told himself it was a blessing in a way, meeting up with this damaged man—a reminder of the need to focus on the now, the present, the only true reality, and how it might evolve. Memory is sentiment. The future, impenetrable. Anxiety a waste of time and energy.

  He checked his watch. Seven. He thought of his friend Fadi. It was a long time ago but Fadi’s words came back. The future is a harvest of consequences. They were in Fadi’s office near the port, watching a group of stoned Kata’ib outside firing automatic rifles in the air, randomly and for no reason.

  “A harvest?” Pierre said laughing. Fadi, everybody said, was far too educated. The rattle of the automatic weapons resumed.

  “It’s raining bullets somewhere,” Fadi said.

  “It’s crazy,” Pierre said.

  “But it will be worse afterwards, when we try to return to what we think is normal…that’s when they’ll be a problem. This, for them, is normal. They think this insanity is freedom. A licence to do anything they want. I don’t want to be the one to put that back in the box.”

  “Put what back?” Pierre had asked.

  “Anarchy,” Fadi said. “That’s the harvest that we’ve planted here.”

  Then Pierre heard the truck returning.

  Angus put a bottle of wine and a bottle of rum on the table. He seemed cheerful. The level of the rum was already down near the top of the label. “I got a head start,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t think you’re much of a drinker. Am I right?”

  Pierre smiled. This curious habit of English speakers amused him—always looking for concurrence. Right? Eh? You know? You hear what I’m saying? Am I right or am I wrong? Meaning, please agree with me. Arabs and Frenchmen rarely worry about concurrence, tone.

  “Right on,” he said, handing one of the glasses to Angus. Right on. Another of their odd agreeable expressions. He didn’t particularly enjoy rum, but he poured two large wallops. He felt a surge of adrenalin before he tasted his. He was in the mood to drink more than he should and felt a tiny pulse of warning.

  Pierre took a sip. “You can mix it however you wish.”

  “You got any Coke?”

  “I have. There, in the cooler.”

  Angus rattled in the cooler among the bottles and the cans and packages. “You’re out of ice. You should have told me,” Angus said. “I’m just back from town.”

  “Ah,” Pierre said. “A shopping trip.”

  “Nah. Visiting the war department.”

  “The war department?”

  “The ex-wife,” he said. Raised his glass. “May she rot in peace.”

  Angus liked his steak well done. “Jesus,” he said when Pierre cut into his. “I expect that thing to moo.”

  Dinner conversation was mostly about wives. Pierre didn’t know enough about Aggie’s family history to be helpful in identifying her for Angus Beaton. “All I know,” Pierre said, “is that her mom came from here. A MacDonald.”

  Angus laughed. “MacDonald here is like Mohammed in the Arab countries. Tells you nothing.”

  “You’ve been to the Arab countries?” Pierre asked.

  “Egypt, Jordan, Turkey.”

  “Lebanon?”

  “Stayed away from there.”

  “Just as well. You mentioned the Golan Heights.”

  “Not sure what that is. Arab. Israeli. Whatever.” Angus pushed his plate away. “So how do you get along with the ex? You mentioned you tied the knot again. I see you wear the ring.”

  Pierre extended his left hand, the ring and the loose gold chain around his wrist glinting, a wedding gift from Lois.

  “It looks fairly new, the ring.”

  “About two years. But I don’t wear it all the time. I don’t like rings. The chain I always wear. It was a gift from my wife. It has a special history in her family.”

  “My old lady would go crazy any time I took my ring off,” Angus said, refilling his wineglass. “I’d leave it home when I’d be going on a tour. Guys got robbed for their jewellery. But she’d assume I was looking for pussy when I was away. Thinkin’ the ring would matter.” He laughed. “As if.”

  “Kids?”

  “Two. They’re great.” He produced a wallet and two photographs, which he examined before passing them across. The little boy about nine. An awkward-looking prepubescent girl.

  “That was a few years ago. She’s fifteen now,” Beaton said, pointing at her photo. “The young fella is twelve. We called him Bradley. We weren’t into the old-fashioned names. She’s Melissa. What about yourself?”

  “One. And one on the way.”

  “Hah. Congratulations. When’s the big day?”

  “December.”

  “And the one you have already. How old?”

  “Nineteen,” Pierre said. “He was twelve when I left his mother. His name is Cyril.”

  “Y’all get along?”

  “I suppose so. You?”

  “We got issues.” He stood. “I’m going to have another shot. What about yourself?”

  He nodded and Angus poured for them both, topped up his own with Coke.

  He sat. “See she did a bit of a number on me. I won’t bore you with the details. But when I came back from my last trip there was nobody there to meet me. And when I got to the house, it was cleaned out. No forwarding address. No nothing.”

  “I’m trying to imagine.”

  “It took a few days to track them down and I just decided to arrive at her new place without notice, which was probably a mistake. It didn’t go too well. Now there’s a restraining order.” He shrugged, then laughed. “Here’s how stupid it is: I can’t be with the kids alone. She has to be there. If there’s anybody in fuckin’ danger, it’s her, but they can’t see that.”

  “You went today, though?”

  “Yeah. Melissa’s birthday.”

  “And that went okay?”

  “Actually, yes. The ex was half-civil for a change. In a way that’s worse, though. I find it’s easier to be pissed off than sad. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I hear you.”

  They both drank and sat in silence for a while. Angus lit a cigarette, then stared at him with half a smile. “I’d bet money you could tell a few stories yourself.”

  “Why would you make such a bet?”

  “Just looking at you. Your age. I was in Cyprus once, on leave. I met an Irish UNIFIL fella. He was based in the south part of your country. Man, the stories out of him.”

  Pierre shrugged.
They sat. The boat was still and silent. Angus crushed the cigarette. “Why don’t I do the dishes?”

  “Leave them,” Pierre said. “There’s just a few. It’ll only take a few minutes in the morning. Something to get my day started.”

  “So tomorrow,” Beaton said. “What do you think? You’ll be going out?”

  “Weather permitting. Maybe a little handlining. Judging by the whales the mackerel are out there. You’re welcome to come along.”

  “I might take you up on that.”

  Pierre drained his glass, then stood and walked back to the glass door and stared out.

  “Are you expecting someone?” Beaton asked.

  “No, why?”

  “You keep looking out, like.”

  Pierre turned and Beaton was standing, pouring another drink. “You?”

  “I’ll get my own,” Pierre said. Sat and reached for the bottle of rum. There was something liberating about talking to a stranger, a stranger who is safe because he will inevitably disappear back into his own entirely separate existence.

  Angus said, “If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you end up in Cape Breton?”

  “That’s a complicated story.”

  Angus just stared, waiting, then said, “We can talk about something else.”

  “No, no, no,” Pierre said. “There’s really nothing to not talk about. You know about the civil war, I guess.”

  “Wasn’t very civil, from what I heard.”

  Pierre laughed. “Well put. Long story short. A priest from here, from over in the Waterford area, was in Lebanon looking for some family history. I guess he hadn’t been following the news that closely. For whatever reason, he got stranded there. The airport was closed.”

  “So he’d have been connected to your family, this priest from Waterford.”

  “No. No. My family was pretty well all gone.”

  “Gone?”

  He could feel the familiar buzz of caution, but it had been so long since he had talked about it. He splashed some liquor in his glass. Nodded to Beaton. “Let’s just say I was at loose ends when I met the priest from here.”

  “Loose ends?”

  “Well, as you know, the country was upside down back then. People’s lives on hold. You were either a fighter or a wheeler-dealer. You had to be one or the other.”

  “And so which were you?”

  “A bit of both.” He sipped from his glass, then projected a broad smile, reminding himself that Beaton was a soldier. “I’m Lebanese, man. What can I tell you?”

  “So this priest.”

  “Aboud. Father Cyril Aboud. We hit it off and stayed in touch when he finally got out.”

  “So why did you leave?”

  “I suppose it was the Israeli occupation. You know about that. After ’82.”

  Beaton laughed. “The IDF. Cunts, those guys are. Smartest people in the world. Great soldiers. But boy, don’t trust them. The stories this Irish fella had. And even when I was in the Golan. Man, oh man. So they did it for you, the ol’ IDF.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t just that. It was an opportunity to change my life and so I grabbed it.”

  “It must have been quite the change.”

  “Well. It was quiet. Took a while to get used to the fact that nobody wanted to blow up the house that I was sleeping in. Or that I could go to school and figure on finishing the year. That was a big change. Or that I didn’t have to carry a gun wherever I went.”

  “You had a gun?”

  “Everybody had a gun.”

  He stood, grabbed the bottle. “How’s your drink?”

  “Not sure which I’d find the biggest adjustment,” Beaton said as Pierre poured. “Lebanon or Waterford. Always felt foreign over on that side of the island.”

  “I felt right at home with all the ethnic people. You Scotchmen think you’re the only people here.”

  “Anybody else come over with you?”

  “Just me.”

  “So they’re back there.”

  “What’s left of them.”

  “Anyone close?”

  “No.”

  A light breeze stirred outside. The boat shifted.

  “I think the wind is coming back,” Angus said.

  “It won’t amount to anything,” Pierre said.

  He felt woozy, the start of edginess and impatience. Angus carried his glass to the wheel, leaned against it, looking forward. “That was a wicked sunset before. Maybe I’ll go out with you tomorrow.”

  “That would be great.”

  He turned to face Pierre. “Why do you think those cops were sniffing around your car yesterday?”

  “You should’ve asked them.”

  “They seemed to know who they were looking for.”

  “But they said nothing?”

  “You aren’t some kind of a fugitive, are you? Not that I’d give a fuck one way or the other.”

  Pierre laughed. “Why would you ask that?”

  “It’s a queer place for a holiday here.”

  “What’s queer?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Guy by himself on a boat in Mabou Coal Mines. In June.”

  “I have history here, man. Like I said.” His guard was up now and he was almost grateful—adrenalin was neutralizing the effects of liquor. “Do I look like a fugitive?”

  Beaton stepped back, sipped from his glass. He was unsteady on his feet. “Nah,” he said. “You look more like one of those cops who was around here yesterday.” He put his glass down. “Don’t mind me, sometimes I talk too much.” He held out his hand. “Thanks for putting up with me.” He stumbled slightly at the door.

  Pierre climbed up the wharf-side ladder behind him, concerned that he might lose his footing. At the top Beaton was breathing heavily.

  “The fags,” he said quietly. “I swear one of these days I’m gonna quit. Cold fuckin’ turkey. Get back in shape while I still got time.”

  “See you in the morning, then,” Pierre said.

  He thought of Ari as he watched the damaged soldier walk off into the darkness, erect and careful, conscious of being studied and perhaps evaluated.

  Pierre climbed back down into what seemed to have become his world. And for what felt like endless time he just stood staring out over the stern, suspended in the overpowering silence. A lone gull settled briefly on a bollard, then fluttered off.

  As sanctuaries go he could have done worse, he thought. He had at other times done much worse. He winced at the sudden memory of sand leaking out of musty rotting burlap, of burning garbage, shit and piss and the intermingled gassy smell of putrefaction. He turned away from the silence and the moonlight and went inside, hoping to find rest there, knowing that he wouldn’t.

  He sat in the large captain’s chair tilted back against the wheel, alone and going nowhere. There was an old moon, one sliver away from fullness, hanging heavily over the Mabou hills and it flooded the cab with light. It was a distraction, if only briefly, from the hovering anxieties that Angus Beaton left behind.

  He shifted his position and the chair tilted, springs in the rocking mechanism squawked. He struggled to quell a feeling of regret for having gone too close to irrevocable disclosure. To blab or not to blab, that is the question. Whether or not ’tis in the mind nobler to disclose. But disclosure is rarely noble. Disclosure is transactional. Disclosure is a ruse to create trust. He had heard so much disclosure of “facts” that were lies, emotions that were false. Deception through disclosure. Engagement. Empathy. The best interrogators were the ones who were capable of manufactured empathy.

  Pierre had watched and listened while strong, strong men slowly lost the will to resist the pull of empathy, to fight off the creeping, comforting, enervating promises of trust, even when they knew what lay in store. Empathy, a kind of gravity.

  He felt guilty, having learned so much so easily from Angus Beaton.

  16.

  He wasn’t accustomed to the subway car, the rocking motion, the human variants around him. He felt sleep
y. There was a system diagram on the wall above the carriage door. Nine stations to his stop.

  He’d lied again to Lois. “I’m just going to walk around a bit, see if some fresh air will clear my head.” Maybe the fact that she wasn’t listening made a moral difference. Is it a lie if no one hears it spoken? But why hadn’t he told her: that he was going back to the Only Café to see what he could learn there. But that was not the whole truth either. And how could he explain the whole truth—that for a quarter of a century he’d longed to talk to someone who might understand his guilt? And now it seemed as though he’d finally found someone.

  He hadn’t really expected to find Ari when he got there but he was on a bench out in front of the café, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, the embodiment of relaxation.

  “You look tired,” Ari said.

  “I am tired,” he’d replied. “I don’t know if you’ve been following. I work for a mining company called Draycor.”

  Ari shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t much follow the news.”

  Pierre sat. He’d felt the empathy, the opening. “I don’t sleep well.”

  Ari looked away.

  “I think I’ll try a cigarette,” Pierre said. “Do you mind?”

  Ari raised his eyebrows. “You sure?” Then he laughed, a deep laugh from somewhere in his girth and Pierre realized he hadn’t heard the laugh before. “I wouldn’t want to corrupt you.” Ari fished a pack of cigarettes from a small leather satchel that he carried.

  The reaction to the cigarette had been instantaneous. Pierre felt his head lifting off his shoulders, his stomach roiling. But he didn’t cough. He inhaled carefully and concentrated on the cigarette between his fingers. It looked good there. It felt good in his hand. It took him back, and it seemed to steady him.

  “Sleep is important,” Ari said. Ground out his cigarette, studied passing cars, people ambling away from the mosque. It was a Friday evening. People emerged from the nearby 7-Eleven with slushies, strolling toward the halal restaurants and butcher shops. “I’ve never had a problem sleeping. Or eating. My secrets of survival.”