Conflict of interest

First Place, Cuffer Prize 2010

Those days my grandfather worked part time as a night guard at the Ferryland lockup. He was up past 80 then, and had a reputation among the local drunks and hard tickets, who found themselves from time to time under his watch, for being fair and decent and discreet. It’s been said he was likely to give you a cigarette if you were stuck, and maybe even a little nip if you weren’t the rowdy type. He informed any new faces that the only reason the cops gave him the job was because there wasn’t a man on the Shore could take him in a square go. Then he’d bore you off to sleep with long-winded war stories and rants about Joey Smallwood.

I always thought it’d be a good laugh if ever I were brought in while he was on duty.

Not so.

He went to the grave insisting that I still owed him a night’s pay. No matter how often I helped mend the fences at the top of the meadow, or burnt myself to a blistered mess in the sun scraping and painting the clapboard on his house, he never let it go.

•••

Now, I’ve been known to grumble that I was seized that night simply for standing and bleeding. But the truth, I suppose, is that I was full to the gills with Smirnoff and Valium and had descended upon the dance hall like a sudden southern squall of boot heels and dog chains and hee-haw warrior whoops.

Within minutes of my appearance outside the hall, the mad rumour spread that I’d head-butted a Trepassey girl and knocked her down on the ice and then tripped and fell on top of her and tried to kiss her.

I dont believe it, myself, but I suppose you could say that I’m slightly biased.

I do remember slipping. I do recall a pretty face, and not having been kissed in a good way in a long time.

Next there’s a scuffle, a nasal mainland twang, then the warm-bath ambiance of my forehead splitting open, and cartoon stars and thin scarlet droplets sprinkled across the snow like the first 30 seconds of a fake Pollack piece. (Days later I found out the bastard was visiting from the Miramichi and wore a gold ring as big as my eyeball. But I was quick to forgive since, oddly enough, I’d just finished reading “Lives of Short Duration,” and so counted myself lucky to be alive.)

When I come to again I’m propped against the side of the dance hall and my ex’s little sister is messing with my buckle and licking the blood from the corner of my eye.

Then it’s the law dogs, right on cue. I’m standing there bleeding, nursing a crimson snowball to my face, my pants undone, and the girl is suddenly as scarce as her big sister’s affections.

I’m too dazed to put up a fight.

In the back seat I get that patronizing third degree, the gloating tone, then the cop leaves me to stew while he checks the dance hall for more unsavoury types. It takes me a full minute to realize that the little Plexiglas window, the one that separates the good guys from the bad guys, the back seat from the front, has been left wide open.

I can feel my legend swelling to rival my forehead as I slip my jacket off.

For a tight, cruel moment it seems that my shoulders wont fit, but I work out a method. The hips are tricky too, and I remember thinking how I wont have to worry about knocking up anyone’s daughter anytime soon. Then it’s the boots, one at a time. Bloody hand on the handle, the heavy Crown Vic door tumbling open and I’m off like a jackrabbit across the icy parking lot, a blundering feral scramble into the surrounding woods, my good old jacket still in the back seat of the cop car.

•••

They picked me up thumbing about an hour later, halfway between Renews and civilization. The cop stood outside the car with my jacket slung over his shoulder and asked me if I was cold enough yet. I could hear the blast of heat coming from the dash. I got in. What odds.

A long dawdling ride to the station and the cop saying how he heard I was good at literature and that I read books. He asked me if I’ve ever read Salinger. I asked him if he knew that Salinger drank his own piss and whipped his dogs.

He said he heard I was into artists and paintings, and so why was I going around smashing things? He wanted to know where all the hash was coming from lately, said maybe if I knew a thing or two about a thing or two he could just drop me home instead of locking me up.

I told him what to lick, and how to go about it.

He got a kick out of that, then radioed in my name and the situation I was in. After a time the pencil pusher on the other end squelched back to say that my grandfather was on duty and wasn’t that a conflict of interest? The cop in the front seat looked back at me and grinned, then replied that my grandfather would have to be dismissed for the night.

The cop gave me the lowdown on “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” the rest of the way to the station. I just sat there and smeared blood into the seat cushions.

•••

My old grandfather was on his way down the steps while the cop was leading me through the front doors. I was having trouble walking, Valium sloshing around in my knees. My shirt was black with blood and flaking from my face and head, all crisped into my hair.

Grandfather didn’t look too pleased. He was hunched under the weight of his old ’50s biker jacket, the one Nan never let him wear anymore, the one he apparently bullied off the back of some colossal stevedore in Old Montreal. The jacket he supposedly won in some back room blackjack game in New Orleans, the one he evidently salvaged from the edge of a bare-knuckle rumble near Hudson’s Bay. Who knows.

He had his lunch tin, a dog-eared Louie L’Amour tucked under his arm and his boots were untied, like he’d slipped them on in a hurry.

He buckled the belt on his jacket, looked me up and down, tossed me the battered western, and told me in his low gravelly way that I owed him a night’s pay.

The cop told him goodnight, but my grandfather never answered.

•••

As the cop was leading me to my cell I tossed the book in the garbage can near his desk. I dug around for it the next morning, but it was gone.

Joel Thomas Hynes is the celebrated author of the novels “Down to the Dirt” and “Right Away Monday,” and the

award-winning stageplays “The Devil You Don’t Know”

(with Sherry White) and “Say Nothing Saw Wood.” Also an actor, Hynes has performed numerous leading roles

for theatre, television and film.