The Wooden Nickel Read online

  “Ain’t supposed to step in front of a loaded gun, you’re liable to get hurt.” He moves the gun barrel up and over her shoulder so it’s pointing at the seal again. She leans her forehead right on the cold steel muzzle and keeps it there. “What the fuck, Ronette.”

  “Don’t fool around with me, Lucky. I ain’t going out with no murderer.”

  “It ain’t murder, cause they ain’t human. It’s survival out here. It’s them or us.” He lowers the shotgun.

  “They are us, Lucky. They’re mammals. They got hair, they nurse their kids same way we do. Besides, I just threw enough lobsters back for ten seals. The seals don’t care if they have claws on them. They can have the culls.”

  “They don’t eat culls. They like them with two claws.”

  “Jesus, Lucky, seals can’t count.”

  “They like the breeders. Ain’t going to be nothing left for us.”

  She’s trying to rub off the two red circles left by the gun barrel on her forehead, makes her look like she’s got two pairs of eyes. “You’re so full of shit,” she says. “It’s a big ocean, there’s plenty for everyone.”

  Not taking the two twelve-gauge shells out of the chamber, he puts the gun back down on the bulkhead rack. “Let’s eat,” he says. “Sarah’s fixed us some lunch.”

  “Oh yeah? What is it? I just brought tuna.”

  “Moose.”

  “Wild moose?”

  “Hell no. Sarah bought it up to the moose farm.”

  “You eat it,” she says. “I’ve got my tuna roll.”

  “Well, she fixed two. One for you.”

  “Your wife fixed me a sandwich? I’ll be god damned. It’s probably poison.”

  “You got to say one thing about Sarah,” Lucky says, “she always provides.”

  “Always has, always will. That’s an old-fashioned marriage, don’t make them anymore.” She pulls the bread apart, looks at the moose tongue slices, neat as a row of shingles. “I hear you got it pretty cozy at home. You ever strayed off the reservation?”

  “Nope.”

  “All these years? Don’t tell me you ain’t had the opportunity. You two must be wicked in love.”

  “Ain’t seen nothing better.”

  “That’s the thing about marriage, makes you walk around with your eyes closed. Course then you’re likely to run into something.” As she hands Sarah’s sandwich back to him, one of the tongue slices falls on the cockpit floor. Ginger’s off her perch in an instant and the meat is gone.

  They pull up two upside-down bait tubs next to the lobster well for lunch. The mid-May sun is coming out strong, Ronette unsnaps Reggie’s bib-front oilskins and peels off the gray sweatshirt. She’s there for a minute in just a blue tank top with no sleeves, the orange bib hanging to her knees. She looks down at herself as if kind of embarrassed, then smiles at Lucky at the same time that she pulls the oilskin straps over her shoulders and snaps them up. “Ain’t supposed to get too much sun at first. Melanoma. That’s what my momma has.” She goes into her purplish-pink yuppie backpack and hauls out a hunk of something wrapped up tight in aluminum foil, then she draws back: “Jesus, will you take a smell of them hands?”

  “They smell OK to me, just a little lobster bait. Hey, what happened to your ring?”

  She rubs a finger on the pale circle where it used to be. “Took it right back to Fishbein’s where we got it, no questions asked. Twelve hundred bucks, less thirty percent restocking. Half-carat diamond, fourteen-karat gold.”

  “Got to say one thing for Clyde. He does something, he goes all the way.”

  “Yeah, well he didn’t do that much going all the way with me.” She unwraps the tuna roll and bites into it. “Tastes like lobster bait.” She throws the rest of it in the saltwater tank.

  “Christ sake, you’ll wreck the balance of nature in there.”

  “Eat your frigging mooseburger,” she says, “packed with ten pounds of love from your ever-loving wife, and me with nothing but a rented trailer and a sub from the convenience store.” She looks pretty sweet like that, red in the face and mad, lips pursed tight and tears starting in her eyes, it goes nice with the blue tank top and her chest heaving under the orange bib overalls. She’s lost weight over this divorce everywhere but the tits, so they stick out all the better on her shrinking frame.

  Ginger reaches a paw into the live well, drags the floating sandwich to the side and slurps it down, salt water dripping from her jaws.

  “I ain’t got it that good,” he says.

  “Oh yeah?” She calms down a bit, sits on her bait tub again, curious. “You ain’t? Everyone thinks you do. Couple of good-looking kids, nice caring little wife.”

  “She ain’t around much. And you seen my kid? Fucking skin-head, hanging out with them Burnt Neck cocksuckers. Nothing but Indians down there.”

  “We got a little Indian blood in Split Cove too.”

  “A little’s different. That kid with the earring is a fucking criminal, sure as shit bound for jail and he’ll drag Kyle with him. Like your cousin Reggie.”

  She puts a hand over his on the gray fuel filler pipe between the bait tubs and pats it. “Jail ain’t so bad,” she says. “Maybe your kid will like it. Reggie learned a trade.”

  “He ain’t going to go far building ships in a bottle.”

  The way she’s sitting, he can see right down the front of her tank top. She’s got a small tattoo on the top of her left tit, right over where the heart’s supposed to be. She knows he’s looking. “You’re worse than the customers.” She gives him another moment, then adjusts the stray strap on her shoulder.

  “You got a tattoo.”

  “I bet your wife don’t have a tattoo.”

  “She don’t,” Lucky says. “But I do.”

  “Where?”

  “My chest, same as yours.”

  She looks intently at his chest like she’s trying to see right through the sweatshirt and orange lobster apron. “What is it? Your wife’s name?”

  “It’s a truck.”

  “A truck? I never heard of that.”

  “I got it over in Vietnam. Everyone in the motor pool got trucks. Mine’s an M-thirty-five six-by-six military troop carrier. Workhorse of the marines.”

  “I thought you’d have it saying Sarah or something.”

  “I wasn’t married then,” he says.

  “Thought you was born married. Let me see your tattoo. I don’t believe it’s a truck. It’s probably a girl’s butt and you don’t dare say it.”

  “It ain’t a girl’s butt. It’s a truck.”

  “You can see mine,” she says. “It’s a sea horse.” She slides the tank top and bra straps to one side and there it is, right where the hollow under her collarbone starts to swell up and become a tit. His heart stops cold. It’s not going to catch again. They’ll find him stretched out on the cockpit floor just like his old man, only Ronette Hannaford will be leaning over him with her shirt half off and her little sea horse breathing the open air.

  She pulls the straps back and the heart starts up again, too slow to too fast, just like a partridge drumming in the woods.

  “So,” she says. “Where’s yours?”

  “I’d have to take the whole damn sweatshirt off, and the vest, and whatever else she put on me this morning.”

  “She put on you?” Ronette busts out laughing. “Your wife dresses you in the morning?” She’s hitching her suspenders up, laughing, getting ready to go back to work.

  “She don’t dress me,” he says. “She just lays the clothes out, depending on the weather.”

  “And you dress in the dark, so you don’t even know what color your underwear is.”

  “It ain’t that bad.”

  “It ain’t that bad. It’s worse. That’s what’s wrong with marriage, Lucky. That’s why I had to leave, you get so frigging close to someone you don’t even know what you got on.”

  “That why you left?” He’s curious now. She had a split-level ranch with hot tub and su
nken swimming pool, now she’s in somebody’s mobile home. It’s not enough that Clyde Hannaford is an ass-hole. There’s got to be something else.

  “It ain’t the only thing,” she says shyly, not laughing anymore. She tilts her head to one side and pulls back the permed-up curls over her neck. “Take a look at that.”

  A dim blue line runs diagonally across the back of her neck. He reaches over, pushes more of the curls up to follow the mark as it fades into her hairline. “What’s that?”

  “Son of a bitch tried to strangle me.”

  “Jesus H. Christ. Clyde Hannaford. Didn’t know he had it in him.”

  “Yeah, well he had it in him. And I was out the door. There’s some girls I can name that put up with it, including his little brother’s wife Yvonne. I could put that cocksucker in jail in about three minutes. I’d rather go on welfare than get treated like that. Clyde’s a weak little bastard too, I could stand up to him, but I ain’t going to have that kind of marriage.”

  “Maybe Yvonne had it coming,” he suggests.

  “I ain’t saying she did or didn’t. But I didn’t have it coming. I was behaving myself like a choir girl and getting nothing in return. I don’t stay if I get slapped around. Ask my old man.”

  “Ivan Astbury? Ask him what?”

  “Ask him what I do when I get beat up, I don’t even stop to say good-bye.”

  She’s crying now, pausing to listen to George Strait singing “I Know She Still Loves Me,” then crying again, though both the song and her sadness are drowned out by Siggy Winchenbach’s big diesel pilot boat, the Gretchen and Irene, which passes a little closer than he has to, then steams over to lay a string into the boulder canyon stretching north off of Red’s Bank.

  “Nosy bastard,” he says. The first wave from Siggy’s wake slams the side of the hull, sprays them both, then the wake hits and they rock hard up and down, splashing a few gallons right out of the circulating tank.

  “You ain’t showed me your tattoo,” she says.

  “I ain’t taking my shirt off with them assholes hanging around.”

  “Take it off down in the cuddy, then.” She ducks her head in the companionway for something to dry her cheek but she can’t find anything cleaner than an engine rag. “Jesus, Lucky, what a mess down here. But let me show you what I brought.”

  She reaches into the backpack and pulls out two strips of flowery blue fabric.

  “What the hell’s that? A bikini?”

  “It’s the curtains. First thing you need to make it decent down here.”

  “Ain’t got nothing to put them up with.”

  “Look, I brought these.” She gets out a box of pushpins, scoots down the hatchway and starts stabbing the curtains along the cabin windows. “Gives us a little privacy too. Now you can show me the damn tattoo. It better be a good one after all this work.”

  She’s not going to be quiet till she sees the truck, which is a very nice piece of art though Sarah’s tired of it and makes him take his shirt off in the dark. He folds down the front of his big rubber lobster apron, so thick with grass and barnacles it’s got green crabs breeding on it, and pulls up the layers of shirts and sweatshirts so Ronette can have a look at his chest.

  “Christ sake, Lucky, it is a truck. I don’t frigging believe it. A truck with hair!”

  “M-thirty-five A, six-wheel drive. Cocksuckers could roll through anything. A Chinese guy did that on R and R in Manila. The truck don’t look too oriental, does it?”

  “Hundred percent American,” she says. “You can see mine again if you want. Tit for tat. I got it before we was married.”

  She pulls the strap down, shudders her shoulders so the little sea horse comes to life. Down here in the dark curtained cabin he feels like a shark at a nude beach, all the forces of nature pushing him up to take a bite, except for one voice in his ear saying, Lucas, this is the worst kind of activity for your heart.

  “Can you believe it,” Ronette’s saying, “that bastard Clyde wanted me to have it removed.”

  He stands up, as much as he can under the low cabin trunk, and speaks with authority. “Can’t really remove them. You’re always going to have a shadow, it’s going through a lot of pain for nothing. Specially in a soft-tissue place like that.”

  “That ain’t the point, Lucky. He thought he could own me. He was afraid that skinny bitch Yvonne would see it and not invite us out to her precious cuntry club. It’s my frigging body, that’s what I told him, and I can do with it as I see fit.”

  “You sound like one of them pro-choicers,” he says.

  “I am a pro-choicer. Only with Clyde I didn’t have to make no choice, you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Cause you know what his sperm count was? Zero. Point oh oh oh. So we didn’t have no choice to be pro about. And you know what? That dickhead knew it all along. Only he never let on till after the honeymoon.”

  He’s struck with a rush of sympathy for his dealer. “Jesus, Ronette, how was he supposed to know that? Ever take a good close look at sperm? Can’t hardly see them little bastards. A normal guy don’t go around counting his sperm all the time.”

  She lights another Marlboro, leaves her strap down so the sea horse jiggles around when she pounds the cigarette pack and flicks the lighter. He can’t quite see the nipple but he’s sure it’s in there. “That’s just it,” she says. “My husband is not a normal guy. He had an undescended testicle till he was thirty-one years old.”

  He chews on that term for a minute. “No shit,” he says. “Undescended. You think you know someone your whole life, it turns out you don’t know them at all. The boys are going to look at old Clyde some different when this gets out.”

  “So he had to have an operation to bring it down, and afterwards, that’s when they did the sperm count and he found out it was zero. He knew that and he married me anyway. You don’t know what that means to a woman. And you know what he wanted? He wanted to get me artificially inseminated, just like a frigging cow. It’s so embarrassing, I never told no one, not even Doris.” She leans her head into the weed-encrusted folds of Lucky’s sweatshirt and seems to shrink, like a kid or something dying in his arms. Then the boat starts to rock a bit as the late-morning southwesterlies pick up strength, and she calms down, wipes her eyes, and goes over to the stereo at the wheelhouse end of the cuddy. “I also brought my new Reba tape,” she says. “Starting Over. Good name, huh? Get it? Just like me.”

  Three o’clock in the mornin’

  And it looks like it’s gonna be another sleepless night

  He stretches and starts up the hatchway to finish hauling, but Ronette puts an arm out and blocks his path. “Your crew don’t feel like hauling, Lucky. They ain’t in a working mood.” Under a coil of pot warp she spots a brown beat-up slab of foam he hooked one time on a mackerel trawl. “That all you got for bunks in this place? Reggie’s boat had a whole bedroom down below.”

  “Portholes even had bars on them, made him feel right at home.”

  She drags the foam out and plunges her face in it. “It’s wet,” she says, “and it smells like fish bait.” She tosses the foam on the workbench and sniffs the air. “It don’t matter, I smell like fish bait too. But you know what, Lucky? It ain’t the best time of the month for me.”

  “I don’t mind fish bait. Lived with it all my life.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean the time ain’t safe. You got something out here we can use? We don’t want to have no accidents.”

  “This ain’t the Rite Aid Pharmacy,” he replies. “This is a lobster boat. And we ought to be hauling lobsters, afternoon wind’s coming on.”

  “Too bad. I guess you’re all married up and everything.”

  “My old man used to say something, and I always stuck by it. Ain’t supposed to mix fish and flesh.”

  She grabs his face in both hands and looks right at him but she goes blurry, he can’t focus that close. “Jesus H. Christ,” she says. “You got your wife dressing you, you go b
y your old man’s sayings like they was the book of God. Who am I out here with? You’re like one of them giant clams. It would take a crowbar to pull them shells apart, see what’s inside.”

  “I ain’t got a crowbar. It’s in the truck.”

  “Bet we could find one on board, Mr. Lucas Lunt, if we look hard enough.” She’s standing now, her head almost touches the roof beam. He’s sitting on the engine box, so she looks down on him like a mom undressing a kid for bed. “She probably takes everything off for you too, home from a hard day’s work.” She undoes the suspender snaps of his grass-covered orange apron and lays it on the chain locker. A couple of green crabs scuttle off it and make for the bilge. Then comes the sweatshirt that says orphan point v.f.d., then his old man’s red plaid hunting vest. When “Ring on Her Finger” comes on she listens to Reba for a moment.

  In a three-bedroom prison I tried to make a home

  She finishes pulling down the top of his one-piece union suit and stands back to view her work. “No shit, Lucky, you’re a good-sized man. Clyde’s such a little fucker, I used to call it Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Now unhook me, will you? This dumb thing unfastens in the back.” She turns around and bends her head down so he can see the bruise again while his huge fingers fumble with the hook. He’s hoping for the voice to stop him, Sarah’s or Clyde’s, but there’s only a dog whimper from the hatchway and Ronette saying, “Be a good girl, Ginger, we’ll give you a Milk-Bone when we’re done.”

  She lets the tank top slide all the way down on one side, there’s no more bra in the way, the nipple puckers and sticks its little tongue out under the sea horse riding the wave crest of her tit. Under Reggie’s big oilskins her pants slip down to her knees: nothing but some kind of bikini bottom left, curly hairs peeking around the edge. “Clyde’s crazy,” he says. “You ought to get a couple more of them tattoos.”

  “Bet we could find a couple more on you.” She pushes him back on the wet foam, rolls down his oilskins, canvas pants, union suit. “She’s got more layers on you than a wedding cake.” He tries to stop her before she gets to the camouflage boxers he got at the ammo store, but she’s got him backed up against the foam and she keeps pushing things down. “Whoa. Camouflage shorts. You sneak up on the moose in them things?”