The Wooden Nickel Read online

  She has no trouble peeling the boxers down, but underneath he’s limp as a garden slug.

  “Must be them heart pills, it ain’t been working right all year.”

  She’s looking down, shaking her head like her dog died. “It ain’t the pills, it’s your loving little wife. She owns you, her and your old man. If you ain’t interested, we better go back to fishing. No hard feelings, Lucky Lunt. I know true love when I see it.” She slides the blue tank top over the sea horse and goes to stand up, then gives him one last glance with her big kelp-colored eyes. “Before I go, I’d love to give that little guy a kiss. I bet he don’t get half enough attention.”

  All those long winter nights under the covers with Sarah Peek, all the truck-seat midnights of their courtship, that was always where she drew the line. Her mouth got anywhere near it, she’d close up tight as a quahog, so finally he gave up hope. That’s what they say, girls don’t do it north of Boston. Now all of a sudden he’s watching the pile of brown hair crawl down his stomach just like a deep throat video. He glances once more at the blue bruise on her neck, closes his eyes, and leans his head back onto an old moldy seat cushion that smells like blue cheese. Ronette mumbles something like, “Like that?”

  “Ain’t polite to talk with your mouth full.”

  She releases him for a second but he can feel her warm breath as she speaks. “Clyde couldn’t stand it. He was scared I’d bite it off. I should of, too.” Then she plugs him back in. His wife’s face appears on the screen of his eyelids — You can still stop, Lucas, and it will be all right — but down below it’s another story. When she finally comes up for air and looks at what she’s done, her eyes grow wide. It’s a foot and a half long and glowing red in the shadowy cabin like an electric eel. He tries pulling his clothes back up but it’s too late, she’s got one leg of her oilskins off and she’s on top of him saying, “It’s too big, Lucky, it ain’t going to fit.” She has to grab onto his arms to pull herself down tight, then she’s got him surrounded, she’s rowing him homeward like a lapstrake dory and all voices of the past are drowning in their foamy wake. Then out of nowhere there’s an engine roar and a big six-cylinder Mack diesel passes close astern. Jesus, if it’s Siggy Winchenbach he could peer down the companionway just like an aquarium. Siggy’s wake rolls them right off the engine box onto the starboard bench as she slides in under him on the foam pad soaked with bilgewater and herring juice where she’ll be crushed flat, he’s the size of a walrus and she’s so tiny with that little patch of fur, just like Alfie when he was a kitten from the pound. But no, she’s still alive and laughing and pulling at his union suit to try and bring him deeper in. There’s still a few inches that won’t fit, but she’s working on it, then all of a sudden she screams like a fish hawk and seizes his chest hair with both hands like she wants to pull the truck off and cram it inside her with the rest of him, the veins stand out of her neck like a weightlifter, her face and chest turn bright red, the sea horse is a dragon with eyes of fire saying, “You got me, Lucky, I ain’t never,” then she clamps him like a live warm oyster so even though he doesn’t want to he can’t hold it, he’s the bull seal up on both flippers roaring his nuts off and spraying inside his female like a fire hose. A thousand-volt electric shock runs from his dicktip right up his spine, jumps into his heart and cracks it open, only it’s pain now and he can’t stay up, his shoulders and elbows buckle and he collapses like that moose in the October sunlight, .357 hollowpoint dead center in his chest.

  He manages to roll off to one side so he won’t squash her, ends up flat on his back on the bilge-smelling foam with his heart fibrillating uncontrollably like a fish on the cockpit sole.

  She’s up now and her eyes are bugged out, she thinks he’s dead. “Jesus, Lucky, are you OK? What the hell’s that noise?” She lays her head on his truck tattoo and clenches her eyes shut like that’s going to help her hear.

  “Heart,” he says, his voice up high like a little kid’s.

  “Sounds like you’ve got two of them in there.”

  “That’s right. I keep a spare handy, just in case.”

  “No shit? That’s what they did at the hospital? They put in another one? If I’m going to be with you, Lucky, you have to tell me how to switch it on.”

  The heart’s calming down now, but he still feels the blood swirl like transmission oil through his wire-mesh stent. He ought to reach for the pills in his lunchbox — he brought them this time — but Ronette’s cheek pressing on his chestbone seems to have the same effect.

  “Better not try that anymore,” she says, lifting her head up gingerly. “We don’t want nobody dying out here, least of all you. I wouldn’t know how the hell to get us back.”

  He swallows a couple of pills and claps another under his tongue. They sit there naked and quiet, just listening to Reba, while his heartbeat settles down, her body pale as a flounder except for the purple sea horse and the big brown nipples, his own body a hairy skinned-out whale.

  You shouldn’t of done it, that’s what his heart was trying to tell him. But it waited till it was too fucking late.

  Ginger’s sitting on the floor beside them with her tongue hanging out, she could be spying for old Clyde. Ronette disentangles an arm, reaches into the backpack and feeds her the Milk-Bone. Outside, the light little waves slap up against the hull as the current pulls them broadside to the wind. Reba McEntire has reversed herself twice over the last hour.

  I had a ring on my finger and time on my hands

  He rests a fingertip just under the sea horse, and the brown nipple tip wakes up and stirs, just like touching the neck of a clam to see if it’s alive. She looks down, curious, like it belongs to someone else. He traces a letter on it, up and over the stiff little bud, ending on the sea horse tattoo.

  “What’d you write?”

  “F.”

  “F for what?”

  “Finest kind.”

  She blushes so much her whole face and neck turn red. “I got saline in them.”

  “What?”

  “Saline injections. You know. They used to do silicone, but they don’t anymore. Saline’s just salt water. It’s natural.”

  “When’d you do that?”

  “It was a wedding present from Clyde. The health plan don’t cover it. He wanted them bigger. He used to compare me with that bitch Yvonne. Yvonne had hers done when she was fourteen years old.”

  “I wouldn’t of made you do it, if it was me. Bet they was nice enough as it was.”

  “Well, you ain’t Clyde Hannaford. Clyde was always wanting more more more. Not that he could do nothing when he had it.”

  He touches the other one and she shivers and pulls away. From the new angle he can make out the little scars under each tit where they put the salt water in and sewed her up. “Little bit of the ocean,” he says, rubbing the scar tissue gently at first, then a little harder, thinking he might erase it with a fingertip, but it won’t come off.

  “You too,” she says. She traces a fingertip around the incision scar on his left thigh where they went in with the heart balloon. “That won’t come off neither. What’s it feel like when I rub it? Numb like mine?”

  “There’s times when it feels like they left the whole fucking tube in there, but it feels pretty good right now.”

  It’s a fine mid-May evening when he drives back from his errand at the Rite Aid drugstore. A yellow dust of pollen has settled over the cars and driveway, the roofs of houses, it’s so thick in the air he has to put the wipers on, just like driving through a fog of piss. Then when he gets there his garage door is blocked by a rusted-out Toyota four-by-four longbed which he’s never seen. He parks up close behind it to check it out. The Toy’s got thirty-five-inch mud tires and big yellow Hurst lifters that raise it so high a dog the size of Ginger could walk beneath. Its cab stands taller than his full-sized GMC, and he’s got five inches of extra leaf on that. There’s dive tanks and weight belts in the back, must be one of Kyle’s pals from Burnt Cove. He wh
istles his way in from the truck with a tune from the Reba McEntire tape that played and replayed through the lunch hour and etched itself into his mind.

  Lord, I’m still five hundred miles away from home

  “Somebody’s happy about something,” his daughter shouts as soon as he gets in the door. “Must have been a good fishing day.” He’s looking around for the guest that would explain the unknown pickup truck outside. Usually Kristen’s locked up in her room studying or listening to church music, but now she’s got all her brochures and pamphlets from the university spread out on the living room rug, because, as she says ten or twelve times a day, “September tenth and I’m getting another life.”

  Sarah gives him a big welcome too. She lets her wire-rimmed glasses slip onto their neck cord and puts a thin hand on the back of his neck, though he can’t actually feel it because it’s a spot where Ronette Hannaford touched him and the skin seems numb. “We were concerned,” his wife says. “You’re unusually late.”

  “Busy day out there. We brought in pretty near a hundred and twenty pounds. That’s better than I was doing in a week, working alone.”

  “I guess we were wrong, Lucas. Your sternperson’s paying for herself. I hope she’s taking some of the physical strain too, for your health’s sake. I hear Ellis Seavey’s got a girl working for him too, they’re all doing it these days.”

  Kyle looks up from the TV and says, “You can’t get no guys to go sternman anymore. That kind of money, might as well go up to Norumbega and work for the Pizza Hut.”

  His wife pops into the warm chowdery kitchen and returns with his earthly reward for a hard day’s work, hot tea with a shot of prohibited 101 black rum and a light kiss on the crown of his head, a spot where the scalp can feel the direct touch of her lips. “Kristen’s got some good news too. She’s got a job.”

  “Where you working, Princess? Down to the cat food plant?”

  “Don’t you wish. Then I’d smell like you when I walked in.”

  “Kristen,” her mother says.

  “I’m only teasing. Daddy can take it. He’s tough.” She hops up and gives him a whack on the shoulder, not with all her might like the old days, more of a heart-patient pat, then a big bear hug, rubbing her nose right in the mossiest fold of his sweatshirt. “Big fragile bear. We have to take it easy on you now.”

  “Don’t have to do nothing different. I’m fixed.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you up at the U.”

  “You’ll think of something,” Kyle says. “You can hang some bait bags around your room, they’ll remind you of home.”

  “You still ain’t told me what your job is. One of them topless dancers Andy’s hiring for at the RoundUp?”

  “Lucas,” Sarah warns. “Keep this up, you’ll be sleeping out in the garage.”

  His daughter covers his eyes with both hands. In her palms’ darkness he sees a little sea horse in the circle of a lipstick kiss.

  “I’m going to be an au pair.”

  “Oh pear? What the hell’s that? You going into the fruit business? Not a bad idea, when the summer trade shows up.”

  “It’s French, Daddy. It means someone who takes care of children. And no more slurs on the summer families. I’m working for one now. They’re from Baltimore.”

  He asks Kristen, “Which family you working for? You happen to know what they drive?”

  “You wouldn’t know them, Daddy. They’re called the Hummer-mans, and they’re new. They’re fixing up that big old Victorian down from the Point Club, on the shore road, it’s the one with the turret. You could see it from here if the air were a little clearer.”

  “I don’t have to see it, I know which one it is. Half this town out of work and the son of a bitch hired foreigners.”

  “Lucas. It’s your daughter’s employer.”

  “They’re not foreign,” Kristen explains. “The architectural firm is from Salem, Massachusetts. It’s not like a local contractor could do a historical restoration.”

  “Local contractors was good enough to build the damn thing in the first place. Them shingle jobs was all built by old man Lurvey, Wendell Lurvey’s grandfather.”

  “Restoration is different, Dad. You can’t dig up Wendell Lurvey’s grandfather. You have to know history. I’ve met them. They were there when I interviewed. The head of the construction crew has a Ph.D. Can you imagine how much someone like that knows?”

  Lucky’s back has a quick spasm and flash of pain like he’d thrown it out hauling a trap over the side. He tries to recall how it happened, then he remembers. Suddenly he’s back in the cuddy with Ronette Hannaford squirming beneath him and his spine arched upward like a sea lion.

  Sarah says, “Oh Lucas, did you strain your back today?” and adds a second splash of black rum to the half-full tea. “Maybe you shouldhave hired a man, he could have taken on the strenuous part.” She then tries to massage his back and shoulder but her thin fingers aren’t strong enough to get through the layers of body hair, blubber, muscle and cartilage down to where it really hurts. “I suppose I’m failing you, Lucas, not to be out there, but look at my hands, they don’t have the strength for a proper backrub. I wouldn’t be much help on a lobster boat.”

  “Them Ph.D.’s,” he asks Kristen, “how many kids they got?”

  “Well, with Dr. Hummerman’s old wife he has a son in college, and with his new wife, who is the one that interviewed me, they have a girl eight and a boy five. And I know the Hummermans let local people work on their dock project because Billy Thurston’s working there too, so there’ll be someone I know.”

  “I heard. Doug Travis has got three men on that job full-time and they’ve been there all spring long. Doug’s crew put in a granite pier and a float made of Tibetan redwood, they must be putting half a million into it.”

  “The Hummermans need it, Daddy, for their new yacht.”

  “I’m sure they do. And another thing, why can’t the college boy take care of their kids?”

  “Lucas,” Sarah says on her way out to the kitchen, “a college boy doesn’t want to baby-sit for two small children. It’s a perfect situation for an au pair. It will get her ready for college too. These are the kind of people she’ll meet in her new life. They’ve already stopped in at Yvonne’s gallery. She says they have excellent taste.”

  “Hey Mom,” Kristen says, “one of your mobiles would look nice in their house.”

  “Don’t be pushy, darling. I’m not good enough yet.”

  “Not true. You’re the best. And Dad, did I tell you, I’m going to have my own room there. Right in the old servants’ quarters over their carriage house.”

  “Slave quarters,” he says. “They lost their fucking plantations down in Dixieland, now they come up here. Confederates should of won, this country’d be a damn sight better off.”

  “Daddy, they’re not Confederates. They’re Jewish. Mrs. Hummerman’s going to teach me all their customs, like eating by candlelight on Friday night.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, our customs ain’t good enough anymore?”

  “Lucas.”

  “No, let me explain to him. Don’t you see, Daddy, we don’t havecustoms. We live in a cultural vacuum. The Hummermans can’t watch any TV after sunset on Friday. It’s very refined.”

  “Can’t be Friday,” he says. “You must of heard it wrong. Friday’s World Wrestling night on TNN.”

  “Daddy, if you think like that you’ll never get anywhere, you’re just going to rot here in this old house that hasn’t changed since the Civil War.”

  Sarah’s just arrived back at the table with a full steaming bowl of mussel stew thick with diced turnips and onions and what looks like tofu but he prays to God is big chunks of salt pork. Even Kyle shuts the TV off with his foot and sits down to slouch his half-shaved head over his food. Now it looks like some kind of writing’s carved into his hair, probably Chinese.

  Sarah serves her daughter first, as the person of honor. “We should all try to
have some positive feeling for Kristen’s achievement. I heard there were a dozen girls applying for that job.”

  “They didn’t hire Lenore Hannaford,” Kristen says. “And she goes to private school.”

  “No shit? Clyde’s niece, huh? That’s decent. Sounds like this guy Hummerman really stepped in shit. What did he do, win the Maryland Megabucks?”

  “He’s a doctor,” Kristen says. “He’s a cardiac surgeon at Johns Hopkins University, and you know what his wife told me? Nobody’s supposed to know, only members of the family, so Kyle, don’t say anything to your dropout friends. If anything ever happened to the president’s heart, Dr. Hummerman would be on the team that gets called in.”

  “Hey. He could fix the whole frigging country with one little slip of the knife.”

  “You know, Lucas, you might not be here eating this food if it weren’t for the miracle of heart surgery.”

  “That would be OK with me. A man ain’t good enough for his own family, he might as well be fucking dead.”

  “Lucas.”

  His son stands up from the table and flips a set of keys in the air. “I don’t have to listen to this shit. I’m going out.”

  “Out? Where? Ain’t this a school night for you?”

  “Maybe I’ll drive over to Split Cove, see what’s happening.”

  “Drive what? You ain’t using the GMC, you got a ticket last time. You going to use the Lynx?”

  “Don’t have to. Got my own.”

  Lucky had forgotten about the truck. “That ain’t your Toyota blocking my door, is it?”

  “Sure is,” Kyle says proudly. “Bought it this afternoon.”

  “Bought it with what? You ain’t got any money. You ain’t even paid me for your outboard motor.”

  “I bought it on credit. Mr. Moto lent me the money.”

  “Mr. Moto?”

  “That’s right. Mr. Moto. At least I got somebody that trusts me.”