The Wooden Nickel Read online

  “You don’t know about economics, do you? You don’t know the Japs have been buying up the United States ever since V-J Day and one day they’re going to show up with a piece of paper and we’re going to be theirs. The whole cocksucking country. We will be serving them cold jellyfish and shining their fucking shoes. And you’re going to deliver us right to the gates of Tokyo with that god damned truck.”

  “Well you don’t have to worry about it none,” Kyle says, “cause they ain’t going to want you.”

  “They ain’t going to want you either, you and that fairy boyfriend of yours. He’s been in jail already, ain’t he? I’d like to know what he does in his spare time.”

  Kyle was on his way out but now he turns and faces his old man head-on, swinging the Toyota keys in his face like a hypnotist. “I’ll tell you what he does in his spare time. He FUCKS DOGS.”

  Lucky goes blind with rage. The whole room shrinks and darkens in his narrowed eye. All he can see is that cocksucking shaved head with the gold earring hanging off of it like a drop of piss. He leaps up and goes for him. “You got it coming now, you little bastard!”

  Sarah shrieks, “Lucas, your son! Your heart!”

  Kyle ducks fast and breaks for the door at the same time. Then he turns and spits: “Fucking loser, at least I ain’t going to end up like you.”

  Lucky leaps forward and lets one fly right at the earring just as Kristen dives between them and knocks Kyle aside so the fist of authority meets empty air. His arm wants to slug Kristen but she looks him right in the eye and says, “I dare you,” so he backs off shouting, then lunges around her to face Kyle again. “We’re going to have some fucking discipline in this house.” He’s got a hold on Kyle’s denim vest and he’s lining him up for another try when Kristen screams and slides in front of her brother again. “Mother, it’s happening. He’s going berserk. You better dial nine one one.”

  Kyle doesn’t go anywhere either. He stands right up there in the doorway beside the open closet of sea boots and oilskins, Kristen beside him, and grinds his teeth at his old man. Lucky is six-one in his lambskin slippers and Kyle’s just under six and still growing, he pumps iron in the cellar too, though Lucky’s got maybe eighty pounds on his son and forearms like a hardshell lobster, thirty years lifting stone-ballasted wooden traps. Kyle turns his head and spits out the open door onto the welcome mat, which has a couple of worn-out mallards on it and now says the unts. “I ain’t putting up with this,” he says.

  “You ain’t going nowhere in that fucking Toyota.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say. And I am blocking the driveway so you can’t get out.”

  “Give me the keys, then, I’ll move that broken-down piece of Deetroit shit.”

  “Keys my ass.” He makes damn sure the key ring is deep in his left front pocket, then sits down in his chair and flips the remote to The Bowling Hour. It’s a mixed doubles championship out in Wisconsin somewhere, nothing but fat white midwesterners in white shirts and black bowling pants like an indoor dairy herd, but they are pretty decent bowlers and fun to watch. Just as he turns up the volume and settles in, Kyle grabs the remote out of his lap and shuts it off. “Now I’m going to fucking kill you,” Lucky shouts, but just as he’s going for the weasely bastard he slips out the door and he’s gone.

  Sarah’s crying and breathing like her asthma’s come back again. “I don’t know which of you is worse. Thank God they’ll be in college in a couple of years.”

  “Kyle’s not going to college,” Kristen says sweetly. “He’s going to move in with Darrell Swan over in Burnt Neck. He told me.”

  Just as he’s getting back into the bowling match, he hears this tremendous engine roar and a scraping noise like a steel boat grounding on a half-tide ledge. He runs out to look at the garage. Even though his truck was in park, Kyle has backed up against it in his granny gear and he’s pushing it backwards down the driveway and right out into the street, which means the pin’s been ripped out of the transmission and chewed up in the fucking gears. “Son of a bitch!” he yells, but Kyle’s engine is so loud he can’t hear anything and he’s off towards Split Cove. The last thing his father sees is the white rectangle of his son’s cardboard ten-day plate.

  He walks out in the road and climbs up to his driver’s seat to check the transmission. Everyone’s forced to drive around him, honking. Fuck them. The shift lever’s stuck fast. He starts the engine, puts a little muscle to the lever, it snaps and flaps free like a broken arm. Then there’s this moment of high-pitched turbojet whine and a final complicated crunch like turning on a blender full of spoons and forks.

  His truck. Useless. Its rear end is half out in the roadway and he can’t even move it back. He stands there looking down the road towards Split Cove as if expecting to see the slant-eyed headlights of the Toyota returning to strike again. His heart pounds so hard he can hear his stent whistling and the valves opening and closing in his ears.

  Sarah and Kristen are watching from the front steps. “Come finish your supper,” his wife calls. “We’ll get Alan Ashmore to come over with the wrecker. He’s Triple-A.”

  “Triple asshole,” he says. “We ain’t covered by them no more.” He stomps upstairs for the bottle of heart pills in the medicine chest.

  When he comes back his daughter has brought him a straight black rum, without the tea, balanced on the Naugahyde arm of his recliner. “I know Kyle will feel bad about this,” she says. “Course he’ll never admit it.”

  “I’ll wait up all night if I have to. When he comes home I’m taking a crowbar to that fucking truck.”

  “I have another idea,” Sarah says. “I’ll ask Kyle to lend you his truck till yours gets fixed.”

  “I ain’t driving it. He won’t be lending it to me neither, cause I am going to convert that son of a whore to a mooring block.”

  She moves quietly behind him, massaging his shoulder blades to calm him down. “Lucas, I’m just trying to think of how you can get to work. You’re welcome to my car but you won’t set foot in it. Or maybe Rhonda Hannaford can pick you up.”

  “Great idea. We’ll stuff ten lobster traps in the trunk of her Barbie doll Probe. That ought to hold it to the road.”

  He’s in his socks already, ten-thirty at night, just listening to the weather before going to bed, when he hears the Toyota pull into the driveway. Sarah and Kristen are up in the studio over the garage, so they can’t stop him. He gets into his mud boots by the doorway, grabs a crowbar from the workbench and goes out to start on the grille and headlights, then work back to the windshield and the doors. When he gets out there, though, it’s not Kyle but some other cocksucker with the same kind of truck, just stopping to see why the GMC’s sitting there with its rear end in the street. Alan Ashmore never showed up with the wrecker. He almost runs out and bashes in their grille, just for driving that Asian shitheap, but he stops short and stands there in the night waving the crowbar while the strange truck flees down the road in terror. Serves them right. Another year or two and there won’t be anything else on the road. Hondas, Hyundais, Accuras, Lexuses, Nissans, Daewoos, amazing they don’t make a Mitsubishi Zero with a bloody fucking sun on the doors, just like Pearl Harbor only this time the suicide pilots are us.

  He unspools the electric winch on the front of his truck and hooks it around a spruce tree alongside the garage and with a terrible grinding noise winches it forward enough to get the poor thing off the highway. He lays out his own clothes for the morning, makes his own sandwich of cold moose liver and Miracle Whip, mixes up some tuna salad for Ronette, and, with the crowbar under his side of the bed, finds the way to sleep all by himself.

  In the middle of the night he hears the Toy again and gropes for the crowbar below. In his union-suit pajamas he creeps downstairs. The truck just idles there with its beady low beams on and shakes with the four-cylinder twitch. He walks up to the driver’s side headlight and puts the cocksucker to sleep with a single stroke. Then his son steps down and puts hi
s hands up like a prisoner, only one hand is full of money, fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, and Kyle extends the bills towards his old man like you’d offer your bare wrist to a rottweiler. “I’ve sold it, Dad. I’ve got five hundred dollars to fix your transmission.” Lucky drops the crowbar and throws his arms around his son, who doesn’t have an earring anymore either, and he’s got his curly brown hair back like he used to wear it when he was a kid. It’s not Darrell Swan beside him in the Toyota either, it’s a dead body, and when it turns around he sees it’s Ronette Hannaford, staring at him through Sarah’s wire-rimmed glasses. His heart starts palpitating and he wakes up sweating in his bed, he reaches for the woman beside him but she’s not there.

  From the bedroom window he can see her studio light’s still on. His truck is in the driveway with the winch cable still attached around the tree. He opens the dormer window and cranes his neck around to view the whole neighborhood, but the Toyota is nowhere to be seen.

  5

  VIRGIL CARTER’S STILL GOT Lucky’s pickup in the garage and he’s stuck with one of Virge’s old beaters, a ’74 Ford half-ton six that’s locked in low range so it drives like a road grader. He heads for Luther Webster’s place on the Riceville Road to buy some traps. Luther’s deaf wife meets him at the mailbox. She’s standing three feet away from him but she yells nevertheless, as if he were the one that couldn’t hear. “He’s worming.”

  “Worming?” Lucky yells. “Best trap maker in the state ain’t ought to be worming.”

  “It’s worm or starve,” she screams back. “Nobody wants wooden traps.”

  Lucky buys twelve from her and loads them in the back of the loaner, then adds a couple more, till it looks like the Ford’s rear springs are going to snap. Seven hundred bucks. Then on the way out he notices the brand-new satellite dish on a steel pillar cemented into Luther Webster’s back lawn. Well fuck it, now they can buy a thirty-two-inch TV.

  When he gets back to the smooth black asphalt of the Riceville Road, he puts the old loaner to the floor, valves slapping the head, bone-dry transfer case grinding itself to death, full of traps, sparks flying off the low-slung rear. Fucking Virgil Carter, he’ll never sell this cocksucker to anyone. Serve him right.

  When he gets home Sarah’s Lynx is already in the driveway and she’s waiting for him in the breakfast nook with a cup of Red Rose tea.

  “Lucas the Loner.” She smiles like she’s looking to make up. The house has been cold as a meat locker since Kyle left home after the truck duel. He doesn’t give a shit, he’s not going to hear or speak the name of his son till he gets his pickup back.

  “I’m driving a christly loaner. She’s right out there.” He gestures out the window to the Ford six, which has a puddle of purple fluid rapidly forming underneath the crankcase and a plume of green smoke pissing straight out from the grille.

  “That’s right. You are a loaner. Only thing is, I don’t get to give you back.”

  “Ain’t nobody’d take me.”

  “I can think of some that might. They don’t know you like I do, though. How was fishing?”

  “Halfway decent, for a crippled old fart and a professional waitress. Price is up too, now Clyde’s got the cooker going out front. Even that cheap bastard is paying three-fifteen a pound.”

  He switches on the stock car channel. Ricky Craven is supposed to be driving in the North Carolina Dura-Lube 400 but there’s a huge pileup with a couple of cars on fire and the yellow flag’s up so there’s no action, just cruising around slow like they’re looking for a place to park. He sits down and watches it anyway.

  “Lucas, why don’t you shut the TV off? We don’t get to talk much these days.”

  “We’re hauling lobsters sunup to half past three. Don’t leave much time for talk.”

  “I don’t imagine,” she says. “Why don’t we go out for supper? Just the two of us. Kristen can look after herself. It’s been a while.”

  “Where at? Doris ain’t open yet for supper. RoundUp’s nothing but beef, they ain’t had a vegetable in there since Prohibition, what are you going to eat?”

  “How about the Irving Big Stop up at the Narwhal Mall? You always like it there.”

  “Only decent thing on the menu’s the bacon cheeseburger, and the prime rib on Thursdays but it ain’t Thursday. Where’s that leave you?”

  “They’ve put in a very attractive salad bar,” she says. “My art class stopped there once when the Salad Patch was closed. Anyway, you’ve had your meat for the week.”

  In the Irving Big Stop restaurant he goes to order the bacon cheese-burger with double blue cheese but she covers the row of glossy burger photos with her hand. “We’re both having the salad bar. Remember, I promised I’d look after your diet.”

  “That was way back in March.”

  “No, Lucas, it was forever.”

  “Don’t know why we bother,” he says. “Might as well eat what we want and die.”

  “That’s not what you said last winter. I should have made a tape of you promising young Dr. Burnside you’d reform your eating habits.”

  “Well, that was then. Now it don’t seem worth it.”

  “What do you mean, worth it? Lucas, you’re only forty-six years old.”

  “My old man Walter, he was just turned forty-eight.”

  “That was a different generation, Lucas. The technology that’s made you able to work again was not available to Walter.”

  He gets the old image back of the Wooden Nickel as a brand-new boat, found adrift off Toothpick Ledge by the Thurston boys, trap wide open, Chrysler slant-six idling away, his old man unconscious on the floor. Howard Thurston said the lobsters had already crawled under his oilskins, greedy bastards, they couldn’t wait for revenge. The Thurstons got him to the hospital but he never fished again.

  “Sometimes I’ll be out there,” he says to his wife, “the days I’m alone...”

  “Which aren’t very many,” she reminds him. “Your sternperson’s with you almost every trip.”

  “Seems like half the time I’m alone, and you know how many smells there is out there, the bait and the hydraulic oil, and the kelp and eelgrass off the bottom, the rotten trap wood, gullshit and salt air...”

  “. . . cigarettes, Wild Turkey. Lucas, I think your self-discipline melts away when you leave the mooring, and I don’t see Ronette Hannaford offering much support.”

  “This ain’t a church, Mother, it’s just a gas station, and I’m trying to tell you something. I’ve been picking up another smell out there, it ain’t the bilge or anything I can put my hands on.”

  “Might be something your sternlady’s sprayed on herself. Those colognes have a way of lingering.”

  “Tell you what I think, I think it’s the smell of death, mixed in with everything else. What worries me, it don’t smell half as bad as I thought it would.”

  She shivers and draws the hand-knit sweater around her shoulders. She’s always been cold, her whole life, there’s not enough flesh on her to keep her warm even on the first of June. “It doesn’t matter what you want or don’t want for yourself, Lucas, there are those of us who care.”

  “Who? Kyle’s gone. He ain’t coming home. Kristen? She’s got the oh pear, then she’s off to college and she ain’t looking back. You? You’re out every night now over to the art school with the stained glass, think you was a monk.”

  “I’m not a monk, Lucas. And from what I hear these days, neither are you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Let’s make our trip to the salad bar, then we’ll talk about it.”

  He realizes why she chose the Big Stop now, they don’t serve alcohol. He’s got half a pint in the glove compartment, he’s thinking how he might get out to it, but she’s already handed him his three-inch Formica bowl and she’s steering him towards the lettuce bin, there’s no escape. He moves through the Irving Big Bar feeling dry and clumsy as the first fucking fish learning to walk on land, groping through the vegetables for
edible food. Lettuce is too much like rockweed. Tomatoes are all right in spaghetti sauce but he doesn’t eat them raw, especially the little cherry ones you can’t even cut into with those blunt plastic knives so they go rolling off your plate. They got carrot slivers, celery slivers, big black olives the size of a guy’s balls. He grabs a tongload of red onions and goes to pile on a cheese slab and a few slices of hard-boiled egg. “No eggs,” she reminds him, “and no cheese. You’re way past your quotas for this week.”

  “Christ.”

  He comes back to their booth with a bowl of onion chunks and green peppers smothered in skin-colored Local French under which he’s concealed a few chunks of boiled ham. “What’s that you’ve sprayed on there,” she asks, “bacon bits?”

  “Jesus, they’re just chemicals, they ain’t real bacon.”

  “Lucas, do you want to know why I spend so much thought and energy on you? Because I care about you. That’s what marriage is, remember. Death do us part. Till then we have to keep each other alive.”

  “OK.”

  “But I don’t particularly want to preserve you for the enjoyment of someone else. Remember the other part, forsaking all others? You know, I had a couple of admirers back then. As you well know, one of them was Clyde Hannaford.”

  “Well, here’s your chance. He’s all alone in the hot tub.”

  “Lucas, the last thing I’m interested in is another man. One is enough, I assure you. I’m only recalling his name to tell you I had a choice back then. I chose you, and I still do.” The tear bulging in each eye makes it look like she’s wearing contacts under her glasses.

  “I don’t get it. Why dig up the past? Them days are gone.”

  “I ran into Rhonda Hannaford the other day, while I was delivering some much-needed supplies to your son in his new home. Or Rhonda Astbury, as she’s starting to call herself again. God knows why she would want to claim relation with that Burnt Neck crowd. She caught my eye and turned green like somebody seasick. I never saw anyone look so guilty. She spun right around and went back to that ostentatious little car Clyde gave her.”