The Wooden Nickel Read online

  Up on the stage, which seems a long distance away, the procession of graduates is filing towards the center, couple of wheelchairs in front ramping up beside the stairs, then the short kids, then the middle ones, including Kristen, who smiles towards the sea of parents and takes the diploma from the principal and lifts her long white gown off the floor so she can make the steps. He’s glad he woke up for it. Grandpa Merritt Lunt didn’t go past the sixth grade. Lucky’s own father, Walter, back in the Depression, only made it through the eighth. Walter Lunt was fishing full-time by the time he was fourteen. Lucky himself dropped out right near the end of junior year, not much of a family for the books, but now a Lunt is walking off the stage with her diploma and sliding the tassel to the other side of her square graduation cap. College track too, course that’s the easiest, they don’t have to do anything but read.

  On the chest of her white gown Kristen displays a small red loop ribbon, probably some kind of award. She did win a bunch of them, she got the scholarship from the Kiwanis and split the one from the Odd Fellows with some kid who was supposed to be the smartest one in the school. A few others in the line have the same decoration, mostly girls, not that they’re smarter but they do have less energy so they can study more. He asks Sarah, “What’s the ribbon for?”

  She whispers, “It’s for AIDS.”

  A chill goes through him. A bunch of them have those ribbons, and every one of them looks sick. No wonder she’s been acting strange this spring. He feels the sweat of fear breaking out on his face, then a spike of anger at the perverts and radicals in that degenerate town. They should have home-schooled her, they never should have put her on the bus. He looks at Sarah with the sweat flowing over his collar where the shirt is suddenly so tight it’s strangling him. “Goodness,” she says. “What’s wrong?” She turns and flashes a look over to Dr. Hummerman like she’s glad he’s near.

  He manages to whisper, “All of them got it?”

  “All who, Lucas?”

  “All the ones with ribbons. They all got the AIDS?”

  A big smile breaks out on her face and she goes right to work loosening the tie and unfastening the top button while she speaks close into his ear so he can feel her breath. “AIDS awareness, dear. They’re members of a support group.” She gives him a squeeze on the arm as Kristen returns to the rows of seated graduates. “Aren’t you proud of her, Lucas? Our little girl.”

  Dr. Hummerman flashes Lucky a thumbs-up and a big smile like it’s his daughter graduating. Then she’s back in her seat and the last of the basketball freaks are striding across the stage and it’s time for them all to hit the Chinese restaurant, which is okay with Lucky because his child is cured of AIDS and he’s suddenly starved.

  Out in the school parking lot, Dr. Hummerman congratulates him and shakes his hand. In the grip of delicate small fingers that can slice your heart open and stitch all the little veins back up, Lucky’s own hand feels stiff and useless as a lobster claw. “This must be a gratifying event for you,” the surgeon says. “She’s a poised and accomplished girl. We already think of her as one of the family.”

  In the Mei Lai Pavilion restaurant, Mrs. Elsie Hummerman orders Moo Shoo Gay Something, her husband orders Straw Mushrooms with Bean Curd, Kristen orders Tofu Kung Fu, Sarah orders a General Sow’s Chicken but her daughter clears her throat and says, “Mother, what did you promise me about meat?” She changes it to something that sounds like Bow Wow Fried Rice — and it’s his turn. The little Chinese waitress stands over him tapping her pencil on her order pad. The menu’s fourteen pages long, mostly in Chinese, and he’s got to choose, good thing they put pictures beside the drinks. He points to a Fog Cutter that Sarah lets him order because it’s graduation night. He points to the lobster image and the waitress says, “Lobster Kowloon.”

  He’s been handling lobsters all his life but the Lobster Kowloon is like nothing he’s ever smelled or seen. He keeps ordering Fog Cutters till the food blurs enough so he can approach it. Sarah whispers in his ear, “Try using the chopsticks, Lucas. You’re the only one at the table using a fork.”

  He whispers back, “It’s like going after a dog turd with a pair of oars.” She turns her head away and starts talking to freckly Elsie Hummerman on the other side.

  Kristen, who’s seated on his right, puts the two sticks between his fingers and shows him how. He manages to haul up a small poisonous mushroom shaped like the umbrella in his drink, not to eat it but to shove it under his dinner plate, but it hits the rim and falls into his lap. He says to Kristen, “No wonder they’re all starving over there. They can’t pick up their christly food.”

  “They’re not starving,” Kristen says. “Chinese babies learn to use chopsticks at the age of two. Look over there!” Sure enough, there’s a Chinese family across the room with five or six little Chinese kids, chopsticks in hand, every one of them scooping up the fried rice like a backhoe.

  Lucky’s poking around his plate looking for something to eat, without much success. “Ain’t no lobster in here.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Sarah says. “It’s not our kind of lobster. It’s Chinese lobster. There’s a world of difference.”

  He manages to pick up a dark stringy little knot of something, and with Kristen’s hand beneath it all the way, he raises it to his mouth. He hails another little Chinese waitress walking past in a red dress. “Excuse me, miss. This ain’t lobster. It tastes like cocker spaniel.”

  “Lucas.” Sarah hisses at him but the waitress didn’t seem to notice at all.

  Dr. Hummerman reaches across the table and puts his hand on Sarah’s to calm her down. “I was in Seoul just a couple of months ago,” he says, “and I did get a taste of man’s best friend. It was an option on the appetizer list. I didn’t expect I’d like it but the tenderness surprised me. Like everything else, it’s all in the preparation.”

  “See?” Lucas turns in triumph to his wife.

  This Hummerman may be all right after all.

  Elsie Hummerman says, “Really, Mr. Lunt, it’s a delight to have Kristen working at our house. She’s worth her weight in gold. We can’t wait till she moves in. We’ve fixed up the old servants’ quarters over the garage.”

  “You can call me Lucky,” he says, speaking right to the low-slung diamond of her necklace like it’s a microphone.

  “Oh, yes. Very much so, to have a gem of a daughter like Kristen. You are a very lucky man.”

  Nathan’s on the other side of Kristen and he’s about to ask him about the Miata when Dr. Hummerman stands up, lays down his chopsticks, and raises his wineglass in a toast. “To our extraordinary young graduate, Kristen Lunt.”

  Hear, hear. Glasses go up. A wandering Chinese photographer slides up to the table and takes a flash shot: that’ll be another twenty bucks on the check, but what the hell, Hummerman’s paying, few hundred on his platinum, he probably doesn’t even read the bill.

  Kristen doesn’t have a wineglass but she lifts her orange juice and speaks in a voice he can hardly recognize, like she’s some summer tourist out of Massachusetts. “Thanks, Dr. Hummerman. Here’s to your new boat!”

  With a beaming smile like she’s his own daughter, Dr. Hummerman clicks glasses with her. “To the Zauberflöte.”

  Lucky takes a big slurp out of his Fog Cutter but his throat closes up and it won’t go down.

  “She nearly came to grief this afternoon,” Hummerman reveals.

  “Oh no,” Kristen says. “What happened?”

  “While you were at the beach with Jason and Becky, we were anchored off the point for a little christening. Phil Good — he’s my naval architect — was up from Sag Harbor. Dave Wong had come all the way from Taiwan, where she was built, and we’re sitting around the cockpit table when quite out of nowhere a lobster boat headed right for us at full throttle. I honestly thought the poor fisherman had died at the helm and the bow was going to cut us in two, then he veered off at the last minute, but the wake knocked the hell out of us. Food went everywh
ere, Dave Wong got a minor scalp gash on the awning frame. Phil — who was up on the coaming — practically got knocked overboard. Luckily he caught himself on the lifeline. I had to check Dave for concussion, so I didn’t even get to see the name on that fellow’s stern, or I would have called the Coast Guard in a minute. Glass all over the place”— he says directly to Lucky —“Lucas, you’ll laugh at us for having real glass aboard ship, which we rarely do, just for special occasions.”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah says. “Lucas can always find a bottle or two on board.”

  “But who was it?” Kristen insists. “Can you describe them, even if you didn’t see the name? My father knows every boat in Orphan Point, don’t you, Daddy?”

  “Wasn’t an Orphan Pointer,” her employer says. “I’m glad to say. That boat headed straight east into Split Cove. Full throttle. They were throwing a wake so high we couldn’t even see the stern.”

  Lucky’s chopsticks open by themselves and drop a big chunk of stir-fried dogmeat onto his lap. He shifts his leg and lets it fall to the carpet between his shoes. “No telling what them Split Cove boys will do,” he says. “Most of them’s pretty much bottom-feeders over there.”

  “Anyway,” Hummerman says, “by the time I got Dave Wong’s skull patched up, the culprit was long gone. But Lucas, you’re a lobsterman, what would get into someone to pull a stunt like that? Aren’t we all sharing the same ocean?”

  “There’s some of them’s don’t care much for pleasure craft, since they see themselves as out there working for a living, and there’s some of them’s think their lobsters get stolen by the summer crowd, and there’s always some that just don’t give a god damn.”

  His wife says, “Lucas, it’s not funny. Someone might have been seriously hurt.”

  By this point Lucky has long since given up on the chopsticks and he’s just forking in the Lobster Kowloon, though it’s got no more lobster in it than a can of Alpo.

  Finally their little waitress shows up with the check in a folder whose gold Chinese letters say Guess who really won World War Two?He leans back and studies the mushrooms and dog chunks on the floor around his chair, so he doesn’t have to see Hummerman reach for his platinum card and snatch the check. Beside his plate are four little umbrellas in a row, all that’s left of his Fog Cutters, and when he gets up he has to hold on to a red lacquered column because it feels like he’s back at sea.

  “Good thing you brought your designated driver.” Hummerman laughs. “But you deserve it. It’s not every day a man sees his daughter graduate.”

  Out in the My Lai parking lot, Kristen heads off in the rattly Mercedes diesel to her new family’s house. Then Mr. and Mrs. Lucas Lunt walk to their vehicles, which are parked side by side, and stand between them. “How many little Chinese umbrellas, Lucas?”

  “Three.”

  “Think you ought to be driving home?”

  “Hell, dear, I steered through thicker nights than this.”

  “And also, we have a date to talk about your sternperson.”

  “Ain’t no time to bring it up, right after Kristen’s graduation.”

  “You made a promise, Lucas. She’s all graduated, now we have to talk about ourselves.”

  He’s glancing around to see if maybe their Chinese waitress is going to float across the parking lot with another Fog Cutter on a cocktail tray. Then he’s looking at his feet in their funeral shoes, head down, a kid that forgot his homework in front of the teacher. “I ain’t found anyone else.”

  “Lucas, have you been trying? That’s what the two weeks were for. You should have hired someone by now. Have you been asking around? Did you put your ad back up? I mean, I haven’t mentioned it because I trusted that you’d get it done.”

  “Can’t find no one. If they ain’t out lobstering, they’re working at the boatyard. Bunny Whelan’s giving them Blue Cross and a dental plan.”

  “Lucas, this has been embarrassing and humiliating beyond belief. I have had lifelong friends avoid me in town. People hear things, and they talk. And this spring what they are talking about is the Hannaford girl and her husband, and although no one would ever say it to my face, I’m sure they’re also talking about the time she spends with you.”

  This conversation is rapidly sobering him up. He’s ready to drive. He wants nothing more than to take himself right home and sit down in his own chair and watch Ricky Craven in the NASCAR Pepsi 400 on TNT. “It ain’t that easy,” he says.

  “I understand your sympathy for someone you’ve been working with all these weeks, but Rhonda Hannaford will not be allowed to starve. She has a job, Doris Twitchell treats her like a daughter, she has the whole Astbury clan over there, she’s young and attractive. Lobster fishing is a dead end for her, Lucas. It’s not like a young boy going out sternman, saving for his own boat. I don’t see why you find it so difficult. You might well be doing her a favor.”

  He pauses, then blurts it out. “She’s going to have a kid. That’s why.”

  “Well, she’s a married woman. She’s got a right to be pregnant. Maybe this will settle her down.”

  “Maybe it will. Only she says it ain’t Clyde’s.”

  “What do you mean, not Clyde’s?”

  “You figure it out. It ain’t Clyde’s.”

  “Lucas, you’re not trying to tell me you’re in trouble with Rhonda Hannaford? The woman’s not even divorced yet. Not to mention you. A man who has two legitimate children of his own.”

  “That’s what she says.”

  For a moment she just stares at him through the round librarian glasses that give her eyes an underwater look. She’s got her face pointed up, of course, there’s half a foot difference in height, but to Lucky it feels like it’s his mother and she’s looking down. She takes his two huge hands while she asks him a question. “Lucas, whatever happened to us?” She doesn’t even wait for an answer. She lets go of his hands, slides in the driver’s seat and slams the door. She pokes the lock shut and collapses with her face on the steering wheel. He looks in the windshield to see if she’s crying but it’s too dark to make out. He goes around to her passenger door but it’s locked too.

  “I’m sorry,” he says through the safety glass. “It wasn’t nothing I ever planned.”

  She just stays there with her face in the wheel dish like she’s been in a head-on collision and she’s dead. He stands over her car till he feels cold and foolish, and she still doesn’t move. She’s like some kind of a snail that’s sucked itself inside, little muscle of snailmeat tightened in her coil of shell. He kicks her left front tire but she doesn’t move. Her hands are on the bottom of the wheel, her face squashed up against the hub.

  He thinks he might chain onto her and tow her home, but he couldn’t get her into neutral and it would wreck her transmission, same as the pickup. He climbs into the cab and starts the engine up and waits. The radio’s playing Deana Carter, “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”

  Well, it’s perfectly clear, between thex TV and the beer

  I won’t get so much as a kiss

  He’s been married to Sarah Peek for twenty-one years. He knows she’s capable of waiting in that position all night until he leaves. It’s happened a couple of times before, once when her mom died, once for no reason at all back when Kyle was in diapers. She went to bed in the daytime and curled up tighter than a boiled shrimp and the county nurse had to give her a shot to get her uncoiled again. No permanent damage, and life went on. But she never curled up in a parking lot like this, and he doesn’t know what to do. Well, he’s the root cause of it, he figures. If he disappears she’ll straighten herself out and drive on home.

  He keeps his headlights low and carefully navigates the nine foggy miles to Orphan Point. He’s tired and he’d like nothing more than to park himself in front of the races with a beer, just like the song. But if she sees the truck in the driveway she may fold up again. They’ve got a big-screen TV down at the RoundUp, so he keeps on going and pretty soon he’s sitting under t
he steer head clearing away the Fog Cutters with a Rolling Rock. He’s just finished persuading Wallace the bartender to switch to the NASCAR races when in walks Travis Hammond with two or three huge bastards in oilskins and trawler boots. Travis is a scrawny dark-haired guy with a black little Hitler mustache and the biggest god damn truck you ever saw, an F-350 with car-crusher mudders and a two-foot lift, it’s a wonder he can even reach the pedals. He was a couple of years behind at Orphan Point High, just coming in ninth grade when Lucky dropped out. One night they were all getting drunk and pissing on tires in the junkyard behind the old Ford garage, there was Howard and Lonnie Gross and the Jenks brothers that were a couple of years older, and all of a sudden one of the Jenks boys told Travis Hammond to kneel down and suck his dick. Just like that. The Jenks brothers held him down one after the other and he blew them both. Later on one of them got fucked up in Vietnam and the other tried to kill somebody in prison and got life without parole. Thirty years and that’s what he thinks of when he sees Travis Hammond. Kneel down and suck it. Nobody paid much attention to him after that.

  The guys with him are not exactly familiar, but not strangers either. They walk like they’ve never been on land. They come past the bar surrounding little Travis Hammond like bodyguards, pass the band and the dance floor, and take a table near the blind stuffed horse head on the far side of the room.

  He asks Wallace the bartender, “Who the fuck’s Travis got with him?”

  “Got me. Some of them Shag Islanders don’t come to the mainland but every four or five years, get their teeth pulled and get laid and it’s back to sea.”