The Wooden Nickel Read online

  He feels all the clothes Sarah put on him, the Grundens oilskin bib trousers and the wool sweater and the long underwear and beneath the clothes, his own skin wrapped around him like a survival suit. Under that layer there’s a circulation no different from the heart of a big-block V-8, the Havoline 10-40 gushing from the pump to lube the pistons stroking in and out of their cylinders like a tight-holed fuck, the nervous gossipy valves jumping in their seats, the spinelike crankshaft turning in its bath of oil. His body idling in the front seat, the engine idling under the hood, they’re the same fucking thing.

  Not that it’s true for every vehicle. Take Sarah’s Mercury Lynx, which is an aluminum-block four-cylinder piece of shit. When she started insisting on a car of her own, he planned to buy her something American at Harry Pomerleau’s Lincoln-Mercury up at the Narwhal Mall in Norumbega. Gas mileage is everything for Sarah, she doesn’t want to take any more than she has to from those nice Arab sheiks and their Rolls-Royces and their dozen wives. Harry Pomerleau sold her a four-cylinder Lynx whose engine sounds like an ice-fishing auger but Honest Harry told her the thing would get ten miles on a quart of gas. That’s the word that slick son of a bitch used on her, a quart, like they were going to put milk in the fucking thing. They had the Lynx three months before Virge Carter told him it was built in Oakville, Ontario. He should have known it from the name, Lynx, must be the national mammal up there in Molsonland. The laws of marriage force him to keep a car in his garage built under a Communist government by slave labor, same as their socialist cooperatives and government-funded fucking Canadian piers so they can give lobsters away while just over the border a free people starve to death.

  So he doesn’t set foot in his wife’s car with its lawnmower engine, and Sarah won’t ride in the truck because it smells like fish. I don’t mind it on you, Lucas, but then I don’t have to climb inside you, do I? When they go out together they take both vehicles, even on the thirty-mile run to the Tarratine mall, the navy blue Lynx tailgated by the big red pickup, Lucky behind the wheel looking down at his wife’s neck through the Lynx’s rear window and thinking, Fuck fuel economy, I’d like to see the EPA rating on us.

  After the angioplasties last November, he was supposed to recuperate on an exercise schedule with walks of gradually increasing distance. He skipped the exercise and went right for the boat engine instead. Within a month of the operation he had cleaned the garage and fashioned an engine bed out of railroad ties, which he couldn’t lift and he had to pay Kyle a dollar apiece to lug them in. Then he flushed out the water-cooling passages with hydrochloric acid. He ran the acid over and over through the engine block the same way they’d done it with the artery balloons run up past his nuts and guts into his own chest. When he was finished the acid came out the same as it went in, swift-flowing, colorless and clear: no rust, no clots. As soon as they let him drive again he dropped the block back in the Wooden Nickel, balanced the shaft and flywheel, and at 3000 rpm it ran fifteen degrees cooler. He drove over to the clinic and said, “Check me out.”

  That exercise program did the job for your husband, that’s what young Dr. Burnside told Sarah when they ran into each other in the IGA.

  At exactly five-thirty, Doris flips the sign around. Open. Just at that moment Clyde Hannaford shows up in his blue three-quarter-ton Dodge Ramcharger with the bright yellow Fisher plow still on the hook. Clyde’s never lowered it yet, not wanting to dirty her up with snow.

  CL. HANNAFORD DEALER

  LOBSTER CLAMS GROUNDFISH

  ORPHAN POINT

  He’s got groundfish crossed out because there’s none of them left, and what there are the government won’t let you have, their goal being to starve the fishermen off the water and turn the Atlantic Ocean into the world’s biggest national fucking aquarium, look but don’t touch. It’s good to have your name on a truck. As long as your name isn’t Lunt. The one time Lucky tried it, the weekend wasn’t over before it became

  LUCAS M. CUNT

  LOBSTERS

  Scrape it off as he tried, it kept reappearing, even when he painted the whole fucking door it would be there again when he got in from a day’s fishing. Lucky Cunt.

  Now Clyde is bringing his thirty-year-old child bride Ronette to her job as Doris’s counter girl at the Blue Claw. Lucky can’t figure why she works there. Clyde Hannaford is not some dumb fisherman in debt for fuel and bait, scraping to meet his boat loan. Clyde owns a wharf and fuel dock that he inherited from his old man, Curtis Hannaford, a first-class prick who diddled the fishermen for about fifty years and now writes postcards from Miami Beach. It’s his boy Clyde who buys and sells every lobster that comes into Orphan Point, and in the winter he now has the urchin trade. With his brother Arvid he runs a lobster takeout in back of the wharf. Come June first they get out a copper kettle big enough to boil four or five New Jersey tourists in and they sell a one-pound shedder with a boat price of three bucks for eighteen ninety-five. Not to mention the daily dock markup that probably nets him ten thousand a month while a man like Lucky, out at sea all day doing the work, can barely scrape up the payments on his gear.

  Clyde’s truck door opens to the sound of a Patsy Cline tape and Ronette Hannaford bounces down from the high cab in a black winter parka over her little waitress miniskirt, showing some places that don’t often see the light of day. She looks like what Paula Jones shouldlook like, if they had a real president in there, only Paula Jones is a dog if you study the pictures, while Ronette’s got a face that makes her look naked even with an overcoat on. She was a cheerleader at Norumbega High, can’t be more than ten or twelve years back, while Clyde Hannaford was two years ahead of Lucky and Sarah at the old red brick high school in Orphan Point. Sarah went out with him too, the years Lucky was a motor-pool mechanic for Uncle Sam, but that was all over when Lucas Lunt came back to town.

  Lucky taps the horn, cries out, “Ain’t you cold?” through the closed window which she probably can’t hear over Clyde’s exhaust.

  Ronette looks embarrassed and pulls the skirt down, wraps the parka tight around her tits and flashes a mean look, fake mean since Ronette Hannaford does love to be noticed. It’s Clyde that is shooting over the mad-dog stare, then he backs up fast with a lot of unnecessary noise, spins his slick nine-fifty by sixteens and heads for the wharf to drink hazelnut decaf and count the profits. Lucky shuts off his engine and goes in.

  Without asking, Doris hands him his coffee and a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie. “Everyone’s out,” she says. “Won’t be any lobsters left for you.”

  “I’ll give them a half-hour start, that way we’ll all arrive at the same time.”

  Ronette looks up and pouts her lips at him, her body bent way over behind the counter to pull up a jar of pickled hard-boiled eggs. Her skirt lifts up so high he can see the shadow of her ass darkening her upper legs. As the father of a daughter he wants to grab hold and pull it back down, as a man out on his own in one of the mornings of the world he’d like to raise it the rest of the way. Talk about miscarriage of justice, an asshole like Clyde Hannaford sleeping every night alongside a woman you should have to be twenty-one to even look at. Without glancing up she says, “That’s you, Mr. Luck, faster than the eye can see.”

  Doris is breaking coin rolls into the cash register but she’s got her ear out. “Don’t get near him, Ronette, he’s so fast he’d do it and you wouldn’t even know it was done.”

  “Wouldn’t know till the Fourth of July,” Ronette says.

  “You’d know before that, dear.” Doris slams the register shut, takes the key out and pockets it. Just then a truck comes screeching in, brakes spray gravel on Doris’s plate glass window: smell of diesel smoke.

  Doris says, “Jesus, what a stench. Who’s got a diesel truck?”

  “Blair Alley,” Ronette says. “Watch out. Don’t that thing smell.” Blair and his brother Frank weigh a good six hundred pounds between them, about three ounces of it is brain. They kick the door open with their boots and try to walk through
the doorway at the same time, get stuck for a second then figure out that Blair was first-born and Frank stands aside. Ronette stands up with the jar of hardboiled eggs and looks down at their boots and says, “Frank Alley, I have always wanted to know, what size shoe do you take?”

  Blair says, “Frank don’t reveal things like that. They’re trade secrets with him.”

  “He don’t reveal them,” Lucky says, “he sells them.”

  Doris opens the cash register drawer with a big ring but zeros showing on the screen. “Frank,” she says, “how much would that information be?”

  Blair reaches into the glass-doored doughnut drum and pulls out a chocolate éclair and throws it in his mouth like it was an M&M. He slides another one down to his brother, who opens his huge jaws like a basking shark and the éclair is gone. “I guess that will do it,” Blair says. “Go ahead, Frank, tell her.”

  Ronette leans over the counter to look down at Frank’s feet, but his trousers hang so far over his boots that Frank’s standing on the cuffs, and meanwhile the cleavage of his dark hairy asscrack is showing like Dolly Parton on Rogaine. One of Ronette’s tits presses down on the how-to-eat-a-lobster place mat, the other presses on a fork and knife. Lucky wonders if she can feel things like silverware through the bra and the white waitress blouse.

  “You’re going to have to lift them trousers up,” Ronette says to Frank, giving him the weird glance she has, as if one of her eyes was astray. He has heard the rumor that Ronette has a glass eye but he does not believe it. Both her eyes move when she looks around, just maybe one doesn’t come at you quite as fast as the other, that’s all. It’s a sexy moment, waiting for the other eye to catch up.

  Doris, who was a friend of his mother’s and must be close to sixty, is pushing her dyed blond hair up in an interested way. “You know what they say, Ronette. ‘Big feet, warm heart.’”

  Frank says, “I wear a nine.”

  “Sure you do,” Ronette says. “And your brother here is a ballet dancer.”

  “Belly dancer,” Lucky says. The Alleys choose to pay no attention.

  “I wouldn’t shit you, Ronette,” Frank says. “You gave me an eeclair.” He hoists the trousers back up over his stern cleavage and there’s a boot two sizes smaller than Lucky’s own. “It is a nine.”

  “Something must be wrong with that one,” Ronette says. “Must be deformed. Lift up the other one.”

  Same size. Nobody knows what to say. Frank Alley is the big one too, he must weigh over three hundred and he’s walking around on a size-nine foot. Doris says, “Whew, I don’t know how you stand up on them. They must hurt at the end of the day. I know mine do, and I ain’t got your weight on them.”

  Blair says, “I think Frank should get more than a fucking eeclair.” He pulls a glazed honey-dip out of the doughnut drum and gives it to his brother and stands up.

  Frank says, “Fucking daylight saving time. It ain’t never going to get light.”

  “Just set your watch ahead an hour,” Lucky tells him. “It’ll get light right away.”

  Frank looks at him seriously and says, “No shit?” He starts frigging around with his watch as they go out, then looks east towards the sunrise like he’s just caused it, pleased as piss. By the doorway he bends down to pet Doris’s weird little Chinese dog and as he does his pants slip down again. His big white cheeks bulge out in the brightening air.

  Ronette whispers, “Ain’t every day you get a sight like that.”

  “Don’t get all jealous.” Lucky says. “Frank’s had an implant. It ain’t real.”

  The Alley brothers can’t hear a thing, they’re outside cranking the diesel over which won’t start cause it hasn’t been plugged in, but Ronette still bends close to Lucky to whisper. The steam rising off his coffee forms a little ridge of moisture on her chin. “Would you of believed that?” she says. “Frank Alley. Size nine. What size are you, Lucky?”

  Doris hears. “Why don’t you call Sarah up and ask her? Lucky never buys his own shoes. How’s he supposed to know?”

  “You don’t know your own size?” Ronette says.

  “Eleven.”

  “Makes sense,” she says. “You’re a few sizes bigger than Clyde, he wears an eight.”

  “Small feet, cold heart,” Doris says. She walks to the jukebox and plays some Garth:

  Parked on some old backstreet

  They laid down in the backseat

  “Clyde does have a cold heart,” Ronette says, suddenly serious, like the song. She hums along as she loads the hard-boiled eggs into the small jar. “Coldhearted Hannaford.”

  “Treats you nice,” Doris reminds her. “You got that Ford Probe or whatever it is, you got that hot tub.”

  “Money ain’t everything,” Ronette says. “There’s a few other things.”

  “Damn few,” Doris says. “You get where I am in life, you see all the other things were daydreams.”

  “Money’s a daydream,” Ronette says. “Tell her, Lucky.”

  Lucky says, “I wouldn’t know. Never seen any.”

  “You ain’t going to,” Doris says, “if you don’t leave the help alone and get on your boat.”

  Ronette sticks her tongue out at her boss, just a quick flicker not meant to be seen, and puts the big egg jar back in the floor cooler. Lucky pays up and leaves her a buck tip for a sixty-eight cent coffee and heads for her husband’s wharf, where he keeps his skiff.

  Turns out he’s not the last boat, the ones that didn’t pick up their gas and bait the night before are still crowding Clyde’s wharf at the pump float. Lucky just has to take the skiff out to his mooring and cast off. Rowing past the gas pumps, he calls, “Good morning, Clyde, just had breakfast with your old lady,” and gets nothing but a wicked glare. Then he remembers his radio. Clyde also handles electronic repairs, not that he can do them himself, but he takes the units to Chubby Burke in Norumbega, supposedly to save you the trip but now Clyde’s got it so Chubby won’t take your repairs if they don’t go through him. Chub gives him a volume discount that does not get passed on. That puts another wing on the hot tub so Ronette gets to stretch out her tired little body to its full length. One good thing you can say about the Commies, they would have eliminated the middleman. Guys like Clyde Hannaford would have got reformed in a labor camp. Too bad. “Hey Clyde,” he shouts, “you got my radio?”

  “Chubby says another wait. That thing’s so old he’s got to get parts from Illinois.”

  “At least they ain’t coming from Tokyo.”

  “You probably got the last working radio made in the U.S.A. That thing belongs in the maritime museum. Chubby says it uses crystals. You could get two Apelcos for what those crystals are going to cost.”

  “Damn good radio,” Lucky says. “You can hear the fucking thing fifty miles away. They don’t make them like that anymore. Know where they make them Apelcos? Malaysia. Wherever the fuck that is.”

  “No doubt. But those crystals are going to be another three weeks.”

  “Don’t need a fucking radio anyway. I ain’t going out to talk. I’m going to fish.”

  It’s now a brightening mackerel sky over Orphan Point. The snow has stopped. The underbellies of the eastern clouds are stained blood-red the way the floors of the old fishhouses used to look before the government shut the tuna fishery down. Lucky rows Downeast style, stern first, so he can see where his ass is going, not like the summer folks who row out blind as quahogs into the fog. Moving at half speed in memory of his operation, he rows down the west shore of the harbor, towards the Money side, where the seasonal residents have their estates and stables on spidery dirt roads that don’t even get plowed in winter so some of them have a foot of snow on them even now. That’s the way they like it, the summer people, they think it keeps the vandals out but nowadays kids break in anyway using their Ski-Doos. Lucky himself got caught once poaching a couple of bottles of Canadian whiskey out of one of those places when he was right around fourteen. He was detained and interrogated by Officer A
rden Jewett, who accepted one of the bottles for evidence and let him go. The owners of those places have three or four homes, couple of Lexuses in the garage, helicopter pads on their lawns so they can step right onto their yachts, rich bastards, they ought to open their mansions after Labor Day and let people come take what they want, instead of having to break in at the coldest time of the year.

  After rowing past a couple of these mansions to stay out of the current, he turns out towards his boat, heading for the east side, where the fishermen live, their old black-shuttered white-clapboard Capes still insulated with newspapers from the Civil War. Same families that built them are living in them now. Lucky’s great-great-grandfather funded their place with a Union Army bonus — that’s how his mother told it — became a fisherman, and they’ve been fishermen ever since. Not one of the Lunt men knew how to do another god damn thing. That’s what they say, a Lunt can smell his way to Nova Scotia through the fog but he needs a compass to find the grocery store.

  No different for Sarah. The Peeks were a fishing family since anyone could remember. They had a house with gingerbread trim, just below the Orphan Point cemetery, on Deadman’s Hill. The Peeks and the Lunts had been marrying off and on ever since lobsters sold for three cents a pound. When the state came to town and set up that office of genetic counseling, they called Lucky and Sarah to come pay a visit, but it was too late, Kyle was on a tricycle and Kristen was on the way. They came out all right, five fingers on each hand, what the fuck. The GC office is a waste of taxpayers’ dollars, except for maybe the Gross family, and all the genetic counselors on earth couldn’t have stopped the Grosses from breeding in. They just don’t have an eye for anyone else.