The Wooden Nickel Page 3

  He can see his own house among the others, all the lights on now. Sarah will be fixing breakfast. Kristen will be pacing in the hall outside the bathroom for Kyle to finish, which takes an hour now he’s shaving his whole fucking head, it’s a wonder they let him in the school.

  The Wooden Nickel’s riding low in the water, lower than she should be even with the traps on board. She’s been a leaker since they put her in this March, no two ways about it. He put a few new strakes on her while she was hauled over the winter and he thought they’d swell in, but she must have half her bilge full cause the water-line stripe’s a foot under even in the bow. Under the traps the stern’s pretty near submerged.

  He fixes the skiff to the mooring and pauses a minute to let his heart catch up. Everything looks right and smells right: fresh engine oil, black polysulfide seam caulking, bait bucket full of nice ripe herring in the stern. Just a whiff of that stuff brings women to his mind. When he was a kid he was scared to kiss them below the waist, then one day he recognized that aroma and realized he’d been working in it his whole life. After that, he never hesitated to plunge right in. He’d do it now if Sarah would give him half a chance, but she pulls his head back if he even gets close. “Lucas,” she always says, “that tickles.”

  He sticks his head right in the opening of the bait bucket and takes a deep pungent inhale until his mind goes blank, he’s back under the covers and Ronette Hannaford is in the bed, her whole body smelling like a beautiful smoked trout. He slides the cover off the engine box, just like opening a coffin lid, and there’s a fresh-painted, reamed-out Chevy 454, cold as a corpse till he touches the electric fuel pump for a second, hits the starter and it comes to life, a miracle that could be in the fucking Bible if you think about it, yet it happens every single day.

  He lets her run out a bit at 1300 rpm, then he switches the power takeoff to the bilge pump because half the harbor has slipped into the cracks of his christly hull. Another hour, she would have been up to the flywheel with the traps washing off the stern. Once he gets offshore and the sea works the hull a bit, she’ll swell and settle in.

  He tunes the stereo back to High Country 104, they’ve got a female DJ now with a nice raspy sunrise voice that makes him think of the Marlboros he’s got stashed behind the radar screen. He flips the box open and eases one out with his teeth. Nothing about a cigarette he doesn’t like, including the filter’s crisp dry asbestos taste. They pick the best of life, every time, and take it away from you. Dr. Burnside made him quit after the operation — right when he needed it most. Those first nights home from the Tarratine hospital, he’d wake up seasick from the medication, withdrawal pains worse than the angina, cold turkey after two packs a day for almost thirty years. He’d stand in the bathroom before breakfast those dark and frigid mornings with his hands shaking like an addict and tear up Kleenexes one after the other till Sarah came in and walked him to the table.

  But Dr. Burnside left a loophole big enough to sail a supertanker through. He didn’t say anything about smoking offshore. Outside the three-mile limit a man can do anything he wants, and in ten minutes that’s where he’s going to be. He jams the unlit Marlboro between the wool cap and his ear. He revs the engine to finish pumping the bilge, and soon as the hose sucks air he switches the PTO to neutral, then goes forward up on the high prow, pulls the heavy eye splice off the bitt and steps back to the wheel, backs off a bit so he won’t catch the pennant, and in a moment he’s clocking fifteen knots on the loran, stern down and throwing a rooster tail behind the prop with a nice wake forking off astern. He detours east across the harbor so he can pass by his own house with Sarah and Kristen waving from the kitchen window, steering so close to shore he can hear the prop echo off the bottom and see his family’s breath steaming against the glass. Kristen turns away and it’s just Sarah, not waving anymore, looking out to sea like a widow over the yellow Fisher snowplow and the snowy lawn. He slows to an idle. If he had his radio he’d ask her to meet him back at Clyde’s and go out lobstering. She wouldn’t have to do anything, she could sit and sketch the islands like she did in the old days. He goes to the port side to wave her towards the wharf with his orange glove, but by the time he gets there she’s turned from the window and then she’s gone. He speeds up and cuts sharp to starboard to avoid Little Sow Ledge with the three black shags perched on the daybeacon looking just like the shapes of death.

  He’d like to max out the rpm and get right out to the three-mile limit and light up, but he’s got a rebuild and she’s got to be run gentle the first few hours. On High Country 104 Wynonna’s singing “Heaven Help My Heart,” which reminds him to take it easy on the engine. He turns up the radio and throttles the V-8 down to give it a break. He doesn’t even have to look outside the wheelhouse to know where he’s going in the light dawn mist, just watches the fishfinder trace its cardiograph across the screen and feels his way along its contours like a crab. As long as he can see a fathometer line he has his location in this world. He knows every rock and crevice on the ocean floor for ten miles in all directions. If he had to crawl home dead drunk on the bottom of the sea he could grope his way among the sunken dories and ghost traps right to the shore of his backyard.

  The fishfinder deepens from six fathoms at the harbor mouth to nine off of Sodom Head, then it shallows up in the Sodom Ledge channel, so he eases her westward to clear the invisible killer shoal with its beacon missing and the pole bent crooked from winter storms. Once he’s past that it drops off and he turns twenty degrees south without looking at the compass, steering by the contour line alone, because on the route to his spring territory he knows the seabed rock by rock.

  Most of the boys will be two or three miles out already, going for the April lobsters, which are still creeping in from their deep winter grounds between Red’s Bank and Nigh Shag Ledge. Lucky figures on going just inshore of them with his first string. He’ll drop them around the fifteen-fathom line that runs south and east from the Sodom bell. No lobsters inside of that, not yet.

  Now the fog thickens like a sudden eclipse, white dew coating the windshield as it steams into invisibility. He swings the glass open but it doesn’t make any difference, so he switches the radar on, gives her a minute to warm up, then another minute, but it’s still blank. He bangs his fist on the top of the screen housing and she glows green, the raster swings around, and one by one the Orphan Point boats form a circle of green blips, his own at the center. Fucking Raytheon, built right in New England. Maybe.

  The fleet’s setting their traps out past the twenty-fathom line, half a mile into the fog bank. But one blip is close by, pretty soon he’s up to them and out of the salt mist appears the Abby and Laura,skipper Alonzo Gross. They say Alonzo’s father married his father’s niece, and Alonzo went and did the same thing: chip off the old block. His old lady’s got the same name as his mother. If old Stubby and Abigail Gross had gone to the genetic counselor with little Alonzo, she would have counseled them to throw him back. Yet there he is hauling traps with his daughter as sternperson, who looks just like him: big square head, square face, squared-off body. Xerox copy, just like that sheep clone over in Finland. By now all the Grosses, male or female, look exactly alike. She’s a big girl with a big orange lobsterman’s apron around her waist and just a jersey on top, a contender in the wet T-shirt contest, sumo division.

  Lucky waves at the Abby and Laura, slows down, yells out, “Hello Alonzo!” then follows the track of his bottom machine into the fog, leaving father and daughter back on the twelve-fathom curve, old Lonnie leaning right over her as they raise their string of empty traps. They say Alonzo gives it to her every chance he gets. Of course the world would be a fucking zoo if you believed everything, so you have to sort out the truth from the rumors, which are all mostly true in the case of Lonnie Gross. Back in high school Lonnie would grow these curly black hairs on his palms from too much jerking off. He’d stand there in the locker room, proud as piss, hands open for everyone to see.

  He s
witches the fishfinder to high resolution and watches the bottom grow in contour and detail. He has to think like a crustacean now, not a hairy-assed air-breather but an armored and camouflaged creature that lives to hide. He fixes on the contour line with the eyes of a green-black lobster moving from deep winter water to medium-depth spring water, groping and searching for a place to lurk and feed. He slows the Wooden Nickel to half a knot, just about the speed of a lobster in high gear. The fathometer shows rocks and drop-offs, ledges and crevasses and canyons in the blind kelp-coated underworld. His body starting to outgrow its shell, driven by cold lust and raw anger, the lobster man feels his way forward with his sensitive antenna and arrives at the chosen spot. He turns her south-southwest to lay the trapline along the current flow. Back at the stern, he pushes over the first of a triple, uses its fall to pull the other two over, and casts his buoy over last of all, painted Day-Glo orange and green with a delicate white intermediate strip by his wife Sarah, an artist in everything she does.

  Just as the pot buoy goes over, a small fluttering charcoal-colored bird comes by, circles the boat as if dazzled by the sight of an object in the fog, then settles on the water not ten yards off the stern. Good omen: birds know where the lobsters are. Maybe they can stick their beaks in and look straight down.

  By the third string he’s sweating and exhausted and has to sit on the coiled pot warp and have a smoke, his heart pounding the floor of his chest like a basketball, twenty-six thousand dollars down the fucking drain. He goes to pop another heart pill, then realizes he left them back in the truck. He opens the lunch pail. She’s wrapped the crab salad sandwich in a penciled note: Be careful out there. We love you.He picks the sandwich up with shaky fingers but feels better after the first bite. Maybe it’s just hunger and not the heart.

  He kills the engine while he eats and lets her drift. He turns the radio up at first for Deana Carter’s “If This Is Love,” then turns it off. It’s hard to swallow the word love out here in the fog: cold sea wind, no sound, no color, like one of those dreams where the earth is all water like it was at the beginning and you’re the only person alive. He tries to taste love in the crabmeat salad Sarah mixed up at 4 a.m., but if there is any, the Miracle Whip covers it like a deodorant. He’s not sure he loves any of them. They were all accidents, even Sarah, it was a shotgun wedding though they moved fast and they were the only ones that knew. Now they’re all turning away from him. Kyle’s got his own boat, he’s not even lobstering anymore. He’s diving for whore’s eggs, that’s what they called sea urchins before they got discovered by the sushi crowd. Kristen’s three years younger than her brother. She was so smart she skipped a grade and now she’s graduating a year ahead. They started Kyle late and kept him back a year in the third grade like you’re supposed to with boys, then the school kept him back another in junior high. Kristen thinks her college roommate’s going to be some lawyer’s daughter and she’ll have to confess her old man fishes with his hands. Sarah’s a celebrity now with her little sea glass sculptures, all of a sudden the summer people think she’s Polly Picasso. Come June she’ll spend more time up at the art school than she will at home. All of them dykes and homos, that’s what Stevie Latete says, he lives just a half-mile down the road.

  He throws the sandwich crust to the gray seabird, who shows no interest, but two big gulls that have been trailing him all morning swoop down and fight for it. He lays the last string right where he’s drifted, too tired to locate another perfect spot. The boat’s riding higher with the traps off, and it seems to be swelling in so the leak is down, he hasn’t run the bilge pump for half an hour. He’s about seven miles from Clyde’s wharf. The Wooden Nickel can do thirty-one knots in flat water when she’s in tune, but there’s no use risking the engine with the Stoneport races a couple of months away. Lucky got fourth in class at Summer Harbor last year. The guy who took third, Sumner Ames out of Riceville, has moved over to diesel, at least that’s what they say. This year, if the heart behaves itself, he’s got a chance to place.

  Should be fifteen minutes at twenty-four knots. He takes the last sip of decaf from the thermos, lights his last Marlboro, turns up the radio and puts the hammer down. It’s the first time he’s opened her up since the rebuild. The 454 whines like a banshee, it throws a rooster tail, it pitches luminous spray over the bow onto the windshield and dumps green water back in the cockpit on every wave. It’s a big Saginaw engine with a ripped muffler and it silences everything else around, including the rebuilt heart.

  They eat supper watching CNN, it’s President Clinton on with some lie about Whitewater, then he’s holding hands with his Lesbian General, Janet Reno. Sarah sees her husband about to go violent and reaches up to switch the set off. “Thanks,” Lucky says. “Saves me from throwing a Rolling Rock through the screen.”

  “Your first day out, Lucas, after the surgery. How did it go out there?”

  “Finest kind.”

  “You smoked, didn’t you? I can smell it in your hair. You’re like a twelve-year-old, sneaking off with a cigarette, but it’s your own body, you can’t run away from it.”

  “I didn’t inhale,” he says. “That’s one thing I got in common with that son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah,” says Kyle over his third bowl of cod head stew. “You both lied about it.”

  “Who you calling a liar?” He pushes his chair back, stands, leans over the big chowder caldron on the table. Kyle’s out of his chair, Sarah poised to move between them if it gets physical. They’re almost the same height though Lucky’s heavier, twice as thick in the neck and shoulders, not to mention the waist. He could still take him, bad heart or not. The kid looks like a terrorist with the shaved head and the shadow of an X cut into it and the T-shirt with the arms ripped off. A twenty-year-old high school junior: maybe they shouldn’t have kept him back.

  His daughter Kristen says, “Don’t just stand there, fight. You’re males. That’s what we learned in biology. Males fight till just one of them is left.”

  “He ain’t worth the trouble,” Lucky says.

  Sarah stands behind Kyle and runs her hand over the shaved head. “Lucas, it’s your own son. Can you imagine your father saying that?”

  “He wouldn’t of said nothing. He would of cocked me one.”

  Kristen pulls her Walkman out of her backpack, jams the earphones down over her blond hair. “Thank God I’m getting out of this in September, I won’t have to hear it. EVER AGAIN.” She cranks up the earphone volume till you can hear it in the room.

  Kyle yells at her, “WHAT’S THAT?”

  “Smashing Pumpkins.” She closes her eyes and pegs the volume all the way.

  He turns to the shaved head. “You got that shitheap in the water yet?”

  “Lucas.”

  “Just wondering if he’s planning to race this year.”

  “Racing’s a waste of time.”

  “You got third last year. Play with that Merc a bit, you could take it.”

  “That was then. Now’s now. I got business.”

  “What kind of business? You’re supposed to be in fucking school.”

  “Private business.” He rubs the X on his shaved head like it’s a sign saying keep out.

  Sarah stays close beside her son to protect him, the top of her head level with his nose. She’s done the same thing as Kyle, two weeks ago she came home from Shear Heaven with her hair chopped and spiked up like a gray-blond porcupine. It gives her a homeless look, though she’s spent the last twenty years in this house, every single night. “I’m going to my studio,” she says. “Send someone up when you guys have worked things out.”

  He turns his back on all of them and switches the TV back on to a Merrill Lynch commercial and turns the volume up. “Finally,” he says, “an ad for bullshit.”

  Forgetting himself completely, he reaches into his shirt pocket for the Marlboros he should have left on board, sticks one in his mouth, looks around with his hands for a light. His wife says, “Lucas, if you don’t ca
re whether you live or die, think of the budget, twenty-six thousand dollars for that hospital to clear the tar out of your veins.”

  Kristen’s got her earphones off now. “And the fat,” she chimes in sweetly. “Remember what he used to eat.”

  “Money we don’t have, with the home equity gone into the boat, Kristen’s tuition coming up.”

  “Too poor for insurance,” Kristen says, “too rich for welfare. We had a social studies unit about us.”

  It feels like he’s in the parlor of a lobster trap, cornered crustaceans going at each other with both claws, might as well build a house of steambent laths, let the wind blow right through. He crumples the cigarette and puts it on his plate. “Jesus H. Christ, this place a home or a church? I’m going to bed. I got to set sixty traps tomorrow.”

  Sarah says, “Lucas, come to the studio on your way up. I’d like to show you something.”

  He doesn’t want to get near the studio, it raises his blood pressure till his neck veins ache. Three years ago Sarah and Kristen said they didn’t want him smoking in the house anymore. He built himself a den out in the attic of their three-door garage, deer head on the wall, nice little fridge, couple of windows overlooking the water, a man could take his boots off and tune in High Country 104 and light up without his family coughing like they’d been teargassed. Then after the operation, when young Dr. Burnside laid down the law, Sarah asked for the den as a studio for her beach glass ornaments that are supposedly works of art. She argued the case like a lawyer with Kristen beside her all the way. She’d been making them up in the bedroom, which hardly left them a place to sleep. The den had a north window with some special kind of light. And in conclusion, she might one day sell one of the christly things and help the cash flow. In the long run they caved him in, a den is pointless if you can’t have a fucking smoke. Just before Christmas, Kristen and Sarah moved the workbench and soldering tools in. “You have the third bay of the garage,” she would say. “You have the basement. You don’t need the light the way I do.” His response was a three-week reign of silence that included Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when instead of taking her to the Grange party he got drunk at the RoundUp with Travis Hammond.