The Wooden Nickel Read online

  He still makes it a point not to set foot in his former den, but tonight he feels pretty good having set forty-eight traps without dropping dead at the helm, so he ducks his head for the low passage leading to the second floor of the garage. It smells of butane and soldering flux and something else, like clam flats, an odor you can never quite get off glass that’s been salvaged from a beach. He misses the cloud of tobacco and spilled beer. She’s got fringed lilac curtains and the big braided Peek family rug that still smells of her mother’s dead cocker spaniel, Rufus. He spends all day in the stench of lobster bait, you’d think his nose would numb out, but it’s keen as a drug dog. Every article in her room speaks to him with its own repellent scent, his back hairs are stiffening, he’s in the lair of another species. She’s got two long tables with mounds of sea glass stacked up by shape and color, she’s got a tray of brass wires to hang them from, she’s got another table with her vise, her low-heat butane soldering torch, her lead strips, and the diamond saw he got her Christmas before last when she still worked on a Black & Decker Workmate at the foot of their bed.

  There’s several of them in different stages on the workbench and a couple of finished ones hanging from the ceiling in front of the window, his window, that looks across the harbor to the old lighthouse which is now a yuppie bed-and-breakfast down on the tip of Sodom Head.

  “I want to show you something, Lucas. These are the ones you’ve seen, from the group exhibition last year that you refused to go to. And this is the one Yvonne Hannaford wants for her gallery this summer. If I can make more like it, she might give me a one-person show.”

  “You’d be the first person that fucking family ever gave anything to.”

  “Well, it’s not totally a gift. Dealer gets fifty percent. It’s the one thing art and lobsters have in common.”

  Now she says “art” like the summer people, ort, like there’s an rin it. Something wrong with their tongues. He picks the thing up by the top wire and holds it under the workbench light. She frames up chunks of different-colored sea glass with lead moldings like the windows in the Episcopal church showing Jesus H. Christ and the sheep, except in hers there’s no story. He turns it around, squints at it, raises it and looks from below like he’s staring up a girl’s skirt, but he can’t make out what it’s supposed to be. “I give up,” he says. “What is it?”

  “It’s not a puzzle, Lucas, it’s an abstraction.” She lays her glasses on the workbench. Her face is thin under the chopped hair. The outlines of her eyes are red, like she’s been crying or leaning over the butane torch or staying up too late. Who knows when she goes to bed now that she’s got the studio, he never hears her, yet she’s up with his clothes and lunch fixed before he’s even awake. She’s got classical music going on his radio too, all of it sounds like a funeral, she’s worse than Kristen.

  He hits the preset for High Country 104, Reba McEntire’s singing “How Blue.” He puts the sculpture down, kicks the foot-stool out of the way, puts an arm around his wife’s slender waist and waltzes her slowly from the workbench to the skylight across the den. “Remember her first one?”

  “Lucas, it was a thousand years ago. I never listen to country anymore.”

  “‘One Night Stand.’ Jesus, we had a one-night stand, lasted us twenty years.”

  She gives in, lays her head on his chest even though his sweat-shirt’s crusted with green algae like a mooring spar. Then she pulls back and says, “Your heart sounds different.”

  “I got machinery in there.”

  “All the more reason to take care of it. You can’t keep going out alone. Remember your father, everyone told him to take a sternman after his first.”

  “Won’t be Kyle.”

  “It doesn’t have to be Kyle.”

  “Lot of the guys are using their wives. Think about it. Working together, wouldn’t be no overhead, we’d get the hospital paid up, Kristen’s school.”

  She stops and looks up with the blue, red-lined eyes. “Lucas, I can’t be a sternman. I’ve got another life. It’s April. In another month I’ll be starting school again.” She takes his huge hand in her thin birdclaw hands, the two of which together don’t weigh as much as his thumb. When they first got together, her hands were a mass of tiny cuts from picking crabmeat at the cannery. Now they’re the same way, only it’s from the workbench, and she’s repeating, “I’d love to, Lucas, but I can’t.”

  It’s late, he’s got to be up an hour before sunrise. He leaves her soldering another piece of sea glass and goes down to catch a few laps of the Coca-Cola 600 on ESPN2.

  Even with the studio visit and a fiery stock car crash that takes ten minutes to clean up, he’s in bed by ten-thirty. He takes a couple of heart pills with a shot of black rum. In no time at all he’s dreaming of Ronette Hannaford in orange Grundens oilpants ten sizes too big so you can look right inside them but there’s nothing down there, no hair, no pussy, not even legs. She has an oilskin top stained with fish blood which he strains to remove so he can see her tits, but he can’t get his arms to move. He’s yelling at her, or someone, It’s my fucking dream, I can get the coat off if I want, but it won’t work. He hasn’t had a hard-on since he mixed all the heart pills in the same bottle, but now he wakes up stiff as a propeller shaft. He hears Sarah coming to bed, quietly so she won’t wake him. The red digital clock says 11:30. He turns over so she won’t notice the hard-on and ask him what he was thinking of.

  She slips in beside him, quietly, then whispers, “Lucas?”

  “Pretty god damn late, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve been talking to Kyle.”

  “Can’t it wait till morning?”

  “It’s serious. He wants to move out and get his own place.”

  “He ain’t even finished high school.”

  “He wants to quit. He’s afraid to tell you.”

  “He should be fucking afraid. I’ll kick his ass.”

  “Lucas, you didn’t finish high school yourself.”

  “Things was different, them days we had lobsters knocking on the door, asking themselves to dinner. You didn’t have to know nothing, any dipshit could make a living. Now there’s technology out there. There’s competition. There’s guys setting twelve hundred traps. They got them on their computers, they don’t even have to steer the god damn boat. Kid wants to go lobstering now, he’s going to need a fucking brain.”

  “You tell him, Lucas, he won’t listen to me. He feels bad too, his younger sister graduating before he does.”

  “I ain’t going to tell him tonight,” Lucas says. “It’s almost twelve.”

  “You listen to the weather?”

  He reaches over and pushes the button on the NOAA radio, but they haven’t changed the tape. “I’ll check it in the morning. It ain’t going to blow too bad.”

  He thinks he can get back in the same dream where Ronette Hannaford has the oilskins on and this time he can get the top off and see what she’s got. Then his wife puts an arm around him under his flannel sweatshirt and puts her hand over his heart. She’s been working and her skin smells of the butane torch. “Lucas, you asleep already?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Depends on who wants to know.”

  He turns slowly, so he can have time to put Ronette Hannaford back where she belongs, and while he’s turning Sarah switches her clock radio on and it’s the Garth Brooks song “The Red Strokes,” soft and easy, she couldn’t have picked better if she’d punched the numbers into a jukebox.

  Steam on the window, salt on a kiss

  The outside air has gone tropical with the east wind, the last of the snow is dripping off the roof. The easterly must be bringing the fog in; even with the song playing he can hear the Split Point horn, sounding and echoing off the granite cliffs of Sodom Head. He reaches over his wife to turn the bedlamp on so he’ll be certain who he’s with. It’s a mistake though. They’re less than a foot apart but he can’t find her. He squints his eyes twenty years in
to the past, there’s a skinny blond kid jumping up beside him in the truck with cuts all over her hands from the cannery, four of them in the front seat, with Art Pettingill and his girl. Now Alma Pettingill would have to be weighed on a truck scale, but Sarah’s got the same body she came with, so thin she’s forever shivering from the cold.

  When he opens his eyes again she’s studying his face like a meat inspector. “I hear that Rhonda Hannaford’s planning to leave home.”

  “I ain’t heard anything to that effect.” The news brings his dream back in full living color. He’s face to face with his wife under a reading lamp but his mind’s wondering what another girl looks like under an oilskin coat. It’s not right and he knows it. But when he tries to put Sarah’s body into the yellow jacket, it won’t fit.

  Then the front door slams. A truck pulls up outside, idles. It’s a Ford six, not too new either, wicked knock, but he doesn’t recognize the exact vehicle, must be from another town. “What the hell, Sarah. You hear that?”

  “It’s nothing, Lucas. Just one of Kyle’s friends.”

  “It’s fucking midnight.” He gets up, yanks his sweatshirt down and his long underwear up, pulls the fishing boots on which are always by the bedroom door. He glances at the Winchester .30-30 in the open closet, just to make sure it’s there. Kristen’s light is still on. She’s on the floor with her homework, feet up on the desk. “Where’s your god damn brother going?” he demands.

  “Hey, I’m not the criminal. Don’t yell at me.”

  He opens the front door and there’s his son talking to three guys in an ’88 Ford half-ton that he’s never seen. They’ve all got cigarettes and Kyle’s lighting one up too. The Ford’s on idle, missing a cylinder if not two and passing oil, he can smell it in the air. Whoever it is, they’re on his list already for neglecting a decent truck. When they see the door open, the Ford crunches into first and takes off.

  Kyle’s startled to see his old man under the porch light, in trawler boots over his long johns. “Bit early to start out, ain’t it?”

  “Who the fuck were you talking to?”

  “Friends.”

  “School friends?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They ain’t from around here.”

  “They’re from Burnt Neck.”

  “What the fuck you hanging out with Burnt Neck kids for? Every one of them bastards ends up in Thomaston.”

  “I dive with them, that’s what.”

  “You don’t dive in the middle of the fucking night.”

  “We’re just talking business, that’s all.”

  “Business.”

  “Yeah, Dad. Business. We’re in the urchin business together.”

  “Whore’s eggs. Them are the garbage of the sea,” he says. “I wouldn’t bait a trap with them. Even a fucking lobster won’t touch them things.”

  “Dad, the Japanese pay three dollars and fifty cents an ounce for that stuff. Darrell and me got it figured. We hold them back a while into the off-season, they’re going to be paying us by the gram.”

  “Might as well sell cocaine while you got the scales out,” Lucky says.

  “Yeah, well maybe we’ll do that too.”

  “I’ll kick your ass. I need a sternman and you’re out in the middle of the night playing pussy with the Chinese.”

  “I got my own boat, Dad. And I’ve got my own dealer. I ain’t chained to that asshole Clyde Hannaford like some I know.”

  “Yeah, well at least Clyde ain’t Chinese. The money feeds right into the U.S.A.”

  “The money feeds right into his wife, that’s what I hear. You see the car she’s got?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Lucky says. He stops in the kitchen to wash down another heart pill with a shot of Wild Turkey in a glass of double-strength mint-flavored Mylanta. He stomps upstairs past Kristen’s bedroom with the light still on, some horrendous screeching coming out of her stereo. He pokes his head in, yells, “What’s all that noise?”

  “Nine Inch Nails!”

  “Jesus H. Christ, you got the headphones on, shut the damn speakers off.”

  “I’m listening to Brahms on the headphones. I like the combination. Besides, it drowns out the cacophony in this house.”

  Cacophony. What the fuck. He kicks his boots off by the door. He gets back under the blanket and says to his wife, “Burnt Neck. Bunch of degenerates. Never should of consolidated the fucking schools.”

  She doesn’t answer. He knows from her breathing that she’s fast asleep.

  2

  IT’S ALMOST MAY and Doris has changed her opening hour to four-thirty, but Lucky’s early as always, sitting behind the wheel in the parking lot. That’s where he smells the weather, figures how much he can get done out there before the wind comes on, what can be learned about the day ahead from the lisp of the tide rip and the fading moon. He’s fishing a hundred and fifty traps at this point, a respectable number for a handicapped guy working alone in spring. The Wooden Nickel may be running cool and sweet since he reamed the tubes out, but his own heart starts knocking after the first string of traps and he’s got to sit down and have a smoke and a Rolling Rock to settle it down, which means he can’t haul half what he used to in a day. He’s got to hire a sternman or cut back. And cutting back is out. The home equity loan for the boat rebuild left them with payments on a house that had been Lunt property free and clear for a hundred years. Then they can start on his twenty-six-thousand-dollar hospital account, going up 18 percent a year. Already he’s missed two equity payments and Les Bernstein called Sarah from the Tarratine Trust Company to find out what’s going on.

  His own father died of a heart attack at forty-eight. He was three weeks in the hospital before he finally went, it took five years to pay off the medical bills. He doesn’t want to leave that legacy to his own kids. Fine way to go: cast off and leave them fifty thousand in the hole.

  Mortgaged or not, the Wooden Nickel looks good out there, just the shape he goes for, boat or woman: high-stemmed, low freeboard amidships, good broad stern so she’ll ride easy in a following sea. White hull, blue wheelhouse, Red Hand bottom paint the color of a baked lobster, American as the Fourth of July, she sits surrounded by hulls made from plastic resin sucked off the dregs of the Arab oil wells, diesel engines built in Stockholm by Turkish wetbacks. She is a thirty-six-foot bilge-keeled sweetheart built by the Alley brothers down in Moose Reach for his old man Walter Lunt. Nineteen seventy, the year before he got too sick to fish and passed her to his only child. In those days Fred and Stan Alley were the best boatbuilders on the coast, no relation to fat Frank Alley from Burnt Neck, who couldn’t build a fucking herring crate. When Lucky took her for a total rebuild twenty years later, everyone had gone to glass. Fred and Stan Alley were raising turkeys down in Moose Reach. Their tools were rusted, their old boat shed was falling down. Redraw the lines, he told them. Make it faster. Stan Alley said, Set you back more than a new one. He hauled like a bastard that summer, mortgaged the house, and trucked her down to Moose Reach in November for the reconstruction. They ordered old-growth cedar from up in the Allagash wilderness and hackmatack frames out of the Canadian border swamps. Stan Alley keeled over from a stroke just after New Year’s, but Fred and his son Junior saw her through, then they closed the boatyard down for good. He paid them forty thousand dollars and they moved right to Sarasota, father and son.

  He had Harley Webster in Riceville rebore a factory-new Chevy 454 and custom fit it to an oversize Hurth transmission on a two-inch stainless shaft, not a cunt hair of torque lost passing through the hull. When he took delivery on Wooden Nickel that June he brought her right to the Summer Harbor races, broke it in on the way and took third in gas unlimited though there were three 502s in that race from as far away as Kittery Point. Thirty-six miles an hour on the radar gun, the only wooden hull in the top ten. That’s what they clocked him at. Cocksucker was paid for and now it’s the bank’s again.

  He notes one strange boat lying in the dredged channel just
off of Clyde’s wharf: the Rachel T, a big steel dragger out of Shag Island with rust streaks weeping down both sides. He knows them, the Trott brothers. Half of Shag Island is named Trott, the other half’s Shavers. The genetic counselors make three flights a month out to their office at the Shag Island airport, which is this grassy field with a weather sock at one end and a graveyard at the other, that’s where they get laid when they’re young and buried when they’re old. Captain Anson Trott and his boys must have brought Clyde a load of shellfish, then got drunk at the RoundUp and now they’re out there sleeping it off on the Rachel T.

  Moment he thinks of Clyde Hannaford, here comes Ronette herself, cruising in with her lemon-and-lime Probe, little white kitten on the rear shelf whose eyes glow red when the brake’s on. The two of them get out of their vehicles at the same time, Lucky and Ronette. She’s tying the lacy waitress apron around her waist as she goes in, so he’s forced to hold the door open for her, and she brushes against him a little more than she has to to get past.

  “Sleep late?” he asks as she disappears behind the counter.

  “None of your business, Mr. Lucky Lunt. If you are. You look like bad luck to me.” She reaches a hand out of the pantry with nail polish the same color as the blueberry syrup. The purple finger-nails tune the radio to Big Country, they’re playing Lorrie Morgan’s “Go Away, No, Wait a Minute.” Ronette’s got black tights under the white waitress outfit, little fringed white cowgirl boots with waitress-shoe bottoms. He tries to see under her clothes but has no more success than he had in the dream. “See anything you need?” she asks, flicks her tail and ducks into the pantry again.

  “Driving your own car now,” Lucky observes. “What color they call that, anyway?”