The Wooden Nickel Read online

  “You got references? You say you worked for Reggie Dolliver over in Split Cove?”

  “That’s right. Reggie’ll tell you how good I was. He was high-lining when I worked for him.”

  “How am I supposed to get a reference off of a man in jail? You think I’m going to pay him a visit in his cell?”

  “He ain’t in no more. They just paroled him. Come on, Lucky. I need the money. I ain’t forgotten how.”

  “I don’t want no trouble with Clyde Hannaford. Clyde don’t care for me much anyway but we do have a business relationship. Live and let live, that’s where it’s at. Don’t step on nobody’s fucking toes.”

  “Clyde don’t own me,” she says. “He maybe used to but he don’t no more. I don’t get you, Lucky Lunt. You dangle this job in front of me, then I get serious and you back off.”

  “Don’t expect to get rich out of it,” Lucky says. “You get a tenth of the gross.”

  “Reggie gave me fifteen percent.”

  “You was going out with him at the time, if I remember.”

  “Was not. Don’t make no difference anyhow. Business is business. He started me at ten, like you’re trying to do, then he moved me to fifteen.”

  “What’d he do that for?”

  “Cause I was good. I work hard, Lucky. I learn fast. I pay attention.”

  Sarah’s over by the TV pretending not to listen, but he can see her ear straining in the direction of the phone.

  “I’ll call you back,” Lucky says. “I might have some other applicants.”

  “You ain’t got no more applicants. Just me. Here’s my number, I’m at my uncle Vincent’s in Split Cove, I’m living in this trailer he’s got on the Back Cove Road.”

  He writes the number down and says good-bye. Sarah looks right at him over the tops of her little wire-rimmed glasses. “I take it that was Rhonda Hannaford looking to work for you.”

  “I put an ad up at the Blue Claw,” Lucky explains. “Can’t find no one around here.”

  “Well you can’t find her either. You better hope somebody else turns up.”

  Up to this point he’s been backing out of this one like a shrewd old hardshell who knows what a trap funnel looks like, but when Sarah sets out the bait he has to take it. “I suppose,” he says, “I could hire her if I want.”

  “I suppose you could, Lucas, and I suppose you could move right into that trailer park over in Split Cove. That’s where she’s staying, isn’t it?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Lucas, I’ve known Rhonda Astbury’s mother since high school days. Clyde Hannaford and Ivan Astbury were the same year. Don’t you remember? That was the big scandal. Clyde Hannaford marrying his classmate’s daughter. He has to be eighteen years older, no wonder they have problems.”

  That was back when Orphan Point had its own high school, now it’s a municipal garage where the snowplows and road graders are kept. Kyle and Kristen have a fifteen-mile ride to the regional high in Norumbega, yuppietown, half the kids drive to school in BMWs.

  Then he hears a Toyota four-by-four in the driveway, front end groaning on the turn from bad shocks and too much lift. The door slams and Kyle bursts in, head still shaved and now he’s got a gold ring in his ear. Lucky shakes the TV remote at it as if it could not only remove the earring but change the channel of history, which is filling up with slackers and fairies including his own son. “Jesus H. Christ, mister, I hope they can stitch up that cocksucking hole again, cause you ain’t going to wear no earring in this house.”

  “Go to hell, Dad. It’s my own ear. I can do what I want with it. I’m getting my tongue pierced next week. Darrell’s already got his done.”

  Kristen has wandered down from her room, headphones around her neck with the plug dragging behind her feet. She steps right in between son and father, then goes up to her brother, feels the earlobe gently, examining it with an expert’s eye. “Keep some Neosporin on it for the first few days,” she advises. “Remember what happened with me?”

  “Yes, I do,” Lucky says. “We had a hell of a hoedown on that one.”

  “You got over it, Daddy. With the passage of time.”

  “Time ain’t going to make him into a woman,” Lucky says.

  “Dad,” Kristen says, “half the guys in my class are pierced.”

  “That’s right. The half with their old man gone so there’s no one to set any limits in the house.”

  “Well you can’t undo it,” Sarah says.

  “You sure as hell can. He leaves that god damn earring out, it will grow back like it’s never happened.”

  “That’s the problem with you, Daddy, you don’t want anything to have ever happened. You want it all to grow back, just like the wooden ship days.” Kristen gives her father a big wraparound hug, then takes a step back, still holding his shoulders. “Hey,” she says, “you’d look cool with an earring yourself, let that beard grow out a little, maybe a ponytail...”

  “It’s true, Lucas,” his wife says. “That would give you the real pirate look.” The three of them have him cornered now, every one of them with earrings: Kyle’s new gold stud and Kristen’s little silver musical notes that she got for her seventeenth birthday and Sarah’s handcrafted ones, chips of blue sea glass framed in lead.

  All of a sudden he has a rush of claustrophobia right in his own house. “I’m going out.”

  “Out?” Sarah says. “Where are you going to go at nine o’clock?”

  “I’ll drive around,” he says. “I’ll think it over.”

  “What are we supposed to say if anyone else calls about the job?”

  “Ask for one reference. If it’s someone we know take the name down. Don’t take nobody if they been in jail.”

  In the dark friendly truck cab, High Country 104 is playing Tanya Tucker’s “Complicated.”

  Heads he loves me, tails he loves me not

  The RoundUp’s dead quiet on a Tuesday night. The old bowling lane that Big Andy converted to a racetrack for belt sanders is dark and covered with a green plastic tarp. The big stuffed longhorn steer head over the bar is the liveliest thing around. The stage where they have western music Fridays and Saturdays is empty except for the electric keyboard and the drum set. The small green-tiled dance floor in front of the stage carries a coat of sawdust without even a footprint on it. Wallace the bartender is on his stool watching the WWF Smackdown on ESPN: the Undertaker’s throwing a couple of long-haired albinos out of the ring, twins it looks like, each one of them the size of a polar bear. They say the WWF breeds those guys out in Wyoming on a human farm.

  There’s a few sullen-looking Split Cove couples in the dark corners, all quite grim like they’re discussing custody issues. Three or four guys sit by themselves at the bar, leaving a space beside them in hopes a woman might sit down. One of the guys is Reggie Dolliver himself, the inmate Ronette gave as a reference. Reggie’s looking good for a guy that’s served eighteen months on an aggravated-assault charge, having shot somebody’s car windows out while the guy was in there with a girl Reggie thought was his. It turned out he didn’t even know her.

  Reggie’s got his hair greased back a bit, a crucified dragon tattoo on his right arm, an empty shot glass and half a beer.

  “Thought you was out of town,” Lucky says. “Buy you a drink?”

  “What’d you do, Lunt? Just cash your welfare check?”

  “That’s right. Taxpayers’ money. On me.”

  Reggie orders a shot of Seagram’s and another Rolling Rock. “I been living on taxpayers’ expense for eleven months.”

  “They let you out early?”

  “I kept my pecker clean.”

  Lucky looks down with technical interest at Reggie Dolliver’s socks. “Hey, you got one of them ankle radios on?”

  Reggie pulls up one pant leg but not the other. “I’m a free man,” he says. “Just have to meet with my PO once a month and I ain’t supposed to have a gun in the truck. Made some money too, off of the crafts stor
e up there. I made ships in a bottle. Know what them cock-suckers sell for? Hundred bucks apiece. I could make three in a week.” Reggie pulls one out of this leather bag he’s got over the arm of his chair. It’s a three-masted warship like Old Ironsides with half the sails rolled up and a few men and cannons scattered around the deck. The men have blue uniforms, and faces with pretty good detail. He must have had plenty of time on his hands to paint every little frigging gold button like that.

  “Shit, you might as well keep doing it, now you’re out.”

  “No. If an inmate don’t make them, they ain’t going to sell. Anyone can make a ship in a bottle. But if it’s genuine con art, the tourists will suck it up.” Reggie takes this long set of tweezers out of the bag and sticks it through the bottle neck so he can play around with the rigging, which does look a bit slack for a hundred-dollar ship.

  “Hey, why not go back in?” Lucky suggests. “You’ll make more in the joint than you will on the water.”

  “I already got a deal,” Reggie replies. “Listen to this. I make the things and we sneak them back into the prison and the cons retail them for me at the prison store. Half that stuff is made by guys on the outside. Not many people know that.”

  “You still own that black boat with the Lehman diesel? What was she called?”

  “Diablo.”

  “Yeah. Diablo. That was a swift little boat.”

  “It was a piece of shit. I sold it to my brother.”

  “Want to go sternman on the Wooden Nickel?” Lucky feels good, a man’s down and he can offer something that would help him up. As a sternman, even a con would be more acceptable to the family than Ronette Hannaford. They’d haul some lobsters too. Reggie’s a good fisherman, it’s not his fault he’s from Split Cove where there’s a lot of criminal blood. You can’t judge someone just by the place they’re from. They say old man Dolliver used to get drunk and put his wife in a coffin, down in the cellar. The boys would sneak down and see them there, the old man drinking and their mother lying in the coffin like she was dead, only every once in a while she’d sit up and old Dolliver would give her a sip of Gallo Red. Background like that, you can’t blame a man for going bad.

  “I seen your ad,” Reggie says, “but I ain’t lobstering no more.”

  “How come?”

  Reggie leans close so even Wallace the bartender won’t hear him. “When I was on the inside,” he whispers, “it was just like a fucking lobster trap. That’s what I’d think of, looking out of them christly bars. I’d crawled in the wrong hole and I was fucking in there like a one-pound shedder.”

  “Locked in,” Lucky says, with a rush of sympathy.

  “It ain’t just that. You know what it’s like when you got a lot of lobsters in one small place, so it gets overcrowded. They turn on each other. They go cannibalistic. There was guys beating each other up, guys fucking each other in the ass. Man’s in there awhile, he don’t exactly want to set traps for a living.”

  He imagines Reggie Dolliver with a big hairy con on top of him, dog style, another one waiting in line. He shoots him a curious look but doesn’t ask, and Reggie’s not about to tell.

  “Besides,” Reggie says, “the government’s going to retrain me in computers.”

  “No shit.” Lucky is surprised a guy like Reggie Dolliver can even read the screen. “You didn’t finish up at school, did you?”

  “Don’t need school for computers. That son of a bitch Gates dropped out of school. The computer prof we had, he was from the voc tech in Rockland, he told us Gates never finished the eighth grade, now he’s got more fucking money than the sultan of Brunei. You know what? All them beautiful women he’s got in Seattle making websites? They say he can fuck any one of them anytime he wants. Just goes up and asks them. They have to.”

  “No shit?”

  “It’s part of their job. The eighth fucking grade. You tell me a man’s got to go to school.”

  “There you go.” Lucky says. “Sure beats jail.”

  “Jail ain’t what you think, man. It’s where I learned. I took a computer repair class on Interactive TV. I got so I could take one of them son of a whores apart with my eyes closed. Course inside all they gave us was old junkers the kindergartens didn’t want anymore so they dumped them on us. But they got a federal reeducation program up in Tarratine, train on the latest stuff. Windows Ninety-five.”

  Wallace the weekday bartender is still glued to the WWF, where the Undertaker has thrown some long-haired fairy wrestler into the crowd and the fairy’s weeping and refusing to go back into the ring. Lucky pries Wallace away from the action long enough to order another shot and a beer. “Reggie,” he says, “remember you used to hire Ronette Hannaford — used to be Rhonda Astbury — a few years back?”

  Reggie starts rubbing this big pink scar under his left eye as if he’s trying to scratch some feeling back to the dense numb flesh. “She only worked for me a couple months. Then she went and married up. She didn’t need no work after that.”

  “Well she does now.”

  “I hear,” Reggie says. “She want to come work for you?”

  “Well, if you ain’t going to do it. She’s the only one that answered my ad. You think she can handle it? She didn’t give you no trouble? I ain’t sure I want a woman out there.”

  “Far as lobstering goes, Ronette Astbury was all right. I’d take her back if I was going out again. Which I ain’t.”

  Lucky glugs his shot down. “You kept it strictly business out there?”

  “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” Lucky says. “I was just wondering.”

  “A man makes a crack like that on the inside, he can get himself sliced.”

  Lucky looks him over. Reggie’s a short little fart like all the Dollivers. He could have kicked his ass a year ago, though now he’s not so sure. Reggie’s bulked up his arms from lifting weights. He hasn’t got any fucking stents in him either. Lucky puts the palms of his hands up. “No offense,” he says. “Just curiosity.”

  “Me and Rhonda Astbury’s related,” Reggie reveals. “Her old man Ivan Astbury is cousins with my mother. That’s how come she was working on my boat.”

  “Jesus, I guess if she’s a relation of yours, she knows how to fish.”

  “I guess she does. I also guess if you hire her, old Clyde will put a bullet through you both.” He leans back in his chair, folds his hands behind his slick prison-haircut head and cracks his knuckles while the dragon tattoo squirms on his forearm.

  Lucky feels a little jump in his chest and realizes he didn’t take his pill. He steadies both arms on the square black table carved up with phone numbers, initials, lobster and drug deals whose obsolete prices are etched into Formica forever. “Fuck Clyde,” he says. “He’s up there with the door locked crying in his office. He ain’t going to shoot no one.”

  “Well,” says Reggie, “why don’t you take her on?”

  “Sarah don’t think much of the idea.”

  “She want you out there alone? I heard you was sick.”

  “She don’t want me fishing alone, she won’t go out herself, I get one applicant and she don’t want me to hire her.”

  “Hey, if your wife and kids won’t go out with you, you got the right. That’s the way I see it.”

  “That’s how I see it too,” Lucky says.

  “Might’s well give her a call,” Reggie suggests. “She’s just sitting up at her place watching TV.”

  Lucky gives him a look. Reggie starts rubbing the scar again, the way he does when he’s nervous. “How the fuck do you know what she’s just doing?”

  “We’re all related. We ain’t got no secrets around here.”

  He leaves Reggie Dolliver going into the bottle with his long tweezers to reef the sails on his ship model and goes to call Ronette and tell her she’s on. The phone is located beneath the stuffed head and shoulders of a good-sized palomino horse, though both its eyes have been gouged out by drunks. It looks blind like
a horse in a bad dream. The jukebox is playing a nice George Strait ballad but it’s too loud. He reaches around the back and finds the volume control and turns it down, then pulls Ronette’s number out of his pants and uncrumples it. When she answers it after the sixth ring, she sounds asleep.

  “Where you calling from, Lucky? Thought they didn’t allow country music around your house.”

  “I’m at the RoundUp. Your old boss says you’re all right, so it looks like you’ve got yourself a job.”

  “Doris?”

  “No, Reggie Dolliver.”

  “Oh Jesus. He’s really over there, huh? I thought he wasn’t supposed to drink. Don’t hang around with him. He’ll get you in trouble sure as shit. He’s on parole. Reggie ain’t supposed to leave the house after dark.”

  “I ain’t prejudiced,” Lucky says. “He’s paid his debt to society, he’s as good as you or me.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she says, “don’t drag me into it.”

  “Listen, you want to work?”

  “You sure it’s all right with your wife? She didn’t sound none too happy when I called your house.”

  “If she ain’t going to do it, I got the right. That’s what Reggie Dolliver says.”

  “Well, right’s one thing. Wrong’s something else.”

  “You want me to ship Reggie instead? He’s all eager for it but I told him you was first.”

  “No, I want to do it.”

  “We’ll start at five tomorrow. You ain’t planning to meet me at Clyde’s, are you?”

  “Not quite.”

  “I’ll swing by the town wharf right next to Doris’s and pick you up. Be there at five or you ain’t going.”

  “I’ll go down there right now and wait all night, that way I won’t be late.”

  Kristen and Sarah are on the couch watching Ellen when he comes in. Ellen DeGeneres is hugging some woman, he doesn’t even want to see it. Clinton’s got fairies everywhere, Janet Reno on down. They say he’s one himself, he puts up a front with all those Paula Joneses, just like J. Edgar Hoover.

  He averts his eyes and goes to the kitchen for a beer. During the commercial he says, “Anyone else call about the sternman job?”