The Wooden Nickel Read online

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing, cause I gave it to Ronette Hannaford. She’s getting divorced and she needs the money.”

  The two of them look up like he’s come home from the RoundUp with the clap. Sarah says, “She’s not the only one that’s going to be getting a divorce.”

  “Hey, I’m in business. I got a family to support. I got a mortgage on the house, I got a problem with every piece of electronics on that boat. I got medical bills. I need to haul more lobsters, and I ain’t supposed to be doing it by myself.”

  “Well, if you want to haul lobsters you better get to bed,” Sarah says. “I’ll be up when Ellen’s over.”

  He’s three-quarters asleep when she comes in, bringing a breath of the night’s chill with her under the covers. He turns and puts a big arm around her and she doesn’t resist. She unbuttons the top of his union suit and nestles close. Her chest is so thin and fine-skinned, it feels like their hearts are in direct electrical contact and if anything happened she could jump-start him without even waking up.

  He pries open his left eye to read the time. Instead of nudging her to get some eggs going and make sure he doesn’t forget to put on half his clothes, he slips out of bed like he used to when they were just married and he would watch her sleeping in the first fog-colored light of dawn. He knew her face to the bone, by touch, like working on the inside of a carburetor in the dark. He’d stare at her so long and hard he’d have to go look in a mirror to remember who he was. But now, in the reddish glow of the digital clock, his wife’s face looks dry and papery, covered with restless markings he can’t read. They could be depth contour lines on a sea chart, only there’s no numbers. Who knows how far down somebody is when they’re asleep.

  He splashes hot water on his face and shaves in the dark, he never gives the mirror a second glance. He used to try and look like a mean son of a bitch that you could never fuck with and live. Now it doesn’t matter, he could look like anyone who jacks off for a living. He’ll brush his teeth with baking soda and salt water when he gets on the boat. It’s pointless to stare yourself in the face when the problems are down in your fucking heart.

  This morning he skips the Blue Claw and goes right to Clyde’s wharf. Clyde isn’t even there yet. Even Art Pettingill is just pulling up, climbing down from a brand-new Ford F-350, looks like fucking leather seats inside. He’s got half a cigar in his mouth, smoking away, big fat fifty-year-old Mormon son of a bitch that lives on Pepsi and salt pork and still his heart keeps going like a herring pump.

  He says, “Art, where’s your boy? You by yourself today?”

  “Boy’s in school. Alma’s going out.”

  He looks down and there’s Art’s skiff with Alma Pettingill already aboard, a substantial woman in the same size orange oilskins her husband wears. The both of them together displace a quarter ton easy, maybe more. The skiff is a good-sized lapstrake dory built to hold a day’s catch, but she’s practically shipping water from the uncompensated weight of Alma Pettingill in the stern. “You might want to get down there in the bow, Art, and balance her out.”

  Art heaves a big wire trap with two stones in it onto his shoulder and starts down the gangway, then turns and asks Lucky with some concern, “You ain’t going to keep on going out alone, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Who’d you get? Sarah?”

  He looks over his shoulder to see if Clyde’s there yet. “I got Ronette Hannaford.”

  Art reaches his free hand under the lobster trap to take the cigar out of his mouth and throw it in the water. He looks at Lucky for a moment like he’s planning to say one thing, putting that away, and planning to say something else. Finally he says, “I guess she’s gone out before.”

  “I guess she has.”

  A small orange-suited figure waits on the end of the public wharf. It’s Ronette Hannaford in what looks like a brand-new Grundens oilsuit, size too big for her, and with her is some kind of animal. He pulls up closer and it’s a god damn red-haired dog. They haven’t got the float in yet at the town wharf, so he has to edge right up to the pilings and Ronette has to use the ladder to clamber down. He doesn’t bother to tie on, just sets the stern in and she jumps off the ladder onto the narrow side deck, skids a bit on the bait slime but recovers herself with a grab first at Lucky’s shoulder, then the pot hauler.

  “Wait a minute,” she says. “We have to bring Ginger.”

  “You’ll have to wave good-bye to Ginger,” he says. “We ain’t bringing her.” Ginger’s the office dog that was always gnawing a rubber bone under Clyde Hannaford’s computer desk. Clyde’s pride and joy, it’s a wonder he doesn’t have a court injunction on the thing.

  “We gotta bring her, Lucky. Clyde will have her kidnapped if I leave her home. He bought her for me and now the son of a bitch wants custody.”

  “The dog can’t climb down a ladder.” Meanwhile Ginger is leaning over the pierhead, whimpering like a seal pup and looking down, but her feet aren’t built to grab the seaweed-covered rungs.

  “She’ll swim and meet us,” Ronette says. “Ginger, go around!” She makes a sweeping motion with her hand and Ginger romps back up the wharf, charges onto the beach and swims for the boat. In a minute she’s dogpaddling alongside, panting and whining at Ronette to get her aboard.

  “What the fuck. How we going to get that thing up over the rail?” He guns the engine in neutral, hoping to scare the dog back to shore.

  “Throw her a rope. A thick one.”

  He goes to the chain locker for a length of inch-and-a-quarter yellow poly mooring line. “This do?”

  “Ain’t you got any natural rope?”

  He goes back for some tarry old hemp, bends a figure-eight into the end, give her something to grab onto, and heaves it over. Ginger sinks her teeth in and he puts the rope over the pot winch. When the dog’s raised a couple feet off of the water, the two of them haul her up over the trap boards with Ginger pawing away to help out. She leaps all over Ronette, licking her face, clawing at her Grundens like she wants to rip the pockets off, then takes a look at Lucky and does a low guard-dog growl deep in her throat. The hair on her back stands up. “Easy,” Ronette says. “You know Lucky. He’s your friend from Daddy’s office.” Ginger goes over by the live well and shakes herself off like a vibrator, trots around the cockpit a couple of times, and comes back whimpering by Ronette’s side.

  “Never took no dogs aboard,” Lucky says. “Dogs spook the lobsters.”

  “Ginger can come with us every time. Can’t you, sweetheart?” The dog nuzzles her snout under the flap of Ronette’s orange jacket, licking away, makes him wonder how the two of them might spend their evenings back in the trailer park. Then he recalls the one fact of life that ever came out of his old man’s mouth, back in ’63 or ’64 when the Twilight went down off Three Witch Ledge. The crew of that big scalloper had picked up a couple of whores in Riceville and all eight of them went down, including the girls. His old man’s voice again: If you want to get laid on the water, Lukie, use a canoe.

  Ginger finds herself a place on the coil of spare pot warp and lies down. Soon as he’s past the Sodom Ledge bell he grabs for a cigarette, forgetting the three-mile limit. “How about me?” Ronette asks, coughing, rubbing her hands together in the cold. He takes another one, lights them both off the red-hot exhaust.

  “Got gloves?”

  She pulls a pair of nice orange work gloves out of the bib pocket of the oilskins. “Like the outfit?” she says. She throws her chest out so her tits make themselves known despite the oversize oilskins and the layers of neoprene. She turns around with a little step to show the stern view, then turns back. “They ain’t the latest fashion.”

  “They’ll do,” he says. “What matters is keeping your ass dry.”

  She looks at the trap load and whistles: “Jesus, Lucky, I didn’t know anyone was still using wooden traps. Where do you even get them things?”

  “There’s one guy left that builds them
, Luther Webster down the Riceville Road. Luther’s about eighty years old, he builds one trap a day. Them things cost me twice what a wire one costs.”

  “Why bother? Reggie never used wooden traps.”

  “You take them metal ones, half them vents don’t work, you lose that cocksucker and it don’t rot out, it keeps on collecting lobsters, pretty soon they’re gnawing each other to death.”

  “Gives me the creeps,” she says.

  “What?”

  “All them lobsters in one place. Trapped like they can’t get out.”

  “That’s what your cousin Reggie said about the cons, he said they was just like lobsters in a trap.”

  “It don’t take a prison,” she says. “You can get nice and trapped right in your own home. There ain’t no escape vent either.”

  “Guess you found one.”

  She says something else but he’s got the throttle up now and there’s too much engine noise to hear.

  They clear the Sodom Ledge whistle and turn southwestward, edging the throttle a bit higher in the open water. The bow of the Wooden Nickel cuts the chop like a knife going through margarine, with the spray’s arc breaking the sunlight into all the colors of an oil slick as it falls. It’s colder now in the sea wind, so Ronette moves behind him to cozy up by the exhaust stack. He has to make himself heard over the engine roar. “Where’d you find a place to buy foul weather gear in the middle of the night?”

  “It ain’t mine,” Ronette shouts. “It’s Reggie Dolliver’s. He ain’t lobstering anymore so he let me use it. Brand new Grundens, he never even put them on.”

  “That was just last night,” he says. “How’d you get his gear?”

  “He brought it over.”

  “By Jesus, I bet he did.”

  She has to yell back over the engine noise, the exhaust is loose and rattling against its collar through the wheelhouse roof. “Fits decent, don’t you think? Reggie ain’t too much bigger than I am. I mean, he’s fatter but he’s about my height.”

  “He’s a thoughtful guy,” Lucky says. “Brought them right over last night?”

  “Get your mind out of the gutter. Reggie and me, we’re history. Ancient history.”

  “You’re related, that’s what he said.”

  “Honey, everyone’s related. I’ll bet you and me’s related, if we dug up the family tree.” She throws her filter overboard and reaches into her little tote bag for a cassette. “I’m tired of Reba, she’s always whining about something. I brought Lorrie Morgan. How do you put this on?”

  “It’s down in the cuddy, works just like a car.” Pretty soon she’s playing “Go Away, No, Wait a Minute.” She’s also got the jacket off from her oilskins so there’s just the bib front flopping over a purplish turtleneck sweater so tight under Reggie’s overalls her tits look like they’ll pop out and strike him blind. He turns quick and pokes his face into the radar hood even though it’s clear for six miles around. The screen is round and greenish, contoured with shoals and shallows like Sarah’s face in the sea-green morning light.

  I want out

  Then I want in it

  “This ain’t a Sunday picnic,” he says. “We got eighteen traps on the stern that has to be baited. You remember what to do?”

  In a minute she’s back aft with a skewer stuffing the bait bags full of herring quicker than he could. If she works like that while he runs the boat, he’s going to be able to set two or three more strings. If she can throw baited traps over while he hauls, band the claws up while he steers, he can double his cash flow, get the house unmortgaged, maybe even pay up on the operation. He may be uninsured but he’s not on welfare. It doesn’t matter if his arteries are cleared, until those bills are settled his heart’s not going to fully heal.

  “You’re fast with the bait bags,” he says.

  “Ain’t much different from restaurant work. Both of them’s stuffing food into something.”

  “Least at Doris’s the food ain’t rotten.”

  She stuffs another mesh bag with ripened herring. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” she says.

  He lights a Marlboro for her off the exhaust stack and sticks it in her mouth so she won’t drown it in fish guts. They’re passing the big green RB flasher that marks Red’s Bank, shags all over it, the buoy’s covered with birdshit so it’s almost white. He slows it down a bit and turns south to pick up the first of his green-and-orange pot buoys when it comes in sight. “Too bad,” she says. “I like the speed.”

  “Can’t haul no lobster traps at twenty knots.”

  “Hey Lucky, where would we of ended up if we just kept going?”

  “We was heading south-southeast. Would of been Africa, I guess.”

  “We’d run out of gas,” she says. “But I’d like to keep going just the same. Africa sounds nice. Put a few thousand miles between me and that dickhead Clyde.”

  “We got to haul traps,” Lucky says. He’s at the first one already and he eases her in reverse to cut his way. He gaffs the buoy, puts the line over the winch drum, and hauls the first trap of a triple. Practically no lobsters, nothing but brown kelp and starfish. They’re set in eighteen fathoms and the lobsters have gone in by now. Only in the seventh trap he gets a five-pound female dripping with eggs. Even Ginger gets up from her rope-coil bed to sniff the big breeder and draw back when a claw snaps shut an inch away from her nose. She whines like she’s in pain and sticks her face under Ronette’s oilskin apron. “Whoa,” Ronette says. “That will make us a few bucks.”

  “Won’t make us shit.” He notches her tail and throws her overboard. “First off, she’s too big. Second off, she’s an egg-bearing female, got to throw her back. Didn’t you learn nothing from Reggie Dolliver?”

  “Reggie used to keep them things. He’d scrape the eggs off them and sell them right from his house.”

  “Yeah, that’s the criminal mentality. That’s why he spent the last year stamping license plates. Ain’t legal to take them that big. Ain’t legal to take them with eggs on them.”

  “Since when are you so interested in obeying the law? I always heard you was a renegade.”

  “Ain’t the state’s law I’m following, it’s fishermen’s law. We make it, we keep it.”

  They both watch the massive five-pound female flail and spiral down through the deepening water and out of sight.

  “She’d of been good eating,” she says.

  “You been hanging out with your cousin Dolliver too much. There ain’t no right and wrong with a guy like that.”

  “I didn’t mean sell her. I meant keep her for ourselves.”

  “There ain’t no ourselves,” he reminds her. “Especially with you hanging around with cons.”

  “Watch your tongue, Lucky. Reggie’s a relation.”

  “I hear Clyde Hannaford’s got spies over in Split Cove, seeing who you go out with.”

  “Let him spy. I ain’t got nothing to hide. Job’s a job.” It’s warm now and she drops the bib front of her orange overalls so there’s just the purple sweater with her tits trying to tear the fabric through. He looks but has to turn away, it confuses him how such big ones can grow on a small little body, like a short female lobster all berried up thick with eggs.

  A boat passes nearby, the Gloria T, which is Howard Thurston’s boat. One of Howard’s kids is on the stern, Howard’s steering. They both wave and smile, friendly and everything but nosy at the same time, just drifting close to see what’s going on.

  “Hey, Howard,” he calls out, “want to buy some lobsters?” Howard guns the Gloria T and heads for his territory, which is almost a mile to the east.

  She’s poking her head down in the cuddy hatch. “You got a ladies’ on this thing?”

  “Down below, forward of the engine, in the wooden box under the storm anchor.”

  She disappears, Ginger jumps up and follows her right down, good loyal dog. Then she shouts up. “How am I supposed to move this anchor? It weighs a ton.”

  “Can’t hear yo
u.” He cuts the engine back down to idle.

  “I said it weighs a ton. The anchor.”

  “Lift.”

  He can’t see what’s going on down there because the companionway’s on the port side, but he hears the scrape and crash of the big fluke anchor sliding onto the portside bench. “What the hell, Lucky, this is a bucket. I ain’t going to sit on this thing.”

  “Well stand then. It’s good enough for the rest of us. You ain’t got time to read anyway, we got traps to haul.”

  “What do you mean, no reading?” she yells up. “What’s this? Hustler. Didn’t think you was the reading type. Hey, this looks like a good story. ‘Up the Bow-wow Highway.’ We’re dog lovers, ain’t we, Ginger?”

  “Put that away, for Christ sake.”

  Next minute she’s back up the companionway, hitching the big suspenders up under the oilskin jacket. She’s got the Hustler in one hand, then she leans over the bait well and throws it overboard, good-looking blond too, high heels, shaved pussy, blurring down beneath the waves. Ginger’s whining over the rail, eager to fetch it, must think it’s a newspaper. “Good riddance,” Ronette says. “That’s it for porn around here. Next time I’m bringing some fabric to fix that downstairs up.”

  They haul another string. Reggie was right about one thing, she’s good. He winches the trap up over the rail and she does the rest, diving right in, pulling the shorts out, dropping the crabs and urchins in the trash bucket, checking the doubtful ones with the state measure, quickly banding the keepers and tossing them in the seawater tank. Another string, then one more, and Lucky’s got himself the biggest haul so far this year.

  “Lady Luck,” he says.

  “Lucky Lunt and Lady Luck. Say that five times without stopping.” She holds her hands up, they’re all cut and bleeding around the nails.

  “Better keep them gloves on,” he says. “I ain’t got no workman’s comp.”

  “I’m faster without them.” She rinses her hands off in the circulating water of the live well and lets Ginger lick them dry.

  “Dog looks hungry,” he says. “Let’s eat.” He kills the engine with a trapline on the winch to hold them in one place.