The Wooden Nickel Read online

  “We could eat downstairs if you kept the place clean. We’d have some privacy.” She opens the yuppie little JanSport pack she brought and takes out two sandwiches. “One for you. Liverwurst and bologna. Did I guess right?”

  “Can’t eat them.” He hangs his head.

  “How come?” She twists her face underneath his and looks up into his mouth. “You got teeth.”

  “Can’t have no organ meat.”

  She busts out laughing. The dog takes advantage of her thrown-back head and snaps for the sandwich. “Might as well let her have it, OK?”

  “Might as well,” he says. “I ain’t going to eat it. I brought my own.”

  Ginger scarfs up the sandwich in two bites.

  “Never figured you for a vegetarian. Always thought you was supposed to be a man.”

  “After the operation, they clamped right down.”

  “Poor baby, bad doctors took the cattle right out of his mouth.” She pats him on the shoulder and he pulls away, goes forward to fetch the tuna sandwich his wife put up after the Ellen show.

  Right in the middle of lunch, engine shut down and the tape playing a quiet Tracy Byrd ballad, something breathes in the water off to starboard. Ginger’s ears perk up and she leaves her resting spot to lean over the side and whimper. A couple of fins break the surface.

  “Porpoises!” Ronette cries.

  Lucky yells, “Hey Ginger, you want to eat one of them puffin pigs?”

  “The Indians eat them,” she says.

  Lucky’s surprised she knows something he’s never heard. “No shit. How’d you hear that?”

  “My uncle Vince told me. He’s part Indian, he knows all this Indian stuff. Ain’t supposed to tell you, though. It’s a tribal secret.”

  “You got these Indian uncles,” he says. “You must have some Indian blood.”

  “Uncle Vince ain’t related. He’s Rosie Astbury’s husband.”

  “Thought you was all related.”

  “Better watch out, Mr. Unlucky Lunt, you might be related too.”

  She ducks down and switches to a Vince Gill tape. It sounds nice with the light hum of the wind on the radio antennas, the chop’s rhythmic hammer blows on the hull.

  Take your memory with you when you go

  Ronette’s been working without her rubber apron, and even though her purple sweater is soaked through with trap slime and fish guts, it’s still sexy cause it’s shrunk even more and it looks like there’s nothing underneath. Then he recalls Sarah saying, Lucas, don’t let her freeze out there.

  “It’s cold,” he shouts. “I got an old sweatshirt down there somewhere, look around for it.”

  She comes up with the big barnacled sweatshirt bagging over her, it’s still covered with bird blood from when he shot the gull. Her hair’s stranded with seaweed, lipstick and mascara smudged off, her cheeks and forehead red from the salt spray. She looks less like Paula Jones now and more like a kid that’s never been out of Split Cove in her life.

  “You ever been anywhere?” he shouts.

  “I’ve been to Fenway Park. And Clyde took me to Quebec City for our honeymoon. We rode a horse and carriage and everyone spoke French. I ate a rabbit.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I ain’t ashamed of it. No need to go anywheres anyway. You can get everything you need off of the TV.” She lights a Marlboro and gives him one. “You been anywhere, Lucky? You have, ain’t you? You was in Vietnam.” She looks up when she says this like he’s a figure from history, a big bronze soldier statue in the park.

  “I was.”

  “You ever been to Washington, to see that monument to all the dead? You know anyone on there?”

  “I was in a motor pool,” he yells over the engine noise. “I didn’t see no action. Ain’t no mechanics on that monument. Lester Seavey got himself killed, he might be on there.”

  “You’re old.” She laughs. “My mother went out with Lester Seavey. Back when she told me the birds and the bees, she used to say, ‘There was this boy Lester, he used to try and feel around.’ So I always thought Lester Seavey was Satan incarnate or something, then I found a picture of him she kept right in her drawer.”

  “Guess she didn’t mind too much.”

  “People like stuff they ain’t supposed to like.” She lights another Marlboro off the manifold. The fleet is converging on the Sodom Ledge whistle, everyone putting on a little steam as they get within earshot of each other. He throttles up to nineteen knots on the loran, the wheel drops and digs in, Ronette sticks her face out beyond the pot hauler into the wind and grabs his arm to hold on. They’re all gawking, so he shakes her off.

  “Sorry,” she shouts. “Didn’t want to fall in.”

  He steams up close to the Money shore to stay off his own house, then cuts her sharp in towards the town pier to avoid Clyde’s wharf. Soon as he pulls up to the ladder beneath her lemon-and-lime Probe, Ginger dives in and swims for the little patch of beach. He waits for Ronette to climb off, but she doesn’t, she just stands there with a hand on the ladder and her foot up on the port rail. He revs the engine to hold the stern in against the current. The harbor chop scrapes his hull up against the barnacle-covered piling. “Ain’t going to be coming in here again.”

  She lets her chin drop and sniffles to herself the way she did in the Blue Claw when she said she was moving out. “Guess you don’t want me working for you no more. I tried my best.”

  “You got the job, Ronette. Only from now on I’ll just swing over to Split Cove. Easier on you that way.”

  “Easier on you too.”

  “Ain’t so easy. Your relations don’t like Orphan Point boats.”

  “They like you better than Clyde and your wife like me.”

  She slings the backpack over one shoulder and hauls herself up the ladder, in Reggie Dolliver’s orange pants and trawler boots, the red dog waiting for her at the top.

  When he takes his catch into Hannaford’s he’s the last boat in. Clyde’s waiting on the lobster float with his dim-witted dockman Albert. Clyde’s got a green Heineken can in his hand like the work-day’s over and there’s nothing left to do. “Hey Clyde,” he says, swinging his stern in so Albert can tie onto the aft bitt as usual, but Albert doesn’t move either, just stands there with his mouth open like a funnel, as if he’s waiting for his boss to pour something into it.

  Lucky jumps back and ties on himself. “What the fuck, Albert?” he yells. “You in a coma?”

  Clyde takes another swig of the Heineken and says, “Dock’s closed. Try tomorrow morning.”

  “The fuck it’s closed. I got a hundred pounds of lobsters in here and in the morning half of them will be dead.”

  Clyde hands the Heineken to Albert and wipes his mouth. He comes over and looks into the lobster well where the big doomed crustaceans are crawling all over each other looking for a way to get out. “Why’nt you try over at Split Cove. I hear they got a co-op over there.”

  “Listen Clyde. I’m sorry about your troubles. Your wife answered an ad and I hired her. It’s strictly business.”

  “It’s pretty fucking sneaky to drop her off over at the town wharf then come over here like you was working all alone.”

  “You want me to bring her in here every day so she can help unload? I’ll do it if that’s what you want. I thought I was doing you a favor. It ain’t going to hurt you, you know, if she’s got her own income. If a woman looks broke the judge’ll ream you up the ass.”

  His dockman makes a grunting sound and Clyde looks up to see him shaking his head in agreement. Though he looks like he wouldn’t know what hole to put it in, even old Albert Doane has been married and divorced, he’s got a couple of kids over near the Indian reservation in Burnt Neck.

  “It ain’t easy,” Clyde says, “thinking of her out there with you. You hear the boys referring to it on the VHF?”

  “I ain’t got a VHF, remember? You’re supposed to be fixing it.”

  “Just as well,” Clyde says with a grim l
ittle laughing sound. The fact is, his mouth is so tight it’s pursed up like an asshole and it always seems like a miracle when he laughs.

  “You going to give me a price and unload them fucking things? I got to get home for supper.”

  “Two fifty-nine.”

  “That ain’t what you’re paying today. I know that.”

  “I got too many already. I ain’t going to be able to sell them all.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Clyde writes him up for two sixty-five. The minute the pen hits the paper of his little money book, Albert’s into the well scooping the lobsters out. It’s late and he wants to get home too.

  4

  ASHARP CLEARING NORTHWEST BREEZE shakes the rooftop antennas and drags him from Vietnam dreams: rattle of helicopters, smell of perpetual oil slick on the backwater by the motor pool. A trough of bad weather has kept the Wooden Nickel on her mooring, the traps will be full. What did Reggie Dolliver say, four or five cons in a two-man cell? Anyone could turn animal, no wonder they cornhole each other up there. Same for lobsters. You’d think the ones in the trap would tell the others not to enter, but the dumb bastards keep on coming in.

  On the way out Sarah hands him a lunch in the thermos pail that seems heavier than usual. “I made two.” It’s too dark to know if she’s being bitchy or generous, when it comes to the sternman situation she’s been known to go either way. She has calmed down some since the beginning, seeing that he’s hauling more lobsters and the help out there seems beneficial to his heart. She’s got her own world too. Her summer art school’s starting up again, she’s helping Yvonne Hannaford open some kind of museum next to the lobster wharf, then she’s sawing and welding and filing till midnight in his exden. She’s home for breakfast and supper, rest of the time she’s in Volvoland.

  He checks out the two identical sandwiches in their Baggies, side by side. “Thanks,” he says. “But she brings her own.”

  “Just thought she might like one of these.”

  “What is it?”

  “Moose. Your favorite, the tongue.”

  “Hey. Surprise. Thought tongue was off the menu.”

  “I won’t tell.”

  He hefts the pail of coffee, moosemeat and bulkie rolls with one arm and with the other waves good-bye, as he has done every predawn morning for the last twenty years. Only this time she stops him. She takes her glasses off and tries to wrap her thin arms around him for a squeeze, though with his girth and the gear he’s got on she can’t reach anywhere near around his back. “I’m glad you’re not working alone out there. Take care, though, you’re still recovering.”

  “Always do.”

  “Be sure and don’t hog the moosemeat. Give some to Rhonda. Now that I think of it, it would be healthier for you if you gave her the whole thing.”

  He’s picking up his sternperson deep in her own territory, at the Split Cove wharf. As he follows the markers at half speed through the tight dredged channel he meets up with a couple of Split Cove boats returning at 5 a.m. from God knows where, evil-hearted bastards, nothing but dark colors on their hulls. These two are the Shadow and the Night Runner. The sun shines just as much on Split Cove as Orphan Point, but from their boat names you’d think it was some Eskimo village in year-round night. Weasely bastards, they can’t catch fish so who knows what the fuck they do. Kyle was a good kid till he started hanging out with those cocksuckers. Ronette too, she’s probably got something up her sleeve. Nobody’s blameless, it takes two to deep-six a marriage. Good thing Sarah’s a saint, otherwise he’d be jerking off alone just like old Clyde.

  He spots the lemon-and-lime Probe in the parking lot before he sees her on the wharf, she picked a good color for piercing through the fog. She’s got her orange Grundens and a black seaman’s watch cap forced down over all her chocolate-colored piled-up hair. She’s also got the christly dog again, which leaps aboard before he’s even up to the float. The instant Ronette steps over the rail, he turns back into the channel and opens her up a bit, he’ll leave a little wake for the Split Cove lobster fleet. They’re just climbing aboard now, lazy dipshits, maybe he’ll wash a few over the side. Course every frigging one of them’s cousins of Ronette. She’s waving and shouting to this and that uncle, they’ve all got big fish-eating Indian dogs on board so Ginger is pawing the gunwales and yawping like a circus seal. He gives the dog a slap on the ass and says, “Jump, Ginger, go for it,” but Ronette grabs her collar and holds on like it’s a drowning kid. “What do you mean,” she says, “telling her to jump off? What if she did? You’d have to go in and get her. You’d be responsible. She’s half Clyde’s, you know.”

  “No doubt. Who was the lucky mother?” She kicks the ankle of his trawler boot. He yells, “Christ, we’re all half Clyde’s,” and right in the narrowest part of the channel, Split Cove boats on every side of him, he puts up the throttle all the way. The bow spurts up, the stern squats, and the big Michigan prop chews water as the Wooden Nickelwipes out four black-hulled boats like they’re in reverse. She throws a twenty-foot-high rooster tail that catches the May-morning sunrise and rains down a plume of oily Split Cove water on men and dogs alike. They’re all rocking and pumping their middle fingers and goosing clouds of black smoke out of their pathetic oil-furnace motors in an attempt to catch the swiftest wood-hulled lobster boat on the coast, being let out for the first time since back in February when she was reamed.

  “Bunch of cunts!” he shouts back over his typhoon wake. He pulls a Marlboro pack from behind the radar, but it’s empty. He flings it into the propwash and glances up at the speed digits on the loran: twenty-six point two. He’s through the channel and the Split Rock passage and approaching the Sodom Ledge bell by the time his stern-lady can smuggle a fresh pack out of her yuppie knapsack. The engine noise forces her to stand on tiptoe and yell into his ear.

  “Here, I’ll light if for you, but I don’t want you to talk like that. Them guys are family.”

  “Whose family, Ginger’s?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Jesus. Clean the airwaves.”

  “Another thing,” she shouts. “We’re going to fix up the downstairs room. You got a potentially decent boat but it looks like shit.”

  On the fishfinder Red’s Bank rises up to eight fathoms from a twelve-fathom trough, so he just bites the cap off a Rolling Rock and follows the sounder curve till the first orange-and-green buoy heaves into sight, then slows her down.

  Ronette says, “Good, now we can hear the radio.” She’s got her arm in the hatchway fooling with the dial, trying to get Classic Country from way over in Vermont cause she likes the good old stuff.

  “Ain’t got time to play with the radio. You’re supposed to be sternman, ain’t you? Get back and start stringing bait. We’re going to have traps busting with lobsters.”

  She sticks her tongue out at him but obeys. “Might’s well work for Doris as for you. She’s just about as much fun.”

  “Work for Doris, I don’t give a shit. What’s she pay you? Three bucks an hour?”

  “Three twenty-five. Plus tips. I don’t see many tips on the table out here.”

  “This works out, you’ll clear eight, nine bucks an hour. Tax-free. You’d have to work naked to make that off of Doris.”

  “Wouldn’t you like that? What would you leave? Ten percent, up from your normal five?”

  “Christ, I leave you a dollar for a fifty-cent cup of coffee. And that’s with your clothes on.”

  He rounds up to gaff the first warp and throw it around the winch. The line’s got weed on it from not being hauled enough, the stone-ballasted traps are so heavy the boat leans halfway to the gunwale when the strain comes on. Just as he thought, eight or nine decent ones just in the first two traps.

  “Two culls,” Ronette says. “Two breeders. One short.” She throws the short and the breeders over after notching the tails, puts the culls in, and holds up a nice two-pounder with claws intact. She deftly secures it by one claw as she slips a blue rubber band
around the other, then lets the free claw snap around in the air a bit before she bands it.

  “Survival of the fittest,” he says.

  “It ain’t, though. He’s the fittest and he’ll get boiled.”

  “Well then we’re the fittest.”

  “No, the fittest was them two breeder females I threw back. They’re down there on the bottom, free, white, and twenty-one.” She bands the second claw. “And pregnant.”

  “Free, pregnant, and twenty-one.”

  “And they’re going to survive.”

  He’s got twelve more traps on the stern, which he puts down in four sets of three. Working their way inshore, they haul a couple more strings off of the boulder-strewn ten-fathom plane west of Red’s Bank, then it’s past eleven and they stop for a break. He runs the warp forward and loops it once around the bitt for a lunch hook. He’s about to go back to show her the contents of Sarah’s pail when he catches sight of a big cocksucking bull seal diving on his trapline and goes for the shotgun instead. This time he’s got his double-barrel, empty, so he has to open the box of green twelve-gauge shells, and by then it’s gone.

  “What the hell, Lucky. What’s the gun for?”

  “Son of a bitch raiding the traps. He’ll come up.”

  “Who?”

  “Big bull seal.”

  “Bull seal? You mean a seal? You fixing to kill a seal?”

  He puts the second shell in and closes the barrel and snaps one hammer back. “Son of a whore’s got to come up before long. They ain’t got gills.”

  Just then the seal surfaces right above an unhauled trap and gives Lucky the royal eye, like he’s saying I’m going to flip open them trap doors down there and eat every fucking lobster you got. Arrogant bastards, ugly as a bald-headed dog. He sights down the left barrel straight into its earhole but it goes under. He’s keeping his aim on the spot where it went down when Ronette steps out in front of the muzzle and stands up on a lobster crate so the shotgun is pointing just over the bib front of her orange oilskin pants. “Go ahead, shoot,” she says. “Put it through me first, then that poor animal.”