The Wooden Nickel

by William Carpenter

  Everyone else is miles ahead by now. The ocean belongs to the Wooden Nickel, a boat built for the open sea and bilge-ballasted with a half ton of cutup gravestones from the Orphan Point Funeral Home. He catches sight of the fleet when he’s climbing a sea swell and loses them when he’s in the trough. He powers up a bit, and soon he spots the Abby and Laura, which is now towing the Li’l Snort with the whole family in the wheelhouse drinking beer, then he’s coming up Travis Hammond’s tail cause the Pisscat wouldn’t go over fifteen knots even when she was new. The big Chevy’s cruising at seventeen on the loran with power to spare. He cranks open the windshield pane and lets in the sea air, lights another Marlboro and almost lights a second for Ronette, he’s got so used to her on board. Off to the southward, Shag Island lies there dark and low on the horizon, and after that’s Bull Island, which is nothing but sand and rock, the navy uses it for a target range, and beyond that is the open Atlantic, sparkling nearby but on the horizon dark as a pool of spilled oil, or blue wine.

  I’ve got a love full of wide open spaces

  I’ve got a big love

  Wild and free

  He cranks up the volume to hear Tracy over the engine noise.

  Deep as a river in raging flood

  As endless as the stars above

  Tracy Byrd may have the Texas desert and some wetback river that’s dry sand half the time, but if he came out here he would see what wide open spaces really means. The horizon’s so far off you could steam all day and not come to the end of it. That’s what a boundary is, air on one side, water on the other, you can’t frig around with it, nobody dragging their zebra-stripe buoys across the line. There’s a whale out there too, he’s scratching his back on the air like a big wet dog, then he takes an outlaw piss into the sky and slides under and he’s gone. If Ronette was here she’d go crazy and they’d have to chase after the fucking thing, but what does she know? Whale’s just another homeless fisherman, looking out for himself like anybody else.

  He spies Danny Thurston’s fast little black-hulled AJ-28 running way offshore of the pack and wings out to starboard, see if he can catch up. The AJ’s a lightweight Kevlar diesel and the swells are going to set it back. He pegs Danny on the radar and opens up to nineteen knots, going faster than the swells now, diagonally across them, cutting the tops off, sharp spray knifing through the wind-shield so he has to close the screen and put the wiper on, but there’s nothing like being out here with the throttle open, bronze spoked wheel straight and steady in his right hand and a Rolling Rock in the left. Wide open, the way it was at the beginning before everything got fucked up. A man, an engine, and an ice-cold beer.

  They are almost to the Bull Island whistle going twenty-one knots on the loran when the Perpetrator has to slow down cause the seas pound its short plastic hull. It’s only six fathoms along here and the surge mounts up before it crashes in pillars of breaking foam on the long granite tongue of Deuteronomy Shoal. Gas and diesel trying to harmonize their different voices, just like Charley Pride and Willie Nelson in the old Tarratine auditorium, he comes in with Danny Thurston side by side.

  After the Virgins gong they meet the rest of the fleet that took the inside route north of Three Witch Ledge and the Pope’s Nose, and ten or twelve Orphan Point boats squeeze in together past the fish factory and the barberpole lighthouse on Jacob’s Point. Jackoff Point, that’s what they called it when they used to pick up the Stoneport girls and take them to watch the red light through the evening fog. Three red flashes equals I love you, numbest line on earth but it always did the trick. Three little words and they’d be nibbling on your tongue like a hungry trout. They were hot tickets and they fucked like minks, not like the Orphan Point girls that were all spines and prayers and tougher to feel up than a spider crab. The Stoneport girls were pregnant by seventeen and their daughters were pregnant by seventeen, so the ones he used to know are grandmas now, sweet little saltwater cunts that would dive in the backseat for a beer and a cigarette and a lift back home.

  As they pass the Stoneport breakwater the harbor narrows down to barnacled seal ledges and lobster-shack islands and gray shingled fisherman’s cottages, where the Stoneport girls are sitting up there on their aluminum beach chairs, out of the race now, gray-haired spectators with binoculars watching the boats steam past the lighthouse on Jackoff Point. Who knows what’s in their memories, maybe a kid named Lucky, long ago.

  The Orphan Point boats raft up in a line alongside Stevie Latete’s big green dragger, the Orphan Queen. Stevie’s always saying, “I got a million five in the bank so don’t call me La Tit anymore,” but it doesn’t help. You get these names in grade school and if there’s any truth to them they don’t just go away. Stevie brought all the wives down and they’re up on the Orphan Queen’s foredeck with lawn chairs and thermoses full of margaritas, one radio tuned to High Country and another to the race channel on the VHF. Every year since he can remember Sarah was up there with them, and he looks the group over just in case her thin body’s mixed in with the heavier ones, but she’s not there, she’s over to the art school eating finger cookies with her New York friends.

  Since his radio’s still not working, he cruises up to the committee boat to find when he’s racing. This is a big Bruno 42 out of Stoneport called the Heather and Valerie, parked at the finish line and packing a radar gun to measure the final speeds as they rip across.

  “Wooden Nickel,” he shouts. “Where am I at?”

  The race committee guy is one of the Hallett brothers that control this stretch of the coast. They’re all big bald-headed guys with piss-yellow mustaches and tight little dog-ass mouths. This one’s got a Red Sox hat on and a portable VHF squawking in one hand. He points to the radio and yells, “Race info’s on channel seventy-five!”

  “Ain’t got no radio!”

  The guy has to yell louder over the sound of a hundred souped-up lobster boats revving their engines as they jockey around for the best view. “Lunt. You’re in race four. Antiques!”

  “Fuck you, antiques. This boat ain’t even paid for.”

  “We put all the wood ones together this year, give them a break.”

  “Don’t I get to race nobody fast?”

  “Christ sake, that thing’d just be in the way. What’s in there, gas or diesel?”

  “Chevy four fifty-four. Turbo. She’d kick your ass.”

  “There’ll be a free-for-all at the end. Winners of each heat, throw them together, fastest boat on the water. Race number ten. If that shitbox can win its class.”

  He heads over to the Orphan Pointers rafted on with Stevie Latete. He ties up alongside the Pisscat to see if Travis Hammond wants to come racing. Travis is scared to burn his engine out and catch hell at home, but he enjoys a fast ride. Now he gropes into the Pisscat’s cuddy and comes back with a cooler full of Rolling Rock and a hot thermos of cod head soup. Lucky takes a Rock and downs it in about two swallows, then takes another to nurse while he tells Travis about the striped buoy on their fishing ground.

  “Bet it’s them fuckers from Shag Island,” Travis says.

  “I didn’t notice you telling them not to, the other night.”

  He takes another one of Travis’s beers and they sit on the Pisscat’s paint-peeling washboard to watch the first two races, for youngsters and the smallest craft. “Ain’t no use getting worked up till it happens,” Travis says.

  “Well it’s happening. It wasn’t no drifter I saw out there. I pulled it. Some son of a whore set that fucking thing right where it’s at.”

  “Pre fucking meditated,” Travis agrees.

  “That’s right.”

  Now they’re on race one, outboard-powered, mostly kids that don’t have their first real boat yet. Travis says, “Hey, ain’t your boy racing this year?”

  “He ain’t got time to race. He’s got an urchin boat. He makes a thousand bucks a day selling sushi to the Japanese.”

  “No shit? Hey, I hear you’re all by yourself over to your place. How’s tha
t?”

  “Finest kind. Eat what I want, jerk off when I please. Nobody asks no questions.”

  “I’d like that,” Travis says.

  “I bet you would. Hilda still beat the shit out of you every night?”

  “Finest kind,” Travis says. “Least she’s to home, she ain’t living in Dyke City.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Travis?”

  “Don’t mean nothing.” Travis gets himself another beer and another cupful of the cod head soup with a fish eye sticking out of the milky surface, staring right at him.

  The high-pitched insect whine of six small full-throttled outboards drowns conversation for about two minutes. Two or three motors go up in smoke, one snaps a shear pin, and four of them cross the line. The time comes over the Pisscat’s radio: DONNIE WASHBURN, BOAT NAME HOMER SIMPSON, POWER MERCURY FORTY-FIVE, TOP SPEED TWENTY-THREE POINT SIX. Before the racers have wound down in the runoff zone, there’s a different sound, one- and two-cylinder inboards revving up, working their way to the starting area for race two: small diesels. These are a bunch of retirees and summer lobstermen, nobody to take seriously, they’ll come farting across the course like a flock of golf carts, but Lucky’s race is two slots away and it’s time to go. Travis jumps aboard with a six-pack in each hand, they cast off from the Pisscat and head for the starting line. Cruising through the clear water back of the spectator fleet, he turns up Big Love on the stereo and looks around for an open straightaway so he can give Travis Hammond a little foretaste of Harley’s turbocharger. It comes on with a high-velocity blistering roar that sounds so good he points her ninety degrees off the race course and takes her up to 3000 rpm for a few seconds, right out to sea. Travis uncaps a couple more Rocks with his big shit-eating grin, yells “Finest kind” over the turbo howl, then he throttles her back down towards the start.

  Tracy lays down the guitar line for a V-8 engine in perfect tune.

  Let’s forgive and forget and start over

  We all make mistakes now and then

  At first he was pissed when they threw him in with the antiques. Now he’s got a plan. He’ll bury the cocksuckers in the first race and end up in the final free-for-all with the winners of all classes. He’ll hook the propane tank to the turbo intake, just for the one minute of that race she’ll be turbocharging pure propane with high-test gas, she’ll smoke out the best of them and maybe take the whole fucking thing, he’ll get the five hundred and buy two new stereos, boat and truck. Ronette will love it when he cranks those up.

  By now the small diesels have plodded across the line — top gun went nineteen knots — and they’re up to race three, adult outboards and sterndrives, light enough to get up on a plane and clock some speed. Race three is running a full six-boat field, the most the race committee allows in the narrow passage between the spectator boats. The thoroughfare along the Stoneport harborfront is a mile-and-a-half-long channel marked for the race by rows of orange and green balls two hundred feet apart. That means each of the six boats has to race at top speed within a thirty-foot lane, and it pays to get ahead and stay ahead because they are all throwing big wakes and if you catch one at open throttle you can flip or get thrown off into the spectator fleet, which is lined up five or six deep on either side of the course. Every harbor and island on this part of the coast has a string of boats rafted up along the race course. Right by the finish line there’s also four or five mega-yachts, they’re chartered by big-shit diesel corporations that sponsor these races and want to be there if their engines win. Couple of years back Dennis Ingalls from Moose Point took diesel unlimited with a Mack 740 and the losers went back home and pulled their engines out with dock hoists and dumped them right off the end of their wharves. Mack sold a hundred units the next month.

  Lucky circles in back of the starting area with the other antiques, waiting for the sterndrive race to run. Some of those little bastards really get going, they whine like hornets and throw so much spray you can’t even see the field. They’re all over twenty-five by the time they hit the finish line. Course they’re not really lobster boats, they’re more like Ski-Doos. If Lucky was in charge of things they wouldn’t even have a class.

  Now it’s time for race four and the antiques are shouldering each other for a good running start. Travis is up on the cabin trunk cranking the windshield open to cut resistance, then he settles himself on the stern where he belongs. The procedure is to follow the pace boat to the start and cross the line all together at fifteen knots, then open her up for a mile and the first one across the finish line wins. They clock each winner with a radar gun, and at the end of the day, top gun speed is the boat that gets remembered, whether she wins the free-for-all or not.

  He checks out the competition as the other antiques move from their circling approaches into the starting line. The Jenny L hails out of Woodpecker Cove up the Tarratine River. The owner’s an old fart that can’t see anymore, but he’s got one of his grandchildren helping him steer and you can see his old brown wrinkled face through the windshield, proud as piss. He’s had twelve heart attacks, strokes, cancer, everything they carry up at the Tarratine hospital and they still can’t keep him off the water. Death doesn’t want him, so he’s going to race another year.

  Off to port of the Jenny L is the Peg Leg out of Riceville, Morris Ashmore, he’s been racing against Lucky all these years. Morris is the only serious competition in the wood boat class. He’s got a cedar-and-oak downeaster built by the old Cherrylog Boat Shop right on the Canadian border in Shackle Cove. Morris raced a 501 Dodge hemi last year but it ripped his transmission apart and he failed to finish. Now he’s running something a bit smaller. Lucky listens intently through the noise of a half-dozen engines: sounds like a Chrysler 440 conversion with a deep bass tone because Morris has tuned the muffler for the race. He can also hear a new Hurth reduction gear in there and down on the shaft a titanium four-bladed prop. They say Morris hires a diver to go down and sharpen the prop blades with a rat-tail file. They are the only guys left that give a shit about wooden boats anymore, and as he draws alongside Morris he gives him the friendly finger and Morris comes back with a thumbs-up. Let the best man win. Morris got shot up in Vietnam and he’s lobstered all his life with a left leg made of green bronze and hackma-tack. He’s a competitor. But when he hears the turbo cut in on the Wooden Nickel he is going to shit.

  The fourth antique in the four-boat field is called Bottom Dollar,out of Burnt Neck, and he can see why they called it that, it looks like they raised it off the sea floor just for this race. One side of the windshield is peppered with bullet holes and the other side has its glass held in with duct tape. The hull has red streaks bleeding out of the scuppers from the machinery rusting out, the engine is an oil-burning GM 350 rattler that’s pouring blue smoke out of the stack like a refinery. He’ll give it one minute of race time before that thing swallows a valve and dies. The driver is a young long-haired Burnt Necker with his shirt off and his girlfriend right beside him with one hand on his dick, her other hand holding a cigar-size joint you can smell from here. Stiff competition.

  The pace boat shepherds them into line and speeds up to twelve knots or so, then gets out of the way and the four antiques approach the start in pretty good form holding steady at fifteen knots, Morris on his port side and Bottom Dollar to the right. Travis is at his elbow with another Rock but he pushes him back. “Get your ass on the stern, Travis, far back as you can get. Don’t sweat it if you fall in, she’ll go faster without you.” A split second before the line Lucky puts her up to three-quarters and his whole year of trials is justified the minute that four-bladed prop digs into the water and takes root. Can’t be anything wrong with your heart if your engine throttles up like that. Way off to port the old blind guy is already falling behind. To starboard the Burnt Neck kid is yelling Yahoo like he’s got a horse under him, his girlfriend’s hunched up behind him with her arm in his pants up to the elbow. Lucky’s got the Chevy wide open already, he’s pouring the gas into her
and he moves ahead. On the other side Morris Ashmore moves from three-quarters to full throttle and he keeps up with the kid, Lucky a bit behind at the midpoint, not torquing the engine yet, then a ripping noise comes from the Burnt Neck boat and a spurt of black flaming smoke splits their exhaust open and it’s just Lucky and Morris as it has often been before. Morris opens the 440 and Lucky can feel the Hurth gearbox vibrating right through the water. He stays ahead. Lucky’s at 3600 rpm, the loran says twenty-four knots but it can’t keep up, he knows from the green water surging over the bow they’re breaking twenty-nine. The turbocharger howls as the tach climbs right to 3900, and without even overheating he buries Morris Ashmore in a plume of spray.

  Travis comes forward with a Rock and he chugs it in a single swallow while Hallett’s voice comes over a hundred radios at once, all at different distances so it sounds like the resonant voice of God. LUCAS LUNT, BOAT WOODEN NICKEL, ANTIQUE CATEGORY, THIRTY-FOUR POINT FOUR. Morris Ashmore gives him the finger and revs his Chrysler a few times to make sure it still works. He can see him mumbling Next year, but he can’t hear the words. Who the fuck knows about next year? Maybe he’ll grow his leg back like a lobster. Maybe we’ll all be dead.