The Wooden Nickel

by William Carpenter

  Now the Stoneport girls appear from the crowded hilly little streets in packs of four or five but ready to be detached, sexy as ever, daughters and granddaughters of the girls they used to drag under the tuna wharf. Christ, one or two have a Lunt look to them, they could be anyone’s.

  “Hey Lucky, you’re supposed to be staring at me.” Ronette spins him around and gets a light off his cigarette.

  “Fucked the boat up that last race,” he says. “Might limp her home, but she ain’t going fishing for a while.”

  “I heard. You was the talk of the town up at the Blue Claw. Racing some island woman and they say your boat caught fire. Deputy said you was burned alive.”

  “Bet you didn’t give a shit when you heard that.”

  She kisses his ear with her wet chili dog lips. “I took off my apron and come right down. Somebody’s got to give a shit, Mr. Luck, and I ain’t seen Mrs. Lunt running your way.”

  There’s a little breeze off the water now it’s dark, and it does feel good on the singed skin of his arms and face. She edges up close to him on the tar-smelling pierhead and gives him the last inch of her chili dog. “I been thinking about it all the way down. I can take a second job at the RoundUp, Big Andy’s always after me, then I can help pay for the boat.”

  “You got two jobs already. Anyway, you’re the sternman. You ain’t supposed to cover expenses.”

  “Lucky, look at me.” She pulls his face around with both hands so he’s right up close to her, he can feel the heat of her Marlboro on his ear. “I ain’t just your sternman anymore.”

  “I know,” he says. “I got to pay social security on you.”

  “That ain’t what I meant. Don’t you hear nothing I say?”

  “Know what else, Ron? We got some fucking trouble coming up.”

  “Well it ain’t going to happen tonight. Tonight we’re going to forget it all and dance.”

  “Dance? I ain’t danced since Danny Thurston’s wedding.”

  “You been keeping the wrong company. You don’t exercise, that heart’ll go soft as an old tomato.” She drags him past a bunch of Coast Guard men in their T-shirt uniforms, their eyes glazed over from testing the evidence, then through a clump of Stoneport kids standing in a fog of pot smoke, probably bought off the Coast Guard too, son of a bitches never waste an ounce. She drags him right past the Orphan Point gang, who are still huddled with Reggie Dolliver planning to shoot up a few boats. One of them whistles when Ronette starts to dance, and she is great-looking tonight in the green low-cut top with her tits peeking out over it like a clutch of wild duck eggs in the grass. Then he remembers why it is they’re starting to look so big, it’s not just Clyde’s saline, she’s going to be bulging all over before too long. The thought makes his hand reach into the deep back pocket of his work pants for the pint of 101-proof Wild Turkey. Nobody watches his habits anymore. He pulls it up and takes a slug and offers it to Ronette but she says, “No darling, I ain’t supposed to, it says right on the bottle. Not yet. That’s why I like them draft beers in the plastic cups, they don’t have no pregnancy label.”

  Pregnant or not, she’s dancing all over the place like it was the Rolling Stones up there playing “Brown Sugar” and not a bunch of clamdiggers that just met each other the night before. Lucky’s big rusty eight-cylinder body is trying to recall what it was like to dance, but it gets mixed up with what it was like to fight, so he stands in one spot throwing long loopy punches in her direction while she’s got her arms up in the air and her stern swaying and those big milky knockers sloshing around in a tank top that glows like a bug zapper in the mercury-vapor light. She’s traveling and he’s standing still. Pretty soon she’s spun off towards Reggie’s group to get another drink and he’s throwing punches towards a woman he’s never seen, a hippie tourist with blond hair and glasses and tired little city tits under a T-shirt that says let lobsters live. He points at her chest and yells, “What the fuck’s that?”

  The hippie woman screams, “How would you like to be thrust headfirst into a boiling caldron?”

  “Excuse me?” Lucky’s not sure he hears her right, twists his finger around to drill out his good ear, the starboard one on the other side from the exhaust.

  “Crustaceans feel pain,” the hippie woman shouts, “when they’re scalded. Just like you or me.” But she is dancing in a way he can keep up with, making deep swoops with her arms like she’s swimming but staying in one place so he can throw punches at her till Ronette comes back.

  Then he catches sight of Ronette dancing with Reggie Dolliver, they’ve both got beers in one hand, cigarettes in the other, and she’s looking his way and sticking her tongue out since he’s dancing with this animal-rights chick. Then she’s getting too fucking close to Reggie and he stops dancing and works his way in their direction yelling, “Ain’t you supposed to be on parole?” But suddenly there’s the big zebra-stripe woman standing right in his path, and right behind her is the black-bearded brother with half his teeth. “What’s your hurry,” she says, “you going to a fire?”

  “I would of sank you,” he says, “if the fucking turbo was working right.”

  She laughs and takes a big suck out of something in a paper bag, wipes her mouth off with the back of her hand. “No doubt about that, captain.”

  He’s about to get serious with her over the striped buoy when she takes one of his hands and says, “You dance as good as you race?” Before he can believe it he’s dancing with this huge Shag Island pirate sow that looks just like one of those Russian female weightlifters that always turn out to have a dick.

  Ronette comes up and looks about a foot up into Priscilla Shaver’s face and says, “Ain’t there no men where you come from?” and Priscilla purses her lips up like a monkfish and gives Ronette the finger, then the black-bearded guy says, “Ain’t you the waitress over to Doris’s Blue Claw?” and he starts doing this chicken dance in front of her, he’s squatting down, clucking his Halloween teeth with his black tongue, his elbows are flapping, he’s turning around and around and Ronette’s not even trying to keep up with him, she’s standing there staring. Well, she wanted to dance so much, what the hell. He turns back to Priscilla Shaver and shouts over the band, “You hauling many traps these days?” and she looks over towards her brother and shouts, “Looks like somebody’s hauling your trap right now.” Lucky spins around to crack out the rest of that son of a whore’s teeth with the Wild Turkey bottle, but then Ronette busts out laughing and he doesn’t have the heart to spoil her fun. He’s getting into the Dead Crabs now, shaking the meat off his joints with both hands in the air like a revival meeting and the Bad Pussy right before him, eyeball to eyeball, same weight and height, saying, “You and me got together, we wouldn’t have no boundary problems, would we?” He’s trying to form the image of Priscilla Shaver in a wedding gown when Ronette comes up and cuts her away like a sheepdog. It’s just skipper and sternman again, right in front of the Dead Crabs’ amp. She’s got both his hands and she’s spinning the two of them back and forth, shouting, “Got to dance when you’re pregnant, music’s good for their brain.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ronette, this ain’t music. It don’t have a brain yet anyway.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she shouts. “It does too.”

  The band’s right in the middle of what sounds like “Satisfaction” and she’s got him hopping up and down like a bullfrog, when all of a sudden he feels the twang of a busted guitar string, only it’s not in the music, it’s right in the center of his chest. He stands there rigid with his feet spread apart so he can stay upright, and when he gets his voice back, he says, “Fuck,” only it comes out high and croaky like a twelve-year-old.

  She stops dancing and grabs both his hands and says, “What’s the matter, sweetheart, you OK?”

  “Ain’t nothing,” he says, “just my fucking heart. Twenty-six thousand dollars and they couldn’t fix that son of a bitch.”

  “Sweetheart, your palms are all clammy. Let’s sit down.” />
  She takes him around the back of the chili dog stand along the wharf with the Stoneport skiff floats. No problem finding her car in the public lot, the chartreuse metallic looks radioactive in the mercury-vapor lamp. She opens the door for him and moves her waitress outfit off the passenger seat and tilts it so he can lean way back. The heart twangs once again but less so. His pills are back in the Wooden Nickel, moored up where the Coast Guard dropped him off. She feels under his blackened sweatshirt and work shirt and T-shirt and rubs his chest over the heart. “Jesus, Luck, you can’t dance wearing all these clothes. No wonder.”

  It flips again, weaker but still random and noisy, sounds like the last flops of a mackerel on the cockpit sole. “Feel that?”

  She puts her ear to it. “Yeah, it’s scary. It stopped for about three seconds. Then it flopped. Now it’s going again, just like a motor.”

  “Got to head out to the boat, get some of that stuff.”

  “Don’t have to,” she says. “I got some of your medicine right here.” She reaches in the small lighted glove box of the Probe and comes up with an envelope of heart pills. “I took them off the boat,” she explains. “Figured they might come in handy.”

  He swallows a few with a slug of Wild Turkey and things quiet down in there. “Ain’t used to so much dancing,” he says.

  She takes his hand and holds it between her palms awhile, then checks the windows to see if nobody’s looking and puts it on her chest, right on the little sea horse, which has grown bigger like it’s painted on a balloon. “Maybe that’ll warm it up. It’s a heat wave and you got a hand like a Klondike bar.” Then she pulls the tank top up and puts his palm down on her belly, low enough to feel the tickle of curly whiskers on his finger’s edge. “It’s in there,” she says. “Sometimes I think I can feel it flopping. Just like your heart.”

  “Don’t expect it’s big enough to move around much.”

  “No Lucky, it is. I felt it. They’re developing faster these days, it’s on account of all the growth hormones in our food.”

  He rests his palm there awhile without feeling anything but drumbeats from the Dead Crabs, then he realizes where his hand is and starts feeling a little hard-on coming on. First it’s the memory of a hard-on, since this is the very spot where he first got laid, sixteen years old, the far corner of the big Stoneport municipal lot, in the shadow of the icehouse, where he could feel the vapors of dry ice on his back like the cold tongue of death. The icehouse is still there, beneath the mercury streetlamp, its long shadow stretching almost to the Probe. “Hey Ron,” he whispers, “the seats go all the way down on this thing?”

  She says, “What about your heart?” but the windows are steamed up, it’s dark outside, and one of her tits has already wormed out of the tank top, the end of it browner and bigger than it used to be.

  “That’s what I like about you,” he says, “you’re right up front.”

  “I’m an egg-bearing female, Lucky Lunt. You better notch my tail and throw me back, else you’re going to be in deep-shit trouble.”

  “Too late,” he says. She’s already groping around the door panel on her side and pretty soon the driver’s seat glides electrically down and forward, the seat back reclines almost to horizontal as if he’s going to get drilled and filled. His heart pulses around like it can’t decide whether to slow down with the medicine or run and catch up with Ronette. Then it takes a look at her tank top slipping down and just stops. For a second there’s nothing happening in his chest at all, then there’s a loud low thump back on the car’s trunk and the heart starts racing like a timing chain. He turns fast and scrapes the fog off the window while Ronette pulls her clothes up and smacks the power locks down on her side and scrapes her window too. There’s a huge towering figure blocking all light on one side of the low-slung Probe and a shorter, broader one on the other side. A weird, broken voice is calling, “Mrs. Hannaford!”

  “Who the fuck?”

  “It’s me, Norton. And Clayton Pettingill. We seen your car. We can’t find nobody from Orphan Point.”

  She lowers the window an inch with the power switch. “What do you kids want, a ride home?”

  “No. Grind down your window. Hey, you got Lucky Lunt in there?”

  “No, that’s just a passenger seat dummy, keeps the perverts away.” Ronette’s fixing her shirt, patting her hair before she cranks the window down. Then she goes in the glove compartment for a cigarette. When the light goes on, he also notices a little .25 automatic, no bigger than a water pistol but it’s real. Nice thing to have when there’s a couple of guys hanging over your roofline, but these are friends.

  Norton doesn’t talk so great, and Clayton’s shy, but between the two of them they get the information out. “Clayt’s almost seventeen,” Norton says, “and he ain’t never been drunk before.”

  “Norton ain’t either,” Clayton Pettingill says.

  “I have, you dumb fuck. I got drunk with my old man and my sister Laurie.”

  “Get it out,” Lucky says. “What are you kids trying to tell us?”

  “We found their trucks.”

  “Whose trucks?”

  “The Shag Island trucks. When them cocksuckers come to the mainland they leave all their trucks in one spot, and we found it.”

  “You wait here,” he says to Ronette.

  “Lucky, don’t be stupid. You just had a heart attack.”

  “I won’t be a minute, I’ll make sure these boys find a ride, then I’ll come back.” He hitches his pants up and follows them past the icehouse to a dirt-paved parking annex where there’s about twenty-five vans and pickups, mostly big new four-wheel drives but some shitheaps too, there’s dubs everywhere that can’t find a lobster even if it’s grabbing them by the nuts. The trucks are sitting in the moonlight quiet as headstones, all he can hear is the blood pumping in his chest and the far-off cacophony of the Dead Crabs.

  The kids have stepped up from apricot brandy to a fifth of 151-proof Black Seal Rum that Reggie Dolliver sold them out of the goodness of his heart. Clayton Pettingill’s already so big the fifth looks like a perfume bottle in his hand. It works, though, it’s got him walking wide-legged and careful, looking down at the ground, like he’s on deck in a heavy sea.

  “You should have bought three of these,” Lucky says. He hits up on the bottle too, hell of a lot healthier than those christly pills. Everyone knows alcohol’s good for you, fucking doctors hold that information back. Clayton Pettingill stops to take a long piss on the back tire of a black Chevy Tahoe with a vanity plate that reads shg isld, no doubt where they’re from. Beside the Tahoe is a brand-new Dodge Ram crew-cab whose metallic paint gleams in the moonlight like a kid’s first dream of a red truck.

  “That ain’t what we want to show you,” Clayton says after he zips up. The boys sneak him around behind the rows of trucks under the high three-quarter moon. His heart’s fine now, his hard-on’s gone, he feels like a young kid out to raise hell. It’s women that slow you down.

  The boys have a tough time crouching cause they’re so big. Lucky doesn’t bend so great either, his spine’s stiff as a crankshaft from years at the pot hauler, but they’re down on all fours by now, the two boys up ahead with their pants dragging down off of their asscracks like a couple of big pink pigs. Lucky brings up the rear, trying to keep from laughing because there could be people smoking and fucking in any of these silent trucks.

  Clayton passes a white Dodge Ramcharger van with a black lab inside, curious but not barking, then stops at a Nissan King Cab shining lemon yellow in the moonlight, dark and empty inside but the bed full of lobster gear.

  “King Crab,” Lucky says. “So what?”

  Norton Gross leads him around the back of the truck. There’s four or five wire traps, a few coils of pot warp and about twenty zebra-stripe buoys, brand-new and still roped together in two bunches of ten, fresh from the painting shed. There’s also a couple of jugs of outboard motor mix. Lucky takes out his rope knife and slices one of the bu
oys off. The three of them study the stripe pattern in the moonlight like it’s a secret code. “That it?” Clayton asks.

  “That son of a whore was setting right on Toothpick Shoal.”

  “Well,” Clayton says to him, “you done this before. What are we supposed to do?”

  “Norton’s got the idea.” He always thought Norton Gross had his wires crossed, but he’s already back there with the gas flap open and the gas cap screwed off and he’s got his dick down the filler pipe, taking a leak right in her tank. Meanwhile young Clayton Pettingill, who he always thought was a candyass Mormon despite his bulk, takes out his hunting knife and stabs it slow and deliberate into the front tire on the driver’s side, the air squealing out like a stuck hog.

  Lucky says, “Norton, when you’re all done there, give me your T-shirt.”

  Norton hoists his trousers up, then starts to grunt and twist his short stubby arms around like he’s trying to take his skin off, then he holds the shirt up so they can read it in the moonlight.

  DON’T LIKE THE TIMBER INDUSTRY?

  TRY WIPING YOUR ASS WITH A PLASTIC BAG

  “What are you going to do?” he whines. “My mom bought me that shirt.”

  “Give me that jug of outboard mix,” Lucky says.

  They stuff as many striped buoys as they can into Norton’s enormous T-shirt, then they splash on a decent amount of outboard fuel and set the bundle back in the bed of the Nissan, and top it off with a coil of poly rope. They scout around and find some newspaper and wad it up. He says to Norton and Clayton, “OK, I’m going back to Ronette’s car, so she don’t freak when it goes. You wait three minutes then light them papers and toss them onto Norton’s shirt, then run.”

  Norton Gross takes out a Bic lighter and gets it ready by lighting up a cigarette but then he says, “Clayton should do it, it’s his first time drunk.”

  Clayton reaches way down in his pocket, pretty near pushing his pants off in the process, and comes up with his own Bic lighter.

  “Just wait three minutes and light the newspaper, Clayton, then set it on the shirt and run like hell.”