The Wooden Nickel

  Lucky walks back past the Chevy Tahoe that smells of new car paint and human piss, then stops to check out the toolbox in the bed of the Dodge Ram crew-cab next door. It’s unlocked and he can stand on the running board and feel around in there till he gets his hand on a stubby little crowbar that ought to do the job. He tries it out on the left rear door, just soft at first, case anyone’s around, then he gets going and whacks the passenger window on the crew-cab, makes a nice spiderweb on the second stroke, then moves up forward and takes out the two lights and the ram’s head in the center of the grille. He turns and backhands the left headlight of the Tahoe, then takes out the windshield right above the wheel and brings the crowbar down on the center of the hood, nice strong Detroit steel at first, but a few sharp whacks and it’s pretty much stove in. He’d dearly love to take out the Tahoe’s grille, but he doesn’t have the heart for that first whack on the Chevy emblem, too close to home, so he wedges the prybar in the driver’s side door and bends it hard till he pulls the hinges out and leaves the tire iron inside on the floor: a little present from three generations of fishermen on Toothpick Ledge.

  He crosses the uncut field between the main parking lot and the annex and joins Ronette in the Probe.

  “I was so worried for you,” she says. “I ain’t even supposed to be smoking and look at this.” She lights a new Marlboro from the one still burning and throws the half-smoked one out the window.

  “You want to worry about something, look over there.” He turns her head to stare into the darkness out of the left quarter window of the Probe. In about half a minute they see a pillar of glowing smoke in the next lot that makes him recall the old days before the environment, when they had such grand towering fires at the dump.

  Ronette says, “Lucky, them boys set somebody’s truck on fire?”

  “No, ma’am. Just some pot buoys they wasn’t ever going to use.”

  Then there’s screeching and yelling from the Fag Islanders over in their parking lot, at the same time Clayton and Norton show up at the Probe smelling like smudge pots and they bang on the roof to be let in.

  Lucky gets out on his side so the two huge kids can squish themselves in the back of the Probe. Norton Gross whines, “I can’t fit, this fucking thing’s in the way.” He holds up a baby seat, brand-new blue padding and shiny chrome.

  “Hey Ronette, I didn’t know you had a kid.” Clayton laughs. “You been keeping it secret?”

  “Ain’t none of your business,” she says. “Be a good boy, Lucas, and stick it in the trunk.”

  But there’s no time for that. Half the street dance is moving through the municipal lot, everyone’s yelling Truck on fire, truck on fire, but they’re not going to wait and see. He holds the child seat in his lap while Ronette backs out and maneuvers her way through the oncoming crowd. They’re the only people going the other way.

  Then someone runs past shouting Orphan Point bastards and Clayton says, “We better rescue them fucking boats.”

  They pass the municipal wharf with the Dead Crabs playing to an empty parking lot and a deputy’s car flashing its blue strobe trying to open a passage to the crime scene. Honking, flashing her lights and nudging the crowd aside with her bumper, Ronette gets them down to the lobster dock where the Orphan Point boats are rafted up. Most have gone already, there’s just the Pisscat and Danny Thurston’s Perpetrator rafted up to the poor crippled Wooden Nickel.At least she’s still afloat.

  Travis Hammond and Danny Thurston show up running. They’ve got a quart of black rum and a couple of Stoneport girls. Travis’s girl is this year’s tenth-grade prom queen, Danny’s got her little sister. The girls are begging to go aboard, but Danny and Travis fight them off and get on their boats so they can cast off before the lynch mob arrives.

  He’s still holding the baby seat when they climb aboard the Wooden Nickel, Ronette too, leaving the Probe right at the dock. He turns her over, hoping she’s got enough cylinders to start. Fucking Chevy: two or three exhaust valves gone, carburetor black from the turbo fire, she turns over a couple times, thinks for a while, then remembers how to do it and starts up. Danny’s got Norton and Clayton with him. Danny shouts over, “Hey Lucky, they rolled over the cop car!”

  “Finest kind. Next they’ll be coming after us.”

  “Don’t worry, Lucky, we’ll stay with you.”

  He shouts back, “You fucking well better, you got the bottle.” Keeping it slow and quiet, not even the running lights, the three Orphan Point boats head westward past the band on the wharf, the red flasher off Jackoff Point, the green radar shapes of the Pope’s Nose to starboard and the sharp dot of the Virgins gong buoy off to port. Now they’re in open water, Danny snaps on his deck light so they can see him and Lucky puts on his red-and-greens so they can see him back. Travis Hammond’s up between them with his lights blacked out but he’s a nice fat moving target on the radar screen. Lucky’s going only seven at full throttle, the smell of raw unburned gas mixing with charred cedar and extinguisher foam. Danny and Travis could be out of there in a minute, but they hold back and flank him side by side.

  The radar shows a boat coming up behind, closing fast at a third of a mile. He looks back and can’t see any lights. “They’re coming,” he says. “Only one boat. Anything left of them guns?”

  She feels around below and hands him the twelve-gauge and a box of shells.

  “Not that. The deer rifle. Look around for it.”

  “It stinks down there, Lucky.” When it comes up, the gunstock smells like barbecue coal and it’s covered with black soot like everything else down there. Good thing the ammunition didn’t go off. He clicks the spent cartridge out of her and eases the helm to port so the oncoming boat is directly aft, then he hands the wheel to Ronette so he can turn around and aim. She says, “Lucky, what if it’s the Coast Guard or the Marine Patrol?”

  “It ain’t. They’d show blue strobes like a cop car.” There’s nothing back there but the glare of the street dance off to the northward. He can’t see the boat coming but she’s still on the radar and he fires a shot over his wake into the area of blackness around the stern, but high. The blip keeps coming. He fires another one, low enough so it will whistle over their heads, then the blip turns and speeds back towards Stoneport harbor. “Hey, them stealth bombers got nothing on us, Ronette. We turned them with our radar-aimed missiles.”

  “Jesus, Lucky, put that thing away before somebody gets hurt.”

  The danger past and the rifle returned to its bulkhead rack beneath the shotgun, he can take back the helm and let Ronette snug up behind him in the chill. They’re beyond the Jacob’s Point light and the Virgin ledges now, in open water with the three-quarter moon dead in front of them on its way down in the southwest. In the flat calm, the sea looks like a bowl of light all the way to the horizon and they’re steaming right into it. He’s got the engine on full throttle but she’s still doing only eight point one on the loran, farting and backfiring from the bad cylinders that got their valves sucked out when the turbo went. With that AJ-28 Danny Thurston could be under the covers with his wife by now, but he’s hanging back for group protection, and Travis is staying with him, chickenshit though he is.

  Ronette buries her nose in the small of his neck, presses up close to remind him of what they were doing when Norton and Clayton showed up. “You smell of gunpowder,” she says.

  “You like it. I ought to fire a couple rounds before I come to bed.”

  “We ain’t got a bed,” she reminds him. “You torched it trying to race that island slut.”

  The engine goes dead for a moment then catches again with a backfire that belches red flame up through the stack. “Ought to put one of them bullets through the block so she don’t suffer so much.”

  She’s left the wheelhouse to take a flashlight down into the cuddy and try to scare up some music.

  “Lucky, there’s fucking water in here.”

  He kicks in the bilge pump and he can hear the water slosh over the side. �
��That better?”

  When she comes up she’s crying. “You ain’t got a stereo anymore. I wanted to play my new Tanya Tucker tape.”

  Number four cylinder has dried out and she sounds a bit better now, though it’s loud as hell cause he took off the muffler for the race. She comes up the companionway and stands behind him and puts one hand on his shoulder, the other on the glowing radar screen. “I was getting pretty comfortable on this thing,” she says. “It’s close to all the home we got.”

  “You got your cousin’s trailer. I got my house.”

  “I mean we, Lucky. I used to think it was our little nest down there. Now it’s a black frigging hole.” Still wearing the tank top and cutoffs from the street dance, she burrows into his sweatshirt to get warm.

  “Put on some oilskins from below.”

  “There ain’t any, Lucky. All the rain gear melted together down there.” She comes up with a big mass of blackish-orange material that used to be bib overalls and aprons.

  “I’ll pull them apart back home,” he says. “Might be able to salvage some of them things.”

  Soon as the moon goes down, a light damp southerly comes in and it starts clouding up fast from the west. There’s a dull flash of lightning way to the westward, over the Tarratine River mouth, then right over the hills behind Burnt Neck. A little gust of rain comes through the open windshield and she shivers like she’s standing in a fish freezer. “Ain’t cold,” he says. “It’s July.”

  “It’s cold for me.”

  He peels off the remains of his sweatshirt, which has a nice comforting smell, like brake fluid after a long summer drive. It hangs down below her knees like a dress, she pulls her hands up in the sleeves and puts her face up so he can tie the hood. By the time they follow the Perpetrator through the Split Head passage and into home territory the sky is glowing behind them and it’s 4 a.m. Ronette spots two porpoises off the port bow in the dim light. “Look Lucky, bet them things been following us all night.” He swerves sharp over like he’s going to run them down. “You want me to get the gun, Lucky, so’s you can shoot them?”

  “They’re good eating but they’re too fucking hard to clean.”

  The child’s car seat is still lying on the platform where they dropped it in their escape from Stoneport. She picks it up and hooks it over the bulkhead opposite the wheel and pot hauler, protected by the portside window. “That’s where he’s going to ride.”

  “What do you mean, he? How do you know what it is?”

  “I just know, Lucky. But soon as I can, I’ll get a sonogram.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s like the fishfinder, only they put it on your stomach. You can see them. Only they don’t look human yet, they look like fish.”

  “We was all fish once,” he says. “Would of been nice back then.” She yawns and closes her eyes on his shoulder as he’s making the last turn around the Split Point gong. He flashes his spotlight to say good-bye and thanks to Travis and Danny and heads north and east into Split Cove. Then she gets excited when they pass the Split Ledge nun. “Hey, you going to let us go home and get some sleep?”

  “Ain’t no sleeping on this boat,” he says. “I’m going to Split Cove to pick up bait. See if you can scrape off a couple aprons down there. Boat’s running decent. We got some lobstering to do.”

  8

  HE GETS UP LATE and shares with Alfie a long breakfast of microwaved eels and King Oscar Norway sardines. The sun’s well up there in a cool cloudless sky. A branch of the poplar out back has gone yellow already and half its leaves are on the ground. Wind’s coming northwest, just like fall. The other boats pissed out of the harbor three hours ago, today the Wooden Nickel is fishing late. The Shag Islanders have set a couple hundred zebra-stripe pot buoys off of Toothpick Shoal and they’re hauling them after everyone’s gone home. He’s heading out there armed like a helicopter gunship and hope to Christ he’ll catch them in the act.

  The old Chevy engine went from bad to worse. Harley tapped an eye into it and sank it for a mooring block, then sold him a little Ford straight-six that had been rusting in the grass for twenty years. She’d run better with a hamster wheel but what could he do, he had to get out to his gear. A lobster trap is like a woman, you don’t haul her up off the bottom now and then, she’ll gnaw herself to death. By the time he got out to his fishing ground they’d laid a minefield of zebra-stripe buoys that stretched southward towards Nigh Shag as far as the eye could see. Fuck that. He nukes another eel for himself, changes his mind and slips it into Alfie’s dish. Going out at this time, eight-thirty, when everyone else has been fishing since sunrise, who knows when he’ll be getting back?

  He can’t help slowing down as he drives past the window of Yvonne Hannaford’s Wharfside Art Gallery, it’s full of Sarah’s sea glass, big sign in the bay window:

  ABSTRACTIONS

  MOBILES AND SCULPTURE

  SARAH PEEK LUNT

  OPENING AUGUST 15 4:30

  WINE & BRIE

  All that fucking money and they don’t even know how to spell beer.

  Art Pettingill’s got the Bonanza up to the wharf already and he’s shoving hard-packed lobster crates on the dock as fast as Albert can weigh them in. “I had too many goldarn lobsters,” he shouts. “Had to quit early or we would of sank.” Art’s a true believer, he’s got the Mormon Rock station going full blast, that’s all he listens to. He wouldn’t come out with a swear word if one of his twelve-dollar lobsters reached up and bit his dick off. It crosses Lucky’s mind that Art’s fishing success might be related to his faith in God, but he lets that one drop into the bilge of bad ideas. Plenty of atheistical bastards catch big fish. Besides, the Bonanza’s sporting a bullet hole in the port windshield, few feet on the other side and it would have ended up in a Christian brain.

  “Hey Art, you putting some speed vents in that windshield?”

  “I picked up one of them new stripe traps down south of Toothpick Shoal, just to see what they was using for bait.”

  “Hope you killed a couple of them bastards.”

  “I did not. Reverend Pingree addressed the matter Sunday and he said to turn the other cheek and that’s what I intend to do.”

  “Then you ain’t packing?”

  “I am not packing nothing,” Art says. “The Good Lord will provide enough for all. Besides, they’re down on your end of the ledge. Har har.” Art laughs like a fucking walrus, climbs stairs like one too, the way he snorts through his mustache and drags his three-hundred-pound body up one step at a time, you’d think the Good Lord gave him flippers instead of arms and legs.

  Lucky’s helping old Albert roll a bait barrel down the gangway when Clyde Hannaford comes limping down the outside office stairs like something’s wrong with his leg. He’s holding a box. “Lucky, I got your radio back.”

  “Finest kind, Clyde. I ain’t got no money to pay for it.”

  “Hell, Lucky, your credit’s always good with us. Ninety-four bucks’ damage, and I’m not making a nickel off it. I’ll show you the receipt straight from Neptune Electronics. For that price I could have sold you a new one that would have got all the channels.”

  “I like the old one, thanks.”

  Clyde looks down at the gun case. “Those pirates giving you trouble?”

  “No Clyde, just thought I might spot a deer out there. What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “Nothing. My foot fell asleep at the computer.”

  “Jesus, Clyde, you got a hazardous occupation up there. Your insurance cover you for that?”

  “It doesn’t. It doesn’t cover Rhonda anymore either.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just a point of information.” Albert the baitboy, who’s about sixty years old, is stopping close by with his ear hanging out. “Carry the man’s bait over to his boat, Albert,” Clyde snaps. “He’s running late.”

  “You got any other information?” Lucky says.

  “I hear they near
put a bullet through Li’l Nort, out by Toothpick Shoal.”

  “They ain’t very good shots, then. Li’l Nort’s a hard target to miss. What’s he doing out there anyway? He ain’t got the boat for that.”

  “Slicing off pot warp, that’s what I hear.”

  “Jesus. They take a fucking shot at me, they’ll remember it.”

  “Don’t kill them all,” Clyde says. “They could improve the local economy.” Under the tinted glasses Clyde’s eyes look like a couple of squirts of gullshit.

  “You ain’t saying you’re going to do business with them son of a whores?”

  “Free enterprise,” Clyde says. “Those Shavers are highliners. Ever seen the trucks they drive? They bring in three hundred pounds a day. They’ve been lugging it all the way to Sweeney’s Seafoods in Norumbega, might as well let it pass through Orphan Point. Our school needs a new roof, our roads have more potholes than Bosnia.”

  “They’re taking them lobsters right off my fucking ledge.”

  “Then you better go protect them. Better take care of your stern-lady too, it’s a jungle out there. The world is changing, Lucas, the old boundaries are coming down.”

  He gives Clyde the finger and backs her out sharply under a cloud of screeching seagulls and blue smoke from the old Ford, pleasure craft scattering out of his way. Fuck sailboats. Fuck kayaks. He opens the throttle and heads for one black-haired yuppie kayaker that looks just like Clinton’s boyfriend George Stepopotamus, then swerves at the last moment and pisses right through the school of them, only his new six-cylinder wake is so small they don’t even notice him go by.

  Ronette’s wearing a pink T-shirt from the Burnt Cove Oyster Farm with a ripped-open neck that’s falling off one shoulder and a big open oyster over each tit. She’s got cutoff shorts and Nikes like they’re going on a picnic, not to haul lobster traps and maybe digest some lead over the territory of Toothpick Ledge. Those slick brown legs would look pretty bad cut up with birdshot. Or worse. She swings down the ladder and over the starboard rail as Ginger performs her new trick of jumping off the pierhead right onto the wheelhouse roof.