The Wooden Nickel

by William Carpenter

  “She’s built like a fucking buffalo. Just grazed the blubber, ain’t going to hurt her none.”

  Just then an official-looking dogshit-colored boat comes steaming from the eastward. Arriving just a wee bit late, the State Marine Patrol slows up and hits the blue flashing strobe. He empties the chamber on both guns, dumps the spent shells over the side and sticks the guns in the life jacket locker, then lights a cigarette to cover the gunpowder smell.

  The radio clicks on: WOODEN NICKEL, THIS IS ENFORCER. HEY LUCAS LUNT, THAT YOU? WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON OUT HERE?

  He steps to the middle of the cockpit, points to the antenna and throws his hands out, palms up, to signal his transmitter’s out. In a minute they’re alongside, two guys in olive uniforms, one old, one young, and he knows them both. Ryan Beal is an Orphan Point native, Wilfred Beal’s brother, he was playing cop and arresting kids when he was nine years old, whole family of righteous dickheads.

  Ryan Beal yells, “Hey Lucas, your radio out?”

  “It listens. It don’t talk.”

  “You ought to take a lesson from that thing. Har har.” Ryan says to the kid, “Looks like we might have a violation here.”

  Young Jason Reynolds stares like an owl at Ronette’s outfit, he doesn’t get to see much pussy in his line of work. Not caring for the smell of cops, she ducks down and comes back in one of Lucky’s oil-skin jackets that covers her like an umbrella tent. On top of the Enforcer’s wheelhouse their blue police strobe keeps flashing, though there’s nobody to see it for miles around.

  They put a couple of fenders over and tie up alongside. The afternoon chop sloshes the boats together like a couple of drunks. Ryan Beal steps aboard, followed by the kid Jason. They’ve both got the brown Marine Patrol uniform, green shirt, dogshit neckties to match the boat. Ryan’s dead serious as always but the kid looks like he wants to give Ronette the body cavity search, see if she’s carrying any drugs in there. They’ve both got notebooks and pencils and Ryan is snooping around the boat like he’s Dennis Franz on a homicide. First thing he sees is the bullet hole in the windshield. He flips his notebook open and starts writing notes. “Have a little altercation out here?” he says.

  “They was setting traps in my space, so we chased them off.”

  Jason, a tall skinny kid with a little black mustache and a weird deep voice like a radio announcer, says, “No one owns the sea.”

  Ryan says, “You carrying any weapons aboard?”

  “Just a little .300 Savage, to scare the gulls away.”

  “Got any other damage? Anyone hurt?” He looks at Ronette, who’s leaned back against the wheel in his big yellow Grundens jacket, listening. “You all right, miss?”

  “Bit shook up is all. Never had bullets pass that close.”

  Lucky looks over his shoulder to see what Ryan’s putting in the notebook but he can’t make it out. “They took out the radar too, that will cost me four or five thousand, windshield will be a couple hundred if I glaze it in myself. Took a bullet in the hull too. Write that down.”

  “You were cutting their traps, huh? That’s a violation. ‘Intentional damage to fishing gear in or out of service.’ Do any shooting yourself?”

  “We put a couple over their heads, after they knocked the radar and windshield out.”

  “And they took off.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t hit anybody? You didn’t damage the other vessel?”

  “Too far to see nothing. Soon as we fired back they took right off.”

  Ryan Beal turns to Ronette, who’s lighting one cigarette off the other and leaning on the wheel like she can’t stand up. “What about you, miss? You’re the waitress at the Blue Claw, aren’t you? You look like an observant person. Did you notice anyone hurt, any damage to the other vessel?”

  Ronette shakes her head silently like she’s deaf and dumb.

  Ryan Beal goes on: “We’re asking you cause we heard something on the scanner, somebody hurt out to the island. We was just wondering if maybe your warning shot might have come in a little low. Seeing as how it’s pretty rough out here.”

  “Might of been hard to aim,” the kid Jason adds. “I’d hate like hell having to shoot straight in a chop like this.”

  Ryan Beal writes something in his notebook. He says to Lucky, “You still living in your house?”

  “Course I’m living in my house. Where the Christ you think I live? You pass it every day going to work.”

  “Just wondering. Place got a vacant look. Just so’s we know how to reach you.” He measures the windshield hole with a lobster gauge, pokes his head below, hops up on the rail to check out the holes in the radar dome, one on each side where the bullet went clean through. “Let’s go, Jason, let these nice folks get back to fishing. We’ll take a run out to sea, see what the islanders have to say.”

  “Finest kind.”

  Ryan Beal turns to him. “One other thing, Lucas. We’re going to have to take your gun.”

  “Like hell.”

  “You want to see trouble multiplied by ten, you just try hanging on to that thing.”

  Ronette goes below for the .300 Savage and comes out holding it at arm’s length, barrel pointing straight up in the air. “That’s a good girl,” Ryan Beal says. He takes it and hands it over to Jason, who opens the chamber and smells it like a drug-sniffing beagle. “Been fired,” Jason says.

  “Course it’s been fucking fired. It ain’t brand-new.” They don’t ask for any other weapons, so he doesn’t mention the shotgun still left in the life jacket box.

  The cops keep their light flashing and throttle up due south, tearing a path right through a patch of Travis Hammond’s blue-and-white buoys, probably rip a few of them up, big government wheel wouldn’t even notice them. In five minutes they’re hull down and halfway to Nigh Shag Ledge.

  “You’re going to hear from them guys,” Ronette says. “They was both taking notes like maniacs, and the young guy was drawing pictures of the windshield and the radar. He was kind of cute too, for a cop.”

  “He looks like one of them perverts that would put the cuffs on you before he did anything. Besides, I thought you was already notched.”

  She wraps her arms around him in the old oilskin jacket that smells of gullshit and herring guts. He stays long enough to feel the shape of her body fitting around him in a different way, then he unsheathes the rope knife, gooses the antique Ford and steams over to slice another Shag Island trap.

  9

  RONETTE HAS TO WORK both breakfast and dinner shifts at the Blue Claw, so she can’t come with him to the State Fish-eries Board hearing at the Tarratine County offices, where he must show cause why his lobster license should not be revoked. He’s driving up there with his lawyer, Kermit Beal. At 8:30 a.m. Kermit shows up in a two-tone Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Explorer that still has the price sticker on the window. Thirty-three thousand, bit over the cost of a heart job.

  It is the height of the tourist season now, the Norumbega Road’s jammed with out-of-state Saabs, Lexuses, Range Rovers, BMWs, Volvos, humpbacked Mercedes Nazi SUVs. Kermit’s looking at his watch and swearing under his breath.

  “We ain’t due till ten,” Lucky says.

  “Know how I got this car?” Kermit Beal asks. Lucky swallows his heartfelt answer, looks straight ahead. “I got it because I have never been late to a god damn thing. Not since grade one.”

  “I was late all the time,” Lucky says. “I used to get up at three and go out fishing with my old man for four hours, and when the tide weren’t in our favor I’d miss the bell. One morning I reached the front door of the old Orphan Point High School around nine-thirty a.m. and just kept on walking and left her abeam. My old man was waiting at the dock like he expected it. I ain’t been in a schoolhouse since, that’s why I’m driving a piece of shit pickup and you’re tooling around in this. They probably still got me counted late.”

  “That’s a good one, Lucas. Thirty years late. And you haven’t done bad for yourse
lf. Up till now, anyway. He he he.” He ends up his laugh with a big slurp from the Eddie Bauer coffee mug.

  “You said them other guys been in already?”

  “Cyrus Shaver gave his deposition last week, he’s the one that was driving the third boat.”

  “That fucker fired the first shot, cause I decked him in the RoundUp.”

  “Maybe you should let me do the talking, Lucas, that’s what I’m hired for. Anyway, we have to go in there not knowing what the hell he said. He could have been lying through his nose, but it’s going to go better if your story squares away with his.” Meanwhile Kermit is tailgating this white Taurus that suddenly slams on its brakes with no warning and swerves off into a shop that sells old wooden lobster pots fitted out with glass tabletops. The big Ford Explorer almost drives on top of them. Up on the dash, Kermit’s coffee tips over and spills down the defroster holes. Kermit says, “Damn tourists, we’re not going to make it.”

  “You could let me take the wheel, Kermit. I’d drop this thing in low range and drive over them out-of-state yuppies like the Car Crusher.”

  “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Lucas. Every one of those out-of-state cars is a potential customer. Guys like you couldn’t support their families without the tourist trade. You need them like I need criminals. Whip out your magic wand and whisk them away, we’re eating off food stamps, simple as that. Another thing, you need to get in a serious frame of mind. No smirking, no grinning. They see one shit-eating grin on your face, you’re toast.”

  “I thought you had it all arranged.”

  “What we arranged was that the state would drop the criminal charge because we have a case for self-defense. Lucky for you, these islanders don’t trust the system. They prefer to take the law in their own hands.”

  “They should still get that other bastard for shooting first. He didn’t have no self-defense. He also took a couple of shots at Norton Gross.”

  “They forget those little details when somebody gets hit. By the way, you know something? When I flew out to Shag Island checking things out, that woman you winged, Priscilla Shaver, she pulled me aside and asked if you were single. She’s got hot pants for you, that’s in your favor. They have some strange birds out there.”

  “You’d think a bullet in the shoulder would of cooled her down some.”

  “Some folks, Lucas, you kick them and they love you more.”

  “I got my limits,” Lucky says. “That woman could enter the frigging horse pulls up to the Riceville Fair.”

  “I’m not saying she’s Winona Ryder, Lucas. I’m saying she’s got a soft spot for you and that can work in our favor. You shot her, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I was trying to shoot that other bastard. He buried a hollow-point in my hull.”

  “Henry Shaver. I’ve represented him once or twice in the past. Not to mention his brother Cyrus. Know how Cyrus Shaver lost that middle finger?”

  “I got a few theories,” Lucky says.

  “Cyrus was in a jailhouse fight with his cellmate up in the Tarratine lockup and the guy bit it off and threw it in the toilet. He had it flushed down before Cyrus could dig it out of there. Warden had three cons comb through the septic tank but they never found it. Hey Lucas, you see that Audi go by?”

  “Missed it.”

  “I’m getting one of those soon as the ninety-eights come out. You can’t beat the Europeans for safety. Six air bags, what do you think about that?”

  Seven, he thinks, including the driver, but he doesn’t say it because it’s Kermit Beal that stands between him and a fisheries board that’s drooling to send him to the worm flats with old Luther Webster.

  Now it’s starting to rain, big thick heavy summer raindrops that fall like transparent birdshit across the Explorer’s dusty windshield. The lawyer puts the intermittent wipers on. Tourists are stopping in the middle of the road to raise their convertible tops.

  “They fixing to pull them other guys’ licenses too?” he asks Kermit Beal. “They was the ones that shot first.”

  “The other side’s claiming they sustained bodily injury, so they shouldn’t be punished.”

  “Well what the fuck? They shot my fucking radar out. There’s four thousand dollars right there.”

  “Believe it or not, Lucas, in the eyes of the law, a human being is worth more than a radar set.”

  “Don’t that depend on who it is?”

  “It’s the United States of America, Lucas, haven’t you heard? All men are created equal.”

  “They teach you that at law school? That’s bullshit. That son of a whore is a con. He’s a repeat offender. Three strikes and you’re out. Everyone knows that.”

  “He wasn’t the one you hit, remember? Didn’t you say you struck another member of that family over in the RoundUp? Remember to behave yourself in there, don’t say any more than you have to, try and look sincere, and for Christ’s sake try not to swear.Here, put these on.” He flips open the glove compartment and there’s about ten pairs of wire-rimmed glasses like the kind Sarah wears. Kermit pulls out a big pair and hands them to Lucky. “There’s no prescription to them, it’s just window glass. I put them on all my clients. It makes them look like they can read.”

  He looks at himself in the Eddie Bauer vanity mirror, and for a moment sees another life in there, Mr. Ph.D. Volvo with eyeglasses and bumper sticker:

  REPEAL THE SECOND AMENDMENT

  It scares the piss out of him. He takes the glasses off and puts them back in the glove compartment. “No thanks.”

  Kermit called him at 7 a.m. to tell him what to wear. “Dress like church, Lucas. They might take it easy on you if you look contrite.” So he put on his blazer and necktie even in the August heat. The tie’s got a bowline in it but it hangs OK. Kermit’s tan summer suit seems a lot more comfortable but he’s got the air-conditioning on anyway and all the windows rolled up, like driving down the road in a meat cooler.

  “Let’s get the story right, Lucas. After they deliberately put your radar out, you fired a warning shot to keep them away so they wouldn’t hit you again. It was unusually windy and choppy at the time, that’s the way to put it. Both boats lurched and the shot came in low. That’s how Ms. Shaver received her injury.”

  “No problem. That’s how it happened.”

  They’re in the hearing room facing the fisheries panel over a long wooden table in a room with barred windows and fluorescent lights. There’s a flag at each end — state and national — plus a few paintings of white-headed old farts along one wall and that’s it. The complaining officer, Ryan Beal, all dressed up in his shit-colored shirt and camouflage tie like he’s going to stalk some game, stands at one end of the table, by the state flag. The three panel members get up and introduce themselves like they’re interviewing him for a job. The shortest guy smiles and says, “My name is Robert Fulmar, I’m the acting assistant fisheries commissioner.” Fulmar turns to a woman about Lucky’s age who keeps pulling her skirt down to cover her knees, though with those piano legs she’s got nothing to worry about. She has a lot of nice gray-blond hair but it looks like a wig, and he can’t really get a clear idea of her tits because she has a very loose-fitting high white blouse. She looks nervous and uncomfortable, like she’s wearing somebody else’s clothes. Fulmar says, “This is Sherry Pintle, state representative from South Livery and a member of the House fisheries panel.” He finishes off with the third guy, a downstate lobsterman he’s never met but heard of, “Corliss Drummond, president of the Dead River fisherman’s co-op and member of the governor’s seafood council.”

  “Heard of you,” Lucky says. “Dead River’s just about on the border, ain’t it?”

  “Mile from the state line. Heard of you too. Your name’s on all the race results. Gas-powered.”

  “Finest kind,” Lucky says. This gets a little grin out of his lawyer. Kermit seems happy there’s a real fisherman on the panel, but his client is not so sure. This Drummond has the thick brown scarred-up hands of a lobst
erman but they’re sticking out from the sleeves of a politician’s dark blue suit. That’s another thing his old man used to say: Fishing and politics don’t mix. He can hear his voice over the old Pontiac six, first boat he can remember. Lukie, good fishermen don’t need no laws. Just leave them alone, they’ll regulate themselves. His old man couldn’t even read a comic book, but he was right.

  The panel members sag down into their heavy upholstered chairs. The two chairs for Lucky and his attorney are ketchup-colored plastic, the legs feel like they’re going to splay out and snap right off. Fulmar starts off by saying, “The reason for this hearing is to give you a chance to show cause why your state fishery license should not be revoked. It is a state policy that any use of firearms against another fisherman will result in a suspension, from ninety days to a full year. In the case of an actual wounding, such as we have here, there is no maximum and suspension can be indefinite.”

  The Pintle woman adds, “Violence escalates, Mr. Lunt, as I’m sure you are aware.”

  His lawyer, at two hundred fifty bucks an hour, responds. “I want to remind the board that the shot was fired in self-defense. Striking the victim was an unintended consequence of justifiably defending life and property. The Shag Island parties had already fired on and hit an Orphan Point boat belonging to Mr. Norton Gross, so there was good reason for my client to carry a gun while he worked his territory.”

  Fulmar says, “A warning shot might be understood, but a gunshot wound is something else entirely. Both the bureau and the fishermen have worked hard over the years to civilize the fishery and it has paid off. We have no interest in a return to the mayhem of former times.”

  Next they have Ryan Beal give his version of what happened. “First of all, a false position was reported on the VHF so we were taken twenty miles out of our way. Deliberately, if you ask me. The whole business could have been prevented if the coordinates had been right.”

  “That was them.” Lucky says, “My transmitter didn’t work.”