The Wooden Nickel

  Kermit Beal whispers, “Hold it for now, Lucas. Anything you say will make it worse.”

  The Marine Patrol cop goes on. The whole time his hand’s resting on his revolver butt and he’s looking in Lucky’s direction like he’s authorized to shoot him in his chair if he feels like it. “We heard the call for Orphan Point vessels on the scanner, so we arrived on scene at fifteen-twenty hours and found the suspect boat with several bullet holes but no injuries and a freshly discharged weapon on board. You will find that in the evidence display. The accused claimed they had fired a warning after receiving gunfire that pierced the radar antenna and the windshield. Examination of the accused’s radome showed damage consistent with a bullet passing from bow to stern. A thirty-caliber hollowpoint was also found in the hull of the accused. The other vessels departed the scene southward and we pursued. We followed them to Shag Island and ascertained that a thirty-four-year-old adult female, Priscilla Shaver, had received a gunshot wound in the incident and was taken to a local residence since there is no medical facility on the island. The victim refused to be interviewed without a search warrant so we returned to Stoneport base. Subsequently the victim declined to testify or press charges, so we have turned the matter over to the board.”

  “Thank you, Officer Beal,” Fulmar says. Then he turns to Lucky. “Mr. Lunt, you may now take the opportunity to speak for yourself, or have your attorney enter your version of events, as you wish.”

  He gets up and starts to say, “We was just minding our own business out on Toothpick Ledge . . .” when Kermit Beal gives a secret little tug on his blazer hem that pulls him into the chair. The lawyer stands up and clears his throat. He looks like a near cousin of Ryan Beal no matter what he claims. They’ve both got the same Adam’s apple full of shaving cuts and the same little black mustache blending in with some serious nose hair, but Kermit’s got more weight on him from having a desk job. “My client has asked me to speak in his behalf. This being a clear case of self-defense, these islanders were admittedly encroaching on traditional territory that has been handed down in his family for over fifty years. They deliberately set traps on the southern tip of Toothpick Shoal while my client was clearly present in his own boat with his buoy colors prominently displayed. By this provocation, the victim and her family members had shown disrespect for the community codes that have civilized the lobstering profession. The wounding was accidental, the victim recognized this by refusing to press charges, my client will pledge to carry no firearms or alcohol...”

  Lucky grunts out loud at this point. He can’t help it. He never agreed to go dry, that’s just Kermit Beal’s plan to make him an altar boy. They all look at him but he just sits lower and heavier in the splay-footed plastic chair and sucks his tongue.

  “. . . or have any contact with the victim or her family.”

  The downstate lobsterman breaks in: “What if the Shag Island gang keeps setting traps on your client’s territory? He willing to pledge he won’t retaliate?”

  “My client promises, if his license is renewed, not to commit any acts of violence, even if provoked.”

  Drummond looks directly at the defendant with one eye squinted like he’s aiming a gun at him. “You go along with that one, Mr. Lunt? Them islanders keep setting traps on your ledge, you’ll pledge to accommodate and not fight back?”

  He’s just about to kiss their ass and say yes, sure, I ain’t got nothing against bending over and sharing my old man’s ledge with them cocksuckers, then he gets an image of setting and hauling side by side with the Black Pussy or whatever it is, on the ledge his old man’s father staked out under sail, no radar, no bottom machine and no loran, fishing not only for himself but his kids and their kids after. Merritt Lunt would shit in his coffin if his grandson went along with that.

  With an infinite suspension resting on the question, he looks right at this fat hake with his thick fisherman’s neck puffing out over the white collar and answers, “I can’t do it.”

  “You might want to think that over,” his lawyer quickly corrects. “I believe we may be able to reach a compromise.”

  “I thought it over. And I still can’t do it. I ain’t hauling alongside them bastards on my own family grounds.”

  “Is your client stating that under the same circumstances he would react in a similar manner?”

  “I am.”

  “I think that will be enough from the defendant,” Fulmar says.

  Outside, while they wait for the verdict, the lawyer puts his arm around Lucky’s shoulder like he’s shipping him off to prison and says, “What are you going to do if you can’t go lobstering?”

  “I’m going to law school,” he says. “I’m going to get me one of them Eddie Bauer Explorers and a couple of them Airbag sedans.”

  Before the next minute is up the door opens and Ryan Beal motions them back inside. Fulmar and the fisheries panel are sitting down while Lucky and Kermit Beal stand on the opposite side of the table, Ryan Beal beside them like a guard. Beyond the panel, in the free world outside the barred courthouse window, a long charter bus roars past in a cloud of diesel exhaust, big sign saying cadillac tours, full of old ladies pale as skates.

  “Mr. Lunt,” Fulmar begins. “I’m going to make this short and to the point. The panel has heard the sworn statement of an eyewitness, Mr. Cyrus Shaver, and has read the written version of what Mr. Ryan Beal reiterated here. Because the state construed this as an act of self-defense, and the victim did not press charges, a grand jury was not convened. However, since the bureau has a zero-tolerance policy toward violence in the fishery, the panel has issued a suspension of your lobster license for a period not to exceed five years, along with a five-thousand-dollar fine.”

  “You’re taking my client’s livelihood,” Kermit Beal says. “And his children’s too. If Mr. Lunt is kept off the water for five years, his territory is gone forever.”

  “The state has excellent retraining programs for men leaving the water. The retraining center is right down the street, in the state office building. Take my advice, though, Mr. Lunt, and don’t go in there carrying a gun.”

  There’s two cars in the driveway when Kermit Beal stops the Explorer at Lucky’s house to drop him off. One is Sarah’s navy blue Lynx and behind it is a brown-and-white police cruiser with a Tarratine County Sheriff’s star on the side door, cage wire between front and back seats, shotgun barrel poking up over the Motorola. His GMC’s in the open bay of the garage.

  Kermit looks the scene over like a hunter stumbling on a whole christly herd. Big lawyer’s grin: “Looks like you got company, Lucas. Sure you want me to let you off?”

  “I live here, where the fuck else am I supposed to go?”

  “You can retain me again if you want, it’d be just another five hundred up front.”

  He jumps down and slams the Explorer door and walks between the two vehicles into the open garage door. They must be in there getting her stuff. She always blows things out of proportion. He’ll sit in the truck and smoke till they’ve had their fun.

  He’s just hauling his Marlboros out of the glove box when a brown-shirted deputy comes through the breezeway door, he’s got sweat all over his bald head and a beer gut drooping over his ammunition. In the opening, behind the cop, he can see the long vertical line where he tried to epoxy over the chainsaw cut. It looks stitched up like a surgical scar.

  Holding a big piece of paper, the cop walks past the snow sled and the ATV, right up to the open truck window and says, “Your name Lucas Merritt Lunt?”

  “No,” he says, “it’s William Jefferson Clinton.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, mister, or you’ll be right in the backseat with the cuffs on. Your wife here’s got a court protection order to keep you off the premises.”

  “The premises? These ain’t premises. This is my own fucking house.”

  “Used to be, mister. It ain’t no more. Judge Saperstein issued a restraining order on you. Domestic violence. You the one chainsawed that kitche
n door?”

  “My old man built it. I got the god damn right to cut it out.”

  “I got news for you, mister. You ain’t got any god damn rights at all.”

  He’s got his hand on his revolver just like Ryan Beal.

  “OK,” he tells the deputy. “Just one thing. I got my heart medication inside. I got to keep taking it or I ain’t supposed to be on the road. While I’m in there, I’ll grab some of my gear if I ain’t going to be coming back, then I’ll take the truck and leave.”

  “Do I look stupid? I ain’t going to let you go inside with your wife in there.”

  “I’ll be five minutes. She can stay with you out in the cruiser.”

  “OK, buddy. Five minutes. She ain’t to have no contact with you, it states right here. She stays in the vehicle with me.”

  He lights another Marlboro off of the first one while the deputy brings Sarah out to the car. At first she keeps her head down like a criminal on TV, then she stops the deputy so she can give her husband this long sad look like she’s the one getting kicked out of her family home, not him. He watches her mouth to see if it moves or tries to say anything but the thin pale lips stay tight as a razor clam. The deputy takes her arm and slides her into the backseat of the cruiser and she’s lost behind the cage wire and the tinted glass.

  “Five minutes. In and out. Judge Saperstein finds out about this, I lose my job.”

  “That’d be a shame,” Lucky says. “You’d have to go back to breaking and entering.” The deputy unsnaps the hammer flap on his holster and Lucky puts his hands up in the air and backs off, saying, “Hey. No offense.”

  In the upstairs hallway he walks past the painting of the original Wooden Nickel that she made for him when they were first going out, past Kristen’s bedroom with the university pennant on the door and Kyle’s with the Metallica poster covering a busted panel, straight through the breezeway attic to his wife’s studio above the garage. Both doors are open. Just as he thought. She’s already got a new piece under construction in the workbench vise, another half done beside it. One is a blue-and-white form, looks like a bird wing, framed in sharp splintery lead molding she hasn’t smoothed down yet. The other isn’t anything you could recognize, just a lead-framed sea glass panel, mostly greens and browns, old beer bottles tossed on the rocks before the nickel deposit law and worked over by the surf. Abstractions. He picks the blue-and-white one up in his right hand and feels the burrs of unfiled metal on the lead corners like the sharply filed teeth of a chain saw. He takes one long glance at it, gives it a last chance to look like something, then centers the force of his whole body into his right hand, imagining it not as a hand with skin and bones but a cold green crusher claw that collapses the wing just like Alfie pulling a nuthatch off the suet block. He’s not even surprised when the blood jumps out between his fingers like bright red bird blood. He pulls the other piece out of the vise with his left hand and does the same thing, this time without even giving it a second look. Like the pincher claw, his left hand is weaker and the piece is more of a cube, so it is hard to crush and he has to bang his fist down on the spruce plank of the workbench to finish it off.

  He hears the cruiser’s horn bleat down in the driveway, she must be eager to get back to work. It’s hard to pry the lead and glass fragments out of the palms of his hands because they’re gouged in at several points, but he does it and lays the skeletons down on the workbench. They’re bloody but they’re not smashed enough. She hasn’t even got a decent hammer. He takes a pair of tin snips and bangs the flat end on the remains of her sculptures till there’s nothing left but a small pile of beach debris you could see on the tide line any day. That’s how they started, that’s how they’ll fucking end.

  On the way out, after raiding his side of the medicine cabinet, he detours through the kitchen and grabs an opened can of marinated cod hearts out of the refrigerator, just about Alfie’s favorite meal. While the deputy is leaning on his horn out in the cruiser, he dumps the cod hearts into Alfie’s dish and hears the quick padded pawsteps coming out from his bed behind the gun cabinet in the den. He could scoop Alfie up and take him, but he doesn’t. This is his home, he’s got a right to stay. He bends down to give the cat a couple of quick strokes that raise up its neck fur with static electricity and then dampen it down with blood. He grabs a pair of work gloves out of the hall closet so when he crosses the parlor he won’t bleed all over his grandmother’s braided rugs, they were her pride and joy.

  Outside, the afternoon’s starting to cloud up across the harbor, the sun dropping dark and mean behind the gold cross of the church on the other shore. The deputy has his parking lights on. Lucky steps up in the truck and lights another Marlboro with his gloved hands. He backs past Sarah’s Lynx, cuts his rear end around the cruiser so he doesn’t have to look inside, and heads into the road. In the mirror he can glimpse a figure passing from the cruiser across the yard into the front door. She’s moving back in now, the house is hers.

  He drives the back roads for a while, then heads for the Blue Claw.

  The Claw looks like a different restaurant on a summer evening. No more friendly three-hundred-pound lobstermen at the counter with their asscracks smiling out over their wallet chains. The coffee counter is now a latte bar for yuppie tourists with sweaters tied around their necks in case the night should grow cool. Doris has set the tables with flowers and candles and black-and-white checked tablecloths and every one of them has four Philadelphians with bibs on like big sunburnt children, grinning at each other over dead red lobsters and cowpiss yellow wine. He looks for Ronette through the porthole in the kitchen door. Fat Charlie Bonsall, the dinner cook, is in there blowing his nose on his apron. Doris is playing hostess in a yellow dress with little brown ships sailing across it. She takes one look at Lucky and stands back from the cash register with her hand over her chest. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  “You ain’t seen Ronette, have you?”

  “Your sternlady’s back there getting her order. Take a seat at the counter, have one on the house. Ronette’s so busy tonight, all by herself cause Jessie called in sick, which she’s not. I’ll get it myself.” She pulls out a counter stool for him like he’s the food inspector. “You look like one of those serial killers, with the suit and gloves. That a necktie you got on, or a noose?”

  “I was up to the courthouse in Tarratine.”

  “I heard. You make out all right?”

  “They got my license.”

  “You’re not telling me they grounded Lucas Lunt. How long you been lobstering? Thirty years?”

  “Time don’t mean nothing to them.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “I ain’t thought that far, Doris. Maybe I could help Charlie there in the galley.”

  “I’m afraid Charlie takes up the whole space.” Doris brings him a shot and a microbrew, he didn’t even know they carried the god damn stuff. She puts the shot down on a little napkin with a red lobster on it inside a life preserver. The yuppie beside him stares at the work glove wrapping itself around the algae-flavored beer. Doris leans on the bar corner on his other side. “You know, with Ronette and everything, it feels like you’re family around here.” She looks down at his work gloves. “You need help or anything, don’t be afraid to ask.”

  “What do you mean, help?”

  “From what I hear, you could use a place to stay.”

  “Jesus,” he says. “It don’t take long.”

  “That deputy was setting in your driveway all afternoon, just waiting for you to come back from Tarratine. Everyone figured your wife would come back to claim the house. That art school’s closing for the season. She needs a place to live, same as anyone else.”

  “It ain’t hers.”

  “She raised two kids in there. Guess that gives her a stake, same as you.”

  Ronette comes swinging out of the kitchen in a low-cut black dress with gold ear hoops the size of mooring rings and her tits bubbling over like they’re the
Blue Plate Special. She’s carrying a platter of four lobster dinners on her shoulder. The tray’s so heavy she has to lean way over to keep it level so the melted butter bowls don’t spill. Each lobster has the tail and claws around the edge of the plate and the body sitting straight up in the middle. Their eyes bulge like they’re still looking around the trap for a way out. Back in the kitchen he gets a glimpse of Fat Charlie leaning his bare gut against the griddle, his stomach a road map of burn scars, cigarette hanging from his mouth, lining the lobsters up and whacking their tails off with a cleaver, three at a time.

  When she catches sight of Lucky at the bar with his microbrew and the Sunday clothes with gloves on, she almost trips. She puts the platter down on the tray rack and dishes the lobsters to a table of four skinny queers with gray ponytails reaching down their backs, giggling and whispering and patting each other on the back of the hand. Sweet Jesus, he didn’t think they ever reached that age.

  Finally she comes over and rests the big empty platter on the end of the counter. She bows her head for a moment like she’s too tired to keep it up, then gives it a shake and widens her kelp-colored eyes. “Lucky Lunt, what are you doing in here on the dinner shift? I thought they was going to put you in jail.”

  “Should of. At least I’d of had a place to sleep.”

  “Heard that too. Your wife’s back, you’re out. That’s what Doris said. Hey, why in hell you wearing gloves in here?”

  He pulls one of the work gloves halfway off and shows her the sliced-up palm.

  “Holy shit. You been in a fight.”

  “Just doing some housecleaning,” he says.

  The front door opens and four more yuppies squeeze in. All the tables are full and there’s people waiting at every seat in the bar. Ronette gives his bare hand a quick pat and pulls her fingers back caulked with congealing blood. “No shit, Lucky, I’d take off with you but I’m the only one on, and look at this place. You can’t even stay, the dinner customers have to have a place to sit. That’s the rule. No drinking if you don’t eat. Otherwise it’d become a dive. Take care. You need a place, you got my trailer key.”