The Wooden Nickel

  The next bay’s got a silver Mercedes-Benz 450 diesel Hitler-mobile, and over beyond that’s a turd-brown high-lift Nissan X-cab pickup. The fourth one has a big white Mitsubishi Fuso refrigerated truck that just barely fits inside, looks like anybody’s clam truck. Must be what Moto uses for his sushi runs.

  As soon as they pull up, a stocky little Chinese guy comes out and walks around the front of the truck. He’s got a black sweatshirt on, sweatpants, and white running shoes. He sees the boys in the truck cab and busts into a big shit-eating Chinese grin. “Oh, these two. Carroll and Darrell.”

  “Kyle,” Darrell says.

  “Carroll and Kyle. Who is other gentleman?”

  “My old man.”

  Dead serious, like a Commie guard, the Chinese guy shines one of those little black flashlights right into Lucky’s eyes, then onto the Remington .30-06 in the back window, and back to Lucky again.

  “You sure he is father?”

  “What the fuck, Frank,” Kyle says. “Mr. Moto said it was OK.”

  “OK, OK. Park here. Leave keys.”

  Lucky pockets the keys and hops down. He wants to check out the Humvee in the garage but as he gets closer he hears a low growl. That must be where they keep the one-eyed dog. “Nice friendly place,” he says to Frank.

  Beyond the driveway a big low house glows out of the darkness as if it’s made from varnished teak. The path is lit by a double row of Chinese lanterns just like the ones they have at the My Lai restaurant, that’s probably Moto’s too. On the other side of the garage, stretching away from the circular drive, they’ve got a low chain-link fence surrounding an area washed by banks of orange lights like an illuminated playing field. “What the hell’s that,” he asks, “miniature golf?”

  “Croquet,” Darrell says. “Mr. Moto loves croquet.”

  Kyle and Darrell chat it up a bit with Frank, who gives them each a quick fake karate neck chop then walks over to the chain-link gate and lets them through. They call back to Lucky, “You coming in?”

  Beyond the chain-link the bright green croquet lawn looks like AstroTurf under the orange lights. He’s heard of croquet but he’s never seen the game: a square of green lawn set with colored stakes and little wire hoops. Wilfred Beal is standing with a croquet club beyond one of the end stakes. Wilfred looks up from his croquet hammer and says, “Hey Lunt. Didn’t know you played.” He’s teamed up with a woman in a tight red skirt and high heels, looks like a gogo girl from the tit club in Tarratine. The heels look like they’re going to sink into the putting green, but they don’t. Fake grass.

  Then a short grinning heavyset Chinese guy in a white alligator golf shirt comes up and puts his arm around Kyle’s shoulder. “This is your boy?” he says to Lucky. “He’s good boy. He’s working for me, no problem. I am John Moto.”

  “That your Humvee out there?”

  “I used to have Range Rover. The Hummers, they kick Range Rover butt.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s under the hood?”

  “Eight-cylinder GM diesel. Three hundred horsepower. Come back in daytime, Mr. Runt. I take you drive around.”

  Moto has a long silent look at Lucky’s gloves, then takes his elbow like a midget realtor, showing him the property. They walk away from Kyle and Darrell Swan and the croquet field, to a round white table next to a rock-bordered fishpond behind the garage. “You are fisherman,” he says, “these are my fish.” A spotlight on the back of the garage lights up the pool when they get near, must have a motion sensor. The pool’s surface fills with big slow orange-and-white goldfish, eyes goggling out of their heads, gulping for air bubbles and swishing their fins around like they’re going to drown.

  “Them things breathe air or water?”

  “They are imperial goldfish,” Moto says.

  “They good eating?”

  Moto laughs the way people laugh when the subject is money. “That would be expensive even for sushi bar. They are three thousand apiece and they die like fries. Shipment every week.”

  “You get all this off of sea urchins?”

  “Businessmen cannot be too specialized. Uni is hot today, other fish tomorrow. Uni season closes, demand gets very large.”

  “I hear you’re dealing off-season. Ain’t there a law against that?”

  Moto laughs his little rich-Communist laugh again. “Highest law,” he says, “is law of suppry and demand.”

  Frank the bodyguard shows up with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, an ice bucket and a couple of glasses. One thing you have to say for liquor, it tastes just the same whether you like who you’re drinking with or not. He fills his glass till the liquid’s bulging over the rim. Moto puts maybe a quarter ounce in his, clicks it against Lucky’s. “What we drink to?”

  “Supply and demand,” Lucky says.

  Without touching a drop Moto says, “Big demand now is jumbo lobster. In my country they are eager to impress. Greater lobster, greater the man is. It is like how do you say it? Pecker.”

  “Five and a half inch is the limit,” Lucky informs him.

  “So small for American man?”

  “Not the pecker, the lobster. What we call the carapace. It’s got to be under five and a half inches or we throw them back. That’s a big fucking lobster, go four, four and a quarter pounds at premium price, that’s twelve bucks at the dock. Past that, they’re breeders. We got to conserve the stock for our kids.”

  Moto refills his glass but doesn’t touch his own. “Your son, I observe, is not a lobsterman.”

  “He’s got a chance,” Lucky says. “He ain’t out of high school yet.”

  “I am wondering maybe we do business,” Moto says. “You know, your fine son speaks of you. I would buy five-pound lobster and up.”

  “Don’t take them that big. Besides, there ain’t a dealer in this state that would buy the catch.”

  “I have place to bring in,” Moto says. “Nice quiet spot, no question ask. Five pound and better. I pay eight dollar a pound. Also roe.”

  “We don’t take eggs. Wouldn’t be no lobsters left if we did that.”

  “Roe is thirty dollar extra. Very important. I have customers. It is also roe stiffing the pecker, not here perhaps but in my country.”

  “If it gives you a hard-on there, it ought to do the same thing here,” Lucky says. “We’re all human beings.”

  “We believe we are different species, Mr. Runt. For example, you were once monkeys. We were not.”

  “That may be,” Lucky says, “but I ain’t doing it. Them big deep lobsters, you see, them’s the breeding stock. They’re like the oil wells, dry them up and we’re all running on empty.”

  “Perhaps you are running empty already, Mr. Runt. Mr. Beal tells me your bad fortune. You wish to help out lobster fishing but they take fishing license away. I am a man of strictly business. As I see it you owe them nothing. Your fine son Darrell believes the same, as we have our saying, you receive shaft, you owe nothing back.”

  “I ain’t geared up to take oversize lobsters. My trap heads ain’t big enough, besides, they’re wood, they’d get stove up out there. My engine’s a piece of shit. Sternman I got’s a woman, she ain’t ever been offshore. I ain’t equipped to even think about it.”

  “Money no object,” Moto says. “I advance my fishermen all their gear. Come with me.” They go through a back door of the garage building into a big storage space behind the turd-brown Nissan. Stacked up against one wall are eight of the biggest wire lobster traps he’s ever seen, twice the size of normal ones with a head-end opening eight inches across. He fingers the escape vent in the parlor end, a two-pound lobster could swim out of that without brushing the sides. The voice is barely a whisper now, coming from inside the shadowy trap. Lukie, them big ones is the future. Moto’s taking his elbow, turning him from the oversized wire traps to the black Humvee gleaming in the fluorescent garage light. “Work for me, you will have line of credit. Five, ten thousand, what you need to start up.”

  “Ain’t legal to
bring them fuckers within twelve miles of the shore.”

  “As I say, Mr. Runt, I have nice quiet cove.”

  “Can’t be anywheres near here.”

  “Fifteen mile east, I have old wharf in Whistle Creek. Urchins come in all time year, why not robsters? Your fine son can show you where it is.”

  “I know where it is. My wife’s uncle used to operate that wharf, years back, then it silted up. Can’t get in there now.”

  “Moto Enterprises, we have dredge channel.”

  “Finest kind, Mr. Moto, you got it all figured out. You got the wrong fucking man, that’s all.”

  “We see, Mr. Runt. I am good judge of fishermen. Also, sometime in robster trap perhaps package appears.”

  “I ain’t running no drugs.”

  Moto puts both hands up, backs away like he doesn’t touch the stuff either. “Not now of course. But who knows? Future is rong rong time. I call you Rucas?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anytime, Rucas. Night and day.”

  Frank the bodyguard’s back in the garage starting the reefer truck, must be time for the milk run. Moto gives him a friendly handshake, takes the Johnnie Walker and turns away, leaving his quarter ounce untouched. Lucky knocks it back.

  Back at the croquet field there’s no one left around. Frank the bodyguard is picking the varnished hammers up, wiping off the midnight dew before he stacks them in a white shingled garden shed. “Your boys take other ride,” Frank says.

  The tall garage doors are powering down as he climbs into the GMC cab and starts her up. Big Country 105 is playing Tanya Tucker.

  She’s got everything that a girl could want

  But she needs more, and she can’t stop

  When he gets to the Blue Claw it’s dark except for one small window where Fat Charlie is in there prepping tomorrow’s menu. He’s got Bon Jovi on, his eyes are closed, his face grinning and nodding like he’s jerking off into the clam chowder, a specialty of the house. No Probe in sight, not even Doris’s brand-new Buick. The town wharf is quiet. Out in the harbor somebody’s got his running lights on. Too early for lobstering, it’s probably Noah Parker going out beyond Shag Island on a pilot run. Fifteen miles offshore, Noah and Phil Parker will rendezvous with a tanker bound upriver for Tarratine, thousand bucks before the fucking sun comes up. Everyone’s licking somebody’s asshole, it’s hard to find a man doing a clean day’s work.

  He slows down passing his own house, where the lights are out, all three garage doors closed up tight. Alfie could be right in there on the oil spot where he likes to sit and wait for the pickup to pull in. He tries to think of his wife sleeping inside, but he can’t picture it without him in there too. He’s out in the truck idling, staring up at his own bedroom till he believes he’s in there, out in his truck and in the old brass bed with her at the same time, it’s fucking crazy and his heart starts slamming in his chest. He reaches in the glove compartment for a handful of heart pills, then drives back past the unlighted windows of Lurvey’s Convenience & Video and takes the right turn up Deadman’s Hill. Halfway up is the Peek house, in Sarah’s family since the Revolution, only now there’s a Saab in the driveway with New Jersey plates. Peeks can’t afford it anymore. He comes to the cemetery entrance, U-turns and parks facing downhill. The sprinkle of streetlights and yard lights outlines the sleeping town like a radar screen. The only life on the pitch-black harbor is the four-second red flasher on the Sodom Ledge bell and the ten-second white sweep of Split Point light. On one side of him is a Mazda pickup with a guy and his girl trying to work things out over the stick shift. On the other side, maybe a hundred feet away, his old man’s lying there quiet in the ground and beside him is his grandfather, Merritt Lunt, all dressed up so you won’t know his pecker got chewed off. There’s a question on his mind but he can’t ask it in a way they could answer because they’re both of them stone cold fucking dead.

  With the headlamps off, his night vision picks up a faint flash on the horizon where one kind of black shades into another, must be the Gannet Ledge bell, fifteen miles out. Canyons out there a hundred fathoms deep, big blind lobsters that have never tasted sunlight. They don’t let him fish for his own country, might as well sell them to the Japanese.

  He honks the horn and sends the couple beside him scrambling for their clothes, but the stones over Merritt and Walter Lunt don’t move an inch. He blasts down the hill past the Peek house, and just to hear the sweet sound of his own engine keeps her in second gear till he’s back on the Sherman Road and heading through the dark hackmatack woods towards Moto’s place, past the Zen stones and the one-eyed dog to the four-bay garage with one door open and a couple of Asians leaning on the bumper of the black Humvee.

  Moto’s still up, the only figure on the lighted croquet field. “Why you take so long?” he asks.

  “Had to empty out the truck, make room for the new traps.”

  He peels out of Moto’s circular drive with a heavy load, sixteen oversize wire traps under a canvas tarp, you could stuff a human being inside one of those cocksuckers if he scrunched himself up. When he comes to the highway he turns eastward, speeds up past the dead RoundUp and doesn’t stop till he’s reached the Split Point Road and pulled his truck in front of the trailer where Ronette Hannaford lives. The windows are dark. A weird dog barks once across the street then goes silent like it’s been choked. Jesus. He shuts the lights off, kills the engine, and slumps down to sleep behind the wheel.

  10

  THE ALARM RINGS in the middle of the night, he wakes out of a dream of eel nets and he doesn’t know where the sound’s coming from. He takes a whack on his side of the bed where the clock’s supposed to be but it’s not there. His palm cuts through the empty air and he almost falls off the low, tilted mattress. Way over on the other side the beeping blue-green digital numbers read 1:30. He reaches across the unknown body beside him and puts his whole hand around the clock and squeezes until the beeping strangles and dies. When he rolls back on his own side the room seems to move with him and he thinks for a moment he’s aboard a boat, but it’s only Ronette’s trailer which is so fucking flimsy you can feel the floor bend when you breathe.

  He’s been asleep three hours. Night before they watched tag team wrestling on TNN. Pretty soon they were grappling on the trailer floor themselves, it was almost eleven before they moved to the bedroom and collapsed. Ronette likes to do it while wrestling’s on, she’s got one eye on the tube the whole time. Last night it was the Undertaker versus this new guy Goldberg the Rastling Rabbi, the Undertaker’s sitting on the Rabbi’s butt, twisting his leg back, Rabbi’s screaming and yelling, Ronette’s underneath him thrashing like a halibut, it drives her nuts. He doesn’t give a damn, if that’s what wets her appetite, what the hell.

  Later she wanted another crack at it because she couldn’t sleep, but his heart was still pounding from the first one and he didn’t want to die in a strange house. He swallowed a handful of heart pills and went to sleep.

  Now in the dark he reaches back under the covers groping for Sarah’s familiar papery skin with the bones and ribs underneath, and finds instead a bedful of damp warm flesh coming awake, pulling him towards its mouth like a starfish, ready to do it again.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Ronette. We got to get out there. It’s twenty-five of two.”

  With the old Ford six in there, it takes three hours to reach the offshore fishing grounds.

  Her face is blue from the clock light so it looks like she’s underwater, then she pulls down the covers. She’s got nothing on, her belly’s getting bigger, her arms and shoulders are bulking like she’s been shooting steroids along with Darrell and Kyle. Her nipples look like blue saltwater chocolate in the clock light, he wouldn’t mind chewing on those for a few minutes, see what happens, but by sunrise he wants to be twelve miles out to sea.

  She sees him looking and pulls the covers up. “You’re going to leave me, Lucky. I used to have a figure but now I’m a frigging whale.”

  The
y’re on the back road passing the blacked-out welfare shacks of Burnt Cove, two barrels of Stoneport redfish in the truck bed smelling so ripe it’s making the dogs howl in every house. For two weeks he’s been dressing himself out of Uncle Vince’s closet. He’s wearing long underwear and two sweatshirts under his oilskins because they’re fishing twenty miles offshore in a gray endless September fog bank cold as a witch’s tit. Just thinking of it makes him reach into the glove compartment and wash down his morning pill with Old Mister Boston cherry brandy, a hit for himself, a hit for Ronette, and a hit for old Luther Webster when they pass his road, just the right taste at 3 a.m.

  Snugged up against him with her knees drawn up on either side of the transfer case lever, Ronette Astbury lights him a Marlboro so she can steal a couple of deep forbidden drags. With her other hand she searches for a twenty-four-hour station. She finds Vince and Dolly way at the far end of the dial, lots of static but a great duet:

  Goodbye, please don’t you cry

  ’Cause we both know I’m not what you need

  She turns it up. “Did you know Dolly Parton wrote them lyrics? Bet you didn’t.”

  “I’d like to have a picture of Dolly Parton writing that song.”

  “What for? She don’t write naked.”

  A big fall-colored bird whirrs low across the headlights into the roadside brush: partridge. Just over the Riceville line he turns on the Whistle Creek Road, then stops short for a doe and two late-summer fawns standing right in the road. The doe freezes in the headlights, the little ones scamper off. All by itself his hand reaches back for the .30-06 racked across the window behind his head.

  “Lucky, for Christ sake. Hunting don’t start till November.”

  “Always deer season after dark. That’s what my old man used to say.” The doe breaks out of her stare and follows her fawns into the alder brush before he can get the gun out. Her eyes are still in there watching as he drives past but she’d be gone before he could get out of the car. “If you was paying attention we would of had her. You could of shot right out of the window. She was waiting for it so hard it hurt.”