The Wooden Nickel

by William Carpenter

  “Lucky, you planning on teaching this kid to jack deer?”

  “Don’t see why not. Kyle learned.”

  “Yeah, Kyle learned. And look at him now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean nothing, just don’t want my kid turning out like that.”

  The Whistle Creek Road comes to an intersection with a stop sign. He runs it, then the pavement turns to dirt. They’re almost there. “Ain’t nothing wrong with Kyle,” he says.

  “Nothing wrong if you ain’t planning on grandchildren.”

  “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That Darrell Swan’s the biggest fairy this side of Tarratine. Everyone knows that.”

  “You saying Kyle’s queer?”

  “You got to have your face rubbed in it?”

  He puts the cigarette in his mouth and the cherry brandy between his legs and backhands her right across the mouth: slap. He comes off with the feel of her teeth on the back of his hand.

  “Asshole,” she says. “You stop this fucking truck and let me out.” She’s wiping her mouth with her thumb, looking at it for blood. “Nobody gets to do that, not Clyde, not my old man, and not you.”

  “I ain’t letting you out. I can’t move all this shit by myself.”

  They come to the wharf and he stops. “Fucking asshole,” she says. “No wonder your wife moved out.”

  “I never laid a hand on Sarah. What the fuck you think I am?”

  “I don’t believe you. And supposing you didn’t, so what does that say about me?”

  She’s still got her fist balled up over her mouth but he takes it and pulls the thumb out of the fingers and looks at it. “You ain’t bleeding,” he says.

  She pulls away from him and opens the passenger door. “Let’s get them traps loaded and get out on the water. You ain’t fucking fit to be on land.”

  He stops under the single lightbulb on the corner of Moto’s ice shed and tips her face up so he can see the mouth. She looks just like she did the first day he saw her serving coffee at Doris’s, sad, wet-skinned, lips puffed up. Clyde must have slapped her around at home, her mouth always looked that way at the Blue Claw.

  He tries for a kiss but she pushes his face away. “Least Clyde had some money,” she says.

  “Just leave Kyle alone.”

  “You never gave a shit about Kyle. Why start now?”

  When he gets to Moto’s wharf there’s eight more oversize wire traps for him, hidden under a canvas tarp in case the law comes around. God knows who his source is, the things look like animal cages or prison cells stacked tier on tier in a con movie, nice and scrubbed. Old Luther’s going to be a career wormer now his last customer’s gone.

  They steam through the dark a half hour or so out of Whistle Creek while Ronette knits a tiny green-and-orange sock under the worklight, all that’s left of his old colors, then they enter the offshore fog bank and it’s like a blind man going blinder, they can’t see the bow from the wheelhouse. He switches on the used Apelco VHF he got off Harley Webster but they’re too far out to pick anything up. He tries the broken radar again but all he gets is the blank black screen, raster line going around like a searchlight in outer space.

  They scatter a gang of little gray sea-pigeons that whistle and vanish in the fog. They must be feeding on something, and where there’s something, there might be something else. He reaches in the bait barrel and puts a couple of ripe redfish on a hand line with a gang hook and passes the line over to Ronette. She puts her knitting down but she doesn’t pick up the hand line yet. “See this fog, Lucky? This must be what the kid’s seeing. It must be just like this.”

  “What are you talking about? It ain’t got eyes.”

  “That ain’t true, Lucky. I heard this woman on TV, she said they can start learning to read before they’re born.”

  “What the fuck? There ain’t nothing to read in there.”

  “They ain’t actually reading yet, it’s called pre-reading.”

  “Pre-reading? That’s the stage I’m at.”

  “Supposed to read to them even now.” Then she doesn’t say anything for a minute. “Or you can play them a book on tape. That works just as good.”

  “You’re on the clock,” he reminds her. “You ought to consider doing some work.”

  She takes the line and lets out a hundred feet and makes a couple of loops around the tow bitt in the stern. “We ain’t going to get nothing,” she says.

  “Eight knots,” he says. “Slow enough to trawl. Get a striper or two, might break up the macaroni and cheese.”

  “Don’t complain. You was living off cat food back in that house.”

  He feels a shiver on the wheel and looks back. The hand line on the tow bitt’s jumping around, then it pulls tight. “Come up here, Ronette, and take the helm.” He throttles down and cuts to starboard diagonally across his track to ease the strain on the light line, then hands the wheel over to his sternlady and puts on the canvas gloves. He brings the line forward, takes a couple of turns around the pot winch and hauls in a nice fat striper, maybe twelve or fifteen pounds, crazy god damn fish hit the bait at eight knots and doesn’t know when to quit. It flails around the platform till he can crack it a couple of times with the billy and jerk the hook out and lay it down in the ice box beside the beer.

  He spears another redfish onto the gang hook and throws the line back into the Wooden Nickel’s wake. “This next one’s going to be for Moto. He wants a striper for the sushi bar, he’s going to get one.”

  “He don’t own us.”

  “He’s going to. When we come in he’s going to be waiting with ten thousand in his hand.”

  “Yen?”

  “Dollars.”

  “Jesus, we ain’t caught that much.”

  “It’s an advance. We’ll get rid of this piece of shit engine, stick in a V-8, get the radar fixed, give the hospital a couple thousand so they don’t come after my fucking heart and take it back.”

  “Lucky.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to be needing something too.”

  All this time they’re steaming south-southeast at eight knots through a fog so thick he can just see a hundred-foot circle around the boat, white mist sluicing in the windshield vent and condensing on his face so his mouth fills with the cold and bitter taste of salt. He shouts over the engine, “Hey Ronette, you think there’s any planets with just water on them, no land?”

  “What are you talking about? You can’t have a planet with no land. What would you want with that anyhow, you’d never be able to get off the boat.”

  “Don’t sound so bad.”

  Twenty-two miles out, the swells rise slow and black from the open Atlantic, the air’s the color of a TV after the station goes off. She slips her oilpants on and he hands her the helm for the first haul. He gaffs the buoy and puts it around the old Pitts pot hoist, which can barely handle the heavy offshore gear. The motor pretty near stalls and the winch groans breaking the giant trap over the rail, but it’s got a nice big one in there snapping the air with both claws. “Fucking thing’s never seen light before,” he says. “It’s trying to bite the sky.”

  “It’s got to be nine pounds,” Ronette says. “I ain’t grabbing on to that one.”

  He opens the trap and picks the sucker out and throws it thrashing and biting into her arms. “Catch.” It snaps like an alligator and falls on the cockpit floor. Takes the two of them to subdue the huge bastard and cuff him with six thick green jumbo bands.

  The next five traps have nothing, then they get a couple more godzillas in the next one, bigger than anything he’s ever handled, the kind of lobster old Merritt Lunt used to haul off of Toothpick Shoal sixty years back, when the big ones were still inshore. One of them’s a huge breeder female berried up with a quarter pound of eggs. All his life he’s been conserving the lobster stock by throwing them back the minute he saw the eggs. Sustainable, that’s what Kristen calls it, somehow s
he got the gift of words. Thirty fucking years on the water and nothing to show for it but a bad heart and a mortgaged boat, then he defends his homesite like anyone would and there goes his occupation, just like that.

  He says, “Ronette, scrape the eggs off of that one, will you?”

  “Do it yourself. No wonder them pro-lifers don’t like abortions.”

  “It ain’t a human being, for Christ sake. Can’t you tell the fucking difference?” It was one of the Ten Commandments, Lukie, you see them christly eggs, you throw her back, but he makes himself do it because his old man’s dead and right now that Isuzu-powered cunt’s out there setting her traps on top of a shoal staked out by Merritt Lunt. With a hundred percent government support. He takes his hunting knife to the oversized female’s underbelly and scrapes every last frigging purplish-green egg into the margarine tub. Five ounces at least, that’s sixty, seventy more right there. They throw the big mother in the saltwater well and Ronette skewers a bag of redfish into the trap.

  After they haul another dozen they wrap the last warp over the bitt and kill the engine and stop for a Rolling Rock. By now it’s hot and the fog’s scaled up so they can see a half mile at least. Not that there’s much to see. No friendly lobster boats, no fields of traps, nothing but the long seal-colored ocean swells and the invisible territory of his new deepwater ledge, marked by his new buoys. Ronette sprayed them Day-Glo lemon trying to match her car, Bunny’s Marine didn’t stock chartreuse. She unfastens the straps of her oil-skin bib and leans back for a Marlboro against the piles of coiled yellow hundred-fathom warp. He takes pity and gives her a sip of the Rock and a hit off his Marlboro. She smokes with one hand and with the other one rubs her belly like she’s already rubbing the kid’s head. “Got a little lobster trapped in there.”

  “Be the first god damn lobster that can read.”

  He feels the throb of twin GM diesels resonate in his own keel before he sees anything. Then a big white party boat comes out of the haze traveling north to south and swerves off to westward to avoid the Wooden Nickel and its field of Day-Glo traps. Dark shapes of passengers line the leeward rail, they’re bundled against the cold, orange life jackets on the kids, binoculars and cameras around their necks. The captain veers back closer so his clients can capture the fishermen on film. He smiles and flips a large-diameter upright middle finger wearing a neoprene lobster glove. Take those snapshots home and blow them up, Merry Christmas! Love watching the natives going about their work.

  He can read the stern now:

  BALEEN STALKER

  Norumbega

  It’s a fat double-hulled catamaran with a twisting motion in the swells, her white sides streaked with yellow trails all the way to the waterline from passengers heaving their breakfasts over the wind-ward rail.

  As soon as they pass the Wooden Nickel they speed up again, then slow down abruptly just inside the fog line and stop. This time it’s Ronette getting the binoculars out.

  “We ain’t got time,” he says. “Only thing they’re doing is throwing up. Them whales must like it, that’s all they bait them with.”

  “Take it easy, Luck, you ain’t even done your beer. Besides, they got something over there.”

  The other boat’s only a couple hundred yards south of the ledge, probably in sixty fathoms. He can’t see anything at first, then a shape breaks the dark surface between the boats, heading their way, looks like a porpoise at first but the back keeps rising and it’s a whale all right, what did those Indians get for whalemeat, dollar a pound? Figure it out, a man could live a year off one of those. The Baleen Stalker turns sharp to port and comes back to follow it, forcing the god damn whale to swim right through the field of traps and surface again close to the Wooden Nickel’s bow. Its breath sounds like an oversize porpoise and for a second his nose catches a septic-tank smell that cuts right through the bubbling stench of the redfish barrel.

  “What a racket,” he says. “They got to be carrying sixty people, they probably get fifty bucks a head, three thousand bucks a morning, then he goes back and gets another boatload of suckers after lunch and never takes his hand off the christly wheel.”

  “I’d pay fifty bucks,” she says. “I love to see it when that big fin comes up.”

  “Sure it’s big enough for you, Ronette?”

  She puts the beer on the starboard rail and grabs both his suspenders, pushing her little belly up against the crotch of his barnacled orange apron till she almost shoves him backwards into the lobster well. “We go for the big ones,” she says. “But we don’t let them push us around.”

  His eye catches the color fishfinder with a huge blue mass moving along the six-fathom grid line like a submarine. “Son of a whore’s right under us.” They go over to the port side and watch the fin poke up in the light chop just beyond the shoal. Couple of strange-looking black seagulls wheel in towards it and fly low over the water. The whale-watcher can’t follow it cause they don’t want to snag up on all the buoys and toggles. “Ain’t that cunning. Damn thing’s using the traplines to keep that tourist boat away.”

  “They ain’t that smart, Lucky. They’re just animals. I heard their whole brain was the size of a walnut.”

  “Thought it was a Volkswagen.”

  “That’s their heart, Lucky, their heart’s the size of a Volkswagen, it’s the truth, I heard it on TV.”

  He looks at her hard and thinks something but it won’t come up in words. The whale surfaces again about half a mile away and the whale-watcher goes after it, but they have to arc way out around his trap zone and by then it’s gone into the fog. He goes below and gets the .300 Savage out of the chain locker and puts it up on the rack where it belongs. She says, “Thought you wasn’t supposed to carry a gun aboard.”

  “These here are federal waters. Only law out here is the Bill of fucking Rights, and that says you can have all the guns you want. Second Commandment.”

  “Jesus, anything moves out here, you have to take a shot at it.”

  “You move around plenty and I ain’t shot at you.”

  “You better not, either, cause I been known to shoot back.”

  They haul another twelve traps and it’s almost eleven. The sea breeze is already kicking up whitecaps so they have to stop. You can’t frig around with a heavy trap in these seas, you’d get your rail swamped in a minute.

  They’ve got nine big ones, pretty near five hundred bucks’ worth, along with close to a pound of roe. Not bad. He turns the new stereo on but it’s too far offshore to pick up High Country, so he puts in the new Tanya Tucker tape.

  Every now and then

  You feel like jumping

  Off the deep end

  The Ford six’s exhaust doesn’t have the heat to get a flame off of, so he lights his Marlboro with a Bic and gives her the first puff. The fog’s lifted some more so they can see the Baleen Stalker half a mile south, stopped dead in the water, they must have found more whales. “Know what I heard?” he says.

  “What.”

  “Kristen was telling me this. This whole fucking ocean out here used to be dry land. Six, seven hundred feet higher. This ledge we’re over would of been a hill.”

  “No shit? Was there any people back then?”

  “Indians maybe. Indians, bear, dinosaurs, Christ knows what.”

  “Nothing but lobsters down there now.”

  He revs the engine up and puts her in gear and sets the loran heading back to Whistle Creek.

  Mr. Moto takes Lucky into the little office over the bait shack and pours him a cup of green tea before they sit down to business. Moto’s got a computer, a satellite phone, and a little black bank safe bolted to the floor. Out of the safe he gets a brown envelope and hands it over. “Ten thousand advance. I will take half boat price till you make up.”

  “My old man wouldn’t of took this.”

  “You are not old man. You are alive. Old man is passed away. But you are not wanting so much? Five thousand maybe?” His little short-fingered hand reache
s to draw it back.

  “Hey. I need a decent engine, radar, new hauler. Them oversize traps are heavy. Got a mortgage payment too.”

  “But you not living home. Fine son tells me.”

  “Don’t matter. I got the home equity for the boat.”

  “How it is going so far?” Moto says, pouring him another cup of seaweed tea. Then a big Chinese wink: “Not too ronely?”

  “Plenty of fucking whale-watchers, we had fifty people staring at us the whole time.”

  “They were seeing whale?”

  “Just a small bastard, thirty feet maybe. Size of my boat. You got any customers for whalemeat?”

  The envelope has been sitting on the tea table all this time, but Moto pushes it in his direction. He’s still wearing his orange bib oil-suit and he slips the envelope into the apron pocket. Out the window he can see the Wooden Nickel and his pregnant sternman swabbing the striper blood off the platform while Moto’s dockboy, Curtis, shifts lobsters around in the cars under the float.

  Moto says, “Why ask more trouble? Whale is U.S. crime.”

  “We’re criminals already, look what the shit we’re bringing in. Might’s well go all the way. The Indians shoot them bastards with an elephant gun. I heard they got twenty thousand dollars off of one fucking whale.”

  Moto stands up and looks out the office window at Ronette scrubbing the deck down in her orange oilskins. “Evlything have price.”

  “Another thing, I thought you was going to bring that Humvee down so’s we could try it out.”

  “Tomollow I bring Humvee. You fish tomollow?”

  “Every three days,” Lucky says, “long as it ain’t blowing. We’re on a roll with them godzilla lobsters, no sense quitting now.”

  He drops Ronette off in the driveway of the Split Cove trailer he now calls home. Ginger’s right there pawing the screen door, she doesn’t come anymore on these offshore trips. “Know something?” she says. “I ain’t contesting Ginger. We been swapping that dog off every week since April. Next time I take her over to the wharf for her weekend with Clyde, I ain’t going back to pick her up.”