HARLEY HUNG ON TO the Wooden Nickel a week longer than he promised, so she’s not ready till September eighteenth. He can’t sleep at all the night before. He dreams of Clyde Hannaford’s Ram-charger parked in his garage between the Lynx and the ATV, wakes up, swallows some heart pills with a half shot of 101, then goes back to the same dream. He slips out of Ronette’s bed and walks the wobbling length of the trailer to the built-in couch on the far end and watches an old NASCAR rerun till almost 2 a.m. Then he turns it off and walks back down the hall to wake her because it’s time to head out. His head scrapes the dotted soundproofing of the trailer ceiling and his shoulders brush the fake-birch veneer walls on either side. The floor rocks like a deck. Soon as he wakes her, she stumbles into the bathroom and kneels down without even closing the door and throws up into the head. She’s a real fisherman now, seasick on land, cast iron stomach out to sea.
“Quarter past two,” he calls in. “Don’t take all day in there.”
Looks like a winter night outside, clear black sky above with the moon going down over Corey Prentiss’s dog fence and a mist coming off the road that will mean fog after daybreak, then it will scale up after a couple hours in the sun. She’s out of the bathroom now, getting her boots and oilskins on. “Going to have to borrow a pair of yours before long,” she says. “Can’t do the snap on these things.”
He heaves the last six oversize traps onto the bed of the GMC and they’re over in Riceville by ten past three, listening to Midnight Country all the way. Harley’s not there yet, but the Wooden Nickel’s floating proud and high on the float under the dock light, with a note wedged onto his useless radar screen.
1 oldsm engine reblt $ 2500
1 shaft 2’ bronze usd
1 strat pipe exast
clean engine etc tunup
new wood mount shims
hoses instal
1 Hydroslav haulr usd hoses pump instal
$ 3800 PARTS
$ 700 LABOR
$ 4500 PAID CASH
“So can’t I add right,” she says, “or ain’t we supposed to have five thousand left?”
He casts the lines off the float and says, “You sound like the tax auditor. Some other expenses come up, didn’t have nothing to do with you.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Mystery Man. I been out here every day with you side by side, bad days and good. I’m putting you up in my house rent-free. I got a right to know what become of the ten thousand, same as you.”
“Why don’t you ease off with your right to know and let me hear what this engine sounds like now we got the new shaft.”
“I’ll give you the new shaft,” she says, “if you don’t talk to me about the extra cash. I’m going to be needing some of that myself. I should say we. Me and this kid. We are going to need money. If it don’t get invested in the boat it should go to us.”
He throttles her up to 1500 to drown the noise. The Riceville channel beacons are silhouetted by a green predawn glow forming over the open sea. Beneath the glow, right where they’re heading, the offshore fog bank rises like a wall of ice.
They’re just spotlighting the Riceville entrance buoy when a fifty-foot stern trawler comes out of the dark right at them smelling of marijuana and illegal groundfish, and pulling a trawl of seagulls through the air. No lights. “They ain’t giving way,” he says to Ronette, who has gone silent. “And I ain’t neither.”
He flips the spotlight in their eyes and swings to starboard so the two hulls come within pissing distance but don’t hit. Two silent Riceville bastards in the smoky wheelhouse, dark as Arabs, staring straight ahead while their stern wave breaks over his bow section. He gives them the finger and yells, “Assholes!” but the term is buried in their wake.
“They ain’t going to see your finger in the dark,” Ronette says. “You ought to install a light on the frigging thing.”
“Thought you wasn’t talking.”
Finally they’ve got an exhaust hot enough to light a cigarette. He tamps out a Marlboro and gives her the first hit. She pours herself a cup of coffee from the thermos. He grunts and she pours him one too. They’ve cleared the channel and are headed out past the Virgins off to the eastward and the Bishop and the tall white birdshit-covered rock known as the Bishop’s Dick. The greenish dawn is changing to dark orange over the mist and a cloud of gulls flies off the Bishop to follow them out, though they keep their distance cause he’s still carrying the bloody wing. Ronette breaks through her anger and throws them a fistful of redfish guts.
He runs her up to 2200 on the tach. The 307 pulls like a locomotive compared to that little flathead six, she won’t win races but she’ll carry them twenty-five miles out on the North Atlantic Ocean, and when the day is over she’ll get them home. Even in the swells the new V-8 with the three-bladed H&H prop is taking them out at a steady fifteen knots on the loran.
Passing the Riceville flasher, the reborn Wooden Nickel throws enough spray to wake up the old blackback on the solar panel and send him gliding off into the fog. He locks the helm and puts on the new Tracy Byrd.
With calves like that you gotta be a cowgirl
They don’t make calves like that in town.
She reaches for the tape control and shuts it off.
“Hey. I’m listening to that.”
“You listen to me for a change. I want to know about the five thousand bucks. We’re going to have bills coming up. I ain’t insured, you know.”
“You can get a midwife for a couple hundred and get it born right in the trailer. That’s the way Danny Thurston did it. Five hundred total and the kid was fine.”
“Lucky, we ain’t going to have a midwife and we ain’t going to have it in the mobile home. Dr. Hyman says I’ve got complications, I’m throwing up too much. You know how much that kind of stuff can run?”
“You kidding? Hospital’s got a mortgage on my heart.”
He turns the throttle up a notch, leaves the cloud of gulls behind in his wake. The new V-8’s smoothing out now, getting acquainted with the shaft and wheel, cutless bearing’s settling so she doesn’t shake so much. “Smell them Japanese lobsters all the way from here.”
“About the five thousand,” she yells. “That would be what I’m going to need.”
“I gave it to Kristen. I ain’t like you. I got other mouths to feed.”
“You gave your daughter five thousand bucks?”
“College,” he shouts back. “It ain’t free.”
“You gave our money to her? Has she been out here with you day after fucking day, so far offshore the radio don’t reach, baiting and setting these huge traps pregnant to pay off your advance? How could you?”
“That money came off of my boat. Kristen’s my flesh and blood, raised in my own house.”
“Ex house. Lucky, I don’t know what that girl told you, but she’s driving a brand-new convertible. Reggie Dolliver was hitching a ride, he ain’t got a license, your precious darling picks him up in a Corvette and drives him to Norumbega with the top down. Now, somebody’s got to be lying. Either she ain’t telling the truth or you ain’t. Did you give her our five thousand for a car?”
“Wasn’t no Corvette, it was a Mustang. You couldn’t look at a Corvette for six thousand bucks.”
“See? You did, you bastard, you spent our kid’s birth money on a car.”
He throws the Marlboro butt over the side and throttles her down cause the new shaft is starting to shake some in the seas. “Ain’t none of your business,” he says. “It’s my fucking family.”
She takes his free hand and holds it against the front of her oil-skins the way she used to in the old days, but lower down. The new bump in the middle is getting bigger than the other two. “That’syour family,” she says. “Right in there. Family is whose bed you’re sleeping in. Family is who took you in when you got thrown out. Them others is history, same as your old fucking ancestors you’re always yelling about. They’re dead and gone. You get an impulse to buy something, buy it for us.”
He tries turning the music up again and this time she lets him. She lights one up for herself off the exhaust and leans her back against his back, looking the opposite way.
Now I’m a guy and she’s my girl and we live on the farm
We spend the day, making hay, out behind the barn
With the V-8 in there, cruising at fifteen knots, the sun’s just a fogbound yellow ball on a horizon that’s only a hundred yards away. He passes the last of the local Riceville traps with their old-fashioned glass toggles and moves into deep water so the fishfinder goes blank, eighty, ninety fathoms under the keel, farther than she’ll reach. It’s over an hour before the sounder comes up to fifty and starts flashing again, meaning they’ve picked up the north end of their new ground. All his life he’s fished so close to the Orphan Point boats he could hear them take a leak over the side, now he’s twenty miles from the nearest human being. Life is different out here, big fog-colored birds that probably don’t lay eyes on dry land from birth to death. He’s got a circle of maybe two hundred feet of visibility on the water, though straight up above there’s a clear September sky with the day’s first sunlight cracking through. He looks for the Day-Glo lemon buoy, should be shining through the surface fog right about here, loran’s sounding off, the depth is right, he’s just where he should be. But the buoy’s not. Nothing but three or four seabirds adrift on a scrap of timber, purplish-gray water far as he can see. He whacks the loran with the heel of his hand and it blinks off for a second, then reads the same numbers when it comes back on. That first one was the only buoy he punched in. The rest of them he set on a course south-southwest down the ridge, about a hundred yards apart. He steams south for a couple minutes while the bottom shoals up to twenty-five fathoms. This is where he set four big ones close together, but there’s nothing here either.
“Ain’t been any storms,” he says. “Don’t know where them christly traps could be.”
Ronette’s got the binoculars and she’s sweeping the fog line off to the southeast. “I think there’s something way off there.”
“They ain’t nothing off there, cause I didn’t set no traps down there. I laid the string off to westward along the shoal.”
“No, Lucky, look.”
He turns the wheel and steams over. At twenty-five fathoms there’s a snarl of three Day-Glo lemon buoys twisted together with the handles in three different directions like a propeller.
“What the fuck.”
She hands him the gaff but they’re twisted so tight he can’t untangle them.
“What are you going to do, Luck?”
“I’m going to haul all three of them bastards and see what’s going on.”
He waits for a down swell and hooks the snarl of pot warp over the rail cleat. The new Hydroslave hauler strains like a weightlifter, but it just heels the boat down till she sucks green water over the starboard rail, three traps are too heavy to haul at once. She hands him the long-handled rope knife and he feels the warps to see which is the tightest and cuts it free. “One more fucking ghost trap, four or five big bastards chewing themselves to death.”
The cut line spirals off from the others and disappears. He throws a few more turns on the pot hauler and eases the other two close to the surface, the rail back down to the water with their weight. One trap, ripped halfway across the top, has scooped up a load of bottom mud and stones. The other funnel is ripped right through and another big rock’s in there, the two of them must weigh five hundred pounds submerged.
No way he’s going to untangle the two warps, traps are ruined anyway, so he takes the rope knife and cuts them free. The starboard rail jumps up from the relief.
The sun’s scaling the fog up some and he can see the next buoy, back where it’s supposed to be, so he steams up, slips it over the davy block and around the drum. Twenty fathoms of water and the Hydroslave sucks her off the bottom like a loose tooth. Ronette’s peering down in the water watching it come up. “Nothing wrong with that one.”
They haul it over and there’s two jumbos inside, covered with deepwater barnacles and squirming with hunger, all claws intact. They’ll run eight pounds apiece, at eight bucks a pound that’s about a hundred thirty right there. They get the double bands on them and they’re in the well.
“Look at that, Lucky, they’re trying to crawl right up the side. I feel sorry for these big ones, they could be pretty near human.”
“They was dumb enough to get caught, it’s their own fault.”
“You don’t have no sympathy for nothing, do you?”
“Look at them lobsters close, Ronette. Look at that fucking water. It’s twenty-five fathoms down there, freezing fucking cold, you ain’t a hard-shelled bastard they’re going to eat you alive.”
They haul a dozen more traps and drop another eight godzillas into the live well, then Ronette drops her bib straps to peel her sweatshirt off and puts in a Trisha Yearwood classic.
Well, I’ve got a steady job that pays enough
A pretty good car that don’t break down much
He pulls a Rolling Rock out of the ice box, bites the cap off, and gives it to her for the first sip with the foam drooling over the top and running all over her hand.
“Remind you of something?” he says.
She sticks her tongue out at him, then uses it to lick the foam off of the bottle neck. “Don’t remind me of nothing. I ain’t that kind.”
She slips the orange oilskin bib down so she’s just wearing a T-shirt with the neck ripped down to the Nike sign. She leans back on the cooler so her face points up at the morning sun. A good-looking woman looks good pregnant, everything she had before and more besides. Then he looks over in the well at his jumbo lobsters shuffling around near the pump outlet, some trying to crawl up in the saltwater pipe to escape, others trying to burrow under each other like rocks.
“Hundred pounds of them bastards, we’re going to be pushing eight hundred bucks, just this one haul.”
“Four hundred bucks for Moto, four hundred for your exes.” She holds the Rolling Rock up so the green glass catches the sun and the inside looks like the sparkling depth of the sea.
“You should of stuck with Clyde, you’d be floating around the hot tub now.”
“Clyde would of gave me the whole ten thousand and then some. Cheap bastard, no wonder your wife threw you out.”
“How come you’re out here then? Freezing your ass off, can’t see a hundred feet, cold black water, and all the traps fucked up.”
“There’s one or two reasons, but I ain’t going into them till after lunch.” She’s getting her sandwich out of the lunch pail. “Jesus, I’m starved all the time, I’ll be a blimp before this is over. It don’t come off, neither.” She switches to “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes” on the Country Legends tape. She always puts that on when she’s got something in mind. Works too, same way a dog hears the can opener. He fastens a trapline to the anchor bitt while she finishes her sandwich, then follows her down below. She’s got one leg out of her orange Grundens before her feet hit the cabin floor.
These days, she likes to do it with her clothes half off, one leg in oilskins, the other sticking out warm and bare. The Nike shirt pulled up to her shoulders, bra unhooked, nice round pregnant tits swinging like jellyfish as the boat sloshes in the ocean swell.
Sometimes she’s too much for him and it’s over in a minute, but this time she’s cool and slick as a sea cucumber, he feels he can rock in the crosswaves forever. Then she throws her eyes wide open and pushes him up off her with both hands on his shoulders. She pulls her head back so he’s forced to look her in the eye and listen. “You can’t do this with nobody anymore.”
“Hell,” he says, “you ain’t that far gone. We don’t have to stop yet.”
“Nobody else. I mean it, Lucky. I’m going to be fat and ugly, but even so you got to promise you ain’t going to do this with nobody else. Your womanizer days are over, you understand?”
She’s crying while she says this. Big drops sp
lash down on the blue nylon comforter she fetched out of Clyde’s house when she went back to get her stuff.
His dick has already shriveled and popped out, it’s curled up like a brine shrimp, so they might as well talk. “You afraid I’ll be going back to Sarah? She calls the deputies if I drive past on the road.”
“Don’t make no difference if it’s your wife or whoever. You cheated and lied on her when you was starting up with me, how am I supposed to know you ain’t going to do that again? I ain’t going to be your little honeypot at the Blue Claw. I’m going to be a fat old pig. How do I know you ain’t doing it already?” She’s pointing at his dick like it’s in the witness box. “That thing don’t tell me where it’s been.”
She dries her face off with the tail of her T-shirt but her tits are still staring at him like angry brown octopus eyes. “I ain’t interested,” he says. “I ain’t got time.”
She pulls the shirt down and pokes her free leg around trying to jam it back in the oilskin trousers. “You do, Mr. Lucas Lunt, and you know what’s going to happen to you? Clyde gave me a handgun, you know. I’m going to hunt you down and shoot you where it hurts. And her too. I don’t care if I have to bring the baby up in jail. Lots of girls do, no pricks giving you a hard time, and the medical care is free.”
Then, just to sternward, there’s an engine sound, not a lobster boat but a heavy Caterpillar eight-cylinder diesel turning a full-size three-blade prop, nice and slow. He puts his head up through the companionway. A big black dragger with its gear up is practically stopped just to sternward of them and the crew is staring like pirates over the port rail, every one of them with a shit-eating toothless grin.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he yells, “if it ain’t the god damn Trotts. You boys tired of fishing? You see anything you like?”
Anson Trott puts her in neutral and calls, “Picked you up on the radar, just checking if you was OK. Awful small little boat to be way out here. Didn’t see nobody so I thought something had happened.”
“We was below,” Lucky shouts. The Trotts change from their shit-eating toothless grins to big belly laughs, drooling tobacco spit, stomping on each other’s boots, flashing their black tongues. When Ronette pops her head out the companionway they close their mouths and start frigging around with their drag cable.
The Wooden Nickel Page 30