The Wooden Nickel

  “OK, Lucky,” Anson Trott yells back. “Guess you was. Ain’t hauling, are you?”

  “Hell no, I’m doing government research now.”

  “That’s what we heard. Which government?” Har har. Anson throws his cigar stub into the space between the boats.

  “Hang on a minute. You boys been towing that drag across my gear?”

  “Ain’t no scallops on that ledge. We’re fishing ten miles south of here, just heading out and thought you was in trouble. Didn’t know you had the lady aboard.”

  “I catch anyone dragging this ledge, I’m going to fucking shoot them.”

  In the shadow of his wheelhouse Big Anson Trott’s got both his hands raised to the sky. “Believe you will,” he shouts. “They say you’re pretty handy with a gun.”

  Anson turns back to the helm and revs the diesel while his crew members elbow and goose each other all around and go back to work. The exhaust farts out a black storm cloud and they take off to the west-southwestward, swinging far over to avoid Lucky’s field of traps. There’s so much fish scum and birdshit dripping down the transom you can barely make out their name under the huge winch drum:

  RACHEL T

  Shag Island

  “Them bastards,” she says. “They can’t let nothing drop. That’s the thing about the god damn ocean, there’s nothing to do out here but remember.”

  Last time he set another string half a mile southward on a sixteen-fathom rise, it’s the shallowest shelf around. Steaming over there, he can feel the sea heave up beneath them where the deep swells get lifted by the ledge. The loran and fishfinder both say they’re right on top of it, but the whole field of them has disappeared. “Bastards,” he says. “Five traps gone to hell. Right here.”

  He’s got the waypoint alarm set and the loran’s beeping away.

  “I remember,” she says. “This is where we got the ten-pounder.”

  Another diesel sound, this one twins, then the squat white form of the cat-hulled whale-watching boat steams directly at them out of the lifting fog. The cat passes close enough to see her rail full of tourists throwing up, the crew running frantically from mouth to mouth with plastic bags. “Hey, look at them, they’re all pregnant!” Ronette says.

  The whale-watcher makes a sharp turn to port and the twin engines boil the water as she throttles up. “They must be on to something.” Soon as he says it, they both spot a whale on the close, misty horizon, tipping its tail and jamming down into the water headfirst, just like the Titanic.

  “I ought to drive one of them boats. Easy money, don’t get your hands dirty.”

  “Cute little passengers,” Ronette says.

  “Cute little passengers puking all over you. Just my type.”

  “That’s about all I do these days, ain’t it?” She’s fastening the oil-skins now, pulling the bib over the Nike T-shirt, that’s it for romance.

  “Guess it’s back to work,” he says.

  No answer.

  The fog has scaled up to a hazy September sunlight and it’s easy to spot the next yellow buoy bobbing like a fluorescent sea duck on the long green swell. This one’s way off station too. It seems OK as he slows alongside and gaffs it, but he grinds her till the hydraulics smoke and she won’t come up. “Something’s onto her.” He jams on the winch brake to lean over for a look. Same thing. There’s three or four warps snarled up like a bucket of fish guts, strands coming out all over and a sunken buoy wrapped up in the whole mess. He grinds the hydraulics down till water spills out of the live well and sloshes over the rail. “She ain’t going to come.”

  He looks up and sees the silhouette of the Rachel T, trolling along slow and easy as a drag queen. “Cocksuckers,” he says.

  The high-pitched double diesel of the whale-watching catamaran comes straight towards the Wooden Nickel on a collision course. Ronette says, “Look!” The cat’s chasing a whale with its fin out of the water, herding the fucking thing at them till it tips up and waves its tail in the air not more than a couple hundred feet from their bow and dives straight down. There’s something looped around its tail.

  “You see the tail on that thing?”

  “It had a rope around it, Lucky. You couldn’t see that?”

  “I seen something.”

  “If you can’t see a god damn whale maybe it’s time for glasses.”

  “I got glasses.”

  “You got TV glasses. You bought them at the Rite Aid. That frigging thing had a yellow rope on its tail. You know how one of them tail fins was cut into like a V-notched lobster? Well, the notch had the yellow line in it and around the thick part too.”

  “Anything attached to it?”

  “I couldn’t see.”

  Meanwhile, the whale-watcher boat crosses the Rachel T’s bow and disappears in the green smoky offshore mist. Lucky unhitches the tangled warp off his winch and heads south-southwest where the Rachel T is still slowly dragging along the fog line.

  “We’re going out and have a talk with them bastards.”

  “Who?”

  “The Hot to Trotts, that’s who. Them lines been fucked up by someone. Ain’t no one else fishing this deep but them.”

  “No, Lucky. Don’t you see? It’s the god damn whale. It was your own yellow poly around the fin.”

  “Then get the gun out, Ronette. I’m going to shoot that son of a whore.”

  “You can’t, Lucky. They’re protected.”

  “The fuck they are. We’re twenty-five fucking miles offshore. It’s every man for himself out here.”

  “Lucky, I think they’re protected everywhere.”

  “They ain’t protected from me.”

  They steam due west to the southwest tip of the ledge, where there’s a string of undamaged traps that produce another eight big ones for the saltwater well. Plus the biggest starfish he’s ever seen, clinging on to the outside as they brought it up. He holds the star up by the arms, pretty near as far as he can stretch. Ronette says, “I never seen one that huge.”

  “They feed on nuclear waste, that’s what Wallace Eaton heard. You ain’t going to want to be around when them bastards start coming inshore.”

  She rears right up on the washboard where Ginger used to sit. “Jesus, Lucky, don’t let it get near the baby. Throw it back.”

  They watch it pinwheel slowly down through the darkening sea layers till it seems to glow of its own light, then it disappears. They steam northward towards the waypoint for his last two strings, towards the center and high spots of the ledge, but there’s no sign of them. No toggles, no sunken warps, nothing. Half the traps he set on the new grounds are wrecked or missing in the space of a week. The only clue’s a loop of yellow pot warp that he couldn’t even see.

  Coming into the Old Cove via the Whistle Creek entrance, it’s so shallow he feels the prop churning up the seabed, stern wave looks like raw sewage as it breaks on the harbor ledge. Right in the narrow dredged channel with the sounder reading under five feet, he sees an outboard roaring out towards him, then throttling down hard when they see who it is. Ronette, up on the bow as lookout watching the bottom, yells, “Hey Lucky, it’s your own flesh and blood!”

  Kyle and Darrell Swan have their shirts off and their open boat full of diving gear and a six-pack of Budweiser on the thwart, enough tattoos between them to start a freak show. They pull alongside and Darrell Swan hangs on to the Wooden Nickel’s rail with one arm.

  Lucky says, “You been to Moto’s?”

  Kyle’s got his hands on his hips, big dive knife on his belt, grinning skull tattooed across his shoulder. “Moto ain’t there, Curtis is buying.”

  “Didn’t know it was urchin season yet.”

  “Ain’t no seasons in Whistle Creek. What I hear, there ain’t no size limits neither.” Kyle peers at the jumbo lobsters in the saltwater well. “Old Grandpa Walter, wouldn’t he love to see that.”

  He throws Ronette’s blue quilt over the well cover. “Walter Lunt’s dead. Merritt Lunt’s dead. Them days are gon
e forever. They ain’t coming back. Man’s got to feed his family, he does what he has to do.”

  “Can’t see’s you been feeding us.”

  “He don’t mean you,” Darrell Swan says. He’s still hanging on to the starboard rail, scratching the snake tattoo on his forearm. Must be a new one, it looks raw.

  “Oh yeah,” Kyle says. “I hear there’s another family on the way.” He looks at Ronette, smiling in a slantwise goofy way that’s the image of Walter Lunt. Directly to her, not even glancing at his old man, he says, “Guess I ought to say congratulations. You caught a big one.”

  She puts her hand on her belly like she just finished off a turkey dinner. “Don’t say nothing you don’t mean, Kyle.”

  Kyle stands up next to Darrell Swan on the edge of the Metallica.The two of them on one side pretty near bring the rail under. Ronette reaches over and pats their shaved skulls like a couple of tame seals. “Give me a smoke, would you? Your old man won’t let me have any.”

  Kyle reaches down, pulls a pack of Camels out of his shirt and hands one each to her and to Darrell Swan. “Matter of fact,” he says, “we’re moving to Halifax.”

  “What the fuck,” Lucky spits. “Who said you could do that?”

  Ronette moves over so he’s facing the three of them together. “Jesus, Lucky, what do you think, he’s ten?”

  “Going to Halifax,” Kyle repeats. “We made some money off Moto, now he’s drying up and it’s time to see the world.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, drying up?”

  “Know that Humvee he had? Repo company came for it.”

  “No shit? Thought he had money up the ass.”

  Ronette asks, “What are you going to do in Halifax? They got urchins?”

  “We ain’t going to be fishing,” Darrell Swan says. “We’re going into international trade.”

  Kyle says, “Darrell’s got an uncle in the pharmaceutical business.” Darrell gives him a sharp swat on the shoulder, right on the skull tattoo. Kyle slaps him back. “He’s my old man. He ain’t going to say nothing. He works for Moto just like us.”

  “Catch you running drugs,” Lucky says, “I don’t care where the fuck you are, I’ll come after you and kick your ass. That ain’t what boats are for.”

  Kyle and Darrell both let go the rail and push off a bit, so the Metallica drifts ten or twelve feet off to starboard. Kyle says, “You can’t do nothing anymore. You ain’t got a house, you ain’t got a license, you ain’t even got fishing grounds. Only ass you’ll kick will be your own.”

  Ronette comes over, leans closer to Lucky, offers a drag off of the Camel to calm him down. Over on the skiff, Darrell Swan’s mocking her, he leans up against Kyle the same way, offers him the butt of his Camel, big shit-eating grin on his face. Ronette says, “Remember, Lucky, your heart. They’re just kids.” She stretches up and gives him a wet kiss on the cheek, trying to distract him. Out on the water Darrell Swan gives his son the same big kiss like a mirror image. Ronette pushes him towards the wheel and tugs it to starboard, away from the outboard skiff. “Come on, Lucky, Curtis ain’t going to wait all day.”

  “Just a minute, I ain’t settled with that little bastard.” He backs off from the skiff to get a running start, puts her in gear, revs the 307 and spins the helm to starboard so she points right at the midships of Kyle’s dive boat.

  Darrell Swan takes a look at the big white bow bearing down on him and lunges for the controls. The Merc outboard digs its prop to the channel bottom and douches the green Whistle Creek buoy in a plume of septic-colored spray. But Lucky’s on their tail with the Wooden Nickel, yelling, “Halifax, bullshit. I’m going to sink them little cocksuckers on the spot.”

  The throttle’s pinned, flames are gushing out of the 307’s exhaust, and he’s on track to climb over the Metallica’s stern and fucking sink them with Ronette screaming, “Jesus, Lucky!” and the rocks flashing on the color fishfinder like huge red spikes. All of a sudden Darrell turns the skiff sharp westward out of the dredged channel and planes through the shallows along the rocky shore. Lucky turns to follow but the one-fathom alarm’s bleating like a smoke detector and the whole boat shivers when the keel grazes a boulder and glances off. He throws her in reverse to kill way, the stern wave climbs the transom and floods over the washboard onto the platform. He starts the pump and backs out of there with the sounder showing four-foot readings all the way back to the channel cut. “Sneaky little fucker.”

  “What’d you expect him to do, sit there and let you run them down? Your own kid, for Christ sake.”

  Beyond them, the Metallica’s still skimming across the Whistle Creek tideflats with those two tattooed son of a whores diving into the cooler like it’s a family barbecue.

  “Fucking degenerates, they don’t give a shit. I don’t know who I’m doing all this for.”

  “I do,” she says. “So let’s bring in them lobsters and get paid.”

  Moto’s fish wharf looks a hundred years old, it’s got planks falling through, the gangway’s twisted, the pilings and crossties gilded with piss-colored algae and hanging with brown folded sheets of kelp. The bait shack and icehouse are frosted with gullshit like a wedding cake. The little office where Moto does the paperwork has a pane with a bullet hole in it and another pane boarded up, you’d never know he kept a computer in there and a safe with probably fifty thousand cash. Fucking Chinese, they’re smarter than they look. He keeps the place looking bad so no one will notice. And the guy he has working for him as dockboy, Curtis Landry, is such an insane son of a bitch he could walk into the grand jury with Moto’s outlaw transactions and nobody would believe a word. Curtis is a short guy but he’s built like a mooring stone and he’s an ex-con like Reggie Dolliver, only he did more time. He killed a guy once and served five or six years for it, and they still have him living in some kind of halfway house up in West Stoneport. Moto has to pick him up every morning and drive him to Whistle Creek. Maybe that’s why Moto trusts him, cause the state’s still got its hand around his neck.

  Curtis doesn’t move a muscle when the Wooden Nickel pulls alongside the float. He stands there with his thumb up his ass and lets Ronette jump off and handle the lines. He’s watching her close enough, though, as she bends over and fastens the stern line. They probably don’t get much up at the halfway house.

  He says, “Hey Curtis, you want to hand over one of them crates? We got some counters in here.”

  Curtis spits some black chew into the lobster car under the float. “I ain’t paid to move crates.”

  “Thought you was working here.”

  “Mr. Moto ain’t here, I’m the buyer today.”

  “Well kiss my ass. You got promoted. Who would of believed it?”

  “You want to wise off, mister, you can take them lobsters right on up to Massachusetts.”

  Ronette’s struggling to drag a hundred-pound lobster crate across the float. He lugs out the second crate, between them there’s fourteen godzillas that have to average eight pounds apiece. State ever learned about these, it would be ninety days for everyone, Moto on down. Ronette, she’s an accessory, maybe she’d just get fined. The catch goes up on the scale and totals in at a hundred twenty-one pounds. Curtis dumps the giant lobsters into a float car with a lock and chain, case anyone snoops around. “Dock price is five-fifty. We’ll go upstairs and figure it out.”

  Lucky flips his cigarette and it sizzles out in the rainbow of oil slick around the float. “Five fucking fifty? Moto’s paying me eight. Get on the christly phone and call him up.”

  “Might be Mr. Moto’s price. It ain’t mine.”

  “That’s bullshit. Half my traps got wrecked out there. I got to buy twenty more before I go out again.”

  “You going to take five-fifty or am I going to open the bottom of this here lobster car and let them go? We could use some breeders in this cove.”

  Horny little fucker, he’s staring at Ronette’s tits when he says that.

  “You let them bastards
go, you’ll be down there breeding with them. You ever try it with a jumbo lobster?”

  “Six bucks. Mr. Moto says that’s it. Seven-twenty for the haul.”

  “Hey Curtis, you ever think of turning your boss in for the reward?”

  “Mr. Moto treats me right. He treats all his help right, but me specially cause I been around and I know what the fuck is going on. Them other guys is just Japs, they don’t know shit.”

  “I hear they all got black belts, Curtis. They can bust planks with their foreheads.”

  “They don’t know shit,” Curtis repeats.

  They go up to Moto’s office for the paperwork. Math is a real struggle for Curtis, you can see his eyes cross and his brain start to stall out like a plane about to go down. He’s sitting in Moto’s chair in front of the blank computer screen with his face right down against the paper and his fist around the pencil stabbing it at the invoice like a knife. “Ain’t my fault,” Curtis says. “Ain’t Mr. Moto’s neither. I heard it on Rush. The whole Asian money system’s going under. They got a fucking depression over there. I seen pictures of bank presidents begging on the street. They ain’t going to buy them lobsters off you because they can’t afford no sushi anymore. This guy called in to Rush, he seen some of them Jap bankers eating rats.”

  “You’re full of shit, Curtis. You been to Moto’s place? They ain’t eating no rats up there.”

  “God damn fishermen learned something about the economy, they wouldn’t get fucked in the ass so much.”

  “You ought to know, Curtis.”

  At that, Curtis’s eyes pop open. He stands up, spreads his arms out sideways, and starts coming forward across Moto’s office like a rock crab. Lucky’s reaching for a busted-off tuna gaff in the corner, he’ll gaff the son of a bitch right through the neck, then all of a sudden they hear a German diesel snorting down the hill towards the bait shed. It’s Moto in his Mercedes, leaving a cloud of dust behind on the dirt road and driving right out on the planks of the old pier though you can see the pilings sag under the weight. The diesel keeps flopping and farting even after it gets shut down. Up in the office, Curtis pulls back so his boss won’t see him going for the clientele. Lucky puts the tuna gaff in its corner and says, “Jesus, Curtis, you’d think he’d drive a Lexus or something, seeing as where he’s from.”