The Wooden Nickel

by William Carpenter

  He’s got to haul today or they’re going to lose everything in the traps. The traps could be hard to locate too, seas may have dragged them off station, and if they slipped off the ledge into deep water, they’re going to be lost, they’ll pull the buoys down with them forever.

  Ronette flushes a third time and he rolls out of bed and feels for the flame gun to light a Marlboro and start the Coleman lamp. Going to be raw out there. Sarah would be up already with coffee and the weather report, handing him the one-piece union suit and the wool socks that are still back at Orphan Point. The best he can do is pull on one pair of pants over another one and the heavy Grundens oil-skins over that. The trailer floor’s buckling even more with the wall panel loose, the carpeting’s still awash, the wind’s blowing right through the trailer but it’s just a fall breeze now, coming off the land.

  He checks under the built-in to get the Ruger out and put it on the kitchen table, then knocks on the half-open bathroom door. “Anybody alive in there?”

  “Jesus, Lucky, I ain’t too sure.”

  “I got to go out today. You want, I’ll go see if I can get Sonny Phair to go along. You can stay home and screw the wall back together.”

  “If you go out, I’m going with you. I’m your sternman, remember?”

  “Well get moving, then, it’s pretty near four o’clock.” He boils water for a thermos of instant coffee and shovels in some sugar and Cremora, then some more. She likes it light.

  “Let’s bring some more of that Waylon Jennings. I got a cassette in the drawer.”

  He roots around among lipsticks, old wallets, address books, for the Waylon Jennings tape. “Soon as they get a kid in the oven,” he says, “they go back to the old stuff.”

  They have to drive to Whistle Creek in Ronette’s little Probe since the GMC’s still up to its hubcaps on the swampy lawn holding up the trailer wall. He can’t get his legs under the Probe’s wheel, the seat won’t go back far enough, so he lets her drive. She starts up, flicks the lights on, and puts the tape on to “Good-Hearted Woman.” She’s got a box of sugared crullers that she took home from Doris’s. The high beams slash through the drizzle and light up the leafy road like a blind guy getting his sight back.

  “Nice to have electricity,” she says.

  “Finest kind. Drive this little car right through the hole in the wall, leave the lights on, we could go right off the grid.”

  The high beams make their pathway of light between darkened houses, nobody else on the road, big branches and stray power lines strewn here and there across the way. Then the turnoff to Split Point and all of a sudden the darkness fills up with red, white, and blue strobe lights from half a dozen vehicles in both lanes.

  “Must be a fire,” Ronette says.

  They slow down to see what’s going on and a cop comes up and shines his light in the car, same fucking porkbelly deputy that kicked him out of his house. “You was driving a truck last time I saw you,” the cop says, talking across to Lucky but shining his flashlight right on Ronette’s tits. “Guy your size, I’m surprised you fit inside that little thing.”

  “Stopped to see if you needed any help,” Lucky says.

  “You can help if you can bring back the dead. If that ain’t your specialty you better keep on moving.”

  Behind the cop there’s the burned-out ruin of a trailer with the strobes blinking at a handful of charred uprights, a blackened refrigerator skeleton with the plastic panels melted, and an oil-drum wood stove with the tin chimney still straight up in the air, pointing to heaven. “Wouldn’t of thought nothing could burn in all that rain.”

  As they speed up again he sees the ambulance strobes switch off in the rearview mirror. Ronette says, “I knew the old guy in that trailer. He was an Astbury on my mother’s side.”

  “Father’s, you mean.”

  “I got them on both sides and the middle.” She snuggles over across the automatic shift lever to get close. “And now you’re a blood relation. Someday you’re going to be an old Astbury in a trailer just like Uncle Uke.”

  Back in the comfortable dark car again, Waylon sings,

  A long time forgotten are dreams that just fell by the way

  The good life he promised, it ain’t what she’s living today

  “That Old Cove ain’t the tightest spot in the world. Hope the fucking boat’s still there.”

  “Didn’t know you was the worrying kind.”

  “She was moored right off of the house in Orphan Point. First light after a blow, I’d look right out and see how she was.”

  “Welcome to reality, Mr. Unlucky Lunt. You ain’t got shore property anymore. Life ain’t a big old family farmhouse with a million-dollar view. It’s a trailer in a mudhole, with a big crack in the wall made by some asshole in the middle of the night.”

  But she never complains of the bad times or the bad things he’s done

  Just talks about the good times they’ve had and all the good times to come

  “You should of stuck with Clyde. Guy like that could of brought this kid up in style.”

  “Guy like that would of drowned the kid in the hot tub when he found out it weren’t his.”

  “Ain’t mine?”

  “Ain’t his.”

  “Sure as fuck better be mine, I ain’t doing all this for nothing.”

  Without the streetlight on the corner she misses the turnoff to the Whistle Creek landing and has to U-turn in the road and come back. Soon as they get down the steep driveway to Moto’s pier, though, there’s lights and action. Moto’s got two parked vehicles shining their brights on his ice-house and his big white Mitsubishi Fuso reefer truck pulled right up close. No power here either. Curtis is up on the ramp loading seafood into the truck with Moto standing by one of the cars in a bright yellow rain jacket, urging him on. Not that he’d ever lend a hand to help. One thing you can say for the Chinese, they don’t take to physical labor, unless maybe they’re in prison with a gun pointing at their head.

  When Moto sees the Probe he ducks away from the headlight like a shadow and doesn’t come out till Curtis Landry peers down from off of the truck platform and says, “By Jesus, them Lunts is moving up in the world.”

  Then Moto slides out of the dark and shows his grinning face at the car door. Lucky powers down the window and leans back easy in the seat like the Probe’s his, Ronette’s just a chauffeur.

  “Rucas, you come at right time, nine ton frozen squid lotting in here.”

  “Ain’t got time to help out now. Curtis is a fast guy, he can do it. I ain’t been out to them traps in more than a week. My boat OK?”

  “Who can tell? No light on water yet. One little dory wrecked up on the float.”

  Lucky sticks his head out the window and sniffs around. “You’re too late to get nothing for that squid. I can smell it from here. How about giving me a bucket of that for bait?”

  Moto yells, “Curtis, take bucket of squid down on the float for Mr. Runt.”

  He carries the thermos and the Ruger in one hand and Ronette grabs the other to help her down the dark rampway to the pier. When Curtis gets a glimpse of the gun in the truck headlights, he says, “Lunt, you planning to bag some more of them Shag Island women?”

  “I’ll bring one back for you, Curtis, if you think you can handle it.”

  “No thanks, they ain’t my type. I like them alive.”

  “I bet you do.”

  They stand on the pierhead for a minute getting their bearings on the harbor in the first light. A couple of dories are beached on the granite ledge north of the pier. One of Moto’s floats is ripped off the wharf but the one holding Lucky’s punt is still hanging on, though the rope’s stretched and the float sticks out in the current at an angle. He can hear the surge break over the entrance ledge out by the Old Cove daymarker. Even inside, the float’s groaning up and down a foot or two as the long swells come in, but the chop’s down and the wind’s set to flatten the onshore seas. By the time they get out there it may be smoo
th enough to haul.

  The dawn ratchets up another notch so they can make out the Wooden Nickel in the center of the cove. In the half-light the blue cabin looks black, she’s like a big tough old blackback seagull riding the swell. Those guys are the predators of the ocean, they don’t give a shit, you see them up there riding out a full-blown gale, they enjoy it, they’re loners, they take what they need and move on. His boat’s the only boat visible, she’s got a bit of rain in her but she’s riding proud at the end of her mooring chain. Down on the float, he flips the punt over and launches her in a trough, rows out to the stem end first and checks the pennant line. It’s chafed almost halfway through up at the bow chock where the leathers wore off in the blow, he’ll splice up a new one later. He grabs the davit to hoist himself up out of the punt the way he used to, then halfway up he gets a sharp pinch in the chest and has to let himself back down and take a breath. Then he works his ass up on the rail like an old lady getting aboard the church boat before he can turn around and step into the cockpit. Every time he starts to forget about the heart the fucking thing lets him know it’s there.

  The bilge has a few inches of water and the white life ring got ripped off the cabin top, that’s all for damage. He scans the shore with the binoculars looking for the ring, but all there is is the two stove-in dories, a few tree limbs on the tideline, a handful of local traps and moorings dragged onto the beach. She’s riding a bit low from the rainwater in the bilge but otherwise she checks out fine. The Olds V-8 catches for a moment on the second turn then stalls out. He opens the box and squirts some ether to the carb throat and hits the distributor cap with a spurt of WD-40 and she comes awake one plug at a time, never was an Olds that cared for water. He warms her up a bit, kicks in the bilge pump takeoff and lights a Marlboro while the three-day rainstorm spews over the transom into the little harbor of Whistle Creek.

  It’s bright enough to see surf breaking into foam on both sides as they steam out through the inlet ledges, passing the thermos between them. Ronette busts out laughing at the spot where the Metallica ran them through the shallows. They light a couple more Marlboros, Ronette Clinton tries not to inhale, they turn up the Waylon Jennings tape and stomp the Olds to a clean sixteen knots on the loran. The storm took his bloody gull wing off the antenna, so they’re already dragging a bird cloud in their wake, every one of them wants to get his beak into Moto’s bucket of rotten squid. They pick up the Old Cove daybeacon and in another mile the Whistle Creek flasher, then comes a white offshore fog bank like the cliffs of Labrador, too bad Moto’s advance ran out before they got to the radar. The Wooden Nickel trudges uphill over the long swells, glides down and trudges up again, not a damn thing visible, just the green TD numbers on the loran clicking off their movement south and east.

  The first trap’s got one jumbo, maybe seven pounds, and a good-size cull but Moto won’t touch it. If some Chinaman’s going to pay three hundred bucks for one lobster he wants the whole thing sitting on his plate just like it was at the bottom of the sea, you can’t blame him. What the hell, they’ll keep it and boil it up at home, no sense throwing away good meat. Next two traps have a couple of jumbos each, so they’re up to three hundred bucks in the first half hour and it’s time for a beer. They sit up on the rail with Hank Junior singing “Rainy Night in Georgia” and watch the six big lobsters chase each other like a pack of squirrels around the seawater tank. He spots the gull wing in the scuppers and climbs up to duct-tape it back on the antenna. The cloud of birds draws back right away to a respectful distance.

  The next set’s up towards the shallow end of the deep-sea ledge. The fishfinder rises to thirty-five fathoms, then thirty, he can sense the swells shoaling under him, heaving the keel up, setting them down again in the trough. He steams up on the waypoint till the loran sounds off, but there’s nothing there, just the circle of gray-green sea.

  “We’ll just head down to where that next buoy ought to be, see what the fuck’s going on.” The fishfinder says twenty-eight fathoms, then twenty-five and the fog thickens so he puts Ronette as lookout up on the bow. She’s kneeling down with both hands on the anchor bitt as they head into the swell and the bow sweeps up and down.

  All of a sudden Ronette raises her free arm and screams out, “Rocks!”

  He can’t believe it. There’s no land out here for twenty miles. He throttles off and puts her in neutral so the boat turns broadside to the swells. It sways like a windshield wiper while he squints into the fog. Nothing but gray mist at first. Then, sure as shit, right off to starboard the water’s boiling and breaking on a half-tide ledge.

  “Jesus H. Christ. Supposed to be twenty fucking fathoms over there.” He puts her in gear and heads the bow up, then idles over real slow for a better look, one eye on the fishfinder and the loran, both in agreement and bringing him right to the spot where they set their main trap cluster, should be five or six Day-Glo buoys nearby. The bottom graph shallows to twenty-three fathoms as they approach. A big swell lifts her by the stern and he sees a cloud of birds over the spot, but not much else. They get a little nearer and Ronette yells out, “Buoys! There they are!”

  He sees one for an instant, then it’s gone. On the next swell he looks down where the buoy was and the sea drops off swirling like an ocean whirlpool. Then the long gray barnacle-covered granite ledge rises right out of the water with two of his fucking buoys on it and his heart stops dead. The swell hoists him eight feet into the air and down again while he waits for the heartbeat to come. He can’t breathe and he can’t speak, but he does manage, without a heart, to throw the wheel to port so they don’t go hard aground.

  He bangs his fist once sharp against his chest and the cocksucker turns over and starts up again. He bangs his fist on the fishfinder to make that work too but it just flashes in weird computer letters: error no. 22. Then the screen goes black.

  In a small high voice he says to Ronette, “Steer.” It sounds like somebody else talking, not him. He should have taken a pill this morning, but with the lights out in the strange trailer bathroom he couldn’t find them. Ronette’s got the helm, she’s brought her off to the southeast, so they can’t see anything but gray air and blue-black water and a handful of following gulls. Now that his heart’s pumping again he takes over and turns back on the loran plot, working her slow but steady in the quartering sea. When he bangs the fishfinder again he knocks it right out of its ceiling mount so it hangs swaying in the air by its data cord. He has to rip it off before it breaks the windshield, then he tosses it towards the hatchway but it bounces once on the hatch corner and it’s over the port rail and gone. Last thing he read off it was Made in Malaysia.

  “Jesus, Lucky, now you’ve done it.”

  “Plastic junk,” he says. “Weren’t worth fixing.” He lets the seas drift him off to starboard as the waypoint closes in, but there’s no buoys and he’s right on top of an uncharted breaking shoal where he thought he had twenty fathoms all around. Fucking loran must be busted too. He whacks at it with the back of his lobster glove, yelling, “Piece of Chinese shit.”

  He keeps her bow just starboard of the swell and lets her slip southwest, where the water’s got a deeper color. Then he hears surf breaking close to port.

  Ronette’s leaning on the port side of the wheelhouse so she can see. “That ain’t no rock ledge, Lucky, it’s skin. We’re on top of a fucking whale.”

  Soon as she says that, they’re up on a swell looking down at it, gray-black and barnacled, same length as the Wooden Nickel bow to stern. No wonder it looked like granite, it’s got growth all over it, it’s not moving and the waves are breaking across it like a shoal. On the far side of the whale’s body it’s lifting a long white arm fin like a guy drowning and waving for help, and the fin’s got two or three coils of pot warp wrapped up in the armpit where it joins the body. The head’s mostly underwater, with a bunch of small black-headed seagulls screaming around it like they’re hungry for its eyes. Then it lets off a blast of vapor and steam that makes th
e seabirds screech and back off.

  When the spout goes back underwater again the rear end of it comes up, and there’s the loop of yellow pot warp around the black root of the tail. Now it’s up close and he can see the rope clear as a wedding ring. He’s got the engine in neutral now, idling back one or two wave crests from the whale so they lose sight of it in the troughs, then pick it up again. He’s starting to figure out how the thing is caught. “That loop of yellow line ain’t attached to nothing, it’s them warps around his fin that’s holding him down.”

  “He’s a fucking whale,” Ronette says. “Why don’t he just snap them cheap pieces of rope?”

  “He’s a weasely bastard, he’s waiting to make his move. Look at the warts on him, he must have some kind of VD. Ain’t no morality out here, cocksuckers do whatever they want.”

  “Yeah, that includes us. We better go back in, Lucky. You already had a stroke or something back there. You looked like you was dead.”

  “Happens all the time, I got nine fucking lives. I want to see what’s on the other side of this bastard.” He turns to starboard and cuts a wide slow circle to the northeast, goes out maybe a quarter mile past two more of his traps and toggles, then steams back on a loran course through the fog. The whale’s lying quiet and sneaky as a spider in its yellow web, when they get near him he starts sloshing the right-hand fin around. That one’s got four or five more loops around it, and a couple strands of pot warp going up forward towards the head. Ronette’s got the binoculars on it. “No wonder the poor thing can’t move. That piece of line goes right into the corner of his mouth.”

  “Bastard’s got eight or nine warps on him. That’s what happened to them other traps. He picked them up and dragged them along the bottom till they got wrecked. Cocksucker didn’t get enough of my gear, he come back for more.”