The Wooden Nickel

by William Carpenter

  “Lucky, it ain’t the whale’s fault. He ain’t no different from you. It’s his territory out here, we set the traps on it. He must of swam into them at night. He’s been here through that whole frigging storm trying to get rid of them lines and he’s exhausted. We got to do something. We ain’t going to just let him die.”

  “You just take the helm, sweetheart. I got to go below. Just jog her easy, don’t sweat the wind, keep her southeast with her head up to the swell.”

  He goes down into the anchor box for the .416 Ruger and works the bolt once to bring the Rigby cartridge up. They’re on a high swell again, and even through the cracked and grimy portside cuddy window he can see the spout of that bastard white and smoky against the black-edged fog.

  When he goes up in the cockpit she takes one look at the rifle and says, “Lucas Lunt, what in Christ’s name are you intending on?”

  “Son of a whore took every trap off this fucking ledge.”

  “He didn’t. We saw a couple off to the south of here.”

  “It don’t matter. He gets away, he’ll come on back through and finish them off.”

  “That ain’t true, Lucas. We’ll get on the radio and call the Coast Guard and they’ll send somebody out here and cut him free. That’s what they do. We’ll never see him again.”

  “They’ll cut him free and he’ll be back again. That ain’t what we bought that radio for. Besides, nobody lays a hand on my fucking whale. We got fifteen thousand dollars right here in front of us, half-dead. Gear he’s ripped up, he owes us twice that much.”

  “What are you talking about, fifteen thousand dollars?”

  “I mean my man Mr. Moto’s going to shell out seventy-five cents a pound for that piece of meat. We shoot it and slice the gear free and drag the fucker into Whistle Creek and we are paid off. We don’t owe that bastard a god damn yen.”

  She keeps a hand on the wheel and bites the joint of her thumb to keep from laughing. “Lucky, you are blind, deaf, and dumb. Moto was bullshitting you. He ain’t going to buy no whale. What the hell’s he going to do with it?”

  “He’s going to sell it in Asia. That’s what they fucking eat. He’ll get Curtis Landry to cut it up on the boat ramp with a chain saw and stuff it in the reefer trucks and ship it to the Chinese fish warehouse at Logan Airport just like a load of tuna. That baby’s going to be sushi in the morning. You heard him the other day. Them Asians eat anything that swims.”

  “I heard him. He was bullshitting you. That little pervert Curtis was laughing up his sleeve.”

  “Curtis is a con. He never fished a day in his life, what the fuck does he know?”

  She turns the wheel hard starboard and revs the engine and starts steaming southward towards the Day-Glo buoys. “Let’s haul what we got left and get out of here, Lucky. This ain’t going to be nothing for us but trouble.”

  He rests the Ruger in the crook of his arm like it’s a bird gun. “Take her back, Ronette. You ain’t the captain of this boat.”

  “You pointing that frigging thing at me?”

  “I’m telling you take the boat back there so I can get a shot at that cocksucker or I’m going to do it myself. You think you’re queen shit cause you got a kid coming. You know what? You ain’t nothing but the sternman on this boat.”

  She lets go the helm and backs herself down into the cuddy, keeping her eye on him as he takes over. Resting the gun butt on the cockpit floor, he spins the Wooden Nickel around in a trough between two swells and once again steams back to the waypoint on a one-eighty reverse course through the lifting fog. He’s got one hand on the bronze wheel spoke and the other on the Ruger’s cold oiled steel. He ought to have his sternman at the helm, that way he could spend some time with his shot. Just like a woman, they fold when the shit comes down. He should have left her throwing up in the trailer and come out this morning with fucking Sonny Phair.

  The fog’s shutting down again by the time he’s at the waypoint. He has to close in to a tenth of a mile, then four hundredths, then all of a sudden the thing’s right under them wallowing in a wave trough off to port. The head is raised. It’s got two of his Day-Glo lemon buoys around its neck. It’s putting out a high wheezy spout like an old man blowing his nose. He hits the shift into neutral and puts the rifle up. He follows the top of it with the flip sight like a deer hunter looking for a neck or shoulder shot, only the cocksucker’s got no neck or shoulders and all he wants to do is bury that softpoint .416 in its fucking heart. Not easy to take aim when the gun barrel and the target are both swaying in separate directions, the swell’s bad enough, every time that bastard moves its tail that makes it worse. Then a long sea draws the boat away from the whale and holds it steady for a moment. His sight eye stops at the blowhole where the skin folds in, but it’s a bad angle. You need to get right above that cocksucking spout and fire straight down inside. The hole has all kinds of warts and barnacles around it, it’s armor plated, nothing’s going to get through all that growth. The heart’s too far under and he’s not going to get a shot at that. He moves the sight down to the waterline beneath the spout and the barnacles and braces up against the pot hauler, waits for a long lifting swell, and takes a shot right at its fucking head.

  The noise of the Rigby cartridge blinds him and the kick slams his shoulder around so he doesn’t get to watch it hit.

  He looks back and the whale’s not moving or diving or taking much notice at all. Maybe it takes a long time for the news to reach the brain, their head is so fucking thick. Then he sees a piece of red meat the size of a bloody moose heart hanging off the wound. The gash is getting redder fast, and down at the whale’s stern the tail’s swinging from side to side like it’s got its power back and it’s going to thrash out of there even though it’s caught by six or seven lines. Lucky puts the wheel hard to starboard and slips over a couple of seas westward to wait and see what it will do. He bolts a new cartridge into the chamber and the spent one rattles out and spins around steaming on the wet cockpit floor. The whale twists its chest towards him for a moment, right under the flipper where the heart must be. He braces up quickly for another shot. The whale rolls back so it comes in too high and spits off a slice of skin that skips away shining through the fog like a piece of quartz. Maybe the whale didn’t feel that one, but the first one’s got it bleeding hard up near the eye.

  When he turns around, Ronette’s got her head outside the companionway, not saying a thing, just looking up at him like she’s a dog or something that can’t talk, face all awash with tears like she’s been wailing the whole time she was below.

  He shouldn’t have brought her. “If you don’t say nothing,” he says, “I can’t say nothing back. Don’t matter anyway.” He spins the wheel to port and tracks back to the spot to check things out. There’s three buoys floating on the surface holding up a snarl of lines and the whale probably down under that, but he can’t see it and his fishfinder’s gone. Now he spots a streak of red blood on the water, and over it there’s five or six black seabirds he’s never seen. Must be sea buzzards, waiting for the god damn thing to croak.

  “We got to him,” he says,” but we got to get closer. We got to get right over the spout hole. Fucker comes up again and he’s dead meat.”

  She waits awhile to answer. “I been beside you all this time, Lucky Lunt, but I ain’t helping on this one.”

  “That’s right, you ain’t helping and I ain’t going to forget it. I’m going on with it myself. That thick-skinned bastard, I got to get right on top of him this time. That’s how them god damn Indians do it. They get right over them with an antitank gun and let them have it down the nose.” He nudges the Wooden Nickel up and over a wave crest closing in towards the left flank of the whale. The only thing on the surface now is the root of the tail where the yellow line’s wound around it, so he idles in forward and waits for the head of it to come up for another breath. “It’s a god damn mammal same as you and me, can’t hold its breath forever.”

  The whale rolls towa
rds the boat and goes under, throwing its back up a couple of feet off the water, an easy spine shot on a deer but that thing’s not even going to feel it. He lets it dive. On its way under, it shows the gear tangled beneath it. Ronette says, “Lucky, he’s got three of your buoys wrapped under him. I seen them.”

  “If you ain’t going to help, don’t talk.”

  He throws her in neutral to cut the shaft vibrations for a better shot whenever the thing decides to come back up.

  Then there’s a rush of water on the port side, opposite the wheel, and the whale shoots up a couple of boat lengths away, rolls in the swell and throws off a spout of vapor that blows back over the port rail as a mist in the north wind. It smells like cat food. “Cocksucker went right under the keel.” The eye’s not quite out of the water, so it’s hard to find the place for a head shot. He aims the Ruger just down and forward from the chunk he ripped out before. He lets a swell pick the stern up for a high shot angle and fires the third of five shots in the clip, the kick bangs his shoulder up against the hot exhaust. The blast and recoil blur his head a moment, then he can see the impact as the three-hundred-grain softpoint rips out another bloody chunk right at the waterline. It’s not like any animal he’s shot, these are fucking artillery shells but they’re just scratching the surface, they’re not getting him where he lives.

  “Fucking Indians,” he shouts. “What the fuck are they using on them things?” The whale lifts its tail six feet in the air and rolls hard towards the boat, then brings the tail down flat and a sharp fast wave breaks over the port side, he has to lay the gun down on the bulkhead so it won’t get soaked. “Got to get closer and fire the next one right down the fucking blowhole.”

  Ronette reaches up through the cabin hatch and grabs the gun by the barrel, which is so hot he can hear it searing her skin as she pulls it down the companionway with her hands smoking, then comes back up again without it.

  “Don’t put it away yet,” he says. “I ain’t done.”

  “The fuck you ain’t. We’re getting out of here.” She’s looking at the red burn stripes on her hands.

  “What the hell you talking about? Get that fucking gun back up here. Now.”

  “Don’t order me around, you heartless bastard.”

  He steps off from the helm and shoves her in the face with the heel of his hand. An ooze of blood runs out of her mouth like squeezing a cherry tomato. She backs up till she’s put the engine between them and kneels against the empty life jacket box. “Now stop fucking with me and bring the gun up.” The gun’s right beside her but she doesn’t move. Off a couple of boat lengths to port the whale’s boiling the water trying to escape against the drag of the gear. He goes over to the helm just to cock the rudder over to one side so they don’t drift closer. As soon as he’s by the pot hauler with his hand on the wheel Ronette pulls herself up through the companionway with blood on her face and the barrel of the rifle in her free hand. “About fucking time,” he says, reaching for it while he leaves his other hand on the wheel, keeping the boat backed off from the rush of water around the whale.

  She doesn’t give it to him. She crosses to the port rail, across the beam of the boat from him. Then she raises the Ruger over her head with both hands and throws it as far as she can over the side. It spins a couple of revolutions in the air then hits the water. The wooden stock tries to hold it on the surface, then the steel barrel pulls it down.

  Fucking cunt.

  He crosses the boat in one stride to push her aside and stick his face over as if he could grab for it or at least see it on its way to the bottom, but there’s nothing but afternoon chop and pink foam from the bloody whale. “Jesus H. Christ. That was a thousand-dollar gun. We ain’t got nothing else aboard.”

  Now the whale’s rolling sideways towards the port side of the hull. He looks right down the blowhole as it turns over. This would be the perfect fucking shot, it would go right straight down that windpipe to the heart. That bitch, she ruined it and now she’s standing in the companionway lighting a cigarette while the fucking whale slides back underneath the boat. He spins the wheel to starboard, puts the shift in forward and raises the throttle all at the same time. Fuck her, he’ll drive right up on the cocksucker and chop him up with the propeller. The V-8 spurts to life, the boat jumps forward a few feet, then she stops dead just like she’s thrown a rod.

  “Now what the fuck?” He jams the shift lever into neutral and hits the starter. If she’s got a thrown rod she won’t turn over. But the 307 powers right up and he puts her in forward and she stalls out again. Could only be one thing. “Wheel’s fouled. Cocksucker wrapped a line around it.” He shifts to reverse and revs her up, hoping to back the warp off the way it came. The whale’s turning the surface white over there like it’s trying to drag all that gear southward towards deep water and every time the tail flips he feels a shiver along the keel.

  Ronette comes alive and yells, “Lucky, we’re attached to it, we got to cut them lines away.” She goes for the long-handled rope knife in the scuppers and when she comes up with it she points it at his crotch like a harpoon. “That’s right, I ought to slice it off and feed it to that god damn thing. That’s what they eat, pricks. They can’t get enough of them.” She’s got him backed right up against the pot hauler, then the boat shakes and she turns and goes to look over the side, so he can come up in back of her and pry the rope knife out of her hand. The two of them bend over the port rail looking for a submerged warp pointing towards the whale, but if there is one it’s too deep to see.

  “We fouled one of them lines on the whale,” he says. “The shaft’s shaking every time it moves.”

  Thrashing around like that, the whale must have snagged every piece of gear on this part of the ledge. And now it’s trying to swim forward on the surface, huge tired fucking animal with eight or ten traplines around it along with an eight-ton lobster boat broadside to the swell. He can’t tell if it’s moving any or just plowing the water in one place. There’s nothing to judge by, just the Wooden Nickel and a thirty-five-foot whale with its two big side fins caught in pot warp, more warp around the tail and one or two harnessed through the back of its mouth like a fucking horse.

  “We got to cut free,” Ronette says. She looks like she’s got a mouth full of strawberries and the juice is dripping down her chin. He’d like to kiss her, but his keen sense of timing tells him the moment’s not quite right. She grabs him around the waist of his bib oilskins so he won’t fall overboard slicing at the warps. “Jesus,” she says. “You got more barnacles than the fucking whale.” He gropes over the port rail with the long-handled rope knife, in the direction of the twisting tail, trying to find the line and cut it free, only whenever he gets the blade on it the swell raises him back up. “It’s down too deep,” he calls up to her with his face almost in the water and his arm way in, then raised up in the air the length of the long-handled knife, then plunged up to the shoulder in the next swell as he gropes the knife through the black water feeling for the line. The only place where he can see pot warp is on the whale itself. With the stern to it, he can see a doubled length of taut green line reaching from the armpit of the right fin down in and right towards the boat. “We got to pull ourselves on top of that son of a whore and cut that warp where we can see it.”

  “How the hell we going to do that?”

  There’s one slack yellow line forward of the taut ones. He reaches down and hooks it with the long-handled gaff and slings a few turns around the Hydroslave. When he kicks in the hydraulics the yellow line tautens and draws the rail down and sideways till they’re so close they can hear its lungs breathing in and out. The tail lying on the surface of the water makes a slow beat, stops, makes another beat, like it wants to stir the blood and water together. He reaches over the rail past the taut yellow warp to stab the son of a bitch with the rope knife, yelling, “Die, cocksucker,” but it blasts up a big spout of bloody steam and swings its tail towards them, then away. In that one motion it hauls the Wooden N
ickel about a hundred feet to seaward. It may be tired but it’s still dragging ten or twelve stone-weighted traps over the bottom, along with the crippled boat. It wants to get the fuck out of there and go home, same as anyone else.

  All of a sudden it rolls so hard the rail goes under, but he can finally reach the two lines from the prop, a green one and a white one, stretched taut right under the surface in the direction of the whale. He waits for a wave trough and lunges his arm down with the long-handled rope knife and saws through the green one. It snaps free with the sound of a depth charge and throws the whale’s weight onto the white one, then that one explodes and the whole strain’s on the heavyweight yellow warp off the pot hauler, the rail scoops green water and the boat’s going under sideways. He cuts the yellow line and it slashes into the water like a bullwhip as the Wooden Nickelcomes upright, a foot of trapped seawater sluicing out the scuppers.

  Fifty feet to starboard, with its lines off, the whale lifts its long white side fin up slow like it can’t believe it’s free. Suddenly the head drops diagonally under the boat, the tail lifts to the level of the wheelhouse roof, twists and slants down so close to the starboard rail that the hull shudders with a sharp scrape and crack, then the thing is gone.

  Ronette says, “What the hell was that?”

  “That was fifteen thousand fucking dollars.” He turns and yells in the direction it dived in: “Cocksucker, kiss my ass!” Then to Ronette: “You hadn’t of trashed the gun, we could be towing that son of a whore into Whistle Creek.”

  “Come on, Lucky, he would of been towing us. You wasn’t going to win that one. But what was that noise? It sounded like we hit a ledge.”

  “Tail nicked us on the way down. It don’t matter, we’re out of here.”

  He throttles the engine up a bit in neutral and slams her in reverse to throw off the rest of the line. It spins a couple of revolutions, then shuts down. “What the fuck.” He starts her again and puts the shift forward but it’s not going into gear, must have line wound tight around the shaft. In calm water you might swim the knife under and cut the wheel free, but in the eight-foot swell you’d get your brains knocked out before you ever saw the line.