The Wooden Nickel

by William Carpenter

  “Two. They ain’t Ronette’s.”

  “No. She said this was her first. You are the father?”

  “That’s what she tells me.”

  “That’s all we men are ever given to know. The EMTs said she wasn’t very coherent about dates and times. We do have to figure out exactly how far along she is. Do you have the approximate date of conception?”

  “Few weeks after the start of lobster season. Took us a short while to get around to it.”

  “And when would that be? We’re a ways from the coast up here.”

  “Must of been early May.”

  “Barely five months, too early to induce. It wouldn’t be viable on its own. We put a monitor on her. Hard to believe after what she’s been through, but we have a faint fetal heartbeat. The female forms a cocoon of protection, sometimes to the point of sacrifice. We’re going to do what we can.”

  “What’s the odds?”

  “Mother a hundred percent. Her temperature’s up, her vital signs are fine. She’ll bounce back tomorrow. The child, fifty-fifty. The next few hours are crucial. Wish we could guarantee survival but we can’t. We’re only human.”

  “Any chance of getting a look at her?”

  “She’s resting right now, no sense disturbing her. We’ll be keeping a close eye on them, we should know in the morning. This your number?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll give you a call. I have to get back on station. You can go home now, you did a good job getting her in here. Give her a full night’s sleep, get some rest yourself. We’re here for you and we’ll give it our best shot.”

  He’s just about to go back and join Sonny Phair in the Probe. Then he spots the gift shop off the exit corridor, they’ve got a couple of Sarah’s sea glass mobiles dangling in the shopwindow. One of them is a blue-and-white wing shape like the one he crushed that night in the studio, she must have rewelded it. It makes his hand ache to look at it, he still has black scars on his palms where they got sliced by the lead moldings. He ducks inside the shop and lifts the price tag to see what she’s getting. Hundred and ninety bucks. And the tag says Another craftproduct from Yvonne’s Creations. Orphan Point.He even has a splash of sympathy for Sarah, fifty fucking percent to a parasite like that. People like the Hannafords, they got everyone by the nuts, twist and turn all you want, it only hurts more.

  Then he spots something over in the kids’ corner of the shop. He steps over a couple of little Chinese girls playing with Barbie dolls in the aisle, way past their bedtime, then he has to move a white blanket that’s mostly covering it, but under the blanket is the spitting image of an old-style Downeast lobster boat, four or five feet long, set up with rockers on the bottom to make it a cradle. The boat is unpainted, just plain pine strips on plywood frames with a cabin over and no place for an engine, but the kid wouldn’t be needing an engine for a while. Whoever designed this model took the lines off right, they even cut the pilothouse side away to haul the traps over. Could paint her white and write Wooden Nickel on her stern, nobody’d know the difference except the size. He looks for a price tag. There’s something dangling off the anchor bitt up on the bow. Three hundred and fifty bucks for that little thing, probably not twenty bucks’ worth of wood in it, then they make you build it yourself, so you wind up paying them for your own labor.

  The other side of the tag has the same label as Sarah’s. Clyde’s sister-in-law is everywhere: Another fucking craftproduct from Yvonne’s Creations.

  Meanwhile the saleslady’s come up behind him. “Anything we can interest you in, sir? We close at eleven.”

  “Which end you supposed to put the baby in, the head go down in the cuddy, or the feet?”

  “I believe the infant’s head would stay outside. A mother worries if she can’t see her baby’s face.”

  “You really asking three hundred and fifty bucks for that thing?”

  The saleslady bends down to check the tag. He gets a decent look down into the crack of her blouse but she’s about sixty so it’s a bit dried up in there. “That’s right, sir. Three hundred and fifty. Then there would be the five and a half percent tax.”

  “What would you take for it?”

  “I’m afraid we aren’t allowed to bargain for our merchandise. The prices are all fixed by the management.”

  “OK. How’s about if we just add it to the room charge? That would be under Hannaford. She’s a brand-new patient, just come in.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t allow gifts to be charged to patients’ room accounts. It is a lovely idea but there’s no way we could bill it. The hospital and concession are financially independent. We do accept credit cards, though. Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express.”

  Over behind her the little Chinese girls have got all the clothes off two Barbie dolls and they’re laying the dolls on top of each other, clucking and giggling like hens. Lucky remembers a small black leather case under Ronette’s pile of cassettes out in the glove compartment of the Probe. “Don’t sell them boat kits,” he tells the saleslady. “And don’t close up. I’m coming right back.”

  Out in the parking lot, Sonny Phair’s slumped down in the passenger seat in a cross-eyed trance from smoking too much pot. He sees Lucky and says, “Your old lady coming with us or what?”

  “She’s staying overnight. Let me into the glove compartment.” The leather case is filled with credit cards neatly arranged in little pockets, last thing left from her old life. Some of the cards are in her name, Rhonda Hannaford, some say Clyde Hannaford. He takes the whole thing back to the gift shop lady.

  “Might have to try a couple of these, ma’am. Some of them got kind of maxed out.” He finds a Rhonda Hannaford Visa with her own signature on the back.

  “You’re a designated user of this card, sir?”

  “Designated driver, that’s me.”

  He stands by the boat cradle while the Visa machine talks to Big Brother back in Tokyo. The unbuilt kits are stacked under the window against the wall. They’re massive cartons with heavy copper staples, but he manages to pry an end open and check out the parts. No plywood slabs, either, you frame and plank the things just like a boat.

  The saleslady comes by and says, “These kits are wonderful projects for the fathers while the mothers attend childbirth class.” Then she goes back to her machine, see if his credit card worked. She wants to sell it, it’ll be her big-ticket item for the week.

  He’s poking around in the box, checking out the frames. They’re pretty solid U-shaped sections sawed out of clear pine. The planking’s set up to be nailed and glued. For a moment he flashes on the gar-board strake that let go when the whale slapped them, water starts flooding his brain channels, then he shuts off that part of his mind. Yvonne may be a bloodsucker but she’s got a good thing going with this kit. The only real difference from a working vessel is the two big curved bases so you can rock it back and forth like the motion of the swells. That kid’ll be getting his sea legs before he finds the tit.

  The saleslady waddles back past the Chinese girls. The Barbies have put their clothes back on and they’re having a cup of tea. “I’m afraid that Visa card didn’t go through, sir. It sometimes happens even to the best of us. Did you say you wanted to try another?”

  Old Clyde must have canceled her plastic soon as she left. He gives the lady a Discover with Clyde’s name on it. “This ought to work, ma’am. Sorry about the other. We put all the swimming pool supplies on her and she must of went down.”

  “Is this your signature on the back, Clyde R. Hannaford?”

  “No, ma’am. Clyde’s my employer. He’s got me authorized to sign the slip.”

  The lady goes off again to her Visa machine. He’s already prying the staples up on the four cartons, checking around for the one with the clearest wood. They even throw in a little plastic bag of fasteners, everything you need. Which is a good thing, cause Ronette’s trailer doesn’t contain a single tool and his are down on the boat. He’ll bum a screwdriver off of
Sonny Phair, dig a hammer out of the truck. Sonny’s a sign painter too. He’ll fix him some chowder when they get back. Maybe after they get the hull built Sonny will bring his gear over and paint a name on the transom.

  The saleslady comes back all smiles, patting her hair down, playing with the buttons of her blouse. Now his credit’s been established, it’s flirting time. He signs Lucas M. Lunt on the slip with big letters. Old Clyde will get a charge out of that. Three sixty-nine twenty-five including a twenty-buck tip for the governor. He puts the wallet in his back pocket and picks up the second carton from the bottom, the one with the best wood. He slings the boat kit over his shoulder and walks out. It’s not a bad deal when you think about it. The box is pretty near the size of a small coffin, probably fifty pounds of nice presanded pine.

  Sonny Phair’s moving around in the passenger seat when he gets there. “Shut the god damn stereo off, Sonny, there ain’t going to be enough juice to start the car.”

  “Jesus, Lucky. What are you carrying around? You got a dead body in there?”

  “Boat.”

  “Boat? What kind of a boat?”

  “Kid’s boat. You build it.”

  “Crazy bastard. What do you want to build a toy boat for?”

  “Sonny, you’re going to have to move your ass so we can get this thing inside. Another thing. I ain’t sure we got room to take you back.”

  “What the fuck?”

  He opens the Probe’s trunk and folds the rear seatback forward. He hauls Sonny Phair out of the passenger seat and stands him up, then folds the right front seat forward and down. The two of them slide the boat cradle kit into the trunk beside the kid seat and slant it over so it fits against the dashboard and they can just barely close the trunk.

  “There. Them Mexicans ain’t so dumb.”

  “Where am I supposed to fit?”

  “Lay right on top of her, Sonny. Stretch out and get yourself some sleep.”

  When he gets back to the trailer the wall’s sagged out again and the first thing he has to do is wade over and inch the pickup forward so the panel straightens back up to the roofline. He’s thinking how he’s going to brace it up on its own so he can get the truck out, but that will have to wait till the lawn flood goes down, no use trying to straighten that piece of shit up to his knees in muck. Besides, he’s got a boat to build.

  He unfolds Sonny from his berth on the carton and the two of them carry it inside. “Lights are on,” Sonny says. “Phone work?”

  He picks the phone up and it’s dead. “Sonny, look in the book and get the number of that god damn phone company.”

  “How we going to call?”

  “You’re going over to your place and call them up.”

  “I ain’t had a phone since August. They took it out. All I got’s the scanner.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, Sonny, what the hell you good for? Go on over to Corey’s house and use his phone. Take your twenty-two and shoot that fucking dog while you’re at it.”

  When Sonny comes back he’s got the gun but his head’s down. “Couldn’t bring myself to do it,” he says. “Besides, how you figure Corey was going to let me use the phone if I just killed his dog?”

  “Jesus, Sonny. You were supposed to shoot the dog on the way back.”

  “Lucky, I’m sorry. I ain’t like you. I just don’t have the guts.”

  “That’s OK, Sonny, it’s a democracy, a chickenshit’s as good as anyone else. What’d the phone company say?”

  “They said Clyde Hannaford was paying the bill for this number but he ain’t paying it anymore. Cost you a hundred bucks to reconnect, another hundred deposit. No checks.”

  “Fuck. Well, you’re going over to Corey’s tomorrow noon, call the hospital, see how she’s doing.”

  “Why don’t you go over? She’s your old lady.”

  “You know why? I’ll tell you why. I don’t feel like telling Corey about his fucking gun.”

  Sonny reaches into the pocket of his sweatshirt and says, “Check this out.” It’s a fifth of Jim Beam, cherry seal.

  “No shit, where’d you come up with that?”

  “Corey.”

  “He ain’t so fucking bad. He want to come over and share it with us?”

  “I don’t think so, Luck, seeing how I got ahold of it.”

  “Jesus. Remind me to lock the doors around you.”

  “Don’t worry, you ain’t got nothing I want anyway. ’Cept maybe —”

  “Forget it, Sonny. You wouldn’t know what to do with a woman like Ronette. Now let’s open this cocksucker up and try her out.”

  Next morning he wakes up and it’s blowing some over the trailer roof but not too hard to go lobstering, he can smell the salt air coming through the trees. Then it returns to him, first like a dream, then like the real thing. He won’t be going out anymore. He hits the snooze button on the alarm clock, hits it again in ten minutes, and wakes up nice and easy with the room already light. Half a quart’s not much, he feels pretty good for an old man who just got coldcocked by a fucking whale. Last night the two of them watched the Winston Cup Talladega 500 till they fell asleep. Now it’s 6:30 a.m. Sonny was up early and out of here, probably went home to jerk off.

  He walks down the hallway of the trailer naked. Every step, the floor creaks and sags under his feet. He scratches his nuts and peers out the grimy window at the pickup jammed against the wall. He has a glass of clam juice and twists off the top of a can of sardines, but they remind him too much of Alfie so he opens the screen door and throws the sardines outside on the flooded lawn. The water is down a bit, you can see most of the tires on the GMC, the cinder blocks under the trailer are coming into view.

  The boat gets built first, though, then he’ll look at that fucking aluminum wall.

  He searches around for his Ricky Craven Pro Team mug and mixes a quick cup of instant Nescafé to get his pills down with. The trailer looks better inside than when they left. The wall-to-wall carpet’s still pretty wet but at least nothing’s floating around the floor. Last time they were home, Ronette had her morning sickness and she left the head in pretty bad shape. He takes the toilet brush to it with some Comet and it comes out nice. A trailer’s about like a boat, they’re shitheaps if you let them go downhill. He’ll get some good self-tapping screws later and screw that fucking panel back onto the wall studs and seal it with duct tape, that will make a decent fix and he can drive his truck out. If you’re going to have a little kid crawling around, you can’t have a blizzard coming through the walls.

  Up at the north end of the trailer on the bedroom floor he finds a space big enough to empty the boat kit carton on. Then he’s got to walk out and look for a hammer in the pickup, with Corey’s pride and joy yelping at the end of its chain the minute he goes out the door. No sign of Sonny Phair, though the hubcaps are rattling and his shack seems to be shaking up and down. He must be in there thinking about Ronette.

  The coffee’s done so he gets a Rolling Rock from the fridge and sits on the damp carpeted trailer floor and gets to work. The sawed pine smells like a boatyard in spring when they’re planing the hull planks down. The kit has an instruction book about twenty pages long but the damn thing might as well be in Japanese, his glasses are twenty fathoms down there with the Wooden Nickel. Anyhow, it can’t be too fucking hard to build a five-foot boat. Doesn’t have to float anyway, just rock back and forth to put the kid to sleep.

  He takes the ten U-shaped frame sections and lines them up bow to stern in the right order. The third and eighth frame members have an extra flange on them for the rockers. He starts with those two, flips them upside down so he can pound on them, and nails the keel strip to them, then the first of the hull strips, the garboard strake that butts against the keel. He bends the thin flexible strip up towards the bow and tacks it into the stem piece, repeating that process for the garboard strip on the other side. The next strake was the one the whale got, and for a moment he’s back there with a blue quilt trying to bandage his gashed
hull, but this one could be plugged with a handkerchief, no problem, and he tacks it on. The next pair of strakes follows, then the next, just like the Alley brothers, and before the morning’s over he has a hull.

  The pictures in the manual show the rockers going on next, before the hull gets flipped over upright to attach the cabin. The rockers have a couple of long Phillips-headed screws fastening them back into the frame members directly above them, he’ll need to go to Sonny’s for a screwdriver. He’s been sitting on the wet rug for three hours straight and it hurts like hell to unfold his legs and get up, but he does it, and makes another stop at the fridge on the way out. Outside, it’s a clear late morning with a stiff northwester finally coming in. Even the lawn puddles have whitecaps on them. Across the street Corey’s going out to the doghouse with a bowl of Alpo, the dog’s standing up on its neck chain like a human being. Over at Sonny’s a cockeyed face shows at the window. He’s up, he’s got a beer going, good way to spend a windy Monday. He borrows the Phillips head from Sonny and wades back past a pickup that’s become part of the house.

  Screwdriver in hand, he faces the kit plans again. If they’re going to use the lobster boat model as a cradle, it’s got to have rockers. If they’re going to bury it in the ground behind the trailer, it won’t be needing them. Doctor said fifty-fifty but it’s a new day, might as well hope as not. He starts screwing the rockers on.

  By noon he’s got the deck fastened and the cabin framed up and she’s starting to look shipshape. All that’s missing is the propeller and the engine box, but if you put in a motor there wouldn’t be any room left for the kid.

  He’s just tacking down the wheelhouse roof when he hears someone at the door, sounds like a dog scratching at first. It can’t be Corey’s, that thing’s across the road howling like a timber wolf. Maybe it’s Ginger, smelling her way back from Clyde’s with a tale to tell.

  Turns out it’s Sonny Phair with his white Sherwin-Williams cap on and his arms full of brushes and paint. Sonny grabs a beer out of the fridge, then takes a long whistle when he sees the boat cradle up underneath the trailer window alongside the unmade bed. “Can’t launch her without a paint job,” Sonny says. “I brought my acrylics over, them things dry in half an hour.”