The Wooden Nickel (16 page)

He gets the old image back of the
Wooden Nickel
as a brand-new boat, found adrift off Toothpick Ledge by the Thurston boys, trap wide open, Chrysler slant-six idling away,
his old man unconscious on the floor. Howard Thurston said the lobsters had already crawled under his oilskins, greedy bastards,
they couldn’t wait for revenge. The Thurstons got him to the hospital but he never fished again.

“Sometimes I’ll be out there,” he says to his wife, “the days I’m alone...”

“Which aren’t very many,” she reminds him. “Your sternperson’s with you almost every trip.”

“Seems like half the time I’m alone, and you know how many smells there is out there, the bait and the hydraulic oil, and
the kelp and eelgrass off the bottom, the rotten trap wood, gullshit and salt air...”

“. . . cigarettes, Wild Turkey. Lucas, I think your self-discipline melts away when you leave the mooring, and I don’t see
Ronette Hannaford offering much support.”

“This ain’t a church, Mother, it’s just a gas station, and I’m trying to tell you something. I’ve been picking up another
smell out there, it ain’t the bilge or anything I can put my hands on.”

“Might be something your sternlady’s sprayed on herself. Those colognes have a way of lingering.”

“Tell you what I think, I think it’s the smell of death, mixed in with everything else. What worries me, it don’t smell half
as bad as I thought it would.”

She shivers and draws the hand-knit sweater around her shoulders. She’s always been cold, her whole life, there’s not enough
flesh on her to keep her warm even on the first of June. “It doesn’t matter what you want or don’t want for yourself, Lucas,
there are those of us who care.”

“Who? Kyle’s gone. He ain’t coming home. Kristen? She’s got the oh pear, then she’s off to college and she ain’t looking back.
You? You’re out every night now over to the art school with the stained glass, think you was a monk.”

“I’m not a monk, Lucas. And from what I hear these days, neither are you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s make our trip to the salad bar, then we’ll talk about it.”

He realizes why she chose the Big Stop now, they don’t serve alcohol. He’s got half a pint in the glove compartment, he’s
thinking how he might get out to it, but she’s already handed him his three-inch Formica bowl and she’s steering him towards
the lettuce bin, there’s no escape. He moves through the Irving Big Bar feeling dry and clumsy as the first fucking fish learning
to walk on land, groping through the vegetables for edible food. Lettuce is too much like rockweed. Tomatoes are all right
in spaghetti sauce but he doesn’t eat them raw, especially the little cherry ones you can’t even cut into with those blunt
plastic knives so they go rolling off your plate. They got carrot slivers, celery slivers, big black olives the size of a
guy’s balls. He grabs a tongload of red onions and goes to pile on a cheese slab and a few slices of hard-boiled egg. “No
eggs,” she reminds him, “and no cheese. You’re way past your quotas for this week.”

“Christ.”

He comes back to their booth with a bowl of onion chunks and green peppers smothered in skin-colored Local French under which
he’s concealed a few chunks of boiled ham. “What’s that you’ve sprayed on there,” she asks, “bacon bits?”

“Jesus, they’re just chemicals, they ain’t real bacon.”

“Lucas, do you want to know why I spend so much thought and energy on you? Because I care about you. That’s what marriage
is, remember. Death do us part. Till then we have to keep each other alive.”

“OK.”

“But I don’t particularly want to preserve you for the enjoyment of someone else. Remember the other part,
forsaking all others?
You know, I had a couple of admirers back then. As you well know, one of them was Clyde Hannaford.”

“Well, here’s your chance. He’s all alone in the hot tub.”

“Lucas, the last thing I’m interested in is another man. One is enough, I assure you. I’m only recalling his name to tell
you I had a choice back then. I chose you, and I still do.” The tear bulging in each eye makes it look like she’s wearing
contacts under her glasses.

“I don’t get it. Why dig up the past? Them days are gone.”

“I ran into Rhonda Hannaford the other day, while I was delivering some much-needed supplies to your son in his new home.
Or Rhonda Astbury, as she’s starting to call herself again. God knows why she would want to claim relation with that Burnt
Neck crowd. She caught my eye and turned green like somebody seasick. I never saw anyone look so guilty. She spun right around
and went back to that ostentatious little car Clyde gave her.”

“It’s got the sixteen-valve overhead-cam six,” he reminds her. “Ain’t a big engine but she torques up.”

“I’m sure she does. I walked right over and leaned on her car roof so she couldn’t just drive off. I said if she’s working
for you, I’d like to get to know her a little better. It’s almost like she’s in the family, spending all that time on the
Wooden Nickel,
which as you well know is legally half my boat. So I said, ‘Why don’t you stop off for supper one of these days after hauling,
and get acquainted?’”

“You did, huh? And what’d Ronette say?”

“She said something like, ‘Me and him’s already acquainted.’ You know her grammar, it’s worse than yours. I said, ‘Does that
mean what I think it means?’ and she said it could mean whatever I want. She looked at her watch and said something about
going home to feed her dog. Lucas, I felt as if I’d been condescended to.”

He can’t quite look her in the face at this point, so his glance drifts towards the plate glass window behind her. His eyes
would like to check out the vehicles in the parking lot, but the view is blocked by the June forsythias in violent yellow
bloom under the mercury-vapor lamps. He can just make out the twilight sky and the first star, on which he makes a wish to
be the fuck out of there and not going through this, when suddenly a brand-new forty-five-foot fishing boat pulls right in
front of the window, ten miles from the nearest shore. He can’t see its lower half because of the shrubbery, and the thing’s
so big it looks like the Big Stop restaurant’s moving and the boat is standing still. He’s caught off guard for a moment.

“What the hell, Sarah, take a look at that.”

His wife turns around and says, “Heaven’s sake, Lucas, it’s just someone with a trailer hauling a boat. Try to pay attention.
I’m doing my best to talk with you.”

“But the trailer don’t show, so it looks like she’s steaming right through the parking lot. Ain’t that the optical illusion?”

She’s got a stainless steel tuna pulpit up front, full controls on the wheelhouse roof, cabin closed on both sides so she’ll
never haul a lobster trap. The boat stops right there in front of the Irving door, so new he can see the mold wax clinging
to the sides. He hears the idling diesel of the hauling truck but he can’t see it, so it appears like the boat has docked
up in the Irving parking lot to unload the catch.

In a moment the door swings open and in struts Wilfred Beal with his arm around Clyde Hannaford’s brother Arvid, both of them
with big cigars. Sarah’s got her back to them, but right away they spot Lucky in the booth. “Hey Lunt, which way’s the smoking
section?”

“It ain’t here,” he says, his nose hairs trembling from the whiff of smoke. “Don’t wave them god damn cigars over the salad
bar.”

The two men wheel around to view the new boat through the window. “What do you think?” Wilfred Beal asks. “Trucked her up
from Point Judith, Rhode Island. Pequod Boat Corporation.”

“No need to buy local,” Lucky says. “How come you didn’t get a Mexican one?”

“They ain’t got the technology around here. This one’s an offshore rig, turbocharged diesel, refrigeration, Satcom, monel
tanks, sixty-four-mile Furuno radar.”

“She don’t have no pot hauler,” Lucky observes.

“Ain’t going for lobster. Four, five years, lobstering’s going to be dead. Government’s going to move in, start the trap-limit
squeeze, guys like me and you won’t haul ten christly lobsters in a week. That there boat’s for the twenty-first century.
The good old days has peaked. They ain’t coming back neither. She’s full tuna. Total refrigeration, right to the airport:
Sushi Express.”

“You going to drag with her in the winter?”

“Ain’t going to be here winters. No more iced-up fuel lines, no fucking frostbite. You know my brother lost a toe off of his
right foot.”

“Still got five left, don’t he?”

“
Lu
cas.”

“No, that’s all right, ma’am,” Wilfred Beal says. “Your husband’s got a right to be jealous. This thing’s going to get me
a condo in West Palm Beach.”

“No investment like local talent,” Arvid Hannaford says. He’s got those same little pig eyes like his brother, fat cheeks
and a tight wrinkly little pursed-up mouth like putting a pair of glasses over someone’s asshole. Arvid looks at the boat
again, takes out a calculator, pokes in some numbers with a soft pudgy jointless finger that looks like a dick. It’s pretty
clear Wilfred Beal won’t be seeing any Florida condos, but Arvid and Yvonne Hannaford might buy afew.

“My man,” Wilfred Beal says, laying his arm on Arvid’s shoulder.

As the two of them head for the smoking section, Sarah turns around and flashes a quick smile, not for domestic consumption.
“Arvid, say hello to Yvonne for me. Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow about the fabric.”

“Finest kind,” Arvid Hannaford says.

“We’re getting real cozy with the Hannafords,” he observes.

“I’m helping Yvonne redecorate her gallery. She might hire me part-time when it gets busy.”

“Wait a minute. You wasn’t available when it came to lobstering. Take too much time from the studio.”

“Things have changed, Lucas. I might need the money. In case I find myself one day supporting a household.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She leans forward across their uneaten salads, speaks low so Yvonne’s husband won’t hear. “Lucas, just because I’m finally
getting a life of my own does not mean our marriage is over and anything goes. That afternoon in Burnt Neck I asked Rhonda
Hannaford right out if there was anything she wanted to tell me about your working arrangement, and you know what she said?”

“No.”

“She said, ‘Why don’t you ask around back home?’ Which is what I’m doing. I want to hear it one way or the other straight
from the horse’s mouth, not whispers and rumors and certainly not from a woman who is practically young enough to be your
daughter.
Our
daughter, if we’d married like the Astburys, right out of high school.”

The Irving Musak system is playing a Vince Gill song and he goes to look in the direction of the speaker, but she reaches
for his cheek and turns his face towards her, looks him right in the eye without blinking with her face so thin and solemn
and hurt-looking that it can’t be lied to and he starts to forget everything but the truth.

“Ain’t nothing happening,” he says. Then, after a long pause, “Anyways, not anymore. Maybe one time early on...”

“Lucas, I don’t need the details. I understand that woman is going through a divorce, I know what things can be like for someone
under that strain. With your size, and the age difference, you must be a refuge for her in a stormy time. And I can only guess
what it must be for a man, exposed to temptation out on the solitude of the ocean. I even take partial responsibility because
I know you asked me to work for you and I refused. But Lucas, for twenty years I’ve submerged myself in your life, and the
children’s lives, and now I’m determined to find my own. Do you know what this means to someone like me, who never got a day
of education beyond high school, and has never traveled more than a few miles from home?”

“It ain’t what it used to be,” he says. “You been away a lot.”

She starts crying when he says that. He looks over at Wilfred and Arvid’s table. At the first sob the two of them stopped
talking, and now they’re staring over at the Lunts, Wilfred’s blowing a smoke ring and Arvid Hannaford has his cigar stuck
straight in his mouth like a turd in a dog’s ass. Sarah’s saying, “I
have
been away. I’m trying to cope with an empty nest, in my own way, and maybe take some of the financial burden off your shoulders.
But it’s not worth all the money on earth if it tears down what I wanted to support.”

The tears are crusting on her cheeks, as if a damp easterly fog blew over and salted them down. She looks younger than when
she was knocked up with Kyle and he proposed to her that summer evening in the cab of the ’68 Dodge Power Wagon with the old
small-block 318, toughest truck he ever owned, and despite its carburetor icing problems he can’t separate it from his memories
of early love. He has the impulse to lean forward over their salad bowls and take her face in his hands the way he did twenty-one
years ago, but there’s Ronette’s brother-in-law staring right at them with a fried clam dangling from his tight little asshole
mouth and the impulse to kiss anyone is lost.

“I’ll fire her tomorrow,” he says, “if that’s what you want.”

“Lucas, you’ve already claimed whatever was happening is over and I will take your word for it. I don’t want you out there
all alone. If you continue to keep it strictly business you can give her two weeks’ notice, but meanwhile, for everyone’s
sake, I want you to be looking for someone else.”

“That’s pretty white of you,” he says. “Don’t know’s I would of done that if it was me.”

“There are women who wouldn’t let you back in the house, but I believe in a second chance. Just this week Dr. Nichols’s sermon
was on the Prodigal Son.”

“Speak of the devil.”

“I will. I’m going to try and get Kyle home too.”

“Jesus, Mother. Don’t go overboard.”

“I
am
going overboard. You know, I’ve been thinking of Hillary Clinton. She is a role model for all of us on turning the other
cheek.”

“Hope she don’t turn it too fast,” he says. “She’s liable to rip his nose off.”