The Wooden Nickel (18 page)

“I don’t trust them bastards. One of them things could cruise through a trapline and eat the whole fucking business, pots
and all. That guy Moby Dick was on the right track, stick a harpoon in every fucking one of them.”

“Lucky, I think Moby Dick was the whale.”

“Jesus Christ, Ronette, didn’t you learn nothing over in Split Cove? Moby Dick was this one-legged skipper out of New Bedford,
he killed so many whales the government shut down the fishery. And them bastards was just warming up. Few more years and we
won’t be able to catch a god damn thing, we’ll all be working for Bill Gates. The Japs have a good thing going with whales.”

“What’s that, Lucky?” She’s baiting traps fast now, not even looking up.

“They grind them into cat food.”

“One of them things would feed a lot of god damn cats.”

“They eat them in sushi too, that’s what I heard. They just don’t talk about it, they’re scared them Greenpiss hippies will
drop another atom bomb on them.”

“Lucky, did you ever think of going back and finishing up high school?”

“What for? A lobster don’t ask if you got a fucking diploma.”

“I was just wondering, that’s all. I mean, you got all this knowledge, you ought to have something to show for it.”

“I know one thing. One of them cocksucking whales will take more lobsters than a herd of seals.”

“That ain’t what I heard, I heard their mouths was so small they can’t even swallow a sardine. If that’s true they sure as
hell ain’t going to eat any lobsters.”

“Shows all you know. Some of them has small mouths, some of them don’t. How the fuck are they supposed to know they got small
mouths? They don’t give a shit, they trash your gear anyway. One of them things goes through your gear, you’re fucked. It’s
them or us. Survival of the fittest.” He reaches into the cuddy door and feels for the familiar oiled wood of his shotgun
stock, just to be sure it’s there. He’s got a twelve-gauge slug that would stop a rhinoceros. “Son of a whore comes up again,
I’m going to shoot it. Millionaire Greenpiss activists fuck the little guy every time.”

“Lucky, you ain’t the little guy. What are you, six-two, twofifty?”

“That ain’t what I meant. The world ain’t physical no more, Ronette. That kind of size don’t mean nothing.”

“Means something to me.” She quivers her tits like blueberry Jell-o under the purple tank top, gives him a little smile that
harpoons down his spinal column almost to the dicktip before it runs into a voice saying,
Lucas, look but don’t touch.
All of a sudden the whale’s in closer and it sticks its fin up again like some government bureaucrat giving you the finger.
The dog goes crazy, leaping up and barking like she’s about to swim out and bite it. Ronette says, “You got one on your side,
anyway.”

“You ain’t exempt,” he says to Ginger. “We’ll eat a few of you too while we’re at it.”

After a couple more strings Ronette steps right out of her oil-skins from the heat and shakes her hair out from under the
red kerchief she uses to keep it out of the winch. Everything’s in motion under the tank top. “Like what you see, don’t you?”

“I might but I ain’t looking.”

“Ain’t for you anyhow. Cruelty to animals don’t get to first base with me.”

“I didn’t do nothing, did I? Let’s haul some traps.”

“It’s wicked hot, Lucky. How about cooling off below instead?” He turns to her with a big rock crab in one hand, the other
on the bronze spoke of the wheel. “Ronette, there’s something I got to tell you.”

“There’s something I got to tell you too, Lucky, but it can wait till we been below. It’s been a week at least, ain’t it?
I lose track of time out in the sun.”

He hoists a trap over the rail and slides it aft to Ronette. Right when she’s got her hand in the parlor end pulling the culls
and starfish out, he tells her. “The arrangement don’t seem to be working out. I got to get somebody else as sternman, after
today.”

She finishes pulling a big two-pounder out of the hole and turns to face him, her kelp-colored eyes wide open and the lobster
snapping away in her right hand. “What the hell, Lucky. Ain’t I been good enough?”

“It ain’t that, Ronette. You’re a good worker and I’ll tell anyone you want to go sternman for. Finest kind. But I ain’t had
no peace since you went and told Sarah out at Kyle’s.”

“I didn’t say nothing to your wife.”

“She thinks you did.”

“Thinks I said what?”

“‘Go ask your husband,’ something like that. Anyway, it got her full of piss and I got to let you go.”

“She’s a smart one,” Ronette says, going for another lobster.

“Why?”

“I didn’t say nothing like that. I never even talked to her. She got suspicious and she trapped you. You’re like a god damn
pea-brained lobster, you crawled right into it.”

“Maybe she trapped me, maybe not.”

From one hand she’s dangling a small green cull that’s not even struggling. It hangs there limp as if it’s dead. “Don’t I
mean nothing to you, Lucky?”

He lights a Marlboro but the first puff tastes like creosote and he spits over the rail. The sky’s graying over with high
fog. A big black rusty Shag Island trawler crosses their path, close enough to read the name off her stern:
Black Angel.
He lets the warp slack over the winch drum and braces for the wake. “I can’t leave Sarah,” he says. “She ain’t up to taking
care of herself. Other day, her right-hand wiper blade come off and she couldn’t even fix it, she let the wiper arm carve
a groove into the windshield.”

The trawler’s wake comes through and kicks up the port quarter so high that Ginger slides off into the saltwater tank and
leaps out vibrating and spraying. Ronette has to grab Lucky’s apron and hang on, the cull coming to life and snapping at her
hand.

On High Country 104, Garth Brooks sings “It’s Midnight, Cinderella.”

I gotta few new magic tricks

Your godmother can’t do

Ronette stands there holding the lobster with Ginger beside her and says, “Lucky, it ain’t going to be that easy. I been sick
the last three mornings in a row.”

“What do you mean, sick?”

“I mean sick, that’s what I mean. What does it mean when a woman takes her first sip of coffee and throws up? I ain’t been
this late since I was twelve years old. Three weeks.”

“I thought you said Clyde couldn’t have no kids.”

“It ain’t Clyde.”

“What do you mean, it ain’t Clyde?”

“I ain’t even seen Clyde except to swap off Ginger and at the lawyer’s office. I ain’t seen no one, Lucky. Outside of you.”

He turns away and puts the pot warp around the davit and hauls a deep one up from seven fathoms. It’s got two nice keepers
in there and a bonus of three or four fat-clawed crabs hanging from the bait bag. She stands there waiting for some kind of
answer, not laying a hand on the trap, so he does her work of pulling them out and banding them as if she isn’t even there.
He takes the watch out of his apron pocket. It’s one-thirty. He’s got to get in, get unloaded and get to his daughter’s high
school graduation, first Lunt that ever made it through. “What do you mean, outside of me?”

“This ain’t no Hannaford, Lucky, and I sure as hell didn’t clone it. It’s a Lunt.”

“What do you mean, it? It ain’t nothing. I ain’t even known you that long.”

“Five weeks tomorrow. That was the first time, remember? You about had a heart attack. That must of done it. I got one of
them Dewline home pregnancy tests at the Rite Aid and it came out green as grass. It’s a wonder you ain’t got seventy-eight
kids like Saddam Hussein, cause you’re like the Burpee seed catalog. Guaranteed to sprout. Won’t Clyde have a big surprise.”

“Clyde don’t need to know, does he?”

“Well he’s sure as shit going to know when I drive past with a baby seat in the back. Damn creep. All that stuff coming out
of him and nothing in it. Might as well been Ivory Liquid. Fake. Like the whole damn family. You know his brother Arvid’s
kids are adopted? I never told you that. That skinny bitch Yvonne got herself laid by one of them surrogate doctors, that’s
what Clyde told me, and when that didn’t work they bought them kids in New York City. Ever wonder how they got that Puerto
Rican look? The whole christly Hannaford line, it’s a dead end.”

“Well you still got a few weeks to decide,” Lucky says.

“Decide on what? There ain’t no deciding to do.”

“Ain’t going to be easy, raising a kid by yourself. You got no money to speak of, you’re never going to get nothing off of
Clyde.”

“I counted on working for you, Lucky. You and Doris. Doris will be the godmother. She was kind of around when things got going.”

He baits the last trap himself and throws it off the stern. “I got to get back now,” he says. “It’s Kristen’s graduation.
She’s the first Lunt in history that ever finished up.”

“And she’s going to college. You ought to be proud of her.”

“She don’t need college. She’s too god damn smart already.”

He reaches behind the radar screen for a Marlboro and lights it with a Bic lighter, as the manifold has gone cold with all
the idling. Then he puts her in gear, points the bow for South Sodom Ledge, east-northeast, and shoves the Morse lever almost
to the stop. The big Chevy V-8 explodes with a message of power and freedom that erases the word
pregnant
like it was never spoken. In ten seconds she’s stern down and the loran’s reading eighteen knots, taking the long way around
so he doesn’t disturb Howard Thurston, who’s still working traps, and Lonnie Gross just beyond. Lonnie’s daughter’s throwing
bait off the stern with a cloud of seagulls around her like she’s the most attractive creature in the world. Shows what the
fuck birds know.

He’s got her slowed down after the Orphan Ledge nun where it gets shallow and there’s a raft with a divers’ flag in the cove.
He stays slow at the narrows, where he’s squeezed in by Noah Parker’s pilot boat with the big numbers on the coach roof: 772503.
What a racket, Noah gets a thousand bucks each for bringing the cocksuckers in, he doesn’t even do the work, just watches
over the shoulder of some Liberian captain with a row of silent Arabs on the foredeck, not a word of English between them
so Noah doesn’t even have to talk. A thousand bucks just to stand there guzzling his rum and coffee on the bridge.

He gives Noah the finger as he goes by, Noah gives him a big wave back and steals a long look at Ronette Hannaford perched
up on the washboard in her cutoff shorts, knees crossed, already scraping barnacles off the rock crabs. Their two wakes meet
in the narrow space bounded by ledges and tide rips, causing a confusing little chop, but he throttles her up a hair and she
cuts right through. Ronette comes up behind him as he steers, lights a Marlboro off of his, reaches over his shoulder to turn
the radio up for Reba’s “I Won’t Mention It Again.” In the rush of V-8 speed, she presses her belly up against his back and
a deep shock goes through him like she’s carrying an electric eel. “What about tomorrow?” she shouts.

“If I want you tomorrow I’ll call you at half past four.”

He lights another Marlboro off the hot engine stack. They’re inside the ledges now and the water is calm and smooth. Off to
the westward, ranging north from the big Johnson estate, there’s a string of dark-shingled mansions with turrets and hidden
porches that look like Dracula’s castle. Anyone ever spent a winter in one, they’d hang themselves.

“We used to call that Kotex Point,” he yells. “Guy that ran the Kotex company lived there.”

“I wish I’d of known you back then, Lucky, you must of been an interesting kid.”

“You wasn’t even born.”

“I was an angel, waiting to come down. That’s what my momma used to say.”

“You’re still an angel, Ronette.”

“A pregnant angel. They don’t show those ones on the Christmas cards.”

Most of the moorings are still empty because the summer people have not really arrived yet, but there’s one big new dark blue
sailboat out there, still got the hull wax on, two million in her easy, satellite dome on the spreaders so he can chat with
his broker in the Cayman Islands, big chrome windlass on the foredeck so he won’t get a hernia hauling chain. Think of the
poor bastards breathing fiberglass dust over to Bunny Whelan’s boatyard, emphysema, workman’s comp for a few years, then so
long Sam. Glass lung. Place is worse than a coal mine, all so some rich bastard can go nowhere at five miles an hour.

He says out loud, “Every one of them things is some son of a bitch screwing the working man.” Then he slows down, edges a
point to starboard so he can see behind the canvas dodger and there they are, five or six of them in the cockpit not doing
a god damn thing, getting drunk while the money comes gushing down the mast from the satellite. Look at the bloodsuckers,
three in the afternoon, swilling martinis like a bilge pump. Come suppertime they’ll reach over and pull up some poor lobsterman’s
trap and steal a day’s catch, living off the labor of others, worse parasites than a colony of fucking seals. “Son of a whores,”
Lucky yells and heads right towards them, turning the throttle to 2200 rpm.

“Who? You still ragging on the whales?”

“You talk about whales, take a look at them fatass pigs, you think they ever done a day’s work?”

“Christ sake, Lucky,” she screams over the engine, “they’re on
vacation.
This is supposed to be Vacationland, ain’t it?”

“Ain’t no vacationland for the ones that live here, it’s Work Your Ass Off for Nothingland. They should have the cons stamp
that
on the license plates.” He heads right for the stainless steel barbecue grill smoking off the stern rail, no doubt full of
stolen lobsters.

“Lucky,” she screeches, “what are you
doing?
”

He steams the
Wooden Nickel
right at them till he gets about fifty feet off their stern. He comes so close he can read the name off the transom in big
gold metallic letters, probably fourteen-karat leaf like the church steeple.
Zauberflöte,
whatever the fuck that means. Then he swerves hard to starboard so they’ll catch a nice fat quarter wave and turns away.
“Fucking Krauts. Should of finished them off when we had the chance.” He pins the throttle so they won’t be able to read his
boat name in the cloud of spray, smokes eastward across the harbor towards the Split Ledge beacon at twenty-two knots on the
loran. Ronette has got the binoculars and she’s looking back over the stern. “Jesus, Lucky, you destroyed them, their table’s
fell over, they look like they’re drenched, and now they’re all going down below.”