The Wooden Nickel (2 page)

Twenty-five past. He keeps the pickup idling in park, not just because it’s cold but he also likes the sound of the rods just
turning the crankshaft over in its bath of oil. The pickup’s only a 350 but it’s a 4-barrel, and its low, rumbly, slow-turning
V-8 with just the right hint of exhaust failure sounds enough like his Chevy 454 marine to get his blood moving even before
his first sip of the morning regular Sarah won’t give him but Doris might.

Just light enough to see Art Pettingill’s old Cat diesel farting black soot like a Greyhound bus as the
Bonanza
casts off and smokes out towards Sodom Ledge into the April fog. Art’s got a CB tuned to the truck channel because his brother
drives for Irving Oil, another radio on VHF 64, which is the Orphan Point fishermen’s party line, and a third radio on Christian
Country 88.5, all at top volume, though Art can’t hear any of them through the Cat’s exhaust.

He leans his head back against the reassuring hardwood stock of his .30-06 Remington Standard on its rear-window rack. He
used to carry two guns back there, one for Sarah, but after Oscar Reynolds shot his old lady and glassed her into a hull mold,
Sarah asked him to lock hers away in the gun cabinet. Each year, as the hair on the back of his head thins, he can feel the
oiled walnut stock more clearly against the exposed nerves of his scalp.

The .30-06 hasn’t left its rack since the ill-fated Ambajezus hunting trip when he wound up getting butchered along with the
moose. He likes the gun there, though, it’s a warmer headrest than the plate glass window.

He can see the whole harbor now as the snow subsides and the day brightens over Doris’s parking lot. The Blue Claw sits at
the head of the harbor just east of the bridge over Orphan Creek. Over on the westward side, where there’s water enough to
float a vessel at all tides, is the wharf of Clyde Hannaford, buyer and dealer for the Orphan Point lobster fleet. Like it
or not, you catch lobsters, you deal with Clyde. Otherwise you might as well eat the fucking things yourself. Clyde has a
monopoly, that’s how it is and has always been. Over in Split Cove they have a socialist co-op, maybe they pay a cunt hair
more than Clyde does, but if you don’t like the American way, you might as well move up to Canada and sit back and let the
government pay you not to fish.

Beyond Clyde’s, passing down Summer Street where the Money shore begins, there’s Phelan’s boatyard, full of sailboats shrink-wrapped
for winter like a field of tent caterpillars. Then comes the row of summer shops — the Quiche Barne, Bloom’s Antiques, the
Cockatiel Café. Then the Orphan Point Yacht Club, dues alone more than a working man makes in a year. Then a chocolate-colored
Episcopal church with a fancy brown-shingled steeple that starts tapering at the ground and terminates in a golden cross.
The summer people have that cross gilded every June with fourteen-karat gold leaf, slapped on by some bearded asshole they
get up all the way from Philadelphia. After that church Summer Street peters out into a dirt road running behind the row of
big spooky summer mansions they used to break into to smoke and jerk off when they were kids.

On the other side of the harbor, there’s Main Street, where the year-round fishermen live, there’s the Blue Claw, Lurvey’s
Convenience & Video and Ashmore’s Garage. There is also the regular Methodist church with a normal white steeple, so these
two churches separated by water both reach for the sky like a couple of guys giving each other the finger. A brown guy and
a white guy, if you thought of it that way, which Lucky doesn’t. He doesn’t give a fuck what a man is, though everyone knows
the Asians are taking over the earth. And they can have it. Lucky hasn’t set foot in church for fifteen years, except for
a handful of funerals when Sarah dressed him up like the corpse and made him go.

If you spend enough time offshore you realize all those steeples are pointing the wrong way. If there was to be a God, which
is not likely in this numb universe, He would be down under the surface where the real power is, in the cold invisible currents
of the sea.

He focuses his ear on the soft well-tuned drum of the idling V-8. It doesn’t waver, it doesn’t skip a beat. Now if they had
a church with a truck engine up at the altar end, that would mean something and he might sign on. If you’re going to worship
anything it should be something you can get your hands on and you don’t have to argue whether it’s there or not. You can trust
an engine. When you’re over the horizon, past sight of land, maybe it’s thick of fog, cold, with the wind rising, nothing
around you but freezing black salt water and cold-blooded predators that don’t give a fuck, no invisible spirit is going to
help you. That can be proved by Dennis Gower’s cousin Calvin Willey, a God-abiding Mormon that never touched a drink or smoke,
but his RV stove exploded a couple of Julys ago after the Stoneport races and everyone trapped in the back of it was killed.
All God-fearing Mormons, every one of them burned to a crisp. Now a V-8 engine is something to believe in, made by honest
American working stiffs with their own hands. You won’t find a V-8 in a rice-burner. It can be steaming out beyond Shag Ledge
at fifteen knots with the stern half sunk beneath a load of traps, hard-driving the hydraulic winch to haul a thirty-fathom
trapline, or patiently waiting in neutral as you cull the catch, rebait, dump them in again. Your wife may cheat on you and
your friends may forget you ever lived. Your own body starts fucking you over the minute you’re born, the heart lurks in your
chest like a land mine, the brain goes useless as a fistful of haddock guts. But an internal combustion engine is another
matter. Long as you take care of the bastard, when there’s nothing else on earth to count on, it will get you home.

He feels all the clothes Sarah put on him, the Grundens oilskin bib trousers and the wool sweater and the long underwear and
beneath the clothes, his own skin wrapped around him like a survival suit. Under that layer there’s a circulation no different
from the heart of a big-block V-8, the Havoline 10-40 gushing from the pump to lube the pistons stroking in and out of their
cylinders like a tight-holed fuck, the nervous gossipy valves jumping in their seats, the spinelike crankshaft turning in
its bath of oil. His body idling in the front seat, the engine idling under the hood, they’re the same fucking thing.

Not that it’s true for every vehicle. Take Sarah’s Mercury Lynx, which is an aluminum-block four-cylinder piece of shit. When
she started insisting on a car of her own, he planned to buy her something American at Harry Pomerleau’s Lincoln-Mercury up
at the Narwhal Mall in Norumbega. Gas mileage is everything for Sarah, she doesn’t want to take any more than she has to from
those nice Arab sheiks and their Rolls-Royces and their dozen wives. Harry Pomerleau sold her a four-cylinder Lynx whose engine
sounds like an ice-fishing auger but Honest Harry told her the thing would get ten miles on a quart of gas. That’s the word
that slick son of a bitch used on her, a
quart,
like they were going to put milk in the fucking thing. They had the Lynx three months before Virge Carter told him it was
built in Oakville, Ontario. He should have known it from the name, Lynx, must be the national mammal up there in Molsonland.
The laws of marriage force him to keep a car in his garage built under a Communist government by slave labor, same as their
socialist cooperatives and government-funded fucking Canadian piers so they can give lobsters away while just over the border
a free people starve to death.

So he doesn’t set foot in his wife’s car with its lawnmower engine, and Sarah won’t ride in the truck because it smells like
fish.
I don’t mind it on you, Lucas, but then I don’t have to climb inside you, do I?
When they go out together they take both vehicles, even on the thirty-mile run to the Tarratine mall, the navy blue Lynx
tailgated by the big red pickup, Lucky behind the wheel looking down at his wife’s neck through the Lynx’s rear window and
thinking, Fuck fuel economy, I’d like to see the EPA rating on us.

After the angioplasties last November, he was supposed to recuperate on an exercise schedule with walks of gradually increasing
distance. He skipped the exercise and went right for the boat engine instead. Within a month of the operation he had cleaned
the garage and fashioned an engine bed out of railroad ties, which he couldn’t lift and he had to pay Kyle a dollar apiece
to lug them in. Then he flushed out the water-cooling passages with hydrochloric acid. He ran the acid over and over through
the engine block the same way they’d done it with the artery balloons run up past his nuts and guts into his own chest. When
he was finished the acid came out the same as it went in, swift-flowing, colorless and clear: no rust, no clots. As soon as
they let him drive again he dropped the block back in the
Wooden Nickel,
balanced the shaft and flywheel, and at 3000 rpm it ran fifteen degrees cooler. He drove over to the clinic and said, “Check
me out.”

That exercise program did the job for your husband, that’s what young Dr. Burnside told Sarah when they ran into each other
in the IGA.

At exactly five-thirty, Doris flips the sign around. Open. Just at that moment Clyde Hannaford shows up in his blue three-quarter-ton
Dodge Ramcharger with the bright yellow Fisher plow still on the hook. Clyde’s never lowered it yet, not wanting to dirty
her up with snow.

He’s got groundfish crossed out because there’s none of them left, and what there are the government won’t let you have, their
goal being to starve the fishermen off the water and turn the Atlantic Ocean into the world’s biggest national fucking aquarium,
look but don’t touch. It’s good to have your name on a truck. As long as your name isn’t Lunt. The one time Lucky tried it,
the weekend wasn’t over before it became

Scrape it off as he tried, it kept reappearing, even when he painted the whole fucking door it would be there again when he
got in from a day’s fishing. Lucky Cunt.

Now Clyde is bringing his thirty-year-old child bride Ronette to her job as Doris’s counter girl at the Blue Claw. Lucky can’t
figure why she works there. Clyde Hannaford is not some dumb fisherman in debt for fuel and bait, scraping to meet his boat
loan. Clyde owns a wharf and fuel dock that he inherited from his old man, Curtis Hannaford, a first-class prick who diddled
the fishermen for about fifty years and now writes postcards from Miami Beach. It’s his boy Clyde who buys and sells every
lobster that comes into Orphan Point, and in the winter he now has the urchin trade. With his brother Arvid he runs a lobster
takeout in back of the wharf. Come June first they get out a copper kettle big enough to boil four or five New Jersey tourists
in and they sell a one-pound shedder with a boat price of three bucks for eighteen ninety-five. Not to mention the daily dock
markup that probably nets him ten thousand a month while a man like Lucky, out at sea all day doing the work, can barely scrape
up the payments on his gear.

Clyde’s truck door opens to the sound of a Patsy Cline tape and Ronette Hannaford bounces down from the high cab in a black
winter parka over her little waitress miniskirt, showing some places that don’t often see the light of day. She looks like
what Paula Jones
should
look like, if they had a real president in there, only Paula Jones is a dog if you study the pictures, while Ronette’s got
a face that makes her look naked even with an overcoat on. She was a cheerleader at Norumbega High, can’t be more than ten
or twelve years back, while Clyde Hannaford was two years ahead of Lucky and Sarah at the old red brick high school in Orphan
Point. Sarah went out with him too, the years Lucky was a motor-pool mechanic for Uncle Sam, but that was all over when Lucas
Lunt came back to town.

Lucky taps the horn, cries out, “Ain’t you cold?” through the closed window which she probably can’t hear over Clyde’s exhaust.

Ronette looks embarrassed and pulls the skirt down, wraps the parka tight around her tits and flashes a mean look, fake mean
since Ronette Hannaford does love to be noticed. It’s Clyde that is shooting over the mad-dog stare, then he backs up fast
with a lot of unnecessary noise, spins his slick nine-fifty by sixteens and heads for the wharf to drink hazelnut decaf and
count the profits. Lucky shuts off his engine and goes in.

Without asking, Doris hands him his coffee and a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie. “Everyone’s out,” she says. “Won’t be any
lobsters left for you.”

“I’ll give them a half-hour start, that way we’ll all arrive at the same time.”

Ronette looks up and pouts her lips at him, her body bent way over behind the counter to pull up a jar of pickled hard-boiled
eggs. Her skirt lifts up so high he can see the shadow of her ass darkening her upper legs. As the father of a daughter he
wants to grab hold and pull it back down, as a man out on his own in one of the mornings of the world he’d like to raise it
the rest of the way. Talk about miscarriage of justice, an asshole like Clyde Hannaford sleeping every night alongside a woman
you should have to be twenty-one to even look at. Without glancing up she says, “That’s you, Mr. Luck, faster than the eye
can see.”

Doris is breaking coin rolls into the cash register but she’s got her ear out. “Don’t get near him, Ronette, he’s so fast
he’d do it and you wouldn’t even know it was done.”

“Wouldn’t know till the Fourth of July,” Ronette says.

“You’d know before that, dear.” Doris slams the register shut, takes the key out and pockets it. Just then a truck comes screeching
in, brakes spray gravel on Doris’s plate glass window: smell of diesel smoke.

Doris says, “Jesus, what a stench. Who’s got a diesel
truck?
”

“Blair Alley,” Ronette says. “Watch out. Don’t that thing smell.” Blair and his brother Frank weigh a good six hundred pounds
between them, about three ounces of it is brain. They kick the door open with their boots and try to walk through the doorway
at the same time, get stuck for a second then figure out that Blair was first-born and Frank stands aside. Ronette stands
up with the jar of hardboiled eggs and looks down at their boots and says, “Frank Alley, I have always wanted to know, what
size shoe do you take?”