The Wooden Nickel (22 page)

Kyle and his buddy are standing at the bar being guarded by Big Andy himself so they don’t try and order a drink, though Kyle’s
got less than a year to go. Liquor police must be on hand. His son looks like he’s put on another inch or two since he left
home. His eyes are up to the level of Big Andy’s mouth. He’s growing a mustache too, make up for the shaved head, only it’s
not his color. Looks like he’s dyed it blond. He’s still got the earring. On his left shoulder he’s got a new tattoo but it’s
too far off to make out what it is. His friend Darrell’s a shorter, skinnier, weasely type with a crotch-hair mustache, just
the kind they love in prison.

Travis Hammond says, “Hear your boy’s living over to Burnt Neck.”

Lucky spits on the floor. “I wouldn’t know. I ain’t been to see him.”

The orange-haired islander stops talking to his buddies and asks Lucky, “That kid yours?”

“Used to be. I don’t know who the fuck he is now.”

“He lobstering?”

“No. He’s urchin diving.”

“What about you?” the guy says to Travis Hammond. “You got any kids?”

“My kid’s in the service,” Travis says. “And I got another one . . .” He pauses. “. . . in the community college system.”

“The fuck he is,” Lucky says. “He’s in the juvenile detention system.”

“That’s exactly my point,” the bald black-bearded guy argues. “Your kids ain’t lobstering, why make such a big fuss over a
few traps?”

“Them territories ain’t going to change,” Lucky says.

Travis turns to Lucky. “I don’t know, Luck, we might be able to accommodate a few more sets, way out south, southwest of Sodom
Ledge.”

“Shut the fuck up, Travis. They ain’t getting nothing. Think what your old man would say, he’d piss in his fucking grave,
same as mine.”

“We was thinking we’d just try it out,” the orange-haired guy says, “like an experiment. Lay some traps along south of your
traps, then you could add up and see if you was getting less lobsters, keep everything nice and scientific, and if you was,
like your friend says, we could back off.”

“You can back off now,” Lucky tells him, “save yourself a whole lot of trouble.”

The orange-haired guy gives Lucky the big shit-eating grin with his shovel tooth and the purple tongue poking out of his mouth
like a liver-colored eel. He takes a slug out of the bottle of Rolling Rock and pushes his chair back. He takes off his wristwatch
and slides the expansion band down over the bottle, like he doesn’t want it to get hurt. Though this guy must spend his life
in the open sun, his face is white as a slice of cusk and his hands are huge and pale with large moldy freckles on them like
blue cheese. The guy says, “Who you telling to back off?”

The woman puts her tattooed forearm on the guy’s sleeve. “Let the poor man alone, Cyrus. He don’t mean nothing.”

Lucky feels his heart beat nice and strong and regular in his chest, just like the old days, no jumping around. “Fag Island,”
he says, “that’s what we used to call it.”

The orange-bearded guy sits there a moment with his eyes bulging out of his face like a flounder, then he stands up and leans
over the table to grab Lucky by the throat, his hands knocking down bottles on the way, but they never get there. Lucky plants
his ass in the chair and gives the table a good forward shove and it makes contact just over the guy’s knees. The big son
of a bitch grabs the air for support and goes down backwards, knocking his chair over and breaking the legs off it as he crushes
it to the floor. He lies there a minute, parts of the chair all around him, then starts picking himself up with one hand while
the other hand’s grabbing at his eye like he can’t see. The other two Shag Islanders get up to help him, though not too swiftly,
like they’ve never seen this guy down and they want to enjoy it for a while. Meanwhile the band has stopped and all the old
geezers are closing in on the action while Big Andy charges through the crowd with one hand stiff out in front of him to clear
the way and the other holding an aluminum baseball bat. Along with him’s a guy in a sport coat who was up at the bar drinking,
now he’s letting his coat slip back and there’s a badge on his shirt, he must be the liquor cop. That’s why they gave Kyle
a hard time.

Lucky’s still holding the table edge, then takes the opportunity to remind Big Andy, “I told you not to let them cocksuckers
in here. They ain’t nothing but trouble.”

The orange-haired guy’s still got his hand over his eye and the big woman hisses at Lucky, “Jesus, you blinded him,” but the
black-bearded one says, “Cyrus ain’t blinded, he lost his fucking contact.”

The big black-bearded guy yells, “Don’t step on it, for Christ’s sake. Somebody get a flashlight.”

“Maybe it’s up under the lid,” the woman says. She’s pulling on his shoulders, trying to bring his head down to her level
and calm him so she can look and see where the contact is. “I’ll need a flash-light to look up in there,” she says. Big Andy
goes back to look for flashlights. The liquor cop has his arms outstretched to secure the area where the contact was lost
so nobody walks on it. The woman yells after Big Andy, “See if anyone can find a Q-Tip!”

It seems like the perfect time to leave. He gives Travis Hammond a twenty and says, “Leave a good tip, Travis, we want to
be asked back.”

When he gets home the garage doors are closed, the house is quiet, and the lights are out. He did the right thing by instinct,
killing a little time at the RoundUp while Sarah got calmed down. He knows her to the bone, she gets all excited over stuff,
then she cools off and comes around. They’re closer than Siamese twins, that’s why they’ve lasted all these years. He peeks
in the window and there’s the navy blue Lynx in its place right beside the ATV. He has to be very quiet so she doesn’t wake
up and start going again about Ronette. He won’t even turn on the TV, though the Daytona replays start at 1 a.m. Maybe he
could put it on mute and just watch them go round the track, in hopes of glimpsing Ricky Craven in number 25, his Budweiser
Chevrolet.

He steps into the breezeway and can’t open the kitchen door, first time in history the Lunt house has ever been locked. He
fingers the big key ring hanging from his belt loop. He’s got the truck key and the snowmobile key and the key to the ATV,
a key to Clyde Hannaford’s ice locker that Clyde gave him in earlier days, a key to the Lynx, two boat keys, engine and cuddy
hatch, key to the chain padlock for the punt, key that Ronette gave him to her trailer though he’s never yet set foot in it,
key to the gun cabinet and the gun rack in the pickup, and that’s it. He does not possess a key to his own house.

He tries the front door, which they only use for company. Locked. Garage door too. He gets the crowbar out from behind the
truck seat and tries to jimmy the roll-up doors but they’re down tight from the electric opener and the only remote control
is in the Lynx. He takes the crowbar around to the rear window of the garage and pries the sash up, cracking a pane in the
process because it hasn’t been opened in years and the salt dampness has swollen frame and sash into a single piece of wood.
He pries it about halfway up and there it jams. He has to force a couple hundred pounds of human meat and bone through a half-open
garage window: part by part, leg first, balls over the threshold, ass and belly as a one-piece structure, then bring the other
leg around so he’s half in, backwards, and the rest is easy. Coming in like a burglar, he trips over his own lawn tractor,
feels his way to the light switch, and he can see.

His heart gives a little flip of fear. What if something’s happened? He peers into the Lynx looking for a woman slumped over
the wheel the way she was when he left her, but the car is empty. It takes a while to penetrate that she’s locked him out.
She locked the car doors back in the restaurant parking lot. She locked her body into the steering wheel. She locked her car
even in the locked garage. No problem, she’s a free woman. But the house is different. The car is hers and the body’s hers,
but the house was built by a Lunt and Lunts have owned and maintained it since the Civil War. It’s his. He was born in the
big upstairs bedroom, same as his father was. In the years since his old man’s death he has roofed it and plumbed it and dug
the sump out and scarfed in new sills and rafters where the ants got to them. Evenings, after a full day’s lobstering, he
built the three-car garage and her studio over it with his own hands. When Kyle and Kristen came, he framed the bedrooms out
of the raw attic where he himself had grown up under bare roofboards with the nailpoints sticking through. He has passed through
these doors without question for forty-six years. As far as he knows the house has never been locked, and though he once owned
a house key, he can’t remember when he saw it last.

He knocks hard on the kitchen door and waits. No answer. It’s possible she’s sound asleep and doesn’t hear him.

He goes outside through the breezeway and knocks hard on the central front door of the house, which she has to hear. No light
appears in the south bedroom and no footsteps sound on the stairs. He looks at his watch dial under the yard light. One-thirty.
In four hours he has to be in Split Cove picking Ronette up for the day’s work. He yells up to her window. “Sarah. What the
hell?”

No answer. He rips a clump of grass and sod out of the lawn and underhands it up towards the bedroom windowpane. In the silence
that follows, he remembers once up at her folks’ house when they first met, he’d been out shrimping and they filled the boat
by midnight so they all came in early, maybe one or two in the morning, and all he could think of was seeing Sarah Peek. He
went to the old Peek house on the Deadman’s Hill Road and lobbed a fistful of live shrimp at her window and the light came
on. She came to the window, thin as an elver in some kind of white nightdress, and whispered down, “Lucas, my
folks.
”

Now he’s throwing things at her window again, and finally it does slide open, the light still off but she sticks her head
out in the dark and says, “Lucas, I told you that night in the Irving Big Stop and I meant it. You can’t come in.”

He yells up, “Christ’s sake, Sarah, I’ve got to be fishing at five a.m. We can settle this out tomorrow night.”

“It’s settled, Lucas. You’ve violated everything this house stands for. You show no sign of remorse. You don’t have the right
to live here anymore.”

“What do you mean, the
right?
My family fucking built this place, my old man framed the window you’re looking out of, and I laid the floor you’re standing
on. A hundred and fifty fucking years this has been a Lunt house. Now get your ass down here and unlock the door before I
kick it in.”

By now there’s a car stopped on the road watching this man yelling at a woman in the window. Nobody he knows, though. Not
a cop.

Then she cries down, “Lucas, don’t you see? Nothing is yours anymore. Not me, not this house, nothing. You don’t even own
yourself.”

She shuts the window and the house stays dark. He heads back into the garage and finds the chain saw on its shelf over the
little summer pile of fireplace wood. It’s a McCulloch Pro 20 that he swapped even for a crate of lobsters two years ago,
it wouldn’t cut dogshit when he got it but since then he has filed every sawtooth razor sharp. As always, it starts on the
first pull. The sound is high and clean at first with the choke on, packing the garage with the noise and fumes from its rich
mixture, then with the choke off it warms and idles to a smooth burpy two-cycle purr. He carries the idling saw over to the
kitchen door, the locked one, and touches the blade tip to the door panel just above the knob. The clutch isn’t engaged yet
so it doesn’t make a cut. This is a door his old man put in, back in ’71 when he was too sick for lobstering and too restless
for just sitting around so he rebuilt everything in the house before he died. A door could have been bought all built at the
Tarratine Housing Supply, but his father grooved and rabbeted it out of raw white oak, a month of Walter Lunt’s silent devoted
labor. The door has four panels and he could easily make a cut in one of them that would allow his hand to reach in and slide
the bolt. Then he hears her behind the door. “Lucas, what’s that noise, what are you doing? What’s that noise?”

“I’m coming in.”

“You’re not. You’re crazy.”

He squeezes the trigger and raises the saw tip to the high point of the door in the upper right corner, above the knob. The
instant the moving tip starts smoking through the paint Sarah screams.
“Lucas, for God’s sake!”
The saw makes a vertical pass right down the door, pausing only for a second’s resistance where his old man had grooved in
the hardwood panel. Apply a little more power and she’s through, just like cutting the crust off of a slice of whole wheat
bread. Free of its lock, the cut door swings open on its hinges. He walks over the threshold in triumph, holding up the chain
saw like a sword. The little two-stroke is purring smooth as a house cat, eager for more work.

Sarah leans against the refrigerator with her arms folded, eyes just as steady as if he came in that way every night. She’s
not ready for bed at all but still dressed for her daughter’s graduation. She says, “You may have cut your way in but I’m
leaving. Are you going to keep standing in that opening or are you going to let me through?”

“Where are you going? It’s the middle of the god damn night.”

“It doesn’t matter, Lucas. You have no right to ask. Just get out the way so I can get to my car in the garage.”

He hears the electric garage door open. The tinny Lynx engine starts and backs out past his GMC, then she’s gone down the
pitch-black road. He’s left looking at the sawed-off kitchen door, like a cross section sliced through his old man’s life,
the deep channel grooved to receive the two door panels, the whole thing watertight as a ship. If all that glacial warming
bullshit ever came true and the tide rose a hundred feet up from Orphan Point harbor, this door could have kept the floodwaters
out of his father’s home.