The Wooden Nickel (23 page)

He turns on the NASCAR races but Ricky Craven spins out on the seventh lap. Everyone knows he’s been having seizures since
the New Hampshire crash, but he has a contract and he’s got to race, world-famous son of a bitch but he’s trapped like everyone
else. The yellow flag’s out for the pileup and they’re just crawling around, so he grabs a Rock out of the icebox and takes
it to bed with him but he still can’t sleep. The house is empty. He can feel the sliced-up door like it’s wide open, and for
the first time ever he’d like to have it locked. Christ knows who could walk through that opening and climb the stairs. The
late-rising moon is blasting in through the south window of the bedroom, the kind of thing that used to wake Sarah in the
old days and she’d toss for a while, then she’d wake him in turn and anything could happen. Now she’s got one of her sea glass
mobiles hanging from that window and just as he’s about to pass out, its vanes catch the moonlight and he’s wide awake. He
dozes and the thing swings on its string and he’s staring at the red 3:30 display on the digital clock. From downstairs too,
something’s scratching and shuffling around, it sounds like one of the kids getting up for a piss or a snack, but they’re
both gone. He stands up and puts his boots on. He pulls the sea glass thing off of its hook but in the dark one of the vanes
breaks off and falls on the floor. What the fuck, this is what started it, she starts welding broken glass together and suddenly
she’s an artist and it’s all gone to shit. He throws what’s left of the thing down beside the vane and smashes his heel on
it, glass splinters and leading gouge into the clear pine floor.

There’s still something scratching around downstairs, probably one of those son of a whores from the RoundUp, they’ll grab
his chain saw off the breakfast nook and come up to cut off his arms and legs. He keeps a loaded .30-30 right in the closet
for just such moments. He grabs it and throws the bolt once to bring up a round in the chamber and heads downstairs. Before
going into the kitchen he throws the light switch on to surprise them, but what he sees isn’t a human being. It’s Alfie, the
coon cat, back from his disappearance on Christmas Eve. Six fucking months. He’s thin and rangy, his fur is matted with burdocks
in it, and he’s got a bald scar on his tail. Lucky would hardly know him if it weren’t for the broad six-toed paws, three
black and one almost orange, that Kristen used to call “web feet.” “Only cat that could swim across the harbor,” she used
to say.

The minute Lucky comes into the room with the deer rifle Alfie goes to where his food bowl used to be and starts sniffing
around like he’s just been out overnight. “We ain’t got any cat food,” Lucky explains. “We thought you wasn’t coming back.”

Alfie hops up on the sink in a quick leap that he could have never made when he was a house cat and licks the water drop off
of the faucet like he always did. It’s Alfie all right, that’s the only way he would ever drink. He gets a can of human tuna
from the shelf, White Diamond select, cats love it cause it’s mostly dolphin meat. He puts the electric opener to it and gives
Alfie the whole can. No sleep tonight. In half an hour he’ll be rowing out to the
Wooden Nickel
in his skiff.

H
IS STERNMAN IS PREGNANT
, his wife has moved in with a bull dyke welder out at the art colony, neither of his kids will talk to him, every few hours
his heart flops like a mackerel, and he’s having breakfast alone on a Sunday morning at 5 a.m. Every Sunday of his married
life he came downstairs to a stack of buttered blueberry pancakes, now he’s listening to Tanya Tucker’s “Ridin’ Out the Heartache”
on High Country 104, having a cigarette, and sharing a can of King Oscar sardines with Alfie the cat.

Hey there, where you headed?

I told him I don’t really know

Neither does he, but this is one morning when it doesn’t matter, he’s traveling to the Stoneport races and he’s not worried
about anything but speed. “You got to concentrate,” he says to Alfie at the breakfast table. “You can’t think of nothing but
the engine or else you’re fucked.” He’d take Alfie with him for luck but the cat goes wild and starts throwing up hair balls
the minute he’s aboard a boat.

He opens a fresh can of Norwegian brisling sardines in olive oil. Alfie doesn’t go for the local ones anymore since he came
back, some yuppie must have been feeding him on the back porch and spoiled his taste. Lucky puts the whole can in the food
dish, who knows what hour he’ll be coming home. No doubt about it, it’s an omen of victory that Alfie showed up the night
she left.

The Stoneport lobster boat races start at 10 a.m., he’s got to travel the twenty-five miles of open water and show up by nine-thirty
to register with the race committee. Over the weekend he got Harley Webster up from Riceville and traded two crates of lobsters
for Harley installing a secondhand turbocharger on the 454. Now the engine box cover won’t clamp down so it’s loud as hell,
but they took it out off of Sodom Ledge and when the turbo cut in, it jumped her up five knots on Harley’s portable GPS. While
they were working on it, he asked Harley if he could thread the turbo unit to take a propane fitting on the air intake. “Wouldn’t
that
go like shit,” Lucky said. Harley answered, “What the fuck you want to do that for? It ain’t legal, and you could blow your
frigging boat up.” He installed the propane fitting, though, and by the looks of how quick he did it, it wasn’t the first
time Harley had put one on.

It’s 6 a.m. now and all around him they’re starting their engines up. Usually Sunday mornings they take it easy on the volume,
in case God is nearby they don’t want to bust His eardrums, but this is race day and every fucking lobster boat is revving
up to 3000 rpm, half of them with their mufflers off, not that they’re all going to be racing, just to remind the summer residents
whose harbor it really is. Howard Thurston won’t be entering because his son Danny would whip his ass, but Howard went up
to Burke’s Diesel and got himself a four-thousand-dollar overhaul anyway, just so his Detroit 501 would sound right on the
way down east. It’s easy on the ears, the noise of motors coming back to life, just like a choir of hard-core smokers hacking
and coughing themselves awake, then breathing easy as their lungs get going. One engine puffs a black cloud and sings its
note, then another, finally they all throttle down or up to come in tune so it sounds like music in the lifting fog, only
engines are better than music because they’re real. It proves smoking is natural when you see marine engines doing it. Same
with the Indians, they didn’t give a shit, they invented tobacco, they crawled in their tepees buck naked and inhaled till
they dropped. He finds the Marlboros and pounds the pack on the radar housing till one comes out, then lights it off the exhaust
stack, already cherry hot. One thing about living alone, no one tells him what to do with his own body. He keeps the big sea-clam
ashtray right in front of the TV and the refrigerator’s so full of green Rolling Rock bottles it looks like a Christmas tree
farm. Twenty pounds of mussels in the vegetable storage bins and a freezer full of salt pork that Sarah would have never allowed
anywhere near his heart.

Art Pettingill’s got his wife and boy aboard the
Bonanza,
ballasting the stern. Art races in the diesel 600–800 class, then big Alma takes the helm for the powder puffs. She’s let
him replace his old rusted-out Cat with a new Lugger 610 that must have cost him forty thousand, just for the Stoneport race.
Howard Thurston’s kid is coming down with a whole new hull, it’s called
Perpetrator
like all Danny’s boats. This one’s an ink-black custom AJ-28 with a 315 Cummins turbodiesel and dual side exhausts like a
formula race car. He took his new H&H four-bladed prop and had it CAT-scanned just like at a hospital, make sure every frigging
atom was in the right place. One pass through the MRI tube cost him a thousand bucks, same as a heart. The hull’s made of
Kevlar, he’s got a fake pot hauler of lightweight aluminum and no glass in the windshield, he races with ski goggles on against
the spray.

There’s Travis Hammond in the
Pisscat,
off to the eastward’s Lonnie Gross and his wife and daughter in the
Abby and Laura,
which is leaking so fast Lonnie’s got the bilge pump squirting steady out the back like a fire hose. The man oughtn’t be
allowed to take his family in that wreck, but there’s the three of them fat and happy in the wheelhouse, already diving into
the beer. Behind them their kid Norton’s coming on strong in his outboard, the
Li’l Snort,
it’s faster than his old man’s boat but Norton stays behind since he hasn’t got a clue where he’s supposed to go. The whole
fleet is traveling to Stoneport for the 10 a.m. start, though those first events are only the kids’ races, sterndrives and
outboards like the
Li’l Snort.
The serious racing won’t get going till noon.

They don’t look competitive, bunch of boys out for a good time, but every boat intending to race has been stripped of all
gear except the required pot hauler and the life ring. Danny Thurston’s even dropped his antennas and unscrewed the radome
off the wheelhouse roof. Lucky and all other racers have left behind their saltwater live wells, washdown pumps, and of course
cleaned the cuddy of loose gear, anchors, wet mattresses, pot warp, six-packs and piss buckets. He was almost going to leave
his guns and ammo at home but he thought better of it. Even on race day there’s assholes everywhere you look.

Off Sodom Ledge the Orphan Point fleet usually turns west, to fish the territory bounded by the Sodom Ledge whistle and the
Graveyard bell off of Graveyard Point, which is the boundary of the Tarratine River gang, mostly crude country bastards and
dope runners that couldn’t tell a lobster from a crab louse. But today they’ll pass by their fishing grounds and travel eastward
in open water beyond the Split Point gong and the crooked number three daybeacon that marks Three Witch Ledge off of Burnt
Cove. Most days an Orphan Pointer could get himself shot passing through Split Cove territory, but today’s race day and the
boundaries are off, whole fleets will be crossing each other’s waters, trying fairly hard not to slice any lines as they steam
by.

Lucky’s not out to pussy around with his motor today, what the hell, he’s been holding her back all summer, so when Brent
Plummer passes him in his forty-two-foot Volvo-powered Moody shitheap he lets her out a little, the turbo cuts in, and she
moves up so fast he has to hang on to the wheel to keep from getting dumped right on his ass. This is what men and boats were
built for, letting her out offshore in smooth early-morning water, no traps on the stern, unending rainbow tunnel of spray
over the
Wooden Nickel
’s bow. He pulls alongside the
Pipedream
and plays with her a minute right at the Narrows where you’re squeezed between two buoys, so he can look right into Brent
Plummer’s eyeballs and give him the friendly finger as he opens her into the turbo’s full thrust and wipes him clean. He hears
a tremendous roar from the Volvo, too much noise for a marine engine even with the muffler off, he looks back and there’s
black smoke pouring out of the Moody’s dual stacks and Brent’s slowed to a crawl. Too bad, that’s how the dinosaurs went extinct,
too fucking big for their own good. Two boats behind Brent are slowing to see what’s wrong, they’re cousins and they have
to help him out.

Lucky backs her to 1800 so he can hear the new Tracy Byrd tape he bought for the trip:
Big Love.
Side two starts off with “Don’t Love Make a Diamond Shine,” the only candyass track on the album but you can’t blame Tracy,
he’s got to put food on the table too.

Tommy and Janey hardly eighteen

Holdin’ hands at the jewelry store

Eyes open wide starin’ inside

He reaches in the cabin hatch and feels for the program switch to wipe that bullshit and track to the other side. This cheap
Sony does not have the amps to make itself heard. They’re paying five hundred bucks for class winners at the races. If he
can do it, with Harley’s help, that would get him a down payment on a stereo that could crank up over the engine noise, if
he can ever find one that’s U.S. made.

Running ahead of schedule at an easy eighteen knots, he lets himself cruise southwest away from the fleet for a minute to
graze the edge of his fishing territory and check things out. He finds the slim channel they leave between the thick sets
of traps and runs past the broad, superproductive Thurston area, you can hear the fucking lobsters under there wondering where
Howard and his boy are, then Art Pettingill’s special turf, a ten-fathom canyon that supplies Art with seventy pounds a day,
eighty or ninety of Art’s white-and-maroon buoys, set a tad farther apart because Art’s got five or six traps under each of
them. He’s coming in sight of Toothpick Ledge, his own six-fathom family ground amidst his own orange-and-green pot buoys,
with Danny Thurston’s banana yellow off to the east, when his eye catches a foreign buoy set right over the dropoff of Toothpick
Shoal, on the far southern edge of his own gear. He looks back to see the gang rounding the Sodom whistle, bound east for
Stoneport, they’re letting it out in the chop with whoops of spray. They’ll get ahead of him but he’s got to stop and check
this out. Alongside the familiar Orphan Point colors is a black-and-white zebra-striped buoy he’s never seen. It’s got a toggle,
too, floating ten yards to windward of the zebra float. Orphan Point boats never use toggles on their summer grounds. He looks
around for strangers. Except for the fleet steaming off a couple of miles eastward, the sea is clear. Whoever it was, they
must have come at sunrise, maybe on the way to the races, and dropped that cocksucker before the Orphan Point boats came out.

There’s lots of ways you can fuck around out here, but that one’s not allowed. A fisherman’s territory is a matter of life
and death. Lucky has fished this ledge in summer for thirty years and his old man Walter before that and old Merritt Lunt
before him under a canvas sail. Lunts, Pettingills, Plummers, Grosses, Gowers, Thurstons have mixed and shared in here, traps
rubbing up against each other the same as their houses on shore, one’s garden back up to another’s garage, kids going to Orphan
Point schools, mixing and marrying for pretty much a century; but there’s never been a zebra-striped buoy on this territory
and he hasn’t the faintest fucking idea whose it could be.