The Wooden Nickel (24 page)

He could just tie a gentleman’s knot in their line but that would be a candyass route under the circumstances. He could slice
the pot warp in two but that would leave a ghost trap on his own grounds sucking up good lobsters. He could put one of his
own orange-and-green buoys on it and get a new trap out of the exchange. But he has to send a message to make it clear, because
he does not want this happening again. Bend over just once, like Travis Hammond, and get fucked the rest of your life.

He didn’t expect to be hauling traps on race day. He disengaged the hydraulics for a little more speed, now he has to reengage,
then gaff the toggle and sling the line over the pot hoist and haul it up from six fathoms down. It’s a brand-new green wire
trap marked only by the manufacturer’s name:
Tanous Trap Company 1997 ,
no tag number visible. The trap’s got a nice fat shedder and a couple of stringy culls in it, but Lucky’s cleaned his boat
and taken the sea well out for the race, so he just pulls them and sets them free. Leaving the trap on deck, he goes below
and gets a .30-caliber cartridge and a rubber condom from the Magnum box hidden under the old RDF shelf. He drops the cartridge
in the rubber and puts his mouth on it and blows it up like a balloon, big enough so it won’t float out the trap vent, and
ties it off. It looks good in there, the brass sheen of the cartridge shining through the pink latex condom, like a sunset
at the end of a misty day. He doesn’t know whose the fuck it is, but a word to the wise and if their brains are somewhere
above their ass-holes they’ll check this trap once and they won’t come back.

Everyone else is miles ahead by now. The ocean belongs to the
Wooden Nickel,
a boat built for the open sea and bilge-ballasted with a half ton of cutup gravestones from the Orphan Point Funeral Home.
He catches sight of the fleet when he’s climbing a sea swell and loses them when he’s in the trough. He powers up a bit, and
soon he spots the
Abby and Laura,
which is now towing the
Li’l Snort
with the whole family in the wheelhouse drinking beer, then he’s coming up Travis Hammond’s tail cause the
Pisscat
wouldn’t go over fifteen knots even when she was new. The big Chevy’s cruising at seventeen on the loran with power to spare.
He cranks open the windshield pane and lets in the sea air, lights another Marlboro and almost lights a second for Ronette,
he’s got so used to her on board. Off to the southward, Shag Island lies there dark and low on the horizon, and after that’s
Bull Island, which is nothing but sand and rock, the navy uses it for a target range, and beyond that is the open Atlantic,
sparkling nearby but on the horizon dark as a pool of spilled oil, or blue wine.

I’ve got a love full of wide open spaces

I’ve got a big love

Wild and free

He cranks up the volume to hear Tracy over the engine noise.

Deep as a river in raging flood

As endless as the stars above

Tracy Byrd may have the Texas desert and some wetback river that’s dry sand half the time, but if he came out here he would
see what wide open spaces really means. The horizon’s so far off you could steam all day and not come to the end of it. That’s
what a boundary is, air on one side, water on the other, you can’t frig around with it, nobody dragging their zebra-stripe
buoys across the line. There’s a whale out there too, he’s scratching his back on the air like a big wet dog, then he takes
an outlaw piss into the sky and slides under and he’s gone. If Ronette was here she’d go crazy and they’d have to chase after
the fucking thing, but what does she know? Whale’s just another homeless fisherman, looking out for himself like anybody else.

He spies Danny Thurston’s fast little black-hulled AJ-28 running way offshore of the pack and wings out to starboard, see
if he can catch up. The AJ’s a lightweight Kevlar diesel and the swells are going to set it back. He pegs Danny on the radar
and opens up to nineteen knots, going faster than the swells now, diagonally across them, cutting the tops off, sharp spray
knifing through the wind-shield so he has to close the screen and put the wiper on, but there’s nothing like being out here
with the throttle open, bronze spoked wheel straight and steady in his right hand and a Rolling Rock in the left. Wide open,
the way it was at the beginning before everything got fucked up. A man, an engine, and an ice-cold beer.

They are almost to the Bull Island whistle going twenty-one knots on the loran when the
Perpetrator
has to slow down cause the seas pound its short plastic hull. It’s only six fathoms along here and the surge mounts up before
it crashes in pillars of breaking foam on the long granite tongue of Deuteronomy Shoal. Gas and diesel trying to harmonize
their different voices, just like Charley Pride and Willie Nelson in the old Tarratine auditorium, he comes in with Danny
Thurston side by side.

After the Virgins gong they meet the rest of the fleet that took the inside route north of Three Witch Ledge and the Pope’s
Nose, and ten or twelve Orphan Point boats squeeze in together past the fish factory and the barberpole lighthouse on Jacob’s
Point. Jackoff Point, that’s what they called it when they used to pick up the Stoneport girls and take them to watch the
red light through the evening fog. Three red flashes equals
I love you,
numbest line on earth but it always did the trick. Three little words and they’d be nibbling on your tongue like a hungry
trout. They were hot tickets and they fucked like minks, not like the Orphan Point girls that were all spines and prayers
and tougher to feel up than a spider crab. The Stoneport girls were pregnant by seventeen and their daughters were pregnant
by seventeen, so the ones he used to know are grandmas now, sweet little saltwater cunts that would dive in the backseat for
a beer and a cigarette and a lift back home.

As they pass the Stoneport breakwater the harbor narrows down to barnacled seal ledges and lobster-shack islands and gray
shingled fisherman’s cottages, where the Stoneport girls are sitting up there on their aluminum beach chairs, out of the race
now, gray-haired spectators with binoculars watching the boats steam past the lighthouse on Jackoff Point. Who knows what’s
in their memories, maybe a kid named Lucky, long ago.

The Orphan Point boats raft up in a line alongside Stevie Latete’s big green dragger, the
Orphan Queen.
Stevie’s always saying, “I got a million five in the bank so don’t call me La Tit anymore,” but it doesn’t help. You get
these names in grade school and if there’s any truth to them they don’t just go away. Stevie brought all the wives down and
they’re up on the
Orphan Queen
’s foredeck with lawn chairs and thermoses full of margaritas, one radio tuned to High Country and another to the race channel
on the VHF. Every year since he can remember Sarah was up there with them, and he looks the group over just in case her thin
body’s mixed in with the heavier ones, but she’s not there, she’s over to the art school eating finger cookies with her New
York friends.

Since his radio’s still not working, he cruises up to the committee boat to find when he’s racing. This is a big Bruno 42
out of Stoneport called the
Heather and Valerie,
parked at the finish line and packing a radar gun to measure the final speeds as they rip across.

“Wooden Nickel,”
he shouts. “Where am I at?”

The race committee guy is one of the Hallett brothers that control this stretch of the coast. They’re all big bald-headed
guys with piss-yellow mustaches and tight little dog-ass mouths. This one’s got a Red Sox hat on and a portable VHF squawking
in one hand. He points to the radio and yells, “Race info’s on channel seventy-five!”

“Ain’t got no radio!”

The guy has to yell louder over the sound of a hundred souped-up lobster boats revving their engines as they jockey around
for the best view. “Lunt. You’re in race four. Antiques!”

“Fuck you, antiques. This boat ain’t even paid for.”

“We put all the wood ones together this year, give them a break.”

“Don’t I get to race nobody fast?”

“Christ sake, that thing’d just be in the way. What’s in there, gas or diesel?”

“Chevy four fifty-four. Turbo. She’d kick
your
ass.”

“There’ll be a free-for-all at the end. Winners of each heat, throw them together, fastest boat on the water. Race number
ten.
If
that shitbox can win its class.”

He heads over to the Orphan Pointers rafted on with Stevie Latete. He ties up alongside the
Pisscat
to see if Travis Hammond wants to come racing. Travis is scared to burn his engine out and catch hell at home, but he enjoys
a fast ride. Now he gropes into the
Pisscat
’s cuddy and comes back with a cooler full of Rolling Rock and a hot thermos of cod head soup. Lucky takes a Rock and downs
it in about two swallows, then takes another to nurse while he tells Travis about the striped buoy on their fishing ground.

“Bet it’s them fuckers from Shag Island,” Travis says.

“I didn’t notice you telling them not to, the other night.”

He takes another one of Travis’s beers and they sit on the
Pisscat
’s paint-peeling washboard to watch the first two races, for youngsters and the smallest craft. “Ain’t no use getting worked
up till it happens,” Travis says.

“Well it’s happening. It wasn’t no drifter I saw out there. I pulled it. Some son of a whore set that fucking thing right
where it’s at.”

“Pre fucking meditated,” Travis agrees.

“That’s right.”

Now they’re on race one, outboard-powered, mostly kids that don’t have their first real boat yet. Travis says, “Hey, ain’t
your boy racing this year?”

“He ain’t got time to race. He’s got an urchin boat. He makes a thousand bucks a day selling sushi to the Japanese.”

“No shit? Hey, I hear you’re all by yourself over to your place. How’s that?”

“Finest kind. Eat what I want, jerk off when I please. Nobody asks no questions.”

“I’d like that,” Travis says.

“I bet you would. Hilda still beat the shit out of you every night?”

“Finest kind,” Travis says. “Least she’s to home, she ain’t living in Dyke City.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Travis?”

“Don’t mean nothing.” Travis gets himself another beer and another cupful of the cod head soup with a fish eye sticking out
of the milky surface, staring right at him.

The high-pitched insect whine of six small full-throttled outboards drowns conversation for about two minutes. Two or three
motors go up in smoke, one snaps a shear pin, and four of them cross the line. The time comes over the
Pisscat
’s radio:
DONNIE WASHBURN, BOAT NAME HOMER SIMPSON, POWER MERCURY FORTY-FIVE, TOP SPEED TWENTY-THREE POINT SIX
.
Before the racers have wound down in the runoff zone, there’s a different sound, one- and two-cylinder inboards revving up,
working their way to the starting area for race two: small diesels. These are a bunch of retirees and summer lobstermen, nobody
to take seriously, they’ll come farting across the course like a flock of golf carts, but Lucky’s race is two slots away and
it’s time to go. Travis jumps aboard with a six-pack in each hand, they cast off from the
Pisscat
and head for the starting line. Cruising through the clear water back of the spectator fleet, he turns up
Big Love
on the stereo and looks around for an open straightaway so he can give Travis Hammond a little foretaste of Harley’s turbocharger.
It comes on with a high-velocity blistering roar that sounds so good he points her ninety degrees off the race course and
takes her up to 3000 rpm for a few seconds, right out to sea. Travis uncaps a couple more Rocks with his big shit-eating grin,
yells “Finest kind” over the turbo howl, then he throttles her back down towards the start.

Tracy lays down the guitar line for a V-8 engine in perfect tune.

Let’s forgive and forget and start over

We all make mistakes now and then

At first he was pissed when they threw him in with the antiques. Now he’s got a plan. He’ll bury the cocksuckers in the first
race and end up in the final free-for-all with the winners of all classes. He’ll hook the propane tank to the turbo intake,
just for the one minute of that race she’ll be turbocharging pure propane with high-test gas, she’ll smoke out the best of
them and maybe take the whole fucking thing, he’ll get the five hundred and buy two new stereos, boat and truck. Ronette will
love it when he cranks those up.

By now the small diesels have plodded across the line — top gun went nineteen knots — and they’re up to race three, adult
outboards and sterndrives, light enough to get up on a plane and clock some speed. Race three is running a full six-boat field,
the most the race committee allows in the narrow passage between the spectator boats. The thoroughfare along the Stoneport
harborfront is a mile-and-a-half-long channel marked for the race by rows of orange and green balls two hundred feet apart.
That means each of the six boats has to race at top speed within a thirty-foot lane, and it pays to get ahead and stay ahead
because they are all throwing big wakes and if you catch one at open throttle you can flip or get thrown off into the spectator
fleet, which is lined up five or six deep on either side of the course. Every harbor and island on this part of the coast
has a string of boats rafted up along the race course. Right by the finish line there’s also four or five mega-yachts, they’re
chartered by big-shit diesel corporations that sponsor these races and want to be there if their engines win. Couple of years
back Dennis Ingalls from Moose Point took diesel unlimited with a Mack 740 and the losers went back home and pulled their
engines out with dock hoists and dumped them right off the end of their wharves. Mack sold a hundred units the next month.

Lucky circles in back of the starting area with the other antiques, waiting for the sterndrive race to run. Some of those
little bastards really get going, they whine like hornets and throw so much spray you can’t even see the field. They’re all
over twenty-five by the time they hit the finish line. Course they’re not really lobster boats, they’re more like Ski-Doos.
If Lucky was in charge of things they wouldn’t even have a class.