The Wooden Nickel (27 page)

Then he catches sight of Ronette dancing with Reggie Dolliver, they’ve both got beers in one hand, cigarettes in the other,
and she’s looking his way and sticking her tongue out since he’s dancing with this animal-rights chick. Then she’s getting
too fucking close to Reggie and he stops dancing and works his way in their direction yelling, “Ain’t you supposed to be on
parole?” But suddenly there’s the big zebra-stripe woman standing right in his path, and right behind her is the black-bearded
brother with half his teeth. “What’s your hurry,” she says, “you going to a fire?”

“I would of sank you,” he says, “if the fucking turbo was working right.”

She laughs and takes a big suck out of something in a paper bag, wipes her mouth off with the back of her hand. “No doubt
about that, captain.”

He’s about to get serious with her over the striped buoy when she takes one of his hands and says, “You dance as good as you
race?” Before he can believe it he’s dancing with this huge Shag Island pirate sow that looks just like one of those Russian
female weightlifters that always turn out to have a dick.

Ronette comes up and looks about a foot up into Priscilla Shaver’s face and says, “Ain’t there no men where you come from?”
and Priscilla purses her lips up like a monkfish and gives Ronette the finger, then the black-bearded guy says, “Ain’t you
the waitress over to Doris’s Blue Claw?” and he starts doing this chicken dance in front of her, he’s squatting down, clucking
his Halloween teeth with his black tongue, his elbows are flapping, he’s turning around and around and Ronette’s not even
trying to keep up with him, she’s standing there staring. Well, she wanted to dance so much, what the hell. He turns back
to Priscilla Shaver and shouts over the band, “You hauling many traps these days?” and she looks over towards her brother
and shouts, “Looks like somebody’s hauling your trap right now.” Lucky spins around to crack out the rest of that son of a
whore’s teeth with the Wild Turkey bottle, but then Ronette busts out laughing and he doesn’t have the heart to spoil her
fun. He’s getting into the Dead Crabs now, shaking the meat off his joints with both hands in the air like a revival meeting
and the Bad Pussy right before him, eyeball to eyeball, same weight and height, saying, “You and me got together, we wouldn’t
have no boundary problems, would we?” He’s trying to form the image of Priscilla Shaver in a wedding gown when Ronette comes
up and cuts her away like a sheepdog. It’s just skipper and sternman again, right in front of the Dead Crabs’ amp. She’s got
both his hands and she’s spinning the two of them back and forth, shouting, “Got to dance when you’re pregnant, music’s good
for their
brain.
”

“Jesus Christ, Ronette, this ain’t music. It don’t have a brain yet anyway.”

“Speak for yourself,” she shouts. “It does too.”

The band’s right in the middle of what sounds like “Satisfaction” and she’s got him hopping up and down like a bullfrog, when
all of a sudden he feels the twang of a busted guitar string, only it’s not in the music, it’s right in the center of his
chest. He stands there rigid with his feet spread apart so he can stay upright, and when he gets his voice back, he says,
“Fuck,”
only it comes out high and croaky like a twelve-year-old.

She stops dancing and grabs both his hands and says, “What’s the matter, sweetheart, you OK?”

“Ain’t nothing,” he says, “just my fucking heart. Twenty-six thousand dollars and they couldn’t fix that son of a bitch.”

“Sweetheart, your palms are all clammy. Let’s sit down.”

She takes him around the back of the chili dog stand along the wharf with the Stoneport skiff floats. No problem finding her
car in the public lot, the chartreuse metallic looks radioactive in the mercury-vapor lamp. She opens the door for him and
moves her waitress outfit off the passenger seat and tilts it so he can lean way back. The heart twangs once again but less
so. His pills are back in the
Wooden Nickel,
moored up where the Coast Guard dropped him off. She feels under his blackened sweatshirt and work shirt and T-shirt and
rubs his chest over the heart. “Jesus, Luck, you can’t dance wearing all these clothes. No wonder.”

It flips again, weaker but still random and noisy, sounds like the last flops of a mackerel on the cockpit sole. “Feel that?”

She puts her ear to it. “Yeah, it’s scary. It stopped for about three seconds. Then it flopped. Now it’s going again, just
like a motor.”

“Got to head out to the boat, get some of that stuff.”

“Don’t have to,” she says. “I got some of your medicine right here.” She reaches in the small lighted glove box of the Probe
and comes up with an envelope of heart pills. “I took them off the boat,” she explains. “Figured they might come in handy.”

He swallows a few with a slug of Wild Turkey and things quiet down in there. “Ain’t used to so much dancing,” he says.

She takes his hand and holds it between her palms awhile, then checks the windows to see if nobody’s looking and puts it on
her chest, right on the little sea horse, which has grown bigger like it’s painted on a balloon. “Maybe that’ll warm it up.
It’s a heat wave and you got a hand like a Klondike bar.” Then she pulls the tank top up and puts his palm down on her belly,
low enough to feel the tickle of curly whiskers on his finger’s edge. “It’s
in
there,” she says. “Sometimes I think I can feel it flopping. Just like your heart.”

“Don’t expect it’s big enough to move around much.”

“No Lucky, it is. I felt it. They’re developing faster these days, it’s on account of all the growth hormones in our food.”

He rests his palm there awhile without feeling anything but drumbeats from the Dead Crabs, then he realizes where his hand
is and starts feeling a little hard-on coming on. First it’s the memory of a hard-on, since this is the very spot where he
first got laid, sixteen years old, the far corner of the big Stoneport municipal lot, in the shadow of the icehouse, where
he could feel the vapors of dry ice on his back like the cold tongue of death. The icehouse is still there, beneath the mercury
streetlamp, its long shadow stretching almost to the Probe. “Hey Ron,” he whispers, “the seats go all the way down on this
thing?”

She says, “What about your heart?” but the windows are steamed up, it’s dark outside, and one of her tits has already wormed
out of the tank top, the end of it browner and bigger than it used to be.

“That’s what I like about you,” he says, “you’re right up front.”

“I’m an egg-bearing female, Lucky Lunt. You better notch my tail and throw me back, else you’re going to be in deep-shit trouble.”

“Too late,” he says. She’s already groping around the door panel on her side and pretty soon the driver’s seat glides electrically
down and forward, the seat back reclines almost to horizontal as if he’s going to get drilled and filled. His heart pulses
around like it can’t decide whether to slow down with the medicine or run and catch up with Ronette. Then it takes a look
at her tank top slipping down and just stops. For a second there’s nothing happening in his chest at all, then there’s a loud
low thump back on the car’s trunk and the heart starts racing like a timing chain. He turns fast and scrapes the fog off the
window while Ronette pulls her clothes up and smacks the power locks down on her side and scrapes her window too. There’s
a huge towering figure blocking all light on one side of the low-slung Probe and a shorter, broader one on the other side.
A weird, broken voice is calling, “Mrs. Hannaford!”

“Who the fuck?”

“It’s me, Norton. And Clayton Pettingill. We seen your car. We can’t find nobody from Orphan Point.”

She lowers the window an inch with the power switch. “What do you kids want, a ride home?”

“No. Grind down your window. Hey, you got Lucky Lunt in there?”

“No, that’s just a passenger seat dummy, keeps the perverts away.” Ronette’s fixing her shirt, patting her hair before she
cranks the window down. Then she goes in the glove compartment for a cigarette. When the light goes on, he also notices a
little .25 automatic, no bigger than a water pistol but it’s real. Nice thing to have when there’s a couple of guys hanging
over your roofline, but these are friends.

Norton doesn’t talk so great, and Clayton’s shy, but between the two of them they get the information out. “Clayt’s almost
seventeen,” Norton says, “and he ain’t never been drunk before.”

“Norton ain’t either,” Clayton Pettingill says.

“I have, you dumb fuck. I got drunk with my old man and my sister Laurie.”

“Get it out,” Lucky says. “What are you kids trying to tell us?”

“We found their
trucks.
”

“Whose trucks?”

“The Shag Island trucks. When them cocksuckers come to the mainland they leave all their trucks in one spot, and we found
it.”

“You wait here,” he says to Ronette.

“Lucky, don’t be stupid. You just had a heart attack.”

“I won’t be a minute, I’ll make sure these boys find a ride, then I’ll come back.” He hitches his pants up and follows them
past the icehouse to a dirt-paved parking annex where there’s about twenty-five vans and pickups, mostly big new four-wheel
drives but some shitheaps too, there’s dubs everywhere that can’t find a lobster even if it’s grabbing them by the nuts. The
trucks are sitting in the moonlight quiet as headstones, all he can hear is the blood pumping in his chest and the far-off
cacophony of the Dead Crabs.

The kids have stepped up from apricot brandy to a fifth of 151-proof Black Seal Rum that Reggie Dolliver sold them out of
the goodness of his heart. Clayton Pettingill’s already so big the fifth looks like a perfume bottle in his hand. It works,
though, it’s got him walking wide-legged and careful, looking down at the ground, like he’s on deck in a heavy sea.

“You should have bought three of these,” Lucky says. He hits up on the bottle too, hell of a lot healthier than those christly
pills. Everyone knows alcohol’s good for you, fucking doctors hold that information back. Clayton Pettingill stops to take
a long piss on the back tire of a black Chevy Tahoe with a vanity plate that reads shg isld, no doubt where they’re from.
Beside the Tahoe is a brand-new Dodge Ram crew-cab whose metallic paint gleams in the moonlight like a kid’s first dream of
a red truck.

“That ain’t what we want to show you,” Clayton says after he zips up. The boys sneak him around behind the rows of trucks
under the high three-quarter moon. His heart’s fine now, his hard-on’s gone, he feels like a young kid out to raise hell.
It’s women that slow you down.

The boys have a tough time crouching cause they’re so big. Lucky doesn’t bend so great either, his spine’s stiff as a crankshaft
from years at the pot hauler, but they’re down on all fours by now, the two boys up ahead with their pants dragging down off
of their asscracks like a couple of big pink pigs. Lucky brings up the rear, trying to keep from laughing because there could
be people smoking and fucking in any of these silent trucks.

Clayton passes a white Dodge Ramcharger van with a black lab inside, curious but not barking, then stops at a Nissan King
Cab shining lemon yellow in the moonlight, dark and empty inside but the bed full of lobster gear.

“King Crab,” Lucky says. “So what?”

Norton Gross leads him around the back of the truck. There’s four or five wire traps, a few coils of pot warp and about twenty
zebra-stripe buoys, brand-new and still roped together in two bunches of ten, fresh from the painting shed. There’s also a
couple of jugs of outboard motor mix. Lucky takes out his rope knife and slices one of the buoys off. The three of them study
the stripe pattern in the moonlight like it’s a secret code. “That it?” Clayton asks.

“That son of a whore was setting right on Toothpick Shoal.”

“Well,” Clayton says to him, “you done this before. What are we supposed to do?”

“Norton’s got the idea.” He always thought Norton Gross had his wires crossed, but he’s already back there with the gas flap
open and the gas cap screwed off and he’s got his dick down the filler pipe, taking a leak right in her tank. Meanwhile young
Clayton Pettingill, who he always thought was a candyass Mormon despite his bulk, takes out his hunting knife and stabs it
slow and deliberate into the front tire on the driver’s side, the air squealing out like a stuck hog.

Lucky says, “Norton, when you’re all done there, give me your T-shirt.”

Norton hoists his trousers up, then starts to grunt and twist his short stubby arms around like he’s trying to take his skin
off, then he holds the shirt up so they can read it in the moonlight.

“What are you going to do?” he whines. “My mom bought me that shirt.”

“Give me that jug of outboard mix,” Lucky says.

They stuff as many striped buoys as they can into Norton’s enormous T-shirt, then they splash on a decent amount of outboard
fuel and set the bundle back in the bed of the Nissan, and top it off with a coil of poly rope. They scout around and find
some newspaper and wad it up. He says to Norton and Clayton, “OK, I’m going back to Ronette’s car, so she don’t freak when
it goes. You wait three minutes then light them papers and toss them onto Norton’s shirt, then run.”

Norton Gross takes out a Bic lighter and gets it ready by lighting up a cigarette but then he says, “Clayton should do it,
it’s his first time drunk.”

Clayton reaches way down in his pocket, pretty near pushing his pants off in the process, and comes up with his own Bic lighter.

“Just wait three minutes and light the newspaper, Clayton, then set it on the shirt and run like hell.”

Lucky walks back past the Chevy Tahoe that smells of new car paint and human piss, then stops to check out the toolbox in
the bed of the Dodge Ram crew-cab next door. It’s unlocked and he can stand on the running board and feel around in there
till he gets his hand on a stubby little crowbar that ought to do the job. He tries it out on the left rear door, just soft
at first, case anyone’s around, then he gets going and whacks the passenger window on the crew-cab, makes a nice spiderweb
on the second stroke, then moves up forward and takes out the two lights and the ram’s head in the center of the grille. He
turns and backhands the left headlight of the Tahoe, then takes out the windshield right above the wheel and brings the crowbar
down on the center of the hood, nice strong Detroit steel at first, but a few sharp whacks and it’s pretty much stove in.
He’d dearly love to take out the Tahoe’s grille, but he doesn’t have the heart for that first whack on the Chevy emblem, too
close to home, so he wedges the prybar in the driver’s side door and bends it hard till he pulls the hinges out and leaves
the tire iron inside on the floor: a little present from three generations of fishermen on Toothpick Ledge.