The Wooden Nickel (28 page)

He crosses the uncut field between the main parking lot and the annex and joins Ronette in the Probe.

“I was so worried for you,” she says. “I ain’t even supposed to be smoking and look at this.” She lights a new Marlboro from
the one still burning and throws the half-smoked one out the window.

“You want to worry about something, look over there.” He turns her head to stare into the darkness out of the left quarter
window of the Probe. In about half a minute they see a pillar of glowing smoke in the next lot that makes him recall the old
days before the environment, when they had such grand towering fires at the dump.

Ronette says, “Lucky, them boys set somebody’s truck on fire?”

“No, ma’am. Just some pot buoys they wasn’t ever going to use.”

Then there’s screeching and yelling from the Fag Islanders over in their parking lot, at the same time Clayton and Norton
show up at the Probe smelling like smudge pots and they bang on the roof to be let in.

Lucky gets out on his side so the two huge kids can squish themselves in the back of the Probe. Norton Gross whines, “I can’t
fit, this fucking thing’s in the way.” He holds up a baby seat, brand-new blue padding and shiny chrome.

“Hey Ronette, I didn’t know you had a kid.” Clayton laughs. “You been keeping it secret?”

“Ain’t none of your business,” she says. “Be a good boy, Lucas, and stick it in the trunk.”

But there’s no time for that. Half the street dance is moving through the municipal lot, everyone’s yelling
Truck on fire, truck on fire,
but they’re not going to wait and see. He holds the child seat in his lap while Ronette backs out and maneuvers her way through
the oncoming crowd. They’re the only people going the other way.

Then someone runs past shouting
Orphan Point bastards
and Clayton says, “We better rescue them fucking boats.”

They pass the municipal wharf with the Dead Crabs playing to an empty parking lot and a deputy’s car flashing its blue strobe
trying to open a passage to the crime scene. Honking, flashing her lights and nudging the crowd aside with her bumper, Ronette
gets them down to the lobster dock where the Orphan Point boats are rafted up. Most have gone already, there’s just the
Pisscat
and Danny Thurston’s
Perpetrator
rafted up to the poor crippled
Wooden Nickel.
At least she’s still afloat.

Travis Hammond and Danny Thurston show up running. They’ve got a quart of black rum and a couple of Stoneport girls. Travis’s
girl is this year’s tenth-grade prom queen, Danny’s got her little sister. The girls are begging to go aboard, but Danny and
Travis fight them off and get on their boats so they can cast off before the lynch mob arrives.

He’s still holding the baby seat when they climb aboard the
Wooden Nickel,
Ronette too, leaving the Probe right at the dock. He turns her over, hoping she’s got enough cylinders to start. Fucking
Chevy: two or three exhaust valves gone, carburetor black from the turbo fire, she turns over a couple times, thinks for a
while, then remembers how to do it and starts up. Danny’s got Norton and Clayton with him. Danny shouts over, “Hey Lucky,
they rolled over the cop car!”

“Finest kind. Next they’ll be coming after us.”

“Don’t worry, Lucky, we’ll stay with you.”

He shouts back, “You fucking well better, you got the bottle.” Keeping it slow and quiet, not even the running lights, the
three Orphan Point boats head westward past the band on the wharf, the red flasher off Jackoff Point, the green radar shapes
of the Pope’s Nose to starboard and the sharp dot of the Virgins gong buoy off to port. Now they’re in open water, Danny snaps
on his deck light so they can see him and Lucky puts on his red-and-greens so they can see him back. Travis Hammond’s up between
them with his lights blacked out but he’s a nice fat moving target on the radar screen. Lucky’s going only seven at full throttle,
the smell of raw unburned gas mixing with charred cedar and extinguisher foam. Danny and Travis could be out of there in a
minute, but they hold back and flank him side by side.

The radar shows a boat coming up behind, closing fast at a third of a mile. He looks back and can’t see any lights. “They’re
coming,” he says. “Only one boat. Anything left of them guns?”

She feels around below and hands him the twelve-gauge and a box of shells.

“Not that. The deer rifle. Look around for it.”

“It stinks down there, Lucky.” When it comes up, the gunstock smells like barbecue coal and it’s covered with black soot like
everything else down there. Good thing the ammunition didn’t go off. He clicks the spent cartridge out of her and eases the
helm to port so the oncoming boat is directly aft, then he hands the wheel to Ronette so he can turn around and aim. She says,
“Lucky, what if it’s the Coast Guard or the Marine Patrol?”

“It ain’t. They’d show blue strobes like a cop car.” There’s nothing back there but the glare of the street dance off to the
northward. He can’t see the boat coming but she’s still on the radar and he fires a shot over his wake into the area of blackness
around the stern, but high. The blip keeps coming. He fires another one, low enough so it will whistle over their heads, then
the blip turns and speeds back towards Stoneport harbor. “Hey, them stealth bombers got nothing on us, Ronette. We turned
them with our radar-aimed missiles.”

“Jesus, Lucky, put that thing away before somebody gets hurt.”

The danger past and the rifle returned to its bulkhead rack beneath the shotgun, he can take back the helm and let Ronette
snug up behind him in the chill. They’re beyond the Jacob’s Point light and the Virgin ledges now, in open water with the
three-quarter moon dead in front of them on its way down in the southwest. In the flat calm, the sea looks like a bowl of
light all the way to the horizon and they’re steaming right into it. He’s got the engine on full throttle but she’s still
doing only eight point one on the loran, farting and backfiring from the bad cylinders that got their valves sucked out when
the turbo went. With that AJ-28 Danny Thurston could be under the covers with his wife by now, but he’s hanging back for group
protection, and Travis is staying with him, chickenshit though he is.

Ronette buries her nose in the small of his neck, presses up close to remind him of what they were doing when Norton and Clayton
showed up. “You smell of gunpowder,” she says.

“You like it. I ought to fire a couple rounds before I come to bed.”

“We ain’t got a bed,” she reminds him. “You torched it trying to race that island slut.”

The engine goes dead for a moment then catches again with a backfire that belches red flame up through the stack. “Ought to
put one of them bullets through the block so she don’t suffer so much.”

She’s left the wheelhouse to take a flashlight down into the cuddy and try to scare up some music.

“Lucky, there’s fucking
water
in here.”

He kicks in the bilge pump and he can hear the water slosh over the side. “That better?”

When she comes up she’s crying. “You ain’t got a stereo anymore. I wanted to play my new Tanya Tucker tape.”

Number four cylinder has dried out and she sounds a bit better now, though it’s loud as hell cause he took off the muffler
for the race. She comes up the companionway and stands behind him and puts one hand on his shoulder, the other on the glowing
radar screen. “I was getting pretty comfortable on this thing,” she says. “It’s close to all the home we got.”

“You got your cousin’s trailer. I got my house.”

“I mean
we,
Lucky. I used to think it was our little nest down there. Now it’s a black frigging hole.” Still wearing the tank top and
cutoffs from the street dance, she burrows into his sweatshirt to get warm.

“Put on some oilskins from below.”

“There ain’t any, Lucky. All the rain gear melted together down there.” She comes up with a big mass of blackish-orange material
that used to be bib overalls and aprons.

“I’ll pull them apart back home,” he says. “Might be able to salvage some of them things.”

Soon as the moon goes down, a light damp southerly comes in and it starts clouding up fast from the west. There’s a dull flash
of lightning way to the westward, over the Tarratine River mouth, then right over the hills behind Burnt Neck. A little gust
of rain comes through the open windshield and she shivers like she’s standing in a fish freezer. “Ain’t cold,” he says. “It’s
July.”

“It’s cold for me.”

He peels off the remains of his sweatshirt, which has a nice comforting smell, like brake fluid after a long summer drive.
It hangs down below her knees like a dress, she pulls her hands up in the sleeves and puts her face up so he can tie the hood.
By the time they follow the
Perpetrator
through the Split Head passage and into home territory the sky is glowing behind them and it’s 4 a.m. Ronette spots two porpoises
off the port bow in the dim light. “Look Lucky, bet them things been following us all night.” He swerves sharp over like he’s
going to run them down. “You want me to get the gun, Lucky, so’s you can shoot them?”

“They’re good eating but they’re too fucking hard to clean.”

The child’s car seat is still lying on the platform where they dropped it in their escape from Stoneport. She picks it up
and hooks it over the bulkhead opposite the wheel and pot hauler, protected by the portside window. “That’s where he’s going
to ride.”

“What do you mean,
he?
How do you know what it is?”

“I just know, Lucky. But soon as I can, I’ll get a sonogram.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like the fishfinder, only they put it on your stomach. You can see them. Only they don’t look human yet, they look like
fish.”

“We was all fish once,” he says. “Would of been nice back then.” She yawns and closes her eyes on his shoulder as he’s making
the last turn around the Split Point gong. He flashes his spotlight to say good-bye and thanks to Travis and Danny and heads
north and east into Split Cove. Then she gets excited when they pass the Split Ledge nun. “Hey, you going to let us go home
and get some sleep?”

“Ain’t no sleeping on this boat,” he says. “I’m going to Split Cove to pick up bait. See if you can scrape off a couple aprons
down there. Boat’s running decent. We got some lobstering to do.”

H
E GETS UP LATE
and shares with Alfie a long breakfast of microwaved eels and King Oscar Norway sardines. The sun’s well up there in a cool
cloudless sky. A branch of the poplar out back has gone yellow already and half its leaves are on the ground. Wind’s coming
northwest, just like fall. The other boats pissed out of the harbor three hours ago, today the
Wooden Nickel
is fishing late. The Shag Islanders have set a couple hundred zebra-stripe pot buoys off of Toothpick Shoal and they’re hauling
them after everyone’s gone home. He’s heading out there armed like a helicopter gunship and hope to Christ he’ll catch them
in the act.

The old Chevy engine went from bad to worse. Harley tapped an eye into it and sank it for a mooring block, then sold him a
little Ford straight-six that had been rusting in the grass for twenty years. She’d run better with a hamster wheel but what
could he do, he had to get out to his gear. A lobster trap is like a woman, you don’t haul her up off the bottom now and then,
she’ll gnaw herself to death. By the time he got out to his fishing ground they’d laid a minefield of zebra-stripe buoys that
stretched southward towards Nigh Shag as far as the eye could see. Fuck that. He nukes another eel for himself, changes his
mind and slips it into Alfie’s dish. Going out at this time, eight-thirty, when everyone else has been fishing since sunrise,
who knows when he’ll be getting back?

He can’t help slowing down as he drives past the window of Yvonne Hannaford’s Wharfside Art Gallery, it’s full of Sarah’s
sea glass, big sign in the bay window:

All that fucking money and they don’t even know how to spell beer.

Art Pettingill’s got the
Bonanza
up to the wharf already and he’s shoving hard-packed lobster crates on the dock as fast as Albert can weigh them in. “I had
too many goldarn lobsters,” he shouts. “Had to quit early or we would of sank.” Art’s a true believer, he’s got the Mormon
Rock station going full blast, that’s all he listens to. He wouldn’t come out with a swear word if one of his twelve-dollar
lobsters reached up and bit his dick off. It crosses Lucky’s mind that Art’s fishing success might be related to his faith
in God, but he lets that one drop into the bilge of bad ideas. Plenty of atheistical bastards catch big fish. Besides, the
Bonanza
’s sporting a bullet hole in the port windshield, few feet on the other side and it would have ended up in a Christian brain.

“Hey Art, you putting some speed vents in that windshield?”

“I picked up one of them new stripe traps down south of Toothpick Shoal, just to see what they was using for bait.”

“Hope you killed a couple of them bastards.”

“I did not. Reverend Pingree addressed the matter Sunday and he said to turn the other cheek and that’s what I intend to do.”

“Then you ain’t packing?”

“I am not packing nothing,” Art says. “The Good Lord will provide enough for all. Besides, they’re down on your end of the
ledge. Har har.” Art laughs like a fucking walrus, climbs stairs like one too, the way he snorts through his mustache and
drags his three-hundred-pound body up one step at a time, you’d think the Good Lord gave him flippers instead of arms and
legs.

Lucky’s helping old Albert roll a bait barrel down the gangway when Clyde Hannaford comes limping down the outside office
stairs like something’s wrong with his leg. He’s holding a box. “Lucky, I got your radio back.”

“Finest kind, Clyde. I ain’t got no money to pay for it.”