The Wooden Nickel (29 page)

“Hell, Lucky, your credit’s always good with us. Ninety-four bucks’ damage, and I’m not making a nickel off it. I’ll show
you the receipt straight from Neptune Electronics. For that price I could have sold you a new one that would have got all
the channels.”

“I like the old one, thanks.”

Clyde looks down at the gun case. “Those pirates giving you trouble?”

“No Clyde, just thought I might spot a deer out there. What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Nothing. My foot fell asleep at the computer.”

“Jesus, Clyde, you got a hazardous occupation up there. Your insurance cover you for that?”

“It doesn’t. It doesn’t cover Rhonda anymore either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just a point of information.” Albert the baitboy, who’s about sixty years old, is stopping close by with his ear
hanging out. “Carry the man’s bait over to his boat, Albert,” Clyde snaps. “He’s running late.”

“You got any other information?” Lucky says.

“I hear they near put a bullet through Li’l Nort, out by Toothpick Shoal.”

“They ain’t very good shots, then. Li’l Nort’s a hard target to miss. What’s he doing out there anyway? He ain’t got the boat
for that.”

“Slicing off pot warp, that’s what I hear.”

“Jesus. They take a fucking shot at me, they’ll remember it.”

“Don’t kill them all,” Clyde says. “They could improve the local economy.” Under the tinted glasses Clyde’s eyes look like
a couple of squirts of gullshit.

“You ain’t saying you’re going to do business with them son of a whores?”

“Free enterprise,” Clyde says. “Those Shavers are highliners. Ever seen the trucks they drive? They bring in three hundred
pounds a day. They’ve been lugging it all the way to Sweeney’s Seafoods in Norumbega, might as well let it pass through Orphan
Point. Our school needs a new roof, our roads have more potholes than Bosnia.”

“They’re taking them lobsters right off my fucking ledge.”

“Then you better go protect them. Better take care of your stern-lady too, it’s a jungle out there. The world is changing,
Lucas, the old boundaries are coming down.”

He gives Clyde the finger and backs her out sharply under a cloud of screeching seagulls and blue smoke from the old Ford,
pleasure craft scattering out of his way. Fuck sailboats. Fuck kayaks. He opens the throttle and heads for one black-haired
yuppie kayaker that looks just like Clinton’s boyfriend George Stepopotamus, then swerves at the last moment and pisses right
through the school of them, only his new six-cylinder wake is so small they don’t even notice him go by.

Ronette’s wearing a pink T-shirt from the Burnt Cove Oyster Farm with a ripped-open neck that’s falling off one shoulder and
a big open oyster over each tit. She’s got cutoff shorts and Nikes like they’re going on a picnic, not to haul lobster traps
and maybe digest some lead over the territory of Toothpick Ledge. Those slick brown legs would look pretty bad cut up with
birdshot. Or worse. She swings down the ladder and over the starboard rail as Ginger performs her new trick of jumping off
the pierhead right onto the wheelhouse roof.

“Ginger ain’t coming today,” he says. “Get her back up on land and send her home.”

“How come, Lucky? She gets bored at home. Besides, Clyde could come over and kidnap her.”

“I got two guns aboard today, don’t want no animals getting hurt.”

The dog hasn’t learned to climb the ladder yet, so Ronette has to climb back up and call her from shore. Ginger leaps in and
swims for the boat landing and Ronette slaps her on the tail and sends her home.

He looks her over when she gets on board. “How come you ain’t dressed for work?”

“Aw, Lucky. It’s wicked hot.” She looks down and tries to fasten the top snap of her shorts but she can’t do it.

“Eating too much,” he observes.

“I ate too much back in May. I’m on the Lucky Lunt diet plan. Gain fifty pounds in nine months.”

“Here, put these on.” He tosses her the big spare orange rubber work pants he uses to keep the sun off the seawater tank.

“Too damn hot for them things. Maybe I’ll work topless today, that’ll scare them pirates off.”

The whole time they had the
Wooden Nickel
over in Riceville while Harley dicked around with the Ford six, Ronette was coming aboard with her paintbrush and sewing
box. She painted the bulkheads horsepiss yellow and the wood trim the color of windshield-washer fluid. The new foam pad has
a flowery couch cover and a fringed pillow with an embroidered picture, smells just like Yvonne’s Gift Shoppe. Pine cone soap.
The picture is a six-passenger canoe entering a covered canal with bushes all around it, looks like the boat’s steering right
into a cunt.
Tunnel of Love,
that’s what it says. They’re paddling right back where they came from. She’s got new blue curtains on the side windows. She’s
painted the old piss-bucket bright yellow and stuck a roll of pink toilet paper beside it so you no longer have to wipe your
ass with the tide tables. He hollers up over the exhaust: “Looks like a whorehouse down here.”

“I knew you was going to like it,” she says. “But it ain’t a whore-house. It’s a nursery.”

They make the Sodom whistle and turn southwest towards Toothpick Shoal. Just north of Toothpick, on the four-fathom spot known
as Gross’s Bank, Lonnie and Laurie and Li’l Nort are pulling in keepers as fast as they can haul them. Danny Thurston’s about
a mile beyond, hauling off to starboard from the
Perpetrator,
his old man Howard a bit beyond him in the
Gloria T.
By this time it’s getting choppy, they’ve all put in a seven-hour day, and they’re pulling their last strings, boats full
and fixing to go in.

It’s so shallow at the center of Toothpick, the sunlit morning swell breaks over it in explosions of fourteen-karat spray.
He’s almost forgotten he’s got a working radio till a voice comes in on the Orphan Point channel:
HEY, WOODEN NICKEL, YOU GOING OUT FOR SOME NIGHT FISHING?

It’s Howard.

“Negative,” he comes back. “I’m going to drag for some bottom-feeders. You might want to come along.”

NEGATIVE, LUCAS. I GOT THREE CRATES OF LOBSTERS ABOARD, I’M TAKING THEM IN WHILE CLYDE’S STILL GOT SOME MONEY LEFT
.

Ronette says, “You ain’t getting much help on this.”

“My old man’s day, they’d of had a posse out here. Boundaries don’t mean nothing anymore.”

She gives him a big pregnant smile. She used to have an under-nourished look, now her face is rounding and widening like a
belly. “You got a posse of one. One and a half, counting the unborn.”

“Can’t shoot too good when they’re all balled up like that.”

“Don’t matter, loyalty’s what counts.”

They’re steaming onto the north edge of his ground with no foreign boats in sight, though the radar shows a couple of vessels
way offshore and coming on. The only thing on Toothpick Shoal is a redhulled sailboat that’s dead in the water with her canvas
furled and heeled over like she’s trying to winch up a trap. In the binoculars he can read the name on the stern:
Bull Goose,
out of Dover, Delaware. “They don’t make enough off of their god damn stocks,” he says, “they got to steal lobsters. Steer
over, see what the fuck’s going on.”

They come up to starboard of the
Bull Goose
but they can’t see any traps aboard. The crew are all hanging over the side looking down towards the rudder. Three men and
three women with blotchy sunburnt legs and a tangled pot warp around their wheel. They should be on the golf course where
they belong, bunch of rich ass-holes with a big red plastic bath toy frigging up five hundred dollars’ worth of gear. Just
one of their stainless steel winches would cost more than a man’s house. His finger trembles for the bird gun but Ronette
says, “Take it easy, Luck, they ain’t got one of yours.”

He takes the binoculars and looks again. The buoy tangled in their propeller has a zebra stripe. He steers upwind and brings
her alongside on the lee of the sailboat and yells, “You drag that fucking thing from someplace or was it there?”

“Right on this spot,” the skipper says. “It stopped us cold. I’m awfully sorry, if it’s one of yours. We had no intention
. . .”

“Finest kind,” Lucky says. “It ain’t one of mine. You want some lobsters?”

“Never pass up an opportunity,” the guy says. “Course we can’t afford an arm and a leg.”

“I’m sure you can’t.” He slips back a bit and gaffs the zebra buoy and slices it off with the rope knife. “Here’s a souvenir.”
He tosses the buoy over to the skipper, then spins the
Wooden Nickel
bow-and-stern alongside of the
Bull Goose,
gaffs the warp and puts it on his pot hauler. “Now turn your prop nice and slow in reverse,” he yells, “slip the clutch,
she’ll peel the line right off.” The captain starts his fart-nosed little toy diesel and the hauler pulls the line free off
his shaft.

“How much do we owe you for the rescue?” Now they’ve all got their wallets out, big eager accountant smiles like a bunch of
Arvid Hannafords.

There’s more than one trap on the zebra buoy’s line. He hauls the first one, then comes in close and throws four good-sized
shedders right into the sailboat’s cockpit, one after the other. The three wives are backing away and squeaking like rabbits,
but the men corral the monsters into a corner with their boathooks and work all four of them into a nylon sail bag, then they
pull the drawstring tight and throw the bag below. The wives squeal and applaud like they’re married to a bunch of toreadors.

Free at last, the red sailboat is drifting downwind now in the breeze and tide. “Better watch it,” Lucky shouts, “you’ll pick
up another one.”

“How can we thank you?” one of the wives shouts. “Don’t you want a bottle of scotch?”

Ronette yells back, “I can’t drink alcohol, ma’am, cause of my condition.”

“Oh dear, what a sweet thing. And you’re still working all the way out here. Take care!”

By the time they turn around there’s a foreign boat hauling traps right on the southern drop-off of Toothpick Shoal. He doesn’t
need binoculars to see it’s a Wing Brothers hull and hear the same Isuzu diesel that smoked him at the Stoneport races.

“There’s another one coming,” Ronette says. This one he hasn’t seen before, it’s an identical Goldwing hull with the snub
stern, but midnight black. “Let me have them glasses.” It’s coming on fast, in a minute he can read the name
Darth Vader
on the bow. The white one’s the
Bad Pussy.
They’ve both got zebra buoys skewered on their radio whips. The two of them are stopped together now, right on the south
fringe of Toothpick Shoal, and the
Darth Vader
’s just idling while the
Bad Pussy
hauls a triple over the side. The orange-bearded guy with the finger stump and contact lenses is alone on the
Darth Vader.
The ponytailed one is sternman on the
Pussy.
The traps are loaded and they’re keeping everything they haul. “You think they don’t see us?” Ronette says.

“Of course they fucking see us. But they ain’t going to want to see us when I’m done.”

Soon as they bait and drop the last of that string and cast the buoy off, the two boats head for another a hundred yards northwards.
Lucky reaches behind the bulkhead and pulls the .410 out and hands it to Ronette. “Bird gun,” he says. “Ever use one?”

“Old Clyde had me trained on the pistol range. He wanted me to defend myself, case anyone made a sexual advance.”

He puts a hand down the back of her orange work pants but she slithers away. He steers up to the zebra buoy they just set
two minutes ago, gaffs the toggle and slices the warp off with the rope knife, that’s two traps they’ll never see again. A
man’s voice instantly comes over channel 64:
WATCH YOUR ASS, COWBOY. THEM AIN’T YOUR FUCKING TRAPS
.

There’s another zebra buoy a couple of hundred feet upwind. He puts the helm up and goes over and sets that one on the hauler
to see what they’ve got. He sees the
Darth Vader
guy holding his mike, and the same voice comes over the VHF:
I SAID, STAY THE FUCK OFF OF THAT TRAP
.

He punches the mike button and says, “Clear off the fucking channel, this channel’s Orphan Point.”

Lucky cuts him off by going back to channel 16 — emergencies only — but there they are:
YOU DON’T OWN THE AIR, COWBOY. YOU DON’T OWN THE WATER, YOU DON’T OWN NOTHING
.

He punches the VHF mike and says, “Suck my dick, asshole.”

A sugary female voice comes on and says,
VESSELS CONVERSING ON CHANNEL SIXTEEN, BE ADVISED THAT CHANNEL SIXTEEN IS A CALLING AND DISTRESS FREQUENCY. THIS IS THE UNITED
STATES COAST GUARD, OUT
.

Now the two boats are coming right at him from the windward side of the ledge. He puts her in neutral and pumps a shell into
the chamber of the .410. They’re looking down each other’s throats but the Isuzus make so much noise they have to use the
radio. When he gets out the deer rifle and hands the .410 shotgun to Ronette, the
Bad Pussy
’s diesel queen comes on:
HONEY, AIN’T YOU TOO SMALL FOR THAT KIND OF WORK?

A boat comes steaming up behind them. It’s the
Abby and Laura,
manned by Lonnie and Norton Gross. Lonnie comes on the radio,
WE AIN’T GOING TO LET YOU DOWN
,
then the
Darth Vader
’s skipper picks up a big hunting rifle and fires one right into Lonnie’s hull less than a foot over the waterline. Cheap
fucking glass must be about an eighth of an inch thick, cause the hollowpoint opens a hole you could put your dick through.
He goes back on channel 64: “Lonnie, the son of a whore opened you up on your port side. You better stuff a sock in there
and haul ass home.”

Ronette’s at the wheel idling the engine but when she sees the chop splashing around the hole in Lonnie’s hull she says, “Lucky,
why not get out of here and let the law take care of this?”