The Wooden Nickel (3 page)

Blair says, “Frank don’t reveal things like that. They’re trade secrets with him.”

“He don’t reveal them,” Lucky says, “he sells them.”

Doris opens the cash register drawer with a big ring but zeros showing on the screen. “Frank,” she says, “how much would that
information be?”

Blair reaches into the glass-doored doughnut drum and pulls out a chocolate éclair and throws it in his mouth like it was
an M&M. He slides another one down to his brother, who opens his huge jaws like a basking shark and the éclair is gone. “I
guess that will do it,” Blair says. “Go ahead, Frank, tell her.”

Ronette leans over the counter to look down at Frank’s feet, but his trousers hang so far over his boots that Frank’s standing
on the cuffs, and meanwhile the cleavage of his dark hairy asscrack is showing like Dolly Parton on Rogaine. One of Ronette’s
tits presses down on the how-to-eat-a-lobster place mat, the other presses on a fork and knife. Lucky wonders if she can feel
things like silverware through the bra and the white waitress blouse.

“You’re going to have to lift them trousers up,” Ronette says to Frank, giving him the weird glance she has, as if one of
her eyes was astray. He has heard the rumor that Ronette has a glass eye but he does not believe it. Both her eyes move when
she looks around, just maybe one doesn’t come at you quite as fast as the other, that’s all. It’s a sexy moment, waiting for
the other eye to catch up.

Doris, who was a friend of his mother’s and must be close to sixty, is pushing her dyed blond hair up in an interested way.
“You know what they say, Ronette. ‘Big feet, warm heart.’”

Frank says, “I wear a nine.”

“Sure you do,” Ronette says. “And your brother here is a ballet dancer.”

“Belly dancer,” Lucky says. The Alleys choose to pay no attention.

“I wouldn’t shit you, Ronette,” Frank says. “You gave me an eeclair.” He hoists the trousers back up over his stern cleavage
and there’s a boot two sizes smaller than Lucky’s own. “It is a nine.”

“Something must be wrong with that one,” Ronette says. “Must be deformed. Lift up the other one.”

Same size. Nobody knows what to say. Frank Alley is the big one too, he must weigh over three hundred and he’s walking around
on a size-nine foot. Doris says, “Whew, I don’t know how you stand up on them. They must hurt at the end of the day. I know
mine do, and I ain’t got your weight on them.”

Blair says, “I think Frank should get more than a fucking eeclair.” He pulls a glazed honey-dip out of the doughnut drum and
gives it to his brother and stands up.

Frank says, “Fucking daylight saving time. It ain’t never going to get light.”

“Just set your watch ahead an hour,” Lucky tells him. “It’ll get light right away.”

Frank looks at him seriously and says, “No shit?” He starts frigging around with his watch as they go out, then looks east
towards the sunrise like he’s just caused it, pleased as piss. By the doorway he bends down to pet Doris’s weird little Chinese
dog and as he does his pants slip down again. His big white cheeks bulge out in the brightening air.

Ronette whispers, “Ain’t every day you get a sight like that.”

“Don’t get all jealous.” Lucky says. “Frank’s had an implant. It ain’t real.”

The Alley brothers can’t hear a thing, they’re outside cranking the diesel over which won’t start cause it hasn’t been plugged
in, but Ronette still bends close to Lucky to whisper. The steam rising off his coffee forms a little ridge of moisture on
her chin. “Would you of believed that?” she says. “Frank Alley. Size nine. What size are you, Lucky?”

Doris hears. “Why don’t you call Sarah up and ask her? Lucky never buys his own shoes. How’s he supposed to know?”

“You don’t know your own size?” Ronette says.

“Eleven.”

“Makes sense,” she says. “You’re a few sizes bigger than Clyde, he wears an eight.”

“Small feet, cold heart,” Doris says. She walks to the jukebox and plays some Garth:

Parked on some old backstreet

They laid down in the backseat

“Clyde does have a cold heart,” Ronette says, suddenly serious, like the song. She hums along as she loads the hard-boiled
eggs into the small jar. “Coldhearted Hannaford.”

“Treats
you
nice,” Doris reminds her. “You got that Ford Probe or whatever it is, you got that hot tub.”

“Money ain’t everything,” Ronette says. “There’s a few other things.”

“Damn few,” Doris says. “You get where I am in life, you see all the other things were daydreams.”

“Money’s a daydream,” Ronette says. “Tell her, Lucky.”

Lucky says, “I wouldn’t know. Never seen any.”

“You ain’t going to,” Doris says, “if you don’t leave the help alone and get on your boat.”

Ronette sticks her tongue out at her boss, just a quick flicker not meant to be seen, and puts the big egg jar back in the
floor cooler. Lucky pays up and leaves her a buck tip for a sixty-eight cent coffee and heads for her husband’s wharf, where
he keeps his skiff.

Turns out he’s not the last boat, the ones that didn’t pick up their gas and bait the night before are still crowding Clyde’s
wharf at the pump float. Lucky just has to take the skiff out to his mooring and cast off. Rowing past the gas pumps, he calls,
“Good morning, Clyde, just had breakfast with your old lady,” and gets nothing but a wicked glare. Then he remembers his radio.
Clyde also handles electronic repairs, not that he can do them himself, but he takes the units to Chubby Burke in Norumbega,
supposedly to save you the trip but now Clyde’s got it so Chubby won’t take your repairs if they don’t go through him. Chub
gives him a volume discount that does not get passed on. That puts another wing on the hot tub so Ronette gets to stretch
out her tired little body to its full length. One good thing you can say about the Commies, they would have eliminated the
middleman. Guys like Clyde Hannaford would have got reformed in a labor camp. Too bad. “Hey Clyde,” he shouts, “you got my
radio?”

“Chubby says another wait. That thing’s so old he’s got to get parts from Illinois.”

“At least they ain’t coming from Tokyo.”

“You probably got the last working radio made in the U.S.A. That thing belongs in the maritime museum. Chubby says it uses
crystals.
You could get two Apelcos for what those crystals are going to cost.”

“Damn good radio,” Lucky says. “You can hear the fucking thing fifty miles away. They don’t make them like that anymore. Know
where they make them Apelcos? Malaysia. Wherever the fuck that is.”

“No doubt. But those crystals are going to be another three weeks.”

“Don’t need a fucking radio anyway. I ain’t going out to talk. I’m going to fish.”

It’s now a brightening mackerel sky over Orphan Point. The snow has stopped. The underbellies of the eastern clouds are stained
blood-red the way the floors of the old fishhouses used to look before the government shut the tuna fishery down. Lucky rows
Downeast style, stern first, so he can see where his ass is going, not like the summer folks who row out blind as quahogs
into the fog. Moving at half speed in memory of his operation, he rows down the west shore of the harbor, towards the Money
side, where the seasonal residents have their estates and stables on spidery dirt roads that don’t even get plowed in winter
so some of them have a foot of snow on them even now. That’s the way they like it, the summer people, they think it keeps
the vandals out but nowadays kids break in anyway using their Ski-Doos. Lucky himself got caught once poaching a couple of
bottles of Canadian whiskey out of one of those places when he was right around fourteen. He was detained and interrogated
by Officer Arden Jewett, who accepted one of the bottles for evidence and let him go. The owners of those places have three
or four homes, couple of Lexuses in the garage, helicopter pads on their lawns so they can step right onto their yachts, rich
bastards, they ought to open their mansions after Labor Day and let people come take what they want, instead of having to
break in at the coldest time of the year.

After rowing past a couple of these mansions to stay out of the current, he turns out towards his boat, heading for the east
side, where the fishermen live, their old black-shuttered white-clapboard Capes still insulated with newspapers from the Civil
War. Same families that built them are living in them now. Lucky’s great-great-grandfather funded their place with a Union
Army bonus — that’s how his mother told it — became a fisherman, and they’ve been fishermen ever since. Not one of the Lunt
men knew how to do another god damn thing. That’s what they say, a Lunt can smell his way to Nova Scotia through the fog but
he needs a compass to find the grocery store.

No different for Sarah. The Peeks were a fishing family since anyone could remember. They had a house with gingerbread trim,
just below the Orphan Point cemetery, on Deadman’s Hill. The Peeks and the Lunts had been marrying off and on ever since lobsters
sold for three cents a pound. When the state came to town and set up that office of genetic counseling, they called Lucky
and Sarah to come pay a visit, but it was too late, Kyle was on a tricycle and Kristen was on the way. They came out all right,
five fingers on each hand, what the fuck. The GC office is a waste of taxpayers’ dollars, except for maybe the Gross family,
and all the genetic counselors on earth couldn’t have stopped the Grosses from breeding in. They just don’t have an eye for
anyone else.

He can see his own house among the others, all the lights on now. Sarah will be fixing breakfast. Kristen will be pacing in
the hall outside the bathroom for Kyle to finish, which takes an hour now he’s shaving his whole fucking head, it’s a wonder
they let him in the school.

The
Wooden Nickel
’s riding low in the water, lower than she should be even with the traps on board. She’s been a leaker since they put her
in this March, no two ways about it. He put a few new strakes on her while she was hauled over the winter and he thought they’d
swell in, but she must have half her bilge full cause the water-line stripe’s a foot under even in the bow. Under the traps
the stern’s pretty near submerged.

He fixes the skiff to the mooring and pauses a minute to let his heart catch up. Everything looks right and smells right:
fresh engine oil, black polysulfide seam caulking, bait bucket full of nice ripe herring in the stern. Just a whiff of that
stuff brings women to his mind. When he was a kid he was scared to kiss them below the waist, then one day he recognized that
aroma and realized he’d been working in it his whole life. After that, he never hesitated to plunge right in. He’d do it now
if Sarah would give him half a chance, but she pulls his head back if he even gets close. “Lucas,” she always says, “that
tickles.
”

He sticks his head right in the opening of the bait bucket and takes a deep pungent inhale until his mind goes blank, he’s
back under the covers and Ronette Hannaford is in the bed, her whole body smelling like a beautiful smoked trout. He slides
the cover off the engine box, just like opening a coffin lid, and there’s a fresh-painted, reamed-out Chevy 454, cold as a
corpse till he touches the electric fuel pump for a second, hits the starter and it comes to life, a miracle that could be
in the fucking Bible if you think about it, yet it happens every single day.

He lets her run out a bit at 1300 rpm, then he switches the power takeoff to the bilge pump because half the harbor has slipped
into the cracks of his christly hull. Another hour, she would have been up to the flywheel with the traps washing off the
stern. Once he gets offshore and the sea works the hull a bit, she’ll swell and settle in.

He tunes the stereo back to High Country 104, they’ve got a female DJ now with a nice raspy sunrise voice that makes him think
of the Marlboros he’s got stashed behind the radar screen. He flips the box open and eases one out with his teeth. Nothing
about a cigarette he doesn’t like, including the filter’s crisp dry asbestos taste. They pick the best of life, every time,
and take it away from you. Dr. Burnside made him quit after the operation — right when he needed it most. Those first nights
home from the Tarratine hospital, he’d wake up seasick from the medication, withdrawal pains worse than the angina, cold turkey
after two packs a day for almost thirty years. He’d stand in the bathroom before breakfast those dark and frigid mornings
with his hands shaking like an addict and tear up Kleenexes one after the other till Sarah came in and walked him to the table.

But Dr. Burnside left a loophole big enough to sail a supertanker through. He didn’t say anything about smoking offshore.
Outside the three-mile limit a man can do anything he wants, and in ten minutes that’s where he’s going to be. He jams the
unlit Marlboro between the wool cap and his ear. He revs the engine to finish pumping the bilge, and soon as the hose sucks
air he switches the PTO to neutral, then goes forward up on the high prow, pulls the heavy eye splice off the bitt and steps
back to the wheel, backs off a bit so he won’t catch the pennant, and in a moment he’s clocking fifteen knots on the loran,
stern down and throwing a rooster tail behind the prop with a nice wake forking off astern. He detours east across the harbor
so he can pass by his own house with Sarah and Kristen waving from the kitchen window, steering so close to shore he can hear
the prop echo off the bottom and see his family’s breath steaming against the glass. Kristen turns away and it’s just Sarah,
not waving anymore, looking out to sea like a widow over the yellow Fisher snowplow and the snowy lawn. He slows to an idle.
If he had his radio he’d ask her to meet him back at Clyde’s and go out lobstering. She wouldn’t have to do anything, she
could sit and sketch the islands like she did in the old days. He goes to the port side to wave her towards the wharf with
his orange glove, but by the time he gets there she’s turned from the window and then she’s gone. He speeds up and cuts sharp
to starboard to avoid Little Sow Ledge with the three black shags perched on the daybeacon looking just like the shapes of
death.