The Wooden Nickel (34 page)

“So what’s the point?”

“The point is this. I wire these fucking places for security, and I got the codes. Only you can’t get anything out of there
in a truck, they got this gate, they got a private cop. So all’s I need is someone with a boat. And a little imagination,
you know what I mean.”

“What about your ankle bracelet? Ain’t your parole officer going to be watching you on TV?”

“First thing we learned in security class, how to disable them things. I can set mine for anywhere I want. You’ll get the
hang of it. What do you think? You aboard? You ain’t got nothing to lose.”

“Just what I need,” Lucky says. “Spend a couple of years getting cornholed up at Thomaston.”

“You ain’t going to get cornholed, Lucky. You’re too old.”

“I’m too fucking old for that shit too.”

Reggie looks him over like he’s a job applicant. “Just trying to help out,” he says. “Think it over, no hurry. There’s a window
of opportunity, guys like us just got to pry it open a little, that’s all. Cousin.”

He gives him a family slap on the shoulder and they turn to the bar to focus on their shots and beers. Reggie’s a moody bastard,
he must be on some kind of pills. He gets so quiet and lost in thought, Lucky’s ready to start talking to the Indian biker,
then he feels the presence of two guys behind him, one on either side. Fucking Shag Island, he thinks. They’re here. He puts
the shot glass down and turns around slow and ready, but it’s not. It’s a tall lanky kid with his head shaved and his eyebrow
pierced with a gold pin, big enough to look him right in the eye. Fucking Kyle, standing there in his bald skull wearing a
leather jacket that looks like the Hells Angels gave it to the Salvation Army. Beside him is his fairy friend Darrell Swan,
six inches shorter, little mouse-colored mustache, black sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, brown veiny arms like he’s been
working out.

Lucky spits into the sea-green sawdust around his feet. The whole room smells like an electrical fire from the belt sander
track. He looks at Kyle. “How’d you get here? You come in your little slant-eyed truck?”

“I ain’t got it on the road. It’s up to Heidi Astbury’s on blocks.”

“How come?”

“Ain’t got no fucking insurance.”

“I ain’t got no insurance either. It don’t stop
me.
”

“Yeah, Heidi’s cousin’s a cop, he lives down the street, he stopped me and ran the insurance down and now he don’t even let
me out of the driveway. We come here looking for a ride.”

“I ain’t got room.”

“Bullshit. We seen your truck out there. It’s empty.”

He’s caught between Kyle and Reggie Dolliver and he picks Kyle. Couple more drinks and he’d be down on Split Point busting
into someone’s home.

“How far you going?”

“Couple miles. It ain’t long.”

He gets Wallace to sell him three bottles of Colt .45 under the table and waves Reggie good night. “I ain’t rushing you,”
Reggie says. “Just think it over. And don’t let it get nowhere.”

In the RoundUp parking lot, the three of them thread their way to his truck through a hundred pickups. Kyle says, “Hey Dad,
what’s with the gloves?”

“Burnt my hands on the exhaust.”

The three of them hoist themselves up into the GMC’s high-lift cab and he starts her up. “Truck sounds like shit,” Kyle says.

“Don’t remind me. That son of a whore Virgil Carter put a hot Chevy transfer case in her, he got the year wrong and it don’t
even fucking fit. Where we going?”

He takes one of the Colt .45s out of the bag and goes to twist the top off with his work glove but it’s not the twist kind.
His hands hurt like hell from crushing the lead frames. He takes the top between his teeth and pops it off like they did in
the old days, takes a swig, hands it across Darrell’s chest to his son.

“Ain’t you going to give Darrell none?”

“Here.” He hands an unopened bottle to Darrell Swan.

“I ain’t going to open it with my teeth. Fuck that.”

Kyle comes up with a Buck knife and pops it off, then shouts instructions to his old man. “Next right. Head out the Sherman
Road.”

“What the fuck’s out on the Sherman Road? Nothing but pulp-wood and coyotes after you pass the dump.”

“We’re going to Moto’s place.”

“Your Chinese sushi dealer? I ain’t taking you out there.”

“Come on, Dad. I ain’t even living at home. What do you care where I go?”

“If we can’t go to Mr. Moto’s,” Darrell Swan says, “would you mind swinging us over to Burnt Neck?”

“I ain’t going to that shithole. Mojo’s it is.” He drops her into second gear and the hard-sprung GMC goes airborne with every
bump. After the town dump, the Sherman Road turns to gravel and they raise a cloud of dust turned red by the taillights in
the rearview mirror. “Yahoo!” Lucky shouts. “The Orient Express! I ain’t been out here in twenty years. Used to jack deer
on this land when we was kids, put the lights on them and shoot them right between the eyes. Your grandma didn’t ask no questions,
neither. We’d bring one in at night, we’d have venison pie next day for supper. Now they lock you up for that, can’t even
take a leak without breaking some fucking law.”

They make a sharp turn and Kyle says, “Slow down, it’s right around here.” They haven’t passed a house in miles, nothing on
the roadside but scrub thicket and beer cans in the ditch, then they pass by a little unmarked opening in the shoulder, just
a couple of upright stones on either side, no sign, no mailbox, looks like a gravel pit road. “That was it,” Darrell Swan
says. “Them was the Zen stones.”

Lucky says, “Ain’t nothing but a woods road,” but he backs her up and noses into the unmarked entrance. A sign nailed to a
tree says

The sign’s got a silhouette of a German shepherd but someone has put its eye out with a .22.

Another quarter mile on the winding entrance road and they come to a big circular drive with a four-bay garage at the other
end. He knows right where he is, middle of fucking nowhere, they used to come out here in the back of Johnny Thurston’s wood
truck, feel up their girlfriends, jack off and smoke Indian tobacco. Now they’re surrounded by orange floodlights and a big
garage with ten-foot-high bays, all but one of them open: must be this Moto’s personal fleet. One bay has a mean-looking black
Humvee, backed in, showing a five-ton Warn winch and tow cable crisscrossed over the front bumper. He’s seen the black Hummer
a couple of times crawling through Orphan Point, windows tinted all around like it’s Saddam Hussein inside.

The next bay’s got a silver Mercedes-Benz 450 diesel Hitler-mobile, and over beyond that’s a turd-brown high-lift Nissan X-cab
pickup. The fourth one has a big white Mitsubishi Fuso refrigerated truck that just barely fits inside, looks like anybody’s
clam truck. Must be what Moto uses for his sushi runs.

As soon as they pull up, a stocky little Chinese guy comes out and walks around the front of the truck. He’s got a black sweatshirt
on, sweatpants, and white running shoes. He sees the boys in the truck cab and busts into a big shit-eating Chinese grin.
“Oh, these two. Carroll and Darrell.”

“Kyle,” Darrell says.

“Carroll and Kyle. Who is other gentleman?”

“My old man.”

Dead serious, like a Commie guard, the Chinese guy shines one of those little black flashlights right into Lucky’s eyes, then
onto the Remington .30-06 in the back window, and back to Lucky again.

“You sure he is father?”

“What the fuck, Frank,” Kyle says. “Mr. Moto said it was OK.”

“OK, OK. Park here. Leave keys.”

Lucky pockets the keys and hops down. He wants to check out the Humvee in the garage but as he gets closer he hears a low
growl. That must be where they keep the one-eyed dog. “Nice friendly place,” he says to Frank.

Beyond the driveway a big low house glows out of the darkness as if it’s made from varnished teak. The path is lit by a double
row of Chinese lanterns just like the ones they have at the My Lai restaurant, that’s probably Moto’s too. On the other side
of the garage, stretching away from the circular drive, they’ve got a low chain-link fence surrounding an area washed by banks
of orange lights like an illuminated playing field. “What the hell’s that,” he asks, “miniature golf?”

“Croquet,” Darrell says. “Mr. Moto loves croquet.”

Kyle and Darrell chat it up a bit with Frank, who gives them each a quick fake karate neck chop then walks over to the chain-link
gate and lets them through. They call back to Lucky, “You coming in?”

Beyond the chain-link the bright green croquet lawn looks like AstroTurf under the orange lights. He’s heard of croquet but
he’s never seen the game: a square of green lawn set with colored stakes and little wire hoops. Wilfred Beal is standing with
a croquet club beyond one of the end stakes. Wilfred looks up from his croquet hammer and says, “Hey Lunt. Didn’t know you
played.” He’s teamed up with a woman in a tight red skirt and high heels, looks like a gogo girl from the tit club in Tarratine.
The heels look like they’re going to sink into the putting green, but they don’t. Fake grass.

Then a short grinning heavyset Chinese guy in a white alligator golf shirt comes up and puts his arm around Kyle’s shoulder.
“This is your boy?” he says to Lucky. “He’s good boy. He’s working for me, no problem. I am John Moto.”

“That your Humvee out there?”

“I used to have Range Rover. The Hummers, they kick Range Rover butt.”

“Oh yeah? What’s under the hood?”

“Eight-cylinder GM diesel. Three hundred horsepower. Come back in daytime, Mr. Runt. I take you drive around.”

Moto has a long silent look at Lucky’s gloves, then takes his elbow like a midget realtor, showing him the property. They
walk away from Kyle and Darrell Swan and the croquet field, to a round white table next to a rock-bordered fishpond behind
the garage. “You are fisherman,” he says, “these are my fish.” A spotlight on the back of the garage lights up the pool when
they get near, must have a motion sensor. The pool’s surface fills with big slow orange-and-white goldfish, eyes goggling
out of their heads, gulping for air bubbles and swishing their fins around like they’re going to drown.

“Them things breathe air or water?”

“They are imperial goldfish,” Moto says.

“They good eating?”

Moto laughs the way people laugh when the subject is money. “That would be expensive even for sushi bar. They are three thousand
apiece and they die like fries. Shipment every week.”

“You get all this off of sea urchins?”

“Businessmen cannot be too specialized. Uni is hot today, other fish tomorrow. Uni season closes, demand gets very large.”

“I hear you’re dealing off-season. Ain’t there a law against that?”

Moto laughs his little rich-Communist laugh again. “Highest law,” he says, “is law of suppry and demand.”

Frank the bodyguard shows up with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, an ice bucket and a couple of glasses. One thing
you have to say for liquor, it tastes just the same whether you like who you’re drinking with or not. He fills his glass till
the liquid’s bulging over the rim. Moto puts maybe a quarter ounce in his, clicks it against Lucky’s. “What we drink to?”

“Supply and demand,” Lucky says.

Without touching a drop Moto says, “Big demand now is jumbo lobster. In my country they are eager to impress. Greater lobster,
greater the man is. It is like how do you say it? Pecker.”

“Five and a half inch is the limit,” Lucky informs him.

“So small for American man?”

“Not the pecker, the lobster. What we call the carapace. It’s got to be under five and a half inches or we throw them back.
That’s a big fucking lobster, go four, four and a quarter pounds at premium price, that’s twelve bucks at the dock. Past that,
they’re breeders. We got to conserve the stock for our kids.”

Moto refills his glass but doesn’t touch his own. “Your son, I observe, is not a lobsterman.”

“He’s got a chance,” Lucky says. “He ain’t out of high school yet.”

“I am wondering maybe we do business,” Moto says. “You know, your fine son speaks of you. I would buy five-pound lobster and
up.”

“Don’t take them that big. Besides, there ain’t a dealer in this state that would buy the catch.”

“I have place to bring in,” Moto says. “Nice quiet spot, no question ask. Five pound and better. I pay eight dollar a pound.
Also roe.”

“We don’t take eggs. Wouldn’t be no lobsters left if we did that.”

“Roe is thirty dollar extra. Very important. I have customers. It is also roe stiffing the pecker, not here perhaps but in
my country.”

“If it gives you a hard-on there, it ought to do the same thing here,” Lucky says. “We’re all human beings.”

“We believe we are different species, Mr. Runt. For example, you were once monkeys. We were not.”

“That may be,” Lucky says, “but I ain’t doing it. Them big deep lobsters, you see, them’s the breeding stock. They’re like
the oil wells, dry them up and we’re all running on empty.”

“Perhaps you are running empty already, Mr. Runt. Mr. Beal tells me your bad fortune. You wish to help out lobster fishing
but they take fishing license away. I am a man of strictly business. As I see it you owe them nothing. Your fine son Darrell
believes the same, as we have our saying, you receive shaft, you owe nothing back.”

“I ain’t geared up to take oversize lobsters. My trap heads ain’t big enough, besides, they’re wood, they’d get stove up out
there. My engine’s a piece of shit. Sternman I got’s a woman, she ain’t ever been offshore. I ain’t equipped to even think
about it.”

“Money no object,” Moto says. “I advance my fishermen all their gear. Come with me.” They go through a back door of the garage
building into a big storage space behind the turd-brown Nissan. Stacked up against one wall are eight of the biggest wire
lobster traps he’s ever seen, twice the size of normal ones with a head-end opening eight inches across. He fingers the escape
vent in the parlor end, a two-pound lobster could swim out of that without brushing the sides. The voice is barely a whisper
now, coming from inside the shadowy trap.
Lukie, them big ones is the future.
Moto’s taking his elbow, turning him from the oversized wire traps to the black Humvee gleaming in the fluorescent garage
light. “Work for me, you will have line of credit. Five, ten thousand, what you need to start up.”