The Wooden Nickel (35 page)

“Ain’t legal to bring them fuckers within twelve miles of the shore.”

“As I say, Mr. Runt, I have nice quiet cove.”

“Can’t be anywheres near here.”

“Fifteen mile east, I have old wharf in Whistle Creek. Urchins come in all time year, why not robsters? Your fine son can
show you where it is.”

“I know where it is. My wife’s uncle used to operate that wharf, years back, then it silted up. Can’t get in there now.”

“Moto Enterprises, we have dredge channel.”

“Finest kind, Mr. Moto, you got it all figured out. You got the wrong fucking man, that’s all.”

“We see, Mr. Runt. I am good judge of fishermen. Also, sometime in robster trap perhaps package appears.”

“I ain’t running no drugs.”

Moto puts both hands up, backs away like he doesn’t touch the stuff either. “Not now of course. But who knows? Future is rong
rong time. I call you Rucas?”

“Sure.”

“Anytime, Rucas. Night and day.”

Frank the bodyguard’s back in the garage starting the reefer truck, must be time for the milk run. Moto gives him a friendly
handshake, takes the Johnnie Walker and turns away, leaving his quarter ounce untouched. Lucky knocks it back.

Back at the croquet field there’s no one left around. Frank the bodyguard is picking the varnished hammers up, wiping off
the midnight dew before he stacks them in a white shingled garden shed. “Your boys take other ride,” Frank says.

The tall garage doors are powering down as he climbs into the GMC cab and starts her up. Big Country 105 is playing Tanya
Tucker.

She’s got everything that a girl could want

But she needs more, and she can’t stop

When he gets to the Blue Claw it’s dark except for one small window where Fat Charlie is in there prepping tomorrow’s menu.
He’s got Bon Jovi on, his eyes are closed, his face grinning and nodding like he’s jerking off into the clam chowder, a specialty
of the house. No Probe in sight, not even Doris’s brand-new Buick. The town wharf is quiet. Out in the harbor somebody’s got
his running lights on. Too early for lobstering, it’s probably Noah Parker going out beyond Shag Island on a pilot run. Fifteen
miles offshore, Noah and Phil Parker will rendezvous with a tanker bound upriver for Tarratine, thousand bucks before the
fucking sun comes up. Everyone’s licking somebody’s asshole, it’s hard to find a man doing a clean day’s work.

He slows down passing his own house, where the lights are out, all three garage doors closed up tight. Alfie could be right
in there on the oil spot where he likes to sit and wait for the pickup to pull in. He tries to think of his wife sleeping
inside, but he can’t picture it without him in there too. He’s out in the truck idling, staring up at his own bedroom till
he believes he’s in there, out in his truck and in the old brass bed with her at the same time, it’s fucking crazy and his
heart starts slamming in his chest. He reaches in the glove compartment for a handful of heart pills, then drives back past
the unlighted windows of Lurvey’s Convenience & Video and takes the right turn up Deadman’s Hill. Halfway up is the Peek house,
in Sarah’s family since the Revolution, only now there’s a Saab in the driveway with New Jersey plates. Peeks can’t afford
it anymore. He comes to the cemetery entrance, U-turns and parks facing downhill. The sprinkle of streetlights and yard lights
outlines the sleeping town like a radar screen. The only life on the pitch-black harbor is the four-second red flasher on
the Sodom Ledge bell and the ten-second white sweep of Split Point light. On one side of him is a Mazda pickup with a guy
and his girl trying to work things out over the stick shift. On the other side, maybe a hundred feet away, his old man’s lying
there quiet in the ground and beside him is his grandfather, Merritt Lunt, all dressed up so you won’t know his pecker got
chewed off. There’s a question on his mind but he can’t ask it in a way they could answer because they’re both of them stone
cold fucking dead.

With the headlamps off, his night vision picks up a faint flash on the horizon where one kind of black shades into another,
must be the Gannet Ledge bell, fifteen miles out. Canyons out there a hundred fathoms deep, big blind lobsters that have never
tasted sunlight. They don’t let him fish for his own country, might as well sell them to the Japanese.

He honks the horn and sends the couple beside him scrambling for their clothes, but the stones over Merritt and Walter Lunt
don’t move an inch. He blasts down the hill past the Peek house, and just to hear the sweet sound of his own engine keeps
her in second gear till he’s back on the Sherman Road and heading through the dark hackmatack woods towards Moto’s place,
past the Zen stones and the one-eyed dog to the four-bay garage with one door open and a couple of Asians leaning on the bumper
of the black Humvee.

Moto’s still up, the only figure on the lighted croquet field. “Why you take so long?” he asks.

“Had to empty out the truck, make room for the new traps.”

He peels out of Moto’s circular drive with a heavy load, sixteen oversize wire traps under a canvas tarp, you could stuff
a human being inside one of those cocksuckers if he scrunched himself up. When he comes to the highway he turns eastward,
speeds up past the dead RoundUp and doesn’t stop till he’s reached the Split Point Road and pulled his truck in front of the
trailer where Ronette Hannaford lives. The windows are dark. A weird dog barks once across the street then goes silent like
it’s been choked. Jesus. He shuts the lights off, kills the engine, and slumps down to sleep behind the wheel.

T
HE ALARM RINGS
in the middle of the night, he wakes out of a dream of eel nets and he doesn’t know where the sound’s coming from. He takes
a whack on his side of the bed where the clock’s supposed to be but it’s not there. His palm cuts through the empty air and
he almost falls off the low, tilted mattress. Way over on the other side the beeping blue-green digital numbers read 1:30.
He reaches across the unknown body beside him and puts his whole hand around the clock and squeezes until the beeping strangles
and dies. When he rolls back on his own side the room seems to move with him and he thinks for a moment he’s aboard a boat,
but it’s only Ronette’s trailer which is so fucking flimsy you can feel the floor bend when you breathe.

He’s been asleep three hours. Night before they watched tag team wrestling on TNN. Pretty soon they were grappling on the
trailer floor themselves, it was almost eleven before they moved to the bedroom and collapsed. Ronette likes to do it while
wrestling’s on, she’s got one eye on the tube the whole time. Last night it was the Undertaker versus this new guy Goldberg
the Rastling Rabbi, the Undertaker’s sitting on the Rabbi’s butt, twisting his leg back, Rabbi’s screaming and yelling, Ronette’s
underneath him thrashing like a halibut, it drives her nuts. He doesn’t give a damn, if that’s what wets her appetite, what
the hell.

Later she wanted another crack at it because she couldn’t sleep, but his heart was still pounding from the first one and he
didn’t want to die in a strange house. He swallowed a handful of heart pills and went to sleep.

Now in the dark he reaches back under the covers groping for Sarah’s familiar papery skin with the bones and ribs underneath,
and finds instead a bedful of damp warm flesh coming awake, pulling him towards its mouth like a starfish, ready to do it
again.

“Jesus H. Christ, Ronette. We got to get out there. It’s twenty-five of two.”

With the old Ford six in there, it takes three hours to reach the offshore fishing grounds.

Her face is blue from the clock light so it looks like she’s underwater, then she pulls down the covers. She’s got nothing
on, her belly’s getting bigger, her arms and shoulders are bulking like she’s been shooting steroids along with Darrell and
Kyle. Her nipples look like blue saltwater chocolate in the clock light, he wouldn’t mind chewing on those for a few minutes,
see what happens, but by sunrise he wants to be twelve miles out to sea.

She sees him looking and pulls the covers up. “You’re going to leave me, Lucky. I used to have a figure but now I’m a frigging
whale.”

They’re on the back road passing the blacked-out welfare shacks of Burnt Cove, two barrels of Stoneport redfish in the truck
bed smelling so ripe it’s making the dogs howl in every house. For two weeks he’s been dressing himself out of Uncle Vince’s
closet. He’s wearing long underwear and two sweatshirts under his oilskins because they’re fishing twenty miles offshore in
a gray endless September fog bank cold as a witch’s tit. Just thinking of it makes him reach into the glove compartment and
wash down his morning pill with Old Mister Boston cherry brandy, a hit for himself, a hit for Ronette, and a hit for old Luther
Webster when they pass his road, just the right taste at 3 a.m.

Snugged up against him with her knees drawn up on either side of the transfer case lever, Ronette Astbury lights him a Marlboro
so she can steal a couple of deep forbidden drags. With her other hand she searches for a twenty-four-hour station. She finds
Vince and Dolly way at the far end of the dial, lots of static but a great duet:

Goodbye, please don’t you cry

’Cause we both know I’m not what you need

She turns it up. “Did you know Dolly Parton wrote them lyrics? Bet you didn’t.”

“I’d like to have a picture of Dolly Parton writing that song.”

“What for? She don’t write naked.”

A big fall-colored bird whirrs low across the headlights into the roadside brush: partridge. Just over the Riceville line
he turns on the Whistle Creek Road, then stops short for a doe and two late-summer fawns standing right in the road. The doe
freezes in the headlights, the little ones scamper off. All by itself his hand reaches back for the .30-06 racked across the
window behind his head.

“Lucky, for Christ sake. Hunting don’t start till November.”

“Always deer season after dark. That’s what my old man used to say.” The doe breaks out of her stare and follows her fawns
into the alder brush before he can get the gun out. Her eyes are still in there watching as he drives past but she’d be gone
before he could get out of the car. “If you was paying attention we would of had her. You could of shot right out of the window.
She was waiting for it so hard it hurt.”

“Lucky, you planning on teaching this kid to jack deer?”

“Don’t see why not. Kyle learned.”

“Yeah, Kyle learned. And look at him now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean nothing, just don’t want
my
kid turning out like that.”

The Whistle Creek Road comes to an intersection with a stop sign. He runs it, then the pavement turns to dirt. They’re almost
there. “Ain’t nothing wrong with Kyle,” he says.

“Nothing wrong if you ain’t planning on grandchildren.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“That Darrell Swan’s the biggest fairy this side of Tarratine. Everyone knows that.”

“You saying Kyle’s queer?”

“You got to have your face rubbed in it?”

He puts the cigarette in his mouth and the cherry brandy between his legs and backhands her right across the mouth:
slap.
He comes off with the feel of her teeth on the back of his hand.

“Asshole,” she says. “You stop this fucking truck and let me out.” She’s wiping her mouth with her thumb, looking at it for
blood. “Nobody gets to do that, not Clyde, not my old man, and not you.”

“I ain’t letting you out. I can’t move all this shit by myself.”

They come to the wharf and he stops. “Fucking asshole,” she says. “No wonder your wife moved out.”

“I never laid a hand on Sarah. What the fuck you think I am?”

“I don’t believe you. And supposing you didn’t, so what does that say about
me
?”

She’s still got her fist balled up over her mouth but he takes it and pulls the thumb out of the fingers and looks at it.
“You ain’t bleeding,” he says.

She pulls away from him and opens the passenger door. “Let’s get them traps loaded and get out on the water. You ain’t fucking
fit to be on land.”

He stops under the single lightbulb on the corner of Moto’s ice shed and tips her face up so he can see the mouth. She looks
just like she did the first day he saw her serving coffee at Doris’s, sad, wet-skinned, lips puffed up. Clyde must have slapped
her around at home, her mouth always looked that way at the Blue Claw.

He tries for a kiss but she pushes his face away. “Least Clyde had some money,” she says.

“Just leave Kyle alone.”

“You never gave a shit about Kyle. Why start now?”

When he gets to Moto’s wharf there’s eight more oversize wire traps for him, hidden under a canvas tarp in case the law comes
around. God knows who his source is, the things look like animal cages or prison cells stacked tier on tier in a con movie,
nice and scrubbed. Old Luther’s going to be a career wormer now his last customer’s gone.

They steam through the dark a half hour or so out of Whistle Creek while Ronette knits a tiny green-and-orange sock under
the worklight, all that’s left of his old colors, then they enter the offshore fog bank and it’s like a blind man going blinder,
they can’t see the bow from the wheelhouse. He switches on the used Apelco VHF he got off Harley Webster but they’re too far
out to pick anything up. He tries the broken radar again but all he gets is the blank black screen, raster line going around
like a searchlight in outer space.

They scatter a gang of little gray sea-pigeons that whistle and vanish in the fog. They must be feeding on something, and
where there’s something, there might be something else. He reaches in the bait barrel and puts a couple of ripe redfish on
a hand line with a gang hook and passes the line over to Ronette. She puts her knitting down but she doesn’t pick up the hand
line yet. “See this fog, Lucky? This must be what the kid’s seeing. It must be just like this.”