The Wooden Nickel (4 page)

He’d like to max out the rpm and get right out to the three-mile limit and light up, but he’s got a rebuild and she’s got
to be run gentle the first few hours. On High Country 104 Wynonna’s singing “Heaven Help My Heart,” which reminds him to take
it easy on the engine. He turns up the radio and throttles the V-8 down to give it a break. He doesn’t even have to look outside
the wheelhouse to know where he’s going in the light dawn mist, just watches the fishfinder trace its cardiograph across the
screen and feels his way along its contours like a crab. As long as he can see a fathometer line he has his location in this
world. He knows every rock and crevice on the ocean floor for ten miles in all directions. If he had to crawl home dead drunk
on the bottom of the sea he could grope his way among the sunken dories and ghost traps right to the shore of his backyard.

The fishfinder deepens from six fathoms at the harbor mouth to nine off of Sodom Head, then it shallows up in the Sodom Ledge
channel, so he eases her westward to clear the invisible killer shoal with its beacon missing and the pole bent crooked from
winter storms. Once he’s past that it drops off and he turns twenty degrees south without looking at the compass, steering
by the contour line alone, because on the route to his spring territory he knows the seabed rock by rock.

Most of the boys will be two or three miles out already, going for the April lobsters, which are still creeping in from their
deep winter grounds between Red’s Bank and Nigh Shag Ledge. Lucky figures on going just inshore of them with his first string.
He’ll drop them around the fifteen-fathom line that runs south and east from the Sodom bell. No lobsters inside of that, not
yet.

Now the fog thickens like a sudden eclipse, white dew coating the windshield as it steams into invisibility. He swings the
glass open but it doesn’t make any difference, so he switches the radar on, gives her a minute to warm up, then another minute,
but it’s still blank. He bangs his fist on the top of the screen housing and she glows green, the raster swings around, and
one by one the Orphan Point boats form a circle of green blips, his own at the center. Fucking Raytheon, built right in New
England. Maybe.

The fleet’s setting their traps out past the twenty-fathom line, half a mile into the fog bank. But one blip is close by,
pretty soon he’s up to them and out of the salt mist appears the
Abby and Laura,
skipper Alonzo Gross. They say Alonzo’s father married his father’s niece, and Alonzo went and did the same thing: chip off
the old block. His old lady’s got the same name as his mother. If old Stubby and Abigail Gross had gone to the genetic counselor
with little Alonzo, she would have counseled them to throw him back. Yet there he is hauling traps with his daughter as sternperson,
who looks just like him: big square head, square face, squared-off body. Xerox copy, just like that sheep clone over in Finland.
By now all the Grosses, male or female, look exactly alike. She’s a big girl with a big orange lobsterman’s apron around her
waist and just a jersey on top, a contender in the wet T-shirt contest, sumo division.

Lucky waves at the
Abby and Laura,
slows down, yells out, “Hello Alonzo!” then follows the track of his bottom machine into the fog, leaving father and daughter
back on the twelve-fathom curve, old Lonnie leaning right over her as they raise their string of empty traps. They say Alonzo
gives it to her every chance he gets. Of course the world would be a fucking zoo if you believed everything, so you have to
sort out the truth from the rumors, which are all mostly true in the case of Lonnie Gross. Back in high school Lonnie would
grow these curly black hairs on his palms from too much jerking off. He’d stand there in the locker room, proud as piss, hands
open for everyone to see.

He switches the fishfinder to high resolution and watches the bottom grow in contour and detail. He has to think like a crustacean
now, not a hairy-assed air-breather but an armored and camouflaged creature that lives to hide. He fixes on the contour line
with the eyes of a green-black lobster moving from deep winter water to medium-depth spring water, groping and searching for
a place to lurk and feed. He slows the
Wooden Nickel
to half a knot, just about the speed of a lobster in high gear. The fathometer shows rocks and drop-offs, ledges and crevasses
and canyons in the blind kelp-coated underworld. His body starting to outgrow its shell, driven by cold lust and raw anger,
the lobster man feels his way forward with his sensitive antenna and arrives at the chosen spot. He turns her south-southwest
to lay the trapline along the current flow. Back at the stern, he pushes over the first of a triple, uses its fall to pull
the other two over, and casts his buoy over last of all, painted Day-Glo orange and green with a delicate white intermediate
strip by his wife Sarah, an artist in everything she does.

Just as the pot buoy goes over, a small fluttering charcoal-colored bird comes by, circles the boat as if dazzled by the sight
of an object in the fog, then settles on the water not ten yards off the stern. Good omen: birds know where the lobsters are.
Maybe they can stick their beaks in and look straight down.

By the third string he’s sweating and exhausted and has to sit on the coiled pot warp and have a smoke, his heart pounding
the floor of his chest like a basketball, twenty-six thousand dollars down the fucking drain. He goes to pop another heart
pill, then realizes he left them back in the truck. He opens the lunch pail. She’s wrapped the crab salad sandwich in a penciled
note:
Be careful out there. We love you.
He picks the sandwich up with shaky fingers but feels better after the first bite. Maybe it’s just hunger and not the heart.

He kills the engine while he eats and lets her drift. He turns the radio up at first for Deana Carter’s “If This Is Love,”
then turns it off. It’s hard to swallow the word
love
out here in the fog: cold sea wind, no sound, no color, like one of those dreams where the earth is all water like it was
at the beginning and you’re the only person alive. He tries to taste love in the crabmeat salad Sarah mixed up at 4 a.m.,
but if there is any, the Miracle Whip covers it like a deodorant. He’s not sure he loves any of them. They were all accidents,
even Sarah, it was a shotgun wedding though they moved fast and they were the only ones that knew. Now they’re all turning
away from him. Kyle’s got his own boat, he’s not even lobstering anymore. He’s diving for whore’s eggs, that’s what they called
sea urchins before they got discovered by the sushi crowd. Kristen’s three years younger than her brother. She was so smart
she skipped a grade and now she’s graduating a year ahead. They started Kyle late and kept him back a year in the third grade
like you’re supposed to with boys, then the school kept him back another in junior high. Kristen thinks her college roommate’s
going to be some lawyer’s daughter and she’ll have to confess her old man fishes with his hands. Sarah’s a celebrity now with
her little sea glass sculptures, all of a sudden the summer people think she’s Polly Picasso. Come June she’ll spend more
time up at the art school than she will at home. All of them dykes and homos, that’s what Stevie Latete says, he lives just
a half-mile down the road.

He throws the sandwich crust to the gray seabird, who shows no interest, but two big gulls that have been trailing him all
morning swoop down and fight for it. He lays the last string right where he’s drifted, too tired to locate another perfect
spot. The boat’s riding higher with the traps off, and it seems to be swelling in so the leak is down, he hasn’t run the bilge
pump for half an hour. He’s about seven miles from Clyde’s wharf. The
Wooden Nickel
can do thirty-one knots in flat water when she’s in tune, but there’s no use risking the engine with the Stoneport races
a couple of months away. Lucky got fourth in class at Summer Harbor last year. The guy who took third, Sumner Ames out of
Riceville, has moved over to diesel, at least that’s what they say. This year, if the heart behaves itself, he’s got a chance
to place.

Should be fifteen minutes at twenty-four knots. He takes the last sip of decaf from the thermos, lights his last Marlboro,
turns up the radio and puts the hammer down. It’s the first time he’s opened her up since the rebuild. The 454 whines like
a banshee, it throws a rooster tail, it pitches luminous spray over the bow onto the windshield and dumps green water back
in the cockpit on every wave. It’s a big Saginaw engine with a ripped muffler and it silences everything else around, including
the rebuilt heart.

They eat supper watching CNN, it’s President Clinton on with some lie about Whitewater, then he’s holding hands with his Lesbian
General, Janet Reno. Sarah sees her husband about to go violent and reaches up to switch the set off. “Thanks,” Lucky says.
“Saves me from throwing a Rolling Rock through the screen.”

“Your first day out, Lucas, after the surgery. How did it go out there?”

“Finest kind.”

“You smoked, didn’t you? I can smell it in your hair. You’re like a twelve-year-old, sneaking off with a cigarette, but it’s
your own body, you can’t run away from it.”

“I didn’t inhale,” he says. “That’s one thing I got in common with that son of a bitch.”

“Yeah,” says Kyle over his third bowl of cod head stew. “You both lied about it.”

“Who you calling a liar?” He pushes his chair back, stands, leans over the big chowder caldron on the table. Kyle’s out of
his chair, Sarah poised to move between them if it gets physical. They’re almost the same height though Lucky’s heavier, twice
as thick in the neck and shoulders, not to mention the waist. He could still take him, bad heart or not. The kid looks like
a terrorist with the shaved head and the shadow of an X cut into it and the T-shirt with the arms ripped off. A twenty-year-old
high school junior: maybe they shouldn’t have kept him back.

His daughter Kristen says, “Don’t just stand there,
fight.
You’re males. That’s what we learned in biology. Males fight till just one of them is left.”

“He ain’t worth the trouble,” Lucky says.

Sarah stands behind Kyle and runs her hand over the shaved head. “Lucas, it’s your own son. Can you imagine
your
father saying that?”

“He wouldn’t of said nothing. He would of cocked me one.”

Kristen pulls her Walkman out of her backpack, jams the earphones down over her blond hair. “Thank God I’m getting out of
this in September, I won’t have to hear it.
EVER AGAIN.
” She cranks up the earphone volume till you can hear it in the room.

Kyle yells at her,
“WHAT’S THAT?”

“Smashing Pumpkins.” She closes her eyes and pegs the volume all the way.

He turns to the shaved head. “You got that shitheap in the water yet?”

“
Lu
cas.”

“Just wondering if he’s planning to race this year.”

“Racing’s a waste of time.”

“You got third last year. Play with that Merc a bit, you could take it.”

“That was then. Now’s now. I got business.”

“What kind of business? You’re supposed to be in fucking school.”

“Private business.” He rubs the X on his shaved head like it’s a sign saying
keep out.

Sarah stays close beside her son to protect him, the top of her head level with his nose. She’s done the same thing as Kyle,
two weeks ago she came home from Shear Heaven with her hair chopped and spiked up like a gray-blond porcupine. It gives her
a homeless look, though she’s spent the last twenty years in this house, every single night. “I’m going to my studio,” she
says. “Send someone up when you guys have worked things out.”

He turns his back on all of them and switches the TV back on to a Merrill Lynch commercial and turns the volume up. “Finally,”
he says, “an ad for bullshit.”

Forgetting himself completely, he reaches into his shirt pocket for the Marlboros he should have left on board, sticks one
in his mouth, looks around with his hands for a light. His wife says, “Lucas, if you don’t care whether you live or die, think
of the budget, twenty-six thousand dollars for that hospital to clear the tar out of your veins.”

Kristen’s got her earphones off now. “And the fat,” she chimes in sweetly. “Remember what he used to
eat.
”

“Money we don’t have, with the home equity gone into the boat, Kristen’s tuition coming up.”

“Too poor for insurance,” Kristen says, “too rich for welfare. We had a social studies unit about us.”

It feels like he’s in the parlor of a lobster trap, cornered crustaceans going at each other with both claws, might as well
build a house of steambent laths, let the wind blow right through. He crumples the cigarette and puts it on his plate. “Jesus
H. Christ, this place a home or a church? I’m going to bed. I got to set sixty traps tomorrow.”

Sarah says, “Lucas, come to the studio on your way up. I’d like to show you something.”

He doesn’t want to get near the studio, it raises his blood pressure till his neck veins ache. Three years ago Sarah and Kristen
said they didn’t want him smoking in the house anymore. He built himself a den out in the attic of their three-door garage,
deer head on the wall, nice little fridge, couple of windows overlooking the water, a man could take his boots off and tune
in High Country 104 and light up without his family coughing like they’d been teargassed. Then after the operation, when young
Dr. Burnside laid down the law, Sarah asked for the den as a studio for her beach glass ornaments that are supposedly works
of art. She argued the case like a lawyer with Kristen beside her all the way. She’d been making them up in the bedroom, which
hardly left them a place to sleep. The den had a north window with some special kind of light. And in conclusion, she might
one day sell one of the christly things and help the cash flow. In the long run they caved him in, a den is pointless if you
can’t have a fucking smoke. Just before Christmas, Kristen and Sarah moved the workbench and soldering tools in. “You have
the third bay of the garage,” she would say. “You have the basement. You don’t need the light the way I do.” His response
was a three-week reign of silence that included Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when instead of taking her to the Grange party
he got drunk at the RoundUp with Travis Hammond.