The Wooden Nickel (44 page)

“I bet you do.”

They stand on the pierhead for a minute getting their bearings on the harbor in the first light. A couple of dories are beached
on the granite ledge north of the pier. One of Moto’s floats is ripped off the wharf but the one holding Lucky’s punt is still
hanging on, though the rope’s stretched and the float sticks out in the current at an angle. He can hear the surge break over
the entrance ledge out by the Old Cove daymarker. Even inside, the float’s groaning up and down a foot or two as the long
swells come in, but the chop’s down and the wind’s set to flatten the onshore seas. By the time they get out there it may
be smooth enough to haul.

The dawn ratchets up another notch so they can make out the
Wooden Nickel
in the center of the cove. In the half-light the blue cabin looks black, she’s like a big tough old blackback seagull riding
the swell. Those guys are the predators of the ocean, they don’t give a shit, you see them up there riding out a full-blown
gale, they enjoy it, they’re loners, they take what they need and move on. His boat’s the only boat visible, she’s got a bit
of rain in her but she’s riding proud at the end of her mooring chain. Down on the float, he flips the punt over and launches
her in a trough, rows out to the stem end first and checks the pennant line. It’s chafed almost halfway through up at the
bow chock where the leathers wore off in the blow, he’ll splice up a new one later. He grabs the davit to hoist himself up
out of the punt the way he used to, then halfway up he gets a sharp pinch in the chest and has to let himself back down and
take a breath. Then he works his ass up on the rail like an old lady getting aboard the church boat before he can turn around
and step into the cockpit. Every time he starts to forget about the heart the fucking thing lets him know it’s there.

The bilge has a few inches of water and the white life ring got ripped off the cabin top, that’s all for damage. He scans
the shore with the binoculars looking for the ring, but all there is is the two stove-in dories, a few tree limbs on the tideline,
a handful of local traps and moorings dragged onto the beach. She’s riding a bit low from the rainwater in the bilge but otherwise
she checks out fine. The Olds V-8 catches for a moment on the second turn then stalls out. He opens the box and squirts some
ether to the carb throat and hits the distributor cap with a spurt of WD-40 and she comes awake one plug at a time, never
was an Olds that cared for water. He warms her up a bit, kicks in the bilge pump takeoff and lights a Marlboro while the three-day
rainstorm spews over the transom into the little harbor of Whistle Creek.

It’s bright enough to see surf breaking into foam on both sides as they steam out through the inlet ledges, passing the thermos
between them. Ronette busts out laughing at the spot where the
Metallica
ran them through the shallows. They light a couple more Marlboros, Ronette Clinton tries not to inhale, they turn up the
Waylon Jennings tape and stomp the Olds to a clean sixteen knots on the loran. The storm took his bloody gull wing off the
antenna, so they’re already dragging a bird cloud in their wake, every one of them wants to get his beak into Moto’s bucket
of rotten squid. They pick up the Old Cove daybeacon and in another mile the Whistle Creek flasher, then comes a white offshore
fog bank like the cliffs of Labrador, too bad Moto’s advance ran out before they got to the radar. The
Wooden Nickel
trudges uphill over the long swells, glides down and trudges up again, not a damn thing visible, just the green TD numbers
on the loran clicking off their movement south and east.

The first trap’s got one jumbo, maybe seven pounds, and a good-size cull but Moto won’t touch it. If some Chinaman’s going
to pay three hundred bucks for one lobster he wants the whole thing sitting on his plate just like it was at the bottom of
the sea, you can’t blame him. What the hell, they’ll keep it and boil it up at home, no sense throwing away good meat. Next
two traps have a couple of jumbos each, so they’re up to three hundred bucks in the first half hour and it’s time for a beer.
They sit up on the rail with Hank Junior singing “Rainy Night in Georgia” and watch the six big lobsters chase each other
like a pack of squirrels around the seawater tank. He spots the gull wing in the scuppers and climbs up to duct-tape it back
on the antenna. The cloud of birds draws back right away to a respectful distance.

The next set’s up towards the shallow end of the deep-sea ledge. The fishfinder rises to thirty-five fathoms, then thirty,
he can sense the swells shoaling under him, heaving the keel up, setting them down again in the trough. He steams up on the
waypoint till the loran sounds off, but there’s nothing there, just the circle of gray-green sea.

“We’ll just head down to where that next buoy ought to be, see what the fuck’s going on.” The fishfinder says twenty-eight
fathoms, then twenty-five and the fog thickens so he puts Ronette as lookout up on the bow. She’s kneeling down with both
hands on the anchor bitt as they head into the swell and the bow sweeps up and down.

All of a sudden Ronette raises her free arm and screams out,
“Rocks!”

He can’t believe it. There’s no land out here for twenty miles. He throttles off and puts her in neutral so the boat turns
broadside to the swells. It sways like a windshield wiper while he squints into the fog. Nothing but gray mist at first. Then,
sure as shit, right off to starboard the water’s boiling and breaking on a half-tide ledge.

“Jesus H. Christ. Supposed to be twenty fucking fathoms over there.” He puts her in gear and heads the bow up, then idles
over real slow for a better look, one eye on the fishfinder and the loran, both in agreement and bringing him right to the
spot where they set their main trap cluster, should be five or six Day-Glo buoys nearby. The bottom graph shallows to twenty-three
fathoms as they approach. A big swell lifts her by the stern and he sees a cloud of birds over the spot, but not much else.
They get a little nearer and Ronette yells out, “Buoys! There they are!”

He sees one for an instant, then it’s gone. On the next swell he looks down where the buoy was and the sea drops off swirling
like an ocean whirlpool. Then the long gray barnacle-covered granite ledge rises right out of the water with two of his fucking
buoys on it and his heart stops dead. The swell hoists him eight feet into the air and down again while he waits for the heartbeat
to come. He can’t breathe and he can’t speak, but he does manage, without a heart, to throw the wheel to port so they don’t
go hard aground.

He bangs his fist once sharp against his chest and the cocksucker turns over and starts up again. He bangs his fist on the
fishfinder to make that work too but it just flashes in weird computer letters: error no. 22. Then the screen goes black.

In a small high voice he says to Ronette, “Steer.” It sounds like somebody else talking, not him. He should have taken a pill
this morning, but with the lights out in the strange trailer bathroom he couldn’t find them. Ronette’s got the helm, she’s
brought her off to the southeast, so they can’t see anything but gray air and blue-black water and a handful of following
gulls. Now that his heart’s pumping again he takes over and turns back on the loran plot, working her slow but steady in the
quartering sea. When he bangs the fishfinder again he knocks it right out of its ceiling mount so it hangs swaying in the
air by its data cord. He has to rip it off before it breaks the windshield, then he tosses it towards the hatchway but it
bounces once on the hatch corner and it’s over the port rail and gone. Last thing he read off it was
Made in Malaysia.

“Jesus, Lucky, now you’ve done it.”

“Plastic junk,” he says. “Weren’t worth fixing.” He lets the seas drift him off to starboard as the waypoint closes in, but
there’s no buoys and he’s right on top of an uncharted breaking shoal where he thought he had twenty fathoms all around. Fucking
loran must be busted too. He whacks at it with the back of his lobster glove, yelling, “Piece of Chinese shit.”

He keeps her bow just starboard of the swell and lets her slip southwest, where the water’s got a deeper color. Then he hears
surf breaking close to port.

Ronette’s leaning on the port side of the wheelhouse so she can see. “That ain’t no rock ledge, Lucky, it’s
skin.
We’re on top of a fucking whale.”

Soon as she says that, they’re up on a swell looking down at it, gray-black and barnacled, same length as the
Wooden Nickel
bow to stern. No wonder it looked like granite, it’s got growth all over it, it’s not moving and the waves are breaking across
it like a shoal. On the far side of the whale’s body it’s lifting a long white arm fin like a guy drowning and waving for
help, and the fin’s got two or three coils of pot warp wrapped up in the armpit where it joins the body. The head’s mostly
underwater, with a bunch of small black-headed seagulls screaming around it like they’re hungry for its eyes. Then it lets
off a blast of vapor and steam that makes the seabirds screech and back off.

When the spout goes back underwater again the rear end of it comes up, and there’s the loop of yellow pot warp around the
black root of the tail. Now it’s up close and he can see the rope clear as a wedding ring. He’s got the engine in neutral
now, idling back one or two wave crests from the whale so they lose sight of it in the troughs, then pick it up again. He’s
starting to figure out how the thing is caught. “That loop of yellow line ain’t attached to nothing, it’s them warps around
his fin that’s holding him down.”

“He’s a fucking
whale,
” Ronette says. “Why don’t he just snap them cheap pieces of rope?”

“He’s a weasely bastard, he’s waiting to make his move. Look at the warts on him, he must have some kind of VD. Ain’t no morality
out here, cocksuckers do whatever they want.”

“Yeah, that includes
us.
We better go back in, Lucky. You already had a stroke or something back there. You looked like you was dead.”

“Happens all the time, I got nine fucking lives. I want to see what’s on the other side of this bastard.” He turns to starboard
and cuts a wide slow circle to the northeast, goes out maybe a quarter mile past two more of his traps and toggles, then steams
back on a loran course through the fog. The whale’s lying quiet and sneaky as a spider in its yellow web, when they get near
him he starts sloshing the right-hand fin around. That one’s got four or five more loops around it, and a couple strands of
pot warp going up forward towards the head. Ronette’s got the binoculars on it. “No wonder the poor thing can’t move. That
piece of line goes right into the corner of his mouth.”

“Bastard’s got eight or nine warps on him. That’s what happened to them other traps. He picked them up and dragged them along
the bottom till they got wrecked. Cocksucker didn’t get enough of my gear, he come back for more.”

“Lucky, it ain’t the whale’s fault. He ain’t no different from you. It’s his territory out here, we set the traps on it. He
must of swam into them at night. He’s been here through that whole frigging storm trying to get rid of them lines and he’s
exhausted. We got to do something. We ain’t going to just let him die.”

“You just take the helm, sweetheart. I got to go below. Just jog her easy, don’t sweat the wind, keep her southeast with her
head up to the swell.”

He goes down into the anchor box for the .416 Ruger and works the bolt once to bring the Rigby cartridge up. They’re on a
high swell again, and even through the cracked and grimy portside cuddy window he can see the spout of that bastard white
and smoky against the black-edged fog.

When he goes up in the cockpit she takes one look at the rifle and says, “Lucas Lunt, what in Christ’s name are you intending
on?”

“Son of a whore took every trap off this fucking ledge.”

“He didn’t. We saw a couple off to the south of here.”

“It don’t matter. He gets away, he’ll come on back through and finish them off.”

“That ain’t true, Lucas. We’ll get on the radio and call the Coast Guard and they’ll send somebody out here and cut him free.
That’s what they do. We’ll never see him again.”

“They’ll cut him free and he’ll be back again. That ain’t what we bought that radio for. Besides, nobody lays a hand on my
fucking whale. We got fifteen thousand dollars right here in front of us, half-dead. Gear he’s ripped up, he owes us twice
that much.”

“What are you talking about, fifteen thousand dollars?”

“I mean my man Mr. Moto’s going to shell out seventy-five cents a pound for that piece of meat. We shoot it and slice the
gear free and drag the fucker into Whistle Creek and we are paid off. We don’t owe that bastard a god damn yen.”

She keeps a hand on the wheel and bites the joint of her thumb to keep from laughing. “Lucky, you are blind, deaf, and dumb.
Moto was bullshitting you. He ain’t going to buy no whale. What the hell’s he going to do with it?”

“He’s going to sell it in Asia. That’s what they fucking eat. He’ll get Curtis Landry to cut it up on the boat ramp with a
chain saw and stuff it in the reefer trucks and ship it to the Chinese fish warehouse at Logan Airport just like a load of
tuna. That baby’s going to be sushi in the morning. You heard him the other day. Them Asians eat anything that swims.”

“I heard him. He was bullshitting you. That little pervert Curtis was laughing up his sleeve.”

“Curtis is a con. He never fished a day in his life, what the fuck does he know?”

She turns the wheel hard starboard and revs the engine and starts steaming southward towards the Day-Glo buoys. “Let’s haul
what we got left and get out of here, Lucky. This ain’t going to be nothing for us but trouble.”

He rests the Ruger in the crook of his arm like it’s a bird gun. “Take her back, Ronette. You ain’t the captain of this boat.”

“You pointing that frigging thing at me?”

“I’m telling you take the boat back there so I can get a shot at that cocksucker or I’m going to do it myself. You think you’re
queen shit cause you got a kid coming. You know what? You ain’t nothing but the sternman on this boat.”