The Wooden Nickel (47 page)

Ronette takes another sip off the Wild Turkey and snaps up her orange oilskins. Her mouth is swollen up from the blow and
numb with cold, so her words slur like she’s drunk. “Lucky, what the hell time is it? They ever going to come?”

They both look down at his digital watch but it’s filled with water and the numbers all read eight. “Must be an hour to go.”

“How are they going to find us in this fog? Ain’t nothing left of us to show on the radar screen.”

She’s right, but he won’t say it. Way they’re sinking, they’re going to be invisible. “If you’d of kept away from the fucking
gun, we’d be towing that bastard home by now. We’d be listening to Waymore, having a smoke.”

“It was your fault, Lucky, we should of stayed away from the god damn thing, it’s a curse. We’d be steaming into Whistle Creek
with all them jumbos, get paid, pick up the car at Moto’s, have a nice beer at home.”

“Watch some wrestling.”

“Ain’t going to be no more wrestling, Lucky. Look, we hardly stick up over the water, even if they could find us they’d never
see us.”

“They ain’t going to find us,” he says. “Wind’s pushed us way off that fix you gave them.”

The fog’s thickening up too, you can see only three or four boat lengths over the long colorless swells. They’re sitting on
the cabin trunk just a foot above the surface. Behind the wheelhouse, the long cockpit’s already submerged. A stray swell
heaves right over the foredeck and breaks across their legs. She grabs his arm with one hand, holds the Marlboros high above
the spray. “Lucky, I’m freezing. Any way we can get that blue comforter below?”

“I tried to stuff the hole with it.”

She shivers and draws closer. All she has on is the oilskin jacket over her purple sweater. “I ain’t worried about myself,
I seen enough. But I’m scared for the little guy. He ain’t been anywhere. How’re we supposed to say good-bye if we ain’t even
met him yet?” He takes a small swig of the Wild Turkey and passes it over. The bottle’s light, it’s getting near the end.
Next time he’ll bring a fifth instead of a pint. She looks at the label while she’s rubbing her swollen lip. “
Causes birth defects.
Causes fucking defects in you too, Mr. Lucky Lunt.” She takes the bottle and tosses it over the cabin side.

Lucky lunges for it even though it’s open and it’s already being invaded by undrinkable sea-water. He’d have to go overboard
to get his hands on it, then it’s gone. He raises his arm again, but this time she’s ready, she twists out from under him
and stands over the green icy water like she’s going to jump. She stands in front of shotguns, she grabs hot rifle barrels
with her bare hands, she probably fucking would. “Another thing,” she says, still balanced there on the low edge of the slanting
cabin top. “We ain’t going to get through this, cause nobody’s going to find us in this christly fog, but if we do, there
ain’t going to be no more hitting. Just one fucking touch and I’ll leave you faster than I left Clyde Hannaford. Cause you
ain’t even got a hot tub. Besides that, you ever raise your hand against this kid, I’ll kill you before I leave. I seen what
you did to Kyle, and it ain’t going to happen in my house. You understand?”

Suddenly the boat lurches even more to starboard, but she doesn’t move. She’s standing on the roof’s edge, beyond the handrail,
her feet wide apart, her legs angled back against the slant like she’s in a wind tunnel. “Get the fuck back up here,” he yells.

She doesn’t move and she doesn’t look back. “How are you going to make me come up there? You going to hit me?”

“I ain’t going to hit you, for Christ sake. I ain’t going in after you neither, so move off the fucking edge.” He’s standing
behind her with his water-filled boots braced on the handrail, waiting. On the next swell, she turns and falls against his
chest so he has to grab her and hold on. Her face is cold as seawater and she’s shaking all over like a hooked fish. He walks
her over to the other side of the cabin top to level the boat off, but now the prow’s gone under and there’s water over the
cabin trunk. They can’t sit on the handrail anymore, even the high one’s immersed. Water breaking over their boots now with
every swell, they have to stand on the cabin top and lean across the windshield to hold on to the wheelhouse roof. Beneath
them through the wet glass he can see the spoked wheel’s completely submerged and the companionway flooded to the dashboard,
just the blank radar screen sticking above the surface. He can’t see the compass, he has no fucking idea where they’re pointing.
Everything aft is deep below the surface, the davit’s going under to starboard and the engine box cover is floating back up
through the hatchway. The cabin’s full of water, but there must be an air bubble trapped against the forward bulkhead keeping
them afloat. Both bait barrels went over the rail when the stern dropped and they’re drifting into the fog bank twenty yards
astern. “Should of grabbed them bastards,” he says.

As the wind rises again, they drift to leeward, still trailing the snapped green and yellow lines, and the whitecaps start
breaking right across the trunk. The only space left’s on top of the wheelhouse, hanging on to the radar mount. Ronette climbs
first. She’s trying to pull herself up the steep windshield by grabbing on the life ring mounts but she can’t get a purchase
on the slick blue paint or the wet glass. He puts a hand on her cold little oilskinned ass and pushes her up and over so she’s
sitting right up there hanging on to the radome with the bullet holes in it, but his heart is knocking like a one-lung diesel
and he can’t climb up himself. He rears a leg back and kicks the auto glass of the center windshield panel, right where the
bullet went through, but he can’t get his foot in there. He kicks again and again till he’s wedged his boot tip in a round
hole in the center of the windshield and can boost himself up and over on the cabin top, blowing and wheezing like a walrus.
It’s listing way over, they both have to hang on the Raytheon radome, only place you can grip the slippery fucker is by the
bullet holes. Beneath them, down in the tilting wheelhouse, the box of cassette tapes floats free from its place behind the
radar screen and the albums drift off over the starboard rail. Say good-bye to Vince’s scrubbed face, Waylon’s eight-string,
Tanya’s white cowgirl outfit, big Garth in his ten-gallon hat, glint of Reba’s dyed red hair.

Ronette leans over the low side of the wheelhouse top, trying to hang on to the radome and get her face over the side at the
same time. “Hold on to me please, sweetheart, I got to throw up.”

“Can’t be the morning sickness. Must be three in the afternoon.”

“Don’t frig with me, Lucky. Just give me a hand so’s I don’t fall off.” He’s got one hand on the white metal frame of the
radome mount and the other around her waist as she leans over and heaves it brown and liquid into the blue-black sea. It smells
of whiskey and he almost goes sick himself. He’s been on boats since he was born, he’s lived on liquor for forty-eight hours
without eating so there was nothing in his body but alcohol, he consumed a bottle of windshield-washer fluid on one cold lonesome
drive, but he has never thrown up the contents of his stomach in his life. A couple of last night’s cod chunks swim into his
mouth in a sauce of whiskey but he swallows them back down like a hot lunch. When she turns around wiping her mouth she opens
her eyes wide and smiles slantwise despite the blue cheese drool and the cut lip. “My God, Lucky, you’re white as a corpse.
Your heart still going? You look like you’re already drowned.” Now she’s got tears leaking out through the sea spray. All
that dried blood and vomit and caked white salt on her face, she’s still a good-looking woman when she cries.

There’s a big slurping sound as the cabin bubble busts up through the hatchway and the last of the wheelhouse air farts out
through his boothole in the windshield. The cabin trunk’s two feet underwater, whitecaps are breaking right over the wheelhouse
roof where they’re both half-seated on the radome now, hoping the fucker won’t break off. The boat settles another half a
foot as a swell breaks over the windward side. She howls as their boots fill with ice water but he barely feels it, his feet
have gone so numb. “Should of stuck with old Clyde,” he says. “You’d be dangling your toes in the hot tub.”

“Wouldn’t be pregnant, neither.”

“Free, white, and twenty-one.”

She lets go her hold on the bullet holes in the radome and grips on to the folds of his oilskins. Suddenly there’s the aroma
of barbecued steak on the wind, steak smothered in warm bubbly A.1. Sauce with a slight touch of gasoline from the rainbow
slick forming around them out of the fuel vent pipes. He can’t tell her what he knows, in a minute or two the whole fucking
boat will go down, the two of them sucked to the bottom in their clothes and boots. Then she sits up straight.
“Lucky,”
she says.
“Listen.”

“Don’t hear nothing. Only the wind and waves.”

“Deaf old bastard. There’s a
motor
out there.”

“Ain’t time for the Coast Guard yet. We’ll be lying on that deep-sea ledge by the time them bastards get their pants on, going
to be the lobsters’ fucking revenge.”

Then he can hear it over the wind noise and he instantly knows just what it is. It’s a godawful old Caterpillar diesel turning
a bent three-bladed wheel and drumming on the water through a metal hull. “Ain’t the Coast Guard. It’s a fisherman. Steel
hull.”

Then the sound is turning and going away.

She’s standing up in a foot of water on the wheelhouse top, yelling blindly into the fog.
“Over here! Over here, for Christ sake!”

A big sea breaking over the high side slaps him right across the back. He yells out,
“Over here, assholes,”
but it’s not half as loud as Ronette and he ends up coughing and panting just like his old man when he died.

The breeze blows the fog open a bit on the port side to show a high black steel bow steaming right at them, it’s got rust
dripping off of every hull plate and a stench of rotten seafood so strong even the cloud of seagulls can’t get close. The
minute he lays eyes on it he hears the Caterpillar backing down and the bow swings sidewise so they don’t run over what’s
left of the
Wooden Nickel.

Soon as he sees the crew lined up on the bow rail he knows who it is, the whole fucking Trott gang in the stern dragger
Rachel T.

Big black-bearded Captain Anson Trott’s leaning over the rail with a cigar in his mouth the size of a bowling pin. One of
the other Trotts has got the helm. They pull up close as they can in the swell and put her in neutral. Now the one with the
arm missing joins Big Anson at the rail, along with another he’s never seen before. That may be Carleton Trott, he’s done
some racing in a black thirty-footer with a six-cylinder John Deere. The other’s the short squat thick-necked bald-headed
little fucker that looks like a dwarf. There’s no one steering, the whole crew’s out at the port rail staring down.

Lucky shifts his grip on the radome and cups his ear so he can hear Anson Trott over the diesel. Big Anson yells, “If it ain’t
my friend Lint out of Orphan Point. Everything OK out here?”

“Finest kind,” he yells back. “Riding a bit low, that’s all. Too many lobsters in the hold.”

“OK, big guy, just checking. We caught you talking on channel sixteen.”

“False alarm,” Lucky says. “Ain’t nothing wrong here.”

“How about getting your crew off of there, just in case? Then you can take your vessel on in yourself. We’ll see the lady
gets home safe and sound.”

The bald-headed one is grinning and shaking his head, while Carleton Trott starts lowering a red boarding ladder over the
port rail. They haven’t got any small boats aboard, so Big Anson goes back into the wheelhouse and backs her down till the
Rachel T
comes straight to windward, then cuts her in neutral till the dragger drifts down on them and the ladder’s about twenty feet
away. They can’t come closer, the
Wooden Nickel
’s right under the surface. That big steel hull bumps the lobster boat, she’ll go straight to the bottom, no questions asked.
Ronette’s already trying to reach for the ladder, but there’s a stretch of rainbow-colored water between the two from the
escaped fuel. The one-armed Trott reaches his hook up and drags the orange rectangular foam life ring off of the
Rachel T
’s cabin top and dumps it over the rail to leeward so the wind sails it in the right direction, but the line on it clumps
and fouls and the ring drops into the water ten feet away. Ronette’s not saying anything, she’s got a death grip on the radar
mast but the cabin top under them is slanting down more, won’t be a minute till she slides right in. Big Anson creeps the
dragger forward across their bow and the bald-headed dwarf coils up the line and lifts the life ring again and flips it towards
them with one hand like a four-foot Frisbee. This time it passes by close enough to grab. His feet slip right down the windshield
and he’s standing waist deep in frigid water on the high side of the trunk, but he’s got his hands on the big orange lifesaver,
which has a net bottom so you can’t slip it over your head, you have to climb in.

Ronette’s still up at the radome clinging on like a limpet and saying, “Jesus, I can’t swim,” but he pushes the ring against
the slope of the windshield and coaxes her feet off the wheelhouse roof, so she lets go and slides down the stove-in glass
with a cold splash that blinds him for a second with a douche of salt and gasoline, but she’s safe, she’s sitting on the ring
like a swim float with her legs inside the nylon mesh. He’s standing outside the life ring up to his chest in ice-cold seawater,
feet braced on the handrails, steadying her with both arms. In the long swells the line first points way up at the big steel
dragger, then way down. On their end the bald-headed dwarf’s keeping it taut so they don’t drift apart.

He turns away from Ronette for one last minute with the
Wooden Nickel.
His occupation’s gone, along with his kids and the woman he married and the home he was born in, but he promised his old
man he’d keep this boat till the end. He hangs on a moment to the only part still above water, then turns around to hop on
the orange raft.