The Wooden Nickel (51 page)

“You want my autograph?”

Sonny keeps saying, “I can’t fucking believe it. Thought you was just another shitheel fisherman and now you’re on the radio
all day long. And that woman was Rhonda? Coast Guard radioed up to Tarratine for an ambulance. I heard the whole thing.”

“You got a great scanner, Sonny.”

“I got it on all the time, even if I’m watching TV. You never know. They was making that movie two summers ago, I heard Mel
Gibson right on the radio.”

Lucky’s already peeling the oilskins off, throwing them in the back of the pickup while they talk. Under his wet wool pants
his body itches like the skin’s going to come off.

“I’m going in for some dry clothes, Sonny. Then I’m heading for the Tarratine hospital, see how she’s doing. You want to go
up with me?”

“Sure, anything. Want me to bring the scanner? It works off of a battery.”

“You don’t have to, Sonny. There ain’t nothing left to scan.”

Half-hour later they pull into emergency room parking. The whole way to Tarratine, Sonny’s been puffing on this long wiry
joint, slapping his knees like there’s bugs on them, fishing around the radio for Lee Ann Womack songs. Lucky parks in the
same place Sarah did when she picked him up after the heart job. Then it was snowing. Now the parking lot’s strewn with yellow
leaves from the first October blow.

Sonny stays in the car smoking his joint with the stereo on. “Don’t go nowhere,” Lucky shouts back. He turns around to get
the keys but Sonny says, “Christ sake, I want to hear the radio. I ain’t going to steal your car.”

The young nurse at the emergency desk buttons her shirtfront when she sees him staring. “You a relative?”

“I better be. I slept alongside her last night.”

“Guess that qualifies. You the husband?”

“No.”

“We’ll put you down as domestic partner. Dr. Radner will be right out. He has the rest of the paperwork.”

He stands in the corner of the emergency room breathing the stench of death. The bubbling fish tank beside him has three or
four guppies and minnows drifting belly-up on the surface and another half dozen on the way out. You’d think they could keep
the fish going in a hospital. Across the room is a guy about to die of old age, looks like he can’t wait. He’s holding on
the sides of his walker, just staring out the emergency room door towards the parking attendant’s shelter like it’s the tollbooth
to heaven. His wife looks up from her
People
magazine and gives him a little nudge now and then to keep him alive.

A doctor comes through a door with a porthole, looks around for just a minute, then comes over to Lucky and takes his arm.
“I’m Dr. Radner,” he says. “I guess you’ve been through a lot too.”

“I come in under my own power.”

“Yes. The young lady wasn’t so fortunate.” The doctor flips a few pages on his clipboard, finds the right one. “Rhonda Hannaford,”
he says. “And you’re the husband?”

“Domestic partner.”

He checks a box. “I didn’t get her insurance company. We didn’t want to bother her with a lot of questions. We have her under
mild sedation and she’s resting.”

“We ain’t insured.”

He grunts and checks another box. “We’ll want to observe her overnight, Mr. Lund.”

“Lunt.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I can never read Portia’s writing. Your domestic partner shows every sign of coming through this in good
shape, despite a pretty serious brush with hypothermia. In many ways the pregnant female is the sturdiest organism on the
planet. I’ll be frank with you, we were afraid she’d lost the child at first. Now it looks like there’s a sporting chance.
You have other children, Mr. Lunt?”

“Two. They ain’t Ronette’s.”

“No. She said this was her first. You are the father?”

“That’s what she tells me.”

“That’s all we men are ever given to know. The EMTs said she wasn’t very coherent about dates and times. We do have to figure
out exactly how far along she is. Do you have the approximate date of conception?”

“Few weeks after the start of lobster season. Took us a short while to get around to it.”

“And when would that be? We’re a ways from the coast up here.”

“Must of been early May.”

“Barely five months, too early to induce. It wouldn’t be viable on its own. We put a monitor on her. Hard to believe after
what she’s been through, but we have a faint fetal heartbeat. The female forms a cocoon of protection, sometimes to the point
of sacrifice. We’re going to do what we can.”

“What’s the odds?”

“Mother a hundred percent. Her temperature’s up, her vital signs are fine. She’ll bounce back tomorrow. The child, fifty-fifty.
The next few hours are crucial. Wish we could guarantee survival but we can’t. We’re only human.”

“Any chance of getting a look at her?”

“She’s resting right now, no sense disturbing her. We’ll be keeping a close eye on them, we should know in the morning. This
your number?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll give you a call. I have to get back on station. You can go home now, you did a good job getting her in here. Give her
a full night’s sleep, get some rest yourself. We’re here for you and we’ll give it our best shot.”

He’s just about to go back and join Sonny Phair in the Probe. Then he spots the gift shop off the exit corridor, they’ve got
a couple of Sarah’s sea glass mobiles dangling in the shopwindow. One of them is a blue-and-white wing shape like the one
he crushed that night in the studio, she must have rewelded it. It makes his hand ache to look at it, he still has black scars
on his palms where they got sliced by the lead moldings. He ducks inside the shop and lifts the price tag to see what she’s
getting. Hundred and ninety bucks. And the tag says
Another craftproduct from Yvonne’s Creations. Orphan Point.
He even has a splash of sympathy for Sarah, fifty fucking percent to a parasite like that. People like the Hannafords, they
got everyone by the nuts, twist and turn all you want, it only hurts more.

Then he spots something over in the kids’ corner of the shop. He steps over a couple of little Chinese girls playing with
Barbie dolls in the aisle, way past their bedtime, then he has to move a white blanket that’s mostly covering it, but under
the blanket is the spitting image of an old-style Downeast lobster boat, four or five feet long, set up with rockers on the
bottom to make it a cradle. The boat is unpainted, just plain pine strips on plywood frames with a cabin over and no place
for an engine, but the kid wouldn’t be needing an engine for a while. Whoever designed this model took the lines off right,
they even cut the pilothouse side away to haul the traps over. Could paint her white and write
Wooden Nickel
on her stern, nobody’d know the difference except the size. He looks for a price tag. There’s something dangling off the
anchor bitt up on the bow. Three hundred and fifty bucks for that little thing, probably not twenty bucks’ worth of wood in
it, then they make you build it yourself, so you wind up paying them for your own labor.

The other side of the tag has the same label as Sarah’s. Clyde’s sister-in-law is everywhere:
Another fucking craftproduct from Yvonne’s Creations.

Meanwhile the saleslady’s come up behind him. “Anything we can interest you in, sir? We close at eleven.”

“Which end you supposed to put the baby in, the head go down in the cuddy, or the feet?”

“I believe the infant’s head would stay outside. A mother worries if she can’t see her baby’s face.”

“You really asking three hundred and fifty bucks for that thing?”

The saleslady bends down to check the tag. He gets a decent look down into the crack of her blouse but she’s about sixty so
it’s a bit dried up in there. “That’s right, sir. Three hundred and fifty. Then there would be the five and a half percent
tax.”

“What would you take for it?”

“I’m afraid we aren’t allowed to bargain for our merchandise. The prices are all fixed by the management.”

“OK. How’s about if we just add it to the room charge? That would be under Hannaford. She’s a brand-new patient, just come
in.”

“I’m afraid we don’t allow gifts to be charged to patients’ room accounts. It is a lovely idea but there’s no way we could
bill it. The hospital and concession are financially independent. We do accept credit cards, though. Visa, MasterCard, Discover,
and American Express.”

Over behind her the little Chinese girls have got all the clothes off two Barbie dolls and they’re laying the dolls on top
of each other, clucking and giggling like hens. Lucky remembers a small black leather case under Ronette’s pile of cassettes
out in the glove compartment of the Probe. “Don’t sell them boat kits,” he tells the saleslady. “And don’t close up. I’m coming
right back.”

Out in the parking lot, Sonny Phair’s slumped down in the passenger seat in a cross-eyed trance from smoking too much pot.
He sees Lucky and says, “Your old lady coming with us or what?”

“She’s staying overnight. Let me into the glove compartment.” The leather case is filled with credit cards neatly arranged
in little pockets, last thing left from her old life. Some of the cards are in her name, Rhonda Hannaford, some say Clyde
Hannaford. He takes the whole thing back to the gift shop lady.

“Might have to try a couple of these, ma’am. Some of them got kind of maxed out.” He finds a Rhonda Hannaford Visa with her
own signature on the back.

“You’re a designated user of this card, sir?”

“Designated driver, that’s me.”

He stands by the boat cradle while the Visa machine talks to Big Brother back in Tokyo. The unbuilt kits are stacked under
the window against the wall. They’re massive cartons with heavy copper staples, but he manages to pry an end open and check
out the parts. No plywood slabs, either, you frame and plank the things just like a boat.

The saleslady comes by and says, “These kits are wonderful projects for the fathers while the mothers attend childbirth class.”
Then she goes back to her machine, see if his credit card worked. She wants to sell it, it’ll be her big-ticket item for the
week.

He’s poking around in the box, checking out the frames. They’re pretty solid U-shaped sections sawed out of clear pine. The
planking’s set up to be nailed and glued. For a moment he flashes on the gar-board strake that let go when the whale slapped
them, water starts flooding his brain channels, then he shuts off that part of his mind. Yvonne may be a bloodsucker but she’s
got a good thing going with this kit. The only real difference from a working vessel is the two big curved bases so you can
rock it back and forth like the motion of the swells. That kid’ll be getting his sea legs before he finds the tit.

The saleslady waddles back past the Chinese girls. The Barbies have put their clothes back on and they’re having a cup of
tea. “I’m afraid that Visa card didn’t go through, sir. It sometimes happens even to the best of us. Did you say you wanted
to try another?”

Old Clyde must have canceled her plastic soon as she left. He gives the lady a Discover with Clyde’s name on it. “This ought
to work, ma’am. Sorry about the other. We put all the swimming pool supplies on her and she must of went down.”

“Is this your signature on the back, Clyde R. Hannaford?”

“No, ma’am. Clyde’s my employer. He’s got me authorized to sign the slip.”

The lady goes off again to her Visa machine. He’s already prying the staples up on the four cartons, checking around for the
one with the clearest wood. They even throw in a little plastic bag of fasteners, everything you need. Which is a good thing,
cause Ronette’s trailer doesn’t contain a single tool and his are down on the boat. He’ll bum a screwdriver off of Sonny Phair,
dig a hammer out of the truck. Sonny’s a sign painter too. He’ll fix him some chowder when they get back. Maybe after they
get the hull built Sonny will bring his gear over and paint a name on the transom.

The saleslady comes back all smiles, patting her hair down, playing with the buttons of her blouse. Now his credit’s been
established, it’s flirting time. He signs
Lucas M. Lunt
on the slip with big letters. Old Clyde will get a charge out of that. Three sixty-nine twenty-five including a twenty-buck
tip for the governor. He puts the wallet in his back pocket and picks up the second carton from the bottom, the one with the
best wood. He slings the boat kit over his shoulder and walks out. It’s not a bad deal when you think about it. The box is
pretty near the size of a small coffin, probably fifty pounds of nice presanded pine.

Sonny Phair’s moving around in the passenger seat when he gets there. “Shut the god damn stereo off, Sonny, there ain’t going
to be enough juice to start the car.”

“Jesus, Lucky. What are you carrying around? You got a dead body in there?”

“Boat.”

“Boat? What kind of a boat?”

“Kid’s boat. You build it.”

“Crazy bastard. What do you want to build a toy boat for?”

“Sonny, you’re going to have to move your ass so we can get this thing inside. Another thing. I ain’t sure we got room to
take you back.”

“What the fuck?”

He opens the Probe’s trunk and folds the rear seatback forward. He hauls Sonny Phair out of the passenger seat and stands
him up, then folds the right front seat forward and down. The two of them slide the boat cradle kit into the trunk beside
the kid seat and slant it over so it fits against the dashboard and they can just barely close the trunk.

“There. Them Mexicans ain’t so dumb.”

“Where am I supposed to fit?”

“Lay right on top of her, Sonny. Stretch out and get yourself some sleep.”

When he gets back to the trailer the wall’s sagged out again and the first thing he has to do is wade over and inch the pickup
forward so the panel straightens back up to the roofline. He’s thinking how he’s going to brace it up on its own so he can
get the truck out, but that will have to wait till the lawn flood goes down, no use trying to straighten that piece of shit
up to his knees in muck. Besides, he’s got a boat to build.