The Wooden Nickel (52 page)

He unfolds Sonny from his berth on the carton and the two of them carry it inside. “Lights are on,” Sonny says. “Phone work?”

He picks the phone up and it’s dead. “Sonny, look in the book and get the number of that god damn phone company.”

“How we going to call?”

“You’re going over to your place and call them up.”

“I ain’t had a phone since August. They took it out. All I got’s the scanner.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Sonny, what the hell you good for? Go on over to Corey’s house and use his phone. Take your twenty-two and
shoot that fucking dog while you’re at it.”

When Sonny comes back he’s got the gun but his head’s down. “Couldn’t bring myself to do it,” he says. “Besides, how you figure
Corey was going to let me use the phone if I just killed his dog?”

“Jesus, Sonny. You were supposed to shoot the dog on the way
back.
”

“Lucky, I’m sorry. I ain’t like you. I just don’t have the guts.”

“That’s OK, Sonny, it’s a democracy, a chickenshit’s as good as anyone else. What’d the phone company say?”

“They said Clyde Hannaford was paying the bill for this number but he ain’t paying it anymore. Cost you a hundred bucks to
reconnect, another hundred deposit. No checks.”

“Fuck. Well, you’re going over to Corey’s tomorrow noon, call the hospital, see how she’s doing.”

“Why don’t
you
go over? She’s your old lady.”

“You know why? I’ll tell you why. I don’t feel like telling Corey about his fucking gun.”

Sonny reaches into the pocket of his sweatshirt and says, “Check this out.” It’s a fifth of Jim Beam, cherry seal.

“No shit, where’d you come up with that?”

“Corey.”

“He ain’t so fucking bad. He want to come over and share it with us?”

“I don’t think so, Luck, seeing how I got ahold of it.”

“Jesus. Remind me to lock the doors around you.”

“Don’t worry, you ain’t got nothing I want anyway. ’Cept maybe —”

“Forget it, Sonny. You wouldn’t know what to do with a woman like Ronette. Now let’s open this cocksucker up and try her out.”

Next morning he wakes up and it’s blowing some over the trailer roof but not too hard to go lobstering, he can smell the salt
air coming through the trees. Then it returns to him, first like a dream, then like the real thing. He won’t be going out
anymore. He hits the snooze button on the alarm clock, hits it again in ten minutes, and wakes up nice and easy with the room
already light. Half a quart’s not much, he feels pretty good for an old man who just got coldcocked by a fucking whale. Last
night the two of them watched the Winston Cup Talladega 500 till they fell asleep. Now it’s 6:30 a.m. Sonny was up early and
out of here, probably went home to jerk off.

He walks down the hallway of the trailer naked. Every step, the floor creaks and sags under his feet. He scratches his nuts
and peers out the grimy window at the pickup jammed against the wall. He has a glass of clam juice and twists off the top
of a can of sardines, but they remind him too much of Alfie so he opens the screen door and throws the sardines outside on
the flooded lawn. The water is down a bit, you can see most of the tires on the GMC, the cinder blocks under the trailer are
coming into view.

The boat gets built first, though, then he’ll look at that fucking aluminum wall.

He searches around for his Ricky Craven Pro Team mug and mixes a quick cup of instant Nescafé to get his pills down with.
The trailer looks better inside than when they left. The wall-to-wall carpet’s still pretty wet but at least nothing’s floating
around the floor. Last time they were home, Ronette had her morning sickness and she left the head in pretty bad shape. He
takes the toilet brush to it with some Comet and it comes out nice. A trailer’s about like a boat, they’re shitheaps if you
let them go downhill. He’ll get some good self-tapping screws later and screw that fucking panel back onto the wall studs
and seal it with duct tape, that will make a decent fix and he can drive his truck out. If you’re going to have a little kid
crawling around, you can’t have a blizzard coming through the walls.

Up at the north end of the trailer on the bedroom floor he finds a space big enough to empty the boat kit carton on. Then
he’s got to walk out and look for a hammer in the pickup, with Corey’s pride and joy yelping at the end of its chain the minute
he goes out the door. No sign of Sonny Phair, though the hubcaps are rattling and his shack seems to be shaking up and down.
He must be in there thinking about Ronette.

The coffee’s done so he gets a Rolling Rock from the fridge and sits on the damp carpeted trailer floor and gets to work.
The sawed pine smells like a boatyard in spring when they’re planing the hull planks down. The kit has an instruction book
about twenty pages long but the damn thing might as well be in Japanese, his glasses are twenty fathoms down there with the
Wooden Nickel.
Anyhow, it can’t be too fucking hard to build a five-foot boat. Doesn’t have to float anyway, just rock back and forth to
put the kid to sleep.

He takes the ten U-shaped frame sections and lines them up bow to stern in the right order. The third and eighth frame members
have an extra flange on them for the rockers. He starts with those two, flips them upside down so he can pound on them, and
nails the keel strip to them, then the first of the hull strips, the garboard strake that butts against the keel. He bends
the thin flexible strip up towards the bow and tacks it into the stem piece, repeating that process for the garboard strip
on the other side. The next strake was the one the whale got, and for a moment he’s back there with a blue quilt trying to
bandage his gashed hull, but this one could be plugged with a handkerchief, no problem, and he tacks it on. The next pair
of strakes follows, then the next, just like the Alley brothers, and before the morning’s over he has a hull.

The pictures in the manual show the rockers going on next, before the hull gets flipped over upright to attach the cabin.
The rockers have a couple of long Phillips-headed screws fastening them back into the frame members directly above them, he’ll
need to go to Sonny’s for a screwdriver. He’s been sitting on the wet rug for three hours straight and it hurts like hell
to unfold his legs and get up, but he does it, and makes another stop at the fridge on the way out. Outside, it’s a clear
late morning with a stiff northwester finally coming in. Even the lawn puddles have whitecaps on them. Across the street Corey’s
going out to the doghouse with a bowl of Alpo, the dog’s standing up on its neck chain like a human being. Over at Sonny’s
a cockeyed face shows at the window. He’s up, he’s got a beer going, good way to spend a windy Monday. He borrows the Phillips
head from Sonny and wades back past a pickup that’s become part of the house.

Screwdriver in hand, he faces the kit plans again. If they’re going to use the lobster boat model as a cradle, it’s got to
have rockers. If they’re going to bury it in the ground behind the trailer, it won’t be needing them. Doctor said fifty-fifty
but it’s a new day, might as well hope as not. He starts screwing the rockers on.

By noon he’s got the deck fastened and the cabin framed up and she’s starting to look shipshape. All that’s missing is the
propeller and the engine box, but if you put in a motor there wouldn’t be any room left for the kid.

He’s just tacking down the wheelhouse roof when he hears someone at the door, sounds like a dog scratching at first. It can’t
be Corey’s, that thing’s across the road howling like a timber wolf. Maybe it’s Ginger, smelling her way back from Clyde’s
with a tale to tell.

Turns out it’s Sonny Phair with his white Sherwin-Williams cap on and his arms full of brushes and paint. Sonny grabs a beer
out of the fridge, then takes a long whistle when he sees the boat cradle up underneath the trailer window alongside the unmade
bed. “Can’t launch her without a paint job,” Sonny says. “I brought my acrylics over, them things dry in half an hour.”

They spread newspapers over the blankets and lift her up on the bed so they can each paint a side. In an hour she’s got a
white hull and a blue cabin top and a red bottom, Sonny even threw a little sand in the deck paint for the nonskid, you can’t
tell her from the original.

They have a couple more beers and watch the Silverado 150 while the paint dries. Sonny says, “I’m going to paint the name
on her stern now.”

“You can’t. You’ve had six of them beers and it ain’t going to look right.”

“I’ve painted five hundred fucking boat names and every one of them I had a six-pack before I started out. I know what I’m
doing. You just got to arch up the letters a bit so the name don’t have a smile.”

He pencils in the slight upward bend across the transom, then pencils the letters. He takes a bottle of black model-airplane
paint and fills in each letter so it’s nice and crisp against the white.

“Looks like the real thing, Lucky. Only thing she needs is a home port. You want me to paint Orphan Point or Split Cove?”

“You don’t need to paint nowhere, Sonny. Just the name. We’ll put the port in later.”

“Don’t touch her for a few minutes,” Sonny says. “We don’t want to fuck up a perfect job.” Sonny cleans his gear up from around
the bed, then turns to the boat. “You know, Lucky, we could go into business. Build some more of them suckers over the winter
and sell them up to that craft shop in Orphan Point.”

“Yvonne’s.”

“Ever see the junk they sell in there? Work of art like this, add a few details, it could go for a thousand bucks. Think about
it.”

“I will.”

Sonny lugs his paints and brushes back to his shack. Lucky watches him from the window coming up to his old place covered
with tar paper and old license plates and hubcaps, big scanner antenna on the roof, whole fucking structure would collapse
if the junk didn’t hold it up. Sonny tries to get the door open with his foot but he trips and the paint and brushes drop
all over his feet. He’s shitface drunk. But he didn’t make a single mistake painting the stern.

He waits for Sonny to come back but he doesn’t show up. For some reason his heart is kicking in his chest like he swallowed
a live rabbit. He gets a beer to wash down a handful of heart pills.

After a half hour, he picks the boat cradle up with a few sheets of newspaper still stuck to the rockers, lugs it the length
of the trailer into the living room so he can look it over while he watches the Louisville Speedway qualifier on channel 38.
It’s a damn good thing the TV doesn’t come in on the phone cable, he’d have a blank screen along with the dead phone. That’s
why you got to bust up the monopolies, bastards will leave you blind and deaf at the same time.

The trailer widens out at the living room end so it’s got a bit of space for the dinette set and the TV. He moves the table
and the three chairs so he can place the boat cradle in the center of the room with the bow pointing towards the television
and the transom towards the door. It looks half-decent, considering it was built in a day and painted by a couple of drunks.
If he keeps it, he’s got some ideas for decoration. He’ll stick a radar mast on the wheelhouse and build a little pot hoist
the kid can pick things up with. You’re never too young to learn.

He puts on a George Strait album,
Blue Clear Sky,
and opens a Rolling Rock. He’s looking at the boat with one eye and the race with the other when he hears a car splash into
the driveway and stop short. Big American V-8, maybe they’re just using the yard to turn around. He’s right. Pretty soon the
car backs out and he hears it head back up the road.

Then someone’s walking up the metal steps outside. He starts to go for the door but it opens on its own before he can get
there. It’s Ronette. She’s just standing in the trailer doorway holding it open, wearing a long gray coat he’s never laid
eyes on, and behind her the sky’s clearing and the sun glints off the metallic chartreuse Probe. First thing she sees is the
boat cradle with the name
Wooden Nickel
and the two rockers underneath the hull. She kneels down beside it in the gray coat and runs her hand over Sonny’s acrylic
paint job, her eyes wide open like it’s the real thing, hauled off the bottom by the robot sub. Then she stands up and puts
her arms around his neck like they’re slow dancing and buries her face in the old sweatshirt he’s had on since he got back
from Burnt Neck. Her body pulses a little, maybe from crying or laughing, he can’t tell which. He has a question for her,
but George Strait’s singing “I Can Still Make Cheyenne,” and there’s no hurry, so he lets her rest there awhile before he
asks.

The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following copyrighted material:

“By the Blue Sea” by Leo Connellan from
New and Collected Poems.
© 1989, Paragon House, New York, NY. Permission granted by the author.

“A Good Hearted Woman” by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. © 1971 (renewed) Full Nelson Music, Inc. and Songs of Polygram
International, Inc. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

“Big Love” by Michael Clark and Jeff Stevens. © 1995 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI) & Jeff Stevens Music (BMI). All
rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

“Callin’ Baton Rouge” by Dennis Linde. © 1978 TEMI Combine Inc. All rights controlled by Combine Music Corp. and administered
by EMI Blackwood Music Inc.

“Complicated” by Bill LaBounty and Pat McLaughlin. © 1992 Songs of Universal, Inc., o/b/o itself and Frankly Scarlett Music,
a division of Universal Studios, Inc. (BMI), Ensign Music Corp., Sneaky Moon Music, MCA Music Publishing, and Careers-BMG
o/b/o Bill LaBounty.

“Cowgirl” by Harley Allen and Shawn Camp. © 1996 Coburn Music, Inc. (BMI), administered by Ten Ten Music Group, 33 Music Square
West, Nashville, TN 37203, Shawn Camp Music (BMI), © 1997 Foreshadow Songs, Inc. administered by Songs of Universal, Inc.,
a division of Universal Studios, Inc. (ASCAP/BMI).