The Wooden Nickel (7 page)

Lucky’s not going to let it drop, you don’t get a chance like this every day. “I heard there ain’t any fast boats out to Shag
Island since Alvah Greene died.”

“We got a couple,” the skipper says. “Carleton Trott just got his-self a six-hundred-cubic-inch Deetroit Diesel.”

“I heard he had a Deere.”

“He did. After a week he didn’t like it, pulled the cocksucker out and threw it overboard. Low tide, you can see that son
of a whore right off the ferry wharf in eight feet of water, bright fucking John Deere yellow.”

“Brand-new thirty-thousand-dollar engine,” his brother echoes. “Put the dock crane to the son of a whore and dropped her over
the side.”

“He any relation?” Lucky asks, fishing in his pocket to leave a decent tip.

“Not that I know of,” the Trott captain says, at the same time fingering a piece of chipped beef off one of his huge wooden
molars, spearing it on his fork, and eating it again. He spits something else out of his mouth, holds it out, looks at it.
“Jesus H. Christ, Doris, what do you put in this shit?”

“It’s kind of a secret,” Doris says.

“Looks like a fucking tooth. Don’t that look like a tooth, Harv?”

Harvey Trott puts his cruller down with his hook hand, reaches for the thing with his good one, looks it over, pops it in
his mouth and chews it down. “Nothing wrong with that, Anson. Just a bit gristly, that’s all.”

Anson gets up off of the stool, his head just about touching Doris’s acoustic ceiling, and goes to pay her with a brand-new
hundred-dollar bill.

When Lucky goes to take care of his own check, she says, “Coffee’s paid for. The Trott boys picked it up.”

Lucky runs right into Clyde Hannaford on the gangway leading to the skiff float. He can’t avoid him. “Sorry to hear about
things at home,” he says.

Clyde answers, “Fuck you too,” which Lucky doesn’t know whether to take personally, or if it’s just what a guy might say to
anyone after his wife takes off.

“It ain’t my fault, Clyde. Could happen to anyone.”

“I’m going to close this fucking place up and sell it,” Clyde says. He’s got a bit of a whine in his voice, same whine he
uses when he’s jawing your dock price down five cents a pound.

“No you ain’t, Clyde. We all need you. Get drunk after work, jerk off, give her a while, maybe she’ll come back.”

“I can’t get drunk,” Clyde whines. “Only place to get drunk is the RoundUp, and she’s going to be there. Sure as shit. I’m
moving to Florida, live with my folks down in Coral Gables.”

“You ain’t. Who would run things around here? Nobody knows diddly shit except how to fish.”

“You boys could take over the wharf, buy me out, make it a
co-
operative like they got over to Split Cove.”

“Won’t work. There ain’t one of us that can keep the books.”

“No problem,” Clyde says. “It’s not hard. Just take what I pay you guys and add on fifty percent for yourself.”

“That’s simple,” Lucky says. “I could even do that.”

“Then take her, she’s yours.” He squints over at Clyde, who adds, “I mean the wharf.”

“I’m sure you do,” Lucky says. “I’m sure as shit sure you do.”

He leaves Clyde turning the prices up on his fuel pumps and rows towards the
Wooden Nickel,
hugging the shore at first to avoid the channel current. A ways down he can see a construction crew renovating one of the
old mansions for some Philadelphia son of a bitch, well-drilling rig in there, backhoe digging for a huge septic tank the
size of a garage. That’s what Dwight Lord tells him, he’s the honey-wagon driver from Burnt Neck,
Nobody shits like the rich.
Dwight claims they stuff those big tanks full three or four times a month — just one family, plus a few other big shitters
that show up for weekend visits in their corporate jets. He has to come down and ream the drains out twice a week. Eat and
shit, that’s how Dwight puts it. And the fucking contractor is from Massachusetts.

He ties the skiff to the pennant and lets it drift back aft where it’s easier to climb on, not jumping up on the prow as he
might have ten or fifteen years ago. You don’t go leaping around when you’re a forty-six-year-old medical experiment, proud
father of a kid bound off to college and another one bound for jail. He climbs in, flips the radio to High Country and reaches
behind the radar screen for a Marlboro. On the way, though, his hand encounters something else. Hey. A bag lunch. Sarah must
have come out here and stuck it on the boat. That would be a first. Anyhow, he’s already got Sarah’s lunch right in his hand.
He puts Sarah’s sandwich on the engine box and opens the new bag. There’s an éclair in there from Doris’s with its cream interior
oozing out and the chocolate topping stuck to the paper bag, and a banana and a Reba McEntire cassette and a note. The note
is printed like the way Kristen used to print in about grade four. It reads, HAVE I GOT A DEAL FOR YOU, which is the name
of one of Reba’s songs. On the other side it reads, JUST A SNACK. DINNER SOME TIME. And on that side it is signed, Rhonda
(Astbury)
Hannaford. He barely remembers Ronette was an Astbury before she married Clyde. Her old man Ivan runs Astbury’s Wrecking
out on the Burnt Neck Road. And another thing, as a high school freshman Lucky played JV football for Orphan Point when Ivan
Astbury was a senior on the same team. He must have had Rhonda first thing after graduation. Sarah would know.

Sixteen years difference. She could pretty near be his kid.

He throws the banana in the bait bucket, thinking he might bait one of the traps with it, lobsters might go for something
new. He eats the éclair, wipes the cream smears off the cassette so it won’t fuck up the stereo, and puts it on. It’s cued
right to the song too.

Have I got a deal for you

A heart that’s almost like brand-new

Her old man Ivan Astbury lives over on the Split Point Road, right near the RoundUp so he can find his way home when he’s
drunk. That’s where she’s probably gone, home to Daddy, all the way across the harbor from the hot tub of her frozen home.
He looks over eastward as if he could see Ronette Astbury standing on the Split Cove wharf, but it’s a good two miles and
his eyes aren’t what they once were either, not anymore.

When he starts up, instead of steaming past his own house on the eastern side, he steers her down the Money shore and doesn’t
turn eastward till he’s opposite the Split Cove entrance buoy, a red nun half sunk because the Split Cove boys like to take
a shot at it as they go by. He doesn’t go in exactly, it’s been a long time since an Orphan Point boat crossed the Split Cove
line. He does come close enough to make out a figure on the dock. He picks up the binoculars. It’s not Ronette, just the blubbery
outline of Chub Washburn, the Split Cove co-op manager, inspecting his lobster cars. It’s a well-known fact that Chub takes
a leak in them now and then, gives his product that special Split Cove taste.

He puts the throttle up and swings way over to avoid Split Rock, used to be big lobsters right in those shallows in his old
man’s day, but they’re long since gone. He’s going eighteen knots by the time he reaches Sodom Ledge, which at this tide is
lined with seals, big fat cocksuckers, every one of them’s got a hundred pounds of lobster digesting in their stomachs. The
Eskimos have the right idea, kill them and eat them just like anything else. It would improve the environment. You cut up
seal blubber in thin strips, dry it in the sun, it tastes just like a fried clam.

He slows and swings close to Sodom Ledge so the color fishfinder comes right up in a big red splash. He pulls the twelve-gauge
out from its bulkhead rack, feeds a shell into the chamber and takes aim at a couple of big bull seals dozing off on a rock
after pumping their harems all night. Take a look at those females, every one of them’s pregnant, all they do is bellow and
fuck out there, there’s more seals than the sea can support so they have to raid traps, lazy fucking parasites, living off
the sweat of other people’s brows. It would be a good deed to kill three or four of the greedy bastards.

The seals take one glance at the
Wooden Nickel
and its blood-thirsty captain and slide off their deck chairs into the surge. Too late. He puts the gun away and hauls ass
out to sea.

End of the day, he’s made his gas and bait, he’s got maybe fifty pounds aboard and a bucket of rock crabs from the line off
Ragged Arse Ledge that will return to the water in Sarah’s deluxe crab sandwiches. He’s moving a line inshore that didn’t
catch anything out by Red’s Bank, carrying twelve traps on the stern, motor purring easy at 1600 rpm, clouds breaking up after
a gray spell, nice George Strait song on the radio. Though his heart’s jumping a bit from the skipped medicine, it feels pretty
decent to be alive. He takes Ronette’s note out of his oilskin bib pocket and reads it again.

Just a snack.

What the fuck does she mean by that? He crumples the note into the bag and throws it off the stern. Then he notices one of
his traps has the vent hatch missing so the lobsters can walk right out. And another. No wonder this string didn’t produce.
Fucking seals rip the vents right off the trap and help themselves. The state makes you use these escape hatches that turn
every christly lobster trap into a seal feeder. Might as well forget about fishing and just throw pieces of meat off the side
all day long. Fucking government can’t help itself, it pisses out welfare every chance it gets.

He sees one of their brown bald heads staring at him from the water right off the starboard beam, with a dumb satisfied look
like he’s got two or three lobsters in his throat right out of some poor man’s trap who’s trying to make ends meet. He slows
down and grabs the shotgun off the radar shelf and fires a twelve-gauge load right in the seal’s skull.

BOOM.

The shot echoes off the sharp granite ledges and a flock of seagulls jumps into the air flapping and squawking like a hippie
protest. Though the top of its head is sliced off at the eye line, the seal flashes a look of hatred, then goes down for its
last dive.
“Fuck you too!”
he yells. Only this time it won’t be ripping up anyone’s trapline when it gets down there. Another Orphan Point family is
going to have food on the table as a result of Lucky’s quick thinking and steady aim even in a cross-running sea. Not to mention
the lobsters already feasting on hot bloody seal. Scavengers, just like us.

Half the seagulls are circling the water where the seal went down, looking for what they can get. The other half are crowding
over his stern for a free lunch, bunch of parasites worse than the seals. There’s one big blackback cocksucker flying right
over the bait barrel like he owns the fucking sea and every fish in it. He pumps another round into the chamber and blows
the seagull into a cloud of bloody feathers. The minute its head hits the water another gull gives off a cannibal scream and
dives down to peck the eyes out. He puts the gun down and backs up till he can gaff the dead gull and bring him over the side.
He slices the left wing off with a rope knife and throws the carcass to the other gulls. He stands up on the rolling side
deck and duct-tapes the bloody wing to the loran whip. Soon as it’s up there, the other gulls back off like they’ve seen a
ghost. He’ll leave it up all season, teach them a little respect for the workingman.

He steers with one knee on the bronze wheel spoke while he runs a wad through the shotgun barrel, rubs a little Watson’s gun
oil on the untarnished surface, and puts it back. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Survival of the fittest. It’s them or us. They’ve
got the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Greenpeace submarines and the financial backing of the Rockefellers and the IRS.
Whereas we, the people, what does that leave us but our guns and our own two hands?

Or one, in the case of that Shag Island guy with the robot hook. A whole fucking government against one human hand.

He sets his trapline in five fathoms right where the seal went down. Free bait. He’ll be back to get them in a couple of days.

He’s coming in by Sodom Ledge now with a couple of other boats in sight. There’s the
Bonanza
running a foot low in the water from what must be three thousand pounds of lobster, Art’s kid steering while Art throws shorts
over the side like he’s trying to reseed the inner harbor.

There’s Damon Peterson, he always took second in class C diesels till he got himself a vasectomy. Since that day he hasn’t
risen above sixth place.

Coming up on Damon is the
Trudy P,
Chucky Peek’s boat, throwing off black smoke the way a boat does when it’s in its death throes. Chucky’s a relation of Sarah’s,
he’s got six kids, his wife’s pregnant, they have one with spina bifida so they spend half their time at the Ronald McDonald
House, and now his diesel’s going. They told him he was crazy to race the fucking thing, that 260 Isotta-Zucchini was a piece
of shit right out of the crate. He came in dead last and burnt her out to boot. Guy like that’s not going to survive, but
where’s he going to go? Ought to be a way to help out, chip in, keep it a secret, get him a new engine or something, but you
can’t. No way he wouldn’t know it, and he wouldn’t take a cent. A man would go under first. But there’s no under, when you
think about it. And nothing under that.

Now a Split Cove boat crowds the
Wooden Nickel
coming up to the narrows at the Sodom Ledge bell. It’s a little black plastic diesel called the
Bad Trip,
there’s about four Split Cove guys aboard. It’s clear they’ve been hauling all day and have nothing to show for it, they’re
riding high and passing a joint around, all huddled grimly about the wheel. They’ve got a bottle of that fruit-flavored brandy
they like so much, Split Cove life expectancy’s around twenty-six. One of them pulls a Red Sox cap down low over his eyes,
another one gives Lucky the finger, low and sneaky, but no mistaking it. That boat belongs to some Astbury cousins if he recalls,
all of them dark-skinned like Ronette, dark-haired, there’s Indians in the next town over. The Split Covers like to fish with
the whole tribe aboard and they’re now trying to crowd the
Wooden Nickel
into the bell buoy, which is not allowed. He puts the throttle up hard and the stern drops, his four-blade Michigan prop
grabs solid water and the wake rises behind him like a waterspout. The loran takes a minute to figure it out, reads out twenty-one
knots, then twenty-four, then twenty-seven. He sneaks past Ronette’s Indian cousins before the bell. They’re straining her.
It sounds like a little Isuzu 650 in there, kerosene vaporizing from the stack and all six injectors strangling in oil.