The Wooden Nickel (8 page)

Then, because he can’t stand bullshit, he spins the wheel to port and cuts dead across their bow at top speed with about three
yards to spare. He looks back to see them drenched and pounded by his wake, all four pumping the finger up and down, taking
their trawler boots off to drain the water out. Fuck them. He slows down and lets them pass, falls just astern of them, floors
her again and crawls right up their asshole with the
Wooden Nickel
throwing off a bow wave full of crystal stars and rainbows from the afternoon sun.

He parts company with the
Bad Trip
after Sodom Ledge, fast-forwards the Reba McEntire cassette to the next cut, “He Broke Your Memory Last Night.” That lady
is one fine musician. He throttles back so he can hear the words.

Like a rare piece of crystal

Like a fine china cup

Which leads his thoughts to Sarah’s sea glass ornaments, the delicacy of leadwork that makes his hand seem as gross as a backhoe,
so he’s afraid even to touch them. Yet Reba’s talking about sex, if you think about it. That’s the thing about Reba McEntire,
she’s full of hidden meanings. You have to listen more than once.

The
Bad Trip
’s oriental whine has faded to the other side of the bay. He’ll sell these lobsters, maybe take Sarah out to dinner at the
Irving Big Stop, though if she makes him order the Petite Chicken Breast again he’ll put a fork through her hand. Fuck her.
He only had three cigarettes today. He’s going to order the Prime fucking Rib.

He spots his son Kyle’s dive boat in the shoal water west of Split Ledge, it’s an old pop-riveted aluminum derelict that had
been relaxing on the bottom for at least three years.
Metallica,
numb name for dumb music. Kyle spotted it one day on the
Wooden Nickel
’s fishfinder and floated her up with inner tubes. He borrowed five hundred from his old man and put a 60-horse Merc on the
transom so it planes in a flat sea though it pounds like a bastard if there’s any chop. On a calm day he might have a chance
in class B outboards but the kid’s too lazy to sign up. He’s got one of his Burnt Neck buddies with him from the other night,
half Indian probably, schoolmate of Kyle’s but he looks about thirty with his skull shaved like George Foreman along with
a snake’s head tattoo on the left arm and two or three earrings in each ear. They’re taking their dive tanks off, smoking
cigarettes, pawing through a big black plastic bucket of urchins.

“Ain’t you supposed to be in school?” he shouts.

“School got out at noon today.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit, nothing. Ask Darrell. It was teachers’ day.”

Darrell looks around and shoots a big weasely grin earring to earring but he doesn’t say anything.

“You ain’t going to graduate,” Lucky says. “That guy Leavitt called your mother. You’re flunking two courses. I don’t give
a shit myself, but you got your old lady all wound up.”

Kyle stands up in the boat, grabs an urchin and cuts it open with his dive knife, rubs the meat of it between thumb and finger,
then spreads the eggs out on his palm. “Black gold,” he says. “Price is going through the roof. Urchin divers don’t need no
diploma. Besides, when’d
you
drop out? Eighth fucking grade?”

“Another thing,” Lucky says. “You ought to watch your language. Your mother heard you talking like that, she’d lock your ass
right in your room. You wouldn’t see your friend here for a fucking week. Wouldn’t
that
be a shame.”

The Burnt Neck kid, Darrell, picks an urchin out of the bucket, stares into the cunt end of it, then takes the dive knife
off his belt and jabs at it like he’s testing a clam. He brings the urchin up to his face and touches his tongue to it, makes
a face, spits in the bilge and throws the urchin over the side. He looks into another one and throws that up to Lucky. “Here,
Mr. Lunt. You want some lobster bait?”

Lucky catches it and smells it. It stinks OK, but it’s got a different stink to it than lobster bait. “They ain’t going to
go for that,” he says. “Might as well put a bag of horseshit down there.”

“Never know till you try,” the kid says.

Lucky kills the engine, takes a quick hitch around the midship cleats to raft onto the urchin boat, which they’ve got anchored
with light line. “Hey Kyle,” he says to his son, “you giving all them urchins to Clyde Hannaford?”

“We don’t give,” Kyle says. “We sell.”

“Well, Clyde ain’t going to buy none after this week. Urchin season’s over. He’s got the sign up already. Starting Monday,
if you ain’t in school, you can come out as sternman.”

“Clyde ain’t the only guy that buys them,” Kyle shoots back. “There’s others.”

Down in the bilge, Darrell gives him a kick on the ankle to shut him up. “It don’t matter, Darrell. He’s my old man. He ain’t
going to tell no one.”

Darrell cuts a rotten piece off an urchin and throws it over the side. “Don’t say nothing about it.”

Lucky feels his heart missing a beat, then pumping to catch up. He puts a hand on the pot hauler to steady himself, then says
to Darrell, “I don’t give a shit what you do. Half your fucking town’s stamping license plates, other half’s on welfare. Just
don’t drag my kid into it or I’ll kick your ass.”

“Too bad,” Darrell says. “I hear they’re paying top dollar for lobsters too.”

“Top yen,” Kyle adds.

“Go ahead, tell him,” Darrell says, “Tell him about Mr. Moto. He might be interested.”

“If it’s Italian I ain’t dealing with them,” Lucky says. “They got the fish mafia up to Boston, frig around with them, they
don’t give a shit, they’ll cuff you to the wheel and set your truck on fire.”

Darrell squints down into the
Wooden Nickel
’s tank, couple of four-pounders in one corner, shakes his head. “Mr. Moto wouldn’t have nothing to do with them. Too fucking
small.”

“Right up at the legal limit,” Lucky says. “You put the gauge to them.”

“No doubt.” Darrell keeps shaking his head like he doesn’t believe something. “You see them urchins, Mr. Lunt? The price of
them suckers is going to double next week. Only we don’t sell. We hold out. Week after that, closed season, Japs starving
for sushi, the price is going to double again.”

“You ain’t going to play that kind of game with the mafia,” Lucky says.

Darrell says, “Mr. Moto ain’t Italian. He happens to be from oriental extraction.”

“And he’s buying off-season?”

“Oversize lobsters too,” Kyle says, trusting his old man now that Darrell has trusted him. “How about eight dollars a pound?”

Lucky has to stop on this one. He’s had a couple of jumbos in the outside traps over the last week, five or six pounds apiece,
which he throws back by instinct, not even bothering to put the measure to them. Forty-eight pounds of lobster at eight bucks
a pound would be close to four hundred bucks a week, on top of what he gets off Clyde. Kristen’s going to college next year,
mailbox full of bills all winter when the boat is hauled, nothing coming in, he hasn’t the dimmest fucking idea where he’s
going to get the money.

Another voice comes in, it’s his old man Walter Lunt:
Don’t take no shorts, Lukie, and don’t take no breeders, you got to leave something for your kids.
A brief little length of tape inside playing his old man’s voice. Just like the shorts and the females, big offshore breeders
are the future, like his house and his fishing grounds, a legacy to save for his own flesh and blood, whether they give a
shit or not. If lobstering was a religion, that would be the first commandment. “I ain’t going to do it,” he says. “I don’t
care nothing about sea urchins, but them big deep-sea lobsters ain’t going to Tokyo. They’re the breeding stock.”

“Don’t worry,” Darrell says, “you ain’t going to catch them all.”

“Don’t matter, I ain’t doing it. And Kyle ain’t either. There’s things besides money.”

“I’d like to know what,” Kyle says. “I didn’t learn none from you.”

“You won’t learn none from him either. Or that gook dealer of yours.”

Kyle gets sullen and looks down but he doesn’t answer back. He takes up a cracked urchin and throws it on the other side.
Darrell goes to cast off the
Wooden Nickel
but Lucky beats him to it. He idles out so as not to rock them too bad, then after a few yards he runs up the harbor to bring
his legal lobsters into Clyde’s.

H
E’S GOT HIS FEET UP
after supper on the big stack of
Commercial Fisherman
s in the TV nook. One eye’s checking out the boat photos in the new issue, the other’s watching the
K-Mart Kountry Talent Show,
which is not showing much talent, couple of Christian crotch-scratchers from the county, a commercial for the Tarratine Monster
Truck Show, then a pale wrinkly woman that looks like Dale Evans out of the grave. It’s supposed to be her debut performance
but she’s sixty if she’s a day. They used to have a good show with real talent but now it’s mostly freaks. They’re bringing
the Lemieux Brothers next, a ghoul act with two dead-looking teenagers stuck together like Siamese twins, when the phone rings
and he lets Sarah get it. She sings sweetly, “Lucas, somebody for you.”

She hands him the cordless and waits listening as if it’s a business call that concerns them both. Must be some son of a bitch
pushing bank cards, they like to call you when your mouth’s full, even though when they actually run his credit check, they
turn him down. But god damn if it’s not Ronette Hannaford answering the sternman ad.

“Don’t like calling you at your home like this, I know you’re with your family, probably finishing up supper, but I didn’t
want you to give it to no one else. You ain’t, have you?”

“Not yet,” he says. “I had it up awhile and no calls come in. That ain’t to say I’m going to hire
you.
You already passed it up.”

“Things are different. That bastard Clyde’s cutting me off completely. I need the money. I got to have a better lawyer. I
got to have car insurance.”

“Insurance ain’t that much,” he says. “It’s twice as cheap for females.”

“You don’t know, honey, I flunked so many breath tests, I got to go with a special company.” He hears the tears in her voice,
imagines her holding an open coffee can with the other hand.

“You got references? You say you worked for Reggie Dolliver over in Split Cove?”

“That’s right. Reggie’ll tell you how good I was. He was high-lining when I worked for him.”

“How am I supposed to get a reference off of a man in jail? You think I’m going to pay him a visit in his cell?”

“He ain’t in no more. They just paroled him. Come on, Lucky. I need the money. I ain’t forgotten how.”

“I don’t want no trouble with Clyde Hannaford. Clyde don’t care for me much anyway but we do have a business relationship.
Live and let live, that’s where it’s at. Don’t step on nobody’s fucking toes.”

“Clyde don’t own me,” she says. “He maybe used to but he don’t no more. I don’t get you, Lucky Lunt. You dangle this job in
front of me, then I get serious and you back off.”

“Don’t expect to get rich out of it,” Lucky says. “You get a tenth of the gross.”

“Reggie gave me fifteen percent.”

“You was going out with him at the time, if I remember.”

“Was not. Don’t make no difference anyhow. Business is business. He started me at ten, like you’re trying to do, then he moved
me to fifteen.”

“What’d he do that for?”

“Cause I was good. I work hard, Lucky. I learn fast. I pay attention.”

Sarah’s over by the TV pretending not to listen, but he can see her ear straining in the direction of the phone.

“I’ll call you back,” Lucky says. “I might have some other applicants.”

“You ain’t got no more applicants. Just me. Here’s my number, I’m at my uncle Vincent’s in Split Cove, I’m living in this
trailer he’s got on the Back Cove Road.”

He writes the number down and says good-bye. Sarah looks right at him over the tops of her little wire-rimmed glasses. “I
take it that was Rhonda Hannaford looking to work for you.”

“I put an ad up at the Blue Claw,” Lucky explains. “Can’t find no one around here.”

“Well you can’t find her either. You better hope somebody else turns up.”

Up to this point he’s been backing out of this one like a shrewd old hardshell who knows what a trap funnel looks like, but
when Sarah sets out the bait he has to take it. “I suppose,” he says, “I could hire her if I want.”

“I suppose you could, Lucas, and I suppose you could move right into that trailer park over in Split Cove. That’s where she’s
staying, isn’t it?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Lucas, I’ve known Rhonda Astbury’s mother since high school days. Clyde Hannaford and Ivan Astbury were the same year. Don’t
you remember? That was the big scandal. Clyde Hannaford marrying his classmate’s daughter. He has to be eighteen years older,
no wonder they have problems.”

That was back when Orphan Point had its own high school, now it’s a municipal garage where the snowplows and road graders
are kept. Kyle and Kristen have a fifteen-mile ride to the regional high in Norumbega, yuppietown, half the kids drive to
school in BMWs.

Then he hears a Toyota four-by-four in the driveway, front end groaning on the turn from bad shocks and too much lift. The
door slams and Kyle bursts in, head still shaved and now he’s got a gold ring in his ear. Lucky shakes the TV remote at it
as if it could not only remove the earring but change the channel of history, which is filling up with slackers and fairies
including his own son. “Jesus H. Christ, mister, I hope they can stitch up that cocksucking hole again, cause you ain’t going
to wear no earring in this house.”

“Go to hell, Dad. It’s my own ear. I can do what I want with it. I’m getting my tongue pierced next week. Darrell’s already
got his done.”

Kristen has wandered down from her room, headphones around her neck with the plug dragging behind her feet. She steps right
in between son and father, then goes up to her brother, feels the earlobe gently, examining it with an expert’s eye. “Keep
some Neosporin on it for the first few days,” she advises. “Remember what happened with me?”