The Wooden Nickel (9 page)

“Yes, I do,” Lucky says. “We had a hell of a hoedown on that one.”

“You got over it, Daddy. With the passage of time.”

“Time ain’t going to make him into a woman,” Lucky says.

“Dad,” Kristen says, “half the guys in my class are pierced.”

“That’s right. The half with their old man gone so there’s no one to set any limits in the house.”

“Well you can’t undo it,” Sarah says.

“You sure as hell can. He leaves that god damn earring out, it will grow back like it’s never happened.”

“That’s the problem with you, Daddy, you don’t want anything to have ever happened. You want it all to grow back, just like
the wooden ship days.” Kristen gives her father a big wraparound hug, then takes a step back, still holding his shoulders.
“Hey,” she says, “you’d look cool with an earring yourself, let that beard grow out a little, maybe a ponytail...”

“It’s true, Lucas,” his wife says. “That would give you the real pirate look.” The three of them have him cornered now, every
one of them with earrings: Kyle’s new gold stud and Kristen’s little silver musical notes that she got for her seventeenth
birthday and Sarah’s handcrafted ones, chips of blue sea glass framed in lead.

All of a sudden he has a rush of claustrophobia right in his own house. “I’m going out.”

“Out?” Sarah says. “Where are you going to go at nine o’clock?”

“I’ll drive around,” he says. “I’ll think it over.”

“What are we supposed to say if anyone else calls about the job?”

“Ask for one reference. If it’s someone we know take the name down. Don’t take nobody if they been in jail.”

In the dark friendly truck cab, High Country 104 is playing Tanya Tucker’s “Complicated.”

Heads he loves me, tails he loves me not

The RoundUp’s dead quiet on a Tuesday night. The old bowling lane that Big Andy converted to a racetrack for belt sanders
is dark and covered with a green plastic tarp. The big stuffed longhorn steer head over the bar is the liveliest thing around.
The stage where they have western music Fridays and Saturdays is empty except for the electric keyboard and the drum set.
The small green-tiled dance floor in front of the stage carries a coat of sawdust without even a footprint on it. Wallace
the bartender is on his stool watching the WWF Smackdown on ESPN: the Undertaker’s throwing a couple of long-haired albinos
out of the ring, twins it looks like, each one of them the size of a polar bear. They say the WWF breeds those guys out in
Wyoming on a human farm.

There’s a few sullen-looking Split Cove couples in the dark corners, all quite grim like they’re discussing custody issues.
Three or four guys sit by themselves at the bar, leaving a space beside them in hopes a woman might sit down. One of the guys
is Reggie Dolliver himself, the inmate Ronette gave as a reference. Reggie’s looking good for a guy that’s served eighteen
months on an aggravated-assault charge, having shot somebody’s car windows out while the guy was in there with a girl Reggie
thought was his. It turned out he didn’t even know her.

Reggie’s got his hair greased back a bit, a crucified dragon tattoo on his right arm, an empty shot glass and half a beer.

“Thought you was out of town,” Lucky says. “Buy you a drink?”

“What’d you do, Lunt? Just cash your welfare check?”

“That’s right. Taxpayers’ money. On me.”

Reggie orders a shot of Seagram’s and another Rolling Rock. “I been living on taxpayers’ expense for eleven months.”

“They let you out early?”

“I kept my pecker clean.”

Lucky looks down with technical interest at Reggie Dolliver’s socks. “Hey, you got one of them ankle radios on?”

Reggie pulls up one pant leg but not the other. “I’m a free man,” he says. “Just have to meet with my PO once a month and
I ain’t supposed to have a gun in the truck. Made some money too, off of the crafts store up there. I made ships in a bottle.
Know what them cock-suckers sell for? Hundred bucks apiece. I could make three in a week.” Reggie pulls one out of this leather
bag he’s got over the arm of his chair. It’s a three-masted warship like Old Ironsides with half the sails rolled up and a
few men and cannons scattered around the deck. The men have blue uniforms, and faces with pretty good detail. He must have
had plenty of time on his hands to paint every little frigging gold button like that.

“Shit, you might as well keep doing it, now you’re out.”

“No. If an inmate don’t make them, they ain’t going to sell. Anyone can make a ship in a bottle. But if it’s genuine con art,
the tourists will suck it up.” Reggie takes this long set of tweezers out of the bag and sticks it through the bottle neck
so he can play around with the rigging, which does look a bit slack for a hundred-dollar ship.

“Hey, why not go back in?” Lucky suggests. “You’ll make more in the joint than you will on the water.”

“I already got a deal,” Reggie replies. “Listen to this. I make the things and we sneak them back into the prison and the
cons retail them for me at the prison store. Half that stuff is made by guys on the outside. Not many people know that.”

“You still own that black boat with the Lehman diesel? What was she called?”

“Diablo.”

“Yeah.
Diablo.
That was a swift little boat.”

“It was a piece of shit. I sold it to my brother.”

“Want to go sternman on the
Wooden Nickel?
” Lucky feels good, a man’s down and he can offer something that would help him up. As a sternman, even a con would be more
acceptable to the family than Ronette Hannaford. They’d haul some lobsters too. Reggie’s a good fisherman, it’s not his fault
he’s from Split Cove where there’s a lot of criminal blood. You can’t judge someone just by the place they’re from. They say
old man Dolliver used to get drunk and put his wife in a coffin, down in the cellar. The boys would sneak down and see them
there, the old man drinking and their mother lying in the coffin like she was dead, only every once in a while she’d sit up
and old Dolliver would give her a sip of Gallo Red. Background like that, you can’t blame a man for going bad.

“I seen your ad,” Reggie says, “but I ain’t lobstering no more.”

“How come?”

Reggie leans close so even Wallace the bartender won’t hear him. “When I was on the inside,” he whispers, “it was just like
a fucking lobster trap. That’s what I’d think of, looking out of them christly bars. I’d crawled in the wrong hole and I was
fucking in there like a one-pound shedder.”

“Locked in,” Lucky says, with a rush of sympathy.

“It ain’t just that. You know what it’s like when you got a lot of lobsters in one small place, so it gets overcrowded. They
turn on each other. They go cannibalistic. There was guys beating each other up, guys fucking each other in the ass. Man’s
in there awhile, he don’t exactly want to set traps for a living.”

He imagines Reggie Dolliver with a big hairy con on top of him, dog style, another one waiting in line. He shoots him a curious
look but doesn’t ask, and Reggie’s not about to tell.

“Besides,” Reggie says, “the government’s going to retrain me in computers.”

“No shit.” Lucky is surprised a guy like Reggie Dolliver can even read the screen. “You didn’t finish up at school, did you?”

“Don’t need school for computers. That son of a bitch Gates dropped out of school. The computer prof we had, he was from the
voc tech in Rockland, he told us Gates never finished the eighth grade, now he’s got more fucking money than the sultan of
Brunei. You know what? All them beautiful women he’s got in Seattle making websites? They say he can fuck any one of them
anytime he wants. Just goes up and asks them. They have to.”

“No shit?”

“It’s part of their job. The eighth fucking grade. You tell me a man’s got to go to school.”

“There you go.” Lucky says. “Sure beats jail.”

“Jail ain’t what you think, man. It’s where I learned. I took a computer repair class on Interactive TV. I got so I could
take one of them son of a whores apart with my eyes closed. Course inside all they gave us was old junkers the kindergartens
didn’t want anymore so they dumped them on us. But they got a federal reeducation program up in Tarratine, train on the latest
stuff. Windows Ninety-five.”

Wallace the weekday bartender is still glued to the WWF, where the Undertaker has thrown some long-haired fairy wrestler into
the crowd and the fairy’s weeping and refusing to go back into the ring. Lucky pries Wallace away from the action long enough
to order another shot and a beer. “Reggie,” he says, “remember you used to hire Ronette Hannaford — used to be Rhonda Astbury
— a few years back?”

Reggie starts rubbing this big pink scar under his left eye as if he’s trying to scratch some feeling back to the dense numb
flesh. “She only worked for me a couple months. Then she went and married up. She didn’t need no work after that.”

“Well she does now.”

“I hear,” Reggie says. “She want to come work for you?”

“Well, if you ain’t going to do it. She’s the only one that answered my ad. You think she can handle it? She didn’t give you
no trouble? I ain’t sure I want a woman out there.”

“Far as lobstering goes, Ronette Astbury was all right. I’d take her back if I was going out again. Which I ain’t.”

Lucky glugs his shot down. “You kept it strictly business out there?”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Lucky says. “I was just wondering.”

“A man makes a crack like that on the inside, he can get himself sliced.”

Lucky looks him over. Reggie’s a short little fart like all the Dollivers. He could have kicked his ass a year ago, though
now he’s not so sure. Reggie’s bulked up his arms from lifting weights. He hasn’t got any fucking stents in him either. Lucky
puts the palms of his hands up. “No offense,” he says. “Just curiosity.”

“Me and Rhonda Astbury’s related,” Reggie reveals. “Her old man Ivan Astbury is cousins with my mother. That’s how come she
was working on my boat.”

“Jesus, I guess if she’s a relation of yours, she knows how to fish.”

“I guess she does. I also guess if you hire her, old Clyde will put a bullet through you both.” He leans back in his chair,
folds his hands behind his slick prison-haircut head and cracks his knuckles while the dragon tattoo squirms on his forearm.

Lucky feels a little jump in his chest and realizes he didn’t take his pill. He steadies both arms on the square black table
carved up with phone numbers, initials, lobster and drug deals whose obsolete prices are etched into Formica forever. “Fuck
Clyde,” he says. “He’s up there with the door locked crying in his office. He ain’t going to shoot no one.”

“Well,” says Reggie, “why don’t you take her on?”

“Sarah don’t think much of the idea.”

“She want you out there alone? I heard you was sick.”

“She don’t want me fishing alone, she won’t go out herself, I get one applicant and she don’t want me to hire her.”

“Hey, if your wife and kids won’t go out with you, you got the right. That’s the way I see it.”

“That’s how I see it too,” Lucky says.

“Might’s well give her a call,” Reggie suggests. “She’s just sitting up at her place watching TV.”

Lucky gives him a look. Reggie starts rubbing the scar again, the way he does when he’s nervous. “How the fuck do you know
what she’s just doing?”

“We’re all related. We ain’t got no secrets around here.”

He leaves Reggie Dolliver going into the bottle with his long tweezers to reef the sails on his ship model and goes to call
Ronette and tell her she’s on. The phone is located beneath the stuffed head and shoulders of a good-sized palomino horse,
though both its eyes have been gouged out by drunks. It looks blind like a horse in a bad dream. The jukebox is playing a
nice George Strait ballad but it’s too loud. He reaches around the back and finds the volume control and turns it down, then
pulls Ronette’s number out of his pants and uncrumples it. When she answers it after the sixth ring, she sounds asleep.

“Where you calling from, Lucky? Thought they didn’t allow country music around your house.”

“I’m at the RoundUp. Your old boss says you’re all right, so it looks like you’ve got yourself a job.”

“Doris?”

“No, Reggie Dolliver.”

“Oh Jesus. He’s really over there, huh? I thought he wasn’t supposed to drink. Don’t hang around with
him.
He’ll get you in trouble sure as shit. He’s on parole. Reggie ain’t supposed to leave the house after dark.”

“I ain’t prejudiced,” Lucky says. “He’s paid his debt to society, he’s as good as you or me.”

“Speak for yourself,” she says, “don’t drag me into it.”

“Listen, you want to work?”

“You sure it’s all right with your wife? She didn’t sound none too happy when I called your house.”

“If she ain’t going to do it, I got the right. That’s what Reggie Dolliver says.”

“Well, right’s one thing. Wrong’s something else.”

“You want me to ship Reggie instead? He’s all eager for it but I told him you was first.”

“No, I want to do it.”

“We’ll start at five tomorrow. You ain’t planning to meet me at Clyde’s, are you?”

“Not quite.”

“I’ll swing by the town wharf right next to Doris’s and pick you up. Be there at five or you ain’t going.”

“I’ll go down there right now and wait all night, that way I won’t be late.”

Kristen and Sarah are on the couch watching
Ellen
when he comes in. Ellen DeGeneres is hugging some woman, he doesn’t even want to see it. Clinton’s got fairies everywhere,
Janet Reno on down. They say he’s one himself, he puts up a front with all those Paula Joneses, just like J. Edgar Hoover.

He averts his eyes and goes to the kitchen for a beer. During the commercial he says, “Anyone else call about the sternman
job?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s a good thing, cause I gave it to Ronette Hannaford. She’s getting divorced and she needs the money.”

The two of them look up like he’s come home from the RoundUp with the clap. Sarah says, “She’s not the only one that’s going
to be getting a divorce.”