The Wooden Nickel (11 page)

“You been hanging out with your cousin Dolliver too much. There ain’t no right and wrong with a guy like that.”

“I didn’t mean sell her. I meant keep her for ourselves.”

“There ain’t no ourselves,” he reminds her. “Especially with you hanging around with cons.”

“Watch your tongue, Lucky. Reggie’s a relation.”

“I hear Clyde Hannaford’s got spies over in Split Cove, seeing who you go out with.”

“Let him spy. I ain’t got nothing to hide. Job’s a job.” It’s warm now and she drops the bib front of her orange overalls
so there’s just the purple sweater with her tits trying to tear the fabric through. He looks but has to turn away, it confuses
him how such big ones can grow on a small little body, like a short female lobster all berried up thick with eggs.

A boat passes nearby, the
Gloria T,
which is Howard Thurston’s boat. One of Howard’s kids is on the stern, Howard’s steering. They both wave and smile, friendly
and everything but nosy at the same time, just drifting close to see what’s going on.

“Hey, Howard,”
he calls out,
“want to buy some lobsters?”
Howard guns the
Gloria T
and heads for his territory, which is almost a mile to the east.

She’s poking her head down in the cuddy hatch. “You got a ladies’ on this thing?”

“Down below, forward of the engine, in the wooden box under the storm anchor.”

She disappears, Ginger jumps up and follows her right down, good loyal dog. Then she shouts up. “How am I supposed to move
this anchor? It weighs a ton.”

“Can’t hear you.” He cuts the engine back down to idle.

“I said it weighs a ton. The anchor.”

“Lift.”

He can’t see what’s going on down there because the companionway’s on the port side, but he hears the scrape and crash of
the big fluke anchor sliding onto the portside bench. “What the hell, Lucky, this is a
bucket.
I ain’t going to sit on this thing.”

“Well stand then. It’s good enough for the rest of us. You ain’t got time to read anyway, we got traps to haul.”

“What do you mean, no reading?” she yells up. “What’s this?
Hustler.
Didn’t think you was the reading type. Hey, this looks like a good story. ‘Up the Bow-wow Highway.’ We’re dog lovers, ain’t
we, Ginger?”

“Put that away, for Christ sake.”

Next minute she’s back up the companionway, hitching the big suspenders up under the oilskin jacket. She’s got the
Hustler
in one hand, then she leans over the bait well and throws it overboard, good-looking blond too, high heels, shaved pussy,
blurring down beneath the waves. Ginger’s whining over the rail, eager to fetch it, must think it’s a newspaper. “Good riddance,”
Ronette says. “That’s it for porn around here. Next time I’m bringing some fabric to fix that downstairs up.”

They haul another string. Reggie was right about one thing, she’s good. He winches the trap up over the rail and she does
the rest, diving right in, pulling the shorts out, dropping the crabs and urchins in the trash bucket, checking the doubtful
ones with the state measure, quickly banding the keepers and tossing them in the seawater tank. Another string, then one more,
and Lucky’s got himself the biggest haul so far this year.

“Lady Luck,” he says.

“Lucky Lunt and Lady Luck. Say that five times without stopping.” She holds her hands up, they’re all cut and bleeding around
the nails.

“Better keep them gloves on,” he says. “I ain’t got no workman’s comp.”

“I’m faster without them.” She rinses her hands off in the circulating water of the live well and lets Ginger lick them dry.

“Dog looks hungry,” he says. “Let’s eat.” He kills the engine with a trapline on the winch to hold them in one place.

“We could eat downstairs if you kept the place clean. We’d have some privacy.” She opens the yuppie little JanSport pack she
brought and takes out two sandwiches. “One for you. Liverwurst and bologna. Did I guess right?”

“Can’t eat them.” He hangs his head.

“How come?” She twists her face underneath his and looks up into his mouth. “You got teeth.”

“Can’t have no organ meat.”

She busts out laughing. The dog takes advantage of her thrown-back head and snaps for the sandwich. “Might as well let her
have it, OK?”

“Might as well,” he says. “I ain’t going to eat it. I brought my own.”

Ginger scarfs up the sandwich in two bites.

“Never figured you for a vegetarian. Always thought you was supposed to be a man.”

“After the operation, they clamped right down.”

“Poor baby, bad doctors took the cattle right out of his mouth.” She pats him on the shoulder and he pulls away, goes forward
to fetch the tuna sandwich his wife put up after the
Ellen
show.

Right in the middle of lunch, engine shut down and the tape playing a quiet Tracy Byrd ballad, something breathes in the water
off to starboard. Ginger’s ears perk up and she leaves her resting spot to lean over the side and whimper. A couple of fins
break the surface.

“Porpoises!” Ronette cries.

Lucky yells, “Hey Ginger, you want to eat one of them puffin pigs?”

“The Indians eat them,” she says.

Lucky’s surprised she knows something he’s never heard. “No shit. How’d you hear that?”

“My uncle Vince told me. He’s part Indian, he knows all this Indian stuff. Ain’t supposed to tell you, though. It’s a tribal
secret.”

“You got these Indian uncles,” he says. “You must have some Indian blood.”

“Uncle Vince ain’t related. He’s Rosie Astbury’s husband.”

“Thought you was all related.”

“Better watch out, Mr. Unlucky Lunt, you might be related too.”

She ducks down and switches to a Vince Gill tape. It sounds nice with the light hum of the wind on the radio antennas, the
chop’s rhythmic hammer blows on the hull.

Take your memory with you when you go

Ronette’s been working without her rubber apron, and even though her purple sweater is soaked through with trap slime and
fish guts, it’s still sexy cause it’s shrunk even more and it looks like there’s nothing underneath. Then he recalls Sarah
saying,
Lucas, don’t let her freeze out there.

“It’s cold,” he shouts. “I got an old sweatshirt down there somewhere, look around for it.”

She comes up with the big barnacled sweatshirt bagging over her, it’s still covered with bird blood from when he shot the
gull. Her hair’s stranded with seaweed, lipstick and mascara smudged off, her cheeks and forehead red from the salt spray.
She looks less like Paula Jones now and more like a kid that’s never been out of Split Cove in her life.

“You ever been anywhere?” he shouts.

“I’ve been to Fenway Park. And Clyde took me to Quebec City for our honeymoon. We rode a horse and carriage and everyone spoke
French. I ate a rabbit.”

“That’s it?”

“I ain’t ashamed of it. No need to go anywheres anyway. You can get everything you need off of the TV.” She lights a Marlboro
and gives him one. “You been anywhere, Lucky? You have, ain’t you? You was in Vietnam.” She looks up when she says this like
he’s a figure from history, a big bronze soldier statue in the park.

“I was.”

“You ever been to Washington, to see that monument to all the dead? You know anyone on there?”

“I was in a motor pool,” he yells over the engine noise. “I didn’t see no action. Ain’t no mechanics on that monument. Lester
Seavey got himself killed, he might be on there.”

“You’re
old.
” She laughs. “My
mother
went out with Lester Seavey. Back when she told me the birds and the bees, she used to say, ‘There was this boy Lester, he
used to try and feel around.’ So I always thought Lester Seavey was Satan incarnate or something, then I found a picture of
him she kept right in her drawer.”

“Guess she didn’t mind too much.”

“People like stuff they ain’t supposed to like.” She lights another Marlboro off the manifold. The fleet is converging on
the Sodom Ledge whistle, everyone putting on a little steam as they get within earshot of each other. He throttles up to nineteen
knots on the loran, the wheel drops and digs in, Ronette sticks her face out beyond the pot hauler into the wind and grabs
his arm to hold on. They’re all gawking, so he shakes her off.

“Sorry,” she shouts. “Didn’t want to fall in.”

He steams up close to the Money shore to stay off his own house, then cuts her sharp in towards the town pier to avoid Clyde’s
wharf. Soon as he pulls up to the ladder beneath her lemon-and-lime Probe, Ginger dives in and swims for the little patch
of beach. He waits for Ronette to climb off, but she doesn’t, she just stands there with a hand on the ladder and her foot
up on the port rail. He revs the engine to hold the stern in against the current. The harbor chop scrapes his hull up against
the barnacle-covered piling. “Ain’t going to be coming in here again.”

She lets her chin drop and sniffles to herself the way she did in the Blue Claw when she said she was moving out. “Guess you
don’t want me working for you no more. I tried my best.”

“You got the job, Ronette. Only from now on I’ll just swing over to Split Cove. Easier on you that way.”

“Easier on you too.”

“Ain’t so easy. Your relations don’t like Orphan Point boats.”

“They like you better than Clyde and your wife like
me.
”

She slings the backpack over one shoulder and hauls herself up the ladder, in Reggie Dolliver’s orange pants and trawler boots,
the red dog waiting for her at the top.

When he takes his catch into Hannaford’s he’s the last boat in. Clyde’s waiting on the lobster float with his dim-witted dockman
Albert. Clyde’s got a green Heineken can in his hand like the work-day’s over and there’s nothing left to do. “Hey Clyde,”
he says, swinging his stern in so Albert can tie onto the aft bitt as usual, but Albert doesn’t move either, just stands there
with his mouth open like a funnel, as if he’s waiting for his boss to pour something into it.

Lucky jumps back and ties on himself. “What the fuck, Albert?” he yells. “You in a coma?”

Clyde takes another swig of the Heineken and says, “Dock’s closed. Try tomorrow morning.”

“The fuck it’s closed. I got a hundred pounds of lobsters in here and in the morning half of them will be dead.”

Clyde hands the Heineken to Albert and wipes his mouth. He comes over and looks into the lobster well where the big doomed
crustaceans are crawling all over each other looking for a way to get out. “Why’nt you try over at Split Cove. I hear they
got a co-op over there.”

“Listen Clyde. I’m sorry about your troubles. Your wife answered an ad and I hired her. It’s strictly business.”

“It’s pretty fucking sneaky to drop her off over at the town wharf then come over here like you was working all alone.”

“You want me to bring her in here every day so she can help unload? I’ll do it if that’s what you want. I thought I was doing
you a favor. It ain’t going to hurt you, you know, if she’s got her own income. If a woman looks broke the judge’ll ream you
up the ass.”

His dockman makes a grunting sound and Clyde looks up to see him shaking his head in agreement. Though he looks like he wouldn’t
know what hole to put it in, even old Albert Doane has been married and divorced, he’s got a couple of kids over near the
Indian reservation in Burnt Neck.

“It ain’t easy,” Clyde says, “thinking of her out there with you. You hear the boys referring to it on the VHF?”

“I ain’t got a VHF, remember? You’re supposed to be fixing it.”

“Just as well,” Clyde says with a grim little laughing sound. The fact is, his mouth is so tight it’s pursed up like an asshole
and it always seems like a miracle when he laughs.

“You going to give me a price and unload them fucking things? I got to get home for supper.”

“Two fifty-nine.”

“That ain’t what you’re paying today. I know that.”

“I got too many already. I ain’t going to be able to sell them all.”

“Fuck you.”

Clyde writes him up for two sixty-five. The minute the pen hits the paper of his little money book, Albert’s into the well
scooping the lobsters out. It’s late and he wants to get home too.

A
SHARP CLEARING NORTHWEST BREEZE
shakes the rooftop antennas and drags him from Vietnam dreams: rattle of helicopters, smell of perpetual oil slick on the
backwater by the motor pool. A trough of bad weather has kept the
Wooden Nickel
on her mooring, the traps will be full. What did Reggie Dolliver say, four or five cons in a two-man cell? Anyone could turn
animal, no wonder they cornhole each other up there. Same for lobsters. You’d think the ones in the trap would tell the others
not to enter, but the dumb bastards keep on coming in.

On the way out Sarah hands him a lunch in the thermos pail that seems heavier than usual. “I made two.” It’s too dark to know
if she’s being bitchy or generous, when it comes to the sternman situation she’s been known to go either way. She has calmed
down some since the beginning, seeing that he’s hauling more lobsters and the help out there seems beneficial to his heart.
She’s got her own world too. Her summer art school’s starting up again, she’s helping Yvonne Hannaford open some kind of museum
next to the lobster wharf, then she’s sawing and welding and filing till midnight in his exden. She’s home for breakfast and
supper, rest of the time she’s in Volvoland.

He checks out the two identical sandwiches in their Baggies, side by side. “Thanks,” he says. “But she brings her own.”

“Just thought she might like one of these.”

“What is it?”

“Moose. Your favorite, the tongue.”

“Hey. Surprise. Thought tongue was off the menu.”

“I won’t tell.”

He hefts the pail of coffee, moosemeat and bulkie rolls with one arm and with the other waves good-bye, as he has done every
predawn morning for the last twenty years. Only this time she stops him. She takes her glasses off and tries to wrap her thin
arms around him for a squeeze, though with his girth and the gear he’s got on she can’t reach anywhere near around his back.
“I’m glad you’re not working alone out there. Take care, though, you’re still recovering.”