The Wooden Nickel (38 page)

Harley says, “Look who’s back for another turbo. Heard you was done lobstering. Guess you won’t be needing that boat for a
while. Planning to sell her?”

“Fuck that. I’m doing offshore research now, foreign government contract. I’m going to need something better than that dipshit
six.”

“Got a 307 Olds in there, freshwater cooled, twice as strong as that little six. Finest fucking kind, hundred percent marinized,
new starter, new alternator, ain’t got a thousand hours on her. Guy out of Stoneport went diesel and traded on a 210 Cummins.
Ain’t going to last, neither. I got somebody coming down tonight.”

“Tonight? Where is it?”

“Inside, on the small hoist.”

The 307 has rust on the block surface and the saltwater cooling side, it’s going to need a new manifold. He takes a pipe wrench
off of Harley’s shelf and cranks her over. Compression’s decent. Takes a plug out and tastes the electrode with the end of
his tongue. Little burned, not bad. Puts his middle finger down in the cylinder, runs it around the cylinder wall and licks
the tip. Inside’s decent but the outside’s a mess. The pit bull’s right there beside him ready to snap his hand off if he
pockets a tool. He gives it a pat on the neck and goes out to deal.

Harley’s swinging the hoist over the engineless Stoneport boat tied to the end of his wharf. His boy Peter’s down in the cockpit
with the bulkhead pulled, ready to guide the big Volvo into place. “Hang on, Lucas. We’ll get this son of a whore in, then
we’ll talk.”

The sun’s starting to go down over Riceville harbor, it’s catching the line of red and green channel markers and the hulls
of a couple dozen of the fastest boats on the coast. Harley keeps the locals tuned up right. Out beyond the harbor is the
open sea, with a smoky afternoon southwester cooking a mist off of the whitecaps, an eastern-rig trawler passing by, hull
down, bound for Stoneport with a nice full load.

Harley has dropped the Volvo now and his son’s down there shimming up the mounts. Now he can give Lucky his full attention.
“Seen anything you like?”

“Looks like that Olds got a little wet.”

“The fuck it did. Old fart never left the mooring.”

“Whose was it?”

“You know him, Alan French. Senior.”

“Alan’s fucking boat sunk, everyone knows that. How long’d that piece of shit spend on the bottom?”

“Lucky, you find that 307 has touched salt water, I’ll
give
you the fucking thing.”

“Them growths on the flywheel cover, you sure they ain’t barnacles?”

“No, them are just from hanging there in the fog.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five hundred installed, now you ain’t got the use of Clyde’s hoist.”

“Harley, you owe me for that fucking turbo. Piece of shit blew up on me.”

“Bull shit. You ordered that propane rig, I put it in.”

“Two thousand.”

Harley looks at his watch, squints his good eye down the road. He’s blind in the other, the black part’s gone white as a fish.
“Guy’s coming for it in twenty minutes. I promised him over the phone. Didn’t know you was coming in. He gets here, he’s got
it.” He pulls a cigar out of his tool apron and lights it like it’s a fuse and when it’s smoked down the other guy’s going
to show up and buy the 307.

“OK, for Christ sake.”

“I got to be paid now, Lucky. That guy comes in, he’s going to start screaming. I got to be able to tell that cocksucker the
deal is done.”

“I need something else too. Fourteen-inch Hydroslave hauler, good for offshore. You got one?”

“Finest kind.”

“Throw in the Hydroslave,” Lucky says, “we’ll be even.”

“What do you mean, throw it in? For Christ sake, Lunt, this ain’t the Salvation Army, this is a fucking business. The Hydroslave’s
cherry. Out of the box. New, it’s four thousand bucks. For you, because you are an asshole, it’s three.”

“Give you forty-five hundred for the package,” Lucky offers. “Engine, hauler, hydraulics. You put them in.”

“You come down and help me. Just so’s you won’t come back yelling your ass off like you usually do. We dig our own fucking
graves in this world, nobody digs them for us.”

He pulls the rest of Moto’s money out of his pants pocket and hands it over. Harley sticks it in his tool apron without even
looking at it. He throws a screwdriver off towards the block yard and the pit bull screams off to pick it up. “You come around
next Monday good and early, we’ll clean that V-8 up and stick her in that research vessel of yours, see how she runs.”

He drives back up the Riceville Road filling the pickup cab with cigar smoke till he can barely see. The Indians knew what
they were doing, zip the door of the tepee and light up. When he gets to the Carrying Place, where the road slopes down right
next to the water, he stops the truck and looks out through the smoky windows onto the North Atlantic Ocean as if he’s just
bought it off of Harley Webster for forty-five hundred bucks.

Fucking Harley, how can he stay in business making deals like that?

H
ARLEY HUNG ON TO
the
Wooden Nickel
a week longer than he promised, so she’s not ready till September eighteenth. He can’t sleep at all the night before. He
dreams of Clyde Hannaford’s Ram-charger parked in his garage between the Lynx and the ATV, wakes up, swallows some heart pills
with a half shot of 101, then goes back to the same dream. He slips out of Ronette’s bed and walks the wobbling length of
the trailer to the built-in couch on the far end and watches an old NASCAR rerun till almost 2 a.m. Then he turns it off and
walks back down the hall to wake her because it’s time to head out. His head scrapes the dotted soundproofing of the trailer
ceiling and his shoulders brush the fake-birch veneer walls on either side. The floor rocks like a deck. Soon as he wakes
her, she stumbles into the bathroom and kneels down without even closing the door and throws up into the head. She’s a real
fisherman now, seasick on land, cast iron stomach out to sea.

“Quarter past two,” he calls in. “Don’t take all day in there.”

Looks like a winter night outside, clear black sky above with the moon going down over Corey Prentiss’s dog fence and a mist
coming off the road that will mean fog after daybreak, then it will scale up after a couple hours in the sun. She’s out of
the bathroom now, getting her boots and oilskins on. “Going to have to borrow a pair of yours before long,” she says. “Can’t
do the snap on these things.”

He heaves the last six oversize traps onto the bed of the GMC and they’re over in Riceville by ten past three, listening to
Midnight Country all the way. Harley’s not there yet, but the
Wooden Nickel
’s floating proud and high on the float under the dock light, with a note wedged onto his useless radar screen.

1 oldsm engine reblt $ 2500

1 shaft 2’ bronze usd

1 strat pipe exast

clean engine etc tunup

new wood mount shims

hoses instal

1 Hydroslav haulr usd hoses pump instal

$ 3800 PARTS

$ 700 LABOR

$ 4500 PAID CASH

“So can’t I add right,” she says, “or ain’t we supposed to have five thousand left?”

He casts the lines off the float and says, “You sound like the tax auditor. Some other expenses come up, didn’t have nothing
to do with you.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Mystery Man. I been out here every day with you side by side, bad days and good. I’m putting you up in
my house rent-free. I got a right to know what become of the ten thousand, same as you.”

“Why don’t you ease off with your right to know and let me hear what this engine sounds like now we got the new shaft.”

“I’ll give
you
the new shaft,” she says, “if you don’t talk to me about the extra cash. I’m going to be needing some of that myself. I should
say
we.
Me and this kid.
We
are going to need money. If it don’t get invested in the boat it should go to us.”

He throttles her up to 1500 to drown the noise. The Riceville channel beacons are silhouetted by a green predawn glow forming
over the open sea. Beneath the glow, right where they’re heading, the offshore fog bank rises like a wall of ice.

They’re just spotlighting the Riceville entrance buoy when a fifty-foot stern trawler comes out of the dark right at them
smelling of marijuana and illegal groundfish, and pulling a trawl of seagulls through the air. No lights. “They ain’t giving
way,” he says to Ronette, who has gone silent. “And I ain’t neither.”

He flips the spotlight in their eyes and swings to starboard so the two hulls come within pissing distance but don’t hit.
Two silent Riceville bastards in the smoky wheelhouse, dark as Arabs, staring straight ahead while their stern wave breaks
over his bow section. He gives them the finger and yells,
“Assholes!”
but the term is buried in their wake.

“They ain’t going to see your finger in the dark,” Ronette says. “You ought to install a light on the frigging thing.”

“Thought you wasn’t talking.”

Finally they’ve got an exhaust hot enough to light a cigarette. He tamps out a Marlboro and gives her the first hit. She pours
herself a cup of coffee from the thermos. He grunts and she pours him one too. They’ve cleared the channel and are headed
out past the Virgins off to the eastward and the Bishop and the tall white birdshit-covered rock known as the Bishop’s Dick.
The greenish dawn is changing to dark orange over the mist and a cloud of gulls flies off the Bishop to follow them out, though
they keep their distance cause he’s still carrying the bloody wing. Ronette breaks through her anger and throws them a fistful
of redfish guts.

He runs her up to 2200 on the tach. The 307 pulls like a locomotive compared to that little flathead six, she won’t win races
but she’ll carry them twenty-five miles out on the North Atlantic Ocean, and when the day is over she’ll get them home. Even
in the swells the new V-8 with the three-bladed H&H prop is taking them out at a steady fifteen knots on the loran.

Passing the Riceville flasher, the reborn
Wooden Nickel
throws enough spray to wake up the old blackback on the solar panel and send him gliding off into the fog. He locks the helm
and puts on the new Tracy Byrd.

With calves like that you gotta be a cowgirl

They don’t make calves like that in town.

She reaches for the tape control and shuts it off.

“Hey. I’m listening to that.”

“You listen to me for a change. I want to know about the five thousand bucks. We’re going to have bills coming up. I ain’t
insured, you know.”

“You can get a midwife for a couple hundred and get it born right in the trailer. That’s the way Danny Thurston did it. Five
hundred total and the kid was fine.”

“Lucky, we ain’t going to have a midwife and we ain’t going to have it in the mobile home. Dr. Hyman says I’ve got complications,
I’m throwing up too much. You know how much that kind of stuff can run?”

“You kidding? Hospital’s got a mortgage on my heart.”

He turns the throttle up a notch, leaves the cloud of gulls behind in his wake. The new V-8’s smoothing out now, getting acquainted
with the shaft and wheel, cutless bearing’s settling so she doesn’t shake so much. “Smell them Japanese lobsters all the way
from here.”

“About the five thousand,” she yells. “That would be what I’m going to need.”

“I gave it to Kristen. I ain’t like you. I got other mouths to feed.”

“You gave your daughter five thousand bucks?”

“College,” he shouts back. “It ain’t free.”

“You gave
our money
to
her?
Has she been out here with you day after fucking day, so far offshore the radio don’t reach, baiting and setting these huge
traps pregnant to pay off your advance? How
could
you?”

“That money came off of
my
boat. Kristen’s
my
flesh and blood, raised in my own house.”

“
Ex
house. Lucky, I don’t know what that girl told
you,
but she’s driving a brand-new convertible. Reggie Dolliver was hitching a ride, he ain’t got a license, your precious darling
picks him up in a Corvette and drives him to Norumbega with the top down. Now, somebody’s got to be lying. Either she ain’t
telling the truth or you ain’t. Did you give her our five thousand for a car?”

“Wasn’t no Corvette, it was a Mustang. You couldn’t look at a Corvette for six thousand bucks.”

“See? You
did,
you bastard, you spent our kid’s birth money on a
car.
”

He throws the Marlboro butt over the side and throttles her down cause the new shaft is starting to shake some in the seas.
“Ain’t none of your business,” he says. “It’s my fucking family.”

She takes his free hand and holds it against the front of her oil-skins the way she used to in the old days, but lower down.
The new bump in the middle is getting bigger than the other two. “
That’s
your family,” she says. “Right in there. Family is whose bed you’re sleeping in. Family is who took you in when you got thrown
out. Them others is history, same as your old fucking ancestors you’re always yelling about. They’re dead and gone. You get
an impulse to buy something, buy it for us.”

He tries turning the music up again and this time she lets him. She lights one up for herself off the exhaust and leans her
back against his back, looking the opposite way.

Now I’m a guy and she’s my girl and we live on the farm

We spend the day, making hay, out behind the barn

With the V-8 in there, cruising at fifteen knots, the sun’s just a fogbound yellow ball on a horizon that’s only a hundred
yards away. He passes the last of the local Riceville traps with their old-fashioned glass toggles and moves into deep water
so the fishfinder goes blank, eighty, ninety fathoms under the keel, farther than she’ll reach. It’s over an hour before the
sounder comes up to fifty and starts flashing again, meaning they’ve picked up the north end of their new ground. All his
life he’s fished so close to the Orphan Point boats he could hear them take a leak over the side, now he’s twenty miles from
the nearest human being. Life is different out here, big fog-colored birds that probably don’t lay eyes on dry land from birth
to death. He’s got a circle of maybe two hundred feet of visibility on the water, though straight up above there’s a clear
September sky with the day’s first sunlight cracking through. He looks for the Day-Glo lemon buoy, should be shining through
the surface fog right about here, loran’s sounding off, the depth is right, he’s just where he should be. But the buoy’s not.
Nothing but three or four seabirds adrift on a scrap of timber, purplish-gray water far as he can see. He whacks the loran
with the heel of his hand and it blinks off for a second, then reads the same numbers when it comes back on. That first one
was the only buoy he punched in. The rest of them he set on a course south-southwest down the ridge, about a hundred yards
apart. He steams south for a couple minutes while the bottom shoals up to twenty-five fathoms. This is where he set four big
ones close together, but there’s nothing here either.