The Wooden Nickel (41 page)

Moto rolls Curtis Landry aside on the office chair and sticks his little brown hand into the desk drawer, pulls out a pocket
calculator and pokes some numbers in. “You are owing me ten thousand dollar.”

“Less the two we brought in.”

“I am a poor man much like yourself. One poor man cannot cally another on his back.”

“I need some cash before I can pay you off. I got a heart condition. I got pills to buy. I got a kid coming. Half my fucking
traps got destroyed out there.”

“You are in trouble with neighbor again, even thirty mile out?”

Curtis, the old con, his eyes light up at the sound of violence. “I hear you take care of yourself out there.”

“Relax, Curtis. It ain’t a fight. Fucking whale ripped through a trapline. Cocksucker had a piece of my warp right around
his tail.”

Moto pulls a fistful of folded bills out of his pocket and rolls off five brand-new hundreds on the office desk, the ones
with the big heads that look like counterfeits, Curtis drools over the sight of them. Moto will be lucky if his dockboy doesn’t
kill him someday and stuff him in the lobster car.

“Remainder will be on company account.”

“I’m going to need more of them big traps,” he says. “Must of lost fifteen of them things.”

“Best perhaps not set them in whaling zone.”

“How the fuck am I supposed to know? It’s the Atlantic Ocean out there, there ain’t no yellow signs with whales on them. Them
fuckers are probably going after the lobsters anyway, they’d eat a few dozen at once, no different from a fucking seal.”

Just then Ronette shows up in the office. There’s only one chair and Moto pushes Curtis out of it saying, “Up, up,” and rolls
it in front of her like a gentleman so she can have a seat. Moto is about the same height as Curtis but Curtis would outweigh
three of him. Both of them standing tall come up to somewhere in the middle of Lucky’s chest, like that guy Dolliver and the
midgets.

Moto starts some water on a hot plate and gets out a box with four little black teacups, no handles. Pretty soon the water’s
steaming and he throws a green tea bag into each cup. Curtis’s cup looks like a thimble in his thick fingers. Ronette holds
her cup on the knee of her orange oilpants and says, “Mr. Moto, I hear your boat price is going down.”

“I am truly sorry,” Moto answers. “Eight dollar not possible.”

“Well, you lent Lucky all that money saying the price would be eight, now how are we supposed to catch up at five-fifty a
pound?”

“Six,” Moto says.

With her sitting at the desk like that, everyone else standing, she looks more like the boss than Moto does. Ronette spent
time as a dealer’s wife, she knows what’s going on. “Clyde Hannaford would never of let one of his fishermen get in debt like
that.”

Moto brightens up and says, “Oh yes, you are Mrs. Hannaford. Also seafood buyer.”

“I
was
Mrs. Hannaford. I ain’t no more.”

“You now Mrs. Runt?”

“You kidding? Lucky ain’t even got his lawyer yet.”

“Excellent. I am not mallied either.” Moto slides up closer to her with more hot water for the cup balanced on her knee. Sitting
there in the office chair with the torn T-shirt sliding off under her apron and her hair frizzed up from the salt air, Ronette’s
looking just like a page off of the Snap-Lok Tool calendar in Harley’s garage. The shirt’s getting so tight on her, the head
of her little sea horse peeks over the ripped neck. The orange oilskins bunch up so her belly doesn’t show. Curtis is drooling
into his tea, his ankle radio’s lighting up the switchboard back in the halfway house.

On the desk there’s a big color photo in a wooden frame, it’s Moto and Wilfred Beal grinning on some Florida fish pier with
a thousand-pound marlin hoisted up between them. Moto reaches under the photo and pulls a brown bottle out of the desk drawer
and offers her a hit of it in the tea. It’s got a red label with big yellow Chinese letters. “Sockey,” he says. “You try.”

“Sure.”

Lucky sticks his cup out for a hit. Stuff’s got an odor like acetone, but it does wipe out the dulse taste of the tea. Moto
puts it away without offering it to Curtis, probably just as well. Short guys are mean drunks, every one of them.

Ronette says, “Six bucks a pound ain’t enough for what we got to go through to get them things. Me and Lucas need more money.
We’re planning a family. We got to pay you off too, Mr. Moto. It don’t feel good to have a debt around our neck.”

Moto looks down at her neck like he can see the debt hanging between her tits and takes a sip of his green seaweed tea. “For
you only, six-fifty a pound.”

Ronette says, “We got to have more traps and line too. He tell you what happened to the gear? We think a whale wrecked it.”

Curtis says, “What if the same thing happens again? You going to keep coming back for more loans? Mr. Moto ain’t made of cash,
you know.”

Lucky drains the rest of his acetone seaweed tea and stretches his hand towards Moto for a refill. “Happens again, I’ll kill
the son of a whore.”

Curtis jabs his elbow against Moto’s and giggles like a girl. Rugged as he appears, he probably took it from behind a few
times in the slammer. Don’t care how big you are, somebody’s always bigger. “Hee hee, I’d like to see that,” Curtis says.
“How you planning to kill a fucking whale? You planning to use a harpoon?”

“Shoot him. Whales got a heart, ain’t they? They got blood. They got to come up for air. Three-hundred Savage, maybe a three
fifty-seven magnum, same as we use for moose. Shoot the cocksucker in the right place, he’s going to bleed to death just like
anybody else.” He looks at his favorite dockboy. “Ain’t that right, Curtis?”

Curtis puts his cup down next to the hot plate and steps back away from Moto and starts spreading his claws again like he’s
about to come on even though the boss is there. Lucky’s heart skips and speeds up, then settles in. He sets the tea down and
spreads his feet apart, ready.

Ronette turns to Curtis, puts a hand on his arm to settle him down — “Curtis, he didn’t mean nothing, he’s just
like
that” — and the short fat fingers pick up the tea again.

Moto pays no attention. He’s interested in the whale. “Just like red Indians,” he says.

“That’s right. The Indians go out in the Pacific Ocean and shoot the bastards out of a war canoe.”

Ronette’s having a tea refill with another splash of sockey, like she’s been a fish broker all her life. She leans her head
against Moto’s elbow and laughs. “Listen up, Lucky. We bring one of them whales in, we got ourselves paid off. One fish.”

“OK, I pay seven.” Moto laughs back. “No need to kill whale.” Curtis grumbles, “Too god damn much.”

“And I go five thousand more for gear,” Moto volunteers. “You are ten thousand already, less two as you say. Thirteen thousand
total. OK? No more. That is big debt for a small boat.”

Curtis giggles again. “Supposing you was to take a shot at one of them son of a whores and you managed to kill him. How you
planning to bring him in? You going to tow him into Whistle Creek? You can’t drag a peeled eel through that slit.”

Now Moto’s got something up on the computer screen, he’s checking his prices. “Whalemeat down too,” he says. “Only ninety
yen a pound. Seventy-five cent.”

“That takes care of
that
dumb idea,” Ronette says. “Now let’s get the boat cleaned up and get the hell home.”

“Wait a minute,” Lucky says. “They run a half ton a foot, that’s what I hear. That one’s a short little bastard, maybe a boat
length, say thirty-five feet, that’s at least fifteen tons, come around twenty-four thousand bucks, same as my operation.
Tow her in at night, all’s you have to do is come in here with a big truck with a winch in the trailer box. We’ll drag that
sucker up the boat ramp, Curtis will chop her up, and it’s off to Tokyo. No more fucked-up traps, and we’re paid off. Hey
Mr. Moto, can you get a ten-ton refrigerated truck down here?”

“You stick to robsters,” Moto says. “Let Indian tribe catch whale.”

The brown bottle empty, Moto gives them a ride back to where they left the truck in Riceville. He stuffs Curtis behind the
wire in back along with the doberman and puts Ronette between him and Lucky on the pull-down center seat. His stereo’s on
Communist Public Radio playing the kind of music Kristen likes.

“Crassical,” Moto says.

Ronette says, “Mind if we shut it off? It’s kind of screechy on the ears.”

“Anything you rike, Lonette.”

She hits the seek button. In a minute she’s got Real Country 103 and Vince Gill singing “When I Call Your Name.”

I rushed home from work

Like I always do

I spent my whole day

Just thinking of you

When I walked through the front door

My whole life was changed

Cause nobody answered

When I called your name

“That’s what we call classic around here,” she says. “Mind if I smoke? I ain’t supposed to but it’s been a long hard day.”

She pulls out a Marlboro and draws the ashtray out. A little spotlight comes on over the tray and the lighter. The ashtray
still has the factory seal across it, never been used once. The minute she lights it there’s the click of a Bic in the backseat,
either it’s the doberman or Curtis lighting up. Moto says, “Curtis,” in a little whisper and you can hear him snuff out the
butt he’s just started, while up front Ronette is puffing like a smokehouse, pregnant or not, eyes closed, thinking about
Vince Gill.

Back in his own truck driving home from Riceville, she’s fishing around in the glove box for the Vince Gill tape. “Relax,”
he says. “You got it back home.”

The instant they get in the trailer door and she peels her oilskins off, she’s going through the pile of cassettes looking
for Vince before the moment’s lost. She runs around pulling the shades to keep the sunset out, then in the dark living room
between the TV and the built-in, she circles her arms around his waist and tries to join them around his back but as always
they don’t quite reach. She closes her eyes, rests her nose beneath his armpit, and waltzes him in a slow circle over the
wall-to-wall rug.

The note on the table

That told me good-bye

Said you’ve grown weary

Of living a lie

“Taking up where we left off,” she says.

“Unless something comes up between us.”

“Might of come up already,” she says, pushing her hips in tight. “Sure you ain’t hiding a lobster buoy in there?”

“Just the handle. The big part’s underwater.”

This time she rides on top of him like a kid on a Wal-Mart horse. He’s hanging onto her waist so she won’t throw herself off
onto the trailer floor, at the same time he’s watching a ceiling joint rock back and forth like the walls are about to come
down, only Ronette beats them to it and grabs his chest hair with both hands, then screams and crashes down on him like old
Clyde’s arrived in his big Dodge Ram and shot her in the back through the trailer window.

They’re lying there with a clamshell ashtray on the bed between them. One tit’s pointing right up in the air, the other’s
drooped over a bit to the side and staring at him soft and quiet as a scallop. Her face is smeared up like she’s been crying.
That sometimes happens with Ronette, she’ll come off like a stomp rocket, the next moment she’ll start sniffling and her big
kelp-colored eyes will fill with tears.

She takes her can of Miller High Life off the nightstand and balances it on her growing belly that’s just starting to push
up higher than her hips. “Just a little hill now,” she says.

“That’ll be a mountain before Christmas. You’ll have toboggans going down the side of it.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I been to the doctor.”

“Yeah?”

“I told you, Lucky. I got a complication. Dr. Hyman sent me to Dr. Sempert in Tarratine, he’s such a geek, he says how much
it’s going to cost, I tell him I ain’t married, I got no insurance. You know what he says when I tell him that?” She lifts
the can off her belly and takes a slug, then pours a little on the end of her tit so the nipple stands up curious as an earthworm
in the rain.

Lucky doesn’t answer, just gets his own Miller’s off of the trailer floor and takes a sip.

“He says, ‘You might want to consider a termination.’ That’s the way he put it,
termination.
You’d think he was Arnold F. Schwarzenegger.”

“Tad late for that,” Lucky says.

“That’s what I tell him. I’m past four months. ‘Not too late,’ he says. ‘If I recommend it, they do it.’”

He stands right up on the trailer floor beside the bed. “No wonder they shoot them partial-birth bastards,” he says. “Reggie
Dolliver said he seen them on the Internet, whole page of abortion butchers, names and addresses, targets on their heads.”

“No, wait, Lucky. I been thinking. Dr. Sempert ain’t all bad. Maybe he’s right. Look at us, we ain’t got a pot to piss in.
This ain’t even our trailer. My uncle Vince, he used to keep this for when Aunt Rosie threw him out. They start fighting again,
Vince is coming back in here, then what the hell are we going to do?”

“There’s room. He gets the sofa down the other end.”

“Come on, Lucky. Get serious. That’s where the
baby’s
going to sleep. And you got a heart condition. You got any life insurance? What if something happens to you? You don’t even
have a house no more.”

“I got the
Wooden Nickel.
”

“Free and clear?”

“She ain’t exactly.”

“See what I mean? I got complications, we’re going to have more bills. It ain’t going to be like you, telling the doctors
‘I got my heart, so fuck off.’ We got to pay them or I can’t take the baby in when it gets sick.”

The Vince Gill tape has run out by now and it’s real quiet. Outside the trailer he can hear the TV going over in Sonny Phair’s
little shack next door. Sonny’s listening to the ball game, Sox and Toronto. Lucky tries to catch the score, then an evening
wind rises and the aluminum trailer roof starts rattling and drowns it out.