The Wooden Nickel (12 page)

“Always do.”

“Be sure and don’t hog the moosemeat. Give some to Rhonda. Now that I think of it, it would be healthier for you if you gave
her the whole thing.”

He’s picking up his sternperson deep in her own territory, at the Split Cove wharf. As he follows the markers at half speed
through the tight dredged channel he meets up with a couple of Split Cove boats returning at 5 a.m. from God knows where,
evil-hearted bastards, nothing but dark colors on their hulls. These two are the
Shadow
and the
Night Runner.
The sun shines just as much on Split Cove as Orphan Point, but from their boat names you’d think it was some Eskimo village
in year-round night. Weasely bastards, they can’t catch fish so who knows what the fuck they do. Kyle was a good kid till
he started hanging out with those cocksuckers. Ronette too, she’s probably got something up her sleeve. Nobody’s blameless,
it takes two to deep-six a marriage. Good thing Sarah’s a saint, otherwise he’d be jerking off alone just like old Clyde.

He spots the lemon-and-lime Probe in the parking lot before he sees her on the wharf, she picked a good color for piercing
through the fog. She’s got her orange Grundens and a black seaman’s watch cap forced down over all her chocolate-colored piled-up
hair. She’s also got the christly dog again, which leaps aboard before he’s even up to the float. The instant Ronette steps
over the rail, he turns back into the channel and opens her up a bit, he’ll leave a little wake for the Split Cove lobster
fleet. They’re just climbing aboard now, lazy dipshits, maybe he’ll wash a few over the side. Course every frigging one of
them’s cousins of Ronette. She’s waving and shouting to this and that uncle, they’ve all got big fish-eating Indian dogs on
board so Ginger is pawing the gunwales and yawping like a circus seal. He gives the dog a slap on the ass and says, “Jump,
Ginger, go for it,” but Ronette grabs her collar and holds on like it’s a drowning kid. “What do you mean,” she says, “telling
her to jump off? What if she did? You’d have to go in and get her. You’d be responsible. She’s half Clyde’s, you know.”

“No doubt. Who was the lucky mother?” She kicks the ankle of his trawler boot. He yells, “Christ, we’re all half Clyde’s,”
and right in the narrowest part of the channel, Split Cove boats on every side of him, he puts up the throttle all the way.
The bow spurts up, the stern squats, and the big Michigan prop chews water as the
Wooden Nickel
wipes out four black-hulled boats like they’re in reverse. She throws a twenty-foot-high rooster tail that catches the May-morning
sunrise and rains down a plume of oily Split Cove water on men and dogs alike. They’re all rocking and pumping their middle
fingers and goosing clouds of black smoke out of their pathetic oil-furnace motors in an attempt to catch the swiftest wood-hulled
lobster boat on the coast, being let out for the first time since back in February when she was reamed.

“Bunch of cunts!”
he shouts back over his typhoon wake. He pulls a Marlboro pack from behind the radar, but it’s empty. He flings it into the
propwash and glances up at the speed digits on the loran: twenty-six point two. He’s through the channel and the Split Rock
passage and approaching the Sodom Ledge bell by the time his stern-lady can smuggle a fresh pack out of her yuppie knapsack.
The engine noise forces her to stand on tiptoe and yell into his ear.

“Here, I’ll light if for you, but I don’t want you to talk like that. Them guys are family.”

“Whose family, Ginger’s?”

“Fuck you.”

“Jesus. Clean the airwaves.”

“Another thing,” she shouts. “We’re going to fix up the downstairs room. You got a potentially decent boat but it looks like
shit.”

On the fishfinder Red’s Bank rises up to eight fathoms from a twelve-fathom trough, so he just bites the cap off a Rolling
Rock and follows the sounder curve till the first orange-and-green buoy heaves into sight, then slows her down.

Ronette says, “Good, now we can hear the radio.” She’s got her arm in the hatchway fooling with the dial, trying to get Classic
Country from way over in Vermont cause she likes the good old stuff.

“Ain’t got time to play with the radio. You’re supposed to be sternman, ain’t you? Get back and start stringing bait. We’re
going to have traps busting with lobsters.”

She sticks her tongue out at him but obeys. “Might’s well work for Doris as for you. She’s just about as much fun.”

“Work for Doris, I don’t give a shit. What’s she pay you? Three bucks an hour?”

“Three twenty-five. Plus
tips.
I don’t see many tips on the table out here.”

“This works out, you’ll clear eight, nine bucks an hour. Tax-free. You’d have to work naked to make that off of Doris.”

“Wouldn’t you like
that?
What would you leave? Ten percent, up from your normal five?”

“Christ, I leave you a dollar for a fifty-cent cup of coffee. And that’s with your clothes on.”

He rounds up to gaff the first warp and throw it around the winch. The line’s got weed on it from not being hauled enough,
the stone-ballasted traps are so heavy the boat leans halfway to the gunwale when the strain comes on. Just as he thought,
eight or nine decent ones just in the first two traps.

“Two culls,” Ronette says. “Two breeders. One short.” She throws the short and the breeders over after notching the tails,
puts the culls in, and holds up a nice two-pounder with claws intact. She deftly secures it by one claw as she slips a blue
rubber band around the other, then lets the free claw snap around in the air a bit before she bands it.

“Survival of the fittest,” he says.

“It ain’t, though. He’s the fittest and he’ll get boiled.”

“Well then we’re the fittest.”

“No, the fittest was them two breeder females I threw back. They’re down there on the bottom, free, white, and twenty-one.”
She bands the second claw. “And pregnant.”

“Free, pregnant, and twenty-one.”

“And they’re going to survive.”

He’s got twelve more traps on the stern, which he puts down in four sets of three. Working their way inshore, they haul a
couple more strings off of the boulder-strewn ten-fathom plane west of Red’s Bank, then it’s past eleven and they stop for
a break. He runs the warp forward and loops it once around the bitt for a lunch hook. He’s about to go back to show her the
contents of Sarah’s pail when he catches sight of a big cocksucking bull seal diving on his trapline and goes for the shotgun
instead. This time he’s got his double-barrel, empty, so he has to open the box of green twelve-gauge shells, and by then
it’s gone.

“What the hell, Lucky. What’s the gun for?”

“Son of a bitch raiding the traps. He’ll come up.”

“Who?”

“Big bull seal.”

“Bull seal? You mean a
seal
? You fixing to kill a seal?”

He puts the second shell in and closes the barrel and snaps one hammer back. “Son of a whore’s got to come up before long.
They ain’t got gills.”

Just then the seal surfaces right above an unhauled trap and gives Lucky the royal eye, like he’s saying
I’m going to flip open them trap doors down there and eat every fucking lobster you got.
Arrogant bastards, ugly as a bald-headed dog. He sights down the left barrel straight into its earhole but it goes under.
He’s keeping his aim on the spot where it went down when Ronette steps out in front of the muzzle and stands up on a lobster
crate so the shotgun is pointing just over the bib front of her orange oilskin pants. “Go ahead, shoot,” she says. “Put it
through me first, then that poor animal.”

“Ain’t supposed to step in front of a loaded gun, you’re liable to get hurt.” He moves the gun barrel up and over her shoulder
so it’s pointing at the seal again. She leans her forehead right on the cold steel muzzle and keeps it there. “What the fuck,
Ronette.”

“Don’t fool around with me, Lucky. I ain’t going out with no murderer.”

“It ain’t murder, cause they ain’t human. It’s survival out here. It’s them or us.” He lowers the shotgun.

“They
are
us, Lucky. They’re mammals. They got hair, they nurse their kids same way we do. Besides, I just threw enough lobsters back
for ten seals. The seals don’t care if they have claws on them. They can have the culls.”

“They don’t eat culls. They like them with two claws.”

“Jesus, Lucky, seals can’t count.”

“They like the breeders. Ain’t going to be nothing left for us.”

She’s trying to rub off the two red circles left by the gun barrel on her forehead, makes her look like she’s got two pairs
of eyes. “You’re so full of shit,” she says. “It’s a big ocean, there’s plenty for everyone.”

Not taking the two twelve-gauge shells out of the chamber, he puts the gun back down on the bulkhead rack. “Let’s eat,” he
says. “Sarah’s fixed us some lunch.”

“Oh yeah? What is it? I just brought tuna.”

“Moose.”

“Wild moose?”

“Hell no. Sarah bought it up to the moose farm.”

“You eat it,” she says. “I’ve got my tuna roll.”

“Well, she fixed two. One for you.”

“Your wife fixed me a sandwich? I’ll be god damned. It’s probably poison.”

“You got to say one thing about Sarah,” Lucky says, “she always provides.”

“Always has, always will. That’s an old-fashioned marriage, don’t make
them
anymore.” She pulls the bread apart, looks at the moose tongue slices, neat as a row of shingles. “I hear you got it pretty
cozy at home. You ever strayed off the reservation?”

“Nope.”

“All these years? Don’t tell me you ain’t had the opportunity. You two must be wicked in love.”

“Ain’t seen nothing better.”

“That’s the thing about marriage, makes you walk around with your eyes closed. Course then you’re likely to run into something.”
As she hands Sarah’s sandwich back to him, one of the tongue slices falls on the cockpit floor. Ginger’s off her perch in
an instant and the meat is gone.

They pull up two upside-down bait tubs next to the lobster well for lunch. The mid-May sun is coming out strong, Ronette unsnaps
Reggie’s bib-front oilskins and peels off the gray sweatshirt. She’s there for a minute in just a blue tank top with no sleeves,
the orange bib hanging to her knees. She looks down at herself as if kind of embarrassed, then smiles at Lucky at the same
time that she pulls the oilskin straps over her shoulders and snaps them up. “Ain’t supposed to get too much sun at first.
Melanoma. That’s what my momma has.” She goes into her purplish-pink yuppie backpack and hauls out a hunk of something wrapped
up tight in aluminum foil, then she draws back: “Jesus, will you take a smell of them hands?”

“They smell OK to me, just a little lobster bait. Hey, what happened to your ring?”

She rubs a finger on the pale circle where it used to be. “Took it right back to Fishbein’s where we got it, no questions
asked. Twelve hundred bucks, less thirty percent restocking. Half-carat diamond, fourteen-karat gold.”

“Got to say one thing for Clyde. He does something, he goes all the way.”

“Yeah, well he didn’t do that much going all the way with me.” She unwraps the tuna roll and bites into it. “Tastes like lobster
bait.” She throws the rest of it in the saltwater tank.

“Christ sake, you’ll wreck the balance of nature in there.”

“Eat your frigging mooseburger,” she says, “packed with ten pounds of love from your ever-loving wife, and me with nothing
but a rented trailer and a sub from the convenience store.” She looks pretty sweet like that, red in the face and mad, lips
pursed tight and tears starting in her eyes, it goes nice with the blue tank top and her chest heaving under the orange bib
overalls. She’s lost weight over this divorce everywhere but the tits, so they stick out all the better on her shrinking frame.

Ginger reaches a paw into the live well, drags the floating sandwich to the side and slurps it down, salt water dripping from
her jaws.

“I ain’t got it that good,” he says.

“Oh yeah?” She calms down a bit, sits on her bait tub again, curious. “You ain’t? Everyone thinks you do. Couple of good-looking
kids, nice caring little wife.”

“She ain’t around much. And you seen my kid? Fucking skin-head, hanging out with them Burnt Neck cocksuckers. Nothing but
Indians down there.”

“We got a little Indian blood in Split Cove too.”

“A little’s different. That kid with the earring is a fucking criminal, sure as shit bound for jail and he’ll drag Kyle with
him. Like your cousin Reggie.”

She puts a hand over his on the gray fuel filler pipe between the bait tubs and pats it. “Jail ain’t so bad,” she says. “Maybe
your kid will like it. Reggie learned a trade.”

“He ain’t going to go far building ships in a bottle.”

The way she’s sitting, he can see right down the front of her tank top. She’s got a small tattoo on the top of her left tit,
right over where the heart’s supposed to be. She knows he’s looking. “You’re worse than the customers.” She gives him another
moment, then adjusts the stray strap on her shoulder.

“You got a tattoo.”

“I bet your wife don’t have a tattoo.”

“She don’t,” Lucky says. “But I do.”

“Where?”

“My chest, same as yours.”

She looks intently at his chest like she’s trying to see right through the sweatshirt and orange lobster apron. “What is it?
Your wife’s name?”

“It’s a truck.”

“A
truck?
I never heard of that.”

“I got it over in Vietnam. Everyone in the motor pool got trucks. Mine’s an M-thirty-five six-by-six military troop carrier.
Workhorse of the marines.”

“I thought you’d have it saying Sarah or something.”

“I wasn’t married then,” he says.

“Thought you was born married. Let me see your tattoo. I don’t believe it’s a truck. It’s probably a girl’s butt and you don’t
dare say it.”

“It ain’t a girl’s butt. It’s a truck.”

“You can see mine,” she says. “It’s a sea horse.” She slides the tank top and bra straps to one side and there it is, right
where the hollow under her collarbone starts to swell up and become a tit. His heart stops cold. It’s not going to catch again.
They’ll find him stretched out on the cockpit floor just like his old man, only Ronette Hannaford will be leaning over him
with her shirt half off and her little sea horse breathing the open air.