The Wooden Nickel (21 page)

“And also, we have a date to talk about your sternperson.”

“Ain’t no time to bring it up, right after Kristen’s graduation.”

“You made a promise, Lucas. She’s all graduated, now we have to talk about ourselves.”

He’s glancing around to see if maybe their Chinese waitress is going to float across the parking lot with another Fog Cutter
on a cocktail tray. Then he’s looking at his feet in their funeral shoes, head down, a kid that forgot his homework in front
of the teacher. “I ain’t found anyone else.”

“Lucas, have you been
trying?
That’s what the two weeks were for. You should have hired someone by now. Have you been asking around? Did you put your ad
back up? I mean, I haven’t mentioned it because I trusted that you’d get it done.”

“Can’t find no one. If they ain’t out lobstering, they’re working at the boatyard. Bunny Whelan’s giving them Blue Cross and
a dental plan.”

“Lucas, this has been embarrassing and humiliating beyond belief. I have had lifelong friends avoid me in town. People hear
things, and they talk. And this spring what they are talking about is the Hannaford girl and her husband, and although no
one would ever say it to my face, I’m sure they’re also talking about the time she spends with you.”

This conversation is rapidly sobering him up. He’s ready to drive. He wants nothing more than to take himself right home and
sit down in his own chair and watch Ricky Craven in the NASCAR Pepsi 400 on TNT. “It ain’t that easy,” he says.

“I understand your sympathy for someone you’ve been working with all these weeks, but Rhonda Hannaford will not be allowed
to starve. She has a job, Doris Twitchell treats her like a daughter, she has the whole Astbury clan over there, she’s young
and attractive. Lobster fishing is a dead end for her, Lucas. It’s not like a young boy going out sternman, saving for his
own boat. I don’t see why you find it so difficult. You might well be doing her a favor.”

He pauses, then blurts it out. “She’s going to have a kid. That’s why.”

“Well, she’s a married woman. She’s got a right to be pregnant. Maybe this will settle her down.”

“Maybe it will. Only she says it ain’t Clyde’s.”

“What do you mean, not Clyde’s?”

“You figure it out. It ain’t Clyde’s.”

“Lucas, you’re not trying to tell me you’re in trouble with Rhonda Hannaford? The woman’s not even divorced yet. Not to mention
you.
A man who has two legitimate children of his own.”

“That’s what she says.”

For a moment she just stares at him through the round librarian glasses that give her eyes an underwater look. She’s got her
face pointed up, of course, there’s half a foot difference in height, but to Lucky it feels like it’s his mother and she’s
looking down. She takes his two huge hands while she asks him a question. “Lucas, whatever happened to us?” She doesn’t even
wait for an answer. She lets go of his hands, slides in the driver’s seat and slams the door. She pokes the lock shut and
collapses with her face on the steering wheel. He looks in the windshield to see if she’s crying but it’s too dark to make
out. He goes around to her passenger door but it’s locked too.

“I’m sorry,” he says through the safety glass. “It wasn’t nothing I ever planned.”

She just stays there with her face in the wheel dish like she’s been in a head-on collision and she’s dead. He stands over
her car till he feels cold and foolish, and she still doesn’t move. She’s like some kind of a snail that’s sucked itself inside,
little muscle of snailmeat tightened in her coil of shell. He kicks her left front tire but she doesn’t move. Her hands are
on the bottom of the wheel, her face squashed up against the hub.

He thinks he might chain onto her and tow her home, but he couldn’t get her into neutral and it would wreck her transmission,
same as the pickup. He climbs into the cab and starts the engine up and waits. The radio’s playing Deana Carter, “Did I Shave
My Legs for This?”

Well, it’s perfectly clear, between thex TV and the beer

I won’t get so much as a kiss

He’s been married to Sarah Peek for twenty-one years. He knows she’s capable of waiting in that position all night until he
leaves. It’s happened a couple of times before, once when her mom died, once for no reason at all back when Kyle was in diapers.
She went to bed in the daytime and curled up tighter than a boiled shrimp and the county nurse had to give her a shot to get
her uncoiled again. No permanent damage, and life went on. But she never curled up in a parking lot like this, and he doesn’t
know what to do. Well, he’s the root cause of it, he figures. If he disappears she’ll straighten herself out and drive on
home.

He keeps his headlights low and carefully navigates the nine foggy miles to Orphan Point. He’s tired and he’d like nothing
more than to park himself in front of the races with a beer, just like the song. But if she sees the truck in the driveway
she may fold up again. They’ve got a big-screen TV down at the RoundUp, so he keeps on going and pretty soon he’s sitting
under the steer head clearing away the Fog Cutters with a Rolling Rock. He’s just finished persuading Wallace the bartender
to switch to the NASCAR races when in walks Travis Hammond with two or three huge bastards in oilskins and trawler boots.
Travis is a scrawny dark-haired guy with a black little Hitler mustache and the biggest god damn truck you ever saw, an F-350
with car-crusher mudders and a two-foot lift, it’s a wonder he can even reach the pedals. He was a couple of years behind
at Orphan Point High, just coming in ninth grade when Lucky dropped out. One night they were all getting drunk and pissing
on tires in the junkyard behind the old Ford garage, there was Howard and Lonnie Gross and the Jenks brothers that were a
couple of years older, and all of a sudden one of the Jenks boys told Travis Hammond to kneel down and suck his dick. Just
like that. The Jenks brothers held him down one after the other and he blew them both. Later on one of them got fucked up
in Vietnam and the other tried to kill somebody in prison and got life without parole. Thirty years and that’s what he thinks
of when he sees Travis Hammond.
Kneel down and suck it.
Nobody paid much attention to him after that.

The guys with him are not exactly familiar, but not strangers either. They walk like they’ve never been on land. They come
past the bar surrounding little Travis Hammond like bodyguards, pass the band and the dance floor, and take a table near the
blind stuffed horse head on the far side of the room.

He asks Wallace the bartender, “Who the fuck’s Travis got with him?”

“Got me. Some of them Shag Islanders don’t come to the mainland but every four or five years, get their teeth pulled and get
laid and it’s back to sea.”

Tonight’s Montana Night at the RoundUp so they’ve got a live country band, the Sundowners, big banner behind them: the blue
grass boys from athol, mass. He takes a look over at the dance floor, which is mostly full of old-timers waltzing their wives
in full western outfits with cowboy boots and string ties. They’re playing a scaggy mutation of Marty Stuart’s “Burn Me Down”
when Travis Hammond spies him staring at the future and shouts across the dance floor, “Hey Lunt, come over and join us before
you get yourself in trouble.” He’s got no choice but to take his Rolling Rock over and sit down.

“Band sucks,” he says.

“That’s right,” Travis Hammond says. “That’s why we’re sitting over here. Hey, how come you’re solo? I thought you had women
up the ass.”

“That’s exactly where they are. They ain’t much use up there either.”

“Know what you mean,” Travis Hammond replies. “Know what you mean.”

Meanwhile the three fishermen with him are drinking shots and beers as fast as they can put them down. Even to Lucky’s seahardened
nostrils their clothes stink of herring and diesel fuel, and one of them’s talking about blowing an 800-horsepower Caterpillar
engine just out of the crate. “Son of a whore cracked open like an oyster. I sunk her for a skiff mooring.”

A second one turns to Lucky and says, “Don’t I know you from someplace?” He’s a big black-bearded guy bald as a dick on top
with his long gray-black side-hairs pulled into a ponytail in back.

Lucky says, “You ain’t a Trott, are you? Thought you was all Trotts out there.”

“No, we ain’t Trotts.” The three of them grin at each other and laugh. “We’re Shavers, the Trotts is up to the north end.”

“You ain’t married into them, living out there all them years?”

“Nobody’d marry a Trott woman, they’re too fucking ugly.”

The black-bearded one does look familiar, he’s been at the lobster boat races, though he never wins. Small boat, big diesel,
but he’s afraid to let it out. “You was at Summer Harbor last year, wasn’t you?” Lucky recalls. “You had that black Goldwing
that jumped the gun.”

“How about you, you still running that Model T?”

“Fourth place, gas unlimited,” Lucky reminds them. “Swiftest wooden boat in the race.”

The guy with the sunken Caterpillar is a big orange-bearded fisherman with one wide brown spade of a tooth in his upper jaw.
He must have had a good haul, because he buys Lucky what they’re all drinking: shot of Wild Turkey and a Rolling Rock, it
settles down smooth on top of the Fog Cutters. “Thanks,” he says. “You guys come to the mainland for dental work?”

“No. We come in to make a bank deposit and get some local pussy, if you don’t mind, then we’re heading back. You fellows got
any spare daughters?”

“That ain’t what I heard,” Lucky says. “I heard you boys wasn’t much interested in women.”

The orange-bearded one holds up a middle finger that’s just a one-inch stump, a big raw scar on the end that looks like he
sewed it up himself with his other hand. “I heard you was interested in this.”

“Seriously boys, I hope you’re coming in for the races next month. We always enjoy watching you get towed back home.”

Travis Hammond says, “These guys was saying the lobsters out their way is getting scarce.”

“No fucking wonder,” Lucky says. “Greedy bastards fishing a thousand traps apiece, you caught everything on the bottom, now
you’re whining they’re gone. You might try giving them a rest, we’ll sell you some starters, you can let the stock build up.”

The black-bearded guy wears a studded Hells Angels vest over a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a tattoo with the
head of a pit bull in a black star. He has so many spaces between his teeth his mouth looks like a piano. He throws back his
shot and looks at Travis first and then Lucky. “We was thinking we might want to expand our territory a bit.”

“Well,” Lucky tells him, “you got three thousand fucking miles of clear water the other side of you. Go for it.”

“They ain’t no keepers that side of us. You know it and we know it. It’s too fucking deep. Course that don’t stop them Taxachusetts
cocksuckers coming up and dragging it clean. We was figuring we might move inshore a bit. Heard you guys got more lobsters
than you can handle, ain’t that so, Travis?”

Travis takes a sip from his Wild Turkey and a slosh of Rolling Rock. He looks very serious, which he should be, because these
guys are basically asking if he and Lucky would like to bend over and get fucked. Just like ninth grade. “We got a lot of
pressure,” Travis explains. “We got Split Cove on one side and them Tarratine River bastards on the other. We’re squeezed
bad as you.”

The third of the huge Shag Island figures turns out to be a woman, at least he thinks so since they’re calling her “Priscilla.”
Maybe she’s a Shaver too, she’s got the size and shape. She must weigh in at one-ninety, she’s got an anatomically correct
heart tattoo on her bicep with blue sliced-off arteries coming out of it, black pirate scarf around her forehead, on her chin
a quarter-inch of kinky purplish beard the color of dulse on a stone, and now she’s addressing Lucky in a low chain-smoking
female voice. “Think of it, sugar, all them boats fishing off of this point, you ain’t even going to notice a couple more.”

Lucky throws back the rest of his Wild Turkey and looks the meanest one of these bastards right in the eye, the bald piano-toothed
one, and says, “There was a guy out of Stoneport, he set a couple traps on Toothpick Ledge back when my old man fished it.
Next day they come out to haul, they found four boats waiting for them with a dozen men. Last we seen of them son of a whores.”

The black-bearded guy says, “Them was the old days. Things has got a bit more flexible now. It ain’t so fucking uptight anymore.
People ease off, they get along. Them territory lines ain’t written in stone.”

“Can’t write in water.” The big female laughs. “The ink don’t take.”

Then Travis is craning his neck to see past Lucky in the direction of the band and the bar. He looks like he’s trying to get
more drinks, then he says, “Hey Lucky, ain’t that your boy over there? Ain’t none of my business, but I can’t see why he hangs
out with them fucking retards over to Burnt Neck.”

“He ain’t in here,” Lucky says, “he ain’t even twenty-one. Anyway, I ain’t in charge of his life.”

“You’re his old man, ain’t you? That fucking Swan kid, his old lady is a whore. I heard she sucked off a whole Halifax trawler
crew after the Stoneport races. One after the other. Ten bucks apiece, Canadian.”

Sure enough, it’s his son Kyle and his Burnt Neck buddy, the two of them in sweatshirts with the arms razored off, showing
off their steroid biceps and their tattoos. He doesn’t want to run into them, he’s had enough fucking family for one night.

“I don’t know him,” Lucky says.

Travis Hammond says, “I heard you two wasn’t getting on.”

Behind Kyle and Darrell a dozen geezers are waltzing around with their arms around their partners, old dried-out bodies hanging
on each other like stuffed animals, nothing inside them anymore but Dunkin Donuts and All-Bran. They all used to be fishermen,
now they can’t even find the hook, death’s climbing up their stern pipe but they hang on to their wives and waltz away. They
come from Orphan Point and Split Cove, Burnt Neck and Riceville and the closer islands like Hadley’s and Cleftstone, and some
from as far off as Norumbega and Stoneport, which was a dry town till the last decade and they still don’t have a dancing
spot except for the public pier. The old men look like they’ve been flaked down and shrunk, big eyes stare over the shoulders
of their wives at something nobody else can see.