The Wooden Nickel (25 page)

Now it’s time for race four and the antiques are shouldering each other for a good running start. Travis is up on the cabin
trunk cranking the windshield open to cut resistance, then he settles himself on the stern where he belongs. The procedure
is to follow the pace boat to the start and cross the line all together at fifteen knots, then open her up for a mile and
the first one across the finish line wins. They clock each winner with a radar gun, and at the end of the day, top gun speed
is the boat that gets remembered, whether she wins the free-for-all or not.

He checks out the competition as the other antiques move from their circling approaches into the starting line. The
Jenny L
hails out of Woodpecker Cove up the Tarratine River. The owner’s an old fart that can’t see anymore, but he’s got one of
his grandchildren helping him steer and you can see his old brown wrinkled face through the windshield, proud as piss. He’s
had twelve heart attacks, strokes, cancer, everything they carry up at the Tarratine hospital and they still can’t keep him
off the water. Death doesn’t want him, so he’s going to race another year.

Off to port of the
Jenny L
is the
Peg Leg
out of Riceville, Morris Ashmore, he’s been racing against Lucky all these years. Morris is the only serious competition
in the wood boat class. He’s got a cedar-and-oak downeaster built by the old Cherrylog Boat Shop right on the Canadian border
in Shackle Cove. Morris raced a 501 Dodge hemi last year but it ripped his transmission apart and he failed to finish. Now
he’s running something a bit smaller. Lucky listens intently through the noise of a half-dozen engines: sounds like a Chrysler
440 conversion with a deep bass tone because Morris has tuned the muffler for the race. He can also hear a new Hurth reduction
gear in there and down on the shaft a titanium four-bladed prop. They say Morris hires a diver to go down and sharpen the
prop blades with a rat-tail file. They are the only guys left that give a shit about wooden boats anymore, and as he draws
alongside Morris he gives him the friendly finger and Morris comes back with a thumbs-up. Let the best man win. Morris got
shot up in Vietnam and he’s lobstered all his life with a left leg made of green bronze and hackma-tack. He’s a competitor.
But when he hears the turbo cut in on the
Wooden Nickel
he is going to shit.

The fourth antique in the four-boat field is called
Bottom Dollar,
out of Burnt Neck, and he can see why they called it that, it looks like they raised it off the sea floor just for this race.
One side of the windshield is peppered with bullet holes and the other side has its glass held in with duct tape. The hull
has red streaks bleeding out of the scuppers from the machinery rusting out, the engine is an oil-burning GM 350 rattler that’s
pouring blue smoke out of the stack like a refinery. He’ll give it one minute of race time before that thing swallows a valve
and dies. The driver is a young long-haired Burnt Necker with his shirt off and his girlfriend right beside him with one hand
on his dick, her other hand holding a cigar-size joint you can smell from here. Stiff competition.

The pace boat shepherds them into line and speeds up to twelve knots or so, then gets out of the way and the four antiques
approach the start in pretty good form holding steady at fifteen knots, Morris on his port side and
Bottom Dollar
to the right. Travis is at his elbow with another Rock but he pushes him back. “Get your ass on the stern, Travis, far back
as you can get. Don’t sweat it if you fall in, she’ll go faster without you.” A split second before the line Lucky puts her
up to three-quarters and his whole year of trials is justified the minute that four-bladed prop digs into the water and takes
root. Can’t be anything wrong with your heart if your engine throttles up like that. Way off to port the old blind guy is
already falling behind. To starboard the Burnt Neck kid is yelling
Yahoo
like he’s got a horse under him, his girlfriend’s hunched up behind him with her arm in his pants up to the elbow. Lucky’s
got the Chevy wide open already, he’s pouring the gas into her and he moves ahead. On the other side Morris Ashmore moves
from three-quarters to full throttle and he keeps up with the kid, Lucky a bit behind at the midpoint, not torquing the engine
yet, then a ripping noise comes from the Burnt Neck boat and a spurt of black flaming smoke splits their exhaust open and
it’s just Lucky and Morris as it has often been before. Morris opens the 440 and Lucky can feel the Hurth gearbox vibrating
right through the water. He stays ahead. Lucky’s at 3600 rpm, the loran says twenty-four knots but it can’t keep up, he knows
from the green water surging over the bow they’re breaking twenty-nine. The turbocharger howls as the tach climbs right to
3900, and without even overheating he buries Morris Ashmore in a plume of spray.

Travis comes forward with a Rock and he chugs it in a single swallow while Hallett’s voice comes over a hundred radios at
once, all at different distances so it sounds like the resonant voice of God.
LUCAS LUNT, BOAT WOODEN NICKEL, ANTIQUE CATEGORY, THIRTY-FOUR POINT FOUR
.
Morris Ashmore gives him the finger and revs his Chrysler a few times to make sure it still works. He can see him mumbling
Next year,
but he can’t hear the words. Who the fuck knows about next year? Maybe he’ll grow his leg back like a lobster. Maybe we’ll
all be dead.

He idles off the turbo and checks the Chevy to see if she survived the race. It’s overtorquing the valve shafts, he can hear
one of the valves hit just a cunt hair off the beat. He won, though, so he will get to race again.

Race five is the powder puffs, women taking their husbands’ and boyfriends’ boats, for the most part, though these days some
of them drive their own. Mostly the guys stay on board back in the stern so they can jump in if there’s any trouble. These
are slow races, the girls don’t want to eat shit if they burn the engines out. Lucky usually takes his lunch break during
the powder-puff race, now he’s cruising behind the starting line, checking to see who’s letting their wives race this year.
He can’t quite make out the names on the stern, but every boat carries its trap colors on the wheelhouse roof and Lucky knows
most of them by sight. There’s a Split Cove boat, Jason Astbury’s
Red Dog,
it’s a Walker Johnson 33 with a Yanmar diesel and a tuna bridge. That’s a strong motor but they’re carrying too much superstructure
to go fast. Jason’s got a young girl he wants to fuck so he’s letting her drive the boat. Art Pettingill’s old yellow
Bonanza
is in this race, new Lugger diesel’s pissing out brown fumes cause it’s not yet broken in. Art and Clayton are both in the
stern to balance off Big Alma at the wheel, the three of them set the
Bonanza
down a foot below her lines like an oil barge. There’s a full field in this race, he sees the
Big Mack
out of Norumbega with a whole family aboard, kids and all, and a Volvo-Penta Walker Johnson called
Hog Heaven,
this one out of Three Witch Cove.

At that point he grabs Travis’s arm and says, “That’s
them.
” One of the boats crossing his bow to start the powder-puff event is carrying the zebra-striped buoy right up on its roof.
The boat is a Wing Brothers Goldwing 29, fast little glasser, brand-new, running what sounds like a 230 Isuzu diesel, no smoke
at all visible, dual vertical stacks tuned like a couple of organ pipes. Unlike the other powderpuff boats, she’s not carrying
a man aboard. He gooses the
Wooden Nickel
a bit and comes up close behind her so he can read the name. Doesn’t look much like a woman from behind, but it has to be
if she’s in the powder-puff, unless they’re using morphodites like the Chinese Olympic team.

Across the Goldwing’s stern it reads

Shag Island

Lucky says, “Who the christly shit is driving that island boat?” Most of the powder puffs aren’t being pushed too fast but
they’re full race vessels making a lot of noise and wake. The
Bonanza
is wallowing back under the weight of its ownership, but the
Red Dog
and the
Bad Pussy
are up there neck and neck, the
Pussy
showing that zebra buoy on the roof. “
That
one,” Lucky repeats, “that’s the cocksucking striped buoy that was on our ledge.”

Before Travis can answer, the
Bad Pussy
is over the line and the powder-puff race is hers.

They tie up alongside the
Pisscat
to resupply. As Travis gropes into his cooler for a couple more Rolling Rocks, the
Bad Pussy
’s speed comes over everyone’s radio at thirty-four point six. “Ain’t bad,” Travis says. “Art and Alma must have done around
fifteen.”

“Ain’t bad,” he echoes, “for a cunt that doesn’t know where she’s supposed to set her traps.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“See that fucking black-and-white-striped buoy she’s carrying? That’s the cocksucker I found on Toothpick Shoal.”

“Know who that is, Lucky? That’s Priscilla Shaver, you slammed her brother the other night at the RoundUp. You met her. You
don’t even remember, numb peckerhead, you was drunker than shit.”

“Sweet fucking Jesus, Travis. I thought we made it clear to them cocksuckers not to move in.”

“I knew they was coming,” Travis says, “just a matter of time. You cut their warp off?”

“I gave them a bullet and a rubber and set it back down.”

Travis opens another Rolling Rock. “Tell you my opinion,” he says. “Them fuckers are here to stay, like it or not.”

“That’s cause they’re counting on chickenshits like you.”

“This ain’t the old days, Lucky. Things change. Them Gloucester son of a whores come up and vacuum their christly territory
out there, what are they supposed to do?”

“What are you, their fucking PR agent?”

“No, Lucky. I’m a realist. So they don’t set right on Toothpick Shoal. Maybe they’ll set half a mile out. There’s a shitload
of fucking lobsters out there. Nobody’s starving at Orphan Point.”

“Nobody’s starving on Shag Island either. That bitch has a brand-new Eye-zoo-zoo diesel, brand-new Wing Brothers boat. Hundred
fifty thousand right up front. That ain’t exactly the face of poverty. Greedy fucks, why should they need more?” He looks
hard at Travis Hammond’s narrow-set eyes and mustached little mouth, trying to see where he’s coming from on this, but it’s
the same old hollow face that got a dick shoved into it back in the ninth grade. People don’t change. “I ain’t racing with
you, Travis.”

He puts his half-drunk beer on Travis’s washboard, gets into the
Wooden Nickel
and casts off by himself. Stoneport’s the one race they let you run solo, as long as you have a kill switch so your boat
won’t keep going if you flip off.

He can’t go forward cause they’re running another race and there’s six high-cube diesels pissing right towards him, neck and
neck. He backs up behind the spectator boats, wheels around, and cruises seaward for a minute; then he remembers he’s got
another race coming, the class winners’ runoff, and the
Bad Pussy
’s going to be there too.

They run the last race in two heats. The winners of the slow and small classes start off first. Antiques, powder puffs, one-cylinder
diesels, and sterndrives. Then the big glass gas and diesels finish the day, including the winner of the first runoff. He’d
like to save his nuclear weapons for the second heat, but with the
Bad Pussy
running thirty-four point six he’ll need to feed the propane to her in the first. With his turbo breathing pure gas he’ll
swamp that zebra-striped witch and join the serious racers for part two. That should end the antique category once and for
all and get the wooden boats back in contention where they belong.

He has one quick second thought as he recalls for a moment the look on Harley Webster’s face when he put the propane fitting
in, then he thinks:
That’s old age talking, don’t pay no attention.
Harley used to burn nitro but now he’s an old fart with a Taurus who guzzles Poland Spring water all day long. He digs the
five-pound propane canister out of the life jacket box and screws the propane hose to the turbo intake so this time when that
turbocharger calls for air it’s going to find itself breathing LP gas. Surprise, surprise.

Six boats come into line at fifteen knots, including a fast little Volvo sterndrive that’s up to speed and planing right away.
On the other side he sees the Shaver woman, size of a cow moose, with a blue bandanna around her head, a cigarette in her
teeth, and a whiskey bottle in the binocular rack next to her wheel. Jesus H. Christ, she won’t even look his way. She’s swift
too. A half-second before the line she redlines the Isuzu, her stern drops, a tongue of purple smoke flares from each stack.
She pulls ahead and goes for the Volvo stern-drive in the starboard lane. Lucky’s turbo is screeching since it can’t get any
air from the screwed-in valve. Fuck it, you only live once, and some bastards don’t even get to do that. He reaches down with
his left hand and opens the propane valve and there’s an instant smell of gas, his Chevy howls like an F-16, the tach goes
up over the 5000 point and snaps off its needle at the pin. He blows past the stern of the
Bad Pussy
and buries that blubber-headed whore with the wake of an aircraft carrier, thirty-six knots on the loran and he’s only at
the halfway point. Off course to port he hears Stevie Latete blowing the dragger’s horn to speed him on. He’s in sight of
the finish line when down in the cuddy there’s a noise like a blown tire and a spurt of yellow flame out of the turbocharger,
then the whole engine box fills up with black-and-orange fire like a volcano. Sweet fucking Jesus, he thinks, why
now?
Why me? There’s less than a hundred yards to go. He doesn’t give a shit, he throttles up to take her through the finish line
on fire but the propane’s not making her go faster, it’s just burning in the cabin air. He backs down the throttle and dives
for the fuel valves. He grabs the big old gas-fire extinguisher beside the helm and pulls the pin and throws that son of a
whore down there like it’s a grenade, while meanwhile the boat slows so fast the stern wave comes over the transom and everything’s
fucking drenched. That helps. The fire extinguisher has not been inspected since 1985, it could go in there and explode like
everything else, but it does what it’s supposed to do and the cuddy fills with brown steaming foam and the flames turn to
black smoke that coats his lungs like boiling creosote.