The Wooden Nickel (40 page)

“Lucky, I think they’re protected everywhere.”

“They ain’t protected from me.”

They steam due west to the southwest tip of the ledge, where there’s a string of undamaged traps that produce another eight
big ones for the saltwater well. Plus the biggest starfish he’s ever seen, clinging on to the outside as they brought it up.
He holds the star up by the arms, pretty near as far as he can stretch. Ronette says, “I never seen one that huge.”

“They feed on nuclear waste, that’s what Wallace Eaton heard. You ain’t going to want to be around when them bastards start
coming inshore.”

She rears right up on the washboard where Ginger used to sit. “Jesus, Lucky, don’t let it get near the baby. Throw it
back.
”

They watch it pinwheel slowly down through the darkening sea layers till it seems to glow of its own light, then it disappears.
They steam northward towards the waypoint for his last two strings, towards the center and high spots of the ledge, but there’s
no sign of them. No toggles, no sunken warps, nothing. Half the traps he set on the new grounds are wrecked or missing in
the space of a week. The only clue’s a loop of yellow pot warp that he couldn’t even see.

Coming into the Old Cove via the Whistle Creek entrance, it’s so shallow he feels the prop churning up the seabed, stern wave
looks like raw sewage as it breaks on the harbor ledge. Right in the narrow dredged channel with the sounder reading under
five feet, he sees an outboard roaring out towards him, then throttling down hard when they see who it is. Ronette, up on
the bow as lookout watching the bottom, yells, “Hey Lucky, it’s your own flesh and blood!”

Kyle and Darrell Swan have their shirts off and their open boat full of diving gear and a six-pack of Budweiser on the thwart,
enough tattoos between them to start a freak show. They pull alongside and Darrell Swan hangs on to the
Wooden Nickel
’s rail with one arm.

Lucky says, “You been to Moto’s?”

Kyle’s got his hands on his hips, big dive knife on his belt, grinning skull tattooed across his shoulder. “Moto ain’t there,
Curtis is buying.”

“Didn’t know it was urchin season yet.”

“Ain’t no seasons in Whistle Creek. What I hear, there ain’t no size limits neither.” Kyle peers at the jumbo lobsters in
the saltwater well. “Old Grandpa Walter, wouldn’t he love to see that.”

He throws Ronette’s blue quilt over the well cover. “Walter Lunt’s dead. Merritt Lunt’s dead. Them days are gone forever.
They ain’t coming back. Man’s got to feed his family, he does what he has to do.”

“Can’t see’s you been feeding
us.
”

“He don’t mean you,” Darrell Swan says. He’s still hanging on to the starboard rail, scratching the snake tattoo on his forearm.
Must be a new one, it looks raw.

“Oh yeah,” Kyle says. “I hear there’s another family on the way.” He looks at Ronette, smiling in a slantwise goofy way that’s
the image of Walter Lunt. Directly to her, not even glancing at his old man, he says, “Guess I ought to say congratulations.
You caught a big one.”

She puts her hand on her belly like she just finished off a turkey dinner. “Don’t say nothing you don’t mean, Kyle.”

Kyle stands up next to Darrell Swan on the edge of the
Metallica.
The two of them on one side pretty near bring the rail under. Ronette reaches over and pats their shaved skulls like a couple
of tame seals. “Give me a smoke, would you? Your old man won’t let me have any.”

Kyle reaches down, pulls a pack of Camels out of his shirt and hands one each to her and to Darrell Swan. “Matter of fact,”
he says, “we’re moving to Halifax.”

“What the
fuck,
” Lucky spits. “Who said you could do that?”

Ronette moves over so he’s facing the three of them together. “Jesus, Lucky, what do you think, he’s
ten?
”

“Going to Halifax,” Kyle repeats. “We made some money off Moto, now he’s drying up and it’s time to see the world.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, drying up?”

“Know that Humvee he had? Repo company came for it.”

“No shit? Thought he had money up the ass.”

Ronette asks, “What are you going to do in Halifax? They got urchins?”

“We ain’t going to be fishing,” Darrell Swan says. “We’re going into international trade.”

Kyle says, “Darrell’s got an uncle in the pharmaceutical business.” Darrell gives him a sharp swat on the shoulder, right
on the skull tattoo. Kyle slaps him back. “He’s my old man. He ain’t going to say nothing. He works for Moto just like us.”

“Catch you running drugs,” Lucky says, “I don’t care where the fuck you are, I’ll come after you and kick your ass. That ain’t
what boats are for.”

Kyle and Darrell both let go the rail and push off a bit, so the
Metallica
drifts ten or twelve feet off to starboard. Kyle says, “You can’t do nothing anymore. You ain’t got a house, you ain’t got
a license, you ain’t even got fishing grounds. Only ass you’ll kick will be your own.”

Ronette comes over, leans closer to Lucky, offers a drag off of the Camel to calm him down. Over on the skiff, Darrell Swan’s
mocking her, he leans up against Kyle the same way, offers him the butt of his Camel, big shit-eating grin on his face. Ronette
says, “Remember, Lucky, your heart. They’re just kids.” She stretches up and gives him a wet kiss on the cheek, trying to
distract him. Out on the water Darrell Swan gives his son the same big kiss like a mirror image. Ronette pushes him towards
the wheel and tugs it to starboard, away from the outboard skiff. “Come on, Lucky, Curtis ain’t going to wait all day.”

“Just a minute, I ain’t settled with that little bastard.” He backs off from the skiff to get a running start, puts her in
gear, revs the 307 and spins the helm to starboard so she points right at the midships of Kyle’s dive boat.

Darrell Swan takes a look at the big white bow bearing down on him and lunges for the controls. The Merc outboard digs its
prop to the channel bottom and douches the green Whistle Creek buoy in a plume of septic-colored spray. But Lucky’s on their
tail with the
Wooden Nickel,
yelling, “Halifax, bullshit. I’m going to sink them little cocksuckers on the spot.”

The throttle’s pinned, flames are gushing out of the 307’s exhaust, and he’s on track to climb over the
Metallica
’s stern and fucking sink them with Ronette screaming,
“Jesus, Lucky!”
and the rocks flashing on the color fishfinder like huge red spikes. All of a sudden Darrell turns the skiff sharp westward
out of the dredged channel and planes through the shallows along the rocky shore. Lucky turns to follow but the one-fathom
alarm’s bleating like a smoke detector and the whole boat shivers when the keel grazes a boulder and glances off. He throws
her in reverse to kill way, the stern wave climbs the transom and floods over the washboard onto the platform. He starts the
pump and backs out of there with the sounder showing four-foot readings all the way back to the channel cut. “Sneaky little
fucker.”

“What’d you expect him to do, sit there and let you run them down? Your own kid, for Christ sake.”

Beyond them, the
Metallica
’s still skimming across the Whistle Creek tideflats with those two tattooed son of a whores diving into the cooler like it’s
a family barbecue.

“Fucking degenerates, they don’t give a shit. I don’t know who I’m doing all this for.”

“I do,” she says. “So let’s bring in them lobsters and get paid.”

Moto’s fish wharf looks a hundred years old, it’s got planks falling through, the gangway’s twisted, the pilings and crossties
gilded with piss-colored algae and hanging with brown folded sheets of kelp. The bait shack and icehouse are frosted with
gullshit like a wedding cake. The little office where Moto does the paperwork has a pane with a bullet hole in it and another
pane boarded up, you’d never know he kept a computer in there and a safe with probably fifty thousand cash. Fucking Chinese,
they’re smarter than they look. He keeps the place looking bad so no one will notice. And the guy he has working for him as
dockboy, Curtis Landry, is such an insane son of a bitch he could walk into the grand jury with Moto’s outlaw transactions
and nobody would believe a word. Curtis is a short guy but he’s built like a mooring stone and he’s an ex-con like Reggie
Dolliver, only he did more time. He killed a guy once and served five or six years for it, and they still have him living
in some kind of halfway house up in West Stoneport. Moto has to pick him up every morning and drive him to Whistle Creek.
Maybe that’s why Moto trusts him, cause the state’s still got its hand around his neck.

Curtis doesn’t move a muscle when the
Wooden Nickel
pulls alongside the float. He stands there with his thumb up his ass and lets Ronette jump off and handle the lines. He’s
watching her close enough, though, as she bends over and fastens the stern line. They probably don’t get much up at the halfway
house.

He says, “Hey Curtis, you want to hand over one of them crates? We got some counters in here.”

Curtis spits some black chew into the lobster car under the float. “I ain’t paid to move crates.”

“Thought you was working here.”

“Mr. Moto ain’t here, I’m the buyer today.”

“Well kiss my ass. You got promoted. Who would of believed it?”

“You want to wise off, mister, you can take them lobsters right on up to Massachusetts.”

Ronette’s struggling to drag a hundred-pound lobster crate across the float. He lugs out the second crate, between them there’s
fourteen godzillas that have to average eight pounds apiece. State ever learned about these, it would be ninety days for everyone,
Moto on down. Ronette, she’s an accessory, maybe she’d just get fined. The catch goes up on the scale and totals in at a hundred
twenty-one pounds. Curtis dumps the giant lobsters into a float car with a lock and chain, case anyone snoops around. “Dock
price is five-fifty. We’ll go upstairs and figure it out.”

Lucky flips his cigarette and it sizzles out in the rainbow of oil slick around the float. “
Five fucking fifty?
Moto’s paying me eight. Get on the christly phone and call him up.”

“Might be Mr. Moto’s price. It ain’t mine.”

“That’s bullshit. Half my traps got wrecked out there. I got to buy twenty more before I go out again.”

“You going to take five-fifty or am I going to open the bottom of this here lobster car and let them go? We could use some
breeders in this cove.”

Horny little fucker, he’s staring at Ronette’s tits when he says that.

“You let them bastards go, you’ll be down there breeding with them. You ever try it with a jumbo lobster?”

“Six bucks. Mr. Moto says that’s it. Seven-twenty for the haul.”

“Hey Curtis, you ever think of turning your boss in for the reward?”

“Mr. Moto treats me right. He treats all his help right, but me specially cause I been around and I know what the fuck is
going on. Them other guys is just Japs, they don’t know shit.”

“I hear they all got black belts, Curtis. They can bust planks with their foreheads.”

“They don’t know shit,” Curtis repeats.

They go up to Moto’s office for the paperwork. Math is a real struggle for Curtis, you can see his eyes cross and his brain
start to stall out like a plane about to go down. He’s sitting in Moto’s chair in front of the blank computer screen with
his face right down against the paper and his fist around the pencil stabbing it at the invoice like a knife. “Ain’t my fault,”
Curtis says. “Ain’t Mr. Moto’s neither. I heard it on Rush. The whole Asian money system’s going under. They got a fucking
depression over there. I seen pictures of bank presidents begging on the street. They ain’t going to buy them lobsters off
you because they can’t afford no sushi anymore. This guy called in to Rush, he seen some of them Jap bankers eating rats.”

“You’re full of shit, Curtis. You been to Moto’s place? They ain’t eating no rats up there.”

“God damn fishermen learned something about the economy, they wouldn’t get fucked in the ass so much.”

“You ought to know, Curtis.”

At that, Curtis’s eyes pop open. He stands up, spreads his arms out sideways, and starts coming forward across Moto’s office
like a rock crab. Lucky’s reaching for a busted-off tuna gaff in the corner, he’ll gaff the son of a bitch right through the
neck, then all of a sudden they hear a German diesel snorting down the hill towards the bait shed. It’s Moto in his Mercedes,
leaving a cloud of dust behind on the dirt road and driving right out on the planks of the old pier though you can see the
pilings sag under the weight. The diesel keeps flopping and farting even after it gets shut down. Up in the office, Curtis
pulls back so his boss won’t see him going for the clientele. Lucky puts the tuna gaff in its corner and says, “Jesus, Curtis,
you’d think he’d drive a Lexus or something, seeing as where he’s from.”

Moto’s got a black doberman with him in the backseat behind a cage wire like in the K-9 cars, looks like a big lobster trap
with a dog in it. Then he’s pulling himself along the dock rail towards his office and up the outside stairway railing like
he can’t climb so great. But he’s grinning and happy when he walks in the office door.

Right away Curtis says, “Mr. Moto, tell this guy what the new price is on his lobsters. He don’t listen to nothing.”

“Six dollar.”

“What the fuck?” Lucky bursts out. “Our deal was eight and you said it was going up to nine. Not down. Them things don’t grow
on trees out there. I’m going out thirty miles offshore, I’m fishing on a twenty-fathom ledge. They ain’t like one-pound chicken
lobsters crawling all over each other on the bottom. Them bastards is few and far between. I haul eight a day, I’m doing good.
Six bucks a pound ain’t going to cover gas and bait, never mind paying off your loan.”

“Economy very poor this time. I am have to absorb ross myself. Five-fifty next time, I am afraid.”

“There ain’t going to be a next time at five-fifty. I can’t afford to make the fucking trip.”