The Wooden Nickel (43 page)

At first she seems to be bending back OK. “One more heave ought to set her in.”

“Take it easy, Lucky. This place ain’t the Rock of Gibraltar.” Soon as she says that, his last heave splits the aluminum panel
right off at the roofline and a whole wall section falls down onto the lawn. They’re standing there right in the living room
looking into the powerless night with the downpour pissing in from the direction of the two shadowy vehicles in the invisible
driveway. “Jesus H. Christ, now you’ve done it.”

“Weren’t my fault. God damn wall’s thinner than a beer can.”

“It’s a good trailer, you just found a weak spot, that’s all.”

“Bull shit. The whole fucking thing’s weak. Watch this.” He takes the next panel in both fists and pulls the edge back where
it busted off from the other. It curls like a sardine top and the roof bends down till another tire slides off and splashes
down on the flooded lawn.

“Holy shit, Lucky.
Enough.
”

He opens two more beers and they stand there watching the rain sluice past the big open square like it’s a Sony projection
TV. Every once in a while a lightning bolt flashes and it’s like changing to another channel, you can see the chartreuse car
and the red truck, Corey Prentiss’s chain-link fence with the doghouse behind it, the naked poplar sapling in the front yard
with the empty bird feeder flailing around in the wind, Ronette’s fall-brown little garden with the blue crystal ball, just
like a photograph. Then it goes black again and it’s just the rain and the night and the two of them by the wet sizzling kerosene
heater next to the open wall.

She cuddles up in her waitress outfit looking like the first time he laid eyes on her, she was a waitress in the RoundUp,
brown-haired and cute as a pussy, flashing her half-carat engagement ring. He tosses his empty through the open wall into
the dark and leans away from the missing panel in the direction of the bed. Then she says, “Lucas, maybe we ought to bring
that wall back up before you get any ideas.”

He gets his trawler boots back on and wades out in the swampy yard with the rain pouring down and tries to get his shoulder
under the wall panel and jerk it back up in place. He can get down there and lift it up at an angle, but he can’t keep it
up high enough to push it forward to the roofline. Ronette’s in there screaming about Noah and the fucking animals but she’s
not coming out to help. He’s standing there holding the wall up slantways so all the water funnels right into the trailer,
when a flashlight shows up like a lifeboat through the rain and fog. It’s the next-door neighbor Sonny Phair, drunk as a mackerel,
with a tarp draped completely over him like a boat ready for winter.

“Seen you needed some help.”

“Sonny, get your head under here and prop up this son of a whore till I drive the truck up against it.”

Now he’s got Sonny under the wall panel, he can go over and start the pickup and slog it across the muddy yard in four-wheel
granny low. With the headlights on high beam and the truck coming over at an angle, he can finally see. There’s the trailer
with a panel wide open and old Sonny Phair stone blind in his tarp, his legs spread wide, holding the panel steady as a sawhorse.
There’s the living room inside lit by the gas lantern, and Ronette standing in her waitress outfit at the table by the two
bowls of chowder and the Rolling Rocks like she expects a tip. He creeps the pickup right up against the panel and slowly
encourages her into an upright position, with Sonny Phair pushing alongside till the piece finally fits back in. Sort of.

He shuts the truck off with its grille up against the trailer panel and leaves her in that position for the night. He says
to Sonny, “Long as that truck don’t move she’s going to stay put. How about some ripe cod chowder and a nice warm beer?”

Inside, they’ve still got a considerable drip down the wall where the panels don’t join, but the wind’s quieted down so it’s
not pushing the rain through quite so hard. Sonny pulls up a chair and stares like a stray dog in the direction of the chowder
pot. He’s a short, round, dark little guy with big thick hairy wrists and a long thick neck with veins and red streaks on
it like a pecker. He eats a couple of bowls like he’s never seen food before. “I been eating Nine Lives,” he says. “I like
the Ocean Platter best.”

“Why don’t you go up to the state agency in Norumbega, get yourself some food stamps?”

“Ain’t got a license.”

“Jesus,” Ronette says. “You should of come over here.”

“Don’t want to get no obligations, if I can’t pay it back.” Ronette gives him a third bowl of chowder and another Rolling
Rock. Lucky gets out the new rifle from under the built-in and says, “Surprise. Look what I swapped off with Corey Prentiss.”

“Looks like a cannon,” Ronette says. “What do we want that thing around for, you and Corey planning to go to war?”

Sonny turns the gun around with the stock up, sticks it in his eye and looks down the barrel. Lucky says, “Ain’t nothing to
drink in there, Sonny.” He takes it back and polishes Sonny’s fingerprints off the blue steel with his shirttail.

Outside, the rain’s coming down harder but the wind’s slacked and gone north. “We may be out tending them traps tomorrow.”

“Jesus, Lucky. It’s a fucking hurricane.”

“No, she’s winding down. Be a swell offshore but no wind, next day it’ll start blowing northwest and we’ll be stuck another
three days. Keeps slacking off like this, I’m catching the window in the morning.”

“Crazy bastard,” Sonny Phair says. He’s eaten half the chowder now and he’s going home.

“Thanks for holding the wall up, Sonny.”

“Anytime. What friends are for.”

He’s in a dream with Sarah on one side of him and Alfie on the other, they’re in a wire mesh jail cell full of cons and every
one of them’s using chopsticks to build a computer in a bottle. When the alarm rings he doesn’t know who he’s with or who
he is. He reaches an arm out to slap the clock quiet, the trailer shakes all over from the impact so he knows he’s not at
home. He listens for signs of the storm but the wind’s backed and died, just a little breeze on the north side ruffling a
downed wire outside the window, he can hear it knocking against the kerosene tank. He can’t see Corey Prentiss’s twenty-four-hour
yard light, that means the power’s still down. Someone turns and gives him a kiss on the forehead, then slips out of bed on
the other side. He still has to think
Who is this?
for a moment, then he figures it out. He hears her feeling her way through the dark corridor towards the bathroom, then a
flashlight switches on and she shuts the door. He hears the whirlpool of the flush and the hiss of the tank filling, then
the flush again.

He’s got to haul today or they’re going to lose everything in the traps. The traps could be hard to locate too, seas may have
dragged them off station, and if they slipped off the ledge into deep water, they’re going to be lost, they’ll pull the buoys
down with them forever.

Ronette flushes a third time and he rolls out of bed and feels for the flame gun to light a Marlboro and start the Coleman
lamp. Going to be raw out there. Sarah would be up already with coffee and the weather report, handing him the one-piece union
suit and the wool socks that are still back at Orphan Point. The best he can do is pull on one pair of pants over another
one and the heavy Grundens oil-skins over that. The trailer floor’s buckling even more with the wall panel loose, the carpeting’s
still awash, the wind’s blowing right through the trailer but it’s just a fall breeze now, coming off the land.

He checks under the built-in to get the Ruger out and put it on the kitchen table, then knocks on the half-open bathroom door.
“Anybody alive in there?”

“Jesus, Lucky, I ain’t too sure.”

“I got to go out today. You want, I’ll go see if I can get Sonny Phair to go along. You can stay home and screw the wall back
together.”

“If you go out, I’m going with you. I’m your sternman, remember?”

“Well get moving, then, it’s pretty near four o’clock.” He boils water for a thermos of instant coffee and shovels in some
sugar and Cremora, then some more. She likes it light.

“Let’s bring some more of that Waylon Jennings. I got a cassette in the drawer.”

He roots around among lipsticks, old wallets, address books, for the Waylon Jennings tape. “Soon as they get a kid in the
oven,” he says, “they go back to the old stuff.”

They have to drive to Whistle Creek in Ronette’s little Probe since the GMC’s still up to its hubcaps on the swampy lawn holding
up the trailer wall. He can’t get his legs under the Probe’s wheel, the seat won’t go back far enough, so he lets her drive.
She starts up, flicks the lights on, and puts the tape on to “Good-Hearted Woman.” She’s got a box of sugared crullers that
she took home from Doris’s. The high beams slash through the drizzle and light up the leafy road like a blind guy getting
his sight back.

“Nice to have electricity,” she says.

“Finest kind. Drive this little car right through the hole in the wall, leave the lights on, we could go right off the grid.”

The high beams make their pathway of light between darkened houses, nobody else on the road, big branches and stray power
lines strewn here and there across the way. Then the turnoff to Split Point and all of a sudden the darkness fills up with
red, white, and blue strobe lights from half a dozen vehicles in both lanes.

“Must be a fire,” Ronette says.

They slow down to see what’s going on and a cop comes up and shines his light in the car, same fucking porkbelly deputy that
kicked him out of his house. “You was driving a truck last time I saw you,” the cop says, talking across to Lucky but shining
his flashlight right on Ronette’s tits. “Guy your size, I’m surprised you fit inside that little thing.”

“Stopped to see if you needed any help,” Lucky says.

“You can help if you can bring back the dead. If that ain’t your specialty you better keep on moving.”

Behind the cop there’s the burned-out ruin of a trailer with the strobes blinking at a handful of charred uprights, a blackened
refrigerator skeleton with the plastic panels melted, and an oil-drum wood stove with the tin chimney still straight up in
the air, pointing to heaven. “Wouldn’t of thought nothing could burn in all that rain.”

As they speed up again he sees the ambulance strobes switch off in the rearview mirror. Ronette says, “I knew the old guy
in that trailer. He was an Astbury on my mother’s side.”

“Father’s, you mean.”

“I got them on both sides and the middle.” She snuggles over across the automatic shift lever to get close. “And now you’re
a blood relation. Someday you’re going to be an old Astbury in a trailer just like Uncle Uke.”

Back in the comfortable dark car again, Waylon sings,

A long time forgotten are dreams that just fell by the way

The good life he promised, it ain’t what she’s living today

“That Old Cove ain’t the tightest spot in the world. Hope the fucking boat’s still there.”

“Didn’t know you was the worrying kind.”

“She was moored right off of the house in Orphan Point. First light after a blow, I’d look right out and see how she was.”

“Welcome to reality, Mr. Unlucky Lunt. You ain’t got shore property anymore. Life ain’t a big old family farmhouse with a
million-dollar view. It’s a trailer in a mudhole, with a big crack in the wall made by some asshole in the middle of the night.”

But she never complains of the bad times or the bad things he’s done

Just talks about the good times they’ve had and all the good times to come

“You should of stuck with Clyde. Guy like that could of brought this kid up in style.”

“Guy like that would of drowned the kid in the hot tub when he found out it weren’t his.”

“Ain’t mine?”

“Ain’t
his.
”

“Sure as fuck better be mine, I ain’t doing all this for nothing.”

Without the streetlight on the corner she misses the turnoff to the Whistle Creek landing and has to U-turn in the road and
come back. Soon as they get down the steep driveway to Moto’s pier, though, there’s lights and action. Moto’s got two parked
vehicles shining their brights on his ice-house and his big white Mitsubishi Fuso reefer truck pulled right up close. No power
here either. Curtis is up on the ramp loading seafood into the truck with Moto standing by one of the cars in a bright yellow
rain jacket, urging him on. Not that he’d ever lend a hand to help. One thing you can say for the Chinese, they don’t take
to physical labor, unless maybe they’re in prison with a gun pointing at their head.

When Moto sees the Probe he ducks away from the headlight like a shadow and doesn’t come out till Curtis Landry peers down
from off of the truck platform and says, “By Jesus, them Lunts is moving up in the world.”

Then Moto slides out of the dark and shows his grinning face at the car door. Lucky powers down the window and leans back
easy in the seat like the Probe’s his, Ronette’s just a chauffeur.

“Rucas, you come at right time, nine ton frozen squid lotting in here.”

“Ain’t got time to help out now. Curtis is a fast guy, he can do it. I ain’t been out to them traps in more than a week. My
boat OK?”

“Who can tell? No light on water yet. One little dory wrecked up on the float.”

Lucky sticks his head out the window and sniffs around. “You’re too late to get nothing for that squid. I can smell it from
here. How about giving me a bucket of that for bait?”

Moto yells, “Curtis, take bucket of squid down on the float for Mr. Runt.”

He carries the thermos and the Ruger in one hand and Ronette grabs the other to help her down the dark rampway to the pier.
When Curtis gets a glimpse of the gun in the truck headlights, he says, “Lunt, you planning to bag some more of them Shag
Island women?”

“I’ll bring one back for you, Curtis, if you think you can handle it.”

“No thanks, they ain’t my type. I like them alive.”