The Wooden Nickel

by William Carpenter

Genres: Action & Adventure; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A third generation lobsterman with an unreliable heart, Lucky Lunt finds himself trying to adapt to change when his wife starts selling sea-glass sculptures to tourists, his daughter prepares for college, his son defies the law, and he is forced to hire a deckhand--all of which lead to a heroic confrontation with his enemies and a dastardly whale. 25,000 first printing.

Release date: March 26, 2002

Publisher: Little, Brown

Print pages: 352

Sample

HE’S SOUND ASLEEP, no dreams, nothing, then a hand touches his forehead and he surfaces slowly, as if they’re hauling his brain off a fifteen-fathom
ledge. The voice sounds like a stranger, though it’s the same one that has whispered him awake for twenty years. “Lucas. It’s almost quarter of five.”


She gets up even before he does, checks out the forecast on the scanner, arranges his clothes on the bedroom recliner so he
can feel for them in the dark. He can tell the weather from what’s laid out for him. Today it might as well be January, she’s
got the union suit, two sweatshirts, wool pants, two pair of socks. “What the hell?” he says.


“Look.”

He raises the blind. The red GMC pickup down in the driveway is covered with snow.

“Jesus H. Christ, Sarah. It’s April.”


“Quiet, you’ll wake the kids. The weather radio says it’s changing to rain. And you know, Lucas, it’s not just April, it’s
the fifteenth. Have you mailed the tax forms?”


“Fuck them bastards. I paid them last year.”

“You didn’t, Lucas. It was the year before. And I wound up doing it.”

April 15 may be a black moment for the lawful citizen, but it’s Opening Day for the lobstermen of Orphan Point, and the Wooden Nickel’s sitting out there in the predawn darkness with forty-eight brand-new wooden traps weighing down the stern. He was up till
near midnight loading them on because that son of a bitch Hannaford put him on last for the dock crane. Clyde Hannaford blames
everyone in town for his wife problem but for some reason Lucky most of all, though he knows god damn well Lucky’s married
with two kids and Sarah does not cut him much slack to frig around.


He is tired and pissed, mainly at himself for not putting the pickup in the garage so he has to scrape two inches of wet slush
off the windshield, and for taking the big Fisher plow off the hook already and storing it out back. Forty-six years in Orphan
Point, you’d think he’d seen enough April blizzards to know better, but this is the year they said global warming was supposed
to kick in. Fucking environmentalists, nothing but broken promises. If you have your head up your ass, naturally the world
is going to look like shit.


He would have liked to plow Sarah out before going to work. Now he can’t. The pickup’s got thirty-three-inch Wranglers, it
can steam through this fluff without even going into four-wheel drive. But her little blue Lynx with the twelve-inch tires
won’t be able to claw its way out of the garage. Kyle won’t shovel her out either, because she’ll let him sleep till ten minutes
before his ride like he was still in the second grade. Well fuck her, he thinks, she has dug her own grave with that kid,
she’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up in Thomaston like Howard Thurston’s son that robbed the convenience store, three and
a half years and one suspended.


Now she’s bent over in the half-light, going through his pockets. “Just making sure you have your medication along. There
won’t be any drugstores out there.”


“And checking for cigarettes.”

“We do want to keep you alive, Lucas, even if it’s against your will. You know what young Dr. Burnside said, and I’m not going
to be along to remind you.”


She doesn’t find them. Fact is, the Marlboros went aboard already, along with the gear, fuel and bait.

Thick snow blows towards his windshield so it feels like he’s stopped dead and the white world is swimming past. He drives
the still-unplowed road around the back side of the cove towards Hannaford’s wharf. Other pickups are coming from other directions,
their lights illuminating the snowflakes like darting schools of shiners as they converge on the waterfront. Lucky of course
knows every truck, every driver and passenger, even in the predawn darkness, and he would know them if struck blind, so long
as he could hear their individual engines and the wake of their oversize tires through the snow.


Every boat wants to be first out of the harbor on opening day, so they are all heading straight down to the wharf and out
to sea, without stopping for coffee and crullers at Doris’s. He, Lucky Lunt, was once among the first men out with the most
traps, but last season Kyle stopped sterning for him, he had to do all the work out there, and he slowed down. One string
of traps and he’d break into a sweat, have to stop, have a cigarette, a beer maybe, rest half an hour before hauling the next
string. Then in the fall he shot the moose up in Ambajezus and couldn’t get it out of the woods. They found him passed out
on top of the christly thing, at first they couldn’t tell which one was dead, him or the moose. The paramedics had to use
his own four-wheeler to haul him out to a field where the chopper could land. They flew him to the Tarratine hospital and
found his arteries choked up like a saltwater engine block. Eleven years since his last checkup. They did the first angioplasty
on the spot and sent him home, he was out on the water in a week. They drill right through your crotch up into the coronaries
and inflate a long skinny five-thousand-dollar condom which is supposed to push the layers of butter and french fries back
against the arterial wall. Sarah served the moose for Thanksgiving dinner, next morning he was back in the heart ward for
another try. The second time, when they pulled the balloon out they left a stent to keep the stuff in place, a few inches
of stainless steel plumbing that will still shine like starlight when the rest of him’s eaten up by worms.


Sarah had a hard time adjusting to a metal part inside her husband, but the way he sees it, the stent brings him that much
closer to the hearts of his boat and truck, an honorary member of the mechanical world.


After the operation they poisoned him with vegetables and put him on three or four different-colored pills, which he’s long
since mixed together in the same brown bottles, one in the pickup, one over the bathroom sink. He takes a handful of them
now and then when Sarah reminds him, though they make him seasick in front of the TV. Well fuck that, he’d rather listen to
country, though when the stock car races are on he clings to both arms of his chair and watches anyway.


He’s also under strict orders to slow it down, not drive straight to his chained-up skiff but pause for a cup of decaf at
the Blue Claw, and if Doris is not yet open, spend a moment relaxing in the pickup cab with the heater on listening to High
Country 104. Course it will make him the last boat on the water, an honor that used to belong to Alonzo Gross, but now the
Wooden Nickel will bring up the fucking rear. He used to be right up there with Art Pettingill, who goes to bed at half past seven and
rises at three, but now he’s supposed to cut his stress level in half and take time “for himself,” as Dr. Burnside told him,
but who the fuck is himself? There’s lobsters, there’s the Wooden Nickel and there’s the sea. That’s it.


Doris opens the Blue Claw sharply at five-thirty, but he’s already in the parking lot at twenty past. He knows she’s in there
because her old Plymouth minivan’s out back with the faded blue claw on its two front doors. The restaurant windows are fogged
already with coffee steam, but the closed sign is still up and she’s not going to flip it around till five-thirty even if
the coffee is turning to creosote at the bottom of the urn.


There’s enough light now to make out the silhouette of the Wooden Nickel moored among the Orphan Point fleet, all of them stern down and low in the water under their first-day load of traps. A wheelhouse
light snaps on in one of the boats, then another, then red and green running lights that blur through the light snow like
it’s still Christmas. The first diesel kicks in, maybe Pettingill’s but nope, it’s a straight-six, probably Dennis Gower in
the Kathleen and Brian,which he repowered with a Volvo 102 last year but it already sounds like an old man farting himself to death. Big dumb Swedes,
twenty-four hours of daylight and still they can’t build shit.


The diesel sounds float in over the water and fill his heart with anxiety and competition till he feels the medication kick
in and slow it down. How is he going to cut his christly stress level in half if he has to sit here hearing the other boats
start up? He takes the pill bottle out of his lunchbox and puts it in the glove compartment instead. Fuck that. He’s not going
on the water with that stuff.


The DJ is still playing his mellow wee-hours material, it fits right in with the sky clearing and the late stars coming through
the clouds. He even lets himself cue up Garth Brooks’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain” because of the weather, must still be
winter up in the mountains where their studio is. On the western side of the harbor, lined with gloomy vacant summer estates,
there’s not a sign of life. On the east, though, all along the shore he can make out the lights of fishermen’s homes through
the colorless snowy haze of dawn. The men are already at work but their wives are cleaning up after the first-shift breakfast
and getting ready to rouse and feed the kids. He knows the town so well it’s like X-ray vision, he can see through the walls,
knows each woman in each kitchen, each kid in bed, the contents of the refrigerator and what station she’s tuned to waiting
for the sun to come up, country mostly, but some will have the Christian station or the talk show, then they’ll all switch
over to Rush when he comes on.


It was torture to see Art Pettingill and his boy drive past him in their big crew-cab F-350, not even turning to look at the
Blue Claw, straight to the mooring. Art’s boy will be straining at the oars, Big Art in the stern, skiff sinking under his
whale’s body and the twelve-pound lunch pail in his lap, Art putting the sponge to her every ten seconds because she’s still
full of shotgun holes from when the Split Cove boys gave him a piece of advice. He hears their boat start up, old Caterpillar
320 with dual pipes up through the wheelhouse roof. The Bonanza. Banana, it should be called, it’s got the hog shape and the yellow hull covering the rust that drips off of all Art’s gear. Still,
he is a highliner and he brings them in. Thirty-five thousand pounds of lobster last season and his wife won’t let him trade
the boat. Alma Pettingill’s a churchgoing woman and she’s got him securely by the nuts.


Art’s son is fifteen, sixteen, great big kid, just the right age for a sternman. Another year or two and they want their own
boats, then you have to hire a stranger who half the time won’t know what the fuck is going on. Sternperson, that’s what you’re
supposed to call them now, though somehow that word makes him think of doing it dog style, he can’t say why. Things have changed,
there’s a lot of female sternmen. Wives, daughters, girlfriends, it does improve the morning if you can get laid down in the
cuddy after a few strings, but for Lucky Lunt the purpose of going out on the water is to catch lobsters, and like his old
man used to quote out of the Bible, a man’s not supposed to mix fish and flesh. The day Ellis Seavey took that Tarratine girl
with the bikini top out to show her his trapline, Lucky shouted, “Going after crabs today?” and Ellis didn’t speak to him
for a month. That whole summer Ellis had one hand under his oilskins, scratching away, till his uncle Lester lent him his
tube of Captain Scratch’s crotch ointment and they found someplace else to live.


Twenty-five past. He keeps the pickup idling in park, not just because it’s cold but he also likes the sound of the rods just
turning the crankshaft over in its bath of oil. The pickup’s only a 350 but it’s a 4-barrel, and its low, rumbly, slow-turning
V-8 with just the right hint of exhaust failure sounds enough like his Chevy 454 marine to get his blood moving even before
his first sip of the morning regular Sarah won’t give him but Doris might.


Just light enough to see Art Pettingill’s old Cat diesel farting black soot like a Greyhound bus as the Bonanza casts off and smokes out towards Sodom Ledge into the April fog. Art’s got a CB tuned to the truck channel because his brother
drives for Irving Oil, another radio on VHF 64, which is the Orphan Point fishermen’s party line, and a third radio on Christian
Country 88.5, all at top volume, though Art can’t hear any of them through the Cat’s exhaust.


He leans his head back against the reassuring hardwood stock of his .30-06 Remington Standard on its rear-window rack. He
used to carry two guns back there, one for Sarah, but after Oscar Reynolds shot his old lady and glassed her into a hull mold,
Sarah asked him to lock hers away in the gun cabinet. Each year, as the hair on the back of his head thins, he can feel the
oiled walnut stock more clearly against the exposed nerves of his scalp.


The .30-06 hasn’t left its rack since the ill-fated Ambajezus hunting trip when he wound up getting butchered along with the
moose. He likes the gun there, though, it’s a warmer headrest than the plate glass window.


He can see the whole harbor now as the snow subsides and the day brightens over Doris’s parking lot. The Blue Claw sits at
the head of the harbor just east of the bridge over Orphan Creek. Over on the westward side, where there’s water enough to
float a vessel at all tides, is the wharf of Clyde Hannaford, buyer and dealer for the Orphan Point lobster fleet. Like it
or not, you catch lobsters, you deal with Clyde. Otherwise you might as well eat the fucking things yourself. Clyde has a
monopoly, that’s how it is and has always been. Over in Split Cove they have a socialist co-op, maybe they pay a cunt hair
more than Clyde does, but if you don’t like the American way, you might as well move up to Canada and sit back and let the
government pay you not to fish.


Beyond Clyde’s, passing down Summer Street where the Money shore begins, there’s Phelan’s boatyard, full of sailboats shrink-wrapped
for winter like a field of tent caterpillars. Then comes the row of summer shops — the Quiche Barne, Bloom’s Antiques, the
Cockatiel Café. Then the Orphan Point Yacht Club, dues alone more than a working man makes in a year. Then a chocolate-colored
Episcopal church with a fancy brown-shingled steeple that starts tapering at the ground and terminates in a golden cross.
The summer people have that cross gilded every June with fourteen-karat gold leaf, slapped on by some bearded asshole they
get up all the way from Philadelphia. After that church Summer Street peters out into a dirt road running behind the row of
big spooky summer mansions they used to break into to smoke and jerk off when they were kids.


On the other side of the harbor, there’s Main Street, where the year-round fishermen live, there’s the Blue Claw, Lurvey’s
Convenience & Video and Ashmore’s Garage. There is also the regular Methodist church with a normal white steeple, so these
two churches separated by water both reach for the sky like a couple of guys giving each other the finger. A brown guy and
a white guy, if you thought of it that way, which Lucky doesn’t. He doesn’t give a fuck what a man is, though everyone knows
the Asians are taking over the earth. And they can have it. Lucky hasn’t set foot in church for fifteen years, except for
a handful of funerals when Sarah dressed him up like the corpse and made him go.


If you spend enough time offshore you realize all those steeples are pointing the wrong way. If there was to be a God, which
is not likely in this numb universe, He would be down under the surface where the real power is, in the cold invisible currents
of the sea.


He focuses his ear on the soft well-tuned drum of the idling V-8. It doesn’t waver, it doesn’t skip a beat. Now if they had
a church with a truck engine up at the altar end, that would mean something and he might sign on. If you’re going to worship
anything it should be something you can get your hands on and you don’t have to argue whether it’s there or not. You can trust
an engine. When you’re over the horizon, past sight of land, maybe it’s thick of fog, cold, with the wind rising, nothing
around you but freezing black salt water and cold-blooded predators that don’t give a fuck, no invisible spirit is going to
help you. That can be proved by Dennis Gower’s cousin Calvin Willey, a God-abiding Mormon that never touched a drink or smoke,
but his RV stove exploded a couple of Julys ago after the Stoneport races and everyone trapped in the back of it was killed.
All God-fearing Mormons, every one of them burned to a crisp. Now a V-8 engine is something to believe in, made by honest
American working stiffs with their own hands. You won’t find a V-8 in a rice-burner. It can be steaming out beyond Shag Ledge
at fifteen knots with the stern half sunk beneath a load of traps, hard-driving the hydraulic winch to haul a thirty-fathom
trapline, or patiently waiting in neutral as you cull the catch, rebait, dump them in again. Your wife may cheat on you and
your friends may forget you ever lived. Your own body starts fucking you over the minute you’re born, the heart lurks in your
chest like a land mine, the brain goes useless as a fistful of haddock guts. But an internal combustion engine is another
matter. Long as you take care of the bastard, when there’s nothing else on earth to count on, it will get you home.


He feels all the clothes Sarah put on him, the Grundens oilskin bib trousers and the wool sweater and the long underwear and
beneath the clothes, his own skin wrapped around him like a survival suit. Under that layer there’s a circulation no different
from the heart of a big-block V-8, the Havoline 10-40 gushing from the pump to lube the pistons stroking in and out of their
cylinders like a tight-holed fuck, the nervous gossipy valves jumping in their seats, the spinelike crankshaft turning in
its bath of oil. His body idling in the front seat, the engine idling under the hood, they’re the same fucking thing.


Not that it’s true for every vehicle. Take Sarah’s Mercury Lynx, which is an aluminum-block four-cylinder piece of shit. When
she started insisting on a car of her own, he planned to buy her something American at Harry Pomerleau’s Lincoln-Mercury up
at the Narwhal Mall in Norumbega. Gas mileage is everything for Sarah, she doesn’t want to take any more than she has to from
those nice Arab sheiks and their Rolls-Royces and their dozen wives. Harry Pomerleau sold her a four-cylinder Lynx whose engine
sounds like an ice-fishing auger but Honest Harry told her the thing would get ten miles on a quart of gas. That’s the word
that slick son of a bitch used on her, a quart, like they were going to put milk in the fucking thing. They had the Lynx three months before Virge Carter told him it was
built in Oakville, Ontario. He should have known it from the name, Lynx, must be the national mammal up there in Molsonland.
The laws of marriage force him to keep a car in his garage built under a Communist government by slave labor, same as their
socialist cooperatives and government-funded fucking Canadian piers so they can give lobsters away while just over the border
a free people starve to death.


So he doesn’t set foot in his wife’s car with its lawnmower engine, and Sarah won’t ride in the truck because it smells like
fish. I don’t mind it on you, Lucas, but then I don’t have to climb inside you, do I? When they go out together they take both vehicles, even on the thirty-mile run to the Tarratine mall, the navy blue Lynx
tailgated by the big red pickup, Lucky behind the wheel looking down at his wife’s neck through the Lynx’s rear window and
thinking, Fuck fuel economy, I’d like to see the EPA rating on us.


After the angioplasties last November, he was supposed to recuperate on an exercise schedule with walks of gradually increasing
distance. He skipped the exercise and went right for the boat engine instead. Within a month of the operation he had cleaned
the garage and fashioned an engine bed out of railroad ties, which he couldn’t lift and he had to pay Kyle a dollar apiece
to lug them in. Then he flushed out the water-cooling passages with hydrochloric acid. He ran the acid over and over through
the engine block the same way they’d done it with the artery balloons run up past his nuts and guts into his own chest. When
he was finished the acid came out the same as it went in, swift-flowing, colorless and clear: no rust, no clots. As soon as
they let him drive again he dropped the block back in the Wooden Nickel, balanced the shaft and flywheel, and at 3000 rpm it ran fifteen degrees cooler. He drove over to the clinic and said, “Check
me out.”


That exercise program did the job for your husband, that’s what young Dr. Burnside told Sarah when they ran into each other
in the IGA.


At exactly five-thirty, Doris flips the sign around. Open. Just at that moment Clyde Hannaford shows up in his blue three-quarter-ton
Dodge Ramcharger with the bright yellow Fisher plow still on the hook. Clyde’s never lowered it yet, not wanting to dirty
her up with snow.


He’s got groundfish crossed out because there’s none of them left, and what there are the government won’t let you have, their
goal being to starve the fishermen off the water and turn the Atlantic Ocean into the world’s biggest national fucking aquarium,
look but don’t touch. It’s good to have your name on a truck. As long as your name isn’t Lunt. The one time Lucky tried it,
the weekend wasn’t over before it became


Scrape it off as he tried, it kept reappearing, even when he painted the whole fucking door it would be there again when he
got in from a day’s fishing. Lucky Cunt.


Now Clyde is bringing his thirty-year-old child bride Ronette to her job as Doris’s counter girl at the Blue Claw. Lucky can’t
figure why she works there. Clyde Hannaford is not some dumb fisherman in debt for fuel and bait, scraping to meet his boat
loan. Clyde owns a wharf and fuel dock that he inherited from his old man, Curtis Hannaford, a first-class prick who diddled
the fishermen for about fifty years and now writes postcards from Miami Beach. It’s his boy Clyde who buys and sells every
lobster that comes into Orphan Point, and in the winter he now has the urchin trade. With his brother Arvid he runs a lobster
takeout in back of the wharf. Come June first they get out a copper kettle big enough to boil four or five New Jersey tourists
in and they sell a one-pound shedder with a boat price of three bucks for eighteen ninety-five. Not to mention the daily dock
markup that probably nets him ten thousand a month while a man like Lucky, out at sea all day doing the work, can barely scrape
up the payments on his gear.


Clyde’s truck door opens to the sound of a Patsy Cline tape and Ronette Hannaford bounces down from the high cab in a black
winter parka over her little waitress miniskirt, showing some places that don’t often see the light of day. She looks like
what Paula Jones shouldlook like, if they had a real president in there, only Paula Jones is a dog if you study the pictures, while Ronette’s got
a face that makes her look naked even with an overcoat on. She was a cheerleader at Norumbega High, can’t be more than ten
or twelve years back, while Clyde Hannaford was two years ahead of Lucky and Sarah at the old red brick high school in Orphan
Point. Sarah went out with him too, the years Lucky was a motor-pool mechanic for Uncle Sam, but that was all over when Lucas
Lunt came back to town.


Lucky taps the horn, cries out, “Ain’t you cold?” through the closed window which she probably can’t hear over Clyde’s exhaust.

Ronette looks embarrassed and pulls the skirt down, wraps the parka tight around her tits and flashes a mean look, fake mean
since Ronette Hannaford does love to be noticed. It’s Clyde that is shooting over the mad-dog stare, then he backs up fast
with a lot of unnecessary noise, spins his slick nine-fifty by sixteens and heads for the wharf to drink hazelnut decaf and
count the profits. Lucky shuts off his engine and goes in.


Without asking, Doris hands him his coffee and a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie. “Everyone’s out,” she says. “Won’t be any
lobsters left for you.”


“I’ll give them a half-hour start, that way we’ll all arrive at the same time.”

Ronette looks up and pouts her lips at him, her body bent way over behind the counter to pull up a jar of pickled hard-boiled
eggs. Her skirt lifts up so high he can see the shadow of her ass darkening her upper legs. As the father of a daughter he
wants to grab hold and pull it back down, as a man out on his own in one of the mornings of the world he’d like to raise it
the rest of the way. Talk about miscarriage of justice, an asshole like Clyde Hannaford sleeping every night alongside a woman
you should have to be twenty-one to even look at. Without glancing up she says, “That’s you, Mr. Luck, faster than the eye
can see.”


Doris is breaking coin rolls into the cash register but she’s got her ear out. “Don’t get near him, Ronette, he’s so fast
he’d do it and you wouldn’t even know it was done.”


“Wouldn’t know till the Fourth of July,” Ronette says.

“You’d know before that, dear.” Doris slams the register shut, takes the key out and pockets it. Just then a truck comes screeching
in, brakes spray gravel on Doris’s plate glass window: smell of diesel smoke.


Doris says, “Jesus, what a stench. Who’s got a diesel truck?”


“Blair Alley,” Ronette says. “Watch out. Don’t that thing smell.” Blair and his brother Frank weigh a good six hundred pounds
between them, about three ounces of it is brain. They kick the door open with their boots and try to walk through the doorway
at the same time, get stuck for a second then figure out that Blair was first-born and Frank stands aside. Ronette stands
up with the jar of hardboiled eggs and looks down at their boots and says, “Frank Alley, I have always wanted to know, what
size shoe do you take?”


Blair says, “Frank don’t reveal things like that. They’re trade secrets with him.”

“He don’t reveal them,” Lucky says, “he sells them.”

Doris opens the cash register drawer with a big ring but zeros showing on the screen. “Frank,” she says, “how much would that
information be?”


Blair reaches into the glass-doored doughnut drum and pulls out a chocolate éclair and throws it in his mouth like it was
an M&M. He slides another one down to his brother, who opens his huge jaws like a basking shark and the éclair is gone. “I
guess that will do it,” Blair says. “Go ahead, Frank, tell her.”


Ronette leans over the counter to look down at Frank’s feet, but his trousers hang so far over his boots that Frank’s standing
on the cuffs, and meanwhile the cleavage of his dark hairy asscrack is showing like Dolly Parton on Rogaine. One of Ronette’s
tits presses down on the how-to-eat-a-lobster place mat, the other presses on a fork and knife. Lucky wonders if she can feel
things like silverware through the bra and the white waitress blouse.


“You’re going to have to lift them trousers up,” Ronette says to Frank, giving him the weird glance she has, as if one of
her eyes was astray. He has heard the rumor that Ronette has a glass eye but he does not believe it. Both her eyes move when
she looks around, just ma