The Wooden Nickel (32 page)

Lucky grunts out loud at this point. He can’t help it. He never agreed to go dry, that’s just Kermit Beal’s plan to make him
an altar boy. They all look at him but he just sits lower and heavier in the splay-footed plastic chair and sucks his tongue.

“. . . or have any contact with the victim or her family.”

The downstate lobsterman breaks in: “What if the Shag Island gang keeps setting traps on your client’s territory? He willing
to pledge he won’t retaliate?”

“My client promises, if his license is renewed, not to commit any acts of violence, even if provoked.”

Drummond looks directly at the defendant with one eye squinted like he’s aiming a gun at him. “You go along with that one,
Mr. Lunt? Them islanders keep setting traps on your ledge, you’ll pledge to accommodate and not fight back?”

He’s just about to kiss their ass and say yes, sure, I ain’t got nothing against bending over and sharing my old man’s ledge
with them cocksuckers, then he gets an image of setting and hauling side by side with the
Black Pussy
or whatever it is, on the ledge his old man’s father staked out under sail, no radar, no bottom machine and no loran, fishing
not only for himself but his kids and their kids after. Merritt Lunt would shit in his coffin if his grandson went along with
that.

With an infinite suspension resting on the question, he looks right at this fat hake with his thick fisherman’s neck puffing
out over the white collar and answers, “I can’t do it.”

“You might want to think that over,” his lawyer quickly corrects. “I believe we may be able to reach a compromise.”

“I thought it over. And I still can’t do it. I ain’t hauling alongside them bastards on my own family grounds.”

“Is your client stating that under the same circumstances he would react in a similar manner?”

“I am.”

“I think that will be enough from the defendant,” Fulmar says.

Outside, while they wait for the verdict, the lawyer puts his arm around Lucky’s shoulder like he’s shipping him off to prison
and says, “What are you going to do if you can’t go lobstering?”

“I’m going to law school,” he says. “I’m going to get me one of them Eddie Bauer Explorers and a couple of them Airbag sedans.”

Before the next minute is up the door opens and Ryan Beal motions them back inside. Fulmar and the fisheries panel are sitting
down while Lucky and Kermit Beal stand on the opposite side of the table, Ryan Beal beside them like a guard. Beyond the panel,
in the free world outside the barred courthouse window, a long charter bus roars past in a cloud of diesel exhaust, big sign
saying cadillac tours, full of old ladies pale as skates.

“Mr. Lunt,” Fulmar begins. “I’m going to make this short and to the point. The panel has heard the sworn statement of an eyewitness,
Mr. Cyrus Shaver, and has read the written version of what Mr. Ryan Beal reiterated here. Because the state construed this
as an act of self-defense, and the victim did not press charges, a grand jury was not convened. However, since the bureau
has a zero-tolerance policy toward violence in the fishery, the panel has issued a suspension of your lobster license for
a period not to exceed five years, along with a five-thousand-dollar fine.”

“You’re taking my client’s livelihood,” Kermit Beal says. “And his children’s too. If Mr. Lunt is kept off the water for five
years, his territory is gone forever.”

“The state has excellent retraining programs for men leaving the water. The retraining center is right down the street, in
the state office building. Take my advice, though, Mr. Lunt, and don’t go in there carrying a gun.”

There’s two cars in the driveway when Kermit Beal stops the Explorer at Lucky’s house to drop him off. One is Sarah’s navy
blue Lynx and behind it is a brown-and-white police cruiser with a Tarratine County Sheriff’s star on the side door, cage
wire between front and back seats, shotgun barrel poking up over the Motorola. His GMC’s in the open bay of the garage.

Kermit looks the scene over like a hunter stumbling on a whole christly herd. Big lawyer’s grin: “Looks like you got company,
Lucas. Sure you want me to let you off?”

“I live here, where the fuck else am I supposed to go?”

“You can retain me again if you want, it’d be just another five hundred up front.”

He jumps down and slams the Explorer door and walks between the two vehicles into the open garage door. They must be in there
getting her stuff. She always blows things out of proportion. He’ll sit in the truck and smoke till they’ve had their fun.

He’s just hauling his Marlboros out of the glove box when a brown-shirted deputy comes through the breezeway door, he’s got
sweat all over his bald head and a beer gut drooping over his ammunition. In the opening, behind the cop, he can see the long
vertical line where he tried to epoxy over the chainsaw cut. It looks stitched up like a surgical scar.

Holding a big piece of paper, the cop walks past the snow sled and the ATV, right up to the open truck window and says, “Your
name Lucas Merritt Lunt?”

“No,” he says, “it’s William Jefferson Clinton.”

“Don’t bullshit me, mister, or you’ll be right in the backseat with the cuffs on. Your wife here’s got a court protection
order to keep you off the premises.”

“The
premises?
These ain’t premises. This is my own fucking house.”

“Used to be, mister. It ain’t no more. Judge Saperstein issued a restraining order on you. Domestic violence. You the one
chainsawed that kitchen door?”

“My old man built it. I got the god damn right to cut it out.”

“I got news for you, mister. You ain’t got any god damn rights at all.”

He’s got his hand on his revolver just like Ryan Beal.

“OK,” he tells the deputy. “Just one thing. I got my heart medication inside. I got to keep taking it or I ain’t supposed
to be on the road. While I’m in there, I’ll grab some of my gear if I ain’t going to be coming back, then I’ll take the truck
and leave.”

“Do I look stupid? I ain’t going to let you go inside with your wife in there.”

“I’ll be five minutes. She can stay with you out in the cruiser.”

“OK, buddy. Five minutes. She ain’t to have no contact with you, it states right here. She stays in the vehicle with me.”

He lights another Marlboro off of the first one while the deputy brings Sarah out to the car. At first she keeps her head
down like a criminal on TV, then she stops the deputy so she can give her husband this long sad look like she’s the one getting
kicked out of her family home, not him. He watches her mouth to see if it moves or tries to say anything but the thin pale
lips stay tight as a razor clam. The deputy takes her arm and slides her into the backseat of the cruiser and she’s lost behind
the cage wire and the tinted glass.

“Five minutes. In and out. Judge Saperstein finds out about this, I lose my job.”

“That’d be a shame,” Lucky says. “You’d have to go back to breaking and entering.” The deputy unsnaps the hammer flap on his
holster and Lucky puts his hands up in the air and backs off, saying, “Hey. No offense.”

In the upstairs hallway he walks past the painting of the original
Wooden Nickel
that she made for him when they were first going out, past Kristen’s bedroom with the university pennant on the door and
Kyle’s with the Metallica poster covering a busted panel, straight through the breezeway attic to his wife’s studio above
the garage. Both doors are open. Just as he thought. She’s already got a new piece under construction in the workbench vise,
another half done beside it. One is a blue-and-white form, looks like a bird wing, framed in sharp splintery lead molding
she hasn’t smoothed down yet. The other isn’t anything you could recognize, just a lead-framed sea glass panel, mostly greens
and browns, old beer bottles tossed on the rocks before the nickel deposit law and worked over by the surf.
Abstractions.
He picks the blue-and-white one up in his right hand and feels the burrs of unfiled metal on the lead corners like the sharply
filed teeth of a chain saw. He takes one long glance at it, gives it a last chance to look like something, then centers the
force of his whole body into his right hand, imagining it not as a hand with skin and bones but a cold green crusher claw
that collapses the wing just like Alfie pulling a nuthatch off the suet block. He’s not even surprised when the blood jumps
out between his fingers like bright red bird blood. He pulls the other piece out of the vise with his left hand and does the
same thing, this time without even giving it a second look. Like the pincher claw, his left hand is weaker and the piece is
more of a cube, so it is hard to crush and he has to bang his fist down on the spruce plank of the workbench to finish it
off.

He hears the cruiser’s horn bleat down in the driveway, she must be eager to get back to work. It’s hard to pry the lead and
glass fragments out of the palms of his hands because they’re gouged in at several points, but he does it and lays the skeletons
down on the workbench. They’re bloody but they’re not smashed enough. She hasn’t even got a decent hammer. He takes a pair
of tin snips and bangs the flat end on the remains of her sculptures till there’s nothing left but a small pile of beach debris
you could see on the tide line any day. That’s how they started, that’s how they’ll fucking end.

On the way out, after raiding his side of the medicine cabinet, he detours through the kitchen and grabs an opened can of
marinated cod hearts out of the refrigerator, just about Alfie’s favorite meal. While the deputy is leaning on his horn out
in the cruiser, he dumps the cod hearts into Alfie’s dish and hears the quick padded pawsteps coming out from his bed behind
the gun cabinet in the den. He could scoop Alfie up and take him, but he doesn’t. This is his home, he’s got a right to stay.
He bends down to give the cat a couple of quick strokes that raise up its neck fur with static electricity and then dampen
it down with blood. He grabs a pair of work gloves out of the hall closet so when he crosses the parlor he won’t bleed all
over his grandmother’s braided rugs, they were her pride and joy.

Outside, the afternoon’s starting to cloud up across the harbor, the sun dropping dark and mean behind the gold cross of the
church on the other shore. The deputy has his parking lights on. Lucky steps up in the truck and lights another Marlboro with
his gloved hands. He backs past Sarah’s Lynx, cuts his rear end around the cruiser so he doesn’t have to look inside, and
heads into the road. In the mirror he can glimpse a figure passing from the cruiser across the yard into the front door. She’s
moving back in now, the house is hers.

He drives the back roads for a while, then heads for the Blue Claw.

The Claw looks like a different restaurant on a summer evening. No more friendly three-hundred-pound lobstermen at the counter
with their asscracks smiling out over their wallet chains. The coffee counter is now a latte bar for yuppie tourists with
sweaters tied around their necks in case the night should grow cool. Doris has set the tables with flowers and candles and
black-and-white checked tablecloths and every one of them has four Philadelphians with bibs on like big sunburnt children,
grinning at each other over dead red lobsters and cowpiss yellow wine. He looks for Ronette through the porthole in the kitchen
door. Fat Charlie Bonsall, the dinner cook, is in there blowing his nose on his apron. Doris is playing hostess in a yellow
dress with little brown ships sailing across it. She takes one look at Lucky and stands back from the cash register with her
hand over her chest. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

“You ain’t seen Ronette, have you?”

“Your sternlady’s back there getting her order. Take a seat at the counter, have one on the house. Ronette’s so busy tonight,
all by herself cause Jessie called in sick, which she’s not. I’ll get it myself.” She pulls out a counter stool for him like
he’s the food inspector. “You look like one of those serial killers, with the suit and gloves. That a necktie you got on,
or a noose?”

“I was up to the courthouse in Tarratine.”

“I heard. You make out all right?”

“They got my license.”

“You’re not telling me they grounded Lucas Lunt. How long you been lobstering? Thirty years?”

“Time don’t mean nothing to them.”

“What will you do now?”

“I ain’t thought that far, Doris. Maybe I could help Charlie there in the galley.”

“I’m afraid Charlie takes up the whole space.” Doris brings him a shot and a microbrew, he didn’t even know they carried the
god damn stuff. She puts the shot down on a little napkin with a red lobster on it inside a life preserver. The yuppie beside
him stares at the work glove wrapping itself around the algae-flavored beer. Doris leans on the bar corner on his other side.
“You know, with Ronette and everything, it feels like you’re family around here.” She looks down at his work gloves. “You
need help or anything, don’t be afraid to ask.”

“What do you mean, help?”

“From what I hear, you could use a place to stay.”