Free The Wooden Nickel by William Carpenter Page B

with them, they
     don’t give a shit, they’ll cuff you to the wheel and set your truck on fire.”
    Darrell squints down into the
Wooden Nickel
’s tank, couple of four-pounders in one corner, shakes his head. “Mr. Moto wouldn’t have nothing to do with them. Too fucking
     small.”
    “Right up at the legal limit,” Lucky says. “You put the gauge to them.”
    “No doubt.” Darrell keeps shaking his head like he doesn’t believe something. “You see them urchins, Mr. Lunt? The price of
     them suckers is going to double next week. Only we don’t sell. We hold out. Week after that, closed season, Japs starving
     for sushi, the price is going to double again.”
    “You ain’t going to play that kind of game with the mafia,” Lucky says.
    Darrell says, “Mr. Moto ain’t Italian. He happens to be from oriental extraction.”
    “And he’s buying off-season?”
    “Oversize lobsters too,” Kyle says, trusting his old man now that Darrell has trusted him. “How about eight dollars a pound?”
    Lucky has to stop on this one. He’s had a couple of jumbos in the outside traps over the last week, five or six pounds apiece,
     which he throws back by instinct, not even bothering to put the measure to them. Forty-eight pounds of lobster at eight bucks
     a pound would be close to four hundred bucks a week, on top of what he gets off Clyde. Kristen’s going to college next year,
     mailbox full of bills all winter when the boat is hauled, nothing coming in, he hasn’t the dimmest fucking idea where he’s
     going to get the money.
    Another voice comes in, it’s his old man Walter Lunt:
Don’t take no shorts, Lukie, and don’t take no breeders, you got to leave something for your kids.
A brief little length of tape inside playing his old man’s voice. Just like the shorts and the females, big offshore breeders
     are the future, like his house and his fishing grounds, a legacy to save for his own flesh and blood, whether they give a
     shit or not. If lobstering was a religion, that would be the first commandment. “I ain’t going to do it,” he says. “I don’t
     care nothing about sea urchins, but them big deep-sea lobsters ain’t going to Tokyo. They’re the breeding stock.”
    “Don’t worry,” Darrell says, “you ain’t going to catch them all.”
    “Don’t matter, I ain’t doing it. And Kyle ain’t either. There’s things besides money.”
    “I’d like to know what,” Kyle says. “I didn’t learn none from you.”
    “You won’t learn none from him either. Or that gook dealer of yours.”
    Kyle gets sullen and looks down but he doesn’t answer back. He takes up a cracked urchin and throws it on the other side.
     Darrell goes to cast off the
Wooden Nickel
but Lucky beats him to it. He idles out so as not to rock them too bad, then after a few yards he runs up the harbor to bring
     his legal lobsters into Clyde’s.

3
    H E’S GOT HIS FEET UP after supper on the big stack of
Commercial Fisherman
s in the TV nook. One eye’s checking out the boat photos in the new issue, the other’s watching the
K-Mart Kountry Talent Show,
which is not showing much talent, couple of Christian crotch-scratchers from the county, a commercial for the Tarratine Monster
     Truck Show, then a pale wrinkly woman that looks like Dale Evans out of the grave. It’s supposed to be her debut performance
     but she’s sixty if she’s a day. They used to have a good show with real talent but now it’s mostly freaks. They’re bringing
     the Lemieux Brothers next, a ghoul act with two dead-looking teenagers stuck together like Siamese twins, when the phone rings
     and he lets Sarah get it. She sings sweetly, “Lucas, somebody for you.”
    She hands him the cordless and waits listening as if it’s a business call that concerns them both. Must be some son of a bitch
     pushing bank cards, they like to call you when your mouth’s full, even though when they actually run his credit check, they
     turn him down. But god