Read Online The Wooden Nickel by William Carpenter - Free Book Online

spearing it on his fork, and eating it again. He spits something else out of his mouth, holds it out, looks at it.
     “Jesus H. Christ, Doris, what do you put in this shit?”
    “It’s kind of a secret,” Doris says.
    “Looks like a fucking tooth. Don’t that look like a tooth, Harv?”
    Harvey Trott puts his cruller down with his hook hand, reaches for the thing with his good one, looks it over, pops it in
     his mouth and chews it down. “Nothing wrong with that, Anson. Just a bit gristly, that’s all.”
    Anson gets up off of the stool, his head just about touching Doris’s acoustic ceiling, and goes to pay her with a brand-new
     hundred-dollar bill.
    When Lucky goes to take care of his own check, she says, “Coffee’s paid for. The Trott boys picked it up.”
    Lucky runs right into Clyde Hannaford on the gangway leading to the skiff float. He can’t avoid him. “Sorry to hear about
     things at home,” he says.
    Clyde answers, “Fuck you too,” which Lucky doesn’t know whether to take personally, or if it’s just what a guy might say to
     anyone after his wife takes off.
    “It ain’t my fault, Clyde. Could happen to anyone.”
    “I’m going to close this fucking place up and sell it,” Clyde says. He’s got a bit of a whine in his voice, same whine he
     uses when he’s jawing your dock price down five cents a pound.
    “No you ain’t, Clyde. We all need you. Get drunk after work, jerk off, give her a while, maybe she’ll come back.”
    “I can’t get drunk,” Clyde whines. “Only place to get drunk is the RoundUp, and she’s going to be there. Sure as shit. I’m
     moving to Florida, live with my folks down in Coral Gables.”
    “You ain’t. Who would run things around here? Nobody knows diddly shit except how to fish.”
    “You boys could take over the wharf, buy me out, make it a
co-
operative like they got over to Split Cove.”
    “Won’t work. There ain’t one of us that can keep the books.”
    “No problem,” Clyde says. “It’s not hard. Just take what I pay you guys and add on fifty percent for yourself.”
    “That’s simple,” Lucky says. “I could even do that.”
    “Then take her, she’s yours.” He squints over at Clyde, who adds, “I mean the wharf.”
    “I’m sure you do,” Lucky says. “I’m sure as shit sure you do.”
    He leaves Clyde turning the prices up on his fuel pumps and rows towards the
Wooden Nickel,
hugging the shore at first to avoid the channel current. A ways down he can see a construction crew renovating one of the
     old mansions for some Philadelphia son of a bitch, well-drilling rig in there, backhoe digging for a huge septic tank the
     size of a garage. That’s what Dwight Lord tells him, he’s the honey-wagon driver from Burnt Neck,
Nobody shits like the rich.
Dwight claims they stuff those big tanks full three or four times a month — just one family, plus a few other big shitters
     that show up for weekend visits in their corporate jets. He has to come down and ream the drains out twice a week. Eat and
     shit, that’s how Dwight puts it. And the fucking contractor is from Massachusetts.
    He ties the skiff to the pennant and lets it drift back aft where it’s easier to climb on, not jumping up on the prow as he
     might have ten or fifteen years ago. You don’t go leaping around when you’re a forty-six-year-old medical experiment, proud
     father of a kid bound off to college and another one bound for jail. He climbs in, flips the radio to High Country and reaches
     behind the radar screen for a Marlboro. On the way, though, his hand encounters something else. Hey. A bag lunch. Sarah must
     have come out here and stuck it on the boat. That would be a first. Anyhow, he’s already got Sarah’s lunch right in his hand.
     He puts Sarah’s sandwich on the engine box and opens the new bag. There’s an éclair in there from Doris’s with its cream interior
     oozing out and the chocolate topping stuck to the paper bag, and a banana