The Amazing Adventures of 4¢ Ned Read online

  The Amazing Adventures of 4¢ Ned

  Coinworld: Book One

  Benjamin Laskin

  Aretê Books

  Contents

  Coinworld: Book One

  1. e pluribus awesome

  2. saving franny

  3. turning up like a bad penny

  4. paddy’s tale

  5. 4¢ ned and chief iron tail

  6. the legend of 4¢ ned spreads

  7. little buggers

  8. the great escape

  9. buccaneers

  10. lost and found

  11. fireside chat

  12. a nickel-and-dime operation

  13. lake woes begun

  14. missing ingredients

  15. island hopping

  16. local legends

  17. ring leader

  18. powwow

  19. affaire de coins

  20. endangered species

  Message from the Author

  Other Novels by Benjamin Laskin

  Special Offer

  Special Thanks

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 by Benjamin Laskin The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Published by Aretê Books Cover design by Domi at Inspired Cover Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-5404-7608-1

  Created with Vellum

  In memory of my beloved father, Nat Laskin, forever the most precious man in my life.

  * * *

  Coinworld: Book One

  Money talks.

  - Anonymous

  With money in your pocket you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well too.

  —Yiddish Proverb

  1

  e pluribus awesome

  July 1949 — Wyoming

  A bearded, gap-toothed, and luckless prospector introduced Pete to Ned Nickel on a hot summer afternoon in a Wyoming saloon in 1949. Pete had been sitting shunned and forlorn on the saloon’s bar top until the old prospector discovered him wedged between the ketchup bottle and the Worcestershire sauce.

  The man pressed a nicotine-stained finger onto Pete’s backside and dragged him across the counter. He flipped Pete over, checked his date, and snorted in derision. Clearly, the old-timer expected to find the shabby penny much older than he actually was. He smacked the Lincoln heads-up back onto the bar top, flicked him with his finger, and sent him ricocheting off a shiny nickel and into the side of a nearby ashtray. The prospector promptly forgot about the penny and ordered another beer.

  Pete Penny didn’t take the old duffer’s snubbing personally. He had already grown used to rejection in his young life. Minted in 1946, and boasting 95% copper, 5% tin and zinc, the proud Lincoln wheat cent popped out of the hopper gleaming, cheerful, and ready to circulate. Little did he know back in that pristine state what adventures awaited, or the toll they would take on him.

  Prior to that afternoon, Pete never thought that a single cent could make much of a difference in the world, but that was about to change. Every jingle and jangle in every pocket or purse was a ballad sung by some coinage, but no coin Pete had ever met had a tale like Ned Nickel’s.

  “Hello, penny,” the nickel greeted, happy for the company.

  “Hi,” Pete returned, a little self-conscious. He was embarrassed by the speck of dried ketchup on Abe Lincoln’s beard and the crumbs that stuck like feathers around his rough edges.

  The coins’ conversation was inaudible to the prospector. People’s range of hearing came nowhere near that of coins. When conversing it didn’t matter that Pete was heads-up and the nickel was heads-down. They could hear through either side. Coins also possessed exceptional, fly-like eyesight, though seeing well did require being face-side up.

  When at rest or “playing dead” in the presence of humans, coins appeared flat and typically in profile, with only one eye and one ear. When among themselves, however, a coin could project its embossments, and so bring out the rest of its face—something it never chanced when around people.

  Pete didn’t know the nickel’s age, but he looked freshly minted. His edge was smooth and without notch or nick, and his tail-side gleamed. Most coins were already scuffed up within a few years, so Pete figured that the nickel hadn’t been in circulation long.

  Just like the great man embossed on his obverse (front side), Pete always enjoyed talking with his kinsmen and learning their stories, and so he asked the nickel how he got to the Wyoming bar top.

  “The prospector got me from the general store down the road, who got me from an old seamstress on the other side of town, who got me from a traveling salesman who had torn his trousers changing a flat tire. You?”

  “I’ve been sitting here for three days. I arrived in the pocket of an old drunk who picked me up out of a gutter he was getting sick in. Have you ever been stuck in a gutter?”

  “No, thank goodness,” the nickel answered. “You were lucky that guy barfed on you.”

  “That’s one way to look at it, I suppose. It rained hard the next day, so yeah, I could have gone from gutter to storm drain, and then who knows where I’d have ended up? Lost forever, most likely.”

  Pete learned that the nickel’s name was Ned and that they were both minted in Philadelphia. To the penny’s surprise, the sparkling nickel entered the world in 1938, and so was eight years older than Pete.

  As a coin never knew when one of them would be pocketed or spirited away, Pete dispensed with the small talk and said, “If you don’t mind me asking, how come you still look so new? I mean, look at me. If it weren’t for Mr. Lincoln’s face you’d think I was unearthed from an archeological dig in Mesopotamia.”

  “Aw, you don’t look a year earlier than 1948.”

  “Yeah, right,” the penny scoffed. “That’s because you’re looking out your tail-side. C’mon, what’s your beauty secret?”

  “I’m a reject.”

  “A snappy looking guy like you? No way.”

  “Take a closer look.”

  “Hah, hah,” Pete said, not amused.

  All coins knew that they were bound by Newton’s 1st law of coinage motion; that a coin must remain in a state of rest until acted on by an external force, usually a person’s finger.

  “I’m not joking,” Ned said. “Give it a try.”

  Pete rolled his one eye, and then he grunted in an effort to move. He didn’t budge a whisper of an iota, of course.

  “Are you mocking me, nickel?” Pete said, peeved.

  Pete may have been a puny little penny, but he had stood up to coins a lot bigger than a nickel before.

  “No joke, Pete. E pluribus unum. That’s the key.”

  “E pluribus unum?”

  “Out of many, one.”

  “I know what our motto means, but they’re just words.”

  “To some just words; to others our motto is the source of the All and the recipe for freedom.”

  “Say what?”

  “Watch.”

  Pete was sure that the nickel was just pulling his wheat stalks, but after having been abandoned on a sticky bar top for a week, he was a sucker for any entertainment that came his way.

  Ned chanted the phrase “e pluribu
s unum,” and then he grew as still and dumb as a poker chip.

  Nothing happened.

  Feeling the sucker, the penny was about to give the smart-aleck nickel a piece of his mind, when the old prospector grabbed Pete up and flicked him tumbling into the air with his thumbnail. The man caught him, and then slapped him back onto the bar top next to Ned.

  “Holy moolah!” Pete exclaimed. “How’d you do that?!”

  “I call it palm jumping. I tap into people’s greed and effect a quantum leap from one stationary state to another.”

  “Palm jumping, huh? But-but how?”

  “E pluribus unum,” Ned stated. “From many, one. The mind of the Great Minter flows through everything in the universe, Pete. And as you well know, money is always on the minds of humans. I just tapped into the currency.”

  “You told the old guy to do that?” Pete said with disbelief.

  “Nah. I only floated a request that Pete Penny might move a little closer. The old timer has free will, and we can’t tamper with that. I didn’t know where he’d set you down. But, here you are.”

  “Well,” Pete said, “if I hadn’t seen it with my own eye, I’d never have believed such a thing possible. But let me ask you, how do I know it wasn’t just a coincidence?”

  “Want to see it again?”

  “Could you blame me?”

  “Okay, but remember, I don’t have any control over what a person might do when I send a request out into the vast river of currency. I always run the risk of something going wrong.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Okay, then. Hold on to your britches, Pete Penny.”

  Ned readied himself like before, and sure enough, the old prospector picked Pete up again. This time he twirled the penny on the counter like a top. Pete became dizzy, then nauseous, and then he collapsed heads-down on Ned’s lap, half of him right across the words, UNITED STATES.

  “Sorry about that,” Ned said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Pete slurred. “That’s hardly the first spin I’ve taken. But give me a minute because what I’m seeing isn’t making much sense.”

  “You mean cents,” Ned said. “You’re seeing right.”

  At once Pete recognized the source of Ned’s youthful good looks. He knew that there had to be a reason behind the nickel’s smooth complexion, but he’d never have guessed this could be it. Ned was as silky fresh as a spring leaf, so Pete had assumed that the nickel was one of those coins who had spent most of his or her life unmolested in a piggy bank, a misplaced coin purse, or lost for years in the crevice of a sofa.

  But, no. The reason for Ned’s mint condition was staring Pete in the face, right under Mr. Lincoln’s sizable nose. Ned Nickel might have had Pete Penny by eight years, but he also had him by 3¢. Somehow Ned had got stamped with a FOUR instead of a FIVE. He was a 4¢ nickel, and Pete knew that made Ned very valuable to collectors.

  “Don’t you have any memory of that day?” Pete asked after recovering from his astonishment.

  “Some,” Ned answered, “but it’s kind of a blur. You have to remember, I didn’t know that there was anything wrong with me. I was just happy to be alive. That first yummy taste of oxidation, who can forget that, right?”

  Pete nodded in recollection of that awesome moment. “So, when did you figure out that you were, well, misfigured?”

  “Pretty darn fast,” Ned answered. “An inspector snatched me from the conveyor belt, turned me over, and right then and there I knew by the gawking look on his face that something was wrong. He spat on my backside, rubbed me with a cloth, and held me up to a magnifying glass. Did I have an unsightly scratch or blotch? Did Mr. Jefferson’s Monticello home come out a ruin? I had no idea. And then the man hollered, ‘Stop the presses!’”

  “Whoa. Were you scared?”

  “Heck, yeah. I had only been alive for a few minutes and thought, ‘This is it? I’m done for? Would I never see the inside of a gumball machine? Never be a part of any tip? Never know the joy of deciding a toss-up or hear the melodious chime of a cash register?’

  “Anyway,” Ned continued, “a crowd gathered and I was passed from man to man, each peering at me like I was some sort of mutant. It was humiliating, I gotta tell you. There I was, butt-naked, gleaming with all the freshness of youth, and they were giving me the fish eye.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The chief inspector ordered me to the recycling bin.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Tell me about it. It’s one thing when you’re just lumps of copper, silver, nickel, zinc or manganese, but now I was alive. I was a living, breathing nickel! Okay, short a cent, but other than that, I looked just like the rest of us. My face was as handsome as every other coin’s, and Tommy Jefferson’s Monticello home was a beauty.”

  Pete groused, “You got a plantation home and I got stuck with a couple stalks of wheat.”

  “The staff of life,” Ned reminded him.

  For a deformed nickel, Ned seemed to always look on the bright side, and Pete admired that in a coin.

  Pete said, “You’re still here, so they must have changed their minds, right?”

  “Far from it. They doomed me to the furnace, all right. Once they were done mocking me, the inspector unapologetically chucked me towards the recycle bin. I sailed through the air screaming our motto, ‘In God we trust!’ I was desperate after all, and that motto we’re all stamped with had to be there for a reason, don’t you think?”

  “Frankly, I never thought about it, but maybe so. What happened next?”

  “I bounced off the edge of the bin and hit the floor rolling, that’s what. I rolled as fast and far as my little rim would carry me.”

  “A natural-born athlete, weren’t you?”

  “How’s that?” Ned asked.

  “Most coins couldn’t travel more than a foot or two before toppling over.”

  “I always attributed my sprint to sheer desperation. Fearing for your life is a good motivator.”

  “The inspector didn’t notice?”

  “I didn’t wait around to find out. I hightailed it towards some machinery for cover. I doubted that the guy wanted to get down on his hands and knees with all that dirt and grease and go hunting for me.”

  “Good thinking,” Pete said. “How long did you have to stay in that bog?”

  “I didn’t. I kept rolling. I chugged through the grease, bounced over some metal filings, and then dashed out the other side.”

  “That’s incredible,” Pete said. “Then what happened?”

  “Well, fueled by fright and my manganese pumping, I beelined it for the door. I shot underneath a press machine and straight out the other side. I zipped past a stack of wooden pallets, and kept spinning my hoop until—bam!—I slammed up against some guy’s work boot and collapsed heads-up and panting on the floor in the corner of the room.”

  “Heck of a way to start your life,” Pete said.

  “Hello, world!” Ned crowed good-naturedly. “Anyway, there I sat until around midnight when a janitor came in and found me. He picked me up and casually dropped me into his pocket. I plunked alongside some spare change—a few pennies, a dime, and two quarters.”

  “You never forget your first pocket, do you?” Pete said. “Lint?”

  “Plenty, but I didn’t mind because I was grimy from my jaunt. Within a few hours of jangling I was cleaned up. Ever since I’ve kinda liked the stuff, you know?”

  “Cushy, too,” Pete remarked.

  “Yep. I never understood how that stuff grows, but I’m not gonna complain. It always did right by me.”

  Pete nodded in agreement. A lot of coinage liked to bellyache about lint, saying it was a source of embarrassment when the stuff hitched a ride with them out of some human’s pocket, but not Pete. He thought of it like grass under a person’s bare feet. He imagined that felt pretty good, and that was his attitude.

  And so began Ned Nickel’s amazing adventure. At first he got passed around plenty by p
eople who weren’t very observant; people who took him at face value, and didn’t notice the FOUR inscribed on his tail-side. As with most coins, he went from sweaty palm to sweaty palm, and few people gave him a second thought.

  For Ned, as with all coins, nothing was sweeter than to remain loose change. Gregarious by nature and born to circulate, partaking in human commerce gave coins a sense of purpose. A coin would rather be stuck in a paper coin roll or even a mint bag than be held prisoner by a numismatist, and so stranded companionless for eternity. Because of Ned’s rarity, that was his greatest fear. With every exchange he dreaded that some person might recognize his inestimable value as the world’s only four-cent nickel, and so end up isolated and never to engage in commerce again.

  He had many close calls, as every so often a human would give him a good squint and holler something like, “Hey, Mabel, have a gander at this oddball!” The person would then show Ned to every passerby like he was a circus freak. Inevitably, the holder would lose interest, and Ned would pass months in solitude: forgotten in a drawer, or under the tray of a cash register beneath a bunch of dumb, worthless coupons.

  Ned told Pete that on one occasion, a teenage boy had discovered his four-cent value and consigned him to a secret compartment in the youth’s wallet next to a scrap of paper with a phone number to a girl named Betty that the kid was too chicken to call. There Ned sat until the boy lost his wallet under some bleachers at a high school football game. He passed six months under the stands beneath some trash. Eventually, another schoolmate found the wallet after a teacher forced the student to clean under the stadium’s bleachers as punishment for having mouthed off to him in class. The boy discovered Ned inside the wallet, gave Betty a call, and the following day spent Ned as part of two chocolate malts.

  “Long story short,” Ned said, returning to the discovery of his amazing ability to tap into human greed, “it was during my long, dark exiles that I developed my philosophy and learned to palm jump. I never gave up hope. I never lost faith that one day I’d feel the warmth of a pocket again, and once more know the thrill of the free market.”