Seventeen Against the Dealer (11 page)

He broke the silence to ask, “Think it's going to snow?”

Dicey shrugged; she didn't know.

“Do you get much snow around here?”

“No, not much.” She dipped her brush into the thick white paint and stroked along the side of the boat.

“Ever get blizzards around here?”

Dicey shook her head, her eyes on the moist line of fresh paint.

“I've seen blizzards, like you can't imagine. I was in one once, at sea—the North Atlantic and I'll tell you, Miss Tillerman, never more than once for me. For one thing, I was scared. Scared like nothing else ever. But—with the snow just pouring down and pouring down, and those waves, gray as thunderclouds, and the tops of them foaming, hissing, like it was blizzarding up, too—you ever see those little glass jars kids get for Christmas?” Dicey nodded. “And when you shake them, this fake snow swirls around?” She nodded again. “It felt like that, like I was inside one of those glass balls and someone was holding it in his hand, shaking it.”

Dicey could almost see what he meant. For a minute, she could feel it as if she'd been there.

“And cold—cold so bad you couldn't breathe the air without freezing your lungs. No, it's true, we had to wrap scarves up around our chins and breathe through them, or our lungs would have frozen. Freezing from the inside out. Why do you think those ski masks—the kind robbers wear with just a slit for the mouth?—they cover up your mouth. It's the same anywhere the temperature goes down to—I dunno, somewhere below zero. Don't you believe me?”

“Sure,” Dicey said. It didn't matter if she believed him or not. She had no way of finding out. Carefully, she ran the paintbrush up the sharp angle where the two sides of the rowboats joined at the pointed bow, then gently she painted horizontally again, so that all the brush strokes on the sides would go in the same direction. When she looked up, he was crouched there beside the other boat, watching her paint.

“That bit's unnecessary,” he told her. “No one's going to notice it and I timed you, it used up about five minutes.”

“That's
my
business,” Dicey told him.

“Right you are,” he said, not offended.

She carried her paint can to the bow of the boat he was working on, and began painting down toward him.

“Are you a Republican or a Democrat, Miss Tillerman?” he asked.

“What difference does that make?” She had, in fact, registered Independent, not that it was any of his business.

“Truer words were never spoken.”

It took her a minute to figure out what he meant. He'd taken her words to mean something different from what they meant to her.

“The thing is,” he said, “that there are three subjects everyone
can talk about. The weather”—he counted them off—“politics, and education. I was trying politics, since you don't seem interested in the weather and you obviously aren't being educated.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing personal. Just that if you were, you'd be in school now, not running a boat shop. You're what—maybe eighteen or nineteen?”

“Twenty-one,” Dicey muttered. “And who says so, anyway, that those are the three topics?”

“Tolstoy.” He answered so quickly she knew he'd wanted her to ask. “You ever heard of Tolstoy?”

“Yes. He's a Russian writer.”

“Ever read him?” the man asked.

Dicey would have liked to say yes, but it would have been a lie. She almost said, But my friend Jeff did, and my brother, and she thought Gram probably had, too, remembering some conversations among the three of them. Dicey, however, hadn't. She shook her head.

“So what is there for us to talk about?” the man asked.

“I thought,” Dicey reminded him, “that you were going to talk and I was going to listen.”

“But I already know everything I think, and I'm bored with it. Whereas you, Miss Tillerman, are terra incognita.”

Dicey glared at him. She didn't know what that meant and he knew she didn't, but she wasn't about to ask. She got back to work. Let him talk if he wanted to. She had work to do.

Another silence occupied them. They worked slowly toward each other at the center of the rowboat, where they would pass each other to move apart again.

“Miss Tillerman?” He sounded like he was barely not laughing.

Dicey didn't say a word, she just looked up.

“I wonder if I might make use of your bathroom,” he asked.

“Sure,” Dicey said. To his back, she demanded, “And why do you keep calling me Miss Tillerman, anyway?”

He didn't answer, closing the door behind him. He didn't answer, emerging, returning to the job, picking up his brush and laying thick lines of paint on with it. Finally he asked, “You don't like the name?”

“I didn't say that.”

“I don't know your name,” he pointed out. They were about opposite to each other by then.

“I don't know yours, either.”

He didn't say anything, didn't look at her. She studied his thick graying hair and his broken nose; she studied the weathered tan on his skin, and saw that the ends of his wide mouth wanted to twitch up.

“Dicey,” she said.

“How'd you get a name like that?” he asked, without looking up from his work.

Dicey shrugged. She wasn't about to say I got it from my father, or so I think, but I'm not sure because he took off years ago, so I never asked him. “What's yours?” she asked.

He hesitated. “Cisco,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes.

He didn't look Spanish, Dicey thought. He didn't have a Spanish accent. But what did she know, anyway, about Spanish people; she'd never met any, or been to Spain. How did she know what he would look like if he were Spanish and had a Spanish name? But she knew he was lying, she thought; not that she cared what his name was.

“Kidd,” he added. “Like the pirate?” Dicey had no idea. “Captain Kidd, but I never made captain so they called me Cisco, like the Cisco Kid on the television series. Or are you too young? Yeah, you're too young. Cisco rode around the Wild
West, righting wrongs, and he had a sidekick, Poncho, because Poncho was pretty fat around the gut. So they called me Cisco and it stuck.”

He was talking as if all of that made sense, but it didn't make much sense to Dicey.

“You can call me Cisco,” he concluded. “You know, it looks like those tools over there haven't been in use very long. In fact, it looks as if they've never been used.”

“That's true enough,” Dicey told him.

He waited, painting, then asked: “But you said you've been in business a couple of months. And you've got those three boats, over there, racked up like storage and looking like all the maintenance work has already been done, and there's that pile of lumber, as if you were going to build something, or patch it, but it looks pretty pricey for patching wood, and larch would be one of my first choices, if I were going to build a small boat. . . .”

He knew wood, and he had a quick eye, a quick tongue, and good hands, too. She didn't know where'd he'd come from, but she wasn't sorry he'd turned up for the afternoon. “I had some old tools, I'd bought them and refinished them, and—they were pretty fine, some of them were really old and fine. But I got robbed,” she told him. “And don't ask me if I was insured, because I wasn't.”

“Insurance is for people who like to play it safe, people who can't take risks,” he answered.

Also for people who didn't want to take losses, Dicey thought to herself. She wasn't about to kid herself that she didn't wish she'd had insurance to cover that loss.

“Anyway, that's why I took this job. Originally I turned it down. There are thirty of these boats. It's for my landlord,” she explained. “He needed to go to Florida, or his wife did—”

“Wives,” Cisco said, sympathizing with Claude. “Women.”

“Yeah, well, he's never too eager to work any harder than he has to, and I need the money.”

“I didn't mean to be sexist,” Cisco said, mocking.

“Yes, you did.” Dicey couldn't think of any reason not to let him know she didn't believe him.

“Well, okay, maybe I did. Maybe I am. Do you think I am?”

Dicey just laughed. “How would I know? I don't know anything about you.”

“Fair enough,” he answered. “You don't know much about men in general, either, I bet.”

Dicey didn't bother rising to that piece of bait.

“Because otherwise you would have thought of the most obvious thing.”

Obvious thing? She had no idea what he meant.

“About being robbed. You mean it never crossed your mind? You never wondered if your landlord might have arranged the whole thing? So you'd have to work on his boats, and he'd be able to head on south and shut his wife up?”

“Are you saying that Claude's the one who stole my tools?”

“Probably not.”

“Or hired somebody?”

“Does that sound like him?” Cisco asked.

None of it sounded like Claude, or anybody else she knew. She wondered about the kind of people this Cisco knew. “No,” she said.

“My guess would be, it would be like Henry II having Becket killed. Your landlord would just sort of mention, maybe at a bar or something, that you had a set of tools that was practically antique, practically priceless, and if someone overheard him and decided to relieve you of them—well, that wouldn't be his fault, would it?”

“Is that what
you'd
do?” Dicey asked him.

“No. I'd take them myself, and get the money for myself.”

For a second, she wondered if Cisco had actually done that. If he had heard Claude talking at a bar and heard about her tools, and stolen them. Then why would he come by the shop? Maybe he was playing out some elaborate game of his own. Then she realized how unlikely all of that was. It was the kind of complicated idea that might apply where there was a lot of money at stake, or some fantastic jewels, but not the tools in her shop. Cisco wasn't serious, he was just talking.

“What happened with Henry II?” she asked.

“Well, you know about Becket, don't you?”

He already knew she didn't, or he guessed so surely that it was the same as knowing. So she didn't bother answering. He wasn't surprised she didn't answer. He just went on and told her the long story. Dicey listened, and painted, letting his voice bring up alive in her imagination the man who changed his Lord Chamberlain's seal for a bishop's ring, understanding how that changed his way of looking at things. She could almost hear the footsteps of the knights come to murder him in his cathedral, the sound of the metal swords being drawn out of their scabbards. Cisco was, as he said, a good talker.

T
he next morning, Dicey loaded the truck with firewood and stopped at Claude's to pick up the trailer, before going to the shop. In the dimmed brightness under an overcast sky, she emptied the truck bed, stacking the firewood under the worktable. Then she lay plastic sheets down over the floor and began working the first of the finished rowboats around to the shop door.

It wasn't cold enough to snow, but it was cold. She inched the boat carefully along, wondering if it would be possible to bring two of the unfinished rowboats at one time on the trailer. That would cut down at least on that end of the job. She thought about how with two people working, some things—like moving boats around, for example—took less than half the time, more like a quarter.

She wished she did have the money to hire someone. Not for all the time, just part of it. She didn't feel right always asking Sammy and Maybeth—and she hadn't even told Gram there were boats to be moved today. Gram's cold had cleared up, but she was still having trouble shaking the cough. Yesterday, after dinner, Gram had made a pot of tea, declaring her intention of floating the cough out to sea on a tide of tea. “You're no more tired of it than I am, girl,” she'd told Dicey, which was probably the truth. “Have you returned Jeff's phone call yet?” Dicey hadn't, and didn't. There was too much to do, and by the time
she got everything done, it was too late to call. Jeff's roommate went to bed early—well, early for a college student. She couldn't call Jeff after ten-fifteen. Besides, she thought, looking across at Gram over the list of biology vocabulary she was helping Maybeth memorize, she was too tired to have any kind of a conversation.

She couldn't ask Sammy and Maybeth to help her move boats, anyway, because they were on their last two regular class days before exams. She almost wished she'd had the money to hire that Cisco person.

She was lifting the first unfinished rowboat off the trailer when he returned. The boat's weight came into balance and she looked up; he was standing there, as if he'd always been there. “You sneak around like a cat,” she said.

“You don't like cats?” he asked, the laughter barely below the surface of his voice, and unconcealed in his eyes. “It's pretty inefficient to do this by yourself.”

“I told you yesterday,” she warned him, “I can't afford to hire anyone.”

“I heard you yesterday,” he said. “So, where does this go?”

They carried it inside, then brought out the second of the finished boats, setting it down gently on the trailer's cradle. Cisco went around to the passenger side of the truck.

“I thought you were going to look for work,” Dicey said.

“Nobody's hiring. I haven't got anything better to do.”

She shrugged. She wasn't about to turn down help.

Wheezing at the weight of the load it was pulling, the truck hauled the trailer the half-mile to Claude's. Cisco, relaxed in his seat but refusing to do up the seat belt, commented on the sounds from the motor. “This truck's ready for the knacker's.”