Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  When she had the time and energy, Dicey studied boat designs—or tried to. The trouble was, she couldn’t read the designs, couldn’t see from the flat lines on flat paper what the finished boat would look like. She studied the drawings and even copied one, line by line, onto another sheet of paper, but that didn’t help. Besides, that wasn’t what she wanted to do. She wanted to make her own ideas into this boat, to follow her own drawings. When she had time but no energy, Dicey simply worried; worrying gave her the strength to keep going.

  Every morning, she forced herself out of bed. The alarm would go off and her body would want to go back to sleep. To keep that from happening, she lined up in her mind all the things she was in trouble over, and hadn’t gotten done, or hadn’t gotten done in time. This worked like hammering together a bed of six-inch nails and lying down on it, the way Indian fakirs were supposed to do. She would turn off the alarm and start remembering: the unpaid storage bill, the supply of sandpaper, the question of if she could have the truck, of how far behind schedule she was falling—driving the nails through the board she was lying on, like an Indian fakir reaching around to hammer up nails that would stick into his flesh. That got her out of bed pretty quickly.

  The only time Dicey enjoyed was the time spent fussing over boat plans, thinking about the way a V-bottom was put together, or standing beside the larch she’d bought from Ken, with her hand resting on the pale boards, trying to feel the way they should be shaped. The golden lines of grain ran the length of the boards, almost as perfectly parallel as warp threads set out on a loom, ready for weaving. Looking down at her fingers resting on a board, feeling the wood, she was reminded of the Shakespeare Jeff had read to her, about shaping rough-hewn ends. When she had her fingertips tracing the lines of a board, Shakespeare’s words felt real to her, because she was going to shape this wood to her own purpose, to her own design, into a boat she already had the buyer for.

  Days passed. Dicey worried and worked.

  CHAPTER 9

  Half of the difficulties, she was thinking one day, as the wind blew bright and cold in the shop door and out the open windows, arose because Claude did such bad work. His bad work made her work harder. She had to sand more; sometimes she even had to replace badly driven nails or stuff paint thick into inadequately filled joints. She knew why she had to waste her time working on these boats—but even so there was in her a low, banked anger. She felt like some piece of skewered meat rotating over the heat of her own anger. Need for money skewered her, and lack of time skewered her, and she was being turned over her anger’s fire as if every long brush stroke her arm made propelled her, rolling her around and around. It had been days since she’d been able to work on Mr. Hobart’s boat plans, she thought. Although she wasn’t exactly sure, it might have just been yesterday that she didn’t.

  The voice came from behind her, a laughing voice she didn’t recognize: “‘Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task does not divide the Sunday from the week?’”

  Dicey straightened up and turned around, all in the same movement, holding the paintbrush up in front of her like a knife. A man was leaning against the door frame, the bright sunlight behind him shadowing his face. He had thick, dark hair with streaks of gray running through it. He looked, in his faded jeans and high-buttoned pea jacket, as if he’d been leaning lazily there for hours. His eyes watched her, laughing.

  “What?” Dicey demanded. He’d broken the rhythm of her work. “What did you say? What do you want?”

  “I was only wondering why you were working on a Sunday.” He didn’t move. The laughter was gone from every part of his face, except his eyes.

  Dicey shook her head, impatient. “I know that. That was a Shakespeare quote, I know.”

  He took a step into the shop. “Hamlet,” he said.

  Dicey shrugged: it didn’t matter which play. “What do you want?” she asked again.

  He moved into the shop and stood beside an upturned boat. Before he answered her question, he reached down and tested the paint with his fingers. Then he ran his hand along the long board that marked the keel of the flat-bottomed rowboat. “This one of yours?”

  “No.” Dicey disowned it quickly.

  He straightened up. “Let me give you a hand turning it rightside up, miss. Or are you going to set it over there?” He indicated two rowboats waiting beside the stack of larch.

  He had a noticing eye, a quick eye, Dicey thought. His light-brown eyes studied her, as if he had only one minute to learn everything about her. “I’ve got one more coat to put on it,” she told him.

  That seemed to surprise him, although she didn’t know why it was any of his business to be surprised. “You’ve already got two coats on it, haven’t you?”

  She nodded. She didn’t have time to waste, talking.

  “Why three coats?” he wondered.

  “The builder said so.”

  “It beats me,” the man said. “Someone who slaps together a boat like this—it’s a P-poor piece of work—he probably wouldn’t notice a missing coat of paint. Did you think of not doing the third coat? Did you think of the time it would save? Is he going to check up on you?”

  For less than a minute, for just a few seamless seconds, Dicey thought of it: These two boats were numbers seven and eight, and she was two weeks into the job; she was on schedule—almost; well, she was falling behind almost imperceptibly; and there were twenty-two more of these waiting for her. . . . It wasn’t the size of the job she minded. What she minded was spending her good working hours on such bad work. For a few seconds Dicey was tempted. Then she shook her head, as much to shake off temptation as to say no.

  “Just because he told you to put on three? He won’t notice if it’s only two. Trust me, miss, he’d never know the difference.”

  Dicey, watching his face, thought she wouldn’t trust him an inch. His face was made for mocking, a clever, mocking face. He looked lively, interesting, he looked like fun, but she wouldn’t trust his advice.

  “You always do what you’re told?” he asked.

  If he only knew, Dicey thought. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I want to see your boss.”

  “I’m the boss,” she said.

  That made him smile. She didn’t like why he was smiling, but she liked his smile.

  “I should have guessed. It’s the bosses who work on Sundays, isn’t it?”

  “So, what do you want to see me about?”

  “Work, I think. I could use a job, make a little money, and this place looks busy. Every other place around here is closed up tight.”

  “I can’t afford to hire help,” Dicey told him. “Sorry,” she said. She turned back to the boat she was painting. It was an odd time of year for an itinerant worker to be looking for a job. Mostly they’d come around during spring and summer, and mostly they were kids. She dipped the brush into the paint and stroked down the side of the rowboat. She wished she could hire someone, and get this job over with.

  She thought he’d leave, but he walked around to stand across from her. She looked up at him. “Really, I can’t.” It wouldn’t do him any good to try to persuade her.

  “Fair enough, miss. But it’s a cold day out there, and you could offer me a hot drink. I see”—he forestalled her protest—“a kettle, and a box of cocoa mix, and I assume that’s a sink in there. If you offered me a hot drink, I’d make it, and make you one, too. I’m pretty handy.”

  Maybe he was hungry, Dicey thought. His face didn’t look hungry, but there was hunger mixed in with laughter in his eyes, so maybe he was too proud to ask. “Sure, okay,” she said.

  She painted while he ran water, then opened up the envelopes and poured mix into two mugs. The inside of this boat was already done, she was finishing up the final coat, and then she just had the one more coat to put onto the other, and this batch of work would be completed. Eight done, twenty-two to go. Dragging the paint can behind her, she worked up the curving side to the pointed bow. The man wait
ed until she’d finished it and laid her brush across the top of the paint can before he poured steaming water into the mugs and stirred.

  He passed her a mug, and she sat down on the dry boat to drink. The man leaned against the wall beside the stove, his jacket unbuttoned to show a thick white turtleneck sweater. “So this is your shop,” he said. “I’ve never had a business of my own. Never had the capital. Never had the chance. It must be nice, having your own business. You been at it long?”

  “A couple of months.” The instant cocoa wasn’t anything as good as Gram’s, but it was hot and thinly sweet.

  “The great thing about a hot drink on a cold day,” he said, “is the first swallow, the way you can feel it sliding all the way down your throat into your stomach. You know? It’s about the only time I can really feel where my throat is, the length of it. So—you’re Tillerman?”

  She nodded.

  “And you’re not hiring.”

  She nodded again.

  “I guess that’s just my bad luck.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell you what, though, Miss Tillerman. I’ll help you out. Gratis. A free afternoon’s labor, what do you say to that?”

  Dicey didn’t know.

  “You’d be doing me a favor. It’s cold, there’s nowhere else I can look for work until tomorrow—if I don’t decide to move on—and I haven’t talked much to anyone for a few days. I’m a man who likes talking,” he told her, his eyes laughing, at himself that time.

  “Yeah, but what if I don’t? Like talking.”

  “Then you can listen. The truth is, I always prefer listeners to fellow talkers. You aren’t going to turn down my offer, are you?”

  Dicey thought about it. With another pair of hands she could do some actual work on Mr. Hobart’s boat at the end of the day, before going home. She might even get home in time for dinner. “No,” she decided.

  “Good enough,” he said. He took off his jacket and draped it over the stack of larch. He peeled his sweater over his head, and then pulled his undershirt down. He put his hand out for Dicey’s mug, and she gave it to him. He washed both mugs in the bathroom, dried them, and set them back in place on the worktable. He moved around the shop with a catlike grace, never disturbing anything. Dicey got back to work.

  He didn’t need to be told anything. He opened a can of paint and stirred it patiently. He selected a brush from the glass jar where she kept them soft in turpentine, shook it out, then painted it dry on his jeans. He carried the brush and paint to the other boat and started painting the flat transom. Watching him out of the corner of her eye, Dicey decided he must just be lonely, which was why he was crouched there, painting with slow, careful strokes. He sure wasn’t talking. He didn’t look or move like a man who’d paint so slowly, so she thought he might be dragging out the time because he wanted company.

  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 no
se; 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.”