Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  “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.

  CHAPTER 10

  The 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.”

  “The what?”

  “You know, that’s what they used to do with old horses. Send them to the knacker’s to be turned into—oh, glue and dog food and probably cheap leather, too, now I think of it. Haven’t you ever heard of the knacker’s?”

  Dicey didn’t bother answering him. Obviously she hadn’t.

  “This truck must be about a hundred years old.”

  The low gray sky hung over them.

  “It’s probably a verifiable miracle that it’s still running.”

  “My brother keeps it going.” She shifted into third.

  “You have a brother?”

  “Two.”

  “Is that all of you?”

  “No, I’ve got a sister, too.”

  “Are they all like you?” he asked. “Extroverted, talkative? Warm-heartedly convivial?”

  Dicey looked across to meet his laughing eyes. “No,” she said, keeping her own face straight.

  “Oh. Well then, about cats. Did you know that the early Egyptians believed that cats were sacred?”

  Dicey hadn’t known that and now that she did, it didn’t strike her as any too hot a piece of news.

  “Certain cats, that is, not all cats. Like the Hindus with cows.”

  What about the Hindus with cows? she thought.

  “You don’t know about that, either?” He sounded pleased that she didn’t. “What kind of an education did you have?”

  “A normal one.”

  “Any college?”

  “I quit, last May. Afte
r I finished my second year.” Now he’d ask her why and she would have to decide whether to explain. She pulled the truck into Claude’s parking lot and backed it around, until the trailer was in place, hoping he wouldn’t ask her why.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I got out of school as soon as I could, myself. Listen, Miss Tillerman, I know you don’t want to damage your paint job on the finished boats, but is there any reason we can’t bring back two of the unfinished ones at one time?”

  It was as if he could read her mind, or as if their minds worked the same way. “We can try,” she said.

  It didn’t work, because the angle of the sides wasn’t wide enough to allow an overlap that let the boats stack securely. So they spent a couple of hours moving rowboats around, leaning the finished ones on each other, like a row of circus elephants parading down the length of Claude’s shop, bringing back the next group of four to Dicey’s. Dicey didn’t mind the time it took. She had figured to lose a day over this job. She figured now she was coming out ahead.

  She split her lunch with him, giving him one of the two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and half of the wedge of pie. He declined any of the milk Gram had put into a thermos for her. He’d had enough dried milk to last him a lifetime, he said.

  They ate sitting on the two boats she’d work on next, facing each other, both pairs of knees in worn jeans, the two pairs of feet in sneakers, only his were the thick-soled kind. He ate the way he did everything else, quickly and neatly.

  “Why don’t you go home for lunch?” he asked her.

  “It takes longer. Besides, my grandmother needs time to herself.”

  “You live with your grandmother?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited, but she had nothing more to say.

  “It’s funny, you’ve got instant milk, which is about as skimpy as milk can get and still have the name, but this bread is homemade and the pie—” He put the final bite into his mouth and chewed contentedly.

  “Instant milk is cheaper and just as nourishing. Homemade bread is cheaper, too. Gram buys flour in hundred-pound sacks.”

  “Is it okay if I make myself a cup of hot chocolate?” he asked.

  “Sure.” She listened to him as he filled the kettle with water and set it on top of the wood-burning stove. She heard the clink as he set a mug down, and the tiny ripping sound when he opened a packet of mix. His voice came from behind her.

  “If you live with your grandmother, what about your mother?”

  Dicey’s eyes were on the rough joints where Claude had nailed household to marine plywood, the cheap materials hastily assembled. She was reminding herself—eight done, the next four beginning, when she finished these there would be twelve done, which was almost half of the job—“She’s dead,” Dicey said.

  “I am sorry.” He sounded like he meant it. Well, Dicey was sorry, too, but there was nothing she could do about it. “So you live—there are four of you, right?—with your grandmother. Did you ever think,” he changed the subject, “of how many lives Louis Pasteur saved?”

  Dicey shook her head. She never had.

  “If there’s a heaven, and if good deeds get you there, he’s probably in heaven.”

  That was too many ifs for Dicey to have anything to say about.

  “You do know who Pasteur is, don’t you?”

  She turned her head to look at him. He wasn’t looking at her. He was standing, watching the kettle, so all she saw was his tall, lean body, and the broad shoulders under the white turtleneck sweater, and the thick, gray-streaked hair growing long down over his weathered neck. “I’m not stupid.” She let him know that.

  He turned his head, to grin at her. “I never thought you were stupid, Miss Tillerman. Only uneducated.”

  Dicey stood up, crushing the two folds of wax paper that had wrapped the sandwiches, balling up the foil from the pie. She tossed them like baseballs into the wastebasket, and then folded up the paper bag, to take it home with her at the end of the day. She had work to do, a long afternoon’s work.

  “What do you do next?” he asked her.

  “Sanding.”

  “I could stay and help out.”

  “I keep telling you, I can’t afford hired help.”

  Steam came out of the kettle’s spout. He poured water into the mug, then stirred it with a spoon. “So, I could work a few hours, and then when you get paid you could pay me.”

  Dicey shook her head. “I don’t plan to owe anybody any money.”

  He studied her, his eyes peering over the top of the mug. Dicey made herself go over to pick up a couple of squares of sandpaper. She didn’t kid herself; she didn’t want to bend to this particular job. She especially didn’t want to do the sanding, partly because of the tedium of the task, but also because it was only the first step, and the first step on the first boat. Until she’d begun, she wasn’t doing the job. But she had to, and she knew it, so she leaned over the boat and got to work. Getting to work, that was the only way to get the job done.

  Cisco drank hot chocolate and watched her work. He didn’t say anything. She ignored him. It took all of her concentration to keep on with the sanding, forcing her hand to hold the stiff square of sandpaper, forcing her arm to reach out and gently circle the floor of the boat. And this was only boat number nine. Dicey had never played any sport herself, but she’d heard that there was a point where if you pushed yourself past it, all the exhaustion disappeared. Maybe she was at that point. She hoped so, because at that point she couldn’t even dangle the picture of Mr. Hobart’s boat in front of herself, like a carrot dangled in front of a mule, to keep the animal moving.

  It made her angry, too—she could take about two more minutes of having someone stand around while she worked, stand around watching somebody else work, as if he was . . . an old-time plantation owner, strolling through fields where cotton was being picked. Dicey was surprised, now that she thought of it, that overseers and owners hadn’t been beaten to death by the slaves. There had been enough slaves. They had outnumbered the white men. If she were a slave, and someone watched her slave away, she’d have murder in her heart.

  He went into the bathroom and rinsed out the mug. At least, she thought, working mechanically, he was tidy. At least, she thought, he’d be leaving now and she wouldn’t have someone standing around; she could at least be alone while she worked. At least, she recognized, she was now working mechanically, without having to make herself do it.

  He wasn’t leaving, however. He was getting a piece of sandpaper and getting to work on the second boat. In a minute, she thought crossly, he’d start talking.

  And he did. “Why are you in such a big hurry with these?” he asked. He had a light voice, and you could let it float right on past you if you wanted to ignore it. She didn’t want to, but it was the kind of voice that let you decide. Gram’s voice was like a grappling hook; it went right into your head and caught your mind. Maybeth’s voice, like their momma’s as Dicey remembered it, went its own direction, like an arrow from a bow. You had to reach out for Maybeth’s voice, with your mind, to try to ride along on what it was saying. Jeff’s voice, she thought, smiling to herself, spread out from the middle of your mind, of her mind at least. She ought to call Jeff. He’d left enough messages. She made a mental note to call him before supper, before he left to spend his evening at the library.

  “You going to tell me?” Cisco’s voice asked. “Or is it some deep, dark secret?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “I’d asked you a question, but you were way off somewhere else. What were you daydreaming about? Some boyfriend?”

  “Voices,” she snapped. What she was thinking was none of his business, and she didn’t know why he didn’t go away, anyway.

  He laughed—amused at Dicey didn’t care what. “You’re in a real charming mood today, Miss Tillerman.”

  Dicey just gave him a look.

  “If looks could kill” was his only response. “What is it with you, anyway—you
on the rag or something?”

  Dicey straightened up. It was almost a relief to have something clear to be angry at. “If you mean am I menstruating, the answer is it’s none of your business. I assume,” she went on, almost enjoying herself, “that you meant to be pretty vulgar. Rude, too.”

  He had straightened up to face her, and he wiped his face clear of laughter, although he couldn’t control his eyes. “Sorry, Miss Tillerman,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry, and I apologize. Accepted?”

  She didn’t want to accept. She wanted to be angry. She didn’t move a muscle.

  “It would be childish to sulk,” his light voice pointed out to her.

  She wasn’t sure she cared about that.

  “I’ll not repeat the error—not in any form. I know when I’m outgunned.”

  Dicey bent back to work.

  “So,” he asked, “what were you thinking about voices? We can’t hear our own, because they echo inside our heads, did you ever think about that? That’s why deaf people have so much trouble learning how to speak. And that’s why it was such a remarkable thing that Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, and therefore effectively dumb, could be taught to speak. Do you know about Helen Keller?”

  Dicey shook her head, so he told her the long story. Having done that, he asked her again why she was in such a hurry with these rowboats. She told him about the order Mr. Hobart had placed with her, about the boat she was going to build. Because he was curious about it, she explained how the money for the business worked out, between Mr. Hobart’s advance and what she’d earn from Claude and the maintenance-storage income. She even told him about the dentist’s overdue account.

  “Want me to call and demand payment?” he offered.

  “I’ve already written, twice. He’s never even answered.”

  “Yeah, but—now, don’t get your dander up about this, because it’s only a fact of life—sometimes if it’s a man, they’ll take it more seriously. Listen, are you willing to give up the money? I’m serious, because if it were me, my boat here, I’d figure to just pay you when I picked it up in the spring. I’d let you wait and keep the money in my own pocket. I wouldn’t pay you until I absolutely had to. Not because I couldn’t afford it but because it would make me feel more powerful, in control, getting away with something. If I could get away with it, I would. So if I knew you were going to just dump my boat somewhere—into the water?—then I’d be more likely to pay my bill, because I’d feel as if I had something to lose.”