Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  Dicey thought about the same, and it didn’t trouble her.

  “D’you mind?” Gram asked her. “I would.”

  “No. Because you can’t read it, not really,” Dicey said.

  “Probably a good thing, too,” Gram said. “There’s mail for you. And don’t bother yelling at me about going outside—Maybeth brought it in. I haven’t stirred out of my own doors for—a week now, almost. It feels like a year.”

  The mail wasn’t a letter from Jeff, but it was a check from the dentist in Salisbury, for twenty-five dollars. If Cisco came back again, Dicey thought, she could tell him he’d succeeded. She signed the check over to Gram. Gram didn’t refuse to take it, although from the look she gave Dicey, Dicey wondered if Gram didn’t have a pretty good idea of how tight money was in the business. “I’m due over three hundred dollars, from Claude,” she told her grandmother. “I finished the first ten of those boats, and I sent him the bill.” Sammy entered the kitchen at that news and pronounced it satisfactory. Saturday was payday for him, and he took ten dollars out of the envelope before handing it to Gram.

  “Looks like we can make it through another month now,” Gram said. “If your sister will let me out of the house to go to the bank and make a deposit. That was a joke,” she said, looking from one to the other of them. “Don’t bother telling me how bad a joke it was. Go away and let me read.”

  “I wanted to ask Dicey something, anyway.” Sammy’s face was red from the long bike ride home. He blew on his hands. “I should’ve worn mittens. The January thaw is sure over.”

  “But it’s just the beginning of January. How can the thaw be already over?” Dicey asked.

  “Cripes, Dicey, where is your mind? It’s almost February. No, I’m serious, it is. In fact, it’s almost”—he grinned at his grandmother—“Valentine’s Day.”

  Gram humphed. Dicey spoke quickly, before Gram could get going on what she called the proliferation of holidays, appearing like rabbits all over the calendar. Somebody, Gram maintained, was making a fortune out of all of these brand-spanking-new holidays, with the paint not dry on them. But Gram was too busy trying not to cough to get started on her speech.

  “I was going to ask if you could help me out for a while this afternoon,” Dicey asked Sammy. “Moving boats around. I’ll give you my full attention about whatever. It won’t take long to move them. But we’d have to ride our bikes.”

  “I have to be back for dinner,” he said.

  “Nobody has to be here for dinner,” Gram snapped, and then she started coughing, a deep, chesty cough. She waved her hands at them to say she was all right, and coughed. She tried to drink some tea, and coughed. Dicey looked at Sammy, and felt him asking the same unspoken question she was, which neither of them could answer. In a couple of minutes the coughing subsided. Gram sat bent over for a minute, as if she was catching her breath after some race, some running race. Then she drank off her mug of tea. “And don’t you two look at me like that. I tell you it’s getting better.”

  If this was better, Dicey thought, worse must have been pretty bad.

  “I want to be home for dinner,” Sammy got back to the argument.

  “Nobody ever said you didn’t,” Gram answered, pouring herself another mug of tea, squeezing lemon into it, spooning honey. “I don’t even like honey and lemon in my tea,” she complained.

  “Then let’s get going,” Sammy said to Dicey.

  At the shop they shifted the rowboats around and turned them over. “This is like turning the mattresses in the spring,” Sammy said. “Want me to put masking tape along the waterline for you? You do one side and I’ll do the other, and I could tell you.”

  “Great,” Dicey said. “Thanks.” She got to work, peeling off tape, setting it evenly along the top of the painted bottom, ripping an arm’s length of tape off the roller. “So, tell,” she asked. “Tell me whatever it is you want to tell me.”

  “They turned me down.”

  “They what? What they?”

  “That tennis camp.”

  “The one you were talking about?”

  Sammy nodded.

  “The one in Arizona?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you actually send in an application?”

  “Yeah. That part was okay. It’s when I asked for a scholarship that they turned me down. It was a nice letter, they sounded sorry, but they said no. The list of tournaments I’ve played in, and how I placed, didn’t give them enough to go on, for all that money. Because the scholarship is for a lot of money. Because, if I were in Arizona they’d know what the competition was like. Or California. But because I’m not—and they’ve never seen me play.”

  “That’s hard on you,” Dicey said.

  “Maybe they’re right. I mean, maybe I’m a big fish in a little pond here, in my pond, but I wouldn’t be such a big fish in their pond. I just wish—”

  Dicey knew what he wished. He wished he could go to that tennis camp.

  “The letter really was nice. They said they hoped I could find a way of being able to enroll, even without the scholarship.”

  “Can you?” Dicey wondered.

  “Dicey.” He looked at her across the flat-bottomed rowboat, half-amused; half-annoyed. “Do you have any idea what it costs? It costs sixty-five hundred dollars.”

  Dicey just stared at him.

  Sammy just stared back at her.

  “Oh, Sammy,” she said. There was no way any of them, even putting everything together, could afford that. For a summer camp. Nor even for a tennis camp, not even for Sammy could they come up with that kind of money. “That’s terrible.”

  “Plus the airfare there and back,” he added. “I just wanted to tell you,” Sammy said.

  “I know.”

  “Because what really gets me is, I could work, if I dropped out of school, and if I worked a couple of jobs I could save up the money—not for this summer but for next—and then I could afford the camp, but if I did that then I wouldn’t be playing tennis in the meantime, not competitive tennis, so . . .”

  Dicey knew what he meant, but didn’t see any purpose in repeating that. She didn’t have any ideas, either. She could probably, if she had to, work nights in the spring and earn his airfare, and she wouldn’t mind doing that, for tennis camp, for Sammy. But coming up with sixty-five hundred dollars—

  “All I can do is work,” Sammy said, working steadily while he talked, “and even then, even if I do that, it won’t get me what I want.”

  They taped in silence for a while.

  “I should stop wanting it,” Sammy said.

  Dicey didn’t know about that.

  “But just because you aren’t good enough, or rich enough, to be able to get something, that doesn’t mean you have to give up wanting it, does it?” he asked her.

  Dicey didn’t know.

  “And I am good enough,” he said.

  Dicey nodded.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you.” He was waiting for her to answer him, but she didn’t have any answer for him.

  “All I can say is—I know what you mean,” Dicey said.

  He lifted his head and grinned across at her. “Yeah, I know. I guess that’s what I wanted to hear.”

  Sammy, Dicey thought, took his knocks standing up. While she was thinking about how to say that to him, to tell him how proud she was of him, he changed the subject. “What about Phil? I think it’s okay for Maybeth to go out with him, and so does James. Do you?”

  “Has he asked her?”

  “Once, before he went back to school, but Maybeth says he will again, she hopes, maybe.”

  “You’re worried because he’s so much older? I always liked him.”

  “Except he seems like the kind of guy she might fall in love with.”

  “Would you mind that?”

  “Not a bit. Except, I figure Momma must have fallen in love, too.”

  Dicey thought she understood what he was asking her. “But Maybeth isn’t going to have to
run away from home if she wants to love someone, not like Momma did. It’s not the same at all.”

  “You’re really sure about that, aren’t you?”

  Dicey was.

  “So am I,” Sammy said. “But then, I was pretty sure the tennis camp would give me a scholarship, and they won’t, so I wanted to hear what you thought.”

  Dicey said just what she was feeling. “If you went away for the whole summer, I’d miss you.”

  “Cripes, Dicey, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Going away? You did it.”

  “I came back,” Dicey protested.

  “It’s not the same. Even if you come back it’s not the same. You don’t come back the same. I mean, how many times have you been home for dinner this month? You’re away from home right now. You live here in the shop. All you don’t do is sleep here.”

  “Who’d want to sleep here?”

  “Not me. I’ve gotten used to a bed, and sheets, and good food on a regular basis. But I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  Dicey looked around the shop. You could fit a cot in, or a sleeping bag, with the stove for warmth and cooking, and with a bathroom, you could live here. She’d lived under worse circumstances, and Sammy had lived in them with her. She remembered Sammy then, Sammy little, as she looked at Sammy, now fifteen. Remembering, as she watched his strong hands smooth masking tape along the waterline of a boat, just helping her out because she needed it, she told him, “You ought to be able to go to that camp.”

  “Sixty-five hundred dollars,” he reminded her. “Thinking about trying to get that much money, it’s like—wanting to fly to the moon.”

  “But that is what you want,” she reminded him. “That’s what astronauts do. Fly to the moon.”

  He looked at her, and his eyes had laughter in them. “The stars, actually. Farther than the moon, more than the moon, that’s where I want to go. All the way, the farthest.”

  Dicey didn’t know what she should say to him about that.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sometimes work was all you could do, just put your shoulder to the wheel and push, and keep on pushing. You could barely see the wheel moving, but after a while you could see that you’d gotten somewhere. So Dicey worked, patient brushstroke after patient brushstroke, keeping the stove burning hot enough to dry whatever boats were near it, shifting the boats by herself, not wasting any of her working time.

  When she had to wait for paint to dry, when she had that time, she prepared the bills to send out: fifty dollars for maintenance work, twenty-five for storage. She couldn’t mail the three bills out until Friday, which was the last day of the month, but she had them all ready to go, stamped and sealed, by Tuesday morning. On Tuesday, she hauled back the four rowboats she’d finished painting and picked up the next four; that job ate up most of a day. Working the boats out of the shop, then up onto the trailer, working them off and onto the racks in Claude’s shop . . . the day wasted away on her. That was the time she really wished Cisco was around. She’d half-expected him Sunday afternoon, and was nearly surprised when he didn’t show up on Monday morning. She’d given him up by Tuesday, figuring he must have won his bets in Atlantic City, because she was figuring he wouldn’t return to Crisfield unless he lost. He hadn’t said anything about coming back—and why should he? But he hadn’t said anything about not coming back, either.

  Dicey knew that it was her own convenience his presence suited, not his. She would lift her head sometimes and look down the length of weeks ahead, and think of how long it would take her to build Mr. Hobart’s boat. When she did that, she could feel the end of March rushing at her, too fast. She could feel how short the week was, and how—thinking of the eight or nine weeks that were left to her—and those boats of Claude’s she had to do so slowly, doing them alone—she didn’t let herself think of it.

  It would have been easier with Cisco’s help, that was all. But Dicey figured he wasn’t anyone you could rely on and he certainly hadn’t made her any promises. He didn’t owe her anything. If anyone had asked her, that would have been what she said, all along. It wasn’t as if she’d hired him, or was paying him, and the job would have been in worse shape, she knew, without the days of labor he’d given her.

  If all went well in the mail, then Claude’s check might arrive before the end of the week. She’d asked him to take the rent for February out of the money he owed her, so that was taken care of, and only the nineteen-dollar phone bill was left to be paid. That was okay, everything was okay. As long as Dicey could keep on working she’d be okay.

  Dicey concentrated on getting done what had to get done, each day. No wishes, no regrets, just the job at hand. That was why, when she returned from Claude’s shop late Wednesday, the back of the pickup loaded with cans of paint, she was surprised to see Cisco there, leaning against the door to the shop, a duffle bag at his feet.

  Dicey, smiling despite herself, feeling as if it had been years, not days, since he’d left, climbed down to say hello. “I guess you didn’t win.”

  Cisco laughed. “I guess I didn’t. Well, to tell the exact truth, I did, but not enough, and not for all that long. How’s it going?”

  Dicey shrugged. “The usual.”

  Cisco reached in to help her take paint out of the back of the truck. He waited for Dicey to unlock the door. When they had the gallon cans lined up along the wall, he offered to make her a cup of hot chocolate. Dicey, feeding logs into the stove, thought that sounded good. Before he did that, however, Cisco went back outside to get his duffle. He carried it slung over his back, the way Jeff sometimes carried his guitar.

  “Brought you something,” Cisco announced. “A souvenir from Sodom, a gift from Gomorrah—a little memento from the cities of the plain.”

  Cisco looked so pleased with himself as he listened to what he was saying; he looked so smug and self-satisfied and sure of himself that Dicey said, “But I thought you were going to New Jersey.”

  He wasn’t sure if she was saying something stupid that showed she didn’t understand what he’d said, or saying something smart that showed she thought what he’d said was stupid. She helped him decide: “And Atlantic City is right on the coast.”

  Cisco dropped his duffle behind him, and started to laugh. Dicey tried to keep her face blank, to keep him guessing, but she couldn’t. When he laughed, the lines and wrinkles of his face gathered together, around his eyes and mouth. “I almost missed you, Miss Tillerman, while I was away. If you were a man—” He went to fill the kettle with water.

  “If I were a man, what?” Dicey asked him.

  He looked at her for a bit, wondering if he wanted to say it. “I’d say, Come on along with me for a while, a few days, or months—years? Time has a way of disappearing underfoot when you’re journeying. I could show you the whole world, spread out—and you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Dicey asked him. Right then, the thought of the whole world, spread out and waiting—right then, it sounded like what she’d always wanted.

  “Most people wouldn’t. Most people don’t. I thought I was right about you. But,” he said, bending over to unzip the duffle, “since you aren’t, I can’t, and you’ll have to make do with this.” He held out a long, narrow candy bar, in an odd triangular shape. “Best chocolate in the world,” he promised her. “I’d be happy if you shared it with me.”

  Without passing it to her, he peeled back the thin cardboard box and then the thin foil covering. He broke off a big chunk, and handed it to Dicey. “I love this stuff,” he told her, breaking off a chunk for himself, placing it tenderly into his mouth. He set the kettle on the stove, took down the mugs, and emptied cocoa mix into them; then he stood watching the kettle, waiting for the water to heat. Dicey studied his back for a minute, swallowed the candy—which was okay but not all that great—then took off her jacket and hunkered down beside the row of paint cans. She pried the lid up with a screwdriver, then took the electric paint mixer she’d borrowed from Claude, turned i
t on, and watched it get to work stirring up the separated paint.

  Crouching down to hold the mixer steady, looking up at Cisco, at his long back and the faded jeans that rode low on his narrow hips, Dicey smiled to herself: Her candy bar poked up out of the back pocket of his jeans.

  Cisco turned around. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.” He wasn’t the kind of person to whom you could say, Look at what you did, isn’t it a joke the way you did that?

  “Same goes for me,” he said. “I got thrown out. The lady I’ve been staying with? Her husband came home early. Well, she says it’s early. Matter of fact, I have only her word for it that he’s home. But the upshot is, there’s no room at the inn for little Cisco Kidd.”

  Dicey didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Sit down here, relax for a minute, you could use a break.”

  “How would you know?” Dicey asked.

  “You could always use a break, that’s how I know. You don’t need to tell me what you were doing last weekend. And what I’ve been doing isn’t worth the telling.” He sat on the gunwale of a rowboat, and Dicey sat facing him, the hot mug warm in her hands. “I should never gamble, especially not blackjack. You’d think I’d learn, wouldn’t you?”

  Dicey didn’t know. When he asked that, he looked rueful, but mostly pleased with himself, like a little boy who knew he’d probably be caught, but went ahead anyway, just to try to get away with it, just for the adventure. Cisco was a little old to be acting like a little boy, Dicey thought. But that wasn’t any of her business.

  “There’s a song,” Cisco said. “‘Never hit seventeen, when you play against the dealer, for you know the odds won’t ride with you.’” He was speaking the words, but Dicey heard the melody playing in her head.

  “I know it,” she told him.

  “How would you know that?”

  “I have a—” Dicey hesitated. She didn’t know what word was the true one. “A friend, who plays guitar, and knows about every song ever.”