Seventeen Against the Dealer (25 page)

The next afternoon, when Sammy and Maybeth were home to see that Gram stayed in her bed, Dicey drove into town. She hadn't been to the shop for four days. She was ready to get working on something, even Claude's cheap boats. She could sympathize with her grandmother, being stuck in bed. Maybe over the weekend they'd let Gram move to the sofa, and light a fire in there, cover her with a blanket. Gram was being pretty docile about obeying Dr. Landros's instructions. It wasn't like Gram to be that obedient, Dicey thought, and then she thought that it was. Gram said she'd learned her lesson, and she meant it. When Gram made mistakes, she thought about them, to understand them.

Dicey walked into the shop, shedding her jacket, asking, “What coat are we on?” Then she looked around her.

Cisco sat leaning against the wall, reading, his stocking feet stretched out toward the stove. “Miss Tillerman.” He stood up. “I didn't expect you. I got a library card,” he said, mocking himself and her. He looked glad to see her, that, too. “I used your name as reference, which I hope wasn't imposing. How's your grandmother?”

“Getting better,” Dicey said.

Looking around the shop, she saw that none of the boats had been given even the first coat of paint. The top of the worktable
was piled with pizza boxes and napkins, Cisco's jacket, and empty bottles, both soda and beer. Undershirts and Jockey briefs were stretched out drying over the side of the boat nearest the stove.

“You have no idea how hard it is to wash anything in that sink,” Cisco said. “The boats are all ready to start on, if you're ready.”

In four days he could have finished two of them. She would have finished two of them.

“What have you been doing?” she asked. She tried to keep the anger out of her voice, but he heard it and his shoulders stiffened under the work shirt. His smile faded.

“Sanded every bleeding one of them,” he said.

About one day's work, Dicey thought, chewing on her lip.

“Which still leaves you ahead, in this particular labor exchange,” he pointed out. “Even if you're thinking of minimum wage. Since you can't describe the quarters as exactly luxurious,” he told her.

That was true, Dicey reminded herself. It wasn't as if she'd actually hired him, she reminded herself.

“In fact, if we were figuring numbers, you'd owe me a bundle,” Cisco pointed out. His easy smile returned, now that he had proved to her how right he was. “But since we never were, there's no problem. Is there?”

Dicey shook her head. If it mattered so much to him to prove he was right, he must feel awfully wrong. That was pretty weird, that feeling wrong would make him start a quarrel to prove he was right.

“I'll just put these things away.” He moved into action, quick and graceful as a cat. “And we can get to work.”

Cisco could work, and working with him was easy. In just the couple of hours she had before she had to get home for dinner,
they got the first coat on the inside of two of the boats. Working made Dicey feel better.

She listened to Cisco talk, and watched the smooth lines of paint gradually cover the inside of the boat she was working on. Cisco, she decided, just wasn't any good at working on his own. However he felt about taking orders, and she'd just been given a taste of how he felt about it, he didn't get things done working alone. If she'd thought about it, she'd have predicted that. After all, she'd worked with enough people to know how they worked, and she knew enough about enough people to know how different people were. But when she thought of all the people in the world, so many of them and each one different, her mind went on to another idea.

“Do you ever think,” she asked Cisco, “about how much you don't know?” Dicey was beginning to think it was wonderful how much she didn't know—in the sense that to think of it filled her with wonder.

“You want to hear the truth? The truth is, I don't. I'm more impressed by how much I do know. It's alarming how much my brain has stored away in it.”

The answer was so like him that Dicey grinned.

“I know the grandmother is better, so tell me, how's the boyfriend?”

“I don't know,” Dicey admitted.

“Uh-oh. Uh-oh and uh-oh.” He kept on painting while he talked. So did Dicey. “Looks like you've painted yourself into a corner, Miss Tillerman. You played hard to get—which is about the oldest trick in the world. Granted, it's the oldest because it's the best. I have to grant you women that. Something women seem to be born knowing. You women,” he said, looking across at her, the wrinkles spraying out from the corners of his eyes.

Dicey didn't know what he meant. He'd already told her she
wasn't particularly feminine, and now he was telling her she was just like every other woman. Cisco meant things only temporarily, she guessed. He probably didn't even remember that he was contradicting himself. Before, he'd said that about her to make her cross, and make her feel inadequate, as if there were things she didn't know that she ought to know; now, she thought, he was trying to make her feel as if there were things she knew, and did, to get her own way, to make her cross and make her feel guilty. She wasn't about to believe anything he told her about herself.

“My advice is: switch tactics,” he said. “Try chasing him. Try it, I'm serious. Unless you want to get rid of him?”

Dicey didn't want to answer that. It was none of his business. But he outwaited her, until she shook her head no.

“Chase him a little—let him think he's the most wonderful thing in the world, desirable, wise, strong—all those things men like to hear about themselves. It's the second oldest trick. You should try that, Miss Tillerman.”

Dicey didn't even want to think about Jeff. She could stand it, she could accept it, she could even understand it—but she didn't want to think about it.

“You should try working, Mr. Kidd,” she snapped back at him.

“Nag, nag, nag,” he said.

After a long, silent time he asked, “You going to be back in tomorrow?”

“In the afternoon.”

He grimaced.

“Listen,” she asked, “will you do me a favor? I got a check—for the first two-thirds of this job. Could you deposit it for me? I've got a phone bill to pay, and I can't leave my grandmother alone, so I can't get into town during banking hours. Could you?”

“If you want me to. Sure. It's no trouble. I usually pick up breakfast downtown, the drugstore does a nice breakfast for a dollar nineteen, I'd be happy to.”

Dicey took her checkbook out of her pocket. She ripped out a deposit slip, dated it, entered the bank number and the amount of the check—since Claude banked where she did, she could draw on the money tomorrow afternoon if it was deposited in the morning—then signed the back of Claude's check and entered the amount into her records before passing the two slips of paper to Cisco. He looked at them, holding them in his fingers like a hand of cards.

“I'll take care of it,” he said. “Are you sure you want to trust me with this much money?”

“I'm not trusting you with the money,” she pointed out to him. “I'm trusting you to deposit it in the bank for me, and save me from bankruptcy.”

“You can't go bankrupt,” he informed her, mocking. He took out a wallet, to put the slips away. Then he grinned at her. The expression on his face had the same kind of confidence that Sammy's did when he knew that scoring the crib would win him the game.

So Dicey answered as she would have answered her brother: “Oh, yeah?”

“Not unless you're earning a living. Since this business doesn't make enough to support you, you're absolutely safe.”

Listening to the twisting of his mind, Dicey remembered a question she had for him. “Do you know something called Machiavelli?”

“Some-one,” Cisco corrected her. Standing beside him at the worktable, she had to look up at him. Cisco liked her, she could see it on his face. She didn't know why, but he did.

“Machiavelli was a Renaissance political theorist.”

“I knew you'd know,” she told him. She didn't mind Cisco, either. You couldn't expect much of him, but if you took him on his own terms, he was good company.

“Who wants to know?” he asked.

“I do. My brother used the word. I was talking to him on the phone.”

“Your brother at Yale?” Cisco asked. “Well, I am impressed with myself. And so should you be.”

Dicey just got into her jacket and went to the door. She could see right through him—through the vanity and pride to the fear that she wouldn't think much of him. Since it pleased him so much to be asked to deposit the check, she was glad she'd thought of it, although she'd thought of it only because it suited her own convenience. Deposits made after noon weren't credited until the next business day, the bank made that clear. She had plans for some of that money tomorrow afternoon, plans that included Cisco. Thinking of that, she smiled to herself: she guessed he'd be pretty surprised.

“I'll see you late tomorrow, then,” Cisco said. “And I'll get some work done in the morning, I promise you. I don't think I could take disappointing you again. You're much too disapproving when you're disappointed,” he told her.

“You can tell me all about it tomorrow,” Dicey said, laughing, leaving him there in the shop.

B
y Friday afternoon Gram was starting to argue that people healed at different rates, that just because most people took a week in bed with pneumonia it didn't mean she was going to need that long; she pointed out that Dicey was chained to the house, and announced that surely she could just move out to the living room, because she was going heartily crazy staring at these four walls. Leaving Maybeth and Sammy to restrain their grandmother, Dicey went downtown. She went first to the library, where she exchanged Gram's tapes for more Mozart, more Beethoven and, since they didn't have any more Vivaldi, some trumpet voluntaries, because that also was a name she liked. It made no sense to choose music because of words, but if you had no other way of choosing, words made it possible actually to make a choice, instead of just grabbing the first three tapes you came to.

The bank was open from four to six on Friday afternoons. She parked the truck in the lot and went inside, to write out the check for Cisco. She made it out to cash, and decided while she stood in line that she'd ask for it in fifties. It was more than she could afford, but it was less than he deserved, for the work he'd done. Besides, the checks for storage and maintenance would come in next week; she could pay Gram and have two months rent clear. They'd finish up Claude's boats in the next week or so, and that
would be five hundred dollars more. She was okay for a while, and that was all she needed.

“How's your grandmother?” Mrs. Pommes asked her from behind the thick plastic shield that protected tellers from robbers.

“Getting better,” Dicey said. She didn't wonder how Mrs. Pommes knew Gram was sick; people just seemed to know.

“And what can we do for you this afternoon?” Mrs. Pommes asked. Her earrings that day were long silver tubes that banged gently against her neck when she moved.

“I want to cash this, into fifties please.” Dicey was used to writing checks, but it still made her realize that she was grown-up, a grown-up person, when she went to the bank and traded a check for cash.

“You must have had a good trip, then,” Mrs. Pommes said. Before Dicey could ask her, What trip? and say, No, she hadn't had any trip, Mrs. Pommes turned away to call up the account records on the computer. They always did that and it always took time. Dicey had learned to be patient. Mrs. Pommes returned to her window and slid the check back to Dicey. “You don't have enough money to cover this,” she said.

“I made a deposit this morning, from another account in this bank,” Dicey explained. The trouble with computers was that they didn't always work efficiently. James said it was because they could think only in straight lines. She pictured Claude's check, going in a straight line up to Baltimore, then coming back into her account, in a straight line.

“Were you in earlier today? I guess I didn't see you.”

“I wasn't, but the man who—works for me, he brought it in for me. I stay with Gram until Sammy and Maybeth get home from school, so I couldn't come in myself.”

“But—” Mrs. Pommes said, and she put her forefinger against
her mouth while her face emptied itself of any expression, to disguise the worry that rose into her eyes. Her earrings hung quiet. “But you know, he cashed it.”

Dicey didn't know any such thing. “I made out a deposit slip.”

“But—” Mrs. Pommes looked to the teller beside her, as if asking for help, but the young man was busy with a customer. She turned back to Dicey and leaned toward the plastic window to bring her face closer. Dicey felt as if she were a prisoner in jail, on visiting day. “You had countersigned the check. He told me you were going someplace in Virginia, I can't recall the name, I'd never heard of it, but there are so many little places in Virginia one never hears of—to buy wood, where you'd heard the prices were excellent. He said you had to have it in cash. You're supposed to write ‘For Deposit Only.'”

Dicey felt her head nodding. She felt her feet heavy on the floor, as if she was wearing iron shoes and not sneakers.

“I did wonder, because it was so much cash, that's an awful lot of cash.” Dicey's head nodded. “But he told me about the man from Annapolis who wanted to hire you to build him a boat, who came all the way down from Annapolis to hire you, and because you wanted to bring the wood back with you, you needed cash. Because the people in Virginia wouldn't know you, wouldn't know if your check was good. Oh, Dicey,” Mrs. Pommes said.

Dicey's head nodded. Her hands were like weights, holding down the check she had written.