Seventeen Against the Dealer (16 page)

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.

S
ometimes 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 it 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.”

“That one, that's one of the true songs.” Cisco raised his mug as if he was toasting the song.

Dicey looked at his face, all the parts of it, and remembered how the song went: “Never leave your woman alone, when your friends are out to steal her. Years are gambled, and lost like summer wages.” She wondered if that was what had happened to Cisco, sometime long ago, to cut him so loose from everything and anyone.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked him.

Cisco shrugged, pursed his lips, put his elbow on his knee and his forefinger beside his nose—his eyes laughing at himself, and at her, all the time. “That, Miss Tillerman, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. D'you know the story behind that expression?”

Dicey didn't.

“A tale of greed, corruption—millions of people fooled into thinking something false was true—they should have known better, everyone involved should have known better—and at the end a good man made corrupt. Or maybe just shown to have always been corrupt even though he was pretending to be good. It's very twentieth century, the story. It's the twentieth century encapsulated.”

“If someone is good, then he can't be corrupt,” Dicey pointed out. “The two terms are mutually exclusive.” She liked that idea and felt smart for having it. She hadn't been using much of her brain recently, she realized; and she hadn't thought she minded that, but she did.

“Maybe,” Cisco said. “I wouldn't have taken you for a moralist,” he said.

He was misunderstanding her. But it wasn't worth your while trying to explain something like that to someone like Cisco. Like the way he kept calling her Miss Tillerman, as if making sure that she stayed the person he wanted her to be, he really paid attention only to himself. She didn't mind that. He was pretty interesting, himself.

“What
are
you going to do?” she asked again.

“I've got a job waiting in a few weeks, it's a matter of hanging on until then. So, I did think, as a matter of fact, that I might just stay on with you.”

Anyone else, Dicey would have assumed he meant what she
thought he meant, but Cisco wasn't like anyone else. “What do you mean, stay?”

“Just the basics—stay, like live, you know, sleep and eat and have a roof over your head.”

Dicey knew what the basics were. She started to shake her head, to say no.

“I don't mean at home, with your grandmother and your brother who goes to Yale, Miss Tillerman. And your other brother and your sister. I meant here.” He pointed at the floor.

“In the shop?”

“I've got a bedroll. There's enough room for a man to lie down and sleep. You never paid me for the work I've done, and I'll do more in exchange for a place to stay. Just temporarily. So it works out fair enough, it works out about equal, as I see it.”

His eyes watched her with no expression on his face, like he was holding cards in his hand and he didn't want her to know what they were. Dicey made sure her face didn't give away anything she was thinking. Her thoughts were rushing at her, like a wind that carried rain and sleet mixed in together. She didn't need to feel bad about him working if she was trading him a place to live in exchange. She didn't have any good reason for saying no to his staying at the shop. She also knew what it was like to need shelter and to have only the one chance for it. One chance on a good day, she remembered; there had been days when they had no chance. And none of those days had been in winter. For a minute, she remembered that summer almost eight years ago, so clearly that for a minute she forgot where she was. She remembered the walking and the worrying—she had the three younger kids to take care of. She remembered the maps—Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland—and the roads, and the not knowing where they could sleep or what they'd eat, or whether when they got where they were going they'd be able to stay there.
She remembered how much it mattered when someone said yes, they could stay, when someone helped them out. “Okay,” she decided. “Yeah, that'll be okay, I guess.”