Seventeen Against the Dealer

  “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.”

  “I thought you’d see it my way,” Cisco said. “I guess you’re the one who comes out ahead on the deal.”

  As a thank-you it left a lot to be desired. Dicey drained her mug and stood up. She didn’t need people being grateful, anyway, and it was true, anyway, and she didn’t have any trouble understanding how he was feeling. “I’ve got work to do,” she said.

  “Then let’s get to it,” Cisco answered, standing up, too.

  They had been painting for only five minutes when he started in talking again. Dicey had been half-hoping he would. His first words, however, put her on guard.

  “This friend, the one who plays the guitar,” Cisco said, “and knows all the songs. He wouldn’t by any chance be a boy.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Did I say anything was wrong with it? Don’t get your dander up, Miss Tillerman. No, I’m curious. The question I’m most curious about is, whether this boy wouldn’t by any chance be a boy friend, as in boyfriend, beau, suitor, swain.”

  By the time he got through with his list, Dicey was grinning. “What difference would that make?” She couldn’t tell what Cisco was leading up to, except that he usually had something he was leading up to.

  “You’d be able to answer that question better than I can. It’s just, if he’s a serious boyfriend . . .” Cisco waited. Dicey didn’t say anything. As if he understood what her not saying anything meant, or didn’t mean, precisely, Cisco went on. “If, for example, he wants to marry you?”

  “Is there any reason why he shouldn’t?”

  “You’re not wearing an engagement ring,” Cisco pointed out. “Not that everyone does, but you also don’t seem to do anything but work. Meaning—no dates, no evenings out, no phone calls, flowers, etcetera. A distinct lack of etcetera, if you ask me, which is pretty strange for someone who says he wants to marry you.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to get married,” Dicey suggested.

  “I have trouble believing that. It’s always seemed to me, there has to be an awfully good reason for a man to do it, but a woman, I mean, she’s got everything to gain. Someone to support her, and be responsible, and owe her fidelity, take her out, keep her happy. She can have children.”

  “You don’t need to be married to have children,” Dicey pointed out. She could have added, My parents weren’t, but she didn’t.

  “I know that,” Cisco answered. “So what’s he like, this boy? This suitor. Good-looking?”

  “Yes,” Dicey said. When Cisco didn’t say anything, she looked up at him to catch him staring at her as if she’d just told him a secret or something.

  “Then what’s wrong? Why aren’t you at least engaged?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “What’s he doing with his life?”

  “He’s in school. College.”

  “So he’s pretty eligible. If you ask me, Miss Tillerman, you ought to do it. That’s my advice. I mean, I know I’ve seen you at your worst—in that perpetual sweatshirt—not exactly dolled up, and maybe dolled up you look better—”

  “Dolled up I look exactly the same,” Dicey informed him.

  “And you’re not my type, you’re too sharp around the tongue for me. Too smart. Stubborn, too, a workaholic probably. Not that I personally mind, but then, I’m not thinking of dating you, or marrying you, or anything in between.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re old enough to be my grandfather,” Dicey reminded him.

  For a minute, it looked as if Cisco was going to say something angry. Then he decided he would take it as a joke.

  “You’re telling me it’s none of my business,” Cisco said.

  “Something like that.”

  “I still say you ought to marry this boy. You’re not going to have all that many offers,” he warned her.

  One thing you could say about Cisco. He wasn’t exactly sweet-talking her. “Have you ever been married?” she asked. He wasn’t the only one who could be nosy.

  “No,” he s
aid. But there was something in his voice, some difference, as if he might be lying, or as if he might wish he were married, or as if there were some sad story behind that simple no. She stared at his back, and wondered.

  He turned around and his eyes were laughing. “I never met anybody rich enough,” he explained.

  “I don’t believe you,” she told him.

  “You ought to believe me, Miss Tillerman.”

  “I don’t think so,” Dicey said.

  His face was like a map, she thought. If time acted like wind and water to make the lines on his face, around his eyes and down from his nose to the ends of his mouth, on his forehead under the thick fall of gray-black hair, then his face was like a map of all the years he’d traveled through.

  “What’re you staring at?” he asked her.

  “You. I was just thinking, a face is like—one of those topographic maps.” She went back to her painting.

  “Yeah? What do you think of the landscape?”

  The idea was in her head and out of her mouth before she had time to think about it. “A nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she was laughing.

  Cisco didn’t think it was funny. She didn’t turn around to check, but she could feel him not thinking it was one bit funny. But it was true, she was willing to bet on that; everything he said about himself indicated that. And he knew it, too. She was sorry that he could know it but she wasn’t allowed to say it.

  After a while, he asked her, “You ever get the rent money from that dentist guy?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s too bad. I’d have enjoyed dumping his boat into the water, screwing him over a little.”

  Dicey guessed she could see why he’d feel that way. A man of his age, with no job, no family, no home—he hadn’t done much with his life.

  “So my face bothers you?” Cisco’s voice asked her.

  “No,” Dicey said. That wasn’t what she’d meant.

  “You know what Abraham Lincoln said, he said that after the age of forty every man was responsible for the look of his own face,” Cisco told her.

  Dicey liked that. She tucked the idea away in her mind, to tell Gram, because it was an idea Gram would like hearing. This was going to be a pretty good day after all—with Cisco working, Claude’s boats wouldn’t take long, and she was going to go home at the end of the day with a new idea, like a flower in her hand, to give to her grandmother.

  As it turned out, even though Dicey got home in time for dinner, she couldn’t tell Gram anything. Gram had gone to bed, Maybeth reported. She’d gone to bed in the afternoon because she felt sick.

  It was just the three of them at the table. Dicey had knocked gently on Gram’s door, then looked in when there was no answer to see her grandmother sleeping. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked Maybeth and Sammy, who sat facing her across the table. Nobody had much appetite.

  “She’s decided it must be a flu,” Maybeth told her. Maybeth didn’t sound worried, and she didn’t look worried.

  Sammy, however, did. “Gram’s never sick,” he explained. “We could ask Dr. Landros, she’d make a house call. I’ll pay for it.”

  “Gram told me she didn’t need any doctor,” Maybeth said. “I asked her, and she told me I shouldn’t call Dr. Landros.”

  Dicey wished she’d gotten a look at her grandmother so she could think for herself. “Does she have a temperature?”

  “I didn’t ask. Her cheeks were pink.”

  “But she’s never gone to bed like this,” Sammy said. “When she gets a cold, she goes to the sofa, not to bed. Besides, I don’t believe she’d tell you, because she wouldn’t want us to worry. And with her bathroom next to her own room, we wouldn’t even know if she was being sick.”

  “Gram would call Dr. Landros if we were sick, if it went on too long, so I think she’d tell me. We’ll see how she is tomorrow,” Maybeth decided.

  “Maybe you should stay home from school,” Dicey suggested.

  Maybeth nodded. “That’s what I think.”

  “Wait,” Sammy suggested. “Why don’t you let me do that? You’re the one that likes school, Maybeth, and I’ve got a weekly algebra test—”

  “Maybeth,” Dicey decided.

  “But—”

  “If I were sick, it’s Maybeth I’d want to have staying around,” Dicey said. “And so would you,” she told her brother, “so don’t bother arguing. When I was getting better, that’s when I’d want you. But if Gram’s sick—”

  “She is,” Maybeth said.

  “That settles it then,” Dicey told Sammy.

  “I don’t know where you get off, coming in and giving orders. You haven’t paid any attention to anything for months, and now you show up for once and start deciding things—”

  “If I were you, Sammy, I’d use my energy studying for the test, not trying to get out of it.”

  For a second it looked as if Sammy might get angry, and then he grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. I guess that means you’ll do the dishes, right?”

  “But—” Dicey started to say. She was tired, she’d been working all day, she had plans for her time that evening, and a long, hot bath . . . Sammy leaned back in his chair, grinning away, so pleased with himself that Dicey could have kicked him.

  “You’re right, Dicey,” he said, adding fuel to his fire. “I ought to take school more seriously.”

  “I’ll help with the dishes,” Maybeth said.

  “No, I’m okay. You did all the work making dinner, and you’ve got homework, too, don’t you? If you two work in here I’d be glad of the company. And we could keep an ear on Gram.”

  The two of them worked at the table while Dicey ran hot water into the sink, whipping the detergent into the water with her fingers. For some reason, she was convinced that the more bubbles you had the more cleaning power you had. Gram had assured her that was tomfoolery, but Dicey wasn’t convinced. Her eyes rested on Gram’s cyclamen. Two of the white flowers had bent over at the middle of their stalks, bowing down to the dirt, the way cyclamen blooms did when they died. The leaves that ran up beside the stalks were curled together and brown at the edges. Dicey rinsed her fingers off in the tap water and pinched off the dead blooms, then the leaves. Three more blooms curled tightly over their stalks, in early bud, the hunched way cyclamen blooms started out. They budded, bloomed, and died, in a few days. So did people, Dicey thought, her hands busy with glasses and plates, utensils, then the pan Maybeth had fried the chicken in. People lived in cycles, too, longer running than flowers but shorter than trees.

  At twenty-one, Dicey had run through a lot of her time. If seventy was about the usual amount of time, then she had used more than a quarter of hers up. That didn’t leave all that much time to go, only forty-nine years. That was about twice twenty-one, so she was through about a third of her time, not a quarter. It felt short, and it made Dicey nervous to think about her life that way. But when she thought back, remembering, the past seemed to lie so far behind her—if she went back eight or nine years, for example, and back to Momma, it all seemed so long ago, as long ago as an old story. Thinking about it that way, nine years was a long time ahead of her.

  Dicey thought about that. If the time that lay ahead moved at the same pace as the time flowing out behind her, there wasn’t such a big hurry. It was when you started matching up numbers and time that you got nervous. They counted time in numbers, but that wasn’t what time was. They kept cutting time up into smaller and smaller units, and numbering those units—as if, if the number got bigger you’d have more of it?

  Sometimes, Dicey thought, the real trouble with people was that they were greedy.

  But maybe, if that was the real trouble, that was what would keep things going? Because if being greedy was the trouble, then nobody would want to start blowing everything up, since the one thing that was clear was that there wouldn’t be much of anything left to grab and be greedy about, not after a
nuclear war.

  So what was the real trouble was also a saving grace?

  Dicey wouldn’t have minded sitting down to think about that, or walking around outside in the night darkness to think about it, but she had work to do and the time to do it in. She went up to her room and brought down the books and the sheets of paper with rough plans for Mr. Hobart’s boat. The trouble was, when the books showed copies of boat designs, with the measuring lines drawn lengthwise, or cross sections, and illustrations of the joints, she didn’t know how to figure out how to understand them. She didn’t know how to read a nautical blueprint, that was the trouble; and the books all assumed that you did.

  She had a picture in her mind, and a few sketches down on paper. She had measurements penciled in on her sketches. Her hands knew the curves she wanted, the angles, planes, and joins. But when she looked at the illustrations, the grids, squares, and pictures of cuts—all those lines breaking up a boat into boxes, and she couldn’t figure out why, or how to understand them—it was hard to begin when you already knew before you started that you didn’t know enough.

  They spent the evening in the kitchen, the three of them, each working over his own papers, all listening to the sleeping silence in Gram’s room. Before they went to bed, Dicey said, “Sleep is a good sign, isn’t it? It’s good to sleep when you’re sick.” Sammy and Maybeth thought probably that was right.

  CHAPTER 15

  On Friday, it was Sammy who stayed home with Gram. Gram said she was getting better. She didn’t look any better, and she never wanted anything to eat. She didn’t even read. She just lay there in bed, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake. “I’m getting better,” Gram said, her voice—like her eyes—without snap. “There’s no call to fuss. Go on about your lives. I’m just old, and it takes longer to get rid of these bugs.” She was looking at Dicey when she said that, but not as if she was seeing her.

  Dicey went to work. She had to, although she promised herself that if Gram wasn’t out of bed soon—or at least sitting up and reading, and eating, too—she’d call Dr. Landros, whatever Gram said. Meanwhile, she had to finish this job for Claude.