Seventeen Against the Dealer

  “He’s not that bad, Dicey. At least, I don’t think he is. But you can’t leave a guy on his own like that, not someone like Dex—he’s a flirt, and he’s so energetic, he’s always got some idea cooking—my mother says if you leave a man alone too much he’s bound to get himself into trouble.”

  “Do you think this girl is trouble?” Dicey asked.

  Mina laughed. “For now, yeah—she’s trouble enough. Do you ever think, when my mother was my age, she was already married and pregnant with Charles Stuart?”

  “No, I never do think that,” Dicey said, grinning.

  “And Belle’s been married for two years and she’s having a baby in June. Whereas me—It’ll be another year and a half before I graduate, then three years of law school. Sometimes I wonder if . . . it’s not overwhelmingly womanly, if you know what I mean, getting degrees, practicing law, being ambitious, succeeding. Don’t you ever think about that?”

  “I don’t have the time,” Dicey said.

  Mina laughed again. “Yeah, and besides, you tell me, what’s so womanly about cleaning out the oven and hauling kids around, playground, play group, grocery store, doctors—right? So I’m not a failure, right?”

  “You? No, you never could be. You aren’t worried about that, are you, Mina?”

  Mina thought the question over, then shook her head. “No. It’s Dexter who is. Or, he says he is. When you put it that way, I guess he’s just being an arrogant, manipulative . . .” She hesitated over the right word.

  “Person,” Dicey suggested.

  “Person,” Mina echoed. “You know what he said to me? That uppity man said to me that I was going to have to choose between him and law school. But the way I see it, he was really saying I’d have to choose between him and me. Which is no contest, right?”

  “I wouldn’t have any trouble with it.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. And I shouldn’t,” Mina said, then, “so I won’t. I think I’ll aim to do the best I can for myself. How’s that sound to you?” Jeff had finished the song. Before he could start another, and before Dicey could answer that question, Mina called across to him, “You know what I want to hear? A love song.”

  “What kind of love song?” Jeff asked. “True love? Love betrayed? Lost love, faithless love, or false love?”

  “Let’s go for true love,” Mina laughed. “Never mind the odds.”

  Jeff looked at Maybeth, who nodded at him. He started to play a song Dicey had never heard before, but before she could wonder, Maybeth was singing. “‘The first time ever I saw your face,’” Maybeth sang to a guitar accompaniment as single and clear as the golden voice Maybeth cast out around the room, where—like the animated drawing of a ribbon—it curled around and around everyone, then tied itself into a perfect bow. The song brought tears into Mina’s eyes, Dicey saw, and had Phil Milson sitting so still, watching and listening so hard, that you could almost see the way the beating of his heart pushed the blood up into his cheeks, and turned them pink.

  Maybeth sang, “‘I thought the sun rose in your eyes.’” On the last word, her voice rose up a third and then down and around, a turning of melodic line as smooth as a curving ribbon. “‘And the moon, and the stars,’” she sang on, “‘were the gifts you gave to the dark and the endless skies. . . .’”

  Dicey couldn’t remember the first time ever she saw Jeff’s face. Jeff’s gray eyes, dazed with the song, were on Maybeth. Then he turned to look at Dicey, as if he’d known she was looking at him, and she knew that he did remember the first time he saw her. She thought she ought to be able to remember, but she couldn’t, not the time. The season, that she could, but she ought to be able to do better than that. Then she stopped thinking and let the song wind itself around her, and pull her into the room to sit on the floor beside him.

  All the long afternoon they sang, and talked, and ate, and Dicey didn’t think about her boats, the ones she was working on or the ones she was dreaming about, except once, when they came to the line in Momma’s old song that said “bring me a boat will carry two.” She could see that boat then, as real as if she had already built it.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dicey took the turn onto Route 50, heading north, and moved the truck immediately into the right lane. The truck’s top speed was fifty-one, the speed limit on the road was fifty-five, so even though she could see no other traffic, she kept in the slow lane.

  The land spread out around her, flat under the broad sky. Fields lay empty, trees raised naked branches, the scrawny tops of loblollies looked even scrawnier than usual, and the few houses she could see from the road had a closed-in winter look to them. Dicey was warm enough, since Sammy had tinkered the truck’s heating system into working order.

  She didn’t mind driving—the machinery did all the work. In a boat, you had wind and waves, tides, too, to work with or against; in a boat, you had things constantly changing, perpetual small changes that you needed to respond to, if you wanted to do it right and keep on getting where you wanted to go. In a boat, the sailor did half the work. It was a lot like living, sailing was, much more so than driving was. Driving, you got onto the track and steered along—accelerating or braking as the occasion demanded, but mostly you did what the signs told you to do. Driving was more dangerous, that was all, and it was dangerous because of the other cars and their drivers; maybe also, she thought, more dangerous because it was easier.

  She kept an eye out, on the road ahead and the road behind, on crossroads, and let her mind work: It was a question of whether she should buy the wood Ken had called about. She’d brought her checkbook with her, so she could do that. Ken Forbeck knew wood, so if he said this was worth looking at, it would be.

  “Close to nine hundred board feet,” he’d told her, “and I’ll let you have it for only what it cost me, five hundred and ninety dollars. That’s a good price, Dicey.”

  “Why so cheap?” she’d asked. “Isn’t it rift sawn?”

  “Of course—the only reason I called is I haven’t got any room to store it. I picked up a job lot. A shop in Carolina went out of business, and I bid on the inventory. He’d stocked Philippine mahogany, and some teak—this larch was in that. I won’t need it. You’d be a fool to pass it up, Dicey.”

  If she spent $590, that would get her bank account down to just over $700, $706.87 to be exact, which brought her time limit down to three or four months, March or April. But if she built a boat over the winter and sold it in the spring . . . and in the spring there would be more repair work around, if she could get it . . . that was an awful lot of ifs to be banking on. Banking on ifs wasn’t any too smart.

  Not taking opportunities wasn’t any too smart, either.

  After Cambridge, and the long, low bridge over the Choptank River, the land opened out again. Dicey pulled the visor down to keep the sun out of her eyes. Cornfields, cropped to stubble, farmhouses with smoke rising out of their chimneys, and an occasional abandoned farm-produce stand—she passed by them without really seeing them, the speedometer needle steady at fifty. She couldn’t believe what Claude Shorter had asked her that morning on the phone.

  His call had interrupted her in the middle of hefting the dinghies around, which was no easy job. Moving boats was a two-man job. But the paint was still tacky and she wanted to get to work at least caulking on the next boat, so she’d been shifting them around to fit the two broadside on the rack, when the phone rang. At least, she’d thought, hearing Claude identify himself on the phone, he had been too lazy to come see her in person. She wasn’t going to have to wait for him to talk himself out before he’d leave.

  Claude Shorter was her landlord, but that didn’t mean he thought she’d make a go of the business. He’d rented the shop to her because she offered to pay rent, and he hadn’t decided whether he would be selling the property or not, now that he’d built himself a new shop, about four times as large as his old one. What he wanted from her that morning was to contract out some work to her. “I’ve got this order for thirty rowb
oats, finished, due the end of March,” he said. Claude’s business was mainly building rowboats for shipbuilders down in Norfolk, who didn’t expect the little boats to hold up more than a year or two. “And the wife says I’ve got to take her down south. She’s giving me hell.”

  Dicey had mumbled into the phone, not wanting to say anything. If she were his wife she’d give Claude hell, too. Everything he did was sloppy; his boatyard was a mess, his work—using the cheapest possible materials, skimping even on the marine plywood he made boat bottoms out of, and never getting anything better than household-grade plywood for the sides and seats. . . . Claude boasted about putting three coats of paint on his boats, but Dicey figured the only reason he did that was to glue them together so they wouldn’t fall apart before he’d delivered them. She and Claude had entirely different ideas about the same job. Claude built boats to make money; he made money so he could buy things, like the trailer down in Florida he spent the winter in, or the diamond earrings he’d come around to show Dicey before he gave them to his wife for Christmas. The more money he made from each boat, the happier he was with his work. Dicey didn’t want to make money. She wanted to earn her living building boats.

  “I can’t finish up the job,” Claude said into her ear. “Not and take the missus south. We done the bottoms, and primer’s on all of them. It’s just the final sanding, then the painting.”

  “I can’t,” Dicey told him. The truth was, she didn’t want to waste her time on his shoddy workmanship.

  Along with which, Claude went on, not paying any attention to what she said, he’d supply all the materials needed, everything was already in his storeroom, sandpaper, paint, brushes, and even the turpentine to soak the brushes clean.

  Dicey told him she wasn’t interested. She was sorry but she wasn’t interested.

  “Besides, I’ll leave the key to my shop with you—it’ll be easy—and there’s a trailer, so you can move them back and forth without any trouble. I know you don’t have room to store thirty boats in that little place.”

  “Absolutely not,” Dicey said.

  His whiskery voice droned on. “Fifty dollars a boat, girlie. Think about that.”

  Dicey bit her lip—you couldn’t take it personally, he called anyone female “girlie.”

  “Do the math,” Claude counseled her.

  “No,” she said. “No, I can’t.”

  “I’ll give you a couple of days to think about it, before I offer the work to someone else. I’m doing you a favor,” he explained to her. Looking at the two boats balanced askew on the rack, Dicey wished he’d do her a real favor and hang up. Driving along up to Annapolis, remembering the time-wasting conversation, she wished she’d had the bad manners to hang up on him. She wasn’t about to take on work that Claude’s sloppy planning left him behind on.

  Up ahead, the little Kent Island drawbridge humped up high over the narrows. Across the bridge, the road ran between new shopping centers and new housing developments, to cross the island. Occasional inlets crept in close to the highway, the blue of the water so dark it looked black, and bottomless. The water looked as cold as the land.

  Where the ramp rose up to the long Bay Bridge, and the bridge rose up, the sky took over. A setting sun lit up the long feathers of clouds that lay across the cold blue sky. The feathery clouds shone rosy orange, orangy gold. Two jet trails streaked across the open sky, long, golden lines cutting across the whole width of the sky. Then the bridge peaked and she began the downhill slope to the tollbooth.

  She took the lower Severn River Bridge into the city. The Naval Academy edged the river like a medieval fortress, as if it had been built to protect the city behind it, or even to protect the whole country that stretched out behind the coastal city. It wouldn’t be able to protect anything, however, so it looked like something it wasn’t. She crossed the bridge over College Creek—just a hyphen between two roads—turned up the road in front of the college, rounded Church Circle, and then went down the long hill to the arched drawbridge over Spa Creek, where the Yacht Club watched over its long docks. The bridges marked her passage into, across, and out of the city.

  She parked the truck beside Ken’s van, but instead of going right into the office, she walked down to the creek. Looking west, she saw the creek flowing into the Severn, and the Severn opening out into the bay. At her feet, the water blew up against the pilings and bulkheading. Looking inland, Dicey saw masts, so many that they seemed grown as thick as marsh grass, all up the creek and along the labyrinthine docks built to serve apartment complexes. She began to get the choked and crowded Annapolis feeling. “A good place to live”—that was what Ken had said about it—“but a rotten place to visit.” Ken liked to count up all the money those masts represented; but then, Ken liked money, liked talking about it and thinking about it.

  She was only looking, Dicey reminded herself, she wasn’t planning to buy, she was planning not to be interested in this wood. She didn’t bother knocking on the office door, because off-season everybody went home at four-thirty, so there’d be nobody to hear her. She went right through the reception area, glancing at the photographs of work Ken had done—cabinets, tables, bunks, planking in varnished mahogany or oiled teak—and on into the shop. She couldn’t afford to be interested in the wood, now she thought about it.

  Half an hour later, she had the larch piled in the back of the truck, its projecting ends marked by a red cloth Ken had given her. She was using the hood of the truck as a tabletop, to write the check. “It’s a good buy,” Ken told her. He’d grown a red beard over the summer and fall, which made him look like a modern-day Viking.

  She couldn’t quarrel with him. It was a bargain price he was giving her. “Except, of course, you’ve got no use for it and you don’t want to have to store it,” she reminded him.

  “So, you scratch my back and I scratch yours. Anything wrong with that?”

  “Not by me,” she agreed, passing him the check. She’d worked for Ken one summer, and they got along fine. As she was turning to climb back into the truck, two men came into the lot. One of them, in a sheepskin jacket and heavy mittens, she knew—Jake Mitchell, she’d stitched sails for him the summer before she worked for Ken. The other, in scuffed docksiders and jeans worn through at the knees, in a down vest over a flannel shirt, she’d never seen before. His clothing was pretty scrungy, but his face, even in the fading light, looked pinkly healthy, freshly shaved, and his hands had none of the thick calluses workingmen’s hands had.

  “I hoped we’d catch you before you went home, Ken,” Jake said. “Hey, hi, Dicey. How’s it going?” he asked, but didn’t wait for her to answer before introducing her. “Tad Hobart, Dicey Tillerman.”

  “Call me Hobie,” the man said, smiling at her. He was old enough to be her grandfather, and Dicey wouldn’t dream of calling him Hobie. He didn’t even want her to, anyway. If she hadn’t already noticed his cheeks and hands, she’d have figured him out from the way Ken and Jake stepped back, to let him take the lead. A lot of wealthy people who had to do with boats dressed like workmen; but they always had something about them to make sure you knew what they really were. This man, pulling back his sleeve to see the time, had a heavy gold watch. “We were going to get a drink. I’ve been looking at the sails Jake’s making for me, and a beer was starting to sound pretty good. How about it, Ken? And you, too—I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  Dicey shook her head. She wanted to get on back.

  “Dicey’s been slave labor for both of us,” Ken said. “She came to pick up some wood.”

  “You’re selling firewood now?” Mr. Hobart asked. “I know things are slow, but I didn’t think they were that bad.”

  “Dicey,” Ken said, in a mock confiding tone, “is going to become a boatbuilder.”

  He didn’t need to say it that way, as if she were about three years old. Mr. Hobart looked at her from under thick white eyebrows, and smiled as if there were seven hundred things he knew, things that she’d never
figure out. Dicey just stared right back at him.

  “What kind of a boat are you going to build, Dicey?” Mr. Hobart asked.

  “A pink one.”

  It took him a minute, and then his smile came back. “Something in rose? Or more lavender?” Reluctantly, Dicey smiled, and he asked again, “What kind of boat? Seriously.”

  “Just a fourteen-foot rowboat, one you could put a motor on if you wanted.”

  He kept his eyes on her, as if they were playing poker. “Round-bottomed?”

  She shook her head. “Flat. I’ve never built one on my own before.”

  “Where did you learn how? Where’d you study?”

  “Nowhere,” she said. She knew what he was thinking.

  “What kind of wood did Ken give you?”

  “I bought it,” she told him. She’d had about enough of this conversation, and she was tired of the way they kept looking at one another, like it was all a joke, and as if she couldn’t see that. She turned around, to open the pickup door.

  “Okay, okay,” Mr. Hobart said. “What kind of wood did you buy?”

  “Tamarack.” Well, it was. Tamarack was just an obscure name for it.

  “What’s that?” he asked Ken. As if she didn’t know.

  “Larch,” Ken told the man, his smile pretty much hidden by his new beard. Dicey put her foot on the running board.

  “Hey, hold on, little lady,” Mr. Hobart said. “What I’m thinking is, if you’ll build it V-bottom, I’ll buy it.”

  That stopped Dicey. She looked at Ken, but he was as surprised as she was. Behind Ken, Jake was smirking away, like the whole thing was some circus show that turned out even better than he’d hoped. She looked back at Mr. Hobart. He was waiting.

  “That doesn’t seem any too smart to me,” she said, surprising him back. “Why would you want to do that?”