The Lantern Wreckers

I rolled into Bagdad on a Thursday with about forty dollars to my name and a plan to leave with more. Sixty-two years old and still hustling drink tickets off race crowds. My daughter says I should retire. My knees say it too. But a man's got to eat, and trucking was eating me alive, so here I was.

The race crowd was thick that morning. Folks from Prescott, Phoenix, a busload from Tucson. All of them sunburned and happy and carrying cash they hadn't counted. I like a crowd like that. Happy people don't check their change.

I worked the beer line first. Easy marks everywhere. A fellow in a golf shirt bought three tickets off me at face value and never even asked why I was selling them behind the tent instead of at the booth. I don't know why people don't ask questions. They should. But they don't, and that's how a guy like me stays fed.

Then a woman in a vendor apron spotted me.

"Hey! You! Tall guy!"

I kept walking. That's rule one.

"You still owe seven dollars from this morning!"

So much for rule one. I'd bought a turkey leg and a lemonade off her cart earlier today, and told her I'd get her at the end of the shift. Classic mistake. Never owe a vendor. They've got good eyes and nowhere else to be.

"Seven dollars," she yelled again.

I cut between two canoe displays and picked up my pace. There was a building at the edge of the fairgrounds, some kind of shop with a forge sign over the door. Chandlery Forge, the sign said. I didn't know what a chandlery was and I didn't care. The door was open and the vendor was gaining, so in I went.

The back room was dim and warm. A forge glowed low in one corner, more coals than fire. There were stacks of canoes leaning against every wall, half-built hulls and finished ones, and a workbench cluttered with rags and cans of oil. The air smelled like boiled linseed and coal dust. Not a bad smell, honestly. Workshop smell. My father would've liked it.

I stood there catching my breath and listening. No vendor. Good.

"You're the judge?"

I turned around. A woman was standing by the workbench, forty-something, sturdy hands, hair pulled back with a rubber band. She had a canvas bag over her shoulder and she was looking at me like I was expected.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"The judge. For the technical judging." She checked a watch on her wrist. "You're early. That's fine. I'm early too. I'm Mika."

I should have said no right then. I want that understood. Any halfway honest man says "ma'am, I'm not the judge, I'm a sixty-two-year-old scalper hiding from a turkey leg debt." That's what a good man does.

"Well," I said instead, "yes. Judging. That's me."

Thirty years of running scams and sometimes the scam just walks up and introduces itself. What was I supposed to do?

"Thank God," she said, and dug into her bag. "They moved the deadline up an hour and I've been pacing." She pulled out a flask and set it on the bench while she rummaged. I noticed the flask. Noted it. Filed it away. "I'm sorry, I'm being rude. Do you want a swig? It's been a morning."

"Well. Sure. Since you're offering."

She handed it over. Peppermint schnapps, cheap brand, cold from sitting. I took a swig and handed it back and she took one too. That right there put us on friendly terms, in my book.

"So the thing is my hull finish," she said. "I've been told my satin topcoat is the best in the field and I want that on paper before the deadline. But the real trouble is the lantern glass. Come here, look at this."

She led me to a canoe propped on sawhorses near the forge. Beautiful thing, cedar strips, a curved bow like a swan's neck. Set into the bow deck was a small lantern with glass panels, and the glass was gritty. Sooty. Like someone had rubbed ash into it on purpose.

"See that?" she said. "That's the problem. Every judge so far says the grit comes off in scoring. But I've been sanding and polishing for three weeks and it won't clean. I think it's baked in from a bad curing fire. What's your read?"

My read. She wanted my read. I used to be a long-haul driver. Now I sell counterfeit drink tickets. My read on boat lanterns is that they're small windows in boats.

"Mm," I said, and leaned in close like I knew something. "That's, uh. That's some soot."

"Right? Three weeks. I've tried everything. What would you score that?"

"Low," I said, then saw her face fall and hurried on. "On the glass alone. The hull work is different. That's first-rate. What grit did you finish at?"

"Two twenty, then four hundred."

"Right, right." I nodded like four hundred meant something to me. "And your topcoat was thinned how much?"

"Ten percent, why?"

"Just checking the spread rate," I said, which meant nothing, and she wrote it down! She wrote down spread rate on a little pad like it was official.

"See, this is why I wanted the Bagdad judging," she said. "The Prescott crowd just eyeballs everything. You're actually checking the numbers. Where did you train? There's that program out east, isn't there? The maritime school?"

"Yes," I said. "The maritime school. Out east."

"Which one?"

"The. Boat one."

God help me. The boat one.

She squinted at me. "The Landing School? IYRS? Great Lakes?"

"The, uh. Great Lakes," I said, because that was the last one she said and I figured she'd stop there.

She didn't stop there. "My cousin went to Great Lakes for welding. Small world. What year?"

Here's where I got in deep. "Oh, you know. A while back. Ninety... eight."

"You'd have been there with Hartwell then. He teaches the finishing course now."

"Hartwell. Sure. Old Hartwell." I took another swig of her schnapps to buy time. It didn't help. "Sharp as ever."

"He is," she said. "I've never met him. I just read his book. What's he like in person?"

"Quiet," I said. "Very quiet. Hands always smell like tung oil."

That one landed. She nodded, satisfied, and I felt like the biggest fraud in Yavapai County. Which, granted, at a con man's gathering like this one, was saying something.

"So," she said, all business again, "the glass. Is it a fail? Straight answer. I can take it. I'd rather fix it than fool myself."

And there it was, the problem with lying to a straight-shooter. She wanted the truth and I didn't have it. I looked at that gritty glass and thought about my seven dollars and my forty dollars and the vendor probably still prowling outside.

"Hold on," I said. "Before I score anything official-like, I need to consult my notes. Back in a minute."

"You're leaving? The deadline."

"Two minutes," I said, and headed for the door, and I'll be damned if I didn't hear her call out something about Hartwell's spread rate. I pushed out into the sun, spotted the vendor across the lane, and turned right back around.

Some cons you walk away from. This one had a flask in it, and a woman who laughed at my bad jokes, and a canoe like a swan. I went back in.

I came back through the door and she was right where I left her, bent over the bow deck with her face about six inches from the lantern. Hair still pulled back with that rubber band. She didn't look up.

"Your notes," she said. "Good. Because I wrote down spread rate and I want to know if I got it right."

"Sure," I said. "The notes."

The notes. Which were a complete blank, because I didn't have any. So I did the only thing left to me. I bent down and looked at that lantern glass as if I actually gave a damn.

And here's the funny part. Somewhere in the middle of faking it, I stopped faking it.

Because the thing was beautiful. Not the glass. The glass was a mess. But the hull around it, the way the cedar strips ran into the bow and