Fingerprints of Previous Owners Read online

  Wondered if Jasmine Manion in her shop looked like Lionel scaling the plateaued rims of the landfill. Climbing over and sorting through and salvaging from her shop’s junk-pile landscape. Lionel recirculated the resort’s barely used items; the recipients, us, making things our own through needing. Even his own home imprinted with the resort’s handling. I pictured her, late at night, scrubbing away the smudgy fingerprints of previous owners. Days later, her customers’ curated mantels.

  I headed toward a three-walled shed by the entrance to the landfill: Lionel’s office of sorts. Queen Isa came to greet me with her barking, all nosing and wagging. Lionel had named her that for prancing around the landfill as if she owned the place. I drummed gently on her sides, and she turned and walked back with me where she’d come from. Lionel was the only one who could fill out my forms properly, but Claudia wanted only my amateur assessment of the landfill’s capacity—and there was only one answer to give her. Island alchemy solved all puzzles with yes.

  Lionel hadn’t processed that morning’s local dump yet, and it was small enough that I could settle my bags in that pile, keep them out of the way of tomorrow’s resort dump. A slit in one of the local bags released the scent of fritters someone had for dinner last night. And then, like a reverse exile from the capital, another scent that my memory had on tap. Hadn’t actually smelled this one, though, since Troy left the island that day after Dad’s funeral, and Mother said he had really gone back now that his big bottle of cologne was off the counter. The cologne he’d worn since about fourteen. Always smelled liquory to me—like adulthood, like freedom, like traveling to the horizon.

  The cologne Andre wore, too. The story of the two of them wafting up from yesterday’s spilled trash.

  When I didn’t find anyone at Lionel’s, I went around the bend and crossed the street to Junkful Beach. Lionel and Jasmine Manion stood just a bit down from the path I’d come through, facing south. His shirt filled with wind behind him, her shoulders skewed by that bag. Bare feet so flat in the sand her knees popped out back above her calves. She was one of the only outsiders to see this mucky side of the island. Even her own family and her own nanny—the woman who worked for her—were just hanging around the resort on an island beautifully landscaped, low on bugs, relaxing. Sitting by the pool thinking this island had one time zone and one name.

  I sat down to wait on the disk of a rock breathing out of the sand. Above me a female frigate hung in the air with her shrug-shaped wings. I watched for a male throbbing his red throat toward her, but I didn’t see one. Just her, longer across than I was tall. Tried not to let the angle of the sun make me anxious to get back. No turning off Lionel when he had an audience. A woman new to the island who was also a paying tourist: his best kind.

  The brochures called the resort the most beautiful spot on the island. True, the scrubby east-side sand was dark, strewn with seaweed, a little fishy smelling. Flotsam all around us, some of it identifiable and some of it not. But looking for luck in a big old mess: that was a much better place for me. Stinking of garbage duty and overtime as I was, threads frazzled up and down. My uniform the topography of this beach. I opened my nose to the scents strong enough to block out cologne.

  The wind brought their voices to me. Lionel’s tour continuing, even here amid the world’s refuse.

  “Around here people believe it’s good luck to go collect it. And see out there on that little peninsula sticking out from the beach? Down there. See it?”

  The spot Lionel pointed to seemed very far away but also like we could all just walk to it if we wanted. The ocean could always trick you with how close we seemed, how far we were.

  “Yeah. What’s out there?” she asked.

  “For hundreds of years they thought that was Columbus’s landing spot. Out there. That’s the east side of the island, on the Atlantic.”

  “But they were coming from the east, so...”

  “Yes, but there’s no way a boat could land out there, especially those big ships,” he said. “They’d wreck on the reefs before they got close to shore. They had to land on the west side. Harbor’s still over there. Always has been, always will be.”

  He pointed again: the water breaking then sealing itself in a white seam over the reef we couldn’t see. We watched it split and heal, split and heal.

  “What’s that?” She pointed farther down the beach.

  I let my eyes go unfocused, trying to see it through the eyes of someone who didn’t know what she was looking at: a lightning-struck tree or maybe pipes, painted black and roped up in what almost looked like the charred remnants of a flag on a pole. Then refocused to see it for what it was, as Lionel began to tell her about Troy’s sculpture.

  “There used to be this giant sculpture of a white cross right there, easily two times as tall as me.” Lionel jumped up, hand raised to emphasize how high. “Someone took it down in the middle of the night. No one knows who. Or if anyone knows they don’t say. It was a monument to where he supposedly landed. But once it was gone, my cousin gathered some stuff that had washed up on the beach and built that in its place—like a distorted one.”

  “A distorted cross?”

  “A distorted monument. My cousin, man, he was a great artist, and it was amazing how he got all that junk to stay together in that sculpture you see there. No matter how rough the weather gets over here: stays just how he wanted it.” Lionel picked up a broken branch the size of his arm and flung it into a wave, which heaved it back again and again.

  I closed my eyes. Didn’t want Lionel talking to tourists about my brother, but there was nothing I could say. Jasmine Manion was telling him she was an artist, too, but I already knew that; I’d lifted her bag of paintbrushes up, careful not to spill them, each time I’d wiped off her dresser.

  I jiggled my water bottle to see how much I had left. The sun felt as though it had chosen to sit specifically on my shoulders and upper back. Dripped down like melted wax from a candle. Tried to think of the sweat through my uniform as letting the resort ooze out of my pores, along with the anxiousness of needing to get back. Nothing I could do about that either—couldn’t get back from here on foot without a couple hours to spare.

  I scooted off the tippy rock and let the sand mold around my body; it was packed hard beneath me so that I fit in it and was held atop it at the same time. The rhythm of the waves had unexpected turns that pulled my mind away. I kept my eyes shut. Felt a sinking: how I’d always thought of the sadness that would envelop my brother for weeks at a time, in between when he made something new and found his baggy smile again.

  Maybe they were still talking, but all I heard was faint barking in the distance, an occasional squawk, and the sounds of the water. The crash of the waves was amplified by the absence of the pool sounds at the resort: the pocking beat from the speakers, the scraping shoo-shoo of the brooms.

  My fingers pushed crude horizontal brackets of birds in flight into the sand around me. But when I looked down, the lines looked like boats, arriving and arriving and arriving at my feet. With my palm I wiped them back into the sand.

  Same sand I sat on years ago when Troy, Hebbie, Andre, and I tended to be a foursome on lazy evenings. Charades on the beach—only props allowed were stuff we found washed up. Too much beer fizzing in my head, leaking mischief through my veins, I found a piece of a filthy gray tarp, caped it around myself, and bugged my eyes to be the ghost of Jimmy Cruffey; turned around, and before I even started, all three looked at me blankly. No idea what I was up to. I’d let the tarp drop and had told Troy to take his turn instead.

  Finger found the sand again. Made the four slashes of a diamond.

  I watched Jasmine Manion pick up objects that had washed into the tall grasses just back from the shore. Wondered if she was here on a quest for ghosts, digging for what her great-gran had never told her. But she didn’t seem to be looking for anything—just looking because she wanted to and could.

  She held up a knitted mitten. Yellow soaked in mud. Hal
f unraveled by the wrist, missing a thumb. “It’d confuse people if I sold this in my shop, right? A mitten found on a tropical beach?” She laughed.

  A plastic bottle—shampoo, looked like to me. She examined the print, bringing the thin bottle close to her thick glasses. “Portuguese!” she said to Lionel.

  “Hey, Myrna.”

  I flinched at the hand on my back. Turned around to see just Manny, carrying his shoes and wiggling his toes in the sand. Had Bayard told his kid about what the students saw when the boat came in? Me in my sheet? Drew my legs into my chest, as if he couldn’t tell what I had on. The uniform that was always telling something to someone.

  “Oh, hey, Manny.”

  Lionel and Jasmine Manion turned around at our voices, finally seeing that I was there.

  Manny ran toward Lionel, kicking up sand as he went. I knew he was a kid who couldn’t sit still in class. Ran around in the afternoon, at the landfill or down here on the beach. The way Hebbie and I used to. Now he stopped and stared; could’ve been the first black American woman he saw come to this island. Might’ve been the first tourist on this oval to talk to him, too. Certainly the first one turning up on Junkful.

  Jasmine Manion reached out her hand to him. “I’m staying at the resort. From America.”

  Manny laughed outright, thinking the same thing Lionel and I were: Did she think someone’d mistake her for one of us? On this island where we knew the number of steps between our houses? Lionel’s forehead moved back, like he was both surprised and not surprised at all. I froze. We both waited for her response to Manny laughing at her.

  She just shrugged. Her shoulder blades sharp enough to puncture the tension. I stood up and brushed sand from my behind. We left Manny standing where the sand had been rubbed smooth by the tide; he waited for the water to creep closer and closer to his feet and watched his toes try to hold on to the tiny islands of sand when it pulled back out. Way Bayard was so upset about kids seeing the arrival on the beach, couldn’t imagine he’d be happy to hear from his kid we’d brought one of the tourists to this side of the island. Not the chattiest kid, though—maybe Manny wouldn’t mention who he’d seen at Junkful. Doubted Miss Minnie or Miss Patrice would chat about our visit to town. And Miss Wayida’s voice sloshed only around her empty church, coming back to echo in her own ears.

  The three of us back in the cab, sides of our thighs stuck together with island glue. Couldn’t balance myself without touching her if I tried. Talking a mile a minute about what she’d picked up on the beach, her shop back in Wisconsin, where she got her own junk to sell. She’d made an easel out of some varnished fruit crates that turned up in the shop—PPLES still visible down its spine—and said she’d pluck from donation piles some kitschy sculptures and random objects to paint as still lifes. Then she’d display both the objects and their paintings in the window. She sold more items when they were displayed like that.

  “How long have you been painting?” Lionel asked.

  “Oh, a long time. My grandmother used to paint with me when she watched me. Always beach landscapes. Now I wonder if they were Caribbean island landscapes—of Quickly—that she’d learned from her mother. Anyway, most of my customers are women in the neighborhood, and a bunch of them started taking group cruises to the Caribbean as a reprieve from the long Wisconsin winters. I started keeping an eye out for anything Caribbean related—I had a few things anyhow, because of my great-grandmother—and displayed it in what I called the Caribbean-of-the-Mind Nook.”

  “Caribbean of the mind!” Lionel leaned into the steering wheel, a mix of honking and tittering. I tucked my lips inside my mouth to keep from joining him. Swallowing laughter is just choking, Dad used to say.

  The way she described it, the nook sounded like a simple plywood bench she’d built under a window and topped with pillows, a bookcase with relevant books, and some shelves with this and that. Imagined her putting the junk from the beach on those shelves, neighbors coming in, like the resort’s Jamboree tourists beguiled by broken glass labeled sea. All of them sighing over pictures of turquoise water, glossy brochures about places like Furnace Island, where it was already an hour later than right here.

  “In harder times, which are almost always in really grim, sunless winters, that nook really keeps things going for my shop. When people are planning cruises and especially when they aren’t. Helped fund this whole vacation! Though don’t tell my husband I told you that. He—we...” She trailed off.

  The truck dusted the air around us; we were farther from shore now, using the landfill access road to cut back to the western side of the island instead of circling the southern tip. Jasmine Manion studied out the window; I thought maybe she’d complain about not getting the full-oval tour, but instead she seemed intent on the tangly hill rising up alongside us. Inland.

  The top of her bag gaped like a screaming mouth, and there it was: the book that had shuttered Lionel’s open face at the Jamboree. It was broad but not all that thick. Almost the size of a record but heavy. Plain gray cover with a black title at the top and nothing else.

  The Cruffey Plantation Journal: 1833.

  If management could check on me in this truck, in my fired cousin’s truck but “at work,” they’d find me staring straight ahead. Not reaching for the book or even looking at it directly. Not talking to the guest. Not matching up the snags on my skin and clothing with all the sharp points of the word slavery.

  The truck never lost speed, Lionel’s leg never lifted from against mine to hit the brake. I could even see out the corner of my eye that he faced the road, nowhere else. But a line of sun coming through the window striped across his ear, then his cheek: head moving just that tiny bit to shift the light. Eyes looking. Still we moved toward the resort on the road we’d traveled all our lives.

  “This is from the nook. The same one I showed you at the Jamboree, Lionel. I don’t remember who donated it, where it came from. But it’s the only thing that’s come through the shop from this island, see?”

  I let my head turn a second-hand’s tick. She opened it, flipping pages that looked like copies of typewritten pages, their serifs prominent and cluttered. Each page number bounded by hyphens. She stopped at its center, the left-hand cover and pages sitting on my right leg, the other half of the book on her left leg.

  A hand-drawn map of the entire estate spilled across the centerfold. Her hand that’d been gesturing out the window toward inland now came back to the plantation marked out in our laps. Her pointer finger slid over the dipped horizon of the book’s binding. Bluish, veiny ink.

  “Where do you think we are now? In relation to this plantation?” Her voice bluish again, too. Deeper blue.

  While most of the points on the map were marked by blue dots—storehouse, kitchen, well, lockup, office, slaves’ quarters, cotton gin house—the main house was as big as the pad of her thumb and drawn so we could see what it looked like: two stories, pointy roof. It was perched close to the hill that sloped down to the shore; the key—a dot in the ocean—and the harbor on the west side of the island where boats arrived even now, as Lionel had just explained. In the upper right-hand corner was an insert of another map, a small drawing labeled Archipelago. The estate just a speck in the scattering of islands that looked like they’d crumbled off Florida. She connected the dots from one simple shape to another, all those islands flattened against the roundness of her finger. I felt grim, sleepy. The book’s weight on my knee like a fallen boulder. The curves of the blue lines on the map blurred until I might have been looking at water.

  Her question about the plantation—as if anyone on this island had ever seen this map before, knew where the hell we were in relation to its points.

  Her next question: “What’s wrong?”

  She leaned into me more to hear Lionel’s voice, which had broken itself into a slow, low gravel: “Just never saw a map like that before, that’s all.”

  The book pulled off my knee in a thwuck, closed against itself. The Cruffey Plant
ation Journal.

  My voice: “That’s his last name.”

  Cruffey. Cruffey and Wells: only two islands still named after old-time plantation owners. A name that couldn’t be scrubbed off, left to decompose on the inland the way other words had been.

  Jasmine Manion, B3, put the book back in her bag and pushed it down under everything else she was carrying. Book of mysterious birds alighting on top of it.

  Finally Lionel said we’d better be hurrying back to the resort, and I felt the truck pick up speed.

  A bang against the driver’s side, and we came to a dusty halt, all three of us boomeranging back against the bench.

  “What the—?” Lionel looked pissed but stopped talking when he saw the tourist in the road tipped off his bike with one foot on the ground. Dusty shirt and shorts, gray hair like half a splayed mop, arms skinnier than the rest of him. As far as I could tell, he’d banged on the truck with his hand, since we clearly hadn’t hit him. Started explaining to Lionel how he’d tried to ride the whole oval but realized it was going to get dark and he was nowhere near getting around. Took the cut-through but wasn’t sure where he was. Voice was full of bile, but I couldn’t tell who he was angry at. If he turned down the landfill road, the only one that cut across, the only second road there was, he hadn’t even been halfway around. I didn’t see a water bottle anywhere on him. Even his eyes looked dry, grayish and flat. A gutter of skin ran down the center of his neck. Lionel picked up the water bottle from the cab floor—my water bottle—and handed it out his window.

  “All right, we’ll take you back. Headed there anyway.”

  Compared with the cyclist’s English, which sounded droopy as an old hammock, Lionel’s words felt taut as a clothesline.

  I didn’t think the man heard the second half of what Lionel said. He was already around the passenger side, lifting his bike over into the truck bed and grunting. I could see that his face was younger, despite his gray hair and eyes. I didn’t recognize him—must be staying in the D wing, which I hadn’t been assigned to lately, and out biking around instead of sitting by the pool. His T-shirt said Sanibel Island with a sun not unlike the resort’s logo, but something—what?—signaled a rising sun, instead of a setting one.