Fingerprints of Previous Owners Read online

  Dad told me that when the worst dark thing was cultivating itself in someone’s throat, when the sickliest gray was marbling someone’s tooth, his dentist hands couldn’t stop feeling out the nothing-est cold sores. And now I was occupying my mind with little details, the tiniest sand crabs skittering along the edge of the grass, instead of maps I couldn’t touch even when someone put them in my lap.

  Once the bike was in, the cyclist came around to the door. I knew what was coming next. Couldn’t collect on tours if Lionel put tourists in the back of a pickup that’d been hauling garbage all day. Took me a second to collect my voice to say a second thing to Jasmine Manion.

  “Excuse me.”

  She got out of the cab, pulling her bag in front of her. Away from me. I climbed into the truck bed and tried to resettle the bike so it wouldn’t fall on me. Leaned over the side, ready for some fresh air in my face instead of the leftover garbage scent all around, cologne and old book scents in my nose. The D-wing man and Jasmine Manion were still standing next to the passenger-side door, open like a waiting arm. In the late-afternoon sun, the paint splatters on her clothing took on a sheen. Then he got in the front seat and slammed the door closed.

  Jasmine Manion just stood in the road, her face inches away from his through the open window. But he faced forward.

  After a long pause of just staring and staring, she said, “You and your wife had dinner at my table last night,. Anthony.” She sounded pissed, even with her lazy midwestern vowels. Pissed about being taken to be “at work.” “At work” with me.

  Lionel was leaning over, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Whatever he said, eventually the man got into the middle of the cab, and Jasmine Manion climbed back into her seat by the window. Grimy window between me and that book felt as solid as the brush between us and the inland right now. I closed my eyes to the air off the ocean pushing against my face.

  We dropped the cyclist at the bike rental shack, where he jumped out and got his bike without saying anything to any of us. Lionel offered to drop Jasmine Manion off a bit closer to the gate. (Guessed that cyclist could be a good alibi if anyone saw us, as though we’d just happened to pick up two tourists who nearly missed dinner. Helped out those two and the resort’s meal schedule, too.) But she said she’d just go from there. Handed Lionel some bills rolled to the size of a cigarette. Walked away without saying much.

  Lionel pulled around closer to the truck entrance to let me off, and we could see her meeting up with her family on the path. Her little boy pounced away from the nanny and flung himself against his mother’s legs. I couldn’t tell if her hands were caressing him or straightening him up—worried, now or still, that he could be lumped in with us, too. Keeping him closer either way.

  I climbed down and walked over by Lionel’s window. Evening now, the color of the sky changed in front of us. Counting up what I still needed to do for overtime garbage duty. Hovering there, even though it was as likely Lionel’d unfold into a mysterious bird as talk to me about that book.

  B3’s husband had joined her, and I tried to imagine them sharing either a joke or a murky secret. Wondered whether she’d tell him about the cyclist. And if she did, would she do it in front of the kid? In front of the nanny? Or just in bed at night, hedged in by stacks of magazines and paintbrushes on their nightstands, awaiting my morning dusting. Had the book been in that pile and I just never saw it? Or was it tucked away, even from her husband?

  “Well, let me go change first, and then we can go to dinner,” she was saying.

  “Change?” he whined. “You’re fine. It’s a million degrees outside.”

  “Al.”

  She seemed agitated, looping the shredded cutoff end of her shorts around her finger. My own finger went to a looped snag on my skirt.

  “You and Nathan go ahead. I’ll be quick.”

  Her husband stood waiting, for a capitulation or for more of an explanation.

  “Later,” she said.

  She walked away alone, alone with the book, and her husband looked at the boy, nervously taking the little hand to keep him from following his mother. The nanny left, too, passing through the gate without looking back and without the guard glancing at, let alone in, her purse.

  And then we were us, and the truck, just like last night, just like always. Not talking about the plantation book. Not talking about the plantation.

  Sun leaking out of the sky, garbage paperwork to file: my machete would have to sleep another night. Glimpse of a map or not.

  “I’ll wait here till you’re through. We both need a drink.” Turning that roll of cash in his palm.

  There was no way I could argue with him. I’d have to explain where else I’d had to go after work.

  When we got to Thiflae, there was the nanny. Taken me so long to finish up she’d beaten us on foot. I was glad we hadn’t seen her on the road. Didn’t feel like having to scoot and squeeze for another American woman Lionel’d picked up. Who’d told her about this place? Maybe she was just a wanderer.

  Considered for a second whether Jasmine Manion could have sent her out to explore for the things her great-gran had told her—or for the things her great-gran had never molded into words. And maybe this nanny, stumbly with beer five feet away from me, had been sent on a nocturnal quest. Knew something about the book.

  But she didn’t seem to be on any sort of mission, her limbs looser and head swiveling on her neck; at the resort, I’d seen her making only quick, defensive movements: reacting to a three-year-old. When her purse tumbled off the stool next to her, a toy car clattered against the tile. In her face a mixture of guilt, affection, and relief—parts of her lighter, glad finally to be away from the Manions for the first time since arriving and parts soaked through with missing. Counting up the owing. The same way my face must be when I went inland instead of going home to Mother, and she’d come into my mind like a mosquito in my ear: so close before I even heard it. Tethered no matter where I wandered. The nanny took another mouthful of beer.

  She was telling Nelson about Wisconsin winters. He and some others were leaning in for every word. If a black American tourist was a novelty, her white nanny was like a comet we might never see again in our lifetimes. Others had deserted to the porch as soon as a tourist walked in, I was sure. Ones left wanted to hear.

  My brain itched to huddle around something small and fluffy as a thiflae bud. Just like Dad and the cold sores. Lionel beat me to it. Shouted a tourist question in her direction.

  “How cold was it the day you left to come here?”

  “Negative sixteen with wind chill!” She looked pleased by the shocked looks she got, the impressed whistles. Smiled so wide the tip of her nose twitched up. Only Mr. Ken lost interest, rolled his tongue across the inside of his cheek. He had friends in North Dakota and plenty of his own stories to tell about visiting them in December weather. Only time of year he closed the bar. He never spent Christmas on the island since he and Miss Philene split up, which was pretty much as far back as I could remember.

  “I mean, it might have got up to plus ten or so later in the day, but it was way below zero when we left for the airport.”

  Encouraged, she described the whole neighborhood. The Manions picking her up on one of those mornings after New Year’s, she explained, when vacation kept the racket of school buses off the streets, and the only sounds owed to garbage day with its dark green dumpsters trundling down the driveways. The crusty snow crunched underfoot, and the discarded Christmas trees lolled on the curbs like drunks.

  Garbage day? Lionel mouthed to me.

  The strange mix of weather she’d described them having this winter—air so cold it froze the inside of your nose one day, the next day sunny and melty—had left small islands of snow holding on the soggy lawns, littered with shriveled locust tree pods. She traced the shape of a pod in the air: parenthesis shaped, as if everything we were talking about was beside the point.

  She leaned her head forward to show those nearby the g
ritty white patch of frostbite on her forehead. As I’d expected, the taut skin between her braids was the flashy pink of cinnamon candy.

  “This was the part of me not covered by my scarf or hat just when I walked between the car and the airport!”

  Lionel pointed out that she was both frostbitten and sunburned at the same time. The few interested laughed and huddled in to look at her bitten forehead and her scorched scalp. Her gums revealed the whole time they looked. Lionel was grinning, too, at me. Like it made him happy I was being social for the first time in a long time. Like it made him happy we were away from that book. Or that the focus was on the topographical story of her skin, not mine. The marked skin that had an explanation he could stand. Or maybe he was just happy he’d made extra money today.

  I tried to give him a smile. But like I didn’t know how to swim around the talk of a crowd anymore. When was the last time I was on Junkful, at Thiflae? And today I went to both. (Bags and bags keeping me from where I usually was after work, machete in hand.)

  Turned back to the bar to find Mr. Ken noticing the scrabbly mess of my uniform. A new sweating bottle next to the one the light was already shining through. Soon enough the new one was full of light, too.

  Leave it to Lionel to have the American at our table after just his second drink. She shook my hand longer than I expected—kinda felt like my arm being yanked back into the resort when the rest of me had already passed through the gate. I knew she used whitening toothpaste and wore two-piece bathing suits and contacts; that she had pills for air sickness; that she’d packed three pairs of identical black flip-flops, all worn thin under the big toe and that she kicked off anywhere in the room. Even with my uniform, she thought she was just meeting me. But that was for the best anyhow.

  I sat there not talking as Katelynn chattered about how funny Captain Columbus was, and Lionel chimed in with good-natured, semi-neutral jabs about the resort. Every time Lionel said my name I kicked him under the table until my leg hung, the nudges I gave him weary instead of cautionary. When the nanny finally slipped Murna into something she was saying, I ordered another drink without even looking at him. Excused myself with the beer in one hand and a glass of water in the other and went to stand outside the front door for some fresh air. Freddy, the blondest dog on the island, nosed into the jellyfish-soft place behind my knee. I bent down and put the glass on the ground, letting her stick her tongue down into the water. Gave her a good scratch, and she skittered away from my hand. Whimpered. Even in the pitiful light from the entryway I could see something by her shoulder: a tick. Side ripply with ribs. Been too long since Dr. Amerie had come. For Lionel, too, I guessed, from the looks through the hanging door: his stool scooted up next to the nanny’s.

  A few more gulps, and I’d be too sleepy to walk home; I’d have to go back in to get Lionel to give me a ride. They slid down my throat, led me back to the table.

  “I mean it was so sad,” the nanny was saying when I got close to the table. “Mrs. Manion practically begging her family to come over for Christmas. And Mr. Manion stomping around the house going on about how his family wasn’t the biggest fan of their marriage either—big shocker—but they came for Thanksgiving. And how he’d stayed in that house long after the divorce from his first wife, a house big enough for hosting a whole bunch of people on holidays, because he thought Mrs. Manion would want to live somewhere like that, like Tehawkee Bay, when her family had only lived in Milwaukee, blah, blah, blah. And it is, like, a huge, really nice house. Nathan has this massive playroom in the basement. And kind of another one, too, upstairs in the room Mrs. Manion uses for painting. But anyway, that was the only time I saw them really fight in front of me. Sometimes they seem to make each other laugh about random things that I don’t really get.”

  “So no one like her family lived in this bay, huh?” Lionel was drunk. Like her family: not treading too carefully around tourists. But the nanny was drunk, too. (How many drinks would she need before I could ask her about the book? How many for me to do it, how many for her to forget I’d done it so I wouldn’t get in trouble? How many would I need—to forget not just the trouble but all the folks in earshot hearing me ask? Far too many.)

  “Nah, she’s pretty much the only one. First time my mom went to buy stuff at her shop, she just thought she worked there, had no idea she was Mrs. Alvin Manion—or that’s what my mom called her. My mom goes to that shop all the time now. We live, like, two streets over.”

  She drummed on the table with both hands, and Lionel’s head seemed to bop along to the rhythm. I tried to catch his eye. I was ready to go. But he was rapt as Katelynn talked up her spring semester courses, her roommate troubles.

  “You look like my ex-boyfriend,” she slurred, one eyelid drooping. (Maybe that was why Jasmine Manion trusted this girl with her kid: that ex-boyfriend.) Then she flicked Lionel’s braid, and it bounced against his face. When he laughed, I knew he was too drunk to drive me home.

  Didn’t even try to hide my rolling eyes. I’d lost count of the women Lionel was interested in first minute they stepped on this island from the capital or from the States or from the moon. Tomorrow I’d probably hear about his truck being parked off the road someplace between Thiflae and the resort gate. Nighttime tour, no fee. I told him I was leaving to walk home. They barely looked up from their conversation. Both halfway put up their hands: one full wave good-bye between the two of them.

  Freddy was nowhere to be seen when I exited and started down the road. Walk seemed longer when I wasn’t coming from or going to the inland. And after a day of double duty. A day of the word plantation across my lap.

  Could hear the water as I walked but couldn’t see it. Reminded me of the way Hebbie used to hum everywhere she went, so you’d hear her coming round the bend before you saw her. Been just me and the inland so long now—if I found myself walking the road with Hebbie like we’d always done, I’d mistake her for my shadow. Now I expected my shadow to be a rectangle with soft edges, like all of me was a thought of that book. The book my shadow—even touching me, I couldn’t touch it.

  Bench Story No. 6: Mr. Quentin “Q” Cruffey

  On my right I have the sack I always wear low across my back, banging against my backside when I walk down the road, which makes a lot of folks laugh, given what they tend to say about me and my Wilson. But let them. This sack has nothing you would want. Nothing you could relate to money. Nothing you could relate to meaning if you do not dwell within my mind. Inside the sack is a violin bow, big enough only for a child, and it pokes through the sack, makes me look, from afar, as though I have a tail. More laughing. Let them. I carry this with me all of my days. Wherever my destination, whatever my errand.

  Ever look closely and extensively at a bow? It will look from afar as though the strings were a solid strip of hide or a similar material, but then close up you will see the most delicate of hairs strung tight and close, end to end, one right next to the other. Both silky and tough to the touch at once.

  My bow is warped. My bow is rubbed round in places the wood should still have corners. The wood of my bow is smooth as sea glass and the color of the foam on the waves instead of the delicious color of wine or coffee or Miss Hebbie’s mud-and-auburn hair. As most bows of fine craftsmanship would be.

  I am not a musician. This is not a confession of a secret musical talent, a knowing way with a violin at night inside my house when no one would hear or suspect. Neither was Wilson a musician before he went back to Miami and passed from this world. Neither is this a relic of my parents or any ancestor in my past whose life centered on violin playing. I will explain how this bow came to travel with me.

  Before Wilson returned to Miami to receive medical care he could not receive here, he requested we walk the entire island, not on the main road. He did not want to drive in a circle, as surely we had done before. But rather he wanted us to walk along the coastline from our home until we found our home once again. Many times over the years when we would walk along the s
outhern beaches near our home together, when he was in health, we would wonder at how long such a venture would take; once we walked about a quarter of the way, clockwise, for many hours, deciding to turn back for dinner around where the resort now has made its home. He requested that in this instance we walk counterclockwise because, as he said, that is how we have always lived together on this island and in this world.

  I told him, as he already knew, that he was not well and perhaps this would be much too hard on him. Indeed, this would be quite an endeavor for anyone, and I do not know if it has been done many times by even the young and strong. But no, he insisted, we must try it before he leaves in case he does not come back. He must be sure our feet had felt the sand of our home, together, in an unbroken oval.

  We planned quite a bit. I would fill this sack with essentials, of course, and we planned to borrow the baby stroller Miss Minnie had that went well over sand, so we could push supplies we might need with minimal effort. I considered a wheelchair so that I could push Wilson or perhaps he could manage a moped that at times they rent at the resort—or perhaps we both could, as I was not such a young man myself—but Wilson insisted on walking. Our feet in the sand, he said. Marking out the oval of this island side by side, he said.

  The problem was, as I saw it, if by some miraculous confluence of, well, miracles we were to be able to walk together the full oval of the island: at some point we would arrive at the fences where the resort had made the beach private. How would Wilson react to our needing to circumnavigate these fences, arriving on the road he did not plan to walk on, for quite a spell, as the resort is somewhat vast, before we could descend to the coastline again and continue our journey? When I brought this matter to his attention, he reminded me that we could buy day passes and be allowed into the resort for 350 dollars total. And then we could walk along “their” beach. (He made ugly, crooked quotation marks with his fingers when he said this.)