Fingerprints of Previous Owners Read online

  I didn’t know how long it’d been when all of a sudden I heard a car going by and realized, like a fool, I wasn’t all that far off the road after all. I ended up crawling toward the sound until I felt the pavement beneath my hands and pulled myself up to walk along the road. A bloody, bitten mess.

  When I finally got home, deep in the night, I went through the motions my body had always known. Skipped the broken step; pulled the doorknob up just so to make the key catch; rattled it four times before turning all the way; turned back just a tick and heard the tiny click. Did it all without waking Mother. But my body felt different, heavier.

  After that night I went up only if I could make it back out before the sun went down. But I went up as often as I could, most days for a year. Always had Dad’s machete by my side; after that night at Thiflae, Lionel had returned it to its place with the other tools in our shed. I started in the same place every time—by the low, stooped tree—so I could keep working on the trail I was making, and I hid the machete far enough in no one else would find it. Took it back to Dad’s old shed when it needed sharpening. Mother must’ve thought how much I was missing him, with how often I was in that shed, his old mill file in my hand going up and down the blade.

  Chapter Two

  Furnace Island: I sneered every time I walked under the resort sign, tying my apron strings at the last possible second before the managers considered me “at work” on their island: this landscaped bite of our oval that existed one hour ahead of the rest of us so that some tourists wouldn’t have to adjust quite as much to the different time zone. Only advantage was I got off work one hour before Mother expected me: one hour to trek inland. Lionel laughed each time he saw me in the evening: “Out of the furnace, into the—what’s worse than a furnace?” Guessed most folks I knew would think the inland was worse, but no one knew I went up there.

  My ID tag said nothing but Maid. But it was also my job to be silent and visible only when the tourists wanted to see me. “At work” meant not just a place or time. A being, a not being.

  Mother would scoff: “Life is work, Myrna.” Mother in the yard tending the garden. Mother struggling up from tending the garden. Mother in the kitchen fixing meals with her rewards from the garden. Doing the wash for Miss Patrice in exchange for some credit at the store. Packing up what we didn’t use from the garden and carrying a box on her hip around to Bayard’s house, where he’d trade for meat and milk. Mother drying the sisal rope in the dirt alongside the house. Braiding it once it was dry. Selling lengths of that rope at the Straw Market, to tourists only, since everyone else around here knew the rope wasn’t so strong now that her hands were older. Mother trawling the beach from the sun’s first streak in the sky until her stomach was too empty to keep on, eyes cast down for unbroken shells the tourists might buy. Walking home with her skirt pulled into a bowl full of shells, hands raw. After eating a little, Mother flagging friends’ cars on the road to drop her at a different stretch of beach where another harvest of shells awaited. Mother on her knees washing out shells in a metal tub. D-thonk, d-thonk, d-thonk, d-thonk as they hit the sides. This, for hours, before any shells we’d clean out for dinner. Her knees stiff as bark by nightfall. Mother walking the road, back and forth, back and forth, seeking out the most vibrant buds that would open the next morning. Standing outside the resort’s snack bar area, colorful island weeds clutched in her hands and propped in jars at her feet. A cardboard sign resting against her legs: Tourists: Buy Native Island Wildflowers for 50 cents a bunch. U.S. coins and other OK. Mother at work.

  But never setting foot inside the resort to work, I reminded myself—reassured myself—each time I arrived at the gate.

  The key where the planes landed was close enough that not only could I hear them landing from the gate, but from the pool deck I could see how they rattled to the ground. The propellers seemingly no bigger than a truck’s steering wheel slowed to show their arms, and then the whining of the engines ebbed to silence. I could even see passengers filing out the hatch, jostled by their own bags. And I would ready myself for another arrival.

  “Aye, it’s hot today. Sweating in this thing,” said Christine, who I’d heard complain almost every day of our lives. Almost rolled my eyes at her but remembered that when I came into Miss Patrice’s store for Band-Aids, Christine never asked why I had so many scratches. Though she might have recognized the way the pin-sized bits of skin flipped sideways from my ankles and wrists: the work of the innermost nettles of the island. I always stuck to this side of the group these days anyway, Hebbie sticking to the other side.

  For all her complaining, Christine got into her role. Came alive when the boats approached. She let the wind whip her sheet out in front of the rest of us and waved her arms at the tourists. The look on her face: astonished wonderment, grateful welcome. She could flatten parts of her face into a plane both ancient and without its own story: a trick of the nerves I could never master. She’d once told me she liked putting on that sheet to pretend she was somewhere else in history. Jumping from Cruffey Island to make-believe Furnace Island. I hung toward the back near Miss Philene, who hated this as much as I did.

  “Your sheet’s got a stain, Myrna.” Miss Philene’s cracked voice was older than she was and stubborn in its boredom. She stood strategically behind me to hide her cigarette from the boat staff. I yanked the tail of my sheet around and saw the stain: a bloom of yellowish brown.

  “Blotched paradise, my dear.” She chuckled low, a sound that conjured the knobbiness of her face, the bluishness of her lips. She’d said much worse about stains and smells when it was just us soft-padding down the hallway with two rooms’ worth of used guest sheets bundled in our arms. Her face always pinched as if she could solder her nostrils. We weren’t allowed to push a laundry cart, because it would keep us from ducking into corners when guests appeared in the halls. She always said that walking the halls of this resort, hugging the sheets clean rich folks have made foul in all sorts of ways, didn’t mean that foulness touched her. Dropped them at the laundry, did her other chores, went home, and was still herself. She let me steal a drag of her cigarette as Max—Columbus—went through the labored explanation of Furnace Island.

  Lionel had been fired from the resort for asking the Arrival Manager if he could edit the boat script. He’d even printed out pages from the Internet showing that furnaces hadn’t been invented yet in 1492. Surprise, surprise. She’d pulled out rebuttal pages from a photocopy of Columbus’s journal, showing that Max said a lot of what Columbus supposedly actually wrote. When Lionel pointed out first, that the journal was full of nonsense, and second, that none of us was descended from or even remotely looked—in our “sheet-y getups”—like the natives of Columbus’s arrival, she banned him from setting foot in the resort. He went back to working at the landfill, where the pay was less but he worked alone most of the day. Getting company when everyone dumped about once a week, when the resort’s trucks came about three times a day, when folks came to pick up the good stuff those trucks had dumped. Where he got to reclaim all the decent stuff to help keep all of our houses furnished, comfortable—and to keep the landfill manageable, according to the plan his granddad measured it for years ago when he was still working and walking.

  The new batch of tourists started scrambling off the boat; it was impossible to climb off the thing in an elegant way, but the boat staff was there with smiles and hands, twisting and bending their bodies to ease the transition. They were even stepped on where the sand was gummy with strands of seaweed. Some of the tourists looked weary from travel, but most twinkled at us as if we were magical.

  So rare a black American came to the resort that we had to notice her climbing off the boat. She was all sharp angles: octagonal bracelets clattering up her arms, the arrows of her elbows facing us. Biggest purse I’d ever seen: a pastel-pink summer-weight bag stamped with an aqua palm tree and a tick of blue paint on the strap. Sharp corners of a book sticking through the fabric against her hip. She’d s
urely designated it, among all her other purses, “Vacation, Resort.” But like that book was pulling her down.

  Also had to notice her white-as-Max husband waving his phone around, frowning, and the little boy between them. Far as I could tell, everyone—maids and boat staff and tourists—took note. Then a white girl standing near them in her college T-shirt the color of a cherry sucker, taking the little boy’s hand when the woman told her to. Hands free now, the woman shifted her bag to the other shoulder, pressed it close to her hip. (Later I would feel how heavy that book really was, weighed down with time and the smudges of all the other hands that had held it. Weighted with what it was.)

  Christine murmuring, speculating: “You think his daughter from a first marriage?”

  “Maybe,” Della whispered. “But I don’t think it’s his wife. Maybe she works for them, and they let her bring her kid along.”

  “Naw,” Miss Philene tutted. “Seems like wife, way she told that girl to take the boy’s hand.”

  Before anyone answered, the little boy was whining for a grape sucker; he started off a chorus of kids, and pennies started slipping from the sweaty pockets of palms all around us. A few of the maids bent to their knees to save the pennies from the sand.

  Max was ambling through the crowd, repeating that there would be a reliable Wi-Fi signal once they were inside the confines of the resort. “Not to worry,” he kept saying with a puffed-up chest.

  He began barking over the wind again, back on script. “Willing to trade anything, ladies and gentlemen!”

  Lionel’s voice came loudly into my head, swishing in the background. Performing the speech he wrote one night when we were having beers on Junkful Beach, posturing above us on a dune while Christine and I laughed and laughed. That speech was just a joke to her, but I kept imagining it over Max’s words:

  Willing has nothing to do with it, ladies and gentlemen! Come gaze on these people draped in white because they are darker than the natives who I originally came across in 1492, sent off to the silver mines and otherwise cleared from the island, setting the stage for the other ships that would come later, bringing the ancestors of these people you see before you in uniforms, here to serve because the economy is a rough ocean, my friends. They will smile and greet you. But during your stay they will be a reminder of the sad and punishing history of this island whose beauty you soak in, that you will take with you like the sand that will, I promise you, come back with you no matter how many times you try to shake yourselves free of it!

  A giggle rumbled out of my lips, and my cheeks inched up toward my eyes. Max caught my eye and smiled, big and bright, his chest puffing up even more. Like I was finally playing my role with the glee he’d been waiting to see. I had to squint my eyes as his rings caught the sunlight and shot it at me.

  Christine and I ducked our heads to remove strands of plastic beads and handed them to the tourists in exchange for pennies. I could see in their eyes: the expectation of gratitude, how the pennies—not worth stooping to the ground for back at their homes—were transformed through some sort of island alchemy. The alchemy of poverty.

  And to the Maids’ Brigade, I say: our resort will take anything, yes, and shall make you so eager to please!

  Behind the fence we stepped around the crabs that’d been missteered by our brooms. But out of the tourists’ way still. After I dropped my stained sheet off at the laundry, I took my handful of pennies back to the jar in the kitchen. Their clink-clink sounded like a shell cracking under a tire. The Arrival Manager would count to ensure all fifty pennies were returned, then they’d be handed out again on the next boat in expectation of the natives showing up with more trinkets. Which we would, since there was no other work.

  The resort’s blog mainly told tourists the day’s meals (always a buffet with everything) and the day’s weather (always warm, sunny) and sometimes where to go (today: the Jamboree). It didn’t tell them what not to look at; “at work,” we had to keep them from seeing.

  Island Jamboree for kids of all ages. Featuring our local steel drum band and native women selling native crafts. Hair braiding, too! Special guest appearance by our Captain Columbus. Get a taste of the island without venturing too far from the comfort of your room: the Jamboree will be held at the snack bars that are conveniently located just beyond the resort’s gate. More details will be available on The Beach Blanket Blog.

  We had to memorize the description in case any tourists asked about the event ahead of time. Only words I’d be allowed to say to them. Script stuck to my tongue like a piece of a brochure washed up from someone else’s island.

  The job of the AYS was to bring water, lemonade, extra-sweet-smelling punch with too much rum—but not just to serve. They soothed with drinks, they directed with conversation, they encouraged the purchase of trinkets. The drinks, the braids, the massages were all free. But the Jamboree was always outside the gate to up the number of snacks purchased from the snack shacks and the number of bikes rented from the Captain-on-Wheels bike shack. (Some of the kids on the island got the old, discarded bikes from the dump at least. Not even old, just replaced.)

  My job was to clear away and not be seen. I was one of the maids in charge of water bottles. Some others, plates and flatware. Others, trash. The Events Manager thought tables full of near-empty bottles or abandoned plates with sprays of food fork-nudged to their edges or blooms of crumpled napkins catching the wind didn’t say “Jamboree.” Clear it all away and ourselves, too. Keep moving. Event management didn’t want us standing still for more than eight seconds at a time, and two of us couldn’t stand next to each other at all. If any of us stood still for too long—watching for a table that needed us, talking to one another, or just leaning quickly against anything at all—trouble dusted up, like sand you couldn’t get out of your clothes.

  Sometimes the sun painted yellow shadows along the sides of the bottles, making it impossible to see the water level. Half full or more: give the guests five minutes to return to it, then assume abandoned. Less: our cue to whisk the bottles away. Then we’d have to approach carefully, when the guests had left their tables or, if they were still sitting, when they were engaged by the AYS. Certain times of day, it was impossible to step close enough to reach without throwing your shadow over the guest tables. Luckily today’s Jamboree was right after lunch, when the sun pounded our shadows straight under us.

  The steel drum players were Floridian. Bought their set off some Jamaican street band in Miami. But the tourists leaned in for every timbred bounce of their mallets. The couple from room B1 was smiling and bopping—wouldn’t have guessed from watching them they had so many pill bottles I had to line them up on the floor in order while I wiped their bathroom counter. It wasn’t bad music, but repetitive—and, as far as I could tell, all Trinidadian songs on Floridian-Jamaican drums anyway.

  Miss Vernie sat behind the table spread with earrings and necklaces, candleholders and straw bags. The resort didn’t even buy the bags from Miss Minnie, best weaver on the island. Had them shipped in, big flat boxes of them with plastic bubbles tucked in between. The banner above the table: Miss Martha’s Island Crafts. Management had told Miss Vernie to keep weaving and unweaving the same four plumes of straw while the maybe-customers browsed.

  (Before they started shipping in crafts, and before Lionel was fired, the Events Manager had asked him to bring stuff from the dump. My brother would help him turn junk into stuff tourists would gladly buy. I remembered sitting in the back of Lionel’s truck while they worked, watching them cobble before bringing stuff around to the Events Manager for approval.

  “Not authentic enough,” he might say. Or he might put it right on Miss Martha’s table. Whoever Miss Martha was that time.

  Sometimes it was all just scamming: shards of a broken beer bottle called sea glass. But Troy took great care, sometimes, his artist self not letting his hands rush. His specialty was stitching scraps of brown leather from a thrown-away belt to hooks not good enough for fishing. To the
tourists: coconut-shell earrings. He’d soak the leather in salt water, then let it dry around an actual shell for the right curve. With each Jamboree, that old belt hanging from his doorknob inched shorter and shorter.

  “Does this look like a coconut shell?” he’d ask me. I’d shrug, which he probably took as ambivalence about the pretense. I just didn’t know what coconut shells would look like as jewelry.

  But I knew he was an artist, transformation just by turning over in his hands. I was always more interested in how Troy made things, without a tool to his name or an art class his whole life. A brother more distant than the three-plus years that separated us. Led me to try to see into his mind through the steps of his art. Trace back to the thought that propelled his fingers. “Study a work of art to understand the time and place that produced it and the sensibility of its maker.” That’s what the university art history brochure had said, and that’s what I—not a maker myself—had wanted to find out: time, place, sensibility. About Troy, the maker. Before I’d heard back about the application I’d secretly mailed, the major had been shut down. Funds shuttled to the burgeoning Hospitality Studies School. And I went to work instead. With an apron around my waist and the sunset logo stamped on my shoes, like I’d signed up for the hospitality major after all.

  When Troy and Hebbie’s brother, Andre, first went to the capital, they’d set up a table outside the dock of the big resorts. Andre was the better salesman. Standing there in his always-intriguing T-shirts that tourists came closer to read; aloof with his headphones in, acting like he didn’t care if he sold a piece or not. Troy not even at the table. Felt sick to my stomach thinking of them tinkering up their own Jamboree. Hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, giving the nausea more room to bloom.)