Fingerprints of Previous Owners Read online

  Three women who I also recognized from hall B, my cleaning wing, were trying jewelry on their ankles and wrists. Hands raised to the sun, feet looking soft and rested. The black American woman from B3 was clipping a coconut-shell barrette in her son’s curls, the two of them laughing. Not seeing the interested looks shot their way. His head just reaching beneath her squared-out palm tree bag.

  Days at the resort now, and we were still talking about that family with the refrain the woman with the white husband. Her mix-up kid staying in the room next door with the white girl in her college T-shirts. Some places in the Caribbean were beyond a mix-up from the mixed-up-ness of history—all the ghosts on every dot of an island in this sea—but some places were color coded clearly. Cruffey certainly was. And Furnace Island—certain.

  Hebbie’d been put to braiding. Joke to me, since growing up I was the one always doing her hair. Not wearing her uniform but not her regular clothes either. I didn’t know where they got the getup they’d given her to wear. A dress so long like it was meant for her brother, tall as he was. Her tray of beads rattled with kids and women riffling through for their colors, then sitting and squirming while she worked.

  Hebbie’s own hair was braided for her to play the role: shooting stars of pink ducking behind black. Wondered who’d done it for her. Her eyes looked sad without her bangs winging above. Looked just like her brother with that high shiny forehead. She caught my eye like she was going to say something, but I stared down at my black sneakers, like I was investigating the sinking spider sunset stitched into my feet, then walked away before eight seconds added up beneath them.

  She used to play piano in the abandoned house by the southeastern bay while I talked a streak about everything I could think of. When she was studying in the capital I used to go over to her mother’s house for her scheduled calls home. Inseparable as our brothers. Until we got the news about Troy, and Mother stopped speaking, and I couldn’t bear to be going around with Hebbie knowing her brother was going around without mine. Knowing her brother knew things about how it all happened. Hebbie was my sister-friend, more than Christine or some of the others my own age, but hearing any of it, even filtered through her voice, would make it all meaner than it already was.

  Christine was walking toward me like she had something to say. I turned half sideways and drifted along behind where the braiding was happening, where my eyes wouldn’t meet Hebbie’s again. The taught white scalps looked so raw they made me cringe. I wanted to muss that hair back over all those riverbeds of skin. Flaming pink burn would spill around each braid soon enough.

  Maneuvering around without touching anyone or stopping anywhere felt somewhat like trying to go inland without a machete, dodging haulback nettles and keeping on and on to avoid the insects gnashing on you. Less visible snags here—but nowhere to get to either. Kept walking by the other maids, hearing just snippets of what they wanted to tell me.

  Miss Philene, tray primly under her arm like her at-church purse: “Arrival Manager’s office. Right after this.” Her back to me before I could ask a thing.

  Christine right there again: “Trouble brewing.” Ripple of her fingers for emphasis. Max walked by in his Columbus hat, reached out and tickled his fingers against Christine’s. She half laughed, but I shrugged my free hand into my pocket.

  Miss Philene again, trading places with Christine in a figure eight: “Boil and bubble.”

  One of the AYS stepped in between us. I lofted my tray of near-empty bottles onto my shoulder and kept circulating.

  One of the backup Columbuses, also in costume, rode circles on a kid-sized bike, legs sticking out like rifles, throwing his hands up in the air, too, while the kids cheered. Wind almost took his hat into my face before he snatched it back.

  The pocking of the steel drums turned into pounding. Not like the rustle chorus of insects inland in the evening, the cicadas crushing the air, like an engine moving me on and on.

  I headed back around the brush, circled behind the cluster of padded chairs where Max was now standing next to the AYS who usually did the massages. In one chair was B3’s husband, telling the woman next to him about that morning’s gecko on his bedpost. (Complaining about my cleaning or just storytelling about exotic wildlife? Hard to tell with his voice that refused to spike with interest.) Max kept pushing up his bulky costume sleeves as he squeezed another man’s shoulders.

  The man scowled each time the sleeves slid back against his neck. Said to his wife and to whoever could hear: “On our cruise last year we loved the massages from the Jamaicans.”

  His wife nodded vigorously as an iguana. “Yes, yes, the best hands are the Jamaicans’.” More nodding. The chain attached to her sunglasses clinked against her earrings. “Shouldn’t you have a local do this sort of thing?” she asked.

  Hurried off to the kitchen before I could be recruited. Last time a guest requested a local woman give her a massage, Miss Philene was yanked over. Afterward management had examined her hands for an hour, debating whether it was more or less authentic for the maids’ fingernails to be painted when the guests wanted us to touch them. My own nails were ragged and encrusted with the dirt of the inland. Fingertips gouged by the stones. I again stuck my free hand in the emptiness of my pocket. Had a flash of when Mother used to clip my and Troy’s nails out on the doorstep, when we were small enough sitting still was an even bigger chore than now.

  I placed each empty bottle gently into the recycling barrel that was almost as big as the door. According to management, bottles were placed carefully to avoid clatter; according to Lionel, to avoid the denting that revealed recycled bottles to be not new. There was no recycling facility on the island. But the tourists liked to see the green bins with their happily spinning arrows.

  Sometimes Lionel gave kids spare American coins that turned up in the trash for washing the bottles, and we’d sneak them back in. The trick was not to sneak bottles in our bags, betrayed at the gate by the crinkling sound, but to load a pallet of them into Lem’s truck when he delivered to the dump. So they came back in via the truck entrance and could be shelved with the new pallets. Lionel our island recycling facility after all.

  The trick was to do it only once before the resort’s logo on the bottle started to rub off, gave us away with disappearing letters or an asymmetrical sun. If we didn’t risk it, though, the piles of plastic at the dump clacked in the wind, rolled against one another as if huddling from the gusts. Could hear them all the way at Garrett and Della’s house. Pile of empties so high it could distort the view. Even at the top of the landfill, there was a view.

  My next load, one completely empty bottle got picked up by the wind. The plastic crinkled against the gravel as the wind blew it away from me. I stooped, reached out, only to have the wind swoosh the other way. Finally grabbed the bottle by its cap as it tried to sneak around the bend where the resort’s landscaping gave way to the bursts of brush we were used to. That grew the way it just grew. I noticed a few other empties rolled up under the brush, and I pulled my apron up and out into a bowl for them.

  Looked up to see Lionel’s truck parked just out of view of the Jamboree. Lionel himself, dressed like a tourist: bright T-shirt, baggy shorts with pockets bigger than his knees, rubber sandals like spiderwebs. Probably wearing dumped tourists’ clothes.

  He was talking to B3, the woman with the white husband and the palm tree bag. Showing him something that she’d bought from “Miss Martha.” Maybe beer-bottle sea glass, maybe a string of wrinkly tumor-shaped beads called sea pearls. Something shiny and split to pieces.

  Speakers from the Jamboree blotted out whatever he was asking her. When they quieted down again, I could hear her describing to Lionel what sounded like his landfill but she called her consignment shop. Explaining how the topography of the shop shifted slowly but remained fully populated: novelty lamps swarming her cash register, a baby buggy filled with lizard skulls, midcentury TVs that were their own furniture, vintage cameras like miniature luggage stacked
in a skyline by the window. The objects bearing some marks of their owners. How she liked sorting and recontextualizing the donations into anonymous objects that could belong to someone new, to anyone. People bought this stuff from her, she said. Arranged their purchases on shiny mantels and texted her proud photos.

  “We turned a particleboard bookcase on its side,” she was saying to him. “Like a holding place for some stacks of smaller items but also a balance beam to travel toward the front of the store. That’s how full to the gills the store is sometimes! With a clothesline to hold on to.” She mimed it for Lionel: feet shuffling sideways, hands overhead.

  Reminded me of the corridors Lionel’s father had created along the far wall of the landfill when it was first built, wide enough for one. Few times I was up there with him, each of us tracing a different level, facing each other only every fourth sentence or so. Thinking about Lionel taking an American tourist up there to show her the similarities in their jobs: made me ready to laugh. Once in a while he did get up to forty dollars taking them on what he called the “real island tour.” But getting paid by an American tourist to take her to the dump? That’d be the same day the resort made me captain.

  When I heard Lionel actually offering to show her how he handled the sorting and the navigating at the landfill, I turned my head away to hide my smile, a little bit of a laugh seeping out onto my face.

  That’s when I saw Mother, facing the road. In the afternoon light her grayish hair shimmered platinum. Lost count of how many times Miss Minnie had asked various managers at the resort not to schedule the Jamboree on Straw Market Day, especially when a new boat of tourists had just come in. She and Mother must’ve agreed to split up this time. New strategy for selling.

  Mother’s sign for selling flowers was facing the road. I saw only its blank, dusty back through her ankles. And her own dusty back. Just a slice of face in my view. Resort would let non-employees sell so close to the gate only if they faced out, pretending to sell to their own. Not take a single coin away from the Jamboree vendors if management could help it.

  I rebalanced my tray with the partly full bottles and gathered together the empty ones in my apron pouch. Tried to keep them wrapped from the wind so no one would hear me standing there, catch me watching.

  Then I heard the word plantation, American accent. Stopped dead still. Must’ve heard wrong, I thought. Plan, nation, plant, situation, damnation. Something else said. But still I stood, a stone myself.

  Corner of my eye saw B3 clutching to her a book the size and shape of the records Miss Wayida Callaghan could be heard blasting out the open windows of her church no one would set foot in. An old book, corners soft. She turned back to Lionel, lowering the book to show him the cover, and his face folded in. Not his usual eye-and-mouth puppetry, especially when trying to sell a tour. Not his usual shag of braids jumping around with his head. His eyes shifted toward Mother. Hand gently nudging the book back up against B3’s torso.

  Force between Lionel’s eyes, Mother’s hunched body, book whose title I couldn’t read. Mother shifted her position so I couldn’t see her face at all. Shoulder blades a fortress. Her back a curling wave about to sink back under where it came from. Eight seconds, then I had to move my feet so management wouldn’t move theirs toward me.

  Lionel might have said something, but I could no longer hear their conversation as a bunch of older tourist kids who’d rented bikes zoomed around me, hooting, almost knocking my tray out of my hands.

  Before I could round back, an AYS appeared. Skin alive with anger or too much sun. At me standing still? At Lionel being here? At B3 talking to a local? At the possibility she could buy a flower from Mother or something, anything, from somebody else?

  Once I got to the kitchen door with my new load, I upturned any bottles that weren’t empty. Watched the wet darkness burn off the ground almost instantly.

  When I came back, B3 had rejoined her husband. He tapped his hand on his knee to the beat of the music, and the two of them passed a cup of rum punch back and forth. Their kid was sitting in the lap of that white girl while she got her hair braided. Hebbie’s hands rushed. She had to join us for the maids’ call-up, whatever it was about.

  From across a table, Miss Philene’s lips reminded me: Office.

  “What now?” I whispered. Circled a table, counting seconds. Came back around so she could answer me.

  “Don’t know, dear,” she said. “But keep your hands in your pockets, I’d say.”

  I slid my tray on top of hers by the bar station, and we followed the others out of the sun, waiting for our sweat-soaked uniforms to get soggy and cold in the air-conditioning.

  They took us in one at a time. According to the four who’d already gone in, they were each first addressed as “Christine.” Christine found this funny, but I saw under the older women’s eyes a subtle strain. We stood quietly, each fidgeting with the rim of a pocket or something deep inside.

  Only one talking like a rainstorm was the actual Christine. Talking about how antsy she got standing still like we were. How she needed to go out and see things, talk to people.

  “No worry,” Miss Philene said. “Plenty to see and new people to talk to when they march us back out for the next boat.” She rolled her eyes.

  “And that’s fine,” Christine answered, ignoring the shushing of everyone who was sick of her talking. “May sound silly, but I like standing on the sand.”

  “Standing on sand?” Della snickered. “What are you, taking a break out there?”

  Christine shrugged. “Can pretend and be myself at different times of day,” she said. She stepped out of line and pointed to each of us in turn. “Other girls having so much trouble here? They need to learn how to do that, I think.”

  “We’re all in trouble, that’s what we’re doing in this line. Over pennies, not pretending.” Miss Philene moved to the back of the line. She’d rather wait all day than stand next to Christine.

  Christine kept talking by the mile as always, this time about the new tourists and what she’d learned about them at the Jamboree.

  “That white college girl is the family’s nanny!” Her hands starbursts. It sorta was a revelation, with how interested folks had been.

  “Now I’ve seen everything,” Miss Vernie said.

  I wondered how Christine learned this, since I’d been cleaning their rooms and didn’t know. Talking to them directly? Couldn’t be. One time last season when management heard from the AYS that some of the maids had talked all night with tourists who’d been at Thiflae Bar, they’d started asking the guests questions to see if they knew by name who cleaned their rooms or cleared their tables after meals. Even heard they used a poster with all of our pictures, like a mug shot collage, and just asked the guests all sweetly who’d been taking care of them. Nelson’d been fired when three tourists matched his name to his picture. Miss Philene said there was a hidden-away room somewhere with that poster in it, among other things.

  Waiting outside management’s office like we were was pretty much a lineup anyway, mug shots or not.

  I wanted to hear some more about the family, but Christine was going on and on about her own boy being about the same age as their little boy. Miss Philene, still planted at the back, called out to the whole line, “Let’s talk about the weather.” She was likely to change the subject when it was sons, sons, and more sons. Of her three kids, only one and two—both daughters—still left in the world.

  Even I laughed at her idea. So few weather variations around here, not much to say.

  “Too bad hurricane season passed us by,” Miss Philene grumbled. “Resort’s not going to blow away while we’re standing here.”

  I let out a snort.

  We marked time by the worst storms, named them, talked about house repairs by how many storms they’d withstood. Last year was the Big Blowout, when the resort had no electricity for a week and a half, though the structures came through all right on the eastern side of the island. When folks referred to
That Storm, everyone knew which one they meant and which roofs had been made useless by the worst winds anyone could remember. The winds had blown the ocean so far inland, salted up the wells for weeks. Even if you hadn’t been born yet, you knew That Storm. We all knew the story of Miss Patrice, pregnant with the youngest of her five kids, and her husband off in the capital. When the roof started blowing off the house, she didn’t know whether she was crying or just wet from the rain coming in. A tree crashed into the door, and they had to climb out the window—all four kids and Miss Patrice with her swollen belly. All of them crawled to her brother’s house, blinded by wind.

  Other thing we all knew was that hurricanes didn’t used to slam that part of the island where Miss Patrice’s house had always been. But that was before the resort had bought up more land along the western shore and cleared it of trees. You had to go back a long time to have seen hardwood all over this island. Most of it had been gone since the early nineteenth century, cut down and shipped off for money by Cruffey, who planted his feet here and claimed to own those trees. And claimed to own the men and women who cut the trees down and loaded them up for shipment. Later a lot of folks built houses on that one slice of the island, where trees pointed toward the storms blowing in. Tall trees with roots that stayed firm in the soil. Used to be those trees soaked up some of a storm, withstood the rage. But the resort came in like a storm of its own and stripped the rest of the hardwood, like leaving a door open to those houses.

  Worst part was—and we all knew this story, too—Miss Patrice’s late husband had all kinds of engineering know-how. Gave the resort all the right advice about where to clear or not, what to build or not, and was plain ignored. We’d all heard her description of him standing on the beach with all the executives sweating in their suits, their faces red as thiflae in the noon sun, explaining how the small cabin suites they wanted to put in the cleared-out slice couldn’t match Mother Nature on that part of shore. Heard Miss Patrice’s description of him standing on that same beach when the trees had been chopped and stacked like carrot sticks, watching them loading up with his hands fisted against his hips, fingertips white.