Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  Praise for Fingerprints of Previous Owners

  “Entel’s delicately crafted debut explores the relationships between the resort, an economic center that distorts the island’s history for its own purposes, and the local people and the ways the past infuses the present, no matter how hard one tries to forget. Entel gives Myrna a distinctive voice and creates a rich history for the island and its residents.”

  – Booklist

  “Fingerprints of Previous Owners simmers with implicit and explicit violence, with social and economic injustices… Audacious, heartfelt and realistic, I found myself immersed in the perverted paradise of this island world and in the travails of the characters.”

  – Maxine Case, author of All We Have Left Unsaid and Softness of the Lime

  “Fingerprints of Previous Owners is a memorable debut. Through the force of her sure storytelling and graceful prose, Rebecca Entel makes the unseen visible, and the unspoken past powerfully present.”

  – Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Madeleine is Sleeping and Ms. Hempel Chronicles

  The Unnamed Press

  P.O. Box 411272

  Los Angeles, CA 90041

  Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

  13579108642

  Copyright © 2017 by Rebecca Entel

  ISBN: 9781944700430

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940133

  This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

  Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com.

  For my parents,

  Esther and Leonard Entel

  too slow the stones crawling toward language...

  Derek Walcott

  Pain—has an Element of Blank—

  Emily Dickinson

  There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves... There’s no small bench by the road.

  Toni Morrison

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  When the planes landed out on the key, we would gather on the beach. We draped ourselves in sheets, the wind turning us into shifting shapes of brown and white, like sea creatures wrestling our own bleached shells.

  I’d never arrived here from somewhere northern, frosty. But I imagined that when they filed out of the plane, it was hard not to go rigid, expecting the January cold. The sun would come down to massage their shoulders. They would relax against its warmth and squint through their sunglasses against its glare. From there, they headed to the resort on Furnace Island, though their boarding passes had said the destination was Cruffey. They didn’t know what it meant for this place to have two names.

  I’d never even been on the key where the resort landed its planes to see the island as a dot out in the ocean. I’d never arrived here from anywhere.

  When they moved toward a gravelly area labeled Baggage Claim, a flurry. A team of people with the name of the resort scripted across their chests would appear, arrange its bodies as prosthetics for whatever they needed to do: move luggage, climb into the small boat that awaited them. Scaffolded in wooden masts and adornments, bearing a flag with the resort’s sunset logo imprinted over a red-and-yellow castle. Across its side in regal script: The Pinta. The boat would jostle against the dock, clacking and swishing, as they waited to be unmoored.

  After heaving all of their luggage in a human assembly line onto a twin boat labeled The Nina: Luggage, some team members would don felt hats with feathers and put on the bug-eyed faces of actors. Those staff members without costumes—the ones who’d done the lifting, the ones from the island, the ones like me—would sit down on the floor of the boat and wait.

  Some of the newly arrived faced toward the island, some faced backward toward the airport key or the open water. Their backs would touch. The stepping-stone trail of clouds in the sky would lure some of their eyes out to sea while others would lean away, waving their phones around for a signal, frowning. The boat would begin bobbing along.

  A throat clearing, followed by a sandy boot planting itself on the bench next to them, bringing all the eyes back.

  “Then the Pinta!” the befeathered man would bellow. “Being faster and in the lead! Sighted land!”

  Some of the other men would jump up around him, pointing excitedly at the beach that had been in view even from the key.

  “In the presence of all of my crew!” the bellower would continue, Columbus embroidered across the front of his hat. “I ask you to bear solemn witness that I am taking possession of this island for their lord and lady, the King and the Queen! And I will call this island, in all her glory, after our sovereigns Ferdinand and Ees-abella: Ferdin-Ees Island. And oh, the glorious heat of the sun that circles our God-given Earth: Furnace Island, then!”

  Kids would clap. I imagined the adults, too, cheering.

  “Lo and behold, sir!” One of the hatted crew members would put his arm around Columbus’s shoulders. “Natives!”

  Finally every head would turn to the beach. The beach where we waited. They’d see a cluster of women gather slowly to face them. Just the local women, no flown-in-from-the-States staff with skin lighter than our driest sand.

  “Why, they go about as naked as the day they were born!”

  Laughing, they would all feel lighter. Drifting farther from home and its tethers as their boat rocked ever more slowly toward the shore.

  They must have seen that the women on the beach were distinctly not naked. The draped gowns shaped out of white bedsheets would whip around in the unpredictably looping wind, both revealing and distorting the shapes of our bodies. Some of us would seem to be looking right at them, our faces hardened into expressions they couldn’t read. They would look away, to the smiling faces with the slightly downcast eyes instead. A hatted team member would begin handing out pennies.

  “We will give them coins of small values,” Columbus would shout. “They will be so delighted, as they are so eager to please and will give us anything we should ask for!” His hands would take wing as he spoke, flashing rings with the sunset insignia carved into them.

  We women on the beach would begin unlooping necklaces over our heads and pulling bouquets of suckers from bags sunken in the sand. The colored wrappers shimmered in the heat. Our stiff arms would reach toward them like branches. Murmurs of approval would flutter through the crowd.

  “And now all of you!” Columbus would flourish his hand around the boat. Even the people who’d been grumpily waving their phones around on the key would relax, docile hands at their sides and their chins pointed ever so slightly toward Columbus. “Our natives take anything and give willingly whatever they have! Our staff shall be so eager to please you during your stay on Furnace Island. They shall be called eeeeyes. A-Y-S: At Your Service. You need eeeeyes? They will provide!”

  The staff would motion for them to climb from the boat and would press pennies into the squishy pockets of their hands. Kids would cry for suckers, jump happily at receivin
g them, cry again when they ducked into the sand, sticks up.

  Our group in white would begin to disband, pulling sheets from our shoulders, revealing the maid uniforms that would make them think of fifties sitcom reruns on late-night TV. We, the women, would disappear through a break in the fence they would never see behind.

  They would tell one another and themselves to forget any dropped pennies as they were directed away from the fence, up a graveled path to where the pool sat on the beach, hugged by either wing of the hotel. Speakers hung like bats under the roof’s edge, vibrating with the pock of steel drums. They’d hear the faint sound of someone sawing very dry wood.

  At night the speakers and the sawing would fall away, but the sounds of Furnace Island would keep them alert. The whoosh of the waves, a sound that was supposed to put them to sleep but was called a roar. After a night or two, they’d dream through everything.

  Archipelago, the maps in their rooms would tell them: scattered seeds floating away from the finger of Florida, that imperative pillar to our point of exclamation. A tiny island way out from any mainland, quivering like an unattached period in the water, seemed like an invitation to decide how to complete the sentence that had brought them here. Sentences started elsewhere; we were just a dot. A dot named twice, neither time by us. They would hone their geographical grammar, tracing the explosion of islands across the map’s flat sea. Or they would turn away, be no place. The rooms would be full of no one’s history, never belonging to anyone.

  They would end up sitting by the pool most of their days at the resort, reaching out for drinks on trays. Flipping through magazines, maybe forgetting the books weighing down their oversized pastel bags they’d bought to bring here. Most of them would never swim. Those who did would dip in the pool, never the ocean. Their loungers would face in toward the pool, the hotel. Never out to sea. Some would do laps, strapped with full snorkeling equipment. Back and forth, slow-motion lawnmowers, finally emerging like primordial creatures with the baggy seats of their bathing suits leaking water down their legs. Plastic masks and the snakes of their snorkels like plumbing for their heads. The soupy words they called out to the staff would sound like complaints or warnings.

  They would eventually discover that the sawing was the sound of the maids sweeping crabs from the deck with wire brooms. Back onto the sand to scuttle in loops down to the beach or into the truck parking lot.

  I was one of the maids they heard but didn’t see, sweeping away.

  By day.

  By night I swooped with gravity like a ghost was crocheted around my arm, the machete its extension. Not hacking away like a crazy bitch. My brother, Troy, did that. He couldn’t be taught, Mother used to say, and she had been a teacher. He was the bad one, the one who’d left her for work in the capital on Wells Island and wouldn’t ever be coming back. I was the good one, the one who came home every night, bringing money. I was the one who would never leave.

  She had no idea I went where I wasn’t supposed to go. Wandered along the stones that peeked from the earth like calluses hardened from time. Slicing a path big enough only for me, not caring if the nettles picked at my work uniform, which would cost us money when it had to be replaced. Sliced and climbed and grubbed and tiptoed around anthills to walk inland among the dead.

  Those are not our bones, she would have said to me. She would not have meant people. She would have meant the ruins: the stone walls creeping up within the brush, which led nowhere, which told you nothing, which were built only to keep in. I knew; I had followed them.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for. Mother loved the knowing. Knowing Bayard a third of a mile down the road in the limegreen house could fix your car. (We didn’t have a car, but Mother knew Bayard could fix it if we got one. And she liked knowing exactly how far it was to walk if someone else broke down in front of our house.) Knowing a whistle in the air meant Hebbie was coming around the bend. Knowing her hair’d be some shade of red you’d never find growing in your garden. Knowing Miss Patrice’s store would always reopen after lunch and would always have ibuprofen when you couldn’t find it anywhere else. Garrett would always stop by when he’d been catching crabs, and we’d always eat well each night that he did. Miss Minnie would ask every time I saw her if Mother would join her in selling at the Straw Market that coming Wednesday or singing at church that coming Sunday. And the answers would always be yes and no. Knowing her brother, my uncle Q, lived as far from us on this oval as you could get, but he wouldn’t go three days without seeing on her. And Mother knew I’d wash all the plates if she’d grab a needle to fix up the edges of my work apron until her hand was too stiff and came to rest in her lap, a knobby cavern. She didn’t wonder how it got torn up, because she hadn’t been inside the resort to see they’d cleared away the brush so you’d walk through the entire stretch of the place without anything touching you. For all she knew my uniform got snagged all day at work.

  Haulback, we called those nettled plants. They dug into your skin and your clothes when you tried to get by, hauled you back.

  Before the resort, most of the men went to the capital for work. Many still did. My dad had. And my brother, Troy; Troy’s best friend, Andre; so many. Some women, too. And way before that, there was only the land you were in a relationship with for anything you could plant or pluck. Everything else had you waiting for a boat to come in. Those boats came slowly, infrequently. Still did.

  And before that, long before our time, life—if you could call it that—was only on the inland. Working the land for someone else who’d claimed you, corpse that you were, from the ship that docked in the capital and put you on another boat to this bitty outermost island. Once you were here, you were theirs. Even if you could slip the inland to reach the shore, there was nowhere to go, nothing to take you away. The horizon surrounded you. The sun and the water promising escape only in surrender, only in giving yourself up to the waves instead of to your master. The platform of sale in the capital was now where the cruise ships docked, and with every arrival Americans in visors filed down to the beach. That’s what Troy had described.

  Even Ole Mr. Vit was too young to remember the move down from the inland, but he once told me about it when I was young enough not to know I shouldn’t ask. He was just a boy when the oldest people around would remember their parents reminiscing about it. Each family turning its back on the high inland, a while after the masters had deserted this place and its miserly soil.

  New houses were put up just back from the beach trim, and a road ringing our oval island was built in one swoop. Still our main road. After a storm its potholes became mini-oceans, and rocks rose like icebergs. They ruined cars that went too fast.

  Water and electricity came more slowly, each family saving up week by week to pay for the connections. Those of us who still weren’t on the water grid came to the spigot at the gate of the resort with jugs the size of calves. Six dollars came out of my pay each month.

  I had a water bottle from the resort’s gift shop that I took with me when I went inland. (I found it, still shrink-wrapped, behind a bush by the resort’s main gate.) See you, Mother would have said if she saw me using it, you don’t belong up there. See you, like a tourist. You’re making yourself a tourist up there.

  But she would never say that, because she stopped speaking once Troy was gone, and because I would never tell her where I’d been. Except in my imaginings: when I sat on a wall and collected her next to me, a ghost girl with old eyes, sucking the thiflae flower for sweetness. I never liked it, this red bud that felt like fabric in your mouth, until I saw all the kids at the resort—couldn’t keep their mouths from taking on the colors of their suckers. All sticky. Thwuck, thwuck sucking. Made me see that we had to work our mouths a little for our sweetness, and it was a sweetness that grew on your tongue, didn’t just spike your mouth. Made me see who I was a little bit.

  Mother would be right, though, that only tourists went inland. The resort had cleared a path to a ruin that looked lik
e a house—the only one that looked like anything—and took packs of guests up to see its walls. They didn’t tell the tourists what the walls had been a part of, what they sat on. Just an old house, just a formation of stone to pose yourself against. Stone spangling in the sun until it was cooked into something else. I didn’t know exactly what they told the tourists, their path off-limits to me. I could see only the ruins still shrouded in the brush that shrouded me, too.

  The resort owned most all the inland. No one was allowed to go among the ruins beyond this little tourist patch. The ruins of the estate that all of us on the island, way, way back, came from—now a trap of trespass. I waded through the brush like a ghost, a nocturnal animal, a thief.

  Except for the house they’d claimed for the tourists, all I could find remaining from the plantation: these stones and stones and stones piping the hills, holding themselves against the overwhelming brush.

  I pictured what it must have been like moving down from the inland to the edges of the island. I pictured everyone moving all at once, like an exodus, though I knew it wasn’t really like that. I pictured every single family creeping down the same ways I went up, carrying sacks of all they owned—not much—the ones in front swinging their machetes. Reverse invasion, I thought, a dispersal. Moving from the center out, out, finding space between all of them, to set up where they could actually see the sky and the sea. The brush filling in behind them almost as soon as they passed through. Almost like water, how you couldn’t keep it from taking any little space you might try to carve out for yourself around here. This tiny oval, quiet and loud at once.

  Most of those very first houses had been abandoned. People just left whole houses behind, took what they could carry. There was a piano in one of them. We used to have parties there when I was a little younger. Somewhere to sit and get out of the sun, hear someone plucking at the keys. Even if my friend Hebbie was the only one who really knew how to play, it was something to hear besides the dogs bickering on the road, the scribbling sound of the waves reclaiming sand. Mother hated when people would go in those deserted houses to take stuff, practical though she was about us collecting trash on the beach to use at our house. Just didn’t like the idea of transplanting some piece of that loneliness into your own space. Me: couldn’t get enough of the memories of things. Everything I touched dripped with the syrup of the past, even at the resort where the brand new strapped over everything like duct tape.