Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  “Have you ever been there?” she asked.

  “Nah,” Lionel said. “Not to Quickly. Called that ’cause it’s closest to Florida, you know. I’ve only been to the ones closer to here.”

  Lionel’s first trip off the island as a kid was when his mother took him to the capital to see his father, who’d moved there for work. They’d decided to make a surprise trip a month earlier than expected for his dad’s birthday instead of for Christmas as they’d planned. Lionel’s eyes couldn’t even blink, he was taking in so much. New faces, new houses. Seemed so busy. They ended up surprising his dad, really surprising his dad, who had taken up with another woman. His dad stayed on in the capital, eventually with a whole new family, and Lionel never went back there. He’d been to Grand Isle, where his ma’s people were from and the island closest to ours, but he had to fly to the capital and then take another plane back to it. Told me he’d almost wanted to hold his breath at the airport in the capital during the wait-over to avoid breathing the same air as his dad.

  Jasmine Manion was asking Lionel to list all of our islands. I remembered running a dry rag over the laminated map that hung in her room. Flat, easy to clean compared with the woodwork running behind the beds that tourists always eye-checked for dust. Thick pinch through my left hip when I folded to reach back there.

  “In this archipelago? Mercy Isle, Grand Isle: those are the two closest. You’ll find lots of folks round here been to both, have family. I’ve been to Grand, not Mercy. Then there’s Strip Isle.” He ran his finger in a straight line. “It’s called that because it’s like a strip, longer and thinner than this one. Cruffey, of course, and Wells—that’s where the capital is. The farthest away from us is Quickly. And there’s Flat Island. My granddad was from Flat, but I’ve never been. You know,” Lionel continued in his almost-captain’s voice. “They sometimes call Quickly the—”

  “Isle of Mysterious Birds,” they both said in unison and laughed. Another place with two names. Did she believe in “Furnace Island”?

  She pulled out of her bag a children’s book, cracked at the binding and grayed with handling. Not the book Lionel had pushed away at the Jamboree. In her room I’d seen only glossy magazines.

  “My great-grandmother used to read this to me every time she visited. The Isle of Mysterious Birds. I used to have dreams of all the magical birds that lived there. They could fly across the entire ocean. At least in the book they could.” She began describing the kids’-book version of Quickly. A specific purple bird that lived only there. She turned to a page where the watercolored purple went from a deep puddle of color to just wisps as the birds leaped off branches and into the pages’ white skies.

  The way her finger traveled in the air: as if she saw it moving north-westerly to Quickly and farther and farther northwesterly back to her home. As if she believed the birds could fly all the way there. Lionel always said about any tourist he took around, they saw only some painted version of the island anyway.

  Maybe the book meant the frigates, who could fly and fly and fly without sleeping. Or maybe those purple birds could fly the entire ocean. How would I know, landlocked on an island as I’d always been?

  “My little boy likes to hear this book. My husband will read it to him, too, but when he says, ‘That little one jumps into the sky with them,’ I just can’t keep from laughing till it hurts! Them! He tries, he really does, but if he tries to say dem, it’s even funnier to me.” Her voice sounded sad, not laugh-y, though.

  “D-eh-m!” She lowered her voice to, I guessed, her husband’s, but her dem had sounded pretty much the same to me: the vowel pooling out into a lake. The ehhh of hesitation. Even facing straight ahead, I could see her shake her head clear of whatever was making her voice sad.

  “Will you say it?” All smiles. I pretended she was talking only to Lionel, my eyes on the road. She cajoled and cajoled until Lionel gave in.

  “Dhm.”

  Smile as wide as her e when she heard him say it. Just like how her great-gran—and probably her gran and maybe her own ma—must’ve said it. Mouth barely opening to let it out, like we swallowed up our word for everyone around us.

  “Do you see them here? The purple birds?” she asked, still smiling but with that bluish tone slumbering in her voice.

  “You’ll see them flying around here sometimes, but they only nest and mate back on Quickly, I think,” Lionel said.

  Even I looked up at the throbbing screech of a frigate, as if on cue. And like that the truck dribbled to a dead stop, stranding me and my garbage duties. Metallic crack of the driver’s-side door.

  “Frigates,” Lionel said, pointing to the birds swooping out over the water. “Come, let’s check if we can see any purple birds along the shore.”

  They both hopped out. But I kept my knees pressed together to stay in the narrow slice of the bench that was mine.

  It wasn’t the pool deck or the resort’s beach where she was standing now. The sand would be slightly rocky in some places and bumpy with branches in others—and, in still others, smooth and soft like the resort’s sand. The air might be fuzzy with insects. Soon enough she’d alternate between waving her hands around her head to scatter the mosquitoes and slapping at the pinprick stings on her ankles to kill the sand fleas. The ocean was still clear, like a turquoise jewel, but thick grasses would sway below the surface like long hair. And we were still just on the calm-beach side.

  “Oh, hey, look over there.” Lionel pointed at a yellow bird flying in a straighter line than the swooping frigates. “You see that yellow one? The littler guy?”

  “I see,” she said.

  “You can find that one on Quickly, too.”

  They walked far enough down the road that I couldn’t hear the next part of Lionel’s bird tour. The salty air blew into the car, then died down. Against my cheek and away, like the tide. I calculated in my head, at this rate, what time I’d get off work: too late for the inland. I hadn’t moved from the center of the bench seat. Their leftopen doors like deadened wings.

  The birds swooped and squawked over the water, coming and going as they pleased. I watched one move out farther over the water and take a turn. Returning, I guessed, to its home beyond where I could see or hear.

  Lionel’s voice grew closer. “We better be moving along,” he was saying, “if you want to be back for dinner.”

  She looked at her watch. “It’s five fifteen now?”

  “They really told you it’s five fifteen? Ha! It’s four fifteen.”

  She shook her watch and, when no water or sand fell out, shook it again. Lionel laughed and explained that the resort didn’t want tourists coming from farther east to have to adjust so much. They’d invented a time zone.

  “Man, resort,” he said. “Forget how crazy it was since they fired me.”

  “Fired you?”

  He laughed at that, too, and Jasmine Manion looked confused as she climbed back in the truck. She must’ve noticed the AYS on the pool deck weren’t the people working behind the fence—and that Lionel would’ve been one of the people working behind the fence.

  Lionel’s voice bloated with the bravado of his fake boat speech as he pulled back onto the road. His audience turned to follow his pointing arm. I was in the way but with nowhere to go. My body a mountain, my nose a ledge between them. I leaned back.

  I kept my eyes on the road as we passed the trailhead I’d made, where my machete slept during the day. My trail started behind a lignum vitae tree. I’d done my best to cut at an angle so no one would see the break in the brush as they were driving by. Chosen a tree that was big enough to hide, small enough not to stand out. Stooped strangely enough so I could identify it even in the haze of dusk.

  When Jasmine Manion gasped, I felt the clutch of exposure in my chest. “Look at that!”

  One of our dogs, which looked like three different breeds tacked together, had jumped out of the brush. I let my breath seep out slowly.

  “That’s just old Eppie. She’s har
mless,” Lionel said. He returned to his narration: rounding onto the north side of the island; his ma’s house; Thiflae Bar. I shot him a slitted eye in case he was thinking about stopping. Made sure he saw me peeking over my shoulder to check all those bags.

  I resisted the urge to duck as we passed Hebbie’s house. A relief to see no car there, no sign of anyone home. To know there’d be no invitation to sit at the kitchen table next to Hebbie, who could look into a cabinet and see her brother’s favorite beer glass waiting for him to come back sometime, any time, to use it. No invitation to sit there while he, visiting, drank from it.

  Town seemed quiet as we drove in. An extra-hot day, so no one hanging around outside after work or before dinner. No Straw Market or other planned goings-on today. Lionel slowed for the narrower street, and all we heard was the ticking grumble of the tires over gravel and the singing from Miss Wayida’s church: the doors that circled her building all flung open to the air; every pew empty.

  “Is this town? The AYS told us there wasn’t anything to buy here. Or to do really.”

  The truck stopped, and the only sound seemed to be that singing, which I’d long ago learned not to hear. Last time I was this close to her church was months and months ago with Lem, looking for a private place. A place we knew no one else would be, between her porch and the church cemetery a little ways back. We’d spent most of a night keeping quiet: Lem using his shirt to muffle the pop of bottle caps; neither of us with shoes on, feet soft against the path.

  B3 begged Lionel to stop so she could see the church. He finally ran out of excuses. (The realest excuse—that I needed to get to the dump already—never came up.)

  I could see glimpses of Miss Wayida twirling around inside the way her voice was twisting around the air, and then she was on the wraparound porch, dress swaying about her in the breeze, chin regal, motioning for Lionel and the American woman to come on in. The way her posture worked against her folded skin reminded me of Miss Philene all stiff with weathering everything that’d happened to her. Two trees, those two were—but poisonous to each other.

  Whatever hymn Miss Wayida was singing made Jasmine Manion smile, but I could hear the notches in the lyrics, the gurgle of her throat stuck against its chain mail of necklaces.

  Caught Miss Minnie out the corner of my eye, though it wasn’t one of her days in town for the market, and Miss Patrice trailing behind her, though these were store hours. (Hand still to that cheek! Though her smile reached all the way up to her fringed, almond-shaped eyes, betraying no pain.) Feet quick, faces still. Felt like the wind coming up to blow this American woman—and us—in a different direction.

  “Hello there, ma’am,” Miss Minnie said. I thought she was calling out to Miss Wayida at first, but from the way she gestured to Lionel, I realized she was addressing Jasmine Manion.

  “Isn’t this a beautiful church building?” Miss Minnie said, inviting the American woman to follow around to see the four sides of its exterior and the views of the ocean from the side yard.

  Lionel shrugged at me. Came back to lean on the truck without looking back at Miss Wayida.

  What would a tour look like that took people into that church? Drew you in by the singing, led you to the path to the cemetery where Minister Callaghan had heard Miss Philene’s Jimmy and his friends’ raucousness move up the path and then not come back. A tour that led you to the dark spot where those two had found each other. And where Minister Callaghan had left Jimmy behind. And if you were willing to go deeper into the haulback, you’d find the path I’d been cutting to the piece of a building so blocked up with cacti it wouldn’t let me in. To the wall that ran alongside and didn’t ever seem to end. To our house where I wrapped Mother’s hands in humid towels to deswell from the all-day braiding and braiding of sisal. To the airport, where we said good-bye to those who went to the capital, and to the cemetery on the other side of the island, a cemetery of limestone and brambles, where we welcomed some of them back. A tour that left you at the dock to wait in the sun as long as it took for the mail boat to come in. That took you to the school, into the corner where the roof still wasn’t fixed from the last hurricane. To the dump, where you might recognize pieces of your yesterday’s self. To Junkful Beach, which lived up to its name, and you wouldn’t be able to take any of the luck with you; you’d have to leave it here with us.

  Flinched back to myself when Lionel’s door slammed, and his thigh re-adhered to mine. He sat so still his hair, which had been so animated by the wind as we drove, now stood like bow-legged pipe cleaners on his shoulders. The women had completed their circling. Hadn’t let their tourist even one step off the path they created around her.

  “And for your baby.” Miss Minnie’s hand tucked a piece of double-braided sisal rope in Jasmine Manion’s hand, which opened as a flower, then closed tight as a clam. Miss Minnie’s voice silkier than I’d ever heard it, ironed out by the upturned bend of her lips usually straight as the horizon. Helping Jasmine Manion back into the truck and directing us to back up onto the road. Like the truck was steered by her waving hand.

  A bit of rope Mother might have gotten twenty-five cents for at the Straw Market.

  Jasmine Manion’s face had gone soft and gracious. Island alchemy burbling, catalyzed by the nice womenfolk sharing their postcard-perfect views and their church singing. Their handmade rope worth nothing and also too much. She’d tell people about them at home.

  She took off her sunglasses to smile at Miss Minnie. Her gray eyeliner had melted into fat stripes, sitting beneath her eyes like saucers under cups.

  Lionel turned the key: nothing. He looked over at his charge with one finger raised to say, Just a sec, this happens all the time. Uniform sticking to my back in the stillness. Miss Minnie and Miss Patrice standing by, faces placid but bodies tense with an undertow. I watched his hand turn the key for the fourth time, then the fifth. Finally the engine grumbled alive. Saw their bodies relax now that we could haul our garbage away from town.

  “Well,” Lionel said, spinning gravel as he pulled back, “let’s keep on. I’m taking you over to Junkful Beach.”

  The American woman stroked the rope like a rosary. Then she slipped it into the bag at her feet.

  As we rounded onto the east side of the island—past my house and everything else—Lionel explained in his tour guide voice the two different sides of the island. She’d soon see that despite the island being under four miles across, the landscapes on the west and east sides looked almost like separate countries. One the paradise she expected, where the resort was. One mangy with brush, shore scalloped with choppy water, and flotsam she wouldn’t believe washing ashore from across the Atlantic.

  “The east side of the island is much rougher because it faces the open ocean.”

  “Like two sides of a coin?” she asked.

  Not really. But I remained silent. Lionel shook his head.

  “Like when one person wants plain pizza, and one person wants their side with everything?”

  “Actually, maybe a little,” Lionel said, chuckling.

  Jasmine Manion smiled and stuck her head out the window, looked up at the birds.

  The truck turned away from the ocean onto a wide dirt road that cut through the brush. When we got to the sign that said Dump This Way, Lionel slowed. Jasmine Manion perked up and said she wanted to see it, really. A tourist who ran a junk shop back home wasn’t the usual tourist after all. Could be the impossible tour I’d imagined stirring up. Next stop: the dump. We came to the newer, bigger sign that said Landfill with its hours of operation, and Lionel even turned into the entrance. Saved me some long walks with all those bags.

  Lionel told me he’d show her his house and then Junkful. Her black flip-flops became the color of the blond dust almost immediately as they walked away. His voice carried out over the landfill, telling the story of the shaggier, unkempt version of the beaches we’d just driven by.

  “When I take you to see Junkful Beach over there, you’ll understand why a
s kids we called this place Scruffy.”

  I heard two laughs echo against the walls of the dump’s basin. Their voices faded away as they made the turn toward Lionel’s small, square house. The inside tour wouldn’t take long at all; they’d have to step around each other across the branched shape of floor made by the hodgepodge of furniture. Unframed prints tacked up along the wall, some missing corners or stained by a seepy yellow. Only seat the plastic lounge chair that looked like an older version of the ones at the resort pool with some slats missing.

  Almost every single thing in that one-room house had been picked out from the dumped loads at the landfill. The furniture, the bedding, the lamps, the mirror over the dresser, those prints: it was all close enough to her hotel room to strike her with déjà vu. The whole house, even if it was a one-room place: built out of the resort’s garbage. Just rearranged, as if Lionel had shuffled a deck of cards. She wouldn’t believe it at first, and he’d laugh a big laugh that folded his cheeks back toward his ears. Wasn’t his crazy. Was their crazy.

  And Lionel continually rebuilding it with more garbage once the sandy, salty air had worn things through. Must be paint chipping all around the exterior, though, without Troy to touch up for him.

  If Jasmine Manion looked around Lionel’s room closely enough, she’d find the piece of paper, postcard-sized, taped on a windowpane. A drawing of the sunset, looking west from the rocks by the Straw Market. Just drawn in pencil, but expertly, with more gradations of gray than seemed possible. Drawn by Amerie, the vet who came once a year from the capital. (Usually stayed with Lionel right there in that room, too, or him at her rented place. Wondered what Amerie would think of Lionel taking around an American woman.) Could a tourist tell it was drawn in the white square from the back of a magazine, in the space where the address would be if Lionel had been a subscriber to the magazine instead of the Landfill Manager who fished magazines out of the garbage? The space that was blank because it hadn’t been sent from somewhere to him, but just came in a pack on the mail boat with everything else, already outdated when it sat on the rack at Miss Patrice’s store?.