Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  “Also wanted to come talk to you while I’m on the island. You and your ma. Tell you all, you know. What I know.”

  “Don’t tell me anything else,” I said and ran back in where I’d gotten my machete from, fumbling for the flashlight and the feel of the path under my feet. My legs were so tired I had to check the ground with my hand to keep on. But kept on, waiting for that moment when I was far enough inland the sounds from the road couldn’t reach me, but the pull of the stones and their ghosts could.

  Andre’s voice caught up to me, but I knew he wouldn’t chase me in. No one from this island would.

  What a damn hypocrite I was. Running in to find out what no one else would tell stories about. But running in to escape Andre telling stories about what had happened to my brother. Bloody stories all.

  “I’m a bigger ghost to you than those two ghouls?” he called after me.

  Got a machete for them.

  Bench Story No. 3: Mr. Harper Cruffey

  My favorite dinner is fritters, any kind of fish, freshly caught and fried right before I put it on my plate. And a mixture of tea I make myself from the jumbled mess of bushes that grow behind my house, all hunkered in one area of the yard as if they knew they’d make the most delicious tea for me. Some people are real particular about what they pick for tea, what different leaves are good for. I think: if it grows together, it goes together! I tell you this stuff because people will come and look at me rolling up the road in my wheelchair or digging crutches into the gravel or sand to come sit with you, one leg on and one leg off, and that will be all they think about my life. The life with one half-leg. But my life, when it’s good, is about fritters and tea, and if I’m really lucky and have a woman sweet on me, whatever vegetables she pulls up from the garden and brings to my table.

  My father was known for the boat business he ran that most folks around here called a genius thing. Before his business idea people either fished just for themselves and their families, or even if they were going to sell their fish, they had to invest in a boat or negotiate with friends who had a boat. But then they were kind of competitors, you know, all going out to the same spots together, but then all trying to sell. So my father had the idea that he would spruce up this old boat that had wrecked out and beached up on the east side. No one thought they could do anything with this thing, and it sat there getting beaten by the wind and all for months until my father and his brother hauled it three miles just with their hands and their feet to our house and spent a month building it all up good as new and ready to go. Then they took contracts for all the fishermen around. I was still too young at this time to even go along in the boat, since they didn’t want to have to worry about a little pip like me.

  You could reserve your place for a certain number of days per month, and he had all sorts of priced-out deals for making up bad-weather days or how much you hauled or not bringing other people to your sweet spot and that sort of thing. He knew all about fishing, so he knew just what the fishermen would be concerned about and interested in. I should say fisherwomen, too, since there were plenty of women who used his services and did really well. Did so well, my dad’s business did. I remember my mother just sort of walking a little more relaxed, once he started doing that business and the task of feeding a family wasn’t so hard on her anymore. So relaxed her bag might swing all the way to the dust like a schoolgirl’s instead of being all clenched alongside her hip.

  I love the smell of sisal rope when it comes out of salt water and somehow holds the hard, twiny scent. Sharp like it’s rocket-propelled to your nose. That’s what it feels like when it gets to my nose. Most people can’t stand that briny shit, but I love it. You’ll smell that only around here. I’ve traveled to the capital and to Florida and to South Carolina and to Haiti to see my mother’s family there, and I’ve never smelled quite the same thing. My late wife used to—when I was coming home after a long spell, which happened all the time before I lost my leg, especially when I was traveling often to Haiti to help my mother’s family—my wife, she would dip some rope in the ocean the day I was coming home and would tack it up on the door to our house so I could smell it right when I was walking up. Right when I was thinking, I’m home! I would smell that and know I’m home.

  Now: how did I lose my leg, that’s what everyone here who isn’t from here is wondering. And maybe some who are from here, too. And I’ll talk about it because it has to do with this resort here. It did not happen in Haiti, though people have asked that when they hear I’d spent time there. They have some idea that things are so peaceful here and so harsh and violent there—like it would just make sense to come back from Haiti without half your leg!

  The resort had all these papers saying they’re buying all that inland land in addition to the beachfront strip. I don’t know who the devil they think they bought that inland land from, since it didn’t belong to anyone. And if you really go back to how the land was given out at emancipation, it “belongs” in its way to the families here anyway, not the government or whoever claims to have sold it. Even if those families don’t want it. Even if not a single family stayed up there. Still theirs.

  And when the resort was first opening up, they had all these “blueprints” of the inland, along with their “land deeds.” For all I knew these blueprints were just a mess of guesses about what might be under this giant mess or even a complete fake. Used to build the resort, not unbuild the ruins.

  But anyway, I was telling you all about my leg. We all knew this land-deed-and-blueprint business was bogus—those of us who talked about it hushed up in kitchens—but who could do anything about it and what difference would it make anyway, most of us said, because we didn’t want anything to do with that land anyhow. How’d it get so full of brush never tended to? That’s how. Nothing at all to do with that land. That’s why it’s like that.

  But anyway, they wanted to clean up the area of the Cruffey Main House, because that was the one building you could tell was a building, and it was closest to the main resort space on the beach. So it made sense for them if they’re going to try to take tourists up there—that’s the spot. They needed some men to help clean it up so it’d be accessible: both the ruins of the house and the path up to it. Get rid of the crumbled piece of wall and all. And they said it might lead to more work, if they decided to go farther in and clear out any of the rest of the site. So a bunch of us took the work, you know, we were always looking for work. That or leave the island, and I still had my mother here after my father died, needing me. So how’d I end up with half a leg when I was born with two strong legs? Strong enough that I was one of the ones they hired for this kind of work: not to just clear out the brush but really landscape it out, so it wouldn’t just grow back each time it rained, and also to haul out the extra stones or the loose stones that people shouldn’t climb on and also to fix up the path so it wouldn’t wash away or become dangerous in any way? People who aren’t from around here, they don’t know what to look for when they’re navigating a path such as that. Around here we can sort of tell when a big boulder’s not quite steady in place. Sometimes, anyway.

  So: my leg. It’s not that I remember everything that happened, play by play. Because there was part of it that happened very fast, and I didn’t quite know what had happened, and then there was the part that happened so, so slow. Took maybe almost a full day once it had finished happening for them to get me out and airlifted to a hospital in the capital. But you know some about that now.

  And so, you see. It is a crushing literal metaphor, the damnable weight of those ruins waiting to fall, fall on me, with just the slightest nudging out of the places they’ve been settled in, covered with dirt, for so many years. And now, right now, me sitting on some of them, them holding me up like I held them up. You have to laugh, don’t you? Taken down by the thing we don’t want to speak of. Yes, I guess we got to laugh. We got to go right ahead and laugh.

  After, when I had come home and gotten a little used to things, I spent m
y days watching my neighbor’s kids for her while she worked cleaning up hotel rooms all day. She had just two, and one was at school, and the other little one was very well behaved, so she figured I could handle him, and I could. He wouldn’t run away from me if we went outside for a walk, him ambling alongside me with my crutches—crutches when I was still young enough to haul myself here and there.

  And this boy’s favorite activity, all afternoon, was to collect everything that was in one trunk and take it to the other side of the room and put it under the table, and then do just the opposite, taking it all out from under the table and putting it deep in the trunk. I think his mother would specially fill that trunk because there was so much in there: shoes, books, marbles, a dried pepper that rattled if you shook it, an old sack with only one handle left, unusable bits of rope. I can still see it all now these years later. And all day long I just watched this little boy, Harold. You never saw such concentration, just dismantling one life of objects and creating a new formation on the other side of the room where it all looked different and then picking that apart, ever so carefully not to have an avalanche, and reassembling it in the bottom of a trunk, like a city’s remains on the bottom of the sea. But he’s grown and left the island like a bunch of the other boys. Off, off to the capital.

  Who could have known that the way all that house stuff got moved around, that people would get moved around, too? And stones getting all moved, then and now. Me sitting here, the stones holding me up. You do have to laugh at that.

  Chapter Six

  I’d never been to a resort banquet before or any other kind of banquet. Only the AYS were allowed to serve at them, and I’d seen only the aftermath that needed to be cleaned up. Pounds and pounds of untouched food that started in careful displays and got bulldozed as if the long table were a conveyer belt ending in huge garbage cans. Bags of it sitting in a dumpster nobody was allowed to fish in. But this wouldn’t be like any banquet I’d seen or hadn’t seen. Banquet just a word to involve us all in the renovation. Speed up the demolition process. Create garbage and the need for new stuff that would become more garbage soon enough. Lionel was right, of course: no need for a renovation. Though there would be soon, once we made a big enough mess out of things.

  AYS dressed up as Columbus and his sailors had circulated all day, letting the tourists know that tonight’s banquet would be a “special opportunity.” They’d be given characters—some sailors, some stampeding wild cows—and would “embark on the adventure of discovery and settlement.” The cows were even supposed to wreak havoc all over the pool deck, upturning anything they wanted. Guessed sailors could and would, too. I’d kept my distance from any of those sailors since last night, but the script spelled it all out. Natives, bring your sheets.

  The banquet hall—the meal would take place after the rest of it—was a tent set up alongside the pool deck, encased in plastic with air conditioners noisily inflating the whole place. The tourists were lined up in front of it, waiting. I watched their open faces, wondering what they thought banquet meant.

  I walked along the line, eyes down, handing out the cards that gave them their characters: if one card said sailor, the next one said stampeding cow. Miss Philene followed behind me, handing out plastic swords to the sailors. I knew I would’ve held those swords too tightly, my fingers remembering machetes. With each cow card, I handed out a bell, too; every step I took an alarm until all the bells had been distributed.

  “Discovery and settlement.” The words dribbled out of my mouth as I handed the sailor card to Jasmine Manion’s husband. The nanny was looking away from me. Seemed she was enthralled with the boat crew trying to lure the Pinta, gussied with balloons, closer to the pool deck.

  “And what are you?” the husband asked me. His face, usually pul-led more taut by indifference than even sunburn, seemed almost amused.

  “A native,” I tried to say. He squinted as if he couldn’t hear me but laughed anyway, head drooping toward his left shoulder; his two cowlicks veered right as if trying to straighten him. The pool deck was a din. Even to my own ear I’d heard myself say, “Taken.” Katelynn seemed to wince at that. Nathan hovered just below her hand, smiled up at me in his T-shirt with a picture of a tie. No sign of yesterday’s tears. I didn’t know where his mother was, but her husband seemed now to be looking around for her. Or maybe he was just checking out the bizarre scene setting up around us. The wind came up around him and flattened his hair across his forehead. Looked monkish or boyish.

  Out of cards and bells, I crossed the pool deck toward the entrance to the hotel. Through the glass doors to the lobby I saw Jasmine Manion sitting at the bar, though I didn’t think anyone’d be serving inside during the banquet. Her ivory sundress was crisp and bright against her skin; maybe she’d gone inside so no one would mistake her dress for one of our sheets. She didn’t have on any jewelry but still looked a little fancier than the other American women. She picked up the white rectangle in front of her: the book of mysterious birds. Hands picking it up and putting it back on the bar. Nervously? Her great-gran’s book, kept away from the madness outside that couldn’t possibly line up with any island memory her great-gran had ever shared—while her husband and son lingered in anticipation of the banquet, taking on the characters handed to them. (What were those island memories told to Jasmine Manion when she was a girl? Would an elder from Quickly ever dip into history, let the word plantation tumble from her mouth? It seemed maybe so.)

  I imagined her arrival here, stepping out onto a key with the sun pushing down, head buzzing with expectations for her first trip to the Caribbean. A book-heavy but summer-weight “Vacation, Resort” bag pulling her sideways to look at the island in the distance from a new angle. Now, on the barstool, in her lap only a small clutch purse the size of my apron pocket.

  I’d never seen the deck empty like this, the pool water like glass, and I leaned slightly toward the edge and looked down, my nose scrunching away from the chlorine fumes. There was no reflection in the water, but I knew the sheet hung on me like a hospital gown. The wind had left us for other islands this week. Even inside these gates, where they sprayed and sprayed against them, insects hung easily in the air.

  Looking at the bottom of the pool through the water was like looking through fire, with the way the colors waved, sometimes clearly and sometimes not. But I could make out the painted floor, its fluorescent mural and scabby patches of blue where the paint was gone, here and there. The handlike plant shapes rough markings of coral, the brightly colored egg shapes tricking your eye into spotting fish.

  An appliance like a giant vacuum cleaner sat on the bottom, snaking out corrugated blue tubes. I followed one of its arms to the break in the fence and half tripped over the forest of wire brooms it had knocked over, just within reach as they always were for the crabs. Even without bells, my body couldn’t help giving itself away. Watched or heard. Lem was getting the pump ready. He and B3 the only ones not dressed up to play. His back was to me, but I hovered near, hoping the fence hid me a little. Knowing that when the pump went on, all the tension on the pool deck would crescendo into the kind of waves boats steered clear of. He turned and noticed me, and we both stared offshore to the line where the ocean went a darker blue.

  “So Andre’s around,” he said.

  I responded with a nod, but he wasn’t looking at me.

  “Them guys”—he pointed at the boat crew, the two backup Columbuses who had run last night—“came into Thiflae last night. Sounded like they saw you two talking on the road. You and Andre. All private, sounded like.”

  Couldn’t tell if he was trying to suss out if Andre had told me something about Troy or if he knew something himself. Wished I was heading up my path with my machete—hands finding the diamond and its bundle of sticks that wanted to loosen and tell me something—instead of waiting here for what other hells might be let loose. On account of the banquet or Lem’s throat. But I hovered with him like the fence was our fortress, watching the tourists
starting to shift their weight back and forth.

  “Two of ’em said they had to get going, you and Andre had so much to talk about.”

  I realized he was jealous of Andre and me; boat guys painting a picture that left out their plundering, sprinkled in what was never there. Shook my head something fierce. Nothing I could do but change the subject.

  “Look, the thing with that kid in the gift shop the other day? Do you think you can talk to the AYS about it?” Nonsense question, I knew, but if Katelynn checked up, could say I’d asked, kinda.

  Lem turned to me, blocking my view of the pool deck. Eyes pink, forehead sweaty. Face twisted just like my question was: asking him to get in trouble for no reason—me as the reason—and not for the first time.

  “You and Andre messing around or what?”

  Sourness again. A feeling to dump out because I couldn’t stand the touch of it anymore.

  “You drunk or what?”

  Lem’s lips looked shriveled, everything about him smaller and clutching. Sucked in, old-man-like.

  I stepped around him. Couldn’t hear what he said next as Max rang a huge bell that’d been strung up on the Pinta. The pump kicked on with a whir and a boom at once.

  All the hotel guests who’d been lined up flung themselves into a run, screaming wildly and even knocking over chairs and kicking at the fence. Burnished bronze in the sunset except for the insistent pale stamps of their palms and their toothy smiles. AYS, all dressed up, were waving play swords, running in circles, too, and kneeling down to rummage and scatter the boat path in a din of ricocheting gravel. Some were dragging tubes from the pool down toward the ocean. The pump’s growling only partially drowned out the screaming.