Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  Chapter Seven

  The room they put me in was not Claudia’s office, with its yellow slips and windows facing the pool deck. The room they put me in was a collection of counters spread out from a center chair, where one of the security guards who searched our bags at the end of the workday sat. His face slack with disinterest, peppery with stubble. The room they put me in was a room I didn’t even know existed, without a single window but with a grid of screens showing what was happening: by the gate, by the snack bar, by the pool, in the lobby, by the trucks behind the fence, in the main hallway, in the dining room, in the kitchen, at the boat dock. The images played continuously in their boxes, black-and-white stories stacked on one another, but the sound filling the space kept switching among locations, like when Lionel drove me crazy with his hand never leaving the radio dial in his truck. The guard looked at his watch, glanced from Claudia to me, and left the room. Claudia pointed to the chair, and I sat. Then she and Max stepped outside. I could hear sounds of at least one of them staying just outside the door.

  The guard appeared again, this time on the screen that showed the front gate. I saw the other maids lining up to check out, but I heard the pocking of the pool deck music, then the low din of the lobby setting up for happy hour. As I sat there waiting, three different AYS came in, none of whom really looked at me in the metal chair. The room was small enough that no one could go about their business without coming so close their calves brushed mine or their smell got caught by my nose or their hips chucked my chair an inch this way, an inch that way. When Matt, from the road the other night, came in and brushed by me, elbow near cheek, I turned away. Curled into my apron some.

  A poster against the wall in the corner. Pictures of all the maids and maintenance staff gridded like the screens but the pictures not moving a fly wing’s twitch. Not pictures we smiled for. Frozen images—must have been from the security cameras while we worked. Didn’t recognize myself with my chin tucked toward my shoulder; and there was Hebbie with her hair on fire in the light; Christine with her cheekbones like a baby’s balled-up hands. Christine.

  This was the room I’d heard about. The mug shot room. Now the firing room.

  Saw Lem on the screen by the trucks. Claudia there, too, along with an AYS who worked the lobby and gift shop. Happy hour sounds all around me. Was she just going through the clipboard of the night’s garbage duty with him? Did they know he knew where I’d gone and hadn’t gone? That he’d, in their view, signed off? Had he been trying to talk to that gift-shop AYS about the nanny and the Manions’ boy because I’d asked him to? When the sound finally switched to the truck area, Lem was there alone. Walked offscreen. Just the sound of him opening and closing a door. The beep-pause-beep-pause of a truck backing up.

  Even in black and white, the ravaged pool deck was mesmerizing to me, like watching a storm from inside. Its emptiness. Yet it was littered with signs of the banquet’s destruction. There were plastic cones by the steps to the pool: single caution of all the resort’s hazards.

  The security camera, wherever they’d nested it, was perched high enough to show that the pool itself had been emptied, and an assortment of AYS were in various positions inside: all fours to standing erect, like a diagram of evolution. The bottom of the pool was a mix of scabs scraped clear to cement and sections of the reef mural still there, looking sickly. The background’s startling electric blue just another gray on the screen.

  Claudia and Max came back in. Claudia held the book, Max held a file. He began unloading its papers.

  I turned back to Claudia when I heard a thwap: she’d let the book drop to the metal counter against the wall. She yanked the cover open, slumped over it. Right foot scratching her left calf. With the tourists she was ethereal, like they could pass through her to go wherever they were going. With us, carrying with her all of her duties at once, all of her family’s needs, all the stuff of sickness and tiredness and demands coming down from management. All the weight of dealing with an islander walking across her island.

  She ran her finger around the bookplate that I knew said MANION COTTAGE CONSIGNMENT ~ TEHAWKEE BAY, WISCONSIN.

  “Shit,” she said.

  She flipped through quickly, doubling back here and there. Watching her uncareful fingers touching, I wanted to reach out for the book. Hugged my arms in tight. A stone on a chair.

  Claudia looked up at me. Took me in, as though I were bigger after absorbing all the garbage she’d charged me with since our last doomsday meeting. But this book wasn’t pennies, and she’d found me trespassing. And now she knew where I’d gotten the book, if it hadn’t already been reported missing. Stolen.

  Eye of the Arrival Manager, of the House builder, scriptwriter, of the smoother of diamonds, stealer of ships. I couldn’t tell if she knew what she was looking at, if she was figuring out what danger had been unleashed. By me.

  If they’d just come minutes later, maybe I would’ve been down in the water, tangle of limbs nobody’s problem anymore.

  Max’s voice just before they had come upon me: “You’re getting new mugs for the coffee station in the lobby, right? So smash the old ones, we’ll put the shards here, clear that landscaping out over there where there’s that flattish space behind the House, just throw dirt on top. They’d just need gloves. Or it could be a kid thing, like a sandbox with plastic shovels. We’ll just put the shards in that old sandbox we used to have on the edge of the pool deck. ‘Native Tribe Archaeological Dig!’ Or something.” He spread his hands out in front of him like a banner.

  He hadn’t seen me yet. Claudia looked straight at me. When Max realized Claudia wasn’t answering him, he turned toward me. Columbus hat on his head like a stranded bird.

  “You were not here. You were never here,” he’d said, when his thumb and forefinger were squeezing around my shoulder, heading down the path.

  “Proceed with caution, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” I’d repeated to him as he hustled me along. “No falling. No falling in love.”

  “Shit,” Claudia said again now, and looked steady now, book dangling by the small clutch of pages between her thumb and pinkie. Letting the rest of the book flop toward the ground. I could see the twitch of her pupil, deciding.

  The center pages. Felt as though the stitching holding it all together thinned fragile as eyelashes.

  “Tear these out.”

  “What? But I—”

  “Tear these out.”

  I took the book from her, the cover gently atop my palms, and put it across my lap. I took each page by itself. Each leaf of the maps. Tore as carefully as I could, all the way to the binding so I wouldn’t split any of the printing. Line of severing trembly as my hands. My hyphen hands. She reached in my lap and flipped some of the pages over. Turned around and mumbled something to Max. Blueprints? Turned back to me.

  “That, too,” she said. The Wh. Post page.

  Had I heard correctly: Blueprints? Or did I just want to hear that: a plan, some other paper I might find to piece things together. But: their plan. Word like a slow tear in my stomach. Slave boy’s etched ship sanded right off the side of the master’s house.

  Resort might not be a stumbling, ignorant storm over the ruins after all. After all, might be an architect.

  When I was done she took the carcass of the book back from me and tossed it toward the floor into a box with Guest Lost/Found in green marker on its side. Sticking out, askew. Missing its pages that told me where to go. Claudia tucked those torn-out pages in her armpit.

  She was gone only a couple of minutes, but Max stayed, fiddling his boat hat and barely noticing me. Babysitter Columbus. My eyes on that box. My body glued to the chair. She came back without those pages and with new ones.

  My employee ID said nothing but Maid, but my firing papers for trespassing had my full name, stretched way out: Myrna Daphanie Cruffey Burre. My middle two names: Mother’s first name and born-to last name. Her whole name broke my go-by name in two.

  They debat
ed whether they could take my uniform back, but what would they have me walk out in? I pressed my back against the chair until I could feel the bundle of my zipper still in its place.

  “Sit here,” she said, as if I hadn’t been. “A guard has to take you out or you’re trespassing again, but as a nonemployee; jail time would be possible, so you want to wait. So wait for him to be done checking everyone out and to come back for you.” The happy hour music came streaming in from the security video bay, almost comical behind her pinched face.

  She and Max spoke low to each other, and Claudia pointed at my feet. Thought she was going to say something about the bleach dots, pinkish brown now. “We don’t want you walking around representing the logo. Give us the shoes.”

  Max rattled the carton in the corner of the room, and the book disappeared from my view. He reached in and tossed two mismatched flip-flops at my feet. Told me again to stay still, wait for the guard. The door clicked multiple times from the other side.

  I stared at the box, but I was afraid to get up. Stayed in front of those screens. Silence from an empty hallway, then the chatter and phones at the front desk, then the sound of a truck shutting off, then the clinking of the setup for dinner, then the tinny bobbing of the music on the pool deck and the clacking on of the nighttime pool lights, though the sun was still up. An unfamiliar whirring over that music I was so used to: sanders inside the empty pool. Then a silence, then the cranky squeak of the opening and shutting of the gate. The voice of the guard calling for the line at the gate to tidy itself up. Then silence. Then voices in a noisy kitchen, indecipherable. Then the pool deck music again, the sound of spinning blades against concrete.

  It took me a moment to realize the woman on the screen was Jasmine Manion, in her painting clothes again with that left-behind cloth bag over her shoulder. Almost felt like ducking, as though she could see me, the thief, the way I could see her. Was she looking right into the camera?

  She and her son were passing a paintbrush back and forth between them as he kept loosening her fingers from around the wooden handle and waving it through the air like a conductor, and she kept grabbing it back. Then I could see he was swinging against her hip, then over to a broken lounger. She looked harried. (Nanny running around with Lionel again, maybe.)

  “Hey you!” The voice echoed strangely from the depths of the empty pool. Or maybe everything I was hearing and seeing warped as it traveled into the cave of this room.

  The AYS who’d called out climbed from the pool, tall and sweatless. He looked back down to address the others, pointing his long arm at Jasmine Manion. “That’s the lady we’re waiting for. The painter.”

  And then to her: “Come on, come on.”

  Tried to mind-see the renovation chore list on the clipboard which of us was supposed to help paint. Me? Then the sound in the room took on a new interval: the crunching of gravel as those who parked by the snack shacks left for the day.

  Jasmine Manion swatted his hand away, annoyed. I could see her lips shaping no.

  The AYS put his hand on her back, nudging her toward the pool. Lips moving as he nudged. The sound switched again, what I was hearing matching what I was watching.

  “Here. Come on. You’re already late.”

  “No. No. Curtis,” she said, reading his name off his shirt, I guessed. “I’m not—I’m a guest.”

  “We need to get this going,” another of the AYS yelled from within the concrete grave.

  Another one of their voices grumbling: “These people. Always late.”

  “Let’s go,” Curtis said, his hand still on Mrs. Manion’s back.

  From the pool: “We can’t keep waiting for these freaking people to show up for work. And then not even get to work.”

  Sound switched again. The gate. Hebbie leaving, then Della. I heard them say their names and the contents of their purses. I hadn’t seen Christine all day and didn’t see her now. The voice I heard was Miss Philene’s: “Philene Cruffey. Nothing to report.”

  Jasmine Manion was looking more frantic as the AYS had walked her right up to the edge. Her son dashed nervously between his mother’s back and the lounger. I felt weak and floppy. Vision sparkly with not eating or drinking all day, with everything I was seeing. But I kept my zipper against the chair and my eyes on the screen.

  I heard the music for happy hour get louder: the shuffle of guests gathering on the screen in the top right corner, their outsized bodies looming behind them on the refracting glass doors of the lobby.

  I could see by her waving arms that Jasmine Manion was outright yelling, and the little boy’s body tensed up at the sight of his mother pulling toward him but being pulled away from him.

  The sound changed to chatting and music, and my eyes moved briefly to the lobby screen. The cyclist with the mop hair. The woman in the giant hat. All just standing there looking at nothing, as if their eyes had glazed over. Jasmine Manion’s husband: palm upward, stem of a wineglass growing down through his fingers. Eyes blanked out by his sunglasses, and he seemed impossibly still, surveying his own feet. So still I wondered if the screen had frozen, but the sounds continued.

  “Al—”

  “—vin!” I heard one part of his name come from the lobby, the next part when the sound switched to the pool deck.

  Then he was on the deck. Right before they pulled her in, and her calling stopped, but the music played, and the sound switched to the boat arrival area on the beach, silent now except for the wind.

  Bench Story No. 13: Mr. Ken Cruffey

  In our typical life on this island, I interact with most of you at night. Folks can wax on about the night coming down like a blanket to cover, to collect. But I say darkness can shatter. I see it all around me: faces across my bar a jumble of pieces just barely held together by skin, that bag growing looser every day. I see those capillaries beneath coming out sometimes—fissures spreading, warning us. Can’t see them in everybody’s skin, can’t see them unless we’re sitting too close, but I wait for the shattering nonetheless. Yes, can see it all around me: how darkness shattered Philene and me—who knew marriage was the weakest glue? And the falling apart in the middle of the island shows us all of it.

  The joke around the island is always that Ken wants ten: convince anyone to spend ten dollars on three beers instead of four one at a time. What no one knows is the darkness brewing behind that joke. Not a joke at all. Not about the money, not really. The bar mostly keeps me going all right no matter what an individual buys or doesn’t buy one night or the next. Steadier than most around here, anyway. But I can’t keep myself from wanting that little overflow—not of money; that overflow of emotion. That moment when the beer gets to the high-tide level and opens your mouth for the flow to come out. I want to hear stories, if you didn’t know that about me. Not looking for a party as a bartender, not for the laughing and dancing that comes along to shake the place sometimes. Not looking for tourists coming in showing off what they’d let the sun do to them. Not even looking for the warmth of the men who come stand on the porch night after night just to talk and talk. I’m really looking for the darkness to come out of a crack, so it doesn’t fill up and shatter the whole. A little bit more beer makes it more possible.

  Beer even makes it easier to slur the words. Let your tongue soften into it—sllll...—and see where to go from there. If even one time anyone—one of you—had said the word, had let slavery’s sl whisper against the roof of your mouth and let your lips push the ver out toward me before the y settled back into your face: I could’ve talked about losing my own Jimmy. Fifteen years now of waiting for that.

  I didn’t take on the bar looking for that. The place just came to me after Mr. Gerard’s Broken Oar Bar had gotten beaten up by and closed after That Storm. But then something changed.

  Fifteen years ago now? My Lord, Philene, can it be fifteen years? But I don’t need to ask. I know it. Has been and so it can be.

  That night I breathed in and out, in and out, rocked back and forth on my f
eet—fighting myself to take the first step into the brush. We were going looking for a boy wandering, my boy who never came home the previous night. Never dreamed something’d be bad enough to warrant stepping into that brush. But there I was, first step in. And I came home out of that brush with a lost son, with a body.

  Two people were with me that night: Mr. Vitman and Minister Callaghan—covering his tracks, his bloody, bloody tracks. Though when we found him, found his body—I mean, Jimmy’d wandered so far from where the minister first unleashed his rage—trying to find his way out, we must assume—so the minister couldn’t have led us to my son even if he’d been willing to own up to what he’d done.

  Maybe some won’t believe I’d never set eyes on a stone from the estate before that night. But it’s true—as true as it is that these stones under me now are those stones. I’d never set foot inland as a boy or man. As far as I knew, no one had. As far as I knew, the whole place was a fog of fused nightmares, a place you couldn’t see for the darkness of it, and that was what I thought even before that night. Monster movies and murder movies and Grimms’ fairy tales and the muckiest parts of your awful mind all melted together. A circle of the underworld. All the circles of the underworld. All the tip-tops of all the most threatening mountains in all the legends of all the cultures of the world, where the combined sums of our fears and our hurts have packed into shapes we call the bodies of goblins and evil wizards. A place where you found the name we invented called monster.