Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  Wasn’t a haunting thought either. Just a wondering, I guess, about it being so.

  Long, long silence followed Miss Wayida’s story. Though she was right about that demon: the very mystery I’d been wondering about since Jimmy’s death all those years ago. When she got up from the stones, folks stepped aside. To let her pass or to let her back in the crowd? I wasn’t sure. No one met the eyes of Miss Philene, mother of the other person made up that inland story. Not even me, who most days lived right alongside her at work.

  When the silence finally came to an end, it was Uncle Q who’d ended it. Felt myself sway as I listened to his voice, elegant as his words, always calmed me no matter what he was talking about. Her brother’s voice closest thing to Mother’s voice there was, I guessed, even with how differently they spoke. Even telling of the sad tale of Wilson’s death after he left the island: my other uncle I struggled to remember after all this time. Even telling of what had happened to him on a spot of the resort I’d walked through hundreds of times without any idea what had occurred there, without knowing the pain under my feet.

  Didn’t know what to think when the next one to settle on the stones was Lem. Looked away when he turned toward me, and I saw one of Claudia’s yellow papers poking out of his back pocket.

  Bench Story No. 7: Lem Eldon

  I’ve worked garbage at the resort a long time. Long enough, needed a new uniform twice because my ankles, then my calves, showing out the bottom. Been longer hours nowadays, no better pay, though. Miss Myrna there could tell you. Even if she doesn’t want to meet my eyes. Even if she thinks I’m some kinda weak head. But I won’t talk none about her anymore, just tell this story ’bout her uncle: Mr. Q.

  Thing about working garbage at the resort is garbage full of bounty. So much food there, they throw away half. Got instructions to guard dumpsters like they full of gold. Couldn’t even let your own pa take something still good. Still great, in some cases.

  Thing about working garbage at the resort is you spend lots of time, when you’re not driving to and from the landfill, in that fenced courtyard area the staff use for all kind of things: coming and going, trucks and dumpsters, smoking, chatting ’bout nothing. Place smell like weed and rotten food most of the time. Buzz of chatting rivals sound of the waves. Residents who work the resort be there, in and out all day long, just like rest of the American staff, too, except management, ’less they checking up. Or once in a while smoking. So I spend plenty my time with some front desk staff who smoking while I working back there or waiters and pool deck attendees and even the boat staff come back for various causes. Boat boys even set up an old picnic table back there, play cards. Lots of people in and out all day while we garbage boys haul in and out of the trucks, back and forth to the landfill, hosing down what needs to be hosed, working repairs on equipment out the garage, and all that.

  My pa taught me all about how our family always work with garbage, even way back ’fore he worked at the resort, too. He and his breddas swam out to wrecked ships, abandoned on the reefs, went through it all for whatever they could swim back with. But me working that resort garbage brigade, he say, like him and his buddies collecting, ’cept he said swimming better for you than driving trucks back and forth, and he’d laugh away. Garbage not really “garbage,” he said, when can still be made use of.

  “Garbage grows here, too,” he’d say. “Native as Columbus, spit onto the sand like the ocean didn’t want it no more.” Native as Columbus: always made so many folks laugh away hard and laugh away long.

  This day with Mr. Q years ago, when I went to work with my pa one day. Me: still a boy. Don’t remember why that particular day but went with him sometimes. Spent plenty time with that fence round me even ’fore working there myself.

  That day Mr. Q come on through, and that someone who don’t belong there out of everyone. Didn’t know how he got back there but came through the staff door. Thought he musta took a wrong turn from the lobby, but I didn’t know what he’d be doing at that resort front desk anyway.

  Now I know, hearing your story, Mr. Q. Now I know.

  But that day he look kinda surprised as he come through the door to see us all and the dumpsters and all. Holding a bright orange day pass card of all thing. Kind of keep-quiet guy on the island, knew he’s not joining the garbage brigade or nothing, ’cause he real proper. Bunch of boat staff there, smoking and playing cards and talking ’bout girls but get all quiet when Mr. Q start walking through. One of the boys who knew him point to the gate behind the trucks, knowing he looking for the way to get back out whatever he doing here in the first place. But boat staff start in ’fore he can get to the gate. Start saying name like—well, you know what kinda things they call a man like that. ’Fore you know it they pushin’ him around, man old as their daddies, and still sayin’ all kind of nasty talk, and one of them take a piece of pool equipment like a long pole and get it caught up in his legs so Mr. Q fall to all fours, and they sayin’ their shit and like spankin’ him with it. Not that hard, so I’m not sure if he can’t get up ’cause he hurt or just think it better to wait ’em out.

  I turn round to some of the other guys, guess ’cause I don’t know what to do and, too, little ’fraid to see what gonna happen next.

  But I do watch my pa. See him out the corner of my eye, so I know he’s not moving none. But his eyes darting round way they do when he wants to do something real bad. Plotting, like. Waiting to do something soon as he can. His eyes darting to the guy sitting in the corner smoking: his boss, I know.

  Pa don’t move, and I sit still there, too. Don’t know if just boat staff do it or some of our own garbage crew, too. Kind of boy I was then, just looked at my hands when trouble swellin’ up round me. Just look to my pa. And knowing, no matter what, I’d end up working there just as soon as I’m old enough. And then until I’m too old.

  By time I turn back round boat boys running off, boss finished his smoke and went inside, and I lookin’ around for Mr. Q and then some other guys, and my pa, help get him out the dumpster they toss him in. Dumpster still pretty full, since no one’d taken a load yet that day, so that’s good, because he not real hurt. Able to walk out the gate himself.

  Never told this; didn’t say nothing to my pa nor he to me. Didn’t tell it even later to Myrna. Never heard Mr. Q tell it neither. Guess this my story, too, ’long with Mr. Q’s. Me, Lem, just sitting at that table lookin’ at my hands. Pa’s eyes racing; my pa’s body froze. Every day workin’ back there in that fence a day I think about it some. Maybe felt like I owed that family some, owed her on top of how I was sweet for her. Maybe all of us need to be weak heads ’bout remembering all the years’ trouble behind that fence.

  I saw only the point of that yellow paper sticking out Lem’s pocket as he walked off. Lionel stepped up quick as Lem was off the stones. As if he’d been wanting to for years. Then he winked at me and jumped up on those stones—standing, not sitting—and gave his boat arrival speech.

  “I have arrived! I am arriving! Bear witness to my arrival and taking of this island! That’s right: laugh, clap your hands, stomp your feet, stand up, lie down, do whatever. I will sail in and make my sovereignty known by the amount of alive stuff I rename Garbage in the name of the almighty International Office and with which I fill your landfill at three times the rate it was designed for! I will throw you down if you are late or if I even think I know who you are! I will convince your central government that I will bring so much money—so many jobs, investment beyond the dreams of simple outer-island folk. Yes, laugh if you believed me. Laugh if you believed my claims ever to be true! Laugh, Madame Arrival Manager! You have already fired me and banned me and need not worry about me screaming this on the beach to your customers. I am just on a bench in a parking lot!”

  Longer speech he’d been working and working on, seemed like. I didn’t laugh this time around, but plenty did. Lionel jumped down and grabbed Angelina’s hand, urging her to go next. She looked up at Lem. He patted his kid sist
er’s head and pointed her toward the bench with his chin.

  Angelina sat down and told us all the story of Picker and the tourists on the road. Manny and Gussie hovered around her, like they were going to act out their parts. Seemed as though tears were about to seep out of all of us after all this storytelling—a deluge, couldn’t be stopped—but I saw lots of folks smiling, just the same, at how smart Angelina was.

  When Hebbie stepped up to the stones, it no longer felt as though I had anything to do with putting them there. The stories could go anywhere now, be so many things I—we—didn’t want to hear. As Hebbie spoke, Miss Philene came to stand by my side. One of us holding up the other. Wondered if Andre’d told his sister what had happened on the road that night with the boat guys, but she didn’t say anything about it. Just told her story about inside the resort’s gate. Similar things we hadn’t shared.

  Christine couldn’t stand back while everyone else did their talking, especially Hebbie talking about her. She was up there maybe longer than anyone. My gaze wandered to Mother, still hovering next to Uncle Q. I blinked back to paying attention when Christine’s talk wound around to the banquet.

  “The captain’s ring may have gotten me ’cross the cheek here with all that banquet chasing—he got too caught up in acting the captain. Still, I’ll keep this job and not let someone else have it. I can outrun most of them men, with my legs long and them so drunk most nights. Don’t feel too bad about it, all of you shaking your heads. It’ll fade sometime.”

  Maybe she finally stopped because Ole Mr. Vit was waiting near her. He took all the time he needed. First time in my life I heard anyone on this island speak the words aloud: whipping post.

  I felt Miss Philene’s touch leave me as Ole Mr. Vit’s voice faded. I’m sure everyone, not just me, was surprised Miss Philene would say anything with the resort staff standing so near. She wouldn’t even name her kids when she was at work. Always said her life, especially her babies, was no one’s business but her own. All this time, did she know about the cameras’ eyes? And here she was sitting on the bench. Maybe she couldn’t let Wayida Callaghan be the one to touch on Jimmy’s story. Or maybe she also had other things deep inside that bobbed to the surface just now.

  But before she took her seat on the bench, Mr. Ken was standing beside her. I thought he was just lending a hand to help her sit, but she nodded to him as he took a seat instead. Jimmy’s father, after all. Though I never thought of him that way, since no one ever talked of them as a family. Two of them split since I was a kid, and their daughters together left the island years back.

  When he finished speaking, Mr. Ken looked over at me as though we understood each other, as though he knew it was me who spent a night of moving stones to let the darkness leak out the cracks into the open. But he didn’t know some ways I was bad as the elders with their fortress around the inland, wanting some of those bodies to come home without the stories of how they got to be just bodies. Turned my head away so I wouldn’t smell Andre’s cologne on the air.

  Was Jimmy just a stubborn kid? Wouldn’t leave, just ’cause an elder said so? Or was he tired, looking for a new place on this oval he’d rounded a thousand times? Or was he like me, couldn’t stop unburying?

  Quiet all around as we waited for Miss Philene to settle herself on the stones. First she sat silent. Maybe taking in all Mr. Ken had said. Maybe answering by not answering. Then she spoke.

  Bench Story No. 14: Miss Philene Cruffey

  What I want to say today is about that woman and what was done to her. Yes, she was an American woman. Yes, I’m sure she was here because she had money and not so bad off, maybe you say, but let’s talk loud and clear about the fact of her skin. Not her husband’s skin or even her baby’s skin, light mix-up as he is, but her skin.

  I’ve been in that woman’s room, because some days it was my job to clean up after her. I never spoke to her once but could tell you all kinds of things about her. But let us say something that no “Investigating Manager” or “Claims Adjuster” or no one else you fly down here to wipe up this mess will say. That woman was pulled into that pool, that woman is injured bad, because the people who pulled her thought she was one of us. And thought she thought she was too good for the job they wanted her to do. And no explanation for that except skin, skin, skin. Except black, black, black.

  Now when Mr. Harper got pinned under that rock, got his leg crushed under that rock, so help him, those of us old enough to be here knew the painful slowness of it all. No Claims Adjuster, no nothing. Just waiting. Finally getting him to the capital for a hospital took far, far too long.

  Didn’t take as long for that American woman. And I know all of you thinking that that woman will go home to the States and see her fancy doctor and be all set up OK, and maybe she will; maybe she’ll spend every evening relaxing on the shore of a lake with its water so cold and opaque it’ll make our turquoise sheen seem like nothing but a dream. But still let’s all remember that nothing’s thrown down quicker to the ground than a black-skinned woman.

  No one spoke for a long, long time after Miss Philene. Way things felt right then, I figured the bench stories had come to their close. Done their part.

  But without Mother finding her voice.

  After that long silent spell I looked up, and Andre was sitting on the stones, readying to speak, as if I’d called it all together for what I was most afraid to hear. Not sure for a moment whether I wanted to be like the master and order the stones back to their sitting places inland. Rub away this spot with my foot.

  Then it was too late to do anything but listen.

  Bench Story No. 15: Andre Whylly

  ’Fore I went off to the capital, spent months of nights wandering the road. ’Fore I left, only one thing strapped to me, nothing else: drum Granduncle Vit made me long time back. Sometimes visitors threw coins when I played.

  Wandering the road with that drum like I did, prickly brush against my arm—stepped into it when a car went by. Edge of the inland brush took me in. But I didn’t want to stay there.

  Lionel, bredda, do you remember once years gone by wind so strong my hat blew off from your truck, all the way inland? Said you: “Inland now. No use trying to find it.”

  But see Myrna there. Scratches all o’er her face. Old and new scratches. She comes in and out of the brush quick like a ghost but catches in the haulback like a body. Carousing with ghosts, girl, visiting dead. Maybe she wants to stay there inland, not just bring a trickle of it down with her.

  But who knows the right place to be anymore? Nah, hard to say what’s home.

  Out on the capital Troy and I shared a home some o’ you would say was no home. Room in a house with strangers. Two beds, two chairs, coffeepot, sink with hot water. Might seem modern to some of ya. No home at all to some. Weren’t there that much anyway. Worked. Played, too, at first. Out soaking in all the new. And always looking, hustling, hurry-up-ing for work. Think it plentiful in the capital compared with here. Is, some ways. And lot o’ new girls. And roads to walk up never seen before what’s at the end of ’em. Not just a circle road, like here, bring you right back. But still a hurry-up life to keep what people take and give somewhere else at a drop of a hat.

  So. Troy Burre. Troy’s pa helped us out at first get set up with some folks he know. Then we start knowin’ folks, too. When Mr. Horace gone all of a sudden, seem like we both been capital dwellers a long, long time. Like we old, old men. But still hot boys, you know, way we were. But Troy could get shadowy and spook-eyed, too, stuck in his bed with darkness.

  A hurry-up life it sure was, when folks barely eating two meals a day need to send money back home. That’s what happened once Mr. Horace gone, you know. Troy wouldn’t want me saying such a thing to his ma, but it’s true just the same. Writing home with money saying he was selling some art at a market here, a market there—but with money he got not buying food for too long. Or some extra dollars in his hand after he spent the day cleaning a house or hauling a mess around to
wn like a mule. And did those things only after I got him out of bed. Lay in our beds laughing some midnights when we couldn’t sleep from hearing each other’s bellies groan from ’cross the room. But mostly wasn’t time for laughing in our life there. More like waiting. Waiting for the whites of our bloodshot eyes to whiten once more.

  Could sit here all day totin’ news, speculating all the things that would make a guy far away from home, trying to eke out a living—a guy like Troy with fire spilling out all his pockets—could make a guy like that give up. Go to the capital and die by his own hand.

  We were breddas to each other, me and Troy, both hot boys run off like we did—and I know what made it so. Only one who saw it, no speculatin’. What I came and wanted to tell you, Miss Myrna. What I wanted to tell you, Miss Daphanie. All that made what happened to Troy so.

  Morning after a mad, mad storm, not too many tourists coming into the capital on account of all ’em flight delays and cruises pulled into ports overnight. You know how a morning is after storm like that. Bright, quiet, sense of waiting.

  But all of a sudden, when everyone’s on the way to look for work in the morning, there’s a boat comes to dock and out come a whole long line of soldiers. American. Just a line of soldiers that keeps coming and coming out of that boat.

  Yes, I hear ya, Miss Minnie, I hear ya: all you said about your fore-parents. Everybody there that day—and most likely all your fore-parents, too—thinking just what you’re thinking: So they here at last. Luck runs out on an island.

  Troy and I stood watching, like everyone else was doing. I looked up and down the beach and could see just about everyone there is to see, all standing there. Silent. Frozen.

  We waited to see what those soldiers gonna do. Stood there a long while, while their line started to get a little looser, and started noticing that their faces weren’t so serious, were even fun-like. Didn’t know what it meant. Whether better or worse than we were all thinking.