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Fingerprints of Previous Owners. Rebecca Entel
Читать онлайн.Название Fingerprints of Previous Owners
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781944700430
Автор произведения Rebecca Entel
Жанр Зарубежная классика
Издательство Ingram
We had to memorize the description in case any tourists asked about the event ahead of time. Only words I’d be allowed to say to them. Script stuck to my tongue like a piece of a brochure washed up from someone else’s island.
The job of the AYS was to bring water, lemonade, extra-sweet-smelling punch with too much rum—but not just to serve. They soothed with drinks, they directed with conversation, they encouraged the purchase of trinkets. The drinks, the braids, the massages were all free. But the Jamboree was always outside the gate to up the number of snacks purchased from the snack shacks and the number of bikes rented from the Captain-on-Wheels bike shack. (Some of the kids on the island got the old, discarded bikes from the dump at least. Not even old, just replaced.)
My job was to clear away and not be seen. I was one of the maids in charge of water bottles. Some others, plates and flatware. Others, trash. The Events Manager thought tables full of near-empty bottles or abandoned plates with sprays of food fork-nudged to their edges or blooms of crumpled napkins catching the wind didn’t say “Jamboree.” Clear it all away and ourselves, too. Keep moving. Event management didn’t want us standing still for more than eight seconds at a time, and two of us couldn’t stand next to each other at all. If any of us stood still for too long—watching for a table that needed us, talking to one another, or just leaning quickly against anything at all—trouble dusted up, like sand you couldn’t get out of your clothes.
Sometimes the sun painted yellow shadows along the sides of the bottles, making it impossible to see the water level. Half full or more: give the guests five minutes to return to it, then assume abandoned. Less: our cue to whisk the bottles away. Then we’d have to approach carefully, when the guests had left their tables or, if they were still sitting, when they were engaged by the AYS. Certain times of day, it was impossible to step close enough to reach without throwing your shadow over the guest tables. Luckily today’s Jamboree was right after lunch, when the sun pounded our shadows straight under us.
The steel drum players were Floridian. Bought their set off some Jamaican street band in Miami. But the tourists leaned in for every timbred bounce of their mallets. The couple from room B1 was smiling and bopping—wouldn’t have guessed from watching them they had so many pill bottles I had to line them up on the floor in order while I wiped their bathroom counter. It wasn’t bad music, but repetitive—and, as far as I could tell, all Trinidadian songs on Floridian-Jamaican drums anyway.
Miss Vernie sat behind the table spread with earrings and necklaces, candleholders and straw bags. The resort didn’t even buy the bags from Miss Minnie, best weaver on the island. Had them shipped in, big flat boxes of them with plastic bubbles tucked in between. The banner above the table: Miss Martha’s Island Crafts. Management had told Miss Vernie to keep weaving and unweaving the same four plumes of straw while the maybe-customers browsed.
(Before they started shipping in crafts, and before Lionel was fired, the Events Manager had asked him to bring stuff from the dump. My brother would help him turn junk into stuff tourists would gladly buy. I remembered sitting in the back of Lionel’s truck while they worked, watching them cobble before bringing stuff around to the Events Manager for approval.
“Not authentic enough,” he might say. Or he might put it right on Miss Martha’s table. Whoever Miss Martha was that time.
Sometimes it was all just scamming: shards of a broken beer bottle called sea glass. But Troy took great care, sometimes, his artist self not letting his hands rush. His specialty was stitching scraps of brown leather from a thrown-away belt to hooks not good enough for fishing. To the tourists: coconut-shell earrings. He’d soak the leather in salt water, then let it dry around an actual shell for the right curve. With each Jamboree, that old belt hanging from his doorknob inched shorter and shorter.
“Does this look like a coconut shell?” he’d ask me. I’d shrug, which he probably took as ambivalence about the pretense. I just didn’t know what coconut shells would look like as jewelry.
But I knew he was an artist, transformation just by turning over in his hands. I was always more interested in how Troy made things, without a tool to his name or an art class his whole life. A brother more distant than the three-plus years that separated us. Led me to try to see into his mind through the steps of his art. Trace back to the thought that propelled his fingers. “Study a work of art to understand the time and place that produced it and the sensibility of its maker.” That’s what the university art history brochure had said, and that’s what I—not a maker myself—had wanted to find out: time, place, sensibility. About Troy, the maker. Before I’d heard back about the application I’d secretly mailed, the major had been shut down. Funds shuttled to the burgeoning Hospitality Studies School. And I went to work instead. With an apron around my waist and the sunset logo stamped on my shoes, like I’d signed up for the hospitality major after all.
When Troy and Hebbie’s brother, Andre, first went to the capital, they’d set up a table outside the dock of the big resorts. Andre was the better salesman. Standing there in his always-intriguing T-shirts that tourists came closer to read; aloof with his headphones in, acting like he didn’t care if he sold a piece or not. Troy not even at the table. Felt sick to my stomach thinking of them tinkering up their own Jamboree. Hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, giving the nausea more room to bloom.)
Three women who I also recognized from hall B, my cleaning wing, were trying jewelry on their ankles and wrists. Hands raised to the sun, feet looking soft and rested. The black American woman from B3 was clipping a coconut-shell barrette in her son’s curls, the two of them laughing. Not seeing the interested looks shot their way. His head just reaching beneath her squared-out palm tree bag.
Days at the resort now, and we were still talking about that family with the refrain the woman with the white husband. Her mix-up kid staying in the room next door with the white girl in her college T-shirts. Some places in the Caribbean were beyond a mix-up from the mixed-up-ness of history—all the ghosts on every dot of an island in this sea—but some places were color coded clearly. Cruffey certainly was. And Furnace Island—certain.
Hebbie’d been put to braiding. Joke to me, since growing up I was the one always doing her hair. Not wearing her uniform but not her regular clothes either. I didn’t know where they got the getup they’d given her to wear. A dress so long like it was meant for her brother, tall as he was. Her tray of beads rattled with kids and women riffling through for their colors, then sitting and squirming while she worked.
Hebbie’s own hair was braided for her to play the role: shooting stars of pink ducking behind black. Wondered who’d done it for her. Her eyes looked sad without her bangs winging above. Looked just like her brother with that high shiny forehead. She caught my eye like she was going to say something, but I stared down at my black sneakers, like I was investigating the sinking spider sunset stitched into my feet, then walked away before eight seconds added up beneath them.
She used to play piano in the abandoned house by the southeastern bay while I talked a streak about everything I could think of. When she was studying in the capital I used to go over to her mother’s house for her scheduled calls home. Inseparable as our brothers. Until we got the news about Troy, and Mother stopped speaking, and I couldn’t bear to be going around with Hebbie knowing her brother was going around without mine. Knowing her brother knew things about how it all happened. Hebbie was my sister-friend, more than Christine or some of the others my own age, but hearing any of it, even filtered through her voice, would make it all meaner than it already was.
Christine was walking toward me like she had something to say. I turned half sideways and drifted along behind where the braiding was happening, where my eyes wouldn’t meet Hebbie’s again. The taught white scalps looked so raw they made me cringe. I wanted to muss that hair back over all those riverbeds of skin. Flaming pink burn would spill around each braid soon enough.
Maneuvering