Fingerprints of Previous Owners. Rebecca Entel
trying to go inland without a machete, dodging haulback nettles and keeping on and on to avoid the insects gnashing on you. Less visible snags here—but nowhere to get to either. Kept walking by the other maids, hearing just snippets of what they wanted to tell me.
Miss Philene, tray primly under her arm like her at-church purse: “Arrival Manager’s office. Right after this.” Her back to me before I could ask a thing.
Christine right there again: “Trouble brewing.” Ripple of her fingers for emphasis. Max walked by in his Columbus hat, reached out and tickled his fingers against Christine’s. She half laughed, but I shrugged my free hand into my pocket.
Miss Philene again, trading places with Christine in a figure eight: “Boil and bubble.”
One of the AYS stepped in between us. I lofted my tray of near-empty bottles onto my shoulder and kept circulating.
One of the backup Columbuses, also in costume, rode circles on a kid-sized bike, legs sticking out like rifles, throwing his hands up in the air, too, while the kids cheered. Wind almost took his hat into my face before he snatched it back.
The pocking of the steel drums turned into pounding. Not like the rustle chorus of insects inland in the evening, the cicadas crushing the air, like an engine moving me on and on.
I headed back around the brush, circled behind the cluster of padded chairs where Max was now standing next to the AYS who usually did the massages. In one chair was B3’s husband, telling the woman next to him about that morning’s gecko on his bedpost. (Complaining about my cleaning or just storytelling about exotic wildlife? Hard to tell with his voice that refused to spike with interest.) Max kept pushing up his bulky costume sleeves as he squeezed another man’s shoulders.
The man scowled each time the sleeves slid back against his neck. Said to his wife and to whoever could hear: “On our cruise last year we loved the massages from the Jamaicans.”
His wife nodded vigorously as an iguana. “Yes, yes, the best hands are the Jamaicans’.” More nodding. The chain attached to her sunglasses clinked against her earrings. “Shouldn’t you have a local do this sort of thing?” she asked.
Hurried off to the kitchen before I could be recruited. Last time a guest requested a local woman give her a massage, Miss Philene was yanked over. Afterward management had examined her hands for an hour, debating whether it was more or less authentic for the maids’ fingernails to be painted when the guests wanted us to touch them. My own nails were ragged and encrusted with the dirt of the inland. Fingertips gouged by the stones. I again stuck my free hand in the emptiness of my pocket. Had a flash of when Mother used to clip my and Troy’s nails out on the doorstep, when we were small enough sitting still was an even bigger chore than now.
I placed each empty bottle gently into the recycling barrel that was almost as big as the door. According to management, bottles were placed carefully to avoid clatter; according to Lionel, to avoid the denting that revealed recycled bottles to be not new. There was no recycling facility on the island. But the tourists liked to see the green bins with their happily spinning arrows.
Sometimes Lionel gave kids spare American coins that turned up in the trash for washing the bottles, and we’d sneak them back in. The trick was not to sneak bottles in our bags, betrayed at the gate by the crinkling sound, but to load a pallet of them into Lem’s truck when he delivered to the dump. So they came back in via the truck entrance and could be shelved with the new pallets. Lionel our island recycling facility after all.
The trick was to do it only once before the resort’s logo on the bottle started to rub off, gave us away with disappearing letters or an asymmetrical sun. If we didn’t risk it, though, the piles of plastic at the dump clacked in the wind, rolled against one another as if huddling from the gusts. Could hear them all the way at Garrett and Della’s house. Pile of empties so high it could distort the view. Even at the top of the landfill, there was a view.
My next load, one completely empty bottle got picked up by the wind. The plastic crinkled against the gravel as the wind blew it away from me. I stooped, reached out, only to have the wind swoosh the other way. Finally grabbed the bottle by its cap as it tried to sneak around the bend where the resort’s landscaping gave way to the bursts of brush we were used to. That grew the way it just grew. I noticed a few other empties rolled up under the brush, and I pulled my apron up and out into a bowl for them.
Looked up to see Lionel’s truck parked just out of view of the Jamboree. Lionel himself, dressed like a tourist: bright T-shirt, baggy shorts with pockets bigger than his knees, rubber sandals like spiderwebs. Probably wearing dumped tourists’ clothes.
He was talking to B3, the woman with the white husband and the palm tree bag. Showing him something that she’d bought from “Miss Martha.” Maybe beer-bottle sea glass, maybe a string of wrinkly tumor-shaped beads called sea pearls. Something shiny and split to pieces.
Speakers from the Jamboree blotted out whatever he was asking her. When they quieted down again, I could hear her describing to Lionel what sounded like his landfill but she called her consignment shop. Explaining how the topography of the shop shifted slowly but remained fully populated: novelty lamps swarming her cash register, a baby buggy filled with lizard skulls, midcentury TVs that were their own furniture, vintage cameras like miniature luggage stacked in a skyline by the window. The objects bearing some marks of their owners. How she liked sorting and recontextualizing the donations into anonymous objects that could belong to someone new, to anyone. People bought this stuff from her, she said. Arranged their purchases on shiny mantels and texted her proud photos.
“We turned a particleboard bookcase on its side,” she was saying to him. “Like a holding place for some stacks of smaller items but also a balance beam to travel toward the front of the store. That’s how full to the gills the store is sometimes! With a clothesline to hold on to.” She mimed it for Lionel: feet shuffling sideways, hands overhead.
Reminded me of the corridors Lionel’s father had created along the far wall of the landfill when it was first built, wide enough for one. Few times I was up there with him, each of us tracing a different level, facing each other only every fourth sentence or so. Thinking about Lionel taking an American tourist up there to show her the similarities in their jobs: made me ready to laugh. Once in a while he did get up to forty dollars taking them on what he called the “real island tour.” But getting paid by an American tourist to take her to the dump? That’d be the same day the resort made me captain.
When I heard Lionel actually offering to show her how he handled the sorting and the navigating at the landfill, I turned my head away to hide my smile, a little bit of a laugh seeping out onto my face.
That’s when I saw Mother, facing the road. In the afternoon light her grayish hair shimmered platinum. Lost count of how many times Miss Minnie had asked various managers at the resort not to schedule the Jamboree on Straw Market Day, especially when a new boat of tourists had just come in. She and Mother must’ve agreed to split up this time. New strategy for selling.
Mother’s sign for selling flowers was facing the road. I saw only its blank, dusty back through her ankles. And her own dusty back. Just a slice of face in my view. Resort would let non-employees sell so close to the gate only if they faced out, pretending to sell to their own. Not take a single coin away from the Jamboree vendors if management could help it.
I rebalanced my tray with the partly full bottles and gathered together the empty ones in my apron pouch. Tried to keep them wrapped from the wind so no one would hear me standing there, catch me watching.
Then I heard the word plantation, American accent. Stopped dead still. Must’ve heard wrong, I thought. Plan, nation, plant, situation, damnation. Something else said. But still I stood, a stone myself.
Corner of my eye saw B3 clutching to her a book the size and shape of the records Miss Wayida Callaghan could be heard blasting out the open windows of her church no one would set foot in. An old book, corners soft. She turned back to Lionel, lowering the book to show him the cover, and his face folded in. Not his usual eye-and-mouth puppetry, especially when trying to sell a