“Who’s there?” St. William called.
From her hiding place, she saw him tilt his head.
“Come,” she said.
“Who’s there?”
“I say come.”
“Come where?”
“Up here.”
He put his hands against his hips.
“Is it who I think it is?”
“I can’t read you mind.”
“Is it…is it you?”
“Is me…yes…is me.”
He pointed at the ramp.
“What are you doing there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well…what do you want?”
She swallowed.
“I don’t know. Just come.”
“There’s no one here. Just me. They’re gone.”
“I know.”
“So you come then.”
“Why I should come to you?”
“Well…let’s see…the ramp is very steep.”
She sucked her teeth and thought, I ain’t able for this rass right now.
“You know what? Just forget it. Just go you way. I ain’t want no worries no more.”
“I don’t want trouble either. If you want, let’s talk.”
“Where?”
He looked around and dabbed his brows.
“Let’s do it in the car.”
She drummed her fingers on the wall.
“No. If you want to talk to me, you have to come up here.”
He was too far away for her to hear his footsteps growing closer, but near enough for her to hear his leather Oxfords crunching dirt and gravel on the crumbling stone.
In the middle of the floor there was a pool where rain had settled. She went to wash her feet and saw reflections of her face and thought, You ain’t look like nothing, and you have to look like something when you meet this man. He have to look at you and judge you as a person that is talking sense. And he ain’t going hear what you saying proper if you looking like a tramp.
Yesterday you look like something. When you bathe off and you was riding in the back o’ Joseph truck, every man was looking hard. Now you look like chew-up-and-spit-out. Who would find you interesting now? Who would give you a job? You could go to the Chinese shop and beg a little alms from the girl who help you with you books. But where you would go from there? Back to you grandmother and Big Tuck and plead with them to take you in…looking mash-up so, and ragged so, and smelling so? So they could ask you what you was doing and what happen to the things you leave with? Eh-eh, you gone with high pride and big ambition and come right back with two long hands like…Rawle!
The skin along her body prickled when it struck her that the man she was about to talk to was the one who’d gone away to England and returned with two long hands, the legendary failure invoked by Big Tuck.
She could hear the forward motion of his footsteps now, and with a greater urgency began to slap the dirt out of her clothes.
Tuck might be a wicked fucker, but this time I taking what he say, ’cause I hear the father cuss him ’bout the same damn thing…how he gone to big school in England and ain’t come back with nought. Well, is a good thing you never stick him with you knife, because now you have a better chance to get what you want. Because that man brain ain’t sharp like yours. You could outbrain him. He’s a dunce.
Don’t care how he was headmaster. The man is a blasted dunce. His own father say so. And no dunce man going outbrain me. I going talk to him like a barrister. I going make my case. And if he is a soldier man or a policeman or whatever he suppose to be, then he suppose to know the law. And I read ’bout them big barrister how they persecute they case when people thief and dirty other people name. And I hear it on the rediffusion box as well. Well, if this dunce man is the law then I going persecute my case against him and win. ’Cause what they do me wasn’t right.
They take advantage. And I tired o’ people taking advantage o’ me. Because o’ people taking advantage why I ain’t wearing my shoes now and going about the place to find my job. And no way under the sun that could be right.
She spat into her hands and smoothed her hair and scooped it into a bun while she used one foot to scrub the other in the dirty pool. Deciding that her clothes were too filthy, she turned them inside out. The colors on the inside had a richer tone. They were not as badly bleached. And she rolled her cuffs above her elbow and swung out from behind the column—as solid in her presence as a door.
“Mr. Rawle,” she said in her most formal English, swinging her right arm like a baseball pitcher warming up, “I need to speak with you.”
He paused along the ramp, some thirty yards away, and pushed his hat off his sweating brow, leaning with his arms on his forward knee, frozen in a stride.
“Mr. Rawle,” Estrella called again. She raised her voice and placed her hands against her hips. “Mr. Rawle, you need to come right now. I need to talk to you.”
The seams that lined her face from mouth to cheek were pulsing as she walked, and when her shadow striped St. William’s back and shoulders from above, he looked away and winced as if he thought he would be caned. This unleashed a brutal instinct from Estrella’s core, urging her to hook him in the collarbone, and use his hat to slap his face and give him what the British called “a proper straightening out.”
“Mr. Rawle,” she said. “I come to talk to you because—as a soldier man or policeman or whatever kind o’ man you is—you is the law. My name as I told you before is Estrella Thompson, and I have come to persecute my case in front o’ you. Yesterday afternoon I left my home to come to town to buy a pair o’ shoes because I want to get a decent job so I could improve myself in life. I will be honest with you—my grandparents put me out. They are ignorant people. They don’t want to learn and they don’t want me to learn, and I want to learn. And because I want to learn, it cause a problem. Because I like to read, the people I live with stop talking to me. Even my own blood. So I left my house and went to sleep in a old canoe. Then the people on my beach began to say I’m the reason why fish stop coming. I took a bus to come to town and by accident I took the wrong bus, which drop me off in Speyside. And after I waited for a long time I began to walk until I got a lift in a truck. I began to walk again until I got a ride from a man on a horse. I came off downtown right by the statue, but then the rain began to fall and I went in the park. The rain came more so I left the park to sleep by the building. And then you came and saw me and thought I was a troublemaker. Mr. Rawle, I am not making any trouble, sir. I am not like the people from Black Well that I heard you father saying make a lot o’ trouble all the time. I am not the best girl. But everybody have faults. My head is good and I want to be something in life. Now, as I told you before—that bag I had with me had all my belongings in this world, including all my money. I have no money now, sir. Not a penny in the world. Which simply means I cannot go home.”
As she looked at him, awaiting his response, he closed each eye to look at her from slightly different angles, and saw that one of his suspicions had been right—her face had perfect lines. If you halved it right along her nose, and took away the crescent scar, the sides were exactly the same. No part of it was deviated, or uneven, or of a different height.
“We were wrong,” he said, exhaling, “but there is nothing I can do.”
“I’m not asking you for money, sir. I need a ride go to town.”
She slipped her hands inside her pockets.
At least you’ll clear your chest, he thought. Do this thing and then it will be over. You’ll never have to see her for the rest of your life.
XIII.
They drove in an electric silence. Between them was a soundless hum until she asked, when they’d passed the last retaining wall that led to Thunder Hill: “You think what you do me could be right?”
“It’s not a matter of right and wrong,” he told her, slowing as they came upon a curve.
“Is just wrong,” she said.
Her arms were crossed;
her back against the door.
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a simple thing at all.”
“You reached all the way to headmaster. I’ve never been to school. Explain me what you mean.”
“We’re all faced with hard choices every day,” he said with reservation. “And sometimes doing one thing for right will make you to do another thing for wrong. I always try to do the right thing. But sometimes in doing the right thing people get hurt. It has nothing to do with you.”
“I’m very disappointed, Mr. Rawle. You don’t know how disappointed I am. Stop the car and let me out.”
They had gotten to the place where she could see the turnoff to Savanna Ridge, the place she’d thought they were going to take her. The memory lit again the fire under what was now a third degree of pain.
In the tense, unmoving car she looked away from him toward the sea, and held her stomach as she felt the mass of something dark and sleek inside her rushing upward from her depths, driving with the power of a whale. She held the dashboard and addressed him quickly, rushing all her words before the monster whooshed out, making waves, at which point words wouldn’t matter anymore.
“Mr. Rawle,” she told him in Sancoche, “the way I heard you father curse you is just how my grandmother curse me. When I see you wipe you face in the back o’ this same car here I feel so sorry for you, because I know the pain you was feeling in you heart, because I feel that same pain too…anger, shame, and heartbreak knot up in one. And when I tell you I vex with my grandmother and grandfather, you know, Mr. Rawle, believe me. I vex. But I can’t vex with you. You ain’t owe me nothing. Them is my grandmother and my grandfather. You ain’t owe me nothing. But truthfully, Mr. Rawle, you make me lose my faith. I use to think all I had to do was try, that all I had to do was give it everything and the rest would just be ambition and luck. I born unlucky. But ambition is not something you can have by yourself. Other people have to have it for you too. Because if they ain’t want you to be nothing, and if they ain’t give you a chance to be nothing, nothing going come of you. You teach me something, headmaster. You teach me a lesson I will keep in my head all my life. You know what? It don’t even make sense I go for my basket now. That basket must be gone.”
With this, she pushed against the door and sprinted down the road, and when she reached the spot at which Savanna Ridge branched off to her left and she could see the loop of whitewashed stones around the cricket ground and the flutter of royal palms around the pond, she drew the knife and flung it in the bush and howled.
After this, she straightened up and walked again.
Mingled with the mist of sound suspended in the air above Seville she heard the slapping of her blistered feet against the rain-slick road and the drumming of blood inside her ears.
Is a fifty-minute walk to the market, she thought, and it have people there I could ask for something, a little money, a little water, a little choops o’ food to eat.
You granny ain’t suppose to come to town for days, and although them market people bound to know you people blame you for the fishing blight, they ain’t going know yet that they turn you out.
But what they going think when they see you with you clothes turn inside out, and smell you sour breath and hear the failure in you voice? They going want to know. And what hide in darkness must come out to light. So even if you ain’t going tell them, in time they bound to know.
She was deep in these thoughts and about to cross the road and take the Queens toward the harbor from the governor’s gate, when she saw a movement from the corner of her eye and skipped up on the verge.
With the steering of the Buick on “the other side,” St. William’s face was just a foot away. Speaking in Sancoche, he said, “You ain’t even know you size I’m sure.”
His eyes were red as if he’d been crying, and his nostrils quivered when he tried to stop his running nose.
“I ain’t wear no shoes before,” she told him curtly and began to walk again.
He caught up to her and stopped again as horns began to honk and other drivers cursed and ordered him to move.
Standing on the grassy verge, Estrella leaned against the car, put her elbows on the roof, and waved the cars behind him to go on. With her belly inches from his face, he stole a little of her musty smell, and feeling sentimental, wished to God that human beings were born with special pockets in the nose for keeping special scents.
When the cars had passed, she crossed the street. He scrambled from the vehicle and chased her, and she felt a secret pleasure when she heard his footsteps coming close.
“My wife have a lot o’ shoes at home,” he said, and took her by the arm. “Dress too. Blouse too. Skirt too. And I sure she have too much o’ anything a girl like you might want. You were right. You are right. What we did was wrong.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rawle,” she said, twisting from his grasp. “But I want you look at me and look at me good.”
“Okay …”
“I ain’t come to town to beg no alms. I come to get a job. And I might be doing the wrongest thing in the world, but I going ask you a favor. And if you can’t do it, you should tell me you can’t do it. Don’t make no false promise to me.”
“Okay …”
With a smile, she said in English, “Fuck off and leave me alone.”
“What?”
“I came to town to get a job, Mr. Rawle. I didn’t come to ask for charity from the likes o’ you.”
“You want a work?” he shouted as he grabbed her blouse.
“Let me go,” she said between her teeth. “Let me go. You better fucking let me go.”
She seized him by the neck and they began to grapple, breathing hotly in each other’s faces till he used his tennis grip to twist her arm, which made her lose her balance, and she fell.
“If you want a job, then ask,” he said, while pinning her down. “Who the fuck you think you are?”
She spat at him and freed a hand and reached into her pocket. But the fucking knife was gone.
From all angles, people rushed toward them, and he stood and waved them off. They hushed but didn’t move. They wanted to observe the drama as it turned.
“Just who do you think you are?” he shouted as he rose. “Tell me. Tell me now!”
He stood there feeling helpless but it came across as rage. The girl had spat his compassion in his face. And he needed her to see him as he knew himself to be—a man who wanted her to live in a different island from the one in which they lived today, a Mr. Rawle who was nothing like his father.
“I ain’t going beg you for a thing,” Estrella said when she was on her feet.
“You can cook?” he asked.
She brushed the grit from her elbows and watched his blue eyes.
“All poor people can do them things.”
“You can cook?” he asked again, glancing at his dirty clothes.
“Anything you want. Except fish.”
“And clean?”
“That and wash and press.”
Two policemen jostled through the crowd. St. William told them all was well. After making whispered inquiries they left him with the girl.
“And if you want,” he said, avoiding what he thought of as her damn man-breaking stare, “you could live in. It’s a big place. You could have your own room.”
Chewing on her pride, she told him, “But I’d need to start today.”
“You can.”
“And I’d like to start right now before anything else happen and nothing don’t work out.”
“You can start when we get home.”
When they reached the car, she asked him, “Could you teach me how to read and write proper? Even if you take it from my pay?”
He shook his head and offered her a Dunhill. She took it and they smoked.
When they’d begun to drive again, he took the road that led along the big savanna, and she looked out at the horses exercising on the track, their sharp hooves lifting dirt, and up above, the lovely
houses on the ridge. Then St. William turned onto an avenue that led away from all of this.
They passed some newer houses, even larger than the ones along the rise, and they privately acknowledged in their separate ways that something had been started when they grappled, something that would complicate their lives.
“Wake me when we reach,” she said, and closed her slanted eyes. “I going catch some sleep.”
She hadn’t fallen fully into sleep when she began to feel the vehicle slowing down. When it stopped, she sat up lazily, awakened by the sound of conversation. Beside St. William’s window was a man. Grazing on the verge, there was a horse.
“Who’s that?” she asked him when the car began to move again, although she knew the answer by the rider’s voice and smell. He’d tipped his hat politely, but it didn’t seem as if he knew her; but she knew him by his scent. He smelled of rum, cedar shavings, and carbolic soap, but none of them intensely—and also, she believed, a little bit of her.
He was red like new pottery, with a long straight nose, and his tight cream pants were stained with grass and dirt.
“That’s Wilfredo Dominguez,” said St. William tightly, “and he’s coming from my house. My wife is there. You’ll meet her. My little son as well. Wilfredo is the finest carpenter you’ll ever meet. In fact he made our matrimonial bed.”
“I’m glad to know his name.”
“Are you okay?”
“No, sir, I’m not okay at all.”
“What’s the matter?”
She closed her eyes, hoping to reclaim the peace of sleep.
“I ain’t want to wear you wife old shoes, Mr. Rawle. I walk too far from country for that. I need a ride to Salan’s. I need to buy my own.”
“I thought you didn’t have any money.”
“I lost it. But is your fault, so you going have to give me back fourteen pounds and fifty pence.” Then she remembered the money from Wilfredo, whom she thought of as Simón. “Plus twenty pounds on that.”
“That’s a lot.”
“That’s my point.”
“I don’t know if I have that.”
“If you ain’t have it, put me out.”
The Girl With the Golden Shoes Page 12
