The Girl With the Golden Shoes (3 page)

It unsettled them to watch her reading…smiling to herself…whispering fancy words…her finger pointing all the time…her head bowed like she praying to the damn
rass
thing.

If you play you drum or pluck you
cuatro
when the gal was reading one, she’d walk away. What kind o’ thing is that? And when she come back after she done walk away and you ask her what it really have inside that thing, she only want to tell you things ’bout other places—like where we from ain’t place.

So although they were amazed that one of them had learned to read, they also felt as if the girl had put them under siege, a sense that if they didn’t act, then history would remember them as people who’d watched and waited while their way of life was slowly laid to waste.

As days turned into weeks, Estrella found herself preparing fish beneath the almond tree alone. People whispered. When they had too much to drink sometimes, they’d lob their blazing words.

Is them things you reading in them papers have you head so tie up. You think we born big so we ain’t know how children can be devious? If is you dead mother telling you things to come and confuse us, well, is a good thing she gone.

Intimidated by their parents and confused, the children who’d been with Estrella when the diver waded from the surf began to doubt what they’d seen. Pressured by his parents, a boy began to spread the rumor that Estrella had confided that the story was a hoax. Two girls swore on a Bible that they’d seen a mermaid flopping on the shore, long hair, gold comb, and all. But most of them just shook their heads when asked and mumbled that they didn’t know, that yes, they were there, but didn’t see, that so much time had passed.

Through all of this, Estrella found a way to manage. But when her younger cousins, candid children, told her that it might be better if she went away, she left the hammock where she slept with them and made a bed inside the broken body of an old canoe left rotting just outside a cave, fifty yards beyond the almond tree.

While this was happening in San Carlos, a tepid winter in the North Atlantic caused a shift in ocean streams all around the world, and the swimming patterns of the fish in the West Indies were disrupted for six weeks.

Each island had its range of local explanations. But in
this
corner of
this
island, there was only one. And after forty days of empty nets, the elders called a meeting on a desert cay.

“Big Tuck,” the meeting started, “there’s a problem in you house, and as a man you have to fix it.”

They were sitting in a circle by a sea grape tree whose twisted branches formed a dome.

“Is not you flesh,” they argued when he told them that he couldn’t do what they were asking. “Everybody else who live here in some way or other is blood. The fish in we blood and it not in hers. And you is the very one that say she look you in you face and tell you right in front o’ Rose that if she stay here she going dead.”

“Well, that ain’t what she say exactly,” said Big Tuck, who had true, natural feelings for the girl.

“Tuck, what the
rass
you talking ’bout? This is forty days o’ judgment. Forty days o’ blight. The only time I see people round here holding they head like they ain’t know if they coming or going was that long time when Mount Diablo look like it was going blow. Tuck, when you old like we you have to accept that we could see the signs. And every man in this place here seeing the signs right now. And you is one o’ we, Tuck, so you bound to see them too.”

“You ain’t have to say nothing like that,” Big Tuck replied. He took another drink, but couldn’t keep it down. “You ain’t have to test me if I is one o’ you. I is one o’ you in truth.”

He wiped the trace of spit and vomit from his mouth.

“Is you bring Rose here to live,” someone accused. “And is Rose bring she here. And Rose own story is a mix-up too. She born in Trinidad, then she gone and live in Cuba, then she come here with a baby saying the mother die in childbirth and no father ain’t there. Tuck, how so much mix-up going on in you house?”

“You see sign?” the one who’d mentioned the volcano pointed out. “The gal kill she own mother. What she would do to we?”

“Tuck, if you get the feeling that you ain’t able to manage,” said the oldest one among them, “put the pressure ’pon you wife.”

On the morning that she had to ask the girl to leave, Roselyn passed the line of huts belonging to her neighbors and walked into the water till it caught her at the knees. She was dressed in white, a flowing dress with puffed sleeves and a turban. In her ears there was a pair of silver hoops.

In a calabash gourd lined with a swatch of gingham cloth in white and blue, she’d placed some silver coins, red flowers, a watermelon slice, and a jar of molasses. And as the gourd bobbled on the waves, she sang hymns to Yemoja asking the
orisha
for prosperity and safety for the girl.

The neighbors watched her furtively, peering through their barely open shutters and the cracks between the boards that made their huts, unhappy but relieved as Roselyn heaved her heavy body past the anchored, striped canoes, then came upon the almond tree, where she stopped for a moment before running back into the sea to put her earrings in the calabash.

“My heart feel like it going to burst,” she told Estrella when the deed was done. “But since you curse the fish is only blight. Why you had to spit in God face? Now, he giving everybody bad eye.”

Sitting on the edge of her broken canoe with her elbows on her knees, Estrella answered with a quiet pledge: “One day I going come back here and all o’ you going look at me and frighten. That’s all I have to say.”

Square-jawed and trembling, Roselyn put her hands across her ears and heaved away.

“I not going live and dead in no shack in no place where nothing don’t happen,” said Estrella, standing up to shout. “Mark my words. Something big going happen to me. And you lucky you even find me anyway. You lucky you find me here this morning. I already make up my mind to leave this place…to go my own damn way. And that ain’t no jest. That’s the gospel truth.”

In the hut, Roselyn did as she’d promised Tuck the night before. She lay down on the bed beside him, listened to his snores, and took a dose of poison that would kill her in her sleep.

Later, during the hour of siesta, while Big Tuck and all the neighbors found it hard to sleep, Estrella sat beneath the hut to pack her things. She didn’t have a lot, but she couldn’t take it all, because she didn’t have a bag. So she packed what she could carry in a basket, which she slung across her body with a length of rope, unaware, like Big Tuck and all the neighbors, that Roselyn was dead.

As she walked along the empty beach, Estrella felt the glare of eyes, which encouraged her to fortify her walk with more authority and grace. She pulled back her shoulders and stuck out her ass, and used a hand to dab at any hairs that might have loosened in her plaits.

When she came upon the almond tree, unsure of what would happen and wondering what to do—she’d never seen a person being banished in her life—she saw two fellows sitting in a red canoe.

“Hey, Estrella. How you doing? Come here. I want to talk to you.”

“Come where?” she answered with a knowing look.

She stood, arms folded, water lapping at her shins.

“Well, it look like you going out. I just was thinking to ask you if you want a ride.”

“Don’t fret ’bout me, Alston. I could take care on my own.”

She spat in punctuation, cut her slanted eyes, and stomped away.

“Estrella. Where you going? Come back here. It ain’t have no other way.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You have to come, Estrella. Make it simple. Don’t make it turn a fuss.”

She spun around.

“If I had my own boat is one thing. But I ain’t going nowhere with the likes o’ you. I would rather climb the cliff.”

“Well go, nuh. See, nuh. Climb the cliff and break you neck and dead.”

“Alston, you is a blasted dog.”

As she stomped in the direction of the cliffs, she thought, How I could sit in a boat with Alston and Perry and act like nothing ain’t happen? Them is fellows I know all my life. I know them men children. Them men even put talks to me a few times when their wife wasn’t about. And in truth, I even do a little feel-up with that Alston there one time. Man is man, eh. After all o’ that, he expect me to go with them in a boat so they could carry me ’way like I is some piece o’ filth? Before I go with them I’d rather climb this cliff and get my death. Then what they going to say?

The limestone cliff was high and sheer, a little under ninety feet, and flecked with blinking crystals. In certain spots, the roots of hardy plants came dangling out of fissures in the rock, and as she climbed, Estrella Thompson, who was too scared to look below, felt around with shoeless feet for little gaps or sills to hold her weight.

Hand over hand, her body taut with dogged anger, her sweating face so deep in focus that it was serene, slipping once or twice, she reached the top.

Without looking down to see the depth from which she’d come, or stare in triumph at her neighbors, who’d spilled out from their huts across the sand, the tall, strong-bodied girl began to sprint across a field of guinea grass toward the world she thought contained her future, moving through the gulf of green as swiftly as a marlin that had snapped a fishing line.

She wore a purple dress with long sleeves and puffed shoulders that were fraying at the seams. In her deep patch pockets bounced her gutting knife and money that she’d stolen from Old Tuck.

With fifteen pounds and fifty pence, she planned to buy a pair of shoes, the first ones in her life; after this, she would present herself correctly for a job.

III.

Like a beetle on a trail of gum, the stubby, silver bus was crawling north along the wild Atlantic coast. Estrella stared outside the window, a strong out-pointed cheekbone pressed against the dusty windowpane.

From the cliff, she’d walked and run eight miles through grass and scrub and climbed through woodlands strung with vines; there, little monkeys skittered on the limbs of trees with overlapping leaves that blocked the heat and light.

When the forest opened up, she’d seen a narrow road below her, curling in a double bend then gathered in the grip of interlocking slopes.

She began to sweat profusely as she left the cooler, denser woods behind and picked her way through lighter woods with smaller, thinner trees that came advancing from the road. She took the road, which she didn’t realize was the very one that ran in other places on the coast, and came upon an Indian reservation.

The Indians were
caribes
; not
madrasitos
, the local name for workers who were brought from India in the 1800s to replace the slaves. The
caribes
were the remnants of the people who’d seen Columbus when he stumbled on their shore, who’d fought the Spanish for a hundred years. But like most Carlitos, they were now impure.

Apart from a tin sign hammered to a shoulder-level post, nothing marked the reservation as important or unique. It was like any other village—a little road that cut a little shop in two; little lanes that led to little huts and little fields; little ribby dogs and little naked children; women by the road selling things nobody wanted, and the dominating mass of old Diablo, the volcano that had rumbled forty years before, rising high above the other peaks.

The
caribes
were so small that at first Estrella thought that all of them were children. She found herself staring at their flat cheeks and straight hair, which most of them cut bluntly, while they looked at her with wonder and suspicion through eyes so dark and tiny that at times she thought they were closed.

She went inside a bar—a dim square in coral pink with a zinc roof stretching past the door to shade a porch supported by unshaven posts; there, a pair of women sat on stools surrounded by displays of woven objects. One wore a bonnet and the other jazzed a yellow cowboy hat, and when the tall
negrita
passed to go inside the bar, they turned around to look.

“Excuse me, what it have to eat?” Estrella asked across the counter. Two men were drinking and the barmaid looked as if she hadn’t fully gotten over a debilitating sleep.

“It have ’possum and iguana. Fry and stew.”

“No. I ain’t feeling that today,” she said politely, as a grimace flashed across her face.

One of the men who’d been drinking pushed a plate of bones with knots of meat on them toward her.

“It have some chicken too.”

“Yes, please. I would rather take a plate o’ that.”

She took a table by the door so she could look outside, and the barmaid brought the food.

“This is chicken?” she asked after sniffing it. “It smell kind o’ different to me.”

As soon as she’d said this she remembered there was another kind of chicken here—a giant frog that lived in mountain forests and whose hind legs had the shape and juicy texture of a duck.

But you pay you money already, she thought. So you might as well eat it. Is not as if you have money to waste. You ain’t eat from this morning. If you eat it and pretend is something else, like octopus, then you stomach would be full. And Seville must be at least a hour or two by bus, so you should really eat. But what if this thing make you vomit? You can’t look for work if you sick.

“If you don’t want it, I can eat it,” said the drunk from his position at the bar.

“Gimme thirty pence for it.”

He wobbled off his stool.

“What? You trying to make a profit?”

“Is fifty pence I pay for it. You saving twenty pence. Is almost half price.” She tossed her head toward the barmaid. “It cheaper than you would get it from she. And apart from a little piece I break off, you can’t really say I even touch it. Is almost brand new.”

“Well, she’s my wife,” the drunkard said. “And I’m the owner o’ the bar. So if I want some more, I can just take it.”

The woman and the other drunk began to laugh. Estrella went outside and asked the woman in the bonnet for directions to the bus. With a wrinkled thumb she pointed to the shop across the street, where a man wearing shoes was standing with a suitcase in his hand.