The Girl With the Golden Shoes (14 page)

Dawn was beginning to break by now and Estrella had an understanding of each face. Will, the older son, who was in his early thirties, had clear blue eyes. The father had a slim mustache. The younger son had freckles and a dimple in his chin. They were all of average build, and she could see from their faces that their heavy uniforms gave them added stock; but from their eyes, which were fatigued, she perceived them to be worn, and doubted that they’d have the strength to give pursuit.

“What’s your name again?” the older brother asked.

He leaned against the gun as if it were a walking stick, with the stock against the damp stone floor.

“Estrella,” she said, blinking sleep out of her eyes. “I told you once before.”

His body heaved, his mouth opened, then he stopped. He did this five more times, heaving then stopping, like a discus thrower warming up. Then finally, as everybody stared at him, he let it go.

“Look,” he said, embarrassed, “just get out of here. Go home.”

She began to walk in circles. The sudden shift in circumstances was a lot for her to bear, the lack of plot disorienting. There was no clear pattern. No clear link between action and reaction. Cause and effect. It didn’t feel like life.

“Just go home just like so?” she asked when she was settled.

He shook his head, excused himself, and yawned.

“So what all this was about?” she asked, looking at each man in turn. “You must have a reason why you do me what you do.”

The father said, “One day it will soak in.”

She shrugged and thought, One day in truth, but not right now. I ain’t want to talk no more. I ain’t care ’bout nothing no more. I just want to go my way and never see these people face again.

“So how I get back to town from here?” she asked.

They looked at her in silence. They hadn’t thought that far.

“If I have to walk then I have to walk,” she said, holding back her rage. Then speaking in a clear, respectful tone, she asked, “Well, may I kindly have my things?”

They craned their necks and cocked their heads, confused.

“What things?” the father asked.

“That I bring from home.” Her brows and voice were raised. “My basket with my blanket and my books…my clothes…my dolly…my soap …”

The father turned toward the younger son, the one with the freckled face, raised his hands indifferently, and shrugged.

“Sir, where are my things?” Estrella asked again. She rolled her fists and bit her lips, squeezing back the other words.

The father answered, “Must be where you left them, I suppose.”

“Sir, you is the one who told me I had to come. Not that I want to make a big thing out o’ this. But when you hold my arm and told me to come on and you bring me to the car, I think one o’ you was going bring my basket. You leave it? You sure? I ain’t mean to take up you time, but we could look in the car?”

She began to walk around the Buick, peering inside. They watched as if inebriated by a cocktail mix of indifference, regret, and surprise, brows half-raised…skin softly tingling from a mild attack of nerves…something fearful, but not quite paranoia, an awareness that they might have hounded her too much, had crossed a line and entered a place they didn’t understand and were therefore not equipped to rule.

“They were not my things,” the father pointed out. “They were yours. What? Am I supposed to be your servant now? Same thing down at Speyside. Nobody wants to work on this damn island anymore. Everything is on the boss.
Boss do this. Boss do that.
Well, boss is tired now and boss wants to go home.”

“You know all my money is in there, sir?” she droned, astounded by the loss. “I had it in my pocket but I move it. I wrap it up and put it in my basket right under my head in case it drop out o’ my pocket in the night. You know all my clothes in there, sir? You know if I ain’t get back my things I don’t have nothing in this world, sir? When you answer me the way you answer me…as if I ain’t really lose nothing…like this is a simple thing…you did know how much it had in there, sir?”

“I was only doing my job,” he said glibly. “You weren’t supposed to be there. If you had obeyed the law, then none of this would have happened.”

Desperate, Estrella trampled her pride and went down on one knee. “I begging you for a drive into town to get my things, sir. Please, sir, before somebody take away my things. I didn’t mean to talk fresh, sir. I didn’t mean to offend you, sir. Sometimes I can get carried away, sir, and talk like I don’t have no sense or no upbringing, sir. But I’m not a hooligan or virago, sir. Please, can you carry me so I can go and get my things?”

“No, I can’t,” replied the man who owned the truck that had taken her from the bridge across the island to the Caribbean coast. “Carry you? I’m off duty now. But you’re free to go on your own. The lesson has been learned. That’s what’s most important. The lesson has been learned.”

Through the open gates of the gigantic fort, the brokenhearted girl could see the eastern sky becoming filled with shades of red. She thought she heard a creaking as her heart began to fall.

Dazed, she made a step toward the men, half-expecting them to tell her not to move.

“I ain’t know what to say no more,” she said, using her hands to part them. “But what you do to me is a sin. I will take this lesson to my grave. It have some wicked people in this world.”

And as the father forced himself to laugh so he could drown his feelings of regret, Estrella Thompson ran toward the morning on her blisters, hoping that the one who held the gun would raise it, aim it, and draw a breath, ensuring that the bullet that would free her from this life would hit her clean between the shoulder blades. This way she’d return to the cove in a coffin instead of in disgrace.

XI.

St. William Rawle—the older son—was driving down the hill. The car was big, and the road was small, with many twisting turns, so with the steering wheel on what Carlitos called “the other side” he found it hard to judge the curves, forcing him to stop at every corner just to calculate the angle of the bends. Sometimes he stepped outside the car to look.

Considered from an unexpected point of view, the turns made him feel disoriented, made him question where he sat. In this way they called to mind the girl.

The last time he’d felt this way was when he’d first encountered Graham Greene’s
The Power and the Glory
, and had felt a sense of urgency to write about someone as complicated as the whiskey priest.

Compassion, he’d thought. That’s what writing is about—compassion for the people on “the other side.” And that’s no easy thing to do. So, he’d written and still wrote—without support or glory—publishing his efforts at his own expense.

It was hot, and he’d raised the roof to shield him from the sun, and was using a yellow handkerchief to dab his neck as he perspired in his crushed white suit.

Alone in the car—his father and brother had been chauffeured home in the family Jag—he left the main road after passing the parade ground and drove along a lower rampart that led him to the wide, stone deck of a bastion.

The mighty stones had fallen over time. What was left recalled a lower jaw with blackened teeth, and he could see the footprints of the various buildings that had crumbled—barracks, cisterns, storage rooms.

The bastion had been built like an arrow, a hundred-meter flying wedge, lined on either side with cannons, some of which remained.

He wandered through the ruins in deep contemplation and went inside the old munitions building, which was larger than a parish church. It was cool and shaded there and he sat against a window ledge and thought about the girl, the whiteness of his suit intense against the gray volcanic stone and beautiful against the ocean blue that filled the empty arches of the missing doors.

He knew the girl, he thought. He knew her without knowing. But he’d like to know her more.

When he was headmaster he’d meet this kind of girl.

You’d be in your office on a Monday morning and one of your father’s cronies—some member of the opera society or the yacht club, or some member of some board—would bring her in and introduce her as a Christian girl with sense and morals who deserved a chance, and you’d look at him and think, Okay, you’ve got an outside daughter and you went to church and got a case of guilt. Or if she’s not your daughter, she’s the object of some kind of complicated love. And you’d do what you could—which was a hell of a lot—and the girl would get in.

But these were not the circumstances of this girl…Estrella. She didn’t think in English, but she spoke the kind we speak here fairly well—which tells you that she’s been to school, but not for many years. If she’d gone to school for longer, her English vowels wouldn’t be so short, or as she’d say it, “shot.”

She could be a farm girl though. She had that kind of ruggedness and strength. But if she were a farm girl her hands would be rough in a different way. No…she didn’t farm. She fished.

When you held her hand, or when she held yours, you were so stunned by the feeling that infused you—you don’t even remember what happened. Only that she made you feel good…so good that for the rest of the ride you found it hard to talk. You know what farm girls feel like. No, she isn’t one of them. Her calluses ran in a line along the inside of her thumbs to where they joined the fullness of her hand, and you could feel them climbing like a set of rungs on the outside of her pointer. You got those kinds of calluses from pulling on a line. No…she didn’t farm. She didn’t farm at all. She fished.

So Estrella is a fishing girl. By her voice, probably from down the wild Atlantic coast. She hadn’t been in town for very long, because word would have come to you. And she surely didn’t live in Black Well, where you went to find the young
negritas
you pay to pose for you so you can paint them in the nude.

This is such a funny backward island, this damn San Carlos place. It’s okay to get young girls to stand around for hours in the flesh. But tell somebody you want to write and paint for the rest of your life and they think you need a weekend in a padded room.

But what is really strange is that this girl was sleeping in the street. Why would she have to do that? What could she have done? You get the sense that she’s a warm and loving soul. What did she do?

Your family is your pride. You’re nothing if you’re not your blood. If someone kicks you out, you just go somewhere else. A relative. A friend. Or you stay and make amends. Because to leave your household is a big disgrace. And
you
know this very well. Because your wife just told you she wants a damn divorce and that’s why you’re here, marking time. You don’t want to go home.

He walked outside across the flat expanse of stone, and stood there in the open, thinking of Rebecca…Rebecca Salan …Rebecca Salan his wife, then walked toward the point at which the walls converged into a prow, and saw the land below him sheer away.

On the lower slopes, the lines of other ruins and the edges of the sweeping thick retaining walls were overlapping like the kind of waves that cause an undertow, and St. William Rawle, who’d gone away to Cambridge in the years before the war and flunked out in disgrace, put his hands behind his back and dropped his chin, sorry, lonely, and ashamed—at thirty-two, the unevacuated captain of a ship wrecked on a reef—and thought about his wife and wondered what had happened to the girl.

After she’d run away he’d argued with his father, who insisted that he’d actually been nice. His younger brother listened, but he didn’t intervene, and only talked about it when their father went to change.

“Will, we know he’s an ass.”

They were moving through the courtyard to the storeroom with their weapons and their clothes. “But you’ve got to understand…he’s disappointed.”

“Albert, what he did was wrong!”

“True, but in a way she brought it on herself.”

“How?”

“Insubordination. If you let them get away with that, there’s nothing left.”

“Insubordination? She was frightened. She’s a simple country girl.”

“Don’t get too high-minded now. You’ve screwed a lot of them.”

“Why’re we straying from the point?”

“But that
is
the point. You want to screw this girl, so you’re getting sentimental.”

“You’re getting out of order now. Please stop it.”

“Everybody likes to burn a little diesel now and then, but you’ve let this crossing over rule your life. What’s this painting all about? Have you ever sold or shown a painting of a naked behind?”

“You just don’t understand.”

“Well …”

“Albert Rawle, you
are
your father’s child.”

“That’s good. He gets respect.”

“No. He gets fear and hate.”

“Listen, Will, and listen good. England is at war. There’s a madman in Berlin. There’s an emperor in Japan who thinks he’s God on earth. There are brutes in Italy and Spain who think their backward countries have a reason to exist beyond their women and their wine. And you want me to waste time on a spat about a girl I hardly fucking know? Go home to Rebecca. Whatever she might be, she’s your wife. Do you hear me? Get some sleep. In the morning everything will be okay. Drive safely. Everything is dodgy from the other side.”

XII.

As St. William contemplated all these things, Estrella watched him from the shadow of a ruined barrack on a grassy ramp of earth, the length of her against the ground, her knife sideways across her mouth, stalking.

When they didn’t shoot her, she’d sped along the ramp and veered across the grass away from where she’d seen the Yankee soldiers, taking refuge in a crumbled building where she hid and watched the fort to see if she was being pursued. After thirty nervous minutes, she began to execute her slow escape, moving down the hill on trails, staying off the main.

She was hiding in the bushes when she saw the car, and at first she wasn’t going to give pursuit. But when she realized that the one who had the gun was now alone, an idea came to mind.

It might not have come to mind if she’d seen one of the other two, but St. William’s timid driving made her think of him as soft. He sat close against the wheel and craned his neck across the dash; and observing this, and thinking of the way that almost everything he’d said was overruled, she chose him as the object of a lesson in revenge.