The Girl With the Golden Shoes (15 page)

At one point she was sure he’d seen her—when she tried to dash across the road before he came around a bend. But he was focused on his inner life and didn’t notice when she spun around and dove into the bush.

Lying on her side, she’d said, while watching him go by: “You would die in war in Europe. You’re so careless and so soft.” As soon as she’d said this, an image came to mind, an image that was instantly translated to a thought. It was an image of a knife against a throat, which was translated as,
I have to get him in the car.
After that there were no other thoughts. Just actions. Running. Hiding. Jumping. Rolling. Scaling. Shunting. Creeping. Crawling. Darting…until now.

She watched him walking back and forth across the lonely open deck. Two truckloads of soldiers rumbled down the hill. If I going to do it then I have to do it now, she thought.

That man ain’t going stand up there all morning. Any minute now he going go ’bout his business. And if he goes before you do what you suppose to do, then you plan get spoil.

If he could just frighten, she thought, as she disciplined her nerves. If he could just frighten when he come and see me in the car, and don’t try to wrestle…then it would be awright. Because as I lying here I ain’t want to cut nobody anymore. Them things easy to think ’bout, but they hard to do unless you have them kind o’ mind. And I ain’t have them kind o’ mind.

I have it sometimes, but I ain’t have it right now. That’s why it ain’t good to talk out you intentions, even to yourself. ’Cause if you talk them is like you do them already, and you ain’t going have the feeling to do them again.

Is like when somebody tell you the last part of a joke. You ain’t bother want to hear the joke again. You know the whole joke now. Same way, I lie down here thinking what I going do, and now I ain’t feel to do it.

I want to do it, but I ain’t
feel
to do it. And that is two different things. Is like when a person want you do something, and you want to do it just because that person ask you, especially when they ask you in a forcing way.

Well, something inside me
want
me to do this thing. Want me to shuffle down this hillside and hide in that car and jump up when that man pull that door and drag him by the arm inside and tell him, “Shut you mouth. Shut you mouth. Shut you goddamn mouth and listen to me right now before I open up you fucking gills and gut you. I going take you for a ride just like how you take me for a ride. I going take you out o’ you way and mash up whatever business you have, just like how you mash up mine. How that feel now? How that feel? This is what you going do. You going take me back where you find me so I can find my things. And just in case we don’t find it, you going have to gimme a hundred…no…a thousand pounds as pay for what I lose and for how much you make me go through. For all the suffer I suffer. For all the pain I feel. And as a matter o’ fact, gimme that money right now ’cause I ain’t trust you. I ain’t trust you at all. I use to trust you one time. But I ain’t trust you again. You grow up and hear all kind o’ thing ’bout all kind o’ people how they thief. But nobody ever tell you white man thief too. You hear how everybody thief. And they always say we nigger is the worst. And I myself use to think so too. But I see for myself now. All man is man. All flesh is flesh. Drive this fucking car right now and drive it fast. I lose too much time already. I have a lot o’ catching up to do. You ain’t going hold me back no more.”

That’s what I
want
to do, she thought. But that ain’t what I
feel
to do. Maybe I is a coward or something. But that ain’t what I feel to do. And I ain’t really know what I feel to do. All I know is I want back my things and my money. And I ain’t want to fuss no more.

Her head was heavy with combusting thoughts. The heat was as solid as a piston pumping downward in its case. She stood up as St. William Rawle began to move toward the car.

Something was about to happen. What, she wasn’t sure. And she felt it was important to look at her surroundings as if she might be seeing them for the final time.

Down the coast and to her left she noticed the hooking headlands of the harbor in Seville, but a spur came angling down across her line of sight and she couldn’t see the town. In the sky, beyond the spur, there was a stack of piling clouds. It would rain.

It would rain. But she would have known this even if she hadn’t seen the clouds. She would have known this even if she’d only seen the water, which was frilled with waves, or if she’d simply closed her eyes and concentrated as she breathed, for as a daughter of the sea she’d learned to smell the rain from miles away, like a shark was born to catch the faintest scent of blood.

A voice said, “Hey.”

She withdrew behind the column with her back against the stone.

“Hey.”

She put away the knife. The voice had been hers.

“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.”