“What you plant?” he asked now, scratching his belly with one hand while digging around in his gap-toothed mouth with the index finger of the other.
“Well…” Michael began thoughtfully.
“Oh my God!” Feliz screamed out of the blue.
Then he turned to me.
“Are you one hundred percent today?”
“Absolutely,” I hazarded, wondering what he could possibly mean. “One hundred percent.”
I certainly wasn’t going to settle for anything less, whatever we were discussing.
This sent him into gales of uncontrollable laughter, punctuated by loud rat-a-tats of flatulence.
We edged slowly away. Frankly I was tempted to run inside and bolt the door.
But then I remembered that his own garden was lush and reasonably well-tended, and it occurred to me that he might have some useful advice for us after all. I decided to give it a try.
“What kind of plant would you put here?” I asked, pointing to the small triangular plot near the driveway. “¿Aqui?” (here)
“¿Aquí?” he repeated, drooling slightly.
“Sí, aquí,” I said, pointing again.
He considered.
“Cactus!” he stated emphatically. “Or flores or ferns.”
Even I, who had never cultivated anything more demanding than a Chia Pet, recognized the complete and utter uselessness of this advice.
“What grows in sunlight?” I prompted him. “Sol.”
He rearranged his genitals and belched greasily. “Calathea.”
“Calathea?” I repeated.
“Sí.”
Michael, looking vaguely encouraged by this scrap of information, took up my thread.
“And what do you plant without sun?” he asked. “¿Sin sol?”
“Ah,” Feliz replied, touching the side of his nose with his finger. Hadn’t I seen Mafiosi perform this same gesture in countless Godfather-type movies? Only I couldn’t recall its significance. Arcane hand gestures had always baffled me—if you scratched your chin with the back of your hand you were disrespecting someone’s mother, and if you touched your eyebrow while tugging your earlobe you were suggesting group sex. Or something like that.
“Heliconia,” he said, winking ominously.
“Good for no sun?”
“Yes, no sun.”
After our hammered neighbor had wreathed us in beery hugs and lumbered home for what would undoubtedly be his tenth or twelfth Medalla of the morning, we rushed inside to write down his suggestions.
After all, there was the very remote possibility that he knew more about gardening than we did.
Which wasn’t saying much.
☼ ☼ ☼
“Let’s pay a visit to Arte Tropicale,” Michael suggested the next morning.
This was our neighborhood nursery, situated in a well-tended compound across the road from Superdescuentos Morales.
“Great,” I chirped, all too happy to have his laser-like attention focused on the most derelict sector of our domain.
The proprietress of Arte Tropicale was seldom “in the yard,” so to speak. But never fear. Her neat little cottage was perched on the far side of the nursery grounds and when you came up to her gate you simply rang the bell. Before long she would emerge from her house and scuttle between the lush plants to unfasten the latch with a coquettish smile.
“¡Hola!” she cried that morning. “You are back!”
Her enthusiasm was particularly admirable when you considered that we had clearly interrupted her telenovela, which we could hear blaring all the way across the yard.
“Sí,” Michael replied, grinning from ear to ear. “We make a jardín.”
Her mood visibly escalated from delighted to ecstatic at this news. She may have loved her soap operas, but at the end of the day she was a merchant with a business to run. How, after all, could she afford her precious Satellite TV if she failed to turn a profit?
“You need many plants?” she asked with relish.
Michael looked around the well-maintained nursery. “Well…a few. It’s a pequeño (small) garden.”
Though these were surely unwelcome tidings, she maintained her beatific smile.
“¿Pequeño?” she asked, with perhaps one less teaspoon of sugar in her voice.
“Sí,” Michael confirmed. “Actually two. One jardín con sol, one jardín sin sol.” He was really giving his Spanish a workout today.
“Ah,” she said, smiling broadly. “First, sol.” She strode outside and, with a sweeping gesture vaguely reminiscent of a game show hostess, indicated her selection of “sunny” plants.
“How about these?” I said to Michael, pointing to a bed of tall, lush plants with dramatic Bird-of-Paradise-like flowers.
His eyes swept over them.
“Perfect.”
He bent down to read the label.
“Heliconia…”
He paused, fumbling for a piece of paper in his pocket.
“Hey, isn’t this the plant our neighbor told us not to plant in the sun?”
I rolled my eyes.
We both glanced at the nursery lady, who was smiling in a distracted manner while surreptitiously glancing in the direction of her tidy hacienda. Maybe a new telenovela was about to begin.
“And what about shade plants?” I asked Michael. We strode over to the covered section of the yard. Here we found three varieties we liked, including a lovely Calathea, which (according to our notes) our neighbor had expressly recommended for full sunlight.
Was it a coincidence that his advice had been exactly backwards? Or was he just so perma-drunk he didn’t know the difference between sun and shade?
Now we were thoroughly confused. Meanwhile, señora was looking distinctly antsy.
“Let’s buy a bunch of both and decide where to put what when we get home,” Michael suggested.
Always a sucker for wishy-washy compromises, I happily concurred.
After helping us load up our car the señora waved us off with a sweet smile tinged with relief. As we drove away she could be seen positively sprinting towards her house.
Back home, we planted everything according to instructions and gave it all a thorough watering.
Perfection.
Or not.
During his stroll around the garden the next morning Michael discovered to his horror that three of our new plants were missing.
Let’s be clear. They weren’t dead, they weren’t looking slightly-less-healthy than they had the day before. They were gone, their absence commemorated by gaping holes in the ground.
We scratched our respective heads.
I wondered out loud if our neighbor had been so mortally offended by our disregard of his advice that he’d dug up our fledgling plants. But Michael guffawed at the very idea that Feliz was capable of following through with such a sustained act of, well, anything. Good point.
Then what could it be? Neighborhood kids looking for a bit of harmless mischief? Doubtful.
It was Jane who finally solved the mystery.
Driving by later that day she saw a horse chowing down on our Calathea. She stopped and shooed him away but not before he’d made mincemeat of half of our horticultural investment.
Now what? we asked.
“Well, personally, I’d go for things horses don’t like.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed. “And what would that be?”
“Prickly stuff.”
“Such as?”
“Hmm…” she said. “Not really my department. Ask the nursery lady.”
Señora Arte Tropicale greeted us warmly, if somewhat distractedly, the next morning. Sounds of high drama emanated from her living room.
She listened sympathetically to our problem, and was all too delighted to sell us a carload of horse-proof plants.
Our reconstituted garden looked beautiful. Better still, our neighborhood horses took one look, tossed their glossy manes indignantly and moved on to more palatable pastures.
>
Another small victory for our side.
Twenty-Eight
Touch and Glow
Later that week we were sitting in a bar in Esperanza when a couple of twenty-somethings parked themselves next to us and struck up a conversation. Married for about a year, Colin and Denise had come to Vieques for a long-postponed honeymoon.
“You have a house here?” Colin all-but-shouted. “You dudes are effing lucky!” His eyes swept from Michael to me.
We admitted that we considered ourselves pretty fortunate.
Colin asked lots of questions. Where could they get the absolute best food on the island? Which was our favorite beach? What was the biggest iguana we’d ever seen?
We answered as best we could, including telling him about the Stegosaurus-sized iguana we’d encountered on our first visit to the island.
And then he asked, “What’s the bio-bay like?”
“Uh…”
Denise, who had remained quiet for most of the conversation, spoke up now.
“You’ve never done the bio-bay, have you?”
Her question was good-natured but seasoned with a pinch of mischief.
Michael sighed.
“Not so much.”
“We’ve always meant to, but there’s never enough time,” I complained.
A brief silence followed.
“That’s pretty lame,” Denise threw back.
We laughed uneasily.
“Wanna go with us?” Colin asked.
Michael glanced at me.
“Sure.”
It wasn’t as if we’d deliberately avoided the bioluminescent bay. After all, many people considered floating around in the glowing bay a life-altering experience.
And if the experts were right, postponing our visit to the bio-bay much longer might not be such a good idea. There was evidence that this natural wonder was ecologically endangered and could simply cease to exist in the not-too-distant future.
In layman’s terms, the bay’s luminescence is generated when the microorganisms inhabiting its waters are disturbed by movement. The water looks dark until you jump in, at which point the microorganisms begin to glow, outlining your body with an eerie blue-green light. The faster you move, the brighter the glow. In terms of pay-off, you get a very big bang for your buck.
Although this phenomenon exists elsewhere in the world, most bioluminescent bays have been partially—and, in some extreme cases, completely—destroyed by pollution. Vieques’ Puerto Mosquito is the brightest surviving bay of its kind in the world.
Which is another way of saying it was truly disgraceful we’d never experienced it.
Colin and Denise, our new best friends, followed up with a phone call the next day. This was both surprising and slightly dismaying. In effect, they’d called our bluff.
We met up that night at the tour company’s “base camp,” a dilapidated building on Route 996 near Esperanza.
Colin and Denise were as delightful sober as they were tipsy. They seemed genuinely excited that we had come, which of course made us glad, in turn, that we’d made the effort.
“So it took a couple of strangers to get you off your butts,” Denise remarked in her quiet way. It was if she were delivering the closing argument of a criminal prosecution, though in the nicest way possible.
“That’s true,” Michael said without missing a beat. “Our real friends couldn’t possibly have convinced us to do this.”
Colin pronounced Michael “a stitch.”
I told him he didn’t know the half of it.
☼ ☼ ☼
By seven-thirty our bio-bay tour group was ready to rumble.
Our fellow adventurers were, to say the least, a mixed bag. There was a chubby Canadian couple with three rambunctious young boys; a severely-sunburned quartet of Scandinavian seniors (how do you say “sunblock” in Swedish?); and a gay couple from Wisconsin whose age difference was so vast they gave the term “May-December relationship” a whole new meaning.
Our tour guide was drearily perky. Clad in a T-shirt that read I Glow in the Dark, she introduced herself as Cate with a “C” before regaling us with a host of arcane information about the history of the bio-bay, its current state of decline, and its shaky future. After a numbingly long fifteen minutes, one of the Canadian urchins raised his hand.
“But what makes the people glow?” he asked.
Everyone heaved a sigh of relief—this was, after all, the question we all wanted to ask (even those of us who had done a little reading beforehand and thought we knew the answer).
Cate paused. She cleared her throat. She shifted from foot to foot. Was it possible she didn’t know the answer?
“It’s magic!” she said at last.
But the little boy wasn’t about to fall for this.
“No, it’s not, it’s science,” he stated.
Cate smiled lamely.
“Of course it is!” she agreed.
“But what causes it?” continued the persistent little guy, who clearly had a future as a D.A.
Cate looked blank.
“Bio-flagellates,” one of her male colleagues exclaimed, rushing in from the sidelines. “When you disturb them, they glow,” he explained, shooting Cate’s persecutor a stern look. “Kind of like when someone hassles you and you start crying.”
“I do not,” the little boy sulked.
It was going to be that kind of night.
After our less than inspiring orientation, we were loaded into a yellow school bus that appeared to have migrated south from Mayberry RFD around 1960.
It was pleasant enough cruising through Esperanza in this antique conveyance, but when we hit the deeply potholed road leading to the beach the ride was slightly less relaxing (think permanent disability).
Once we arrived at our destination we were herded over shallow dunes to a pontoon boat moored in a shallow, murky bay. It was a moonless night (one of the chief criteria for optimal viewing of bioluminescence is a lack of moonlight), which made progress difficult over the uneven terrain. But soon we were all safely on board.
The first of the evening’s many spontaneous whoops of delight erupted from the passengers when the boat gurgled out into the water, agitating millions of tiny flagellates into states of frenzied luminescence. The boat’s wake glowed like neon.
Yes, it was pretty cool.
☼ ☼ ☼
Although I’ve spent a good part of my life on islands and am perpetually mesmerized by the sight of the ocean, I’ve never been terribly keen on actually getting into the water. My first doubts about aquatic immersion occurred on a childhood visit to Daytona Beach when a crab bit my toe. My doubts became a certainty, a few years later, after seeing Jaws.
Ten years ago, during a visit to Key West, Michael signed us up for a clothing-optional snorkeling cruise. I was fine with the clothing optional part, but the prospect of snorkeling left me cold. However, I agreed to go, and at first everything seemed fine.
The boat was beautiful, the captain was appropriately jolly and our fellow passengers looked fine in their birthday suits.
But it was February, and although we were in Key West, it was an unusually chilly month and the water was downright cold. Nonetheless, every last person donned flippers and a mask and leapt into the water with gay (yes, I said it) abandon—except the captain and me.
“Too chilly for these old bones,” was his excuse. And when I offered no excuse at all he said, “Let’s play cards.”
While Michael and his fellow snorkelers thrashed around in the choppy waves, the captain taught me to play two-handed solitaire, which got us through the better part of the afternoon.
I still have a photo (taken by Michael after he’d hauled himself back onto the boat and thawed out for a few minutes in the sun) depicting me with the captain’s pet bird perched atop my head.
And I still play two-handed solitaire when I can convince Michael to join me.
Which isn’t often.
☼ ☼ ☼
Our fellow bio-bay enthusiasts hurled themselves into the pitch black water that night with apparent delight.
Not us.
I wasn’t remotely tempted to join them, and even Michael looked skeptical.
Meanwhile our new friends, Colin and Denise, who’d been among the first to plunge into the murky depths, good-naturedly harangued us to join them.
“Come on, you wusses,” Colin cried, his body glowing eerily amidst thousands of over-stimulated flagellates.
“Sticks and stones,” I recited half-heartedly.
“What are you scared of, sharks?” Denise laughed.
“Don’t be silly,” I replied as the theme music from Jaws pounded through my head. “But the bay’s full of jellyfish.”
“Rubbish!” Colin cried dismissively. “There’s not a jellyfish for miles.”
As if on cue, the father of the Canadian district-attorney-in-training emitted a loud, girlish screech. “Oh my God!”
“What’s wrong?” asked his portly wife, flailing her short, fat arms.
“I think I’ve been bit!” he gasped.
“Bitten,” I said under my breath. There’s really no excuse for poor grammar, even in times of duress.
“Help!” his wife cried. “Help!”
Admirably enough, one of the fully-clothed tour guides leapt into the water (I can only assume there were liability issues) and paddled wearily to the man’s side.
“I’m going to bring you back to the boat,” he calmly informed the victim, who sobbed loudly before surrendering to his rescuer’s embrace.
Michael and I hauled our Canadian comrade back onto the boat. Cate with a C trained a flashlight on his leg, which bore a nasty-looking red mark. “Jellyfish sting,” she said. “Nothing to worry about.”
By now the other swimmers were showing signs of concern. Even Colin and Denise had paddled nearer the side of the boat.
“What’s going on?” Colin called out.
“Jellyfish,” I announced with enormous satisfaction.
He catapulted himself out of the water like a shot, leaving Denise behind.
“How about me?” she wailed.
“Every man for himself,” was Colin’s less than chivalrous response.
I gave their relationship a year, tops.
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 18