Had I committed crabicide?
Racked with guilt all evening, I decided not to tell Michael what I’d done. I felt sure he’d call the humane society and have me hauled away in cuffs. I was just glad he didn’t suggest shellfish for dinner.
And when I rushed to the balcony the next morning I was hugely relieved to see that my crab friend had disappeared. Clearly it had found its bearings and discovered some new surface to cling to.
With a contented sigh, I stumbled back inside to pour my first cup of coffee. All was right in the crab world.
But after a few sips an even more ominous thought occurred to me. What if a dog had eaten it?
Or an iguana?
And although I couldn’t actually imagine such a hard and intractable creature making much of a meal, one never knew. Lobsters, for example, don’t look all that enticing at first glance either.
So, of course, five minutes later I was roaming the sideyard in my flip flops searching for my lost crustacean. It didn’t help matters that I had begun to think of him as Mr. Krabs from Sponge Bob Squarepants.
When Michael wandered out onto the balcony ten minutes later I was still searching in vain for my new pet.
“Okay,” he said in his most patient voice, regarding me with something resembling pity. “I give up. What’s the story?”
It occurred to me to lie, but what story could I concoct that would be remotely feasible?
“I’m looking for a crab,” I admitted.
Michael glanced at me sleepily across the early morning light.
“You might have better luck at the beach.”
“Good idea,” I said.
After a while he went inside, no doubt to call my therapist.
A few minutes later I found Mr. Krabs clinging to the far side of our back door stoop.
If I hadn’t known better I would have sworn he waved a claw lazily in my general direction.
Whether it was a greeting or an accusation, it’s impossible to say.
☼ ☼ ☼
Speaking of local fauna.
Each time we browsed through the “Comments and Suggestions” book Jane had advised us to position strategically on our coffee table, we noticed that almost every entry mentioned the local roosters.
Yep, roosters.
People seemed to be obsessed with them.
While some were big fans of these strutting, highly vocal fowl (“they add local color and the crowing sound is so relaxing”), others considered them the poultry equivalent of the anti-Christ. (“Can’t they be stopped??”). For the latter group, we began leaving disposable earplugs in the medicine cabinet.
Admittedly, the roosters of Vieques take a bit of getting used to.
The first time we visited the island—the time I was deathly ill and fully expecting to die any second—the teeming rooster population (along with the goats next door) worked overtime to make sure I didn’t get a wink of sleep.
I had already encountered a similar issue when I lived in Key West. There the rooster problem was deemed so grave that some city commissioners declared war on the island’s roosters. Naturally, within minutes a Rooster Rescue Team was formed to fight back. Those wacky Floridians.
In Vieques, no one seems to like (or hate) the roosters except tourists. The locals barely seem to notice them at all except when they’re participating in cock fights. But let’s not go there.
Having spent part of my childhood on my grandparents’ farm, I’m not particularly fazed by chickens, even of the feral variety. Yes, I admit it’s highly annoying when they crow so loudly they wake you up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night. But I’d rather be roused from my slumbers by a rooster than a garbage truck. Call me provincial if you like.
Michael has a slightly less laissez-faire attitude towards our feathered friends. For starters, he thoroughly despises trespassers of any sort—don’t set foot on his property unless you’ve been invited. Even worse, he suspects the roosters of having collaborated with the island’s wild horses to eat our garden.
During our first couple of years in Vieques, Michael’s enmity towards the roosters escalated from mild irritation to a state of guerilla warfare. He bought a slingshot, which I didn’t consider a particularly inspired idea. Our neighbors, I suspected, weren’t likely to enjoy the sight of Michael taking potshots at the local fauna.
But he was determined.
Luckily, every time he became agitated enough to strike, he had trouble finding his slingshot. This suited me fine. When he began leaving the slingshot on the balcony ledge, to make sure he was armed the next time an opportunity presented itself, I routinely tipped it into the garden or brought it inside and placed it somewhere he might accidentally have put it himself.
The occasional curse word ensued, but our neighborhood roosters remained unscathed.
I found myself coping with the situation through home décor. It is surprising how many rooster-themed decorative items there are out there. I found a handsome rooster poster and hung it in one of the bedrooms. We stumbled across a carved plaque of a rooster at a flea market in D.C. and bought it for the downstairs kitchenette. A friend, picking up on the general theme, gave us a set of rooster-topped swizzle sticks.
Lesson of the day: if you can’t destroy your enemy, you can at least make fun of him through home accessories.
☼ ☼ ☼
Please bear with me while I ramble on a bit more about the critters of Vieques.
One of the things we love about the island is that nature is “in your face” every day. It’s never far away. Even when you’re walking up Isabel’s main street, the ocean is right in front of you.
Colorful birds swoop overhead. Big, irritable-looking iguanas loll in the viaduct nearby. We once saw a man leading two goat-kids on leashes down a side street.
Goat-kids out for a walk
One of Vieques’ most enchanting auditory experiences is brought to you courtesy of the island’s teeming frog population, most notably coquis, which are the national symbol of Puerto Rico. These tiny frogs enliven the night with their double-note chirp that sounds, perhaps not coincidentally, like “ko-kee.”
Visitors become so enthralled with the call of the coqui that they sometimes buy small devices at the San Juan airport reproducing the coqui sound on an endless loop. I’ve never bought one, though it might be just the thing to warm up a snowy night in D.C.
Some local creatures aren’t quite so endearing. Standing on our balcony at night we can see (and occasionally hear) bats hurtling from tree to tree. For such a small place, the island is home to lots of different kinds of bats, including highly-specialized types such as “single leaf” and “brown flower” varieties.
Surprisingly, bats are the only terrestrial mammals native to Puerto Rico (all other species were introduced by humans, including cats, goats, sheep and mongooses). Some bats eat fruit. A few eat fish—yes, fish. Nearly all of them eat insects, which prevents the island’s human inhabitants from being carried away bodily by mosquitoes. Oh, and the bats also pollinate flowers. They’re hard-working little buggers.
Speaking of insects, the island has zillions of different kinds, some of them fairly intimidating. We saw a big, hairy tarantula strolling his way across our driveway one day with a slightly self-conscious air.
You can hardly blame him for looking dodgy—you’d have a complex too if everyone you encountered screamed and ran away in terror. Plus, his fangs looked moist, as if he were drooling, which isn’t a particularly attractive look on anyone.
Then there are centipedes, which can grow up to a foot long and are almost always grumpy when disturbed. Their sting can be terrifically painful, even lethal on rare occasions.
I read a blog recently, in which a college student described waking up one morning in a B&B in Esperanza, to find an enormous centipede crawling up his bare thigh towards his private parts. His yelp of horror brought the management bolting upstairs, fearing fire, dismemberment or God knows what else.
&
nbsp; When they learned the source of their guest’s panic they couldn’t help laughing (though sympathetically, I’m sure) at his predicament.
I ought to sue those bastards, he grumbled in his blog.
Might as well sue Mother Nature.
To make things even more exciting, there are scorpions in Vieques. Although shy by nature, if disturbed they will make their displeasure known in no uncertain terms with a nasty sting.
We’re constantly being assured that none of these insects (except maybe the centipede) is particularly poisonous. In the abstract, I find this somewhat comforting. But if I discovered a centipede crawling up my leg, I’m not sure my reaction would be appreciably more mature than the college student’s shrieks of horror.
Thirty-Two
Guests Sweet
It was official.
At long last, our fully-furnished house—upstairs and downstairs—was ready to hit the rental market.
We changed our web pages to reflect our exalted new status as a three-bedroom property instead of a “one,” and sat back to wait for the bookings to pour in.
But they didn’t.
Whereas the previous October we had received twenty or thirty inquiries, this October we got just six. We were mystified. Was it the economy? Or was it some subtle change in the wording of our web pages that was turning off prospective guests? We called Jane and asked her, somewhat breathlessly, exactly what we’d done wrong.
“Nothing that I know of,” she said. “By the way, have you cut back on your meds?”
She had a subtle way of letting you know when she thought you were going off the rails.
We contacted the handful of other people we knew who owned rental houses on the island to ask if their bookings were down.
“Actually we’re doing better than last year,” replied Veronica, a divorcée from Boston who had bought a house on Vieques with her son and daughter-in-law. “Of course we’re just a two-bedroom. I’ve heard the bigger houses are having trouble this year.”
This was disheartening. Michael logged on to a Vieques travel website and checked out three-bedroom rentals. The previous year there had been thirty-two (the year before, only nineteen). This year there were fifty-eight.
Had we inadvertently positioned our house in the most competitive rental market on the island? We discussed offering the place either as a one- or three-bedroom, but after all our hard work we weren’t ready to offer the one-bedroom option yet. Maybe more inquiries about the three-bedroom would come in soon.
Three weeks before Christmas the New York Times ran an article about Vieques in its Sunday travel section.
“This will do it,” we said, high-fiving each other. “We’re in.”
But while the article generated lots more emails from potential renters in New York, Boston and Washington, bookings remained sluggish.
For the first time, we found ourselves trying to convince people to rent our house. Neither of us felt comfortable doing this. Previously all we’d had to do was respond to email queries about the house; now we started calling potential renters who listed a phone number.
Sometimes these calls didn’t go so well. Howard from New York answered his phone with a growl when I called in response to his email about renting the house over New Year’s.
“I don’t remember sending you an email,” he barked. “Where’s your house?”
“Vieques.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico.”
“Oh, Puerto Rico,” he said, upgrading his tone from nasty to merely unpleasant. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“I, uh…”
“Look, I’m busy here, what’s the deal?”
Had rentals not been so tough that season I would’ve proposed a very specific deal involving the insertion of the phone into his most intimate place, but we needed the business. Deep breath.
“You sent me an email about renting our house in Vieques over New Year’s. I’m calling to say that the house is available that week if you’re still interested.”
“Where did you say it is?”
“Vieques Island, off the coast of Puerto Rico.”
“Sounds pretty nice.”
“It is.”
Silence.
“Are you trying to sell me something?”
“No sir, it’s a rental. The house isn’t for sale. And you contacted me, not the other way around.”
“Hey buddy, no need to get testy.”
Another very deep breath.
“Would you like me to email you a link to our web page? Then you can have a look at the house and see what you think.”
“Suit yourself.”
Reluctantly, I sent him the link. An hour later he called back.
“Your house is fabulous.”
I was taken aback. How had the lunatic I’d spoken to just a few minutes earlier morphed into this perfectly polite man?
“Oh, thanks.”
“We’ll take it.”
“Uh, okay…”
“Is there a problem?”
“No, not at all, you just seemed so uncertain before.”
“Look kid,” he said in a low voice, as if he were confiding a state secret, “I’m a decision guy. I think about something, I make up my mind, just like that. And I’m very seldom wrong.”
“Sounds good,” I said, experiencing the habitual ditherer’s twinge of envy at such fabulous decisiveness.
“And you’ll make sure I’m not wrong this time, won’t you?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
What had I gotten us into? If this guy’s sheets weren’t perfectly pressed, I was pretty sure Michael and I would end up in cement shoes at the bottom of the Hudson. But then again, did I mention that we needed the business?
Howard called me every day for the next couple of weeks. Some days he was grouchy, some days he was downright charming. You never knew which Howard you were going to get when you answered the phone.
In some ways I preferred Nasty Howard. At least you knew where you stood with him. Nice Howard was unsettlingly pleasant, as if he were doing an impersonation of a kind, caring person and—having no actual experience of such a creature—wasn’t quite sure how far to take the performance.
Unfailingly, Nice Howard overplayed his hand, though hints of Nasty Howard crept in even when he was trying his hardest to be good.
“Thank you so much for letting us stay in your beautiful house,” he said one day.
I almost laughed at his unctuousness.
“You’re welcome, but you haven’t even seen it yet.”
“You mean it’s not beautiful?”
“Well, we think it is.”
“How about other people? What do they say?”
“We’ve gotten great reviews.”
“Did you write them yourselves?”
“No, Howard, we wouldn’t do that. Our guests wrote them. They genuinely liked the house.”
“Of course they did. It’s beautiful.”
“It certainly is.”
Jane called us the day Howard and his girlfriend arrived.
“He’s mean to his wife.”
“She’s not his wife, just his girlfriend.”
“Good for her. He’s a jerk.”
“What happened?”
“She asked if you can make bread from breadfruit. He told her she was an idiot.”
“Charming. What do they look like?”
I always asked this when I got the chance. I couldn’t help wanting to know what the people who slept in our bed looked like.
“He’s short, chubby and balding, she’s Asian and pretty, with long fingernails.”
“Is he nice to you?”
“Yes, almost annoyingly so. It’s such a contrast to the way he treats his girlfriend.”
“He’s a little schizoid.”
“You think? By the way, what do you know about this guy’s background?”
“I think he might be Mafia.”<
br />
“Really?” she said, and for the first time since I’d known her I heard something like awe in Jane’s voice. “I think I’ll take over some extra towels this afternoon.”
☼ ☼ ☼
Speaking of linens and difficult guests.
Although it took us a while to catch on, after a few months we realized that even if your house isn’t the next best thing to the Ritz, your guests will think it’s pretty swell if you have nice linens.
Yep, that’s what I said. Nice linens.
As in big fluffy white towels and high-thread-count sheets.
I can’t emphasize this point enough.
Yes, our house is always super-clean, thanks to Jane and her tireless crew, and attractively decorated, thanks to random moments of inspiration on our part, but there are many swankier properties on the island.
And yet, even if something goes completely haywire—the electricity shuts off, the phone decides to take a week-long break—we get consistently positive feedback from our guests.
Admittedly we try to anticipate their every need, right down to cocktail shakers, muffin tins, and first aid kits.
But even so, soft goods seem to be the tipping point.
Case in point: Fiona, an upcoming guest from Boston, who had scared us half to death with her endless list of demands in the weeks leading up to her stay.
She called me on a daily basis to ask if our property included:
•a gym
•a cappuccino maker
•a lap pool
•remote-controlled retractable windows
•an infinity pool
•an Aga stove (feel free to look it up)
When I replied, “unfortunately we don’t” to her questions—apologetically at first and then slightly less so as the weeks wore on—she seemed enormously miffed.
I kept referring her back to our web page, but it didn’t seem to matter. Within twenty-four hours she’d simply call back with yet another bizarro question.
“Are there any houses within five hundred yards of your property line?”
“Yes,” I replied, “our house is in a quiet residential neighborhood.”
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 20