After breakfast the next morning I dialed Francisco’s number. He picked up immediately.
“¡Hola!” he sang out cheerfully.
“Francisco, this is Patrick.”
“¡Mi amigo!”
“Could you stop by this morning?” I screamed, straining to make myself heard about the ear-splitting background noise.
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’d like to discuss the garden with you.”
“Yes, your garden. You like?”
“Not so much,” I said.
“¿Qué?”
“What time can you stop by?”
“But you like your garden, sí?”
“No.”
“What you mean?”
He sounded genuinely hurt.
“Let’s discuss it when you get here.”
Loud slurping noises ensued, followed by a sloppy belch.
“To me, it perfect.”
“To me, it not,” I replied.
Okay, time out. Had I just uttered the phrase, To me, it not? Why, oh why did I always fall into Francisco’s fractured speech patterns when we talked?
“See you at eleven,” I said, as briskly and syntactically as possible.
He arrived at noon. Michael was ready to throttle him.
“Let me talk to him first, then you come down and have your say,” I urged, fearing bloodshed.
Francisco was leaning against his truck drinking a beer as I unlocked the carport gate. When he saw me approach he chug-a-lugged his morning brewski and tossed the empty can into the cab of his truck.
“¡Buenas dias!” he bellowed.
“Hola.”
“Welcome to your new garden,” he began, gesturing grandiosely around the barren patch of earth that, in retrospect, had been a veritable Garden of Eden before he got his hands on it.
“You love?” he asked hopefully.
“No, Francisco, I don’t love. It’s a disaster.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What you mean?”
I pulled out my notes.
“Well,” I began, “let’s see. For starters, you promised to plant a mature hedge of bougainvilleas across the bottom of the driveway. I wouldn’t exactly call what you planted mature,” I said, gesturing to the scraggly, ten-inch-tall specimens he had stuck into the ground at uneven intervals. “I’m not sure I’d even call them plants.”
“These will grew very fast,” he claimed.
“I don’t think they’ll grew at all,” I shot back.
Grew at all? The one-time-English-major in me paused for a moment of silent despair.
“And then there’s the hibiscus hedge,” I soldiered on. “Just call me curious, but is there any particular reason why you planted it out of sight behind the garbage cans?”
“This is good spot.”
“This is terrible spot. Unless you’re a garbage man who happens to like hibiscus. And now let’s talk about all the beautiful plants you removed.”
“What remove?”
“I’m glad you asked,” I said, smiling demonically, at which point Francisco began to look the teeniest bit uneasy for the first time. “I have the list right here: one palm tree, three ferns, five Heliconias and seven Calatheas. Not to mention,” I paused for dramatic effect, pointing down the steps towards the lower level, “the ten beautiful seagrapes you hacked down and replaced with $5 weeds.”
“Weeds?”
Just then, as Francisco and I squared off across the driveway, rhetorical daggers drawn, the guests staying at Corinne’s house came tiptoeing down the stairs, loaded with towels, beach chairs and a cooler.
“Good morning!” I called out cheerfully, pretending for all that world that I hadn’t just been on the brink of throttling our gardener.
“Hey,” they muttered nervously. And then, without further ado, they crammed the beach paraphernalia into the back of their car, threw open the gate and screeched down the hill in record time.
My guess was that they’d been eavesdropping through one of the back windows and had decided to escape before the shooting began.
“Weeds?” Francisco repeated, picking up exactly where we’d left off.
“That’s what I said, weeds,” I replied wearily.
As fun as this was, it was clear we were getting nowhere. I had said everything I wanted to say, and Francisco had offered a series of non-responses so unconvincing that only someone drunker than himself would have fallen for them. But then I realized that I hadn’t said the most important thing of all.
“To be honest, we feel cheated.”
This got his attention. First his face flushed bright red, then he looked as if he might cry.
“I no cheat you,” he whined. “I honest.”
Michael rounded the corner of the house as Francisco spoke.
“If you’re so honest then prove it,” he said.
Francisco looked puzzled.
“Fix our garden.”
A bubbly sigh escaped Francisco’s puffy lips.
“Okay,” he said, dangerously close to tears. “I fix.”
☼ ☼ ☼
We never saw him again.
We called his cell phone several times but he didn’t pick up. We left messages but he didn’t return them. We considered sending carrier pigeons but figured he’d just shoot them.
So we gave up.
Several thousand bucks down the drain, and our garden looked worse than it had before we started. Not quite the triumph we’d hoped for.
But it was time to move on.
Standing on the balcony early one morning, a couple of days before our return to D.C., I began formulating a new plan. First order of business: we desperately needed some sort of privacy screen between our property and the house below.
Francisco’s bougainvillea hedge was supposed to have served this purpose, but frankly the desiccated bonsai shrubs he’d ended up planting wouldn’t have shielded an ant colony from a band of leprechauns.
I tried to shift my brain into creative mode, but it wasn’t cooperating. I went inside and poured myself a jolt of caffeine. Okay, now focus. How about a trellis fence?
Hey, not bad. I’ve always liked trellis. It’s attractive and inexpensive and you can easily train vines to grow up around and over it. And a trellis fence would provide just enough privacy between our properties without seeming unfriendly.
To create an even more informal effect, how about two sections, I asked myself, one set back slightly from the other? Now I was cooking.
When Michael joined me on the balcony an hour later I’d already made a rough sketch of the fence, which I later translated into a more detailed drawing. Chances were we wouldn’t be on Vieques when the fence was built, so I wanted to be as specific as possible about what we wanted.
Michael seemed to like my idea. Now all we had to do was find someone to build it.
In the meantime, to satisfy our more immediate horticultural urges, we decided to replant the sections of the driveway area Francisco had decimated.
Off we went to the nursery, and twenty-four hours later the garden looked almost as good as new.
Francisco was already a distant memory.
Garden after replanting
Now to get our new fence built.
Through the years we had hired plenty of itinerant handymen to tackle small jobs at our house, some with great results, others not so much. But most of these moderately-skilled craftsmen had faded away.
As a result, we literally couldn’t think of anyone who might be willing to tackle such a small job without charging us a fortune.
Until we remembered that our neighbors’ house up the hill was positively bristling with lattice. I dug out Ellen Butler’s number and called her for ideas.
“I know just the guy,” she said when I described the project. “Our housekeeper’s cousin-in-law Geraldo. He installed our lattice two years ago and did a great job.”
“You’re a godsend.”
“By the way, we we
re down last week and couldn’t help noticing your garden. What happened?”
“It’s a long story, but for now we’re blaming it on Disney World.”
☼ ☼ ☼
“Sí, I can do,” Geraldo crisply informed me when I called him later that day. “When I start?”
I liked his eagerness.
Even more, I liked the way he presented himself when he stopped by the house a couple of weeks later to discuss the project in person. He was cordial and businesslike and cut quite a dashing figure—short, slim and debonair, with an expression of intense concentration. Michael observed that he was a Puerto Rican version of Ben Kingsley.
And he totally got our fence concept.
“Is nice,” he said. “You draw good.”
“Thanks,” I murmured, feeling like Margaret Bourke-White must have felt when Gandhi gave her props for her snapshots.
“We have to sink these posts in deep,” he said with dramatic emphasis. “Very deep.”
I imagined us drilling through to Shanghai, but it turned out he only meant four feet, though sunk in concrete.
Concrete? The price just went up. A lot.
“You like the lattice work I designed?” I asked, unashamedly fishing for compliments.
“Is charming.”
He named a price, we shook hands, and I went inside to break the bad news to Michael. “Bad” because the amount was about three times what we had expected. Why didn’t this surprise me?
Frankly, what did surprise me was that Geraldo was on-site early the next morning with a small crew, measuring, digging and pouring concrete. He tacked my drawing to the trunk of our mango tree and consulted it often.
Aw shucks, I thought, secretly enjoying every minute of the process.
☼ ☼ ☼
It was hard to believe that the whole fence-building project took less than two days.
First Geraldo and his crew arrived with a truckload of supplies, including a neat stack of four by four posts and a bag of concrete. Then they dug six very deep postholes, mixed up the concrete, poured it into the holes, and eased in the posts. While waiting for the posts to set, they embarked on a massive session of measuring and note-taking, and after many calculations installed brackets on the insides of the posts.
That was day one.
On day two they hauled in big sheets of lattice and sawed it into precisely-shaped panels. With crisp efficiency, they installed them on the brackets between the posts.
For Act Three they brandished a gallon of white paint and whitewashed the whole thing.
It looked pretty wonderful.
☼ ☼ ☼
As you’ve learned by now, there’s usually a footnote (or two) to these little stories.
Here’s footnote one.
We had ordered some ball-shaped finials online, a few weeks earlier, and had asked Geraldo to glue them to the posts and paint them white. Alas, the finials started falling apart about a week after the project was completed. Don’t ask me how plastic fence caps can manage to self-destruct, but they did. Trust me on this.
I noticed their untimely decrepitude one morning as I stood on our balcony sipping my first cup of coffee. Maybe, I told myself, my eyes were deceiving me. I slouched inside for a second cup of Joe then ventured back onto the balcony.
Damn!
At least one ball finial was completely gone (who knew where?) and two were listing wildly to the side. Ten minutes later I was down in the garden inspecting the damage. Had someone tampered with our fence, or were the caps just poorly constructed?
Crappy construction seemed the most likely explanation, and this was confirmed when I grasped one of the intact finials and it came off in my hand. Deep breath.
After a brief consultation with Michael, I decided to re-glue the finials to their bases and nail the bases to the posts. I even found the missing ball under a bush a few feet from the fence.
A couple of hours later the fence was complete and looked exactly as we had imagined.
We were thrilled.
Puerto Rico’s version of Ben Kingsley definitely rocks.
Lattice fence
Okay, but did you honestly believe the fence story ended there?
How touching.
Now sober up and fast forward a few weeks.
A tropical storm hit the island.
Our house was unscathed except for one thing: our favorite coconut tree fell down—right on top of our new fence.
Forty-Four
Air Scare
I wouldn’t exactly call us lazy. But once we’ve dragged our bones out of bed at four in the morning and flown several hours from D.C. to San Juan, surrounded by choruses of screeching toddlers, I admit we’re not overly enthusiastic about anything more strenuous than strolling to an adjacent concourse in San Juan International to make our connection to Vieques.
Quite literally, the last thing we want to do is jump in a taxi and sprint across the city to depart from a different airport.
But once it sank into our thick noggins that a reasonably short taxi ride could save us hundreds of dollars each time we headed to our vacation retreat, we reluctantly abandoned our practice of connecting through the big airport and switched to Isla Grande, San Juan’s regional airport, instead.
In more ways than one, the switch was a trip.
First, of course, was the taxi ride. Taxis in San Juan often smell like something really unpleasant happened in the back seat just before you got in (dismemberment maybe?), at which point the driver obviously panicked and overcompensated by blasting the interior with three or four cans of Glade.
The air conditioner is invariably cranked up to “Arctic Circle” and the windows are usually rolled all the way down, ensuring that you’re buffeted with simultaneous gusts of hot and cold air—which you hardly even notice because you’re desperately searching for your nonexistent seatbelt while trying to avoid concussion as the driver weaves wildly in and out of sixty mile-per-hour traffic.
After you whizz past lots of un-noteworthy sites, each one more generic and run-down than the one before, you suddenly spot the new convention center looming impressively to the left and, if you’re lucky, a cruise ship much bigger than most hotels hovering to your right. And then you turn down a rutted lane that may or may not qualify as an alley but doesn’t remotely resemble an airport access road.
The first time we took a taxi to Isla Grande I suspected the driver had either lost his way or was driving us to some forlorn outpost of the city to murder us. But just I as tried (and failed) to imagine expiring in such an un-lovely spot, the driver turned yet another corner and the little airport sprang into view.
At first glance it’s hard to believe that this was the main airport serving San Juan until the early ’50s, when most of the action shifted to the new, much bigger, airport across town that could accommodate jets.
Clearly no one has given more than five minutes’ thought to Isla Grande Airport since about 1975. To say it’s modest would be an understatement. Actually, a compliment. Its stark utilitarianism is outstripped only by its air of benign neglect.
On a good day it reminds me of an abandoned rec room in an obscure psychiatric facility. On less felicitous days it begs comparison with a hospital emergency waiting room in a third-world-country. And yet, in spite of its homeliness, we’ve grown to love it.
☼ ☼ ☼
The day of our first-ever flight out of Isla Grande Airport got off to an unusually smooth start. The D.C. to San Juan leg was almost on time, give or take a couple of hours. And it was populated by fewer bellowing toddlers than usual. Plus no one in our immediate vicinity appeared to be afflicted by the plague. Or even a cold. Clearly the travel gods were with us.
Our run of good luck continued in San Juan. The weather was so perfect it was almost a cliché—azure skies punctuated by the occasional puffy cloud, a light breeze, eighty degrees—and our taxi driver greeted us with such unusual courtesy we couldn’t help wondering if he had mistaken us for huma
n beings. Admittedly, the actual taxi ride from San Juan International to Isla Grande was a trifle hair-raising, but after we had peeled our nerve-endings from the interior of the van and administered a few vertebral self-adjustments, we were almost as good as new.
As I’ve already mentioned, Isla Grande Airport reminds me of the past—though not necessarily in a grand way. Instead of evoking gauzy images of bygone elegance, it lands you with a huge splat into the middle of the inelegant seventies, when fiberglass suspended ceilings were all the rage and red plastic chairs ruled the land. Throw in a dollop of chalky white paint and a shifty-eyed photo-portrait of a Puerto Rican military hero and you’ve pretty much got the vibe.
Once we had checked in I suggested we grab a drink before our flight.
“A drink?” Michael all but sneered. “In this joint?”
There are those who might have been put off by his tone but I’m not so easily deterred, particularly where alcohol is concerned.
“There’s a little snack bar over there,” I suggested hopefully.
“Good luck,” he countered.
But just as I made a beeline for the snack bar’s entrance, the proprietor sauntered out and locked the door with a spiteful little flourish. And with a padlock, no less. I’m not kidding.
Then he scuttled away, leaving us dry and not at all high. With the specter of sobriety rearing its ugly head, we broke out our Kindles and attempted to distract ourselves for the next hour or so with literature instead of liquor.
But just as we were beginning to immerse ourselves in our respective reading material we noticed that the room was beginning to grow appreciably darker. What had happened to our perfect day? A quick glance through the smudged airport window told the story. A big thunderstorm was rolling in.
Fast.
☼ ☼ ☼
Even by tropical standards it was a doozy.
Vast sheets of water plummeted down from the heavens and pounded the airport roof. The lights flickered. The jerry-built structure trembled and groaned.
Our scheduled departure time came and went and no one said a word. In fact it wasn’t entirely clear if anyone working at the airport had even noticed the apocalyptic deluge wreaking havoc just outside the door.
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 26