Michael decided to find out. A bored-looking employee greeted him with a grunt at the airline’s shabby desk.
“Any word on the two forty-five to Vieques?” Michael asked.
The man glanced at his watch.
“It’s delayed.” he said, with no obvious trace of irony.
Thanks for the update.
“Any idea when it might leave?” Michael continued, determined to wring a few drops of blood from this human turnip.
The man swiveled in his chair and looked through the window towards the howling storm.
“Soon,” he said. “Or tomorrow.”
And with that he turned back to his computer.
“Oh God, we might have to spend the night in San Juan,” Michael moaned as he returned to his seat beside me.
“No, we won’t,” said a red-haired woman sitting across from us. “I’ve been flying back and forth from this airport for fifteen years and unless the propeller falls off—and I mean that literally—we’ll fly.”
I wasn’t sure if this was comforting or not. Yes, I was anxious to get to Vieques, but an overnight stay in San Juan seemed a small price to pay when the alternative was fiery death.
As I was pondering our not-so-appealing options, the snack counter proprietor reappeared and removed the padlock from the door of his humble establishment. I darted inside like a shot.
“Do you have any liquor?” I panted.
“No,” he replied, just as my eye settled on a dusty bottle of Beefeater’s gin on the back counter.
“I’ll give you $10 for a short one,” I hazarded, slipping a crisp note across the counter.
Grudgingly he poured a miniscule drop of gin into a plastic cup. I nudged the bill back towards my side of the counter.
“Màs, por favor.” (More please.)
This time he gave me a full shot…and a bit more. “Any ice?” I asked, going for broke.
“Sí,” he answered with a sigh.
Five minutes later I was feeling slightly less gloomy about our impending deaths. Soon Michael joined me. For a mere $12 he managed to negotiate a shot of gin and a can of orange juice.
“Got any food?” I asked our surly barkeep, who was listlessly scraping food particles off the kitchen grill.
“Sí.”
“Burgers?”
“Maybe.”
“We’d like two. And fries.”
He looked mortally offended.
“Tu eres un hombre muy agradable,” (You are a very nice man), I shamelessly flattered him with my slowly-improving Spanish.
He almost-but-not-quite cracked a smile.
“With fries?” he asked.
It was almost like a party.
Or a last supper.
☼ ☼ ☼
I was just coming out of the airport restroom an hour later when Michael tore around the corner.
“We’re leaving!” he all but screamed.
Rushing into the waiting room (checking absentmindedly to make sure I’d zipped up my shorts), I found Michael and a red-faced airline employee waiting for me by the door leading to the tarmac. Both appeared to be on the brink of hyperventilation.
“So we waited four hours and now it’s a national emergency?” I couldn’t help muttering.
Michael took my arm and steered me outside.
“Let’s just get on the plane,” he said. “They say there’s a very small window of opportunity for getting us there.”
I didn’t like the sound of this. Not one bit. And as we sprinted towards the plane I liked it even less. A steady rain was still falling, and a heavy wind was blowing up from the bay. The sky was the color of lead.
As in a lead balloon.
There were just two other passengers: the red-haired woman from the waiting area and her teenage son. The mother treated us to a steady stream of lame wisecracks while the son, in the time-honored tradition of adolescent males, looked catatonically bored.
The pilot looked pretty much out of it too. I couldn’t decide if this was a good sign or not. Maybe flying in this kind of weather was about as adrenalin-generating for him as a stroll in the spring rain would be for me.
On the other hand, maybe he was in the midst of a take-no-prisoners child custody battle with his alcoholic ex-wife and had stopped caring several court appearances back if he lived or died. Hard to tell.
As we turned and began taxiing down the short runway, the rain picked up and the wind shook the small craft with a vengeance. As the pilot gunned the engine for take-off and we plowed down the runway, the plane listed so violently to the left I was pretty sure we were done for.
The teenager yawned extravagantly as we lifted off into the turbulent skies.
I hated him.
Up we crawled, giant sheets of rain washing over the plane. It was like being in a massive washing machine that was stuck on some rogue setting between rinse and spin.
“What’s your favorite restaurant on the island?” our female fellow passenger leaned back and asked.
Talk about non sequitur.
“Uh…” I muttered, my mind definitely elsewhere. Actually, I was hoping my mother would remember to recite I felt a Funeral in my Brain as she and five hundred of our closest friends scattered our ashes over Nantucket Harbor.
“How about Second Course? Have you tried it?”
“Yep, we went there New Year’s Eve,” said Michael, clearly vying with the teenager for the “Calmest Passenger in an Airline Disaster Award.”
“Good, but not great,” was the mother’s assessment.
“I like Bananas,” said the teenager, who had not spoken one word all afternoon but decided, now that we were facing certain extinction, to sprout a personality. “Their fries rule.”
Frankly I’ve always thought their fries were a bit on the soggy side. But, since my teeth were chattering so hard that my fillings were likely to fly out and crack the windows any second, I decided to keep my mouth shut and my opinion to myself.
After five minutes or so, as my fellow passengers nattered on about the pros and cons of Conuco vs El Quenepo, I noticed that we were flying in the wrong direction.
Very wrong. As in due north. And we were supposed to be flying pretty much due east. I tugged on Michael’s shirt-tail.
“Huh?” he said distractedly.
“We’re headed the wrong way.”
“I noticed that.”
“What do you think’s going on?”
“Oh, who knows.”
“But we’ve been flying north ever since we took off.”
“Holding pattern,” said the lady.
“Holding patterns are circular,” I replied.
“The fries at Bili’s aren’t bad either,” continued the teenager, obviously determined to divest himself, at this supremely inopportune moment, of all the inane thoughts he’d stored up in his brain during the previous four hours of dead silence.
Just then, the plane banked sharply to the right and began flying south again.
“Looks like we’re headed back to San Juan,” said the lady, gurgling with delight. “Now that was a short vacation.”
Just as I was pondering the fact that no jury in the world would convict me if I strangled her then and there, I turned and looked out the left-hand window and was greeted with a sight that quelled all thoughts, murderous and otherwise.
Yes, dear reader, it was a double rainbow.
Sigh.
☼ ☼ ☼
We didn’t perish in an unseemly fireball on the Isla Grande Airport runway.
In fact, we landed smoothly and were herded back into the airport, which looked depressingly familiar, most likely because we’d spent the previous four hours languishing in its narrow confines.
The tiny bar was still open, and it was there that we headed, despite the fact that we were ninety-nine percent sure we’d drunk the place as dry as the Kalahari on our previous visit.
The proprietor, not exactly a paragon of hospitality under the best of circumstances,
barely glanced up from his newspaper when we stumbled back in, damp and disgruntled. I fished yet another twenty out of my pocket and eased it across the counter.
“Anything left to drink?”
He kept reading.
“¿Por favor?”
“All gone,” he mumbled.
“Tengo sed.” (I’m thirsty.)
He lowered his paper marginally and scowled.
“Lo siento.” (Sorry.)
At least we were arguing in the same language.
I fished out another twenty.
Michael looked marginally alarmed but held his tongue—he knew better than to get between me and a bottle of Tanqueray. Flutterings of interest registered on the proprietor’s face.
“Quizà…” (perhaps) he muttered vaguely, putting aside his paper and drifting towards the back room.
Five minutes later he re-emerged with a dusty bottle of rum and a box of surprisingly plump mangoes.
“Daiquiri?” he teased.
“Hmm…” I stalled, pressing down on the twenties. “Got a blender?”
“Sí,” he replied.
We were in business.
Oddly, his next move was to scuttle out from behind the bar and lock the door of his little eatery.
“Too much customer,” he remarked to no one in particular.
Five minutes later the three of us were guzzling down the most delicious daiquiris ever. At some point—to be honest, I’m a little hazy on the exact timeline—our erstwhile flight mates (the chatty lady and her sullen offspring) rattled the locked door, trying to get in.
“!Cerrado!” our barkeep announced triumphantly.
“Closed!” I translated.
Through the door’s porthole window the woman caught my eye and shot me a distinctly spiteful look. And when we were finally airborne and winging our way towards Vieques an hour later, she maintained a decidedly frosty demeanor.
I felt bad.
Kind of.
But to be honest, I was far too relaxed to care.
Forty-Five
Vanity Project
Certain phrases are guaranteed to inspire terror in the human heart.
These include:
“I think I just heard a noise downstairs.”
“I don’t like the look of this CAT scan.”
“We’re out of vodka.”
And, perhaps most ghastly of all:
“It’s time to remodel the bathroom.”
And yet I found myself muttering this last phrase late one afternoon as I stood gazing at the master bathroom of our house in Vieques.
As a whole, the house looked terrific, which was hardly a surprise considering that we had replaced, repaired or generally updated every square inch of the place from top to bottom—with the exception of the upstairs bathroom.
This seeming oversight wasn’t because we were in love with the bathroom’s original décor. To be honest, ceramic tiles embellished with diagonal gray stripes and tiny pink roses aren’t exactly our idea of tropical chic.
We just hadn’t gotten around to it.
But standing in the shower and staring at the pink roses, just prior to my epiphany, I realized (in the tradition of Oscar Wilde) that one of us had to go—and it wasn’t going to be me. Gingerly, I broached the topic with Michael.
“You know, this place is looking great,” I commented out of nowhere, later that night as we sat in the great room reading.
He looked up from his Kindle and glanced around the space briefly.
“Sure is,” he said, returning to his story.
I leapt to my feet and nervously straightened a picture on the wall.
“Except…” I began.
He kept on reading.
“With the exception of, um, you know…”
His eyes never left the page.
“The one part we haven’t gotten to…”
“The bathroom,” he said quietly, putting down his reader with an air of ominous patience. “You think it’s time to re-do the bathroom.”
“Oh well,” I muttered evasively, not quite knowing how to proceed.
I had imagined steering the conversation in stately procession from Points A to B and eventually C, but somehow it had suddenly zipped from A to Z with lightning speed.
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” I huffed self-righteously.
He flicked some imaginary lint from the front of his polo shirt.
“Then how would you put it?”
I racked my brain for another point of entry, but nothing sprang to mind except the truth.
“I hate those pink roses.”
He sighed.
“Me too. So let’s get rid of them.”
Oh my God, I said to myself, that was ridiculously easy. And in the heat of the moment I decided to push my luck.
“How about a new shower?” I soldiered on.
“Sure, why not?” he countered, smiling almost as broadly as before.
“And a new vanity?”
There was no stopping me now.
“Fine,” he agreed, the left corner of his mouth twitching slightly.
“Wow, that’s great!” I exclaimed, grinning idiotically at my run of good fortune.
Without another word he went back to his Kindle. And I, for once, rested my case.
☼ ☼ ☼
It’s surprisingly easy to find bathroom renovation experts in Vieques.
In fact, there seem to be at least three on every corner.
Once we had decided to have our bathroom re-done and started mentioning the project to acquaintances around the island, we were bombarded with glowing recommendations.
Tanya, who sold home-baked goods at the farmers’ market every Tuesday and Thursday, assured us that she had a great guy who “practically works for free.”
Knowing from bitter experience that you get what you pay for in Vieques—which, in the case of “practically for free” would translate to “practically nothing”—we politely declined.
“My cousin is the tile-master of Vieques,” our friend Carlos at the sandwich shop proclaimed.
Really? Tile-master?
Hmm. Okay.
I made the call.
The guy’s phone manner was abrupt but oddly reassuring.
“You listen me, I give you the great price and the perfect grout.”
As improbable as it may seem that any sentence with the word grout in it could generate excitement, I decided to give him a try.
He showed up at the house an hour late the following morning with a Chihuahua puppy grumbling sleepily in the crook of his arm. His name was Edwin and he had a lazy left eye, which created the impression that he was winking all the time.
Or not. It was impossible to tell.
“This is simple job,” he said, a statement that was hauntingly reminiscent of Humberto’s cousin’s proclamation that it would be “easy” to replaster and paint the three-story garden façade of our house and replace all the windows as well.
But I was willing to play along with Edwin until it dawned on me that he had very possibly winked when he advised me that it was an easy task.
“Ha ha,” I replied knowingly, hedging my bets. “You mean difficult, right?”
His eye drifted even further afield.
“No,” he said with maddening consistency, “simple.”
“It looks tough to me,” I countered neutrally.
“Well, maybe not too simple,” he went on, obviously trying to meet me half way.
Clearly, we were getting nowhere fast.
“Call me,” I mumbled, edging towards the door.
The roving eye wandered uncertainly.
“Call me with your estimate,” I explained. “Tomorrow.”
He called three days later.
“I charge $40 an hour until job is done,” he stated baldly.
My brain reeled.
“But how long will it take?”
“Until it finish,” he replied unhelpfully.
“But sur
ely you have some idea of how long that’ll be. I mean, will it take a week…or a month?”
“Yes,” was his response.
After agonizing over his tempting offer for at least three whole minutes I called him back with the verdict.
“You must be joking.”
Or words to that effect.
☼ ☼ ☼
Meanwhile, it was back to square one for our little project.
In other words, it was time to call Jane.
“I’ve got the perfect fellow for you,” she announced. “My cousin’s husband’s uncle.”
His name was Frederico Franconi. He told me during our brief phone conversation that he hailed from Aguadilla on the big island, was the proud father of seven children and was called Freddy by all his friends.
He sounded normal enough. But when he appeared the next morning I was reminded of the old adage: Don’t judge a ceramic-tile-layer by his voice.
Let’s start with Freddy’s outfit, which might have been (charitably) characterized as “Ronald McDonald Visits Margaritaville.”
It wasn’t just his sensationally baggy yellow cargo pants that caught my eye—you could have stuffed a mariachi band and a couple of supermodels into the side pockets and still had room for a trowel—but also the broad-banded red and white T-shirt topped off with a Hawaiian style “big as a muumuu” duster.
Oh, and he had curly orange hair.
I kid you not.
All in all, it wasn’t what you’d normally think of as an interview outfit unless you’re hoping to snag a position at Barnum and Bailey’s. And yet, despite my undoubtedly aghast expression, Freddy got right down to business.
“What overall look do you want and how much do you want to spend?” he asked pointedly.
I kept expecting him to hop into a tiny car and speed around our great room or shoot seltzer water down my pants. But he remained admirably on topic.
“And what’s your color palette?” he continued.
“White,” I replied numbly.
He wrote it down. I was impressed. Maybe he wasn’t so freakish after all. And when he whipped out a camera and began snapping photos of the shower stall I was further swayed. Lots of people wear unusual clothes, I told myself—just take a stroll through the main concourse of any major American airport if you need a refresher course in what not to wear.
In fact, by the time he had measured the walls down to the last quarter inch I found myself mentally extolling the virtues of comfortable casual wear.
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 27