by Chris Knopf
“Delicioso,” I told her.
“Oui, très délicieux.”
I walked off the plane at the Luis Muñoz Marín airport and wondered, now what? I wound my way through the throngs of Puerto Ricans and off islanders coming and going to the car rental area, where I asked at the first counter what they had in the way of a four-wheel-drive vehicle. They had several, with options boiled down to big, medium, or small, and I picked the middling one, not knowing the girth of the roads to come.
The guy at the counter asked if I needed insurance. I told him I wasn’t sure.
“Where is the señor staying?”
I showed him on a map where the Loventeers’ campus was located, up in the hills near the town of La Selva Bendita, the Blessed Jungle. He looked concerned.
“Let me show you our premium plan.”
He also made a reservation for me at a resort hotel in the Condado area of San Juan, a good place to alight and gather myself before moving inland. I think he was pleased I didn’t hesitate at the choice, hoping maybe I’d just settle down and spend time at the beach with a flow of mojitos and give up on this mountain exploration.
I was traveling light, with just a duffel bag packed with a few clothes wrapped as a buffer around my tablet and laptop. I used the phone itself to guide me on the quick trip to the hotel, during which I marveled at the insulated comfort of the modern SUV, almost asphyxiating on the new-car smell and getting hypnotized by the display of state-of-the-art LEDs.
I called Amanda to complain.
“What’s the world coming to?” I asked her.
“The world is coming along fine. You just need to get out of North Sea once in a while.”
“I remember when Dubai was a colorful little trading town selling pearl necklaces and smuggled gold.”
“My mother remembered cows grazing on dune grass in Southampton Village,” she said. “What’s your point?”
“How’s Eddie?”
“Voracious. Can’t understand why he doesn’t gain weight.”
“He’s on the Beach Foraging Workout. Great aerobics bolstered by meals of rotting sea life.”
“I might try it,” she said.
“Not necessary. You look great.”
“You think so?”
Amanda knew, intellectually, she was an extraordinary specimen of middle-aged loveliness, but was still a bit insecure about it, which no amount of reassurance would ever completely dispel. Not vain, exactly, but unsure how to traverse the inevitable transitions to come.
“I do.”
We ambled through meaningless conversation until I arrived at my hotel, when she let me go. The reception area was open to the outside, allowing a silken breeze to animate huge potted palms and shuffle the paperwork when I was signing in. A tiny young woman with eyelashes to her forehead tried to fill me in on all the hotel’s seductive amenities, but I told her I was just stopping over on the way to other parts of the island. She showed no disappointment.
“Maybe a little swim before you go,” she said. “The sea,” pointing a long, thin finger to the north, “or the pool, open twenty-four hours a day. We have towels.”
“And a bar?”
“By the pool.”
It had what looked like a thatched roof, wicker stools, and a floriferous jungle of local plant life taking up most of the space. I sat down and impulsively felt the surface of the bar, made of joined planks of dark tropical wood sealed under about an inch of clear urethane.
“Like what you feel?” asked the tall, shaggy Anglo bartender.
“I do. Not easy to get this stuff so smooth.”
“Local craftsmen, dude. Rebuilt this whole place after Maria in, like, six months. Where you from?”
“New York. It’s hotter up there,” I said.
“PR, man. Fucking great weather year-round, if you don’t mind the occasional Category 24, end-of-the-world, zombie apocalypse fucking hurricane.”
“You were here?”
“Oh, yeah. Had this shack over in Loíza, which is down the coast from here, but super funky, you know, like Venice Beach meets the Ninth Ward meets, I don’t know what, Oahu? Not much there is exactly built to hurricane specifications. Spent the whole storm in the bathroom, which was cool, since I had a place to pee. Until water came up through the john, which wasn’t so cool. Biggest problem was keeping my man Drunk Carlito’s face above the water, since he was passed out the whole time. After the wind stopped, we went outside and like the bathroom was the only thing left standing.”
I asked him what they did after that.
“Drunk Carlito asked if it was okay for him to take off all his clothes, and I said, Carlito, man, that is totally not okay. But he said, the world’s been destroyed, like it sort of was, so we can do what we want. Which I almost believed until the US Army eventually dropped out of the sky and informed us otherwise. Do you want another one of those Swedish vodkas? I’d do ’em myself, only they overstimulate the gastric juices.”
I got another round and ate some food to soak up the consequences. The bartender, whose name tag identified him as Slope, coasted by once in a while to check up on me. I asked him how he ended up in Puerto Rico. He said that had yet to be clearly determined.
“I was rehearsing with a band in a house on the Outer Banks, then I was here. The stuff in the middle is a little vague. Memory can play tricks on you.”
“What happened to the band?”
“Not sure about that either.”
I asked him about La Selva Bendita, where the volunteers had their local campus, without mentioning the organization by name.
“No bueno,” he said. “Maria kicked the shit out of them. Why do you ask?”
“Read about it, that’s all.”
“No place for touristas, amigo. Stick around here. We got the Caribbean and a pool.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I let him get back to his other customers for a while, then when he wandered back, asked him where I could buy a used four-wheel-drive vehicle to replace my rental before traveling up into the mountains.
“Why do you want to do that?” he asked.
“Don’t want to call undue attention to myself.”
He studied me with a look that didn’t need interpretation. Then said, “Well, it’s pretty simple. You find a car in the want ads or online. You go meet with the owner to check it out, do a test drive, squabble over the price, all of that. Then both of you go to Obras Públicas to pay off any fines he’s got piled up. When that’s paid off, you’ll have to buy sellos, these stamps that show you’re in the clear. Then both of you just have to stand in line for about a week to get the title, though you’ll have to prove you’re a resident of PR. After that, you pay for the car, then go get an emissions inspection, which usually amounts to a guy in a gas station charging about twenty bucks to glance at the car and say it’s all shipshape. Then you need to go to another colecturia office to buy a marbete, a sticker you put on the window, which proves it’s registered and covered by liability insurance, which’ll cost you another hundred and fifty bucks, or so. Then you drive off a happy new owner. Piece of cake.”
“Or?”
“I get my man Drunk Carlito to rent you his spare Wrangler for about forty bucks a day, paid in advance. With another two thousand in collateral I’ll hold onto till you get back.”
“You can make that deal on your own?”
“I make all of Carlito’s deals. Since he’s, like, drunk all the time.”
The transaction moved fluidly from there, since the white Wrangler was in the parking lot and the hotel was able to use my credit card to advance me the necessary cash. I asked Slope how he was going to get home, and he pointed to the street in front of us.
“Bus station four blocks thataway, on foot. Exercise will do me good,” he said, handing over the keys. “If you get busted for anything, I’m saying it was just a loan to avoid any accessory-before-the fact shit. Appreciate you honoring that.”
When he went
back to the bar, I examined my new ride, which was in reasonably good shape, if you overlooked dinged fenders and the subtle whiff of mildew, apparently from losing part of the soft top in Maria. It was a stick shift, like my Cherokee, and the gauges looked to be in familiar places.
I cleaned out an assortment of local and imported beer bottles and cans from the back seat and trunk area and went back inside to sign for my bar bill. Before heading to my room, I asked Slope if he had a first name.
“Slippery,” he said. “But no need to stand on formalities.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I turned in the luxury SUV at the rental company’s San Juan office, checked out of the hotel, and tossed my duffel bag in Carlito’s Wrangler.
I wore a white T-shirt, jeans, and the lightweight hiking boots I used on the job. My first stop was a hardware store, where I bought a one-inch-diameter wooden dowel, a coping saw, and a roll of duct tape. I cut the dowel down to about eighteen inches in length, wrapped one end with the tape, and stowed the result under the front seat.
The air was wet with wind-driven humidity, the sun behind a veil of haze. I had the radio on, trying to keep up with the rapid-fire, English-infested Puerto Rican Spanish. The GPS on my smartphone plotted the course, but I kept track with a paper map open on the passenger seat in case the signal failed.
As I moved from the traffic-clogged highways around San Juan, then onto the minor arteries, and finally entirely rural roads that wound their way up into the hills, the Puerto Rico of my prior visits emerged. I remembered a dense tree canopy and exuberant tangles of tropical foliage, much of which had made a spirited comeback, I was happy to see. Stalwart plastered concrete and cinder-block structures painted faded shades of yellow, gold, green, and pink, stood defiant in the midst of the destroyed flora spilled around the properties, much of which had been gathered into piles to await further resolution.
Blue FEMA tarps were in evidence on pitched roofs, but so was new metal and tile. Other buildings were dejected wreckage—crumbling, abandoned, and left for dead. I wondered how long they’d stand there and how deep their local stories would become.
The Jeep’s capable traction in four-wheel-drive soon proved its utility over roads that were never a model of fine finish, potholes and crumbled shoulders now abundant and treacherous as I climbed farther up. Not an uncommon vehicle in those parts, it drew little notice. I probably wouldn’t either, curly-haired and bent-nosed as I was, looking Latin enough to pass for a native.
A dog, about Eddie’s size, though skinny and shorthaired, walked out into the road and stopped, looking my way with hostility shaded by indifference. Slow moving as I was, it wasn’t hard to pull up to a halt. I waited him out, finally tapping my horn, which resigned him to moving on along.
I could easily imagine some muttering under his breath.
As I came up to each crossroad, I consulted the GPS, which gave me the answer. The mechanical voice mispronounced the street names, but was close enough for me to decipher what to do. There was no setting that would tell it to speak like a regular Puerto Rican.
About two hours in, moving at about ten miles an hour max, I could see that I needed another half hour to get even close to my destination, assuming increasing up and down travel, shown as a curvy line on the GPS map. So I began to look for a place to stay the night.
I asked Google its opinion of my options, and it just sent me back to the north coast. I would have appreciated, “Sorry, man, you’re on your own.” Since I was.
I still had solid cell service, surprisingly, and was tempted to call Amanda, but thought better of it. Nothing I could say would make her feel better about me being here, and it would only make me feel worse about not being there.
Little businesses still appeared at intersections, so I pulled into a tumbled-down colmado of indistinct character to consult.
After buying some water and a bag of alcapurrias, I asked the kid at the cash register if he knew where I could put in for the night. He asked me if I was from Mexico.
“Nah,” I told him in my inflected Spanish. “I’m from New York. Most of the guys I talk to are Mexican, or from Central America, and that messes with my accent.”
“My Uncle Xavier lives in Brooklyn,” he said in English. “No one here understand him anymore. Talks like a Yankee.”
“So do you,” I said. “Which is good, since the Yankees are going to win the World Series this year.”
“You better believe it,” he said. “My cousin has a tourist hotel in La Selva Bendita. I think they’re open. I can call her and ask.”
I gave him my smartphone and he punched in the number. After a few moments of back and forth, he handed me the phone. “She say maybe.”
The woman on the other end of the line sounded tired.
“How many nights?” she asked in Spanish, without preamble.
“Just tonight, I think.”
“Pay in cash. Power may be on, may be off. We have candles.”
“That’s fine. Just need a bed.”
“We have a generator, but you’ll have to pay for gas,” she said.
“That’s okay. Probably won’t need it.”
“Give me back to my cousin.”
The two of them seemed to be catching up on family matters. The kid looked at me when she was talking and nodded his head, saying something like, “Seems okay. Just an old guy from New York.”
After hanging up, he pulled out a road map and showed me where to go. It was farther up into the hills, with a little road winding through lots of green shading.
“People go there for the rain forest,” he said, “though to me it’s just the campo. Full of things that bite.”
“Thanks for this,” I said, handing him a twenty-dollar bill, to his pleasant surprise. He suddenly looked more cooperative.
“I can take you around here if you want,” he said. “We can look for monkeys.”
“There’re no monkeys in Puerto Rico.”
“Escaped from medical labs, man. They’re out there.”
“Maybe later. I know where to find you.”
“Planet of the Apes, man, I’m just saying.”
Night had fallen, and it took about a half hour to wend my way up the narrow road, once paved, but now little more than a gravelly path, to a house lit up within the tangled overgrowth as if signaling the way.
An angular, black-haired, middle-aged woman wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a faded “I Love New York” T-shirt came out to greet me.
“I only have a casita over there,” she said, pointing down a pathway. “It has a bed and running water, everything clean.”
“Eso es todo lo que necesito,” I told her. That’s all I need.
“So walk this way,” she said, with a big wave of her arm.
I followed her carrying my duffel bag. Ten minutes later, we arrived at a hut that reminded me of the motel cabins in the Hamptons that proliferated before the war and were still plentiful when I was growing up. One room with a bed and desk, plus a separate bathroom with sink, toilet, and shower. Smelled moldier than my Wrangler, but no leaping or soaring insects within view. The lizards had already headed for their escape routes.
I gave her the night’s rent in cash and reemphasized my appreciation for her hospitality. She wasn’t impressed, but spoke as if she was.
“We’re working hard to get up and going again,” she said. “Tell your New York friends. Remind them Puerto Ricans are American.”
“I will.”
She looked both dismissive and reluctant to leave.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
I had a cover story ready, though it embarrassed me to use it.
“I’m writing an article for a newspaper.”
Her disdain deepened.
“You know how many of you assholes came through here after Maria?” she said, in perfect, accent-free English.
I was tired, unnerved by the strangeness of driving up into the hills and finding a home for the night, w
hich might have influenced my response.
“I don’t know,” I said. “A couple thousand? I’m here on a follow-up. Just tell me what you want and I promise it’ll get into my story.”
She examined me the way Slippery Slope had done back at the bar in the fancy hotel.
“What happened to your nose?” she asked.
“Busted in a professional boxing match. By a Filipino guy named Rene Ruiz. I still managed to knock him out, though he lives on every time I breathe.”
“I think you’re lying,” she said.
“Not about the nose. Just let me go to sleep and I’ll be out of your hair by the morning.”
She went into the bathroom and came back holding a white towel, which she tossed in my lap.
“Be sure to do that. You stink of trouble.”
“I’ll wash it off. Promise,” I said, holding up the towel.
Before she could leave the little room, I said, “Not all trouble is bad.”
She had a broad face, unaccustomed to subtle expression, though it almost seemed to give up a little.
“We’ll talk about that if I ever see you again,” she said, softly closing the door.
I OVERSLEPT the next morning. I dreamed of missing trains and losing valuable possessions. I protested loudly, but no one seemed to care. At one point, Eddie was lost in San Juan and Amanda unable to call me back on my smartphone, claiming technical incompetence, which in the dream I thought was a subterfuge. Art Reynolds was hanging behind her, grinning.
I woke in a sweat. The bed, made up of coarse cotton, was soaked through. Wet and hot inside the sheets, my face was cool, and my arms, out in the air, were blanching from the cold. It was confusing.
The nasty dreams, conflating with reality, lingered. I yelled “Jesus Christ” into the air and heard “He is our Savior” in return.
The casita’s owner was outside my door, knocking. I got into my jeans and T-shirt and answered.
“Wanted to be sure you’re not dead in there,” she said. “You said you’d be long gone by now.”
