by Chris Knopf
“Sorry. I overslept, something I never do.”
“Travel will do that. Happens to me when I go see my sister in Cincinnati.”
“I’ll be out of here soon as I can.”
“My nephews are up at the house. They’ll see that you are,” she said, and stalked away.
True to her word, a pair of young guys were leaning against the front of the Wrangler, arms folded in a caricature of dimwitted pugnaciousness. One taller than the other, with more or less the same-looking face. Each wore a baseball hat from competing National League teams. I walked past them and opened the Jeep, putting my duffel in the back. The shorter of the two stepped around and stood in front of the driver’s side door.
“Good morning, guys. How’s it going?” I said in Spanish.
“You got to leave,” said the guy in front of me, wearing a Phillies cap.
“Happy to do it, soon as you move out of the way.”
“Maybe quicker if we carry you,” said the other one, a supporter of the Mets.
“Feet first,” said Phillies cap.
“Doesn’t seem all that efficient,” I said. “Why don’t I just drive away?”
“We want to know what you’re doing in La Selva Bendita.”
They were different heights, and the shorter one much heavier, more fleshy than toned.
“I want to know why the swallows always return to Capistrano,” I said, “but I’ll probably never find out.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Yes, it is. But what about, I’m just passing through?”
“Why stay here?” one of them asked.
“It’s a nice place. And your aunt is a nice lady.”
“She don’t like you,” Phillies cap said in English.
“That’s too bad, since I like her. Why the attitude? I’m just trying to leave.”
The tall guy in the Mets cap moved next to his brother, too close to get his longer arms into play. They had their fists partially raised, but the way they stood and their foot placement were all wrong. Amateurs.
“You might not know about Capistrano, but are you familiar with Newton’s Laws of Motion?” I asked them, stepping away from the car and flexing my hands. “Number three is ‘for every action there’s an opposite and equal reaction.’ They teach you that in school?”
“Newton who?”
“Sir Isaac. Famous for his apple.”
They separated a little, which was actually better for me, though it was clear we were about to get into it. It didn’t make me happy, so soon after waking up with my head still full of jittery nightmares.
“You’re talking nonsense,” said Mets cap.
“You’re a dumb fucker,” said his brother, or the equivalent in Spanish. “Dumb fucking gringo.”
“That’s an ugly word. I don’t like it,” I said.
“See if you like this,” said Phillies cap, taking a swing he’d telegraphed all the way from San Juan. I blocked it with my left and stuck a right jab in his nose, which I know from personal experience hurts like hell. He stumbled back and fell over his own feet.
“Newton’s third law explained,” I said. “I punch you, you fall down.”
Which is what I also did with Mets cap, who went over like a tree.
I could tell that Phillies cap was neither stupid, nor lacking in courage, though practice in the ring might have improved his effectiveness. He scrambled up onto his feet, and thinking he had a weight advantage, bent over, and came in swinging blind. Blind being the operative word. I stepped aside and let him go by, then swiveled and hit him in the right kidney. This also really hurts, which is why boxing rules say you can’t do it. Not that we didn’t try anyway.
He grabbed his side and stood up straight, exposing his face, which allowed me time to gather up a cowboy roundhouse, which I used to launch him off his feet and back onto the ground, where I hoped he’d stay. Just in case, I got my homemade club from under the driver’s seat and stood at the ready.
“You fucking idiots, what the hell are you doing?” their aunt yelled, running down the front path holding a broom.
“I was trying to leave,” I said, though she ignored me and went after her nephews, whacking them with the broom. I have a pretty good command of colloquial Spanish, even the Puerto Rican variety, but she called them things I’d never heard before.
“I said to make sure he leaves, not get into a fight, imbéciles!” was the gist of her complaint.
Not caring how the conflict might resolve, I just got in the Jeep and rode away, flexing my right fist to make sure I hadn’t broken anything. Except for a small cut on my knuckles, all was well.
“So much for undue attention,” I said out loud, the kind of thing I’d say to Eddie, but he wasn’t there.
I wound back down the bumpy, narrow, barely manageable road, keeping the rest of my thoughts to myself.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It took about a half hour of rotten roads and up and down driving to get to the entrance of Worldwide Loventeers, Puerto Rico Campus, in La Selva Bendita. I drove by without looking closely and stopped where a guy was working on the side of the road. He had a big wrench on a piece of pipe sticking up out of the ground; I assumed a well head, but it could have been anything. I asked in Spanish where a man could get a drink in those parts.
I didn’t need one, but there’s no better way to approach unfamiliar terrain than via the local bar. He gave me directions to a place called El Rancho de Velilla down the road where I could get lunch and a beer. He said it looked like a house, but if you went around back, there were outside tables and a bar tucked up under a freestanding metal roof, since Maria had blown away the original building. He said to get the arroz con habichuelas with chopped-up sausage.
Everything was as advertised, though he’d failed to mention the gutted carcass of a small car up on jacks in front of the place. Two of the plastic tables were occupied by men hunched over their meals beneath fresh orange and red umbrellas. I sat at the bar under the improvised shelter, somewhat upwind from the wood-fried grill, and asked the barmaid for a Medalla Light to go with my arroz con habichuelas.
She left me alone to eat so it wasn’t until she cleared the empty plates that I asked about Worldwide Loventeers, and if they employed people from around the area.
“They do, thank God,” she said. She described how Maria had virtually wiped out the local plantain plantations and all the little businesses that served the agriculture business, making the Loventeers one of the few places to find work. She wasn’t sure if they took Mexicans without visas, assuming my status from my accent.
“But if you have English and education, they might not care,” she said, more advice than speculation. She left the bar for a moment and came back with a ragged printout that listed employment opportunities on the campus. As she suggested, there were plenty of openings to work in the office, requiring good English skills, but also in construction, all trades welcome. I asked about that and she said they were still rebuilding after the hurricane, and most of the local tradesmen had left for the coasts where the need was vast and the money far better.
“My brother is in Mayagüez fixing roofs for the university,” she said. “Our mother still has a FEMA tarp on hers, but I don’t blame him. We’re happy to get money sent to us every month. It paid for gasoline for the generator until the power came back on after nine months. My mother refuses to leave her house. She’s afraid if she leaves they’ll never let her come back.”
She drifted away to help other customers, and when she came back I asked her how most people fared in the storm.
“They say it sounds like a freight train, but no freight train is that loud. Our roof stayed on, but water came in from all sides and from up above. I keep thinking it’s almost over, then it gets worse. And this is for hours. Ruined everything. My plants with flowers, all gone. I don’t even know what they’re called so I can get new ones. Our neighbor next door was very old and had a machine to give him oxygen. So wit
hout electricity he died in about two days. We buried him in his backyard, because there was nothing else we could do since the bridges were all gone and there was no gasoline for the cars anyway. We might have starved if my husband hadn’t grabbed up a few baskets of plantains and bananas before the storm. We collected rainwater to drink and cook, and washed in the river once it calmed down.”
I guessed she was somewhere in her thirties, and as with so many of the hurricane survivors, too poor or too stubborn to abandon their old lives, Maria had beaten her up, but had failed to douse her spirit.
“When they finally came with water and gasoline, we had to stand in line for hours. So we brought along radios and Medallas so we could make noise and dance to the merengue and bachata, two wings of the same bird, to pass the time. Because this is what Puerto Ricans do.”
I thanked her for the meal and information and left a sturdy tip. She thanked me, and wished me luck, since that was a commodity in even less supply than a waterproof place to sleep.
NO PLAN is perfect, but at least I had the basic outlines of one when I pulled up to the locked gate. It would involve creating a false identity, something I had little practice in, with every word spoken in Spanish. Though I had grown up with a number of kids in the Bronx and Southampton who had pursued careers in illegality, most of whom were fluid and adept weavers of fanciful selves. The trick was to stay as close as possible to the truth.
“I’m a builder looking for work,” I told the white-shirted security guard at the gate.
“What sort of work?” he asked.
“Carpentry, if it’s available, but I can do anything.”
He looked in the back of the Wrangler.
“Where are your tools?”
“Stolen,” I said. “One reason I need the job.”
He stepped out of earshot and called someone on a hand radio, eventually nodding at me and opening the gate. He had me stop just inside and wait for another guard to escort me onto the grounds. I thanked him, which only elicited a slight shrug and a stern expression on his face. The universal language of security guards the world over.
The next guy was older, but a little friendlier and more forthcoming. He had a Wrangler of his own, which I followed down a curved drive to a squat metal building identified as the security office. It looked new, though temporary, the kind often used as office space on a construction site. The reception area was a small room with two desks heaped with papers and printed manuals. A rack on the wall was filled with walkie-talkies with a sign-in/sign-out sheet posted next to it.
I stood and waited for about ten minutes before a third man arrived, this one in a short-sleeved shirt and tie. Young enough to still be in college, by appearance, and positively ebullient compared to the security force.
He introduced himself as Daniel Osterman, executive director of the Loventeers’ Puerto Rico Campus, and shook my hand.
“Carlito Montaño,” I said, the first big, but essential lie.
He led me to a canteen, with a sink, vending machines, coffee maker, and the sour smell of past meals. We had the room to ourselves.
“So please tell me, Carlito, how you came to be way up here in La Selva.”
I gave him my story. I had been working on a condo complex in Condado and was stupid enough to go out drinking at some crummy place just south of there with a few other carpenters from the job. It was a tired, but reliable story of fumbling with my car keys, getting hit from behind, and waking up with a bad headache and all my tools taken from the Jeep. I was tired of that job anyway, tired of the city, and generally bored. So I packed a bag of clothes and took off, only stopping when I came to the bed-and-breakfast, where I spent the night, and then was directed there by the barmaid down the road.
“You’re a carpenter?” he asked.
“I am, but I’ve done it all at one time or another. I’m not great with plaster, careful, but too slow, and not much of a painter. But I can lay up block, or brick, and level concrete. Metal work is okay and I can run electrical and plumbing. But finish carpentry and building cabinets are my main skills. I’ve also managed crews in Mexico and the US.”
He looked pleased by all this, literally jumping around in his seat when I mentioned finish carpentry. Or maybe that was just youthful energy. I made sure my hands were always well in view, nicked, scarred, and covered in calluses, my forearms overdeveloped from constant manual labor. I was braced for questions about work visas and certifications, but they never came. Nor any prying about how I ended up in Puerto Rico. It told me how badly the Loventeers needed help with rebuilding, and their current relationship with official propriety, which was casual at best.
He left me alone with the coffee maker and a bag of Café Rico, which I turned into a dense and bracing black brew. I was on my second cup when he came back with a guy whose balding head was framed by thin, white hair, though by the overall look of him, not much older than me. He had even less concern about my documentation, but there was another hitch.
He was a Mexican.
I’d spent a number of years going in and out of an oil refinery just over the border with Texas, so it gave me a place to be from, and a vocabulary rich in industrial Spanish. He looked satisfied enough, especially after I gave him a loose résumé of my experience with hammers, power tools, arc welders, and electrical testing gear.
So I got the gig, along with a plastic name tag with my photo and a room in a bunkhouse with a freestanding closet and sink, showers, and toilet down the hall. My new boss waited for me outside while I stowed my stuff, taking a few extra minutes to tape the laptop to the back of the closet. Then we stopped off at a construction shed where he gave me a leather nail bag with a built-in hammer holster, and we put together a canvas satchel filled with carpentry tools. Plus a circular saw and a battery-powered drill for driving in screws. Basic, essential gear.
“We’re putting an addition on the hacienda,” he told me, adding that they had a temporary shop set up on the job site.
To get there, we got back in our vehicles and I followed him farther up the hill through splintered and truncated foliage, though still dense, and covered in bright-green new growth. At the top of the hill, the world was transformed.
The gravel road became a paved driveway that led up to a circle in front of the stucco hacienda, painted a brilliant white, with a grand staircase leading up to the second story, three-sided porch. Large, tapered columns supported the porch roof, which had been recently reshingled in a rust-red asphalt made to resemble tile. Tall double windows were open to the porch, and ceiling fans turned listlessly overhead. To either side of the stairway, giant palms and floral shrubs—lobster tails and birds of paradise—screened and blocked access to the first floor.
It was a big building, easily ten thousand square feet viewed from the exterior, though I knew there was probably a center courtyard behind the facade, carving out some of that space. Behind the hacienda, other buildings were attached, suggesting years of progressive add-ons. Some of these had freshly troweled-on stucco, others plain cinder block, all recently painted the same eye-searing white.
My new supervisor, Ramon, led me down a path and around to the back of the complex to another attached extension, this one a single story made of cinder block in the process of being sheathed in stucco.
Inside was one big room, about thirty feet by forty feet. Two-by-fours and finish lumber were stacked on the concrete floor. Overheard the roof structure was a truss-style that could handle the span without vertical support, this one held together with metal plates and straps, and an abundance of through bolts. All covered with metal roofing panels on top.
“Gusts up to two hundred miles an hour,” said Ramon, anticipating my question. “Any more than that, the world is probably coming to an end anyway.”
The temporary shop he described was in a far corner. It had a table saw, cut-off saw, a compressor with a collection of nail guns, and a workbench made of plywood and sawhorses. My natural habitat.
�
��So what are we doing here?” I asked.
“Making the inside. I have drawings.”
He spread out rolls of plans pulled from a big cardboard tube. They were professional architectural renderings, detailed and precisely drawn using draftsman software. The kind of thing I worked with every day.
We held down the corners so I could give them a good look over.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay what?”
“I can do it. Any helpers available?”
“You’re looking at him.”
“Good. Let’s start tomorrow after I’ve had a chance to plan the approach. Unless you’ve got one in mind.”
He shook his head.
“I’m a stone mason. My plan was to figure out how to fashion wood without cutting off my fingers.”
“So you’ve already learned lesson one.”
Left alone, I laid out the first steps and did an inventory of tools and supplies. There was enough to get through the initial framing. I listed what was needed to take it from there.
Not that I ever thought I’d get that far.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A week later, Ramon and I had framed up all the interior walls. It was only then that the executive director found a moment to wander into our work space to appraise the progress.
“Lookin’ good,” he said in English, examining the interior framing that defined rooms and hallways, door openings, and support for future mechanicals. I acted like I didn’t understand him. “Nice work,” he said in Spanish, making a pantomime of swinging a hammer.
“Gracias.”
“Ramon tells me you’re a very good carpenter.”
“He’s the skillful one. Easy to work with,” I said, with all truthfulness.
“If you have a moment, I’d like to get your opinion on something.”
I said sure, and followed him into the main building. We traveled through a windowed passageway to a heavy door that he opened with some effort. On the other side I was assaulted by a blast of air-conditioned air and a sudden drop in ambient noise. There was deep carpet on the floor, curtains made of floral fabric pulled back from the windows and heavy wooden desks occupying an open space filled with young men and women, dressed in shirts and ties, sensible skirts and pale blouses, flat shoes and clear complexions, some Latino, some not.
