by Chris Knopf
They spoke in barely audible Spanish and English. Computer screens were lit up and hands danced over keyboards. Some wore earbuds, the delicate wires draping down their chests like high-tech necklaces.
As I walked through the room, I felt like a mountain ogre spreading sweat and sawdust in my wake. The men tried to smile as I passed by, the women diverted their eyes. I adjusted my tool belt to keep it from knocking into anything.
The eyes following the executive director were a mix of amusement and disdain. One of the men flicked his hand under his chin. A woman next to him swatted him, looking both wary and filled with fun.
“It’s in here,” said the director. “A silly thing, but it’s driving me nuts.”
It was his private office, a monkish spare room with the cloying mildew smell that seemed to permeate much of the island. He pointed to a bookcase behind his desk, which was sagging noticeably to the right, the side facing the window.
“I’m afraid it’s going to fall,” he said, a legitimate fear. The swaybacked shelves and vertical supports were soft to the touch.
“Rot,” I said. “The whole thing has to be replaced.”
“I know,” said the director, ashamed to face the inevitable. “Can you do it?”
“Of course. A lot of these books will have to be thrown away.”
“That’s okay. I don’t read them anyway. I inherited all this.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked, taking a chance with a personal question. He actually lightened up.
“Three months, two weeks, and a day. Not that I’m counting.”
“You’re a good man to be doing this important work,” I said, trying like hell to sound sincere.
“That’s what I keep telling myself.”
Someone knocked on the door, an imperious little tap-tap-tap. The director looked wearily at the door.
“Yes, Ruth.”
A large woman with an English accent came in clutching a loose pile of papers. She wore a print dress a size too small and a hairdo a few sizes too big. She was around fifty and all her weight was above her waist, the type of shape I always feared would topple over at a moment’s notice.
“Daniel, we need to get these reports signed and sent off. Oh, sorry,” she added, seeing me there in the room.
I smiled down at the floor, the dutiful servant.
“He’s here to fix my bookshelf,” said Daniel.
“¿Inglés?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
“People are coming, you know that,” she said to Daniel. “Everything has to be in perfect order. We can’t disappoint.”
“We won’t,” said Daniel, with a kind of exhausted resolve.
The woman inhaled a deep breath, then barked out, “Are you a dedicated Loventeer?”
“I am,” said Daniel, proclaiming with shoulders suddenly straight and proud.
The woman’s view drifted over to me, pausing longer than I wanted. I kept my eyes averted, fiddling with my tool belt.
“I’ll be in my office next door,” she said to Daniel, though still peering at me. “I don’t want people like this in the hacienda,” she added.
I smiled at her like she’d just given me a wonderful compliment and watched her spin around and leave.
RAMON WAS pissed that I’d been pulled off the big job to make a new bookcase for the executive director. I couldn’t blame him, having known that rage from similar situations back in corporate America. All I could do was promise to build the thing after hours from the available supply of finish pine.
“Won’t take long,” I said. “It’s just a bookcase.”
As promised, I waited till it was time to knock off, then asked which of the finish lumber I could use for the bookcase. We’d had another good day and I was sorry to remind him of the director’s request.
With a lot of muttering and unnecessary struggle, he came up with enough eight-foot, three-quarter-inch pine boards to complete the task, seemingly among the knottiest in the stacks. As we laid them on the worktable, I asked him a question.
“Say, Ramon, I see people working in the office, but where are the ones being helped?”
“At the Caring Center. That’s all separate,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “In another place down the hill. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious. I thought I’d see kids running all around.”
He grinned at that, though not sympathetically.
“Maybe that’s why they put them there. They don’t like the noise.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Just seems odd.”
Ramon’s frustration with the director’s bookcase seemed to deepen into hostility.
“Lots of odd things about the Loventeers, Carlito. Better not to be too curious.”
“Can’t help it. It’s my nature.”
He told me the old proverb about the scorpion and the frog, which I hated from the first time I’d heard it, but pretended to thank him for his advice. Then before he left me to get on with my night job, said, “Don’t make this thing into a work of art. They don’t deserve it. The motherfuckers,” he added, in English, like a true kid from the neighborhood, which made me feel strangely homesick.
“Fuckin’ A, brother,” I said, and we executed an awkward, painful fist bump.
THE BOOKCASE was ready the next morning.
It wasn’t much of a structural wonder, pieced together with a little glue and a finish nailer, but would stand up to your average rows of books once it was screwed into the wall.
Ramon reluctantly agreed to go into the hacienda to fetch the executive director. I told him the sooner I got it installed, the sooner we could get back to the job at hand. Soon after he came back to say the director was away from his office, but we should just lug the bookcase in there and to hell with permission.
We almost made it to the executive director’s office when two oversized guys in tropical shirts stopped us in the middle of the open area full of millennial worker bees. They spoke to us in English, but it wasn’t hard for either of us to understand.
“Get that goddamned thing out of here.”
Ramon struggled with his limited English to describe what we were doing. The two guys seemed less than sympathetic. One of the kids from the office stepped up to help, explaining the situation to the two tropical shirts.
“Tell them it will only take a few minutes,” I said to the kid.
One of the tropical shirts moved us along with an impatient wave. The other followed us a few steps behind. The director’s door was unlocked, so we let ourselves in. They stood outside while we pulled out the old bookcase, stacking the books in a corner in two piles, one good, the other irredeemably foul.
When we had the new case firmly attached to the wall, the guy was still waiting outside in the hall. With no words passing, he escorted us all the way to the big office area, then left us to go the rest of the way on our own. I told Ramon to go ahead of me.
“I need to take a piss,” I said. He was troubled by that, saying I could just go behind the new building. I opened the door and gently guided him out. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”
I made it all the way back to Director Osterman’s office unmolested, so I kept going. I followed the hall past other enclosed offices, pausing when I heard voices coming from around the next corner. I strained to hear. From the sound of it, it was a gathering of English speakers making small talk, though I couldn’t make out specific words.
I went ahead and turned the corner.
It was a sumptuous room with a ceiling high enough to hang a chandelier, under which was an ornate Mediterranean dining room table laid out with serving platters filled with breakfast food. The two tropical shirts were there juggling small plates and cups of coffee, and two other guys, much older, in polo shirts and khakis, differing only in shades of tan. More interesting were the half-dozen Latinas they were speaking to, very young, wearing heels they could barely stand up in, wobbling like newborn fillies, and the kind of dresses
you’d see lined up at the door of a Manhattan nightclub.
Some of the women held coffee cups, but only the guys were eating. It was about all I could take in before the big-haired woman who didn’t like the way I looked strode into the room and saw me standing in the doorway.
“What the hell?” she asked me, in low tones, though delivered like a shiv in the chest.
“I’m sorry. I was just looking for a place to go to the bathroom.”
“This isn’t it,” she hissed, moving close enough for me to smell the perfume that went with her overdressed outfit. “Get the hell out of here.”
I didn’t bother apologizing again, not knowing how it would come out, before returning the way I came. As I moved down the hall, I passed a men’s room, and now in the mood, finally took that piss.
Ramon was pulling wood out of the fresh stock when I got back to the job site. If he was annoyed with me, it didn’t show. It wasn’t long before we were back in the rhythm of the work—measuring, cutting, popping in nails with the pneumatic hammer.
I ATE dinner at El Rancho de Velilla that night, then hung around nursing Medallas and watching an old Yankees game with the sound turned off on my smartphone. Not entirely satisfying, but killed the time, so I was back in the bunkhouse after eleven.
I’d picked up a pack of cigarettes at the bar, and went outside to light up the first one I’d had in a few years. I wondered if it would reignite the habit, wondering if the bartender Slippery Slope would have an opinion on the matter. In any event, there was no better excuse should anyone pass by and ask what I was doing outside well after hours.
As I stood and smoked, I looked around the tree cover and utility poles in search of little red lights that might give away security cameras or motion detectors. I assumed they were there, but took the chance of wandering away from the bunkhouse toward the closest building abutting the hacienda. I got as close as I could without leaving the path and stood there listening, though hearing nothing more than the coqui, the little frogs that provide the soundtrack for the island’s countryside, and other nocturnal creatures in the surrounding rain forest.
I smoked one more cigarette and was about to go back to the bunkhouse when I heard a door opening. Two women, backlit from the door, stepped outside, speaking to each other in unintelligible whispers. They sounded like excited kids. Moments later, I could see the burning ends of cigarettes. Sisters in crime, I thought to myself.
I walked back up the path, not waiting for them to finish their smokes. Satisfied that sometimes hunches work out exactly as planned.
I spent another hour online after successfully using my smartphone to link up with the Internet. I went to Google Earth and in a few minutes, zoomed in on La Selva Bendita, and using the GPS map as a guide, found the Loventeers’ campus. Even with Maria’s savage pruning, there was still plenty of canopy cover, but I could make out the roof of the hacienda and bits of the adjacent buildings. Remembering Ramon’s thumb gesture, I moved to the southeast and saw the roofs of other buildings, and the bright blue, rectangular telltale of a swimming pool. I could also see fragments of road surface, showing that the working portion of the camp had its own access road.
I pinned and labeled the entrance in the GPS, logged off, and went to bed.
Abandoned by sleep, at a loss for waking dreams, I lay there and thought of the Little Peconic Bay, wondering how it was getting along without proper supervision.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Daniel Osterman, the young executive director, wore awkwardness like an itchy shirt. I knew what he wanted to talk to me about, but I was up on a ladder and made him work for it.
“It would be better if you could just come down,” he said.
I finished driving in a nail and did as he asked.
“Obviously you’ve encountered Ruth Bellingham,” he told me when I got there. “She wanted me to fire you.”
I tried to look sheepish, apologetic, and a little defiant all at once. Not sure which of those showed as intended.
“I don’t want to make trouble,” I said. “I need the work.”
“We need you to do the work, which is what I said to her. But we can’t have people just wandering around inside the main building. You understand that?”
“Of course you can’t. Especially with the big boss around.”
He didn’t exactly know how to respond to that.
“Ruth’s not the big boss, but she works for them in New York. She’s escorting some very important people. That’s what she does. It’s a very demanding job, and she’s a demanding person.”
I reassured him as well as I could, offering to paint the new bookcase if Ramon could dig up some paint. That was apparently the worst suggestion I could have come up with.
“No, no, no. We’ll manage that ourselves, thank you very much,” he said, too loudly, as if it made his lousy Spanish more coherent, then he beat it out of there.
Ramon shook his head but kept the unspoken remonstrance to himself.
OVER LUNCH I asked Ramon if he ever did any work at the Caring Center. He nodded as he swallowed a mouthful of a three-meat sandwich called a tripleta.
“They did better in Maria,” he said. “The hill blocked the wind. But there was still plenty to do. Nice people. They were grateful,” implying a contrast with our current supervisors.
“What sort of folks are they looking after?”
“The poor. In this part of Puerto Rico, it’s hard to tell the poor from the rest of us, but they find a way to do it.”
“Families? Women and children? Daddies and mommies?”
“And grandmothers. No single men.”
“But single women,” I said.
“Indeed. They have their own dormitory up here in the hacienda.”
“Why the separate housing?” I asked.
He shook his tripleta at me, grinning. He called me a nosy bastard, using a local colloquialism that sounded nothing like what it meant.
I let him eat in peace for a while, then asked, “Did you leave any tools on the job at the Caring Center?”
“Nothing we need here. Maybe the impact drill. I love that tool.”
“We definitely need an impact drill, Ramon. Why didn’t you tell me we had one of those?”
He looked a little embarrassed.
“I told you, I’m a mason.”
“I’ll go get it,” I said. “Just tell me where it is.”
“You’ll have to ask the executive director,” he said. “He’ll give you a permission slip.”
“I’ve worked on military bases with less security than this place.”
He let that slide by, but changed the subject.
“Where were you born, actually?” he asked.
“Montreal.”
“I thought maybe America. New York.”
“We moved to New York when I was a little kid,” I said. “Never left.”
He nodded, happy with his guess. He let a little more quiet form around his thoughts.
“Don’t ask the executive director,” he said. “You can buy a pass at the security hut for forty bucks. Just keep it hid in your palm.”
“I know how to do that.”
“I imagine you do. I’ll give you directions to the maintenance shed. And the key to open it up.”
We finished up the rest of the day’s work with no more mention of the impact drill or countries of origin. But before I left for the day, Ramon stopped me with a hand on the shoulder.
“Your Spanish is pretty good, but you won’t fool another Mexican,” he said. “Some of us not desperate for construction help might be offended.”
“Okay, what do you suggest?”
“Try French Canadian. It’s the truth and you sound like one anyway.”
“Merci beaucoup, mon ami.”
THE NEXT morning, instead of going to the job site, I drove the Wrangler down and around the hill to the entrance to the Caring Center, as I’d accurately guessed from Google Earth. There was no sign, but they h
ad a similar gate with a security hut. The guard, big around the waist, looked a little imposed upon by my arrival, a bad sign.
“I forgot to get a pass from Director Daniel, but I’m really in a hurry,” I said, after he took a few hours to waddle over to the car window. “Can you just let me in?”
“Need a pass,” he said.
“Can’t get one till tomorrow.”
I explained our work up at the hacienda and the need for a special tool left here on the Caring Center grounds. He looked at me as if he was listening, then said, “Need a pass.”
I opened my hand to show him the folded twenty-dollar bills.
“Would this work?” I asked.
He reached a meaty forearm through the window, but I moved my hand out of the way.
“Need a pass,” I said.
He went into the hut and came out holding a small slip of paper. Before passing it to me, he rested his hand on the butt of the gun stuck in his holster. That this simple transaction could falter enough for him to actually shoot me was sobering. I reached out my hand to shake, and he took it, allowing me to transfer the forty bucks. He gave me the permission slip and let me through the gate. No friendly waves were exchanged.
The Loventeers’ landscaping standards took a decided turn for the worse, though the grounds were clean and uncluttered. I pulled over to consult Ramon’s map, especially helpful since there were no signs to direct anyone anywhere.
There were kids, however, which I discovered soon after in teeming numbers at a big playground featuring wooden structures designed for sliding, climbing, swinging, balancing, and breaking bones big and small. The decibel level was commensurate with the activity, supporting Ramon’s theory of why they were down there on the side of the hill.
I stopped at the first sight of an adult, a blonde Anglo woman wearing blue-jeans shorts, white tank top, and a weary expression. I decided to forgo the Spanish and just thrust out Ramon’s map and ask, “Can you tell me where this is?”
