The International Language of Gardening

In hindsight, we probably should have known better than to take gardening advice from our alcoholic neighbor.

As you may recall, his English left a great deal to be desired, and our Spanish didn’t exactly qualify us for translating positions at the U.N.

So what were we thinking?

Not much, apparently.

It happened like this.  We were standing at the rear of the house staring at the empty flower box, hoping, I suppose, for divine inspiration, when our neighbor shot out of his house like a (bow-legged) stunt man out of a cannon.

“Hola,” he chortled.  “You make jardin?”

“Si,” we both admitted somewhat unenthusiastically.  In truth, we were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man was both mentally defective and a hopeless drunk—what else could explain his permanent state of cheerfulness, his complete lack of inhibition, his casual friendliness?

Yes, I know what you’re thinking.  They’ve lived in the big city too long, they’re jaded, give the guy a break.

All very nice.

But you’re wrong.

Our neighbor was permanently sozzled.  You could see it in his crimson-flecked eyes, in his jaundiced skin, in the roaring sourness of his breath—and if you weren’t convinced by these subtle signs, there was always the fact that he stood on his roof in the morning and crowed with the roosters.

“What you plant?” he asked now, sedately scratching his belly with one hand while digging around in his gap-toothed mouth with the index finger of the other.

“Well…” Michael began thoughtfully.

“Oh my god!” the man screamed, apropos of nothing.  Then he turned to me:  “Are you one hundred percent today?”

“Si?” I hazarded, wondering what he could possibly mean.  “One hundred percent.”  I certainly wasn’t going to settle for anything less, whatever he was talking about.

This sent him into gales of uncontrollable laughter, punctuated by loud rat-a-tats of flatulence.

We edged slowly away.  Frankly I was tempted to run inside and bolt the door.

But then I noticed that his own garden was lush and reasonably well-tended, and it occurred to me that maybe he’d have some useful advice for us after all.

I decided to give it a try.  “What kind of plant would you put here?” I asked, pointing to the flower box.  “Aqui?”

“Aqui?” he repeated, drooling slightly.

“Si, aqui,” I said, pointing again.

He considered.  “Cactus!” he said emphatically.

“Or flores or ferns.”

Even I, who had never cultivated anything more demanding than a Chia Pet, recognized the complete and utter uselessness of this advice.

“What grows in sunlight?” I prompted him.  “Sol.”

He rearranged his genitals and belched softly.  “Calathea.”

“Calathea?” I repeated.

“Si.”

Michael, looking vaguely encouraged by this scrap of information, took up my thread.

“Come,” he said, gesturing toward the side of the house.

Our neighbor instantly obeyed, propelling himself on surprisingly steady legs along the road and down into our driveway.  “Oh my god,” he muttered to himself as he bustled along.

“What do you plant without sun?” Michael asked.  “Sin sol?”

“Ah,” our neighbor replied, touching the side of his nose with his finger.  Hadn’t I seen Mafiosi perform this same gesture in countless Godfather-type movies?

Only I couldn’t recall its significance.  Arcane hand gestures had always baffled me—if you scratched your chin with the back of your hand you were disrespecting someone’s mother, and if you touched your eyebrow while tugging your earlobe you were suggesting group sex.  Or something like that.

“Heliconia,” the man said, winking ominously.

“Good for no sun?”

“Si.”

After our neighbor had wreathed us in beery hugs and lumbered home for what would undoubtedly be his tenth or twelfth Medalla of the morning we rushed inside to write down his suggestions.

After all, there was a very remote possibility that he knew more about gardening than we did.

Which wasn’t saying much.

Adventures in Horticulture

Having more or less recovered from the shock of finding a goateed stranger living in our house, we took stock of our little slice of paradise.

We couldn’t help admitting that the house looked superb (snaps to Jane).

In fact, after puttering around for a couple of days touching up barely-discernible wall scratches, straightening pictures that were no more than a quarter-inch off plumb, and rearranging the fifty or sixty books in our bookcase, we ran out of things to do inside.

So we turned our attention to the garden.

By rights this was Michael’s province.  Early in our relationship he had demonstrated a green-ish thumb by rescuing a couple of all-but-dead plants from my balcony and tenderly nursing them back to health.

Admittedly this could have been a fluke, except that he bought a spindly looking palm tree the following spring and fertilized, trimmed and cajoled it into a state of spectacular health by summer’s end.   One August afternoon I actually saw a tourist turn his camera away from the stunning Gothic cathedral across the street from our building and train it instead upon the behemoth palm tree on Michael’s balcony.

Now that we were the proud owners of a small square of turf in Vieques, Michael set his jaw and resolved to bring order to the overgrown mess we’d inherited from the previous owners.

While the garden contained a number of impressive fruit trees, including breadfruit, avocado, lime and mango, it also boasted a variety of highly unusual garden ornaments:

• three massive concrete pylons originally intended to support a cistern before the project was abandoned;
• random blobs of concrete that had been unceremoniously dumped into the garden at the conclusion of earlier construction jobs;
• a highly-visible septic tank; and
• the rusted body of an old car.

Michael had taken all this in his stride.  The concrete pylons, which we dubbed Stonehenge South”…

…had been the first to go—Daniel had actually overseen their dismantling during his brief tenure.  He had also made sure the concrete blobs disappeared.

During her first months on the job Jane had hired a couple of guys to hack their way through the tangled thicket that had become our side yard, disentangle the Buick from the thick undergrowth, and haul it with long, thick ropes onto a flatbed truck and thence to the local landfill.

She then more or less reversed this process to solve the cistern problem; instead of hacking vines away, she encouraged them to run rampant over the offending structure until we could barely see it from the upstairs balcony.

As she often said, nature happens fast in Vieques.

Despite these Herculean efforts, the side yard remained singularly uninviting.  The soil was sandy and hard, immature banana trees poked up randomly here and there, and the whole affair sloped downward at an alarming angle from our neighbor’s retaining wall at the top of the lot to our own crumbling wall at the bottom.

Daniel had suggested “terracing” it, as though it were a parterre at Versailles, and at the time we had rolled our eyes at the very idea.

But of course he was right.  Endless truckloads of dirt would have to be brought in to make the space even remotely utilitarian, whether for a garden or, more ambitiously, a pool.  And in either case some or all of the trees would have to go—an eventuality we weren’t prepared to face emotionally or financially.

In the meantime, Michael set his horticultural sights on less ambitious territory—the flower box running along the back of the house beside our neighbor’s driveway…

…and the triangular patch of dirt formed by the intersection of the driveway, the side of the house, and the short flight of concrete steps leading to the laundry and storage rooms on the bottom level.

Both areas were small, manageable, and woefully in need of attention.

And he was up for the challenge.

Maybe.

Pee Oh’d

Our fellow biobay enthusiasts jumped into the pitch black water that night with wild abandon.

Not us.

I wasn’t remotely tempted to join them, and even Michael looked skeptical.

Meanwhile our new friends Colin and Denise—who’d been among the first to plunge into the murky depths—harangued us good-naturedly to join them.

“Come on, you wusses,” Colin cried, his body glowing eerily in the light of thousands of over-stimulated flagellates.

“Sticks and stones,” I recited half-heartedly.

“What are you scared of, sharks?” Denise laughed.

“Don’t be silly,” I replied as the theme music from Jaws pounded through my head.  “But the bay’s full of jellyfish.”

“Rubbish!” Colin cried dismissively.  “There’s not a jellyfish for miles.”

As if on cue, the father of the Canadian district attorney-in-training emitted a loud, girlish scream.  “Oh my god,” he screeched.

“What’s wrong?” asked his portly wife, flailing her short, fat arms.

“I think I’ve been bit!” he gasped.

“Bitten,” I said under my breath (even in times of duress there’s no excuse for poor grammar).

“Help!” his wife cried.  “Help!”

Admirably enough one of the fully-clothed tour guides leapt into the water (I can only assume there were liability issues) and paddled wearily to the man’s side.

“I’m going to bring you back to the boat,” he calmly informed the sting victim, who sobbed loudly before surrendering to his rescuer’s embrace.

Michael and I hauled our Canadian friend back onto the boat.  Cate (with a C) trained a flashlight on his leg, which bore a nasty-looking red mark.  “Jellyfish sting,” she said.  “Nothing to worry about.”

By now the other swimmers were showing signs of concern.  Even Colin and Denise had paddled nearer the side of the boat.

“What is it?” Colin called out.

“Jellyfish,” I announced with enormous satisfaction.

He catapulted himself out of the water like a shot, leaving Denise behind.

“How about me?” she wailed.

“Every man for himself” was Colin’s less than chivalrous response.

I gave them a year, tops.

The Canadian was groaning piteously.  “Oh my god, it hurts like hell.  Is there anything we can do?”

“Urine helps,” volunteered the drenched tour guide who had fished him out of the bay.

The wife had bobbled her way to the side of the boat and was trying unsuccessfully to launch herself out of the water.  Reluctantly, Michael gave her a hand—actually, two hands.  (He later complained of back pain.)

Once on the boat, she rushed with great drama to her husband’s side.

“Did you say urine?” she asked the tour guide.

“Yes ma’am.  It helps with the pain.”

For a heart-stopping moment it appeared as if she might divest herself of her ruffled swimsuit and squat, for all to see, on her husband’s leg.

Blessedly she thought better of it.

“Jerry!” she cried out instead across the water to one of her pasty sons.  “Come pee on your father!”

Young Jerry huffed his way back to the boat and, with remarkable composure, obeyed.

Biobay or Bust

By seven-thirty our biobay tour group was ready to rumble.

Our fellow adventurers were, to say the least, a mixed bag.  There was a chubby Canadian couple with three rambunctious young boys; a severely-sunburned quartet of Scandinavian seniors (how do you say “sunblock” in Swedish?); and a gay couple from Wisconsin whose age difference was so vast they gave the term “May-December relationship” a whole new meaning…

Our tour guide was drearily perky. Clad in a t-shirt that read “I Glow in the Dark,” she introduced herself as Cate with a “C” before regaling us with a host of arcane information about the history of the bio-bay, its current state of decline, and its shaky future.

After a stunningly long fifteen minutes one of the Canadian urchins raised his hand and asked, “But what makes the people glow?”

Everyone heaved a sigh of relief—this, after all, was the question we all wanted to ask (even those of us who had done a little reading beforehand and thought we knew the answer).

Cate paused.  She cleared her throat.  She shifted from foot to foot.  Was it possible she didn’t know the answer?

“It’s magic!” she said at last.

But the little boy wasn’t about to fall for this.  “No it’s not, it’s science,” he stated baldly.

Cate smiled lamely.  “Of course it is!” she agreed.

“But what causes it?” continued the persistent little guy, who clearly had a future as a D.A.

Cate looked blank.

“Bioflagellates,” one of her male colleagues exclaimed, rushing in from the sidelines.  “When you disturb them, they glow.”  He shot Cate’s persecutor a stern look.  “Kind of like when someone disturbs you and you start crying.”

“I do not,” the little boy sulked.

Clearly it was going to be that kind of night.

After our less than inspiring orientation, we were loaded into a yellow school bus that appeared to have migrated south from Mayberry RFD around 1960.

It was pleasant enough cruising through Esperanza in this antique conveyance but when we hit the deeply potholed road leading to the beach the ride was slightly less relaxing (think permanent disability).

Once we arrived at our destination we were herded over shallow dunes to a pontoon boat moored in a shallow, murky bay.  It was a moonless night (one of the chief criteria for optimum viewing of bioluminescence is a lack of light), which made progress difficult over the uneven terrain.  But soon we were all safely on board.

The first of the evening’s many spontaneous whoops of delight erupted from the passengers when the boat gurgled out into the water, agitating millions of tiny flagellates into states of frenzied luminescence. The boat’s wake glowed like neon.

Yes, it was pretty cool.

Although I’ve spent a good part of my life on islands and am perpetually mesmerized by the sight of the ocean, I’ve never been terribly keen on actually getting into the water.  On a childhood visit to Daytona Beach a crab bit my toe, which first gave me doubts about aquatic immersion.  A few years later I saw Jaws, which sealed the bargain.

Ten years ago, during a visit to Key West, Michael signed us up for a clothing-optional snorkeling cruise.  I was fine with the “clothing optional” part, but the prospect of snorkeling left me cold.  However, I agreed to go, and at first everything seemed fine.

The boat was beautiful, the captain was appropriately jolly, and the passengers who actually took off their clothes looked fine in their birthday suits.

But it was February, and although we were in Key West, it was an unusually chilly month and the water was downright cold.  Nonetheless, every last person donned flippers and a mask and leapt into the water with gay (yes, I said it) abandon—except the captain and me.

“Too chilly for these old bones,” was his excuse.  And when I offered no excuse at all he said, “Let’s play cards.”

While Michael and his fellow snorkelers thrashed around in the choppy waves the captain taught me to play two-handed solitaire, which got us through the better part of the afternoon.

I still have a photo of me, taken after Michael had hauled himself back onto the boat and thawed out for a few minutes in the sun, with the captain’s pet bird perched atop my head.

I still play two-handed solitaire when I can convince Michael to join me.

Which isn’t often.

[Stay tuned…I’ll tell you the outcome of our biobay experience tomorrow!]

Touch and Glow

Later that week we were sitting in a bar in Esperanza…

…when a couple of twenty-somethings parked themselves next to us and struck up a conversation.  Married for about a year, Colin and Denise had come to Vieques for their long-postponed honeymoon.

“You have a house here?” exclaimed Colin.  “You dudes are effing lucky!”  His eyes swept from Michael to me.

We admitted that we considered ourselves pretty fortunate.

Colin asked lots of questions: Where could they get the absolute best food on the island?  Which was our favorite beach?  What was the biggest iguana we’d ever seen?

We answered as best we could. (And yes, we told him about the Stegosaurus-sized iguana we’d encountered on our first visit to the island.)

And then he asked: “What’s the biobay like?”

“Uh….”

Denise, who had remained quiet for most of the conversation, spoke up now.  “You’ve never done the biobay, have you?”

Her question was good-natured, but seasoned with a pinch of mischief.

Michael sighed.  “Not so much.”

“We’ve always meant to, but there’s never enough time,” I complained.

A brief silence followed.  “That’s pretty lame,” Denise threw back.

We all laughed uneasily.

“Wanna go with us?” Colin asked.

Michael looked at me uncertainly.

“Sure.”

It wasn’t as if we’d deliberately avoided the bioluminescent bay.  After all, many people considered the glowing properties of the bay a “life-altering” experience.  And if the experts were right, postponing our visit to the biobay too much longer might not be such a good idea.  There was evidence that this natural wonder was ecologically endangered and could simply cease to exist in the not-too-distant future.

In layman’s terms, the bay’s luminescence is generated when the microorganisms inhabiting its waters are disturbed by movement.  The water looks dark until you jump in, at which point the microorganisms begin to glow, outlining your body with an eerie blue-green light.  The faster you move, the brighter the glow.  In terms of pay-off, you definitely get a very big bang for your buck.

Although this phenomenon exists elsewhere in the world, most bioluminescent bays have been partially—and in some extreme cases completely—destroyed by pollution.  Vieques’ Puerto Mosquito is the brightest surviving bay of its kind in the world.

Which is another way of saying it was truly disgraceful we’d never been.

Colin and Denise, our new best friends, followed up with a phone call the next day.  This was both surprising and slightly dismaying.  In effect, they’d called our bluff.

We met up that night at the company’s “base camp,” a slightly dilapidated building on Route 996 near Esperanza.

Oddly enough, Colin and Denise were as delightful sober as they were tipsy.  They seemed genuinely excited that we had come, which of course made us feel glad, in turn, that we’d made the effort.

“So it took a couple of strangers to get you off your butts,” Denise remarked in her quiet way.  It was if she were delivering the closing argument of a criminal prosecution, though in the nicest way possible.

“That’s true,” Michael said without missing a beat.  “Our real friends couldn’t possibly have convinced us to do this.”

Colin pronounced Michael “a stitch.”

I told him he didn’t know the half of it.

And with that, the games began.

The Circle Ladder

The guy we found living in our house when we returned to Vieques that October afternoon didn’t look remotely dangerous but you never knew.

“What happened to the place you were staying in before?” Michael asked.

“I kinda got asked to leave,” Kevin replied, blushing demurely.

I digested this less-than-encouraging piece of information.  “That’s not good,” I said.

“I know.  Another embarrassment.”

“Hmm.”

“So Jane said I could stay here.”  He smiled for the first time.  “She sure did.  Good old Jane.”

That’s not exactly how I would have characterized Jane at that exact moment.  In fact I was mentally reducing her Christmas bonus by fifty percent as he spoke…

…but I could see how Kevin might feel beholden to her.

“Speaking of good old Jane,” I said, “I think I’ll give her a call.

To her credit, and (yes, I admit) my intense satisfaction, Jane was mortified.

“I thought you weren’t coming in till tomorrow!”

“Not unless tomorrow’s the 5^th,” I responded glibly.

She had the good grace to laugh.  “Oh my god,” she moaned.  “And now you’ve got poor homeless Kevin on your hands.”

“Excuse me?”

“But probably just for two or three days at the most.”

I was speechless.  “Listen Jane…” I began.

“Got you!” she yelped (I was beginning to wonder if she’d finally succumbed to the island’s intense October heat).  “I’m joking,” she said in a less manic tone.  “Just making a little joke.  Put him on the phone.  I’ll have him out of there in a jiff.”

I handed the phone to Kevin, who had been following our conversation with the expression of a dog waiting to find out if he’ll be allowed to spend the night by the fire or be cast out into the blizzard.

“Hello,” he mumbled, his voice quivering slightly.  He listened, mouth slightly agape, as Jane talked.  “Okay,” he said in the same flat voice, then handed the phone back to me.

“He’ll be out of your hair in thirty minutes flat,” Jane informed me, all business now.  “But it’ll take longer for me to round up Lydia and bring her over to clean up the place.  Probably a couple of hours.”

I did the math.  That would mean Lydia would be vacuuming and dusting at 6 p.m.

“You know what,” I said, “we’ll just do it ourselves and save the money.”

Jane was aghast.  “But the bathroom,” she wailed.  “I’m not having you clean up Kevin’s mess.”

“Hey, it’s fine, just relax,” I said, walking toward the bathroom.  It couldn’t be that bad.

“Oh Jesus,” I said, almost involuntarily.  It was an absolute pigsty.

“Tell me,” she intoned breathlessly, as if we were discussing porn.

I gulped.  “Pretty grim.”

“Save it for me.  I’m on my way.”

I did as I was told.  She had chosen the bathroom as her penance.

Who was I to interfere?

By the time Jane got there, Michael and I had stripped the bed, cleaned up the kitchen and swept the whole house.  Jane knocked off the bathroom in a jiff.  Then we sat down for a celebratory drink.

“So what do you think of the staircase?” she asked, clearly proud of what she’d accomplished.

“We love it.”

She sat back with a contented sigh.  “I have to admit that was one painful project.”

“It must have been awful when they brought it over the first time and it didn’t fit.”

Jane nodded, flashing back to the moment.  “Alfredo was crushed.  He came to me with tears in his eyes.  He said, ‘Miss Jane, the circle ladder do not fit.’”

“’Circle ladder’?” Michael repeated.

“That was his translation of ‘spiral staircase.’”

In a weird sort of way, it made sense.

Who’s Been Sleeping in Our Bed?

Coming back to Vieques was always a thrill.

Okay, the journey itself had become a little humdrum—it’s hard to get excited about being crammed into a seat designed for a masochistic, smaller-than-average elf for almost four hours with a grudgingly-offered cup of Diet Coke the only bright spot on the horizon…

But once we landed in Vieques we always felt a shiver of anticipation.  We were back!

And yet no matter how excited we were, we invariably experienced a sinking feeling when we turned that final corner and began climbing the hill toward our house.   After all, we never quite knew what to expect.

Our return that October was no different.

The neurosis du jour was our suspicion that Jane had somehow managed to photograph the spiral staircase from its only favorable angle.  When viewed in person, we feared, it would have all the appeal of a giant barnacle on a ship’s hull.

The night of our departure from D.C. my overactive imagination had even transformed my fears into a nightmare in which I began going down the stairs and literally couldn’t stop—there was no bottom.  It didn’t take a house call from Dr. Freud…

…to figure out that the never-ending downward spiral of my dream was a remarkably apt metaphor for the staircase project itself.

I tried not to think about it.

We unlocked the carport gate and turned, with equal measures of excitement and foreboding, toward the staircase.  I’m not sure exactly what we expected—maybe just that this new addition to the house would somehow ruin the whole effect—but our fears were unfounded.

If anything, the stairs were a plus.  Pristine white, faultlessly aligned, and elegantly compact, the staircase was like a modern sculpture with benefits—it not only looked good, it got you from one place to another with admirable simplicity.

I went up first.  The structure felt sturdy yet supple, and as I wound my way up, the ocean view slowly unfurled itself in all its glory.  And then suddenly I was at the top, standing on the broad white balcony, the verdant landscape spread out below, the ocean a turquoise banner in the distance.

Yes, I regretted that the project had probably shaved a few years off Jane’s life.  But it was worth it.

As we stood awestruck on the balcony, mesmerized as ever by the view, it slowly dawned on us that the voices we’d been hearing since we’d come up the stairs were issuing from inside our house.

Our hackles, as it were, rose.

Michael edged his way along the breezeway running along the east side of the house.  He stopped beside the bedroom window, listening attentively, then uttered a hushed “hello?”

A short pause.  “Hello?” an equally tentative voice answered.

“Who’s there?” Michael asked, this time in his most authoritative voice.

“It’s Kevin.”  The voice was muffled now, almost inaudible.

“Kevin who?”

“Jane’s Kevin.”

We didn’t even know Jane had a Kevin.

“You mean you work for her?”

“Yes.”

“And what are you doing here?”

“She said it was okay.”

Michael digested this information.  “Let us in.”

A pale, red-headed waif with a wispy goatee padded out to the great room in his bare feet and unlocked the door.

Michael introduced himself and asked again, “So what are you doing here?”

Kevin tugged on his goatee nervously.  “I didn’t have anywhere to stay the past few days so Jane said I could stay here.”

“I see.  And she didn’t mention that we were coming in today?”

Kevin looked perplexed.  “Not at all,” he said, as if there were degrees of mentioning the imminent arrival of the owners of the house you’re essentially squatting in.  “But man oh man am I embarrassed,” he giggled, darting a glance back toward the bedroom.  “Caught red-handed watching The Dukes of Hazard.”

Regrettable as this was, his taste in TV shows was the least of his worries.

Stairway to Heaven

Jane called us two days later.

“It doesn’t fit,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Your new staircase.  It doesn’t fit in the hole.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Neither do I—and I was there when they tried to install it.  Eight men hauled it in and stood it up straight.  It looked perfect.  I swear it gleamed in the sunlight…

…but it didn’t fit in the hole.”

Michael, having caught the gist of our conversation, grabbed the phone out of my hand.  “You mean it’s too big?”

“Not really.”

“Too small?”

“Not so much.  It’s the…” she hesitated, clearly at a loss for words.  “You know, the way it faces.”

“The orientation?”

“Yes!”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Well, it starts out okay at the top, but when it gets to the bottom it runs into the balustrade.”

Michael put her on speakerphone so I could hear.  We both tried to picture the problem.  “So he miscalculated?” he asked her.

“I guess,” she replied, obviously puzzled.

“So what’s next?”

“They took it away.”

“The staircase?”

“Yep.  To fix it.  It took nine men.”

I couldn’t resist weighing in.

“It took more men to take it out than to bring it in?”

“Yes, they were dejected.”

“But if the orientation doesn’t work it doesn’t work,” Michael commented, bringing us back to reality.  “I mean, there aren’t many variables here.  The tread size is a given, the distance between treads is a given.  And you can’t exactly expect people to climb over a balustrade to go upstairs.   So what exactly does he plan to change?”

“I have no idea. But I saw the look in his eye.  He’ll make it work somehow.”

I took a deep breath.  “Are you sure?”

She sighed too.  “Absolutely not.”

In the end, Alfredo took the staircase apart and put it back together again piece by piece, adjusting the placement of the steps marginally.

It made all the difference, and a week later the whole thing was in place.

Jane sent photos.

It was pure heaven.

Fourteen Step Program

I called Jane to tell her we wanted a spiral staircase like the one at Jack’s Coffee House.

“Do you know Alfredo?” I asked.

“Junior or Senior?” she shot back.

She really did seem to know everyone on the island.

“Not sure.  Who does ironwork?”

“Both of them.”

“Who built the staircase at Jack’s?”

“Probably Senior, but I’ll find out.”

She found out.  It was Alfredo Senior, but he couldn’t make our staircase, at least not for a while because his wife was seriously ill.

“How awful,” I murmured sympathetically, adding in the same breath, “Could Junior do it instead?”  I wasn’t sure I liked myself anymore.

“I’ll find out.”

Alfredo Junior couldn’t do it, but Senior decided he could.  He needed to keep busy, he explained to Jane through her new sidekick and translator, Chris.

And anyway, he needed the money to pay his wife’s medical bills.

First we asked for an estimate, including installation.  This took three weeks.  When it came it seemed high.  But then everything seems outlandishly high or low when you lack a frame of reference.

So we went online and got a general idea of how much metal spiral staircases cost in the U.S.  Then we took a second look at Alfredo’s estimate and decided it was more or less reasonable (for Vieques anyway).

We gave Jane the green light.

A month later Alfredo called her to say he needed to come out to measure the space again.

“But that means he hasn’t done anything yet!” I wailed.

“Could be,” Jane responded in her matter of fact way.  “Should I tell him not to come?”

She had me there.  “Of course not,” I said.  “But tell him to hurry.”

She paused for effect.  “I’ll get right on that.”

A week later she called to report that the staircase was ready.  I dashed into the other room to tell Michael.

“It’s ready!” I gasped ecstatically.

He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

“The staircase!  They’re installing it tomorrow!”

He put down his book.  “Seriously?”

“Yes!  Jane says it looks great.”

“She saw it?”

“She went to Alfredo’s shop.”

“She’s a treasure.”

“She’s a goddess!”

“You need to lie down.”

Downward Spiral

Okay, now all we needed was to find out where the owner of the coffee house got his spiral staircase.

I made the call.

The owner, whose name was Edwin, “wasn’t available at the moment.”

“Is he on island?” I asked.

“Yes,” the woman on the phone reluctantly admitted.  “But he’s not here.”

I cleared my throat.  “Do you happen to know where he got his staircase?”

“Excuse me?”  I could hear a blender in the background.

“The spiral staircase.”  The one right in front of you.  “Any idea where he got it?”

Silence.  “Not really.  But it was his friend Charlie’s idea.  You know Charlie?”

“I met him once a few months ago.  Any chance you’ve got his number?”

“Everyone’s got Charlie’s number,” she deadpanned.

Michael called Charlie.

“This is Michael, your neighbor.  From the big white house down the hill.”

“Huh?”

“We met at Jack’s Coffee House a few months ago.”

“Oh yeah?”

Clearly didn’t ring a bell.  So much for considering yourself memorable.

Michael took a deep breath.  “We’re the guys Daniel fired.”

“Oh, sure, I remember you!” he yelled.  “That bastard.”

Michael held the phone away from his ear.  “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but we heard it was your idea to put that spiral staircase in Jack’s.  Where’d you get it?”

“Excuse me?”

“We like the spiral staircase at Jack’s and we’re considering putting one like it in our house.  Do you know where it came from?”

Quite a bit of hemming and hawing ensued.  It was obvious that Charlie knew all about the staircase but for some reason didn’t want to tell us.

Was it stolen?  Bought on the spiral-staircase black market?  Or was Charlie just a jerk?

He tap danced around Michael’s questions for a surprisingly long time, but Michael was his usual persistent self (he would have enjoyed terrific job security during the Spanish Inquisition)…

…and eventually Charlie caved under pressure.

AA Ironworks.  A guy named Alfredo.  “But he’s got a huge backlog.  It’ll take months,” Charlie added hopefully.

“Is there anyone else who could do it?”

“In Vieques?” he snorted.  “Absolutely not.

Michael gave me a thumbs up.

“Then Afredo it is.  Do you have contact information for him?”

“Uh.  I did, but I think I lost it.”

Of course you did.

“No worries.  We can look it up.”

Charlie was a piece of cake compared to Alfredo.  He didn’t seem like a particularly chatty guy under any circumstances, and then there was the fact that he didn’t seem to speak one word of English.

Not.

One.

Word.

I took the first crack at making him understand what we wanted.  Then in desperation I handed the phone to Michael.  He tried even harder, eventually sounding out, in a non-visual version of Charades, the words “spiral staircase.”

(Don’t ask.)

Needless to say, his efforts were unsuccessful.

Yes, reader, you guessed it.

Our next call was to Jane.