The look

When I returned Sanita was quite nice and civil to me, except for certain looks now and then and as long as we avoided that one subject. She never could communicate in words. It was always in gestures, from the start. She made me dinners every night and slept next to me, while I scored a job with ‘Lord Electric’, the largest electrical contractor on the island.

But Sanita dropped me a clue one day. She told me that Becky was a radical feminist and told all the women in her circle that men only held women back from their potentials and possible fulfilments. This was soon after April disappeared, a sort of excuse or forewarning of her own secret plans. A month later it was my turn. So I knew it was Becky who persuaded Sanita’s gullible and feeble mind to leave me, to take the dive into her own private world, an empty swimming pool, off the diving board, headed for a crash, head first, which is exactly what happened.

Becky could convince these women that she was a strong, unique model of a woman and in control. But it wasn’t men she could control, only her women friends and only in one direction, to convince them to leave the man they were with.

I hated Becky soon after my return from the work in St. Croix because I asked my friends about Sanita’s decision and how it came about, and heard all the hints and rumors, all fingers pointing in the same direction, the same hut, the same person.

I would have had it out with her if we’d met soon after. She lived just down the hill. But we didn’t, as she had just left Bill and her five year old boy, Ramses. She was ‘shacked up’ for a long time. But I was secretly pleased to hear the details of this disappearance. She divorced Bill that very Spring and hooked up with a heroin addict, a short, ugly cripple (he actually was a cripple with a deformed, twisted leg and had to walk with a crutch). But he was a painter of the beaches and landscapes in Rincon with strange splashes of colors on large oil canvasses and sold some at Cindy’s gift shop to locals and tourists. His one, obvious mistake in salesmanship was this: his canvasses were three and four feet wide and tourists had no easy way of fitting them in their luggage and getting them back home. Had he painted miniatures he would have done much better.

A tourist showing of some of his pictures.

Some locals praised his talents to the skies. In such a small backwater of the world he had a reputation but must have had another source of income as his pictures rarely sold. His house was a small, dingy cottage. I know most of his money went to heroin, as he was a heavy user, and in that state you don’t notice the shabbiness of your surroundings. In any big city, as an artist, he’d be a joke.

Becky moved into his hovel and into this habit with him. So much for her intelligence. Captain Bill had kicked her out with nothing but one suitcase and cut her off from all contact with her son, which showed his nasty character. In a matter of months she was a dedicated addict, soon derelict, avoiding all her old contacts and all sunlight, like a vampire.

I ran into her at the Calypso one day about a year later, too wacked out to even address, walking as unsteadily as her boyfriend. The price she so visibly paid, the wrinkles and aging on her face abated all my anger. I couldn’t have cursed her to a worse fate in all my wrath. Just seeing her stumble by, drunk and high and speechless, calmed me. She was by now abandoned by everyone. No one could believe the bad choice she’d made, seeming so gifted before. A few years later they broke up and she disappeared. The island had some mysterious ways of destroying minds and lives.

I was lucky to find work right away. It didn’t pay much but it got me out of the house each weekday, which was pay enough from having to face the ugly facts of our marriage, which Sanita, in a strange kind of reticence, also avoided.

It was a huge project in Aguadilla, just twenty minutes north of us, building a Hewlett Packard factory from ground up, where printers were to be made. I went to an interview and was hired on the spot, the boss in his trailer telling me he was going to pay me a special rate because of all my experience, 5.75 an hour, to wire the control room, (the most complex job). He spoke perfect English, was my age and intelligent.

But he told me not to mention this wage to anyone. He had other electricians on site who’d been working twenty years for the company and still only making 5.25 an hour. My wife even drove me to work every day and handed me a brown, paper, lunch bag in the parking lot, right in front of the other workers as they arrived. They complimented and kidded me daily on what a beautiful and good wife I had. I kept that situation a secret, but the irony pierced my heart.

The very first day in his office, as he was filling out my application form, I glanced at his paper-strewn desk and noticed a long order list of materials. As my eyes ran down the sheet I noticed that he’d ordered hundreds of rolls of twelve gauge wire, the common size used for lighting and almost everything else. But I saw someone had written down ‘solid’ copper wire, which was ten times harder to pull through conduits, rather than the far more practical and cheaper ‘stranded’ wire. I told him this mistake and he jumps up and claps me on the back, seeing the error right away and thanking me profusely. Some idiot clerk must have made that blunder and I’d just saved them plenty of grief and time and money before I was even done being hired.

But from then on this foreman treated me with deferential respect, giving me the control room to finish, where I worked alone, seated, hooking up tiny wires into hundreds of P.L.C.’s all day long. Then I saved his life six weeks later. I don’t say this to boast. It was just pure luck, for him. He would put on his belt most days and work a few hours, terminating the transformers, another critical job. One morning he was working on one in a nearly finished section when it was lunch time. His wires were stripped bare, laying on the floor and ready to be plugged into their proper lugs.

I knew which switch (in a bank of fifty switches) in the control room that energized them. We had talked about it and tagged it out that morning. When I walked back after lunch I noticed the Hewlett Packard supervisor had ripped off his red tag and turned that switch on with his lock. I ran across the factory floor, yelling, just as he was sitting down to resume work and touch the wires that were now live. He pulled out his tester and saw they were hot. The Packard man assumed that section of the plant was done and turned it on. Each section was energized, sequentially, when finished, so the lights and outlets could be used. Once again my foreman thanked me profusely, wiping the sweat off his brow, and offered to endorse me for a P.R. electrical license. I should have taken him up on that valuable favor but a few days later Jaime scored another store, starting immediately.

In his office that Friday I told him I was quitting and a curious discussion ensued. I said I had a new store to wire, in a mall. He asked how much I’d make at this, guessing out loud seven or eight dollars an hour. I told him “no it’s a contract, a set price, and if I do it efficiently I get whatever’s left, after the material costs are deducted”.

Now he was all ears and dying of curiosity, begging me to tell him how much it might be. I shocked him even more when I said: “I’ll draw five hundred a week and there should be one to two thousand left in profits after the six week build-out. That’s how I bid it and the bid was accepted”. He was flabbergasted. He was running a million dollar project for a pittance, less than one fourth of that.

“Well somebody’s making the money,” I told him. “You should go out on your own. Big corporations are always like that. They give you security, work you every week but in return you get a bare living”.

As I left he looked devastated, as if he’d chosen a very wrong career path. And he had, like most people, sucked in by the promise of a weekly paycheck, with the life sucked out of you by a life-long, minimum wage job, enriching billionaires.

The next three years were continuous stores for me, with Jaime my constant companion the first year, driving around the island to check out each new site, reading over prints and signing contracts, sitting next to each other in some office, the owners on the other side of the desk. He always brought me along to read the fine print, as he couldn’t. He was dyslexic and had a poor comprehension of complicated sentences. I didn’t.

I quickly learned the lingo of typical store contracts and had a sharp eye for half-hidden, special requirements, or unspecified materials which we’d have to supply, or anything that needed clarification. My education in the Classics served me well here, a sharp eye for every detail and a habit of never passing over a sentence until it was fully comprehended. It’s amazing what skills translate to other fields one assumes are totally different.

A few times I caught something in these details and we’d renegotiate the contract right there when we saw hidden costs. Our price went up thousands of dollars, and the deal was still signed, with smiles all around the table. And the money I made was just as I described to this foreman. But after six month, with more and more contracts rolling in, Jaime, without consulting me, hired a shady guy with an office in San Juan, Victor, and his two secretaries, to be our front man and handle all of the paperwork, though Victor had no knowledge of the construction trade, but a great deal of twisted cleverness in how to lie, cheat, steal, deceive and scam. He’d been practicing this art for years, with a straight face and a sharp tongue.

He’d met Victor and his wife Gina two years before in Rincon where they ran a video rental store. Now Victor had moved to S.J. and was running a scam. He sold raffle tickets for prizes, at one or two dollars a ticket. One of the prizes was a brand-new Suzuki Vitara, which I ended up driving for free for the next three years. His trick was this. He’d print up a hundred thousand numbered tickets. You could chose your number but he’d often sold only five or ten thousand numbers by the draw date, so when the number was drawn, it was almost always an unchosen one. The prize and the money then reverted to him. He was just about to get busted in this cheat with complaints filing in when Jaime called him up and offered a partnership. He jumped at Jaime’s proposal.

Jaime told me of this new arrangement after the deal was done. We drove to San Juan, I was introduced to him, given a tour of his office, met his two secretaries, one quite pretty, and with him, all handshakes and smiles, knowing nothing of his past. I thought this might be a grand improvement on our fast-expanding business. He even showed me a room with a desk that would be my own, to work on bids. But from now on he signed all the contracts which Jaime and I wrote up, from his bigger desk in the back office where all our proposals and calculations were sent.

And my final profits after completing all the electrical work on each store, ahead of schedule and well under the price negotiated, went into Victor’s coffers, the so-called company assets, purportedly to expand the business, but never to be seen by me again. I drew a five hundred dollar a week salary, was handed one of the three company credit cards for gas and small expenses, and the keys to a brand-new Vitara as my personal vehicle, as a gift, a trojan horse as it turned out, to suck me in. This all seemed fine and dandy, as I trusted Jaime’s judgement and we did need an office with secretaries for all the people trying to contact us and a pile of paperwork. Cindy handled this the first months from their home phone. But it became too much for her. She didn't want a full time job and complained.

But I secretly wondered at this choice of a new partner in charge, as he knew nothing of the construction trade. I figured we’d have him totally under our thumb, which was the case for awhile. After a very profitable first year, completing some twenty stores in the San Juan area, Victor put us up in a nice condo in Isla Verde, his three main foramen that is. I lived in it for a year, Mondays through Fridays, with great bars and the mile long beach in front of us, the 'El San Juan casino just a few blocks away. It was Puerto Rico's answer to Las Vegas. Then I'd head home on a three-hour drive each Friday night to be with Willy for the weekend. By then Sanita had moved out to a rental house on the other side of Rincon, a five minute drive. So even in my home there, I was happy with Willy and his friends, playing games.

I knew we were doing well and coming in well under our bid prices because of one small store where we didn’t, and Victor threw a hissy fit, calling me into his office, saying my bid was under by a few thousand dollars. But this was one out of dozens of stores we completed profitably, with many thousands in the bank. I never saw the books he kept in his safe and never knew what profits he stashed away on most of our stores, except once and a while I’d get a big pat on my back as he opened his final check for one more store completed, which he’d tuck it away. By then Jaime was removed from our company.

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