Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 32*
After we returned to Costa Rica, things quieted down a bit. Jane started spending more time in the States, Horace wrote in the mornings and played golf in the afternoons, and Paul and Richard were starting to get the feeling that the import/export business wasn’t really going to go anywhere, which encouraged them to slack off working quite so hard (as defined by tropical standards, of course). Paul had rented an apartment with his girlfriend Barbie in San José, so we didn’t see as much of him as before. In addition, the rains had stopped and a lazy torpor seemed to have settled over everyone.
This didn’t last, however. One night, Luis startled Don Marcos awake in the wee hours, and Don Marcos had punched him in the jaw before he realized what he was doing. Friction had been building between the two of them for a while, actually, as Luis was technically considered the major domo and top dog at the Kelton household. However, he was younger than Don Marcos, as well as his son-in-law, which meant that in cultural/familial terms, he occupied a subordinate position. Luis was nothing if not el gallo mas gallo, so he told Horatio that either Don Marcos had to go, or he would.
Jane and Horace hated to fire Don Marcos, but they felt they had no choice. He had assaulted Luis, and it seemed that he was getting odder and more volatile lately. An out-of-control Don Marcos was a scary thing to contemplate, for everyone’s sake. But it was a sad day when he left. Richard told me that he had visited Don Marcos’s home in Cartago one day and Don Marcos had proudly shown him the shrine to Don Horatio that he had erected in tribute to his patron. A large picture plus several smaller pictures of Horace sat surrounded by votive candles on a cabinet draped with some sort of special, fancy red cloth. He worshipped Don Horatio, and he verged on tears as he packed his meager belongings into the jeep for his ride back home to Cartago. We were sorry to see Don Marcos go, too, as he had always been kind, respectful, and helpful to us.
We didn’t realize, though, just how sorry we were going to be until Lijia’s brother, Rafa, came to take Don Marcos’s place.
Apparently, there used to be an old wives’ tale which claimed that in every large family, there’s always a family idiot. In fact, my mom loved to tell the story of her own family, which had fourteen children, she being the youngest. My grandfather had served as a state senator for several years and then as Secretary of State for Missouri, and his constituents often dropped by his home to see what kind of man they had elected. One day, a prim, sour-faced woman showed up without warning and asked my grandmother if she could meet all the children. Dutifully, Grandmother Sallie rounded them up from hither and yon, and when they were all crowded into the parlor, the woman declared, “Why, this can’t be all of them!” My grandmother assured her that yes, indeed, this was all of them and that this was certainly enough for any family.
“But where is the family idiot?!” the woman purportedly exclaimed. “Everyone knows that in a family this large, there is always a family idiot!”
My aunt Celestine (whom my mother took pains to inform me I was not named after; no, I was named after the actress Celeste Holm) decided that she would become the family idiot and from then on, when any prim, sour-faced ladies showed up to meet the children, she would mess her hair up into a complete rat’s nest, pull her clothes askew, and stagger drooling into the parlor.
I suppose there might be some occasional truth to these old wives’ tales.
The first hint we had that interacting with Rafa might be a little different than interacting with any of the other staff came one afternoon when he popped into our apartment, clutching what looked like a whole bunch of dental floss that had been unraveled from its dispenser.
“I found this in your trash,” he told us in his thick, guttural Spanish, and I realized, with a queasy feeling, that he was in fact grasping a handful of dental floss. Used dental floss. “Muy fuerte, eh?” he exclaimed delightedly, tugging on a couple of ends and snapping it in the air to demonstrate just how strong it was. He wanted to know if he could have it.
Well, it was nice of him to ask, although the thought of his rooting through our trash made me feel uncomfortable. I knew that Ana and Lijia did the same thing, because they once brought to me a worn-out, discarded bra of mine that I had tossed into a wastebasket. They couldn’t believe that I meant to get rid of it; they were sure it had fallen in there by mistake. But they had never shown up with skeins of tartar-encrusted and plaque-slimed dental floss.
We couldn’t bring ourselves to tell him what it was for some reason. We just nodded mutely so he would take it away. Later, Richard got the idea to give him a couple of spools of nice, new dental floss, but he continued to fetch whatever used pieces he could find in our waste cans until I took to hiding it inside other trash.
Rafa turned out to be the complete opposite of Don Marcos, despite the fact that that they were father and son. Whereas Don Marcos never slept, Rafa didn’t seem to take any of his responsibilities very seriously. He never seemed to patrol the place at night. At least, we never saw him. But he did like to stare through Richard’s and my bedroom window in the mornings if we hadn’t drawn our curtains, staring at us so long and intently that he would actually wake us up. In addition, he clearly knew very little about gardening. It was probably just as well that he wasn’t incredibly motivated, because when he did turn his attention to some poor, unfortunate plant, he butchered it in a most disturbing way. And whereas Don Marcos had been quiet and taciturn, Rafa talked incessantly. We heard, through Ana, that Rafa was hanging out in Escazú on his time off and bragging to everyone in town about his cushy new job working for ricos. Late one night, when Rafa should have been guarding the place but was instead snoozing away on the couch in the Keltons’ living room, some thieves stole in. Ironically, they robbed all of Rafa’s stuff, none of anyone else’s. I felt sorry for him when he discovered what all had been taken. But this was tempered by my feelings about his hobby.
It was taxidermy.
As soon as he moved in, he began hunting everything that moved on the Keltons’ grounds. We started noticing that a lot fewer birds and animals were roaming around, but we didn’t know why until Rafa began proudly displaying his trophies. I don’t have any problem with eating meat—clearly, the food chains of the planet are organized along these lines—and I suppose, in an effort to be culturally open-minded, I could have excused an occasional kill here and there for the sole purpose of decorating Rafa’s room. But this guy was the Stalin of small game hunters. He was snuffing dozens and dozens of happy little creatures just going about their business of being alive, maintaining the ecology of the area, and brightening the surroundings.
It got so bad that Horatio had a talk with him, but this only slowed him down a little. What made it all worse was that Rafa didn’t do a very good job of preserving these animals. He took the same attitude toward his avocation as he did toward his work, so his taxidermy specimens were neither well-embalmed nor nicely arranged.
One day, he staggered into our room screaming, his fists shoved into his eye sockets. He had a very heavy Cartago accent that we had a hard time understanding, but in between his shrieks of pain, we figured out that he had sprayed himself in the eyes with formaldehyde. He had been using a syringe to squirt some of the stuff into the brain cavity of a dead squirrel but he went overboard and injected way too much. The top of the skull came flying open like a spring-loaded garbage can lid, and the formaldehyde spurt right into Rafa’s unprotected eyes.
Richard enlisted Ana’s help in bundling Rafa into the jeep to take him to the hospital. When they got to the hospital, Ana refused to go in, which made Richard a tad nervous, but he escorted the wounded taxidermist into the emergency room, where he was eventually treated and released.
Afterward, I couldn’t help but wonder if somehow the collective consciousness of all the small animals in the neighborhood hadn’t pooled their psychic resources and delivered this ironic accident. Either that, or the ghosts of all the slaughtered ones were exacting their revenge. Fortunately, Rafa didn’t inflict any permanent damage on his eyes, but this episode did have the effect of cooling his enthusiasm for this hobby, thank God.
Shortly after this, another odd encounter with animals occurred, and this time, in fact, Rafa was not the culprit. Richard was away on business, and I woke up late one morning, having finished my novel with nothing much else to do. As I lay in bed, trying to remember my dreams, I noticed a peculiar skritching, scuttling sound underneath the bed. There was no telling what it was. I almost didn’t want to know, and I stayed motionless for a while, listening to: clackity-clackity. Clack skritch. Skritch skritch. Scuffle scuffle scuffle. It sounded fairly large from the volume of the sound. It sounded a little desperate, too, as if it were trying to get out from under the bed but didn’t know how. I couldn’t tell at all what phylum the creature might belong to, arthropod, crustacean, or vertebrate, which of course, included a whole lot of different possibilities ranging from reptile to amphibian to rodent.
One twilight evening out in the yard Richard and I had heard a loud flapping sound and then spotted this enormous flying creature as it landed with a billowing thwack on the side of the house. We approached cautiously, curious to see what it might be, thinking that it was probably a bat. But when we got close enough, we discovered that it was a moth! I was definitely considering the possibility that the creature under the bed might be a giant palmetto bug. It could even be a snake, a poisonous one, even though the clacking aspect of the noises it was making argued against snake. But if a snake was thrashing around wildly enough, it could probably produce some clacking sounds against the wooden legs of the bed. For several long minutes, I didn’t want to step out of bed for fear my bare foot might get nailed by this thing, but then my concern that the creature’s frantic scuttling movements might somehow propel it up the side of the bed and into the covers got me out of there.
I dressed hastily, which seemed to incite the animal even more as the scrabbling noises intensified, and then, with all the courage I could muster, I pushed the bed away from the headboard so that I could peer below. Scowling up at me with all the squinchiness associated with its name was a crab. A land crab. It jabbed its claws at me threateningly, and I stumbled back.
Richard wasn’t here to help me, so I went looking for Ana or Lijia and found Lijia in the kitchen. I told her that there was a crab in my room, and she looked as alarmed as if I’d just told her a jaguar was prowling around in there.
“Ay! Un cangrejo?” she exclaimed, her eyes huge, her mouth falling slack. “Son muy peligrosos! Muy venemosos!”
Dangerous?! Poisonous??!! I gazed back at her in dismay. “What should I do?” I asked, as terrified as she.
She said that she would go get Luis so I went downstairs and waited outside on our porch until he arrived with a broom and his little yellow dog, Mary. I wasn’t quite sure in what way the crab was poisonous, but from Lijia’s disconcerting reaction, I imagined that it might be like a spitting cobra or skunk, able to shoot deadly toxins out of some specially evolved crustacean blow-dart thingy from its eye stalks or arm pits.
On the other hand, if the crab was so venomous, I wasn’t sure why Luis had brought Mary. I knew that his daughters adored the ugly little mongrel and if anything happened to her, they would be devastated. I became even more bewildered when more and more of the Ticos began showing up—Rafa, Ana, Sofía, and a couple of guys I’d never seen before. We had a crowd in the room by the time Luis took up his station as crab handler. He looked around, making sure that he had everyone’s attention. Then he thrust his broom at the furious crab who waved its claws like deadly, pernicious scissors. I cringed behind the door jamb and waited for a toxic stream of the most potent acid on Earth to assault us all and melt us in chunks and parts, leaving us crimped and misshapen for the rest of our lives.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, the crab glommed onto the broom with one of its pincers and didn’t let go. It reminded me of a Stupid Pet Trick I saw on David Letterman one time, of a pit bull who clomped onto a frisbee with his massive jaws while the owner gripped the other side of the frisbee and spun him around, the dog’s teeny little tadpole of a body sticking straight out from the centrifugal force. That pit bull was not going to let go of that frisbee for anything. The owner probably had to take him offstage and inject him with some sort of muscle relaxer in order to pry him off. Well, this crab wasn’t letting go of the broom, either. That is, until Luis jabbed it at Mary and Mary, brave creature that she was, began snapping at the crab.
Apparently, the crab could let go of the broom if it had something else to attach itself to, and it reached over with its free claw and clamped onto Mary’s upper lip with the strength of a vise. Poor Mary! She sawed her head back and forth, trying to dislodge the crab, but it looked as though surgery might be the only solution. The shellfish itself wore an expression of complete and utter crabbiness.
I couldn’t believe Luis had set Mary up for this and that everyone was treating this as entertainment. This was their beloved little dog! Didn’t they care that she was in pain? But the more frantically Mary whipped her head, the harder the Ticos laughed, until I thought they were going to pass out and crash face down on the marble floor. They clutched their stomachs as if they were suffering the agonies of ptomaine poisoning while tears coursed down their faces. They were laughing so hard they were sobbing. Myself, I couldn’t laugh because I knew how much that poor little dog was hurting—not to mention freaked out. And clearly, the crab was not a danger. My guess is that this particular species is only poisonous if eaten.
When the Ticos had wrung as much mirth as they possibly could out of their exhausted, spent bodies, Luis needled the crab with the broom so mercilessly that it finally transferred its grip from Mary to the bristles of the broom. Mary took off like a shot to go hide underneath something and nurse her bruised lip while Luis galloped out of the room to deposit the crab outside with everyone following him in great, high spirits, as if he held King Arthur’s sword and was getting ready to plunge it into the swimming pool to keep for the next worthy knight destined to wield it.
Man. If I’d known the crab wasn’t dangerous, I could have poked a broom at it and taken it outside myself. This must be what happens when people don’t have cable.
It wasn’t long after this that Horatio sat Richard and Paul down in the living room one day and told them that he and Jane were going to close down the import/export business. It didn’t look promising—the political climate involving Central America and the United States was particularly troublesome—and they couldn’t afford to keep putting money into the venture without a stronger indication that money would eventually be coming in. Meanwhile, Jane had grown increasingly interested in developing some land that her father had left her in Arlington, Texas. Texas was continuing to boom and vast fortunes were being made, those that already existed greatly enlarged. A high energy person like Jane found Costa Rica a little too laconic for her revved-up tastes, and she longed to flex her financial muscles, see what she might be able to accomplish.
It would take several months to close down operations, fortunately for us, so we wouldn’t be leaving immediately. We had always been aware that this gig might not last forever, but we felt downcast all the same. In addition, it wasn’t clear what we were going to do after we left. Although Richard’s job was loaded with bountiful perks, he didn’t pull down a lot in the way of monthly salary, and we had continued to make payments to the family and friends we had borrowed money from in order to build our house in northern California. So we hadn’t really saved up much of a cushion. We could return to Redding, but the employment situation there wasn’t any better than when we had left. By now, even the job in the lunar basin of Nevada was gone, and our future loomed as a big, fat question mark.
Above: The view from the balcony at los Kelton. Photo courtesy of Ted James.
*Intro:
At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.
This is Chapter 32 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.
This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.
So once a week, I’ll be excerpting a chapter from Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue until I’ve told the whole tale. I hope you enjoy these stories!
**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.
UPDATE: I’ll be posting the story of Caelum Moor on Monday, October 19. This is one of the most amazing stories I’ve ever had the privilege to recount.
Thursday, October 15, 2009