Adrift on St. John (16 page)

From our seats at the Dumpster table, we all turned to stare as Charlie hung out the side of his newly acquired Jeep, hollering—needlessly—to draw our attention.

He wore his typical garb of cutoff camo pants and scuffed up Army-surplus combat boots, an outfit that apparently suited his daily activities as a building contractor.

Charlie had plenty of regular full-sized vehicles, including
St. John’s largest tow truck (if you believed the claim of the multicolored advert painted on its side).

He was constantly transporting heavy machinery up and down the island’s steep and frequently washed-out roads, but he never drove any of his work fleet into town. Simply put, there wouldn’t have been any place for him to park.

The dearth of available parking spaces was a long-running beef for the island’s residents. Cruz Bay’s narrow streets were tightly packed with shops, bars, restaurants, vacation rentals, and the occasional residence. The few legitimate parking spots were jealously guarded, leaving the rest of the island’s vehicles to compete over a handful of dubiously designated parking areas, most of which were far more vertical than horizontal in terrain. It was not unusual to see several vehicles left precariously clinging to a thirty-degree incline with half an inch of separation between them.

Some of the most violent disputes between neighbors were rooted in the impossible parking situation—hence, Charlie’s use of the golf cart.

Despite the constant mockery Charlie suffered for driving it, the golf cart was the perfect solution to Cruz Bay’s parking dilemma. It could squeeze into holes that stymied even the smallest model of Jeep—including the short space between the Dumpster and our table, so long as there were enough expats around to lift it over.

The golf cart, however, had a few drawbacks.

First, its miniature size made it a dangerous target on Cruz Bay’s busy streets. Charlie had been nearly flattened on several occasions by disoriented tourists who had temporarily forgotten that everyone in the Virgin Islands drives on the left-hand side of the road.

Despite the best efforts of the rental car agencies, who strategically plastered shiny red stickers screaming KEEP LEFT across the front dash of their vehicles, most Americans, the bulk of the island’s tourists, had a hard time adjusting to the concept of left-handed driving.

To be honest, on those rare instances when I’d rented a ride, I’d had a few dodgy moments with oncoming traffic. Instinct is a difficult trait to change.

Setting aside its susceptibility to near-fatal collisions, the golf cart’s other main shortcoming was its limited power.

Charlie lived in a sprawling concrete block house perched at the top of an inland hill about a mile east from town. It was easy enough to drive the golf cart down into Cruz Bay—Charlie had amped up the cart’s brakes so that you could hear its distinctive squall several blocks away.

It was quite another matter to convince the golf cart to climb back up the hill at the end of the evening. No amount of tinkering had successfully modified the engine to pull it and its driver up the incline. On more than half of Charlie’s return trips, the golf cart wound up parked in the weeds at the side of the road, waiting to be towed the rest of the way home the following morning.

After several years of ranting, raving, and inflicting a significant amount of physical abuse on the cart’s plastic hood, Charlie had finally tired of walking the last half mile up the hill.

As it turned out, Charlie had news to share beyond his newly purchased Jeep, although he was now, predictably, having difficulty finding a place to park.

On his second pass by the Dumpster table, he slowed the vehicle to a crawl, leaned out again, and shouted, “Who’s the guy in the black limo?”

17

St. John typically saw an increase in rental vehicles around the middle of November, but the presence of a limo on the island was surprising—at any time of the year.

Each fall, as the weather cooled in the States and schoolchildren were released for their Thanksgiving breaks, vacationers began their annual migration down to the Caribbean. Extra flights from the eastern seaboard to the airport on St. Thomas facilitated the uptick in population.

The trend continued through the end of November. Then, after a short lull, the whole cycle repeated for the Christmas and New Year holidays.

All this extra traffic was generally fine with St. John’s year-round residents; the high season was when those in the tourism industry made the bulk of their annual income.

I didn’t know anyone, though, who didn’t let out a sigh of relief in late January, when the tide finally began to ebb, and the island returned to its regular, relaxed vibe.

This November, however, a second type of visitor had begun to crowd Cruz Bay’s streets. It was one of those,
I suspected, who had been riding in the limo that had caught Charlie’s eye.

With the eco-resort’s lease nearing its end and a likely auction of the Maho Bay real estate looming, diligence teams from various corporate entities were now arriving to inspect the property. It appeared several parties had plans to participate in the upcoming bidding process.

Even with the island’s exploding tourist numbers, the real estate vultures were easy to spot, conspicuous in their business-casual clothing, leather briefcases, and flashy rental cars—the last of which they picked up on St. Thomas and shipped across on the car ferry—further exacerbating the already unmanageable parking situation.

The rental agencies did their best to prohibit transport of their nicer vehicles across the channel to St. John, where the road conditions were notoriously bad. The potholes alone could ruin the suspensions of most models. Even some of the island’s “paved” roads required four-wheel drive to safely navigate.

My brow furrowed as I sipped on a frozen daiquiri from my seat at the Dumpster table. I could only imagine the conniption fit the limo owner would have if he discovered his pricey vehicle had been schlepped over to St. John. Someone was certainly going out of his way to make an impression.

We expats weren’t the only ones taking note of the island’s sudden influx of ostentatious wealth.

The crowds of day workers milling about the ferry building and the Freedom Memorial park across the street turned to stare with mounting hostility at each new batch of arriving power brokers—who in turn passed them by as if they were invisible. At the elementary school up the hill from the Crunchy Carrot, parents stood in the sun waiting for their children to be released from class as air-conditioned sedans drove by carrying the economic elite who would determine the island’s fate.

The topic of Maho Bay also began popping up in the
Constitutional Convention debates, which the local radio stations seemed to be broadcasting nonstop.

Sensing a theme upon which to expand their base, the Native Rights advocates asked why such a pristine and valuable piece of land should be controlled by a foreign entity. Shouldn’t it belong instead, they argued, to the people of the Virgin Islands?

An uneasy tension was settling in—one for which there seemed no ready means of release.

As Charlie and his Jeep made another futile pass by the Crunchy Carrot, César stuffed the last bite of his fish sandwich into his mouth, wiped a napkin across his flushed face, and waved a short good-bye. He was needed back at the kitchen.

The real estate teams were having a noticeable impact on the island’s food consumption. Reservations at the higher-end restaurants had filled up as the business executives used their lucrative expense budgets to sample the best of the local cuisine.

Seats at Pesce were the hardest to come by, and César was feeling the pressure. His consumption of fish sandwiches had dramatically increased in number, even as the length of his lunch breaks at the Crunchy Carrot grew ever shorter.

Richard the rooster kept a close eye on the stressed-out Puerto Rican. As soon as César scuttled away from the table, the bird pounced on his discarded wrappings. A moment later, an excited
squawk
signaled the discovery of an overlooked French fry.

Grinning at the bird’s delight, I returned my attention to the street as Charlie’s limo turned the corner at the ferry building and proceeded up the road toward the Dumpster table. Squinting, I stared at the rear windows, but the tinted glass prevented any visual of the shadowed figure in the backseat.

I couldn’t help but think of the large man from Miami as the car rolled slowly past.

18

A few days later, I was enjoying a morning walk through the resort when I heard the approaching hum of one of our many motorized golf carts. I stepped onto the curb of the brick path to let the cart through, but it slowed to an idle beside me.

Manto leaned out from the driver’s seat and motioned for me to join him.

“Cum’ on, Pin,”
he said jovially.
“Eye’ve broker’d a truce.”

A smile of relief broke across my face. Despite all my complaining, I’d missed tormenting my cranky assistant.

“She’s lonely, isn’t she?” I replied as I climbed into the passenger seat.

Shaking his head, Manto pressed down on the accelerator.

“How’d you get pulled into this?” I asked as we sped off toward the resort’s recreation area.

“Ain’t no fun wit’ you two nut talk-in’.”
He chuckled.
“More enter-tainin’ to wat’ch ya bicker.”

After a short drive, Manto parked the cart in a shady spot near the tennis courts. He turned off the ignition, reached
into a shirt pocket, and pulled out a small flask of rum. Handing me the bottle, he pointed to a narrow compartment in the molding between the seats.

“Plas-teek cups een there.”

Then he exited the cart and strolled off, grinning to himself. About twenty yards down the path, he turned back and pointed a finger at me.

“Play nice, Pin,”
he admonished with a wink.
“At least for a leet-tle while.”

I cracked open the bottle and took a sniff. If the scent was anything to go by, it was strong but drinkable. After lifting the lid to the compartment between the seats, I fished around inside for one of the plastic cups. I held the cup up to the sunlight, blew out a few cobwebs, and dumped in an inch of the dark amber liquid.