Tropical Fever - The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House - page 9

“You're going to love this house,” Felicity volunteered as we shot past the gates of what
I assumed to be the Dream Son's resort, lighting her third cigarette from the dying embers
of her second. “The goats are adorable.”
Goats?
Michael, in the front seat, stared straight ahead.
We rocketed past a deserted-looking hospital and turned left at a house with matching
half-size statues of cows, painted black and white, standing in the front yard. Then we
drove up a series of dusty, pot-holed lanes until we reached an iron gate, secured with an
enormous, rusty padlock that clearly hadn't been unlocked in a couple of decades.
We squeezed our way around the gate and stumbled along the driveway past the neigh-
bor's yard (technically a corral, filled with—you guessed it—goats), dragging our dented
suitcases behind us.
Although the house didn't bear more than a passing resemblance to the idyllic website
photos Michael had excitedly emailed to me a couple of months earlier, it looked present-
able enough from the outside. And the view from the terrace was stupendous—a sweeping
panorama encompassing both the big island of Puerto Rico and the tiny island of Culebra,
with a broad swath of aquamarine sea between them.
The less said about the interior of the house the better. Think jailhouse block meets sub-
urban tract house, circa 1975, minus the glamour.
It was grim but serviceable. The toilet flushed; the fridge worked; the sheets, though no
doubt already threadbare when they'd escaped from their discount outlet a decade earlier,
appeared to be clean. Nothing fancy, as Felicity cheerfully exclaimed, but it would get us
through the week.
And there was always the view.
Once we'd settled in, Felicity drove us to the rental car company where we were given
custody of a scratched-up clunker with a permanently-illuminated 'check engine' light.
Tired and hungry though we were, it was thrilling to be cruising around in the tropics after
a bitingly cold winter, so I suggested we take an exploratory spin.
Michael, always good with maps, had already figured out the basic layout of the island
and soon we were on the road to Esperanza, the tiny fishing village nestled on the south (or
Caribbean) side of the island, where most of the restaurants seemed to be located.
Then two things happened in rapid succession.
First, there were the horses.
At least five or six of them were standing in the middle of the road. Yes, we'd read all
about the island's wild horses but frankly we'd imagined something more along the lines
of the ponies that inhabited Assateague Island off the Maryland shore (one of our favor-
ite summer haunts), stubby, ill-mannered quadrupeds who ate your coveted club sandwich
when you turned your back, then digested it and shot it out the other end with cartoonish
speed.