You Can't Miss It (standard:adventure, 3369 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Aug 23 2007	Views/Reads: 3158/2060	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
When I went looking for a coffee-sack factory in the Dominican Republic it turned out to be a surrealistic quest

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

absolutely sure.  Very gently I said, 

"What a shame, Senorita!  That won't help me at all.  Please find me the
red bus with a white stripe!"  She looked up, visibly affected.  
Clearly I had offended her honor. The sound of the TV filled each 
little silence. 

"I'll look one more time," she said crossly, "but if it doesn't show up
again...."  I watched the pages flutter by, one by one. 

"No Red-and-White" she declared resignedly.  I looked grateful and
dropped a ten-peso note onto the open book.  She burst into tears.  I 
backed out discreetly without trying to apologize.  At least I had the 
right bus: the White-and-Red. 

It wasn't until a month later, when I left the island, that I realized
the Ministry of Transportation also operated a Red-with-White bus and a 
White-with-Red one, half-and-half each color.  The red-and-white buses 
had been too badly shot up during the last uprising to put back into 
service.  As for the Red-Cross-White bus, two of those were driven by 
an ambulance service.  The Swiss Legation also had a smaller vehicle, 
White-Cross-Red, but that didn't go to Veintimilla.  This two-color 
variant held true for blue and white, blue and red, green and blue, and 
so on, for hundreds of viable combinations.  Santo Domingo has about a 
million inhabitants. 

My next stop was the Textile Workers' Union.  A giant of a man with
three shades of brown mottling his face, stood just inside the door of 
this elegant colonial building. 

"Appointment card" he demanded.  I held mine out.  He took my briefcase
and emptied it on a table, then probed every square inch of my body 
through my clothing, starting with my hair. 

"Take off your shoes and socks," he ordered.  I sat on the floor and did
this.  He examined the soles of my feet.  "Okay, put them on again.  
You can go in."  I wondered, as I drew on my sandals, what he might 
have been looking for. 

It took a little while to get myself together, re-pack my briefcase and
straighten my tie.  Somewhere I had lost a ball-point pen.  Another 
visitor was already pounding at the door.  I went into the next room, 
where a receptionist sat behind a bullet-proof glass.  Her metallic 
voice came out of a loudspeaker in the ceiling. 

"Who are you supposed to see?" she asked.  I didn't know how to answer
that, so I responded: 

"Is there a textile mill in Veintimilla?"  She paused just one
thousandth of a second, then replied, 

"East or West?"  Now it was my turn to be nonplussed.  All at once, I
had the answer. 

"The one that makes coffee sacks," I replied.  She picked up a telephone
and talked with someone for several minutes.  When she hung up, the 
metallic voice informed me, 

"That's not the password.  Go through that door behind you and turn
right, do you hear?   You can't miss it."  She pointed.  I turned and 
went through the open door, hoping earnestly that it wasn't a gas 
chamber.  Just inside, I turned left. 

A massive metal door barred the way.  It seemed to have no handle, so I
pushed the palm-sized cream-colored button in its center.  For an 
instant, nothing happened.  Then the door swung aside heavily, 
silently, lodging open with a gentle click.  Inside I could see a lot 
of racks -- tier upon tier -- stacked with blue steel gun barrels.  The 
acrid odor of preservative prickled in my nose.  Somewhere a yellow 
flashing light came on and I could see figures running here and there.  
Slowly I backed out the door into the belly of the dappled giant who 
enfolded me gently in one arm and turned me around facing the other 
way. 

"The receptionist said to turn right." he whispered in my ear. 

A few steps down the hallway, I found another office and went in.  The
aroma of a Cuban panatella floated in the air.  A small man stepped 
from behind the door and closed it after me. 

"This is the Textile Workers' Union, isn't it?" I asked, feeling as if I
had lost my way inside a time warp.  He motioned me to a comfortable, 
high-backed chair and offered me a cigar.  I refused, so he lit one 
himself and replied, 

"It is the Dominican Division of the International Syndicate of Cotton
and Jute Harvesters, Spinners and Weavers." he replied.  "Miguel 
Antonio Prieto de Saldarriaga y Garcia at your service." 

I was impressed.  At least I had come to the right place.  Returning the
introduction, I explained what I was looking for -- a factory that made 
coffee sacks in Veintimilla.  He seemed very accommodating.  As he 
spoke, waving the panatella about, ruby flashes glinted off the jewel 
in his ring. 

"We have a very well developed Textile industry here, you know," he
began, and went on for some time, describing how it started back in the 
late fourteen hundreds when Columbus arrived.  His story spanned nearly 
five centuries, right up to the present.  I was not aware that 
parachutes and barrage balloons were made here during World War II.  
Finally, he got to my question. 

"I cannot say personally if there is a textile mill in Veintimilla," he
apologized, "but if you would kindly telephone the receptionist after 
lunch, I am sure that she will be able to tell you at that time." 

I looked at the clock.  His story had taken three hours.  I scribbled
the receptionist's phone number in my notebook and left by the side 
door.  It led into a charming little garden with bleeding-hearts and 
forget-me-nots nestled daintily among the juniper bushes.  A short walk 
later I was back at the hotel. 

After a snack and a siesta, I telephoned the Textile Worker's Union and
sure enough, the receptionist had my answer. 

"If you go to the Ministry of Commerce -- you know where it is? -- they
can tell you if there is a textile mill in Veintimilla."  The Ministry 
of Commerce was where I had started. 

So next day, here I stood in Veintimilla, beside the white bus with a
red stripe, at the end of a road of houses, wondering where to find the 
textile mill that made coffee sacks.  Everyone had told me, if I 
remember correctly, 

"You can't miss it." 

I was beginning to regret coming.  The sun was hot.  The atmosphere was
dusty.  I knew nobody -- a stranger in a strange place.  Not far from 
me was the first house, where a beautiful little girl, delicate as a 
china doll, was jumping rope just inside the door.  I watched her for 
some time, and between jumps she smiled at me.  Suddenly with a giggle, 
she ran inside, leaving me alone again.  I waited, hoping her mother 
might come to tell me about the textile mill, but nobody came. 

I took off my jacket, hoisted my briefcase, and trudged to the next
house.  Nobody was home.  The door was open.  Each house abutted on its 
neighbor, so I went from door to door.  Not a dog.  Not a cat.  I 
knocked at the open doors of twenty or thirty houses before I gave up.  
It was as if the Gestapo were calling.  Everyone must be hiding. 

Finally I came back to house one.  The little girl had returned and I
watched the ribbons of her pigtails beat time to the thrashing of the 
jump rope. She laughed, seeing that I was pleased.  I had to ask: 

"Tell me little girl, do you know where the textile factory is?" 

She smiled and jumped, smiled and jumped.  Finally she missed a step.
"Papi works there." she offered, then went back to jumping.  I tried 
again: 

"Sweetheart," I cooed, wishing I had a lollipop, "where is the textile
mill?" 

She stopped jumping and came out the door.  Standing at the curb, she
pointed at some empty lots to the south.  They ended in the ocean, 
about half a mile away. 

"You can't miss it." she said, adding, "Mami isn't home.  Do you want me
to come with you?" 

I thought about it and refused point-blank.  The last thing I needed
right now was to be spindled or mutilated or whatever they did to 
kidnappers here.  After tucking my sweaty shirt back into my pants, and 
shaking the sand out of one shoe, I set off across the sandy emptiness 
in the direction of the ocean. 

About six blocks later, the road took a sudden dip, and I saw a long low
building hidden in the trough behind a dune.  The ocean wasn't far 
away.  I stopped a moment to wipe my face and head, wring out my 
handkerchief and tramp onward.  Like the houses, the building was 
painted pastel blue. 

I recalled the "Blue House" in Peru, the official government-sanctioned
and inspected, Ministry-approved whorehouse.  It was the same shade of 
blue.  They used to talk about some wild goings-on in the upper 
stories.  The fee was unique: two hundred soles for the ground floor, 
four hundred for the first floor, eight hundred for the second floor, 
sixteen hundred .... and so on.  As I remember, the building had eleven 
stories, which was pretty high for a primary earthquake zone. 

A lot more walking finally brought me to the west end of the building,
which was larger than I expected.  A couple of dozen bicycles were 
hanging beneath a tin shed, but no cars were visible.  I found a door 
and went inside the mill, where it was cooler if noisy.  I stood beside 
a massive power generator which drove two heavy-duty air compressors.  
They grumbled, wheezed and banged while I tried to decide where the 
office might be.  Along the north wall stood skids and pallets piled 
high with jute sacks;  near them a baling machine was wrapping each 
bale with steel tape and ejecting the bales onto a wheeled cart.  Not 
far from me, two burros were nuzzling some hay and I realized what they 
were for: they would just fit the cart. 

Finally, the maintenance man saw me and came over.  He dressed
differently from the others, wearing orange coveralls instead of a blue 
shirt.  Rulers and gages spouted from his bib pocket.  He set down his 
tool kit on the base of the compressor and asked politely: 

"How can I serve you, sir?"  I thanked him and explained my business.
"Follow me" he said, and a minute later I was in the manager's office. 

"Garcia" said the manager and I introduced myself again.  He wasn't
busy, so we talked about coffee sacks for an hour -- about the strength 
of jute and how it varies with color or age, about the merits of 
straight fiber versus twine, about flexibility and radius of bending 
and a lot of other things.   He took me on a trip around the factory, 
showing me how they comb and twist and reel the raw fiber, how they 
bleach and dry it.   He showed me the way it was cross-woven into 
sheets of "costal" then folded, trimmed, doubled, seamed, overlapped 
and sewn shut by hand.  A great deal of care was taken to insure that 
not one coffee bean would escape, once it was sealed inside that sack.  
The bales of sacks were shipped all over the Caribbean.   As expected, 
the most costly, time-consuming operation was sewing the sack shut. 

I opened my sample kit and took out the glue.  It took only a minute to
show him how much faster my brand of glue could seal his sacks.  He 
tried one sack after another. 

Ten sacks later, we both had very sticky hands.  "Don't touch me!" he
laughed.  "If we stick together, my wife will wonder why I'm late to 
dinner!"  We went over to the circular washbasin and scrubbed the glue 
off our hands.  It was pretty good glue, and didn't give up easily to 
soap and  water.  Finally, I left most of it stuck to some shop rags 
and made my way back out, among a bevy of oil drums.  I noticed that a 
couple were open.  Lifting a thin cardboard cover, I looked into one 
drum: it was  stacked with tier after tier of blue steel gun barrels.  
Each drum must have held a hundred.  I lost count after roughly two 
hundred drums.  The manager came out and escorted me back to his 
office. 

A technician was waiting for us.  "Fill them," said Garcia, pointing at
the sacks we had glued at the bottom  The technician took two sacks to 
an overhead hopper, hooked them to the outlet and pulled a lever.  The 
sacks began to fill with coffee beans.  I took a closer look and 
discovered they were actually bean-sized pellets of lead.  Each filled 
sack must have held a ton of lead -- twenty times the weight of a 
sackful of coffee beans.  But the glued seams held up. 

As I recovered my briefcase, he complimented me. 

"It's good glue.  Really good.  We could use a good glue like that. 
Leave us a couple of samples."  I emptied the briefcase gladly.  "How 
many more would you need?" I asked, pulling out my order pad, "say a 
thousand tubes a month?" 

"We'll let you know," said the manager, "tomorrow." 

Nobody offered to drive me back to the bus, so I asked Garcia about it. 

"Take one of the bicycles," he replied.  I couldn't believe my ears.The
maintenance man went outside with me, set a sturdy green-and-white bike 
on its wheels in the sand, and held it for me while I got on.  He 
started me off with a hefty push, but before I got halfway back to the 
bus stop, the bike was a wreck.  Sand crunched in the sprocket and 
froze up the wheel bearings.  The handlebars refused to steer straight 
ahead.  I had to abandon it in a sand dune and continue on foot. 

Several hot, sweaty, uphill blocks later, I reached the bus stop at
Veintimilla.  At one point, the rocky sidewalk crumbled under my feet 
and I fell headfirst into the gutter.  After a minute, the bus pulled 
up at its stop, so I picked myself up and climbed in.  My clothes were 
rumpled and dusty, my briefcase had a long scratch on it, but no blood 
was dripping from my bruises.  The bus driver was reading a newspaper 
and said nothing.  It was still very hot. 

Soon a breeze would come up from the ocean and it would be night-time,
playtime.  I picked a couple of stones out of my back pocket and sat 
down. The uneven seat sank in and its springs twanged back with every 
movement, so I moved to another row.  Between heartbeats it was very 
quiet.  The humming insects had changed their tune.  Nobody came. 

After what seemed a very long time, the driver started the engine while
I sucked at a cut finger.  The bus lurched, but wouldn't move.  "Okay," 
said the driver, "we push."  I left my papers on the seat and got out 
to join him, behind it.  "One, two, three, PUSH!" he shouted.  We 
pushed but nothing happened.  We stepped back and rested a minute.  My 
friend, the little girl with braids and a jump rope, was standing in 
her doorway. 

"Wanna push?" she offered.  The driver laughed.  Nevertheless, she
dropped her jump rope and scampered up between us, stretching out her 
arms and placing her diminutive palms square against the scarred white 
bumper.  The driver and I leaned against the bus again, half choked by 
exhaust fumes.  She sang out: 

"One-potato, two-potato, three-potato, PUSH!" and the bus lurched
forward, rolling downhill.  I raced the driver to the door and a moment 
later he was in his seat, while I was waving back at my friend from the 
smut-blackened rear window. 

That night, I dressed up my scars with peroxide, brushed a little shoe
polish into the scratch on my briefcase, and looked forward to 
tomorrow. 

*     *     *     *     * 

Seattle WA 

Gerald X. Diamond 

Copyright 1992


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