No Bueno is not exactly the kind of name you want to call someone. But he seemed to like it. It wasn’t his real name, of course. His name was Carlos and he was a Ngobe Indian who lived with his family on the remote island of Solarte in Bocas Del Toro, Panama. To get there from the USA you would have to fly into Panama City, take a small plane to the airport on Isla Colon and then take a boat from there. Solarte has no roads. There is a sidewalk in the Ngobe village, but most of the homes are accessible only by boat. We lived up on the hill for about six months. It was a nice gig, although the bugs were unbelievable. The home was big and open and had screens on the windows, but no glass. Wind blew through all day and big lazy fans kept the place cool.
We bought a panga, a 23ft traditional boat with an 85hp motor on it. We named her after my dog, Babygirl. She was our car (the panga, not the dog). There was no sense in owning a car in the islands and the panga was a necessity. I loved her. She was reliable and fast. I loved shooting across the bay, wind in my hair, skipping over the ocean. Sometimes I was afraid we might hit the coral beneath us because the water was so clear and it had that swimming pool effect—the one where the water is ten feet deep but it feels like you can reach out and touch the bottom.
We had a place to park her. An overhang at the Rock Dock. Rock Dock was the name of the dilapidated concrete dock a quarter mile below the house. At one time it was used to haul in supplies from the ferry, but years of wind and salt eroded it into a withering strip of stones and rebar.
Nothing lasts long in the islands.
Non-the-less, it was enough. We had a nice overhang to keep most of the rain out of the boat, which was a good thing because we had no bilge pump and a night of rain could sink a boat.
Then there were the Indians.
The Ngobe don’t make a lot of money. For the most part that is OK since they own land and build homes from wild hardwoods, palms, and bamboo. But they have the opinion that we Gringos have more money than we need, so once in a while they take something useful and figure it isn’t a problem because we can replace it and they can’t.
Enter Babygirl.
And No Bueno.
No Bueno was a good guy. He was short with milked-coffee colored skin and lovely dark-rimmed eyes that looked like he was always wearing heavy eye-liner. He was fair and jovial and drove a taxi boat—a panga just like ours. Mostly, he drove for Bambooda—the off-the-grid hostel just down the shore from us. But he also drove school-boat. No, not school-bus. School-boat.
The kids came down from their houses in the jungle on the hill. They walked down narrow, muddy paths past crocodile infested rivers (OK, that sounds terrible. There were non-aggressive caimans in the streams.) down to the dock. They wore crisp, white shirts and navy-blue skirts or trousers and they all arrived at the Rock Dock brand-spanking clean. In all honesty, I don’t know how their mothers kept their clothes so clean. I suppose it had something to do with scrubbing them on the rocks. I can’t get my whites white for nothing. Maybe I should go visit with the Ngobe and take a laundry lesson.
Laundry aside...
The kids came down to the dock and No Bueno took them by boat to the main island where they attended school.
So of course, No Bueno was very careful with his boat. Not careful driving it, although he was that too. He was careful locking everything up so stuff wouldn’t be stolen—like a motor, or a gas tank, or an expensive hose connecting the two.
He understood the problem with the Indians.
After all, he was one.
Which brings me to how No Bueno got his name.
We had just moved into the house on the hill and Babygirl had just been purchased. (The boat, not the dog. The dog was adopted off the streets in Mexico, but that is an entirely different story.) We sped across the water to the Rock Dock all excited and full of enthusiasm for our new adventure in island living.
We pulled up to the crumbling dock, jumped out, and tied off through secure looking places between stones and wood with our new blue lines.
Carlos (later known as No Bueno) pulled up right behind us. He had finished his school-boat run and was headed up to his house in the jungle. He shut off his engine, removed the key from the ignition, and took a line of thick cable and ran it around a non-removable part of the dock, through the handle on his gas tank, through a bracket on the motor, through a drilled hole in the fiberglass on his panga, and back up to the non-removable part of the dock. Then he locked the whole thing with a padlock the size of my fist.
When he was finished, he climbed up onto the dock, took a quick look at our bright blue, nicely tied lines and said, "No bueno."
And off he went up the muddy path and into the jungle.
Lee and I just stood there looking at each other. Apparently, our nice new lines were not going to do the trick.
This is where the story becomes like The Three Little Pigs or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You know, one of those stories where the same event is repeated over and over again with just a small change each time. And each time the answer is...
"No bueno."
Wind out of our sails, we hesitantly left Babygirl by herself and trudged up the muddy hill to our house. (The golf cart which had earlier been driven into the sea by one of the adorable little Ngobe kids had not yet been Jimmy-rigged.) From Carlos' expression and short declaration, we were under the distinct impression we had better not leave Babygirl alone long.
Up at the house, we plundered the bodega for a length of cable and a padlock. Actually, I was amazed we found them. In a normal world, you wouldn't just walk into the house a find ten feet of stainless steel cable and a brand new padlock WITH the key. But then this was not a normal world.
We slid back down the hill and secured the boat. Well, sort of. The cable wasn’t long enough to do all the under and over Carlos did. But we did manage to run it through a bracket on the motor, around one of the poles on the bimini, and back to the dock.
Just at that moment, Carols reappeared, apparently done with lunch and ready to go back to work. He quickly glanced at our handy work.
"No bueno," was all he said and he was off again.
Not having the energy to bang back over the waves to the hardware store, we decided to risk leaving Babygirl not-too-securely-cabled and we spent the rest of that day and that night on the island. But, we were up early scooting across the channel to the big island where we bought a longer piece of cable.
Carlos magically seemed to reappear right when, after running the cable through everything we could possibly imagine, we were clicking our brand new little pad lock into place.
"No bueno."
Maddening? Funny? I wasn't sure which. But the message was loud and clear.
So, we bought a new, bigger lock.
"No bueno."
We bought a thicker piece of cable figuring maybe ours was too easy to cut through with a pair of wire snippers.
"No bueno."
That was about the time we actually started calling him No Bueno, behind his back of course because he really was a nice guy and was just trying to help. He knew his own people better than we did and he knew what they were capable of.
But after doing everything we could possibly think of to secure our little Babygirl, we still got the inevitable,
"No bueno."
We finally figured it out the night our fuel line was stolen.
Apparently is wasn't enough to just lock everything to everything in an OCD manner and secure everything with a lock big enough to guard Fort Knox. Apparently the line connecting the fuel tank to the motor actually needed to be removed and taken home each and every evening.
It cost $107 US dollars to replace.
No Bueno is a nice guy.
I like him. I like his family. And when his sister hobbled down from the jungle every day to go by boat to the hospital for physical therapy for her knee, I always asked how she was doing.
I still think No Bueno has the coolest, eye-liner rimmed eyes.
And the day we passed him on the water, us in Babygirl and he in his boat, and I enthusiastically waved and accidently hollered, "Hola! No Bueno!"… he smiled.
I have no idea what was going through his head, but the name stuck and he didn't seem to mind.
Maybe he was just gloating in an I-told-you-so kind of way after we forked out the cash for a new fuel line.
Maybe he just liked the name.