The susto backfired gatcho.
Cuito brought home in one go all the paneling from the mansion he had been hired to strip. It amounted to a single six-foot-high stack of four by eight-foot panels, some bare and some painted. Because all the panels still had nails in them, the pile was unsteady. The nails kept the layers from resting flat.
Cuito noted the problem. He put a cinder block on top to press down the stack and keep the panels from flying off in the wind, but the block caused an incline and slid off. He then tried two blocks, they formed opposite inclines, and both slid off.
“Ah, qué sura. I’ll tie a strap around them tomorrow,” he told himself, tired after a long day yanking out panels.
That night, the temperature dropped and the wind picked up and gusted all night.
The sound of the wind sent Cuito into a deep sleep.
The next morning, he awoke and noticed the leaves had been stripped off the trees. Winter has arrived, he thought. Then he remembered the rickety stack of paneling he left unsecured the previous evening.
He rushed outside and was overcome by the site of the missing stack. There wasn’t a single piece of panel to be seen.
“Gatcho!” he said out loud.
“I better levantarlas and ponerle before the jura comes and fines me for littering like they warned,” he said.
He quickly packed a lunch and jumped into his pichirilo pickup and le puzo.
The coast was clear, but he saw his panels strewn all over the barrio. Get gas now or on the highway when out of town, he asked himself.
But just he was about to pass the gas station on the main drag in the Southside, he spotted an old girlfriend pumping gas into her ramfla.
“Todavia las levanta,” Cuito told himself and decided to stop and pump gas beside her.
“Watch out driving over the nails in that panel,” the woman said to Cuito when he got of his pickup.
Cuito looked under his pichirilo and saw that indeed he had driven over the panel, which was facing up with the pointed end of all its nails upward. No chance he’d missed driving over them.
“Eeee! Bad move de amadres,” he said.
“Did you say you were gonna haul panels?” a stern voice asked as Cuito was still assessing the damage from the nail-laden panel underneath his pickup. Cuito couldn’t deny it was a police car’s tires he was looking at.
“Winter has arrived,” he said out loud.
