El Dedo de Pancho

Power tools are a fairly new phenomenon in San Juanico. Full-time electricity has only been around for a couple of years and fishing has been the main occupation since the 1960’s when the town grew out of a seasonal fish camp that was originally used by ranch dweller’s from the nearby mountains. The exposure to power tools has come with the influx of gringos who’ve provided new construction opportunities. But in the beginning there were very few guys with construction experience for others to observe the tools in action and there weren’t any formal tool- safety classes, so a lot of scary habits developed.

I’m pretty sure Pancho was once a pangero like almost all of the men, but as long as we’ve known him he’s owned the Tecate store in town. More recently, he’s been doing various construction jobs for his gringo son-in-law who is also our builder.

Pancho and his son were elected to build the sombra (shade structure) off our garage few months ago. I told them my idea for rows of tallos (palm leaf stems) in an alternating chevron pattern that would provide parking shade over the large area. Our builder brought them a nail gun and circular saw and my husband powered up our generator and off we went to paint our new casita, leaving them with hundreds of tallos to cut and nail.

My husband went back out a few hours later to check on their progress. From across the yard he saw Pancho holding the nail gun upside down, obviously trying to troubleshoot a problem. He could tell that Pancho was getting ready to pull the trigger with the gun aimed right at his face, so BigWooo yelled “Pancho” loud enough to make him almost fall off the ladder, which stopped him from firing the thing. He then gestured “think about what you’re doing” and a look of “holy ****” came across Pancho’s face as the lightbulb came on.

A few days, and hundreds of tallos later, they were doing a beautiful job and the sombra was looking even better than I expected. We went out to the garage to get more paint one day and Pancho’s son was alone. He calmly reported that “there had been as accident” and Pancho was on his was to Constitucion. He said it “wasn’t too bad” but there had been a lot of blood. We asked what had happened and he demonstrated how Pancho had been cutting each tallo by hold it out in front of him and then slicing through the air with the circular saw. Something slipped and Pancho sliced through his finger instead, and cut off his fingertip. The doctor in town couldn’t do anything, so he was going in to Constitucion.

Later in the afternoon, I went to clean up the area and got a glimpse of something that looked out of place lying in the gravel. Sure enough, there was Pancho’s soft white fingertip pad. I picked it up and showed BigWooo and we tried to decide whether to tell Pancho we’d found it, wondering if it would symbolize bad Mexican juju for him or something.

Pancho stopped by when he got back from town and had large bulky bandages on his hand. I told him I’d found his fingertip and his eyes lit up. “Did you save it? Can I have it?” I gladly relinquished his digit and he put it in his pocket. I later heard that he carried it around for days and showed everybody and then put it in a jar in his house.

Aqui es Pancho a few days later, working on our palapa.