“De nada.”
Santana was waiting in the car. Yocke walked around and opened the front seat passenger door. “You ride in back,” Santana told him. “María’s coming with us.”
Yocke dusted the rear seat as best he could and sat. The odor of chicken shit wouldn’t be too bad at speed if they kept the windows down. María came out of the house with three or four plastic jugs filled with water. She put them in the trunk and climbed in beside her brother.
As they rolled out of the farmyard, Yocke could hear the transmission grinding. Or the differential. Perhaps both. “This thing’ll never make it to Havana.”
“Beats walking,” Santana said.
They had gone just a mile or so when they came to a two-lane asphalt road running east and west. Santana turned right, west.
For the first few hours the car made good time, rolling along at twenty-five or thirty miles per hour, Yocke estimated. The speedometer needle never moved off the peg. The few vehicles on the road were all westbound. The flatbeds of cane trucks were packed with people, the old cars similarly stuffed and riding on their frames. Occasional knots of people walked west alongside the road.
Cane fields swept away to the horizon to the north and south across the flat, rolling fields, under a bright sun. Here and there shacks near the roads stood deserted and empty, with not even a chicken or pig in sight.
After two hours they came to a town. It was a real town, with streets and throngs of people in the streets. The car took an hour to creep through as Santana leaned out and shouted to knots of people in doorways, huddled around radios, “Que pasa?”
“The prisons have been emptied,” Santana told Jack Yocke at one point. “The guards refused to fire on the people, who liberated the prisoners.”
On the west side of town the road was jammed with walking people: men, women, children, the elderly, the lame. The western pilgrimage grew denser at every crossroads, every village.
The Chevy proceeded little faster than the walking people, who gently parted in front of it to let it past and closed in again behind, like water in the wake of a boat’s passage.
The radiator boiled over around noon. The three of them piled out and sat beside the car in a little shady strip as the human stream trudged by. Some of the people carried chickens and ducks with their feet tied together. Every now and then a man passed with a pig arranged around his shoulders.
Yocke mopped his face with his shirttail and relieved himself beside the road. Everyone else was doing likewise. There was no embarrassment: there was nowhere else to do it. He stood there with his back to the road looking out across the miles of growing cane and breathing deeply of the sweet odor, and made a wet spot on the red earth.
An army truck came by, also headed west. In addition to the troops packed willy-nilly in the back, civilians had clambered aboard, poultry, kids, and all. Yocke thought the truck looked like Noah’s ark as it slowly breasted the human sea, trailing diesel fumes. He caught a glimpse of a goat amid the people and protruding rifles.
Eventually the steam from the Chevy’s tired engine subsided. Water from bottles in the trunk was added, the worn-out radiator cap was replaced and carefully wired down, then Santana got behind the wheel and cranked the engine. It caught. For Santana’s benefit, Yocke raised his hands in thanksgiving, then took his place amid the chicken dung.
In late afternoon the radiator failed catastrophically. Clouds of steam billowed from around the hood.
They pushed the car off the road, into the cane, and took what they could carry from the car. Yocke had to have the computer. He took the toothbrush and razor from the vinyl bag and put them in his pockets. His passport and money were already in his pocket. He changed shirts and socks. The rest of it he left.
As Yocke stood on the road beside the car waiting for the others, another army truck approached. A young woman sat on the left front fender facing forward with her blouse open breast-feeding a baby, her long, dark hair streaming gently in the shifting air currents. Her attention was concentrated on the child. She appeared golden in the evening sunlight. Yocke stood transfixed until the truck was far up the road and the young madonna no longer visible.
His companions were already walking westward with the throng. Jack Yocke eased the strap of the computer on his shoulder and set off after them.
At dusk, with the sunset still glowing ahead of them, they came to a burned-out Soviet-made armored personnel carrier — APC — sitting fifty feet or so off the road in a drainage ditch. Jack Yocke walked over to look.
A missile had punched a neat hole in the side armor; explosion and fire had done the rest. Burned, mutilated bodies lay everywhere, perhaps a dozen. Several reasonably intact bodies lay on the side of the ditch. These men had been shot by someone who had gotten behind them. The holes in their backs were neat and precise. Very military. The bodies had begun to bloat, stretching the clothing on the corpses drum-head tight.
One of the men was very young, just a boy really. He had been dead a while, perhaps since this morning. Flies crawled around his mouth and eyes and ears. A shift in the breeze gave Yocke a full dose of the stench.
He staggered out of the ditch retching.
Santana and the young woman were waiting for him. Together they rejoined the human river flowing westward in the gathering dusk.
They reached the outskirts of Havana about nine p.m.
The streets were packed. People everywhere. Water could be had but no food. Those who had poultry or the carcasses of dogs built a fire out of anything that would burn and roasted them. The smoke wafted through the streets and between the buildings: the shadows it cast under the flickering streetlights played wildly over the crowd. Some people were drunk, shouting and singing and scuffling.
Government warehouses had been looted earlier in the afternoon, Santana learned, but the food had been eaten by those who carried it off. Mañana, tomorrow, the Yankees would send food. That was the rumor, oft-repeated, as hungry children wailed endlessly.
Castro was being held by the revolutionary committee, according to the radios, which were being played at maximum volume from every window. Fidel and his brother and the top government officials would be shot tomorrow in the Plaza de Revolución. Viva Cuba! Cuba Libre!
People stretched out in the street to sleep. Whole families. The crowd swirled and eddied and flowed around them, flowed toward the center of the city and the government offices around the Plaza de Revolución. Yocke followed Hector Santana and his sister.
The American was exhausted. The endless walking, the lack of sleep and food — these things had taken their toll. He wanted to slump down on the first vacant stretch of pavement he came to and sleep forever.
On he trudged, following Santana, following the crowd through the smoke and noise and dim lights.
When he reached the plaza he stopped and gaped. It was huge, covering several acres, and was packed with people. There wasn’t room to lie down. People stood shoulder to shoulder, more people in one place than Jack Yocke had ever seen in his lifetime. The crowd was alive, buzzing endlessly with thousands of conversations. As he stood and looked in awe, chants broke out. “Cu-ba, Cu-ba, Cu-ba,” over and over, growing as tens of thousands of voices picked it up. The sound had a low, pulsating thud to it that seemed to make the building walls shake.
Then Yocke realized he had lost Santana. He didn’t care. He had to sleep.
He turned and retraced his steps, away from the plaza. Several blocks away he found an alley. It was full of sleeping people. He felt his way in, found a spot, and lay down. The chanting wasn’t as loud here, two blocks from the square, but it was clear, distinctive, sublime. “Cu-ba, Cu-ba,” repeated endlessly, like a religious chant.