Flight from a Firing Wall

by Baynard Kendrick

  I collected my worn-out senses by a sheer effort of will. “¡Madre de Dios! The fishermen may be able to make this trip, but none of the rest of us are. What sort of a boat are we going in?”

  “It isn’t any Tantivy. It’s a nineteen-foot fishing boat with a wood frame and a fiberglass bottom. It has an outboard, but no seats. Would you rather go back to the galera to die or be buried at sea?”

  I thought of Pica Culo’s bayonet and said, “I’ll take the sharks. They eat you with such a humane grin. But why Jibacoa Beach with those three-hundred-foot limestone cliffs? It sounds like the worst place in Cuba to take off from to me.”

  “That’s why we picked it. It’s also the worst place in Cuba to mount an invasion. So it’s guarded the most lightly. Shortly, if there’s any truth to the letrina rumors going around and to what the Comandante tells us, the island will be bottled so tight a greased anguila —eel—couldn’t make a getaway. That is, not if Fidel wants them to stay.”

  “What’s he going to do? Wrap two thousand miles of fish net around the island?” I asked him.

  “Just the reverse, chico. The poop is that he and Russia are going to open the doors. Give everyone who wants to leave a kick in the tail and a one-way ticket to the USA. Always provided of course that the dirty Yanqui imperialists are willing to play and pay.”

  “Now I’ve heard everything,” I said scornfully. “What gave birth to that newest piece of idiocy?”

  “The smart money thinks it’s true, and that Fidel will announce it any day. So do I.”

  “You’ve always been slightly mad,” I observed. “Still, you’ll have to agree that Fidel’s idea of good clean fun has consisted of offering some trembling wretch in his clutches his liberty and just as quickly snatching it away.”

  “You’re still a little stir-crazy and nobody can blame you, but give me a chance to tell you what the jefe has to say: The block spies are all busy as beavers working night and day taking inventory of everything everyone on the island has; what relatives they have in the States; whether or not they have pensions, or income, deriving from the government expropriations of their properties; or whether they have some well-paying job in a government bureau that Fidel is desperately trying to scale down.”

  “That’s been the job of the CDR since the first day it started.”

  “This is different, I’m telling you. Fidel was put on the hook when LBJ refused to play footsie with him last year and, as Fidel states, planned the collapse of the sugar market until it went below two cents a pound a couple of weeks ago.”

  “So?”

  “So, the country’s cornered sugar and it’s choking to death on it. The Orville Harringtons are demanding cash for running in the necessary parts to keep Cuba going. The Czech-made spare parts get worse all the time. All the indispensable machinery is breaking down, oil pumps, waterworks, and cane machinery. Locomotives, tractors, and trucks are falling apart.”

  “He’ll have nobody left to run any machinery if he opens the doors.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nobody, but nobody, is going if he wants them to stay. Right now he has too many nonproducing mouths to feed. Too many passive resistors. Too many open resistors, still in the underground. So, what to do? Ship as many of them out as he can to the USA after picking them clean. Maybe political prisoners, too. Even the prisons are getting overcrowded, or do I need to tell you?”

  “Then what’s the matter with our waiting until we get some strength? Or until we can ship back to Miami first-class? If you actually think this pipe dream is going to come true.”

  “¡Dios me perdone! I keep thinking I’m talking to somebody sane. If and when Fidel makes this great announcement to the world at large, which may be tomorrow, in a week or two, or maybe a month. And if the United States decides to accept, say in another month or two. What do you think will happen?”

  “I can’t imagine, but you’ve just said I was insane. You tell me.”

  “Just one port will be left open. Maybe Matanzas, to funnel this great exodus through. It will be immediately mobbed by thousands trying to jump the gun, but nobody’s going to get out without passports, and passing sixteen tests to get one. Do you think for a minute that passports are going to be issued to jailbreakers, cold-blooded killers and their wives?”

  “Gracias, amigo. What about the jefe, Guido, and you?”

  He filtered a big laugh through his beard. “One of Fidel’s great hopes is that this piece of strategy will smoke out the underground forever. A fallacy that proves him even more unbalanced than you. The jefe may have a bad heart, but there’s nothing wrong with his brain. He says it’s just as silly as thinking that, if J. Edgar Hoover promised all the members of the Cosa Nostra that if they cut all their capers and confessed all their crimes, they’d turn in all the boys if he promised them safe passage to Sicily.”

  “Then you’ll stay and carry on?”

  “What else? The jefe knows he’s going to die. He also knows that so long as Fidel keeps Communism in Cuba, and keeps trying to spread it through all of South America, there’ll be more than a handful of Cubans who know they have work to do.”

  The car stopped with its headlights shining on the beginning of a long narrow trail leading steeply down. Leo, with a flashlight, led the way. We tried to rouse Milagros, but realized quickly that she had no more physical resources left to draw on. Guido picked her up, cradling her like a sleeping baby, and carried her down to the beach below. I didn’t have much feeling left myself. It wasn’t until the following day that I found that my shoeless feet were cut and bleeding.

  The boat was concealed in a narrow cleft, rising and falling as each wave rolled in. Guido laid Milagros gently in the bottom, still sleeping. Nobody spoke. I found my heart was filled to bursting. Silently and separately I threw my arms around Guido and Leo, putting into a farewell embrace my gratefulness for all they had done.

  Leo’s powerful arms tightened about me too. “El jefe es muy duro, chico— The boss is pretty hard boiled, chico,” he whispered in my ear. “He doesn’t approve of demonstrations such as this. Now, for God’s sake get in that boat and go!”

  34

  I had exchanged two iron men of the underground for two others, Carlos and Elio, the fishermen. From somewhere they had obtained two 35 horsepower outboard motors, a Johnson and an Evinrude, and had mounted both on the square-ended stern. A six-gallon pressure tank sat between them with the hose connected to the Johnson. The Evinrude was tilted inboard out of the water. The two old mills had seen valiant service in their day. I doubt if there was an original part left in either one. Still, they both proved they could run, if only long enough to get us away.

  What astonished me most was that Guido, just before we left, had pressed a compass into Carlos’ hand. I wondered which of the Cuban patrol boats had been robbed. They were more difficult to get in Cuba than shoes or medicine. The militia had confiscated all of them long before. I was skeptical about its use, however. Like most Cuban fishermen, Carlos and Elio’s activities had been confined to the shallow waters of their own particular areas. It was doubtful that either of them had ever been ten miles from shore.

  Certainly, whoever had planned the trip had unbounded faith in the guiding hand of a merciful God, and very little knowledge of the punishing inclemency of the Straits of Florida. We had fifty-six gallons of fuel: six in the pressure tank, and ten five-gallon cans lashed in rows of five along each rail. So strict was the check on rations in the fishing cooperative that all Elio and Carlos had been able to smuggle out in two weeks’ time was two cans of corned beef and two packages of crackers. We had ten gallons of water, in two five-gallon carboys.

  According to Carlos, either of the 35 HP outboards, running wide open, drove the boat at fifteen miles per hour and burned a six-gallon tankful in an hour and a half. This, our fisherman navigators explained would surely bring us in sight of land in the morning. It might have, at that, if we had laid a straight course for Key West, ninety
miles away, in a calm and glassy sea.

  We put out of the cove smack into the teeth of what might well have been called a northeast gale. Teresa and the children, José, six, and Victoria, four, were stretched out amidships, covered by a tarpaulin. There was nothing to cover any of the rest. I sat on the starboard side by the Johnson, my back pressed to the transom, supporting Milagros’ head on my knee. In five minutes both of us were soaked clear through by the flying spray. I smoothed back her hair, bent over and kissed her for the very first time in more than five years. Gradually her cold lips warmed and clung to mine possessively. She reached up finally and took my hand wordlessly. As though unaware of the drenching spray and the racking hardness of the planks beneath her, she turned her head and settled down more comfortably.

  The night was moonless and starless, but if any rain was falling it was merged with the spray. The only thing to remind me that I was still on an earth populated with people was the occasional glimpse, when the boat reached a peak, of the flasher on Point Rubalcava, visible for fourteen miles.

  Carlos came up to squat in front of Elio, seated between the motors steering. He shone a flashlight on the compass cupped in his hand, then moved around the tiller closer so that I could see. We were headed almost due northeast, straight into the wind and waves. It was a course which I figured if we had been traveling aboard a P. & O. liner, and missed the shoals north of Andros Island, might land us in the Bahamas sometime within the next day or two, provided we held to it steadily. Still, I knew the object was to put the greatest distance between us and Cuba in the shortest possible time. While we were running directly away from Key West, it meant almost certain capsizing if we attempted to turn and got caught in the trough of that six-foot sea.

  I shouted into Carlos’ ear, “We’re not going to make it halfway to Key West if this wind doesn’t drop soon and let us turn.”

  The remnants of my already frazzled faculties went dead when he answered me. “Do not be worried, señor. We are not headed for Key West. We decided it would be fatal to attempt to run up Machine Gun Alley. When the wind dies down and the seas are calm, we are setting our course direct to Miami.”

  Miami! Two hundred miles as the crow flies. The way we were going, nearer three. It had taken ten hours to make the trip with the 800 horses in the flying Tantivy. Two cans of corned beef, two packages of crackers, and ten gallons of water for three men and three women and two small children, six and four. It might be more merciful if the boat sank right now before they had to face two hundred miles of drifting on the waste of a trackless ocean.

  The motor churned on steadily. The flashlight touched on Milagros’ red hair and went out. My addled conceptions merged it somehow with that malignant red dot blinking at me so steadily from Point Rubalcava. The red in the boat I wanted forever. The red on the shore I was trying hard to wish away. The only motion I could detect in the boat was up and down. When the flashing ruby dot on the land finally vanished, I was convinced that someone had put it out. It couldn’t be the boat that was moving. Like that northern star of Julius Caesar’s, that flashing red light was fixed and constant and had impressed itself on my consciousness to stay.

  I had forgotten about Ana, Carlos’ wife, until he knelt beside her and turned on the flash. She was a wisp of a thing. Her face and hands were scratched and bleeding from briars and thorns. Her white legs and her feet in their pitiful shoes were swollen and welted with insect bites. She told me later she had walked all day to our rendezvous, dodging militia on a mountain trail. Now, she lay on her side uncomplainingly, one hand clutching desperately to the starboard rail.

  It must have been an hour or two later that the faithful old Johnson, tired of bucking such a wind and sea, gave forth with a horrible death rattle and conked out entirely. Carlos didn’t waste any time. They had already filled the six-gallon pressure tank once, and the gauge on the side showed over half full. He uncoupled the hose from the Johnson, clamped it on to the Evinrude, and vigorously started pumping up pressure while Elio pulled the starter cord. Magically, it caught and started before we broached. Carlos loosened the thumbscrews that held the Johnson in place and sent the 140 pounds of dead motor splashing over the stern. I felt as though we had had a burial at sea already.

  Elio was forced to keep the Evinrude straining to make headway against an ever-increasing wind and rising sea. A shapeless object whooshed over my head, like a witch riding a broom. The flash of Carlos’ light showed the last of Elio’s fishing equipment, a basket-shaped dragnet, whisked overside like a paper bag.

  Morning came, and with it providentially the wind began to die down. But not the waves. If anything they seemed to grow higher and come faster and faster. The motor was overheating badly and burning gas to capacity. Still Elio had to run it wide open just to hold steerageway.

  The waves began to subside somewhat about noon. Elio was able to slow the motor to three-quarter speed, but it burned out and froze forever early in the evening of the first day. It followed the Johnson overboard, together with what was left of the gasoline. Carlos stove holes in the empties so they would sink and not leave an easily followed trail.

  The wind hauled around and started blowing from the south, but not nearly so strong. We could see that it was flattening out the waves. The lightened boat began to ride more easily. We took the tarpaulin, lashed it on to a long stout pole, and nailed it firmly up in the bow to make a sail. All night long, and all through the blistering heat of the second day, we sailed on northward, the three of us taking turns at steering with a heavy scull.

  Mutual peril sweeps prudery away. The head was a bucket partially concealed by the sail. Probably due to the meager food and water rations, the normal bodily excretions of us all somehow progressively lessened after the first night and day.

  With the coming of dawn on our third morning out, our spirits rose. The sky above was overcast, shielding us from the scorching sun. I refused to remember the double danger of sunburn when the ultraviolet rays were filtered through clouds and reflected from the water.

  The light breeze was cooling and kept us moving over rollers now comfortably flat and calm. Milagros sat beside me while I steered and for hours we conversed, catching up on everything that had happened to us, but carefully avoiding any mention of the horrors of La Cabana or Guanajay.

  We were visited by a school of friendly porpoises. We all fell to amusing the children by trying to find names for them, the first and last beginning with a J. We soon had six-year-old José Nunez screaming shrilly at every flashing back: “¡Hola, Jaime Jordán! (or Juan Junco) ¿Cómo estás?— Hello, how are you?” While four-year-old Victoria satisfied herself by calling them all after her brother, José. The children finally went to sleep in Teresa’s arms, and she dozed off shortly after.

  Carlos and Elio told Milagros and me about conditions in the cooperatives while Ana listened quietly, her head on Carlos’ knee. Both of them were very religious men. Along with hundreds of others they had firmly refused to renounce their God and participate in the Communist Party. They had found themselves in trouble immediately. Virtually prisoners, with twenty armed guards to every two hundred men, they were watched day and night and forced to put up with bad conditions and inadequate pay. Finally, like so many others, they had joined up with the underground to help their co-workers get out of the country. Once suspected, it was their turn to flee.

  We finished the last of the food and water on the afternoon of the third day. The fourth day dawned on us bright and clear, bringing with it the burning sun. We had no idea of where we were, where we were going, or how far we had come. By then, the salty corned beef and dry crackers had done their work and the demon of thirst had seized us all. The children’s lips were cracked and broken. Milagros, Teresa and Ana were taking turns bending over them to give them what small protection they could from the broiling sun.

  It was around eleven in the morning when Elio sighted a vessel headed straight for us. All we could tell about her was that she was
over a hundred feet long. When she was closer I saw terror spread over Elio’s face. He crossed himself and said softly for my ears alone, “Merciful Mother protect us! It’s a Russian trawler. Now, I fear we are all gone.”

  She pulled close alongside of us and stopped. We could see a dozen or more of the crew ranged along the rail and staring down at us. They just stood motionless, saying nothing. I decided to make a plea for water. After all, I could only fail.

  I tried them in Spanish and then in English, watching their impassive faces for any change of expression. I pointed to the empty carboys, then lifted up the tiny Victoria toward them and essayed what little French I knew, “Enough water for the children for the love of God.” I pointed from Victoria’s cracked lips to the weeping José.

  The French, at least to one of the Comrades, got through. He left the rail and was back in an instant with a gallon jug of water. I put the child down and reached for it eagerly. He drew back and shook his finger at me like a naughty boy. Then he poured its contents over the side, making rainbows in the sun. He pointed down and said in French, “There is plenty down there where you are going.” He repeated his playful jest in Russian, I guess, for with his shipmates roaring in laughter the trawler’s engines speeded up and she pulled away.

  Milagros asked me timorously, “Won’t they call Cuba on the radio?”

  All I could say was, “Will it make much difference now?”

  Fiendish fantasies from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner were plaguing my mind by the fifth day. “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” There wasn’t much life left in any of us. The three women were almost speechless. The children’s weeping had ceased and turned to a steady heartbreaking whimper.