Francisco led them inland for perhaps half a mile, down a winding dirt road between shanties walled with uneven planks gapped by mortarless chinks. Each had a little garden and chicken coop and hog pen. Bare-chested men—some black, some brown, some white, some a fusion of all three races—were up on crude ladders, re-roofing the hovels with palm thatch, bundles of which lay in ox and donkey carts drawn up everywhere. Here and there, women were grinding coffee beans in tall wooden mortars. The savor of the crushed beans mingled with the stench of excrement and the fragrance of flowers and herbal gardens to play havoc with the boys’ nostrils, delighting them one moment, offending them the next. The men and women often stopped whatever they were doing to gawk at the four strangers trudging behind Francisco, who, with the shotgun in one hand, looked as though he were leading prisoners to jail.

They came at last to a bohío that looked no different from the others, its raked dirt yard shaded by coconut palm and a spreading royal poinciana ablaze with scarlet blossoms. In the back was a plot, bigger than a garden but smaller than a farm field, planted with a crop of some kind, and beyond it, the land rose toward what looked like a high desert plateau, bristling with agave and cactus.

It was dark and musty inside. Solid wooden shutters, like ship’s hatches, were battened over the glassless windows. Francisco threw them open and dropped the muslin bedsheets furled over the openings, permitting a hazy light to fall on three beds, arranged in a U along the partition walls of a room twelve feet square; a room only sailors would have found commodious. There was a washstand bearing an earthenware pitcher and bowl, and a thin draw curtain over the doorway, which led into a second room that combined kitchen, dining room, and parlor. A picture of an anguished Christ, baring a heart wrapped in thorns, hung over the washstand. Otherwise, the walls were as bare as those in a monk’s or a captive’s cell.

“I am afraid one of you will have to take the floor,” Francisco said, looking apologetically at Will, while motioning at the three beds. “This was my father’s house before he was killed. He died, you know, at Santiago, fighting with the guerrillas alongside the yanqui army. No one has lived here since then, but my sister keeps it clean—in case our father’s spirit comes back to spend a night in the old place.” He propped the shotgun aganist one of the corner posts. “I return the gun to you. You four look like cimarrones, but I am satisfied that you’re not. I go now to find my uncle, Enrique. He knows a lot about what to do, and I think he can help you return to North America. Buenas tardes.”