Chasing Che by Patrick Symmes Read Free Book Online Page A

Head. He earned his nickname by riding vast distances over the pampas, and he came to love their spareness:
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t
is beautiful to see the effect which the wind has in passing over this wild expanse of waving grass; the shades between the brown and yellow are beautiful—the scene is placid beyond description—no habitation nor human being is to be seen, unless occasionally the wild and picturesque outline of the gaucho on the horizon.… The country has no striking features, but it possesses, like all the works of nature, ten thousand beauties. It has also the grandeur and magnificence of space, and I found that the oftener I crossed it, the more charms I discovered in it
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    Sometimes a few drops of gasoline trickle down the walls of an empty tank to fill the carburetors again. I reached for the tiny dashboard, the size of a paperback book, and twisted the key. The little green neutral light glowed like an emerald. The procedure was always the same, an ingrained routine for every motorcyclist: choke on; hit the starter button and wait for the roar; choke off; left foot up on the peg; left hand pulling in on the clutch; left toe knocking the shift pegdown one click into first gear; check the neutral light is out; ease the clutch out with the left hand while twisting the right wrist for throttle; right foot up on the peg as you pull away and gain speed.
    Seven tenths of a mile later the bike died again and coasted to a stop, and I set off to look for the next gaucho. I found a white fence and followed it to a driveway, which led to a boxlike one-story house with a bright red roof. Halfway to the house I stopped and clapped twice. Nothing happened, so after a few moments I covered half the remaining distance, clapped twice, and waited. I felt ridiculous standing in the sun at noon in the middle of a field covered with horse shit while clapping, but I waited. Again nothing, and I advanced a third time—close enough now to hear a radio blaring inside the house. I went up and banged hard on the door.
    In time the gaucho appeared, wearing the usual baggy
bombacha
trousers and black hat turned up in front. We went around back to a shed where, hidden behind enough bridles and saddles to outfit a squad of dragoons, there was yet another dusty Ford Falcon. The gaucho cut a yard of garden hose, retrieved a sun-bleached two-liter Coke bottle from the trash ditch beyond the tomato plants, lay down on the ground, and methodically began sucking gas out of the Falcon’s tank. For some reason the gas would not keep flowing after each pull on the tube, as if gravity were weak.
    I insisted on taking a few mouthfuls myself, but the gas hit me like a drug. I spat a few ounces of fuel into the Coke bottle and then fell about the floor, hacking and wheezing and spitting. “It is not easy,” the gaucho said, and took another mouthful. Eventually he filled the bottle halfway with a mixture of gas and spit. The next gas station was four miles down the road, he told me. The math looked good: half of a two-liter bottle would last about ten miles. He refused payment of any kind, and I stumbled back to the bike, fed it, and set off again.
    The miles rolled by. After five there was no sign of the town, just the same unrelieved flatness and the sky overhead. Six miles passed, and seven. At eight miles I saw something on the horizon and grew hopeful; at nine I saw it was just a tollbooth; at ten I drove through itwithout slowing. The bike shuddered once, then again, but kept running on gaucho spit.
    The road bent around another windbreak of poplars and there was the town, a half mile away. Then the engine died. I was going about seventy miles an hour when it quit, and now the math didn’t look so good. I lay down on the tank to cut wind resistance and drifted silently sixty, fifty, forty, thirty, twenty miles an hour. The gas station was at the far end of town. It was going to be close.
    I drifted down the main street, wobbled the last few yards, and