The Origin of Species (40 page)

It makes sense
. It was the sort of thing madmen said.

Santos was rowing back from the boat, a black shape against the black of the night. This was Alex’s only surety against Desmond, this leviathan. He emerged out of the dark carrying a big plastic sack of what turned out to be salt, which he started packing in handfuls into the gutted insides of his fish.

“
Bacalao
,” he said again, with his unpleasant smile. “
Qué tipo, muchacho? Le gusta?
”

Alex had lost all his reading material to the rain on the Inca Trail, which left him to Darwin’s
Beagle
. He didn’t hold out much hope for it, but he pulled up next to the fire as far from Desmond as he could manage and started in. Darwin, it turned out, hadn’t had it much better than Alex did—his own captain was not only a tyrant but a depressive to boot, and had apparently brought Darwin along, at Darwin’s expense, just to keep from slitting his own throat.

A couple of lumps dragged themselves onto the beach and plopped themselves down, followed by a bigger one, the bull, who took up a position peering out to sea against the threat of rivals.

“Looks like we’re sharing,” Desmond said.

Alex stretched out his sleeping bag for the night, trying to avoid the booby nests, the guano pads in the bushes, the ubiquitous gulls with the red circles around their eyes who ambled about the beach hunched up like old men. He was getting value out here, at least, he’d have to grant that; he was pushing the boundaries. In Africa he’d taken trips through
the bush where the wild had seemed to loom on every side ready to swallow him, but here it felt as if they’d already crossed over, as if there was no us and them anymore, no certain distinction. He would awake one morning to find he’d sprouted flippers and fins and would take to the oceans his forebears had abandoned a billion years earlier, eating
bacalao
until the sea cows came home. Out on the beach, meanwhile, the bull was still at his vigil, while his brood lay around him dreaming, for all Alex knew, of becoming human. It was getting hard to say anymore, out here with the likes of Desmond and Santos, in which direction progress lay, or whose fate seemed the better.

They awoke to a haze that had blocked the sun, not so much cloud as a thickening of the air, and to a sticky breeze that revealed itself, the instant they’d cleared the bay, to be a stiffish wind.

“Right on time,” Desmond said. “The trade winds fail, and all that hot water that’s been pushing up against Asia comes sloshing back.”

The wind wasn’t especially strong but was insistent—it didn’t gust or blow about but came on straight and warm like a wall. Alex and Desmond took refuge in the cabin with Santos, who had the throttle down full, though still the boat seemed to be inching forward at a crawl. Alex felt concerned, all of a sudden, at what passed for the boat’s navigation system, now that navigation might actually be called for. Apart from the throttle and the tiller, the one bolted to an old two-by-four that served as the dashboard and the other consisting of a wooden pole sticking through a hole in the floor, the only instrumentation was a cracked compass on the dash, the face of it so clouded that it might just as well have been a Magic 8-Ball.

Alex tried to read his Darwin, but Desmond couldn’t stay put, poring over his maps, making notations, peering out through the guano-caked windshield into the haze.

“Where the fuck is it? We should be seeing it by now.” He was crowding up into the little space that formed Santos’s command post. “Bindloe, for Christ’s sake. Isla Marchena.
Dónde?
”

Santos kept his eyes on the ocean.

“
Sí, sí. El viento
.”

“The wind, my arse. You’ve probably passed the thing. You just want to get out to your bloody fishing fields.”

A smudge finally appeared in the distance, a patch of darker gray against the gray of the sea and the sky.

Alex saw Santos’s eye slip to the compass.

“It’s about bloody time,” Desmond said.

He got out a pair of binoculars, puny things that looked like a lady’s opera glasses.

“Fucking haze,” he said, fiddling with the focus wheel.

There was a tension in the air, but Alex couldn’t read it. Santos glanced down at the compass again. Desmond had squeezed in past him with the binoculars to get up close to the windshield, practically edging him away from the tiller.

“I don’t get it. There’s a cinder cone out there.”

All Alex could make out was the barest streak of land, beneath a streak of cloud that hung over it separate and low like its own private weather system.

“It’s not right. It’s not fucking right.”

Something seemed to click suddenly in Desmond’s head.

“It’s fucking Pinta! It’s not Marchena at all! It’s Pinta, you bloody idiot! You’ve fucking missed it!”

Santos stared out, stone-faced.

“
El viento
,” he said.

“Yes,
el
fucking
viento!
” Desmond looked fit to be tied. “It was a bloody straight line to the place, a child could have found it! You’ll have to go back!
Regreso!
”

Santos kept his hand on the throttle.

“
Es el mismo
.”

“No, it’s not bloody
el mismo!
Everything’s different, the wind pattern, the soil, everything! If I’d wanted Pinta I’d have asked for Pinta! You have to go back, for Christ’s sake, or I’ll take the fucking rudder myself!”

He seemed ready to do it. Even Santos looked momentarily cowed, though he could have snapped Desmond like a twig.

“No gas,” Santos said finally, in perfect English, as if playing a trump.

Alex had no idea what he was getting at—they were up to their ears in gas, they were swimming in it. But he seemed to have given Desmond pause.

“We’ll get more bloody petrol if we need it,” he said finally. “We’ll stop at Villamil or whatever. I’ll get it from Mrs. Wittmer if I have to, the old witch.”

Santos had slowed now, but was still holding his course.

“You pay,” he said.

“Yes, I’ll fucking pay. Just get us back there.”

Santos turned the boat.

It looked like Santos had actually screwed up. Maybe it was just Desmond’s El Niño—already it was beginning to seem like a poltergeist who was dogging them, a mischievous Ariel. Santos had hardly turned the boat around before Marchena suddenly appeared out of nowhere in front of them, and it was hard to see how they’d missed it. Like Pinta it lay under its own little bubble of climate, shrouded in what from a distance looked like mist but turned out to be a fine drizzle. It came down on them as straight as a curtain as they drew into shore, no sign here of El Niño’s wind.

The island looked dismal even by Galápagan standards, just a low swell of rubbly hills like the scattered slag heaps of a smelting operation. Santos brought them into a little bay that gave onto a somber-looking beach, almost black in the rain and entirely devoid of vegetation.

“We’ll have to hurry,” Desmond said. “Bloody day’s almost shot now.”

“Aren’t we going to wait for it to clear?”

“You’ll be waiting till August, my boy. Time and El Niño wait for no man.”

Santos anchored and dropped the panga while Desmond gathered his things, limiting himself this time, apart from his satchel and his precious case, to a single duffel bag. All he had against the rain was a dime-store poncho of flimsy plastic.

“No rain gear?” he said to Alex.

Alex wasn’t sure why he didn’t simply refuse to go along.

“Not really.”

“Here, take this.” He handed Alex a little zippered pack with another poncho inside. “We’ll just be an hour or so.”

Santos stood on the back deck in the drizzle holding the panga ready. Desmond boarded and Alex, despite himself, followed. But Santos stayed on the deck.

He threw down the rope.

“
Me quedo aquí
.”

“Bloody hell you will,” Desmond said. “You’re rowing us in.”

But Santos didn’t budge.

“Fine. Suit yourself.”

Alex wondered why he was following this man around like his pet. It was better than just going stir crazy out here was what he told himself, but it wasn’t just that. Somehow, the more time he spent with Desmond and the more reasons he amassed to detest him, the more he felt in his thrall. He wasn’t sure what sort of pathology might lie behind this, if he was drawn to him because he thought them so different or because he thought them the same.

“I hope you know how to row this thing. They must teach you that up in Canada, don’t they?”

Alex was already half-soaked beneath his flimsy poncho by the time they reached the beach, then had to wade through the shallows up to his knees to drag the dinghy ashore. Desmond kept his place until the dinghy was safely on terra firma.

“Bloody superstition is all it is,” he said. “He doesn’t want to land here because it’s Dead Man’s Beach.”

Dead Man’s Beach. Alex felt it best not to ask. No doubt Santos just wasn’t so stupid as to come out in this miserable rain, which was coming at them with the same maddening tedium as the wind had that morning.

They had skipped lunch again. Desmond pulled a strip of jerky from his satchel and bit into it.

“You got any more of that?”

“Oh.” Alex had caught him off guard. “Sure.”

He quickly gnawed off another length of the strip, leaving a tattered remnant.

“Here. Why don’t you have the rest.”

Here as well they had to cross to the other side of the island, though there was nothing like a path, just rock and scattered growth. They followed the seashore until the beach gave way to impassable rock, then moved inland. The ground, which from a distance had looked nearly barren, turned out to be carpeted in prickly vegetation, cactus leaves and desiccated brush and thick clusters of thorny vine that rolled out over the rocks like barbed wire. They had to pick their way through this tangle step by step, scrambling for footholds on the drizzle-slicked rocks. At one point Alex looked behind him and realized he had lost the sense of any landmark to
gauge their progress by, the boat, the beach, the shore all hidden from sight behind the endless hummocks of rock and brush they had zigzagged across.

“How far is it, exactly?”

“Well, we wouldn’t have had to do this at all if that ox had come up on the other side like he was supposed to.”

Alex wasn’t sure of it but he thought the light had dimmed. He’d stopped wearing his watch after Desmond’s crack about time, but now with the cloud cover they’d have no way of telling the time of day.

Little red-necked lizards darted from under their feet. Overhead, a hawk traced wide, slow circles around them.

“Aren’t we going to get lost out here?”

“It’s not as if we’re out in the fucking northland. The whole place is the size of a postage stamp.”

They came to a wide clump of shrub they had to push their way through, of the same cadaverous bush that had lined Genovesa but that was stunted and small here, scratching at them with every step.
Palo santo
, Desmond called it, holy bush, though it looked like a cursed thing. There was a clearing in the middle of it, a patch of beaten earth that looked like some sort of gathering ground. The remains of an animal lay at the edge of it, shriveled and ancient-looking but still with much of the hide stretched over the bones.

“Goat,” Desmond said. “One of the last of them, looks like. Park Service actually managed to hunt them all down here, probably with those six-shooters they carry around with them.”

“They shot them?”

“And a bloody good job, or they’d have made a quick meal of my mollugo. They’ll eat a place down to the rock if you let them.”

The light held until they reached the far shore, where the land flattened out to ease down to the sea. The rain, mercifully, had stopped. The ground here was worn down to a gravelly marl, spotted here and there with patches of growth.

Desmond had bent to finger it.

“Is this the place?” Alex said.

Desmond scowled. He looked out across the water, but there was nothing out there except the gray of the sea and the sky.

“I can’t fucking tell where Tower’s supposed to be. Anyway the soil’s too old.”

He moved from spot to spot, squatting down to grub at the earth. The light was definitely fading now. Alex couldn’t say how long they’d been walking to get here, an hour at least, maybe two.

He looked around them and couldn’t even have said what direction they’d come from, every hillock and patch of bush indistinguishable from the next.

Desmond was on his hands and knees now, pawing through the scrub along the shoreline like someone looking for his keys.

“We have to get back,” Alex said. “It’s getting dark.”

“There’s no point doing this if the conditions aren’t right.”

There was no way they’d manage the trip back in the dark.

“Then I’ll start on my own.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Desmond said churlishly. “Fine, fine, just give me a minute. Bring that bag, will you?”

He settled for a little outcropping rising out over the sea, arranging what remained of his succulents there. He didn’t bother this time with smashing rocks up, just cadging what soil he could from the surrounding plants.

“It’ll have to do. I was supposed to have the whole day here to map the place out. This fucks up everything.”

Somehow the light had continued to hold, as if by the force of Alex’s will. But once they had started back he felt the twilight creeping up behind them. It was only a matter of minutes now before it would be dark.

“Do you have a flashlight at least?”

“A what?”

“A flashlight. A torch.”

“Well, I would have if we’d brought the other bag, but I thought I’d spare you.”

They hadn’t gone more than half a mile before it grew too dark to pick their way through the brush. They retreated to the shoreline, where they could at least keep from going in circles. The tide was out and there was a bit of a shingle to walk along, greasy with sea slime but relatively flat. They were able to scramble along it by clinging to the bank that ran along the shore. Even so, they went at a snail’s pace. Alex, in the lead, Desmond’s duffel bag flopping against him at each step, heard the waves lap at their feet and wondered how long it would be before the tide turned.