The Origin of Species (41 page)

The only thing keeping his panic down was his rage at Desmond.

“Slow down a bit, would you, I’ve got this bloody case to look after.”

They came up against an outcropping. Alex tried to edge around it but quickly found himself up to his thighs in water.

“We have to cross over,” he said.

It was like traveling blind. There was rock, which he slithered over, though it jagged out like broken glass, then some sort of thicket, which he shouldered through on hands and knees, keeping his head low. He couldn’t hear Desmond behind him anymore. If Alex was lucky some rogue wave had hauled him out to sea.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck! Give me a hand here, would you, I think I’ve broken my ankle!”

This was it, Alex thought, this was the end. They would surely die out here now, that was the way of these things—the smallest mistake, an insect bite, a missed turn, a lost shoe, and suddenly nothing else mattered. He felt a sick sense of how little he amounted to, that he could die out here so stupidly with only this asshole for company.

He crawled back through the brush until he stumbled up against flesh.

“Watch it, for Christ’s sake!”

“What happened?”

“I’ve twisted my fucking ankle.”

“I can’t believe this,” Alex said. “I can’t fucking believe this.”

“Don’t start going gutless on me,” Desmond said, without the least hint of sympathy or remorse. “It’s just the dark, not the bloody end of the world. It’ll be over soon enough.”

He was right. Even if all else failed, at some point morning would come. It seemed unlikely they’d be killed before then by marauding boobies or goats.

Alex heard Desmond fumbling around in his satchel. Something came at him in the dark.

“Here.” It was a piece of Desmond’s jerky. “It’ll take the edge off till we get some of that bloody fish into us again.”

They made a little hollow for themselves in the brush. There was nothing to do but wait. A couple of stars showed themselves through the clouds and it was actually possible to make out the outlines of things.

Desmond tore off a strip of his plastic poncho to bandage his ankle.

“How is it?”

“Big as a fucking melon.”

Alex lay back, using the duffel bag as a pillow. He could stay calm this way, just staring up through the brush into the night.

“Not what you bloody bargained for, I imagine,” Desmond said. “Stranded out here in the bush.”

Alex hoped they weren’t headed toward some sort of apology. He wanted to keep his dislike of the man hard in him.

“I’ve had worse.”

“I’ll tell you what’s worse. A Council flat in East London with fucking Pakistan outside your door. I’ll take this in a minute.”

Alex might have tried to sleep but Desmond chose this moment to wax philosophical, going on with a kind of pleased virulence about the Pakis and the blacks, the mucky-mucks at Imperial College, the fucking Ecuadoreans, who seemed to think these islands belonged to them.

“If we’d left it to them they’d have turned them into salt mines or something, or bloody Acapulco. Then they have the balls to try to kick us out, though there’s hardly one of them that knows a Darwin’s finch from a parakeet.”

Alex grew dimly aware of a distant rumble. It grew gradually more insistent, until Alex understood with a start that it was real. Through the bushes, out along the shore, he thought he glimpsed a pinprick of light.

Desmond was suddenly on his feet.

“It’s a boat! It’s a fucking boat!”

All his stoicism was gone.

“Over here!” he shouted, screaming like a schoolgirl. “Help us! I’ve broken my ankle! Over here!”

Slowly a boat drifted into view along the shoreline, a pale headlight gleaming above the cabin. It was Santos.

“It’s about fucking time! He could have figured we were stranded out here. Over here, you moron!”

Santos had retrieved the panga from the beach. He rowed it out to their little promontory to fetch them. The shingle they’d walked on earlier had completely vanished.

Desmond made a great show of leaning into Alex as he struggled into the boat, raising high his injured ankle.

“I’ll bet you were wishing you’d seen the last of us,” he said to Santos.

A look passed between Santos and Alex. Santos put a finger to his head and gave it a discreet turn.
Loco
.

“Get on with it, then. I hope you’ve got some supper ready.”

There was indeed some supper waiting: fish again, and rice, picked over and long cold, though Desmond lit into them with his usual animal vehemence. Santos had set the boat off without a word, heading straight to open sea. It looked like they were in for another long night. Already their awful journey on the island in the dark, the fear Alex had felt, seemed unreal.

Desmond searched through his literature—he had a big bag of it—and fished out another book.

“There it is,” he said, shining his flashlight. “What we’d have looked like in a couple of months.”

He’d opened to an old black-and-white photo of the beach they had landed on that afternoon. A rowboat in an early stage of decay sat near the water, a figure lying next to it curled up on some sort of tarp. Further up the beach was another figure, stretched out on the sand as if he’d fallen asleep there.
December 1934
.

“Rudolf Lorenz and his crew,” Desmond said. “One of Mrs. Wittmer’s victims. We’ll stop in on her if we get a chance.”

So that was what it was to die out here. The two of them looked so well preserved, like the goat on Marchena: nothing to eat them, Alex imagined.

“One wrong turn,” Desmond said sententiously, as if it had been some prowess of his that had saved them. “That’s all it takes out here.”

He crawled up into his hammock. Alex had to figure out how to rig one of those. For now, he removed his shoes, not even bothering to peel away his moldering clothing, and stretched out on his plank to sleep.

Santos’s preferred fishing grounds turned out to be at the far end of the archipelago, beyond the headlands of Isabela. A peculiar silence reigned there, creation seeming still poised at the moment of its birth, awaiting the spark that would set it in motion. To one side were the blank walls of Isabela’s coastline, great fingers of rock at the tops of which hundreds upon hundreds of blue-footed boobies nested; to the other were the black lava runs of Fernandina, which looked as fresh as if they had been formed days before. “Like pitch over the rim of a pot,” Darwin had described them, and it seemed nothing had changed since then, nothing had moved, all the years in between the merest heartbeat.

When they had entered the channel they had seen a shadow move
on the water and suddenly a great hump of silver-blue reared up in front of them, not ten yards from the boat, flashing an instant before dipping quietly back into the sea. Santos had pushed back sharply on the throttle. If the beast had breached beneath them they might have been tossed over like a feather.

Alex thought of the inscriptions on the old maps:
Here there be monsters
.

“Off to find their krill,” Desmond said. “Big ones eat the little ones.”

But Alex had seen the flinch in him too, the instant’s panic as if some nightmare thing had come for them.

Their days took on a sameness. The weather continued as before, with the same haze clouding the sky, the same hot wind, the bouts of drizzle when the wind died and the rain came down straight as falling pins. They passed a single tourist cruiser and a couple of other fishing boats, which Santos steered well clear of, but otherwise they were alone. Each day they grew more scruffy and rank, the cabin taking on a feral odor like an animal’s lair. Desmond, despite his oranges, which he’d sneak in his bunk now, the smell of citrus wafting over to Alex, had taken on a scurvied look, his skin flaking and red and oozing pustules flaring up on the back of his neck. They used the rain for their water now, Santos collecting it in plastic vinegar jugs from the runoff on the cabin roof—though once when Desmond tried to use it to wash himself, Santos seemed ready to strike him.

“
Es para beber
,” he said harshly, taking his jug from him. It did not occur to any of them to wash themselves in the sea—there seemed to be an agreement among them that it was off limits, as if some absolute boundary existed between what was above it and what was below.

Santos rose well before dawn to start his fishing, hauling in two or three catches before they had their breakfast. Desmond railed about his sleep and his schedule—he was working obsessively, spending the days combing the wastes of Isabela as if to map every last ragged strand of his mollugo—but ever since Marchena, Santos had ceased to make any effort to appease him. Alex had become a sort of token between them: in each other’s presence they vied for his allegiance like suitors, as if it were proof of the other’s derangement, though if he was alone with either of them they quickly reverted to their usual bullying.

Early on, to get free of Desmond, Alex had made the mistake of spending a day alone with Santos while he fished. Maybe he’d imagined
that the crust would fall away from Santos, that the two of them would bond in some deep peasant way, though once they were alone Alex felt only the usual icy blankness coming off him. Santos’s methods were gruntingly primitive: there were no fancy reels or nets or hydraulics, just a long, greening rope that he rolled out by hand from a wooden spool and dangled hooks from at intervals. The hooks he baited with bits of octopus and squid and with little crabs he stored live in a burlap sack that dragged behind the boat and stabbed whole onto the hooks, their limbs writhing. At longer intervals he tied off a pair of the same battered jugs he used for their water, one lidless so it sank and one capped so it floated, the series of them holding the line suspended along its length some twenty or thirty feet below the water’s surface.

Santos pulled out a bottle of something when he’d set the first line and took a long draw.

“
Te gusta?
”

He eyed Alex grimly, top to bottom, with a look that sent a chill up Alex.

“
No, gracias
.”

Santos reeled the line in barehanded, fist over fist. It came up heavy with flopping grouper, big, vicious things that wrestled with every fiber in them before Santos swung their heads against a tackle box to quiet them. It seemed a sort of magic trick to Alex, that with that bit of line and bait Santos had managed to lure up all this writhing flesh. Santos, though, was grumbling: some of the hooks had come up untouched.

“
Conche tu madre
.”

The next line came up the same. Without a word Santos set about gutting his catch, the birds circling at once, pelicans and boobies and greedy frigates who perched vigilant on the roof of the cabin. Alex dragged the salt over and began packing it into a fish the way he’d seen Santos do.

“
Así no
.” Santos took the fish from him. “
Hazlo así. Entiende?
”

He was worse than Alex’s father. He could salt his own fucking fish, for all Alex cared, though still he kept at it, until his hands were raw and he was covered in fish slime.

It wasn’t yet sunset when they went to fetch Desmond at the little cove they used as their anchorage, a ruined caldera on the Isabela coast just across the channel from Fernandina. The cliffs ringing the cove were
veined with graffiti:
ALBATROSS, MOANA, ST. GEORGE,
the names of other ships that had put in there. Desmond had shown off the oldest:
PHOENIX
1836. The year after Darwin had landed. Alex had gone up to the little cinder cone that Darwin had described from his stop, a “beautifully symmetrical one” cupping a tiny lake to which Darwin had hurried down hoping to slake his thirst, only to find it was salt.

The lake was still there.

“On time, for once!”

Desmond was waiting for them at the bottom of the gully that served as a landing. A couple of seals waddled up behind him from a rock ledge and gave him a start.

“Fuck! Bloody hell!”

Santos was watching beside Alex from the boat.

“
Maricón
,” he said, with a leer. Faggot. His hand reached up, so quick Alex wasn’t sure if he’d only imagined it, and cupped Alex’s balls. “
Él va culearlos, no?
”

It was the first time Alex was actually glad to see Desmond. Santos retrieved him in the panga and he limped onto the deck with his things, looking harried, one hand gripping his kneecap.

“Put my fucking knee out.” His ankle by now was long forgotten. “I hope the Old Man in the Sea didn’t try to bugger you.”

All night long Alex’s balls itched from the feel of that big callused hand on him. Maybe it had been nothing, just the usual sort of locker room horseplay, but then who knew what could happen out here, what people were capable of? The whole trip was starting to seem a bad dream, the sort where you did some foolish, irreversible thing you couldn’t get free of.

He lay in his bunk the next morning waiting until Desmond had stirred before he dared go out to the deck. Santos was there in his Yankees cap, baiting a line.

He shoved an empty gas canister toward Alex with his foot, hardly glancing at him.

“
Rellénalo
.” Fill it. Alex was at a loss—maybe this was part of some test, some freakish rite he was going to put Alex through.

Desmond had yet to emerge from the cabin.

“
Con agua
.” Santos motioned toward the back of the boat with his chin. “
Agua de mar
.”

He wanted him to fill the canister with seawater. Alex lay on his stomach at the back of the boat, one eye on Santos, and let the sea gurgle into it until it was so heavy he was barely able to lift it to the deck.

Santos tied an end of his line to the canister and swung the canister over the rail, letting it drop down into the sea until the line pulled taut against the cleat that anchored it.

“Depth line.” Desmond had finally come out. “To find out where the fishies are biting.”

They waited. The whole operation seemed oddly fraught. The line thrummed, then again, and Santos began to haul it in, putting his weight into it. Then suddenly the line went slack, and Santos stumbled back against the hatch.