The Origin of Species (44 page)

“
Mollugo flavescens
,” Desmond said. “If that means anything to you.”

The ranger made an effort to restrain his contempt.

“You are a researcher?”

“Imperial College, University of London.”

Now that he wasn’t under the threat of imminent death, Desmond had returned to his old self.

“So you have a permit, then. For these plants.”

“Yes, I have a permit,” Desmond said, not wavering an instant. “Back at the research station. I’ll be very happy to show it to you when I return there.”

A spasm of irritation crossed the ranger’s face. It was clear he would have preferred simply to be done with the matter.

“You must carry it,” he said. “It’s required.”

“Well, I didn’t know I’d have to wear it on my bloody sleeve.”

The ranger motioned to his deputy to close up the case.

“
Traigalo
.”

The deputy made to climb back over the rail with the case, but Desmond looked ready to spring on him again.

“You can’t take those! That’s weeks of work in there!”

“You must follow us to Villamil,” the ranger said dryly. “There we will see. In any event there is the storm.”

Santos, having apparently got the gist of this, stirred uneasily, but Desmond pre-empted him before he could make any protest.

“Those specimens are extremely fragile, you’re not carting them off to some storage shed! If anything happens to them you can be sure your superiors will hear about it! They’ll probably be very anxious to learn how you and your assistant nearly gunned down two researchers from the University of London!”

The ranger scowled. He might simply have pulled his revolver again to finish the job if the storm hadn’t chosen that moment to unleash its first fat drops.

He looked skyward.

“
Qué pendejo
,” he spat out, which Alex would have guessed meant something along the lines of “fucking asshole.” He gave an angry nod toward his deputy. “
Déjelo
.”

“
Capitán?
”

“
Déjelo!
”

The deputy, still at the rail, set down the case. Desmond snatched it up practically before it had touched the deck.

“
Vamos!
” the ranger barked. “
Rápido!
”

Santos’s papers were still bulging from his shirt pocket.

“
Mis documentos, señor!
”

“
En Villamil!
” the ranger shouted, and they moved off.

There seemed nothing for it but to follow them. As soon as they were out of the inlet the wind gusted and the first timid smattering of rain became a downpour. Alex and Desmond huddled up in the cabin, Desmond sitting hunched over his case like a distraught parent. Santos looked like he would gladly have thrown the both of them overboard.

“I guess they’ll find out you don’t have a permit,” Alex said.

“I guess they bloody well will, won’t they?”

The wind was lashing them now and the windshield had become a steady wash of rain. Ahead of them the patrol boat bobbed in and out of sight amidst the waves. It was the first rough weather they’d had. Santos’s boat seemed suddenly insubstantial in the face of it, tilting with every swell, the tiller straining against Santos’s grip like an animate thing.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Desmond pulled a broken vine from his plants. “Half these things are ruined.”

The dark of the storm gave way to the dark of night. They saw only the thin haze of Santos’s headlight against the rain and the little running lights of the patrol boat ahead of them, gone and then there again. The waves were crashing up to the very windshield. One caught them hard, and Desmond, working in the beam of his little flashlight, nearly went sprawling off his bunk.

“Shit!” He inspected the plants for further damage. “Bloody casing’s cracked, on top of everything.”

There was no telling how long the trip to Villamil would be. Santos had the throttle at full, but it seemed they barely made headway against the waves. Ahead of them the patrol boat was inching away from them, bit by bit its lights growing smaller and the intervals when it dipped from view growing longer, though now and again Alex could make out the silhouettes of the ranger and his deputy against the light of the little doorless cockpit that served as their cabin. Then a long moment passed when it seemed the boat had disappeared entirely.

Santos cut his light suddenly and eased off on the throttle. It was as if he’d given them over to the waves—in an instant the boat had lost all momentum and was being tossed like a twig, up and then down again. They sank to a valley and then seemed to get sucked up in the maw of a wave, the whole boat twisting and tilting so wildly Alex was certain they would capsize.

Alex felt Desmond’s bones crunch against him in the dark.

“What the fuck are you doing? You’re going to sink us!”

Santos pulled on the tiller hard and gunned the engine again. For a moment it felt like they were hanging against the wall of the wave, about to be swallowed in it, but then the boat seemed to catch against something like a gear clicking in, and they wrestled upright again. Another wave caught them, but differently, as if the wind had shifted or the sea had changed its direction.

Desmond, suddenly energized, pulled himself up and flung open the door of the cabin.

“They’re behind us! The fucker turned the boat around! He’s running them!”

It was true: every few instants the lights of the patrol boat reappeared behind them, getting smaller. But what was Santos thinking? They would truly be outlaws now.

“My man Santos!” Desmond said, as if this had all become some grand adventure. “There’s balls for you!”

The patrol boat had slowed now, and begun to turn in a wide arc. It had noticed their flight. A powerful beam of light pierced the rain from its deck searching them out, moving back and forth across the waves. Somehow it managed to miss them, once, and again, but then a crack of lightning lit up the sea and held them frozen there on the waves.

The searchlight swung around to them, but Santos kept the throttle at full.

“He’s still going to run them!” Desmond said, as excited as a schoolboy. “It’s bloody Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid!”

It was madness: already the patrol boat was gaining on them. Alex made out the ranger standing in the bow in the lashing rain, maybe shouting at them, though whatever he was saying was lost to the wind and the waves. Then he drew his gun.

“Fuck me!” Desmond said, ducking behind Alex.

The ranger aimed the gun skyward and fired a single shot. It came out muffled and strange in the rain, the merest clack. Alex hunched, waiting for more, but the ranger just stood there, bobbing up and down with the waves, looking rain-swept and maddened.

He turned away and a moment later the patrol boat began to circle back in the direction of Villamil. Desmond was still cowering.

“They’ve stopped following,” Alex said.

“He’s not aiming that bloody pistol at us, is he?”

“No. They’re going back.”

Santos turned on his light again. They continued in silence, the frenzied energy of their escape giving way to exhaustion. It took an hour or more of hard slogging before they made their cove, and then another half hour’s maneuvering to get the boat into it without smashing against the rocks. The cove, at least, was calm, with only the rain and the slightest heave of the sea to tell of the storm not fifty yards away. Santos lined the side of the boat with his jugs and his lifesaver to keep it from grinding against the cliff face and leaped out into the rain to tie the mooring lines to the rocks and trees. They were all drenched by then, even Desmond, who stood flinging ropes inexpertly to Santos from the deck.

There was no sign that Desmond’s newfound respect for Santos was in any way mutual.

“
Aquí, mujer, aquí!
”

The only thing Desmond cared about was, of course, that Santos had saved his plants. Alex still couldn’t figure out what was in it for Santos, though he was coming around to the opinion that at bottom he simply wasn’t very bright. He wanted his fish, as Desmond had said. Everything else was an inconvenience.

They’d gone beyond mere madness by this point.

“Quite the adventure, isn’t it?” Desmond said. “Looks like you’re getting your money’s worth.”

The rain was battering the roof of the cabin. Through the cabin door, Alex saw Santos put a jug up to the little funnel he had rigged to catch the runoff, then a minute later another. They had water enough to last them. Alex suspected they would need it.

They retreated to the far side of Fernandina, where there was only the ocean between them and the Chinese coast. Alex kept expecting the cavalry to arrive at any moment, choppers and gunships,
SWAT
teams that would storm them on the beaches, but the days passed and they saw only the lizards and the birds. Fernandina was another planet, what he thought Neptune might be, or Uranus, a place of black sand and purple scoria fields and highways of bouldered lava rock that rose up to the rim of a single massive crater. A green lake lay at the crater’s bottom, placid and remote, little conclaves of ducks drifting across it that looked as if they had strayed there through a warp in space.

They had days of drizzle and gray, more storms, then sudden cloudless mornings when the sun beat down on them like a tyrant. Santos was up every day in darkness, baiting his lines, but the fishing here was even more erratic than it had been in the bay—half-catches, with half the fish undersized, and half the rest just bastard interlopers that ate Santos’s bait, then had to be chucked. Day by day Santos grew more impassive and sour. Alex kept sneaking looks at the hold to try to gauge what remained of their exile, but the time passed and the hold seemed no closer to filling.

He avoided being caught alone with Santos. That left him to Desmond, who after the first thrill of their escape had had to come around to the fact that they were stuck out there now at the remotest reaches of the archipelago.

“We’re in virgin territory, my boy,” he’d said at the outset. “Time to stake our place in the history books.”

But they scoured the slopes for his mollugo, through glaring sun and bitter rain, across lava fields that were like climbing through a landfill and along precarious ridges where the ground threatened to give way with every step, and found no trace of it.

It wasn’t long before the bloom had gone off Desmond’s brief infatuation with Santos.

“Might as well be in fucking Alcatraz. The Mongol should never have given them a reason to come after us.”

If the merest speck appeared on the horizon Santos at once hid the boat in some mangrove clump along the coast until it had passed; if they camped on the beach they had to cover every trace of themselves lest someone come looking for them. It all seemed pointless: surely Santos’s boat would be impounded the instant he pulled into a harbor, and Desmond’s specimens probably crammed into a baggie so he could be brought before some international tribunal on crimes against nature. Desmond and Santos avoided each other now like partners in a murder who couldn’t bear being forever reminded of their villainy. The sheen they had seemed to have of being survivors, above every obstacle, when they had set out from Puerto Ayora had completely gone—they looked beleaguered and small now, men with a mark on them.

Desmond kept cooking up plans for his escape, schemes that involved sneaking off in the panga in the dead of night or hailing a passing freighter to hitch a ride to the mainland. Alex didn’t want to hear about them: the more he knew, the more chance he’d get dragged into them. He would rather take it up the bum from Santos than set out in a rowboat on the high seas with the likes of Desmond.

Desmond never let his case from his sight, dragging it up and down the island like a dead child he couldn’t part with, stopping obsessively to give his plants their daily doses of light.

“Bloody gunslingers put them back a good month, at least. If the fuckers don’t go to seed they’re completely useless.”

It looked to Alex like the plants were on their last legs.

“Maybe you should throw them out,” he said. “Destroy the evidence.”

“Over my fucking corpse.”

Alex, to fill the hours, had begun to sneak glances at Desmond’s
Origin of Species
. He was surprised—put off, really—at how unassuming it was, with its talk of visits to the neighborhood pigeon fanciers and of the varieties of primrose and cowslip. He kept skipping ahead, looking for the Big Pronouncement, but it all went along like this in the most tentative way as if it was just a polite accumulation of the musings of a Victorian gentleman. Maybe that was the chilling thing: here was a theory that had turned the established order on its head and it seemed to depend on nothing more than the difference between pouter pigeons and fantails.

Back in university, Alex would have put this sort of book aside as hopelessly mired in minutiae. Yet it had a kind of suspense to it, as if poor Darwin was being driven despite himself toward an awkward conclusion. He wouldn’t say it, he spent the whole of his book finding ways not to say it, and yet there it was, the unacknowledged elephant: the chance, the possibility, that all of creation made no sense. There was no end point in his version of existence; there was an order, but it was a sort of order without Order, that carried on blind. Alex had never quite understood this. He had always seen Darwinism as just another of the grand schemes for making sense of the world—like Marxism, say, or Freudianism, or the New Criticism—that proved all was right with it.

These were the sorts of thoughts that ran through Alex’s head while he was out traipsing after Desmond across the wastes of Fernandina. Meanwhile he had the primordial world in front of him like his own Darwinian science kit, an outcrop of rock that had heaved itself up to the light of day just an eye-blink ago, in geological time, and the paltry offerings of life it had managed to scrape together in the interim. There were those same Jurassic iguanas as on Isabela, with their crazy third eye, and their black-skinned brethren by the sea that massed together on the rocks in tangled heaps; there were the hawks that circled patiently over them, day after day, waiting for some fatal error. A margin of green ran around the island’s coast and another mirrored it around the rim of the volcano, but in between there was only gray and black, though in ten million years, or a hundred million, the place might have got around to being vaguely habitable. Who could say what new freaks of nature would have sprung up by then, three-armed or fully amphibious or with a second set of eyes in the backs of their heads? There was no telling, really, that was the thing: there was no Plan. Things went on and on, this happened, then that, and it was all merest chance.