The Origin of Species (45 page)

With a symbolism that wasn’t lost on him, Alex had dropped his watch into the sea. He had taken to wearing it again after the near-disaster on Marchena, but one day he was leaning over the rail of the boat and it simply slipped from his wrist. Plop, he heard, then felt the lightness. Now he was reduced to following the sun to get his bearings, which usually had vanished behind El Niño’s veil by mid-afternoon. By that time, Alex had invariably smoked the last of the three cigarettes that were all he allowed himself on their excursions these days and his only
thought was to get back to the boat for his next one, the minutes hanging like hours, now that he had no means to measure them. Somehow, in his head, the dwindling of his cigarettes was linked in an inexplicably cosmic way to his lost watch, and to the sun inching hidden across the sky, not really inching at all but actually hanging there ninety-three million miles from them in the middle of absolutely nothing. He began to feel as if with each cigarette he smoked he was somehow bringing them all closer to calamity, the instant when whatever laws there were that held everything just so would cease to function.

His cigarettes were all that were left to him, his coffee long gone by now. He couldn’t face the horror of running out, and just shoved a blind hand down into his remaining carton when he needed a new pack without daring to count how many were left. Then one morning he rose early and went out to the deck to find Santos baiting his line with a cigarette drooping from his lip. The sight of him smoking so cavalierly, as if they’d somehow been transported back to the cigarette-rich civilized world, sent an instant’s thrill through him. But then the alarm bells went off: the only cigarettes he’d ever seen Santos with were the ones he’d cadged from Alex.

Alex was suddenly sure, with the rock solidity of instinct, that Santos had pilfered from him.

“
El cigarrillo
,” he said hotly, hardly able to stop from wrenching the thing from Santos’s lips.

Santos didn’t even bother glancing up from his work.

“
Qué quieres?
”

“
El cigarrillo. De dónde?
”

Now Santos looked over at him.

“
De dónde?
” An acid grin spread across his face. He pinched the cigarette between his thumb and middle finger and took a drag, held it. “
De dónde, muchacho? Qué tipo?
”

He exhaled.

“
Es un cigarrillo de bacalao
,” he said, with his laugh, and flicked the butt into the sea.

It was war after that. A single pack, it turned out, was all Alex had left—he did the math, what he would have smoked, say, at fifteen cigarettes a day for some twenty days, a generous estimate, and came up about two packs short. He began to watch Santos like a hawk, was up when he was, would spy on him from the shore with Desmond’s binoculars to try
to catch him sneaking smokes while they were away. At the smallest opportunity he made covert searches of the boat, the tackle boxes, the engine well, the little wooden chest that Santos kept near his feet at the helm, looking for half-finished Marlboro packs, foil, cellophane wrappers, anything incriminating. He found not the least evidence to support his suspicions—the little chest, for instance, held a map, of all things, and a small pile of neatly folded clothing some woman must have laundered for him. Yet he remained convinced of Santos’s guilt. At the very least he’d been hoarding his own secret supply, crime enough in Alex’s eyes, and surely justification for raiding it if he sniffed it out.

He had cut down to a lone cigarette after breakfast and then a final tantalizing one before bed. The sudden drop in his nicotine intake seemed to have whittled away at what little remaining patience he had with Desmond. When Santos set them ashore in the mornings now, Alex left Desmond to fend for himself, taking with him only a little shoulder bag with his own bare necessities, his Swiss Army knife and his lighter and his remaining cigarettes, which he had taken to keeping on him at all times, then a jug of rainwater and whatever leftover fish and rice he could scrounge, stored in a little tin pot with a handy latching lid to which he had helped himself out of Santos’s supplies. If it ever came to it—and to this end he always kept his moneybelt with him, tucked in his pants, his documents and cash safely sealed away inside it in Ziploc bags—he figured he could leave Desmond and Santos to their fates and make his way on his own, cooking up lizards and crabs for his meat and rigging a still for his water with hollowed-out crab legs.

The first time Alex had left the boat without taking any of Desmond’s equipment, Desmond had stood on the deck looking as if he’d been left in the lurch by an incompetent bellhop.

“I can’t lug all this stuff on my own. Not with my fucking knee.”

Alex sat waiting in the panga.

“Then just take what you can manage.”

Desmond looked like he’d been betrayed.

“Fucking hell, then. If that’s how you want it.”

It was too late, though, for any fundamental shift in the order of things—their roles were too ingrained by then, the hierarchy too established. Short of sulking alone on the beach, Alex was stuck following Desmond on his rounds, which at least gave a shape to the days, something
to hold back the amorphousness they were slipping into. All that Alex’s newfound independence amounted to in the end was a constant prickliness that Desmond went out of his way to inflame.

“Grab that satchel, would you?” he’d say, putting Alex in the position of looking petulant if he refused. Now that Alex had made his aversion to him plain, Desmond seemed determined to give it no quarter. Alex felt he had lost his trump card, the one thing that had afforded him any sort of power over Desmond.

“There’s no point moping around like fucking Achilles,” Desmond said. “Not many people get this sort of opportunity, you should be grateful for that.”

“Opportunity for what, exactly?”

“Don’t be an ass. Something like this changes your life. What’s that worth to you? Or would you rather go back home like some bloody jock just to say how many girls you’ve fucked?”

It would have been easier to keep strong against Desmond if Desmond hadn’t actually had his number. Desmond was willing to say anything, to speak his cesspit mind, which meant he often strayed into the truth.

“In a week,” he said, “you’ll get on a plane and go back to whatever it is you do up there in Canada. But you’ll have this. You’ll thank me for it. A day won’t go by when you don’t remember it, I’ll guarantee that.”

Desmond didn’t say where
he
might be in a week—probably winging his way back to England, having somehow wormed his way out of this mess. Alex was surprised at how much he actually took heart from the thought. He’d been hatching his own escape plans, carting around his little survival kit and thinking he might simply hike down to Punta Espinosa one day, where the tourist boats stopped, and head for the nearest police station. But what he really hoped for was a clean escape for the lot of them, Desmond with his mollugo and Santos with his fish, if only because he didn’t want either of them on his conscience, didn’t want to have to think of Desmond stuck in his East London flat teaching English to foreigners all his life or Santos shipped back to some Third World hell on the mainland, sans boat and sans fish and with the woman who laundered his shirts on his case every day and who knew how many hungry
niños
at his heels.

Alex had continued scouring the battered suitcase that served as Desmond’s library in search of more reading material. It was crammed with every manner of arcana, thousand-page reference books and
hand-bound monographs and photocopied journal articles with titles like “Effects of Seed Dispersal by Animals on the Regeneration of
Bursera graveolens
” and “Cacti in the Galápagos Islands, with Special Reference to Their Relations with Tortoises.” Most of these were replete with Desmond’s crabbed annotations, as impressively unreadable and obscure as the material itself. But once Alex dug through to a folder buried at the bottom of the suitcase filled with articles by a certain Prof. J. M. Bowinger of Imperial College. Here the annotations were easier to make out. “Bollocks!!” Desmond had scrawled across one of the articles, and “Bloody crap!!!” on another. But try as he might, Alex couldn’t see anything in Bowinger’s leaden prose and ponderous thoughts that made him any worse than the rest. In fact, one of the articles talked about pioneer plants in terms that might have come from Desmond himself. It was almost heartbreaking to see Desmond’s vindictiveness, his sense of injury, exposed so baldly. Some sort of contest had been fought, it was clear, and he had lost. Perhaps there was a sort of dignity in that, in hard-won bitterness. Alex had had his own share of it.

They gave up their search for mollugo across Fernandina’s slopes and descended for the first time into the island’s crater. This one was of a different order than the one they’d been in on Isabela, almost entirely barren, runneled cliffs of ashy gray stretching down half a mile or more to the lake on the crater floor. They had to test every step, inching their way down along capricious footholds that seemed firm one instant and the next as soft as sand, the crater gaping in front of them at every turn.

It was a couple of hours of knee-busting work before they got down to the lake, a pocket of life amidst the waste. There were the ducks, entirely ordinary-looking creatures of dullish brown that were boating casually along on their green element as if it were a wetland in Muskoka; there were clouds of insects, gnat-like things that hovered above the surface of the lake like a miasma it gave off. Now the lake’s preternatural green was explained: the water was a thick algal soup, as viscous as creamed broccoli.

“The thing goes as clear as the Mediterranean when there’s an eruption,” Desmond said. “Then it starts over again. God’s little laboratory.”

Alex could feel the spectral stillness of the place, the isolation. The only ripples on the lake were the wakes of the ducks, quelled in an
instant by the carpet of algae. Maybe this was as close as you got to the beginning of things, a bit of water and dust and then His Big Finger reaching down for the spark.

Desmond had picked up Alex’s shoulder bag from where he’d dropped it.

“I’ll take a bit of your water, if you don’t mind. Mine’s out.”

They found a scattering of stubborn plant life in the nooks and crannies around the lake, grasses and vines and tiny flowering weeds. But no mollugo. Desmond was surprisingly sanguine.

“All this is just birdshit, most likely. Brings the seeds over. Ergo, no mollugo. A certain colleague of mine maintains that birds are the major factor, but that’s just nonsense, it has to be wind. It’s a pioneer plant, for Christ’s sake, it’s not going to wait for the bloody birds to show up.”

“Is that what all this is about?” Alex said. “You and Bowinger?”

“Bowinger? What the fuck do you know about Bowinger?”

Alex felt a thrill. He had struck a nerve.

“I saw his articles. In your things.”

“You were fucking snooping! I don’t believe it! You went through my things!”

There was a genuine outrage in this that threw Alex off balance.

“I was just looking for something to read.”

“My bloody arse you were! You’re a common sneak! So Mr. Fucking Goody Two-Shoes from Canada finally shows his true colors!”

Alex felt like he’d blown another crucial advantage.

“So is that it? This wind thing?”

“Yes, that’s part of it. The ‘wind thing,’ as you so articulately put it. You can bet it bent his nose out of shape. Though he was smart enough to pick on something else when my dissertation came up. But never you mind. I’ll fix all that, once I get these fuckers home, which I’ll manage even if I have to eat them first and shit them out on the other side. That’d be a fine bloody irony.”

They crawled their way back to the rim before nightfall, both of them gray as ghosts from the dust. Alex thought he’d never be rid of the taste of it, ferrous and bitter like burnt bone. Clouds had massed over the crater and they had to make their way in the fog a good ways before they got clear of them. But higher up in the sky, another layer of cloud stretched to the horizon.

They reached the shore just as the first rain began to fall. Santos’s boat was not ten feet from where they’d left it, as if it hadn’t moved. Alex had begun to suspect that their gas had run low.

“Bloody home sweet home,” Desmond said.

Santos rigged a canopy over the engine well and cooked up some fish on the brazier. They ate in the cabin, in silence. Alex’s clothes clung to him like mud from the dust and rain. He thought of their first meal together on the beach in Darwin Bay and how different the silence had seemed then.

The fish was one of Santos’s discards, barely edible. He wasn’t wasting his grouper on them anymore.

“He might throw on some crab for a fucking change,” Desmond said. “Bloody nigger’ll be feeding us rat shit next.”

Santos rose and in one movement grabbed Desmond’s dish and hurled the remains of his dinner out the cabin door.

“Fucking hell! What the fuck did you do that for?”

Santos sat back down without a word.

“You fucking bloody oaf! You fucking monkey! I ought to split your skull, you fucking spic!”

Desmond made a stab for Santos’s plate but Santos lunged at him, lightning quick, and pinned him against the cabin wall, a hand at his throat. Santos looked massive suddenly, murderous, the smallest shiver away from snapping Desmond’s neck.

“Go on, you fucking animal!” Desmond screamed. “Why don’t you kill me? Go on, or I’ll kill you first!”

Alex cast an eye around wildly for something to strike Santos with if he needed to.

“Stop, for Christ’s sake!” he shouted. “Stop it!”

A long second passed, but then something seemed to give in Santos and he let Desmond go.

“You fucking cocksucker! You fucking coward! I hope they lock you away, you bloody pirate, it’s what you deserve!”

An awful silence followed. Santos hunched over his plate, then finally took it out on deck and flung the remains of his meal after Desmond’s.