The Origin of Species Read online

  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.

  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 pe
culiar 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.