The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  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.

  “Hijo de puta!”

  He jerked the rest of the line up with a few angry pulls. The end came up free, the canister gone. Santos was furious. Alex could see he blamed him, though he was the one who had tied the thing. To top it off he hadn’t hooked a single grouper, just a few small, colored aquarium fish and another rogue species, ugly and mean-looking, that he tossed at once back into the sea.

  “Poor sod,” Desmond said. “Looks like El Niño has been at it. Fucks up the currents.”

  “Shouldn’t he know about that?”

  Desmond was looking cheery.

  “He’s a mainlander, sadly, that’s why I chose him. Less territorial about the place. I suppose he hasn’t worked out all the tricks yet. Probably quit his job in the merchant marine thinking he’d come out here to make his fortune, and now all the fish have gone home.”

  Santos’s mood turned black. He set his line deeper than usual, down to seventy or eighty feet, the nylon cutting into his palms from the extra drag when he hauled it in. But still half his hooks came up empty. He couldn’t be bothered to cook any breakfast and just thrust some leftovers at them from a couple of days before, the rice already going sour.

  Desmond put on his highest dudgeon.

  “If you’re not going to feed us properly you can at least let us off the fucking boat.”

  It was nearly midday before Santos finally pulled up to shore, not at the cove but at a rocky promontory jutting out among the mangrove lagoons of southern Isabela.

  “I’m not getting off in this swamp,” Desmond said. “I haven’t finished the north end yet.”

  But as soon as they were within heaving range of the rocks, Santos grabbed one of Desmond’s bags and tossed it onto them.

  “That’s my equipment, you fucking ape!”

  Desmond was already clambering down the ladder after his bag, his case in hand. He stepped off into the water but sank down to his chin before he touched bottom.

  “Bloody hell! He wants to fucking drown me!”

  He had to bob his way to shore, pushing the case across the water with the tips of his fingers.

  If Alex didn’t hurry, he’d end up stuck on the boat with Santos.

  “Me quedo aquí.”

  Santos tossed out another bag.

  “Como quieras.”

  He waded o
ut from the ladder before he could change his mind, making the rocks just as Santos tossed out their sleeping bags.

  “Regreso mañana! Por la noche!”

  Desmond stood dripping among his scattered belongings looking like a castaway.

  “Mañana? Have you lost your mind? What are we supposed to do for food, exactly?”

  Santos grabbed a sack and tossed a couple of fish from his morning’s catch into it, then went around adding whatever came to hand, a pot, a jug of water. He heaved the sack onto the rocks.

  “You cook!” he said.

  Desmond seemed ready to shit himself.

  “I don’t believe this! I don’t believe this!”

  But Santos had already gunned the engine.

  “Can you believe that gorilla? I don’t fucking believe this!”

  The boat bucked like an old horse and began churning out to sea, quickly growing small. Alex collected their things. Little crabs scuttered away from him on the rocks.

  “We should never have paid him up front, I’ll tell you that. Bloody fucking gall!”

  They had to thread their way through the mangrove to get off their little landing, Desmond complaining of his knee again and Alex stuck with the bulk of their things. When they came out to open ground they found themselves at the foot of a wide slope spiked with the usual smattering of palo santo and rising up in the distance to the rim of a massive crater. Here and there the brush was cut through with barren runs of dark lava rock.

  Alex wasn’t sure, but he thought he made out a plume of smoke drifting up from the crater into the canopy of cloud above it.

  “Well we’ll just have to make the best of it,” Desmond said. “It’ll give us a chance to get up to the crater at least.”

  Any relief Alex had felt at being off the boat was quickly dissipated under the strain of their trek and of Desmond’s company. The terrain was as tangled and inhospitable as Marchena’s had been, but sloped parabola-like ever more steeply upward. Alex could see the crater ahead of them rising almost sheer, like a big top hat, and wondered how exactly Desmond was planning to scale it. Meanwhile the sun had come out, for the first time in days, through a hole in the cloud cover that seemed trained directly above them, so that Alex could feel it beating down on the top of his head with all the force of midday. He made the mistake of complaining about it and got one of Desmond’s lectures.

  “The source of life, my boy, don’t knock it. The Egyptians had it right, all that sun worship, before the Jews came along and fucked things up with the Invisible Man.”

  He’d started dragging his plant maps out, big topographical things in some impossibly large scale. Now that he was at his work everything else seemed put aside, Santos, his knee, their being stranded out here with two stinking fish and a jug of rain.

  The maps were ruled off into tidy grids, little markings in what seemed a kind of code strewn across the areas he’d already covered. Some of the marks were in red, though surprisingly few: his mollugo.

  “What if you miss some?” Alex said. “It’s kind of hard to be thorough.”

  “Who’s going to contradict me? I don’t see a lot of competition around.”

  As they passed, surly iguanas scattered into holes in the underbrush in their exhausting little spurts, clumsy, prehistoric things much more outlandish and baroque than the demonic black ones that matted the rocks by the sea. Somewhere in one of Desmond’s books Alex had read they had a third eye on the tops of their heads. It sounded freakish, but maybe no more freakish than having eyebrows, say, or fingers and toes. In any event freakish seemed the norm here—off the Isabela coast they’d passed penguins basking on the rocks like happy vacationers, and flightless cormorants, with stunted thalidomide wings, gliding through the water with the grace of sea lions.

  Now, from the recent rain, there were actually greenish buds on the palo santo, tiny as dewdrops but giving off an odor as vegetal and rank as a rain forest’s. The higher they went, though, the more ragged the scrub got and the more bitter the terrain, until they were down to thorny weeds struggling up through a rusty alluvium of volcanic scree that gave way beneath them with each step. Alex could already see what was going to happen: at some point the whole slope would just crumble and they’d end up buried alive beneath tons of volcanic scurf.

  At least Alex had the water with him.

  “Fucking dust,” Desmond said. “Give me that jug, would you?”

  Desmond had grown vigilant: they were in mollugo territory. Alex had actually glanced at a few of Desmond’s articles on the stuff, hopelessly footnoted things that Alex had nonetheless managed to glean a few essentials from. What a pioneer plant was, for instance: one of those that was the first to take root in virgin rock and begin the eons-long work of breaking it down into dirt. Looked at in that light Mollugo flavescens took on a kind of nobility, of romance. The beginnings of life. Two billion years ago or whatever, before the first fishy half-thing had crawled up from the deep, this was what the world was, this dead rock, waiting for the likes of mollugo to make it over.

  “Bloody crap.” Desmond was scavenging irritably amidst the bits of growth. “Fucking goats have been here. You can see the tracks.”

  “I thought they’d killed them all.”

  “Not here. The battle still rages.”

  Desmond didn’t stop his foraging until the scree had given way entirely to solid rock, sharp as nails and nearly impassable. They still had a ways to go to reach the summit. They swung around to the southern end of the slope to find better ground and soon the rock turned to scree again and then to scattered brush. The first of the goats appeared here, a rotting lump much more putrid and fresh than the one on Marchena. Further on there was another, still with a bloodied hole visible behind the ear where a bullet had gone in.

  Desmond kicked it.

  “Hasn’t been here a week. The last thing we need is to run into the bloody Park Service.”

  The vegetation grew rapidly denser. In the space of a few hundred yards they passed from near desert to lushness, the palo santo replaced by grasses and by shrubs in full leaf and these by woods so overgrown you would have had to hack your way through them. All down the southern slope the green stretched, a different world. Almost despite himself—it was just a matter of winds, after all, he’d learned that, not some miracle—Alex felt a surge.

  Part way down the slope, the woods opened out to scattered clearings. Fields. It was the first sign in days of anything human.

  Desmond had hardly given the view a second glance.

  “We’ll have to speed up a bit if we want to make the crater before dark.”

  “Are there actually people living here?”

  “Eh? That’s Villamil, on the coast. We could be there in a couple of hours if you wanted. Awful place, of course, though it would serve Santos right if we just fucked off on him.”

  They started up toward the crater. Alex couldn’t get over the thought that there were people so close, houses, streets, electric lights. It seemed almost incredible that these things still existed, that he hadn’t actually stepped back into some Precambrian world. He could set off at dawn, he thought, and be there in time for breakfast—eggs, maybe, anything but fish. From there he’d beg his way home if he had to, whatever it took to be free of this place.

  “You’re lucky to get up here, I hope you realize,” Desmond said. “It’s not exactly on the usual tourist run.”

  They scrambled forward, up rubbly inclines and over crags tangled with growth. They passed more of the goats lying dead here and there, one hanging grotesquely from the limbs of a stunted fruit tree it had somehow toppled into. Then in a clearing they came across a whole killing field of them, maybe a dozen or so, weighing the grasses down, fresh, from the looks of them, and sending up a stench.

  Desmond scowled.

  “Looks like they’ve sent out the whole bloody posse.”

  They were close to the crater now. The air had grown misty and the terrain too steep to hold anything m
ore than scraggly vines. Alex’s bags pulled at him like clinging animals. Then just when it seemed they couldn’t go any further against the slope, they came to a narrow rift in the cliff face that snaked up like an old streambed, bubbled with twisting rock from some recent lava flow.

  “This way,” Desmond said.

  “Do you know where this goes, exactly?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?”

  Alex was just able to squeeze into the crack with his bags, clinging to whatever handhold he could grab and balancing back and forth against the pocked latticework of mangled rock at his feet. Within a few steps all he could see were the snarled walls of the rift on either side, towering over him to where they disappeared into cloud.

  With each step the passage seemed to narrow.

  “We should go back.”

  Desmond, in the lead, kept blundering forward.

  “Just a bit further, I think.”

  Alex’s hands and elbows were raw, his ankles ached, his sneakers seemed on the verge of splitting. Then suddenly the walls of the rift folded back and they came into a little pit about the size of a swimming pool, beyond which a vast green plain lay spread before them, cupped in an oval of hills that held it like a stadium of the gods.

  They had passed through the rim of the volcano into the crater. Alex had imagined it a lifeless pit, more heaps of ash and scree, not this hidden universe, a kind of heaven and hell of lakelets and scrubby meadows and bush interspersed with great moonish stretches of scorched rock. Here and there shafts of smoke drifted up, flattening out like mushroom clouds against the mist overhead.

  “Better make camp,” Desmond said. “I hope you know how to cook.”

  They camped down on the crater floor, where they found a clump of grass that provided some cushioning against the rock. They’d spotted a herd of goats to the north, maybe a hundred or more, grazing peacefully there while their comrades lay rotting on the other side of the crater.

  Desmond had already claimed the thickest patch of grass.

  “Gather up a bit of firewood, would you? I’ve got to finish my notes.”

  Alex couldn’t even be bothered to resent this sort of behavior anymore. He set out to scout through a nearby stand of palo santo but part way there came across a mud pit, huge grayish mounds rising out of it like giant toadstools. Tortoises, about half a dozen of them. They were the first he had come across. At his approach, one of them stretched its brontosauran neck in what seemed a kind of tired affront, but almost at once a second one came charging at it with a surprising burst of speed, head raised high as if to strike. The first beat a hasty retreat into the muck and the victor preened an instant, gazing this way and that, before giving Alex a look that made it seem as old as Adam.