The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  “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.

  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 r
emaining 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?”