The Origin of Species (47 page)

“That should do it.” He looked uneasily at the sorry remnant he’d left behind. “If it doesn’t make it I’ll come back and reseed the thing myself.”

Alex had stood by during all of this still not quite comprehending—it was just a matter of a few extra root hairs, surely what any self-respecting plant could have managed in a twinkling to handle an extra spot of drink. Yet Desmond was acting as if the skies had opened, as if Darwin himself had come down from the clouds and anointed him his holy son. Alex didn’t think evolution happened like this, overnight—it took millennia, eons, while whole continents shifted and mountains rose up and decayed.

Desmond was packing up. Alex needed to know if he was truly a madman, now that decisions had to be made.

“You never finished telling me about your dissertation,” he said warily. “What they actually failed you on.”

“Why in Christ would you bring that up now?”

He had to push on before Desmond beat him down.

“I was curious. Wondering if this will help.”

“It’s not actually any of your fucking business,” Desmond started, but already relenting. “If you really want to know, it was a frame-up. Fifteen
words. Fifteen bloody words. A fucking sentence. Bowinger claimed that I lifted it from his stuff.”

He’d grown gloomy with remembered bitterness.

“Did you?” Alex said.

“As if I’d bother. You could have put an armadillo in front of a typewriter and eventually he’d have come up with the same thing. But it was enough to sink me.”

“But had you actually read the sentence somewhere?”

“Of course I’d fucking read it! I’d read everything, even that arsewipe. Especially him. So maybe the thing stuck in my head, who the fuck knows, these things happen. But once he had that, he made a whole bloody argument. Probably fed my dissertation through a fucking computer, I wouldn’t put it past him. Three words here, some bloody turn of phrase over there. And because he’s such a mucky-muck, everyone kowtowed. Plagiarism. They might as well just have hanged me from a tree.”

He fell silent. At once Alex regretted having brought the subject up. He saw it all now, everything he hadn’t wanted to know. The dingy basement flat with the books everywhere and the moldering walls and the stinking cat litter in the bathroom; the mother, even, who came over Sundays to do the dishes and bring Tupperware meals and to whom he’d said nothing of his shame, guarding her illusions. He could see the whole of it, could practically smell it, the stale odor of Desmond’s life.

Desmond clicked shut his case.

“This’ll change all that, though,” he said quietly. “This’ll change it.”

It was not much past noon yet, to judge from the sun, though the first pale wisps of El Niño cloud had started drifting in.

“Might as well set out before the weather changes,” Desmond said. “Let the fucker come after us if he wants. My guess is he’ll probably be glad to be rid of us.”

This was it, then, Alex thought. He would have to decide. Somehow their find seemed to make his choices more ambiguous. He cast a glance back at the paltry shred of mollugo they’d left behind in the ash. A new thing on the earth, for all Alex knew. Its fate lay in their hands.

Desmond waved off Alex’s help at the ridge, clutching his case in one hand and somehow managing to lower himself over the edge with the other. He disappeared from view and Alex heard gravel trickling off into space. After a long moment Desmond reappeared on the ledge below him.

“Be quick about it! I don’t like the look of those clouds.”

Alex began to lower himself down. His shoulder bag shifted and nearly threw him off balance.

“Don’t monkey around up there, for Christ’s sake, you’ve got the fucking Grim Reaper behind you.”

By the time Alex made the ledge his limbs felt like water.

“You’ll have to give me a boost here to get the case up,” Desmond said. “Then I’ll give you a hand once I’m over.”

Alex was too jittery to argue. He just wanted off that ledge. It was maybe ten feet to the one above them, up an ashy slope that reached a few feet short of it.

Desmond insisted they get the case up first.

“Just give me a boost and I’ll shove it over.”

But Alex’s feet kept slipping against the scree under Desmond’s weight.

“Just leave it!” Alex said. “I’ll hand it to you! You need both hands to get over!”

“Fine, fine! Just don’t fucking let go of it till I’ve got it!”

Desmond clambered up the slope. There was a heart-stopping moment at the top when he had to stand nearly vertical against the cliff face to clear the last few feet, but then he was over. In a flash he’d turned and was on his belly, leaning out for the case.

“Let’s have it, then! Just don’t drop the bloody thing!”

Alex gauged the slope. It would be awkward getting traction with only a single hand to pull himself up. He leaned his whole body into the scree, bracing one foot against it and pushing off from the ledge with the other.

He heard a whoosh behind him, like an intake of breath, and saw Desmond’s face twist.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

Alex froze.

“Don’t go back, for Christ’s sake! Keep coming! Keep coming!”

Another sound reached Alex, a distant rain of debris like a handful of pebbles reaching the bottom of a well.

“Keep moving, dammit! Move!”

All Alex could see now was the image in his mind’s eye of the slope giving way to air beneath him. His body was in the grip of an unfamiliar sensation, as if speed was pumping through him or a thousand volts.

He felt a warmth at his groin.

“For the love of Christ, move, goddammit!”

He eased his hand forward, surprised his brain could still send messages to such distant outposts. It was a matter of moving ahead inch by inch, only that. One inch, then another.

Desmond was leaning out over the cliff edge, arms outstretched. Alex felt something like gratitude flood through him.

“The case, for fuck’s sake! Hand up the case!”

The fucking case. That was all it came down to.

For a second, then, Alex almost gave up his grip. It would be so easy, a crossed signal in the brain, a tiny misfire, and then the almost instantaneous electrical surge through his nerves that would shut his muscles down. He would slip over the cliff edge and into the air, and a moment later nothing. Mineral death.

“Hand up the fucking case, for God’s sake!”

It would serve him right
, Alex thought.

He heaved up the case.

“Thank fucking Christ!”

It seemed almost as an afterthought that Desmond held a hand out to him to help him up.

“Pushed off a little hard on that one, eh?” he said, with grotesque cheeriness. “You must have been pissing yourself.”

Alex’s heart was still pounding, his hands were shaking, but suddenly none of it seemed to have anything to do with him.

The ash had covered the wet at his groin.

“We should go,” he said.

He went ahead, following the trail they’d come by. He was trembling still but wouldn’t show it, keeping up a brisk pace so that Desmond had to struggle to keep up. Then they reached the rim and saw what they hadn’t seen from inside the crater, a line of dark cloud that was pushing toward them from the horizon.

Alex was pleased.

“Fuck it!” Desmond said. “Bloody hell! This fucks up everything.”

The clouds moved in while they descended. By the time they had reached the coast the sky had closed over and the wind had started to pick up. Santos’s boat was already waiting for them offshore.

Alex hadn’t spoken since they’d set out.

“Fucking perfect chance shot to hell,” Desmond grumbled.

There was nothing for it but to drag out the panga and row back to the boat. Santos was battening things down with a look of dark intent.

“
Regresamos a Puerto Ayora
,” he said, without preliminaries.

So he’d had enough: they were heading back to port.

Desmond’s face screwed up as if he was about to lay into him, but he seemed to think better of it.

“That’s just crazy,” he spat out.

“
Sí
,” Santos said. “
Loco
.”

The matter didn’t appear open for discussion. Alex couldn’t see what Desmond had to complain about: he had his mollugo now, his mission was done, and the storm would likely get them past whoever might be watching for them at Villamil. Alex didn’t really care. He just wanted to be free of these men.

Santos wasted no time in setting out, heading around the far side of Fernandina. Within minutes they were in open sea; within minutes more the rain was coming down in sheets and the waves were washing over the bow. In the dark of the storm Alex could barely make out Fernandina’s shore. One wrong turn and they might end up in Fiji or on some uncharted atoll, with only a cracked compass to guide them.

Desmond had grown muted. He was picturing his vindication, Alex imagined, his revenge, close enough to taste.

“Think I’ll rest up a bit,” he said, climbing into his hammock, though by now the boat was tossing in the waves.

Alex stared at the storm from his bunk, not wanting to think. With each swell he had to brace himself to keep from cracking his skull against the beams. The waves rose out of the dark again and again like an unstoppable legion. Each time the boat dipped beneath them Alex thought it must founder, but somehow it rose again.

He still had the smell of piss on him. He couldn’t believe how they had lived out here all these days, wallowing in each other’s filth, smelling each other’s shit. Desmond had stopped bothering even to duck behind a bush when he shat, so that more than once Alex had seen the logs fall from his scrawny ass, viscous and thin. It turned his stomach to think of it. They’d become animals out here, except that animals had lines they wouldn’t cross, a sort of integrity they couldn’t betray.

Night came on, a sudden deepening of the dark. Alex couldn’t say how long they’d been plowing the waves, two hours, maybe three. Desmond was snoring in his hammock, turned to the wall, tilting this way, then that, yet maddeningly still. Alex had never quite managed to rig a hammock of his own and had made do with his bunk, unable to bring himself to ask Desmond for help.

For a scary moment the engine sputtered and seemed about to die, then rumbled to life again. Alex caught a glimpse of the hard set of Santos’s face in the crooked light from the headlight. They went on for a time in a kind of suspension, but then the engine faltered again, and went dead.

In an instant they were tossing on the waves.

“What in Christ?”

Desmond had awoken. There was no order now to their movement, the boat swinging in every direction.

“Fuck it! Bloody hell!”

He’d smashed his forehead against one of the beams above his hammock.

“What in fuck is going on?”

Santos had gone out into the storm. Alex heard him banging around with increasing fury among the canisters on the deck.

“Looks like we’re out of gas.”

“You’re not bloody serious!”

Santos lurched back into the cabin dripping like some monstrous sea thing and began kicking at the canisters wedged under the bunks. One of the ones under Desmond gave a liquid thunk.

Desmond was caught up with tending to his head.

“Find me a plaster or something, I’ve split my fucking skull.”

Santos disappeared into the storm again. A minute passed, then another, the boat pitching wildly. Then suddenly the engine stammered back to life and Santos resumed his spot at the tiller.

Alex caught a flash of wetness from Desmond’s forehead. It looked like he was bleeding in earnest.

“I don’t suppose he has a fucking first aid kit.”

The boat took on a kind of rhythm again against the waves and Desmond crawled into the aisle between the bunks, rummaging among his things.

He managed to lay hold of his flashlight.

“Fuck it. Bloody battery’s gone.”

He groped around in the darkness. Santos, at the tiller, hadn’t taken his eyes from the sea.

“What in hell?” Quietly at first, as if he had made some sort of mistake. Then the note of panic came into his voice. “It’s not here. Where the fuck is it?”

Alex thought of ignoring him.

“Where’s what?”

“My specimen case! My fucking case is gone!”

He began scrabbling madly under the bunks.

“It’s not here! It’s not fucking here! Where the fuck is it?”

“It probably just shifted when Santos took the gas.”

As soon as Alex had said this, though, the same suspicion seemed to dawn on both of them.

Desmond leaped up.

“The fucker took it! The fucking cocksucker took it!”

He flung himself at Santos’s back.

“You fucking bloody motherfucker, where is it? Give me my fucking case!”

He was grabbing at Santos trying to get a purchase.

“Where’s my bloody case, you fucking ape? You fucking savage! Give me back my fucking case!”

Santos fended him off with one arm as if he were a yapping mutt. Desmond tried to come at him again, but Santos swung out at him and sent him sprawling. Desmond grabbed for something on the floor. Santos’s jeroboam.

“You bloody cocksucking motherfucker! I want my case back!”

Before Desmond could swing the bottle up, Santos had let go of the tiller to take hold of him by the scruff of the neck. The boat rolled to one side and the two nearly toppled full force onto Alex, but then it pitched sharply back and Santos flung Desmond hard against the cabin door, where he crumpled in a heap.

“
Basta ya!
” Santos shouted, as if for Desmond’s own good. “
Está con los pescados!
”

It was with the fish. So he had actually taken it. Alex, now that it was clear the matter had come to this, felt an unexpected sense of violation.
It couldn’t be true, he thought, the man wouldn’t simply have tossed the thing into the sea, not with those plants in it.

Desmond was still sitting collapsed against the cabin door, the jeroboam cradled in his lap like a child.

“You fucker, you fucker, you fucker, I want my fucking case! You have to go back for it, I’ll pay you! Turn the fucking boat around! You might as well have killed me when you had the chance!”