by Nino Ricci
Santos was still at the controls.
“Agua,” Alex said.
Santos took a swig from his jeroboam and handed it to Alex.
“Bebe.”
All Alex’s inhibitions had gone. At the first swig his body seemed to unfurl like a fist opening.
“Gracias.”
They were just entering some sort of bay, a perfect circle of guano-washed cliffs. Out on the deck it was surprisingly cool, the air strident with bird cries. A low line of clouds sat on the horizon, but otherwise the sky was clear.
Desmond was sitting on the hatch, peeling an orange, still in the dandruff-flecked blazer he’d been wearing since Alex had first laid eyes on him.
He tossed the peel into the water.
“Darwin Bay,” he said. “The irony is, Darwin never laid eyes on it.”
Alex eyed his orange.
“Is there another one of those?”
“Personal supply.” Desmond pried off a wedge and popped it into his mouth. “You should have stocked up.”
Alex felt ready to knock him over the rail.
“I thought Santos was supposed to supply the food.”
“The basics, yes. Not the goodies.”
“Are the basics going to be making an appearance any time soon?”
Desmond downed another wedge.
“I expect once we get to the beach.”
It took a good while to get across the bay to the sole stretch of beach that broke up the ring of cliffs. Here, at least, was a bit of bluish lagoon and whitish sand, though beyond them the black cliffs rose up, topped with bush that had the gray, dried-out look of a failed crop. Santos anchored the boat. He stuffed various bits of cooking equipment into a sack, then climbed down into the hip-high water without so much as removing his boots and began wading into shore. After a moment Desmond followed, cringing like a cat, though unlike Santos he had taken his socks and shoes off, holding them aloft as he sloshed toward the beach.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
He had stepped on something. Alex, taking his cue from Santos, kept his sneakers on during the crossing. He could feel the bony unevenness of the seabed through his soles: they were walking on coral.
Desmond squatted on the beach to inspect his foot.
“Fuck it! I’ve cut myself. Damn it to hell!”
Santos, entirely ignoring Desmond, had started collecting up bits of wood and brush for a fire. Alex followed his lead. Desmond could fuck himself, for all Alex cared.
“Bloody hell. I’m bleeding like a stuck pig.”
Santos had a fire going within minutes. He had brought his odd pressure cooker with him and he dunked it into the sea to let water gurgle in through a nozzle at the top, then set it on the fire on a little tripod of rocks. From his sack he pulled out a length of crudely coiled metal tubing, fitting one end of it over the nozzle and inserting the other into an empty jeroboam.
He saw Alex watching him.
“Agua,” he said, seeming to puff up a bit. “Es muy importante.”
Alex twigged. It was a still for their water. He stood looking at it, trying to express a proper level of gravity.
Santos grunted.
“Más leña,” he said finally, more wood, their moment of communion over. Alex could already see how this was going to go: he was going to be everyone’s bum boy, while Santos played the captain and Desmond, who was still fretting over his foot, managed to shirk every responsibility.
He went off to look for more firewood, past an outcropping of rock further along the beach. A couple of tide pools had formed there, a number of odd gray lumps stretched out next to them. Alex went nearer to see what they were but started back when one of them raised itself up and let out a bark. Seals, half a dozen of them. He expected them to waddle off at the sight of him, but apart from the one, a massive brute whose hide was covered with scars, they didn’t pay him the least attention.
A mother was suckling her pup, pale white droplets spilling from her teats.
“I’d watch out for the bull.” It was Desmond, limping up behind him to take a seat on the rocks. “He might think you’ve got designs.”
Alex moved inland to scrounge for wood in a patch of mangrove. Big blue-snooted birds sat roosting in the branches, clutching to them incongruously with their red ducks’ feet. They seemed as incurious as halfwits, not even bothering to shift their weight when he approached. He saw their nests in the foliage, assemblages of twigs that looked like they’d been slapped together in the most careless manner. Some had eggs in them or huge fluffy hatchlings, who stared out at him dopily between the leaves, close enough to touch. It gave Alex the strangest feeling, walking among these things so unregarded. What brutal beasts the animals back home must have thought humans, that even the sparrows and squirrels scattered at the first sight of them.
Back near the fire, a few large white birds with blackened eyes were nesting in hollows they’d fashioned in the rubbly earth, little depressions of cleared ground surrounded by a nearly perfect circle of birdshit.
“Masked booby.” Desmond again. He hadn’t moved from his perch. “Two eggs at a go, and the first one to hatch kills off the other. There’s a way to start off your life. The tourists come here and think it’s lion and lamb, but it’s nature all the way, make no mistake. Red in tooth and claw.”
Alex tried to ignore him. Santos had managed to snag a fish with a hand line, a big reddish-orange thing that had glinted brightly as he brought it up from the water but almost at once grew dull. He knocked its head on a rock to stop its writhing and in under a minute had it scaled and gutted. He threw it directly into the fire. There was another pot going there now, into which Santos poured a few handfuls of dirty rice.
“Pescado,” he said to Alex, nodding toward the fish. He seemed to have taken it upon himself, like Desmond, to be Alex’s tutor.
“Qué tipo?” Alex said.
Santos actually laughed, though it was more a guffaw, as if Alex had a lot to learn.
“No importa,” he said. It doesn’t matter.
The still, in all this time, had produced about a cupful of water. Desmond limped over to the bottle and drained it.
“Bloody brackish,” he said, scowling. “We’ll die out here if we have to survive on this.”
They ate in grunting silence, sitting squat-legged on the beach. The rice was oversalted and tasted of sea; the fish wasn’t salted at all and was laced with tiny bones. But Alex couldn’t get enough. They ate without utensils on army-issue tin plates, scooping their rice up with their hands. Alex had thought Desmond would be finicky, but he was quick to grab the lion’s share of things, thumbing around in the fish head to scrounge what extra morsels he could from it.
Around them the masked boobies sat on their nests while great red-breasted birds wheeled overhead.
“That’s better,” Desmond said.
A boat appeared at the mouth of the bay as they were finishing up. At the sight of it Santos and Desmond sprang into action, stowing the rice pot and heaping sand up around the fire, ready to douse it.
“Who are they?” Alex said.
“No idea. Just clean away that fish mess.”
They waited tensely until it grew clear that the boat wasn’t headed for the beach but for a spot across the bay, though all Alex could see there was the same wall of cliffs.
“Aren’t we allowed to cook here?”
“It’s just nonsense,” Desmond said. “Some of these ball-breakers will turn you in if you so much as fart here.”
None of this concerned Alex as much as it might have, now that his belly was full. Maybe it was better to be renegades like this, to come and go as they pleased. The agent he had talked to had said the official tours were required to use guides from the research station, who probably ushered people around like cattle.
They waited on the beach until the still had run dry, then covered their tracks so that there was hardly a sign that they’d been there. Santos sprinkled seawater over the embers from
their fire to douse them, then collected them up in one of the cooking pots.
“Charcoal,” Desmond said. “Waste not.”
This time Desmond kept his shoes on when they waded out into the lagoon. There were more nests in the shrubs at the water’s edge, crumbling little guano pads sitting completely exposed to the sun, scrawny buzzard-like nestlings cawing unhappily from them. Everything seemed just slightly out of whack in this place, as if nature had not quite got things right. Yet Alex felt a peculiar sort of calm here. He didn’t know if he’d ever enjoyed a meal as much as he had their breakfast, even with these lugs for company, eating grunting there on the beach, just three animals amongst other animals.
Desmond was dragging himself through the water like a cripple.
“Rápido!” Santos called out.
They set out again. The boat skirted the cliffs, which were swarming with birds of every sort, until it came to a crack in them. The other boat was there, a ways off from shore, a massive yacht with tinted windows and half a dozen aerials and whirring instruments projecting from it.
“I hope they’re not here all bloody day,” Desmond said.
Santos maneuvered the boat until it was practically up against the rock face and idled the engine. Somehow, using a grappling hook, he managed to steady the boat against a little outcropping that afforded a landing.
“Ándale, ándale!”
Desmond was suddenly scrambling among his bags.
“Hold your bloody horses, you big oaf. I have to get my stuff!”
A wave lifted the boat and Santos had to struggle to hold his position.
“Váyanse!”
“What’s going on?” Alex said.
“Go! Go! We’re getting off here.”
“What about Santos?”
“Don’t worry about fucking Santos!” He had started tossing bags into the rock cleft. “Just go!”
Alex leaped. The boat lurched at the last instant and he ended up tumbling into the rocks. He felt a stab of pain in his shoulder.
“Quickly, for Christ’s sake! Grab the case!”
Desmond was holding it out to him.
“Don’t drop it!” He leaped after the case without the least thought for his injured foot, making the landing in a graceless flurry of limbs. “Here, I’ll take it. You grab the rest.”
He was already hauling himself up to higher ground.
“Back before dark!” he shouted back to Santos. “Not fucking mañana!”
Alex watched their boat disappearing into the bay, at a loss again as to what was happening. He was stranded here with Desmond, wherever here was, and on whatever questionable mission Desmond had made him an accomplice in. He didn’t care, really, what Desmond was up to or even where he took him—what difference could it make, when his ignorance of the place was more or less absolute?—but he hated being shuffled around like some sort of cabin boy.
Desmond had taken only his satchel and his case. Two hefty duffel bags bulging with unknown implements were left for Alex. He hoisted them both onto one shoulder, his other aching still as if someone had pounded a nail into it.
He scraped his way to the clifftop to find Desmond sitting again, nursing his foot.
“He could have brought out the dinghy instead of just dumping us on the rocks, the fucking baboon.”
He’d removed his shoe. His foot did indeed look injured, a livid gash near the heel oozing red. He wrung out his sock, wet from the lagoon, and the water dripped brown with blood.
Alex wondered what happened out here in the case, say, of an infection. Words like tetanus and gangrene came to mind.
“Where is Santos going, exactly?”
“To get his bloody fish, I imagine. Don’t expect any special treatment from him, I’ll tell you that. We’re just extra cargo as far as he’s concerned.”
It seemed entirely possible that Santos might decide just to leave them here to rot. They should never have paid him up front. Alex looked out to the gleaming cruiser in the bay and considered whether he should place himself at its mercy.
“Did you bring any water, at least?” he said to Desmond.
“You didn’t bring a supply?”
Alex was tempted to toss Desmond’s bags over the cliff.
“It’s not like I had a lot of time to think about it.”
“You’ll be fine. We’ll be finished up here in a couple of hours.”
They started along a narrow path choked with branches toward the other side of the island. A single tree near the start had held a smattering of yellow blossoms, but otherwise all they saw was a gnarl of leafless bush fading back to darkness, skeletal and vaguely menacing and giving off a narcotic smell like someplace bewitched. Alex was still saddled with the two bags, which shifted against him with each step and caught against the bushes, so that soon his good shoulder ached as much as the injured one.
Part way along they heard footsteps, voices, snapping twigs, and then a column of trekkers came into view ahead of them wearing sensible headgear and khaki, canteens and binoculars and impressive cameras with foot-long lenses slung from their shoulders. It was the group from the yacht. They were a strange sight, in this forsaken bush, tanned and hale like a misplaced species.
“Bloody krauts,” Desmond said.
The leader stood a good six foot five. He towered over Desmond, smiling down on him like the sun itself.
“You are come for the boobies, I think. It is very good here, many nests.”
“Actually, it’s more the flora I’m interested in,” Desmond said dryly. “Plant Biology, University of London.”
“Ah, so.”
People stood aside to let them pass. An older group brought up the rear, professorial types holding guidebooks and walking sticks who greeted them politely as they went by.
“Ja, ja, sieg heil,” Desmond muttered.
To Alex the troupe seemed like a little pocket of the known world amidst this alien one. It wasn’t too late; he could just abandon Desmond and go after them. But then the sound of them diminished—they were laughing at something, at Desmond, maybe—and the moment seemed lost.
“Fucking Germans,” Desmond said. “They’d buy the place if they could.”
The bush ended suddenly, as abruptly as if it had been razed, and a wide expanse of stony earth opened out to the sea, bare except for the occasional bit of shrub and for the hundreds upon hundreds of masked boobies squatting at intervals in the chalky rubble. They had come to the nests, which stretched out a mile or more across the flats, each with its little acreage, like the ghost houses of the old army base near the airport. The birds sat placid in their little domains, rising sometimes from their eggs to do a waddling circle around them before settling again. Alex couldn’t make out any sign in them of the bloody battle to come, though at some of the nests a single chick tottered nearby, hardly able to stand but no doubt gathering its forces. What would the parents do when the time came for their offspring’s awful deed? Cheer it on, perhaps, though maybe for a booby it was exactly the moral thing to kill your sibling, otherwise there were years of therapy ahead and bad relations all around for the family.
The path curved to continue along the seafront, to one side of a great rift beyond which nothing grew except a few lonely clumps of tiny cacti. Desmond, without a word, set down his satchel and case at one of these clumps and suddenly vaulted over the rift. He crouched and without hesitation pulled up one of the cacti, inspecting the little tangle of roots and the bit of soil beneath.
“Pitch me that satchel, will you?”
It was surprisingly heavy. Alex tossed it over and Desmond fumbled with it and nearly lost his balance but didn’t even pause to catch his breath, pulling a battered camera from it, the cheapest sort of Instamatic, and kneeling on the rock to snap some quick close-ups of the cactus’s soil and roots.
He tossed the cactus into the rift.
“Catch,” he said, heaving the satchel back.
They followed the trail until it petered out a
t a promontory, just beyond where the nests ended and the fissure gave out. The terrain further on was rough and untrammeled, just rock and ragged scrub, with a sheer drop to the sea. The birds circled over them, boobies, pelicans, a dozen other sorts Alex couldn’t have named. Sometimes they would drop out of the sky like stones to plunge headfirst into the water, their beaks flashing silver an instant when they came up before something disappeared into their gullets.
Desmond cast a furtive glance back along the trail.
“Let’s keep going,” he said.
“It’s a bit rough here. For your foot.”
“Never mind that.”
They set out across the rocks. Desmond stopped at every shrub, putting a hand down to finger the sprinkling of soil at its base.
“Here,” he said finally. “This’ll do. Give me those bags.”
He set to work. Alex thought he’d be gathering more specimens, but he began to chisel at a little hollow in the rock with a hammer and pick, breaking pieces of stone away and then pounding at them in the hollow until he’d formed a little bowl of powdery earth. He scrabbled a few handfuls of dirt from a nearby shrub to add to it.
“There’s a few hundred years of effort I’ve saved Mother Nature,” he said.
He unlatched the black case. Alex didn’t know what he’d been expecting, a state-of-the-art mini-laboratory or maybe the blue glow of some nuclear device. Instead Desmond folded back the lid, which split open into halves, to reveal merely a crude sort of plant box, already crammed with a mass of tangled tendrils and vines. The thing looked like a child’s science project, lined with sheets of foggy Plexiglas held together with caulking and tape and sectioned off with dividers that seemed made of floor tile.
“The work begins,” Desmond said, reaching in and carefully cupping one of the plants under the roots to set it in his bowl of dust.
Alex was beginning to think that maybe Desmond wasn’t so much an outlaw as simply nuts.
“What are you doing? I thought you were collecting things.”
The plant Desmond had set out was just a jumble of spindly vine, half-dead from the look of it, with the barest hint of tiny leaves and an even barer hint of some sort of flower or bud at the tips. Bits of nascent earth clung to the roots.
