by John Yunker
“I’ve been wet before,” he said. “All I need is food. And liquor couldn’t hurt.”
Shelly was heading back to the States in the morning, to give exams to her Boston University students and to squeeze more money from donors, leaving Angela in charge for a week. Her departure gave Angela hope that she could keep the man hidden.
Without anyone noticing, Angela folded a large piece of lamb into a napkin, no small feat, as she was a vegetarian. She excused herself from dinner and exited through the back door, by the storage room, where she grabbed a bottle of Malbec.
Outside, Angela peeked underneath the pickup truck, a ritual she now dreaded. The female was there waiting, her head swaying erratically from side to side, the chicks chirping loudly, calling out to be fed.
Diesel should be back by now. Back with a belly of food to feed his chicks, to relieve his mate so she could go back to sea to feed herself, continuing the relay race of raising their young. Another day and this penguin would have no choice but to abandon her chicks.
Angela opened the creaky door of her trailer. Now that she was second in command, she no longer crammed into the cueva, and while an eight-foot, 1970s-era trailer that leaked wasn’t exactly high living, it was a big step up. Mostly, it was privacy. It also came with its own penguin, Geraldo, who nested under the trailer, between its cinder block foundations. In early mornings and late at night, Geraldo brayed loudly, calling out for any and all potential mates. Angela was long past being awoken by penguins, but she still liked hearing him flap his wings against her floor.
Unlike Diesel, Geraldo had at least selected a nest that was guaranteed to be around for awhile. But here at camp, these penguins were still a kilometer too far inland; the most desirable nests were nearer the water, closer to the swarms of anchovies, krill, and sardines the birds relied on. Penguins waddled to the ocean two or three times a week, and adding a kilometer of pockmarked land to the journey made these inland nests less desirable. But the younger males took what they could get, even if they ended up with “starter homes.” Angela sighed as she entered her trailer, knowing that Geraldo would likely be single for another season.
A few minutes later, Doug knocked. “You look like you’re going somewhere,” he said when she opened the door.
“Just up the hill, like always.”
“You need a companion?”
“I think I can manage tonight.”
“You sure?”
“I’m quite sure.”
She could tell that Doug was not accustomed to rejection, and he loitered around her trailer as she headed up the hill. Fifty yards into the darkness, Angela heard movement and stopped.
It was Doug. “Centaurus is going to be brilliant tonight,” he said, squinting as she turned her flashlight on him.
“Doug, go home.”
She watched him sulk back to camp, then waited another fifteen minutes to be certain he would remain there. She knew that eventually she would have to humor him and take him along on a trip or two. How quickly the object of her affection had become one of annoyance.
Her mind wandered as she hiked through the darkness toward the tent, the moon not yet making itself known. Why was she harboring this man? Maybe it was transference, caring for this lost soul as a way of making up for another lost soul: Diesel’s. Maybe it was the scientist in her, the opportunity to study a human for a change, instead of a penguin. Or maybe she simply found him too attractive to share with the others.
She opted for the scientific explanation. After devoting a lifetime to studying hundreds of thousands of penguins, her life had become consumed with numbers and averages. The average-sized penguin. The typical lifespan. The standard rate of reproduction. Statistical outliers were always left out of the calculations, as they should be. But now Angela found herself face-to-face with a statistical outlier. A human anomaly. Not average in any way. And not so easily dismissed as a number.
She found him standing outside his tent, looking back over the water.
“How long do you need?” she asked.
“A few days.”
“You cannot leave this campsite,” she said. “I will bring you food and water. But under no circumstances do you start a fire or draw attention to yourself in any way. And by no means do you set foot on the tourist trail.”
“People will just think I’m one of you.”
“You’re not one of us. This is a provincial reserve, not a campsite, and it’s surrounded by private land. If the guardafauna don’t shoot you, the ranchers surely will.”
He sighed loudly. “You’re the boss.” She handed him her flashlight and a large water bottle. When she offered him the lamb he waved her off.
“I don’t eat meat,” he said.
“You have to eat something.”
“That will suffice,” he said, pointing to the bottle of wine. Angela had forgotten a corkscrew, so he carved an opening with his pocket knife and took a long drink.
The moon was rising and, with it, the volume of the penguins around them. She studied his face in the dim light as he watched a penguin lean forward and let forth an escalating progression of honks.
“Do you have any earplugs?” he asked.
“You’ll get used to the noise.” Angela remembered a protein bar she’d tossed into her backpack last week and dug it out.
“Thank you,” he said, tearing open the wrapper with his teeth. He sat on the ground and inhaled the bar. She sat across from him. Angela could tell the man was starving, and yet he’d turned down the lamb. Most of the other naturalists at Verde were meat eaters, and it always bothered her that they could devote their lives to protecting one animal while consuming another.
“We have something in common,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m a vegetarian, too.”
He took another swig from the bottle and studied her face. She averted her eyes, focusing on a penguin as it passed behind him, its white belly glowing in the moonlight.
“How’s your hand?” he asked.
“All stitched together,” she said, holding it up as proof.
Despite being alone with a strange man in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, she was not afraid. She never really felt alone out here, surrounded by knee-high chaperones peeking at her from under bushes and within burrows. Some hovered nearby, cutting wide swaths around the tent as they trekked to the water.
Angela didn’t ask the man who he was or what he was running from. There was something freeing about knowing nothing about someone, about him knowing nothing about you. Her research camp was a soap opera, one that grew more incestuous by the day. Everybody knew about her crush on Doug, including Doug. Angela never deluded herself. Although her body was slim and athletic, she did not display it in a way that attracted men’s eyes. She had a chest, she knew, that might catch an eye or two, if she hadn’t tethered it under a sports bra that could be washed in a bucket and dried on a clothesline in ten minutes. She dressed for fieldwork, wearing cargo pants for function rather than fashion, layering on dusty shirts and sweaters in the region’s dark green and taupe. She had always dressed to blend in with the landscape, not stand out.
Yet during those times Doug tagged along on her nightly trips up the hill—the closest thing to a date she’d had in years—Angela found herself wishing she’d packed something sexier. It felt almost romantic the way Doug, an astronomy major before switching to biology, pointed out the Southern Cross and the creatures of the heavens, like Leo and Pisces. Angela realized that she had been coming to Punta Verde for fifteen years, had identified every square meter of bush, plant, bug, rodent, mammal, and moss, and yet she’d never bothered to tell one star from another. She spent her life looking down.
Doug got her thinking about children for the first time, simply by asking if she had any. But he was only a flirt, only interested in Angel
a for her knowledge and experience. Perhaps he was angling to co-author a research paper with her, to leapfrog the post-docs. Their profession could be as ruthless as nature itself; not everybody would get the research grants or the honorary professorships, see their names in news articles. With people and with penguins, scarcity drove them to do extreme things.
Even Angela was not immune. A month ago, she nearly flew into a fury when Doug and the others did not show up for an outing, until Shelly told her it was Thanksgiving and they were in town calling their families.
So Angela was glad for a new, albeit mysterious, companion. As they sat together in the dark, she found herself thinking of the body under her filthy work clothes, a body kept in camouflage suddenly yearning to be noticed. A body that had not been touched in a long time. A body that, just now, wanted to remember what it felt like.
She took the bottle when the man offered it to her. With each drink he became a bit more talkative, as did she. He asked for her name, and she told him.
“They call me Aeneas,” he said.
“You’re kidding.”
“You’ve not heard of me?” He appeared surprised. “Surely you’ve read about me in the papers.”
“We don’t exactly get home delivery here.”
He explained the name, an alias, and his pursuers—various coast guards, police bureaus, and intelligence agencies.
“I do battle with whaling ships,” he said.
“Like Greenpeace?” Angela asked.
“They fight with words and water guns,” he said. “We fight with the hulls of our ships. We ram them. We mangle their props.”
“You sink them?”
“On occasion.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“No.”
Angela left it at that. She didn’t want to know more, to find out anything worse.
“Are you married?” he asked.
“Do I look like I have time for a marriage? Out here attending to wayward men?”
A sneeze broke the silence that followed.
“What was that?” he asked.
“A penguin.”
“Penguins catch colds?”
“They sneeze to exhale the salt from their beaks.”
“I could probably do the same,” he said, rubbing his nose. “I was married once.”
“You?”
“She was a volunteer. Earnest. A scientist, like you. Told me I was full of shit one day, and I was hooked. We made it official in Ushuaia. Had the ceremony on the ship in middle of the Drake Passage. It’s not easy saying I do with forty-foot waves lapping at your feet. That time of year, the sun never sets, the body never gets tired. There’s a sense of collective euphoria. It’s as if you’ve stepped outside of the world and none of the old rules apply. Eventually, however, you have to head north again. Where there are roads and traffic lights, yards that need to be mowed, bills to be paid. She traveled with me for a while after her tour was up, but I think she thought it was a phase I was going through. She went back to L.A. and waited for me to settle down, to return to her. I didn’t. And she divorced me in absentia.”
He took a long drink. “You find that amusing?” he asked.
Angela realized that she had been smiling. “No. It’s—it’s that word.”
“What word?”
“Absentia. When I was a kid, I used to think absentia was an actual place. I even spent time looking for it in the atlas at the school library.”
“I’ve been living in absentia for years,” he said. She saw his lips curve upward, into a private smile, as if he’d forgotten she was there. And as the silence lingered, once again she felt left behind.
The bottle was empty, and reluctantly she stood to leave.
“Come here.” In one smooth motion, he stood, grabbed her waist, and kissed her. She felt the scruff of his unshaven face bite her chin as she kissed him back. Then, remembering where they were, she pulled away. “Wait,” she said.
“Wait for what?”
She didn’t know. She was certain Doug hadn’t followed her; they were as alone as any two people could be. And maybe this was the problem: that a wish, one she could barely admit she’d wished, was being granted.
She began to say something, but he grabbed her again, this time more tightly, and she responded by pushing against him so that he stumbled backward into a quilambay bush. A startled penguin emerged from under him and bit his leg.
“Ouch!” he yelled, flushing out several more penguins, sending them flapping away on their bellies.
Angela attempted to smooth down her jacket, her hair, before turning away. “Good night,” she called out, walking off into the dark.
On the next hill, she stopped and removed her jacket. Her heart was pounding, and she looked back into the darkness. Despite his aggressiveness, she still did not fear him. Mostly, she feared herself, and how close she came to not pushing him away. Instinct served her well in self-defense. But now she was alone again, heading back to an empty trailer.
* * *
The morning was drizzly, the first rainfall in a month. Outside the office, Shelly gathered food requests from the assembled naturalists—energy bars, Doritos, Red Vines—and loaded her bags into the pickup truck.
Then she approached Angela. “Can I bring you anything?” she asked.
“I think we’re good here.”
Such departures were frequent at the camp and did not warrant hugs or other displays of affection. Yet Shelly seemed to linger longer than usual. “I’ll see if I can scrounge up another satellite transmitter,” she said, and Angela felt herself wince before Shelly added, “As a backup.”
“Right. As a backup.” Angela forced a smile. Shelly climbed into the car with Stacy, and they left for Trelew airport.
Now in charge, Angela sent the team, including a reluctant Doug, south of the camp, and she headed north. During the long walk alone, her mind turned to Diesel. It had been Angela’s idea to attach the satellite transmitter to him.
Using a blend of duct tape and super glue, Angela had affixed the transmitter to Diesel’s flank on a cold morning in mid-December. The yellow device was about the size of a deck of cards, with rounded edges and a three-inch rubber antenna. Once activated, for up to six weeks the device sent signals at five-minute intervals to a satellite twenty miles above the planet. To conserve battery life, the device shut itself off while the penguin was underwater and out of range. To a satellite, the path of a penguin looked more like Morse code than a continuous line, but Angela could decipher the data, connect the dots, learn where Diesel traveled to fill his belly. The transmitters cost $5,000 each, so it was very important to get them back. The key to getting one returned was selecting a bird that had a reason to return—in other words, a male penguin with a new chick. Shelly had thought it was premature to tag Diesel. Give him another year, she said. But Angela had insisted.
Doug had helped, though he’d made it known he did not approve. Although each new generation of transmitter diminished in size, the devices still exerted a drag on a penguin in water, reducing its odds, ever so slightly, of out-swimming a leopard seal or an orca. Doug held Diesel while Angela attached the device. The procedure usually lasted up to an hour, and a penguin usually struggled during every minute. But Diesel was calm. He seemed to enjoy the attention.
It’s a southern cross, Doug had said while looking at Diesel’s belly. Angela looked at the dark smudges on his white feathers, how they did indeed form a cross, something she never noticed until now.
What’s the point of tracking them, Doug added, if the act of doing so reduces their numbers?
Fishing nets do more damage than these devices will ever do, Angela told him.
This they knew from the dozens of flipper tags they received each year, mailed anonymously from the fishermen who obeyed the Avise al request stamped on the back
of each tag. Some tags arrived carefully flattened out by hammer, easier to slip into an envelope; others arrived intact, little thin triangles. And Angela always wondered how many tags were left on those ships, or at the bottom of the sea.
Her life was consumed with attrition and its causes. The unreported oil spills, evidenced by the blackened, shivering birds that staggered upon the shores. The plastic six-pack rings that doubled as lassos. The baited long lines, meant for large fish but difficult for any species to resist. And the most acute and least visible cause of all—the food supply. Penguins depended on anchovies and krill, once abundant and ignored by fishermen, now in demand at salmon farms and for multivitamins. Like penguins, fishermen aimed for the food nearest to shore, and because they were more efficient and rapacious, penguins were forced to forage farther and farther from their nests, diminishing the odds of a successful return.
Still walking north, and fifteen minutes away from the research camp, Angela sighted a figure in a yellow jacket atop Beacon Hill. She rushed toward it to find Aeneas straining his eyes over the water. “I told you to stay at the tent,” she said.
“I needed a higher vantage point. I thought I saw my ship.”
But he had not seen his ship, and Angela scolded him as she led him back to his camp. “Do you have to wear that jacket?” she asked.
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s not exactly camouflage.”
“You should talk,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“With that red hair of yours, I could spot you a mile away.”
Angela felt her face blush at the thought of him watching her, and she was glad for the biting wind.
She had work to do, and she decided that if she was going to harbor a fugitive, she would at least put him to work. She led Aeneas to the furthest reach of the colony, six miles from the park entrance. She could hear him breathing heavily behind her.
“You walk too fast,” he said.
“And you walk too slow,” she countered.
As they hiked along, she began to ignore his harmless taunts. But just as they’d reached the place where she wanted to begin the census, he gave a startled shout, and she turned to see him with one leg knee deep in the ground. He had collapsed a penguin burrow, apparently twisting his ankle. She bent down to assess the damage—to the nest, not him—and was relieved to find the burrow empty.
