“Fishermen can catch bluefin tuna, blanquillo, cod, swordfish. But I had friends who headed out, and never came back,” he says. “Riptides … ?they’re unpredictable. If your engine fails for some reason, you can get caught in one that moves three meters per second.”
“So you mean … ?they died?” I ask.
He nods. “Like I told you,” he says. “Dangerous.” He navigates through the steampunk maze of risen rock. “Look, over there, on the aa lava.”
“The what?”
He points. “The spiky rock,” he explains. “Pahoehoe lava is the other kind—the stuff that looks like it’s melting.” I follow his finger to see two blue-footed boobies. They face each other, bowing formally to the left and then to the right and back again, twin metronomes. Then they attack each other with their beaks in a frenzy of nips and clacks. “They’re going to kill each other,” I say.
“Actually, they’re going to mate,” Gabriel says.
“Not if he keeps that up,” I murmur.
He laughs. “That guy’s a pro. The older the bird, the bluer the feet. This isn’t his first shoot-out.”
It takes me a moment. “Rodeo,” I correct, grinning. I watch him hop out of the boat and drag it onto the beach. “I know Beatriz learned in school, but how come you speak English so well?”
“I had to for my job,” he says. He reaches under the seat again and tosses me a snorkel and mask. “You know how to use these, yes?”
I nod. “But I’m not wearing a bathing suit.”
Gabriel shrugs, kicks off his flip-flops, and wades into the water fully dressed. It laps at his hips, his waist, and then he dives forward, surfacing with a shake of his shaggy hair. He fits his own snorkel and mask to his forehead. “Coward,” he says, and he splashes me.
The water is a dizzy mirror of the sky, the sand like sugar under my feet. It feels strange having my shorts float around my legs and my shirt plastered to my body, but I get used to the sensation as I tread water. Gabriel dives a few feet away and a moment later I feel him tug at my ankle. “Vamos,” he says, and when he ducks beneath the surface this time, I follow.
The undersea world explodes with color and texture—bright anemone jewels, runnels of coral, wispy fronds of seagrass. For a little while we follow a sea lion that keeps playfully slapping Gabriel with its tail. Gabriel squeezes my hand, pointing out a sea turtle rhythmically sawing through the water. A moment later, in front of my mask floats a bright pink sea horse, a question mark with a trumpet nose and translucent skin.
Gabriel surfaces, pulling me with him. “Hold your breath,” he says, and still grasping me, he kicks us powerfully to the seafloor, where a rocky promontory juts, polka-dotted with sea stars and a ripple of octopus. Gabriel twists until we are hovering in front of a small crevice in the boulder. Inside I see two small silver triangles. Eyes? I swim closer for a better look. But when I do, one moves, and I realize I am staring at the white-tipped fins of sleeping reef sharks.
I kick backward so fast that I create a wall of bubbles. Without looking to see if Gabriel is following, I swim as hard and as fast as I can back to shore. When I crawl onto the sand and rip off my snorkel, he’s right behind me. “That was,” I gasp, “a fucking shark.”
“Not the kind that would kill you.” He laughs. “I mean, maybe just a good bite.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, and I flop onto my back on the sand.
A moment later, Gabriel sits down next to me. He is breathing hard, too. He pulls off his soaked shirt and throws it to the side in a soggy ball. When he lies back, the sun glints off the medallion he wears.
“What is that?” I ask. “Your necklace.”
“Pirate treasure,” he tells me.
When I look at him dubiously, he shrugs. “In the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, pirates used the canal between Isabela and Fernandina Island to hide from the Spaniards after raiding their galleons. Back then, this was a place where you could disappear.”
Still, I think.
“The pirates knew the galleons went from Peru to Panama, and after they stole the gold, they hid it on Isabela.” He raises a brow. “They also nearly hunted the land tortoise population to extinction, and they left behind donkeys, goats, and rats. But that wasn’t nearly as interesting to a seven-year-old boy who was digging for buried treasure.”
I come up on an elbow, invested.
“It was back in 1995 on Estero Beach—that’s near El Muro de las Lágrimas. Two sailboats showed up, full of Frenchmen who were exploring Isabela, digging for treasure. I helped them for a few days—or at least I thought I did, I was probably more of a nuisance—and they found a chest. I helped them dig it out.”