by James Morrow
“There’s no harm in asking,” she said.
“I don’t want to burst your balloon, honey,” said Percy, “but I doubt that they’re getting her ready just in case somebody shows up needing a ride to Mexico.”
“Fatalist.”
For a man committed to sailing his tanker out of the harbor by sundown, the master of the Exxon Bangor, a muscular African-American named Marbles Rafferty, seemed peculiarly unperturbed—pleased, actually—when Nora and Percy appeared uninvited on his bridge. The explanation proved simple. Rafferty had caught Gilgamesh the King two nights earlier in Barnett Crossroads, and he’d loved every minute.
“You were brilliant,” he told Percy. Spiffily attired in dress blues, the captain was an imperially serious man, with soft dark eyes and a slight stammer. “Act three was the best, all those nautical scenes.” He guided them into his private quarters, a cluttered cabin dominated by a desk holding a brass sextant, a pack of Camels, and a cloth-cover edition of a book called The Gospel According to Popeye. “I’d never realized how much of Gilgamesh is a sea odyssey. The Crab of Hell had me on the edge of my seat.”
“Not everyone cares for the Crab,” said Percy, smirking in Nora’s direction. He brushed the gold piping on Rafferty’s sleeve. “We’re hoping you can point us toward the Casper Theater.”
“This isn’t my town.” Rafferty retrieved the Camels and with a flick of his wrist caused a single cigarette to emerge from the pack. “Smoke?”
“No, thanks.”
“We’re also trying to reach the Bahía de Campeche,” said Nora.
The captain removed the exposed Camel, slid it between his lips, and, giving the pack a shake, coaxed out a second cigarette. He offered it to Nora. She declined.
“That seduction scene of yours, Mrs. Burkhart—sensational!” Rafferty lit his cigarette and scowled. “Palermo’s my port of call. Would either of you like a beer? I feel like I’m entertaining royalty.”
“I might be tempted,” said Percy.
“Sure,” said Nora.
Rafferty opened his refrigerator and took out three damp brown Budweiser bottles. “These may be the last three Buds in America,” he said, distributing the beers. “Normally I’d never use the Bangor as a passenger liner, but somehow they found enough bunker fuel for an Atlantic crossing, plus they’re paying me in gold. Once we reach Europe, I’m converting to Islam and heading for Turkey. No abulia there. Why Mexico?”
“My son’s been thected. There’s a treatment facility in Coatzacoalcos, the Lucido Clinic. Heard of it?”
“’Fraid not.”
“I hope to find a ship in New Orleans.”
A smile spread across a face that seemed unaccustomed to the merest grin. “When you get there,” said Rafferty, “scour the docks for my good buddy, Anthony Van Horne. You’ve heard of him, the guy who hauled God from Gabon to the Arctic. He got a book out of it. Anthony, I mean, not God. I was his first mate.” Taking a hearty swallow of beer, he lifted The Gospel According to Popeye from his desk and showed Nora the back cover: a photograph of a rugged but vulnerable-looking sea captain—a New Age Ahab, she decided, prepared to make peace with the universe. “Lately he’s had a run of tough luck, I heard, reduced to managing some sort of oddball whorehouse.”
“Has he got a ship?” asked Nora.
“One way or another, Anthony always gets a ship.” From his refrigerator Rafferty obtained a Skippy peanut butter jar filled with a gray, moist, arcane gunk. “When you find the old gooney bird, give him this, and he’ll know you’re my friend.” He handed Nora the jar, colder even than the Budweiser. “It’s called glory grease, an ointment we used to make on the Valparaíso: Corpus Dei blood and lymph, good for what ails you—sunburn, hemorrhoids.”
“Will it help my bad knee?”
“Worth a try. Tell him Marbles Rafferty thinks your Great Sumerian Circus has done the world a few favors, and he should bust his chops trying to get you across the Gulf.”
As Nora tucked the glory grease into her Celtics jacket, Rafferty’s first officer, a man reminiscent of Khumbaba in bulk and loudness, appeared in the doorway and announced that their “weirdo passengers” had arrived. The captain glowered, obviously more inclined to discuss Gilgamesh the King than to address practicalities. He introduced his visitors to the mate, who bore the incongruously fey name of Delbert Florence, then grabbed his binoculars, donned his Hemingway cap, and ushered everyone back onto the bridge.
“Ever hear of a movie palace called the Casper?” Percy asked Delbert Florence.
“It went belly-up a few years after VCRs came in,” said Florence. “New owners stripped it clean and turned it into a Wal-Mart.”
Fingers locked tight around the glory grease, Nora followed her companions out of the wheelhouse and onto the starboard bridge wing. The noonday sun shone brightly, collaborating with the skull to bum off the last of the mist. When Nora saw Rafferty’s passengers, her first impression was that some progressive insane asylum had accorded its inmates a field trip. Despite December’s cold, or possibly because of it, the pilgrims were naked to the waist, their abdomens girded by iron bands, their attention fixed not on the temperature but on the task at hand: lashing one another savagely with leather thongs, band-saw blades, and strands of barbed wire. The air vibrated with whipcracks. Smiling through their tears, answering one another’s yelps and groans with inspirational laughter, the flagellants marched across the docks and up the gangway, a parade of happy masochists.
“Three hundred from Pensacola, seven hundred from Bay Minette, over a thousand from Mobile,” said Rafferty.
“I don’t get it,” said Percy.
“If they make a pilgrimage to the Cinecittà Reliquary, whipping themselves all the way, God will lift the plague—or so they believe.”
Nora snorted contemptuously. “Who will lift the plague? God? Don’t they ever glance at the sky?”
“The skull, they claim, is a snare set by Satan, rather like the dinosaur fossils,” said Rafferty. “To tell you the truth, I’m not looking forward to this trip.”
As the flagellants swarmed over the weather deck, Nora beheld their piety in all its grisly particulars, a crazy quilt of weeping wounds and exposed bone.
“Are you two screwing in real life,” asked Rafferty, “or do you just do that on stage?”
Percy slipped his arm around Nora’s waist and said, “Have you noticed how straightforward people are these days?”
“Our era’s only virtue,” said Rafferty.
“We’re screwing in real life,” answered Nora.
“Good for you,” said Rafferty.
Repulsed by the martyrdom on deck, Nora turned toward the water. A dozen fishing trawlers plied Mobile Bay, accompanied by squawking entourages of cormorants and seagulls. She reached into her jacket and removed the peanut butter jar. If she rubbed glory grease all over her son, would Quincy go away? Doubtful. And yet the balm was precious: her entrée to Anthony Van Home and, by extension, her passport to Coatzacoalcos.
Later, as Nora and Percy stood on the dock watching the tugboats drag the Bangor seaward, she asked, “Why was Gilgamesh so foolish as to leave the Flower of Youth unprotected?”
“Hard to say, honey,” replied Percy. “Perhaps he knew, unconsciously or whatever—he knew that no mere mortal could possess the plant for long. If the Woman-Serpent hadn’t stolen it, a lion would have, or a wolf, or an eagle.”
While Nora pondered Percy’s analysis, the tugs shot free of the Bangor. The tanker’s engines kicked in, their guttural groans rising above the laughter of the flagellants and the clatter of their lashes.
“I see what you mean,” she said, squeezing the jar. “Even so, if the Flower of Youth ever comes my way, I’m going to guard it with my blood.”
Inanna Unbending
THE WET AND GLOOMY MORNING of December 29 found Nora, Percy, and the rest of the Great Sumerian Circus on fabled Bourbon Street, moving amid swarms of gaudily costumed revelers, most of them sipping
Hurricanes and bathtub-gin fizzes through red plastic straws inserted into sequined masks adorned with peacock feathers. Dixieland trumpet solos vibrated the winter air. Banjos sang; snare drums rattled; sybaritic shouts resounded among the ornate hotels, doorless restaurants, and iron-brocaded balconies. It made no sense, she decided. Carnival season always started on January 6, never before. Not until the Sumerians reached Jackson Square did she understand that a celebration even grander than Carnival was in progress, an everlasting Mardi Gras convened in decadent defiance of the skull. High above the stratosphere God enacted His perpetual laugh, and the city of New Orleans laughed back.
The entire French Quarter had become a red-light district. Everywhere Nora looked, streetwalkers unveiled their wares, as if Storyville, Louisiana’s fabled experiment in legalized prostitution, had returned from history’s mists to spread its ethos throughout the town. Given the scope of the bacchanal, Nora predicted a poor turnout for that evening’s performance. Who had time for the Sumerian Circus’s three-act paean to stoicism when the Vieux Carré roiled with communal rye, free love, and gratis jazz? And yet attendance proved substantial—a consequence, she supposed, of Percy’s canny decision to saturate the town with handbills emphasizing not only the show’s many sword fights but also its glamorous venue, the legendary Superdome. In fact it was their largest audience to date, over two thousand violence aficionados and carnage connoisseurs who probably hadn’t visited the moribund sports complex since abulia’s ascent, each now seeking the satisfactions he’d lost when NFL games went the way of gladiatorial combat and public executions.
Even if Gilgamesh the King ran for a decade, it was unlikely that the Sumerian Circus would ever again play to a house packed with people dressed as fire-breathing dragons, dead American presidents, penises the size of canoes, and the entire menagerie of Noah’s ark. Distracted by all this ostentation, Nora had trouble staying in character. She screwed up three lines. She missed two cues. The audience didn’t mind. Indeed, they rewarded their entertainers handsomely, filling the troupe’s Rubbermaid cans with bags of raw crayfish and boxes of Cajun rice. Nothing, it seemed, not even abulia, could dim the city’s renowned lagniappe.
Act three was well under way, with Gilgamesh battling the Crab of Hell, when Nora, surveying the spectators from behind a scrim, spotted a squat, sixtyish man in the second row, wearing a tattered pea jacket and a baseball cap embroidered with the word VALPARAÍSO. Stem eyes, weathered skin, beard resembling a Brillo pad: a colleague of Van Home’s, surely. The crab fight took forever. Gilgamesh’s final speech went on and on. The curtain call seemed interminable. But then, at last, as the houselights brightened, Nora moved inconspicuously into the bearded man’s vicinity, drew him aside, and asked whether he might be a sea captain.
“Right church, wrong pew. Crock O’Connor, engineer on the Natchez Queen. Can I buy you a drink, Inanna?”
“Who runs the Natchez Queen?”
“Anthony Van Horne.”
Her heart leaped. “Author of The Gospel According to Popeye?”
The engineer gave a knowing nod. “People thought it was fiction, but I knew different. When Van Home sank his hooks into God and started towing Him north, I was right there, making sure we didn’t blow a boiler.”
As her conversation with Crock O’Connor progressed, Nora learned that the Natchez Queen, once the flagship of a proud fleet devoted to hauling tourists up and down the Mississippi, had fallen on hard times. Shortly after discovering that her owners had died of the plague, Anthony “commandeered” the old sternwheeler, outfitting her with wood-burning boilers and turning her into an extension of the city’s eternal Mardi Gras: a floating bordello catering to a clientele that favored aquatic sex over landlocked. Twice a day Van Home and his crew made their tautological voyage, ferrying the fornicators down to Belle Chasse then up to Harahan and back to the French Quarter. For a can of soup or ravioli, a man received admittance to the general orgy on the cargo deck. Two cans got him a free Hurricane and a private stateroom with the tart of his choice.
“And what would a customer get for this?” asked Nora, producing the peanut butter jar she’d obtained three days earlier on the Exxon Bangor.
O’Connor’s jaw dropped. He yanked off his baseball cap, revealing a large, livid steam bum etched on his pate like a nautical mark of Cain. “I haven’t seen that stuff in years.”
After explaining how she’d come by the glory grease, Nora asked whether Van Horne might be willing to meet her that night.
“Sorry, ma’am,” said O’Connor. “We’re doing a wee-hours cruise, and then he always goes home to his wife and kid. A sad story. The boy got thected in March. Thirteen years old.”
For the first time ever, the word thected made Nora smile. “Thected? Then he’ll definitely want to see me.”
“Tell you what. Come down to Riverwalk by eleven-thirty, pier 24, and the boss might spare you a minute.”
If Percy had known about the perils of Bienville Street, he probably would have insisted on accompanying her, with Cyril Avalon or the Lotz twins looking after Kevin. Instead he took the boy in hand, kissed Nora so hard that his beard enveloped her jaw, and wished her good luck.
Maneuvering along the crowded thoroughfare, brushing past hookers and winos, she endured the entreaties of a half-dozen men with dirt under their fingernails and ejaculation on their minds. On four occasions she had to brandish the plywood sword Percy employed each night to butcher the Bull of Heaven (easily mistaken for the real thing under the city’s sallow lamps) and threaten to separate the accoster from his testicles. The deterrent worked in every case.
Battered but stately, the Natchez Queen lay cozily in her berth, lashed to a dozen bollards, the celestial death’s-head hovering between her twin smokestacks like a field goal suspended in time. Although the boat wouldn’t be leaving for an hour, the evening’s entertainment had already begun, and Nora’s progress across the cargo deck became a matter of picking her way through a pulpy landscape of naked, contiguous, writhing bodies. Such a pathetic spectacle, she thought. If an antidote to abulia existed, it surely wasn’t this. You couldn’t simply fuck the plague out of existence.
She entered the casino, walked past a raucous craps table and a solemn blackjack game, then ascended to the saloon deck using the broad central staircase, its brass banisters and plush carpet evoking the luxury hotels of pre-plague Paris. A second staircase brought her to the observation deck, a third to the texas deck. The door to the captain’s stateroom stood ajar. She crossed the threshold.
In contrast to Marbles Rafferty’s spartan cabin aboard the Bangor, Van Horne’s private sanctum boasted gilded mirrors, oil paintings of sailing ships, and red taffeta drapes: the sort of elegant Victorian salon in which Henry Jekyll, his dark side waxing, might have sought to seduce a music-hall prostitute. The captain himself lay sprawled on a green velvet sofa, clean shaven, eyes closed, not so much asleep as dazed. Hearing Nora approach, he swung his legs outward and set his feet on the fake Persian carpet.
“I’ve got no job for you,” he grumbled, then added, with a laugh, “All the sexual positions are taken.”
Nora, nervous, absently unsheathed her sword. The captain glanced at the plywood blade and smiled.
“My name is Nora Burkhart,” she began, “and you are Anthony Van Horne, father of a thected child.”
Van Horne stood up, smoothing the front of his New York Mets windbreaker. Fifteen years after the fact, he was still fundamentally the trim, attractive man of his Gospel According to Popeye author photo. “How did you know that?”
Presenting the glory grease, Nora told her tale. Kevin’s illness, the alleged Mexican clinic, the Sumerian Circus, her encounters with Rafferty and O’Connor.
“Sailing with you would be lovely, I’m sure,” said the captain. “Do you play chess?”
“Not very well, but I can recite six Shakespearean sonnets by heart. I’m hoping we might leave sometime tomorrow.”
“Impossible.”
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“The next day, then. It’s not easy getting admitted. I’ve lugged two gallons of diesel fuel all the way from Virginia. If I were you, I’d offer something from this vessel—the roulette wheel, your binoculars.”
“The Natchez Queen is a riverboat, Mrs. Burkhart. It’s intended for rivers. The Mississippi River, for example. The Gulf of Mexico, by contrast, is part of the Atlantic Ocean. Storms arrive without warning, and the waves get big as houses.”
“So you’d rather have a dead boy than a swamped boat?”
Searing anger claimed the captain’s face. His jaw tightened. “Do you know how many cures Cassie and I have tried?” he whispered with fearful intensity. “Do you? Give Stevie a pound of mashed cantaloupe rinds a day, that’s sure to drive away his fetch. Take him to the Creek Indian medicine men over in Andalusia, they whip those old wraiths every time. Check out the hoodoo priests in the bayous, they never fail. Sorry, Mrs. Burkhart. We’ve heard it all.”
“The Lucido Clinic is different.”
“No doubt. And the children still die. It’s time you were running along. I start work in fifteen minutes.”
“Do you like your job, Captain?”
“I hate my job. I hate this stateroom, this cathouse, this whole sleazy setup. I’m a pimp with a sextant. A man has to feed his family.”
Nora sheathed her sword, sidled toward the door, and offered Van Horne the precise stare with which her Siduri side nightly seduced Gilgamesh. “The Circus is in town until next Friday,” she said, leaving the captain’s quarters. “You haven’t seen the last of me.”
For two deplorable and wholly unproductive days—forty-eight hours of alternately sipping rum and reading Dante Alighieri, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Ockham—Gerard ignored his commitment to carve a heroic statue of Adrian Lucido. On the third day, the obligation took hold of him, claiming his conscience like Soaragid seizing a goat in his jaws, and he performed the first step: riding down to El Agujero to inspect the niche in which the projected sculpture would reside.
