Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  “Tell me about the crew.”

  Thomas twisted the lid off his beer, sealed his lips around the rim, and drank. “This morning I signed up that steward you wanted. Sam somebody.”

  “Follingsbee. I’ll never get over the irony—the sea cook who hates seafood. Doesn’t matter. The man knows exactly what today’s sailor wants. He can mimic it all: Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken…”

  “Buzzy Longchamps turned down the first mate’s position.”

  “Because he’d be working for me again?”

  “Because he’d be working on the Valparaíso again. Superstitious.” Thomas set his briefcase on the AT&T spool, popped the clasps, and removed his Jerusalem Bible. “Your second choice said yes.”

  “Rafferty? Never sailed with him, but they say he knows more about salvage than anybody this side of…”

  The captain’s voice trailed off. A faraway look settled into his eyes. Taking a large gulp of humid air, he ran the nail of his index finger along the belly of his tattooed mermaid, as if performing a caesarean section.

  “The oil won’t go,” he said tonelessly.

  “What?”

  “Matagorda Bay. When I’m asleep, a heron flies into my bedroom, black oil dripping from its wings. It circles above me like a vulture over a carcass, screeching curses. Sometimes it’s an egret, sometimes an ibis or a roseate spoonbill. Did you know that when the sludge hit their faces, the manatees rubbed their eyes with their flippers until they went blind?”

  “I’m…sorry,” said Thomas.

  “Stone blind.” Van Horne made his right hand into tongs, squeezing his forehead between thumb and ring finger. With his left hand he lifted his Old Milwaukee and chugged down half the bottle. “What about a second mate?”

  “You mustn’t hate yourself, Anthony.”

  “An engineer?”

  “Hate what you did, but don’t hate yourself.”

  “A bos’n?”

  Opening his Bible, Thomas slipped out the set of 8 × 10 glossies that L’Osservatore romano’s photography editor had printed from Gabriel’s 35mm slides. “It all happens tomorrow—an officer’s call down at the mates’ union, a seaman’s call over in Jersey City…”

  The captain disappeared into his bedroom, returning two minutes later in red Bermuda shorts and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the Exxon tiger. “Big sucker, eh?” he said, staring at the photos. “Two miles long, Raphael told me. About the size of downtown Wilkes-Barre.” He dragged the edge of his hand along the blurry corpse. “Small for a city, large for a person. You figured His displacement?”

  Thomas treated himself to a hearty swallow of Old Milwaukee. “Hard to say. Close to seven million tons, I’d guess.” The enjoyment of cold beer was probably the closest he ever came to sinning—beer, and the pride he took in seeing himself footnoted in The Journal of Experimental Physics—beer, footnotes, and the viscous oblations that followed his occasional purchase of a Playboy. “Captain, how do you see this voyage of ours?”

  “Huh?”

  “What’s our purpose?”

  Van Horne flopped into his ruptured couch. “We’re giving Him a decent burial.”

  “Your angel say anything about resuscitation?”

  “Nope.”

  Thomas closed his eyes, as if he were about to offer his undergraduates some particularly difficult and disconcerting idea, like strange attractors or the many-worlds hypothesis. “The Catholic Church is not an institution that readily abandons hope. Her position is this: while the divine heart has evidently stopped beating, the divine nervous system may still boast a few healthy cells. In short, the Holy Father proposes we apply the science of cryonics to this crisis. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “We should get God on ice before His brain dies?”

  “Precisely. Personally, I believe the Pope’s being far too optimistic.”

  An uncanny but entirely reasonable gleam overcame Van Horne, the inevitable luminescence of a man who’s been given the opportunity to save the universe. “But if he’s not being too optimistic,” said the captain, a mild tremor in his voice, “how much time…?”

  “The Vatican computer wants us to cross the Arctic Circle no later than the eighteenth of August.”

  Van Horne chugged down the rest of his beer. “Damn, I wish we had the Val now. I’d leave with the morning tide, crew or no.”

  “Your ship arrived in New York Harbor last night.”

  The captain slammed the empty bottle onto the AT&T spool. “She’s here? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Don’t know why. Sorry.” Thomas collected the photos and slipped them back into his Bible. He knew perfectly well why. It was a matter of power and control, a matter of convincing this strange, oil-haunted man that Holy Mother Church, not Anthony Van Horne, was running the show. “Pier Eighty-eight…”

  In a flurry of movement the captain pulled on a pair of mirrorshades and a John Deere fits-all visor cap. “Excuse me, Padre. I gotta go visit my ship.”

  “It’s awfully late.”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Because the SS Carpco Valparaíso is currently under Vatican jurisdiction”—Thomas offered the scowling captain a long, meandering smile—“and no one, not even you, can board her without my permission.”

  In his life and travels Anthony Van Horne had seen the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, and his ex-fiancée Janet Yost without her clothes on, but he’d never beheld a sight so beautiful as the rehabilitated Carpco Valparaíso riding high and empty in the moonlit waters off Pier 88. He gasped. Until that exact and magical moment, he’d not fully believed this mission was real. But there she was, all right, the canny old Val herself, tied to the wharf by a half-dozen Dacron lines, dominating New York Harbor with all the stark disproportionality of a rowboat sitting in a bathtub.

  In certain rare moments, Anthony thought he understood the general antipathy toward Ultra Large Crude Carriers. Such a ship had no sheer, no gentle ascending slope to her contours. She had no rake, none of the subtle angling of mast and funnel by which traditional cargo vessels paid homage to the Age of Sail. With her crushing tonnage and broad beam, a ULCC didn’t ride the waves; she ground them down. Gross ships, monstrous ships—but that was precisely the point, he felt: their fearsome majesty, their ponderous glamour, the way they plied the planet like yachts designed to provide vacation crudes for rhinoceroses. To command a ULCC—to walk its decks and feel it vibrating beneath you, amplifying your flesh and blood—was a grand and defiant gesture, like pissing on a king, or having your own international terrorist organization, or keeping a thermonuclear warhead in your garage.

  They went out to her in a launch named the Juan Fernández, piloted by a member of the Vatican Secret Service, a bearish sergeant with frazzled white hair and a Colt .45 snugged against his armpit. Lights blazed on every floor of the aft superstructure, its seven levels culminating in a congestion of antennas, smokestacks, masts, and flags. Anthony wasn’t sure which of the present banners troubled him more—the keys-and-tiara symbol of the Vatican or the famous stegosaurus logo of Caribbean Petroleum. He resolved to have Marbles Rafferty strike the Carpco colors first thing.

  As the launch glided past the Valparaíso’s stern, Anthony grabbed the Jacob’s ladder and began his ascent to the weather deck, Father Ockham right behind. He had to say one thing for this control-freak priest: the man had nerve. Ockham climbed up the ship’s side with perfect aplomb, one hand on his attaché case, the other on the rungs, as if he’d been scaling rope ladders all his life.

  The retrofitted towing rig rose sharply against the Jersey City skyline: two mighty windlasses bolted to the afterdeck like a pair of gigantic player-piano rolls, wound not with ordinary mooring lines but with heavy-duty chains, their links as large as inner tubes. At the end of each chain lay a massive kedge anchor, twenty tons of iron, an anchor to hook a whale, tether a continent, moor the moon.
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  “You’re looking at some fancy footwork.” Ockham opened his attaché case and drew out a gridded pink checklist clamped to a Masonite clipboard. “Anchors brought down by rail from Canada, motors flown over from Germany, capstans imported from Belgium. The Japanese gave us a great deal on the chains—underbid USX by ten percent.”

  “You put this stuff out on bid?”

  “The Church is not a profit-making institution, Anthony, but she knows the value of a dollar.”

  Boarding the elevator, they rose three stories to the steward’s deck. The main galley was aswarm. Eager, robust, competent-looking women in blue jeans and khaki work shirts bustled through the great stainless-steel kitchen, filling the freezers and refrigerators with provisions: tubs of ice cream, wheels of cheese, planks of ham, sides of beef, sacks of Cheerios, barrels of milk, pools of salad oil sealed in 55-gallon drums like so much Texas crude. A propane-fueled Toyota forklift truck chugged past, its orange body peppered with rust, its prongs supporting a paddock piled high with crates of fresh eggs.

  “Who the hell are these people?” asked Anthony.

  “Vatican longshoremen,” Ockham explained.

  “They look like women to me.”

  “They’re Carmelites.”

  “Who?”

  “Carmelite nuns.”

  In the center of the kitchen stood portly Sam Follingsbee, dressed in a white apron and supervising the chaos like a cop directing traffic. Catching sight of his visitors, the steward waddled over and tipped his big, floppy cream puff of a hat.

  “Thanks for the recommendation, sir.” Follingsbee clasped his captain’s hand. “I needed this ship, I really did.” Swinging his formidable belly toward the priest, he asked, “Father Ockham, right?” Ockham nodded. “Father, I’m puzzled—how come a crummy Carpco voyage rates the services of all these lovely sisters, not to mention yourself?”

  “This isn’t a Carpco voyage,” said Ockham.

  “So what’s the deal?”

  “Once we’re at sea, things will become clearer.” The priest drummed his bony fingers on the checklist. “Now I’ll ask a question. On Friday I put in a requisition for one thousand communion wafers. They look a bit like poker chips…”

  Follingsbee chuckled. “I know what they look like, Father—you’re talkin’ to an ex-altar boy. Not to worry. We got all them hosts in freezer number six—couldn’t be safer. Will you be celebratin’ Mass every day?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I’ll be there,” said Follingsbee, starting back into the heart of the hubbub. “Well, maybe not every day.” His eye caught a Carmelite maneuvering a wheel of cheddar across the floor like a child playing with a hoop. “Hey, Sister, carry that thing—don’t fuckin’ roll it!”

  The forklift truck pulled up, and a plump, ruddy nun climbed down from behind the wheel, a string of smoked sausages hanging about her neck like a yoke. Her step struck Anthony as remarkably lively, a sashay, really, if nuns sashayed. Evidently she moved to the beat of whatever private concert was pouring from the Sony Walkman strapped to her waist.

  “Tom!” The nun ripped off her headphones. “Tom Ockham!”

  “Miriam, darling! How wonderful! I didn’t know they’d recruited you!” The priest threw his arms around the nun and planted a sprightly kiss on her cheek. “Get my letter?”

  “I did, Tom. Oddest words I ever read. And yet, somehow, I sensed they were true.”

  “All true,” said the priest. “Rome, Gabriel, the slides, the EKG…”

  “A bad business.”

  “The worst.”

  “There’s no hope?”

  “You know me, the eternal pessimist.”

  Anthony massaged his beard. The banter between Ockham and Sister Miriam bewildered him. It seemed a conversation less between a priest and a nun than between two passé movie actors encountering each other on a Hollywood set twenty years after their amicable divorce.

  “Darling, meet Anthony Van Horne—the planet’s greatest living sailor, or so the angels believed,” said Ockham. “Miriam and I go back a long way,” he told the captain. “At Loyola they’re still using a textbook we wrote in the early seventies, Introduction to Theodicy.”

  “What’s theodicy?” asked Anthony.

  “Hard to explain.”

  “Sounds like idiocy.”

  “Much of it is.”

  “Theodicy means reconciling God’s goodness with the world’s evils.” Sister Miriam snapped off a smoked sausage and took a bite. “Dinner,” she explained, chewing slowly. “Captain, I want to come along.”

  “Along where?”

  “On the voyage.”

  “Bad idea.”

  “It’s a splendid idea,” said the priest. He gestured toward the sausages. “Would you mind? I haven’t eaten all day.”

  “One PAC is enough,” said Anthony.

  Miriam snapped off a second sausage and handed it to Ockham.

  “Let me put it this way.” The priest nudged Anthony with his clipboard. “The Holy Father was never entirely sold on you. It’s not too late for him to hire another captain.”

  The first insidious stirrings of a migraine crept through Anthony’s brain. He rubbed his temples. “All right, Padre. Fine. But she won’t like the work. All you do is chip rust and paint what’s underneath.”

  “Sounds dreadful,” said the nun. “I’ll take it.”

  “See you in church tomorrow?” said Ockham, squeezing Miriam’s hand. “Saint Patrick’s Cathedral—0800 hours, as we say in the Merchant Marine.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Sister Miriam put on her headphones and returned to her forklift.

  “Okay, so our galley’s in good shape,” said Anthony as he and Ockham approached the elevator, “but what about the rest? The antipredator matériel?”

  “We loaded six crates of Dupont shark repellent this morning,” said Ockham, devouring his sausage, “along with fifteen T-62 bazookas”—he glanced at his checklist—“and twenty WP-17 Toshiba exploding-harpoon guns.”

  “Backup turbine?”

  “Arrives tomorrow.”

  They went up to level seven, the bridge. The place seemed untouched, frozen, as if some historical society were preserving the Carpco Valparaíso for tourism, the newest exhibit in the Museum of Environmental Disasters. Even the Bushnell binoculars occupied their customary spot in the canvas bin beside the twelve-mile radar.

  “Bulkhead reinforcement beams?”

  “In the fo’c’sle hold,” Ockham replied.

  “Emergency prop?”

  “Look down—you’ll see it lashed to the weather deck.”

  “I didn’t like that crap you pulled back there, threatening me…”

  “I didn’t like it either. Let’s try to be friends, okay?”

  Saying nothing, Anthony grasped the helm, curling his palms around the cold steel disc. He smiled. In his past lay a dead mother, a mercurial father, a broken engagement, and eleven million gallons of spilled oil. His future promised little beyond old age, chronic migraines, futile showers, and a voyage that smacked of madness.

  But at that precise moment, standing on the bridge of his ship and contemplating his emergency screw propeller, Anthony Van Horne was a happy man.

  In the soggy, sweltering center of Jersey City, a twenty-six-year-old orphan named Neil Weisinger shouldered his seabag, climbed eight flights to the top of the Nimrod Building, and entered the New York Hall of the National Maritime Union. Over three dozen ABs and ordinaries jammed the dusty room, sitting nervously on folding chairs, gear wedged between their legs, half of them puffing on cigarettes, each sailor hoping for a berth on the only ship scheduled to dock that month, the SS Argo Lykes. Neil groaned. So much competition. The instant he’d finished his last voyage (a dry-cargo jaunt on the Stella Lykes, through the Canal to Auckland and back), he’d done as every able-bodied seaman does on disembarking—run straight down to the nearest union hall to get his shipping card stamped with the exact date and time. Nin
e months and fourteen days later, the card had acquired considerable seniority, but it still wasn’t a killer.

  Neil pulled the card from his wallet—he liked his ID photo immensely, the way the harsh glare of the strobe had made his black eyes sparkle and his cherubic face look angular and austere—and tossed the laminated rectangle into a shoe box duct-taped to the wall below a poster reading SHIP AMERICAN: IT COSTS NO MORE. Reaching into the box, he flipped through his rivals. Bad news. A Rastafarian with nineteen more days on shore than Neil. A fellow Jew named Daniel Rosenberg with eleven. A Chinese woman, An-mei Jong, with six. Damn.

  He sat down beneath an open window, a thick layer of Jersey grime spread across its panes like peanut butter on a saltine. You never knew, of course. Miracles happened. A tramp tanker might arrive from the Persian Gulf. The dispatcher might post an in-port relief job, or one of those short trips up the Hudson nobody wanted unless he was as broke as Neil. A crew of methane-breathing Neptunians might land in Journal Square, their helmsman dead from an oxygen overdose, and sign him up on the spot.

  “Ever had any close calls?” A tense voice, slightly laryngitic. Neil turned. Outside the window, a sailor lounged on the fire escape—a muscular, freckled, auburn-haired young man in a red polo shirt and tattered black beret, his seabag serving as a pillow. “I mean, really close?”

  “Not me, no. Once, in Philly, I saw an AB come in with this card three hundred and sixty-four days old.”

  “Sweating?”

  “Like a stoker. When the sheet went up, the guy actually pissed his pants.”

  “He get a berth?”

  Neil nodded. “Twelve and a half minutes before his card would’ve rolled over.”

  “The Lord was lookin’ out for him.” The freckled sailor slipped a tiny gold chain from beneath his polo shirt, glancing at the attached cross like the White Rabbit consulting his pocket watch.

  Neil winced. This wasn’t the first time he’d encountered a Jesus aficionado. As a rule, he didn’t mind them. Once at sea, they were usually diligent as hell, cleaning toilets and chipping rust without a whimper, but their agenda made him nervous. Often as not, the conversation got around to the precarious position of Neil’s immortal soul. On the Stella, for example, a Seventh Day Adventist had somberly advised Neil that he could spare himself “the trouble of Armageddon” by accepting Jesus then and there.