Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  “What’re you doin’ on the fire escape?”

  “It’s cooler out here,” said the freckled sailor, unwrapping a package of Bazooka bubblegum. He scanned the comic strip and chortled, then popped the pink lozenge into his mouth.

  “I’m Neil Weisinger.”

  “Leo Zook.”

  Drawing his plastic Bugs Bunny lunch box from his seabag, Neil climbed through the window. He’d always been a great admirer of Bugs. The rabbit was a loner, and liked it. No friends. No family. Smart, resourceful, rejected by the outside world. There was something rather Jewish about Bugs Bunny.

  “Hey, Leo, I saw three killer cards in the box, and none of ’em belongs to you.” The fire escape seemed no cooler than the hall, but the view was spectacular, a clear vista stretching all the way from midtown to the Statue of Liberty. “Why don’t you leave?”

  “The Lord told me I’d be getting a ship today.” From the zippered compartment of his seabag, Zook retrieved a tattered booklet titled Close Encounters with Jesus Christ, the author being one Hyman Levkowitz. “You might find this interesting,” he said, pressing the tract into Neil’s palm. “It’s by a cantor who found salvation.”

  Neil opened his lunch box, removed a green apple, and began to munch. He beat back a sneer. God was a perfectly fine idea. Indeed, before realizing he belonged on ships, Neil had spent two years across the river at Yeshiva University, studying Jewish history and toying with the idea of becoming a rabbi. But Neil’s God was not the patient, accessible, direct-dial deity on whom Leo Zook evidently predicated his life. Neil’s was the God he’d found by going to sea, the radiant En Sof who lay somewhere below the deepest mid-Atlantic trench and beyond the highest navigational star, the God of the four A.M. watch.

  “Do yourself a favor—read it through,” said Zook. “I can’t recommend eternal life highly enough.”

  At that moment, Neil would have preferred almost anyone else’s company. An encyclopedia salesman’s. An Arab’s. Whatever their other foibles, his Arab mates never tried to convert him. Usually they just ignored him, though sometimes they actually became his friends—particularly when, during prayers, he helped them stay pointed toward Mecca while the ship made a turn. Neil always brought a magnetically-corrected compass to sea for expressly this purpose.

  A pear-shaped woman with the demeanor of a fishwife waddled out of the office and headed for the board.

  “Soup’s on!” the dispatcher cried as Neil and Zook scrambled back into the hall. She jerked two thumbtacks from her mouth as if they were loose teeth and pinned a job sheet to the cork.

  • OFFSHORE SHIPPING JOBS •

  COMPANY:

  Lykes Brothers

  SHIP:

  SS Argo Lykes

  LOCATED:

  Pier 86

  SAILS:

  1500 Friday

  RUN:

  West Coast South America

  JOBS:

  Able Seaman: 2

  TIME:

  120-day rotary

  RELIEVING:

  J. Pierce, F. Pellegrino

  REASON:

  Time up

  “All right,” said the dispatcher, “who’s got ’em?”

  “Nobody here be beatin’ ten month plus fifteen day, eh?” said the Rastafarian.

  “The other one’s mine,” said Daniel Rosenberg.

  The dispatcher checked her watch. “Assuming no killer card shows up in the next six seconds”—she winked at the winners—“they’re all yours. Step into the office, fellas.”

  Gradually the mob dispersed, forty disappointed men and women ambling morosely back to their seats. Eight sailors collected their cards and, conceding defeat, left. The dreamers and the desperate sat down to wait.

  “The Lord will come through,” said Zook.

  Neil slumped onto the nearest folding chair. Why didn’t he just admit it—he had no career, he was a failure. Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville.

  As a boy, Neil had never tired of hearing Grandfather Moshe recount his maritime adventures, wondrous tales of battling pirates on Ecuadorian rivers, transporting hippopotami to French zoos, playing cat-and-mouse with Nazi submarines in the North Atlantic, and, most impressive of all, helping to smuggle fifteen hundred displaced Jews past the British blockade and into Palestine on the Hatikvah, one of the dozen rogue freighters secretly leased by the Aliyah Bet. Four decades later, Chief Mate Moshe Weisinger had opened his mail to find a token of appreciation from the Israeli government: a bronze medal bearing the face of David Ben-Gurion in bas-relief. When Grandfather Moshe died, Neil inherited the medal. He always kept it in his right pants pocket, something to clutch in moments of stress.

  The door to the hall swung open, and a wrinkled, lanky man wearing a black shirt and Roman collar entered, slapping a job sheet into the dispatcher’s palm.

  “Call this right away.”

  The dispatcher tacked up the priest’s sheet directly over the Argo Lykes notice. “Okay, you packet rats,” she said, turning to the hopeful sailors, “we’ve got this tramp tanker over at Pier Eighty-eight, and it looks like they’re startin’ from scratch.”

  • OFFSHORE SHIPPING JOBS •

  COMPANY:

  Carpco Shipping

  SHIP:

  SS Carpco Valparaíso

  LOCATED:

  Pier 88

  SAILS:

  1700 Thursday

  RUN:

  Svalbard, Arctic Ocean

  JOBS:

  Able Seaman: 18

  Ordinary Seaman: 12

  Food Handler: 2

  TIME:

  90-day rotary

  RELIEVING:

  Not applicable

  REASON:

  Not applicable

  Grunts of dismay resounded through the union hall. Rumors swarmed like sea gulls feasting on a landfill. The Valparaíso, the infamous Valparaíso, the tainted, broken, bedeviled Valparaíso. Hadn’t she been sold to the Japanese and converted into a toxic-waste carrier? Sunk in a Tomahawk missile test?

  “Does this mean we’re all hired?” asked a blobby man with bad teeth and five o’clock shadow.

  “Every one of you,” said the priest. “Not only that but you can figure on more overtime than you’ve ever pulled down in your lives. My name is Thomas Ockham, Society of Jesus, and we’ll be spending the next three months together.”

  And then, as if he thought the U.S. Merchant Marine were a branch of the military, the priest saluted, made an abrupt about-face, and marched out of the room.

  “I told you the Lord would come through,” said Zook, licking a mustache of perspiration from his upper lip.

  An eerie silence descended, settling into the dust, clinging to the cigarette smoke. The Lord had come through, mused Neil. Either the Lord or Caribbean Petroleum. Neil wouldn’t be ferrying any Jews to Haifa or hippos to Le Havre this trip, he wouldn’t be dodging any Nazi subs, but at least he had a job.

  “Jesus hasn’t let me down yet,” the Evangelical went on.

  A job—and yet…

  “Christ never lets anybody down.”

  A ship like the Valparaíso should not be resurrected, Neil believed, and if she were resurrected, a smart AB would look elsewhere for work.

  “You know, mates, this seems kinda creepy to me,” said a buxom Puerto Rican woman in a tight Menudo T-shirt. “Why’re we shippin’ out with a priest?”

  “Yeah, and why on the fucking Titanic?” asked a leathery old sailor with I LOVE BRENDA tattooed on the back of his hand.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” said the blobby man. “I been to Svalbard on a bulk carrier once, and I can say for an absolute fact you won’t find one solitary drop of crude up there. What’re we takin’ on, walrus piss?”

  “Well, it’s great to have a ship,” said willowy An-mei Jong with fo
rced enthusiasm.

  “Oh, for sure,” said Brenda’s lover with artificial cheer.

  Reaching into his right pants pocket, Neil squeezed his grandfather’s Ben-Gurion medal. “Let’s go sign up,” he said, when in fact his impulse was to bolt from the room, find some unemployed sailor roaming the Eleventh Avenue docks, and give the poor bastard his berth.

  Storm

  FOR THE AVERAGE sea captain, handing one’s ship over to a harbor pilot was a wrenching experience, an ordeal of displacement not unlike that endured by a husband finding an alien brand of condom in his wife’s purse. But Anthony Van Horne was not the average sea captain. Harbor pilots didn’t make the rules, he reasoned; the National Transportation Safety Board did. And so when a battered New York Port Authority launch tied up alongside the Carpco Valparaíso at 1735 hours on the evening of her scheduled departure, Anthony was quite prepared to be civil.

  Then he recognized the pilot.

  Frank Kolby. Unctuous old Frank Kolby, the idiot who’d laughed so uproariously on seeing Anthony’s father reenact the wreck of the Val in a gravy boat.

  “Hello, Frank.”

  “Hiya, Anthony.” The pilot stepped into the wheelhouse and pulled off his black waterproof leggings. “I heard it was you on the bridge.” He wore a blue three-piece suit, well tailored and neatly pressed, as if trying to pass himself off as other than what he was, a glorified parking-lot attendant. “They spliced the Val together real good, didn’t they?”

  “I expect she’ll last another voyage,” said Anthony, slipping on his mirrorshades.

  The tugboats tooted their readiness. Kolby dropped his leggings next to the compass binnacle, then reached toward the control console and snatched up the walkie-talkie. “Raise anchors!”

  Groaning, gushing steam, the fo’c’sle windlasses rotated, slowly drawing two algae-coated chains from the river. On the forward TV monitor Anthony watched globs of dark silt slide from the starboard anchor like Jell-O from a fork and plop into the Hudson. For an instant he imagined he saw Raphael Azarias’s corpse wrapped around the flukes, but then he realized it was only an angel-shaped hunk of mud.

  “Cast off!”

  Snugging his John Deere visor cap down to his eyebrows, Anthony opened the starboard door and strode across the bridge wing. All along Pier 88, stevedores in torn plimsolls and ratty T-shirts scurried about, untying Dacron lines from bollards, setting the tanker free. Sea gulls wheeled across the setting sun, squawking their endless disapproval of the world. A half-dozen tugs converged from all directions, whistles shrieking madly as their crews tossed thick, shaggy ropes to the ABs stationed on the Val’s weather deck.

  Anthony inhaled a generous helping of harbor air—his last chance, before shoving off, to savor this unique mix of bunker oil, bilge water, raw sewage, dead fish, and gull guano—and stepped back inside.

  “Slow ahead,” said Kolby. “Twenty rpm’s.”

  “Slow ahead.” Chief Mate Marbles Rafferty—a mournful black sailor in his early forties, lean and tightly wound, a kind of human sheepshank—eased the dual joysticks forward.

  Gently, cautiously, like a team of seeing-eye tuna guiding a blind whale home, the tugs began the simultaneously gross and balletic business of hauling the Valparaíso down the river and pointing her into Upper New York Bay.

  “Right ten degrees,” said Kolby.

  “Right ten,” echoed the AB at the helm, Karl Jaworski, a paunchy sailor who carried the designation able-bodied seaman into the deepest reaches of euphemism. Eyes locked on the rudder indicator, Jaworski gave the wheel a lethargic twist.

  “Half ahead,” said Kolby.

  “Half ahead,” said Rafferty, advancing the throttles.

  The Valparaíso coasted smoothly over three hundred westbound commuters stuck in the Holland Tunnel’s regular six P.M. traffic jam.

  “Is it true Dad and his wife are in Spain?” Anthony asked the pilot.

  “Yep,” said Kolby. “Town called Valladolid.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Christopher Columbus died there.”

  Anthony suppressed a smirk. But of course. Where else would the old man drag himself at the end of his life but to the site of his idol’s passing?

  “Know how I can reach him?”

  As the pilot pulled a computerized Sanyo Life Organizer from his vest, Anthony flashed on the previous Thanksgiving: Kolby eating a helping of mashed potatoes saturated with giblet gravy and lighter fluid.

  “I got his fax number.”

  Anthony grabbed a Chevron ballpoint and an American Practical Navigator from atop the Marisat computer. “Shoot,” he said, opening the book.

  Why did his father identify so fiercely with Columbus? Reincarnation? If so, then the spirit that occupied Christopher Van Horne was surely not the visionary, inspired Columbus who’d discovered the New World. It was the demented, arthritic Columbus of the subsequent voyages—the Columbus who’d kept a gibbet permanently installed on the taffrail of his ship so he could hang mutineers, deserters, grumblers, and all those who publicly doubted they’d reached the Indies.

  “Dial 011-34-28…”

  Anthony transcribed the number across a diagram of the Little Dipper, filling the bowl with digits.

  “Away with the tugs!” bellowed Kolby.

  As the World Trade Center loomed up, its promontories rising into the dusk like bollards meant to moor some unimaginably humongous ship, a disquieting thought possessed Anthony. This seventy-year-old Sea Scout, this asshole friend of his icebox father, was within two hundred yards of hanging them up on the shoals.

  “Come right ten degrees!” cried Anthony.

  “I was about to say that,” Kolby snapped.

  “Right ten,” echoed Jaworski.

  “Dead slow!” said Anthony.

  “And that,” said Kolby.

  “Dead slow,” echoed Rafferty.

  “Stern tugs gone,” came the bos’n’s report, rasping out of the walkie-talkie.

  “You gotta be a little sharper, Frank.” Anthony gave the pilot a condescending wink. “When the Val’s riding this light, she takes her sweet time turning.”

  “Forward tugs gone,” said the bos’n.

  “Steady,” said Anthony.

  “Steady,” said Jaworski.

  The tugs spun north, let out a high, raunchy series of farewell toots, and steamed back up the Hudson like an ensemble of seagoing calliopes.

  “Wake up the pump room,” said Kolby, plucking the intercom mike from the console and handing it to the chief mate. “Time we took on some ballast.”

  “Don’t do it, Marbles,” said Anthony.

  “I need ballast to steer,” Kolby protested.

  “Look at the fathometer, for Christ’s sake. Our barnacles can stick their peckers in the bottom.”

  “This is my harbor, Anthony. I know how deep it is.”

  “No ballast, Frank.”

  The pilot reddened and fumed. “It appears I’m no longer needed up here, am I?”

  “Appears that way.”

  “Who’s your tailor, Frank?” asked Rafferty, deadpan. “I’d like to be buried in a suit like that.”

  “Fuck you,” said the pilot. “Fuck the lot of you.”

  Anthony tore the walkie-talkie from Kolby’s hand. “Lower starboard accommodation ladder,” he instructed the bos’n. “We’re dropping our pilot in ten minutes.”

  “Once the Coast Guard hears about this,” said Kolby, quivering with rage as he climbed back into his leggings, “it won’t be a week before you lose your master’s license all over again.”

  “Put your complaint in Portuguese,” said the captain. The Statue of Liberty glided past, tirelessly lifting her lamp. “My license comes from Brazil.”

  “Brazil?”

  “It’s in South America, Frank,” said Anthony, hustling the pilot out of the wheelhouse. “You’ll never get there.”

  By 1835 Kolby was in the harbor launch, speeding back toward Pier 88.

&
nbsp; At 1845 the Valparaíso began drinking Upper New York Bay, sucking its tides into her ballast tanks.

  At 1910 Anthony’s radio officer came onto the bridge: Lianne Bliss—“Sparks,” as per hallowed maritime tradition—the bony little hippie vegetarian Ockham had dug up on Wednesday at the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots. “Jay Island’s on the phone.” For someone so petite, Sparks had an astonishingly resonant voice, as if she were speaking from the bottom of an empty cargo bay. “They wanna know what we’re up to.”

  Anthony ducked into the radio shack, thumbing the transceiver mike to ON. “Calling Jay Island Coast Guard Station…”

  “Go ahead. Over.”

  “Carpco Valparaíso here, bound in ballast for Lagos, Nigeria, to take on two hundred thousand barrels of crude oil. Over.”

  “Roger, Valparaíso. Be advised of Tropical Depression Number Six—Hurricane Beatrice—currently blowing west from Cape Verde.”

  “Gotcha, Jay Island. Out.”

  At 1934 the Valparaíso slid across the ethereal line separating Lower New York Bay from the North Atlantic Ocean. Twenty minutes later, Second Mate Spicer—Big Joe Spicer, the only sailor on board who seemed scaled to the tanker herself—entered the wheelhouse to relieve Rafferty.

  “Lay me a course for São Tomé,” Anthony ordered Spicer. Grabbing the Exxon coffee Thermos and his ceramic Carpco mug, the captain poured himself the first of what he expected would be about five hundred cups of thick black jamoke. “I want us there in two weeks.”

  “I overheard the Coast Guard mention a hurricane,” said Rafferty.

  “Forget the damn hurricane. This is the Carpco Valparaíso, not some proctologist’s sailboat. If it starts to rain, we’ll turn on the windshield wipers.”