Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  “Can O’Connor give us a steady eighteen knots?” asked Spicer.

  “I expect so.”

  “Then we’ll be in the Gulf of Guinea by the tenth.” The second mate advanced the joysticks, notch by notch. “All ahead full?”

  The captain looked south, scanning the ranks of gray, glassy swells, the eternally shifting terrain of the sea. And so it begins, he thought, the great race, Anthony Van Horne versus brain death, decay, and the Devil’s own sharks.

  “All ahead full!”

  July 2.

  Latitude: 37°7'N. Longitude: 58°10'W. Course: 094. Speed: 18 knots. Distance made good since New York: 810 nautical miles. A gentle breeze, no. 3 on the Beaufort scale, wafts across our weather deck.

  I wanted a real diary, but there wasn’t time to visit a stationery store, so instead I ran down to Thrift Drug and got you. According to your cover, you’re an “Official Popeye the Sailor Spiral-Bound Notebook, copyright © 1959 King Features Syndicate.” When I look into your wizened face, Popeye, I know you’re a man I can trust.

  On this day in 1816, the French frigate Medusa went aground off the west coast of Africa—so says my Manner’s Pocket Companion. “Of the 147 who escaped on a raft, most were murdered by their mates and either thrown overboard or eaten. Only 15 survived.”

  I think we can do better than that. For a company cobbled together at the last minute, they seem like a pretty smart bunch. Big Joe Spicer brought his own sextant aboard, always a good sign in a navigator. Dolores Haycox, the zaftig third mate, passed the surprise quiz I gave her without a hiccup. (I had her calculate her distance from a hypothetical bold shore based on the interval between a ship’s foghorn blast and the echo.) Marbles Rafferty, the gloomy first officer, is a particularly poetic choice for this mission—his great-grandfather was owned by a family of Florida Keys salvage masters, those vainglorious 19th-century sailors who were, Ockham informs me, “immortalized by John Wayne and Raymond Massey in Reap the Wild Wind.”

  I already knew Sam Follingsbee was a brilliant cook, but tonight’s fried chicken was indistinguishable from Colonel Sanders’s secret recipes, both Original and Extra Crispy. An odd talent, this genius for mediocrity. Crock O’Connor, the chief engineer, is the sort of affable Alabama yarn spinner who claims he invented the twist-off bottle cap but receives no royalties thanks to the knavery of an unscrupulous patent attorney. He’s been giving us our 18 knots, so who am I to call him a liar? Lou Chickering, the blond and handsome first assistant engineer—our very own Billy Budd—is a stage actor from Philly who once tried to make it on Broadway and now spends his off-hours organizing talent shows in the deckies’ recreation room. His specialty is Shakespeare, and even our illiterates were beguiled by his performance last night of Ariel’s song from The Tempest. (“Full fathom five thy father lies…”) Bud Ramsey, the second engineer, is a pornography collector, beer connoisseur, and seven-card-stud fanatic. It’s refreshing, I think, when a man wears his vices on his sleeve. And backing us up: 38 gratefully employed sailors—23 men and 15 women—scattered among our decks, galleys, engine rooms, and cargo-control stations. I enjoy browsing through their résumés. We’ve got a minor-league center fielder on board (Albany Bullets), a former clown (Hunt Brothers Circus), an ex-con (armed robbery), a spot-welder, an auto assembly-line worker, a Revlon saleslady, an Army corporal, a dog trainer, a Chinese math teacher (junior high), a taxi driver, three Desert Storm vets, and a full-blooded Lakota Sioux named James Echohawk.

  A great mass of spilled oil—one of those “floating particulate petroleum residues”—has coagulated off Cameroon: that’s the story I’ve been feeding anybody who asks. When Carpco realized the Vatican had gotten wind of the disaster, they offered the Pope a deal: keep Greenpeace and the U.N. off our backs, and we’ll remove the asphalt posthaste. And we won’t just sink it, either. We’ll tow it to shore, chop it up, and refine the fragments into free oil for burgeoning African industries. Great, said Rome, but we’re sending Father Ockham to supervise.

  So: a secret operation, get it, men? Hush-hush, understand? That’s why we don’t signal passing ships, turn on our running lights, or let anybody phone home.

  “Okay, but why so damn fast?” Crock O’Connor wants to know. “We’re practicing to be the first supertanker ever to win the America’s Cup?”

  “The asphalt’s a menace to navigation,” I explain. “The sooner we get there, the better.”

  “Last night I left my empty orange-juice glass on the table,” the man persists, “and the damn thing scooted right up to the edge and fell, singing all the way. We’re vibrating, Captain. We’re gonna crack the fucking hull.”

  He’s right, actually. Run your ULCC in a straight line at 18 knots with empty cargo bays, and before long you’ll start flapping apart like a ’57 Chevy.

  There are ways to soothe a shivering ship without losing too much time. I’m using every trick in the book: changing speed briefly, altering course slightly, shutting down entirely for a minute or two and coasting—anything to break the rhythm of the waves hitting our stem. So far it’s working. So far we’re still in one piece.

  At dawn the sea turtles came.

  Hundreds of them, Popeye, swimming through my dreams, their shells glistening with Texas crude. Then the snowy egrets arrived, black as crows, then the roseate spoonbills, the blue herons…

  I awoke in a sweat. I took a shower, dried off, read Act I of The Tempest—Prospero raising the storm and drawing the royal ship to his enchanted island, Miranda falling hopelessly in love with the castaway prince Ferdinand—and drank a glass of warm milk. At 0800 I finally got back to sleep.

  The urge to pray was intense, but Cassie Fowler, who at age forty-one knew better than to believe in God, had so far managed to resist. There are no atheists in foxholes: a clever maxim, she felt—deft, wry, and appealing. And she was determined to prove it wrong.

  For over fifteen hot, wretched, thirsty hours Cassie had endured her aquatic foxhole, a rubber dinghy adrift in the North Atlantic, and in all that time she’d been true to herself, never asking God for assistance. Cassie was a woman of integrity—a woman who’d spent the first decade of her adulthood writing antireligious, money-losing off-Broadway plays (the sorts of satires the critics termed “biting” when authored by a male and “strident” if by a female)—a woman who, having devoted most of her thirties to acquiring a Ph.D. in biology, had elected to teach at dull, hidebound Tarrytown Community College, a place where the students were unlikely to form positive opinions about either feminism or evolution without her intervention, and where she was free to conduct oddball little experiments (her initial finding being that, given the opportunity, the male Norway rat exhibits instincts toward its young every bit as nurturing as the female) without pressure to pull down a grant or publish her results.

  Were Cassie’s situation any less desperate, it would have been comic, in a Samuel Beckett sort of way. Maneuvering the dinghy with a Ping-Pong paddle. Bailing it out with an Elvis Presley memorial drinking cup. Sheltering her bikini-clad body with a Betty Boop beach towel. “Help,” she gasped into the transceiver mike, furiously working the generator crank. “Please, somebody…heading east…last known latitude, two degrees north…last known longitude, thirty-seven west…help me.” No answer. Not one word. She might as well be praying.

  To the east, she knew, lay Saint Paul’s Rocks, a tiny volcanic archipelago strung along the equator. The Rocks promised little—a chance to gather her strength, a reprieve from the endless bailing—but at this point a meaningless destination was better than none at all.

  An authentic reenactment of Charles Darwin’s historic voyage undertaken on an exact replica of his ship: what a marvelous concept for a cruise, she’d thought on reading the brochure, a kind of Club Med vacation for rationalists. All during the flight to England, Cassie had imagined herself reporting back to her friends in the Central Park West Enlightenment League, proudly projecting her 35mm color slides of the Galápagos Islands’ nativ
e finches and lizards (she was planning to shoot over fifty rolls of film), descendants of the very beasts from whose anatomies Darwin had inferred that Creation traced not to the hand of God Almighty but to something far more interesting—and she’d continued to indulge in such cheerful fantasies when, on June 12, the Beagle II left the Cornish port of Charlestown, her twenty-four berths jammed with an unlikely assortment of biology professors, armchair naturalists, and spoiled college dropouts being deported by their exasperated parents. The itinerary devised by Maritime Adventures, Incorporated, had the Beagle II following Darwin’s precise route, with the exception of an about-face at Joas Pessoa so they might avail themselves of the Panama Canal and save seven months. Once they’d explored the Galápagos, a jetliner out of Guayaquil would take them back to England.

  They never got past the equator. Hurricane Beatrice did not merely sink the Beagle II, it tore her apart like one of Cassie’s sophomores dissecting a dogfish. As the ship went down, Cassie found herself alone on a frigid sea, clinging to a spar and clutching her Betty Boop towel, bitterly absorbing the fact that among the stratagems by which Maritime Adventures kept its Galapagos package under a thousand dollars per person was the elimination of life rafts, life jackets, and backup batteries for the shortwave radio. Only through a miracle of chance did she manage to fish a hand-cranked transceiver from the flotsam and haul herself aboard the Beagle’s errant dinghy.

  “Heading east…last known latitude, two north…last known longitude, thirty-seven west…help, somebody.”

  Inexorably, maliciously, the sun came up: her one-eyed enemy, a predator as dangerous as any shark. The Betty Boop towel protected her from the rays, but her thirst soon became intolerable. The temptation to dip her Elvis cup into the ocean and drink was nearly overwhelming, though as a biologist she knew that would be fatal. Consume a pint of sea water, and along with those ten cubic inches of pure H2O she would also ingest a quantity of salt far beyond what her body required. Take a second helping, and her kidneys would now have enough H2O to process the salt in pint number one, but not enough to process the salt in pint number two. Drink a third pint—and so on, and so on, never getting ahead of the game. Inevitably her kidneys would turn imperialistic, stealing water from her other tissues. She would dry up, become febrile, die.

  “Help me,” Cassie moaned, painfully rotating the transceiver crank. “Last known latitude, two north…longitude, thirty-seven west…water…water…” I shall not cry out to God, she vowed. I shall not pray for deliverance.

  And suddenly they appeared, Saint Paul’s Rocks, six granite spires rising from the equator like aquatic stalactites, their peaks frosted with heaping mounds of seabird droppings. Briefly she savored the peculiar poetry of the moment. On February 12, 1832, the original Beagle had anchored here. At least I’ll go out in Darwin’s shadow, she mused. At least I’ve followed him to the end.

  By dusk Cassie had made a landfall, maneuvering the dinghy against the lee side of the islet. Transceiver in hand, Betty Boop towel flung over her shoulder, she dragged herself up the highest spire, the jagged pumice tearing her palms and scouring her knees. An ice-cold can of Diet Coke hovered just out of reach; a frosty pitcher of lemonade beckoned from a neighboring crag; a frigid geyser of Hawaiian Punch spewed heavenward from a tide pool. Reaching the summit, she stood up, the towel spilling down her back like a monarch’s cape. It was all hers, the whole dreadful little archipelago. Her Royal Highness Cassie Fowler, Empress of Guano.

  The wayfarers swooped down, squadron after squadron, brazen cormorants perching on her shoulders, bold gannets pecking at her hair. For all her terror and misery, she found herself wishing her students could see these birds; she was prepared to lecture about the Sulidae family in general and the blue-footed booby in particular. The blue-foot was a bird with a vision. While its red-shod cousin laid its eggs in a conventional nest built near the top of a tree, the blue-foot employed a picture of a nest, an elegant abstraction it created by squirting a ring of guano on the ground. Cassie loved the blue-footed booby, not only for its politics (the males did their fair share of sitting on the eggs and caring for the chicks) but also because here was a creature for whom the distinctions between life, art, and shit were less obvious than commonly supposed.

  On all sides, the grim Darwinian rhythms played out: crabs eating plankton, gannets devouring crabs, big fish preying on little fish, an eternal orgy of killing, feasting, digesting, eliminating. Never before had Cassie felt so connected to brute evolutionary truth. Here was Nature, real Nature, red in claw, white in ca-ca, stripped of all Rousseauistic sentiment, rhapsodic as a cold sore, romantic as a yeast infection.

  With the last of her strength she shooed the birds away, then squatted, Joblike, amid the guano. Ironically, Cassie’s personal favorite among her plays, Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46: The Soap Opera, was a freewheeling sequel to Job. Two thousand years after being tortured, browbeaten, and bought off by God, the hero returns to the dung heap for a rematch.

  Her tongue was a stone. She was too dry to weep. I shall not succumb to faith, she swore, staring across the vast, faceless sea.

  There are no atheists in foxholes. “Help,” Cassie rasped, cranking the transceiver. “Please. Help. The Beagle is a stupid name for a ship,” she groaned. “Beagles are dogs, not ships. Help. Please, God, it’s me,” muttered the lapsed Darwinist. “It’s Cassie Fowler. Saint Paul’s Rocks. Beagles are dogs. Please, God, help me.”

  July 4.

  Our fair republic’s birthday. Latitude: 20°9'N. Longitude: 37°15'W. Course: 170. Speed: 18 knots. Distance made good since New York: 1106 nautical miles.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say Jehovah himself had sent that hurricane. Not only did we survive, we got carried 184 miles at 40 knots, and now we’re almost a day ahead of schedule.

  A loaded tanker probably could’ve smashed those rollers apart, but we actually had to ride them—full speed ahead in the troughs, dead slow along the crests. There was so much foam, the waves turned pure white, as if the sea herself had died.

  We had a good man at the helm, a moon-faced Jersey kid named Neil Weisinger, and somehow we bullied our way through, but only after a Marisat dome cracked in two and a starboard kingpost got torn out by the roots. Not to mention 4 lifeboats blown overboard, 15 shattered windows in the deckhouse, 2 broken arms, 1 sprained ankle.

  On a normal voyage, whenever the crew gets drunk and rowdy, I can usually scare them into sobriety by waving a flare pistol around. But on this trip, if things go as I expect, we’ll eventually be arming the deckies with those damn antipredator weapons. I’m nervous, Popeye. A potted sailor and a T-62 bazooka are a bad combination.

  It doesn’t matter that alcoholic beverages are forbidden in the U.S. Merchant Marine. We’re not a dry ship—this I know. Judging from past experience, I’d guess we left port with about 30 cases of contraband beer and 65 bottles of hidden liquor. Rum is especially popular, I’ve noticed over the years. Pirate fantasies, I think. I myself keep 4 bottles of mescal in the chart room, secluded under Madagascar.

  To date we’ve had only one minor setback. The Vatican was supposed to send us the cream of its film collection, but either the reels never arrived or those Carmelites forgot to load them, and the only picture that actually made it on board is a 16mm pan-and-scan print of The Ten Commandments. So we’ve got this fancy theater and just one movie to run in it. It’s a pretty awful flick, and I suspect we’ll be chucking tomatoes at the screen long about the tenth showing.

  There are 4 or 5 VCRs kicking around, and dozens of cassettes with titles like Babs Boffs Boston. We’ve even got the notorious Caligula. But such fare tends to leave about a third of the men and nearly all the women cold.

  Whenever I slip Raphael’s feather from my sea chest and stare at it, the same questions run through my mind. Did my angel speak the truth? Is Dad really the one who can wash away the oil? Or was Raphael just making absolutely sure I’d accept the mission?

  In any even
t, I’m figuring to return from the Arctic by way of Spain. I’ll dock in Cadiz, give the crew shore leave, and hop on the first bus to Valladolid.

  “I did it,” I’ll tell him. “I got the job done.”

  Although zero by zero degrees still lay half an ocean away, Thomas Ockham nevertheless found himself grappling night and day with the eschatological implications of a Corpus Dei. Beyond the information Rome explicitly requested—course, speed, position, estimated date of rendezvous—his daily faxes contained as much speculative theology as he thought the cardinals could stand.

  “At first blush, Eminence,” he wrote to Di Luca on the Fourth of July, “the death of God is a scandalous and enervating notion. But do you remember the riches certain thinkers mined from this vein in the late fifties and early sixties? I’m thinking in particular of Roger Milton’s Post Mortem Dei, Gabriel Vahanian’s Culture of the Post-Christian Era, and Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God. True, these men had no actual body on their hands (nor do we, as of yet). I sense, however, that if we look beyond our immediate angst, we may find some surprises. In an odd way, this whole business is a ringing vindication of Judeo-Christianity (if I may use that mongrel and oxymoronic term), proof that we’ve been on to something all these centuries. From a robust theothanatology, I daresay, some surprising spiritual insights may emerge.”

  Truth to tell, Thomas did not believe these brave words. Truth to tell, the idea of a robust theothanatology depressed him to the point of paralysis. A dark and violent country lay beyond the Corpus Dei, the old priest felt in his heart—a landfall toward which Ultra Large Crude Carriers sailed only at their peril.

  “Dear Professor Ockham,” Di Luca wrote back on July 5, “at the moment we are not interested in Martin Buber or any other atheist egghead. We are interested in Anthony Van Horne. Did the angels pick the right man? Does the crew respect him? Was his decision to dive into Hurricane Beatrice wise or was it rash?”