by James Morrow
Entering the arena, Neil was momentarily bewildered to realize that the corpses of Wheatstone, Jaworski, and Spicer were nowhere to be seen, but then he noticed a mound of mud in the center of the field, evidence that someone—Father Thomas, quite likely—had buried them. An unholy odor rose from the grave, so intense it instantly killed any notion of solving the incipient famine through the ingestion of former shipmates.
By 1530 the pagans were back in the city, sorting through the day’s harvest. It came to a little over thirty pounds, which Haycox divided into two equal stockpiles, storing the first in a seabag—bait, she explained—and parceling out the second on the spot. Greedily Neil grabbed his allotment, a conglomeration of apple cores, Concord grapes, and frankfurter stubs welded together with Turkish taffy and melted cheddar cheese. Staking out a shady spot beneath the banquet table, he sat down, lit a Marlboro, and puffed.
He stared at his meal. A sharp moan broke from his larynx. This wasn’t food. It was a travesty of food, a cruel impersonation of food, tormenting him the way a dead child’s voice torments its parents.
He devoured the ration in four big bites.
“I got a job for you.”
Neil looked up. Dolores Haycox stood over him, her stocky form now swathed in a beige Exxon jumpsuit.
“We need pontoons,” she said, handing Neil a set of battery-powered needle guns. “Four of ’em.”
“Aye-aye.”
“Take Mungo, Jong, and Echohawk. Locate some fifty-five-gallon drums. Good ones. Drain ’em.”
He took a drag on his Marlboro. “Gotcha.”
“We’re gonna get out of this mess, Weisinger.”
“You bet, Captain Haycox.”
After a half-hour’s hike across a mud flat riddled with aerosol cans and disposable diapers, Neil and his three shipmates reached the nearest chemical dump, a dark, viscous swamp where dozens of 55-gallon drums lay about like chunks of pineapple suspended in Jell-O. Most of the drums were fractured and leaking, but before long Mungo spotted a cluster that the dumpers, in an effort to either appease their consciences or cover their asses, had evidently sealed against saltwater corrosion. The sailors switched on their needle guns and got to work, chipping the rust from the caps with the radical caution of neurosurgeons severing frontal lobes: each cap had to be loosened but must not suffer damage in the process.
As Neil freed up his cap, two disquieting images arrived.
Leo Zook, suffocating.
Joe Spicer, bleeding.
Summoning all his pagan powers, the full force of Anno Postdomini One, he tore their livid faces from his mind.
He unplugged the drum, laid it on its side, and watched in appalled fascination as something that resembled black mucus and smelled like burning sulfur flowed forth. He screwed the cap on tight. Within minutes, Mungo, Jong, and Echohawk were emptying out their respective drums: a sudden rush of stinking yellow goo, a steady stream of putrid brown syrup, a slow trickle of acrid purple pus.
Like Sisyphus rolling his stone, Neil began pushing his drum across the mud flat, his companions following, and by sundown all four pontoons were safely within the city’s walls.
The deserters rose at dawn, carrying the banquet table to the beach and lashing the pontoons in place with wires and fan belts scrounged from the nearest auto graveyard. By 0800 the vessel, christened Cornucopia, was ready for sea. Captain Haycox assumed a commanding position in the bow, right beside the freshwater casks. Echohawk, the designated first mate, manned the tiller. Ramsey and Horrocks settled down amidships, their fists wrapped firmly around two jumper cables whose clamps had been twisted into fishhooks. Mungo and Jong took up a corroded pair of Datsun bumpers and began paddling.
Standing on the beach, Neil watched the Cornucopia smash through the breakers and vanish into the dark waters beyond. As fog engulfed the raft, he turned and joined the solemn little march back to the city.
For the next two days, Neil and his mates remained in the museum, lolling in the muddy yard like fourteenth-century Londoners in thrall to the Black Death. They spoke in grunts. They dreamed of food. Not simply the aquatic delicacies promised by Captain Haycox’s mission (lobster bisque, pollack chowder, marlin pie), not simply imitation franchise food from Follingsbee’s galley, but good old-fashioned sailors’ fare as well: hardtack, cracker hash, midshipman’s muffins, strike-me-blind. The fog thickened. Prayers drifted heavenward. Tears fell. Neil figured that each mariner’s reasoning was not unlike his own. Yes, Haycox and her crew might break the covenant, blithely fishing their way to Portugal and never bothering to save their stranded mates, but to do so would constitute betrayal on a cosmic scale. There is honor among the starving, the AB sensed. An unfathomable fraternity binds those who seriously contemplate cutting off their own toes and chewing the raw flesh from the bones.
“I hate you,” muttered Isabel Bostwick. “I hate all of you. You…you men, you and your slime. It’s a real fine line between a consensual orgy and a rape, that’s one thing I’ve learned on this trip, a real fine line.”
“I didn’t see you worryin’ about any fine lines during the party,” said Stubby Barnes.
“I’d better not be pregnant,” said Juanita Torres.
“If we don’t stop talking,” said Neil, “we’re gonna lose our strength.”
On the morning of the third day, the Cornucopia’s little company staggered into the museum. Their faces looked scored and deflated, as if painted on expiring helium balloons. The news was doubly bad. Not only did an impassable barricade of waterspouts and maelstroms surround Van Horne Island, but her bays and inlets were as bereft of fish as the dusty seas of the moon.
“We ate only our fair share,” said Haycox, setting the bait bag on the flagstones.
One by one, the sailors who’d stayed behind came forward, each thrusting a hand into the bag and drawing out his due measure. Neil’s portion consisted of half a Three Musketeers bar on which sat eleven raisins, a cherry LifeSaver, and five sugar-coated Alpha-Bits, K, T, A, S, E. He couldn’t help noticing that the letters, rearranged, spelled STEAK.
August 17.
Course: nowhere. Speed: 0 knots.
They came back 24 hours ago, weak, dizzy, and frightened, stumbling out of the fog like, as Ockham put it, “a bunch of extras from Night of the Living Dead.” I’ve never seen such a scraggly gang of sailors in my life. Led by their phony captain, Dolores Haycox, they threw down their weapons—bazookas, harpoon guns, flare pistols, blasting caps, decorative cutlasses—and collected in the shadow of the hull.
Their arrival proved no surprise to Ockham. On his return from the city, he told me their provisions would be gone by the 9th, so frantic was their bacchanal. Assuming the padre calculated correctly, the mutineers held out for over a week after eating their last morsel.
Impressive.
The minute I saw them, I ordered the anchor raised, locking the bastards out. It’s like some crazy inverse siege—the trapped defenders eating, the outside army starving. I am not a cruel man. I am not Captain Bligh. But if I don’t feed Rafferty and my other loyalists the last of our reserves, they won’t have the energy to keep taking the Juan Fernández on the trolling expeditions that are our last, best, and only hope. So far nobody’s gotten more than two miles from shore before encountering a twenty-foot wall of turbulence, impossible for a small craft to penetrate. Within the navigable zone, though, we’re certain to find fish.
Last night I ordered Follingsbee to do a new inventory, this time throwing in everything that remotely qualifies as food.
3 pounds Cheerios
2 pounds Sun Maid raisins
3 12-oz. tubes Colgate toothpaste
2 loaves Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread
1 36-oz. can Libby’s string beans
1 48-oz. jar Hellman’s mayonnaise
1 12-oz. jar glory grease
4 12-oz. bottles Vick’s cough syrup
1 pound popcorn (gleaned from the floor of our movie theater)
2 1-gallon cans Campbell’s tomato juice
6 carrots
1 bunch broccoli
6 Oscar Mayer hot dogs (we’d better save most of these for bait)
607 communion wafers
311 acorn barnacles scraped from our rudder and hull (lucky thing we harvested these before the mutineers arrived)
76 goose barnacles (ditto)
1 banana
1 slice Kraft American cheese (we’ll set this aside for an emergency)
Sam’s worked out our rations for the coming week. Curious to know the menu aboard the luxury liner Valparaíso? Breakfast: 10 Cheerios, 4 ounces tomato juice. Lunch: 7 string beans, 2 communion wafers. Dinner: 2 acorn barnacles, 1 ounce bread, 1 carrot cube, 8 raisins. The captain, on occasion, will get a belt of mescal.
A force-12 gale swept across Van Horne Island this morning, driving squalls of rain before it. Did I imagine the accumulation might be enough to lift us free? Of course I did. Did I picture the winds blowing the fog away? I’m only human, Popeye.
The mutineers have decided to protect themselves from future storms. Their homes are grotesque, twisted shanties cobbled together from Toyota doors and Volvo hoods, bulging out of the sand like steel igloos.
“Please feed us,” gasps their emissary of the moment, a demac named Barnes, dressed only in hot pink bathing trunks. Evidently he’d been a real porker before the famine. His vacated skin hangs from his torso like blobs of wax dripping down the shaft of a candle.
“We have nothing to spare,” I call to him.
“I had a life,” moans the demac. “Done things. Slung hash, been to Borneo, fathered four boys, organized church picnics. I had a life, Captain Van Horne.”
Tomorrow, as it happens, is the OMNIVAC’s deadline for hauling God across the Arctic Circle. I can see His brain disintegrating, Popeye, each neuron entering oblivion with a sudden, brilliant burst, like five billion flashbulbs firing at some apocalyptic press conference.
During his first three days aboard the Enterprise, Oliver’s favorite amusement was to stand in the forward lookout post and sketch the PBYs as they left on their daily reconnaissance patrols. Scooting along on their flat bottoms, weaving amid the pack ice, the four flying boats would suddenly retract their stabilizer floats and begin their clumsy ascents, fighting their way skyward like a flock of arthritic herons rising from a marsh.
By the end of the week, the PBYs had flown seventy-three separate missions without spotting anything resembling a supertanker towing a golem.
“Think she got sidetracked by a hurricane?” asked Winston.
“How the hell should I know?” replied Oliver.
“If the body’s started to rot, it might be soaking up seawater,” said Barclay. “A few thousand extra tons could cut Van Horne’s speed in half.”
“Maybe the problem’s mechanical,” said Winston. “Merchant ships are built to fall apart. That’s how capitalism works.”
As far as Oliver was concerned, none of these theories could begin to account for the Valparaíso being so woefully behind schedule. On the morning of August 22, he went to the cabin of Ray Spruance’s portrayer and inquired whether the Enterprise had a fax machine.
“Enterprise, not ‘the’ Enterprise,” said the admiral, chewing on the stem of his briar pipe. “Sure we got one, a Mitsubishi-7000.”
“I want to send a message to our agent on the tanker.”
“Since when do we have an agent on the tanker?”
“A long story. She’s my girlfriend, Cassie Fowler. Something’s obviously gone wrong.”
“At this point, Mr. Shostak, any communication with Valparaíso would be a bad idea. Absolute radio silence figured crucially in the American victory at Midway.”
“I don’t give a fuck about Midway. I’m worried about my girlfriend.”
“If you don’t give a fuck about Midway, you don’t belong on this ship.”
“Jesus—do you people always have to live in the past?”
The admiral scowled, manifestly taken aback. He sucked on his pipe. “Yes, friend,” he said at last, “as a matter of fact we do always have to live in the past, and if you’d give it a minute’s thought, you’d want to live there too.” Eyes flashing, Spruance paced compulsively around his cabin, back and forth, like a caged wolf. “Do you realize there was a time when the United States of America actually made sense? A time when you could look at a Norman Rockwell painting of a GI peeling potatoes for Mom and get all choked up and nobody’d laugh at you? A time when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn like they’re supposed to be and there were no jigaboos shooting up our cities and every schoolday started with the Lord’s Prayer? It’s all gone, Shostak. People are scared of their own food, for Christ’s sake. In the forties nobody ate yogurt or Egg Beaters or goddamn turkey franks.”
“You know, Admiral, if you won’t let me contact Cassie Fowler, I might just go out and hire a different set of mercenaries.”
“Don’t diddle me. I like you, friend, but I won’t be diddled.”
“I’m serious, Spruance, or whatever the hell your name is,” snapped Oliver, pleased to be discovering unexpected reserves of impertinence within himself. “As long as I’m paying the piper, I’m also calling the tune.”
It took Oliver over an hour to compose a fax that met the admiral’s standards. The message had to convey curiosity about the Valparaíso’s position yet remain sufficiently ambiguous that if it fell into what Spruance insisted on calling “enemy hands,” and if that enemy succeeded in cracking the code (it was in Heresy), nobody would suspect the tanker’s cargo had been targeted. “You are my heart’s most valued occupant, dearest Cassandra,” Oliver wrote, “though in which chamber you currently reside I cannot say.”
At 1115 hours, the Enterprise’s radio officer, a scrawny Latino actor named Henry Ramírez, fed Oliver’s letter into the Mitsubishi-7000. At 1116, a message popped onto the concomitant computer screen.
TRANSMISSION TERMINATED—ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE AT RECEPTION POINT.
“Heavy weather?” asked Spruance’s portrayer.
“There’s no storm activity anywhere in the North Atlantic today,” Ramírez replied.
An hour later, the radio officer tried again. TRANSMISSION TERMINATED—ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE AT RECEPTION POINT. He made a third attempt an hour after that. TRANSMISSION TERMINATED—ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE AT RECEPTION POINT.
But it wasn’t really “atmospheric disturbance,” Oliver decided; it was something far more sinister. It was the New Dark Ages, spilling across the globe, spreading their inky ignorance everywhere like oil gushing from the Valparaíso’s broken hull, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, a mere rich atheist could do about it.
Cassie seized the compass binnacle, hugging it with the desperation of a wino bag lady steadying herself on a lamppost. She could no longer imagine what a clear head was like, couldn’t remember a time when moving, breathing, or thinking had come easily. Clutching her inflamed belly, she stared at the twelve-mile radar. Fog, always fog, like the output of some demented cable station devoted to anomie and existential dread, the Malaise Channel.
And suddenly here was Father Thomas, holding out a cupped hand. A mound of Cheerios, doubtless from his own allotment, lay in his palm. His generosity did not surprise her. The day before, she’d seen him lean over the Val’s starboard rail and, in a benevolent and forbidden act, throw down a handful of goose barnacles for the poor moaning wretches in the shantytown.
“I don’t deserve them.”
“Eat,” ordered the priest.
“I’m not even supposed to be on this voyage.”
“Eat,” he said again.
Cassie ate. “You’re a good person, Father.”
Sweeping her bleary gaze past the twelve-mile radar, the fifty-mile radar, and the Marisat terminal, she focused on the beach. Marbles Rafferty and Lou Chickering were climbing out of the Juan Fernández, having just returned from another manifestly disastrous sea hunt. They jumped into the breake
rs and, collecting their trolling gear, waded ashore.
“Not even an old inner tube,” sighed Sam Follingsbee, slumped over the control console. “Too bad—I got an incredible recipe for vulcanized rubber in cream sauce.”
“Shut up,” said Crock O’Connor.
“If only they’d found a boot or two. You should taste my cuir tartare.”
“I said shut up.”
Lifting the late Joe Spicer’s copy of A Brief History of Time from atop the Marisat, Cassie slipped it under the cowhide belt she’d borrowed from Lou Chickering. Miraculously, the book seemed to ease her stomach pains. She limped into the radio shack.
Lianne Bliss sat faithfully at her post, her sweaty fist clamped around the shortwave mike. “…the SS Carpco Valparaíso,” she muttered, “thirty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes, north…”
“Any luck?”
The radio officer tore away her headset. Her cheeks were sunken, eyes bloodshot; she looked like an antique photograph of herself, a daguerreotype or mezzotint, gray, faded, and wrinkled. “Occasionally I hear something—bits of sports shows from the States, weather reports from Europe—but I’m not gettin’ through. Too bad the deckies aren’t here. Big news. The Yankees are in first place.” Lianne put her headset back on and leaned toward the mike. “Thirty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes, north. Sixteen degrees, forty-seven minutes, west.” Again she removed her headset. “The worst of it’s the moaning, don’t you think? Those poor bastards. At least we get our communion wafers.”
“And our barnacles.”
“The barnacles are hard for me. I eat ’em, but it’s hard.”
“I understand.” Cassie brushed the sea goddess on Lianne’s biceps. “The last time I was in a jam like this…”
“Saint Paul’s Rocks?”
“Right. I behaved shamefully, Lianne. I prayed for deliverance.”
“Don’t worry about it, sweetie. In your shoes I’d have done the same thing.”
“There are no atheists in foxholes, people say, and it’s so true, it’s so fucking true.” Cassie swallowed, savoring the aftertaste of the Cheerios. “No…no, I’m being too hard on myself. That maxim, it’s not an argument against atheism—it’s an argument against foxholes.”
