Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  The captain leaned over the rail. Today’s emissary from the shantytown was an elderly, cod-faced man, stripped to the waist and wearing black bicycle pants. He sat motionless amid the thick mist and swirling rust, arms outstretched in a gesture of entreaty, ribs bulging from his shriveled torso like bars on a marimba.

  “What’s your name?” Anthony called to the starving man.

  “Mungo, sir.” The sailor rose and stumbled backward, slumping against the tanker’s thrown propeller like a leprechaun crucified on a gigantic shamrock. “Able Seaman Ralph Mungo.”

  “Find your shipmates, Mungo. Tell ’em to report here at once.”

  “Aye-aye.”

  “Give ’em a message.”

  “What message?”

  “‘Van Horne is the bread of life.’ Got that?”

  “Aye.”

  “Let’s not get carried away,” said Ockham, cupping his palm around Anthony’s shoulder.

  “Repeat it,” Anthony ordered the sailor.

  “Van Horne is the bread of life.” Mungo pushed off from the orphan screw. Gasping for breath, he staggered away. “Van Horne is the bread…”

  Twenty minutes later the mutineers appeared, flopping and crawling across the foggy dunes, and soon the lot of them sat clustered around the propeller. The allegory pleased Anthony. Above: he, Captain Van Horne, master of the Valparaíso, splendid in his dress blues and braided cap. Below: they, abject mortals, groveling in the muck. He wasn’t out to torment them. He had no wish to steal their wills or claim their souls. But now was the time to bring these traitors to heel once and for all, now was the time to bury the Idea of the Corpse in the deepest, darkest hole this side of the Mariana Trench.

  Anthony drew a package from the footlocker. “This soup kitchen’s like any other, sailors. First the sermon, then the sandwich.” He cleared his throat. “‘When evening came, the disciples went to Him and said, “Send the people away, and they can go to the villages to buy themselves some food.”’” He’d spent the noon-to-four watch paging through Ockham’s Jerusalem Bible, studying the great precedents: the manna from heaven, the water from the rock, the feeding of the five thousand. “‘Jesus replied, “Give them something to eat yourselves.” But they answered, “All we have is five loaves and two fish.”’”

  Tearing off his Panama hat, Ockham squeezed Anthony’s wrist. “Cut the crap, okay?”

  So far Follingsbee had wrung four distinct variations. The steward’s own favorite was the basic hamburger, while Rafferty found the Filet-o-Fish unbeatable (seafood flavor derived from areola tissue) and Chickering preferred the Quarter Pounder with Cheese (curds cultivated from divine lymph). Nobody much liked the McNuggets.

  “‘Breaking the loaves, He handed them to His disciples,’” Anthony persisted, “‘who gave them to the crowds.’” He hurled the sandwich over the side. “‘They all ate as much as they wanted…’”

  The Filet-o-Fish arced toward the mutineers. Reaching up, Able Seaman Weisinger made the catch. Incredulous, he unwrapped the wax paper and stared at the gift. He rubbed the bun. He sniffed the meat. Tears of gratitude ran down his face in parallel tracks. Crumpling the paper into a ball, he tossed it aside, raised the sandwich to his mouth, and swept his lips along the breaded, juicy fibers.

  “Eat,” Anthony commanded.

  Placing one index finger under his nose, Weisinger hooked the other over his lower teeth and pried his jaw open. He inserted the Filet-o-Fish, bit off a large piece. He swallowed. Gulped. Shuddered. A retching noise issued from his throat, like a ship scraping bottom. Seconds later he vomited up the offering, marring his lap with a sticky mixture of amber fat and sea green bile.

  “Chew it!” called Anthony. “You aren’t scarfing down peanuts in a fucking waterfront dive! Chew it!”

  Weisinger broke off a modest morsel and tried again. His jaw moved slowly, deliberately. “It’s good!” rasped the AB. “It’s so good!”

  “Of course it’s good!” shouted Anthony.

  “Where’d you get it?” asked Ralph Mungo.

  “All good things come from God!” cried Sister Miriam.

  Anthony drew a Quarter Pounder with Cheese from the locker. “Who is your captain?” he screamed into the wind.

  “You are!” cried Dolores Haycox.

  “You are!” insisted Charlie Horrocks.

  “You are!” chimed in Ralph Mungo, Bud Ramsey, James Echohawk, Stubby Barnes, Juanita Torres, Isabel Bostwick, An-mei Jong, and a dozen more.

  Quarter Pounder in hand, Anthony thrust his arm over the rail. “Who is the bread of life?”

  “You are!” cried a chorus of mutineers.

  He waved the sandwich around. “Who can forgive your sins against this ship?”

  “You can!”

  Springing sideways, Sister Miriam grabbed the Quarter Pounder from Anthony and tossed it into the air. Like a tight end catching a forward pass, Haycox snagged the package, instantly ripping away the wax paper.

  “You had no right to do that,” Anthony informed the nun. “You’re just a passenger, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I’m just a passenger,” she agreed. “For Christ’s sake,” she repeated, curling her lower lip.

  Ockham rummaged around in the locker, drawing out four hamburgers and four boxes of McNuggets. “You each get two!” he shouted, chucking the packages over the rail. “Eat slowly!”

  “Very slowly,” said Miriam, throwing down six Filets-o-Fish.

  The sky rained godsend. Half the packages were caught in midair, half hit the sands. Anthony was impressed not only by the orderliness with which the mutineers retrieved the fallen meat but by the fact that no sailor took more than his or her share.

  “They fear me,” he observed.

  “You proud of that?” asked Ockham.

  “Yes. No. I want my ship back, Thomas.”

  “How does it feel, being feared? Heady stuff?”

  “Heady stuff.”

  “That all?”

  “All right, I’ll be frank—sure, I’m tempted to have my ass kissed. I’m tempted to become their god.” Anthony fixed on Ockham. “If you had my power,” said the captain, voice dripping with sarcasm, “no doubt you’d use it only for good.”

  “If I had your power,” said the priest, closing the footlocker, “I’d try not to use it for anything at all.”

  August 28.

  I saved them, Popeye, and for the moment I am their god. It’s not really me they worship, of course—it’s the Idea of the Quarter Pounder. No matter. They still do whatever I say.

  Their thirst is fearsome, but they don’t stop excavating. The sun shines without mercy, burning through the mist and frying their backs and shoulders, but they keep at it, pausing only long enough to wolf down sandwiches or apply protective coatings of glory grease to their skin.

  “They’ve discovered the categorical imperative,” Ockham tells me.

  “They’ve discovered the full belly,” I correct him.

  I am their god, but Sister Miriam is their savior. Canteen in hand, she moves from digger to digger. Inevitably she evokes Debra Paget working the brick pits in The Ten Commandments, giving water to the Hebrew slaves.

  Cassie may be a cynic and an egghead, but she’s certainly doing her part toward getting us out of here, dispensing water alongside Miriam and sometimes even digging herself. Furtively I watch. Until the day I die, I shall retain the image of a beauteous, raven-haired woman in cut-off jeans and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, shoveling out the Carpco Valparaíso.

  When we first went on this diet, we all assumed it would change us in some way. Has it? Hard to say. I’ve seen nothing truly astonishing so far, no big jump in anybody’s reading speed or knot-tying skills. While our bowel movements have been remarkably pale and coherent—it’s like shitting soap—that’s hardly a miracle. (Sparks points out you can get the same result from macrobiotic food.) True, the deckies have tons of energy, a phenomenal amount, but Cassie insists there’s nothing supernatural going on.
“His flesh is acting like Dumbo’s magic feather,” she says, “enabling us to tap our own latent powers.”

  With Spicer and Wheatstone both gone, we’ve had to reapportion the duties. Dolores Haycox seems completely rehabilitated, and so we’ve made her our second mate, bumping James Echohawk up to third. The new bos’n is Ralph Mungo. I’m inclined to stick Weisinger back in the brig, but Ockham is convinced that Zook died before the kid ripped his hose, and right now we need every available pair of hands.

  While Rafferty’s people disassemble the mountain, O’Connor’s men repair the damage, smoothing the keel with scrap-metal patches and straightening the port shaft by banging it with a sledgehammer. It turns out the thrown propeller has a seven-foot fissure running through one blade, but the backup screw seems fine, and that’s the one we’ll be mounting.

  This morning Rafferty and Ockham made exploratory dives. Their report was encouraging. Just as we suspected, the anvil bones snapped in both His ears, but the padre says we can almost certainly get a firm grip on the stirrups.

  Okay, I’ll admit it: His brain is surely mush by now. I keep telling myself this doesn’t matter. The angels wanted a decent burial, that’s all. Just a decent burial.

  During the past twenty-four hours, Sam Follingsbee has gone way beyond McDonald’s, finding amazingly creative ways to prepare the fillets. He’s frustrated that so many spices and condiments got gobbled up during the famine, but he’s a wiz at making do. The local sand, for example, has a decidedly peppery flavor. The body itself supplies other essentials: wart fragments for mushrooms, mole scrapings for garlic cloves, tear duct chunks for onions. Most astonishing of all, by combining a fresh-water condenser and a microwave oven into a contraption that causes rapid fermentation, our chef can now distill His blood into something that tastes exactly like first-class burgundy.

  The names Sam gives his dishes—Dieu Bourguignon, Domine Gumbo, Pater Stroganoff, Mock Turtle Soup—don’t begin to convey how filling and delicious they are. Believe me, Popeye, no human palate has ever known such wonders.

  Dieu Bourguignon

  20 lbs. meat, cubed

  7 cups stock

  42 small onions, sliced

  3 lbs. mushrooms, sliced

  14 cups burgundy

  7 cloves garlic

  Marinate meat in wine and stock for 4 hours. Remove meat, reserve marinade. Brown onions in 3 heavy skillets, remove and reserve. Brown meat in same skillets. Add marinade, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer 2 hours. Return onions to skillets, add mushrooms, garlic cloves, and simmer, covered, 1 hour more. Serves 35.

  For all this, the poor steward frets about our nutrition. He’s been trying everything he can think of, extracting selenium, iodine, and other minerals from the Gibraltar Sea and mixing them into the recipes, but it’s not enough. “All we’re really getting is fat and protein,” he tells me. “Folks recovering from a famine need Vitamin C, sir. They need Vitamin A, the B-complex, calcium, potassium…”

  “Maybe we could mine His liver,” I suggest.

  “Thought of that. To get there, you’d have to cut through eighty-five yards of the toughest flesh on the planet, a three-week dig at least.”

  There hasn’t been an outbreak of scurvy on an American merchant ship since 1903, Popeye, but that happy fact may be about to change.

  When the dinner bell finally rang—a low blast from the Valparaíso’s foghorn, like a shofar heralding Rosh Hashanah—Neil Weisinger took a long, hard look at his hands. He barely recognized them. Blisters speckled his palms like clutches of tiny red eggs. A white callus covered the root of each finger.

  He jabbed his spade into the wet sand, seized his Bugs Bunny lunch box, and sat down. His back ached. His arms throbbed. All around him, sweaty deckies opened their various boxes and buckets and removed their McNuggets, Quarter Pounders, and Filets-o-Fish, devouring them with piggish zeal. They were proud of themselves. They deserved to be. In a mere four and a half days they’d dismantled a three-hundred-thousand-ton mountain and brought the world’s largest oil tanker back down to sea level.

  Neil glanced toward the cove. The setting sun sparkled in their cargo’s starboard eye. Mist cloaked the archipelago of His toes. Languidly the tide rolled in, soughing beneath the Valparaíso’s hull and splashing against her keel. He imagined the moon as a kind of loving mother, gently drawing a blanket of surf across the island’s southern shore, and he continued to imagine this tender scene as, picking up his lunch box, he began his bold little march away from the ship.

  Slipping a hand into his pants pocket, Neil ran his finger along the grooved edge of his grandfather’s Ben-Gurion medal. At any moment, he knew, his courage might desert him. Nerves shot, he would return and join his mates in fleeing this wretched place. But he kept on walking, past the crimson dunes and the 55-gallon drums, the rusting Volvos and the rotting Goodyear tires, following the shrouded shoreline.

  Ahead, a classic Mediterranean fig tree stood perched on a sandy knoll, and the instant Neil saw the fruited branches he resolved to venture no farther. This was it—his own private Burning Bush, the place where he would at last encounter YHWH’s unknowable essence, the vantage from which he would finally behold the God of the four A.M. watch. He ascended the knoll and caressed the trunk. Cold, coarse, hard. A rock. His fingertips continued exploring. Branches, bark, leaves, fruit: rock, all of it—a tree become stone, like Lot’s wife turned to salt. No matter. The thing would serve its purpose.

  A man said, “Astonishing.”

  Neil spun around. Father Thomas stood beside him, dressed in black jeans and a yellow windbreaker, sweat dribbling from beneath his Panama hat.

  “What happened to it?” Neil asked.

  “The Gibraltar Sea’s full of minerals—that’s how Follingsbee’s been seasoning our meals. I suspect they petrified the fibers.”

  Neil peeled off his fishnet shirt and, mopping his brow, looked south. The moon was performing its hydraulic miracle, flooding the cove with tidewater and levitating the tanker inch by inch. “Can you keep a secret, Father? When the Val leaves tonight, I’ll be standing by this fig tree.”

  “You aren’t coming with us?” Father Thomas frowned, tangling his bushy eyebrows.

  “It’s what a Christian would call an act of contrition.”

  “Leo Zook was dead before you took out your knife,” the priest protested. “And with Joe Spicer—self-defense, right?”

  “There’s a picture in my head, Father, a scene I keep playing over and over. I’m in number two center tank, and all that’s needed is for me to reach out and open Zook’s oxygen valve. A simple twist of the wrist, that’s all.” Neil hugged the immortal trunk. “If only I could go back and do it…”

  “Your brain was full of hydrocarbon gas. It was wrecking your judgment.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You couldn’t think straight.”

  “A man died.”

  “If you stay here, you’ll die.”

  Neil plucked a stone fig. “Maybe so, maybe not.”

  “Of course you’ll die. You can’t eat that thing, and we’re taking God with us.”

  “You really think our cargo is God?”

  “Difficult question. Let’s discuss it on the ship.”

  “Ever since I can remember, my Aunt Sarah’s been saying I’m trapped inside myself—‘Neil the hermit, hauling his private cave around with him wherever he goes’—and now I’m really going to become one, a hermit just like…”

  “No.”

  “…like Rabbi Shimon.”

  “Who?”

  “Shimon bar Yochai. At the end of the second century, Rabbi Shimon climbed into a hole in the ground and stayed there, and what do you think finally happened to him?”

  “He starved to death.”

  “He partook of the Creator’s unknowable essence. He encountered En Sof.”

  “You mean he saw God?”

  “He saw God. The true, formless, nameless God, the God of the four A.M. watch, not
King Kong out there.”

  “For all we know, this crazy island might suddenly sink back where it came from.” Father Thomas doffed his Panama hat and raked a withered hand through his hair. “Chaos is…chaotic. You’d drown like a rat.”

  Neil walked his fingers along the stone bark. “If He forgives me, He’ll deliver me.”

  “An action like this—it’s irresponsible, Neil. There are people back home who care about you.”

  “My parents are dead.”

  “What about your friends? Your relatives?”

  “I have no friends. My aunts can’t stand me. I adored my grandfather, but he died—what?—six years ago.”

  The priest harvested a rock. He tossed it into the air, caught it, tossed it, caught it. “I’ll be honest,” he said at last. “This En Sof of yours—I want to know it too, I really do.” He put his hat back on, snugging the brim all the way to his eyebrows. “Sometimes I think my church made a fatal error, turning God into a man. I love Christ, truly, but He’s too easily imagined.”

  “Then I’ve got your blessing?”

  “Not my blessing, no. But…”

  “What?”

  “If this is what your conscience demands…”

  Sighing, Father Thomas extended his right arm. Neil reached out. Their bruised fingers intertwined. Their battered palms connected.

  “Good-bye, Able Seaman Weisinger. Good-bye and good luck.”

  Neil sat down beside the immortal trunk. “God be with you, Father Thomas.”

  Turning, the priest descended the knoll and marched back toward the whispering surf.

  Two hours later, Neil had not moved. The night wind cooled his face. Stars peeked through the fog like candles shining behind frosted windows. Moonlight spilled down, glazing the breakers, transforming the dunes into mounds of sparkling gems.

  Lunch box in hand, Neil climbed the tree, progressing branch by branch, as if scaling a mainmast. As he settled into a high crook, both of the Valparaíso’s engines started up, their hisses and chugs echoing across Van Horne Island, and within minutes she was sailing out of the harbor. The tow chains tightened, their links grinding together like the wisdom teeth of some immense insomniac dragon. The ship kept moving, all ahead full. Panic seized the AB. It was not too late. He could still give himself a reprieve, charging down to the beach and screaming for the tanker to stop. If worse came to worst, he could even try swimming after her.