by James Morrow
“Starboard gone.”
Anthony raised his forearm to his mouth and gave dear Lorelei a kiss. “Okay, boys—let’s reel Him in.”
“Port motor on,” said Chickering.
“Starboard on,” said Ramsey.
Spewing black smoke, belching hot steam, the wildcats began to turn, raveling up the great steel chains. One by one, the links rose out of the sea, dripping foam and spitting spray. They slithered through the chocks, arched over the devil’s claws, and dropped into the whelps like skee-balls scoring points.
“I need lead lengths, gentlemen. Call ’em out.”
“Two thousand yards on the port chain,” said Chickering.
“Two thousand on the starboard,” said Ramsey.
“Marbles, let’s get under way! Forty rpm’s, if you please!”
“Aye! Forty!”
“Fifteen hundred on the port chain!”
“Fifteen hundred on the starboard!”
Anthony and the chief mate had been up all night poring over Rafferty’s U.S. Navy Salvor’s Handbook. With a tow this prodigious, a gap of more than eleven hundred yards would render the Val unsteerable. But a short leash, under nine hundred yards, could mean trouble too: if she suddenly slowed for any reason—a snapped shaft, a blown boiler—the cargo would plow into her stern through sheer momentum.
“Fifty rpm’s!” Anthony ordered.
“Fifty!” said Rafferty.
“Speed?”
“Six knots!”
“Steady, Weisinger!” Anthony told the quartermaster.
“Steady!” the AB echoed.
The chains kept coming, over the windlasses and through the hatches, filling the cavernous steel lockers like performing cobras returning to their wicker baskets after a hard day’s work.
“One thousand yards on the port chain!”
“One thousand on the starboard!”
“Speed?”
“Seven knots!”
“Brakes!” screamed Anthony into the walkie-talkie.
“Port brake on!”
“Starboard on!”
“Sixty rpm’s!”
Sixty!
Both windlasses stopped instantly, screeching and smoking as they showered the afterdeck with bright orange sparks.
“Disengage wildcats!”
“Port cat gone!”
“Starboard gone!”
“Hook claws!”
“Port claw hooked!”
“Starboard hooked!”
Something was wrong. The carcass’s speed had doubled, eight knots at least. Briefly Anthony imagined some supernatural jolt galvanizing the divine nervous system, though the real explanation, he suspected, lay in a sudden conjunction of the Guinea Current and the Southeast Trades. He lowered the binoculars. The Corpus Dei surged forward, crushingly, inexorably, spindrift flying from its crown as it bore down on the tanker like some primordial torpedo.
The prudent tactic was obvious: unlock the cats, free the chains, hard right rudder, full speed ahead.
But Anthony hadn’t been hired to play it safe. He’d been hired to bring God north, and while he didn’t relish the thought of presiding over the Valparaíso’s second collision in two years, either this damn rig worked or it didn’t. “Marbles, eighty rpm’s!”
“Eighty?”
“Eighty!”
“Eighty!” said the mate.
“Speed?”
“Nine knots!”
Nine, good: faster, surely, than the oncoming corpse. He studied the chains. No slack! No slack, and the ship was moving! “Quartermaster, ten degrees left rudder!” Lifting the binoculars, laughing into the wind, the captain studied His vast shining brow. “Course three-five-zero!”
“Three-five-zero!” said Weisinger.
Anthony pivoted toward the bow. “All engines ahead full!” he shouted to Rafferty, and they were off—off like some grandiose water-skiing act, off like some demented rendition of Achilles dragging Hector around the walls of Troy, off like some absurdist advertisement for Boys Town, USA, the angelic youngster bearing his crippled brother on his back (He ain’t heavy, Father, He’s my Creator)—off, towing Jehovah.
Part
two
Teeth
AS THE BURDENED Valparaíso crawled north through the Gulf of Guinea, Cassie Fowler realized that her desire to see their cargo destroyed was more complicated than she’d initially supposed. Yes, this body threatened to further empower the patriarchy. Yes, it was a terrible blow to reason. But something else was going on, something a bit more personal. If her dear Oliver could actually bring off such a spectacular feat, successfully applying his brains and wealth toward God’s obliteration, he would emerge in her eyes as a hero, second only to Charles Darwin. She might even, after all these years, acquiesce to Oliver’s longstanding proposal of marriage.
On July 14, at 0900, Cassie went to the radio shack and made her pitch to Lianne “Sparks” Bliss. They must send Oliver a secret fax. Immediate and total sabotage was required. The future of feminism hung in the balance.
Not that she didn’t love Oliver as he was: a sweet man, a committed atheist, and probably the best president the Central Park West Enlightenment League had ever had—yet also, Cassie felt, a castaway like herself, shipwrecked on the shores of his own essential uselessness, not just a Sunday painter but a Sunday human being. How better for a person to acquire some self-respect than to save Western Civilization from a return to misogynist theocracy?
“The future of feminism?” said Lianne, nervously fingering her crystal pendant. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly,” said Cassie.
“Yeah? Well, nobody except Father Thomas is allowed to contact the outside world. Captain’s orders.”
“Lianne, this damn body is exactly what the patriarchy has been waiting for—evidence that the world was created by the male chauvinist bully of the Old Testament.”
“Okay, but even if we did send a message, would your skeptic friends believe you?”
“Of course my skeptic friends wouldn’t believe me. They’re skeptics. They’d have to fly over, take pictures, argue among themselves…”
“Forget it, sweetie. I could get booted out of the Merchant Marine for something like this.”
“The future of feminism, Lianne…”
“I said forget it.”
The next morning, Cassie tried again.
“Century after century of phallocratic oppression, and finally women are gaining some ground. And now—bang—it’s back to square one.”
“Aren’t you overreacting a bit? We’re gonna bury the thing, not put it on fucking Oprah.”
“Yeah, but what’s to prevent somebody from happening on the tomb in a year or two and spilling the beans?”
“Father Thomas talked to an angel,” said Lianne defensively. “There’s obviously a cosmic necessity behind this voyage.”
“There’s a cosmic necessity behind feminism, too.”
“We shouldn’t go tampering with the cosmos, friend. We absolutely shouldn’t.”
For the rest of the day, Cassie made a point of avoiding Lianne. She had presented her case fully, outlining the ominous political implications of a male Corpus Dei. Now it was time to let the arguments sink in.
How different all this was from Cassie’s previous voyage. On the Beagle II you were periodically knocked off your feet, thrown from your bunk, plunged into nausea: you knew you were at sea. But the Valparaíso felt less like a ship than like some great metal island rooted to the ocean floor. To get any sense of motion, you had to climb down into the forward lookout post, a kind of steel patio thrust out over the water, and watch the stem plates smashing through the waves.
On the evening of July 13, Cassie stood in the bow, sipping coffee, savoring the sunset—a breathtaking spectacle to which the tubby AB on duty, Karl Jaworski, seemed oblivious—and imagining the androgynous marvels that lay perhaps two miles beneath her feet. Hippocampus guttulatus, for instance, the sea horse, whose
males incubated the eggs in special ventral pouches; or groupers, all of whom began life as females (half destined to undergo a sex change at adulthood); or the wonderfully subversive lumpfish, a species whose maternal instincts resided exclusively within the fathers (it being they who oxygenated the eggs during incubation and subsequently guarded the fry). To her right, beyond the horizon, spread the wide sultry delta of the Niger River. To her left, likewise hidden by the planet’s curve, lay Ascension Island. A suffocating heat arose, clothing her in equatorial steam, and she resolved to escape to the Valparaíso’s congenial little movie theater. True, she’d seen The Ten Commandments before—most recently Oliver’s laserdisc of the 35th Anniversary Collector’s Edition—so it wouldn’t have much dramatic impact, but at the moment air-conditioning mattered more than catharsis.
She took the elevator to level three, opened the door to the theater, and plunged into the gloriously cool air.
As it happened, Cassie harbored a special affection for The Ten Commandments. Without it, she would never have written her angriest play, God Without Tears (a prophetic title, she now realized), a one-act satire on the many bowdlerizations Cecil B. DeMille and company had committed in transferring Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy to the screen. She’d been particularly severe with DeMille’s unwillingness to consider the moral implications of the Ten Plagues, with his failure to record the injustices the Hebrews had suffered at their Sponsor’s hands as they wandered in the wilderness (Yahweh striking down the people who disparaged Canaan, firebombing those who complained at Hormah, sending serpents against the ones who grumbled on the road from Mount Hor, visiting a pestilence upon everybody who backslid at Peor), and with his glaring omission of the speech Moses had made to his generals following the subjugation of the Midianites: “Why have you spared the life of all the women? These were the very ones who perverted the sons of Israel! Kill all the male children! Kill also all the women who have slept with a man! Spare the lives only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take them for yourselves!” Paired with Runkleberg, God Without Tears had run for two weeks at Playwrights Horizons on West Forty-second Street, a bill that drew a rave review in Newsday, a pan in the Village Voice, and an Op-Ed letter of condemnation in the Times, written by Terence Cardinal Cooke himself.
Whatever its artistic shortcomings, DeMille’s homage to God’s omnipotence fully acknowledged the bladder’s limits. The movie had an intermission. After an hour and forty minutes, as Moses began his audience with the Burning Bush, the urge to urinate arose. Cassie decided to hold out. She couldn’t remember exactly when the hiatus came, but she knew it was imminent. Besides, she was enjoying herself, in a perverse sort of way. The urge worsened. She was about to leave in medias res—Moses heading back to Egypt with the aim of liberating his people—when the music swelled, the image faded, and the curtains closed.
Two women were ahead of her, almond-eyed Juanita Torres and asthmatic An-mei Jong, waiting to use the single-toilet ladies’ room. There she stood, mulling over her theory that the patriarchy derived in large measure from urinary flexibility, the male’s enviable ability to pee on the run, when a deep, familiar voice intruded.
“Want some?” said Lianne, extending a large, half-empty bag of popcorn. “Vegetarian style—no butter.”
Cassie grabbed a handful. “Seen this movie before?”
“My Sunday school class went in the mid-sixties, some sort of revival. ‘Beauty is but a curse to our women.’ Yech. If it weren’t for Follingsbee’s popcorn, I’d leave.”
A breach, thought Cassie. A chink in Lianne’s armor. “Watch what they do with Queen Nefretiri in Part Two.”
“I don’t like what they do with any of the women.”
“Yeah, but watch what they do with Nefretiri—DeMille and the patriarchy, watch what they do. Notice how, whenever Pharaoh commits some atrocity, chasing after the Hebrews with his chariots and so on, it’s because Nefretiri put him up to it. Same old story, right? Blame the woman. The patriarchy never sleeps, Lianne.”
“I can’t send your boyfriend a fax.”
“I understand.”
“They could take away my FCC license.”
“Right.”
“I can’t send it.”
“Of course you can’t.” Cassie took a greedy helping of Follingsbee’s popcorn. “Watch what they do with Nefretiri.”
July 16.
Latitude: 2°6'N. Longitude: 10°4'W. Course: 272. Speed: 9 knots when the Southeast Trades are with us, 3 in a headwind, 6 on average. Slow—much too slow. At this rate, we won’t cross the Arctic Circle before August 25, a full week behind schedule.
More bad news. The promised predators have finally caught our scent, and at 6 knots we can’t outrun them. We’re killing a dozen sharks on nearly every watch, and almost as many Liberian sea snakes and Cameroon vultures, but they keep on coming. When I sit down to write the official chronicle of this voyage, I’ll dub these bloody days the Battle of the Guinea Current.
“Why don’t they show their Creator a little more respect,” I ask Ockham, “like the porpoises and manatees did last week?”
“Respect?”
“He made them, right? They owe Him everything.”
“In partaking of such a meal,” says Ockham, “quite possibly they are showing Him respect.”
Our afterdeck groans, our windlasses creak, our chains rattle. We sound like Halloween. God forbid a link should break. Once, when I was third mate on the Arco Bangkok, ferrying napalm into the Gulf of Thailand, I saw a towline snap in two, whip across the poop deck, and cut the bos’n in half. Poor bastard lived for a good three minutes afterward. His last words were, “What are we doing in Vietnam, anyway?”
This morning I sent Dad a fax. I told him I’ve gotten the Valparaíso back and am now working for Pope Innocent XIV. “If it’s okay with you,” I wrote, “I’ll be dropping by Valladolid on my return trip.”
The snowy egrets loathe me, Popeye. The sea turtles scream for my blood.
At least once a day, I make a point of ferrying myself over to God, picking up a bazooka or a harpoon gun, and joining the battle. It helps the crew’s morale. The work is dangerous and exhausting, but they’re acquitting themselves well. I think they see our cargo as one of those things worth fighting for, like honor or the American flag.
Every evening, beginning around 1800 hours, Cassie Fowler drinks coffee in the forward lookout post. I’ve pretended to bump into her three times already. I think she’s catching on.
To what uncharted places did your passion for Olive Oyl take you, Popeye? Did you ever imagine lying with her on the fo’c’sle deck at the height of a monsoon, making furious love as the hot rain slicked your naked bodies? Did your creators ever animate such a moment for you, just to give you the thrill?
When the deckies think I’m not looking, they plunder the Corpus Dei, scraping off bits and pieces from the hairs, pimples, warts, and moles, then mixing them with potable water to make a kind of ointment.
“What’s it for?” I ask Ockham.
“Whatever ails them,” he replies.
An-mei Jong, the padre explains, swallows the stuff by the spoonful, hoping to relieve her asthma. Karl Jaworski rubs it on his arthritic joints. Ralph Mungo sticks it on an old Korean War wound that keeps acting up. Juanita Torres uses it for menstrual cramps.
“Does it help?” I ask Ockham.
“They say it does. These things are so subjective. Cassie Fowler calls it the placebo effect. The deckies call it glory grease.”
If I smear some glory grease on my forehead, Popeye, will the migraines go away?
“Shark off the starboard knee! Repeat: shark off the starboard knee!”
Neil Weisinger rose from his bed of holy flesh, set his WP-17 exploding-harpoon gun upright inside a kneecap pore, and pressed the SEND button on his Matsushita walkie-talkie. The heat was unbearable, as if the Guinea Current were about to boil. Had he not slathered his neck and shoulders with glory gr
ease, they would surely have blistered by now. “Course?” he radioed the bos’n, Eddie Wheatstone, currently on lookout.
“Zero-zero-two.”
In his dozen or so voyages as a merchant mariner, Neil had performed many hateful duties, but none so hateful as predator patrol. While washing toilets was degrading, cleaning ballast tanks disgusting, and chipping rust tedious beyond words, at least these jobs entailed no immediate threat to life and limb. Twice already, he’d taken the elevator up to the chief mate’s quarters, determined to lodge a formal complaint, but on both occasions his courage had deserted him at the last minute.
Clipping the Matsushita to his utility belt, right next to the WP-17’s transmitter, Neil raised his field glasses to his eyes and looked east. From his present station he couldn’t see Eddie—too much distance, too much mist—but he knew the bos’n was there all right, standing on the lee side of a starboard toe and surveying the choppy bay created by God’s half-submerged legs.
He hit SEND. “Bearing?”
“Zero-four-six. He’s a twenty-footer, Neil! I’ve never seen so many teeth in one mouth before!”
Lifting the harpoon gun from its pore, Neil marched across the wrinkled, spongy beach that stretched for sixty yards from His knee to the ocean. Water reared up, a high spuming wall eternally created and re-created as the great patella cut its way through the Atlantic. “Operation Jehovah,” the captain was forever calling this peculiar tow, evidently unaware that for a Jew like Neil the word Jehovah was vaguely offensive, the secret and unspeakable YHWH contaminated with secular vowels.
He scanned the churning rollers. Eddie was right: a twenty-foot hammerhead shark, swimming coastwise like some huge organic mallet bred to nail the divine coffin shut. Balancing the WP-17 on his shoulder, Neil cupped the telescopic sight against his eye and plucked the walkie-talkie from his belt.
“Speed?”
“Twelve knots.”
“We aren’t required to do this,” Neil informed the bos’n. “I’ll bet you anything it’s against union rules. We simply aren’t required. Range?”
“Sixteen yards.”