Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  “Steady,” said Katsakos.

  “Steady,” echoed Neil.

  It was damn hairy, this business of maneuvering at high speed through the bergs and floes of the Norwegian Sea. Despite his second-mate status, Katsakos did not seem like a particularly smart or experienced sailor (the day before, he’d led them six leagues off course before noticing his error), and Neil did not really trust him to guide the tanker safely. Neil’s fervent wish was that the Maracaibo’s captain himself would appear on the bridge and take over.

  “Ten degrees left rudder.”

  “Ten left.”

  But the captain never appeared on the bridge—or anywhere else, for that matter. He was as aloof and inaccessible as the immaterial God whom Neil had failed to find during his self-imposed exile on Van Horne Island. At times he wondered whether the Maracaibo even had a master.

  For the first three days, Neil’s penance had gone well. The sun had been suitably hot, his hunger appropriately painful, his thirst fittingly intense (he’d allowed himself no more than a pint of dew every four hours). Perched in his petrified fig tree like some crazed, outcast, spiritually famished vulture, Neil had struggled to gain the universe’s attention. “You appeared to Moses! You appeared to Job!” he’d cried into the fog, over and over until his tongue became so dry the words stuck to it like burrs. “Now appear to me!”

  Looking out to sea, Neil had been astonished to behold a Persian Gulf tanker, gravid with cargo and lying at anchor in the very cove from which the Valparaíso had recently departed. An hour later, a Falstaffian man with bad skin appeared at the base of his tree, swathed in the island’s eternal mist.

  “And who might you be?” demanded the intruder in a musical Italian accent. Terra-cotta sand clung to his vinyl cassock, muting the bright red silk.

  “Able Seaman Weisinger of the United States Merchant Marine,” he mumbled, certain he was about to faint.

  “Tullio Cardinal Di Luca of the Vatican. You may address me as Eminence. Are you with the Carpco Valparaíso?”

  “Not anymore.” A wave of vertigo. Neil feared he might fall from the tree. “I’m marooned, Eminence. Last time I saw the Val, she was headed for the Arctic.”

  “Strange. Your captain was ordered to return to this island. Evidently he’s following his own star.”

  “Evidently.”

  “Was it Van Horne who marooned you?”

  “I marooned myself.”

  “Oh?”

  “To find God,” Neil explained. The holes in Cardinal Di Luca’s face suggested a child’s connect-the-dots puzzle. What constellation would emerge if you drew a line from pock to pock? Ophiuchus, Neil guessed. Serpent Bearer. “The God beyond God. The God of the four A.M. watch. En Sof.”

  “You expect to find God in a tree?”

  “Moses did, Eminence.”

  “Do you want a job, Able Seaman Weisinger?”

  “I want to find God.”

  “Yes, but do you want a job? The Maracaibo departed before we could assemble a proper crew. I can offer you the position of quartermaster.”

  Hunger clawed at Neil’s stomach. His gullet screamed for water. For all he knew, a few more hours of such suffering might be enough to inflame these branches with En Sof.

  And yet…

  “As far as the Maracaibo’s company is concerned,” Di Luca continued, “Van Horne’s cargo is a motion-picture prop. The Holy See aims to keep the film from getting made. Join us, Mr. Weisinger. Time-and-a-half for overtime.”

  The Lord, Neil decided, worked through many media, not just burning bushes and stone trees. YHWH dispatched angels, wrote on walls, poured dreams into prophets’ heads. Perhaps He even used the Catholic Church from time to time. By sending Tullio Di Luca to this place, Neil realized with a surge of joy, the God of the four A.M. watch was almost certainly telling him to get on with his life…

  “Right ten degrees.”

  “Right ten,” echoed Neil.

  “Steady.”

  “Steady.”

  Behind Neil a door squealed open. A pungent fragrance wafted across the bridge, the sourness of human sweat mixed with the woodsy scent of a burning cheroot.

  “What’s your course, Katsakos?” A male voice, resonant and gruff.

  The second mate stiffened. “Zero-one-four.”

  Neil turned. With his broad shoulders, ramrod spine, and leonine head emerging from the hood of a brilliant purple parka, the master of the Maracaibo looked aristocratic if not royal. Though scored with age, his face was astonishingly handsome, dark brown eyes shining from beneath a lofty brow, strong cheekbones flanking an aquiline nose.

  “Speed?”

  “Fifteen knots,” said Katsakos.

  “Bump her up to seventeen.”

  “Is that safe, Captain Van Horne?”

  “When I’m on the bridge, it’s safe.”

  “He called you Van Horne,” Neil blurted out as Katsakos advanced the throttles.

  “Quite so.” The master of the Maracaibo puffed on his cheroot. “Christopher Van Horne.”

  “The last captain I shipped with was named Van Horne too. Anthony Van Horne.”

  “I know,” said the old man. “Di Luca told me. My son’s a good sailor, but he lacks—what shall we call it?—gumption.”

  “Anthony Van Horne…,” mused the second mate. “Wasn’t he in charge when the Valparaíso spilled her cookies into the Gulf of Mexico?”

  “I heard it was mostly Carpco’s fault,” said Neil. “An overworked crew, an understaffed ship…”

  “Don’t defend the man. Know what he’s hauling now? A goddamn skin-flick prop, that’s what.” The captain stubbed out his cheroot on the twelve-mile radar. “Tell me, Mr. Weisinger, are you a sailor I can depend on?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Ever held the wheel in a storm?”

  “Last Fourth of July, I steered the Val through the heart of Hurricane Beatrice.”

  “Through the heart?”

  “Your son wanted to get from Raritan Bay to the Gulf of Guinea in twelve days.”

  “That’s insane,” said the captain. His indignation, Neil felt, was tempered by a certain parental pride. “You made the deadline?”

  “We stopped to rescue a castaway.”

  “But you would’ve made it?”

  “Pretty likely.”

  “In just twelve days?”

  “Yep.”

  Christopher Van Horne smiled, the wrinkled flesh rolling across his magnificent skull. “Listen, Seaman Weisinger, when we finally catch the Val, you’re the man I want at the wheel.” His voice dropped to a half whisper. “Unless I miss my guess, we’ll be making some pretty tricky turns.”

  On the sixteenth of September, at 0915, as the Valparaíso hit the 71st parallel, Cassie Fowler realized that she was in love. Her discovery came during a moment of tranquility, as she and Anthony stood watching the tanker’s hatchetlike prow push through the passage formed by two colossal bergs. Had it happened in the heat of sex (and there’d been plenty of that lately, an itinerant orgy staged wherever their impulses took them, from Anthony’s cabin to the fo’c’sle locker to the bizarre garden Sam Follingsbee was cultivating below), she would have dismissed it as illusory, akin to the phenomenon that prompted dying people to mistake oxygen deprivation for the glow of heaven. But this emotion could be trusted. This felt real. Damn, it was confusing, loving the very man who’d been deputized to preserve the most malevolent counterfeminist artifact since Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.

  “The Arctic’s a known quantity these days,” said Anthony, “but you can’t imagine all the grief and blood that went into mapping this part of the globe.”

  While Cassie’s curiosity urged her to confess her passion then and there—would he laugh? panic? grow mute? say he was as crazy about her as she was about him?—her political convictions told her to wait. This morning, assuming she’d calculated correctly, Oliver would attack their cargo. She would be foolish to divide her loya
lties by entertaining romantic protestations from Anthony at such an hour. If he did an effective job of conveying his love, she might even lose her nerve. Her worst-case scenario had her getting on the Val’s radio, contacting the Enterprise, and telling Oliver to scratch the mission.

  “In the last century, your average armchair geographer believed there was an open, ice-free sea at the North Pole.”

  “Where’d they get that idea?” asked Cassie.

  “Here in the Atlantic we’ve got our Gulf Stream—right?—and meanwhile the Japanese have their Kuroshio, their great Black Tide. The geographers imagined both currents flowing all the way north, melting the bergs and floes, then joining to form a vast warm ocean.”

  “There’s nothing quite so pernicious as wishful thinking.”

  “Yeah, but such a beautiful wish. I mean, what captain wouldn’t fall in love with a fantasy like that? Piloting your ship up the Bering Strait, finding a secret gateway in the ice, sailing across the top of the world…”

  A burst of static drew Anthony’s attention to the walkie-talkie clipped to his utility belt.

  “Captain to the bridge!” screamed Marbles Rafferty. “We need you up here, sir!”

  Anthony grabbed the radio, pressed SEND. “What’s the problem?”

  “Airplanes!”

  “Airplanes?”

  “Airplanes, Captain—from goddamn World War Two!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Just get up here!”

  Airplanes, thought Cassie, following Anthony as he abandoned the lookout post and started down the icy catwalk. Glory be, dear Oliver had actually brought it off. Before the day was out, if all went well, the New Dark Ages would no longer be crouching at the edge of human history, poised to claim center stage.

  “Airplanes,” grumbled Anthony, charging into the elevator car. “I don’t need any fucking airplanes in my life right now.”

  “Their mission may be more benign than you suppose,” said Cassie. As they rose to level seven, a peculiar thought possessed her. Might it be possible to win him over? If she mustered all her best arguments, might he come to see that locking this corpse forever out of history was far more important than sticking it in a tomb? “And your mission less so.”

  They disembarked, passed through the wheelhouse—An-mei Jong at the helm—and marched onto the starboard wing, where the eternally morose Marbles Rafferty stood peering aft through the bridge binoculars, grunting in dismay.

  Cassie looked south. Three separate clusters of droning torpedo planes wove among the bergs, sweeping back and forth across the corpse’s ice-glazed neck, while, several miles above sea level, a swarm of noisy dive bombers made ready to plunge toward the frozen omphalos. Wondrous vibrations surged through her, hymns of impending battle, pleasing for their own sake and pleasing for what they meant: despite her love for Anthony, despite the various moral and psychological ambiguities inherent in this crusade, she was not about to buckle.

  Rafferty pressed the binoculars into Anthony’s chest. “See what I’m talkin’ about?” moaned the chief mate, pointing south as Anthony lifted the Bushnells and focused. “I think those are classic SBD-2 Dauntlesses over near the belly, and meanwhile we got ourselves a squadron of TBD-1 Devastators zooming ’round the throat—all of ’em built, I swear, Captain, all of ’em built in the late thirties. It’s like some goddamn Twilight Zone episode!”

  “Steady, sir?” called An-mei Jong from the wheelhouse.

  “No—turn!” bellowed Anthony, cheeks reddening, eyes darting in all directions. “Left full rudder! We’re taking evasive action!”

  “You can’t evade this,” Cassie insisted.

  “Marbles, get on the sticks! Flank speed!”

  “Aye!”

  As the mate sprinted into the wheelhouse, Anthony seized Cassie’s forearm, squeezing so hard she felt the pressure through the goose-down stuffing. “What do you mean, I can’t evade this?” he said.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Do you know where these planes are from?”

  “Yep.”

  “Where?”

  “Let go of my arm,” Cassie insisted. He did. “Pembroke and Flume’s World War Two Reenactment Society.”

  “Pembroke and who? What?”

  “They’re working for hire.”

  “Who hired them?”

  “Some friends of mine.”

  “Friends of yours? Oliver, you mean?”

  “Try to understand, Anthony—dead or alive, this body’s a menace. If it ever becomes public, reason and women’s equality go out the window. Entombment’s not enough—it must be dumped in the Mohns Trench and left to decompose. Tell me you understand.”

  He faced her squarely, lips curled, teeth clenched. “Understand? Understand?!”

  “I don’t think that’s asking too much.”

  “How could you betray me like this?”

  “The patriarchy’s been betraying my gender for the past four thousand years.”

  “How could you, Cassie? How could you?”

  She looked him in the eye and said, “A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do.”

  For a moment Cassie’s lover stood frozen on the bridge wing, immobilized by anger.

  Checkmate, she thought.

  He spun toward the wheelhouse. “Evasive action!” he yelled to Jong. “Left full rudder!”

  “You already gave that order, sir!”

  Locked in a tight V, five Devastators swung around from the west and flew straight for the neck, releasing their payloads as they drew within a thousand feet of the target. Swiftly, smoothly, the torpedoes made their runs, bubbly white lather spuming from their propellers. One by one, the warheads hit flesh and detonated, sending up fountains of boiling lymph and geysers of pulverized tissue. Cassie laughed: a long, low whoop of delight. At last she was getting it. This was why men took such trouble to arrange for fire and chaos in their lives—the rush of destruction, the imperial nonboredom of war, history’s intoxicating grease. There were probably highs of equal caliber on earth, certainly less violent ones, but, oh, what lovely theater it made, what a hell of an opening night.

  At last the tanker began her turn, carving a great crescent of foam in the Norwegian Sea, God inexorably following.

  “Now hear this!” cried Anthony, grabbing the PA mike. “Now hear this—two squadrons of hostile warplanes are presently harassing our cargo! The Val herself is in no danger, and we’re taking evasive action! Repeat: the Val is in no danger!”

  Cassie released a contemptuous snort. He could call it evasive action if he liked, but at nine lousy knots the stiff was a sitting duck.

  “I pulled you out of the sea!” Anthony brandished the binoculars, holding them before Cassie as if he meant to smash her across the face. “I fed you my mescal worms!”

  She couldn’t decide whether she was madder at Anthony or herself. How naive, how stupefyingly naive, to have imagined he might sanction her agenda. “Damn, I knew you’d miss the point, I just knew it.” Tearing the binoculars from Anthony’s hands, she aimed them at a PBY flying boat currently orbiting above their cargo’s brow. For a brief instant Oliver materialized before her eyes—sweet, weak-chinned Oliver, sitting by a starboard window and looking like a roller-coaster rider on the verge of throwing up. “You know, Anthony, you’re taking this attack much too personally. It’s beyond your control. Relax.”

  “Nothing’s beyond my control!”

  At 0935 an echelon of six dive bombers struck, engines screaming as they peeled off and hurtled downward, lobbing their payloads against the stomach like a flock of blue-footed boobies defecating on Saint Paul’s Rocks. With each direct hit, a ragged column of melted ice and vaporized skin shot skyward.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded a perplexed Father Thomas, striding onto the starboard wing in the company of an equally baffled Dolores Haycox.

  “The Battle of Midway,” Cassie replied.

  “Jesus H. Christ,”
muttered Haycox.

  “Is the Vatican behind it?” asked Father Thomas.

  “You don’t belong here!” shouted Anthony.

  “I warned you not to mess with Rome,” said the priest.

  “Get out!”

  “The Church can’t take credit,” said Cassie.

  “Who, then?” asked Father Thomas.

  “The Enlightenment.”

  “I said get out!” Anthony, sputtering, lurched toward the third mate. “I want to see Sparks—on the double!”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said Haycox again, starting away.

  The next two attacks occurred simultaneously, a V of torpedo planes methodically expanding the breach in God’s neck while another echelon of dive bombers doggedly augmented His belly wound.

  “I’ve never boasted a particularly sophisticated grasp of politics,” Father Thomas confessed.

  “This isn’t politics,” snarled Anthony. “It’s feminist paranoia!” Again he squeezed Cassie’s arm. “Has it occurred to you that if your little friends succeed, the body will drag us all down with it?”

  “Don’t worry—they’ll be bombing the chains soon. Kindly remove your dung forks from my person.”

  Lianne strode onto the wing, face lit by a wide, meandering smile. “You rang, sir?”

  “Those planes are destroying our cargo,” wailed Anthony.

  “So I see.”

  “I want you to raise the squadron leaders.”

  Aye-aye.

  “Hi, Lianne,” said Cassie.

  “Morning, sweetie.”

  “Shit, did you have a hand in this, Sparks?” asked Anthony.

  Lianne winced. “I’ll confess to harboring a certain sympathy for what those planes are trying to do, sir,” she replied, sidestepping the question. “That body’s bad news for women everywhere.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Cassie told Anthony. “Normally you’d have to pay sixty dollars to see a Pembroke and Flume extravaganza.”

  “Raise those leaders, Sparks!”

  Oliver hated the Battle of Midway. It was noisy, confusing, and manifestly dangerous. “Do we have to be so close?” he asked Ensign Reid over the intercom. The third Devastator attack had just gotten under way, five planes zooming across the deckhouse of the circling supertanker and lobbing their torpedoes straight into God’s neck. As each payload exploded, Strawberry Eleven responded to the shock wave, twisting and rocking like a shot goose. “Why don’t we watch”—Oliver extended a trembling index finger—“from over there? Over there by that big berg!”