Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

SQUEEZE LEVER AND SWEEP SIDE TO SIDE. A thick gray mist gushed from the horn, coating the war reenactor in foul-smelling chemicals and instantly smothering the flames.

  “It’s gonna hurt!” groaned Flume as the PBY careened crazily, dropping toward the ocean. “It’s really gonna hurt!”

  “No tail!”

  “Give me pants that en-trance! It’s starting to hurt!”

  Tearing off his headset, Oliver crawled past Flume’s smoking, writhing form, lurched into the tunnel gunner’s compartment, and began attacking the flames.

  “Why does God permit this?” asked Pembroke of no one in particular.

  “Shoulders Gibraltar, shiny as a halter!” screamed Flume, writhing in agony. “Oh, Jesus, it hurts! It hurts so much!”

  Everyone tried to be polite.

  Everyone struggled to avoid the subject.

  But in the end Albert Flume’s situation could not be denied, and right before Strawberry Eleven belly flopped into the Norwegian Sea, splitting into a dozen pieces, Pembroke turned to his best friend and said, in a soft, sad voice, “Alby, buddy, you don’t have any arms.”

  Father

  BY A MIRACLE OF the sort that in an earlier age Jehovah Himself might have wrought, the Valparaíso stayed afloat that afternoon, allowing the officers, crew, and rescued war reenactors to abandon her in an orderly fashion. There was even time to salvage certain crucial items: footlockers, musical instruments, fillets of Corpus Dei, a few jars of glory grease, some supervegetables from Follingsbee’s garden, the Ten Commandments print. The Valparaíso was terminal, of course. Anthony knew it. A captain could always tell. No ingenious patching job or heroic pumping effort could save her. But what a fighter, he thought, what a tough old lady, ceding fewer than ten feet per hour to the bloodstained Norwegian Sea. By noon her weather deck lay completely buried, but her superstructure was still visible, rising out of the waves like a hotel perched on pylons.

  At 1420, Anthony began ferrying the final group over the red ocean to the Carpco Maracaibo—a grim little party consisting of Cassie, Rafferty, O’Connor, Father Ockham, and Sister Miriam, each evacuee clutching a seabag. No one said a word. Cassie refused to look him in the eye. She had much to brood about, he knew, several reasons to be sad: the failure of her plot, the crash landing of her boyfriend’s plane, the deaths of John Waldron and two other mercenaries. Were Anthony not himself benumbed and despondent, he might have actually felt sorry for her.

  He parked the Juan Fernández beside a vulcanized rubber dock tied to the Maracaibo’s hull, waited until everyone had disembarked, then cast off.

  “Where’re you going?” Rafferty called after him.

  “I forgot my sextant.”

  “Christ, Anthony—I’ll buy you a sextant in New York!”

  “My sister gave it to me!” he shouted toward the fading figures on the dock.

  By 1445 Anthony was back at the wreck site, maneuvering the Juan Fernández alongside a first-floor window. He smashed the glass with the launch’s stockless anchor and climbed over the sill. The elevator had shorted out, so he used the companionways instead. Reaching level seven, he entered the chart room, locked the door, and waited.

  Brain lost.

  Body lost.

  Val lost.

  There was no choice, really. He’d blown the mission. His second chance was gone.

  He stared at the Formica table. The jumbled maps tormented him. Sulawesi, redolent of Cassie’s midriff. Pago Pago, so evocative of her breasts. He lifted his gaze. Forward wall, the Mediterranean; aft wall, the Indian Ocean; port wall, the South Pacific; starboard wall, the North Atlantic. He was giving up so much, all these glorious tracts of sea and patches of shore, most of them despoiled and ravaged by the reigning species, yet all still painfully beautiful at the core. Let no man say Anthony Van Horne did not know what he was losing.

  His migraine awoke. In a corner of the aura, an oiled egret rose from the chart of Matagorda Bay and flapped its matted wings. Seconds later, a pilot whale, glossy with Texas crude, wriggled out of the same poisoned sea, flopped onto the floor, and died. How would the end come? Would the ocean pour into the chart room and drown him? Or was the door sufficiently watertight that he would survive the descent into the Mohns Trench, only to perish when the impossible pressures hit the superstructure, crushing it like an egg under a jackboot?

  A loud knock. Then four, rat-a-tat-tat. Anthony ignored them. His visitor persisted.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Thomas. Open up.”

  “Get away!”

  “Suicide’s a sin, Anthony.”

  “In whose eyes? His? They went to jelly two weeks ago.”

  At least one of the losing admirals at Midway, he recalled, had done the honorable thing. Anthony hungered for the details. Had the poor defeated Jap chained himself to the helm? Had he changed his mind at the last minute but died anyway because nobody was around to unlock the manacle?

  A new voice now. “Anthony, open the door. Something unbelievable has happened.”

  “Cassie, get out! You’re on a sinking ship!”

  “I just talked to the Maracaibo’s second mate, and he says her skipper is named Christopher Van Horne.”

  Anthony’s migraine flared hotter than ever. “Get out!”

  “Christopher Van Horne,” she said again. “Your father!”

  “My father’s in Spain.”

  “Your father’s a thousand yards to port. Open the door.”

  A dark laugh rose from the depths of Anthony’s chest. Him? Dear old Dad? But of course, naturally, who else would the Vatican have picked to hunt down the Val and steal her cargo? He wondered how they’d lured him out of retirement. Money, most likely. (Columbus had been greedy too.) Or had the old man been seduced by the opportunity to humiliate his son once again?

  “He wants to see you, Katsakos says.” Cassie sounded on the verge of tears.

  “He wants to steal my cargo.”

  “He’s in no shape to steal anything,” Ockham insisted. “He was out in the open when that bomb hit the Maracaibo.”

  “He’s hurt?”

  “Sounds pretty bad.”

  “Is he assuming I’ll come?”

  “He’s assuming you’ll go down with your ship,” said the priest. “‘The Van Hornes go down with their ships,’ he told Katsakos.”

  “Then I mustn’t disappoint him.”

  “Guess he knows you pretty well.”

  “He doesn’t know me at all. Get back to the Maracaibo, both of you.”

  “He tried to save the Val,” Cassie protested.

  “I doubt that,” said Anthony.

  “Open the door. Why do you think he cut your chains?”

  “To take my cargo away.”

  “To stop the torpedo strike. Why do you think he fired on the planes?”

  “So they wouldn’t sink our cargo.”

  “So they wouldn’t sink you. Ask Katsakos. Open the door.”

  Anthony fixed on the starboard wall. He imagined God massaging the primordial continent, cleaving South America from Africa; he saw the new ocean, the Atlantic, pouring into the breach like amniotic fluid spilling from a ruptured birth sac. Was Cassie telling the truth? Had the old man’s Midway tactics really been intended to save the Val?

  “I lost God.”

  “Merely for the moment,” said Ockham. “You’ll finish this job yet.”

  “Your father loves you,” said Cassie. “So do I, for that matter. Open the door.”

  “The Val’s doomed,” said Anthony.

  “Then you’ll have to hitch Him to the Maracaibo, won’t you?” said Ockham.

  “The Maracaibo’s not mine.”

  “That needn’t stop you.”

  Anthony opened the door.

  And there she stood, eyes moist and sunken, lips chapped, a band of frost spread across her brow like a diamond tiara. Lord, what a perfect match they were: two strong-willed people preoccupied with seven million tons of carrion, though for very di
fferent reasons.

  “You love me, Cassie?”

  “Against my better judgment.”

  Taking his mirrorshades from the pocket of his parka, Anthony slipped them on and, turning, confronted Ockham with a dual reflection of his captain. “You really think we can resume the tow?”

  “I’ve seen you pull bigger rabbits out of smaller hats,” said the priest.

  “Okay, but first I’m goin’ to my cabin. I need some things. A Popeye the Sailor notebook…”

  Ockham cringed. “Captain, the Val’s about to break apart.”

  “A brass sextant,” said Anthony. “A bottle of burgundy.”

  “Be quick about it.”

  “The feather of an angel.”

  “I can certainly see the resemblance,” said the agitated young man with the frozen stethoscope slung around his neck and the aluminum clipboard snugged against his chest. “The high forehead, the heavy jaw—you’re definitely your father’s son.”

  “And my mother’s…” Anthony climbed past a rack of empty Crotale missile launchers and stepped onto the Maracaibo’s athwartships catwalk.

  “Giuseppe Carminati,” said the physician. His ensemble included an officer’s cap with a red cross stitched above the brim and a ceremonial overcoat sporting gold buttons and epaulets, as if he’d just come from appearing in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta about shipboard surgeons. “Your father’s alive, but he can’t be moved. Our quartermaster’s attending him over by number three ballast tank. I believe you know the man. We picked him up in the Gibraltar Sea.”

  “Neil Weisinger?” asked Ockham eagerly.

  Wrapping his glove around the frosty bulb of his stethoscope, Carminati turned toward the priest. “Correct. Weisinger.” The physician smiled with the left side of his mouth. “Perhaps you remember me?”

  “We’ve met?”

  “Three months ago, in the Vatican screening room—I was Gabriel’s attending physician.” Carminati hugged himself. “I should be in Rome right now, listening to the Holy Father’s heart. I don’t function well in the cold.”

  “You got many casualties?” asked Anthony.

  “Compared with the original Midway, no. Twenty-one cases of acute hypothermia, most of them complicated by lacerations and broken bones, plus a noncombatant observer who got badly burned when his PBY caught fire.”

  “Oliver Shostak?” asked Cassie in a fearful, repentant voice.

  “Albert Flume,” said Carminati, consulting his clipboard. “Shostak, it seems, has a dislocated shoulder. You know him?”

  “An old boyfriend. Dislocated shoulder, that’s all?”

  “Superficial cuts, minor burns, treatable hypothermia.”

  “And some people say there’s no God,” muttered Anthony.

  “Expect to lose anyone?” asked Ockham.

  “No, though the actor portraying Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, a man named”—Carminati glanced at the list—“Brad Keating, was vaporized when a missile hit his torpedo plane. Ditto his gunner, Carny Otis in the role of Ensign Collins. Forty minutes ago we pulled a corpse from the sea: David Pasquali as Ensign George Gay. But for the fact that he’ll be dead soon, Captain, your father would probably be facing a manslaughter indictment.”

  “Dead?” Anthony steadied himself on the Crotale rack. No, God, please, the bastard couldn’t be checking out yet, not before shriving his son.

  “Forgive my bluntness,” said Carminati. “It’s been a bad morning. I can promise you he’s in no pain. The Maracaibo carries more morphine than bunker fuel.”

  “Anthony…I’m so sorry,” said Cassie. “These people Oliver hired, they’re obviously deranged. I never imagined…” The words froze in her throat.

  The captain faced the bow, shouldered his knapsack, and marched down the Maracaibo’s central catwalk, passing over a vast tangle of valves and pipework spreading in all directions like exposed entrails. Reaching the fo’c’sle, he picked his way through the aftermath of the demolition bomb—buckled hatches, smashed bulwarks, melted Phalanx cannon—and, descending the ladder, started toward number three ballast tank.

  Ever since the butane had gone into the gravy, Anthony had wondered exactly how he would behave when his father finally left the world. Would he snicker through the viewing? Pass out balloons at the funeral? Leave a lunger on the grave? He needn’t have worried. The instant he beheld Christopher Van Horne’s trapped and broken form, a flood of spontaneous pity poured through him.

  Evidently the shock wave had lifted the old man from behind the Phalanx, flung him off the fo’c’sle, and dropped him beside the tank. There he lay, parka shredded, eyes closed, body imprisoned by an errant Hoffritz valve assembly, its ten-foot-long stem driven clear through the Butterworth plate, its huge circular handle—larger than a covered-wagon wheel—pressed tightly against his chest, pinning him to the starboard samson post in a dreadful parody of sitting. Fire had ravaged the sides of his face, exposing his beautiful cheekbones. His left leg, grotesquely bent, might have belonged to a castoff marionette, a puppet whose master had died for reasons not even the angels knew.

  Neil Weisinger stood atop the plate, teeth chattering as he transferred fresh water from an insulated gallon jug to a cylindrical white Thermos bottle advertising Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “Good afternoon, sir,” said the AB, saluting. “We got a team of licensed welders under the deck right now, cutting the stern loose.”

  “You’re a two-time deserter, Weisinger.” Anthony shed his knapsack.

  “Not exactly, sir,” said the AB, capping the bottle. A corrugated straw elbowed out of the lid. “I didn’t break out of the brig—Joe Spicer kidnapped me.”

  “If somebody’s a deserter,” mumbled Christopher Van Horne, “he should be hauled off…”

  Unzipping the knapsack, Anthony removed a liter of burgundy and gestured for the Last Crusade bottle.

  “…hauled off and shot.”

  Anthony dumped out the water and, in a small-scale recapitulation of the pump-room boys ballasting the Val with blood, filled the bottle to the brim. Kneeling, he placed one glove on the valve, the other on his father’s shoulder. “Hello, Dad,” he whispered.

  “Son?” The old man’s eyes flickered open. “That you? You came?”

  “It’s me. Hope you’re not in pain.”

  “Wish I was.”

  “Oh?”

  “I knew this guy once, a demac on the Amoco Cádiz, dying of bone cancer. You know what he said? ‘When they give you morphine like there’s no tomorrow, there isn’t.’” An oddly seraphic grin spread across Christopher Van Horne’s ashen face. “Tell Tiffany I love her. Got that? Old Froggy loves her.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “You think she’s a bimbo, don’t you?”

  “No, no.” Like a firing-squad captain providing his prisoner with a last cigarette, Anthony pushed the corrugated straw between his father’s lips. “Have some wine.”

  The old man sipped. “Good stuff.”

  “The best.”

  “No more beard, huh?”

  “No more beard.”

  “You didn’t go down with your ship.” His tone was more curious than accusing.

  “I’ve found the woman I want to marry. You’d like her.”

  “I really stuck it to those squadrons, didn’t I?”

  “She’s got Mom’s energy, Susan’s spunk.”

  “Smeared ’em all over the sky.”

  Anthony withdrew the straw. “Something else you should know. That uncharted island in the Gibraltar Sea—I named it after you. Van Horne Island.”

  “Gave every damn Dauntless hell. More wine, okay?”

  “Van Horne Island,” said Anthony again, reinserting the straw. “You’ve finally got your own private paradise. Understand?”

  “It’s really shitty, dying. There’s nothing good about it. Sure wish Tiff were here.”

  Sliding Raphael’s feather from his knapsack, Anthony held it before the old man, its vane quivering
in the wind. “Listen, Dad. Do you know what kind of feather this is?”

  “It’s a feather.”

  “What kind?”

  “I don’t give a fuck. Albatross.”

  “Angel, Dad.”

  “Looks like albatross.”

  “An angel hired me. Wings, halo, everything. This cargo I’ve been hauling, it’s not a movie prop, it’s God’s dead body.”

  “No, I’m the one with the body, I’m the one, and now it’s all wrecked. You left the bridge. Tiff’s a real knockout, isn’t she? Wonder what she sees in me. Half the time my dick doesn’t even work.”

  “I’m going to get the job done. I’m going to haul our Creator to His tomb.”

  “You’re not making a whole lot of sense, son. It’s so weird, being crushed like this and not feeling anything. Angel? Creator? What?”

  “All the bad things you ever did to me—Thanksgiving, locking up the Constitution—I’m ready to let them go.” Anthony pulled off his gloves, holding his naked hands before his father. “Just tell me you’re proud I drew this mission. Tell me you’re proud, and you know I can finish it, and I should put the spill out of my mind.”

  “Constitution?”

  As ice formed beneath his fingernails, Anthony slipped his gloves back on. “Look at me. Say, ‘Put the spill out of your mind.’”

  “What kind of stupid death is this?” Like crude oil seeping from a subterranean reservoir, blood rose to fill the old man’s mouth, mingling with the wine; his words bubbled up through the pool. “Isn’t it enough I shot your tow chains apart? Isn’t that enough?” Tears came, rolling over his naked white cheekbones. “I don’t know what you want, son. Constitution? Angel? Aren’t broken chains enough?” The tears reached his jaw and froze. He shook violently, spasm after spasm of unfelt pain. “Take ’er over, Anthony.” He grabbed the rim of the valve handle and tried to turn it, as if he were living back in 1954, a pumpman again, working the weather deck of the Texaco Star. “Take over the ship.”

  The pure hopelessness of the situation, the morbid comedy of it all, brought a sardonic smile to Anthony’s lips, a grin to match his Creator’s. For the first time ever, his father was offering him something that he wouldn’t—couldn’t—take back…only there was one small catch.