Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  “Mutiny’s the word,” said Di Luca.

  Van Horne shifted the feather from the physician to the cardinal. “If I’m in rebellion against the Vatican, Eminence, then the Vatican’s in rebellion against heaven.” The captain closed his eyes. “I shall leave it for you to decide which is the more serious sin.”

  The half-dozen vending machines in the Maracaibo’s snack bar dispensed a wide variety of grotesqueries: Hostess Twinkies, Li’l Debbie Snack Cakes, Ring Dings—each item underscoring Oliver’s creeping conviction that, with or without a Corpus Dei, Western civilization stood on the brink of collapse. Cassie occupied a contoured plastic chair adjacent to a small Formica table, nursing a Mountain Dew beneath the Lucite glow of the COLD DRINKS machine, an image that for Oliver recalled Degas’s masterful Glass of Absinthe. To her right, PASTRY ’N SNACKS. To her left, CANDY ’N SWEETS. He approached HOT DRINKS, secured black coffee in a paper cup unaccountably decorated with playing cards, and joined her.

  “I believe the Reenactment Society is going out of business,” he said. “Midway finished it off.”

  “The past dies hard.”

  “I guess. Sure. You’ve always been a deeper thinker than me.”

  “It kicks and screams, but eventually it dies.”

  Oliver jammed his thumb into the scalding coffee, savoring the penitential pain. “Hey, Cassandra, we’ve had some terrific times together, haven’t we? Remember Denver?” In some ways that particular Enlightenment League escapade—a colorful protest against the gigantic plywood Ten Commandments that the Fraternal Order of Eagles had erected on the capitol lawn—had been the high point of their relationship. In the park across the street he and Cassie had raised an equally formidable sign labeled WHAT GOD REALLY SAID and featuring a nouvelle decalogue they’d coauthored two days earlier between episodes of rapturous sex (they were field-testing the Shostak Supreme) in her apartment. “I’ll bet if we work at it, we can remember them all. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, except for Roman Catholics if they don’t get tacky about it’.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Denver,” said Cassie.

  “‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s manservant, nor his maidservant, nor question why thy neighbor has servants in the first place’.”

  “Oliver, I’m in love with Anthony Van Horne.”

  And suddenly his hypothermia was back, stealing through his body organ by organ, turning them into frozen cuts of meat. “Shit.” Charlotte Corday after all, stabbing him, murdering him. “Van Horne? Van Horne’s the enemy, for Christ’s sake.” He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Have you…slept with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than once?”

  “Yes.”

  “What brand of condom?”

  “Any answer to that question would be the wrong one.”

  Oliver licked his smarting thumb. “Has he asked you to marry him?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m planning to ask him,” she said.

  “What do you see in a man like that? He’s no rationalist, he’s not one of us!”

  In a move Oliver found at once intensely pleasurable and cruelly patronizing, Cassie stroked his forearm. “I’m sorry. I’m truly, truly sorry…”

  “Know what I think? I think you’ve been seduced by the mystique of the sea. Hey, look, if this is the life you crave, fine, I’ll buy you a boat. You want a sloop, Cassandra? A cabin cruiser? We’ll sail to Tahiti, lie on the beach, paint pictures of the natives, the whole Gauguin bit.”

  “Oliver, it’s over.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “It is.”

  For the next minute neither of them spoke, their silence broken only by an occasional mechanical grunt from a vending machine. Oliver fixed on PERSONAL CARE, desirous of its wares, the Tylenol to assuage his headache, the Alka-Seltzer to settle his stomach, the Wilcox nail file to slit his wrists, the Shostak Supersensitives to facilitate his raging wish to have sex with Cassie one last time.

  “‘Thou shalt not kill,’” he said. “Remember what we did with ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”

  No.

  “Me neither.”

  “Oliver…”

  “My mind’s a blank.” A dull, metallic thumping filled the air. The Iceland choppers, Oliver realized, landing on the Maracaibo’s helipads. “Are you certain you can’t remember?”

  “I guess I’ve—I’ve…I’m not exactly sure what I mean. Blasphemy doesn’t move me the way it used to.”

  “Come with me to Reykjavik, okay? You can catch a plane to Halifax tonight, a connecting flight to New York in the morning. With luck you’ll be back teaching by Wednesday.”

  “Oliver, you’re grasping at straws.”

  “Come with me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  “No.”

  Oliver snapped his fingers. “‘Thou shalt not kill,’” he said, fighting tears, “‘except for communists, whom thou shalt kill with impunity’.”

  September 16.

  I assume you’re grateful I rescued you, Popeye. Truth to tell, I’m glad to be here too. A lot of captains have gone down with their ships over the years, and I don’t envy a single one of them.

  Rafferty’s worried that the target on the twelve-mile scope might be just another iceberg, but I’d know those holy contours anywhere. Assuming the chains are still in place, the best procedure will probably be to sling the ends around the Maracaibo’s deck island and wire the lead links together. If the load’s too much, of course, it’ll tear the island loose and pull it overboard, dumping us all into the sea.

  To earn a living, some men merely have to haul oil.

  At 2015 the last of the Reykjavik choppers took off, bearing away Pembroke, Flume, and Oliver Shostak, along with those two fake ensigns who piloted the PBY. I had a notion to seek old Oliver out before he left, identify myself, and introduce his front teeth to the pit of his stomach, but then I decided stealing his girlfriend is revenge enough. Still, I’ll never fully understand what he and Cassie have against our cargo. It seems to me a person ought to be thankful to his Creator. For now, though, none of my personal philosophical opinions matter. I’ve come to bury God, not to praise Him.

  I’ll give the Val till dawn. If she’s not gone by then, I’ll fire off an Aspide and put her out of her misery. After that I’ll be sorely tempted to hunt down Spruance’s carrier and send her to the bottom as well. But I’ll resist, Popeye. Such vindictiveness would be wrong. “Once enthralled by the Idea of the Corpse,” Ockham tells me, “a person must remain eternally vigilant, forever seeking the moral law within.”

  Under the midnight sun, despair acquires the intensity of sex, insomnia the vehemence of art. To the sailor who finds himself sleepless in the Arctic, wind has never felt sharper, salt air more pungent, a gannet’s cry more piercing. As Anthony Van Horne wandered the central catwalk of the Carpco Maracaibo—icicles dangling everywhere, icebergs growling on all sides—he felt as if he’d become the hero of some vivid Scandinavian myth. He half expected to see the Midgard serpent cruising through the pink sea, swimming in circles around the dying Valparaíso, teeth flashing, eyes aflame, waiting for Ragnarok.

  The old man lay on the fo’c’sle deck, wrapped in a canvas seabag like a statue of a Civil War general about to be unveiled.

  “When you consider how much TNT and testosterone were on the scene this morning,” said Cassie, tapping the corpse’s head with her boot, “it’s amazing only four people got killed.” She smiled weakly. “How are you?”

  “Tired,” he said, unhitching the binoculars from around his neck. “Cold.”

  “Me too.”

  “We’ve been avoiding each other.”

  “True,” she said. “Will my guilt ever go away?”

  “You’re asking the wrong man.”

  “Fucking Gulf tanker. I mean, who’d have figured on a Gulf tanker showing up?”

  Bulky in their d
own parkas, graceless in their fur-lined boots, they pressed together like two bonded grizzly bears finding each other after a long hibernation.

  “I hope you’re not too sad,” said Cassie, extending her sealskin mitten and gesturing toward the seabag.

  “Reminds me of the time I got shot by a pirate in Guayaquil,” said Anthony. “The pain didn’t arrive all at once. I’m still waiting for something to hit.”

  “Grief?”

  “Something. We had a few minutes together at the end.”

  “Did you talk about Matagorda Bay?”

  “The man was on a morphine trip—hopeless. But even if he’d understood, he couldn’t have helped me. The job’s not done. The tomb’s still empty.”

  “Lianne tells me the Vatican wants the corpse cremated.”

  “Did she also tell you we’re forging ahead tomorrow?”

  “To Kvitoya?”

  “Yep.”

  “Wish you’d reconsider,” said Cassie evenly. An oddly appealing, peculiarly sensual anger distorted her face. “The angels are dead. Your father’s dead. God’s dead. There’s nobody left to impress.”

  “I’m left.”

  “Shit.”

  “Cassie, friend, wouldn’t you say things have taken a pretty odd turn when the Holy Catholic Church and the Central Park West Enlightenment League want exactly the same thing?”

  “I can live with that. Burn the sucker, honey. The world’s women will thank you for it.”

  “I gave Raphael my word.”

  “The way I heard it,” said Cassie, “Rome will dispatch more Gulf tankers if you don’t play ball. Surely you don’t want to be torpedoed again.”

  “No, Doc, I don’t want that.” Swerving toward the wreck, Anthony raised the binoculars and focused. “Of course, I could always send the Pope a fax saying the body’s been torched.”

  “You could…”

  “But I won’t,” said Anthony crisply. “There’s been enough deception on this voyage.” Black waves washed across the Valparaíso’s weather deck, hurling chunks of pack ice against the superstructure. “Doc, I’ll make you a deal. If a Vatican armada intercepts us between here and Svalbard, I’ll surrender our cargo without a fight.”

  “No showdowns?”

  “No showdowns.”

  Cassie moved her mouth, working the frozen muscles into a smile. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  With a deep gurgle and an unearthly groan, the Valparaíso began to spin, north to east to south to west, round and round, her bow falling sharply, stirring the Greenland Current into a frothy whirlpool as her ten-ton rudder, Ferris wheel-size propellers, and mammoth keel rose into the air. Level by level, companionway by companionway, the superstructure descended—cabins, galleys, wardroom, wheelhouse, stacks, mast, Vatican flag—sliding into the maelstrom as if into the mouth of some unimaginable grouper, portholes blazing brightly even after they slipped beneath the waves.

  “Farewell, old friend.” Anthony lifted his hand to his brow and fired off a forceful salute. “I’ll miss you,” he called across the ice-choked sea. The gannets screeched, the wind howled, the watery jaws whooshed closed. “You were the best of them all,” the captain told his ship as she began her final voyage, a slow, inexorable drop from the frothy surface of the Norwegian Sea to the inky blackness of the Mohns Trench, five thousand fathoms down.

  Child

  THE DIVINE FACE was still smoldering when the Maracaibo arrived on the scene, smoke wafting off His cheeks in thick black tendrils and drifting northwest toward Jan Mayen Island. Thousands of whisker stubs speckled the charred, exposed flesh of His lantern jaw, encircling the frosted lips and frozen smile, angling upward like the skeletal remains of a forest fire. God, Anthony saw, had become as beardless as he himself.

  Despite the surplus of officers and seamen, it took the Maracaibo’s company all day to dredge up the severed chains, belt them around the superstructure, and splice the raw ends together. “Slow ahead,” Anthony ordered. The chains tightened, grinding against the deckhouse walls, but the foundation held fast, and the Corpus Dei moved forward. At 1830 hours the captain gave the all-ahead-full, gulped down his four hundred and twenty-sixth cup of coffee since New York, and set his course for the Pole.

  Anthony did not like the Carpco Maracaibo. It was all he could do to squeeze five knots out of her; even if the burdensome oil in her hold magically disappeared, he doubted she’d give him more than six. She had no soul, this tanker. The archangels had truly known what they were doing when they picked the Valparaíso.

  The night the tow began, Cassie took up residence in Anthony’s cabin, an environment made erotically tropical by the eighty-degree air Crock O’Connor was obligingly pumping in from the engine flat.

  “I have to know something,” she said, guiding Anthony’s naked body onto the bunk. “If our Midway scheme had worked and God had gone under, would you have forgiven me?”

  “That’s not a fair question.”

  “True.” She began arraying him in a decorator Supersensitive—the best-selling barber pole design, second in popularity only to the diamondback rattlesnake. “What’s the answer?”

  “I’d probably never have forgiven you,” said Anthony, enjoying the way the sweat filled her cleavage like a river flowing through a gorge. “I know that’s not the answer you wanted to hear, but…”

  “But it’s the one I expected,” she confessed.

  “Now I have to know something.” He plugged her ear with his tongue, swizzling it around. “Suppose another opportunity came along for you to destroy my cargo. Would you take it?”

  “You bet I would.”

  “You don’t have to answer right away.”

  Laughing, Cassie unfurled the condom. “You’re surprised?”

  “Not really,” he sighed. Slithering on top of her, he cupped her breasts like Jehovah molding the Andes. “You’re a woman with a mission, Doc. It’s what I love about you.”

  The next morning, while Cassie was out helping to chip ice from the central catwalk and Anthony lay in their bunk writing about the death of the Valparaíso, filling his Popeye journal with page after page of angry lamentation, a knock reverberated through the cabin. He rolled off the mattress, opened the door. Crock O’Connor stepped inside, accompanied by spindly little Vince Mangione, the latter gripping a brass birdcage, lifting it level with his face as if deploying a hurricane lantern against a moonless night.

  Inside the cage, a parrot stood on a trapeze, making quick jabs with its beak in hopes of killing the mites under its wings. The bird turned its scarlet head, fixing on Anthony. Its eyes were like tiny oiled bearings. At first he thought some sort of resurrection had occurred, for the similarity between this macaw and his boyhood pet, Rainbow, was uncanny, but on further inspection he realized the present parrot lacked Rainbow’s distinguishing marks—the peculiar hourglass shape on her beak, the small jagged scar on her right talon.

  “Your father bought her in Palermo, right before we shipped out,” Mangione explained, setting the cage on the bunk.

  “The engine flat made a fine home—all that steam,” said O’Connor. “But I’m sure she’ll do fine in your cabin.”

  “Get her out of here,” said Anthony.

  “What?”

  “I want nothing that belonged to my father.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Mangione. “He told me it was a present.”

  “A present?”

  Despite the Thanksgiving humiliation, the bottled Constitution, the malign neglect—despite everything, Anthony was touched. At last the old man was trying to make amends, restoring to his son the gift he’d taken away forty years earlier.

  “We don’t know if your dad named her or not,” said O’Connor.

  “What do you call her?”

  “Pirate Jenny.”

  “Leave her here,” said Anthony, returning Pirate Jenny’s unblinking stare. A sudden queasiness came. He half expected the parrot to say something sardonic and woundi
ng, like Anthony left the bridge or Anthony fucked up.

  As O’Connor started out of the cabin, Pirate Jenny squawked but produced no vocables. “I’m bored,” said the engineer, pausing in the jamb. He faced Anthony and frowned, crinkling the steam burn on his forehead. “The boilers around here are all on computers. There’s nothing for me to do.”

  “The Val was an eyesore, hard to steer…”

  “I know. I want her back.”

  “Me too, Crock. I want her back too. Thanks for the bird.”

  On September 21, a new variety of ice island appeared on the horizon, drifting southeast with the Greenland Current—glacier fragments so huge they made the Jan Mayen bergs seem like molehills. According to the Marisat, the Maracaibo was barely a day from her destination, but the prospect of journey’s end brought Anthony no pleasure. Eight men had died; the Val was in the Mohns Trench; the divine brain was garbage; his father would never absolve him. And for all Anthony knew, a Vatican armada now lay at anchor inside the tomb, ready to pirate his cargo.

  “Froggy loves Tiffany.”

  He was giving Cassie a backrub, pressing his palms against her beautiful flesh, vertebra after vertebra lined up like speed bumps, and for an instant he thought it was she who’d made the raspy little declaration.

  “What?”

  “Froggy loves Tiffany,” the scarlet macaw repeated. “Froggy loves Tiffany.”

  The universe again, playing another of its outrageous jokes. Froggy loved Tiffany.

  Anthony stifled a giggle. “It’s all too perfect, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Perfect?” Cassie replied. “What?”

  “Absolutely perfect. A masterpiece. The bastard’s dead, and he’s still taking back the things he gave me.”

  “Oh, come on—your father’s not doing anything. Mangione didn’t understand the parrot was for Tiffany, that’s all. There’s no malice here.”

  “You think so?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I must admit, I’m actually rather impressed,” said Anthony, struck by his mental picture of the old man sitting hour after hour in the engine flat, drilling the half-dozen syllables into the parrot’s head. “Imagine how many times he had to say it, over and over…”