James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

Neil winced. This wasn’t the first time he’d encountered a Jesus aficionado. As a rule, he didn’t mind them. Once at sea, they were usually diligent as hell, cleaning toilets and chipping rust without a whimper, but their agenda made him nervous. Often as not, the conversation got around to the precarious position of Neil’s immortal soul. On the Stella, for example, a Seventh Day Adventist had somberly advised Neil that he could spare himself “the trouble of Armageddon” by accepting Jesus then and there.

“What’re you doin’ on the fire escape?”

“It’s cooler out here,” said the freckled sailor, unwrapping a package of Bazooka bubblegum. He scanned the comic strip and chortled, then popped the pink lozenge into his mouth. “I’m Neil Weisinger.”

“Leo Zook.”

Drawing his plastic Bugs Bunny lunch box from his seabag, Neil climbed through the window. He’d always been a great admirer of Bugs. The rabbit was a loner, and liked it. No friends. No family. Smart, resourceful, rejected by the outside world. There was something rather Jewish about Bugs Bunny.

“Hey, Leo, I saw three killer cards in the box, and none of ’em belongs to you.” The fire escape seemed no cooler than the hall, but the view was spectacular, a clear vista stretching all the way from midtown to the Statue of Liberty. “Why don’t you leave?”

“The Lord told me I’d be getting a ship today.” From the zippered compartment of his seabag, Zook retrieved a tattered booklet titled Close Encounters with Jesus Christ, the author being one Hyman Levkowitz. “You might find this interesting,” he said, pressing the tract into Neil’s palm. “It’s by a cantor who found salvation.”

Neil opened his lunch box, removed a green apple, and began to munch. He beat back a sneer. God was a perfectly fine idea. Indeed, before realizing he belonged on ships, Neil had spent two years across the river at Yeshiva University, studying Jewish history and toying with the idea of becoming a rabbi. But Neil’s God was not the patient, accessible, direct-dial deity on whom Leo Zook evidently predicated his life. Neil’s was the God he’d found by going to sea, the radiant En Sof who lay somewhere below the deepest mid-Atlantic trench and beyond the highest navigational star, the God of the four A.M. watch.

“Do yourself a favor — read it through,” said Zook. “I can’t recommend eternal life highly enough.”

At that moment, Neil would have preferred almost anyone else’s company. An encyclopedia salesman’s. An Arab’s. Whatever their other foibles, his Arab mates never tried to convert him. Usually they just ignored him, though sometimes they actually became his friends — particularly when, during prayers, he helped them stay pointed toward Mecca while the ship made a turn. Neil always brought a magnetically-corrected compass to sea for expressly this purpose.

A pear-shaped woman with the demeanor of a fishwife waddled out of the office and headed for the board.

“Soup’s on!” the dispatcher cried as Neil and Zook scrambled back into the hall. She jerked two thumbtacks from her mouth as if they were loose teeth and pinned a job sheet to the cork.

•OFFSHORE SHIPPING JOBS

COMPANY: Lykes Brothers

SHIP: SS Argo Lykes

LOCATED: Pier 86

SAILS: 1500 Friday

RUN: West Coast South America

JOBS: Able Seaman: 2

TIME: 120-day rotary

RELIEVING: J. Pierce, F. Pellegrino

REASON: Time up

“All right,” said the dispatcher, “who’s got ’em?”

“Nobody here be beatin’ ten month plus fifteen day, eh?” said the Rastafarian.

“The other one’s mine,” said Daniel Rosenberg.

The dispatcher checked her watch. “Assuming no killer card shows up in the next six seconds” — she winked at the winners — “they’re all yours. Step into the office, fellas.”

Gradually the mob dispersed, forty disappointed men and women ambling morosely back to their seats. Eight sailors collected their cards and, conceding defeat, left. The dreamers and the desperate sat down to wait.

“The Lord will come through,” said Zook.

Neil slumped onto the nearest folding chair. Why didn’t he just admit it — he had no career, he was a failure. Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville.

As a boy, Neil had never tired of hearing Grandfather Moshe recount his maritime adventures, wondrous tales of battling pirates on Ecuadorian rivers, transporting hippopotami to French zoos, playing cat-and-mouse with Nazi submarines in the North Atlantic, and, most impressive of all, helping to smuggle fifteen hundred displaced Jews past the British blockade and into Palestine on the Hatifyah, one of the dozen rogue freighters secretly leased by the Aliyah Bet. Four decades later, Chief Mate Moshe Weisinger had opened his mail to find a token of appreciation from the Israeli government: a bronze medal bearing the face of David Ben-Gurion in bas-relief. When Grandfather Moshe died, Neil inherited the medal. He always kept it in his right pants pocket, something to clutch in moments of stress.

The door to the hall swung open, and a wrinkled, lanky man wearing a black shirt and Roman collar entered, slapping a job sheet into the dispatcher’s palm.

“Call this right away.”

The dispatcher tacked up the priest’s sheet directly over the Argo Lyfes notice. “Okay, you packet rats,” she said, turning to the hopeful sailors, “we’ve got this tramp tanker over at Pier Eighty-eight, and it looks like they’re startin’ from scratch.”

•OFFSHORE SHIPPING JOBS•

COMPANY: Carpco Shipping

SHIP: SS Carpco Valparaíso

LOCATED: Pier 88

SAILS: 1700 Thursday

RUN: Svalbard, Arctic Ocean

JOBS: Able Seaman: 18

Ordinary Seaman: 12

Food Handler: 2

TIME: 90-day rotary

RELIEVING: Not applicable

REASON: Not applicable

Grunts of dismay resounded through the union hall. Rumors swarmed like sea gulls feasting on a landfill. The Valparaíso, the infamous Valparaíso, the tainted, broken, bedeviled Valparaíso. Hadn’t she been sold to the Japanese and converted into a toxic-waste carrier? Sunk in a Tomahawk missile test?

“Does this mean we’re all hired?” asked a blobby man with bad teeth and five o’clock shadow.

“Every one of you,” said the priest. “Not only that but you can figure on more overtime than you’ve ever pulled down in your lives. My name is Thomas Ockham, Society of Jesus, and we’ll be spending the next three months together.”

And then, as if he thought the U.S. Merchant Marine were a branch of the military, the priest saluted, made an abrupt about-face, and marched out of the room.

“I told you the Lord would come through,” said Zook, licking a mustache of perspiration from his upper lip.

An eerie silence descended, settling into the dust, clinging to the cigarette smoke. The Lord had come through, mused Neil. Either the Lord or Caribbean Petroleum. Neil wouldn’t be ferrying any Jews to Haifa or hippos to Le Havre this trip, he wouldn’t be dodging any Nazi subs, but at least he had a job.

“Jesus hasn’t let me down yet,” the Evangelical went on.

A job — and yet…

“Christ never lets anybody down.”

A ship like the Valparaíso should not be resurrected, Neil believed, and if she were resurrected, a smart AB would look elsewhere for work.

“You know, mates, this seems kinda creepy to me,” said a buxom Puerto Rican woman in a tight Menudo T-shirt. “Why’re we shippin’ out with a priest?”