James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

“Once the Coast Guard hears about this,” said Kolby, quivering with rage as he climbed back into his leggings, “it won’t be a week before you lose your master’s license all over again.”

“Put your complaint in Portuguese,” said the captain. The Statue of Liberty glided past, tirelessly lifting her lamp. “My license comes from Brazil.”

“Brazil?”

“It’s in South America, Frank,” said Anthony, hustling the pilot out of the wheelhouse. “ You’ll never get there.”

By 1835 Kolby was in the harbor launch, speeding back toward Pier 88.

At 1845 the Valparaíso began drinking Upper New York Bay, sucking its tides into her ballast tanks.

At 1910 Anthony’s radio officer came onto the bridge: Lianne Bliss — “Sparks,” as per hallowed maritime tradition — the bony little hippie vegetarian Ockham had dug up on Wednesday at the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots. “Jay Island’s on the phone.” For someone so petite, Sparks had an astonishingly resonant voice, as if she were speaking from the bottom of an empty cargo bay. “They wanna know what we’re up to.”

Anthony ducked into the radio shack, thumbing the transceiver mike to ON. “Calling Jay Island Coast Guard Station…”

“Go ahead. Over.”

“Carpco Valparaíso here, bound in ballast for Lagos, Nigeria, to take on two hundred thousand barrels of crude oil. Over.”

“Roger, Valparaíso. Be advised of Tropical Depression Number Six — Hurricane Beatrice — currently blowing west from Cape Verde.”

“Gotcha, Jay Island. Out.”

At 1934 the Valparaíso slid across the ethereal line separating Lower New York Bay from the North Atlantic Ocean. Twenty minutes later, Second Mate Spicer — Big Joe Spicer, the only sailor on board who seemed scaled to the tanker herself — entered the wheelhouse to relieve Rafferty.

“Lay me a course for Sa г Tomй,” Anthony ordered Spicer. Grabbing the Exxon coffee Thermos and his ceramic Carpco mug, the captain poured himself the first of what he expected would be about five hundred cups of thick black jamoke. “I want us there in two weeks.”

“I overheard the Coast Guard mention a hurricane,” said Rafferty.

“Forget the damn hurricane. This is the Carpco Valparaíso, not some proctologist’s sailboat. If it starts to rain, we’ll turn on the windshield wipers.”

“Can O’Connor give us a steady eighteen knots?” asked Spicer.

“I expect so.”

“Then we’ll be in the Gulf of Guinea by the tenth.” The second mate advanced the joysticks, notch by notch. “All ahead full?”

The captain looked south, scanning the ranks of gray, glassy swells, the eternally shifting terrain of the sea. And so it begins, he thought, the great race, Anthony Van Horne versus brain death, decay, and the Devil’s own sharks.

“All ahead full!”

July 2.

Latitude: 37°7’N. Longitude: 58°10’W. Course: 094. Speed: 18 knots. Distance made good since New York: 810 nautical miles. A gentle breeze, no. 3 on the Beaufort scale, wafts across our weather deck.

I wanted a real diary, but there wasn’t time to visit a stationery store, so instead I ran down to Thrift Drug and got you. According to your cover, you’re an “Official Popeye the Sailor Spiral-Bound Notebook, copyright © 1959 King Features Syndicate.” When I look into your wizened face, Popeye, I know you’re a man I can trust.

On this day in 1816, the French frigate Medusa went aground off the west coast of Africa — so says my Manner’s Pocket Companion. “Of the 147 who escaped on a raft, most were murdered by their mates and either thrown overboard or eaten. Only 15 survived.”

I think we can do better than that. For a company cobbled together at the last minute, they seem like a pretty smart bunch. Big Joe Spicer brought his own sextant aboard, always a good sign in a navigator. Dolores Haycox, the zaftig third mate, passed the surprise quiz I gave her without a hiccup. (I had her calculate her distance from a hypothetical bold shore based on the interval between a ship’s foghorn blast and the echo.) Marbles Rafferty, the gloomy first officer, is a particularly poetic choice for this mission — his great-grandfather was owned by a family of Florida Keys salvage masters, those vainglorious 19th-century sailors who were, Ockham informs me, “immortalized by John Wayne and Raymond Massey in Reap the Wild Wind.”

I already knew Sam Follingsbee was a brilliant cook, but tonight’s fried chicken was indistinguishable from Colonel Sanders’s secret recipes, both Original and Extra Crispy. An odd talent, this genius for mediocrity. Crock O’Connor, the chief engineer, is the sort of affable Alabama yarn spinner who claims he invented the twist-off bottle cap but receives no royalties thanks to the knavery of an unscrupulous patent attorney. He’s been giving us our 18 knots, so who am I to call him a liar? Lou Chickering, the blond and handsome first assistant engineer — our very own Billy Budd — is a stage actor from Philly who once tried to make it on Broadway and now spends his off-hours organizing talent shows in the deckies’ recreation room. His specialty is Shakespeare, and even our illiterates were beguiled by his performance last night of Ariel’s song from The Tempest. (“Full fathom five thy father lies…”) Bud Ramsey, the second engineer, is a pornography collector, beer connoisseur, and seven-card-stud fanatic. It’s refreshing, I think, when a man wears his vices on his sleeve. And backing us up: 38 gratefully employed sailors — 23 men and 15 women — scattered among our decks, galleys, engine rooms, and cargo-control stations. I enjoy browsing through their resumйs. We’ve got a minor-league center fielder on board (Albany Bullets), a former clown (Hunt Brothers Circus), an ex-con (armed robbery), a spot-welder, an auto assembly-line worker, a Revlon saleslady, an Army corporal, a dog trainer, a Chinese math teacher (junior high), a taxi driver, three Desert Storm vets, and a full-blooded Lakota Sioux named James Echohawk.

A great mass of spilled oil — one of those “floating particulate petroleum residues” — has coagulated off Cameroon: that’s the story I’ve been feeding anybody who asks. When Carpco realized the Vatican had gotten wind of the disaster, they offered the Pope a deal: keep Greenpeace and the U.N. off our backs, and we’ll remove the asphalt posthaste. And we won’t just sink it, either. We’ll tow it to shore, chop it up, and refine the fragments into free oil for burgeoning African industries. Great, said Rome, but we’re sending Father Ockham to supervise.

So: a secret operation, get it, men? Hush-hush, understand? That’s why we don’t signal passing ships, turn on our running lights, or let anybody phone home.

“Okay, but why so damn fast?” Crock O’Connor wants to know. “We’re practicing to be the first supertanker ever to win the America’s Cup?”

“The asphalt’s a menace to navigation,” I explain. “The sooner we get there, the better.”

“Last night I left my empty orange-juice glass on the table,” the man persists, “and the damn thing scooted right up to the edge and fell, singing all the way. We’re vibrating, Captain. We’re gonna crack the fucking hull.”

He’s right, actually. Run your ULCC in a straight line at 18 knots with empty cargo bays, and before long you’ll start flapping apart like a ’57 Chevy.

There are ways to soothe a shivering ship without losing too much time. I’m using every trick in the book: changing speed briefly, altering course slightly, shutting down entirely for a minute or two and coasting — anything to break the rhythm of the waves hitting our stem. So far it’s working. So far we’re still in one piece.