James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

Cassie wrung her hands, callus grinding against callus, by-products of the hours she’d spent chipping rust off the athwart-ships catwalk.

Okay, it was dead, a step in the right direction. But that fact alone, she believed, while of undoubted relevance to people like Father Thomas and Able Seaman Zook, did not remove the danger. A corpse was far too easy a thing to rationalize. Christianity had been doing it for two thousand years. The Lord’s intangible essence, the phallocrats and misogynists would say, His infinite mind and eternal spirit, were as viable as ever.

Inevitably, she thought of her favorite moment from her irascible retelling of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac: the scene in which Runkleberg’s wife, Melva, smears her hands with her own menstrual flow. “I shall guard my son’s blood with my own,” Melva vows. “Somehow, some way — no matter what it takes — I shall keep this monstrous thing from happening.”

Slowly, methodically, Cassie removed the crucifix from the bulkhead and, taking hold of the brad, worked it free.

Gritting her teeth, she pushed the tiny spike into her thumb.

“Ow…”

As she withdrew the nail, a large red pearl appeared. She entered the bathroom, stood before the mirror, and began to paint, left cheek, left jaw, chin, right jaw, right cheek, pausing periodically to squeeze out more blood. By the time clotting occurred, a thick, smeary line ran around Cassie’s face, as if she were wearing a mask of herself.

Somehow, some way — no matter what it took — she would send the God of Western Patriarchy to the bottom of the sea.

Now, only now, standing on the starboard wing with the wind howling, the sea roaring, and the great corpse bobbing behind him — only now did it occur to Anthony that the tow might not work. Their cargo was big, bigger than he’d ever imagined. Assuming the anchors held, the chains remained whole, the boilers stayed in one piece, and the windlasses didn’t rip loose and fly into the ocean — assuming all these things, the sheer drag might still prove too much for the Val to handle.

Lifting the walkie-talkie to his lips, he tweaked the channel selector and tuned in the engine flat.

“Van Horne here. We got steam on deck?”

“Enough to make a pig sweat,” said Crock O’Connor.

“We’re gonna try for eighty rpm’s, Crock. Can we do it without busting a gut?”

“Only one way to find out, sir.”

Anthony turned toward the wheelhouse, waving to the quartermaster and giving Marbles Rafferty a thumbs-up. So far the first mate had acquitted himself brilliantly at the console, keeping the carcass directly astern and two thousand yards away, perfectly pacing the Val with her cargo’s three-knot drift. (Too bad Operation Jehovah was a secret, for this was exactly the sort of venture that might earn Rafferty the coveted paper declaring him “Master of United States Steam or Motor Vessels of Any Gross Tons upon Oceans.”) The kid at the helm knew his stuff, too: Neil Weisinger, the same AB who’d performed so splendidly during Hurricane Beatrice. But even with Sinbad the Sailor manning the throttles and Horatio J. Hornblower holding the wheel, winching in this particular load would still be, Anthony knew, the trickiest maneuver of his career.

Pivoting to stern, the captain surveyed the windlasses: two gargantuan cylinders twenty feet in diameter, like bass drums built to pace the music of the spheres. A mile beyond rose God’s balding cranium, His white mane glinting in the morning sun, each hair as thick as a transatlantic cable.

The mourners had all left. Perhaps they’d completed their duties — “swimming shivah” as Weisinger liked to put it — but more probably it was the ship that had driven them away. At some level, Anthony believed, they knew the whole story: the Matagorda Bay tragedy and what it had done to their brothers and sisters. They couldn’t stand to be in the same ocean with the Carpco Valparaíso.

He lifted the Bushnells and focused. The water was astonishingly clear — he could even see His submerged ears, the anchor chains spilling from their interiors like silver pus. Twenty-four hours earlier, Rafferty had taken an exploration party over in the Juan Fernandez. After sailing into the placid cove bounded by the lee biceps and the corresponding bosom, they’d managed to lash an inflatable wharf in place, using armpit hairs as bollards, then rappel up the great cliff of flesh. Hiking across the chest, walking around on the sternum, the chief mate and his team had heard nothing they could honestly call heartbeats. Anthony hadn’t expected they would. And yet he remained cautiously optimistic: cardiovascular stasis wasn’t the same thing as brain death. Who could deny that a neuron or two might be perking away under that fifteen-foot-thick skull?

The captain changed channels, broadcasting to the men by the windlasses. “Ready on the afterdeck?”

The assistant engineers plucked the walkie-talkies from their belts. “Port windlass ready,” said Lou Chickering in his actor’s baritone.

“Starboard windlass ready,” said Bud Ramsey.

“Release devil’s claws,” said Anthony.

Both engineers sprang into action.

“Port claw released.”

“Starboard claw released.”

“Engage wildcats,” the captain ordered.

“Port cat in.”

“Starboard in.”

“Kill brakes.”

“Port brake gone.”

“Starboard gone.”

Anthony raised his forearm to his mouth and gave dear Lorelei a kiss. “Okay, boys — let’s reel Him in.”

“Port motor on,” said Chickering.

“Starboard on,” said Ramsey.

Spewing black smoke, belching hot steam, the wildcats began to turn, raveling up the great steel chains. One by one, the links rose out of the sea, dripping foam and spitting spray. They slithered through the chocks, arched over the devil’s claws, and dropped into the whelps like skee-balls scoring points.

“I need lead lengths, gentlemen. Call ’em out.”

“Two thousand yards on the port chain,” said Chickering.

“Two thousand on the starboard,” said Ramsey.

“Marbles, let’s get under way! Forty rpm’s, if you please!”

“Aye! Forty!”

“Fifteen hundred on the port chain!”

“Fifteen hundred on the starboard!”

Anthony and the chief mate had been up all night poring over Rafferty’s U.S. Navy Salvor’s Handbook. With a tow this prodigious, a gap of more than eleven hundred yards would render the Val unsteerable. But a short leash, under nine hundred yards, could mean trouble too: if she suddenly slowed for any reason — a snapped shaft, a blown boiler — the cargo would plow into her stern through sheer momentum.

“Fifty rpm’s!” Anthony ordered.

“Fifty!” said Rafferty.

“Speed?”

“Six knots!”

“Steady, Weisinger!” Anthony told the quartermaster.

“Steady!” the AB echoed.

The chains kept coming, over the windlasses and through the hatches, filling the cavernous steel lockers like performing cobras returning to their wicker baskets after a hard day’s work.

“One thousand yards on the port chain!”

“One thousand on the starboard!”

“Speed?”

“Seven knots!”

“Brakes!” screamed Anthony into the walkie-talkie.

“Port brake on!”

“Starboard on!”

“Sixty rpm’s!”

Sixty!

Both windlasses stopped instantly, screeching and smoking as they showered the afterdeck with bright orange sparks.

“Disengage wildcats!”

“Port cat gone!”

“Starboard gone!”

“Hook claws!”

“Port claw hooked!”

“Starboard hooked!”

Something was wrong. The carcass’s speed had doubled, eight knots at least. Briefly Anthony imagined some supernatural jolt galvanizing the divine nervous system, though the real explanation, he suspected, lay in a sudden conjunction of the Guinea Current and the Southeast Trades. He lowered the binoculars. The Corpus Dei surged forward, crushingly, inexorably, spindrift flying from its crown as it bore down on the tanker like some primordial torpedo.