James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

Whatever its artistic shortcomings, DeMille’s homage to God’s omnipotence fully acknowledged the bladder’s limits. The movie had an intermission. After an hour and forty minutes, as Moses began his audience with the Burning Bush, the urge to urinate arose. Cassie decided to hold out. She couldn’t remember exactly when the hiatus came, but she knew it was imminent. Besides, she was enjoying herself, in a perverse sort of way. The urge worsened. She was about to leave in medias res — Moses heading back to Egypt with the aim of liberating his people — when the music swelled, the image faded, and the curtains closed.

Two women were ahead of her, almond-eyed Juanita Torres and asthmatic An-mei Jong, waiting to use the single-toilet ladies’ room. There she stood, mulling over her theory that the patriarchy derived in large measure from urinary flexibility, the male’s enviable ability to pee on the run, when a deep, familiar voice intruded.

“Want some?” said Lianne, extending a large, half-empty bag of popcorn. “Vegetarian style — no butter.”

Cassie grabbed a handful. “Seen this movie before?”

“My Sunday school class went in the mid-sixties, some sort of revival. ‘Beauty is but a curse to our women.’ Yech. If it weren’t for Follingsbee’s popcorn, I’d leave.”

A breach, thought Cassie. A chink in Lianne’s armor. “Watch what they do with Queen Nefretiri in Part Two.”

“I don’t like what they do with any of the women.”

“Yeah, but watch what they do with Nefretiri — DeMille and the patriarchy, watch what they do. Notice how, whenever Pharaoh commits some atrocity, chasing after the Hebrews with his chariots and so on, it’s because Nefretiri put him up to it. Same old story, right? Blame the woman. The patriarchy never sleeps, Lianne.”

“I can’t send your boyfriend a fax.”

“I understand.”

“They could take away my FCC license.”

“Right.”

“I can’t send it.”

“Of course you can’t.” Cassie took a greedy helping of Follingsbee’s popcorn. “Watch what they do with Nefretiri.”

July 16.

Latitude: 2°6’N. Longitude: 10°4’W. Course: 272. Speed: 9 knots when the Southeast Trades are with us, 3 in a headwind, 6 on average. Slow — much too slow. At this rate, we won’t cross the Arctic Circle before August 25, a full week behind schedule. More bad news. The promised predators have finally caught our scent, and at 6 knots we can’t outrun them. We’re killing a dozen sharks on nearly every watch, and almost as many Liberian sea snakes and Cameroon vultures, but they keep on coming. When I sit down to write the official chronicle of this voyage, I’ll dub these bloody days the Battle of the Guinea Current.

“Why don’t they show their Creator a little more respect,” I ask Ockham, “like the porpoises and manatees did last week?”

“Respect?”

“He made them, right? They owe Him everything.”

“In partaking of such a meal,” says Ockham, “quite possibly they are showing Him respect.”

Our afterdeck groans, our windlasses creak, our chains rattle. We sound like Halloween. God forbid a link should break. Once, when I was third mate on the Arco Bangkok, ferrying napalm into the Gulf of Thailand, I saw a towline snap in two, whip across the poop deck, and cut the bos’n in half. Poor bastard lived for a good three minutes afterward. His last words were, “What are we doing in Vietnam, anyway?”

This morning I sent Dad a fax. I told him I’ve gotten the Valparaíso back and am now working for Pope Innocent XIV. “If it’s okay with you,” I wrote, “I’ll be dropping by Valladolid on my return trip.”

The snowy egrets loathe me, Popeye. The sea turtles scream for my blood.

At least once a day, I make a point of ferrying myself over to God, picking up a bazooka or a harpoon gun, and joining the battle. It helps the crew’s morale. The work is dangerous and exhausting, but they’re acquitting themselves well. I think they see our cargo as one of those things worth fighting for, like honor or the American flag.

Every evening, beginning around 1800 hours, Cassie Fowler drinks coffee in the forward lookout post. I’ve pretended to bump into her three times already. I think she’s catching on.

To what uncharted places did your passion for Olive Oyl take you, Popeye? Did you ever imagine lying with her on the fo’c’sle deck at the height of a monsoon, making furious love as the hot rain slicked your naked bodies? Did your creators ever animate such a moment for you, just to give you the thrill?

When the deckies think I’m not looking, they plunder the Corpus Dei, scraping off bits and pieces from the hairs, pimples, warts, and moles, then mixing them with potable water to make a kind of ointment.

“What’s it for?” I ask Ockham.

“Whatever ails them,” he replies.

An-mei Jong, the padre explains, swallows the stuff by the spoonful, hoping to relieve her asthma. Karl Jaworski rubs it on his arthritic joints. Ralph Mungo sticks it on an old Korean War wound that keeps acting up. Juanita Torres uses it for menstrual cramps.

“Does it help?” I ask Ockham.

“They say it does. These things are so subjective. Cassie Fowler calls it the placebo effect. The deckies call it glory grease.”

If I smear some glory grease on my forehead, Popeye, will the migraines go away?

“Shark off the starboard knee! Repeat: shark off the starboard kneel”

Neil Weisinger rose from his bed of holy flesh, set his WP-17 exploding-harpoon gun upright inside a kneecap pore, and pressed the SEND button on his Matsushita walkie-talkie. The heat was unbearable, as if the Guinea Current were about to boil. Had he not slathered his neck and shoulders with glory grease, they would surely have blistered by now. “Course?” he radioed the bos’n, Eddie Wheatstone, currently on lookout.

“Zero-zero-two.”

In his dozen or so voyages as a merchant mariner, Neil had performed many hateful duties, but none so hateful as predator patrol. While washing toilets was degrading, cleaning ballast tanks disgusting, and chipping rust tedious beyond words, at least these jobs entailed no immediate threat to life and limb. Twice already, he’d taken the elevator up to the chief mate’s quarters, determined to lodge a formal complaint, but on both occasions his courage had deserted him at the last minute.

Clipping the Matsushita to his utility belt, right next to the WP-17’s transmitter, Neil raised his field glasses to his eyes and looked east. From his present station he couldn’t see Eddie — too much distance, too much mist — but he knew the bos’n was there all right, standing on the lee side of a starboard toe and surveying the choppy bay created by God’s half-submerged legs. He hit SEND. “Bearing?”

“Zero-four-six. He’s a twenty-footer, Neil! I’ve never seen so many teeth in one mouth before!”

Lifting the harpoon gun from its pore, Neil marched across the wrinkled, spongy beach that stretched for sixty yards from His knee to the ocean. Water reared up, a high spuming wall eternally created and re-created as the great patella cut its way through the Atlantic. “Operation Jehovah,” the captain was forever calling this peculiar tow, evidently unaware that for a Jew like Neil the word Jehovah was vaguely offensive, the secret and unspeakable YHWH contaminated with secular vowels.

He scanned the churning rollers. Eddie was right: a twenty-foot hammerhead shark, swimming coastwise like some huge organic mallet bred to nail the divine coffin shut. Balancing the WP-17 on his shoulder, Neil cupped the telescopic sight against his eye and plucked the walkie-talkie from his belt.

“Speed?”