James Morrow: Towing Jehovah

“Oh, you’ll get a flag all right: a Vatican banner, God’s own colors.” A coughing fit possessed the angel, sending tears and feathers into the sultry air. “He hit the Atlantic at zero by zero degrees, where the equator meets the prime meridian. Begin your search there. Quite likely He’s drifted — east, I’d guess, caught in the Guinea Current — so you might find Him near the island of S гo Tomй, but then again, with God, who knows?” Shedding feathers all the way, Raphael hobbled out of the foyer and toward the Cuxa Cloister, Anthony right behind. “You’ll receive a generous salary. Father Ockham is well funded.”

“Otto Merrick might be right for a job like this. I think he’s still with Atlantic-Richfield.”

“You’ll be getting your ship back,” the angel snapped, steadying himself on the fountain. He breathed raggedly, wheez-ingly, as if through shredded lungs. “Your ship — and something more…”

Halo sputtering, tears flowing, the angel tossed his quill pen into the pool. A tableau appeared, painted in saturated reds and muddy greens reminiscent of early color television: six immobile figures seated around a dining-room table.

“Recognize it?”

“Hmmm…”

Thanksgiving Day, 1990, four months after the spill. They’d all gathered at his father’s apartment in Paterson. Christopher Van Horne presided at the far end of the table, overbearing and elegant, dressed in a white woolen suit. To his left: wife number three, a loud, skinny, self-pitying woman named Tiffany. To his right: the old man’s best friend from the Sea Scouts, Frank Kolby, an unimaginative and sycophantic Bostonian. Anthony sat opposite his father, bracketed on one side by his hefty sister, Susan, a New Orleans catfish farmer, and on the other by his then-current girlfriend, Lucy McDade, a short, attractive steward from the Exxon Bangor. Every detail was right: the cheroot in Dad’s mouth, the Ronson cigarette lighter in his hand, the blue ceramic gravy boat resting beside his plate of mashed potatoes and dark meat.

The figures twitched, breathed, began to eat. Peering into the Cuxa pool, Anthony realized, to his considerable horror, what was coming next.

“Hey, look,” said the old man, dropping the Ronson lighter into the gravy, “it’s the Valparaíso.” The lighter oriented itself vertically — striker wheel down, butane well up — but stayed afloat.

“Froggy, take it easy,” said Tiffany.

“Dad, don’t do this,” said Susan.

Anthony’s father lifted the cigarette lighter from the boat. As the greasy brown gravy ran down his fingers, he took out his Swiss Army knife and cut through the lighter’s plastic casing. Oily butane dripped onto the linen tablecloth. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, the Val’s sprung a leak!” He plopped the lighter back into the boat, laughing as the butane oozed into the gravy. “Somebody must’ve run her into a reef! Those poor seabirds!”

“Froggy, please” wailed Tiffany.

“Them pilot whales ain’t got a chance,” said Frank Kolby, releasing a boorish guffaw.

“Do you suppose the captain could’ve left the bridge?” asked Dad with mock puzzlement.

“I think you’ve made your point,” said Susan.

The old man leaned toward Lucy McDade as if about to deal her a playing card. “This sailor lad of yours left the bridge. I’ll bet he got one of those headaches of his and, pfftt, he took off, and now all the egrets and herons are dying. You know what your boyfriend’s problem is, pretty Lucy? He thinks the oily bird catches the worm!”

Tiffany burst into giggles.

Lucy turned red.

Kolby sniggered.

Susan got up to leave.

“Bastard,” said Anthony’s alter ego.

“Bastard,” echoed the observer Anthony.

“Gravy, anyone?” said Christopher Van Horne, lifting the boat from its saucer. “What’s the matter, folks — are you afraid?”

“I’m not afraid.” Kolby seized the boat, pouring polluted gravy onto his mashed potatoes.

“I’ll never forgive you for this,” seethed Susan, stalking out of the room.

Kolby shoveled a glop of potato into his mouth. “Tastes like—”

The scene froze.

The figures dissolved.

Only the waterborne feather remained.

“That was the worst part of Matagorda Bay, wasn’t it?” said Raphael. “Worse than the hate mail from the environmentalists and the death threats from the shrimpers — the worst part was what your father did to you that night.”

“The humiliation…”

“No,” said the angel pointedly. “Not the humiliation. The brute candor of it all.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Four months after the wreck of the Val, somebody was finally telling you a truth the state of Texas had denied.”

“What truth?”

“You’re guilty, Anthony Van Horne.”

“I’ve never claimed otherwise.”

“Guilty,” Raphael repeated, slamming his fist into his palm like a judge wielding a gavel. “But beyond guilt lies redemption, or so the story goes.” The angel slipped his fingers beneath the feathers of his left wing and relieved himself of an itch. “After completing the mission, you will seek out your father.”

“Dad?”

The angel nodded. “Your aloof, capricious, unhappy father. You will tell him you got the job done. And then — this I promise — then you will receive the absolution you deserve.”

“I don’t want his absolution.”

“His absolution,” said Raphael, “is the only one that counts. Blood is thicker than oil, Captain. The man’s hooks are in you.”

“I can absolve myself,” Anthony insisted.

“You’ve tried that. Showers don’t do it. The Cuxa fountain doesn’t do it. You’ll never be free of Matagorda Bay, the oil will never leave you, until Christopher Van Horne looks you in the eye and says, ‘Son, I’m proud of you. You bore Him to His tomb.’ ”

A sudden coldness swept through the Cuxa Cloister. Goose bumps grew on Anthony’s naked skin like barnacles colonizing a tanker’s hull. Crouching over the pool, he fished out the drifting feather. What did he know of God? Maybe God did have blood, bile, and the rest of it; maybe He could die. Anthony’s Sunday school teachers, promoters of a faith so vague and generic it was impossible to imagine anyone rebelling against it (there are no lapsed Wilmington Presbyterians), had never even raised such possibilities. Who could say whether God had a body?

“Dad and I haven’t spoken since Christmas.” Anthony drew the soft, wet feather across his lips. “Last I heard, he and Tiffany were in Spain.”

“Then that’s where you’ll find him.”

Raphael staggered forward, extended his chilly palms, and collapsed into the captain’s arms. The angel was surprisingly heavy, oddly meaty. How strange was the universe. Stranger than Anthony had ever imagined.

“Bury Him…”

The captain studied the spangled sky. He thought of his favorite sextant, the one his sister had given him upon his graduation from New York Maritime College, a flawless facsimile of the wondrous instrument with which, nearly two centuries earlier, Nathaniel Bowditch had corrected and emended all the world’s maps. And the thing worked, too, picking out Polaris in an instant, filtering the brilliance of Venus, sifting banded Jupiter from the clouds. Anthony never sailed without it.

“I own a precise and beautiful sextant,” Anthony told Raphael. “You never know when your computer’ll break down,” the captain added. “You never know when you’ll have to steer by the stars,” said the master of the Valparaíso, whereupon the angel smiled softly and drew his last breath.

The moon assumed an uncanny whiteness, riding the sky like God’s own skull, as, shortly before dawn, Anthony hauled Raphael Azarias’s stiffening body west across Fort Tryon Park, lowered it over the embankment, and flung it facedown into the cool, polluted waters of the Hudson River.