James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

The old man lay on the fo’c’sle deck, wrapped in a canvas seabag like a statue of a Civil War general about to be unveiled.

“When you consider how much TNT and testosterone were on the scene this morning,” said Cassie, tapping the corpse’s head with her boot, “it’s amazing only four people got killed.” She smiled weakly. “How are you?”

“Tired,” he said, unhitching the binoculars from around his neck. “Cold.”

“Me too.”

“We’ve been avoiding each other.”

“True,” she said. “Will my guilt ever go away?”

“You’re asking the wrong man.”

“Fucking Gulf tanker. I mean, who’d have figured on a Gulf tanker showing up?”

Bulky in their down parkas, graceless in their fur-lined boots, they pressed together like two bonded grizzly bears finding each other after a long hibernation.

“I hope you’re not too sad,” said Cassie, extending her sealskin mitten and gesturing toward the seabag.

“Reminds me of the time I got shot by a pirate in Guayaquil,” said Anthony. “The pain didn’t arrive all at once. I’m still waiting for something to hit.”

“Grief?”

“Something. We had a few minutes together at the end.”

“Did you talk about Matagorda Bay?”

“The man was on a morphine trip — hopeless. But even if he’d understood, he couldn’t have helped me. The job’s not done. The tomb’s still empty.”

“Lianne tells me the Vatican wants the corpse cremated.”

“Did she also tell you we’re forging ahead tomorrow?”

“To Kvitoya?”

“Yep.”

“Wish you’d reconsider,” said Cassie evenly. An oddly appealing, peculiarly sensual anger distorted her face. “The angels are dead. Your father’s dead. God’s dead. There’s nobody left to impress.”

“I’m left.”

“Shit.”

“Cassie, friend, wouldn’t you say things have taken a pretty odd turn when the Holy Catholic Church and the Central Park West Enlightenment League want exactly the same thing?”

“I can live with that. Burn the sucker, honey. The world’s women will thank you for it.”

“I gave Raphael my word.”

“The way I heard it,” said Cassie, “Rome will dispatch more Gulf tankers if you don’t play ball. Surely you don’t want to be torpedoed again.”

“No, Doc, I don’t want that.” Swerving toward the wreck, Anthony raised the binoculars and focused. “Of course, I could always send the Pope a fax saying the body’s been torched.”

“You could…”

“But I won’t,” said Anthony crisply. “There’s been enough deception on this voyage.” Black waves washed across the Valparaíso’s weather deck, hurling chunks of pack ice against the superstructure. “Doc, I’ll make you a deal. If a Vatican armada intercepts us between here and Svalbard, I’ll surrender our cargo without a fight.”

“No showdowns?”

“No showdowns.”

Cassie moved her mouth, working the frozen muscles into a smile. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

With a deep gurgle and an unearthly groan, the Valparaíso began to spin, north to east to south to west, round and round, her bow falling sharply, stirring the Greenland Current into a frothy whirlpool as her ten-ton rudder, Ferris wheel-size propellers, and mammoth keel rose into the air. Level by level, companionway by companionway, the superstructure descended — cabins, galleys, wardroom, wheelhouse, stacks, mast, Vatican flag — sliding into the maelstrom as if into the mouth of some unimaginable grouper, portholes blazing brightly even after they slipped beneath the waves.

“Farewell, old friend.” Anthony lifted his hand to his brow and fired off a forceful salute. “I’ll miss you,” he called across the ice-choked sea. The gannets screeched, the wind howled, the watery jaws whooshed closed. “You were the best of them all,” the captain told his ship as she began her final voyage, a slow, inexorable drop from the frothy surface of the Norwegian Sea to the inky blackness of the Mohns Trench, five thousand fathoms down.

THE DIVINE FACE was still smoldering when the Maracaibo arrived on the scene, smoke wafting off His cheeks in thick black tendrils and drifting northwest toward Jan Mayen Island. Thousands of whisker stubs speckled the charred, exposed flesh of His lantern jaw, encircling the frosted lips and frozen smile, angling upward like the skeletal remains of a forest fire. God, Anthony saw, had become as beardless as he himself.

Despite the surplus of officers and seamen, it took the Maracaibo’s company all day to dredge up the severed chains, belt them around the superstructure, and splice the raw ends together. “Slow ahead,” Anthony ordered. The chains tightened, grinding against the deckhouse walls, but the foundation held fast, and the Corpus Dei moved forward. At 1830 hours the captain gave the all-ahead-full, gulped down his four hundred and twenty-sixth cup of coffee since New York, and set his course for the Pole.

Anthony did not like the Carpco Maracaibo. It was all he could do to squeeze five knots out of her; even if the burdensome oil in her hold magically disappeared, he doubted she’d give him more than six. She had no soul, this tanker. The archangels had truly known what they were doing when they picked the Valparaíso.

The night the tow began, Cassie took up residence in Anthony’s cabin, an environment made erotically tropical by the eighty-degree air Crock O’Connor was obligingly pumping in from the engine flat.

“I have to know something,” she said, guiding Anthony’s naked body onto the bunk. “If our Midway scheme had worked and God had gone under, would you have forgiven me?”

“That’s not a fair question.”

“True.” She began arraying him in a decorator Supersensitive — the best-selling barber pole design, second in popularity only to the diamondback rattlesnake. “What’s the answer?”

“I’d probably never have forgiven you,” said Anthony, enjoying the way the sweat filled her cleavage like a river flowing through a gorge. “I know that’s not the answer you wanted to hear, but…”

“But it’s the one I expected,” she confessed.

“Now I have to know something.” He plugged her ear with his tongue, swizzling it around. “Suppose another opportunity came along for you to destroy my cargo. Would you take it?”

“You bet I would.”

“You don’t have to answer right away.”

Laughing, Cassie unfurled the condom. “You’re surprised?”

“Not really,” he sighed. Slithering on top of her, he cupped her breasts like Jehovah molding the Andes. “You’re a woman with a mission, Doc. It’s what I love about you.”

The next morning, while Cassie was out helping to chip ice from the central catwalk and Anthony lay in their bunk writing about the death of the Valparaíso, filling his Popeye journal with page after page of angry lamentation, a knock reverberated through the cabin. He rolled off the mattress, opened the door. Crock O’Connor stepped inside, accompanied by spindly little Vince Mangione, the latter gripping a brass birdcage, lifting it level with his face as if deploying a hurricane lantern against a moonless night.

Inside the cage, a parrot stood on a trapeze, making quick jabs with its beak in hopes of killing the mites under its wings. The bird turned its scarlet head, fixing on Anthony. Its eyes were like tiny oiled bearings. At first he thought some sort of resurrection had occurred, for the similarity between this macaw and his boyhood pet, Rainbow, was uncanny, but on further inspection he realized the present parrot lacked Rainbow’s distinguishing marks — the peculiar hourglass shape on her beak, the small jagged scar on her right talon.