James Morrow: Towing Jehovah

“Your father bought her in Palermo, right before we shipped out,” Mangione explained, setting the cage on the bunk.

“The engine flat made a fine home — all that steam,” said O’Connor. “But I’m sure she’ll do fine in your cabin.”

“Get her out of here,” said Anthony.

“What?”

“I want nothing that belonged to my father.”

“You don’t understand,” said Mangione. “He told me it was a present.”

“A present?”

Despite the Thanksgiving humiliation, the bottled Constitution, the malign neglect — despite everything, Anthony was touched. At last the old man was trying to make amends, restoring to his son the gift he’d taken away forty years earlier.

“We don’t know if your dad named her or not,” said O’Connor.

“What do you call her?”

“Pirate Jenny.”

“Leave her here,” said Anthony, returning Pirate Jenny’s unblinking stare. A sudden queasiness came. He half expected the parrot to say something sardonic and wounding, like Anthony left the bridge or Anthony fucked up.

As O’Connor started out of the cabin, Pirate Jenny squawked but produced no vocables. “I’m bored,” said the engineer, pausing in the jamb. He faced Anthony and frowned, crinkling the steam burn on his forehead. “The boilers around here are all on computers. There’s nothing for me to do.”

“The Val was an eyesore, hard to steer…”

“I know. I want her back.”

“Me too, Crock. I want her back too. Thanks for the bird.”

On September 21, a new variety of ice island appeared on the horizon, drifting southeast with the Greenland Current — glacier fragments so huge they made the Jan Mayen bergs seem like molehills. According to the Marisat, the Maracaibo was barely a day from her destination, but the prospect of journey’s end brought Anthony no pleasure. Eight men had died; the Val was in the Mohns Trench; the divine brain was garbage; his father would never absolve him. And for all Anthony knew, a Vatican armada now lay at anchor inside the tomb, ready to pirate his cargo.

“Froggy loves Tiffany.”

He was giving Cassie a backrub, pressing his palms against her beautiful flesh, vertebra after vertebra lined up like speed bumps, and for an instant he thought it was she who’d made the raspy little declaration.

“What?”

“Froggy loves Tiffany,” the scarlet macaw repeated. “Froggy loves Tiffany.”

The universe again, playing another of its outrageous jokes. Froggy loved Tiffany.

Anthony stifled a giggle. “It’s all too perfect, wouldn’t you say?”

“Perfect?” Cassie replied. “What?”

“Absolutely perfect. A masterpiece. The bastard’s dead, and he’s still taking back the things he gave me.”

“Oh, come on — your father’s not doing anything. Mangione didn’t understand the parrot was for Tiffany, that’s all. There’s no malice here.”

“You think so?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I must admit, I’m actually rather impressed,” said Anthony, struck by his mental picture of the old man sitting hour after hour in the engine flat, drilling the half-dozen syllables into the parrot’s head. “Imagine how many times he had to say it, over and over…”

“Maybe he hired a deckie.”

“No, Dad did the work, I’m sure. He loved that woman. Over and over and over.”

“Froggy loves Tiffany,” said Pirate Jenny.

“Cassie loves Anthony,” said Cassie Fowler.

“Anthony loves Cassie,” said Anthony Van Horne.

September 22.

The autumnal equinox. On this day in 1789, my Manner’s Pocket Companion informs me, 5 months after the mutiny on HMS Bounty, “Fletcher Christian and his crew sailed for the last time from Tahiti in search of a deserted island on which to settle.”

Mr. Christian could’ve done a lot worse than where he ended up, Pitcairn’s Island. He could’ve come here, for instance, to Kvitoya, surely the bleakest, coldest place south of Santa Claus’s outhouse.

At 0920 we drew within sight of the coordinates Raphael gave me in the Manhattan Cloisters — 80°6’N, 34°3’E — and, indeed, there it was, the Great Tomb, a waterborne mountain measuring nearly 16 miles across at its base and towering over 28,000 feet (the approximate height of Everest, Dolores Haycox noted), pinned between the deserted island and the beginning of what the charts call “unnavigable polar ice.” As we bore down on the thing, weaving among the lesser bergs at 5 knots, the entire company gathered spontaneously on the weather deck. Most of the sailors dropped to their knees. About half crossed themselves. The shadow of the tomb spread across the water like an oil slick, darkening our path. Directly above, a shimmering gold ring ran around the sun, a phenomenon that prompted Ockham to get on the PA system and explain how we were seeing “light waves bending as they pass through airborne ice crystals.” The sundogs appeared next: greenish, glassy highlights on either side of the ring, where the crystals were “acting like millions of tiny mirrors.”

The sailors wanted no part of the padre’s rationality, and I didn’t either. This morning, Popeye, the sun wore a halo.

For an hour we cruised along the mountain’s western face, probing, poking, seeking entrance, and at 1105 we spotted a trapezoidal portal. We came left 15 degrees, slowed to 3 knots, and crossed the threshold. Those angels knew their math, Popeye; their calculations were on the mark. Our cargo cleared the portal with a margin of perhaps 6 yards along each floating hand and not much more above the chest.

The Maracaibo steamed forward, her searchlights panning back and forth as she spiraled toward the core. For 20 miles we followed the smooth, slick, ever-curving passageway. It was like navigating the interior of a gigantic conch. Then, at last: the central crypt, its silvery walls soaring to meet a vaulted dome whose apex lay well beyond the reach of our beams.

No armada awaited. Rome may find us yet, of course; her ships could be gathering outside even as I write these words, barricading the exit. But right now we’re free to conduct our business in peace.

Dead ahead, dark waves lapped against a mile-long ice shelf, its surface nearly level with our bulwarks, and the minute I saw the glistery, sculpted bollards I knew the angels had intended it as a pier.

At 1450 I sent a half-dozen ordinaries over in the launch. They had no trouble grabbing the mooring lines and making them fast, but docking the Maracaibo was still a damned dicey operation: deceptive shadows, crazy echoes, chunks of pack ice everywhere. By 1535 the bitch was tied up, both her engines cut for the first time since she left Palermo.

I ordered an immediate burial at sea. Cassie, Ockham, and I marched down the catwalk to the fo’c’sle deck, pried up the seabag with grappling hooks, and, after scavenging an anchor from the handiest lifeboat, carried poor old Dad to the starboard bulwark.

“I’m not sure how Dutch Presbyterians go about it,” said Ockham, slipping a King James Bible from his parka, “but I know they’re fond of this translation.”

Loosening the drawstring, I removed my father’s pale, crushed corpse. He was frozen solid. “A Pop-sicle,” I muttered, and Cassie shot me a glance compounded of both shock and amusement.

Opening to First Corinthians, Ockham recited words I’d heard in a thousand Hollywood burial scenes.

“Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible…”

Cassie and I wrapped the lifeboat anchor around Dad’s waist and hoisted his iron-hard body onto the rail. The anchor hung between his legs like a codpiece. We pushed. He fell, crashing into the black lake. Even with the extra weight, he stayed on the surface for over a minute, drifting slowly toward God’s brow.