James Morrow: Towing Jehovah

Follingsbee chuckled. “I know what they look like, Father — you’re talkin’ to an ex-altar boy. Not to worry. We got all them hosts in freezer number six — couldn’t be safer. Will you be celebratin’ Mass every day?”

“Naturally.”

“I’ll be there,” said Follingsbee, starting back into the heart of the hubbub. “Well, maybe not every day.” His eye caught a Carmelite maneuvering a wheel of cheddar across the floor like a child playing with a hoop. “Hey, Sister, carry that thing — don’t fuckin’ roll it!”

The forklift truck pulled up, and a plump, ruddy nun climbed down from behind the wheel, a string of smoked sausages hanging about her neck like a yoke. Her step struck Anthony as remarkably lively, a sashay, really, if nuns sashayed. Evidently she moved to the beat of whatever private concert was pouring from the Sony Walkman strapped to her waist.

“Tom!” The nun ripped off her headphones. “Tom Ockham!”

“Miriam, darling! How wonderful! I didn’t know they’d recruited you!” The priest threw his arms around the nun and planted a sprightly kiss on her cheek. “Get my letter?”

“I did, Tom. Oddest words I ever read. And yet, somehow, I sensed they were true.”

“All true,” said the priest. “Rome, Gabriel, the slides, the EKG…”

“A bad business.”

“The worst.”

“There’s no hope?”

“You know me, the eternal pessimist.”

Anthony massaged his beard. The banter between Ockham and Sister Miriam bewildered him. It seemed a conversation less between a priest and a nun than between two passй movie actors encountering each other on a Hollywood set twenty years after their amicable divorce.

“Darling, meet Anthony Van Horne — the planet’s greatest living sailor, or so the angels believed,” said Ockham. “Miriam and I go back a long way,” he told the captain. “At Loyola they’re still using a textbook we wrote in the early seventies, Introduction to Theodicy.”

“What’s theodicy?” asked Anthony.

“Hard to explain.”

“Sounds like idiocy.”

“Much of it is.”

“Theodicy means reconciling God’s goodness with the world’s evils.” Sister Miriam snapped off a smoked sausage and took a bite. “Dinner,” she explained, chewing slowly. “Captain, I want to come along.”

“Along where?”

“On the voyage.”

“Bad idea.”

“It’s a splendid idea,” said the priest. He gestured toward the sausages. “Would you mind? I haven’t eaten all day.”

“One PAC is enough,” said Anthony.

Miriam snapped off a second sausage and handed it to Ockham.

“Let me put it this way.” The priest nudged Anthony with his clipboard. “The Holy Father was never entirely sold on you. It’s not too late for him to hire another captain.”

The first insidious stirrings of a migraine crept through Anthony’s brain. He rubbed his temples. “All right, Padre. Fine. But she won’t like the work. All you do is chip rust and paint what’s underneath.”

“Sounds dreadful,” said the nun. “I’ll take it.”

“See you in church tomorrow?” said Ockham, squeezing Miriam’s hand. “Saint Patrick’s Cathedral — 0800 hours, as we say in the Merchant Marine.”

“Sure thing.”

Sister Miriam put on her headphones and returned to her forklift.

“Okay, so our galley’s in good shape,” said Anthony as he and Ockham approached the elevator, “but what about the rest? The antipredator materiel?”

“We loaded six crates of Dupont shark repellent this morning,” said Ockham, devouring his sausage, “along with fifteen T-62 bazookas” — he glanced at his checklist — “and twenty WP-17 Toshiba exploding-harpoon guns.”

“Backup turbine?”

“Arrives tomorrow.”

They went up to level seven, the bridge. The place seemed untouched, frozen, as if some historical society were preserving the Carpco Valparaíso for tourism, the newest exhibit in the Museum of Environmental Disasters. Even the Bushnell binoculars occupied their customary spot in the canvas bin beside the twelve-mile radar.

“Bulkhead reinforcement beams?”

“In the fo’c’sle hold,” Ockham replied.

“Emergency prop?”

“Look down — you’ll see it lashed to the weather deck.”

“I didn’t like that crap you pulled back there, threatening me…”

“I didn’t like it either. Let’s try to be friends, okay?”

Saying nothing, Anthony grasped the helm, curling his palms around the cold steel disc. He smiled. In his past lay a dead mother, a mercurial father, a broken engagement, and eleven million gallons of spilled oil. His future promised little beyond old age, chronic migraines, futile showers, and a voyage that smacked of madness.

But at that precise moment, standing on the bridge of his ship and contemplating his emergency screw propeller, Anthony Van Horne was a happy man.

In the soggy, sweltering center of Jersey City, a twenty-six-year-old orphan named Neil Weisinger shouldered his seabag, climbed eight flights to the top of the Nimrod Building, and entered the New York Hall of the National Maritime Union. Over three dozen ABs and ordinaries jammed the dusty room, sitting nervously on folding chairs, gear wedged between their legs, half of them puffing on cigarettes, each sailor hoping for a berth on the only ship scheduled to dock that month, the SS Argo Lykes. Neil groaned. So much competition. The instant he’d finished his last voyage (a dry-cargo jaunt on the Stella Lykes, through the Canal to Auckland and back), he’d done as every able-bodied seaman does on disembarking — run straight down to the nearest union hall to get his shipping card stamped with the exact date and time. Nine months and fourteen days later, the card had acquired considerable seniority, but it still wasn’t a killer.

Neil pulled the card from his wallet — he liked his ID photo immensely, the way the harsh glare of the strobe had made his black eyes sparkle and his cherubic face look angular and austere — and tossed the laminated rectangle into a shoe box duct-taped to the wall below a poster reading SHIP AMERICAN: IT COSTS NO MORE. Reaching into the box, he flipped through his rivals. Bad news. A Rastafarian with nineteen more days on shore than Neil. A fellow Jew named Daniel Rosenberg with eleven. A Chinese woman, An-mei Jong, with six. Damn.

He sat down beneath an open window, a thick layer of Jersey grime spread across its panes like peanut butter on a saltine. You never knew, of course. Miracles happened. A tramp tanker might arrive from the Persian Gulf. The dispatcher might post an in-port relief job, or one of those short trips up the Hudson nobody wanted unless he was as broke as Neil. A crew of methane-breathing Neptunians might land in Journal Square, their helmsman dead from an oxygen overdose, and sign him up on the spot.

“Ever had any close calls?” A tense voice, slightly laryngitic. Neil turned. Outside the window, a sailor lounged on the fire escape — a muscular, freckled, auburn-haired young man in a red polo shirt and tattered black beret, his seabag serving as a pillow. “I mean, really close ?”

“Not me, no. Once, in Philly, I saw an AB come in with this card three hundred and sixty-four days old.”

“Sweating?”

“Like a stoker. When the sheet went up, the guy actually pissed his pants.”

“He get a berth?”

Neil nodded. “Twelve and a half minutes before his card would’ve rolled over.”

“The Lord was lookin’ out for him.” The freckled sailor slipped a tiny gold chain from beneath his polo shirt, glancing at the attached cross like the White Rabbit consulting his pocket watch.