Towing Jehovah (2 page)

From out of the darkness, a sailor shouted, "Holy shit!"

Descending the amidships stairway, Anthony dashed across the weather deck and leaned over the starboard rail. A searchlight swept the scene, the whole stinking hell of it—the black water, the ruptured hull, the thick, viscous oil gushing from the breach. Eventually Anthony would learn how close they'd come to foundering that night; he would learn how Bolivar Reef had lacerated the
Val
like a can opener cutting the lid off a cocker spaniel's dinner. But just then he knew only the fumes—and the stench—and the peculiar lucidity that attends a man's awareness that he is experiencing the worst moment of his life.

To Caribbean Petroleum, it hardly mattered whether the
Val
was lost or saved that night. An eighty-million-dollar supertanker was chopped liver compared with the four and a half billion Carpco was ultimately obliged to pay out in damage awards, lawyers' fees, lobbyists' salaries, bribes to Texas shrimpers, cleanup efforts that did more harm than good, and a vigorous campaign to restore the corporation's image. The brilliant series of televised messages that Carpco commissioned from Hollywood's rock-video mills, each new spot trivializing the death of Matagorda Bay more shamelessly than its predecessor, went ridiculously over budget, so eager was the company to get them on the air.

"Unless you look long and hard, you probably won't notice her beauty mark is missing," the narrator of spot number twelve intoned over a retouched photograph of Marilyn Monroe. "Similarly, if you study a map of the Texas coast . . ."

Anthony Van Horne gripped the rail, stared at the pooling oil, and wept. Had he known what was coming, he might simply have stayed there, transfixed by the future: the five hundred miles of blackened beaches; the sixteen hundred acres of despoiled shrimp beds; the permanent blinding of three hundred and twenty-five manatees; the oily suffocation of over four thousand sea turtles and pilot whales; the lethal marination of sixty thousand blue herons, roseate spoonbills, glossy ibises, and snowy egrets. Instead he went up to the wheelhouse, where the first words out of Buzzy Longchamp's mouth were,

"Sir, I think we're in a peck of trouble."

Ten months later, a grand jury exonerated Anthony of all the charges the state of Texas had leveled against him: negligence, incompetence, abandoning the bridge. An unfortunate verdict. For if the captain wasn't guilty, then somebody else had to be, somebody named Caribbean Petroleum—Carpco, with its understaffed ships, overworked crews, steadfast refusal to build double-hulled tankers, and gimcrack oil-spill contingency plan (a scheme Judge Lucius Percy quickly dubbed "the greatest work of maritime fiction since
Moby-Dick.
Even as the legal system was vindicating Anthony, his bosses were arranging their revenge. They told him he would never command a supertanker again, a prophecy they proceeded to fulfill by persuading the Coast Guard to rescind his license. Within one year Anthony went from the six-figure salary of a ship's master to the paltry income of those human marginalia who haunt the New York docks taking whatever work they can get. He unloaded cargo until his hands became mottled with calluses. He tied up bulk carriers and Ro-Ros. He repaired rigging, spliced mooring lines, painted bollards, and cleaned out ballast tanks.

And he took showers. Hundreds of them. The morning after the spill, Anthony checked into Port Lavaca's only Holiday Inn and stood beneath the steaming water for nearly an hour. The oil wouldn't come off. After dinner he tried again. The oil remained. Before bed, another shower. Useless. Endless oil, eleven million gallons, a petroleum tumor spreading into the depths of his flesh. Before the year ended, Anthony Van Horne was showering four times a day, seven days a week. "You left the bridge," a voice would rasp in his ear as the water drummed against his chest.

Two officers must be on the bridge at all times . . .

"You left the bridge . . ."

"You left the bridge," said the angel Raphael, wiping his silver tears with the hem of his silken sleeve.

"I left the bridge," Anthony agreed.

"I don't weep because you left the bridge. Beaches and egrets mean nothing to me these days."

"You weep because"—he gulped—"God is dead." The words felt impossibly odd on Anthony's tongue, as if he were suddenly speaking Senegalese. "How can God be dead? How can God have a body?"

"How can He not?"

"Isn't He . . . immaterial?"

"Bodies
are
immaterial, essentially. Any physicist will tell you as much." Groaning softly, Raphael aimed his left wing toward the Late Gothic Hall and took off, flying in the halting, stumbling manner of a damaged moth. As Anthony followed, he noticed that the angel was disintegrating. Feathers drifted through the air like the residue of a pillow fight.

"Insubstantial stuff, matter," Raphael continued, hovering. "Quirky. Quarky. It's barely there. Ask Father Ockham."

Alighting amid the medieval treasures, the creature took Anthony's hand—those cold fingers again, like mooring lines dipped in the Weddell Sea—and led him to an anonymous Italian Renaissance altarpiece in the southeast corner.

"Religion's become too abstract of late. God as spirit, light, love—forget that neo-Platonic twaddle. God's a Person, Anthony. He made you in His own image, Genesis 1:26. He has a nose, Genesis 8:20. Buttocks, Exodus 33:23. He gets excrement on His feet, Deuteronomy 23:14."

"But aren't those just ... ?"

"What?"

"You know. Metaphors."

"Everything's a metaphor. Meanwhile, His toenails are growing, an inevitable phenomenon with corpses." Raphael pointed to the altarpiece, which according to its caption depicted Christ and the Virgin Mary kneeling before God, interceding on behalf of a prominent Florentine family. "Your artists have always known what they were doing. Michelangelo Buonarroti goes to paint the Creation of Adam, and a year later there's God Himself on the Sistine Chapel—an old man with a beard, perfect. Or take William Blake, diligently illustrating Job, getting everything right—God the Father, ancient of days. Or consider the evidence before you . . ." And indeed, Anthony realized, here was God, peering out of the altarpiece: a bearded patriarch, at once serene and severe, loving and fierce. But no. This was madness. Raphael Azarias was a fraud, a con man, a certifiable paranoid.

"You're molting."

"I'm dying," the angel corrected Anthony. Indeed. His halo, previously as red as the Texaco logo, now flickered an anemic pink. His once-bright feathers emitted a sallow, sickly aura, as if infested with aging fireflies. Tiny scarlet veins entwined his eyeballs. "The entire heavenly host is dying. Such is the depth of our sorrow."

"You spoke of my ship."

"The corpse must be salvaged. Salvaged, towed, and entombed. Of all vessels on earth, only the
Carpco
Valparaíso
is equal to the task."

"The
Val's
a cripple."

"They refloated her last week. She's in Connecticut at the moment, taking up most of the National Steel Shipyard, awaiting whatever new fittings you believe the job will require." Anthony stared at his forearm, flexing and unflexing the muscle, making his tattooed mermaid do a series of bumps and grinds.

"God's body . . ."

"Precisely," said Raphael.

"I would imagine it's large."

"Two miles fore to aft."

"Face up?"

"Yes. He's smiling, oddly enough. Rigor mortis, we suspect, or perhaps He elected to assume the expression before passing away."

The captain fixed on the altarpiece, noting the life-giving milk streaming from the Virgin's right breast. Two miles?
Two goddamn miles?
"Then I guess we'll be reading about it in tomorrow's
Times,
huh?"

"Unlikely. He's too dense to catch the attention of weather satellites, and He's giving off so much heat He registers on long-range radar as nothing but a queer-looking patch of fog." As the angel guided Anthony into the foyer, his tears started up again. "We can't let Him rot. We can't leave Him to the predators and worms."

"God doesn't have a
body.
God doesn't
die."

"God has a body—and for reasons wholly obscure to us, that body has expired." Raphael's tears kept coming, as if connected to a source as fecund as the Trans-Texas Pipeline. "Bear Him north. Let the Arctic freeze Him. Bury His remains." From the counter he snatched up a brochure promoting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its cover emblazoned with Piero della Francesca's
Discovery and
Proving of the True Cross.
"A gigantic iceberg lies above Svalbard, permanently pinned against the upper shores of Kvitoya. Nobody goes there. We've hollowed it out: portal, passageways, crypt. You merely have to haul Him inside." The angel plucked a feather from his left wing, eased it toward his eye, and wet the nib with a silver tear. Flipping over the brochure, he began writing on the back in luminous salt water. "Latitude: eighty degrees, six minutes, north. Longitude: thirty-four degrees . . ."

"You're talking to the wrong man, Mr. Azarias. You want a tugboat skipper, not a tanker captain."

"We want a tanker captain. We want you." Raphael's feather continued moving, spewing out characters so bright and fiery they made Anthony squint. "Your new license is in the mail. It's from the Brazilian Coast Guard." As if posting a letter, the angel slid the brochure under the captain's left arm. "The minute the
Valparaíso's
been fitted for a tow, Carpco will send her on a shakedown cruise to New York."

"Carpco? Oh, no, not those bastards again, not
them."

"Of course not
them.
Your ship's been chartered by an outside agent."

"Honest captains don't sail unregistered vessels."

"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 São Tomé, 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."