Towing Jehovah (22 page)

Deuteronomy 21:21.

And here I'd always thought DeMille was afraid of controversy.

One ballsy mogul, Marty.

Damn theater chains.

(nodding)
They think they own the world.

Joe Spicer jumped to his feet, hurled down his horseshoe crab, and said, "Mates, we've been committing a serious epistemological error!”

"Schopenhauer was cracking walnuts in his ass!" agreed Dolores Haycox, tossing aside her Liberian sea snake. "Life's meaning doesn't come from God! Life's meaning comes from life!"

"Captain, you gotta forgive us!" pleaded Bud Ramsey.

At which point Cassie woke up.

August 6.

Ockham wasn't kidding. The bastards cleaned us out. Until we can get a fishing party together, we'll be eating whatever stuff they dropped or didn't want in the first place.

I'm burning up, Popeye. I'm ablaze with migraine auras and shimmering visions of what I'll do to the mutineers once I catch them. I see myself keelhauling Ramsey, the
Val
's barnacled bottom scraping off his skin like a galley grunt peeling a potato. I see myself cutting Haycox into neat little cubes and tossing them into the Gibraltar Sea, snacks for sharks. And Joe Spicer? Spicer I'll tie to a Butterworth plate, whipping him till the sun glints off his backbone.

Welcome to Anno Postdomini One, Joe.

At 1320 Sam Follingsbee handed me an inventory: 1 bunch of bananas, 2 dozen hot dogs, 3 pounds of Cheerios, 5 loaves of bread, 4 slices of Kraft American cheese ... I can't go on, Popeye, it's too depressing. I told the steward to work out a rationing system, something that will keep us functioning for the rest of the month.

"And after that?" he asked.

"We pray," I replied.

Although the mutineers broke into the fo'c'sle hold and made off with all the antipredator weapons, they didn't think to loot the deckhouse locker, so they're without shells for the bazookas and harpoons for the WP-17s. When it comes to serious firepower, we have effectively disarmed each other. Unfortunately, they also ripped off two decorative cutlasses from the wardroom, six or seven flare pistols, and a handful of blasting caps. Given this arsenal and their superior numbers, I see no way to attack their camp and win.

So we sit. And wait. And stew.

Sparks keeps trying to raise the outside world. No luck. I can deal with a grounding, a food shortage, maybe even a mutiny, but this endless fog is making me nuts.

At 1430 Ockham and Sister Miriam filled their knapsacks and set off north across the dunes, looking for the bastards. "We're assuming Immanuel Kant had it right," the padre explained. "There's a natural moral law—a categorical imperative—latent within every person's soul."

"If we can make the deserters understand that," said Miriam, "they may very well recover." Know what I think, Popeye? I think they're about to get themselves killed. They found the deserters by their laughter: whoops of primitive delight and cries of post-theistic joy blowing across the wet sands. Thomas's heart beat faster, rattling the miniature crucifix sandwiched between his chest and sweatshirt.

Straight ahead, a range of high, damp dunes sizzled in the sun. Side by side, Jesuit and Carmelite ascended, pausing halfway up to drink from their canteens and mop the perspiration from their brows.

"No matter how far they've sunk, we must offer them love," Sister Miriam insisted.

"We've been there ourselves, haven't we?" said Thomas. "We know what havoc the Idea of the Corpse can wreak." Reaching the summit, he lifted Van Horne's binoculars to his eyes. He blanched, transfixed by a sight so astonishing it rivaled Miriam's recent Dance of the Seven Veils. "Lord . . ." A marble amphitheater sprawled across the valley floor, its façade broken by arched niches in which resided eight-foot-high statues of nude men wearing the heads of bulls, vultures, and crocodiles, its main gate guarded by a sculpted hermaphrodite happily engaged in a singularly dexterous act of self-pleasuring. Built to accommodate several thousand spectators, the arena now held a mere thirty-two, each deserter stuffing his face with food while watching the gaudy entertainment frantically unfolding below.

In the center of the rocky field, the
Val's
Toyota forklift truck careened in wild circles, its steel prongs menacing a terrified mariner dressed only in tennis shoes and black bathing trunks. Inevitably Thomas thought of the last time he'd seen the forklift in action, the night he and Van Horne had watched Miriam transport a paddock of fresh eggs across the galley. It seemed now as if this very truck had, like the crew, fallen into depravity, seized by some technological analogue of sin. He twisted the focusing drive. The threatened sailor was Eddie Wheatstone, the alcoholic bos'n Van Horne had jailed for destroying the rec-room pinball machine. Sweat glazed the bos'n's face. His eyes looked ready to burst. Thomas panned, focused.

Joe Spicer sat behind the steering wheel, dressed in a Michael Jackson T-shirt and khaki shorts, holding a can of Coors: sensitive Joe Spicer, the Merchant Marine's most civilized officer, the man who brought books to the bridge, now mesmerized by the Idea of the Corpse. Pan, focus. Near the portcullis cowered blubber-bellied Karl Jaworski, the ship's notorious lecher, in cotton briefs and Indian moccasins. Neil Weisinger, clad in nothing but a jockstrap, lay curled up beside the north wall like a catatonic.

The mismatch between Wheatstone and Spicer was outrageous. True, the bos'n was armed—in his right hand he grasped a stockless anchor from
the Juan Fernandez
—but no matter which way he dodged, the forklift kept pace with him, its prongs slashing the foggy air like the tusks of a charging elephant. Wheatstone grew wearier by the minute; the priest could practically see the lactic acid fouling the poor man's blood, byproduct of his muscles' hopeless attempt to burn up all their sugar.

"It's even worse than we imagined," said Thomas, passing the binoculars to his friend. "They've gone over to the gods."

Miriam focused on the field and shuddered. "Is this the future, Tom—vigilante vengeance, public executions? Is this the shape of the post-theistic age?"

"We've got to have faith," he said, taking back the binoculars. Miraculously, Wheatstone now seized the initiative. As a bestial cry broke from his lips—a howl such as Thomas had last heard at an exorcism—the bos'n set the anchor twirling above his head, apparently aiming to puncture a tire. He released the rope. The anchor flew, hit the forklift's right prong, and flipped into the mud. Applause erupted from the pagans, appreciation for a futile gesture well done. Seconds later, they were urging Spicer to retaliate.

“Get him, Joe!” "Run the bastard down!" "Go!" "Go!" "Go!" Laughing maniacally, Spicer pulled a cargo net from the forklift's rear compartment and neatly dropped it over the terrified bos'n. Wheatstone tripped, falling face down. The more he fought, the more entangled he became, but it was only after he began sliding forward—body bouncing across the sharp rocks, forehead cutting through the mud like a plow making a furrow—that Thomas noticed the Dacron mooring line running from the cargo net to the rear bumper.

"Tom, he's gonna kill that man!"

Round and round Spicer towed his prey, as if enacting some grotesque parody of the
Val's
mission. Wheatstone screamed. He kicked and flailed. He started coming apart, his liquid constituents leaking through the interstices of the cargo net like squashed tomatoes permeating the bottom of a grocery bag. When it became clear that Wheatstone was dead, two husky ordinaries rushed onto the field, cut the mooring line, and flung the bos'n's trussed body toward the portcullis.

The pagans jumped to their feet and cheered.

"Yay, Joe!"

"Way to go!"

"Yay, Joe!"

"Way to go!"

Priest and nun raced into the valley, whimpering in dismay, wet sand grabbing at their boots. Together they passed through the main gate and entered the world beneath the tiers, a maze of slimy, silty tunnels in which plunder from the
Val
—bazookas, refrigerators, footlockers, diesel generators, video-game consoles— lay about like beached jetsam. Daylight beckoned. A ramp appeared. They charged into the open air.

A river of wine flowed down the marble steps; abandoned sausages festered under the seats; gnawed pizza slices and half-eaten apples rotted in the heat. As Karl Jaworski ran across the arena—ran, literally, for his life—Thomas and Miriam ascended a dozen rows and paused, panting, between Charlie Horrocks, his features buried in a huge slice of watermelon, and Bud Ramsey, his lips locked around a bottle of Budweiser. It took Thomas several seconds to realize that Dolores Haycox and James Echohawk, stretched out on the seats directly in front of him, were engaged in energetic sexual congress.

"Hiya, Father Tom!" said Ramsey. Beer foam flecked his chin. "Afternoon, Miriam."

"Great party, huh?" said Horrocks, emerging from his watermelon chunk. Haycox and Echohawk groaned in unison, groping toward orgasms of an intensity that, in the previous era, they could probably only have imagined.

To Horrocks's left, Karl Jaworski's three victims—robust Isabel Bostwick, svelte An-mei Jong, exotic Juanita Torres—sat huddled together, blowing kisses toward Spicer. Bostwick licked a Turkish taffy. Jong guzzled a bottle of Cook's champagne. Dressed only in bra and panties, Torres shook a pair of pompoms she'd improvised by ripping up her Menudo T-shirt and tying the shreds to needle guns.

Despite the vivid frenzy on the field—despite the horrific fact that Spicer had somehow maneuvered Jaworski against the south wall and was now driving straight for him—it seemed to Thomas that what the arena really contained was a kind of Barthian
Nichtige:
an ontological nothingness where once God's grace had been, its blind gravity devouring all goodness and mercy like a black hole feasting on light. Jaworski dropped to his knees. Spicer lowered the forklift prongs accordingly. In a choral display of utter joy, Bostwick, Jong, and Torres rose in a body and together shouted, "Kill!" Thomas could see what was about to happen. He begged God that it wouldn't.

"Kill!"

"Kill!"

Even as the entreaty took shape on the priest's lips, the left forklift prong struck Jaworski squarely, slipping into his abdomen as smoothly as the spear of Longinus entering the crucified Savior.

"Bull's-eye!" squealed Jong as Jaworski, impaled, ascended.

"No!" howled Thomas. "No! No!"

"Calm down, man," said Ramsey. "Don't have no fuckin' cow." Spicer backed up. Jaworski, screaming in agony, hung suspended from the prong, wriggling like a beetle on a hatpin.

"No!" moaned Miriam.

"Right on!" yelled Torres.

"Mazel tov!" shouted Bostwick.

Brow knitted in a thoughtful frown, Spicer operated the lift controls, working the prong ever deeper as he raised the skewered man up and down, up and down. Jaworski gripped the wet steel shaft, bathing his hands in his own blood as he attempted, bravely but hopelessly, to free himself.

"Spicer, Spicer, he's our man!" cried Bostwick. "If he can't do it, no one can!" An urge to vomit grew in Thomas, wrenching his stomach and burning his windpipe, as the same ordinaries who'd previously disposed of Wheatstone slid Jaworski's corpse off the prong and casually dumped it in the mud. Miriam, weeping, took her friend's hand, digging her thumbnail so deeply into his palm she drew blood. He beat back his nausea through force of will.

"Go, go, Joe, Joe!" shouted Torres, swishing her pom-poms. "Go, go, Joe, Joe! Go, go, Joe, Joe!" Anchor at the ready, Neil Weisinger stumbled toward the center of the field. Spicer, downshifting, gave chase.

"Stop this!" cried Miriam. She sounded, Thomas had to admit, more like a teacher disciplining a kindergarten than like the voice of reason evoking the spirit of Immanuel Kant. "Stop this right now!" Spicer threw his net.

He missed.

The kid retreated, anchor swinging at his side, his bare feet splashing through the mud. Gushing black exhaust, the forklift bore down on him at five, ten, fifteen miles an hour. Spicer elevated the prongs to the height of Weisinger's belly.

"Go!"

"Go!"

The kid stopped, turned, waited.

"Kill!"

"Kill!"

And suddenly the anchor was airborne, arrowing straight for the driver's seat.

"Go!"

"Go!"

Acting on instinct, Spicer swerved—the same pathetic impulse, Thomas guessed, by which a soldier walking into a hail of grapeshot will raise his arms to fend off the balls.

"Kill!"

"Kill!"

The anchor landed between the second mate's legs. Shrieking with pain, he released the steering wheel and groped toward his crotch.

"Go!"

"Go!"

The forklift hit the wall at over thirty miles per hour, a collision of such force it threw Spicer from the cab and sent him somersaulting through the air. The two hundred and thirty pound man landed on his feet. His femurs shattered audibly. He collapsed, stabbed by his own bones, and began flopping around in the sand.

"Weisinger, Weisinger, he's our man! If he can't do it, no one can!" The kid wasted no time. Retrieving the anchor from the forklift seat, he dashed across the arena and hunched over Spicer. He scanned the crowd. At first Thomas assumed Weisinger merely wanted to savor the moment—where, when, and under what other circumstances could an able-bodied seaman receive a standing ovation?—but then he realized the kid was waiting for a sign. In a weirdly synchronous gesture, thirty-two hands shot forward, thumbs up. With equally uncanny coordination, thirty-two wrists rotated.

Thumbs down.

"Neil, no!" cried Thomas, gaining his feet. "It's me, Neil! It's Father Thomas!"

"Don't do it!" shouted Miriam.

Weisinger got to work, chopping relentlessly with the anchor, mooring himself to Spicer. An enormous bare-chested sailor turned toward Thomas, exuding the sickly sweetness of whiskey. Black beard, bad skin, a face like the granite glutton on the far side of the island. Thomas recognized him as a demac named Stubby Barnes. The man had come to Mass twice. "Hey, you oughta settle down, Father. You too, Sister." The demac's right hand cradled an empty bottle of Cutty Sark. "I mean no disrespect, but this ain't your party!"