Towing Jehovah (9 page)

"Joe."

"Sir?"

"I want you to plot us a new course."

"Destination?"

Mouth hardening, eyes narrowing, Van Horne slid the binoculars into their canvas bin. "That guano farm in the middle of the Atlantic."

"Good," said Thomas. "Very good," he added, wondering how, exactly, he would justify this detour to Di Luca, Orselli, and Pope Innocent XIV. "Believe me, Anthony, acts of compassion are the only epitaph He wants."

DIRGE

WHEN CASSIE FOWLER awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She'd been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?

It was, of course, a pious place. A small ceramic Christ with blue eyes and cherry red lips hung bleeding on the far wall. A gaunt, rawboned priest hovered by her pillow. At the foot of her bed a large man loomed, his gray beard and broken nose evoking every Old Testament prophet she'd ever taught herself to mistrust.

"You're looking much better." The priest rested his palm against her blistered cheek. "I'm afraid there's no physician on board, but our chief mate believes you're suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion combined with dehydration and a bad sunburn. We've been buttering you with Noxzema." Gradually, like cotton candy dissolving in a child's mouth, the fog evaporated from Cassie's mind.
On
board,
he'd said.
Chief mate,
he'd said.

"I'm on a ship?"

The priest gestured toward the prophet. "The SS
Valparaíso,
under the command of Captain Anthony Van Horne. Call me Father Thomas."

Memories came. Maritime Adventures . . .
Beagle II
... Hurricane Beatrice . . . Saint Paul's Rocks. "The famous
Valparaíso?
The oil-spill
Valparaíso?"

"The
Carpco Valparaíso,"
said the captain frostily.

As Cassie sat up, the medicinal stench of camphor filled her nostrils. Pain shot through her shoulders and thighs: the terrible bite of the equatorial sun, her red skin screaming beneath its coating of Noxzema. Good God, she was alive, a winner, a golden girl, a beater of the odds. "How come I'm not thirsty?"

"When you weren't babbling your brains out," said the priest, "you consumed nearly a gallon of fresh water."

The captain stepped into the light, holding out a tangerine. He was better looking than she'd initially supposed, with a Byronesque forehead and the sort of sorrowful, vulnerable virility commonly found in male soap-opera stars on their way down.

"Hungry?"

"Famished." Receiving the tangerine, Cassie worked her thumb into its north pole, then began peeling it.

"Did I really babble?"

"Quite a bit," said Van Horne.

"About what?"

"Norway rats. Your father died of emphysema. In your youth you wrote plays. Oliver—your boyfriend, we presume—fancies himself a painter."

Cassie grunted, half from astonishment, half from annoyance. "Fancies himself a painter," she corroborated.

"You're not sure you want to marry him."

"Well, who's ever
sure?"

The captain shrugged.

She broke off a quadrisphere of tangerine and chewed. The pulp tasted sweet, wet, crisp—alive. She savored the word, the holy vocable. Alive, alive.

"Alive," she said aloud, and even before the second syllable passed her lips, she felt her exhilaration slipping away. "Thirty-three passengers," she muttered, her voice at once mournful and bitter. "Ten sailors

. . ."

Father Thomas nodded empathically. His eyebrows, she noticed, extended onto the bridge of his nose, meshing like two gray caterpillars in the act of kissing. "It's tragic," he said.

"God killed them with His hurricane," she said.

"God had nothing to do with it."

"Actually I agree with you, though for reasons quite different from yours."

"Don't be so sure of that," said the priest cryptically.

Cassie finished her tangerine. In her irreverent sequel to Job, the hero's mistress kept repeating a line from the original, over and over.
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

"This your cabin?" she asked, pointing to the ceramic Christ.

"Was. I've moved."

"You forgot your crucifix."

"I left it here on purpose," said Father Thomas without elaboration.

"Excuse my ignorance," said Cassie, "but do oil tankers normally carry clergy?"

"This isn't a normal voyage, Dr. Fowler." The priest's eyes grew wide and wild, darting every which way like bees who'd lost track of their hive. "Abnormal, in fact."

"Once our mission's accomplished," said the captain, "we'll ferry you back to the States."

"What're you talking about?"

"For the next nine weeks," said Van Horne, "you'll be our guest." Cassie scowled, her broiled body hardening with confusion and anger. "Nine weeks?
Nine weeks?
No, folks, I start teaching at the end of August."

"Sorry."

"Send for a helicopter, okay?" Slowly, like some heroic, evolution-minded fish hauling itself onto dry land, she rose from the berth, and only after her feet touched the green shag carpet did she bother to wonder whether she was clothed. "Do you understand?" Looking down, she saw that someone had swapped her bikini for a kimono printed with zodiac signs. Glued by Noxzema, the silk stuck to her skin in large amorphous patches. "I want you to charter me an International Red Cross helicopter, the sooner the better."

"I'm not authorized to report our position to the International Red Cross," said Van Horne.

"Please—my mother, she'll go nuts," Cassie protested, not knowing whether to sound desperate or furious. "Oliver, too. Please . . ."

"We'll allow you one brief message home."

An old scenario, and Cassie hated it, the patriarchy wielding its power.
Yeah, lady, I think we might
eventually get around to fixing your reduction gear, as if you knew what the hell a reduction gear
is.
"Where's the phone?"

Blue veins bulged from Van Horne's brow. "We're not offering you a
phone,
Dr. Fowler. The
Valparaíso
isn't some farmhouse you stumbled into after getting a flat tire."

"So what
are
you offering me?"

"All communication goes through our radio shack up on the bridge." A spasm of sunburn pain tore through Cassie's neck and back as she followed Father Thomas down a gleaming mahogany corridor and into the sudden claustrophobia of an elevator car. She closed her eyes and grimaced.

"Who's Runkleberg?" the priest asked as they ascended.

"I babbled about Runkleberg? I haven't thought of him in years."

"Another boyfriend?"

"A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg's my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he's out watering his roses, and he hears God's voice telling him to sacrifice his son."

"Does he obey?"

"His wife intervenes."

"How?"

"She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death." The priest gulped audibly. The elevator halted on the seventh floor.

"Biology and theater"—he guided them down another glossy corridor—"the two disciplines aren't normally pursued by the same person."

"Father, I simply
can't
stay on this boat."

"But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the biologist and the dramatist have much in common."

"Not for nine weeks. I have to clean up my office, prepare my lectures . . ."

"Explorers, right? The biologist seeks to discover Nature's laws, the dramatist her truths."

"Nine weeks is out of the question. I'll die of boredom."

The
Valparaíso's
radio shack was a congestion of transceivers, keyboards, fax machines, and telex terminals threaded together by coaxial cables. In the middle of the mess lounged a slender young woman with carrot-colored hair and skin the complexion of provolone. Cassie smiled, grateful for the two metal buttons pinned to the radio officer's red camisole: a clenched fist sprouting from the medical symbol for Woman, and the motto MEN HAVE UTERUS ENVY. Only the officer's pendant, a quartz crystal housed in silver, gave Cassie pause, but she had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the affectations with which radical feminists liked to impoverish their minds-—crystal therapy, neo-paganism, Wicca—her skepticism placed her emphatically in a minority.

"I like your buttons."

"You look good in my kimono," said the radio officer in a voice so deep it might have come from someone twice her size.

"She gets one telegram, Sparks," said Father Thomas, backing out of the shack. "Twenty-five words to her mother—period. Nothing about a ship called the
Valparaíso."

"Roger." The woman stretched out her bare arm, its biceps decorated with a tattoo of a svelte sea goddess riding the waves like a surfboard passenger. "Lianne Bliss, Sagittarius. I'm the one who picked up your SOS."

The biologist shook Lianne BJiss's hand, slick with equatorial sweat. "I'm Cassie Fowler."

"I know. You've had quite an adventure, Cassie Fowler. You drew the Death card, then Fate reversed it."

"Huh?"

"Tarot talk."

'' 'Fraid I don't believe in that stuff."

"You don't believe in Oliver either."

"Jesus."

"There are no private lives on a supertanker, Cassie. The sooner you learn that, the better. Okay, so the boy's got a bankroll, but I still think you should drop him. He sounds like a popinjay."

"Oliver sends back the wine," Cassie admitted, frowning.

"I gather he plans to be the next Van Gogh."

"Much too sane. A Sunday painter at best. . . I'm alive, aren't I, Lianne? Incredible."

"You're alive, sweetie."

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Extending her index finger, Cassie fiddled with a disembodied telegraph key, absently tapping out gibberish. "Now that all
my
secrets have been revealed, what about yours? Do you hate your job?"

"I
love
my job. I get to eavesdrop on the whole damn planet. On a clear night I might tune in a Tokyo businessman and his mistress having cellular-phone sex, a couple of ham-radio drug dealers planning an opium drop in Hong Kong, some neo-Nazis ranting to each other on their CBs in Berlin. I can pipe everything through to the deckies' quarters, and you know what they
really
want? Baseball from the States! What a waste. If I ever hear another Yankees game, I'll puke." She lifted a blue Carpco pencil to her mouth and licked the point. "So—what do we tell Mom?" The radio shack, Cassie decided, would make a great set for a play. She imagined a one-act satire laid entirely in heaven's central communications complex, God working the dials, bypassing the screams of pain and the cries for help as He attempts to pick up Yankee Stadium.

Closing her eyes, she brought her mother into focus: Rebecca Fowler of Hollis, New Hampshire, a cheerful and energetic Unitarian minister whose iconoclasm ran so deep it shocked even her own congregation. BEAGLE II SUNK BY HURRICANE . . . I'M SOLE SURVIVOR . . . PLEASE TELL

OLIVER . . .

Her thoughts drifted.
Mission,
Anthony Van Horne had said, a ship with a mission—and from the peculiar countenance Father Thomas had assumed back in his cabin, it was the most portentous mission since Saul of Tarsus had suffered an epileptic seizure and called it Christianity.

"I gather this isn't a regular voyage."

Lianne tugged on her UTERUS ENVY button. "It's a goddamn
cover-up,
Cassie. Evidently Holy Mother Church has detected some huge tarball coagulating off Africa, but she's promised to keep the matter quiet if Carpco ropes the sucker in and gives it to charity. Personally, I think the whole arrangement stinks."

"I'm a charter member of the Central Park West Enlightenment League," said Cassie with a knowing nod, as if it went without saying that any charter member of the Central Park West Enlightenment League needn't be instructed in the defects of Holy Mother Church. "A vital organization, I believe, a real bulwark"—she pointed to Lianne's pendant—"though you wouldn't like our opinion of those things."

"Small tits?"

"Magic crystals."

"It got rid of my herpes."

"I doubt that."

"You have a better explanation?"

"The placebo effect."

"Know what, Cassie Fowler? You should spend more time on ships. Standing lookout in the bow, with the ocean roaring all around you and the entire universe spread over your head— well, you just
know
there's some sort of eternal presence out there."

"An old man with a beard?" said Cassie, suppressing a sneer.

"Sweetie, if I've learned anything during my ten years at sea, it's this. Never confuse your captain with God."

July 12.

Two days ago we reached our destination, 0°0'N, 0°0'E, 600 miles off the coast of Gabon. Both scopes remained clear, and I should've expected as much—Raphael told me the body's been drifting.

I guess I was hoping we'd find something.

Our search pattern is an ever-expanding spiral, south to north, west to east, north to south, east to west, south to north, a course that should bring us within sight of Sao Tome by Tuesday. We're weaving a net in the sea, Popeye. Big gaps. But then again: big fish.

Crock O'Connor's still giving me my 18 knots, which means we'll hit the equator twice more before midnight.

That Cassie Fowler hates me, I can tell. No doubt she's one of
those.
Tree huggers, bug lovers, squid kissers—I can spot them a mile away, people for whom a polluter like Anthony Van Horne deserves to be eaten alive by ferrets. But I must say this: she's an appealing lady, voluptuous as old Lorelei here on my arm, with frizzy black hair and one of those long, horsy faces that look comical one minute, beautiful the next. I've decided to put her to work—scraping rust, maybe scrubbing a John or two. On the
Carpco Valparaíso
there are no free riders.