Towing Jehovah (26 page)

And suddenly here was Father Thomas, holding out a cupped hand. A mound of Cheerios, doubtless from his own allotment, lay in his palm. His generosity did not surprise her. The day before, she'd seen him lean over the
Val's
starboard rail and, in a benevolent and forbidden act, throw down a handful of goose barnacles for the poor moaning wretches in the shantytown.

"I don't deserve them."

"Eat," ordered the priest.

"I'm not even supposed to be on this voyage."

"Eat," he said again.

Cassie ate. "You're a good person, Father."

Sweeping her bleary gaze past the twelve-mile radar, the fifty-mile radar, and the Marisat terminal, she focused on the beach. Marbles Rafferty and Lou Chickering were climbing out of the
Juan Fernandez,
having just returned from another manifestly disastrous sea hunt. They jumped into the breakers and, collecting their trolling gear, waded ashore.

"Not even an old inner tube," sighed Sam Follingsbee, slumped over the control console. "Too bad—I got an incredible recipe for vulcanized rubber in cream sauce."

"Shut up," said Crock O'Connor.

"If only they'd found a boot or two. You should taste my
cuir tartare."

"I said shut up."

Lifting the late Joe Spicer's copy of
A Brief History of Time
from atop the Marisat, Cassie slipped it under the cowhide belt she'd borrowed from Lou Chickering. Miraculously, the book seemed to ease her stomach pains. She limped into the radio shack.

Lianne Bliss sat faithfully at her post, her sweaty fist clamped around the shortwave mike. ". . . the SS

Carpco Valparaíso"
she muttered, "thirty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes, north . . ."

"Any luck?"

The radio officer tore away her headset. Her cheeks were sunken, eyes bloodshot; she looked like an antique photograph of herself, a daguerreotype or mezzotint, gray, faded, and wrinkled. "Occasionally I hear something—bits of sports shows from the States, weather reports from Europe—but I'm not gettin' through. Too bad the deckies aren't here. Big news. The Yankees are in first place." Lianne put her headset back on and leaned toward the mike. "Thirty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes, north. Sixteen degrees, forty-seven minutes, west." Again she removed her headset. "The worst of it's the moaning, don't you think? Those poor bastards. At least we get our communion wafers."

"And our barnacles."

"The barnacles are hard for me. I eat 'em, but it's hard."

"I understand." Cassie brushed the sea goddess on Lianne's biceps. "The last time I was in a jam like this

. . ."

"Saint Paul's Rocks?"

"Right. I behaved shamefully, Lianne. I prayed for deliverance."

"Don't worry about it, sweetie. In your shoes I'd have done the same thing."

"There are no atheists in foxholes, people say, and it's so true, it's so fucking
true."
Cassie swallowed, savoring the aftertaste of the Cheerios. "No . . . no, I'm being too hard on myself. That maxim, it's not an argument against atheism—it's an argument against foxholes."

"Exactly."

A cold gray tide washed through Cassie's mind. "Lianne, there's something you should know."

"Yeah?"

"I think I'm about to faint."

The radio officer rose from her chair. Her mouth moved, but Cassie heard no words.

"Help . . . ," said Cassie.

The tide crested, crashing against her skull. She slipped down slowly, through the floor of the radio'shack

. . . through the superstructure . . . the weather deck . . . hull . . . island . . . sea. Into the green fathoms.

Into the thick silence.

"This is for you."

A deep voice—deeper, even, than Lianne's.

"This is for you," said Anthony again, handing her a stale slice of American cheese, its corners curled, its center inhabited by a patch of green mold.

She blinked. "Was I ... unconscious?"

"Yeah."

"Long?"

"An hour." The Exxon tiger grinned down from Anthony's T-shirt. "Sam and I agreed that the first person who passed out would get the emergency ration. It's not much, Doc, but it's yours." Cassie folded the slice into quarters and, pushing the ragged stack into her mouth, gratefully wolfed it down. "Th-thanks . . ."

She rose from the bunk. Anthony's cabin was twice as large as hers, but so cluttered it seemed cramped. Books and magazines were scattered everywhere, a
Complete Pelican Shakespeare
on the bureau, a stack of
Mariners' Weather Logs
on the washbasin, a
Carpco Manual
and a
Girls of Penthouse
on the floor. A spiral notebook lay on his desk, its cover displaying an airbrushed portrait of Popeye the Sailor.

"You'll have some, won't you?" asked Anthony, flashing her a half-empty bottle of Monte Alban.
MEZCAL CON GUSANO,
the label said. Mescal with worm. Without waiting for a reply, he sloshed several ounces into two ceramic Arco mugs.

"It's hell being a biologist. I know too much." As the pains started up again, Cassie pressed her palm against the
Brief History of Time
belted to her stomach. "Our fats were the first to go, and now it's the proteins. I can practically feel my muscles coming apart, cracking, splitting. The nitrogen floats free, spilling into our blood, our kidneys . . ."

The captain took a protracted sip of mescal. "That why my urine smells like ammonia?" She nodded.

"My breath stinks too," he said, handing her an Arco mug.

"Ketosis. The odor of sanctity, they used to call it, back when people fasted for God."

"How soon before we . . . ?"

"It's an individual sort of thing. Big fellas like Follingsbee, they're likely to last another month. Rafferty and Lianne—four or five days, maybe."

The captain drained his mescal. "This voyage started out so well. Hell, I even thought we'd save His brain. It's hash by now, don't you think?"

"Quite likely."

Settling behind his desk, Anthony refilled his mug and retrieved a brass sextant from among the nautical charts and Styrofoam coffee cups. "Know something, Doc? I'm just tipsy enough to say I think you're an incredibly attractive and altogether wonderful lady."

The remark aroused in Cassie a strange conjunction of delight and apprehension. A door to chaos had just been opened, and now she'd do best to fling it closed. "I'm flattered," she said, taking a hot gulp of Monte Alban. "Let's not forget I'm practically engaged."

"I was practically engaged once."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Janet Yost, a bos'n with Chevron Shipping." The captain sighted Cassie through his sextant; a lascivious grin twisted his lips, as if the instrument somehow rendered her blouse transparent. "We bunked together for nearly two years, running the glop down from Alaska. Once or twice we talked about a wedding. Far as I'm concerned, she was my fiancée. Then she got pregnant."

"By you?"

"Uh-huh."

"And . . . ?"

"And I freaked out. A baby's no way to start a marriage."

"Did you ask her to get an abortion?"

"Not in so many words, but she could tell that's where I stood. I'm not fit for fatherhood, Cassie. Look at who I've got for a model. It's like a surgeon learning his business from Jack the Ripper."

"Maybe you could've . . . hunted around, right? Gotten some guidance."

"I
tried,
Doc. Talked to sailors with kids, walked uptown to F.A.O. Schwarz and bought a Baby Feels-So-Real, you know, one of those authentic-type dolls, so I could take it home and hold it a lot—I felt pretty embarrassed buying the thing, I'll tell you, like it was some sort of sexual aid. And, hey, let's not forget my trips to Saint Vincent's for purposes of studying the newborns and seeing what sort of creatures they were. You realize how easy it is to sneak into a maternity ward? Act like an uncle, that's all. None of this shit worked. To this day, babies scare me."

"I'm sure you could get over it. Alexander did."

"Who?"

"A Norway rat. When I forced him to live with his own offspring, he started taking care of them. Sea horses make good fathers too. Also lumpfish. Did Janet get the abortion?"

"Wasn't necessary. Mother Nature stepped in. Before I knew it, we'd lost the relationship too. An awful time, terrible fights. Once she threw a sextant at me—that's how my nose got busted. After that we made a point of staying on separate ships. Maybe we passed in the night. Didn't hear from her for three whole years, but then, when the
Val
hit Bolivar Reef, she wrote to me and said she knew it wasn't my fault."

"Was it your fault?"

"I left the bridge."

Gritting her teeth, Cassie placed both her hands against
A Brief History of Time
and pushed. "We ever gonna find food out there?"

"Sure we are, Doc. I guarantee it. You okay?"

"Woozy. Abdominal pains. I don't suppose you have any more cheese?"

"Sorry."

She stretched out on the rug. Her brain had become a sponge, a
Polymastia mamillaris
dripping with Monte Alban. A mescal haze lay between her psyche and the world, hanging in space like a theatrical scrim, backlit, imprinted with twinkling stars. A scarlet macaw flew across the constellations—the very bird she'd promised to buy Anthony once they were home—and suddenly it was molting, feather by feather, until only the bare, breathing flesh remained, knobby, soft, and edible. The minutes locked by. Cassie nodded off, roused herself, nodded off . . .

"Am I dying?" she asked.

Anthony now sat beside her, his back against the desk, cradling her in his bare, sweaty arms. His tattooed mermaid looked anorectic. Slowly he extended his palm, its lifeline bisected by three objects resembling thick, stubby pretzel sticks.

"You won't die," he said. "I won't let anybody die."

"Pretzels?"

"Pickled mescal worms. Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar."

"W-worms?"

"All meat," he insisted, languorously lifting Caspar—or maybe it was Melchior, or possibly Balthazar—to her mouth. The creature was flaxen and segmented: not a true worm, she realized, but the larva of some Mexican moth or other. "Fresh from Oaxaca," he said.

"Yes. Yes. Good."

Gently, Anthony inserted Caspar. She sucked, the oldest of all survival reflexes, wetting the captain's fingers, saturating his larva. Satisfaction beamed from his face, a fulfillment akin to what a mother experiences while nursing—not bad, she decided, for a man who'd panicked at his girlfriend's pregnancy. She worked her jaw. Caspar disintegrated. He had a crude, spiky, medicinal flavor, a blend of raw mescal and
Lepidoptera
innards.

"Tell me what you told me before," said Cassie. "About my being—how did you put it?—'a wonderfully attractive...' ”

He fed her Melchior. "An incredibly attractive . . ."

"Yeah." She devoured the larva. "That."

Now came Balthazar. "I think you're an incredibly attractive and altogether wonderful lady," Anthony informed her for the second time that day.

As Cassie chewed, a mild sense of well-being took hold of her, transient but real. The wheat of General Mills, the cheese of Kraft, the worms of Oaxaca. She licked her lips and drifted toward sleep. Faith did not exist aboard the
Carpco Valparaíso,
nor hope either, but for the moment, at least, there was charity. Whatever the cause of the
Valparaíso's
failure to appear in Arctic waters, Oliver couldn't help noticing that the World War Two Reenactment Society was profiting heavily from the delay. According to the contract the Enlightenment League had signed with Pembroke and Flume, each sailor, pilot, and gunner had to receive "full combat pay" for every day he served aboard the carrier. Not that the men didn't earn it. Their commanders worked them around the clock, as if there were a war on. But Oliver still felt resentful. His money, he decided, was like Cassie's large chest. All during high school, she'd never known for certain why she was constantly being asked out—or, rather, she
had
known, and she didn't like it. A person should be valued for what he gave, Oliver believed, not for what he possessed. The short, homely man portraying Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, the officer in charge of Air Group Six, required both his squadrons to fly two practice missions a day, dropping wooden bombs and Styrofoam torpedoes on the icebergs of Tromso Fjord. Meanwhile, the fellow playing the carrier's skipper, a burly Irishman with a handlebar mustache, made his men keep the flight deck completely clear of ice and snow, even during those hours when the warplanes weren't flying their milk runs. For Captain George Murray's beleaguered sailors, combat duty aboard the
Enterprise
was like living in some suburbanite hell, a world where your driveway was six hundred feet long and needed shoveling even in the middle of summer.

An hour after the ninetieth straight PBY mission failed to find the
Valparaíso,
Pembroke and Flume summoned Oliver to their cabin. During World War Two, these spacious quarters had functioned as the wardroom, but the impresarios had converted it into a two-bedroom suite featuring a parlor furnished with an eye to late-Victorian ostentation.

"The crew's getting itchy," Albert Flume began, guiding Oliver toward a plush divan reminiscent of the couch in Delacroix's
Odalisque.

"Our pilots and gunners're going nuts." Sidney Pembroke unwrapped a facsimile of a Baby Ruth candy bar circa 1944. "If something doesn't happen soon to improve morale, they'll be asking to go home."

"To wit, we'd like to start granting the boys shore leave."

"At full combat pay."

Oliver glowered and clenched his fists. "Shore leave? Shore leave to where? Oslo?" Flume shook his head. "No way to get 'em there. The PBYs are tied up with reconnaissance, and we can't hire bush pilots without attracting attention."

"We hopped over to Ibsen City last night," said Pembroke. "Dull place on the whole, but that Sundog Saloon has possibilities."

Oliver scowled. "It's nothing but an old airplane hangar."