Towing Jehovah (42 page)

A disturbing truth fell upon Neil as he observed James Echohawk offer up his 35mm Nikon. Years from now, enacting his love for the God of the four A.M. watch, Neil might actually start feeling good about himself. In buying Big Joe Spicer's sister a dress for her senior prom or funding a hip operation for Leo Zook's father, he might very well find inner peace. And the instant this happened, the minute he experienced satisfaction, he'd know he wasn't doing enough.

Anthony Van Horne came forward and, with a shudder of reluctance, laid down a Bowditch sextant replica that must have been worth five hundred dollars. Sam Follingsbee surrendered a varnished walnut case filled with stainless-steel Ginsu knives. Father Thomas arrived next, sacrificing a jeweled chalice and a silver ciborium, followed by Sister Miriam, who lifted a golden-beaded rosary from her parka and rested it on the stack. Marbles Rafferty added a pair of high-powered Minolta binoculars, Crock O'Connor a matched set of Sears Craftsman socket wrenches, Lianne Bliss her crystal pendant.

"I've been thinking," said Cassie Fowler.

Reaching into his wool leggings, Neil drew out his gift. "Veimeru: amein," he muttered.
And let us say:
Amen.
"Yeah, Miss Fowler?"

"You're right—whatever else, we still owe Him. I wish I had an offering. I came aboard with nothing but an Elvis cup and a Betty Boop towel."

Neil placed his grandfather's Ben-Gurion medal on the altar and said, "Why not give Him your gratitude?" In God's private tomb, Cassie Fowler soon learned, time did not exist. No tides foretold the dusk; no stars announced the night; no birds declared the break of day. Only by glancing at the bridge clock did she know it was noon, eighteen hours after she'd watched Neil Weisinger offer up his bronze medal. Stepping out of the wheelhouse, melding with the small, sad party on the starboard wing, Cassie was chagrined to realize that everyone else wore more respectful clothing than she. Anthony looked magnificent in his dress whites. Father Thomas had put on a red silk vestment fitted over a black claw-hammer coat. Cardinal Di Luca sported a luxurious fur stole wrapped around a brilliant purple alb. In her shabby orange parka (courtesy of Lianne), ratty green mittens (donated by An-mei Jong), and scruffy leather riding boots (from James Echohawk), Cassie felt downright irreverent. She didn't mind snubbing their cargo— this was, after all, the God of Western Patriarchy—but she did mind feeding the cliché that rationalists have no sense of the sacred.

Raising the PA microphone to his fissured lips, Father Thomas addressed the company below, half of them assembled on the weather deck, the rest milling around on the pier. "Welcome, friends, and peace be with you." The cavernous crypt replayed his words,
be with you, with you, with you.
"Now that our Creator has departed, let it be known that we commend Him to Himself and commit His body to its final resting place—ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . ."

Anthony took up the deckhouse walkie-talkie, pressed SEND, and solemnly contacted the pump room.

"Mr. Horrocks, the hoses . . ."

With the same spectacular efficiency it had displayed during the Battle of Midway, the
Maracaibo's
firefighting system swung into action. A dozen hoses rose along the afterdeck and spewed out gallon upon gallon of thick white foam. Every bubble, Cassie knew, was holy, Father Thomas and Monsignor Di Luca having spent the morning in a frenzy of consecration. The purified lather arced through the air and splashed against His left shoulder, freezing solid at the instant of anointment.

"God Almighty, we pray that You may sleep here in peace until You awaken Yourself to glory," said Father Thomas. Cassie admired the skill with which the priest had adapted the classic rite, the subtle balance he'd struck between traditional Christian optimism and the brute facticity of the corpse. "Then You will see Yourself face to face and know Your might and majesty . . ." Hearing her cue, she came forward, Father Thomas's Jerusalem Bible tucked under her arm.

"Our castaway, Cassie Fowler, has asked permission to address you," the priest told the sailors. "I don't know exactly what she intends to say"—an admonitory glance—"but I'm sure it will be thoughtful."

As she took up the mike, Cassie worried that she might be about to make a fool of herself. It was one thing to lecture on food chains and ecological niches before a class of Tarrytown sophomores and quite another to critique the cosmos before a mob of hardened and depressed merchant sailors. "In all of Scripture," she began, "it is perhaps the ordeal of Job that best allows me to articulate how rationalists such as myself feel about our cargo." Swallowing a frigid mouthful of air, she glanced down at the wharf. Lianne Bliss, standing beneath the blue whale, gave her an encouraging smile. Dolores Haycox, slumped against the sequoia, offered a reassuring wink. "Job, you may recall, demanded to know the
reason
for his terrible losses—possessions, family, health—whereupon the Whirlwind appeared and explained that justice for one mere individual was not the point." She leaned the Bible's spine against the rail and opened it near the middle. " 'Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?' God asks, rhetorically. 'What supports its pillars at their bases? Who pent up the sea behind closed doors when it leapt tumultuous out of the womb?' " She extended her right mitten, indicating the frozen hippopotamus. "

'Now think of Behemoth,' " she said, still quoting God. " 'What strength he has in his loins, what power in his stomach muscles. His tail is as stiff as a cedar, the sinews of his thighs are tightly knit. His vertebrae are bronze tubing, his bones as hard as hammered iron . . .' '' Pivoting ninety degrees, Cassie spoke to the Corpus Dei. "What can I say, Sir? I'm a rationalist. I don't believe the splendor of hippos is any sort of answer to the suffering of humans. Where do I even begin? The Lisbon earthquake? The London plague? Malignant melanoma?" She sighed with a mixture of resignation and exasperation. "And yet, throughout it all, You still remained You, didn't You? You, Creator: a function You performed astonishingly well, laying those foundations and anchoring those supporting pillars. You were not a very good man, God, but You were a very good wizard, and for that I, even I, give You my gratitude." Accepting both the mike and the Jerusalem Bible from Cassie, Father Thomas ran through the rest of the modified liturgy. "Before we go our separate ways, let us take leave of our Creator. May our farewell express our love for Him. May it ease our sadness and strengthen our hope. Now please join me in reciting the words Christ taught us on that celebrated Mount in Judea: 'Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come . . .' ''

While the
Maracaibo's
company prayed, Cassie scanned their smiling cargo, pondering its myriad misfortunes. The voyage had not been kind to God. Nearly a sixth of the right breast had been plundered for fillets. Demolition-bomb craters scarred the belly. Torpedo holes pocked the neck. The chin appeared to have been shaved with a blowtorch. Head to toe, the bites of predators and the ravages of ice alternated with vast swampy tracts of decay. A Martian happening upon the scene would never guess that the thing these mourners were entombing had once been their principal deity.

". . . and the power and the glory. Amen."

As Lou Chickering broke from the crowd and strode across the pier, tears sparkling in his eyes, Cassie recalled the many times she'd heard his mellifluous baritone drifting upward from the engine flat, reciting a soliloquy or belting out an aria. Reaching the shore of the encapsulated bay, the gorgeous sailor threw back his head and sang.

Swing low, sweet chariot,

Comin' for to carry me home,

Swing low, sweet chariot,

Comin for to carry me home.

Now the entire company joined in, over a hundred voices melding into a thunderous dirge that reverberated off the great frozen dome.

I looked over Jordan, an' what did I see,

Comin' for to carry me home?

A band of angels comin' after me,

Comin' for to carry me home.

"All right, Professor Ockham, you win," said Di Luca, stroking his stole. "This was all meant to be, wasn't it?"

"I believe so."

Swing low, sweet chariot,

Comin' for to carry me home . . .

"Tonight I'll compose a letter." The cardinal steadied himself on the bridge rail. "I'll tell Rome the corpse was incinerated as per the consistory's wishes—and then, with Van Horne's permission, I'll send it."

"Don't bother," said Father Thomas. "Three hours ago you faxed the Holy Father just such a message."

"What?"

"I don't like situational ethics any more than you do, Tullio, but these are troubled times. Your signature's not hard to forge. It's fastidious and crisp. The nuns taught you well."
If you get there before I do,

Comin' for to carry me home,

Jes' tell my friends that I'm a-comin' too,

Comin' for to carry me home.

Cassie wasn't sure which aspect of this exchange disturbed her more: Father Thomas's descent into expedience, or her realization that Rome was not about to finish the job Oliver had so badly botched.
Swing low, sweet chariot,

Comin' for to carry me home . . .

The cardinal glowered but said nothing. Thomas kissed his Bible. Cassie closed her eyes, allowing the spiritual to coil through her unquiet soul, and by the time the last echo of the last syllable had died away, she knew that no being, supreme or otherwise, had ever received a more sonorous send-off to the dark, icy gates of oblivion.

The
Maracaibo
sailed southeast, crashing through the Arctic Ocean at a brisk sixteen knots as she headed toward the coast of Russia. For Thomas Ockham, the mood aboard the tanker was difficult to decipher. Naturally the sailors were delighted to be going home, but beneath their happiness he sensed acute melancholy and a grief past understanding. On the night of their departure from Kvitoya, a dozen or so off-duty deckies gathered in the rec room for a kind of eschatological hootenanny, and soon the entire superstructure was resounding with "Rock of Ages," "Kum-Ba-Yah," "Go Down Moses," "Amazing Grace," "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," and "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." The next day at noon, Thomas celebrated Mass as usual, and for the first time ever a whopping ninety percent of available Christians showed up.

As it turned out, the port of Murmansk boasted a deep-water mooring platform, the sort of rig that allowed a tanker to discharge her cargo directly into seabed pipes without entering harbor. Van Horne arranged the transaction over the ship-to-shore radio, and within four hours of hooking up, the
Maracaibo
had been pumped dry. Although the Russians could not comprehend why the Catholic Church was giving them eight million gallons of Arabian crude oil for free, they quickly stopped looking this gift horse in the mouth. Winter was coming.

On the morning of September 25, as the
Maracaibo
drew near the Hebrides, the urge to think overcame Thomas. He knew just what to do. Early in the voyage, he'd discovered that a supertanker's central catwalk was the perfect place for contemplation, as conducive to quietude as a monastery arcade. One slow march down its length and back, and he had effectively penetrated some great mystery—why existing TOE equations failed to accommodate gravity, why the universe contained more matter than antimatter, why God had died. A second such march, and he had ruthlessly generated a thousand reasons for calling his answer invalid.

Tall, choppy waves surrounded the
Maracaibo.
Walking aft, Thomas imagined himself as Moses leading the escaping Hebrews across the Red Sea basin, guiding them past the slippery rocks and bewildered fish, a cliff of suspended water towering on each side. But Thomas did not feel like Moses just then. He did not feel like any sort of prophet. He felt like the universe's stooge, a man who could barely solve a riddle on a Happy Meal box, much less derive a Theory of Everything or crack the conundrum of his Creator's passing.

A cosmic assassination?

An unimaginable supernatural virus?

A broken heart?

He looked to port.

The derelict bore the name
Regina Marts:
an old-style freighter with deckhouses both amidships and aft, dead in the water and drifting aimlessly through the Scottish mist like some phantom frigate out of
The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
By 1400 Thomas was ascending her gangway, Marbles Rafferty right behind. The cold fog enshrouded them, turning their breath to vapor and roughening their skin with goose bumps.

As he stepped onto the main deck, Thomas saw that heaven's very remnants had figured in the
Regina
's ill-starred run. Evidently she'd been manned by cherubs. Their gray, bloated corpses lay everywhere—dozens of plump miniangels rotting atop the fo'c'sle, putrefying by the kingposts, suppurating on the quarterdeck. Tiny feathers danced on the North Sea breeze like snowflakes.

"Captain, it's a pretty weird scene here," said Rafferty into the walkie-talkie. "About forty dead children with wings on their backs."

Van Horne's voice sputtered from the speaker. "Children? Christ . . ."

"Let me talk to him," Thomas insisted, appropriating the walkie-talkie. "Not children, Anthony. Cherubs."

"Cherubs?"

"Uh-huh."

"No survivors?"

"I don't think so. It's amazing they got this far north."

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" asked Van Horne.

"When cherubs come," said Thomas, "angels can't be far behind." Pitted with rust, pocked with corrosion, the
Regina
was in no better shape than her crew. It was as if she'd been scooped up and sucked upon by God Himself—smashed against His cuspids, burned with His saliva—then spit back into the sea. Thomas started into the amidships deckhouse, following a sharp, fruity odor of such intensity it overpowered the cherubs' stench. His jugular veins throbbed. Blood pounded in his ears. The scent led him down a damp corridor, up a narrow companionway, and into a gloomy cabin.