Towing Jehovah (7 page)

"Wake up the pump room," said Kolby, plucking the intercom mike from the console and handing it to the chief mate. "Time we took on some ballast."

"Don't do it, Marbles," said Anthony.

"I need ballast to steer," Kolby protested.

"Look at the fathometer, for Christ's sake. Our barnacles can stick their peckers in the bottom."

"This is
my
harbor, Anthony. I know how deep it is."

"No ballast, Frank."

The pilot reddened and fumed. "It appears I'm no longer needed up here, am I?"

"Appears that way."

"Who's your tailor, Frank?" asked Rafferty, deadpan. "I'd like to be buried in a suit like that."

"Fuck you," said the pilot. "Fuck the lot of you."

Anthony tore the walkie-talkie from Kolby's hand. "Lower starboard accommodation ladder," he instructed the bos'n. "We're dropping our pilot in ten minutes."

"Once the Coast Guard hears about this," said Kolby, quivering with rage as he climbed back into his leggings, "it won't be a
week
before you lose your master's license all over again."

"Put your complaint in Portuguese," said the captain. The Statue of Liberty glided past, tirelessly lifting her lamp. "My license comes from Brazil."

"Brazil?"

"It's in South America, Frank," said Anthony, hustling the pilot out of the wheelhouse.
"You'll
never get there."

By 1835 Kolby was in the harbor launch, speeding back toward Pier 88.

At 1845 the
Valparaíso
began drinking Upper New York Bay, sucking its tides into her ballast tanks. At 1910 Anthony's radio officer came onto the bridge: Lianne Bliss—"Sparks," as per hallowed maritime tradition—the bony little hippie vegetarian Ockham had dug up on Wednesday at the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots. "Jay Island's on the phone." For someone so petite, Sparks had an astonishingly resonant voice, as if she were speaking from the bottom of an empty cargo bay. "They wanna know what we're up to."

Anthony ducked into the radio shack, thumbing the transceiver mike to ON. "Calling Jay Island Coast Guard Station . . ."

"Go ahead. Over."

"Carpco Valparaíso
here, bound in ballast for Lagos, Nigeria, to take on two hundred thousand barrels of crude oil. Over."

"Roger,
Valparaíso.
Be advised of Tropical Depression Number Six—Hurricane Beatrice—currently blowing west from Cape Verde."

"Gotcha, Jay Island. Out."

At 1934 the
Valparaíso
slid across the ethereal line separating Lower New York Bay from the North Atlantic Ocean. Twenty minutes later, Second Mate Spicer—Big Joe Spicer, the only sailor on board who seemed scaled to the tanker herself—entered the wheelhouse to relieve Rafferty.

"Lay me a course for Saã Tomé," Anthony ordered Spicer. Grabbing the Exxon coffee Thermos and his ceramic Carpco mug, the captain poured himself the first of what he expected would be about five hundred cups of thick black jamoke. "I want us there in two weeks."

"I overheard the Coast Guard mention a hurricane," said Rafferty.

"Forget the damn hurricane. This is the
Carpco Valparaíso,
not some proctologist's sailboat. If it starts to rain, we'll turn on the windshield wipers."

"Can O'Connor give us a steady eighteen knots?" asked Spicer.

"I expect so."

"Then we'll be in the Gulf of Guinea by the tenth." The second mate advanced the joysticks, notch by notch. "All ahead full?"

The captain looked south, scanning the ranks of gray, glassy swells, the eternally shifting terrain of the sea. And so it begins, he thought, the great race, Anthony Van Horne versus brain death, decay, and the Devil's own sharks.

"All ahead full!"

July 2.

Latitude: 37°7'N. Longitude: 58°10'W. Course: 094. Speed: 18 knots. Distance made good since New York: 810 nautical miles. A gentle breeze, no. 3 on the Beaufort scale, wafts across our weather deck.

I wanted a real diary, but there wasn't time to visit a stationery store, so instead I ran down to Thrift Drug and got you. According to your cover, you're an "Official Popeye the Sailor Spiral-Bound Notebook, copyright © 1959 King Features Syndicate." When I look into your wizened face, Popeye, I know you're a man I can trust.

On this day in 1816, the French frigate
Medusa
went aground off the west coast of Africa—so says my
Manner's Pocket Companion.
"Of the 147 who escaped on a raft, most were murdered by their mates and either thrown overboard or eaten. Only 15 survived." I think we can do better than that. For a company cobbled together at the last minute, they seem like a pretty smart bunch. Big Joe Spicer brought his own sextant aboard, always a good sign in a navigator. Dolores Haycox, the
zaftig
third mate, passed the surprise quiz I gave her without a hiccup. (I had her calculate her distance from a hypothetical bold shore based on the interval between a ship's foghorn blast and the echo.) Marbles Rafferty, the gloomy first officer, is a particularly poetic choice for this mission—his great-grandfather was owned by a family of Florida Keys salvage masters, those vainglorious 19th-century sailors who were, Ockham informs me, "immortalized by John Wayne and Raymond Massey in
Reap the Wild Wind."

I already knew Sam Follingsbee was a brilliant cook, but tonight's fried chicken was indistinguishable from Colonel Sanders's secret recipes, both Original and Extra Crispy. An odd talent, this genius for mediocrity. Crock O'Connor, the chief engineer, is the sort of affable Alabama yarn spinner who claims he invented the twist-off bottle cap but receives no royalties thanks to the knavery of an unscrupulous patent attorney. He's been giving us our 18 knots, so who am I to call him a liar? Lou Chickering, the blond and handsome first assistant engineer—our very own Billy Budd—is a stage actor from Philly who once tried to make it on Broadway and now spends his off-hours organizing talent shows in the deckies' recreation room. His specialty is Shakespeare, and even our illiterates were beguiled by his performance last night of Ariel's song from
The Tempest.
("Full fathom five thy father lies . . .") Bud Ramsey, the second engineer, is a pornography collector, beer connoisseur, and seven-card-stud fanatic. It's refreshing, I think, when a man wears his vices on his sleeve. And backing us up: 38 gratefully employed sailors—23 men and 15 women—scattered among our decks, galleys, engine rooms, and cargo-control stations. I enjoy browsing through their resumés. We've got a minor-league center fielder on board (Albany Bullets), a former clown (Hunt Brothers Circus), an ex-con (armed robbery), a spot-welder, an auto assembly-line worker, a Revlon saleslady, an Army corporal, a dog trainer, a Chinese math teacher (junior high), a taxi driver, three Desert Storm vets, and a full-blooded Lakota Sioux named James Echohawk.

A great mass of spilled oil—one of those "floating particulate petroleum residues"—has coagulated off Cameroon: that's the story I've been feeding anybody who asks. When Carpco realized the Vatican had gotten wind of the disaster, they offered the Pope a deal: keep Greenpeace and the U.N. off our backs, and we'll remove the asphalt posthaste. And we won't just sink it, either. We'll tow it to shore, chop it up, and refine the fragments into free oil for burgeoning African industries. Great, said Rome, but we're sending Father Ockham to supervise.

So: a secret operation, get it, men? Hush-hush, understand? That's why we don't signal passing ships, turn on our running lights, or let anybody phone home.

"Okay, but why so
damn fast?"
Crock O'Connor wants to know. "We're practicing to be the first supertanker ever to win the America's Cup?"

"The asphalt's a menace to navigation," I explain. "The sooner we get there, the better."

"Last night I left my empty orange-juice glass on the table," the man persists, "and the damn thing scooted right up to the edge and fell, singing all the way. We're vibrating, Captain. We're gonna crack the fucking hull."

He's right, actually. Run your ULCC in a straight line at 18 knots with empty cargo bays, and before long you'll start flapping apart like a '57 Chevy.

There are ways to soothe a shivering ship without losing too much time. I'm using every trick in the book: changing speed briefly, altering course slightly, shutting down entirely for a minute or two and coasting—anything to break the rhythm of the waves hitting our stem. So far it's working. So far we're still in one piece.

At dawn the sea turtles came.

Hundreds of them, Popeye, swimming through my dreams, their shells glistening with Texas crude. Then the snowy egrets arrived, black as crows, then the roseate spoonbills, the blue herons . . . I awoke in a sweat. I took a shower, dried off, read Act I of
The Tempest
—Prospero raising the storm and drawing the royal ship to his enchanted island, Miranda falling hopelessly in love with the castaway prince Ferdinand—and drank a glass of warm milk. At 0800 I finally got back to sleep. The urge to pray was intense, but Cassie Fowler, who at age forty-one knew better than to believe in God, had so far managed to resist.
There are no atheists in foxholes:
a clever maxim, she felt—deft, wry, and appealing. And she was determined to prove it wrong. For over fifteen hot, wretched, thirsty hours Cassie had endured her aquatic foxhole, a rubber dinghy adrift in the North Atlantic, and in all that time she'd been true to herself, never asking God for assistance. Cassie was a woman of integrity—a woman who'd spent the first decade of her adulthood writing antireligious, money-losing off-Broadway plays (the sorts of satires the critics termed "biting" when authored by a male and "strident" if by a female)—a woman who, having devoted most of her thirties to acquiring a Ph.D. in biology, had elected to teach at dull, hidebound Tarrytown Community College, a place where the students were unlikely to form positive opinions about either feminism or evolution without her intervention, and where she was free to conduct oddball little experiments (her initial finding being that, given the opportunity, the male Norway rat exhibits instincts toward its young every bit as nurturing as the female) without pressure to pull down a grant or publish her results. Were Cassie's situation any less desperate, it would have been comic, in a Samuel Beckett sort of way. Maneuvering the dinghy with a Ping-Pong paddle. Bailing it out with an Elvis Presley memorial drinking cup. Sheltering her bikini-clad body with a Betty Boop beach towel. "Help," she gasped into the transceiver mike, furiously working the generator crank. "Please, somebody . . . heading east . . . last known latitude, two degrees north . . . last known longitude, thirty-seven west. . . help me." No answer. Not one word. She might as well be praying.

To the east, she knew, lay Saint Paul's Rocks, a tiny volcanic archipelago strung along the equator. The Rocks promised little—a chance to gather her strength, a reprieve from the endless bailing—but at this point a meaningless destination was better than none at all. An authentic reenactment of Charles Darwin's historic voyage undertaken on an exact replica of his ship: what a marvelous concept for a cruise, she'd thought on reading the brochure, a kind of Club Med vacation for rationalists. All during the flight to England, Cassie had imagined herself reporting back to her friends in the Central Park West Enlightenment League, proudly projecting her 35mm color slides of the Galapagos Islands' native finches and lizards (she was planning to shoot over fifty rolls of film), descendants of the very beasts from whose anatomies Darwin had inferred that Creation traced not to the hand of God Almighty but to something far more interesting—and she'd continued to indulge in such cheerful fantasies when, on June 12, the
Beagle II
left the Cornish port of Charlestown, her twenty-four berths jammed with an unlikely assortment of biology professors, armchair naturalists, and spoiled college dropouts being deported by their exasperated parents. The itinerary devised by Maritime Adventures, Incorporated, had the
Beagle II
following Darwin's precise route, with the exception of an about-face at Joas Pessoa so they might avail themselves of the Panama Canal and save seven months. Once they'd explored the Galapagos, a jetliner out of Guayaquil would take them back to England. They never got past the equator. Hurricane Beatrice did not merely sink the
Beagle II,
it tore her apart like one of Cassie's sophomores dissecting a dogfish. As the ship went down, Cassie found herself alone on a frigid sea, clinging to a spar and clutching her Betty Boop towel, bitterly absorbing the fact that among the stratagems by which Maritime Adventures kept its Galapagos package under a thousand dollars per person was the elimination of life rafts, life jackets, and backup batteries for the shortwave radio. Only through a miracle of chance did she manage to fish a hand-cranked transceiver from the flotsam and haul herself aboard the
Beagle's
errant dinghy.

"Heading east . . . last known latitude, two north . . . last known longitude, thirty-seven west . . . help, somebody."

Inexorably, maliciously, the sun came up: her one-eyed enemy, a predator as dangerous as any shark. The Betty Boop towel protected her from the rays, but her thirst soon became intolerable. The temptation to dip her Elvis cup into the ocean and drink was nearly overwhelming, though as a biologist she knew that would be fatal. Consume a pint of sea water, and along with those ten cubic inches of pure H O she would also ingest a quantity of salt far beyond what her body required. Take a second helping, 2

and her kidneys would now have enough H O to process the salt in pint number one, but not enough to 2

process the salt in pint number two. Drink a third pint — and so on, and so on, never getting ahead of the game. Inevitably her kidneys would turn imperialistic, stealing water from her other tissues. She would dry up, become febrile, die.

"Help me," Cassie moaned, painfully rotating the transceiver crank. "Last known latitude, two north . . . longitude, thirty-seven west . . . water . . . water ..." I shall not cry out to God, she vowed. I shall not pray for deliverance.