Towing Jehovah

With a deep gurgle and an unearthly groan, the Valparaíso began to spin, north to east to south to west, round and round, her bow falling sharply, stirring the Greenland Current into a frothy whirlpool as her ten-ton rudder, Ferris wheel-size propellers, and mammoth keel rose into the air. Level by level, companionway by companionway, the superstructure descended — cabins, galleys, wardroom, wheelhouse, stacks, mast, Vatican flag — sliding into the maelstrom as if into the mouth of some unimaginable grouper, portholes blazing brightly even after they slipped beneath the waves.

“Farewell, old friend.” Anthony lifted his hand to his brow and fired off a forceful salute. “I’ll miss you,” he called across the ice-choked sea. The ga

CHILD

THE DIVINE FACE was still smoldering when the Maracaibo arrived on the scene, smoke wafting off His cheeks in thick black tendrils and drifting northwest toward Jan Mayen Island. Thousands of whisker stubs speckled the charred, exposed flesh of His lantern jaw, encircling the frosted lips and frozen smile, angling upward like the skeletal remains of a forest fire. God, Anthony saw, had become as beardless as he himself.

Despite the surplus of officers and seamen, it took the Maracaibo’s company all day to dredge up the severed chains, belt them around the superstructure, and splice the raw ends together. “Slow ahead,” Anthony ordered. The chains tightened, grinding against the deckhouse walls, but the foundation held fast, and the Corpus Dei moved forward. At 1830 hours the captain gave the all-ahead-full, gulped down his four hundred and twenty-sixth cup of coffee since New York, and set his course for the Pole.

Anthony did not like the Carpco Maracaibo. It was all he could do to squeeze five knots out of her; even if the burdensome oil in her hold magically disappeared, he doubted she’d give him more than six. She had no soul, this tanker. The archangels had truly known what they were doing when they picked the Valparaíso.

The night the tow began, Cassie took up residence in Anthony’s cabin, an environment made erotically tropical by the eighty-degree air Crock O’Co

“I have to know something,” she said, guiding Anthony’s naked body onto the bunk. “If our Midway scheme had worked and God had gone under, would you have forgiven me?”

“That’s not a fair question.”

“True.” She began arraying him in a decorator Supersensitive — the best-selling barber pole design, second in popularity only to the diamondback rattlesnake. “What’s the answer?”

“I’d probably never have forgiven you,” said Anthony, enjoying the way the sweat filled her cleavage like a river flowing through a gorge. “I know that’s not the answer you wanted to hear, but…”

“But it’s the one I expected,” she confessed.

“Now I have to know something.” He plugged her ear with his tongue, swizzling it around. “Suppose another opportunity came along for you to destroy my cargo. Would you take it?”

“You bet I would.”

“You don’t have to answer right away.”

Laughing, Cassie unfurled the condom. “You’re surprised?”

“Not really,” he sighed. Slithering on top of her, he cupped her breasts like Jehovah molding the Andes. “You’re a woman with a mission, Doc. It’s what I love about you.”

The next morning, while Cassie was out helping to chip ice from the central catwalk and Anthony lay in their bunk writing about the death of the Valparaíso, filling his Popeye journal with page after page of angry lamentation, a knock reverberated through the cabin. He rolled off the mattress, opened the door. Crock O’Co

Inside the cage, a parrot stood on a trapeze, making quick jabs with its beak in hopes of killing the mites under its wings. The bird turned its scarlet head, fixing on Anthony. Its eyes were like tiny oiled bearings. At first he thought some sort of resurrection had occurred, for the similarity between this macaw and his boyhood pet, Rainbow, was unca

“Your father bought her in Palermo, right before we shipped out,” Mangione explained, setting the cage on the bunk.

“The engine flat made a fine home — all that steam,” said O’Co

“Get her out of here,” said Anthony.

“What?”

“I want nothing that belonged to my father.”

“You don’t understand,” said Mangione. “He told me it was a present.”

“A present?”

Despite the Thanksgiving humiliation, the bottled Constitution, the malign neglect — despite everything, Anthony was touched. At last the old man was trying to make amends, restoring to his son the gift he’d taken away forty years earlier.

“We don’t know if your dad named her or not,” said O’Co

“What do you call her?”

“Pirate Je

“Leave her here,” said Anthony, returning Pirate Je

As O’Co

“The Val was an eyesore, hard to steer…”

“I know. I want her back.”

“Me too, Crock. I want her back too. Thanks for the bird.”

On September 21, a new variety of ice island appeared on the horizon, drifting southeast with the Greenland Current — glacier fragments so huge they made the Jan Mayen bergs seem like molehills. According to the Marisat, the Maracaibo was barely a day from her destination, but the prospect of journey’s end brought Anthony no pleasure. Eight men had died; the Val was in the Mohns Trench; the divine brain was garbage; his father would never absolve him. And for all Anthony knew, a Vatican armada now lay at anchor inside the tomb, ready to pirate his cargo.

“Froggy loves Tiffany.”

He was giving Cassie a backrub, pressing his palms against her beautiful flesh, vertebra after vertebra lined up like speed bumps, and for an instant he thought it was she who’d made the raspy little declaration.

“What?”

“Froggy loves Tiffany,” the scarlet macaw repeated. “Froggy loves Tiffany.”

The universe again, playing another of its outrageous jokes. Froggy loved Tiffany.

Anthony stifled a giggle. “It’s all too perfect, wouldn’t you say?”

“Perfect?” Cassie replied. “What?”

“Absolutely perfect. A masterpiece. The bastard’s dead, and he’s still taking back the things he gave me.”

“Oh, come on — your father’s not doing anything. Mangione didn’t understand the parrot was for Tiffany, that’s all. There’s no malice here.”

“You think so?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I must admit, I’m actually rather impressed,” said Anthony, struck by his mental picture of the old man sitting hour after hour in the engine flat, drilling the half-dozen syllables into the parrot’s head. “Imagine how many times he had to say it, over and over…”

“Maybe he hired a deckie.”