Towing Jehovah by James Morrow Page A

arms descended, Neil's among them. Spirit and flesh: God couldn't be both. He wondered about the three sailors whose arms remained aloft.
    "Now you're talking about Jesus Christ," said Zook, his hand fluttering about like a drunken hummingbird.
    "No," said the priest. "I'm not talking about Jesus Christ." A falling sensation overcame Neil. Reaching into his jeans, he squeezed the bronze medal his grandfather had received for smuggling refugees to the nascent nation of Israel. "Wait a minute, Father, sir. Are you saying . . . ?" Gulping, he repeated himself. "Are you saying . . . ?"
    "Yes. I am."
    Whereupon Father Thomas lifted a gleaming white ball from the billiard table, tossed it straight up, caught it, and proceeded to relate the most grotesque and disorienting story Neil had heard since learning that the Datsun containing his parents had fallen between the spans of an open drawbridge in Woods Hole, Cape Cod, and vanished beneath the mud. Among its assorted absurdities, the priest's tale included not only a dead deity and a prescient computer, but also weeping angels, confused cardinals, mourning narwhals, and a hollowed-out iceberg jammed against the island of Kvitoya. As soon as he was finished, Dolores Haycox jabbed her thick index finger toward Van Horne. "You told us it was asphalt," she whined. "Asphalt, you said."
    "I lied," the captain admitted.
    From the middle of the crowd, the squat and wan chief engineer, Crock O'Connor, piped up. "I'd like to say something," he drawled, wiping his oily hands on his Harley-Davidson T-shirt. Steam burns dappled his cheeks and arms. "I'd like to say that, in all my thirty years at sea, I never heard such a pile of pasteurized, homogenized, cold-filtered horseshit."
    The priest's voice remained measured and calm. "You may be correct, Mr. O'Connor. But then how are we to interpret the evidence currently floating off our starboard quarter?"
    "A snare set by Satan," Zook replied instantly. "He's testing our faith."
    "A UFO made of flesh," said Chief Steward Sam Follingsbee.
    "The Loch Ness Monster," said Karl Jaworski.
    "One of them government biology experiments," said Ralph Mungo, "gotten way outta hand."
    "I'll bet it's just rubber," said James Echohawk.
    "Yeah," said Willie Pindar. "Rubber and fiberglass and such . . ."
    "Okay, maybe a deity," said Bud Ramsey, the chicken-necked, weasel-faced second assistant engineer,
    "but certainly not God Himself."
    Silence settled over the wardroom, heavy as a kedge anchor, thick as North Sea fog. The sailors of the Valparaíso looked at each other, slowly, with pained eyes. God's dead body.
    Oh, yes.
    "But is He really gone?" asked Horrocks in a high, gelded voice. "Totally and completely gone?"
    "The OMNIVAC predicted a few surviving neurons," said Father Thomas, "but I believe it's working with faulty data. Still, each of us has the right to entertain his own private hopes."
    "Why doesn't the sky turn black?" demanded Jaworski. "Why doesn't the sea dry up and the sun blink out? Why aren't the mountains crumbling, forests toppling over, stars falling from heaven?"
    "Evidently we're living in a noncontingent, Newtonian sort of universe," Father Thomas replied. "The clock continues ticking even after the Clockmaker departs."
    "Okay, okay, but what's the reason for His death?" asked O'Connor. "There's gotta be a reason."
    "At the moment, the mystery of our Creator's passing is as dense as the mystery of His advent. Gabriel urged me to keep thinking about the problem. He believed that, by journey's end, the answer would become clear."
    What followed was a theological free-for-all, the only time, Neil surmised, that a supertanker's entire crew had engaged in a marathon discussion of something other than professional sports. Dinnertime came and went. The new moon rose. The sailors grew schizoid, a company of Jekyll-and-Hydes, their bouts of Weltschmerz alternating with fresh denials (a CIA plot, a sea serpent, an inflatable dummy, a movie prop),