Towing Jehovah by James Morrow Page B

then back to Weltschmerz, then more denials still (communism's last gasp, the Colossus of Rhodes emerging from the seabed, a distraction concocted by the Trilateral Commission, a façade concealing something truly bizarre). Neil's own reactions bewildered him. He was not sad—how could he be sad? Losing this particular Supreme Being was like losing some relative you barely knew, the shadowy Uncle Ezra who gave you a fifty-dollar bill at your bar mitzvah and forthwith disappeared. What Neil experienced just then was freedom. He'd never believed in the stern, bearded God of Abraham, yet in some paradoxical way he'd always felt accountable to that nonexistent deity's laws. But now YHWH
    wasn't watching. Now the rules no longer applied.
    "Guess what, sailors?" Van Horne jumped from the mahogany bar to the Oriental rug. "I'm canceling all duties for the next twenty-four hours. No chipping, no painting—and you won't lose one red cent in pay." Never before in nautical history, Neil speculated, had such an announcement failed to provoke a single cheer. "From this moment until 2200," said the captain, "Father Thomas and Sister Miriam will be available in their cabins for private consultations. And tomorrow—well, tomorrow we start doing what's expected of us, right? How about it? Are we merchant mariners? Are we ready to move the goods? Can you give me an aye on that?"
    About a third of the deckies, Neil among them, sang out with achoked and hesitant "Aye."
    "Are we ready to lay our Creator in a faraway Arctic tomb?" asked Van Horne. "Let me hear you. Aye!" This time over half the room joined in. "Aye!"
    A high, watery howl arose, shooting from Zook's mouth like vomitus. The Evangelical dropped to his knees, clasping his hands in fear and supplication, shivering violently. To Neil he looked like a man enduring the monstrously conscious moment that follows hara-kiri: a man beholding his own steaming bowels.
    Father Thomas sprinted over, helped the distraught AB to his feet, and guided him out of the wardroom. The priest's compassion impressed Neil, and yet he sensed that such gestures alone would not save the Valparaíso from the terrible freedom to which she was about to hitch herself. Inevitably the climax of The Ten Commandments flashed through his brain: Moses hurling the Tablets of the Law to the ground and thus depriving the Israelites of their moral compass, leaving them uncertain where God stood on adultery, theft, and murder.
    "Ship's company—dismissed!"
    Then said Jesus unto His disciples, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me."
    Amen, thought Thomas Ockham as, wrapped in the tight rubbery privacy of his wetsuit, he made his way beneath the Gulf of Guinea. Except that the Cross in this instance was a huge kedge anchor, the Via Dolorosa an unmarked channel between the Valparaíso's keel and the Corpus Dei. Although a PADI-certified diver, Thomas hadn't been underwater in over fifteen years—not since joining Jacques Cousteau on his celebrated descent into the submarine crater of the volcano that destroyed the ancient Greek civilization of Thera—and he didn't feel entirely sure of himself. But, then, who could feel entirely sure of himself while seeking to affix a thirty-foot, twenty-ton anchor to his Creator?
    The dozen divers who constituted Team A had distributed themselves evenly along the kedge: Marbles Rafferty at the crown, Charlie Horrocks on the left fluke, Thomas on the right, James Echohawk and Eddie Wheatstone handling the shank, the others holding up the stock, the ring, and the first five links of the chain. Sixty yards to the south, Joe Spicer's Team B was presumably keeping pace, bearing their own kedge, but a curtain of bubbles and murk prevented Thomas from knowing for sure. Arms raised, palms turned upward, the twelve men worked their flippers, carrying the anchor over their heads like Iroquois portaging a gargantuan war