“Heady stuff.”
“That all?”
“All right, I’ll be frank — sure, I’m tempted to have my ass kissed. I’m tempted to become their god.” Anthony fixed on Ockham. “If you had my power,” said the captain, voice dripping with sarcasm, “no doubt you’d use it only for good.”
“If I had your power,” said the priest, closing the footlocker, “I’d try not to use it for anything at all.”
August 28.
I saved them, Popeye, and for the moment I am their god. It’s not really me they worship, of course — it’s the Idea of the Quarter Pounder. No matter. They still do whatever I say.
Their thirst is fearsome, but they don’t stop excavating. The sun shines without mercy, burning through the mist and frying their backs and shoulders, but they keep at it, pausing only long enough to wolf down sandwiches or apply protective coatings of glory grease to their skin.
“They’ve discovered the categorical imperative,” Ockham tells me.
“They’ve discovered the full belly,” I correct him.
I am their god, but Sister Miriam is their savior. Canteen in hand, she moves from digger to digger. Inevitably she evokes Debra Paget working the brick pits in The Ten Commandments, giving water to the Hebrew slaves.
Cassie may be a cynic and an egghead, but she’s certainly doing her part toward getting us out of here, dispensing water alongside Miriam and sometimes even digging herself. Furtively I watch. Until the day I die, I shall retain the image of a beauteous, raven-haired woman in cut-off jeans and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, shoveling out the Carpco Valparaíso.
When we first went on this diet, we all assumed it would change us in some way. Has it? Hard to say. I’ve seen nothing truly astonishing so far, no big jump in anybody’s reading speed or knot-tying skills. While our bowel movements have been remarkably pale and coherent — it’s like shitting soap — that’s hardly a miracle. (Sparks points out you can get the same result from macrobiotic food.) True, the deckies have tons of energy, a phenomenal amount, but Cassie insists there’s nothing supernatural going on. “His flesh is acting like Dumbo’s magic feather,” she says, “enabling us to tap our own latent powers.”
With Spicer and Wheatstone both gone, we’ve had to reapportion the duties. Dolores Haycox seems completely rehabilitated, and so we’ve made her our second mate, bumping James Echohawk up to third. The new bos’n is Ralph Mungo. I’m inclined to stick Weisinger back in the brig, but Ockham is convinced that Zook died before the kid ripped his hose, and right now we need every available pair of hands.
While Rafferty’s people disassemble the mountain, O’Connor’s men repair the damage, smoothing the keel with scrap-metal patches and straightening the port shaft by banging it with a sledgehammer. It turns out the thrown propeller has a seven-foot fissure running through one blade, but the backup screw seems fine, and that’s the one we’ll be mounting.
This morning Rafferty and Ockham made exploratory dives. Their report was encouraging. Just as we suspected, the anvil bones snapped in both His ears, but the padre says we can almost certainly get a firm grip on the stirrups.
Okay, I’ll admit it: His brain is surely mush by now. I keep telling myself this doesn’t matter. The angels wanted a decent burial, that’s all. Just a decent burial.
During the past twenty-four hours, Sam Follingsbee has gone way beyond McDonald’s, finding amazingly creative ways to prepare the fillets. He’s frustrated that so many spices and condiments got gobbled up during the famine, but he’s a wiz at making do. The local sand, for example, has a decidedly peppery flavor. The body itself supplies other essentials: wart fragments for mushrooms, mole scrapings for garlic cloves, tear duct chunks for onions. Most astonishing of all, by combining a fresh-water condenser and a microwave oven into a contraption that causes rapid fermentation, our chef can now distill His blood into something that tastes exactly like first-class burgundy.
The names Sam gives his dishes — Dieu Bourguignon, Domine Gumbo, Pater Stroganoff, Mock Turtle Soup — don’t begin to convey how filling and delicious they are. Believe me, Popeye, no human palate has ever known such wonders.
Dieu Bourguignon
20 lbs. meat, cubed
42 small onions, sliced
14 cups burgundy
7 cups stock
3 lbs. mushrooms, sliced
7 cloves garlic
Marinate meat in wine and stock for 4 hours. Remove meat, reserve marinade. Brown onions in 3 heavy skillets, remove and reserve. Brown meat in same skillets. Add marinade, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer 2 hours. Return onions to skillets, add mushrooms, garlic cloves, and simmer, covered, 1 hour more. Serves 35.
For all this, the poor steward frets about our nutrition. He’s been trying everything he can think of, extracting selenium, iodine, and other minerals from the Gibraltar Sea and mixing them into the recipes, but it’s not enough. “All we’re really getting is fat and protein,” he tells me. “Folks recovering from a famine need Vitamin C, sir. They need Vitamin A, the B-complex, calcium, potassium…”
“Maybe we could mine His liver,” I suggest.
“Thought of that. To get there, you’d have to cut through eighty-five yards of the toughest flesh on the planet, a three-week dig at least.”
There hasn’t been an outbreak of scurvy on an American merchant ship since 1903, Popeye, but that happy fact may be about to change.
When the dinner bell finally rang — a low blast from the Valparaíso’s foghorn, like a shofar heralding Rosh Hashanah — Neil Weisinger took a long, hard look at his hands. He barely recognized them. Blisters speckled his palms like clutches of tiny red eggs. A white callus covered the root of each finger.
He jabbed his spade into the wet sand, seized his Bugs Bunny lunch box, and sat down. His back ached. His arms throbbed. All around him, sweaty deckies opened their various boxes and buckets and removed their McNuggets, Quarter Pounders, and Filets-o-Fish, devouring them with piggish zeal. They were proud of themselves. They deserved to be. In a mere four and a half days they’d dismantled a three-hundred-thousand-ton mountain and brought the world’s largest oil tanker back down to sea level.
Neil glanced toward the cove. The setting sun sparkled in their cargo’s starboard eye. Mist cloaked the archipelago of His toes. Languidly the tide rolled in, soughing beneath the Valparaíso’s hull and splashing against her keel. He imagined the moon as a kind of loving mother, gently drawing a blanket of surf across the island’s southern shore, and he continued to imagine this tender scene as, picking up his lunch box, he began his bold little march away from the ship.
Slipping a hand into his pants pocket, Neil ran his finger along the grooved edge of his grandfather’s Ben-Gurion medal. At any moment, he knew, his courage might desert him. Nerves shot, he would return and join his mates in fleeing this wretched place. But he kept on walking, past the crimson dunes and the 55-gallon drums, the rusting Volvos and the rotting Goodyear tires, following the shrouded shoreline.
Ahead, a classic Mediterranean fig tree stood perched on a sandy knoll, and the instant Neil saw the fruited branches he resolved to venture no farther. This was it — his own private Burning Bush, the place where he would at last encounter YHWH’s unknowable essence, the vantage from which he would finally behold the God of the four A.M. watch. He ascended the knoll and caressed the trunk. Cold, coarse, hard. A rock. His fingertips continued exploring. Branches, bark, leaves, fruit: rock, all of it — a tree become stone, like Lot’s wife turned to salt. No matter. The thing would serve its purpose.