Spicer threw his net.
He missed.
The kid retreated, anchor swinging at his side, his bare feet splashing through the mud. Gushing black exhaust, the forklift bore down on him at five, ten, fifteen miles an hour. Spicer elevated the prongs to the height of Weisinger’s belly.
“Go!”
“Go!”
The kid stopped, turned, waited.
“Kill!”
“Kill!”
And suddenly the anchor was airborne, arrowing straight for the driver’s seat.
“Go!”
“Go!”
Acting on instinct, Spicer swerved — the same pathetic impulse, Thomas guessed, by which a soldier walking into a hail of grapeshot will raise his arms to fend off the balls.
“Kill!”
“Kill!”
The anchor landed between the second mate’s legs. Shrieking with pain, he released the steering wheel and groped toward his crotch.
“Go!”
“Go!”
The forklift hit the wall at over thirty miles per hour, a collision of such force it threw Spicer from the cab and sent him somersaulting through the air. The two hundred and thirty pound man landed on his feet. His femurs shattered audibly. He collapsed, stabbed by his own bones, and began flopping around in the sand.
“Weisinger, Weisinger, he’s our man! If he can’t do it, no one can!”
The kid wasted no time. Retrieving the anchor from the forklift seat, he dashed across the arena and hunched over Spicer. He scanned the crowd. At first Thomas assumed Weisinger merely wanted to savor the moment — where, when, and under what other circumstances could an able-bodied seaman receive a standing ovation? — but then he realized the kid was waiting for a sign.
In a weirdly synchronous gesture, thirty-two hands shot forward, thumbs up.
With equally uncanny coordination, thirty-two wrists rotated.
Thumbs down.
“Neil, no!” cried Thomas, gaining his feet. “It’s me, Neil! It’s Father Thomas!”
“Don’t do it!” shouted Miriam.
Weisinger got to work, chopping relentlessly with the anchor, mooring himself to Spicer.
An enormous bare-chested sailor turned toward Thomas, exuding the sickly sweetness of whiskey. Black beard, bad skin, a face like the granite glutton on the far side of the island. Thomas recognized him as a demac named Stubby Barnes. The man had come to Mass twice. “Hey, you oughta settle down, Father. You too, Sister.” The demac’s right hand cradled an empty bottle of Cutty Sark. “I mean no disrespect, but this ain’t your party!”
“No, you settle down!” wailed Thomas.
“Take it easy.” Stubby Barnes lifted the bottle high over his head.
“No, you take it easy!”
“We can do whatever we want, man,” Barnes insisted, letting the Cutty Sark fly.
“Listen to your congenital conscience!”
The bottle struck Thomas squarely, a pound of glass crashing into his temple. He felt warm blood rolling down his face, tickling his cheeks, and then he felt nothing at all.
August 7.
It goes from bad to worse. Yesterday at 0915 Ockham and Sister Miriam came stumbling back to the ship, the padre bleeding from a nasty head wound. Their news knocked me for a loop. The mutineers have executed Wheatstone and Jaworski in some sort of crazy rodeo. Joe Spicer’s dead too, killed when Able Seaman Weisinger turned the tables on him.
If you want my opinion, Spicer got what he deserved.
Ever try mescal, Popeye? It has all the kick of spinach, I promise you, and it dulls the pain. Somehow the bastards missed my supply. I’ve given the creatures in the remaining bottles names. Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar — the Three Wise Worms.
I shouldn’t drink, of course. I’m vulnerable. Dad’s probably an alky, and somewhere along the line I had a wino aunt who burned down her house, plus a rummy cousin who shot the mailman for bringing the wrong size welfare check. But what the hell — this is Anno Postdomini One, right? It’s the era when anything goes.
We have exactly 10 days to get Him to the Arctic.
Last night I polished off the first bottle, leaving Caspar beached like the Val, after which I went a bit berserk. Stuck a lighted Marlboro in my palm, puked my guts out, climbed down the anchor chain and rolled around in the sand. I woke up beside the keel, sober but numb, clutching an aluminum soup ladle to my breast.
It was Cassie who found me. What a pathetic creature I must’ve seemed, beard clogged with rust, clothes soaked in mescal. She guided me back up the chain, led me to the main galley, and began doling out aspirin and coffee.
“I didn’t crash into this island,” I insisted, as if she’d said I had.
“This island crashed into you.”
“Am I repulsive, Doc? Am I downright disgusting? Do I smell like Davy Jones’s jockstrap?”
“No, but you ought to shave off that beard.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“I’ve always hated beards.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s like kissing a Brillo pad.”
The word kissing lingered in the air. We both noticed it.
“I think I’m going crazy,” I told her. “I tried digging us out with a soup ladle.”
“That’s not crazy.”
“Oh?”
“Crazy would’ve been if you’d used a teaspoon.”
And then, with a flirtatious toss of her head, or so it seemed, she left me alone with my hangover.
As Thomas entered the empty arena, mirages made of late-afternoon heat arose, twisting and shimmering above the bloody sand. The forklift truck sat inertly in the southeast corner, right prong clean, the left tarnished with Karl Jaworski.
Van Horne and Miriam had both been appalled by the idea of a second mission to the deserters — “Lord, Tom,” the nun had said, “they’ll execute you next time” — but Thomas’s sense of duty demanded not only that he bury the dead but that he once again try to help the living find the Kantian moral law within.
Like a conquistador planting the Spanish flag in the New World, he thrust his steel spade into the ground. Ten yards away, Jaworski’s punctured body lay festering in the shadow of the sculpted hermaphrodite. Beyond, the netted remains of Eddie Wheatstone lay across the eviscerated carcass of Joe Spicer. A mere twenty-four hours had elapsed since their executions, but the decomposition process was fully under way, filling the priest’s nostrils with an acid stench.
Licking sweat from his lips, he retrieved the spade and got busy. The sand, though heavy, was as easily dislodged as new-fallen snow, and the job went effortlessly — so effortlessly, he decided, that should rationality ever descend upon Van Horne Island, then excavating the stranded Valparaíso might prove more feasible than he’d supposed. One hour later, a mass grave yawned in the center of the field.
He dumped in the corpses, prayed for their souls, and shoveled back the sand.
Following the deserters’ trail out of the amphitheater was no problem. Cigarette butts, beer-can tabs, wine-bottle corks, peanut shells, orange rinds, and banana peels marked the way. Inevitably Thomas thought of Hansel and Gretel, dropping their pebbles so they’d be able to rejoin their tractable father and malicious stepmother. Even a dysfunctional family, apparently, was better than none at all.
The route took him through typical terrain — past decaying appliances and discarded 55-gallon drums, past mounds of automobile tires clumped together like gigantic charred bagels — and then, suddenly, it appeared: the wall.
It was huge, sixty feet from foundation to battlements, assembled from the purest marble, each block bleached white as bone. Spidery characters decorated the gateway, the forgotten phonemes of some long-unspoken tongue. He entered.
Music screamed in the city’s heart — amplified guitars, high-tech keyboards. It seemed to Thomas not so much a song as a warning, the sort of sound with which a city might alert its citizens to incoming nuclear warheads. Mud lay everywhere, thick brown seabed pies drooping from the cornices and oozing off the balconies. Cloaked in the omnipresent mist, the temples, shops, and houses were in a sorry state, their roofs crushed by the weight of the Gibraltar Sea, their fa зades erased by underwater currents.