Read Online Towing Jehovah by James Morrow - Free Book Online Page A

glass of warm milk. At 0800 I finally got back to sleep. The urge to pray was intense, but Cassie Fowler, who at age forty-one knew better than to believe in God, had so far managed to resist. There are no atheists in foxholes: a clever maxim, she felt—deft, wry, and appealing. And she was determined to prove it wrong. For over fifteen hot, wretched, thirsty hours Cassie had endured her aquatic foxhole, a rubber dinghy adrift in the North Atlantic, and in all that time she'd been true to herself, never asking God for assistance. Cassie was a woman of integrity—a woman who'd spent the first decade of her adulthood writing antireligious, money-losing off-Broadway plays (the sorts of satires the critics termed "biting" when authored by a male and "strident" if by a female)—a woman who, having devoted most of her thirties to acquiring a Ph.D. in biology, had elected to teach at dull, hidebound Tarrytown Community College, a place where the students were unlikely to form positive opinions about either feminism or evolution without her intervention, and where she was free to conduct oddball little experiments (her initial finding being that, given the opportunity, the male Norway rat exhibits instincts toward its young every bit as nurturing as the female) without pressure to pull down a grant or publish her results. Were Cassie's situation any less desperate, it would have been comic, in a Samuel Beckett sort of way. Maneuvering the dinghy with a Ping-Pong paddle. Bailing it out with an Elvis Presley memorial drinking cup. Sheltering her bikini-clad body with a Betty Boop beach towel. "Help," she gasped into the transceiver mike, furiously working the generator crank. "Please, somebody . . . heading east . . . last known latitude, two degrees north . . . last known longitude, thirty-seven west. . . help me." No answer. Not one word. She might as well be praying.
    To the east, she knew, lay Saint Paul's Rocks, a tiny volcanic archipelago strung along the equator. The Rocks promised little—a chance to gather her strength, a reprieve from the endless bailing—but at this point a meaningless destination was better than none at all. An authentic reenactment of Charles Darwin's historic voyage undertaken on an exact replica of his ship: what a marvelous concept for a cruise, she'd thought on reading the brochure, a kind of Club Med vacation for rationalists. All during the flight to England, Cassie had imagined herself reporting back to her friends in the Central Park West Enlightenment League, proudly projecting her 35mm color slides of the Galapagos Islands' native finches and lizards (she was planning to shoot over fifty rolls of film), descendants of the very beasts from whose anatomies Darwin had inferred that Creation traced not to the hand of God Almighty but to something far more interesting—and she'd continued to indulge in such cheerful fantasies when, on June 12, the Beagle II left the Cornish port of Charlestown, her twenty-four berths jammed with an unlikely assortment of biology professors, armchair naturalists, and spoiled college dropouts being deported by their exasperated parents. The itinerary devised by Maritime Adventures, Incorporated, had the Beagle II following Darwin's precise route, with the exception of an about-face at Joas Pessoa so they might avail themselves of the Panama Canal and save seven months. Once they'd explored the Galapagos, a jetliner out of Guayaquil would take them back to England. They never got past the equator. Hurricane Beatrice did not merely sink the Beagle II, it tore her apart like one of Cassie's sophomores dissecting a dogfish. As the ship went down, Cassie found herself alone on a frigid sea, clinging to a spar and clutching her Betty Boop towel, bitterly absorbing the fact that among the stratagems by which Maritime Adventures kept its Galapagos package under a thousand dollars per person was the elimination of life rafts, life jackets, and backup