"James Morrow - Towing Jehovah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrow James)

"Dad?"
The angel nodded. "Your aloof, capricious, unhappy father. You will tell
him you got the job done. And then тАФ this I promise тАФ then you will
receive the absolution you deserve."
"I don't want his absolution."
"His absolution," said Raphael, "is the only one that counts. Blood is
thicker than oil, Captain. The man's hooks are in you."
"I can absolve myself," Anthony insisted.
"You've tried that. Showers don't do it. The Cuxa fountain doesn't do it.
You'll never be free of Matagorda Bay, the oil will never leave you, until
Christopher Van Horne looks you in the eye and says, 'Son, I'm proud of
you. You bore Him to His tomb.' "
 A sudden coldness swept through the Cuxa Cloister. Goose bumps grew
on Anthony's naked skin like barnacles colonizing a tanker's hull.
Crouching over the pool, he fished out the drifting feather. What did he
know of God? Maybe God did have blood, bile, and the rest of it; maybe
He could die. Anthony's Sunday school teachers, promoters of a faith so
vague and generic it was impossible to imagine anyone rebelling against it
(there are no lapsed Wilmington Presbyterians), had never even raised
such possibilities. Who could say whether God had a body?
"Dad and I haven't spoken since Christmas." Anthony drew the soft, wet
feather across his lips. "Last I heard, he and Tiffany were in Spain."
"Then that's where you'll find him."
Raphael staggered forward, extended his chilly palms, and collapsed
into the captain's arms. The angel was surprisingly heavy, oddly meaty.
How strange was the universe. Stranger than Anthony had ever imagined.
"Bury Him . . ."
The captain studied the spangled sky. He thought of his favorite
sextant, the one his sister had given him upon his graduation from New
York Maritime College, a flawless facsimile of the wondrous instrument
with which, nearly two centuries earlier, Nathaniel Bowditch had
corrected and emended all the world's maps. And the thing worked, too,
picking out Polaris in an instant, filtering the brilliance of Venus, sifting
banded Jupiter from the clouds. Anthony never sailed without it.
"I own a precise and beautiful sextant," Anthony told Raphael. "You
never know when your computer'll break down," the captain added. "You
never know when you'll have to steer by the stars," said the master of the
Valpara├нso, whereupon the angel smiled softly and drew his last breath.




The moon assumed an uncanny whiteness, riding the sky like God's own
skull, as, shortly before dawn, Anthony hauled Raphael Azarias's stiffening
body west across Fort Tryon Park, lowered it over the embankment, and
flung it facedown into the cool, polluted waters of the Hudson River.
 Priest
THOMAS WICKLIFF OCKHAM, a good man, a man who loved God,
ideas, vintage movies, and his brothers in the Society of Jesus, wove
through the crowded Seventh Avenue local, carefully maneuvering his