The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  I picked up the welding rod and imagined the blue flame liquefying steel and binding it together in more fascinating ways. An art form. I thought we were all supposed to have some kind of art form. My father had his lights, my mother her music, and Edwin, who beamed with talent and potential, took wide slabs of butcher paper and mimicked every shape in the world, as if practicing for some larger swath of canvas, maybe even a cathedral ceiling, that would surely come later. In the dark I imagined turning the blue tongue of fire on my own chest to crack it open, to pull out my own hidden talent, my own art form, whatever it was.

  Late the next evening, I was reading at the top of the stairs, petting Fergus, when my mother’s younger brother, Uncle Martin, came to our house. In socked feet, he stood almost as tall as my father, near two meters, but he had muscular arms and a V-shaped back from years of hauling in fishing nets. Under his raincoat he wore a gray French seaman’s sweater for which my mother had sewn thick black elbow patches that cracked white at the bend. Under his sweater was a host of faded gypsy tattoos covering his chest and arms. A compass sat on his right shoulder, a large portrait of Neptune stretched across his stomach, and a bare-chested woman with wings and blue-tipped nipples soared across his rib cage. A paragraph in Latin scrolled along his upper forearm, and between his shoulder blades sailed a schooner at full mast with the words Flying Dutchman, etched in bold blue India ink, arched over the topmast. The top of the h crawled up the side of his neck like an arterial vein.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” our mother said when she first saw us idolizing his tattoos.

  He’d taken his shirt off while wrestling with Edwin, me, and our best friends, Ludo and Hilda. He let Hilda knock him down and took it easy on Ludo, whose left arm had dried up and coiled from a bout of polio he’d survived as an infant.

  When we asked about his inking, our mother said, “He didn’t have a proper upbringing, so he couldn’t help himself. But you boys dream of it, and I’ll scrub the ink off of you with a fistful of sand and gravel.”

  Like my mother and father, almost everything I knew about Uncle Martin’s life came from stories other people told of him. He rarely, if ever, spoke about himself, which gave him a sense of mystery, as if mystery were the language he moved in, his mother tongue.

  Not asking my parents or Uncle Martin about their early lives was one of those things I knew. Whispered to me at birth. Traced on my skin by my mother’s fingers. It was just in me. But of course, that led to the creation of a great antenna to gather any fragments of news about them I could find into my own private mythologies.

  I knew Uncle Martin left home in 1912, when he was fourteen, to get away from his fisherman father he never got along with. This part was shrouded in silence as my grandfather’s name only rose to my uncle and mother’s lips with vitriol. I knew Uncle Martin joined the crew of a schooner ferry that ran cargo between Rotterdam and England. After that, he did his time in the Dutch Marines, which according to him was the happiest he’d ever been. He went back to sea after the marines because that was all he really knew. For years he jumped ships that followed old whale roads to the Dutch colonies and around the world. Then, when I was six, he bought a fishing trawler and started running it out of Delfzijl to be close to us, the only family he had.

  He often took us fishing. Once the lightbulb factory started turning large profits, and our father could spend more time doing what he wanted, he began coming out with us on Uncle Martin’s boat. We’d cruise together into the Ems, past the Frisian Islands, and into the North Sea. Our father became so enamored with the water he bought a leisure boat for himself, which was the first of its kind in our town’s harbor.

  “I have a gift for you guys,” Uncle Martin said as he walked into our home that night. He held out a dusty-looking bottle of liquor. “This is Prohibition-era American liquor. So good it was forbidden.”

  “Where’d you get that?” my father asked. He held the bottle up to the light to study the label. Gray with black letters. Old Hermitage Sour Mash Rye. 62. Broad Street. Boston. They went into the living room and sat on the couches. I lay on my stomach and leaned down the stairs to see them. My father still held the bottle. “It’s contraband.”

  “No, nothing to worry about,” Uncle Martin said. “Let’s give it a taste.”

  My mother caught Uncle Martin’s eyes and nodded her head toward my father.

  “You know. I came over because I thought maybe the boys could come out on the boat for the summer?”

  My father turned the bottle so he could read the back. “I’ve made plans for them already.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  My father looked from the bottle to my mother. His jaw was set, and even from where I watched I could see the pounding of blood at his temple. “Yes. They’ll be working at the factory as well.”

  “He’s worried about his Volkswagen account. Everything’s about Volkswagen.”

  “Drika.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “That’s because it will set us up for the future.”

  “That’s what you said about Auto Union.”

  My father swung toward her. “Auto Union paid for this house. Built the factory. Go ahead and say something bad about that.”

  “You have most of the country’s cars already, Hans.”

  “Stop it, Drika. Just stop this. Like I don’t see you setting Martin on me like this.”

  My mother turned and saw me at the top of the stairs. “Go to your room, Jacob.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry,” I said.

  My father looked up and anger melted from him at the sight of me, the way it always did. He hated being angry, coarse, or drunk in front of us and skulked around like a shamed dog after behaving so.

  “Go study your words, Jacob,” he said and smiled.

  From the heating vent, I heard them talking about the camp. Mostly my mother protesting sending us away and pestering Uncle Martin to help change my father’s mind.

  “You could go out on the boat with them, Hans,” my mother said. “Spend some time with your boys.”

  If my father heard her, he said nothing.

  Edwin pencil-sketched a dark silhouette cutting through a stand of trees. The trees had enough depth to draw the eye into the suggested shadow. That was something he practiced. Shadows. I caught him after he put one of our mother’s dresses on Fergus and chased the dog around the house to study the way folds in the fabric played with light.

  “You fancy dogs now?” I teased him.

  He didn’t respond and acted like he didn’t hear me. I wondered if he registered any of the tension below the floorboards the way I did. That antenna of mine caught every shifting speck of frustration and pulled it into the endlessly burbling core of my body.

  In the end, after my uncle left and my mother and father had a screaming match that felt like it would split the foundation of our home, but crested and fell into the long, apologetic chords of exhaustion, it was agreed that we would go out for a weeklong fishing trip with Uncle Martin, return home to pick up our father who would accompany us to the camp, then come home from camp and work in the factory until school started.

  It was a compromise of sorts. A neat and orderly parceling of our time.

  2

  In early July, my father brought us to the docks to meet Uncle Martin’s boat, the Lighthouse Lady. On our way through town, we saw Father Heard, the parish priest, who was also one of my father’s best, if not only, friends. The two of them founded and kept afloat what seemed to be the only Catholic Church in the north. Father Heard led a man named Samuel to the church by his left arm. Samuel had no control over his right arm. It shot out over his head and frantically scribbled, as if writing some great, unknown sentence in the air. Everyone called him the air-writer. Samuel mostly wandered the town all day and lived in an apartment his father had set him up with before he died. His father had left money in his will to have Father Heard keep watch over his son. My father hired Samuel to clean the factory and
the town’s church so he had something to do. My mother said Samuel had been touched in the head, but Ludo called him retarded when no one else was around.

  Ludo lived with his mother and father in a row of brownstones three kilometers beyond the church. Ludo’s father was a carpenter. His mother worked at Koopman Light on the factory floor.

  The morning shift was starting soon, and the town seemed alive with people flowing to the factory. Most of them I’d known long enough to pick out their gait at first light. There was Edward Fass, who was thick-chested, rough-hewn, and as scarred up as a cutting block. He worked the assembly line and was known for his loud mouth. Gerard Van Den Bosch and his wife, Annie, both worked as accountants for my father. They walked from the early morning café with an old widow, Maud Stein, whose husband was one of my father’s first employees. Most of the town had some connection to my father’s factory, which meant he was often treated with a sort of deference that came with an emotional remove from other families.

  When we got to the dock we boarded the boat. Uncle Martin was going to bring us back in six days’ time to pick up our father and Ludo, who had persuaded his parents to let him come to camp with us. Then we would cross the Ems and board a train to the summer camp in Germany.

  During our first morning on the Lighthouse Lady, Edwin and I set out long nets and spent the afternoon picking cod, herring, friar fish, hake, flounder, mackerel, and an occasional squid from the gill nets and tossing them down a chute to Uncle Martin who sliced them up and pitched the entrails over the side for the seagulls.

  We started close enough to shore to see long-legged shorebirds run back and forth at the edge of the surf. Oystercatchers kept following the waves so they could dig with their beaks into the newly packed sand before they raised their wings and ran away squawking from the next incoming wash. All day they danced like that.

  The estuary was eighty kilometers across at its widest point. Uncle Martin knew every ledge, sandbar, and current around the clock and tried to teach us about navigating a vessel. “You have to be able to picture the wind on the map too. How it works on water,” he said as I looked at all the charts.

  He let me steer the boat straight across the channel where there was a shelf underwater that dipped to the deepest point of the Ems; we couldn’t see land on either side. To me, the Ems itself seemed alive and I wanted to keep going as far out to sea as possible.

  On our second night we passed over the drop-off after the West Frisian Islands. The water was deep, gunmetal blue and calm enough that we could see it sloping off the horizon before sunset. We’d been hitting on a ten-kilometer shoal of herring when Uncle Martin came out on the decks and said, “We’ll set the nets out one more time,” and he tongued the gap where his canine tooth and bicuspid used to be before he lost it in what he called “a collision with a lead pipe.” Spit in his mouth made a popping sound from the suction between the pock in his gums and his tongue.

  Ahead of us herring broke the water, jumping and falling back. When we wrapped up the net with one of our holds full, we went farther out than I’d ever been before, as far as Den Helder.

  I walked into the wheelhouse, where Edwin tried to keep up with Uncle Martin’s exercise routine. Uncle Martin was shirtless. His tattoos pinched and strained as he did deep lunges, push-ups, sit-ups, and then bent-knee pull-ups from a bar he’d mounted on the overhead.

  “Did those hurt?” I asked. “The needles, I mean.”

  Martin ran his palm along his forearm. “Needles. Is that how you think I got these?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” He lifted his fists to his face and rubbed a knuckle into each eye socket. “Do you know how the sun can turn your skin pink, then red before it peels and flakes off?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. I spent too much time on decks without a shirt on, is all. Lost so many layers of skin I started seeing these faint images emerging.” He traced inked lines on his flesh with his fingertip. “They got clearer with time, as more skin burned away.”

  I studied the fluted and hooked tattoos.

  “So we have pictures etched into our bodies?” I asked.

  “Deep down. At the truest version of ourselves.” Uncle Martin winked at me.

  I didn’t know what to say, but liked the idea that drawing as he did, maybe my brother was able to see the pictures beneath other people’s skin?

  Through the window, we saw the large shadow of a German navy ship cut across the swells like an enormous gray dorsal fin.

  “We’ll be seeing a lot more of those, I suspect,” Uncle Martin said.

  Even from a great distance the ship dwarfed Uncle Martin’s boat, though his was one of the largest trawlers in the Ems’s fishing grounds. He had had it custom-built, a thirty-two-meter, steel-beam trawler, with a high-whaleback bow and slow-turning high-torque engines to power it through rough waters.

  Uncle Martin kept exercising as the ship slipped into the horizon.

  The knife he always wore on his belt was on the console. I picked it up. An American sailor had taught him how to make the scrimshaw handle. Whalebone. Sanded smooth and polished. He pencil-drew a rudimentary drawing of a man hugging tight to the upper mast beams of a rigged ship. To me, the picture symbolized some ultimate freedom I’d yet to really understand. Though of course I was young. I would have drawn the sailor with his hands out to the wind. What did I know about holding on for dear life? When the drawing was as good as he could make it, he carved along the pencil lines with an old dentist tool, then poured and wiped away ink until it dyed the grooves.

  “Should have had you draw that one for me,” he said to Edwin and pointed to the knife I held.

  “Was I born yet?” Edwin asked.

  “No. I guess you weren’t. Though even as a baby you could have done better than that. That one took me a heap of hours to make.”

  I held the heft of the handle and swung the blade in front of me, back and forth, back and forth, always keeping the steel moving the way Uncle Martin had shown us.

  “Have you been to the South Pacific?” Edwin asked.

  “Yes,” Uncle Martin said.

  “Is it like the paintings?”

  “Which paintings?

  “The Gauguin paintings.”

  “I don’t know those.”

  Edwin put his hand on the gunwale, looked out at the water, and was silent for a moment. “Is it so bright and lush that the colors seem distorted?”

  “I’m not sure that’s what I was looking for onshore.” Uncle Martin grinned at me.

  “I’d like to travel like you did,” Edwin said. “Bring an endless sheet of canvas and hundreds of brushes to capture everything I see.”

  “Well. You can go anywhere if you’ve got enough fuel or wind. That’s the secret of boats. The world opens up to you. Though to be honest, it can be as much a curse as a gift.”

  “How so?” Edwin asked.

  “You see the whole world, but you do it alone.”

  That was the first time I really thought of how in the middle of the sea there is no break, no leaving. Prior to this, boats always meant the roar of props pushing water. All the science and industry behind each rivet that composed a vessel felt like a poem to people in motion, to wild souls pushing offshore.

  Uncle Martin spread his legs shoulder-distance apart and began another set of deep-knee bends. Edwin jumped in and tried to keep up but lost his balance on the pitching deck. I sat down and watched the water. For as much as I loved this boat, my uncle, and the sea, I knew I’d be more comfortable working in my father’s lab when I grew up, where I was a door away from my family.

  “What was your favorite place?” Edwin asked.

  “I liked South America. Argentina, Brazil, and Dutch Guiana. There are Dutch that settled there. Some of the women have Dutch and native blood and are so exotic it’s impossible not to fall right in love with them. Those were hard places to leave. But I’m a North Sea man. This place calls to me. Besides, I need cold water t
o keep my heart primed.”

  I walked into the holds. On the table sat a pile of small tools, a microphone, and a disassembled green radio housing I hadn’t seen before. I picked the radio up but dropped the microphone.

  “Don’t touch that.” Uncle Martin’s voice boomed down the stairwell.

  I put the microphone back and lay down in my bunk as we traveled farther north. When the engines slowed, I went back to the wheelhouse. Off the port stern a small vessel headed our way. Uncle Martin lifted his binoculars and studied it.

  “Coming fast,” he said.

  Edwin and I went to the window as Uncle Martin slowed the Lighthouse Lady down even more. When he looked again, he put the binoculars down and started down the stairwell. “A patrol boat.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “The spine of the bow is riding high out of the water.”

  I heard him belowdecks shuffling around with the disassembled radio. Something fell on the floor, and he swore. A hatch opened and slammed shut. He climbed back up the stairs.

  “Edwin. Pull back on the throttle. Bring us to idle til they catch up.”

  Edwin sprung to the helm and eased back the throttle. The engine noise settled to a slow thrumming below deck.

  “They’re coming for us.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll see. Edwin, you stay at the wheel. Jacob, go tend the lines at the stern, and I’ll get the spring line.”

  Before I walked out on deck, I noticed the green radio on the table was gone. A tiny screwdriver lay on the ground. Out on deck I coiled up a docking line to ready it for the PT boat’s approach.

  The PT boat idled its engines when it came alongside.

  “Ahoy,” Uncle Martin yelled and lifted a throw line over his head to show the sailors on deck.

  When the boat pulled parallel to us, Uncle Martin tossed the spring line over to them, and a sailor grabbed it and tied it off to a cleat.

  “Where you headed?” a sailor asked in German.