The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  Small artillery cracked from the foxholes the Dutch Marines had dug around the city’s bridges. The few people on the street moved toward the waterfront. The whole city, which had feared the Germans coming, hunkered down or crept toward the dock, seeking safe passage elsewhere. Several blocks from the hotel along the Plantagestraat, the street level dipped below the canal. The canal wall tunneled in that portion of the road and held the water back. But the water had flowed down the canal too fast and surged over the lip down into the cup of the road. Water roared over the wall and flushed the street out for about fifty meters. Beyond the washout, the brick road angled up and rose out of the brown water, and there was the pier building and restaurant we had arranged to meet our father, but the three intersections between us were washed out.

  Water poured over the flooded road, ran up the tree trunks, spilt over the wooden entrances of first-floor shops and the lower lips of windowsills that had shattered from the pressure. Torn strips of leather and random wooden shoes floated out of a broken storefront window at a cobbler’s. Water crept up our shinbones as we moved to another doorway. Ahead of us, a man moved through the water in the street. On his shoulders was a little girl cradling a dulled gray pillowcase. As soon as the man with his child cleared the sunken street, other people started running after them. It got deep at the middle of the intersection, but it was doable, and looked only about knee-deep nearer the dock.

  “What a stupid defense plan,” Edwin said.

  Water covered a bicycle rack. A row of handlebars stuck above the surface and each cut a little V in the current. Dirt and trash floated to the high-water mark, which kept rising. A Packard 180 shimmied toward the lowest point of the road. We watched the hood shift, dip backward, and submerge, which lifted the automobile’s grill and headlights for a brief moment before the whole thing disappeared.

  I felt a swampy heat in my armpits. I was too scared to go into the flooded street and decided to tell Edwin. We were wrong to have come looking for our father. I was wrong. I’d tell him before the tree branch floated by. Before the wooden sign. Before . . . But I didn’t say anything. My mouth formed the words, but I had no tongue, windpipe, or lungs to push them out.

  “Swim where it gets deep so you don’t get caught on anything underwater,” Edwin said. He moved forward and marched into the flooded street. I followed. The water was knee-deep right away. The heavy flow rushed against my wet pant legs. The brownstone buildings on both sides of the street became canyon walls rising out of a river.

  Edwin was ten meters ahead of me. “Watch out,” he yelled without looking behind him as a small birch tree came floating down the street. It got snagged on something underwater, spun around, and floated off again.

  Others walked through the flood behind us like we were a pilgrimage of instant refugees. Some crossed the way we were and others tried to move in the other direction.

  “Keep up, Jacob,” Edwin yelled.

  He looked back. Beside him was the black steel hood of another big car. It was in the middle of the road as if it had been abandoned while moving. The hood of the car reflected the first of the morning’s sunlight, a silver glow laying down on this water that seemed to run through the heart of the city, possibly the whole country. Dead men continued to fall from the sky. The crack and echo of gunfire bounced off the buildings before settling into the mortar and marrow of Rotterdam. Edwin kept looking back and must have seen me among all that—struggling against the current, slipping so my chest and face kept dipping into the water. Every other step now my brother turned back to make sure I kept up.

  When Edwin was next to the car we made eye contact. Then he turned, took about four steps forward so he was even with the car’s front bumper, and he started walking the road’s incline out of the water. The water level sunk from his waist, below his pants pocket, and off the back of his knees as he stepped forward. He looked back again like he knew that seeing him was keeping me calm. The water was at the centerline of his shins when he turned back to the port.

  Then, in midstride, Edwin plunged straight down—dropping below the waterline.

  A white rim of bubbles from where he’d sunk swept to the surface and flowed toward me.

  “Edwin!” I ran hard to get out of the deeper water, dove forward, and swam until my knees scraped the road. Some larval shifting of fear roiled through my stomach. Next to the submerged car, I plunged forward again. My head was out of the water and my hands searched the contours of the road. The brick cut the heel of my palm and scraped at my skin. Then my hands found the circular lip of an open manhole and reached down into it. A stronger, quicker moving current beneath the street sucked at my arm, buckled my body in half, and folded me over the steel lip of the hole, and I had to fight from getting swallowed into that hidden river.

  My hands ran around the lip. The quick flowing water over the street must have jarred the cover loose and pushed it away. I pinned my armpits against the lip and dove my head into the hole. Everything underwater was black. The current pushed hard against my neck, and it took all my strength to hold myself in that position, underwater in both the flooded road and this unmapped world. My hands circled the water, reaching for anything, each finger striving loose of the knuckles. I thought of Samuel’s manic arm. No sunlight sunk beneath the street. I willed my body to let go, to let the current pull me to Edwin. My abdominal muscles locked in a folded U against the lip. My mind kept telling my feet to kick my body the rest of the way in—just kick.

  Air bubbles rose up the side of my head as I exhaled in a gasping scream. Above the surface I took wild fish breaths for air, howled for help, and dove again, but couldn’t bring my body to let itself go with the current. Let go. Let go. Let go. But I stayed like that, diving into and breaching the flooded street, reaching, but not finding anything in that dark underground flow.

  “Help! Please help! I need rope.”

  The water sunk in through my ears and nose and skin and saturated everything.

  I ran to where the road level was above the canal to see if there were any sewer outlets. If there were, they were underwater.

  Tributaries slunk off in quick streams and rivulets. In the water a dead rat floated past me. Up ahead where it was dry, there were more gunned-downed paratroopers on the street.

  Another man crossing the water had a small child on his shoulders. Beside them was a younger boy.

  “Young fellow,” the man said to me. “Keep moving, get out of the street.”

  “Please, help me,” I begged, weeping from hot, incoherent rage. That helpless anger stayed with me, it rose and receded in my throat and coated me like a second skin.

  “Come on. Keep moving,” he said again.

  “What happened?” the boy walking behind the man asked me. The boy’s face was slack and dumb-looking, like he had no context for the city all around him, exploding into flood and noise and death.

  “I think we flooded the streets,” I said, standing and following the man and his children toward the piers, walking like a ghost, floating free of who I had been. As I wandered, I was not myself—could never be myself again. I was now the person who had persuaded Edwin to take to the street with me.

  My father was leaning over a wounded man and wrapping gauze around his shoulder when I got to the restaurant where we had planned to meet.

  I walked inside the barrier of the sidewalk seating.

  “Papi,” I said, using the name for him I hadn’t used since I was a child.

  When he saw me, he ran over and hugged me. “Damn it, I knew you boys wouldn’t stay where you were, I knew it. Why are you all wet? Where’s Edwin?”

  “Papi,” was all I could say.

  “Jacob, where’s your brother? Jacob. Jacob, where’s Edwin?” My father looked right into my eyes—all the way to the deepest reaches of my life. “Where’s Edwin?” he yelled and shook me by the shoulders. “Where’s Edwin?”

  He saw that I was incapable of forming words. That a swelling of garbled cries cl
otted in my stomach. He shook me even harder.

  “Where?”

  “He fell.”

  “What?”

  “Under the road. He fell under the road.”

  The wounded man lay on the patio floor next to a table. Blood already soaked through the bandage wrapped around him. The sunlight reflected off the window, and the golden glow filled the wrinkled edges of my father’s desperate face.

  “Jacob. Tell me what happened.”

  “The road flooded and he fell under it, through a manhole and got swept away.”

  “Where?”

  I pointed behind me, down Plantagestraat, to the section of the street where I lost my brother.

  “Show me.”

  He pulled me along and we worked our way back to the spot where Edwin fell. I led him to the hole under the water. A slow current flowed into the lowest point of the road. Another parallel current ran faster just beneath it, to some unseen place beyond our reach. When we found the hole, my father dropped to his knees and felt out the opening. He plunged his hands in and the currents pulled them away. He sat back up immediately.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Jacob, hold on to my belt.”

  My fingers clasped hold of his belt as he leaned into the hole, the leather strap popped tight against my palms as the water pressure pulled on him. His legs kicked forward, trying to plunge himself into the hole, and I heaved him back to keep him from being carried away too. My father resurfaced, gasping for air.

  “How’d this happen?”

  There was no answer I could have given him then. No confession I could have mustered. Instead I plunged my hands back into the hole and started waving beneath the road from the force of the underground river. I sensed that my arms would now always be searching and wished they would come loose from my body and float away from me.

  After my father examined the hole, he ran in a full panic to the shops that lined the street and asked everyone where the sewer system let out. When no one could tell him, he led me to a corner store that had flooded ankle-deep and rooted around for a map that showed the canals fanning out from the harbor. He was on some other plane of existence then, silent, navigating by instinct, pulling me along by some magnetic force.

  “Jacob,” he said, “start yelling your brother’s name, and don’t stop until we find him. Don’t stop.”

  For three hours I yelled “Edwin” at the top of my lungs along the canals, until it felt like my heart would never stop echoing that call, that name. That whole time my father had not said another word, just run his finger over the map in his hand, then started taking those incredibly long strides of his around the ruined city, along every waterway, scanning the banks.

  Through the roads running along the canal, we passed more dead paratroopers in their ready-made burial tarps. They were dressed as Dutch Royal Guardsmen, but were German soldiers. I looked closely at every heap on the street. I imagined myself hiding away from my father under one of those white, billowing chutes, until I was no longer trembling, wet, and cold. On one corner a parachute snagged on a broken tree trunk. The trunk cut through the tarp and held it in place. The parachute lines pulled taut downstream where they fell into the canal. At the end of the lines, a body bobbed face-down on the surface like a giant fishing lure.

  We circled the flooded area a dozen times, before widening our search and walking the rest of the city. People fled in droves, heading to the bridges. In one of the small shops the radio that someone had pushed against the sill of a broken window was broadcasting. We stopped to listen for a moment. My throat hurt from yelling. My chest hurt. I was trying to rest when the broadcaster said, “German forces to bomb city of Rotterdam if the Dutch do not surrender.”

  My father sank to his knees and let his body crumple onto his haunches. “Jacob,” he said from the ground. “I can’t find your brother. I can’t find him, and we’re going to have to get out of the city.”

  My father looked at the map like it baffled him, like the answer to where to find his missing son had to be hidden on that surface. Eventually he stood up, and we walked toward the eastern bridge out of the city.

  Rotterdam was now a giant anthill stirred up by a boot. Thousands of refugees fleeing the bomb threats filled the roads in cars, buses, lorries, wagons, mules, and horses. A drunk old man yelled from horseback for everyone to go back and wait it out as an old lady leading the horse by the reins walked with the flow of people. A boy about my age drove a cow from his bicycle by gently swatting at the animal’s flanks with a stick to keep it moving. People carried everything they could in pathetic bundles piled on carts drawn by tractors. A canary sang from its cage slung from the side of a Packard. Crates of fowl laced together by hastily tied knots swung off roof racks. Little children carried huge loads and panting Alsatian dogs harnessed to wheelbarrows dragged heaps deemed essential in such a panic. They all crossed the bridge as if it were a gangplank dropping them out of their own lives into something bottomless and unknown.

  Dutch Marines had dug foxholes around the next bridge and let only a single-file line of residents pass over. A marine with a machine gun stood at the start of the bridge where everyone lined up.

  “Have your hands visible as you cross,” the marine yelled. “If you do anything threatening to the bridge, you will be shot.”

  “Stay in front of me,” my father said. The people around us wore business clothes, or smocks from working in restaurants. Two men covered in ash looked like they’d run out from working in an aluminum smelter.

  Once we crossed the bridge, my father looked along the bank and his focus locked on something triggering him to run downhill away from me. His long, awkward stride caught me off guard as he headed to the water. He lost his balance, stumbled, slid down on his back, and got up again in stride.

  “Halt,” one of the marines yelled.

  My father kept moving toward the water. A few steps ahead of him a dark bulge floated against the bank. His back obscured my view as the marine yelled again.

  “Halt,” the soldier boomed down off the concrete lip of the bridge.

  “Wait. No,” I yelled.

  Then the man aimed the muzzle of his gun at my father running to the base of the bridge and let off several rounds. Dirt ahead of my father jumped up in little clouds and disappeared like dark dandelion puffs. My father kept running and almost dove to the edge of the water. His hand reached out and pulled something up on the shore. By the time he had a good grip of it and was pulling it up I was running down the hill after him. The marine who fired his weapon didn’t yell anything at me as he must have seen what my father was after. At the bottom of the bank my father’s back curved over his lap as if he were sinking into the shore. He held a soggy wet burlap sack in his lap. Easy to mistake for a body—just a bag that was filled by the current and hung up on the rocks.

  For a long time we sat by the banks of that water with the wet burlap resting over his lap.

  Eventually, he took the burlap sack and placed it back in the water so it filled up and drifted off downstream, hanging under the surface until we could no longer see it. Then I helped him walk up the hillside, almost pushing his hunched, sapless body.

  Everything was different then. Everything would always be different after that.

  We spent the rest of that day asking everyone among the refugees if they knew where the canals or sewers let out in the city. My father paid to have a message telegraphed to my mother.

  Stay put until you hear from me. Hans.

  Later on, after the guns had been silent for hours and we had not heard any more airplanes, we persuaded a soldier to let us cross a bridge back into Rotterdam and we went to City Hall to look for help, and then the police station, but there was nobody there. Not in either place. Everyone was hiding. All that day we searched, and at night we didn’t sleep. Anyone we passed we asked if they knew where the water let out. If they had a guess, we followed it. We walked along the harbor where all the boats had quickly made way after the morni
ng attack.

  “The ship I paid to take us across has left,” my father said as he stared at the empty slips in the harbor. He turned back to me. “We’re going to be trapped here.”

  Past the harbor we found a huge drainage pipe opening up along the shore. The giant pipe led into a dark hole tunneled under the street. A stream trickled out. In his wet and ruined three-piece suit and sopping shoes my father walked right into the blackness and disappeared. I ran after him and yelled out my brother’s name, which echoed away from us in the darkness. I followed after the splash of my father’s sunken feet as we walked under the city. The passageway ran into smaller grated-off pipes that I put my head against, calling for my brother.

  All that night and into the next day we searched. We wandered the city in a stupor for several days after that, following and backtracking along the city’s canals and eventually ending up at the morgue, where people already began cataloging the new dead. My father made me wait outside while he walked the corridors and looked into the blued faces of strangers.

  I sat on the bench, pulled the rumpled flyer of the woman from my pocket, and felt a bloom of shame and disgust in my gut for wanting something so physical. Vomit rose to the back of my mouth. I crumpled the paper into a wet ball and tossed it into the street.

  At night in the city before the raid, nothing was shrouded in darkness. Streetlights and lights up in the buildings had cast shadows on the city where something was always happening. “Those lights up there feel like glowing money,” my father had said. But since the raid, all was dark. Night came much earlier. The buildings’ shadows slipped away. That darkness seeped into me as we passed those few nights, stopping only to let me sleep in a doorway or on a park bench for an hour here and there when exhaustion set in firmly enough to overpower the wild feeling of wanting to keep following my father, to constantly call out my brother’s name, my phantom hands ever grasping fistfuls of water.