The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  “I have something to show you, if you want to go for a walk,” Ludo said.

  The two of us walked in the rain across town, back to my house. I watched the cracks and gouges in the road fill with water, eyeing each little one and realizing the whole world had such little fissures. When we got to my house, Ludo led me into the woods.

  “I came here earlier this week but didn’t want to bother you or your parents.” He walked me back to our fort. Twenty meters past, in a small clearing in the center of a cropping of Dutch elm trees, Ludo pointed to a large stone that had been rolled onto the grass. The stone had been polished smooth by the rain. On the wide face of the rock there were letters chiseled into it.

  “Because they never found him, I figured we could mark a place for him like this,” Ludo said.

  The lettering on the stone read, Edwin Koopman, Charioteer.

  This made my brother’s absence finite, marked some conclusion to him as a being in the world, and I couldn’t have that. I wasn’t ready. He was still adrift in my dreams and that, at least, was something; that was somehow infinite. My hands leaned against the rock and pushed it over and then over again until it rolled out of the clearing.

  “Why?” Ludo asked.

  “He’s not dead.” My words took shape around me and faded. “He’s not dead,” I said again, this time trying to believe it. Uncle Martin and my father hadn’t yet found a body. Uncle Martin sent daily wires updating us on finding nothing, so there couldn’t be any gravestones yet.

  Ludo looked hurt. I pictured him holding a chisel with his weak arm, which must have been difficult for him. “Thank you, Ludo,” I said. “We’ll put it back if we know.”

  On the morning of May 24, a troop of German soldiers spilled out of three carrier trucks in the center of Delfzijl. They formed two columns and marched over the main brick road. Their arms swung at their sides, their faces empty of any telling expressions as they passed without letting up on their march, without changing speed. Each wore a dark raincoat down to his knees and black jackboots. They were interchangeable in those outfits, with the iron cross on their hats like it was their sole eye, and their gloved hands showing no flesh.

  “The only problem with Germany is that there are twenty million too many Germans,” I remembered Edward Fass, the assembly line worker with the red, angry scar on his forearm, saying; seeing jackbooted infantrymen in my small town made that statement ring true.

  People came out to watch the soldiers fan out across the village. Several locals stood next to the road and raised their flat hands over their heads, the way we’d been taught at summer camp. That surprised me and I took note of everyone who raised their arms.

  Ludo came with me as I followed the soldiers from a distance. We lurked behind buildings and hid behind trees. The soldiers were stationed across town by two men wearing charcoal gray coats. The men in charge were SS, and they had lists of buildings and roads they wanted the soldiers to guard. They took the schoolhouse as their new bunk barracks and commandeered the outdoor market street for what was said to be a new loading area for incoming German boats.

  “What do you think they’re going to do here?” I asked Ludo.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, should we do something? Should we go introduce ourselves?” I was desperate for anything to break the terrible routine of mourning my brother, to shift my focus from the submerged flow of sadness cutting through me.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Tell them we’re the winners of last summer’s games.”

  Ludo kept watching the soldiers. “I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do.”

  When the soldiers spread out, I waved Ludo to follow me and we ran up to two soldiers broken off from the group.

  “Hey, guys. Guys,” I called to them in German.

  When they stopped and faced us with the full seriousness of their charge, something in me deflated, and I looked from one to the next so quick I think I made them nervous.

  “What is it?” one said.

  I just stood there. Ludo said nothing.

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. Never mind. I’m sorry,” I said, letting those pathetic little words dribble free again.

  “Well, go spread the word that total blackouts at night are now mandatory.”

  I still stood there. His jacket was held tight by a thick black belt worn high over the hips, a rectangular buckle pinching where his belly button was. What a big goddamned buckle, I thought.

  “Got it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Get on then.”

  “Okay,” I said and turned back into our town that made light but would now have to go dark.

  We followed the soldiers from a distance for a few hours and then I ran home to tell my mother what happened. Tucked under the front door was a letter from Mr. Gunnelburg from Volkswagen. I walked into the house and placed it on top of the piano. My mother needed to wire my father in Rotterdam and let him know about the letter and the soldiers so he could figure out what it all meant for the factory.

  When I turned around, I found her sleeping naked on the couch by the sliding glass windows. Her head rested on her folded arms, leaving her heavy breasts exposed. The last of the full light of the sun shone through the windows on her, on all her scars, highlighting how she’d aged without my ever having realized it. Then the true enormity and emptiness of our house settled on me, and I wanted to go curl on the floor at her feet, to participate in my family’s downfall.

  I crossed the room and pulled her blue robe over her.

  “Let me take you to bed.”

  Her cheeks had begun to sag, and her features blunted. She pulled the bottom hem of her robe over her knees where she used tweezers to pluck at the fine hairs sprouting over her shins and calves where a road map of dark, forking, varicose veins leaned out against the skin.

  When she sat up on the couch I helped her up, holding her elbows, and then led her up the steps.

  “Thank you, Edwin,” she mumbled in her half-sleep. We stopped and both stood there dazed until she realized what she’d said. Her head dropped into her hands as she walked into her bedroom and slumped at her dressing table.

  Her robe hung open as she reached for her case full of jewelry bought over the course of years on my father’s trips. She opened the sleek, felt case and picked up a necklace thin as a strand of hair. She sat back in the chair facing her bedroom dresser mirror and began to put all of her necklaces on. Then she took everything else out of the box. One by one, she put on every piece of jewelry. An ivory rose. Pearl brooch. Gemstone clasps. The necklaces touched one another on the back of her neck but hung at different lengths, the silver rubbing the gold, the gold rubbing the strings. She hung her loop earrings from her ear holes and then hooked every other glass earring she could into the loops until the clusters pulled her earlobes down toward her jawline.

  “Mom,” I said. “Mom.”

  But she kept at it and then she took out her rings, which were now loose on her, and one after the other she slipped them on until they locked her fingers straight. Her hands were suspended in front of her as she gazed into her mantle mirror. The strange gathering of chains and pearls about her neck was a layered coil of subtle light. Something ungovernable in her heart had saturated her mind. She looked at me then but her eyes were unfocused and didn’t meet mine. She stood up so her ornament-weighted robe fell back off her shoulders, and looked at herself in the mirror as if alone.

  “Honey,” she said, turning to me in the dark hallway. Tendrils of jewelry hung off the side of her blank face. Her fingers could not bend from all the rings so she held them spread out and facing the ceiling like they’d been cast in bronze.

  I turned and fled downstairs, taking three steps at a time. She was at the top flight by the time I slammed onto the first floor.

  “Honey,” she called. “Honey,” she said, like she’d found the word she needed.

  The manic ene
rgy and guilt that rose up in me made me want to sprint or mount some ten-legged chariot and fly over a sea of fire again. Stepping through the glass door into the backyard, I grabbed a shovel from the shed and started furiously scooping mounds of loose dirt back into the pit. I dug and dug, taking wild strikes into the dirt and flinging it until my arms burned and my whole body pulsed with one intention. There. There. There. That beat, beat, beat of a body doing the work of still living. I wanted to cry and weep and confess about Edwin, as if doing so would expunge my guilt. But I held it all in where it became something solid I’ve quietly carried with me until this day—a cancerous pearl.

  When I was too tired to move, I leaned on the shovel’s handle. Above me my mother’s shadow filled her bedroom window. She’d been watching me. What must she have thought of me then? Her son. Her only son. It was very dark out when she stepped back from her window. I hoped she would sleep. It was strange to look up at the house. It seemed like I’d been buried and was only now working my way loose of the earth.

  The next morning my father and Uncle Martin returned.

  “There are Germans everywhere,” Uncle Martin cursed as he walked into the door. “We have to get you out of here.”

  “We didn’t find anything,” my father told me.

  My mother came down the stairs, heard him, and stopped. “Then I’m not going anywhere. Not until we’re sure.” She turned around and went back to her room.

  “We’ll go back. I’ll keep looking,” my father called after her. He walked past me like he was about to sink into the ottoman. “Hello, Jacob,” he said. Then he saw the letter from Mr. Gunnelburg on the piano where I left it.

  “Oh. Thank god,” he sighed and picked up the envelope. “They paid.”

  His long fingers tore the seal back. With the paper folded back in front of him I saw a dark drawbridge slam shut over his face. He crumpled the letter and threw it across the room.

  “They can’t do this,” he said. “Oh no. They can’t do this.”

  He got up and went into his lab where I heard glass shattering against the walls. He spent the rest of the night at home wandering the house, in and out of his lab. He passed me a dozen times without noticing me or seemingly unaware, muttering to himself. When he was in the lab, I snuck up to the crumpled letter like a thief, smoothed it, and read.

  Dear Mr. Koopman,

  In light of recent events, we will be rescinding our initial payment and not placing any further orders. Thank you for your interest in working with Volkswagen.

  Trevor Gunnelburg

  I sensed that disappointment must have tipped my father then. I knew how hard he’d worked on the order, but didn’t know then how much capital he’d invested in the project, or the practical, day-to-day stresses of the business that still required his attention despite our own family being shut down.

  After that my father became immobilized by grief. Over the course of two days he emptied the brandy decanter and several other bottles of liquor in the house. Instead of careening room to room, he sat in his library alone and mumbled to the books. When he sobered up, he went days without eating and lost weight. During the darkest parts of the nights that he wasn’t spooking through Rotterdam, the sound of his crying rose through the vents. It became as steady as one of the noises the house made: the wood settling, popping and cracking behind the walls, or the low groan of water flushing through the pipes. Waking to this sound sent a sadness through me that reached out from my chest and got lost in some unbearable emptiness.

  When I did sleep, my dreams had become a frightening stranger that leaned against me and made me toss the covers off so the cold woke me. My trembling fingers felt for the edges of the blanket. Fergus rested his head on my bed. When I finished petting him, he’d go to Edwin’s bed, sniff the sheets, then jump on the covers and curl himself into a ball. Until morning I would stare at the exquisite cobwebs tucked in the corner of my room and the shadows of tree branches that bent across the ceiling.

  When the long days of summer came it was a blessing. It was easier to spend less time in or close to the house. The first tulip and forsythia blooms lining the front and sides of the house shriveled into dull little fists of petals from a lack of water and tending. But so much time off on my own or with Ludo and Hilda created the constant desire to talk to Edwin. When the need for this got too burdensome, I started talking to him in my head. At first, a short calling out of his name, then, slowly, as if Edwin became my own sounding board, I began to hear myself talk of my own grief. I wanted so terribly for some soft shiver of my brother’s subterranean drifting song to find me.

  At my loneliest moments, I walked around the outskirts and through the center of town, keeping Edwin’s invisible presence next to me. I wondered what tragedies were held in each home on my street alone. One of the houses belonged to Liddy Robinson’s family. Liddy and Edwin were in the same grade and she was the first girl to kiss Edwin. However, later she told Hilda that his breath smelled like cabbage cream soup and she didn’t want to kiss him again.

  Edwin had been gone for three months. He had missed two thunderstorms that shook the house. One storm came marching over our house on legs of lightning, dragging its heavy dark clouds overhead like a wet tarp. Each night after those storms, the clear sky of stars bloomed into sharp-angled shapes etched across the sky. Orion threw his leg over the horizon, climbed atop our world, and sat perched, steadily gazing upon everything we were losing.

  Soon after they arrived, the Germans built a temporary tent city in the middle of town. More soldiers came by small boats along the water, and when their tent city was set up and the presence of the soldiers was ubiquitous, they sent men down to the Koopman Light Company’s factory.

  At first they just walked the factory floor. But one day, my father came home saying that they came in and stationed a soldier who wanted to go over all of the company’s accounting. “All of your production will be going to Germany now,” the soldier told my father. “You will operate as normal. We will have people here to help you load the trucks from now on and we will cover the distribution of your lights.”

  “What about payment?” he asked.

  “‘You will be maintained’ is what he told me. Maintained. What does that mean? Most of our money was sunk into the Volkswagen order.”

  My mother didn’t have much of a reaction. She listened from the couch, her blue bathrobe wrapped tightly around her.

  “They’ve handcuffed me.”

  Still, my mother said nothing. For days after that my father came home and did not try to share his visible frustrations. In fact, whole days went by when I didn’t hear either of their voices.

  That silence I remember most. That silence spoke to me. We will not share these hurts. We will not voice this pain.

  Then, one night, my father walked into my room with Fergus at his heels. “I’m going back to Rotterdam,” he said.

  The next morning, Uncle Martin and I walked my father to the train station.

  “They’re going to run the factory for you?” Uncle Martin asked.

  “They asked me to repair a downed machine, but they can do that without me,” my father said.

  “That’s not like you,” I said.

  “Well. They’re doing the books. Everything. They only want me for repairs and as a consultant. They can manage without me for a spell.”

  When my father’s train left, Uncle Martin and I walked to the harbor.

  “Where else is there to look?” I asked Uncle Martin.

  “I guess we look until we find,” he said.

  The soldiers set up large gun turrets to protect the troop transport boats that came in every day. Several soldiers smoked cigarettes by the tent city. More walked past the outdoor market booths, thumbed over the assorted seeds, coriander, beans, and potatoes Mr. Graaf sold. He was the only one selling anything outside that day.

  There was a commotion up the road in front of the pharmacy. Above it were several floors of apartment houses. A wom
an screamed and then several soldiers ran up the street.

  When we got closer we saw Patrice Mueller being propped up by two German soldiers. Her head had been shaved and slopped in heavy orange paint from a wide brush dragged across her scalp. Rivulets of orange paint ran off her forehead and cheeks and mixed in with a smudge of blood under her nostrils.

  “What happened to her?” I asked Uncle Martin.

  “She’s been with a German man. Some of the locals didn’t think too highly of it.”

  “My god. The townspeople did that to her?”

  “Yes.” Uncle Martin turned away from the commotion and started walking back.

  The front of Patrice’s gray wool skirt had splatters of orange paint on it. Her breasts visibly hung loose under her white blouse. They were wide apart and made it clear how large a woman she was. Little red blotches on her scalp bled where the knife had shorn off the hair too closely and cut the skin. To me, there was nothing sexual about her, and I had a hard time understanding how sex had put her in such a position. I turned away and caught up with Uncle Martin.

  “But Father Heard said that was a sin.” My uncle gave me a sideways look. “I mean, being with anyone before marriage.” I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. I was confused and angry at Patrice Mueller, the German man she was with, and our own townspeople who had done this terrible thing to her.

  “Don’t be so certain of what Father Heard preaches. The good father’s book doesn’t bend enough to cater to its audience. I’ll tell you something about being human. Captain Cook’s bosun had to keep guard of his ship from his own crew, who traded nails for sex in Tahiti. The locals thought it an acceptable form of barter, and the bosun realized the men would have stripped the ship to a floating pile of loose logs at the rate they stole nails. And Columbus found the New World, discovered syphilis, and three years later it was an epidemic in Moscow. That ought to tell you all you need about how real people live, and to be wary of preaching that is so rigid and unforgiving of human nature.”