The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  “Check upstairs,” the German who kneed Fergus said to the other.

  Fergus cautiously followed the man through the house.

  “You two, come over here,” the man in the foyer motioned with the gun.

  My mother stepped in front of me and didn’t move. The heavy, heel-toe, heel-toe footsteps from room to room upstairs was followed by the tap and scratch of Fergus’s nails.

  “We want to talk with Mr. Koopman right now.”

  The soldier upstairs came down and searched the basement. He came up and walked by me, trailing the scent of cool leather. He stepped into my father’s workroom. Time stopped. He pulled something from his deep side pocket. Then he scratched a match across the box and held the flame out in front of him. The match made an outline of the rounded features of his hat. He stepped farther into the workroom. The match lit a path several feet ahead of him, and if he saw the door, he’d see the path my father made in the snow. I tried to say something, even reached my hands out toward the man to touch him, but there was such a knot in my throat that no words came. As he got to the end of the room, he waved the match in front of him, then turned back to me. He stood in the back part of the room for a moment. Then scraped something off the shelf. Small copper fixtures chimed on the floor as they landed. Each little, metallic note echoed in the air. Then the man shook the match out, and the smell of smoke drifted into the air as he walked back out of the room and into the kitchen.

  When he came back, he held the skillet of caramelized onion.

  “When does he come home for dinner?”

  “Right after work,” my mother said. The officer tilted the skillet so the hot onion fell in one glop to the floor. They stood over it, huge, menacing. Fergus slinked up, sniffed, and then ate all of the sizzling onion in several giant gulps.

  The soldiers confiscated our ration cards and left, leaving the front door open. Fergus followed them outside and retched up the steaming onion.

  When their car was gone, I went to the window that looked out on the side yard and saw the wide track of snow my father had belly-crawled over to reach the far woods. There were no footprints—only the indent of his dragged body, a giant slug’s slime trail. I called Fergus inside when he started to eat the snow he’d thrown up on. Once he came in, he wagged his tail and sat next to my mother who dug her fingers into his coat. Her wet, red-wrecked eyes focused on me as if I were the only thing she had left in the world. I didn’t know if I could withstand that weight.

  When it was 10 P.M. that night, I slipped out the side door with a backpack of clothing and what limited dry foods we could muster. My mother put a small roll of cash into the pack’s smallest pocket with a note I didn’t read. It felt too private, like a good-bye between them I didn’t want to acknowledge.

  Outside, narrow pillars of trees shot up into the surrounding darkness, and the naked branches formed a canopy of thousands of interlocked, arthritic fingers. Beyond that was a fury of stars, each some bright splinter of shrapnel whose purpose was to explode and rain down until everything remained jet.

  I waited for two hours at the fort while the wind picked up and my fingertips and toes throbbed with hurt and then went numb. Wherever he had gone in the woods, my father’s footprints were covered by the wind.

  Well past midnight, I left the backpack inside the walls of the fort and went back to the house. My mother’s shadow was framed in the kitchen window. Her figure shifted back and forth on her heels, her fingers manically twirling the ends of her hair. The snow crunched under my feet. In the middle of the open side yard, I stopped. Something felt off as I looked into the woods to the front of the house. A quick red dot of ash breathed to life. I froze. The cigarette’s cherry rose up and brightened with fire again. That same deep fear that coursed through me earlier when the soldiers opened the door to our house surged again. I wished myself a shade, a shadow of a tree that could blend in among the natural world.

  Still holding my breath, I walked inside the house to where my mother sat by the window with her knees drawn up into her chest. The combination of tenderness and desperation with which she looked at me was jarring. Her face split in three directions. “Did you see him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you look everywhere?”

  “He wasn’t there.”

  “Well. Maybe.” She opened her mouth as if to speak but fell silent, close to tears, not trusting herself.

  In the morning, before the sun came up, I snuck out the back door of the house and into the woods, approaching the fort from another angle. There, I saw the backpack had been riffled through. The money, my mother’s note, and the food were gone. The clothes were strewn about. Next to the last traces of my footprints from hours before were two other sets. Each print was set deep into the snow, with a heavy heel and toe section divided by the indent from the heel’s lift. There were no signs of my father since he had taken to moving on his stomach, an image that inexplicably made me ashamed.

  Fingers of light poked sideways between the tree trunks, the slanting beams each a welcoming arm of ghosts. At that moment the forest was full of ghosts—the ghost of my younger self who built the fort with Edwin. Edwin, whose makeshift gravestone rested on its side not ten meters away. And now, the ghost of my father joining the others, and I was suddenly paralyzed by the tally of these losses.

  I returned to the house, slipped past the crater the bomb had left in the backyard and into the kitchen, where my mother sat at the table.

  “What’d you find?”

  “Those men ripped through the pack.”

  “The letter?”

  “It’s all gone.”

  Her face looked different, her hurt was transparent and it seemed like the real tragedy was having lost whatever those words were she had written him.

  I desperately wanted time to reverse. I’d pick my father off the floor, hose the chemical smell from him, and tell him I was proud of Koopman Light Company. I wanted the time I spent mourning to go backward so I could step out and chip all the russet green peels of paint from our house that had gone untended once Edwin was lost. I’d sand it away and coat it fresh with layer after layer of white primer, then change the color of the place altogether. Soft blue trim at the shutters, true the edges. Given the chance I’d go back to when my mother still had the energy of a young woman and gracefully swayed through her day, gesturing freely with her hands as she talked, pressing her clasped hands to her lips when we made her laugh. I’d go back and make a fresh start of it all. I’d nestle Edwin and me as boys into the wedge of the twin-trunked sessile oak and make a fresh start of it all. I wanted time to go back so I could have kissed Hilda, and perhaps more, wanting the experience of exploring her. I would touch upon every embarrassing moment and say no, no, no, this is not the way, and stage-direct every instance back into proper order. Whitewash each with primer. My mother finding me masturbating in the laundry room. More primer. Throwing rocks at spotlit rats. Gone. My brother dropping beneath the water. Dear god. Never happened. My father dropping to his stomach on glass that I knew pierced the flesh. My mother’s slow and painful breaking apart in front of my eyes. Whitewash it all, paint it away, gone from the world and any memory of it.

  My mother stood up, walked over, and hugged me. “Okay. We’re going to the factory today then. I’ll work for your father. First, we’ll tell Martin. Martin will be furious.”

  When she let me go, she walked out of the room while peeling off her blue bathrobe. Several moments later, the shower began running, and within a half hour, my mother stood in front of me in her gray winter slacks, a heavy sweater, and her jacket, hat, and gloves. She looked nothing like the woman we had left behind when we went to Rotterdam and lost Edwin. Her face was gaunt, her cheeks sunken and ruddy. Deep furrows ran from midway down her nose to the corners of her mouth. Though somehow it was her standing in front of me—her brief luxury of mourning now stripped away without food rations. She placed her hands on my shoulders and smoothed out the wrinkles in
my coat, then looked at me the way she had when I was a child.

  Together we walked to the factory, the product of my father’s life’s work. Two German guards had been assigned to check off workers’ names as they arrived, to make sure everyone contributed as expected. Those men stood by the entrance to the assembly plant and the sight of them left a burning resentment in my chest. But my mother led me to the office entrance. Inside the room was bright, too hot, full with lamps and file cabinets. Several of the German engineers my father had shown around were at the desks.

  “The workers’ entrance is around the back,” one of the officers said to us in Dutch as we walked in.

  “I’m Mrs. Koopman,” my mother said.

  “Ah, goedemiddag, Mrs. Koopman. Where is your husband?” the officer asked.

  “I don’t know. Several soldiers came last night to our home to look for him, but he has not come home, and they took our ration cards.”

  “Well, that is because we need to speak to him immediately.”

  My heart jumped. They hadn’t caught him yet. Maybe he’d gotten away.

  “We would like to know where he is too, but since he is not here, and we have no ration cards, I would like to work instead of him and have his ration card.”

  “Ah, I see. The good Mrs. Koopman has arrived to make claims on us,” the officer said, loud enough so the engineers would hear. “Well, well. Why don’t you start working on the lines starting this morning, and you can have your son’s card back. I presume this is your son.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, you can have his for your working. But we would like you, young man”—the officer pointed at me; I didn’t look at him but at the glowing thread of his typewriter ribbon—“not to come back unless you have your father. We know what that slippery bastard was up to.”

  10

  My mother went to work at the factory every day that winter after my father left. That first Sunday, she showed up to church and played her organ for the people who came. In my father’s absence, she played louder and harder, and for once since Edwin left, she was animated, and wailed on the keys and pedal, giving a wild concert. Her song trailed off into its last echoes, each note coming to silence like a dark bird piercing a silver cloud. Week after week she showed up to play the organ, letting the voice of those pipes clear and sing whatever mourning or worry she had locked in her, but fewer and fewer people came.

  During the rest of the time she was frantic with worry, pestering me about where I was going and when I’d be back, pacing around the house, saying, “I can do this. I can do this.” She did this until she crested some new height of fear, and then in an act I will always be proud of, she got herself dressed.

  “I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t wait,” she said. “Martin is doing everything he can, but I can’t wait.” She decided she was going to go find my father. She bundled herself in three sweaters and an overcoat and marched from house to house all through the town and looked into the eyes of the people who lived there.

  “Please. Have you seen or heard from my husband?”

  I accompanied her on the first several rounds through town.

  For me, my brother was always present, floating in a blue underground river. I imagined my father, who belly-crawled through the frozen woods with his cheek to the ground, had heard some trace of that current, that he was rubbing his body over it to understand where to go next. I glommed onto that image of my father, driven by a purpose and not merely a deserter. Though how I thought of him shifted and spun like the Devil in his story, coming out of each dance turn in a new disguise. The businessman. Storyteller. Drinker. Inventor. Coward. Saboteur. Runaway. The Missing. The Gone.

  Sadly, my mother, who was very much present, I tried to dismiss as a stranger. Her worry poisoned me. It compounded my hurt and anger. I was angry with my people for releasing the dams and flooding my brother away, with the Germans for pushing forward with their wild expansion, and most with my father for breaking the rules and being forced to run away. For my mother, I was angry with her for her obvious and glaring pain, as it kept me from going numb.

  At home, rock piles by the pit in our backyard looked like they were placed in the forms of arrows, pointing toward my father’s hiding spot. Everything became some indecipherable clue. Because of this, I avoided going home as much as possible. I started going to the woods behind Hilda’s house to watch for movement behind lit windows or to the docks to help Uncle Martin on his boat. My options were very limited. After my eighteenth birthday, the Germans would make me join a labor crew in the German factories, the Heer, or the Waffen SS, and probably send me to the eastern front. For a while that winter, I was actually eager to leave.

  On a warm morning, Hilda came by our house.

  “Will you come watch me ride?”

  “Sure.”

  We walked up the road between our houses.

  “Thank you,” she said and reached over and held my hand.

  My body felt so tight I didn’t dare turn and look at her. For a moment I thought things might begin to get better.

  I climbed and sat on a wood split-rail fence as she saddled and led a black-and-white quarter horse into the paddock.

  “Here we go,” she said. “You ready?”

  “I’m watching.”

  She eased the horse in a circle close to me and then picked up speed and started doing fast jaunts about the field. I tried to memorize the way her body moved on the horse’s back through that beautiful wooded meadow.

  When we were children, Hilda’s father had a white horse that he let be used by whomever in town dressed up as St. Nicholas that year. So on St. Nicholas Day, December 5, the parade started from Hilda’s house and worked its way down our road into town. When we still believed, we waited in our driveway and joined the procession of St. Nicholas and his gang of boys in blackface called Black Peters. When we were old enough to understand what was happening, we went to Hilda’s first thing in the morning every December 5. Hilda’s mother, a redheaded woman who smelled like dried flowers, painted all of the kids’ faces black with shoe polish, and gave us bags of candies and gingersnaps to throw at people once we got into town.

  “Don’t eat all of this yourself,” she’d say, giving us a soft smile, knowing we would eat our fair share.

  One year, when Hilda was nine and we were dressed, and our skin blackened, we ran around half wild until the adults readied the horse and St. Nicholas. It was during that intermission some of the kids knocked over Hilda’s wooden dollhouse. She dropped her bag of candy and knelt next to the large house and picked up the far wall that had broken off.

  “Don’t worry, Hilda,” Ludo said, “We’ll get my dad to fix it.”

  “I can help. My dad can help too,” I said, wanting to be the one to do it.

  The next afternoon my brother and I carried the dollhouse on a cart to my father’s lab.

  “What do we have here, Jacob?” he said, looking at the dollhouse, then at me. “Think we can get it back together?”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “Sure we can.”

  He used industrial glue and tiny clamps to repair the broken wall, and when that was done, he bent down with his hands on his knees and peered into the house.

  “You know what. I think we should spruce up the old place for your special friend, Hilda.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve got some ideas.”

  He spent the next three hours installing tiny lights, wiring, and a light switch, which Hilda flipped on when we brought it back to her. She stood at the front door laughing as the tiny rooms became illuminated.

  Each room of the dollhouse had miniature polished pine furniture. Beds with headboards, rocking chairs, and coffee tables. From one of the bedrooms, I stole a small chest of drawers and kept it hidden under my mattress. At night I’d open and shut the little drawers and imagine Hilda in her house. I’d see her walking from room to room. Taking a snack from the pantry. Reading by a win
dow. Her feet tucked under her legs. Nothing special. Just her going about her day.

  I was thinking about the dollhouse while Hilda rode the black-and-white mare, nearing to where I was on the railing. The sun caught her eyes, which were wet from crying.

  Without wiping her face, she swung off the horse, removed her helmet, led the horse to the fence I sat on, and tied the rope to the post next to me. I sprang down to stand in front of her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “We have to sell her,” she said. “The food’s getting too expensive.”

  Her cheeks were blotched as crushed roses. The light silvered her upper lip, where tears and snot slicked her skin. She walked up to me, like she was trying to walk through me and tucked her body into mine. I hugged her. She smelled like horse sweat, hay, and Hilda. She always had her own scent, which came off her in waves. Crushed flowers. Soaped hair. The sun. Hilda.

  Her shoulders heaved up and down and her hands made one fist at the small of my back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Of course I did. My mantra.

  Before she finished crying she tilted her head up, closed her eyes, squeezed me closer, and kissed me on the lips. Her tongue jammed inside my mouth and surprised me. I pushed myself into her. I did not shut my eyes but she did. She kept hers shut as we kissed, even as she loosened her hands from behind my back and pressed her palms and fingers downward flat against my stomach and slid them into my pants.

  It was the middle of the day. The sun was on us and I thought, Sweet merciful Christ, finally. She must have felt me swelling when she leaned against me, which was more a bodily reaction than a courageous act on my part, but before I dropped my arms from holding her she had her hand on my half-erect penis. She leaned her forehead into my chest and I looked up at the sky.