The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  Four waves of bombers flew over Delfzijl that night, but none dropped ordinance on the village itself. We huddled together in our sleep vigil. “Maybe they’ll drop chocolate again,” the little boy in Mrs. Von Schuler’s lap whispered to her.

  In the morning, Uncle Martin and I were the first to walk up the stairs into the slant of light coming through the school’s windows. Puffs of black smoke rose from the north. The sun caught and outlined it with yellow and glowing gray that rose into the air like a column of illuminated steam. From what we could tell, the bombers didn’t make a run over the city or port, but as we walked ten minutes north, we realized they had lobbed a volley along the shore, knocking out the air raid siren and the antiaircraft guns.

  “They’re smart, they know where they’ve taken fire from and made sure to clear the path for their next run-through,” Martin said, as we looked at a pit of earth where a heavy flack gun bunker had been.

  “You mean the British, right?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are they bombing us because of all the new soldiers here?”

  “God, I hope not,” Uncle Martin said.

  Walking farther north of town, we saw the heap of twisted metal and splintered and burnt wooden posts that had been the siren. “At night from now on, we’ll either have to be on the boat out in the water or at your mom’s house. That’s far enough from town to be safe.”

  “What about the bomb that almost cut our backyard in half?”

  “I can’t explain that one,” he said.

  We walked back into town. When we got to the main square, a group of people huddled together in a large circle. We pushed through them and saw two bodies on the ground. Both lay face-down with wet red holes in the backs of their heads. A man and a woman, side by side, shoulder to shoulder. We moved in closer. It was Gerard Van Den Bosch and his wife, Annie, the factory’s accountants. Annie’s dark blood-smeared hair was matted forward like a waterlogged blanket covering her face.

  Everyone in the circle of people was hungry and scared. Hilda and Ludo stood across from us. Hilda looked down at the bodies. Ludo’s face was white, and he kept rubbing his palms together like he did when he was nervous. Ludo didn’t take his eyes off the bodies until he whispered something to Hilda and exited the circle. He walked about twenty meters and then started running in the direction of his home.

  “What happened?” Uncle Martin asked the man standing next to us.

  “Wouldn’t you know?” the man said, eyeing Martin’s German jacket.

  “Tell me,” Martin said, a sharpness entering his voice.

  “Soldiers dragged them out here and shot them.”

  “What for?”

  “A few soldiers went to hide in their basement during the raid and discovered Maud Stein hiding down there. They were hiding her.”

  Maud was Jewish. She lived by herself in the apartment building downtown. She’d disappeared years before without a trace. “They killed them for that?” Uncle Martin said. He didn’t ask what the soldiers did with Maud.

  At camp the counselors had said they would need one giant, violent push to clean and unify Europe. As a boy I had never thought to ask what that would look like, where the ugliness would actually fall.

  That night, Ludo showed up at my house. He knocked on the door and stood back off the stoop. His body weight shifted back and forth on his heels.

  “Ludo, come in.”

  “Can we talk outside?” he asked.

  We walked from the house back into the woods to the tree fort where, night after night throughout the past winter, I’d go trying to catch a glimpse of my father, always avoiding the pseudo grave of my brother. Ludo moved quickly, his spindly arm raised up in front of him, pushing away the low branches without paying attention to how they snapped back behind him. When we got to the fort, Ludo stopped and faced me.

  “I need your help with something,” he said. “But I have to know you’ll keep this quiet. You have to promise me. Whatever you think about all this insanity in town and this war, you have to promise to keep this quiet. Can you do that?”

  “Okay, what’s going on?”

  “Today, those soldiers killed the Van Den Bosches for hiding a Jew.”

  “Is your family hiding someone?”

  “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone, Jacob,” Ludo said. “That could be my family dead on the ground.”

  “Who are you hiding?” I wanted it to be my father. I wanted it to be connected to his disappearance.

  “My father found a British airman who’d been shot down last week. His leg was broken, and he would have been captured.”

  I rubbed my hands over my eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Why now?”

  “I don’t want what happened to the Van Den Bosches to happen to my parents. I’m terrified, and now they are too. They won’t send him away though. How could they?”

  “What a mess. Where is he?”

  “He’s in our house.”

  “Where?”

  “We have a hidden cubby off the attic. Can you—”

  “Can I what?”

  “Martin knows people.” Ludo said. “People suspect he’s part of an underground escape system. But no one will approach him about it because they’re afraid of him. Can you and your uncle get him out on your boat?”

  “Don’t you think we would have gotten ourselves out? We’re all trapped here.”

  We stood staring at each other in the early dark of the evening. The trees around us that had always been so familiar seemed to create a barbed meshing that walled us in.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” Ludo said.

  “Ludo, I don’t know how to help you.”

  “Promise not to tell anyone. Promise, not even your uncle if you don’t think he can get him out of here.”

  “I thought you wanted me to ask my uncle?”

  “I did, but if you know he can’t do it, I’d rather he doesn’t know. After all, he works with the Germans.”

  That phrase sank into my heart. I also worked with the Germans for all Ludo knew. That was why he hadn’t told me anything about the downed airman until now. Ludo walked back through the woods toward his home. I was hurt by his distrust of me or my uncle. All my plans, no, they were fantasies, but all my fantasies of getting away had included him. He was my best friend, and it felt like this conversation wedged suspicion between us.

  I tried to picture life in Ludo’s attic for the pilot, which must have felt claustrophobic and cramped compared to the giant sky he cut through in his plane. The darkness of the school’s basement filled my mind again, the palpable worry over how and when death would come for each of the huddled townspeople. I walked to the overturned stone with my brother’s name carved into it and rested my palms flat trying in some way to communicate with those missing. In the woods that night, it seemed all of the light in my country was now going dark or being blocked by some antiaircraft cover. Chaos had shattered my own family and now worked its way along the seams of the only place I’d ever known.

  Two nights later, after finishing work on the docks, I went to my father’s factory and waited for my mother to walk home with her. They had covered the entire building with a giant mesh tarp that was supposed to hide it from bombers.

  “Your father’s factory is having a little camping trip,” my mother said when she exited. She was hunched over and exhausted. She wore a smock over her clothes so the fabric of her dress wouldn’t get rubbed thin from leaning against the metal conveyor line all day long.

  We walked out of the village. On the road out of town were several orange splatters on the gravel. They were spaced far apart and looked like rain drops. One smudged into the dirt when my shoe slid over it. My hand looped under my mother’s elbow and she relaxed under my touch. Her stern face slackened, and she looked like she could fall asleep while walking. I wished she would. She had not been sleeping well for months, and though she had gotten into a routine, she had been up every night for th
e last few weeks, worried about my eighteenth birthday and if or when and where the Germans might take me. She kept trying to find a way to hide all of my records, to claim I was younger, in hopes that some Allied force would liberate Holland within the next few years.

  Several hundred yards from home, something moved off to the side of the road ahead of us. It looked like a waterlogged and deflated barrel. Then it moved again. It was a brown blanket huddled over someone’s back and head. The person leaned their shoulders against a tree. My mother saw it too. Part of us both must have wanted for it to be my father waiting for us. We both wanted every shadow to be him or Edwin returning.

  “Go. Go look,” my mother said. The gravel crunched under my feet and rolled away after each footfall. The person under the blanket was no bigger than a teenage boy. Maybe it was Edwin, who had been preserved under the water, I thought. A sick thought. A desperate thought, that he had not grown, and had just now found his way back home.

  “Hello,” I said. The person balled up and pressed farther into the tree and whimpered. Their knees pushed into the dead leaves that covered the ground in wet clumps. The blanket was rust brown and covered in bright, orange drops that splattered across it. Then I saw the split lip and naked thigh.

  I kneeled down. “Are you okay?”

  The head under the blanket lifted. There were those supple green eyes.

  “Oh. No. No.”

  Strands of red hair were glued to her face by orange paint and blood. “Hilda. No. No. Not you.”

  Beneath the blanket, Hilda was naked and trembling.

  My mother ran up to us and helped Hilda stand, and I caught a glimpse of her pale left breast and soft pink nipple. Her bare spine was beautiful. But this was so far from how I imagined her when we had kissed and I imagined my hand inside her dress. She had been beaten, and her eyes would have been swollen shut if they hadn’t burst open and bled over her temples. Her head was shaved and covered with orange paint that smeared down her neck and on her hands where she tried to rub it off. The fine red hairs over her ears that cupped her face in parentheses were the only hair she had left on her head. The rest had been shorn off, and there was a cropping of red, bloody dots on her skull.

  Hilda leaned into my mother’s arms and started weeping.

  It was foolish of me, but I had always thought of her as virginal and pure and this new reality filled me with confusion, anger, and shame. I helped hold her up despite an immediate desire to banish her from my life. All memory of Hilda and Hilda’s touch—I wanted to whitewash it away.

  “We’ll take you inside, dear,” my mother said.

  “Take me home,” Hilda gurgled out of her swollen lips.

  We helped lead her the rest of the way home, crumpled between us as we walked down the road we had followed so many times as children.

  The blanket barely covered her body. So many nights I had dreamed of her naked body, each contour and mystery, and here it was, battered, bathed in orange, and I knew what that meant. She had been with a German man. At least one, and often enough to have been found out by the townspeople. As we walked, I grew equally upset at the Germans who had touched her and the Dutch who had punished her for letting them. I felt the orange paint dry on my fingers. Though there was much I didn’t understand, about the townspeople, about the Germans or Hilda’s own desires, I knew none of us would come away unchanged.

  14

  December snow dragged itself over Holland like a heavy, wet sheet, and once its deep chill set in, on the boat Martin and I had to spend our time in the covered wheelhouse or below deck as much as possible. When we were not transferring troops or supplies, we tried to fish, though it was often too cold to be on the open decks for long enough to roll out more than one net. It also made it harder for Uncle Martin to show sandbars to the soldiers he ferried, which was good, because it meant I could avoid participating in his covert plans. I was afraid of being caught and killed, and I said as much to him, but I hadn’t pushed the issue after my mother and I found Hilda beaten on the side of the road. Part of me didn’t care who lived or died beyond my own family anymore.

  When we were out fishing, we caught onto a school of herring. The fish flittered several feet under the surface. They’d drift apart and their sides reflected the running lights like dozens of sinking coins. Then some movement of the boat or something beneath brought them back together into a tight teardrop-shaped shadow. They drifted apart again before tightening back into one mass moving in time like a giant heartbeat. We took turns pulling the sprawled net out of the water and spent a day and a half getting one hold container full. Martin still limped from his leg wound. His gap-tooth whistled as he gave me orders. On the decks the cold wind burned my face. I hauled in the nets fearful of dragging up the bones of the dead drifting apart beneath us. When the one hold was full we headed back to Delfzijl, where we were scheduled to make a troop transport. The transport would be a one-way group of soldiers who were supposed to be dropped off at the mouth of the North Sea to work their way inland. If the opportunity arose, they wouldn’t leave the water alive.

  It was early morning when we began working our way back to shore. Martin was belowdecks getting ready for our next transfer. The sun was all the way up and everything looked empty and new in the clear, cold air. The cluster of the town’s buildings shone in the fullness of the day. A glint of light flittered in the sky beyond the town. I focused on it and then saw another, then a third. When it got closer I realized it was a formation of airplanes, four, five, soon over a dozen flying low and toward Delfzijl.

  “Martin,” I yelled down into the holds, “Martin.”

  Martin limped up the ladder into the wheelhouse and I pointed.

  “The air raid siren is still out,” he said, a subtle whistle where his tooth had been.

  “They wouldn’t come during the day. Would they?” I asked.

  “They took out all the guns. They can do whatever they want,” he said, reaching for his radio. He switched on the console and tried hailing the harbor. “Lighthouse Lady to Delfzijl Pier, Lighthouse Lady to Delfzijl Pier.”

  Then he kicked and pulled back the dented panel with his hidden green radio. He jerked the radio out, slammed it on the desk, and began yelling into it in English. “Planes over Delfzijl. Planes over Delfzijl, pull back. Planes over Delfzijl.” He adjusted the nobs and kept yelling in English.

  The formation of bombers dropped lower out of the clouds so we could see the size of them, broad-winged, deep-bellied RAF Manchester heavy bombers.

  “No. No. Please,” Uncle Martin screamed into the microphone.

  The first plane in the formation dropped flares over the town to mark the targets. The flares corkscrewed downward in burning-iron-orange light. The flares were followed by the horrible whistling sound of 2000-pounder bombs. Each of the planes sprinkled the black dots of bombs after the flares, and they fell in the sunlight, each a miniature golden teardrop descending on the town. In seconds the planes roared over the top of the Lighthouse Lady, and the town of Delfzijl was engulfed in a growing orange and black cloud that breathed upward swallowing all the brick, wood, and air in the blue sky above. The crystalline morning cracked open with high whistles that erupted in a pounding that echoed across the water with each ball of fire thrown.

  “No. No. No,” I screamed. I felt a digging pain in a secret part of myself. Strings of electricity cutting under my ribs. The same sensation as being shocked by my father’s bulb. Now it felt like I was licking the socket, taking in all the shock and tremble.

  The roar of the low-flying bombers swept through the sky above. They started to bank off of our stern and head up along the Ems to the North Sea, where they gained elevation again, light, empty, and on the return trip to England.

  We steered the boat to the harbor and put the engine up to full throttle. The freezing wind cut into my face. The taste of burning smoke on the air drifted in from a kilometer out. Then came a subtle warmth from the shore pulsating over the bow. In the
wheelhouse, Martin took two long strips of cloth and dunked them in a potable water bucket. He tied one around his face to cover his nose and mouth and tossed the other to me. We breathed through the wet cloth as we slowed down and steered the boat into the harbor. Gray drifts billowed down the town’s main street and blanketed us. From what we could see, the harbor was leveled. Masts of sunken sailboats peeked above the burning, oil-slicked surface. The bombers leveled everything in a wide strip, from the far side of town up to and through the harbor.

  Martin swung the boat toward shore. None of it seemed real. The air around us turned gray like we’d been sucked up into a thunderhead. I stood leaning over the bow to help him steer clear of floating debris. The skiffs that had been tied to the break wall had sunk. A robin’s egg blue rowboat floated loose, the inside of the boat was on fire, two benches and parts of the inner hull were burning, a little cup of flame drifting out to sea.

  “We’ll steer north to the old fishing pier and tie up there,” Martin said.

  North of town, the wood pylons from an old pier still jutted out from the shore at odd, sloping angles. It would be the closest place outside of the ruined harbor to tie the boat up. We turned the boat north and had to cruise through the dense, black cloud of smoke that drifted onto the water.

  “Go. I’ll be right behind you,” Martin yelled as he prepared a spring line.

  Onshore the giant drift of black smoke rose up into the air and darkened the whole sky. I ran to my father’s factory through several blocks of untouched homes and buildings closer to the village, where gasoline burning from the bombs choked my lungs through the damp rag over my mouth and nose.

  At the main square of town there were dirt craters where the Germans had set up their camp. Beyond that was the leveled pile of brick that had been the school. What was left of the church was on fire up on the hill. Shell-shocked soldiers wandered around town with guns held out in front of them like they could fight off the smoke and fire. One of them had blood running out of his ears. Another’s face was burnt and his skin looked like raw chicken. Ash fell over the street. Several more soldiers ran past me with their hands covering their faces, and I feared they’d taken in some poisonous gas.