The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  I stopped running and tumbled toward what was left of the factory. The office part of the building was a pile of rubble. The factory’s tall steel-sheet- and wood-sided walls stretched the length of half a football field but had nothing of their previous form standing upright. Pieces of steel jutted out from the ground in concrete piles. There was a large chemical fire toward the back corner where the gases were stored. A sour smell that drifted from the chemical vat stung my eyes and left a sulfuric tang at the back of my throat. The flame lapped up at the sky and shimmered in iridescent green and red undulations. The heat had twisted the assembly lines into extraordinary shapes. Copper base mounts of unfinished lightbulbs were spread over the ground.

  I climbed onto a heap of brick and froze at the lip of the caldera. My mother. Hilda. Ludo. Ludo’s mother. All those people.

  Martin staggered up beside me, bent down to massage his wounded ankle, and took in the ruined factory. He ran to the flattened assembly lines. There were bomb-lopped hands, legs, and whole torsos sticking out of the rubble piles. I pulled a hand from the pile and saw the scar crisscrossed deep into the meat of the forearm muscle. Edward Fass, who had shown me how to work on the assembly line all those years ago. I dropped his dead arm and went looking further among the debris, going from body to body, each of which looked like a limp and ashen version of someone I’d once known, digging with my hands into the stone that was hot to the touch despite the frozen air. Every few minutes I fell to my hands and knees and hacked up some chemical gas from deep in my lungs. When I stood back up, I tried to picture the layout of the factory, where Hilda, Ludo and his mother, and my mother would have stood, but couldn’t make sense of what was scattered in ash around me.

  The roof had collapsed. Where the ribbon machines had been, a set of legs stuck out. Whoever it was had their pants burned off, and the rubber soles of their brown shoes were sticky from having melted to the floor. I grabbed the legs at the shins and pulled, but the skin tore loose and bunched down at the ankle like a soggy sock. All I could do to keep from screaming and collapsing right there was to wipe my hands off on the front of my shirt and try to disengage from all memory of touch.

  Martin breathed in and exhaled little puffs of fumes as he crawled through the rubble like an ash-covered spirit collecting last breaths. He scurried from body to body, ignoring the yelps of the living that he found like he’d fallen out of one of Blake’s poems, reaching down with hungry fingers for human souls.

  A wide swath of human skin spread flat against a crumbled cinder block, flash-heated and sealed, as if the whole building had been a living thing.

  “No,” Martin yelled, then scaled a mound of crumbled cinder block in front of him and started digging at the rubble. When I scaled the mound of brick, I saw him pull my mother into his lap.

  Her body hung in his arms. What he held was shattered, bloodied, splintered with shards of steel from the assembly line she must have been standing at. Her cheek was in the light, dirt smudged and bruised along the jawline. Her midsection from her hip bone to her rib cage had been filleted open. A balled knot of skinless snakes poked out of the gaping wound. The kinky knot of intestine was red, purple, and coated in ash. I looked at the white bone and otherness of her torn skin. Blood had pumped out and flooded her clothing. Her teeth were cracked across the top, and the exposed roots nudged out in gummy pink spires; a forehead lump over her right eye split open her small frame, as pale and lifeless as the brick she lay on.

  I leaned my ear to her lips. Breath wasn’t good enough. I wanted her voice. An I love you, or just the word love, a word I could feed on forever. But there was nothing.

  My ash-covered uncle staggered back with a mad scowl twisted across his face. The tint of his eyes lined up the world around him and made me think he was going to explode. All that he had been holding back couldn’t be contained any longer.

  I looked up to the sky expecting more of the bombers. I wished I had been there when the bombs fell, to have opened my mouth and swallowed their ordinance. Then spit it all back at them. I hated them for their ability to fly, for what they had done. I wanted to match my uncle’s rage with my own, but who was there left to hate? The only choice was to hate everyone. Martin undid his jacket and covered my mother with it. Then he scooped her body off the ground.

  Hilda with her fading bruises and half-inch-long hair. Ludo with his half-limp arm. Ludo’s mother with her nine lost pregnancies. The men and women whom I’d worked with and my father had employed for almost two decades. Their lives. Their stories. I didn’t want to look and find them. I didn’t want to find scraps of their bodies, the certainty of their death. If I didn’t look, there was a chance they had survived.

  “We’ll take her home,” Uncle Martin said. He walked past me in the wreckage and started toward the house.

  I followed him in a numb haze until we got to the back of the Protestant church where the body of a German officer lay face-down in the dirt. When no one watched, I walked up to him, rolled him over, and pretended to check his pulse in case any other soldiers were near. Then I unclasped the front of his heavy jacket. The officers carried Lugers on their belts, and when the dead man’s jacket opened, I pulled out the Luger and shoved it into my pocket. The only person around me was my uncle, carrying my half-opened mother home. Her head dangled loose from his arm.

  The handle of the Luger was smooth and cool. My fingertips ran over the stock as I turned away from my uncle and ran down the bombed road west of town.

  It looked like the world had ended. Several blocks of town were leveled. At a familiar corner outside the main square, none of the houses had been touched. I stood in front of the third house on the right, the three-story brownstone where Ludo had lived his entire life. I looked for some other unseen window in the attic, scanned the house for a moment, then walked up to the door and pushed it open.

  “Who’s here?” I yelled.

  Ludo’s family and the rest of the town either would have been in or were now digging away at the rubble of the factory or the town center’s office buildings. There was no knowing who was and wasn’t alive. When no one answered, I started up the stairs with the Luger held out. I started up the stairs oozing a dark rage. The attic door opened up to a large storage space. Boxes lined the walls.

  I scanned the room and yelled, “Come out,” in English. “I know you’re here.” I listened for any movements. There was one small window that looked out into the front of the street and cast a square of light onto the floor. The wood beneath me creaked the way old houses do with big wind gusts. I moved several boxes and then came to a bookshelf that looked built into the corner. I swept the books on top of it to the floor and pulled the shelf away from the wall. It swung on a hinge, and I stepped back to see the small cavity in the wall.

  The smell from a shit and piss bucket by the opening made me gag. Through the dark hole, a pair of dark eyes blinked shut, and an overpowering desire to unload the gun into the dark space between them flushed through me.

  The man’s body bent forward over his straightened legs. His head rested on his kneecaps, and he looked like a giant larva embedded into the wall.

  “Get out here. Get out here now.” I motioned with the gun for him to come out. His shoulder rubbed against the horsehair insulation that bulged between exposed wall studs.

  He rolled to his side and stretched out his body like everything had gone numb from squirreling himself away. He looked up at me and said, “Prisoner of war,” then looked at me for a long moment. “Speekt u Engles? Churchill. Queen Wilhelmina. Kamerad,” he said, making it clear he spoke no Dutch.

  When he was out of the hole, he pulled himself up along the edge of the chest of drawers. His left leg was splinted by a handmade wooden brace with a smooth hone done by an expert carpenter. He wore a Royal Air Force jumpsuit with pockets on both pant legs and over his chest. On the chest pocket was the word Yarborough.

  “What kind of plane were you in when you went down?” I asked in the best
English I could. He kept looking at me. The expression on his face slackened. “Answer me.”

  He studied me and my clothes. The ash darkening my skin. “I’ve been here for a long time.”

  “What kind of plane?”

  “Wait.”

  “Was it a Manchester heavy bomber? The same kind that just went over?”

  When he stood straight, I wanted to shoot him for being part of those who had destroyed my town and killed my mother. A vision of the innards of his head splattered across the back wall filled my mind. I wanted to shoot someone. The bent inside of my finger rubbed against the trigger.

  “Walk over here.”

  “Okay. Easy,” he said. He had a thick British accent. His black hair and beard were unkempt and greasy.

  “I can pay you, I have a barter kit.” The pilot took out a thin, black case from his leg pocket. He opened it, and inside there were three gold coins and three gold rings. “Look, I can pay you. Please don’t shoot. Please. I need help.”

  “Help with what? To get back to England? Get a new plane? Drop more bombs? Kill more of my family and friends?” I held the gun so close to the man’s face the barrel touched his nose. “Put that on the floor and take off your clothes. The brace too.”

  The pilot didn’t move.

  “Now,” I said like a spitting lunatic, stepping into him, scraping the muzzle of the gun from his nose to his forehead.

  He stripped off his wooden brace, then unzipped his jumpsuit and peeled it off.

  “And leave your boots.”

  Once the RAF pilot was only in his underwear, I could see that his skin was covered in sores from his calves up to and over his shoulders. The rounded knobs of his rib cage grotesquely protruded, and the dark blue, swollen left knee was the size of a grapefruit. He kept hopping up and down to keep his balance and not put pressure on his wounded leg. His left ankle had dark yellow bruises from what looked like the knee draining down. I went to the entrance of the cubbyhole and picked up the jumpsuit and the barter kit.

  “Downstairs,” I said.

  He hobbled when he walked, leaning against the banister and jumping to get down the stairs. Pictures of Ludo’s family lined the stairwell. I hadn’t paid any attention to them on my way up, but coming down the black and white prints hurt to look at. There was no knowing if any of them was still alive.

  The photographs made me want to boot the pilot in the back to tumble him down the stairs, to inflict pain on him.

  On the front porch, the man began to shiver. The sun hit his open sores and they shone like dew. He looked so lean and needy with the cold street and row of dull brownstones behind him. The scrape from the gun’s muzzle was pink against his white forehead skin.

  “Go,” I said. “Run. Run like hell.”

  The pilot looked at me, then out into the cold street, a look of total confusion on his face. I thought again of kicking the pilot hard between the shoulder blades so he’d fly down the porch steps, but I didn’t do that. I’m glad, at least, I didn’t do that.

  He may have thought I was going to shoot him in the back, but he turned and worked his way down the steps, hopping with his swollen leg held straight out in front of him. He hobbled across the street and shimmied up the road. His body almost buckled every time he put weight on his swollen leg. By the time he ducked behind some other house, his skin was already turning blue. He slunk off into the bombed and occupied town with I thought about the same chance my father was given.

  I walked home with the officer’s gun and the pilot’s suit and black box under my arm in a bundle. In the pocket of the suit were his papers. Herbert Yarborough. RAF. It was easy to see myself in his clothes, high in the clouds, drifting far above any human concerns.

  At home, Fergus barked into the bathroom, where my uncle knelt on the tile floor between my mother and the claw-footed bathtub, washing the ash and dust and blood off of my mother with a wet towel. A second towel wrapped around her midsection kept her intestines from spilling out.

  “What are we going to do with her?” There was a quick flash of desperation in my uncle’s voice—something I didn’t know could exist. “The ground is too frozen to dig a hole.

  “Stop barking,” Uncle Martin yelled at Fergus. A tragic tremolo floated at the end of his words. “Stop barking. Go dig a hole with all that energy. Help us out and dig a hole.”

  Fergus ran to me, nudged my hand with his cold nose, and then went back to bark at my mother.

  The shape of her body looked plastered to the floor, mummified with rust-colored puddles of her watered-down blood on the tile. Fergus whimpered at the doorway but wouldn’t go any farther into the room. I put my hand on the dog’s head and let my fingers scratch the velvet tips of his ears. Then I stepped into the bathroom, kneeled into the puddle, and felt the blood-water soak into the cloth and cool my skin. I put my hand on her chest and felt compelled to start pushing down, with all my strength, to make her heart beat again. But, once something was dead, it was dead forever. I knew this. The towels were still wet to the touch. I peeled the topmost one back to make sure it was really her. That this was not some awful mistake. When I looked down into her battered face, I knew there was nothing left for me, so I kissed her forehead, pulled out her left hand, kissed her on each fingertip, and covered her once more.

  “What are we going to do?” Martin asked.

  He ran a fresh wet cloth over her face. His own face was coated in grime. I stood up and walked out of the room. Out the window was the huge pit, which was now a sunken little ice pond, a jewel of frozen water.

  “Where should we bury her?” echoed out of the bathroom when I went into the living room, the room she used to dance in, and curled up on the couch. I picked up a pillow. A hexagon patchwork with a thick blue chord sewn along the edge and port wine-colored tassels. Homemade. I held it. Touched by the care and delicacy of her work. I hugged the pillow and lay like that, listening to my uncle ranting and cleaning her off in the bathroom and Fergus’s barking choir until everything in me succumbed to exhaustion. The last vapors of the massive rush that had kept me going drained away. This was the day my mother died. There would never be another day like it. Still, I could not yet mourn, not yet cry, and had spent a quick and horrible burst of anger on Herbert Yarborough, and could do nothing else but fold inside myself and fall asleep.

  I woke to my uncle standing over me. There was a hot, sweet smell on his breath, peat moss scotch, engine fumes, and burnt hair. Streaks of water cut channels down his filthy face. He had no reason to wash.

  “Get your things,” he said. He walked into the kitchen where the pantry door popped open.

  I lay back down and tried not to wade into the river of faces of loved ones who were now gone. I shut my eyes and tried to be Herbert Yarborough, loose in the sky cut by the white triangular whirl of propellers.

  “Where are we going?” I called out.

  “Get your things and I’ll show you.”

  I packed my backpack with my identification papers, warm clothes, the German officer’s Luger, and Herbert Yarborough’s barter kit, jumpsuit, and papers. Then I went to the bathroom door. My mother was no longer there.

  “Where is she?”

  “Come on.”

  I followed my uncle outside, where he headed through the woods. I could picture another chiseled rock laid out next to the headstone Ludo carved. But Uncle Martin walked past the upturned headstone toward the dock by the water.

  “What’s happening?”

  “We’re going to give your mother a burial at sea, Jacob.”

  The idea of dumping my mother off the side of the Lighthouse Lady made me stop. The image of a heathen ceremony came to me then, as dumping her in the water was no different to me than if we torched her in a funeral pyre, or draped her from the limbs of a tree and offered her up to carrion birds.

  The boat was tied to the old pier through the woods. He untied the line as we stepped aboard.

  On the deck of the wheelhouse lay my mo
ther. There was a clean sheet over her body but I could see he had cleaned and dressed her. He started the engines and maneuvered us into the heart of the Ems.

  “What’s happening?”

  “They’re sending a large group of soldiers over to check the wreckage. They called us to get them. We’re going to get all of them this time. We’ll bury your mother and then we’ll cause some real damage. Something real,” he said. “Real.” His eyes were red and spiteful—crazy spiteful, like he had no intention of hiding his true hatred tonight.

  My mind flashed forward to what my uncle would have me do if I continued with him. He would smile and nod throughout the whole war to disarm the Germans, and then massacre them when they let their guard down. He would go on bigger and bigger missions, and take bigger risks with the hope that some Allied force would again step foot in Holland and defeat the Germans.

  At the time I didn’t believe that would ever happen. I had seen the child army practicing at the camps and remembered the two thousand boys running to the beach and playing in the water. There were so many boys. There had been groups like that all over Germany. All trained to answer a unifying call. They were too plentiful and too well organized to lose the war. Uncle Martin would rage against this undying force and be killed, and there was nothing I could do. I knew all this. To me, the outcome was inevitable. Fire and ash and death would continue until the war was over. At the time, it seemed to me that to end it all as soon as possible was the only way to alleviate the suffering.