The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  “It’s nothing, Martin,” I said, unsure of what my real identity should be.

  “Quite a big hoopla for nothing.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “You little shit, I had no idea where you were until I saw this.” He pulled out the newspaper with the picture of my oval face staring off the page.

  “Come with me,” he said and hooked his hand under my elbow and led me toward the door.

  In the dark lawn between the tents and barracks, Uncle Martin walked to the back portion of the camp, near a dilapidated utility shed.

  When we got to the side of the shed, I stopped not wanting to walk into the shadows after my uncle.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t kill my family,” he said. “Now come here.” In the shadows, Uncle Martin stepped forward and hugged me. “You scared the Christ out of me, slipping off like that.”

  My head was in his chest, and I felt his chin lean onto the crown of my head. I hugged him and clutched at his back.

  “I couldn’t handle what we did to those men in the Ems.”

  “That’s okay. I shouldn’t have forced you like that.”

  “I couldn’t keep doing it and I couldn’t stop you. You’ll die killing them like that.”

  “You didn’t do any of that, so don’t regret a thing.” The shadow of the forest swayed behind him. When he let me go, I still held onto him until he stepped away from me and bent over into the bushes and pulled out a large backpack. “Here,” he said, laying the large bag at my feet. “You have to get as far away from this as possible.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I promised your mother I’d save your skinny little ass, and in this bag is how you’re going to do it.”

  “Where would I go? Look what I’m doing here. The Germans will win, Martin, and the sooner they do, the sooner all this will end.”

  “That’s not going to happen, Jacob. You’ll be killed. I may not be meant to survive this war, and I’m okay with that, but I sure as hell don’t want it destroying you too. I need you safe and alive. This family’s lost enough. And that Major Oldif is using you like a piece of meat to lure other stupid Dutch kids who want to be heroes and have no idea what they’re getting into. Your little fame here, Jacob, is a propaganda ploy and nothing more. You have no idea what these people really want, do you? What their Fatherland would look like?”

  Uncle Martin kicked the bag at my feet. “I have papers, maps, a compass, a gun, ammunition, food, and enough money and gold, everything you need to start a new life. Now you have to make it out of Europe. Your German papers will get you far, but once you cross the Rhine, you’ll need to start using all the ones in the bag. The pictures of you are from your parents’ house and were pasted onto these IDs.

  “I want you to get to England. I left a note with the names of several ship captains that can help you. If you find one of them, tell them who you are and catch a ship to Ottawa. There are good Dutch people there.”

  “You aren’t coming too?”

  “Jacob, my whole life has been preparing me for this. Stay and fight is what I’m supposed to do. I know this much if I know anything.”

  “But there’s no way out, you said so yourself.”

  “There is for you and you have to find it. You can’t see the whole picture here, but what you’re mixed in with is vicious. Take this pack and leave, get out of Europe. Follow the instructions and find the men I listed. Find one of these men. They can help you once you get out of here. Your life is all that matters, not this war, not these countries, just your life. You’re the last of our family, and we’ll be erased if you’re lost.”

  Martin looked down on me with his wet eyes. A large vein in his neck slipped under a blade of ink on his skin that rose above his collar.

  “Don’t regret what you’ve done. You can’t. I don’t. What else can you do, Jacob? You have to survive.”

  “Ensign,” someone called to me. “You’re pissing in the woods and missing your own party.” Uncle Martin stepped back into the shadows and pulled the backpack with him. He propped it up behind a tree and turned back to me. I was looking at a condemned man when Uncle Martin said, “Come back later for the pack. You have to leave, Jacob, please, promise me you’ll get out of here.” I turned back from his shadow to the officer in the field behind me. The man staggered. He cupped a cigarette in his right palm.

  “I’ll be back in a second,” I called to the man.

  “Hurry, hurry,” the man said. He swayed back and forth in the lawn and waited for me to finish peeing.

  Martin stood behind the tree in front of me. I stepped forward and pretended to be finishing up. The man behind me mumbled a song to himself. My uncle nodded to me, kissed the palm of his hand and reached his arm out and cuffed the side of my head. “Get to Ottawa,” he said. “You have to get to Ottawa.”

  “Will I see you again?” I asked.

  “Meet me at that flagpole at one A.M.” He pointed to the large field at the center of camp. “Be there at one.”

  “Ensign,” the officer behind me yelled. “You’re missing your party.”

  I turned and left my uncle in the dark woods. The officer, a man I’d never seen before, had an oily face with a scattering of dark, spiky whiskers. He threw an arm around my shoulder and started singing in a raspy falsetto as he led me back to the tent, where a gramophone now played.

  Once the tent cleared out and the soldiers and officers who had gotten the most drunk stumbled off to their bunks, I snuck back to the woods and retrieved the bag. It was heavier than it looked, packed so tightly that it felt like a solid bag of bricks. I lugged it to my cot and stowed it in my locker. A couple hours later, when my few bunkmates were snoring, I opened the locker and started looking through what Uncle Martin had left me.

  The first thing in the pack was a letter scrawled out in my uncle’s handwriting that said,

  You have to be the one to survive. Stay off the main roads as much as possible and use these cards to pass checkpoints if you can’t find a way around. I used to work with some men who can help you once you get to Southampton in Britain, Lisbon in Portugal, or Casablanca in Morocco. In whichever port, ask around for Felix Courtier, Javier Méndez, Petrous Valspar, or Michael McCollum. Try to find these men. Wait in a safe port if you have to. If you find these men, tell them who you are.

  Inside the pack was a stack of German ID papers with my picture but different names. The pictures were from a series Martin had me take at a department store in Utrecht the year before. There were orders corresponding to each ID badge that had the person by that name for change of post and transportation. Each soldier listed was in transition from one base to another. There were more transporting papers, and huge stacks of money in different currencies. There were wads of bills: German, Dutch, Belgian, French, English, Canadian, Australian, and American. There were canned meals, matches, a Luger, and a series of maps on which Martin had written in where large German forces were and how to go around them. The suggested route ran along the northern woods of Germany, Holland, Belgium, and France, trekking west to show the nearest Allied shipping lanes, and a passage across the water.

  With everything he’d given me there was enough paperwork and planning for ten evaders to slip out of the country. Whatever misplaced paperwork he had done, he had done so to procure all this. There were identity papers, passports, exit visas, and entry permits. He even had a French Legionnaire’s papers that said, “Legionnaires, you ask for death and I will give it to you.”

  The pack had combs, a toothbrush, soap, wire cutters, and three compasses that were hidden as buttons. There were maritime maps with planned-out escape routes printed on thin silk that could be folded up and stuffed into a pocket without taking up any space. There was even a pair of special shoelaces that could be used as miniature saws to cut wires. The bag had been packed to use every last millimeter of space. There were twenty-four malted milk tablets, boiled sweets, a bar of chocolate, Benzedri
ne tablets, a ball of darning wool, water-purifying pills, a razor, needle, thread, fishing hook and line, a rubber water container, fifty cigarettes to smoke or barter with, and a brown tarp. The whole pack was an escape plan in jigsaw puzzle form. All I had to do was sneak off and put the pieces to work.

  Uncle Martin’s bag had shown what kind of man he was. His plans were so detailed that he must have been funneling supplies to escape lines and Resistance fighters like Ludo had suggested. I could see the hanged man and full mast sailing ship etched onto my uncle’s skin when I shut my eyes, the marking of life and death he wore over his veins.

  I lay in bed living a dozen different lives, projecting myself into a vast array of futures and then dropping one life and taking up another, each time jumping further and further from the confusion of the war.

  Uncle Martin told me to get to Ottawa, no matter what. The Dutch royal family had gone there, so if Edwin or my father were alive, they would have gone there too. The thought of them waiting out the war in Canada filled my head while I was carefully repacking the bag and putting it back in my bunk locker. But I’d also heard of German deserters who had been shot and left in the street for three days as an example. I didn’t know if I had the courage for something so bold as escape.

  At ten to one, I walked outside and headed to the flagpole. I didn’t bring the pack because I didn’t want anyone to see it. I scanned the edges of the field for the figure of my uncle to emerge or call me to him. Call me to get out of this place. The field at night felt as empty and vacuous as floating in the ocean in the Negro, waiting for the cruiser to come find me. When I was by the flagpole I heard a series of gunshots: tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. After each noise, a ship or U-boat in the harbor exploded. I dropped to the ground and looked into the trees for the muzzle flash. The shooter changed aim and fired at the camp buildings, seeking out planted explosives, which began to burst into flame. Soldiers ran into the field near me. They looked up for planes as four more buildings split open with orange flame and noise. I knew it was Uncle Martin in the camp. That was his parting shot.

  In the wreckage of the camp, most of the crew and soldiers who were not injured or killed were still drunk as they tried to put out the fires. A captain found me cowering in the field and put me to work cleaning up. Had he not, I would have gotten my bag and run off then. He thought I’d passed out after the party and didn’t question why I was there. I worked through the dark hours. Some soldiers talked about the air raid that had just hit us and thought one of their own had fired the gun into the sky after the planes. At a quarter past four in the morning, too tired to be of any use, I returned to my bunk to sleep.

  Just before dawn, a heavy pounding sound came from the revelry field. It was a steady beating of a marching song I’d heard as a boy at camp. Now it sounded much deeper and industrial, like some large machines hammering out the rhythm. Outside the first tendrils of sunlight reached over the treetops. By the flagpole the dark shadow of a man swayed next to four, giant fifty-gallon oil drums that he swung wildly at with two long, metal rods. The rods jumped up off the tops of the oil barrels and he slammed them back down again. There were men running at the mad drummer. I recognized the outline of the bare-chested man, sweating in the cold from his wild swinging.

  Two guards ran across the field. Pauwel turned to them while still pounding on the drums he’d set up in a half circle around him. The guards stopped. Pauwel was naked except for a shoulder holster that held a Luger. The guards called for him to stop, but he kept hammering. When one of the guards pulled out his own pistol, I ran over, waving my arms and telling them not to shoot.

  “Pauwel.”

  “Jacob. I came back for this shit? Look at this place. This is shit.” He pointed to the still smoldering areas of camp, then pounded on the drums again.

  “Pauwel, what are you doing?” I yelled.

  Pauwel looked at me with his deep black bags under his bloodshot eyes. His shoulders still worked the metal rods up and down but now more steadily, like he was echoing the ground’s heartbeat.

  “I’m playing in the sun,” Pauwel yelled and opened his eyes crazy-wide toward the first sun rays topping the trees. “I’m going to be cleansed by the natural light.”

  “Easy now,” one of the guards said as he walked up behind Pauwel.

  Pauwel spun around. “Stay back,” he yelled, and he helicoptered the rods over his head.

  “Pauwel. Pauwel. Look at me,” I yelled.

  “Drop your weapon,” the guard yelled from behind Pauwel. Something changed in Pauwel’s face. He shut his eyes when the first of the sunlight cleared the trees. The warm light touched the back of my neck. The light caught the moving edges of Pauwel’s metal drum rods, and then the beads of wet rust on the upturned oil drum lids. Everything for a moment was touched by light.

  “Are you sleepwalking again?” I yelled to Pauwel.

  Then the guard moved up closer behind him. Everyone was jittery from the explosions. Saboteurs were feared. They trained their guns on Pauwel, likely wondering if it could have been him who blew up the buildings. Pauwel must have sensed the man closing in on him, as he swung around with a rod high in the air and brought it down on the guard’s head. The guard crumpled to his knees in front of Pauwel, who was about to bring his second drumstick down onto the man when the other guard fired his gun. The shot hit Pauwel’s abdomen below the left side of his rib cage, ripped out his back, and popped through one of the oil cans. The raised metal drumstick fell from his hand and clanked off a drum before hitting the ground. A melted rose opened on Pauwel’s back and seeped down over his buttocks as he crumbled to his side, next to the man he’d struck down.

  “Stop. Don’t shoot him. He’s one of us.” I ran to his side with my arms up and shielded him. “He’s one of us.”

  Both men were put on stretchers and carried away. They were taken to the compound’s medic, who had a long line of wounded to deal with from the explosions before he could stitch up the guard’s head and spend the rest of the morning suturing Pauwel’s wounds. The bullet missed all his vital organs but tore through his upper intestine.

  While waiting for him to get out of surgery, I found out that his U-boat returned early because it had technical difficulties. It had submerged several hours outside of Kiel and gone west for two days when all the lights on board started to explode and pop out. “I mean all the fucking lights,” a sailor told me. “It was the craziest thing. We were in the dark damn near the whole time. We had to turn back, but that took twice as long because we had to be extra-careful going about the smallest things. It was spooky. I felt a little crazy too. And the other U-boat that set out with us, we haven’t heard word from them yet. There’s no telling what happened to them.”

  Old visions of lights exploding all over Europe and shards of glass raining down on Nazi soldiers’ heads flashed into my mind, and then there was my father, tall and kind and patient, opening his giant mouth to let out some new story, some soul-enriching story that would tell me who I really was and was supposed to be. But I couldn’t hear the words. I tried to listen to that specter of my father floating through my head, but nothing came.

  I was starting to grasp that I didn’t understand this war or where I should be within it all. All the clear lines had blurred.

  After Pauwel’s surgery was over, they gave him a large dose of morphine. He was limp in the infirmary bed but his head kept thrashing back and forth.

  “Pauwel, what happened?”

  “The bubbles are in my blood. I have dark bubbles seeped into my blood,” he said. His head was tilted back and rocking, smoothing out the pillow. Beads of sweat rolled off his brow and his eyes were open too wide. All pupil. It made me nervous. Later that night I held his dirt-smudged hand as he struggled to breathe. His rib cage sank when he exhaled, then he gasped, and a sucking noise rose from inside his chest. When the medic wasn’t watching, I lifted his eyelid back with my thumb. The white of his eye was threaded with bloodshot veins that loo
ked like raw red worms.

  I stared at the spackled walls of the infirmary room by Pauwel’s side that night, trying to understand what happened to him all those hours in the dark, and how a human being could capture the mechanical heartbeat of war with only a set of drums.

  18

  The Beaver was a wider version of the Negro and they said it could move faster underwater. The dock crew strapped me into the cockpit and closed the glass dome over me. Major Oldif stood on the dock with several engineers, checking off items on their clipboards, and never looked at me. The first training exercise had been fast-tracked because of the Martin’s sabotage. I’d been keeping Pauwel company as he fought his way through morphine dreams and recuperated when I was yanked away to take the Beaver out for a submerged lap of the harbor, and then out to open water and back, to be sure it worked and they could push on with their production schedule.

  “Hurry now. Hurry it up,” Major Oldif kept saying.

  It took me several hours to get to the open water, because there had been a British bomber raid hours before. German fighter planes had been sent to cut them off, which forced the bombers to lighten their load by dropping their bombs into the sea north of Kiel, and left kilometer-long strips of dead fish drifting on the surface. Fish bellies awash with gold and oil-slicked purple-silver drifted past me as the Beaver slipped out on the ebb tide. The bow parted the fish so they fanned out in my small wake.

  It looked like the sea had been poisoned along the northern shores into deeper water. All those dead fish. Almost everyone in Europe was starving and here were so many dead fish. I’d heard talk of what the Germans were doing to Jews, how the eastern front was erupting and the western front was waiting for a giant invasion. There was talk of Japs, Turks, Brits, and Yanks, but they were all out of sight. They were allegedly fighting or ramping up to fight all over the world, spreading out, shooting one another down. Still, it was all out of sight, too big for me to see how I, in my little tube out in the ocean, fit into any of it.