The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  Uncle Martin had been right. I saw no larger picture, and though I did not know it at the time, that is what made me so dangerous. Now, I can imagine boys from camp, like rash-necked Timothy, Garth, Lutz, and all the rest becoming small parts of a machine that would grind us to bits.

  When I returned from my run in the Beaver, I reported to the medic building. After performing a test, the doctor told me I had a very bad case of stomach ulcers. I then went and sat next to Pauwel and told him about the ulcers and dead fish, even though he was still unconscious, and I didn’t know if he could hear me.

  I dipped bread into coffee until I was full. Eating anything had started to feel like a chore, an acidic boiling in my stomach. Perhaps it was the ulcers that gnawed me, or maybe it was the fear that Pauwel would die in front of me, or of being in a midget sub again.

  The coffee in my stomach made me feel nauseated. I propped my hand up against the wall and vomited it all up into a puddle at my feet. The smell rose up in vapors.

  After my running of the Beaver, the crew was ordered into one of the only remaining buildings where Major Oldif gave us a folder with our new orders inside.

  “We will be transferring our operations. Those explosions in camp have made it unsafe to stay here. Tonight the Beavers will be loaded onto trucks, and you will be transported with them to the west in the morning. Your mission will be to set out, protect our shores, and engage any Allied vessels you encounter. You will have thirty-six-hour rotations in your vessel, which includes going out and coming back. We will leave at 0700 for your new base.”

  We were silent as the major spoke. I kept my eyes on him and nodded as he talked, but heard only scraps, as my real thoughts circled like carrion birds. When he straightened his head and looked at me, I was afraid my disgust shone through like my skull was made of old rags, thin cloth.

  In my bunk that night, I took out my uncle’s gear and went to the desk and spread out the escape paraphernalia, starting with the passport papers and even vouchers from my navy command unit. The navigation and tide charts layered on top of one another covered most of the desk. I marked an x on the maps where Major Oldif had planned our routes once we cleared the German naval blockade. I ran my finger over the map and found a spot where there wasn’t supposed to be much German military presence along the shoreline, not far from where we were supposed to set out in the subs. I drew a new route on the map that would have me leaving from the push-out port of Hamburg, where the trucks would take us. I lay the Knight’s Cross on the desk. It would be so much easier to continue following orders.

  The lamplight made the Knight’s Cross glow in front of me. It was something I could be proud of for the rest of my life, the major had told me when he handed it to me.

  On one of the false passport papers there was a blank line to write who my next of kin was. My mother was dead. My father had slithered off and may very well have bled out somewhere, and the current had swallowed my brother. I could put my uncle, but there was no telling how much longer he would be alive or which side of the war effort his name would place me on. So I left the line blank.

  I stuffed Herbert Yarborough’s passport papers and my own Knight’s Cross into the pocket of the Englishman’s rolled-up flight jumpsuit and packed it into the bottom of Uncle Martin’s backpack. On top of that, resting against the side zipper for easy access, was the dead German officer’s Luger and the one Uncle Martin had given me with a spare clip of ammunition. I loaded my own gear and charts in a plastic watertight bag, maps of the North Sea and North Atlantic, ten days’ worth of dried food and canned meat, four canteens full of water, and a bottle of energy pills before closing the pack.

  When I had finished, I took Herbert Yarbrough’s barter kit and walked across the compound to the medic’s office. Pauwel was still unconscious. The wounds in his intestines had become infected, and his temperature had risen the day before. There was no waking him up. No getting him to come with me. I took his hand in mine and slipped the three gold rings from the barter kit around his left ring finger and tucked that hand under the covers.

  “I hope to see you again,” I whispered, then left the room, walked back across the compound, and waited on my cot for our departure.

  In the morning, I was still exhausted from the series of events since the party that I only wanted to sleep. The line of trucks with the Beavers had been covered with mesh camouflage so the loads looked like a giant cropping of alder bushes. There were twenty-eight Beavers being transported to Hamburg where they would deploy. My sailor’s duffle bag with Martin’s backpack inside was stored behind the seat in the cockpit of the truck that had my sub. I rode in the truck’s cab with the boy driver. He was younger than me and had a lopsided face like he’d had a bad birthing. His right eye sat lower than his left, which made his eyebrows slope toward his right ear.

  We split the convoy into three so as not to attract as much attention from marauding Allied fighters intent on shooting anything that looked military.

  On the outskirts of the city we passed bombed-out buildings. A bus had driven into a crater. Its back end angled out of the dirt, and I imagined it full of people driving deeper and deeper into the earth.

  “A shame looking at all that, isn’t it?” my driver said. “I hate looking at rubble. Can’t wait to trade this hunk of wheels in for a plane to get some payback. Maybe even take up one of these odd little boats you’ve got back here.” He lifted his hand and tapped his knuckles against the truck wall behind him. He smiled at me with those big round eyes and crooked teeth. Of all the faces I’ve seen since, his somehow has managed to stay in my mind, that young boy driving a truck for his country. Happy to be a small part in the machine he never asked about. He smelled of sweat, cabbage, and diesel fumes, and never stopped talking.

  We passed a shot-up lorry pushed off the side of the road and a burnt-out munitions train car striped with bullet holes on its side next to the tracks.

  “You hear those bastards buzzing around sometimes, but they haven’t bothered me yet,” the driver said. “Those guys get flak-happy after a while. It takes them the longest, but they all snap. They go mad up there and buzz around shooting whatever looks funny to them. I don’t blame them. They’re in a world of hurt if they get shot down. Soldiers race out to find the RAF men and tie them to the back of their motorcycles and drag them behind. The road peels them like bananas.” He bounced around in his seat like he was trying to unstick each butt cheek from the leather. He hunched over the steering wheel so his back arched into his neck and his torso looked like a thick, angled stump. “Our boys who go down over England, they don’t catch them like that. Some of them carry razors in the cuff of their pant legs to cut their own wrists so they won’t be tortured into giving up any information. One pilot chewed through his own veins to avoid having to tell the Brits anything.”

  As we drove, the boy’s voice washed over me until I was deaf to him, and only let little bits of what he said sink in. I was so tired. Along the road, boulders encrusted with gray-green lichen blurred past.

  “You know, the snipers take you out on your third drag of a cigarette. You light it and they find you. Your second drag they scope you and let you enjoy your last breath, and on your third they blow your head off.”

  We passed a long row of German panzers heading east. A coal barge cut the thin fog and passed under the bridge trestles. The boy kept talking.

  “I’m going to get some time off and go hunt down some of those French girls in Paris. I’ve heard some of the guys talking about them. How you can take them out to be with you for the night. All the guys talk about it. I swear I’ll get there and go crazy. Saving my money for it now. I’ll be happy as a dog with two tails.”

  Two hours west of Kiel, the road was bombed out and splintered trees lay across the path. The second and third waves of trucks caught up to us, and several of the drivers pulled out chain saws to eat away the wood to allow the procession of trucks to pass through. The trucks eased forward over the des
troyed road.

  When we reached the outpost north of Hamburg, there was a small set of tent barracks set up in the woods about a hundred meters from shore. A crane with camouflage meshing sat next to a pier. One by one the Beavers were unloaded from the trucks and tied off.

  My driver patted me on the shoulder after my Beaver was put into the water. “Heil Hitler,” he said, smiling at me one last time before turning his truck around and driving off.

  The crew rested until nightfall in the tents, at which point we would depart. I slept and dreamed of my father telling stories of Thump-Drag.

  When it was time for us to go, Major Oldif was on the pier. He patted me on the shoulder.

  “You keep doing good for us, ensign. I’m proud to have you on this crew.” The major stood in front of me as the dome hatch clicked shut. The engine hummed as I slipped away from the pier into the greasy water of the harbor. There were commercial liners and freighters and lesser ships docked side by side and roped together. I cruised north on the path set for me, but at the opening to the North Sea, where I was supposed to turn north by northwest, I repositioned and went due west along the coast.

  The waves were one- and two-foot swells as the Beaver cruised along the surface with no running lights. In the dark the midget sub motored through the night. To avoid being sighted by any airplanes at first light or spotters on land, I submerged the Beaver, diving so the nose plunged under, but kept it running five feet under the surface to pop back up any time if I needed to.

  By sunset, after cruising through the day at five knots, having run 216 kilometers from the mouth of the Elbe in Hamburg, I calculated my position and steered southwest toward the little x on my map that should have been a long stretch of forested land without any large military camps west of Bremerhaven in Germany.

  Several hundred meters offshore, when there was no sign of life, I aimed the bow of the Beaver downward and out to sea, where there were no lights anywhere and fired my torpedo. The torpedo released and pulled away. The force of it pushed the Beaver backward, and that familiar roil of water carved a gopher tunnel under the surface of the ocean. I prayed my shot would find no purchase but run out of momentum and quietly sink to the sea floor.

  Once the torpedo was gone there was an extra three feet of clearance under the hull. Closer to land, I unlatched the dome lock and pushed it open. The moonlight curled upward into the sky as the ship air flushed against my face. With my backpack in my lap, I increased my speed as much as it would go, and steered until the hull slammed into sand and jerked me forward, my backpack padding the impact of the Beaver slamming to a stop. With my arms threaded through the front of the backpack so it adhered to my chest, I crawled out of the cockpit onto the forward planking of the sub and jumped from the bow, straddling the two worlds at once, not on land, not at sea. Not a part of Germany, not a part of Holland. Not a sailor, not a citizen. Just a fear-filled sack stuffed with bones and gristle. My feet plunged into the water and sank into the sand. The cold water cut into my feet and shins. Alone. Terrified. I worked my way through the surf, over the dark strand of the beach. Ahead of me the dark trees swayed, and I ran toward them and the darkness and cover they offered, carrying the true credo of any life: I enter unprepared.

  19

  I ran through the woods until my legs went numb from the cold and gave out. I hunkered down next to a felled tree, silent in the dark, listening for any signs of life coming to investigate my shadow sprinting for land. My shivering was uncontrollable. I stripped off my jumpsuit. The dilemma of clothing was now my focus. In a military uniform, there was risk of being consumed back into a unit, or some officer changing my orders. Dressed as a civilian, there was risk of being thought a spy and shot or shipped off to a camp. With the prospect of a German search party finding me at any moment, I decided to put on my German sailor’s uniform and move forward with my own papers. My frozen feet sloshed around in my wet boots.

  The land map and one of the button compasses from Uncle Martin led me southwest toward Oldenburg. I walked all night. By morning, icicles on trees hung down like blue fangs, and shone in the first light.

  After eating a canned meal and wrestling with the acidic pains in my stomach, I leaned against a tree and crapped in a sick green splatter onto the leaves. I marched due west all day, only coming across one road, which was like a dark river that I lay in front of, making sure no one was near before sprinting across.

  My feet were in horrible pain from the cold when a storm gathered like a giant bird.

  I kept thinking of Ottawa. Of finding my father there. It kept me walking. This went on for three nights, skirting south and then north of anywhere on the map where a town might be, moving no more than sixty kilometers a day, paralleling several roads from deep in the woods, hiding in the snow. The snow and ice soaked through my boots and clothes and turned my skin pink, bright red, then white. Blisters on my feet bubbled up, burst, and formed again.

  On my fourth day since scuttling the Beaver, the rotten blisters and sores on my feet got so bad they turned into trench foot and large sheets of skin peeled loose. By morning I needed shelter to fend off hypothermia and what I feared was frostbite on my toes. The wind swirled in my ears and I didn’t hear the vehicle that turned onto the road behind me until the driver and passengers had me in full view. It was a German military jeep. I cursed myself for being careless. What a pathetic four-day escape. As the jeep came to a stop next to me, four soldiers got out and, at that moment, I cared little about what happened to me as long as I could get warm.

  The slightest suspicion from them would mean their pistols would slip from their leather holsters, and they’d demand papers. I tried to decide which to show them. In my right pocket were the papers that said Private Lem Volmer, from Munich, in route to a guard station near the former demarcation line in France. Though there was my sailor’s uniform. On either side of me the ditches and thick woods walled me in.

  “What is this?” an officer among them asked. “A long way from the water, sailor.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “You’re not German,” the man said.

  “No, sir. I’m a Dutchman.”

  “Ah, Dutch.” He looked at me then, judging my reaction to what he said. “The Dutch have been giving us a lot of problems,” the officer said. “Where the hell did you get that uniform?”

  “I’m in the Kriegsmarine, sir. I have papers.”

  “You’re not one of these border jumpers?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Let’s see those papers.”

  I kneeled on the ground next to my backpack, reached in and felt the muzzle of the Luger. I knew what Uncle Martin would do in that instant. How he’d be driving alone in these men’s jeep within minutes. But that was not me. Next to the gun my fingers pinched the bag with the newspaper clippings and commendations I’d received from Major Oldif. My papers for the Beaver mission were in there. I handed my orders and accommodation to the officer.

  On top of my paperwork was the certificate of ownership that came with the medal. DER FÜHRER was written in large, bold lettering below a picture of the Knight’s Cross with a swastika in the middle. There was a seal pressed over my own name, Jacob Koopman, Oberfahnrich zur See, Midshipman. The officer read it, looked up at me, then back to the picture. Then he raised his arm and saluted me and told his soldiers, “This sailor wears the Knight’s Cross.”

  As the other soldiers saluted, I saluted them back, raising my arm above my head, trying to uncurl my frozen fingers to face these men like they were my brothers.

  “Very kind of you,” I said. “But I’m freezing to death.”

  The soldiers made room for me between them in the back of the vehicle. We drove past more fields and into another forested area.

  “How was the medal won?” the man driving asked.

  “I sank a ship,” I told him, letting the words flow out of my mouth for the first and last time in my life, as if they held no weight at all. The officer shif
ted in his seat to look back at me. “I was sent out again but had to scuttle my boat north of here and started walking but got caught in a storm. You’re the first people I’ve seen since.”

  We drove through a small German garrison town. The first house we drove past had a huge Nazi flag hanging from it with the swastika against the bloodred cloth. It snapped in the wind as we passed. The streets were full of soldiers in sweat suits jogging up and down the road for exercise. One house had a group of officers out back taking target practice at a scarecrow they lined up against hay bales.

  We drove through the center of town, passing a row of quaint old village homes. I imagined that inside the walls of some of those buildings were starving and terrified men, downed RAF lying fetal in piles of their own excrement, waiting in the darkness for the world or the war to end.

  The soldiers took me to a small, forested mining compound well outside the town. About half a dozen large troop transport vehicles left as our jeep pulled in. The military green, canvas-topped trucks roared by us with their tops snapping in the wind. Each one that passed was empty.

  “You can follow me, and we’ll get you dry and fed,” the officer said. His long stride was hard for me to keep up with.

  He led me to a small bunkhouse next to a mining silo. “You can have that bunk for the night.”

  “Shall I radio your unit now?”

  “Maybe we can wait until after I get some sleep.”

  “Not a problem. We’ll radio them tomorrow. We’ll have trucks going east in the afternoon if that will help.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, already stripping off my wet clothes.

  “That looks awful,” he said and pointed at my bleeding feet. “Let me get the place warm for you.” He walked to the end of the barrack, which was a small wood frame bunkhouse with eight beds that all looked unused. The rafters were untreated pine with nails poking through from where they’d shoddily laid the boards. A wood-burning stove sat at the far end next to a shower and toilet stalls.