The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  Pushing my blanket off, I moved closer to her, belly crawling over the space between us. Her eyes played games against her closed eyelids. My hand reached out for her face. My splayed fingers rose over her chin as close as they could without touching her and lingered in the space over her mouth. Her warm breath passed through my fingers. I held my hand like that for minutes, communicating the underlanguage of want. The miracle of her breathing calmed me—the desperate part of me. Then I rolled back to my blanket, and felt sleepy and depressed, pulled it over my head, and held that same hand in front of my mouth and breathed into it, pretending it was still her life touching mine.

  How could I have felt lust at that moment? What a sad sack the body is. What a sad sack it was always going to be. I imagined what my inner desires would look like if they took some form outside my body, and the image of such a creature streaked across my mind and began haunting around there. There he was, the foul knot of want and loathing and hate and need, his body hunched over, in an impossible curl with his lips sealed shut around his own phallus. His hairy shoulders and arms waved around out to its side, trying to gather flesh with its wanting hands. It emitted a horrible, whimpering cry between breaths. This subhuman, bare-assed, hairy-balled monstrosity streaked past, full of raw want and shame and hunger and inertia. The image was so horrifying I wanted to find it in the scope of a rifle and riddle it with bullets, fell it, and then unload round after round into its curved spine, zip up the legs with bullet holes, and blow out the back of its skull. I wanted to dismember that part of me. Take off the wanting fingers at the knuckle. Anything to no longer associate this thing with myself. I was afraid if there ever was a judgment upon our lives in this world, I would be judged by this creature, this parasitic want dragging me down.

  When the snow stopped in the morning, it gave way to heavy rain. The stream at the base of the ravine reddened and swelled over the top of its banks, and where I’d been melting snow for water, I now had only to walk to the stream and dip my cup where it eddied over unfamiliar ground.

  Mevi and Janna drank from my full canteens. That day was almost the last of my food supplies. What was left after that was only energy pills. So we each took the Benzedrines and shared two cans of sausage and gravy heated on the lip of the fire. When the sun was up, I went back down to the water. Mevi tried to follow me and fell. She hurt her elbow, and I scooped her up and dusted her off. Tears welled in her eyes but she didn’t make a sound. I wanted to do something to comfort her, so I tapped the tip of her nose and aimed her back to the mouth of the cave with a pat on the head.

  I’d become infested with lice since Janna and Mevi arrived in the cave. The little white specks clumped up on my arm hair and all over my body. They jumped in quick, perfect arcs across my forearm. I tried to ignore them until they got so bad I had to try something. On the banks I stripped off all my clothes and ran my hands over my oily skin. My blackened toes, now dried dates, penis slack and shriveled. I lowered my feet into the water and dipped my body under the flowing surface. There was some unworldly and astonishing feeling buzzing around me as I submerged in the frozen water.

  The cold made my body shrink in on itself, but I held on to two rocks under the surface and let my body and legs shimmy back and forth behind me. The dull clanking of stones pushed over one another by the current filled my ears. If I let go, I’d at least momentarily enter the world Edwin had gone to. When I jumped up, the air bit my skin. I put on my underwear and carried the rest of my clothes up the hill to sit and get warm by the fire.

  Halfway up the hill I saw Janna upstream. She squatted near the water. Her back to me. Her open jacket hung down her sides and brushed the ground. Spandrels of light wound through her black curls. I could not see what she was doing and kept walking up the path. When I passed a thick-trunked willow tree, I saw her wipe a sheath of dry leaves between her legs, then place the bloodied leaves into the water, a crimson raft that spun circles in an eddy before pushing downstream. Mesmerized for a moment, I turned and walked back to the cave as quietly as I could so she wouldn’t see me.

  “I’ll have to go find food tonight,” I told Janna and Mevi when we were all in the cave. “You’ll stay here. We need to get those yellow stars off of your jackets. You’ll have to lie about who you are from now on. You were too trusting with me, but now be sure to lie to everyone else.”

  Janna looked at me and nodded. Mevi said nothing. She never said a word while awake. With my Nazi dagger’s tip, I cut the stitching of their yellow stars free and pulled the loose yellow threads out of the cloth. We watched the stars darken and burn in the fire.

  I dressed and waited until the downing sun cast a layer of pink behind the ridgeline. Then I packed my backpack and checked each pocket with my various ID cards. The weight of the pack dug low into my back.

  “Is this good-bye?” Janna asked.

  “Almost,” I said.

  I climbed up to the train tracks and started moving west, taking each fearful step trying to will myself back into the nightmare, doing everything to convince myself this was a better alternative to starving to death. My blackened toes threw off my balance and each foot protested in pain.

  Several kilometers from the cave, the woods opened up to a large farmer’s field. I climbed a horse-gnawed fence post, crossed the boundary stones, and walked through a field with clods of tedded hay to the stable. I peeked through the slats in the wood and knotholes. When I was sure no one was inside, I snuck around to the front door and eased it back, making sure no one in the nearby farmhouse could hear. The inside of the barn smelled like animal breath, wet fur, alfalfa, and urine. I swept my flashlight past two workhorses and a starving old cow. A three-way tipcart full of cut hay and a plow were in one corner, and in the other was a pig pen with four piglets. I scaled the mildew-darkened wall of the pen and grabbed one of the piglets. It kicked and made a deep squealing sound that originated from the tip of its corkscrewed tail and increased in volume as it squeezed out. I tucked the thrashing animal against my chest, closed my fingers under its chin to keep it from biting me, and ran to the barn door. I shut the door behind me so whomever I stole from wouldn’t lose anything else to the cold, and then ran back to the tracks. The animal struggled under my jacket, and its split feet pushed into my side.

  In the woods the pig still thrashed against my chest. I didn’t dare loosen my grip as I wouldn’t be able to catch it if it got free. With the piglet pinned to my body, I pulled my dagger out of my pocket and slipped it under its throat. The animal gurgled out a last breath, loud enough that I knew I was right to not have killed it in the barn or taken more than one. Warm blood leaked out over my hand onto the ground, and it fought for a moment until it went limp in my arms. The smeared blood was thick and warm as I laid it out to see what to do with it next. I’d never killed an animal before. With the piglet laid out on its back, I used my dagger to carve an incision down from the slashed throat to and then a circle around its anus. From that cut I scooped the viscera out of the body cavity. The purple liver, the maroon heart, and crimson coil of intestines and organs flopped onto the wet ground. The blade tore loose the attached tissue, and when the animal was emptied, I picked it up by its hind leg and let it dangle at my side on my way back to the cave.

  The piglet would feed us sparsely for a few days. With grilled meat in their stomachs, Janna and Mevi would get the color back in their faces. Mevi would talk. I would find us a safe place to go together. But I knew the meat wouldn’t last. Closer to the cave, the night got even darker.

  A few feet inside the mouth of the cave, two open and watchful sets of eyes looked at me from beyond the fire. Those eyes glowed like fiery animals in that darkness. I looked at them for a moment, strangers really, the woman who took such a miraculous jump and the child who hadn’t spoken since. I stopped moving. I laid the piglet on the ground and saw how insufficient it was. How insufficient I was to the task of these two lives. I knew I could go back to get another piglet for myself before conti
nuing west along the tracks. It would be so easy to place a stack of thirty, no, a hundred marks under the piglet’s foot. An offering to Janna and Mevi and turn to leave. Turn from them.

  My mouth had gone dry. I tongued the inside of my cheeks. My skin tasted like acrid pig blood. I rubbed my tongue there for a moment and wondered what sweetness was left in life to buoy me against such bitter, bitter disappointment.

  I let the fantasy of leaving them play out. The pig would be eaten. Only the marrow-sucked bones would remain. Janna and Mevi would have enough strength to push on into the forest, to find some better safety. But hidden in my fantasy lay a terrible truth about myself, a deficiency of courage, or an inability to care for others. Leaving them when I could take them with me seemed like the gravest crime, one I would never be able to rectify. Leaving them, I realized, would have brought a deep ice floe of hurt like what I felt seeing my father drop to his knees and slither away.

  No.

  That would not do.

  “I have something for you,” I called to them.

  In the cave I busied myself trying to cook the piglet. Being busy felt important to hold off that fear of tending to these two. I built a spit out of sticks and twine to roast the pig on and then cut pieces of it for both Janna and Mevi. I held out the meat for them and to my surprise felt life pushing upward in me. I wanted to feed them all this meat, then reach into those starving fantasies of food I’d been having and feed them for the rest of their lives. I wanted to save them, and that was like a switch for me. I could hide in a cave the rest of my life, but these two could not. These two needed better than that.

  So, after we tasted the pig, and then kept eating it, devouring it whole to push back a hunger that felt like it was trying to rip out of us, we gathered our things and walked out into the darkness.

  “I’ll find somewhere safe for you,” I said to the little girl as we left the cave. “I will.”

  I imagined the wind curling around like a banner floating in space. As I exited the cave’s mouth and turned up the ravine, they followed, and I allowed myself a small, transcendent moment of feeling alive again. As I watched them, I had a deep and swelling love of trees, their sway and dance, and thought how goddamn beautiful this world would be if we’d never been allowed to touch it.

  I led Janna and Mevi back to the farm I’d stolen the piglet from. It was the only place I was certain there’d be food, and it was away from the cave. It was all I knew to do. From deep in the trees we waited a whole day, trying to blend into the shadows Edwin was so adept at creating, watching for any life on the farm. Only once, in the evening, an old woman with a shotgun and a metal bucket walked into the barn. When she left without the bucket, and latched the door shut, we snuck into the barn and hid in an empty stall.

  “You sleep first,” Janna said.

  Curled on the ground with the scent of hay and horse sweat working up the memory of Hilda, I fell asleep, but not for long. The pig meat in my stomach was churning. I shot up.

  “What is it?” Janna asked. Mevi slept cradled in her lap.

  “Nothing,” I said, but I crawled from our stall and only made it to the next before I had to pull my pants down and let the awful puddle of my shit splatter all over the barn floor.

  It took everything in me not to moan in pain, and the sound of my body was as animal and foul as the swine.

  I crawled back into our stall as embarrassed by my own body as if I’d crapped like the dog at my mother’s dinner table.

  “Sorry,” I whispered.

  “It was the meat,” Janna said. “Fat after nothing will make us all shit like that.”

  She’d done me a kindness by being coarse. Easy.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She nodded and smiled at me. Not smiled. I do not think in our time together I ever saw her smile, but her face performed a small softening. A gift to me.

  “Your turn to sleep,” I said.

  She nodded, then shifted her body to ease Mevi onto the hay and curled around her.

  In the morning, at the first sign of light, I sent Janna and Mevi running into the woods as I snatched another piglet and ran after them like all the purpose and drive had been renewed in me.

  22

  As we walked, Mevi reached her hand up to hold mine. Her skin was cold and clammy and I tried to cup all of it in my fist. I ran my thumb over her tiny knuckles and it felt like the simplest version of love. Language was still stunted deep in her throat by fear. But here was the truest form of communication to ever exist. This was all I needed.

  A large pine unzipped by a lightning strike oozed sap over its charred trunk. We sucked on the sap. It made my mouth water, and I swallowed the sweet spittle while watching Mevi lap at the bark like a malnourished bear.

  The dark hours smelled like wood smoke and lasted the longest. It was during the dark hours that I understood each day was its own living thing in that country. Though the sky was purple at dawn, the color bled away all morning until the sun crested the treetops and left a golden sheen on the tracks.

  We followed the tracks, veering always west in the direction of the Dutch border. Me always chanting Ot-ta-wa. The shape of the cattle in the fog blurred as they moved across the field. They were amorphous, as if my brother had rubbed off their sharp lines with his dampened fingertip. The Germans patrolled the main roads, but they were not hard to avoid.

  As we huddled together at night we went over our story. I showed them the soldier’s ID I carried.

  “We need to have a fast answer ready if asked. You are my wife or girlfriend,” I suggested.

  “I am your older sister,” Janna said. “This is my daughter. She doesn’t talk.”

  “Okay. My older sister,” I mumbled. Hurt.

  The train tracks ran through a small town that had a whole series of bombed and abandoned row houses. We walked through, thumbing the last remaining kitchen cupboards, peering into rooms, trying the doorknobs, and pushing our way into the hidden corners.

  “Look for fruit flies,” Janna told me. “They’ll lead to scraps.”

  On the ground floor of the second house, there was the frame of a giant harp with all its strings broken. I picked it off the floor and stood it up in front of me so the thick strings hung down slack. I bent down and walked through the body of the harp like it were a door, but everything on the other side was still bleak and empty.

  A dusty drop cloth held the shape of the ottoman beneath. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling.

  In the basement I found Mevi standing in front of a collection of decorative spoons that hung from the wall, each by two small nails at the base of the neck. She let her fingers touch one, then the next.

  Every time I pushed a door back, it felt like someone would crash out past me, or dive to cower in some corner. In my mind, I’d been playing a sort of game with my father, hide-and-seek. My father was always ahead of me, like a ghost laying down secrets in the morning mist. Any moment I might turn a corner and find him crouched behind a tree, peering out from behind the edge of a building, watching over me, or waiting for me to come save him. When it was dark and cold, the thought was comforting. It gave me that inner push to move forward, sleep less, be more aware, as there was no knowing how it might happen that he, we, might be saved.

  “Can you tell me about your family?” I asked Janna. I wanted to hear her talk. To hear a voice. I wanted to hear a story.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked. She was looking at me then like she first had. Like I was the soldier. Something imposing and scary.

  “Just to hear,” I said, and it was true.

  “There is not much to tell that doesn’t hurt to think about right now.”

  We left the row houses and weaved among the trees in the darkness like dogs, like Fergus, letting that extra sliver of skin shut over our eyeballs to protect us from briars. Deeper in the night we crept through fields, alongside roads, and a ruddy gray canal. When we found another train track, we followed it to the southwest.<
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  My feet pounded in pain. The curled black toes felt like soggy pieces of rubber. Each time I looked at them it was with a sense of horror, as if they didn’t belong to me, but were something else entirely, like dead squids that hung limply at the end of my legs. They gave off a rotting stink I could almost taste.

  If God did have his finger on my shoulder, I thought, he was trying to flick me off the ledge.

  From deep in the woods, cowbells jingled in the distance. A sheepdog barked. My eyes were always trained for the shifting of sentries. When it was a few hours before dawn, the soft orange glow of a fire shone in the woods. I had the girls hide while I snuck toward it, staying crouched low to the ground. When I was close enough to be sure it was only an old man by himself, I stepped out of the woods to get warm by the fire.

  The man slept sitting up. He didn’t have a jacket on. The sharp sticks of his collarbone stuck out against his thin shirt. The backs of his hands seemed creased and concave, the bones curved inward and sunk toward his palms. A knot of shaggy, graying beard rose off his loose, bone-colored face. There was a rattle deep in his lungs when he breathed. I sat across the fire from him for a moment to get warm and propped my feet up to the flame. When I looked back up at the man I saw his polished, dying eyes.

  “Hello,” I said in German.

  Firelight glinted off the white stubble skirting his neckline. The circle of skin around his mouth sunk in like a pocket over his toothless gums. The man’s right eye rolled back into his skull. The left eye was black and held the flame’s vivid reflection on its glass surface.