The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  He stared at me without moving.

  “Hello,” I said in Dutch.

  Then he nodded. He lifted his hand up to his mouth and started to gnaw on something. When he brought his cupped hand down to his side I saw that he was eating a tulip bulb. The man picked up the rest of the bulb and stuffed it into his mouth where he started to gum at it. He had a jagged ridge of yellow teeth and eyed my uniform as if I were about to steal his last scrap of food.

  All those dead fish floating outside of the harbor in Kiel flashed into my mind, and I imagined gathering them all into giant wicker baskets and leaving the silver and glistening piles of fish at the feet of this old man, or at the mouth of the cave for Janna and Mevi to stay hidden away and fed, or multiplying them like a bedraggled Christ and swallowing them whole myself.

  I waved to the girls to come get warm and walked the perimeter of the fire, collecting a pile of logs and branches to stock the fire, and hunched my body over it. The old man still didn’t talk, but his eyes kept opening and closing. Janna and Mevi stared at him. Took him in. I was amazed yet again by their resilience. I piled more wood, put some next to him, and when I looked up, Janna had reached out and touched his thin shoulder for a second, trying to communicate some sympathy and warmth. It was one of those small, crushing gestures that stay with you.

  We walked back to the tracks, leaving him there to pass the remainder of the night alone.

  The tracks wound west, and I limped along them. We were hungry. I was starving. I craved bacon and bacon fat, warm bread, clean meat, and purified water with honey in it. I wanted sweets so badly I licked sap from a tree again, but it only left a pine flavor coating my teeth. The baskets of fish from Kiel harbor came to my mind again, but this time the fish had gone mealy and the foul stench clung to my skin.

  In a field covered in hoarfrost we found discarded clothes, books, and a brown leather briefcase, which Janna opened. The inside was custom made to hold small glass vials of oils and powders. The top half had a chart on what to mix to make different perfumes. The three of us kneeled in front of the open case. Each vial had a piece of tape with a name written on the top. Mint. Citronella. Peppermint. Spruce. Eucalyptus. Rosemary. Lemon oil. Juniper oil. Rosewood and myrtle oil. Cinnamon water. Clove. Larch resin. Vanilla water. Lavender. Nutmeg. I took a chance and drank sips of the oils, one after the other like shots of schnapps.

  “Here.” I handed the bottles to Janna and she handed them to Mevi, each of us drinking a third.

  Janna took the bottle labeled Spruce and sprinkled it into a puddle at the cup of her hand and rubbed it under her armpits and across her chest. The smell was so intense she looked at me with a new fear in her eyes.

  “I had the thought of us getting caught when someone asks what’s that god-awful stench,” she said.

  I stood up and felt the mix of lemon oil and cinnamon water coating my empty stomach.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “by nightfall we’ll all be pissing some of the smelliest perfume in Europe.”

  We left the case on the ground and walked through the rest of the field, reading it like a narrative. Scatter your silver spoons and candle collections. Your jewelry and bound books. Knit pillows and pressed drawings. They mean nothing now.

  At the border of Germany and Holland, there were cement pillboxes with 16mm-machine-gun mounts spread out every fifty meters along the open fields. Most of them seemed empty, but I led us south and well behind them until there was a place to pass unnoticed into our own country. Several days later, with a sister and niece I’d gathered along the way, I hobbled into Utrecht.

  The few soldiers in town didn’t ask us about our business, and I used several ration cards and marks Uncle Martin had given me to buy bread, carrots, radishes, and cheese. I rearranged the papers in my pockets to have the ID and orders of the soldier to report west to Brussels ready.

  In Utrecht, we spent a night in the basement of a bombed-out house. Utrecht was southwest of Delfzijl, and I wanted to go back to see if there was any sign of my father, by the old fort or in the house. I believed that if he was alive he would have had to go back. He’d need to know what happened. He would have had to.

  Uncle Martin would have taken care of Fergus for as long as he could, but I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be at home with that dog traipsing through the house. Janna and Mevi could come. I tried to imagine my home. The way it had been. What I thought of instead was my uncle’s tattoos. I could see the bare-chested trapeze woman, her glorious blue-tipped breasts, and then the black, shaded, full moon looking down at a tall man, hanging from a tree by the neck. One side was for life and the other for death, his body containing both.

  In the morning, we went around the city looking to buy some salve for my toes and more supplies for at least another week of scurrying west. In an alley a man with jaundiced skin bent down to a puddle and brought the dirty water to his mouth. I felt sorry for him but wanted to be away from the reek and gauntness of other starving men.

  Mevi just took in all that hunger and hurt like there was so much it pushed all the words out of her head to make room. I wanted to push her eyelids down and kiss each one to keep them closed. My brother had been wrong to think he wanted to see everything, or had not lived long enough to know all the starving men that cross one’s path.

  At the cheese and produce shop, the woman behind the counter had a long, angular face with arched eyebrows and watery eyes. In front of her on the table were heads of red cabbage, leeks, turnips, carrots, and onions that I wanted to bite into like a starved beast; taste the freshness and dirt. The woman had a toddler who cried inconsolably. Something about the small boy reminded me of a monstrous radish: filthy, damp, and bitter with a round red face. The child eyed me in my uniform with an uneasy mix of fear, confusion, and some deep-seated anger, with hungry, hungry eyes. I listened to his wail, and felt a strong desire to slam his head onto the marble floor to shut him up, to see a bright color seep from his skull. I was shocked to look down and see my hand cupped, as if palming the boy’s head, only then realizing how twisted my thoughts were becoming.

  We followed the wrought-iron garden fence into the park. A gravel path led to a grotto with a stone statue of a river nymph. On a bench in front of a hedge of budding ornamental shrubs, we ate bread and tried to figure out what to do next. I needed a doctor for my feet.

  Mevi tapped Janna’s leg and pointed down the path. Almost a dozen German soldiers turned the corner, coming our way. We were out in the open and they looked like a patrol. A terrific swelling of energy rose up in me and more than any other time in my life, I felt a screaming need to survive, if not for me, than to protect these two with me. Seeing those soldiers, the fear of Mevi ending up at the bottom of a pit crashed down on me. It was too late to make a run for it, and I thought all was about to be lost.

  I patted the bench next to me, motioning for Mevi to sit down. I eased back and stretched an arm comfortably over the back of the bench around Janna, and watched the soldiers come. As they got closer, they abruptly stopped. They weren’t carrying rifles but musical instruments in dark cases. Breaking to the right, they started walking to the gazebo to practice for a concert. I shut my eyes. How ridiculous. How ridiculous the world was at that moment.

  “What should we do?” Janna asked.

  I sat on that bench, trying to think of an exit point from the city, but my feet were too sore to go through another long stretch of time outside in the wet and cold. I needed help, and I didn’t know which identity to try. What person to become.

  “Do you want to continue on your own?” I asked them then.

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  As a threesome, we walked into a church to seek shelter. Janna and Mevi sat in a back pew as I walked up to a small altar and a stained-glass window of Jesus with his arms spread out to the congregation. I wasn’t sure if Jesus was calling his flock to him or sending them out into the world. Light lingered on the altar, the communion table, the pressed vestm
ent cloths, and the giant, opened Bible with a red ribbon tucked between the pages. Part of me wanted to limp forward, fall to my knees, crawl across the chancel, slither to the tabernacle, eat the bread, and drink the wine, then steal and sell the gold.

  Footsteps came down the aisle. A fat man with a scarred face in a brown friar’s robe walked toward me. A slight wheeze followed each exhale.

  “Are you here for confession, son?” the man asked me.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Then right this way.” He lumbered into the confessional off to the side of the altar. I followed him, and we each sat on our own side of the booth.

  “Father, I need help,” I said.

  “We all need help from time to time,” he rasped.

  “No, it’s my feet, they’re freezing and I need somewhere to hide.”

  The friar was quiet for a moment, and I didn’t say a word. The red chair smelled of incense.

  “Your fellow soldiers will be able to help you,” he said.

  “I am not one of them, Father.”

  “Then what are you?”

  What am I? That’s what I didn’t know anymore, what I hadn’t understood since the war began and everyone was forced to take sides. I was a cave-dweller. An animal in the twilight. A vagrant of the snow. A Dutchman. A Nazi. An orphan. I couldn’t answer. I scratched at the wood on the pew with my fingertips.

  “My son, what can I do for you?”

  “My feet,” I said. “I need someone to doctor them. Please.”

  “Son, I think the other soldiers can help you.”

  “Father, please. I’m not one of them.” I wanted to tell him about Janna and Mevi, but at the moment I thought they’d be ignored or worse for being Jewish and falling in his line of sight. “Just look at my feet.”

  The friar stood up, opened his door, and then swung mine open. He stood there, imposing and as wide as the door frame. I’d made a mistake. I reached into my bag and rooted around for the Luger. The friar lifted his cassock and pulled out two Colt revolvers, one in each hand, that he slung from his belt line. By the time he had the guns leveled at my head, I hadn’t even grabbed the handle of the Luger.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Please, watch your mouth in here, young man.”

  “You’re carrying guns in the church?”

  “What are you reaching for?”

  I slumped back. The bag fell to my feet. I didn’t see a way to get by him.

  “Well, son. I guess you’d better let me have a look at your feet to judge for myself,” he said.

  I kicked off my left boot and reached down to peel off the sock, and the friar let one gun drop to his side and lifted his other hand to block his nose from the stench. My second and third toes on that foot were solid black. There were red lines under the skin, leading across the top of my foot where the entire thing had become infected.

  “Why haven’t you gone to the soldiers to have those taken care of?”

  “I told you, I’m not one of them.”

  “Is the other foot like that?”

  “Only one of my toes on that foot is frozen.”

  “Okay then,” the man said, holstering his guns under his cassock. “Who are you?”

  “Someone who needs help, that’s all.”

  “You have to understand, no one can be trusted in these times. The Gestapo dress up like downed airmen in order to infiltrate the escape lines. Even telling that story does damage. It makes people nervous. I can never be too careful.” He stroked his ginger-colored beard and looked at my rotting foot again. “Let’s see what we can do for you.”

  “You’re not going to turn me in?” I asked.

  “You’re not going to give me a reason to, are you?”

  Specks of dust drifted through the rafters. The friar’s breathing was still labored.

  “No. I’m out of options. I need your help.”

  “Like I said, we all need help sometimes.”

  “Then, I have friends too,” I said, and pointed to the back of the church where Janna was holding Mevi tight as if ready to dash from the church.

  The friar led the three of us to a room behind the altar. “You stay here for a bit. When it’s dark, we’ll find you some help.”

  We waited there for hours. I struggled to remember the ritual of a Mass. The standing, sitting, and kneeling. Lining up for communion. I couldn’t grasp finding solace in such a habit. I wanted no Christian bread or Jesus wafers now. After being alone with my thoughts for so long, I only wanted the hot breath of words. More words than I could take in. Anoint me with voices and the stories of those I love, an outpouring of everything they know. That alone would be worth falling to my knees in worship.

  When the friar came back, he motioned for us to follow. We walked out the back of the church and through the park where we’d been sitting earlier. We cleared the park, and kept walking to the outskirts of town. When we passed people on the street, even soldiers, they nodded to the friar and didn’t stop us.

  I asked him where he had gotten his guns.

  “Maybe it’s best we know very little about each other,” he said.

  “It’s only that I’ve never met such a heavily armed man of God before. Not even a poorly armed one.”

  “Well, one of the guns is for any German who gets in my way, and the other is for me if I fail to hold them off.”

  We continued in silence past the city limits. Painful kilometers, leading us through farmlands.

  When we reached a farmhouse set off by itself, the friar knocked on the door and we waited until an old man opened. The man wore scuffed rubber boots, wool pants, and a brown sweater with a coarse collar popped to cover the back of his neck. His cheeks were pitted, and a purple filigree of veins webbed across his swollen nose. He looked at the four of us, and I saw he didn’t recognize the friar.

  “May we warm up at your table for a minute, sir, before we carry on our way?”

  The man hesitantly stepped aside. Inside, an old woman stood in the doorway. The old man had a laborer’s powerful hands. His wife was stern, upright, with big eyes that took us in. She gave a slight, sad smile to Mevi.

  “Very cold out there tonight. We’re sorry to be a bother, but like I said, just a moment to warm up.”

  The old man pulled out three roughly hewn chairs at his table for us to sit down. The friar looked around the house and then set his eyes on the old man. “A lovely house you have here, sir.” He pulled a torn playing card from his cassock and laid it on the table in front of him.

  “Thank you,” the man said. He looked at the card, and then for a long moment at each of us. He stood up and walked to a cupboard behind him, and when the man turned his back the friar fingered the handle of one of the revolvers under his cassock, his white cord with three knots swung off the side of the chair. When the old man turned around, he brought the matching half of the friar’s torn card to the table.

  “Very good,” the friar said, letting his hands slip away from his sides. “This young man here could use some help that is beyond me.”

  “And who is this young man?” the old woman asked.

  “I’m Dutch.”

  “And?”

  I looked at Janna, then back to the old woman. “I’m trying to escape conscription. They’re with me,” I said, nodding at the girls. Janna looked surprised by my confession, but I kept my eyes on the old couple, who, to my surprise, decided to let us stay. The first night they fed us beans, potatoes, and cognac, which warmed me and I could feel the blood start to circulate, but also made my feet throb. The old couple let me change in their bathroom, and when they saw my feet with my three curled-up and blackened toes, they both covered their mouths.

  Mevi stared without flinching.

  “Maybe take her to the back,” the old woman said to Janna, motioning to Mevi.

  “You have to do something about those toes, boy,” the old man said.

  He had been a soldier in the Great War. He said he’d seen frostb
ite before and knew how bad it could get if not dealt with.

  “He can’t go back to town. There are too many soldiers, and there will be questions,” the friar said.

  “We’ll help you. But this won’t be pleasant.”

  They got me drunk that night. The liquor was sharp and sour and felt like acid in my gut, swishing over my ulcers. I sat in a chair until I could barely hold my head up, and mumbled about Janna and Mevi, the old man dying in the woods, and a giant stepping on me. The friar grabbed my chin and poured more liquor down my throat. Then they put ropes around my upper legs to cinch off the arteries, and then more around my upper calves until my legs felt like sausages in casings. Then the friar laid his giant body across my chest so I couldn’t move. The old man had his wife pour alcohol all over my feet. A giant metal pot of water boiled nearby. She had bandages, a jigsaw, a mallet, and a flat-mouthed screwdriver with a sharpened tip that would slice through bone when her husband hit the handle with the mallet.

  The old woman put a wet rag in my mouth, and the water seeped down my throat and choked me as I bit into it. It was under these crude conditions that the old man amputated three toes on my left foot and one on my right. Thick, phlegm-green pus oozed out of each, followed by black blood. When he cut, my toes made a soft thud against the porcelain plate. More black blood drained from the dismembered toes, and then turned pink and normal-looking again, as if I was making my feet sick. My blood soaked into the wadded cloth until he cauterized the wound with a knife his wife had kept on the stovetop burner until it throbbed bright orange. Strange smells filled the room. The friar’s face was bright red from straining to keep me from bucking loose.

  The friar pulled the rag from my mouth, held his scored face close to mine and whispered, “Were you sent to find out the escape routes?”

  I bit down on the inside of my cheeks.

  “Tell me,” he said, slipping a free hand from my shoulder and pushing it on my throat.

  “Please, don’t do that,” the old woman said, putting a hand on the friar’s arm.