The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  By noon that first day at sea, the ship was west of where I had washed ashore several nights before. We went slow to avoid the heeled-over warships that littered the coastline. Some of the downed vessels were held on submerged rocks. The waves traced a white foam outline along their sides. When the sun went down, I twisted all the lightbulbs aboard off or covered them for us to run in the dark. When it was pitch-black, the captain allowed the people in the holds to come up on deck. Peter stayed at the helm and the captain walked among the passengers.

  “I need to show you how to use our life rafts,” the captain said. He had me and another crew member demonstrate how they inflated and how to load into them. “If we’re torpedoed, you’ll need to do this, so pay attention.” He spoke in slow, direct terms. Then the other crew member translated what the captain had said into Polish. The people were of every age group. A few children were huddled up against the adults. They all focused on the captain and the large inflatable raft in front of them.

  “Who are these people?” I asked the captain later that night in the crew mess room.

  “Refugees. Much like yourself, I would guess.” He chewed on a spoonful of stew.

  “From where?”

  “Poland and Czechoslovakia,” Captain Fernandes said.

  I looked around us, and felt something inside me shift. I pictured the notes they pinned to the board in Southampton. I knew the ultimate Nazi goal of having one race and one grand narrative. Their effort to bind the continent together had failed by the mere presence of these people on board. Boats departed from every corner of Europe, and on each, there burrowed little tics of survival stories embedded in each of the passengers. These living refugees gave me hope. The continent itself was still populated with great storytellers, perhaps even some crawling through every contested border and shifting in currents beneath the very ground that was invaded. There was no mono-story, only the great, broken narrative of raw, throbbing life.

  After we ate, the captain asked me to follow him to the wheelhouse. “Okay, Mr. Koopman. I’m going to show you how to steer this ship. Your job will be continental avoidance. In other words, don’t hit anything. If you can navigate a trawler, this won’t be much different. Only, it takes a lot longer to stop. You can start as the second set of eyes on the night watch.”

  The first several days went like this. I slept in a crew bunk, woke, and helped wash the dishes in the galley and put them away. Then I ate, and sat watch with Peter, or Captain Fernandes, whoever had the watch at the time. I also had to wipe the engines, immaculately kept twin diesels, and do what Peter assigned on the outer decks of the ship, dabbing grout on the exterior so the ship looked rusted and old, which, I was realizing, it was not.

  While under way, the passengers who weren’t sick ate salt bean soup out of tin mess kits from the ship’s galley. The conditions weren’t very good for those aboard, but it was a passage of escape. Every flat surface had a sleeping body on it. Many of them hung on to their bunks or the pipes along the base of the bulkheads as the ship pitched back and forth. They retched into vomit buckets that slid across the deck. The fetid air was so very human and pungent that I covered my nose with the cuff of my sleeve every time the buckets needed to be cleaned.

  When Captain Fernandes came into the holds, he walked around the bunks looking at his passengers. He coughed something up from deep in his lungs. He bent over and hacked phlegm into a hankie he pulled from his coverall pocket and held the dark discharge in front of him, and then folded the hankie in half and slipped it away. He stopped. At the foot of the bed where a man was lying with his arm over his forehead, the captain leaned down and placed a hand on his chest, patting it, reassuring. A sweet gesture. He walked from person to person, smiling at them, touching them, performing a kind of ministry.

  Everything important to me had been taken away or destroyed. These people had probably gone through the same series of losses and were left holding the wreckage of their own lives. Any of them could have been my family, and for a time, that is what they became. I realized that looking into these strangers’ faces. Each was my brother and father. The women were my mother, Hilda, Janna, and Mevi. The boys were Ludo and Pauwel.

  The captain moved about them and I realized he wasn’t giving them last rites, but quite the opposite; he was willing them through. I watched him and thought maybe there were lesser gods who did walk among us. Lifting up others when they needed it most, offering an invisible push on the shoulder that can lead them back to the rest of their lives. Though, maybe that responsibility was for us all, to reach out when we could, to set the floor so people couldn’t free-fall forever.

  I was touched by his interactions in the holds, and I knew if there was such a thing as redemption, it was quicksilver that must be recaptured each day.

  When we came to a patch in the ocean that was glass-calm, the captain idled the engines of the ship. The crew opened a side hatch and let down a rope ladder. The smuggled passengers climbed onto the rub rail and jumped into the freezing sea. Cramped and lice-ridden, they leapt out into the ocean and splashed around like children, consecrated, briefly cleaned and renewed. I watched from the bridge’s wing station as the people whose old lives had been snagged away from them through the upheaval of war, shocking and surely violent, now floated on their backs in the sun.

  A porpoise drifted up to the swimming crowd and the tip of its fin cut the water, which from the surface looked like a shark.

  “Oh boy,” Captain Fernandes said. “Here we go.”

  At once, the swimmers screamed and swam wildly back to the ladder. I was startled by their sudden pronounced and fervent desire to live, and felt I’d never heard a more joyous and powerful noise.

  Once we were again under way, the bow of The Royal Crest cut through the waters southeast of Iceland. It was four in the morning, and I shared the bridge watch with Captain Fernandes. He had me organize the ship’s flag drawers. China. South Africa. Russia. Argentina. A flag for every nation on earth to hoist up the flagpole. He plotted the ship’s course and prepped the navigational charts. On watch with him, he let me ask questions about the ship and took the time to explain everything.

  “Tell me about that uncle’s fishing trawler you were on,” he said, and I did, telling him about the good times I had spent with Uncle Martin on the water.

  “How far out did he go?” the captain asked.

  “All over the North Sea.”

  “For how long would he go out?”

  “A week or more at a time by himself. Only a few days if he took me or my brother along.” I didn’t mean to mention my brother.

  “Was it your uncle who had you looking around for Captain . . . What was the name?”

  “Courtier. Méndez. And a few others.”

  “Huh.”

  We were quiet for a while and the night was calm around us.

  “Who are the people in the holds, really?” I asked. I expected him to tell me to mind my own business, but he didn’t.

  “Financial backers from the major Canadian and American cities pay good money to have people smuggled out of Europe, and very few ships will attempt the trip because of all the carnage caused by U-boats.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “A long time.”

  “Since the war started?”

  “Depends on which war you are referring to.” His lidded eyes flared open so I could see them glisten.

  “What will you do after you deliver these people?”

  “I’ll go back. An Allied invasion fleet will be trying to get into Europe eventually, and if they do, nowhere will be safe. Every bit of the continent will be contested and this shoddy little ship will be needed more than ever. There will always be the business of refugees.”

  The captain’s candor made me nervous. He was clearly working a secretive business, and yet he spoke openly. Still, I wanted to know more. “How have you managed to avoid getting caught?”

  “There are ways. You figure them
out and perfect them.”

  “Do you have to lie about who you are to cross borders?”

  He looked at me for a long time, then broke his gaze and faced the water. “You know, I once saw a burning oil slick sucked up by the eye of a cyclone while at sea. It pulled fire up into a blazing column that moved over the water like God’s fiery finger, tracing a new fault line. A fault line that, if it had crossed our path, my passengers and I would have all died. How could a man-made border mean anything once you’ve seen something like that?”

  I wished for other boats like the Royal Crest to leave every port in Europe. I wanted my father, Uncle Martin, Ludo and his family, Hilda, Mrs. Von Schuler, Mevi and Janna, Herbert Yarborough, the armed friar, the old couple who took my toes, and all the starving, scared, and wounded to be saved before the military tide that had swept into Germany could be pushed back, kicked under, by some giant revolt.

  “What would you do if you had the opportunity to save somebody?” the captain asked me.

  I cupped my hands around my face to shield him from seeing the gloss of my eyes. I had been relying on my calculations and rough instinct for so long, I had trained my mind to oscillate away from the deep, feeling part of me. The place where I held the knowledge that I hadn’t been able to save anyone. But this man must have sensed my distress, my guilt, and I was fearful that if my thoughts were exposed, the whole continent of the past would heave up and crash over me, swallowing me in an unforgiving and savage swoop. In the silence he asked, “Are your parents gone?”

  “Yes.” I began crying into my hands.

  “Siblings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your uncle?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. He was always a cunning one.” The captain’s eyes were on me again in the darkened wheelhouse.

  “What?”

  “Your uncle. Really tall. Tattoos. Whistles through that funny gap in his teeth when he talks too fast.”

  I stood up so fast I felt a cool push of air against my wet face. “You know him?”

  His smile was detached, and his probing eyes contained many strands of consideration. Of me, of what he should say. Of the way this night might unfold. “Not as Martin, but I know him.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you one of the men I was asking for?”

  The captain nodded. He looked out the windows and scanned the water then turned back to me.

  “Are you Courtier or Méndez?”

  He nodded again.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  He arched his eyebrows and gave me a subtle grin.

  “Both?”

  He nodded again.

  “And Valspar and McCollum?”

  He nodded again.

  I had a hard time comprehending what I was hearing. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “That’s a good question.” He started to say something but began a fit of deep, stomach-folding coughing into the crook of his arm. I waited until he finished.

  “Peter heard me asking for you in the port?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s why he sent me to you. To see who I was?”

  “You got it,” he said. “You know, it’s been my experience that it’s the incidents we can’t control that make us who we are.” We sat without speaking for what felt like a long time as the bow cut through the rolling swells. I pictured a tower of fire swirling over the water, and knew political boundaries meant nothing when weighed against a single human heart. I did not know the captain’s motivations, nor he mine, but that night I understood I had crewed up with a shadow ship.

  After that, I walked the decks with Captain Fernandes on his night rounds. He scanned the holds, laden with ripening fruit, sprouting potatoes, and burlap sacks of grain giving off the concentrated odors of earth. There were heaps of dried fish; pallets of concrete and rebar; reams of paper, barrels of liquor, molasses, and tar; and all manner of assembled products from years of crossing and recrossing the equator, stretching from pole to pole. And hidden in the holds were people who were forging ahead to a fresh start.

  On one of the night rounds, we went to the engine room and watched the blurred-out wheels of the twin diesels and the steady force of the plunging pistons, and I let the hum of orbiting machine parts and electric light seep into me. Standing there with the engine songs and the scent of spent oil and bilge water was sort of like receiving Holy Communion for me. In the holds beneath the waterline, looking over the machinery that pushed steel bones of the ship through wave after wave, I felt at peace being on the ocean, and with the idea of being a stranger to no port but always moving on. As if noticing my interest, the captain had me follow him around his vessel, as if showing me what his life was really like, why and how he did what he did.

  “If our schedule holds, we’ll dock in Halifax to refuel. Half the passengers will be dropped off there and will make their way to communities in Maritime Canada that have paid for their transport. The rest will be delivered to Boston and New York, where I’ve arranged paperwork for them.

  “We’ll then return to Halifax before heading back to England. If you want, I’ll pay you for the next trip if you want to stay on. I can show you how to do this. There aren’t many who do this work and it’s good work. Your uncle was good at this. He probably thought the same of you when he gave you that list of names.”

  “What if you get caught?”

  “All boats fall on a bitter tide.”

  “You might be killed.”

  “Nothing’s for certain.” He hacked up something wet from deep in his lungs.

  “Not if you do this kind of work.”

  “Some foolhardy things are well worth doing.” The dim light reflected off his bald patch. The captain told me to think about it, and when I did, I felt as solitary as I had in the darkest moments in the cave. I thought of the thousands of people who could trace the ocean’s waves back to their homeland, to a life now lost. It was horribly selfish to have been concerned only with saving myself when there were all these others who needed saving as well.

  I imagined what my life could now be. I imagined Québec, Ottawa, or somewhere in the States, or South America. Somewhere on land. But the land was full of lank flags, and the earthly history of boundaries claimed and fought over and reclaimed. At sea, the flags were taut and snapped violently in the wind, as if alive, and the waves kept creating and erasing the shape of the world. Powerful yet tranquil, the roll of the sea was significant to me in ways my heart could only murmur, and could not be put in words. For me, the choice felt natural. The ship offered life at the edge, beyond the borderlands, beyond common language, beyond the past and all it carried on its shoulders. The sea offered constant motion, a running toward the future, unburdened from the past. Yes, I knew the sea was for me.

  We worked our way northwest toward Greenland to avoid heavy military traffic. Late one night, everyone seemed awake and restless. The top deck was covered in bodies huddled together in their threadbare clothing. Several old women had climbed the back ladder in knee-length nightgowns that hugged to their torsos and fluttered behind them like wind socks. They reached one hand at a time forward along the rail until they found a place to lie down. The low groan of the props churning three decks below spoke to the rocking slap of the bow skimming the water, but no one spoke. One of the few refugee passengers that I’d met, Earl Sardenski, a retired steel smelter and widower from Warsaw, was so close to the starboard side railing his free hand leaned at the wrist against the safety railing. He had a son in Atlanta who had paid for his passage. His fingers curved upward and cut the wind off the side of the ship. The ship was a fine-hair-length south of the Arctic Circle between Stromfjord, Greenland, and Baffin Island, in the Davis Strait, which was too far north for our destination but we hoped took us clear of U-boat traffic. The water was calm as black ice. The running lights were all off except for forward navigation markers; the ship slipped stealthily through the night.

 
Slow waves of green lights washed over the sky. Chemical-reaction green absorbed into the sable night and flowed as if the source of everything green lay somewhere up in the north. Jarred loose from the ice sheets that choke the passage through Baffin Bay, the great light diffused softly through old animal bones lodged in the ice caps, in its deep fissures and cracks, and it scrubbed the atmosphere above the top deck—some new kind of clean. Green crept over the northern curvature of the earth, pulsating ephemeral matter that rose and settled in the passengers’ eyes as they lay. We watched the slate surface of the sky waxed clean by the living motion of aurora borealis, spreading laterally, each wave drifting, dissipating, and pushed off by the next strange sheet of light. It was as if the sky were performing green miracles over our small, northern corner of the world.

  “What a gift,” Earl said.

  I studied his face. We had temporarily avoided whatever wild, red-eyed force that brings us all, one day, to oblivion. We probably had more in common than I dared to ask. I had endured disgrace, humiliation, loss—loss of hope, loss of self, loss of ever reemerging whole. I was left spiritually broken, alone in every sense, intimately familiar with calamity, and yet, still alive; I could still recalibrate myself to what had happened and go on.

  “This looks like the dawn of Creation,” Earl said then in Dutch. Hearing him freely speak Dutch, I was cleaved open to where my family was kept, each member a burning light, both illuminating and blackening my heart. I saw Hilda floating above me in the sunny woods. Ludo chiseling all our names into stone. Edwin staining colors into a canvas. The sun calling out images from my uncle’s skin. My mother banging on the organ keys. My father palming light in glass. Thump-Drag traveling from this long story to some new, even larger epic.