The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  “Take a shower, and I’ll have this going when you’re done.”

  “Thank you.”

  Once warm, my feet throbbed in pain. When I’d eaten, slept for a few hours, and dried my clothes off over the stove, I dressed and put my backpack on. I was terrified that the officer would take me into custody, so I started walking around the compound. There were soldiers at the gate. Those soldiers must have lived in the only other bunk room. At the food tent, when no one was looking, I squeezed the air out of bread loaves, stuffed my pack with them, and shoved in cans of noodles with meat sauce and sausage with gravy until my pack and pockets were full. Then I headed to the far woods on the hillside that rose above the compound and the gravel quarry to the right of it. I decided to slip out of the compound before my location was reported. As I walked to the woods another row of transport trucks rumbled in. The few soldiers who were outside started walking to the trucks.

  “Guten Morgen,” one of them said to me as he walked over.

  “Guten Morgen,” I said, walking to the face of the woods to make a show of standing behind a tree to urinate. When no one was in sight, I stepped farther into the forest and up the hillside.

  Fifty meters through the trees and below me was a clearing where giant mounds of upturned dirt, clean gray gravel, and another substance that looked like a mountain of thick terra-cotta soil ran parallel to where I walked. In front of the first heap a bulldozer left idling burped out puffs of smoke that shimmied the main chassis. A row of troop transport trucks came in and snaked along the backside of the mountainous piles. Farther through the woods, soldiers led about twenty people of all ages off the back of one of the trucks. It looked like a family of seven was in the lead headed by a skinny dark-haired man and his graying wife of about fifty. They had two girls who looked to be in their twenties and a dark-haired young man around thirty with them. An old woman held a toddler to her chest. She whispered to and tickled the child as she walked out of sight behind the first knoll. Behind the family were men in dark blue jackets with those awful yellow stars on the chest. Several of the men wore wet and stained tweed jackets. Soldiers pushed the people around the backside of the gravel mountain. The largest cloud in the cold blue sky had an orange hole burned through its center by the sun.

  The family was ordered to strip and add their clothes to the already arranged mounds of shoes, pants, undergarments, and jackets. Children’s clothes piled up in their own mounds, frozen together in a giant lump the size of an automobile. When everyone was naked, they were led behind the last hill of dirt. I moved parallel to them from up on the wooded hillside and saw a giant pit on the other side of the hill. Clay stairs cut down into the dirt where it looked like a thousand-person puddle of naked bodies with interlaced limbs bubbled up from the earth. The bodies were powdered in white quicklime.

  The giant tangle of bodies was so very human, yet the least human thing I’d ever seen. When the family rounded the mound and came into view, they hugged one another, but not one made a sound. They clutched one another as they were led to the pit. A soldier sat on the lip of the pit with his feet dangling off the side. In his lap he held a trench sweeper, a Maschingengewehr 42 machine gun. He was smoking a cigarette.

  Once they saw what was ahead of them they all stopped. Soldiers pushed at their backs but they leaned away from the pit. Then a man with skinny legs and wire-rim glasses walked down the steps. He must have known he would be trapped in there forever. I waited for him to crouch down or try to scramble up the walls like a crab in a bucket, but instead he looked upward, away from what he stood on, and stayed perfectly still. The girls were pushed forward, and the rest of the group followed down the clay stairs into the pit. They were the first stark naked women I’d ever seen. The men walking down behind them seemed to be holding back tears. Even from as far back as I was in the woods, I saw how their flesh raised in goose pimples, and the old woman’s body shivered around the toddler’s chubby backside. The child’s little foot hung loose and kicked at the woman’s puff of gray pubic hair. When they were all in the pit, had walked, tripped over, and then stood on the pile of dead bodies, one of the daughters from the family pointed to herself and looked at the man with the gun and said, “Twenty-three years old,” in German.

  The man holding the gun pointed the tip of the gun at himself. “Me too,” he said. Then he aimed the barrel at her and sang her a verse from “Lili Marlene,” the same song I’d sung along to with all the soldiers at the training camp in Kiel.

  Time would come for roll call, time for us to part,

  Darling I’d caress you and press you to my heart,

  And there ‘neath that far off lantern light,

  I’d hold you tight, we’d kiss good-night,

  My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene

  When he finished his verse, he aimed, leaned back to brace himself against the gun, and opened fire. Flames shot from the muzzle, and the muscles in his arm shook against the recoil. The lyrics echoing up the mountainside were chased off by the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. The people in the pit fell in a bloody mist. Most were still. Some twitched. The girl who yelled her age was not quite dead. She’d been shot in the stomach and legs. Her back draped across her family members, her chest heaved upward as if trying to expel the bullets, and her head rocked obscenely back and forth, rolling over the collarbone of a dead man who bled from the throat.

  Another truckload of naked men and women turned the corner and walked to the mound.

  I felt the sudden sense of the world shifting, of morals and laws and civilized human behavior kicked loose. I lay down at the base of the tree. At that moment more than any other since I lost him, I wished Edwin was with me. I wanted him to see this, to look close enough that he could capture the moment in paint or charcoal so others could see. If others could see this, I felt, there would be no more allowing it to continue. I crawled on my hands and knees up the hillside, deeper into the woods so the soldiers wouldn’t see me. There was another chorus of gunfire behind me. From the sound of the gun, the executioner had moved the muzzle from right to left and then back. It sickened me that I knew that. The cracking sounds echoed off the dirt mound and pushed on my back as I crawled.

  When I could stand up without seeing the mounds of dirt through the trees I started to run. As I sprinted through the woods, taking long, panicked strides, more shots rang out, like a stone skipping across a river.

  As I ran I couldn’t stop imagining what lay beneath the snow at that mine camp. What other atrocities had been buried. What other lives had been packed tight beneath the earth. The tangle of folded bodies swelled in my mind. Limbs and digits running like roots through the dirt, stretching out and linking hand to hand, until some bucking jointed monster would dig itself out of this landscape of the damned and proclaim what a foul method it had been laid down by.

  I couldn’t let go of the image of the soldier’s feet dangling off the edge of the pit. Hundreds of people in that pit beneath him, and it was only about two-thirds full. That the executioner seemed so casual sent an anxious nausea through my body and I wanted to vomit again. How would I navigate my way to safety? How, without any papers, could my father have been able to sneak through such a web of evil happenings?

  Bare branches of alders and elms curved over my head. The straps of my pack dug into my shoulders. There was a salty, dry taste in my mouth. I didn’t want to hear birds or airplanes or any other sound beyond my own heart and lungs drumming in my ears, drowning out the thoughts of the blood-covered people I’d seen in the pit, of how I, with the push of a single button, had easily killed more people than that.

  20

  From what Uncle Martin said, I had to move well west of Belgium to search out a boat to England, and if not there, southwest through Spain, and on to Africa, though North Africa was probably no safer. I kept thinking of Ottawa as a haven and the word became a three-step mantra as I walked.

  Ot-ta-wa.

  Ot-ta-wa.

  I had s
ewn the identification papers and money Martin gave me into the lining of my backpack. In the right pocket of my jacket were my German navy ID card and the papers attributing the Knight’s Cross to me. Those papers had my real name, height, hair, and eye color, and were signed by the commander of my naval brigade, Major Oldif. In my left pocket were the identification papers of a German SS officer named Dieter Adenauer, and Dieter’s orders to report to Brussels. In my left pants pocket were Herbert Yarborough’s papers and his small, black barter kit with the three gold coins, and three empty slots where the rings I’d given to Pauwel once sat. I prayed that if the time came, I’d pull the correct version of my life out of the right pocket.

  I spent a day limping through the woods. At best, I blundered through this odyssey in a controlled panic. And all that time, regardless of how paranoid of getting caught I was, I still had the feeling of chasing someone, like blood was calling to blood. I kept imagining some tall, dark figure ahead of me, but every time I got close, he slipped farther away. All night I ran and all night I got no closer. At times it was easy to imagine being on a rescue mission, hunting my father or still seeking out my brother, calling his name out over and over.

  When it was dark, my feet froze through again. The stale bread burned my ulcers. Inside my body was burning, and outside, I was freezing. I remembered reading in one of my father’s history books about fifteen-thousand captured Bulgarian prisoners taken by the emperor Basil of Byzantine. As a warning to never attack him again, he blinded ninety-nine out of every one hundred of the men by taking out both their eyes. The remaining men had one of their eyes taken out so they could lead the rest home. That awful march was in my head, walking into that white nothingness, like I’d wandered off from my one-eyed guide and was lost in a country full of barbarisms.

  The snow kept falling.

  I was tired but lying down meant freezing through.

  My feet burned.

  Ot-ta-wa.

  Ot-ta-wa.

  Ot-ta-wa.

  Halfway through a field I felt large-bore gravel underneath my feet before seeing the railroad ties. I could smell the creosote and tar oil. Nuzzling the compass up to my nose, I saw the tracks at my feet ran east–west and started following them heading west.

  My boots landed heavily on the wooden ties, kicking up gravel. I could walk across all of Europe like this without being seen if the heavy snow kept up. My mind went blank on the railroad tracks. Snow and wind kept erasing my path. I imagined I was on some ladder stretching ahead of me through the whiteout. The ladder led upward, left the ground, ascended into the clouds. I recalled my father telling Edwin and me about the pillars of sunlight that burst through the cloud cover and drew giant glowing columns of light on the water’s surface in the Ems estuary.

  “Those are Jacob’s ladders,” my father said. He told us about the Bible story of Jacob, which is where my name came from. “Those are the ladders of light Jacob used to climb up to heaven on.”

  When a train came, I jumped off the tracks ahead of its iron breath, ran to the woods, and dove into the snow. In the white and silvered edge of the forest I lay motionless. All ache and stink. Beyond desire or prayer. I decided this was what the receding stars felt like at daybreak, or the last embers drawn over with sand. The front of the train had a plow that sprayed sparks off to the side. Rattling cattle cars trembled past, but it was too dark to see through the slats into them as they whooshed by. When the train rounded out of sight, I hurried back to the freshly plowed track, shook the snow off of my body, and started walking the cleared path, churning ice, dirt, and gravel up as I continued.

  Several kilometers beyond where the train passed there was a steel bridge. The wind blew into my face, and I crossed to where the embankment created a lee. Halfway across I couldn’t see anything. Going on seemed so useless as the soundless snow beat against me. The emptiness swallowed me, and for the first time I knew what it meant to become nothing. My brother had done that. Not dying. Not dead. But gone altogether. Disappeared.

  Everything was white. Frozen. Empty. I took slow, methodical steps forward, letting my numb toes tap out each firm plank. The bridge tucked itself into the far hillside. Below the tracks, I hid from the wind by cramming my body into a fold of the bridge and hillside like a sparrow and only wanted to forget myself in sleep. To let the raw silk wings of rest lift me up into the milky mouth of night. Cold hours passed.

  The first graying of the skyline in the east filled the ravine the bridge crossed over. It deepened with more morning light, and by the time I was ready to climb out of the crevice and dig food from my pack, the light was high enough to see the dark shadow of a cave’s mouth farther down the ravine and the stream below that. I packed up my tarp and started making my way toward the cave. When I reached it, the mouth was a large vertical crack big enough to drive a car through.

  Inside the cave I felt like I’d been swallowed by night again. My hands ran against the ribs of the dark, searching out the far end of the cavern. I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face as I moved forward.

  I wanted to retreat to the back, where I hoped there was a bottomless pit to jump into, or some underground river to sweep me away, or a cup of earth to sit still on while I recovered.

  I pulled a small flashlight from my pack and stepped farther into the cave. The little light cut a yellow beam straight ahead of me. The granite crevasse walls rose up on each side. Not far from the mouth was an old blanket caked in mud and ice tamped into the ground. Large exposed slabs of granite protruded from every angle. In the dark mossy cave the air felt cool and fresh despite the clumps of rotting organic decay. The pitch of the earth angled up so the back part of the cave was dry but the darkness became absolute.

  My options were to trudge back out into the snow and keep slogging along, or hunker down until the weather let up. I decided to gather firewood and dragged large dead logs back until the pile of wood was large enough to last a few days.

  With kindling and a corner torn from one of my paper maps, I used matches to start a fire. I sat by it until I was warm, though when the feeling came back into my limbs, my toes were still numb. I pulled my boots and socks off. Two on the right side and one on the left looked like they’d been swatted with a hammer. Under the skin, a black color rose to the surface, old blood seeping out of the bones.

  I placed the frozen firewood around the flame in a circle so it would dry. I pulled a tin of noodles with meat chunk sauce out of the pack and placed it on the lip of the fire pit to heat. In the tin, little bubbles started forming and popping in the sauce, splattering the sides of the can. It shocked me to smell something other than the cold air. When the noodles were hot to the touch, I wrapped a spare shirt around my hand and picked up the can and began taking large, ravenous bites and slurping down the blistering hot food. It burned the inside of my mouth. While I ate, and the fire was warm against my face, the thought of spending the rest of the war hidden in the cave settled on me like a blessing. I rubbed my toes, hoping some spark of pain, of lingering life, would jump up the knuckles and ache, but they remained black nubs no longer associated with my body.

  Looking at my toes, I thought, these days cannot be days but lifetimes. This not mine, but a criminal’s life. A victim’s. Not mine, I raved.

  The hammering winds and their primal whistling blew down the hillside through the deepest parts of that night.

  Each moment in the cave, I felt my instincts gradually relax, yet some inner fear still spread through me. For as much as I wanted to recoil from the world, I knew there was no escaping the human kingdom. Life beyond the cave walls I now saw as manic, sickening, and starved enough that it was consuming itself.

  The sun had crossed the ravine, and the direct light rushed up the far hillside where it pulled over my side of the hill like a retractable curtain. The day passed with excruciating slowness, and I lay in my tarp for the rest of it. I tested my memory of my family’s house by mentally walking through it, seeking out the calming hy
mn of their voices in the dark. Time hung in front of me, dripping away.

  The next day passed as the first had, and the days after that still. Long stretches of cold and dark, followed by a few hours of sunlight that touched the open lip of the cave wall where I’d sit with my eyes closed, letting the first warmth of a late spring lean into my eyelids.

  “Breathe in the light,” I told myself. “Breathe in the light.”

  My feet burned up through my legs as the heat from my body tipped into fever.

  One moment I would dream of a butcher’s stall at the fresh market. Lamb meat, marbled white and deep purple with fat; slabs of tongue; skinned hares looking ready to leap off the table; and the fat, pink quarters of capons. I’d imagine all that meat on a spigot over my fire and feel hunger clawing at the lining of my stomach. But the next moment I’d imagine a young girl with an oozing hole in her throat, red liquid gullies running over her bare chest where her fingers wrote across her abdomen in blood, smearing out her last words.

  When lucid, I studied my maps, considering all the ways to escape or get caught. My finger ran over every route until my eyes blurred and the colors bled together. I imagined the oceans flooding the land and emptying themselves, so that everything switched places, making people move to the newly dried space without any infrastructure they’d created on land. The map would have the water and land inversed, leaving a large, hulking landmass, some Pangaea before the shift and break of continents. That new mass would do fine for starting humanity all over again.

  I’d heard of cave paintings in France, and wanted to etch some new creature into the wall. In the subterranean dank, I could try to mimic the silhouette of Thump-Drag my brother drew, could chisel and scratch my primal markings upon the stone as my friend Ludo had done, but add my own name. Jacob Koopman. Charioteer.