The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  In the dark these grand and crazy thoughts kept me busy, away from the one thought I couldn’t shake, which was that I was close to giving up, that my spirit was flagging. There was no getting to where I really wanted, a return to my life before the war. In the dark cave, with the falling snow shadowed by the night, I felt like a ghost, hovering in some purgatory.

  In the cave I followed the instructions for my Benzedrine and Horlicks malted milk tablets which could be used as a meal. I used my water-purifying kit to get drinking water from the stream. I kept changing my socks, which I knew was important, yet I still couldn’t feel my toes. Each night they blackened a shade darker. I held them close to the fire to try to cull forth any feeling but once got too close and burned the soles of my feet.

  It was still unusually cold, but along the stream, where some of the snow melted off, were arrowhead plants, which the Irish called the antifamine herb. The large leaves had been frozen solid. I cut through the leaves on top with my dagger and followed the root down to the tuberous, potatolike bulb.

  I fished in the stream and caught several eels to fry in my mess kit, I stomped on the mice caught in the gaze of my flashlight at the back part of the cave and boiled mice meat and dandelions, along with other roots I’d dug around for to make a stew. I found a dead raven whose chest had been hollowed out by what looked like a small vermin before it froze. There were specks of crystalized meat inside of it. I pulled the last of the feathers loose and brought the terrible-looking thing to the cave and boiled it in a pot. A toxic layer of sputum floated to the top, which I dumped out at the lip of the cave, and then I drank the awful soup, desperately needing some energy, beyond fear of some parasitic death. But I threw it all up. Once, I boiled raw snails for several minutes and sucked out their slimy insides, in order to save my canned foods. Though when I boiled rhubarb leaves dug out from under the snow, they got me sick, and I threw up for hours, which made my ulcer burn like hot coals and gave me delirious dreams.

  In my half-sleep I dozed on and off, waking covered in sweat or shaking from the cold. The fire died down and instinct took over as I ferreted around the cave in a fever-induced stupor, tossing more wood on and piling some close to me so I could stay under my tarp. Hours went by like this. That desperate, spine-tingling feeling of being utterly alone made me curl up, and at the worst part of the night I began to hallucinate. I saw all the power line poles stretching across Europe like I was above them in a plane, but when I swooped in low, each one had a crucified child nailed into the wood. They yelled from pole to pole to one another and their awful cries spread everywhere.

  Then I daydreamed of a shadowy world at the feet of two giants fighting above me. Each giant held a poisonous snake in his left hand, and they tried to stick the snake out toward the other giant to make the snake bite. I rolled to avoid their footfalls. I couldn’t make out their faces, only the shadow of their movements, and they fought all night until a giant’s sole descended on me, darkening the world in one quick snap, and I woke, sweating and fearful of a new dark beyond the cave.

  21

  The sun came up, and it was light, and when it descended it was dark and colder. Those two facts became my clock, my calendar. I became submammalian in that way. Then, on my eleventh day in the cave, there was the sound of sticks crunching outside. I tossed the blanket off, reached for the Luger in my pack, stepped away from the fire, kicked a heap of dirt at the flame, and leaned into the darkness against the wall. There was a stone jutting out that I rested my arms on to aim the muzzle at the cave’s opening. My finger wrapped the trigger. My eyes focused in the dim light from the opening.

  Someone’s head peeked into the cave and then pulled back. Then they took another look and pulled back again before the dark figure stepped away from the shadows and was backlit by the sunlight. I aimed the gun at the person’s chest and eyed my pack, sitting on the dirt next to my blankets and tarp. Without my pack of supplies and documents, there would be no changing names, no crossing borders through camps, no paying for food and ship’s passage. Without those possibilities, I didn’t know what the dimensions of my own life were—how wide, how long it could be, what say I was to have in any of it.

  The stranger at the mouth of the cave took a step forward and waved a hand. “Come here,” a woman’s voice said in Dutch.

  It was the first human voice I’d heard in what felt like an unimaginable amount of time. My forearms dug into the rock to keep me from dropping to my knees and wailing. Then a small, darkened figure stepped into the light. A child scuttled toward the woman and hid behind her legs. Their combined shadow looked like the lumbering shadow of Thump-Drag.

  “Hello,” the woman called into the darkened cave. Her voice was tentative and trembled in my ears. “Hello,” she called again. She walked closer to the weakened fire and the slight firelight caught the gaunt angles of both their faces. She was young, and it was a little girl with her. Both wore the same dark blue jackets with little yellow stars on them that the massacred people at the mine wore.

  “Look at this,” the woman said and bent over my bag. When the girl went to open it, I stepped out of the shadow.

  “That’s mine,” I said.

  The woman screamed and the girl jumped back, mortified by my presence. The woman stared at the insignia on my jacket. The girl looked to be about six or seven. The woman, a few years on either side of thirty. Her eyes were the color of smoke, their centers as dark as polished coal.

  “Please,” she said, and then was silent. She had wild, curly black hair. The little girl had straight brown hair and her little hands gripped the woman’s pants. Her eyelashes looked sealed together by crystalized snow and tears. “We saw the smoke from your fire,” she said. “We only wanted to get warm.”

  The fire, my god. What a flagrant trail for someone to discover me.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked.

  “I’m a caveman.” Each looked at the other. “Where’d you come from?” I continued.

  “Please don’t shoot us. We were on the bridge when we smelled smoke. It’s so cold outside, we had to look for where it came from to get warm.”

  My gun remained leveled at them, so I dropped it down to my side.

  “Sit by the fire,” I said. The woman pushed the child ahead of her, closer to the fire. She bent over the girl and lifted her bare hands to the flame. I walked to the mouth of the cave and stood in front of it. Blue ribbons of smoke drifted through sunlight. How stupid could I have been? What bigger flag could I have sent up?

  “Where’d you come from?” I asked. The woman stared at me, glanced at my German uniform again, and shuddered at the sight.

  “We’ll leave,” she said.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “You’re a soldier,” she said, and pointed at the gun.

  The little girl’s bare hands hung red and raw in front of her. Both their shoes and pant legs were soaked and covered in ice and mud. I holstered the gun in the inner lining of my jacket. I’d have to leave soon now too if the fire sent up my location. But I didn’t want to leave the cave. I didn’t want this woman or the child to be here. I hated them for their presence. I wanted more than anything for the world to be empty, but here they were, their presence screaming that that could never be. Outside, the low storm clouds frosted everything. It was no place to wander without direction in mind.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes,” the woman said.

  “Tell me where you came from,” I said. “I won’t hurt you. I’m a Dutchman. I won’t hurt you. Just tell me where you came from.”

  “I’m from Amsterdam,” the woman said.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Train.” The little girl hadn’t taken her eyes off me. They were as deep as the cave we stood in and the reflected firelight sounded out their depths.

  “Where’s the train stop?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? How far is the stat
ion from here?” If the train stopped nearby, then this ravine was not as isolated as I’d hoped.

  “We didn’t get off at a station.” She looked at me again. “We’ll leave,” she said.

  Loneliness washed over me.

  “When you’re warm,” I said.

  My eyes moved down the woman’s jawline to her delicate neck.

  The two of them sat next to the fire, and within ten minutes the child curled up and slept in the woman’s lap. Despite her obvious fear, her body succumbed to the warmth and what must have been utter exhaustion.

  We sat next to the fire and were quiet for a long time, spending those strange, haunting hours in each other’s company. I hadn’t eaten yet that day and pangs of hunger flared in my gut. In my pack was eight days’ worth of meals if I ate only once a day. There was a part of me that didn’t want to pull out my food in front of these two, as I knew I’d have to share. But I was starving and ashamed for hoarding. I took out two servings of noodles and sauce with meat chunks and heated them by placing them close to the fire. The woman eyed the food the whole time. When the sauce bubbled, I handed one of them to her.

  “Can you two share?” I said.

  “Yes, of course. Thank you.” She dug her hand into the container and scooped out a finger full of hot noodles and shoved them in her mouth. She tried to cool it against her tongue, puffing out her cheeks and taking weird, sharp little breaths. Almost immediately her face flushed red. She scooped more of the food into her mouth, and then shook the girl awake. “Eat,” she said, and the girl, still half-sleeping, took the food from the woman’s fingertips. She chewed with her eyes closed and ate the rest of the food the woman fed her without fully waking. When she was done chewing, the woman moved the girl so she rested on the dirt next to the fire. The woman then ran her finger along the inside edge of the container, rubbing off the last bits of food and licking her finger clean of the red sauce.

  She stood up and limped to the far corner of the wall. I hadn’t noticed her limp until then. She walked to the mud-covered blanket that had been frozen in the dirt and pulled it off the ground. There were camel crickets, potato bugs, and centipedes in the damp earth beneath it. When she shook it out, she laid it over the sleeping girl and wiped her own tears away.

  That small, sad action made me feel so inhuman. I had only wanted to be far away from her, as looking at her and the girl showed me how stupid, awful, and miserable life in that cave really was.

  The little one didn’t wake up and I continued to stoke the fire and sat by it in silence with the woman. The back of the cave smelled like damp rotting leaves, pewter, and cold air coming in from some opening that created a draft.

  Somewhere out of the quiet, I asked her name.

  She kept looking into the fire with some profound sadness. “Janna. This is Mevi.” She didn’t mention last names. I understood. Last names made associations with people who were not there, people she may not have known the whereabouts of.

  Janna had an oval-shaped face with a wide hairline and cheekbones sloping down to a narrow jaw. The little girl, Mevi, had a pear-shaped face with a pouchy jaw and cartoonish, round cheeks. They looked nothing alike.

  I thought of resting my hand on the crown of the little girl’s head.

  “I’m Jacob,” I said, the name feeling strange to hear out loud.

  Mevi still slept. Her eyelids and fingers twitched.

  Janna sat against the cave wall and took off her socks and shoes. She folded her right leg over her left, and flexed her ankle, which bounced up and down. The top of her foot had veins rising across the thin fan of bones beneath the skin. Splotches of bruises ringed her lower calves.

  She saw me looking at her bruises.

  “Is Mevi your daughter?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Are you a German soldier?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t know who I was anymore. “I took the uniform to stay warm. When the weather clears, I’ll move on and won’t tell anyone about you two if you want to stay here and hide. I won’t turn you in.” Would these two turn me in if I sent them away? Would we all get caught if we stayed?

  Janna kept moving her ankle in small circles as if to loosen it up. There was a mole on the top of her foot. Her thin, crescent-moon eyebrows rose up to her bangs as she talked. She kept pulling on her earlobe as if triggering the words to come. She was soft-spoken, and at moments her voice stuttered. She looked down at her feet in the dirt and the fire cast a wild shadow of her feral hair on the rock behind her.

  “We were put in the same train car from Amsterdam. A cattle car.” She nodded her head at Mevi. “The other people in the car kept talking about what might happen to us when we got to wherever the soldiers were taking us. They were convinced we were going to be killed, instead of sent to labor camps.” She started rubbing her bruised calf and ankle with both her hands. “The train car was packed full, but everyone shifted to take turns, trying to pull a loose overhead board apart. It took most of the night, but they got a hole in the roof, and I was one of the only ones small enough to get through. They boosted me up and I pulled myself onto the roof. Then they pushed Mevi up at me and told me we had to jump. That I had to take care of her.”

  “Did you see any very, very tall men on the train?” I asked.

  “Tall men? No,” Janna said.

  The bruises on her legs must have been from when she landed. I imagined her on the top of the speeding train, how the wind and cold would have blotted out the senses, and that giant leap of faith she took.

  Janna had the scent of chlorine on her clothes. She smelled it. “From the train cars,” she said, almost apologizing.

  She seemed on edge, perhaps not wanting me to ask what happened to her family. I sensed she had no answer or wouldn’t want to give one. I pulled back and let the cave noises fill the void.

  The people in the cars must have convinced her they were all going to die for her to jump off a speeding train with a child she didn’t know tucked in her arms. I could imagine from what I’d seen at the mine camp that the people in her train car had been right. Some instinct must have been screaming inside of them. I watched her foot moving and understood how scared she still was, yet was somehow still managing to keep watch over the sleeping girl who had been thrust upon her.

  I could see every part of her story and how it fit into the larger narrative. The German military had been telling a story for years and the whole country now believed it. I’d believed in it too as they told it with such flair, such verve and promise, that the words got into my bloodstream and ran wild. Their story was of one peaceful world where they could knock all the trouble out with that one violent push, and that story of a harmonious world had sounded so good to me when I was a kid at summer camp, and even later, when Major Oldif spoke of it. But I’d now seen the truth. That one story was meant to blanket over every other that existed. At that moment I knew where someone like Samuel, the air-writer from Delfzijl, would have ended up—where someone so full of stories, like my father, would have ended up. They didn’t leave room for anyone else’s story, all those beautifully odd tales that had filled my childhood.

  When Janna and I went out to gather wood, Mevi was too scared to be left alone and silently followed us. She took hesitant steps down the hill and kept her eyes locked on Janna, a hand on her coat. We laid two long sticks between us to use as a stretcher for the wood that we stacked perpendicularly on top of. The two of us made enough trips to build a few days’ worth of round-the-clock fire.

  While sitting around the fire admiring Janna’s silhouette in the darkness ahead of me, I felt a deep want and sadness.

  Any time either of us woke in the middle of the night, we stoked the fire. The flittering shadows twitched on the cave walls. The darkness formed staggering shapes overhead. If I had to piss, I walked out to the side of the cave’s mouth and peed down the hillside. I hadn’t shit in days. My limited food intake was burned up to keep my body
going.

  When she slept, Mevi twitched and chirped like Fergus used to. Her dreams built and crescendoed to a full-blown night terror. She had a coughing fit, curled into herself, tucked up her knees, and spasmed with each breath. Her cheeks glowed red and glossy as if painful. I sat next to her and wished I knew some purification ritual I could employ. When I reached out to touch her shoulders, the muscles trembled under my fingers. She talked in her sleep. Said the names of people she loved. Her grief was a night-blooming flower. She called out their names and then stood up and started walking around the dark looking for them, exploring the frozen world she had jumped headlong into. The firelight illuminated her face. Each fleck in her eye led to another. Her eyes were endless that way, a map to more maps. Of all the ways the human heart chooses to leave trails for others to follow, the eyes were my favorite and maybe the most crushing. Her eyes revealed the raw truth that life would spare her young form no grace and no fury.

  I led the sleeping girl back to her blanket next to Janna. Janna’s smooth and delicate forearm and hand were uncovered. I wanted to lift her hand and have it touch me—to hold it between my own hands. Each fine fingertip looked incredibly soft despite the dirt under her nails.

  The arched curve of her hip made me start rocking back and forth, trying to shake some of the loneliness out. My shadow shook against the wall, a monstrously humped body rocking over the stone. The light from the fire flickered against the cave wall. Mevi was still whimpering and Janna’s eyes were open, glowing orange in the firelight until she snapped them shut. I swear I heard them close. I lay there looking at her face, and sending secret messages—please touch me here, here, here, and here. Then I watched my own shadow again, dancing on the wall, my darker, truer form. I shut my eyes and imagined more advanced people than me, etching figures into the stone, tracing their own mysteries.

  Much later that night, Janna’s eyebrows flicked up and down in her sleep. I was rotting away with ache, red lines of infection roping up my legs, and in the dark I was convinced touching the bone of her hip would cure me. I could fold my lips over her earlobe, gum at the small hole there that had once probably held glass earrings. I wanted to consume her without really being able to want her—my body wasn’t strong enough to want her the carnal way my mind pictured—so I wanted her in a more intimate way, some sort of cannibal love that could give me my strength back, or at least comfort me with human closeness.