“Make sure you check the drainage grates too. Hair gets caught inside those.”
A tuft of dark blond hair attached to a chunk of wet bloody scalp was stuck in the grate. I held it up by a strand and flung it overboard. When the boat looked clear of any atrocity, Martin started back toward Delfzijl. I sat on my knees and watched the back of my uncle’s head as he drove the boat.
“I’ve taken on the job of thinning the herd,” he said. “Let the fuckers get a bit nervous when their peers start disappearing.” It was clear he was a master at hiding his apoplectic rage, and muting that other language that was written now all over his body—something instinctual, submammalian.
We didn’t talk the rest of the way back to the Dutch side.
Martin pulled the boat to a pier jutting out of the woods adjacent to my house and let me off there. He tossed a pillowcase he’d tied off on the dock at my feet.
“You did good tonight, Jacob. Take that bag home to your mother. Don’t tell her or anyone else about tonight, and meet me at the docks in the morning, okay?”
I watched his boat pull away. The shore was calm and I wanted to lie down in the surf and let it pack me into the land where I could be alone and quietly whole.
Inside the sack was a large loaf of dense, black bread, a small pile of chocolate bars, canned meats, crackers, and a wad of both Dutch guilders and German marks. It would be enough money to feed me and my mother for two months, but seeing the food made me nauseated. I was caught in my own silent tragedy, not understanding my place in all of it. The tide washed ashore shards of glass and seashells that scattered and caught the moonlight so it looked like the coast had a thousand sets of beautiful eyes. That must be how the dead see us, I thought, that’s why we feel their presence so near.
I ducked into the trees and ran north past my home to Hilda’s house. In the dark, I crossed over the spot in the pasture where she had touched me and felt the soft pull of the soil. I stashed my bag and snuck up to her home with a stack of chocolate bars to give to her.
At her house I walked around the side to be below her window. I tossed pebbles up at the glass. Whispered her name. I wanted to tell her everything, feelings I’d never given voice to. I wanted to lie down next to her. After several tries, I walked around the dark house to see if I could find her sleeping on a couch. But there was no open curtain to peer through, so I went and got my bag and headed home, walking beneath the cracked branches of elms and rankled old clouds outlined by a sliver of the hidden moon. At the wood fort I peeled off forty guilders and stuffed them into the lining of the weather-worn pack, the one I had taken out to my father the night he went away. For him, I left that feeble offering.
12
Working on the water for months with Uncle Martin had tattered my hands, cracked my lips, and weathered my skin. My hands rubbing over my face caked up the salt grime in waxy little worms along my jaw. Most nights I slept in a spare bunk on board. In my sleep the sensation of floating, being levitated, always brought me back to Edwin. My dreams were spent chasing after a figure who was always ahead of me, until I woke to the noises of the boat rubbing against the dock, the lines groaning from being stretched with the tides, and my uncle snoring in his own bunk. I’d daydream of him garroting men with mooring lines, shoving heads into the moving propeller of his boat, and nailing minnows all over a body and dragging it behind the boat so large ocean birds would pick the corpse clean, the bones dropping loose and fluttering to the bottom of the sea. His country had not chosen sides, but Uncle Martin blamed the Germans for the loss of family and had made his choice.
When we didn’t sleep on the Lighthouse Lady, we went home to visit my mother. Ludo and Hilda, who were both still working at the lightbulb factory, would join us as well. The five of us would spend our evenings in the living room with Fergus crawling between each of us looking for attention, his soft brown eyes reflecting the yellow light and a bare, honest pleading.
Ludo was terrified of us turning eighteen; we’d been told I would be joining the German army and he’d be assigned to a work crew. Each of us shipped to somewhere we had no say in. My mother couldn’t handle talking about it and always wanted us to divert the subject. She had exhausted her voice pleading with us to run away. She wanted Martin to take us by ship, but he swore the whole North Sea was blockaded and that he had no way to pass through it.
“Give me time,” he said. “I’ll work something out for us. I swear.” So we sat together and held our fears in our laps, letting the evenings wear down.
On a night when I walked Hilda home, we held hands. We stopped several times to kiss. I stopped to kiss her or let her kiss me. I kept stopping us like it were a new game. Before we got to her home, I hugged her, bent my mouth to touch the top of her head, and smelled her hair.
“I love you,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, but hugged me tighter. Then like before, she pushed her forehead into my chest and slid her hands into my pants. Wordlessly, and with a fierce, fast grip, she made me feel like a god breaking loose of my skin, and then all of sudden like a raw, new baby spilling out into the world, quivering and weak. She said nothing, reached up and kissed me, then ran into her house.
By the next morning there was a scab browning over the tip of my penis where she had rubbed me raw against the fabric of my pants. I looked at the scab and felt I should not have told her I loved her, yet was happy I did. I would say it again. I knew I would say it again. Next time I would ease my pants down too. Already all I could think of was the next time, and then the next.
When I wasn’t on the boat with Uncle Martin, I passed the time at home doing the domestic chores to keep up the house. My mother cooked on our two burners as best she could, but there wasn’t enough gas to use it for more than a half hour a day. At night we played card games. Uncle Martin did card tricks. He shuffled a deck taken from the soldiers, fanned out the cards, and then ran the edge of one card along the row of face-down cards so they rose up like a wave traveling back and forth beneath his fingers. Though we all used the same cards, they looked like something living in Uncle Martin’s hands; they had a measure of grace plied from his touch. When it was dark, I went outside and did a lap around the house to make sure there were no unwelcome guests. Then we pulled our radio from the loose floorboard and turned on BBC to listen to the war news. The war so far had consisted of planes and ships bombing one another, but there was talk of the Allied invasion that made us all lean in closer, trying to swallow the words.
My mother finally wanted to talk about a plan before they came for me.
“What if he didn’t have a trigger finger?” she said.