He took small, slow steps over the plank. His figure wavered against the dark night with each step, and for a moment I hoped that the plank would stretch far, far ahead of him, so whatever he planned to do would not happen near me.
The sailor on the beam helped Martin steady himself as he walked to the top of the U-boat. Martin crossed the plank, bent down, and pushed the black metal box onto the deck of the U-boat so the dough-shaped gobs smoothed down and adhered themselves to the deck. When he stood up, he pulled a Luger out of his jacket pocket, fired two shots into the chest of the man closest to him, and one shot each into the chest of the other two men, who both fell. The orange flash of the muzzle lingered across my field of vision as one man doubled backward and slid off the side of the boat like a wet rag. In what seemed like one fluid motion, in which I did not take a single breath, Martin stuck the muzzle of the gun down the hatch and started pulling the trigger, dropped the gun down the hole, pulled the potato masher grenade out of his jacket lining, twisted the top of it, threw it down the hole, and slammed the hatch shut. He twisted the hatch wheel closed and pushed the skiff anchor through the wheel so it would be jammed shut if someone tried to open it from the inside.
“Martin,” I yelled, but it was too late.
One of the soldiers on the deck of the ship reached out with a blade that glinted for a moment before the man slashed it at the back of my uncle’s ankle. Martin’s leg gave way, and he kneeled next to the man who was about to gouge him again. I turned to get something to throw at the man or grab the machine gun, but when I looked back, Uncle Martin had lodged the hilt of his scrimshaw knife into the soldier’s throat. Uncle Martin stood up and jumped off the side of the U-boat onto the stern of the Lighthouse Lady as the explosion of the potato masher pounded its way from out of the ship’s innards and punched at the hatch door.
Uncle Martin stood up on the deck of the Lady. His left leg, cut through the boot, bent at the knee. He hobbled as he jumped to the spring line, which he pulled to release.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled up to me as the mooring line between the two boats fell loose.
A series of small explosions echoed at my back as the boat steered free. I looked back onto the stern deck to see if Uncle Martin was okay. He came out of the hold with the Mauser submachine gun, raised it to his shoulder, and fired at the black metal box he’d stuck to the U-boat. The fire red tails of the tracer bullets ripped into the side of the U-boat. His aim traced a burning line up to hit the mark. The box exploded, blasting the side of the U-boat open across the top and below the waterline. The percussion of more potato mashers echoed as the explosions burped out of the smoking hole that rolled and flooded. The hole pulled the honing tower down on its side before it started to sink.
A large surge of air bubbled up behind us where the U-boat sank.
“Steer a wide circle around it,” Uncle Martin yelled up to me.
We circled around the sinking sub to make sure nothing or no one floated to the surface. Small potato masher explosions popped under the water and each let a little blast of bubbles breach the surface. Martin swept his spotlight with his left hand and in his right he held the Mauser. The gun’s muzzle followed the sweeping light on our several loops around the area. For a while the U-boat’s belly faced upward toward us beneath the surface. It had rolled upside down and shook as the last blasts pushed the rest of the air out. When we couldn’t see it anymore and found nothing floating up to the surface in the wake of the white wash of air bubbles, I turned the boat back southwest, in the direction of Delfzijl. A small sliver torn from the far corner of the moon had come out. The sky lay dark and low as an osprey shadow circling beneath the clouds.
Uncle Martin climbed up and had me run the boat due west and then south to keep us at least five kilometers offshore the whole time. He set a course for the woods south of Delfzijl that we would reach by sunup. While I steered, he undid a metal panel under the wheel and pulled out a green radio. Years earlier before summer camp, I had seen him take this radio apart and put it back together. He hit a switch and static filled the wheelhouse.
“Turn this dial and listen for any calls of distress from that U-boat,” he said.
All I heard was squelch. Static. A low hum breathing loose from silence.
Uncle Martin then took off his boot and we saw the deep groove of a wound at the top of his Achilles tendon. Once he stanched the blood flow with rags we could see the white ham fat-colored tendon and where the blade cut deep enough to slice part of it. He took off his belt, tied it around his thigh, and held a needle under several lit matches.
“Are you going to sew that back together?” I pointed to his tendon.
“I don’t know how. Just the skin and hope it heals.” It took him twenty sutures to close the wound. He lay on the wheelhouse deck, sweating and swearing to himself. He held up his hands to look at the blood on them.
“Jesus, Jacob. I cut that kid’s throat open.”
“Uncle Martin,” I didn’t know how to talk to him about what I felt. “This can’t go on.”
“What would you have me do? Disappear?” I looked down at him to see if he intended the sting of referencing my father. “Should I give myself over?”
When he got up, he hobbled down the ladder and went through the several boxes of supplies that had not been loaded onto the U-boat. He took out the rest of the grenades. One of the crates had a whole bushel of sour green apples inside. He filled the hem of his shirt with them and climbed up the wheel where we ate them for the rest of the night.
At first light, the mist coming off the water still looked like a thin layer of smoke. The smoke confused the horizon line between the water and air and creating an odd feeling of levitating. I felt that my life was being lived in that suspended mist, lost in the water smoke. My stomach started to turn from all the apples, but I kept eating, hoping that it would give me a visceral reason for feeling so beaten and cold, experiencing a dissipating hunger.
“I love the wind,” Uncle Martin said, tilting his face up. The skin around his eyes was riven with hairline wrinkles. There was an inward curve along the ridge of his nose I only noticed in profile and a pinch of slack skin between his eyebrows.
The cool white flesh of the apples filled our mouths. Juice ran down our chins. We spit seeds into our palms, and lifted our flattened hands up and out the window to let the wind take them away.
When Uncle Martin dropped me off on shore near the woods, he handed me a small pillowcase full of apples and other food for my mother. Then his boat pulled away and headed north until it was out of sight. Walking up the beach to the trail in the woods that led to my house, the watermark wandered the sand ahead of me. I shut my eyes and walked, then stopped and vomited apple chunks, which mixed into the tide’s foam and washed back over my feet. Still, something was left in my stomach. I stuck my finger down my throat and jammed it in over and over, trying to purge out whatever remained.