“We’ll see. Edwin, you stay at the wheel. Jacob, go tend the lines at the stern, and I’ll get the spring line.”
Before I walked out on deck, I noticed the green radio on the table was gone. A tiny screwdriver lay on the ground. Out on deck I coiled up a docking line to ready it for the PT boat’s approach.
The PT boat idled its engines when it came alongside.
“Ahoy,” Uncle Martin yelled and lifted a throw line over his head to show the sailors on deck.
When the boat pulled parallel to us, Uncle Martin tossed the spring line over to them, and a sailor grabbed it and tied it off to a cleat.
“Where you headed?” a sailor asked in German.
“Northwest for herring grounds,” Uncle Martin said in Dutch.
“There’s no more going north of here,” the sailor replied in Dutch.
“It’s prime fishing up there,” Uncle Martin yelled.
“No more.”
Several soldiers leaned over the railing and studied our decks.
I think I picked up on Uncle Martin’s wordless anger and was channeling it as I wanted to tell them to piss off, but I kept from making eye contact with any of them. Not making eye contact was something my father had noticed as a timid habit.
“Stand straight. Look straight,” he’d said, and even his having to mention it, a fault I felt, made my eyes snap to the floor and I’d apologize like a meek little I’m-sorry machine. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’d chant to tamp down any sparks I perceived between us. I’d do this to try to keep the peace between everyone, though I hated every time the words crossed my lips.
“Is there some sort of trouble that way?” Uncle Martin asked the sailors.
“Sealed off.”
Uncle Martin smiled. He turned toward me, and I could tell his smile was fake, lubricious, one of the vocabulary words my father had given me. My uncle’s neck flushed crimson like he was choking back anger. He must have been furious at the notion that someone would try to stop him from moving freely.
“Well. Not sure what I’m supposed to do to make a living if I can’t go fishing there.”
“Fish south,” the sailor said.
“You guys can’t let us slip by for half a day? I’m sure no one out here would crawl up your asses about it.”
“I cannot let you go farther.”
“Well then. I’m sure you got your reasons.” Uncle Martin’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the gunwale. “Maybe later in the season?”
“Maybe,” the soldier said. “Maybe you’ll be allowed a permit.”
“Okay then,” Uncle Martin said. “You guys be safe out here.”
“You as well,” the sailor said and tossed the spring line back onto our deck. The line was as thick as my wrist and pieces of barnacle shells ground into the fibers from rubbing against pylons sliced my skin.
Uncle Martin climbed up the back ladder into the wheelhouse and started to turn the Lighthouse Lady around.
“A permit! Who are these bed-pissers? Bunch of bastards with misshapen peckers, probably.”
“Why’d they stop us?” Edwin asked.
“Who knows. That big ship must have radioed to shore about us. Sent those guys out to check on us.” He pushed the throttle forward and muttered to himself. “Permits. You’re kidding me with your permits.”
We turned the Lighthouse Lady back south and fished those waters until it was time to go get my father and Ludo. Once they boarded we headed east to the port town of Leer, where the three of us boys would meet the train.
That night, onboard, we played card games: spades, whist, and gin rummy.
“Hilda will be mad she’s missing out on these games,” I said. We all grew up with Hilda, who I was desperately and secretly in love with.
“But she’d hate cutting up the fish,” Ludo said.
“For sure,” I said, like I knew anything about her.
My first sex dream was of holding Hilda’s ankles in my hands and letting the sole of my foot press and rub between her legs—an area that in my mind was as smooth and featureless as a mannequin. I had not yet seen a naked girl and didn’t know what to do. The confusion only worsened, then shifted to a shame because I woke with painful erections pushing on my shorts, or worse, a gooey mess crusting in my underwear, which I would strip off, ball up, and cram deep in our hamper to hide.
While Ludo and Edwin played, I went out on deck, where sequins of fish scales glinted on the drying nets. I walked into the wheelhouse where my father and uncle were arguing.
“I can’t believe you’d let them do this, Hans.”
“They’ll have fun.”
“But there?”
“Come on, Martin. Don’t you give this to me too. The boys will have a good time.”
“They just stopped my boat. They want to control everything.” Uncle Martin waved his arms in front of him as if shaking off some ugly thought.
I went and stood between them, to be a good son, a peacemaker.
“I can’t believe you’ll let Jacob do this,” Uncle Martin said. My father looked at me standing there, and held back anything else he had to say.
That night I slept on a wheelhouse bench as Uncle Martin steered, studied the charts, and referenced his liquid compass and echo recorder. The sound of the diesel engines pumping the props through the wind and rolling white caps shook the whole ship.
In my half-sleep I thought I heard one of my father’s stories. He would always tell us stories about a character he invented named Thump-Drag, a clubfooted hunchback. When he swung his dead foot, it clobbered the ground, thump, and then he dragged it behind him as if it were an anvil. We grew up hearing about Thump-Drag’s knotted hump, which was really a giant extra muscle, and about how dragging that foot around made him incredibly strong. The steady rhythm of his walking, thump-drag, thump-drag, was the one constant to all his stories.
Thump-Drag was born a millennium ago as a Celt, my father told us, and the stories of his adventures, strength, and humility grew nightly as our father put us to bed. One night he gave moral lessons akin to Father Heard’s at church. The next, Thump-Drag became an outcast for his deformations. As we grew, Thump-Drag’s travels took him all over the world and through time. One day Thump-Drag was a Stone Age troglodyte and the next he fought in the Great War. In this way, he became the Wandering Jew, a Spartan, different Greek mythological figures, and a Byronic hero.
My father walked into the wheelhouse waking me fully up. “There you are,” he said. “Don’t you want to sleep in your bunk?”
“Can I stay here?”
He sat by my feet and rested a hand over my ankle.
“Can you tell me a story?” I asked.
He looked at Uncle Martin, who nodded.
“A short one,” my father said. He began speaking of Thump-Drag in the sailor Ulysses’ story.