On our second night we passed over the drop-off after the West Frisian Islands. The water was deep, gunmetal blue and calm enough that we could see it sloping off the horizon before sunset. We’d been hitting on a ten-kilometer shoal of herring when Uncle Martin came out on the decks and said, “We’ll set the nets out one more time,” and he tongued the gap where his canine tooth and bicuspid used to be before he lost it in what he called “a collision with a lead pipe.” Spit in his mouth made a popping sound from the suction between the pock in his gums and his tongue.
Ahead of us herring broke the water, jumping and falling back. When we wrapped up the net with one of our holds full, we went farther out than I’d ever been before, as far as Den Helder.
I walked into the wheelhouse, where Edwin tried to keep up with Uncle Martin’s exercise routine. Uncle Martin was shirtless. His tattoos pinched and strained as he did deep lunges, push-ups, sit-ups, and then bent-knee pull-ups from a bar he’d mounted on the overhead.
“Did those hurt?” I asked. “The needles, I mean.”
Martin ran his palm along his forearm. “Needles. Is that how you think I got these?”
“Yes.”
“No.” He lifted his fists to his face and rubbed a knuckle into each eye socket. “Do you know how the sun can turn your skin pink, then red before it peels and flakes off?”
“Yes.”
“Well. I spent too much time on decks without a shirt on, is all. Lost so many layers of skin I started seeing these faint images emerging.” He traced inked lines on his flesh with his fingertip. “They got clearer with time, as more skin burned away.”
I studied the fluted and hooked tattoos.
“So we have pictures etched into our bodies?” I asked.
“Deep down. At the truest version of ourselves.” Uncle Martin winked at me.
I didn’t know what to say, but liked the idea that drawing as he did, maybe my brother was able to see the pictures beneath other people’s skin?
Through the window, we saw the large shadow of a German navy ship cut across the swells like an enormous gray dorsal fin.
“We’ll be seeing a lot more of those, I suspect,” Uncle Martin said.
Even from a great distance the ship dwarfed Uncle Martin’s boat, though his was one of the largest trawlers in the Ems’s fishing grounds. He had had it custom-built, a thirty-two-meter, steel-beam trawler, with a high-whaleback bow and slow-turning high-torque engines to power it through rough waters.
Uncle Martin kept exercising as the ship slipped into the horizon.
The knife he always wore on his belt was on the console. I picked it up. An American sailor had taught him how to make the scrimshaw handle. Whalebone. Sanded smooth and polished. He pencil-drew a rudimentary drawing of a man hugging tight to the upper mast beams of a rigged ship. To me, the picture symbolized some ultimate freedom I’d yet to really understand. Though of course I was young. I would have drawn the sailor with his hands out to the wind. What did I know about holding on for dear life? When the drawing was as good as he could make it, he carved along the pencil lines with an old dentist tool, then poured and wiped away ink until it dyed the grooves.
“Should have had you draw that one for me,” he said to Edwin and pointed to the knife I held.
“Was I born yet?” Edwin asked.
“No. I guess you weren’t. Though even as a baby you could have done better than that. That one took me a heap of hours to make.”
I held the heft of the handle and swung the blade in front of me, back and forth, back and forth, always keeping the steel moving the way Uncle Martin had shown us.
“Have you been to the South Pacific?” Edwin asked.
“Yes,” Uncle Martin said.
“Is it like the paintings?”
“Which paintings?
“The Gauguin paintings.”
“I don’t know those.”
Edwin put his hand on the gunwale, looked out at the water, and was silent for a moment. “Is it so bright and lush that the colors seem distorted?”
“I’m not sure that’s what I was looking for onshore.” Uncle Martin grinned at me.
“I’d like to travel like you did,” Edwin said. “Bring an endless sheet of canvas and hundreds of brushes to capture everything I see.”
“Well. You can go anywhere if you’ve got enough fuel or wind. That’s the secret of boats. The world opens up to you. Though to be honest, it can be as much a curse as a gift.”
“How so?” Edwin asked.
“You see the whole world, but you do it alone.”
That was the first time I really thought of how in the middle of the sea there is no break, no leaving. Prior to this, boats always meant the roar of props pushing water. All the science and industry behind each rivet that composed a vessel felt like a poem to people in motion, to wild souls pushing offshore.
Uncle Martin spread his legs shoulder-distance apart and began another set of deep-knee bends. Edwin jumped in and tried to keep up but lost his balance on the pitching deck. I sat down and watched the water. For as much as I loved this boat, my uncle, and the sea, I knew I’d be more comfortable working in my father’s lab when I grew up, where I was a door away from my family.
“What was your favorite place?” Edwin asked.
“I liked South America. Argentina, Brazil, and Dutch Guiana. There are Dutch that settled there. Some of the women have Dutch and native blood and are so exotic it’s impossible not to fall right in love with them. Those were hard places to leave. But I’m a North Sea man. This place calls to me. Besides, I need cold water to keep my heart primed.”
I walked into the holds. On the table sat a pile of small tools, a microphone, and a disassembled green radio housing I hadn’t seen before. I picked the radio up but dropped the microphone.
“Don’t touch that.” Uncle Martin’s voice boomed down the stairwell.
I put the microphone back and lay down in my bunk as we traveled farther north. When the engines slowed, I went back to the wheelhouse. Off the port stern a small vessel headed our way. Uncle Martin lifted his binoculars and studied it.
“Coming fast,” he said.
Edwin and I went to the window as Uncle Martin slowed the Lighthouse Lady down even more. When he looked again, he put the binoculars down and started down the stairwell. “A patrol boat.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“The spine of the bow is riding high out of the water.”
I heard him belowdecks shuffling around with the disassembled radio. Something fell on the floor, and he swore. A hatch opened and slammed shut. He climbed back up the stairs.
“Edwin. Pull back on the throttle. Bring us to idle til they catch up.”
Edwin sprung to the helm and eased back the throttle. The engine noise settled to a slow thrumming below deck.
“They’re coming for us.”
“Why?”