Joe Speedboat Read online

  That Joe and Christof would become friends was as inevitable as fish on Friday. It started with that gleam in Christof’s eye when he looked so greedily at the powder-covered boy who emerged from the moving van. Sunlight poured into the salon through the shattered wall behind Joe, filling the room with the hum of a spring day. Christof had never seen anything like it. The image of the boy against that flood of light filled him with a longing to cast off his old life.

  But Christof wasn’t like that, and never would be. He was too skittish for that, and too much a doubter. In his longing to be just like the boy from the truck there was also the kind of envy that makes your canines ache, the vampirish urge to suck the life right out of someone.

  The accident with the moving van formed them. It reinforced the stoic in Joe, and brought out something oldish in Christof, something worrisome. If Joe talked about building an airplane, Christof would say, ‘Shouldn’t you fix your bike first?’ If the monthly air-raid sirens went off atop the bank at the very moment Joe had finished knocking together equipment that allowed him to hijack the Sunday broadcast of the evangelical community – ‘Radio God’, as the locals call it – and replace it with speed metal played backwards, that for Christof was a signal that building jamming stations was a bad idea. For Joe it meant that it was twelve o’clock, time for lunch.

  Joe celebrated our first meeting with a doozy of a bomb, that’s how I see it. The very same evening, after we had met at Hoving’s farm: tout Lomark, straight up in bed. It’s a gift. Dogs bark, lights go on, people crowd together in the street. Joe’s name is on everyone’s lips. In bed I lie grinning from ear to ear.

  A couple of men go out for a look-see. He’s blown up an electrical substation. Now the fair has no juice, and a whole lot of houses don’t either.

  The moon licks at the bars of my bed. I exercise my arm.

  I can move again. It’s unbelievable, but I can go straight ahead and I can turn corners with my cart. I move it by pulling on that lever and then pushing it away. A model PTM: Progress Through Musclepower. Otherwise I’m as spastic as it gets, things have a way of flying through the air when I try to grab them, but in the space between spasms I can sometimes get things done. I have to practice a lot, though. For the last month I’ve been going to school again; there’s nothing wrong with my head, even though I still can’t talk. I have to pick up where I left off, though, which means I’m in the same class with Joe and Christof.

  The hardest part is the brakes, especially when I’m rolling down off the dyke into the washlands past the Lange Nek: that goes way too fast. Up on the dyke, the things-aren’t-what-they-used-to-be men watch me go. They’re almost always on that bench, their bicycles leaning on kickstands beside them. They see everything, those woody old farmers, most of whom were around during World War II. I don’t look back at them. I don’t like them.

  The firemen are filling their tank trucks at Bethlehem Deep, the flooded sandpit down by the asphalt plant. The men wear dark overalls and white T-shirts with big arms sticking out of them. I can hear them laughing at their firefighters’ jokes all the way up here, because water carries a long way. One of the firemen sees me and waves. The simp.

  Above my head the poplars are hissing, in the pastures to the right of the Lange Nek a group of about ten pygmy ponies have lost their way in the high grass. They drink dark-green water from the bathtub over by the barbed wire. They probably belong to Dirty Rinus. He’s been fined before for animal neglect.

  Then you’ve got Bethlehem Asphalt, Egon Maandag’s plant. Bulldozers taking bites out of the stony hills in the yard. At night you can see the factory from way off, like an orange bubble of air; when there’s serious roadworks going on, the place hums around the clock. They say Bethlehem Asphalt is the economic cork keeping Lomark afloat, and every family in the village gives it their firstborn son.

  I’m sopping with sweat and my arm smarts, but I’m almost at the river now. I can see the pair of big willows on the other side. Piet Honing always says, ‘The ferryboat is a continuation of the road by other means,’ which he seems to think is funny. Now that I can’t walk anymore, he lets me cross for free. Piet once said he did that because I’ve seen both death and life, but he didn’t go on to explain. After that first time he’s never asked Joe for a penny either.

  Piet pulls up to the far shore, the apron scrapes across the concrete landing. Out on the river a party boat is cruising with the current, you can hear the music and the tinkle of glasses. Can a person be jealous of a riverboat for the way it rolls? Two foamy waves travel beside it at the bow, looking like they were painted on the hull. Upstream is Germany, where hot-air balloons are floating above the hills. Hot-air balloons are OK, everyone seems to agree on that. Did you know, for instance, that those weird things that float in and out of view when you stare at something are actually proteins on the surface of your eyeballs?

  Honing lowers the gate, raises the apron and pulls back on the throttle. He moves away from the shore a little and then the whole shebang comes swinging this way again. The tattered Total flags flutter in the breeze.

  Beyond the hills and hot-air balloons, night is falling. The party boat has disappeared around the bend, headed God only knows where. Ships like that always seem to float downstream, while barges go the other way, to Germany, dieseling hard against the current.

  Piet ties up and comes ashore: ‘So, little buddy . . .’ He grabs my cart by the handles and pushes me on board. I don’t like people pushing me, but oh well. He takes me over to the alcove where he stores the road salt and the brooms.

  The evening is rolling up the day like a newspaper. I smell oil and water. We thud our way to the far side, where a car is flashing its lights. Over there darkness is falling from the willows on the cows below. Cows are silly, all they do is stand around, dreaming about nothing. No, give me horses; at least when they stand around they look like they’re thinking about something, thinking real hard about some horsey problem, while cows look the way the sky looks at us: big and black and empty.

  The way it swings and pounds, this ferry scares the daylights out of some folks. Sometimes the water comes washing over the deck, but there’s nothing to worry about. The thing’s been in operation since 1928, it’s just old. And it was actually built for quiet waterways, not for the river with all its strange moods. Pa says, ‘That thing’s a public menace. It should have gone through the cutter at Hermans & Sons a long time ago.’ As though he gives a shit about public safety, not if he can’t earn anything off it. But Piet keeps his ship running, cost what it may, even if it’s little more than a pilothouse and a sheet-metal plate just big enough for six cars.

  If you ask Piet, he’ll tell you that his cable ferry was motorized when inland vessels started getting faster and faster; it became too dangerous to cross by power of the current alone. Because that’s what a cable ferry actually does. It’s attached by cables to three old buoys upstream, what they call the bochtakers. The last buoy is nailed to the riverbed with a huge anchor. At the end of the sling is the ferryboat. The ferry sweeps across the water like the drive chain of a clock, the ones with metal pinecones at the bottom. By winching in one cable and letting the other one slide, the current brings the boat to the far shore; these days, though, Piet needs the engine to keep the river monsters from rolling right over him. Sometimes the ships run up against the cables between the buoys, and Piet has some damage. Then he’s closed for business for the day while he makes repairs.

  Piet comes out of the pilothouse. ‘And a fine evening it is, buddy.’

  I look up at him and a big blob of spit gushes from my mouth. I’ve got litres of that stuff in me. I could raise goldfish in it. A barge, loaded with mountains of sand, is bearing down on us.

  ‘The old landing could use a little fixing up,’ Piet sighs. ‘Like back in the old days, with a nice little waiting room where you could order coffee and cake. When it was cold they all used to huddle around the stove till I got there. But the bridge and that hi
ghway put an end to that. Just look at it now. Wait, though, till those roads get too packed, then we’ll show ’em who’s got the fastest connection around here.’

  Lately he seems a little sad. The barge cuts past us. Its deck hatches are wide open, piles of sand poke up out of the hold like crests on a dragon’s back. A range of hills sailing up to Germany. No wonder this country’s so flat, the way we export all our hills.

  There’s one cloud up in the sky, in the shape of a foot. Is anybody there, I wonder. Anybody there? You know what I mean?

  Joe never told anyone his real name, not even Christof, who’d become his best friend by then. We knew his last name was really Ratzinger, but his first name was a secret. Normally, when they give you a name, you don’t know any different. It’s your name and you don’t go whining about it. In fact, you’ve got nothing to say about it: you are your name, your name is you, together the two of you are one; after you die, your name lives on for a while in a few people’s heads, then it fades away on your gravestone and that’s that. But that wasn’t enough for Joe. We’re talking about back before he lived in Lomark. With that real name of his, he knew, he could never become what he wanted to be. With a name like his you could never become something or someone else. For example, you might as well have some disease that kept you from leaving the house. It was a misunderstanding, he was born with the wrong name. So when he was about ten he decided to do something about that name, that name like a club foot. He was going to be called Speedboat. Where he came up with it I don’t know, but Speedboat fit him to a tee. He didn’t have a first name yet, but that didn’t worry him; now that he had a last name, the first one would come of its own accord.

  It didn’t take long. One day, as he was walking past a scaffolding, one of those ones with a long chute on it they use to dump rubble down into a container, Joe – who wasn’t called that at that moment – got some dust in his eyes and stopped to rub at them. On the scaffolding was a radio all covered in grit and paint splatters, and at that moment, from that radio, his name appeared. Happy as a child spotting its mother in a crowd, he heard his own first name for the first time: Joe. In the song ‘Hey Joe’ by Jimi Hendrix: ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand / Hey Joe, I said where you going with that gun in your hand / I’m going down to shoot my old lady / You know I caught her messing ‘round with another man.’

  Joe it was. Joe Speedboat. A name like that you could take with you into the world.

  His vocation Joe found in the little front yard of the house on Achterom. It was in the early spring after their first winter in Lomark. I was still in the hospital recovering. Joe was raking dead leaves onto a pile; fresh, cold light poured down over the rotten remains of the seasons. From beneath the leaves brownish-yellow grass appeared, and translucent snail shells. Then, from up toward Westerveld there came a sound – a sound of something ripping, something that hurt. It grew fast, in waves. The young poplar in the yard shivered nervously. Joe clutched the rake to his chest and waited, in the classic pose of parks department employees everywhere.

  Then he saw them: seven glistening Opel Mantas, black as the night, with exhaust pipes vomiting fire and smoke. At their wheels were boys with grim, inbred faces and hair on the palms of their hands. Cigarette smoke was sucked from rolled-down windows, left arms rested casually on the doors, and Joe looked on in amazement as the procession passed like slow thunder. He dropped the rake and lifted his hands to cover his ears. The mufflers gleamed like trumpets, the world seemed to shrivel in all-consuming noise as the boys punched the gas with clutches to the floor, just to let everyone know they were there, so that no one might doubt it, for if it doesn’t reverberate, it doesn’t exist.

  It was Joe’s first lesson in kinetics, in the beauty of motion, as driven by the internal combustion engine.

  The autocade left a bubble of silence in its wake, and in that silence Joe heard his mother’s voice at the open window: ‘Assholes!’

  Regina Ratzinger (anyone accidentally calling her ‘Mrs Speedboat’ was amiably but decidedly set aright) wore out her back each morning as housekeeper to the Family Tabak, and spent each afternoon knitting herself a case of bursitis in order to supply the whole village with woollen sweaters. Those sweaters were of excellent quality, a fact that ultimately turned against her; their indestructibility meant that, once the saturation point had been reached, she barely sold a one. The sharp spike in the success of her sweaters was also due in part to the finely detailed Lomark cocks she conjured up with fine thread on the breast of each one.

  Their house was full of baskets of wool, and that drew moths. At strategic spots, therefore, she had hung bait, sticky strips of cardboard laced with the aroma of mothly sex. Visitors would sometimes hear Regina Ratzinger shouting, ‘A moth! A moth!’, followed by a resounding smack, India’s cry of ‘Oh, that’s mean!’ and Joe’s chuckle.

  Not knowing Joe’s real name drove Christof crazy. One day he approached Regina Ratzinger.

  ‘Mrs Speed—Sorry, Mrs Ratzinger, what’s Joe’s real name?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to say, Christof.’

  ‘But why not? I won’t tell anyone . . .’

  ‘Because Joe doesn’t want me to. He believes that everyone should have one secret in life, however big or however little. Sorry, Stoffy, but I can’t help you.’

  Christof had been named after his grandfather, whose likeness appeared in one of the paintings in the house on Brugstraat; immortalized against a backdrop of classical ruins, he looked out on the parlour the truck had destroyed. At the moment Regina called him ‘Stoffy’, Christof decided he wanted to be called Johnny, Johnny Maandag. Which was a fine name, absolutely, as long as you didn’t know that his real name was Christof and that he had changed it in imitation of Joe Speedboat.

  The name never caught on. Joe was the only one who called him that, for a while, but no one else.

  During the summer holidays Christof was an almost permanent guest at Joe’s house, where a more permissive atmosphere prevailed. You would always see the two of them on the same bike, Christof standing on its baggage rack like an acrobat in a Korean circus act as they went to the Spar for a bottle of Dubro or to Snackbar Phoenix for a helping of chips. That, one day, was the way they happened to pass the ruined house on Brugstraat, still hidden behind a wall of scaffolding and black plastic sheeting. Later, after the house was rebuilt, Egon Maandag sold it, saying he had never had a good night’s sleep there since the accident. He had a villa built on a high stretch of ground outside Lomark, where his feet would remain dry by high water. That day, however, he emerged from behind the plastic at the front door and looked in astonishment at his son perched on the baggage carrier.

  ‘Hi!’ Christof said.

  ‘Hello, Christof,’ his father said, and those, I believe, were the only words they exchanged that summer.

  Joe and Christof ate a lot of chips. The girl behind the counter at Snackbar Phoenix had a cute face and a well-rounded physique.

  ‘What will it be today, gentlemen?’

  ‘One chips, extra large, with extra ketchup, mayo and onions. And two forks,’ Christof said. ‘By the way, do you have any idea why this place is called the Phoenix?’

  The girl shook her head.

  ‘It’s a mythical bird that rises from its own ashes,’ Christof said. ‘Kind of weird that you don’t know that.’

  ‘Oh, well, sorry,’ the girl said.

  She looked around interestedly, as though suddenly seeing something that hadn’t been there before.

  ‘Is this where it was last seen or something,’ she asked, ‘I mean, that they named it that?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Joe said earnestly, ‘it was on this very spot that it had its nest.’

  The chips fizzed in the boiling fat, at the window there droned a bluebottle that had seen better days. While the girl scooped the chips from the fat and shook them dry, Joe and Christof stared at the synchronized shaking of her glorious backside. It exerted an almost
magnetic influence. She sprinkled salt on the chips and scooped them around, and Joe and Christof firmly instilled in themselves the sight of her phenomenal hams.

  ‘One chips with ketchup, mayo and onions for Mr Christof,’ she said.

  ‘His name’s Johnny,’ Joe said. ‘Could you do a little more mayo on that?’

  After losing a year because of the accident, now I’m back in the third class with kids I barely know. And even though I’m the oldest, if you stood me up straight I’d also be the smallest.

  On the first day of school, Verhoeven, our Dutch teacher, asked us what we’d done during our summer vacation.

  ‘What about you, Joe?’ he said when half the class had had its turn. ‘What have you been up to for the last few weeks?’

  ‘Waiting, sir.’

  ‘Waiting for what?’

  ‘For school to begin, sir.’

  Finally I’m in a position to be around him all the time. But then, one morning, Joe asks Mr Beintema for permission to go to the bathroom. A little later, from somewhere in the building, comes a thundering explosion.

  ‘Joe,’ Christof murmurs.

  The jerk had been sitting on the toilet, putting together a bomb. Half his hand blown off, a trail of blood from the cubicle all the way outside, and the principal running after him. Like a wounded rat Joe tries to escape, but the principal catches up with him halfway across the yard and starts swearing like a dozen drunken tinkers. Joe isn’t really listening, though; he falls to the ground as though someone’s pulled the rug out from under him. An ambulance arrives, there’s a whole lot of fuss and we don’t see Joe again for a while. That bomb-gone-wrong put him back a bit.