Joe Speedboat (2 page)

‘They dumped you here, didn't they?' the boy says, his gaze fixed on Lomark.

The top of the Ferris wheel is sticking out above the houses. He nods.

‘I've heard about you. You're a Hermans, from the wrecking yard. They say Mother Mary worked a blessing on you. It doesn't look like it to me, though, if you'll excuse my saying so. I mean, if this is a blessing, what's punishment look like? Right?'

He nods, like he's in full agreement with himself.

‘My name's Joe Speedboat,' he says. ‘I just moved here. We live on Achterom, you know where that is?'

Broad hands, stubby fingers. Broad feet, too, which he stands on like a samurai. That's something I happen to know about, samurai. About
seppuku
, too, the Way of Dying to preserve your honour, when you stick a short sword in your guts and pull it up, from bottom left to top right. You could tell how brave someone was from the length of the cut. But I'm digressing.

I can see what it is that pisses Dirk off. It radiates off him: he's completely unafraid. Joe Speedboat, planter of bombs, ruiner of slumbers – with your cut-off jeans and your nutty dried-out leather sandals. Where have you been so long?

‘Wait a minute, I need to get something,' he says.

He leaves the viewfinder and I hear him going up the stairs somewhere in the house, then footsteps above my head. Is that where he has his workshop? For his bombs and things? Speedboat's Control Room? When he comes back down he's carrying a washing-machine timer and two Black Cat batteries. He sits down on the windowsill, frowns in concentration, and hooks up the poles of the batteries. Then he attaches a little metal rod to the clock and sets the timer to zero. Suddenly he looks up.

‘We had problems while we were moving,' he says earnestly. ‘An accident. That's when my father died.'

Then he goes back to what he was doing.

The first time Lomark heard of Joe and his family was when the Scania crashed through the ancestral gabled home of the Maandag family on Brugstraat. All the way up to its ass in the front room, where son Christof was sitting in front of the tube playing a video game. He never flinched. When he finally looked up the first thing he saw was a headlight poking like an angry eye through the whirl of dust and debris. Then it gradually dawned on him that there was a truck in his house. The only sound the whole time was the
toing-toing
of the video ball bouncing across the screen.

Hanging down over the grille of the Scania was the torso of a man, his arms dangling limply like a scarecrow fallen from heaven. The man's lower body was pinned inside the cab and he was dead, clear enough. But there was still movement inside: the door on the passenger side of the cab swung open slowly and the boy Christof saw climbing down was roughly his age, twelve or thirteen. He was wearing a gold lamé shirt, sandals and a pair of knickerbockers. Your parents would have to be slightly bonkers to dress you like that, but he just peered around the room matter-of-factly, the mortar swirling down onto his head and shoulders.

‘Hello,' Christof said, the joystick still in his hand.

The other boy shook his head, as though something peculiar had occurred to him.

‘Who are you?' was all Christof asked him then.

‘My name's Joe,' the boy said. ‘Joe Speedboat.'

*

And so he came like a meteorite into our village, with its river that floods its banks in winter, its permanent web along which gossip scuttles, and its rooster, the rooster in our coat of arms, the same rooster that chased a band of Vikings from Lomark's gates a thousand years ago or so while our ancestors were in the church praying, for Christ's sake. ‘It was the cock that showed its pluck,' we say around here. Something that keeps something else at arm's length, that's our symbol. But Joe came roaring in with such force that nothing could have stopped him.

The accident had left him a partial orphan; the man hanging out the windshield of the truck was his father. His mother was lying unconscious in the cab, his little sister India was staring at the soles of her father's shoes. Christof and Joe looked at each other like creatures from different galaxies – Joe stranded in his spaceship, Christof holding out his hand to make the historic first contact. Here was something that would free him from the leaden immobility of this village, where the only thing that showed any pluck was the cock, that hateful animal you ran into everywhere: on the doors of the fire engines, above the entrance to the town hall and in bronze on the market square. The rooster that was pulled around on a float during Carnival parades, that crowed at you from decorative roofing tiles beside dozens of front doors and whose incarnation at the local
patisserie
was the ‘Cocky' (a crumbly dog biscuit strewn with granola flakes). On sideboards, mantelpieces and windowsills you found glass roosters, ceramic roosters and stained-glass roosters; oil-painted roosters hung on the walls. When it comes to that cock, our creativity knows no bounds.

Joe looked around in amazement at this house into which Fate (read: faulty steersmanship aggravated by violating the speed limit in a residential zone) had tossed him. In the house where he'd grown up, the one they had traded in for the house
in Lomark, there were no oil-painted portraits staring at you gravely from the walls, as though you'd stolen something. And of course you'd always stolen something, which meant those faces would always keep looking like that so that you didn't have to be afraid, just give them a friendly nod and say, ‘Come, come, boys, a little smile wouldn't hurt.'

The chandelier was real nice too, he thought, as was the antique refreshment trolley bearing Egon Maandag's crystal decanters filled with whiskeys of provenances from Loch Lomond to Talisker. At Joe's place all they had were squat bottles of elderberry wine, deep purple and homemade with a water seal that bubbled and belched like a gastric patient. The wine was always either not quite ripe or just a tad past its prime. ‘But the flavour is really quite special, isn't it, love?' (his mother speaking to his father, never the other way around). After which they would guzzle manfully, only to flush the rotgut down the toilet the very next day; the hangovers it produced resembled nothing so much as the near-death experiences of Russian rubbing-alcohol drinkers.

Later Joe would find out that he had landed in the salon of the Maandag clan, the most important family in Lomark, owners of the asphalt plant by the river. Egon Maandag employed twenty-five men at his factory, not to mention a housemaid and at times an au pair from yet another land beyond the dykes.

Joe just stood and stared around.

Later Christof said he did that in order not to have to see the dead man hanging from the windshield. When he finally took his eyes off Christof and his surroundings, he turned and looked at his father. He reached out his hand and laid it on the back of the man's blood-smeared head. He stroked his hair gently and said something Christof couldn't make out. His
shoulders shook, then he walked over to the hole the truck had knocked in the front wall. Climbing over the rubble he stepped outside, into sunlight. He walked down Brugstraat to the winter dyke, climbed over it and made for the river. Heifers were gambolling in the washlands; wilted grass left behind by winter floods hung from the barbed wire like flaxen Viking beards. Joe reached the summer dyke and the ferryboat jetty behind. Once on board he climbed up onto the railing, his legs dangling over the water, and didn't even look up when Piet Honing came out of the pilothouse to collect his fare.

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.