Joe Speedboat (21 page)

Joe's joy beamed all the way into the garden next door.

‘Isn't that what friends are for, to see things in you that you never saw before?'

I frowned, took a newspaper from the pile and a pencil stub
and scribbled
What do you mean, arm w restler?
in the margin.

‘Arm wrestler, you know, two people sitting at the table with their arms in the middle and trying to push the other one down. You're a natural! They way I see it, you've been at training camp for about ten years now, with that cart of yours and squeezing those briquettes and stuff, and now it's time to put that to good use. You remember out in the hangar, when I asked you to bend those metal rods? When I was working in Germany I saw steel benders, these guys were real monsters, who couldn't do half what you did! You're pretty much unbeatable, Frankie, all we have to do is get started. There are competitions all over Europe. I'll be your manager: we split the take, and have fun doing it.'

He looked at my arm with something close to infatuation, as if I wasn't attached to it, making me feel a kind of confused jealousy toward my own limb. This was his plan: first I had to go on a balanced diet of protein shakes, carbohydrates and fats. At the same time I would start a daily training program in the techniques of arm wrestling, based on the information he'd looked up at the library on the Internet. He was going to be my coach. We would spend the whole summer studying and training, and our very first tournament would be in Liège in October. The main prize was about seven thousand smackers. Second place got five thousand, third place took three.

‘Fat city,' Joe said contentedly.

He'd already drawn up a tournament schedule that would take us all over Europe. Eastern Europeans in particular were crazy about arm wrestling. Two men, one table and then push until one of you lands on his ass.

‘But make no mistake about it,' my self-appointed coach and manager said, ‘there's more technique involved than you ever dreamed possible.'

The first six months of the season we'd spend warming up, a tournament here and there, finding out where I stood in the arm wrestling hierarchy. And because Joe was irrationally optimistic about it, in May of next year we would take part in the world championships in Poznan, Poland.

‘The only thing you lack is weight; weight is our Achilles' heel. Shoulder, chest and arm, that's what we've got going for us. Trapezium, biceps, triceps, pectoralis major and forearm, they all have to be in harmony, but then we're off like a shot. The way I see it . . .'

I held up my hand to stop him.

‘Right, now you.'

I picked up the pencil and wrote two letters at the edge of the newsprint:
NO
.

Joe pursed his lips, as though he'd stumbled upon an interesting chess problem.

‘No?'

I shook my head.

‘Why, I mean, think about it . . . Why no, why so fast?'

Don't feel like it.

And after a while, when Joe went on waving his hands wildly and giving me a bug-eyed explanation of the advantages of his plan, I got tired of listening to him.

Piss off.

Behold if you will what happens when someone comes by on a good day and offers to expand your world ten thousand times over: you panic. Joe offered me competition. I, the man-of-no-contest, who had always seen himself as unfit for the struggle, who had placed himself outside the arena as observer and commentator, was being asked to arm wrestle. They would look at me, judge me and boo or cheer. What Joe was offering was
nothing less than a place in the world, a freedom of movement I couldn't comprehend. It was horrible. So I said no. And I didn't just say no, I clammed up. Everything had to stay the way it was, because the way it was was good. And if it wasn't good, it would get better. Suddenly I found myself bitterly defending the value of a converted garden shed, a briquette installation and a few hundred square metres of room in which to move. Anyone who shook a finger at that risked having it chopped off.

I watched Joe walk out of the garden. He left in dumb amazement at my choosing the beaten track instead of the thrill of adventure. I was relieved and disappointed to see him give up so soon.

So I had become fused with my immobility. I explained that to myself as a kind of harmony with my surroundings and the people in it. You can't call that happiness, happiness burns brighter than that; it was more like the absence of revulsion and the longing for death.

A couple of days after Joe had shown up in the garden, Wednesday flew off. I let him out of his cage and for the first time he didn't come back. Ma said it was because it was springtime, that nature was like that, but I felt sort of heartbroken. Whenever I heard a jackdaw I thought it was Wednesday, but the cage remained empty.

Joe seemed to have abandoned his arm wrestling plans, or at least he'd stopped talking about them. Instead he occupied himself with buying a car, his first: a long, black bomb that had served for years as Griffioen's hearse. Christof's grandmother had ridden in it to her final resting place. It was a real Joe car, an Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser, all straight lines and an impressive quadrangular grille. It needed a little work but it had been kept up well and didn't have a lot of mileage. Joe put in a huge stereo installation, so you could hear the stamping bass long before he himself showed up.

‘It gives me the shivers,' Ma said. ‘It's like having Death pull up in front of your door. I knew everybody they ever took away
in that thing. Couldn't Griffioen have sold it somewhere else? For the sake of the next of kin?'

Joe unbolted the passenger seat so I could go out cruising with him; there was enough space there for me, cart and all. We drove back and forth along the dyke, tooled along the state highway and stopped in for soft ices at the roadhouse like a couple of old fogies. At least he did: I got beer with a straw, because we all know the joke about the spaz who tries to eat an ice-cream cone. We looked at the traffic and the reflection of the setting sun in the windows. In the little playground a father was waiting for his daughter at the bottom of the slide.

‘One more time! One more time!' the little girl shouted each time she got to the bottom, and she kept it up until the tears started.

Christof and Engel had been gone from Lomark for a year already, Joe had come back and found a steady job at Bethlehem. He seemed content with that. I mean, how was he supposed to have
become
something when he already was something: Joe, a three-dimensional, mint-condition product of his own imagination. I was thankful he'd come back.

In July they came trickling in, though, one by one. First Engel, then Christof, and finally P.J. too. The periods away from home had grown longer and longer, just as they had with Wednesday, until finally he never came back at all.

Engel had made it through his first year with ease; he was considered an exceptional talent and had received a grant to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the second semester of next year. Things like that, things that in anyone else's life would have resulted in a proud banging of the gong, he merely accepted with an impassivity that drove me mad with envy. I
saw the same kind of impressive stoicism in Joe. As far as that went, Christof had a chicken heart more like my own: we were always on the lookout, reading the omens and judging them fair or dangerous; we lived with nervous noses sniffing the wind, so to speak.

After Papa Africa disappeared, the meeting place at the ferry landing had gone out of style. During the last summer all of us were together, Joe's car became the nexus; in the mild early evening hours we drove out to Waanders' to drink (me) and exchange anecdotes about the year gone by (them). Christof had joined a fraternity, and he introduced us to a new world. Among the subspecies of frat-rat the laws of the barracks were adopted voluntarily, and the newcomer (‘fresher', Christof said) had to quickly learn a new jargon in order to survive. The malicious tyranny of the senior members resulted, according to him, in ‘friendships for life'. He was proud of having endured those humiliations. Christof didn't seem angry at his tormentors; instead, he seemed to long for the moment when he himself could administer such afflictions.

Engel looked at him in mild horror.

‘You mean they
stood
on your face?'

‘Well, they didn't really stand on it, it was more like putting your foot on it, for a little bit.'

At that, everyone fell silent.

‘But everyone does it,' was how Christof defended the customs of his brotherhood. ‘You just have to grit your teeth and bear it. After Christmas it gets a lot better. It was fun too, in some weird way, an ordeal you all go through together.'

He sighed.

‘It's hard to explain to someone who wasn't there.'

Perhaps, Joe suggested, that was the whole idea: to cultivate a conspiracy in which only the members knew what it took to
belong. Christof nodded gratefully. Whenever he got in a tight spot, Joe came to his rescue. For as long as I'd known him, Joe had always watched over Christof.

‘It's getting chilly,' Engel said.

That day he had on a beige suit and white shirt, the tips of its collar worn over his lapels. The world of the artist had done little to change him, although it was easier now to see the kind of man he would become; the kind you saw standing at the rudder of a yacht in magazine ads, with that brand of eternal boyishness from which greying temples and crow's feet from peering at the horizon could do nothing to detract.

He had sold his first work – a gigantic triptych, ink on paper, showing a horse hanging in a tree in a attitude so twisted it made your stomach turn – to a gallery in Brussels. When asked, Engel didn't mind explaining where the idea had come from: a little World War I museum close to Ypres, in West Flanders. In a stereoscope there he had seen photographs of horses blown into treetops by the force of an exploding mortar; he had never been able to shake the image.

Engel turned to Joe.

‘By the way, are you going to come by and pick up your stuff sometime?'

‘Is it in the way?'

‘No, as long as you pick it up before December. After that I'll be in Paris.'

‘I'll come by with Frankie sometime,' Joe said.

I saw Ella Booij clearing glasses from the terrace tables and caught her attention with a great wave of my arm.

‘More beer, Frankie?' she shrilled over the heads of two customers, a gray-haired couple so vital they might have come cycling out of a Geritol commercial.

When Ella brought the beer, she referred to Engel no less
than three times as ‘the young gentleman', which produced great hilarity. Ella couldn't keep her eyes off him.

‘God's gift to lonely ladies, you are,' Joe said to Engel once she'd left.

Summer broke out like an ulcer. Ma complained of swollen ankles and fingers that made her wedding ring pinch. I had a furious rash on my back and arse, as though I'd been rolling in a patch of nettles. Then P.J. came to Lomark. And what did Joe do, the jerk? One Saturday morning while I was pressing briquettes in the sun, bare-chested (after Ma had announced in her farmer's-almanac voice that sunlight was good against rashes), he brought her to my house.

Joe and P.J. came through the bike gate without me hearing them, and suddenly we were standing there face to face, all three of us speechless somehow. I looked for something to cover myself with, but my shirt was on the bed. Withering under P.J.'s gaze, I crippled my way through the briquette machinery and into the house. Joe came after me. I frantically tried to pull on my shirt, but the little sparrow claw was unwilling and the other arm was spasming out of control.

‘Don't act so pissed off,' Joe said. ‘How was I supposed to know you were walking around half naked? Here, let me . . .'

I slapped his hand away. It had to be on purpose: the only, the really one and only time I went outside uncovered and he had exposed me to
her
eyes. Outside, P.J. seized the handle of the press and pulled it down. She was less pale than usual, her skin was now the lightest shade of beige, her eyes an even more whopping turquoise. Later I heard that she'd been to a Greek island with Lover Boy Writer.

Joe had come by to ask me to go along to collect his things in Enschede. P.J. would be going too. We had to pick up Engel first,
at Ferry Island. He buttoned my shirt for me, murmuring, ‘Mean-tempered bastard' as he did. The black T-shirt he wore had
DEWALT
written on it in yellow letters.

‘Hello, Frankie,' P.J. said when I came outside. ‘Sorry if we gave you a fright.'

It was the first time she'd ever spoken directly to me. I saw Ma looking out the living-room window and waved to her. When she appeared at the kitchen door I made a drinking gesture. She said hello to Joe and introduced herself to P.J., ‘but I've seen you before, of course'. They were an unlikely contrast, this worldly girl and Ma, that rough monument of care and industry. Although they seemed to speak the same language, I was sure that if you sat them down for an hour at the kitchen table together an abrupt end would come to the vocabulary they both understood, they would reach the outer limits of the things both of them could imagine.

I repeated the drinking gesture.

‘Would you like some coffee, or tea? Or something else? Something cold? Both coffee? I'll just make a little then, it will be done in a jiffy, no, no problem at all. Cream, sugar? Both black? Well, that should be easy to remember.'

I felt like scratching, my back was itching badly, aggravated by Ma's blank inertia and the cross-examination that had to go before a plain old cup of coffee. P.J. asked me a jumble of questions about producing briquettes, the answers to which I wrote on my notepad without meeting her eye.

‘You have nice handwriting,' P.J. said as Ma brought the coffee.

‘He writes everything down,' Ma hastened to say. ‘You name it. He sits there writing all day long. Frankie, come on, show the young lady your books! His whole wall is covered in them.'