Joe Speedboat (3 page)

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 highway 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.

Gradually, the class gets used to having me around. I'm excused from oral exams, because every answer I try to give takes at least an hour and still no one can figure it out. All very tiresome.

Particularly tiresome is the fact that I still can't still piss on my own, and somehow it happens that Engel Eleveld comes to my rescue in that regard. Engel's a unique person. He's the kind of guy you don't notice for years, almost as though he's invisible, and then suddenly you
see
him and are hopelessly overtaken by a feeling of friendship.

It was Engel's own idea. I don't know how he found out about my specific need for assistance, but all assistance is welcome. We go to the loo together, he rolls down my pants and hangs my dick in the bedpan that I always carry in the side compartment of my cart. The first few times I feel like dying of mortification, not so much when he stuffs my hose into the reservoir, but when he rinses the urinal in the sink. Amazingly enough, no one gives Engel a hard time about being my piss partner, at least not that I hear about.

You may, of course, be wondering how that goes when it comes time to take a shit, whether Engel helps me do that too. No way! Shitting I do in the privacy of my own home. Ma helps me. I tolerate no one else behind my hole.

After the explosion the toilet door at school was hung back on its hinges and the janitor tells anyone who'll listen (no one, really, but he tells them anyway) that he's never seen anything like it. What I'd like to know is what Joe was actually planning to blow up. Or whom.

When Joe comes back – his hand bandaged, stitches in his
forehead – no one talks about it anymore. The whole thing seems to be dead and buried. Really weird, as though everyone would rather forget that Joe ever did something dumb. It's not something he wears well. For myself, it makes me realize how much I'd like to see him give the world a good going over; if there's anyone who could do that, it's him.

Joe's a little quiet at first, and Christof watches over him. When Joe removes the bandages, in class with everyone there, it's Christof who keeps the curious at a slight distance.

‘Joe,' he says worriedly, ‘isn't that kind of dangerous?'

‘Danger is where you don't expect it,' mumbles Joe, and goes on unwinding the bandage.

Then he comes over to me and holds his hand in front of my face.

‘See this, Frankie? This is what stupidity looks like.'

My stomach flips. His right hand is a kind of meat platter in yellow, green and pink, loosely bound together with something like three hundred stitches. His little finger and ring finger are gone completely.

‘Jeeesus, Joe!' Engel Eleveld says in awe.

Heleen van Paridon gags, but somehow succeeds in keeping her lunch down.