Joe Speedboat (4 page)

‘A little fresh air will do it wonders, you'll see,' says Joe.

‘Were you the one who made those other bombs too?' asks Quincy Hansen, the turdhead who's in my class now all over again because he's flunked twice. I'd tell my secrets to a snake before I'd talk to Quincy Hansen.

‘Hey, it wasn't me,' Joe says.

‘Yes it was!' shouts Heleen van Paridon.

She's kind of aggressive, if you ask me.

‘No it wasn't,' says Christof, with an air of sanctimony.

Damn right, never admit a thing. What follows is a kind of
quibble, with which Joe becomes bored pretty quickly. He gets up and walks away.

‘Well then who was it? Huh?' Heleen shouts at his back. ‘Frankie?'

Joe turns around and looks at me, then at Heleen.

‘Frankie's got more up his sleeve than you might think,' he says.

Then he's gone, Christof right behind. They all look at me. I blow spit bubbles, they laugh. Go on, laugh, laughter is good for the soul.

I don't really take part in any of it. How could I? What I do do is make sure I keep moving all the time, on the roll and on the prowl: the one-armed bandit with his bionic vision. Nothing escapes him, his eyes are peeled. He devours the world the way an anaconda bolts down a piglet. If you can't join 'em, eat 'em; how's that grab you? Over hill and dale, come rain or shine, foaming at the mouth as he goes. Standing sentry in his war wagon, wearing his poncho when the weather's mean, a sou'wester when the storm wind tugs at your shutters, or a Hawaiian shirt in the burning sun. Fear not. The Eyes have it.

I see Joe and Christof heading for the river and crawl along after them like a snail. A grinding sound comes from the link where my hand-lever imparts energy to the front wheel. It's not like I'm tagging along after them, it's not like that. This is something more active. My limits are the limits of the paved, so I guess I should be thankful for the activities of Bethlehem Asphalt. Joe puts his tackle box on the back of the bike and Christof hops up onto the crossbar. They hang out on the shore down there all the time.

Today the thistles are going to fluff, farmers worry their hay and the gulls are having a wingding. Summer has turned juicy ripe. I can choose between two routes, to the left past the sandpit and through the cornfields to the river, or to the right
along the Lange Nek and through the poplars to the ferry. I take a gamble and go left, along the bumpy road that passes the Hole of Bethlehem. That pit is where the factory takes all its sand. No one knows how deep it is, but the water there stays cold as ice even in the hottest of summers, if that tells you anything.

Back of the Hole is where it all happens, that's where they come from the village at dusk on their mopeds, to kiss and stuff. You see the evidence lying all around: empty bags of weed, butt-ends, conked-out lighters, condoms.

All this is underwater in winter, which is why the road is full of holes. In spring, when the water's gone, they fill the holes with rubble and ground bricks, but that never really makes it smooth.

Flocks of sparrows fly up from the corn as I pass by, groaning from the sharp pains in my arm and shoulder; you could compare my method of locomotion to a one-armed man pushing home a dead horse. I'm not whingeing or anything, that's just the way it is. Dirk just won't lube my cart, no matter how often Ma reminds him. He'd rather go off with his sub-zero friends so they can act out their dirty little fantasies. Torturing things and stuff. He's just no good. They already put him in a home once after he tied Roelie Tabak to a tree and stuck twigs in her. When he came back it had only got worse, but then on the sly. He's a sneak, never let him out of your sight.

The sun burns on the back of my neck. All around the sandpit are signs saying
HAZARDOUS TERRAIN – DANGER OF COLLAPSING SLOPES
. Perched up on one of those poles is a hangman crow, a nasty monster with a croak like the hinges on an old barn door. Slopes collapsing is exactly what happened one fall night two years ago, when the road to the ferry landing just disappeared. Gone, like that. Seems the Bethlehem Asphalt sand extractors
had extracted a little too long in one place, and the hole filled itself up with the sand around it. That's what usually happens when you dig a deep hole like that, the sand around it kind of starts to roll, looking for the deepest spot. They call it ‘sloughing'. But the Hole of Bethlehem is so deep and hollow that there wasn't enough sand left for it to fill itself with, and everything in the surroundings started rolling, because it had to come from somewhere. A whole stretch of the riverside and the Lange Nek chunked into the water, with a whole bunch of trees in its wake. When you come by in the morning and find the whole road gone like that, you do a double-take. Gas and electrical mains lying around, lampposts fallen over. They say it's safe now, they've stopped sucking away so much sand in one place. If you're prepared to take their word for it.

The corn is high on both sides of the gravel path, the ears almost bursting from their husks. The poles around here are all askew; whatever you set right in summer goes crooked again in winter. The path's a metre and a half wide, corn shucks lisp
Pull, Frankie, pull!
and I yank till I almost drop. My arm's going to wear out too fast this way, and once it's worn out, where will that leave me? The corn waves its fingers to cheer me on. Frankie parting the waters to escape his enemies – the sea of green closes behind him . . .
Go, Frankie, go!
Cornfingers urge him on –
You're almost there!

The slope of the summer dyke is broad and gradual. If Joe and Christof aren't on the other side, I'll have come all this way for nothing. I make it to the top; my arm's about ready to fall off. Down at the bottom is a little beach, its sand yellow as the fungus nail on Pa's big toe. Swans are floating in the calm of a breakwater. Out at the end of it are two bent backs with long antennae, sounding the water for signals: Joe and Christof.

I haven't been down this way for a long time, along the water, the dyke and the fields shiny with fat grass. The spots they've just mowed are pale as a newly shaved scalp. Hundreds of lapwings are sitting on the next jetty. Joe's got a bite, he pulls a glimmering fish from the water. Christof hops around him nervously.

In fact, I'm the one who should be Joe's friend. Christof isn't good for him, he's too careful. He holds Joe back, that's how I see it. He acts as a drag on Joe's velocity, and that's not right; Joe should be allowed to soup himself up till he flies. My accident happened too soon, it disturbed the natural order of things. It should be me sitting there beside him, not Christof.

The wind at my back wafts me a little coolness, I was almost sopping in my chair. Now Christof sees me, because he suddenly stops, nudges Joe and points. They figured they were all alone, and now there's something about them like they've been caught in the act. The lapwings all take off at once, skimming the river with sloppy wingbeats. I've heard people talk about how the British bombers used to fly above the river, heading to Germany to pound it all flat. There was ack-ack here along the shore, but nothing could put a dent in that total darkening of the sun.

A lot happened around here back then. Like the stuff with the Elevelds. They used to be one of the biggest families in Lomark. September 1944 was the first time their number came up. They were all in a kind of air-raid shelter under the walnuts at the landing when an Allied juggernaut, intended for the ackack on the far side, landed right on top of them. One bomb, twenty-two Elevelds killed at a go. The rest of the family went to Lomark, figuring they'd be safe there. One week later the bombs came raining down again, this time on Lomark, and the first direct hit bull's-eyed their roof. The children came up the
steps carrying their own intestines: ‘Daddy, look!' They died on the spot. Then there were only three Elevelds left. They moved to the city, where, in the final month of the war, they got caught in a German mortar attack. Two of them were killed. By the end of the war the only one still around was Hendrik Eleveld, whom they called ‘Henk the Hat'. Henk the Hat's son, Willem, is Engel's father.

It's a weird story, if you ask me. Fate vs the Elevelds: 27–0. Anyway, when you see Engel you'd do well to think about that invisible queue behind him that's commemorated each year at the war memorial.

Joe and Christof are coming up the dyke toward me. I pull hard on the parking brake.

‘He's following us around,' I hear Christof say.

‘Hey, Frankie,' Joe says once they're in front of me. ‘You come out here all by yourself?'

‘Look,' Christof says, ‘like a horse with all that foam on his lips.'

He laughs. Joe comes closer and takes my arm. With his left hand, because the right one is still a mess from that bomb.

‘What's up, Frankie?'

Then his eyes open wide.

‘Jesus Christ, feel this, would you?'

Christof feels my arm.

‘He got concrete in there or something?' he asks.

Christof raises his eyebrows, which makes him look like an owl. The way they go on about it seems a little exaggerated to me; it's not
that
special. I'm turning a little red.

‘He's blushing,' Christof says.

‘You mind if I take a look?' Joe asks.

He rolls my sleeve up over my bicep and whistles quietly.

‘What a monster.'

Christof gives him a strange look, he doesn't really understand things like that. In fact, until now I hadn't really noticed how big that arm was getting.

‘Especially with that body of his alongside it,' Christof says.

He's right; in the last few months all my growing seems to have gone into that one arm, it looks like the arm of a full-grown man with bumps and veins all over it. A humongous arm, if I may say so myself. Joe starts laughing and calls out like a ringmaster: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, in-tro-ducing . . . Frank the Ar-m!'

Frank the Arm! Yeah! Christof shrugs, the demise of his own new name a bit too fresh in his memory. Sunlight glistens off the frame of his glasses and he squints a little. Who does he remind me of? I can't put my finger on it. Someone from a history book maybe, but I've been reading so many of them lately that I can't think which one. I'll have to look it up.

‘Anyway, I think he's following us around,' Christof says.

As if I'm not free to go wherever I like.

‘He's free to go wherever he likes,' Joe says.

‘You following us, Frankie?' Christof asks.

I shake my head hard.

‘See?' Joe says. ‘No problem. See you around, Frankie.'

They return to their fishing rods and don't look back. They cast out and then sit there again motionless on the basalt. I'm dying to know what they're talking about. Or are they just sitting there, looking out over the water and saying nothing? Those are the kinds of things I want to know. It's lonely up here.

An animal helps against loneliness. Not all animals, though. Rabbits, for example, are worthless, they're no good to anyone, they're too dopey. Dogs really irritate me too. What I wanted was a jackdaw, one of those little crows with a silvery neck and milky-blue eyes. Jackdaws are nice, and the noises they make, more than any crow or a rook, sound like human speech. Especially in the evening, when a whole colony of them would land in the chestnuts along Bleiburg and babble to each other, until it grew dark and all you heard was the occasional ka! when one of them fell off its branch. Besides, jackdaws are fairly tidy birds. You see them beside a puddle in the pasture sometimes, bending over to let the water run down their backs and wings for as long as it takes to get clean.

I knew where a couple of them were. Each spring they nested in a group of half-dead trees down by the scour-hole, a pond left behind after the dyke there collapsed a long time ago. In the olden days a broken dyke used to be a huge disaster, with people drowning by bunches. The water would come roaring in and scour out a deep hole at the spot where the dyke had collapsed. When the dyke was rebuilt it had to cut around a hole like that, which is why some of the old ones have such sharp bends in them.

The jackdaws liked to build their nests in the cracks and hollows of the trees around the pond, and late one Wednesday afternoon I got Sam to understand that I wanted him to pull a fledgling out of the nest for me.

‘OK,' Sam said.

He walked behind me with one hand on the cart, talking non-stop about Sam-like idiocies. Sometimes I think he's got brain damage.

I looked out over the washlands. The river water had retreated behind the summer dykes. The trees out this way had dark rings around the trunk that showed how high the water had come that winter. Circling above them I could see little black dots. I was kind of excited. Another reason I wanted a jackdaw is because they're faithful; a jackdaw couple stays together forever, and when you've had a jackdaw from the time it was little it becomes attached to you in the same way. But you have to catch them young.

‘You really expect me to go down in there?' Sam said once we were at the trees.

He muttered about for a bit, but finally clambered down the side of the dyke on hands and knees. Close to a tree with low branches he stopped and looked up, until he saw a jackdaw entering its nest. Then he started climbing. The birds flew nervously around the branches, in the perfect knowledge that this spelled bad news. I felt cold; winter was still floating between the warmer layers of spring air. It was starting to grow dark and you had to look hard to pick out objects in the distance. The trees around the scour-hole looked poisoned, as good as dead; the bark on some of them had started slipping off, leaving them cold and naked. Sam had reached a branch about a third of the way up and was still climbing clumsily. When they passed out the smarts and agility, he definitely wasn't standing
at the front of the queue. In fact, he has only one real trait, which is that he's quite kind . . . that is, if kindness is really a trait and not just the absence of that brand of cruelty that keeps people like Dirk up and running.