Joe Speedboat

by Tommy Wieringa

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she asked at last.

  I gulped back the thick slime that had collected in my mouth during the dash for the village and raised my head.

  ‘UH-UH-ZZZZJOOOOO,’ I brayed.

  ‘Joe?’ she asked. ‘You want to talk to Joe?’

  ‘UH-YAAEEAAAH.’

  I sounded like Chewbacca, that hairball from Star Wars. India went into the house, leaving the door open behind her. It was as though they were smelting ore in there, so hot and bright it was inside. The house glowed like the electric coil heater in our bathroom. ‘Close the door!’ someone shouted, probably the one who paid the electric bills.

  ‘Joe! There’s someone here for you!’ India shouted.

  Her parents had named her ‘India’ because that was where she was conceived, Joe told me once. Her middle name was Lakshmi. That was a goddess the Hindus said brought happiness and wisdom. I didn’t know anything about Hindus, only about samurais and a couple of things along those lines. Joe’s parents got married in India, he said, because they had a spiritual bond with that country. During the wedding ceremony they’d both had screaming dysentery. As a cloud of lotus blossoms descended on them, the diarrhoea was running down their legs. During the sitar concert for the bride and groom Regina Ratzinger had stayed in the toilet, emptying her bowels and weeping.

  I heard Joe come thundering down the steps. Then he was standing before me, looking incredibly cheerful.

  ‘Frankie, what’s up?’

  I looked up at him in silence.

  ‘OK, what’s going on, and how are you going to let me know?’

  I pointed my arm wildly toward the dyke and gestured for him to come with me.

  Lassie the Wonder Dog.

  ‘Just let me get my shoes,’ Joe said.

  Joe pushed me. His hands seemed to be bursting with energy. It was the hour when everything turns blue, metallic blue, when all the colour drains from things and leaves them blue and hard and dark before they slowly sink into blackness.

  ‘Is it far from here?’ Joe asked.

  I pointed ahead. Joe started talking about the wonders of modern physics, a subject he was wild about in those days. He had a gift for monologue, Joe did.

  Suddenly, when we were about halfway there, he stopped and said, ‘What’s this?’ He tapped his finger against the protective tube where I kept my telescope. It was a gift from Ma; she had realized early on that looking at things could help me shove aside depressing thoughts about my handicaps. The telescope hung at the side of my cart and was part of my expanding armoury. Joe unscrewed the cap and the telescope slid into his hand.

  ‘Wow,’ he said, raising the spyglass to his left eye.

  I knew he could easily see the far side of the river and houses beyond the dyke there. It was a jewel of a telescope, a Kowa 823 with a 20–60 zoom and a 32x wide-angle lens.

  ‘So that’s what you do, huh? You keep an eye on us,’ he said as he lowered it. ‘But what nobody knows is what’s really going on inside your head.’

  He aimed the telescope at me like a pointer. My face flushed in embarrassment; the looker had been seen – I, who had thought I was invisible because no one paid attention to me for more than thirty seconds, had not escaped his gaze. Gratitude welled up in my throat – I was being seen, seen by the only person in the world who I cared to be seen by . . .

  ‘Hey, it’s OK, man.’

  Could I help it? I was touched.

  I gestured that we had to get going, for all I knew Sam might have fallen out of the tree while we were standing there. But when we got to the scour-hole he was nowhere in sight. I searched the ground beneath the trees in a panic, but he wasn’t lying there, groaning with his back broken or his leg bent double. Calm seemed to have returned to the jackdaw community. Maybe Sam had made it down on his own and walked home across the fields. And now I still didn’t have my jackdaw.

  Joe just stood there beside me, with no idea what was going on. I tugged on his sleeve and he bent over to me.

  ‘What are we supposed to do now?’

  Using my good hand, I did my best to imitate the flapping of wings – it could just as easily have been taken for the clawing of an excavator or a hungry Pacman – and pointed to the trees. Joe looked at the birds flying back and forth, and at the sky drawing to a close behind them, then said, ‘Am I right in thinking that you want a little crow?’

  I grinned like a chimp.

  ‘And you want me to get one out of a nest for you, is that what we’re doing here?’

  He shook his head in bemusement, but then slid down the side of the scour-hole with no further ado, climbed into a tree as nimbly as a ninja and was back in no time. In his hand was a huddled fledgling. The little bird had nervous, flashing eyes and a flat, broad beak. Pin-feathers stuck out here and there from its blue and reddish skin, between them there was a kind of greasy down. It was the ugliest thing I’d seen in a while.

  ‘Is this what you’re after?’ Joe asked in disbelief.

  He laid the little creature on my lap and I carefully cupped my hand around it.

  ‘Be careful with that bone cruncher of yours.’

  The jackdaw was warm and a little sticky; despite its tininess it felt like one huge pounding heart, throbbing away in the palm of my hand.

  ‘I guess so,’ Joe said with a shrug. ‘I guess everyone needs something to pet.’

  Grabbing the handles of the cart, he wheeled me around in the direction of Lomark. I shielded the little jackdaw carefully with my hand. He was to become my Eyes in the Sky and would go by the name of Wednesday, for the day I found him. A gentle rain started falling. I was very happy.

  When I turned fifteen I let my parents know that I wanted to move into the garden house at the back of our yard. I could already do some things for myself by then, and heating up a can of hot dogs wouldn’t present much of a problem. Ma was against it; Pa insulated the place and installed a gas fire, a little kitchen and a toilet. Above the door he nailed a horseshoe for good luck. After that my parents became my neighbours across the way, I showered at their place and sometimes watched TV there. Wednesday occupied a cage at the side of the house, and it was his custom during the day to ride around on my shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. He had already learned to fly, he would sometimes be gone for half an hour at a time, but he always came back when I whistled.

  It was there in that little house of mine that I started writing everything down. And I do mean everything. Some people find it hard to believe that I make an almost literal reproduction of this life on paper. To look at my diaries is to see time – here is what 365 days look like, this is ten times 365 days, or fifteen, or twenty. It’s almost too big to see over, it’s a mountain growing backwards into the past. And it’s all in there – at least, if it happened when I was around or if someone told me about it. If you came by today, for example, I’d write that down. Something along the lines of: So-and-so came by, around that time and on this day. And if there was something about you that struck me, if you had weird ears or a pretty nose, I’d write that down too, and what you came here to do and how you did it. But other things as well, about how the autumn rain, for example, rinses the blond from our hair, letting the dark winter hair appear beneath, and about the river that runs through our lives the way the bloodstream runs through our bodies.

  When I write I often think about the great samurai Miyamoto Musashi, who said that the samurai walks a twofold path: the way of the sword and that of the brush – the pen, in other words. The Way of the Sword is a little tough for me, so all that leaves me is the pen. I got that from The Book of Five Rings, Go Rin No Sho, which I found in the library and read to a tatter. I never brought it back.

  Musashi is Kensei, the Sword Saint, who never lost a single fight in his life. His full name was Shinmen Musashi No Kami Fujiwara No Genshin, just plain Musashi to his friends. He was born in Japan in 1584 and slew his first opponent at the age of thirteen. Many fights followed, and he never lost a one of
them. He was a legend in his own time, but said that he only began to grasp the tenets of strategy around the age of fifty. The Book of Five Rings is about how to fight like him, but it’s also full of good advice, even if you’re not much of a swordsman.

  With the force of strategy I practiced many arts and skills – all of them without a teacher. In writing this book I did not make use of the teachings of Buddha or of Confucius, nor did I consult the old chronicles of war or books of martial arts. I took my brush in hand to explain the true spirit of this Ichi School, as reflected in the Way of Heaven and Kwannon. It is now the middle of the night, on the tenth day of the tenth month: the hour of the tiger.

  A few weeks after Musashi had committed his lessons to paper, he died.

  Particularly useful to me has been the Strategic View, which teaches you to see things better. Musashi writes: ‘Your view must be both broad and open. This is the twofold view that is called “Perceiving and Seeing”. Perceiving is strong, seeing is weak. In Strategy, it is important to see things that are far away as though they were near, and to look at the things that are near from a distance.’

  Isn’t that something!?

  I started on my diaries as a sort of retirement fund. I figured: if I write down exactly what happens, people will come to me later and ask, ‘Frankie, what happened on 27 October in the year such-and-such? Would you look if you can find anything about me on that day?’ And because I’d always kept track of everything and filed it away neatly, I’d be able to fetch the book they needed and find it right away. Here, 27 October, a couple of years ago, a howling southwest storm that caused a lot of damage. Trees were felled, car alarms were blaring all over the place. With spaniel-like fidelity, the club treasurer went out to rechalk the lines on the football field and was almost lifted off the ground. A white cloud came blowing from the chalk cart and mussed the lines. I admired the treasurer’s dogged determination. One hour later, all outdoor sporting events all over the country were cancelled.

  The hard wind turned the people out on the street into children, all wild and excited, with glistening eyes and not a worry in the world. That’s what struck me most, that they didn’t seem to worry about a thing, even when tiles came whipping off the roofs and their cars were damaged by flying branches. That day the ferry stuck to its moorings. The river writhed and tossed up wild, gray waves.

  On 28 October, the storm was over. Then came the chainsaws.

  And after I showed you that particular entry, I would take my notepad and write: Cash please.

  But people don’t care about things like that. They’re not interested in what really happened. They’d rather stick to their own fairytales and nightmares, and there’s no demand for the stories of Frank the Arm. They’ll remain on the shelf until the day someone comes along to write the history of Lomark and recognizes them as a treasure trove that sheds a little light on the years behind us. Only then will my work be judged at its true value. Until then it’s just a pile of old news at the back of a shed.

  My diaries are lined up in bookcases against the back wall. I write every day. Historians and archaeologists dig things up from the depths of the past; I go around picking up the same things in the present. You could call what I do ‘horizontal history’. Historians look for things that are long past, that’s why they have to dig so deep: I call that ‘vertical history’. The comparison came to me one day during geography class, when we were talking about strip mining and underground mining. With strip mining, you don’t have to dig; the coal is close to the surface, all you really have to do is scrape it off the earth. But with underground mining you really have to go to great depths, which is why they dig tunnels into the earth.

  It seemed like a useful metaphor to me.

  To a certain extent, I make the historian’s work unnecessary. Should they ever find my diaries, they’ll take from them whatever they need, embellish on it a little and call it their own. Fancy-talking pickpockets is all they are, really, just like novelists. But what do I care as long as someday people know how it really went, all the things about Joe? The things I know, not the stuff Christof and his buddies try to claim. That’s not the truth: that’s lies and folklore.

  International events rarely affect us directly here in Lomark. Sometimes, for example when the price of oil goes up, we know something’s going on in the Middle East, and when a layer of red dust covers the cars after a rain it means there’s probably been a storm in the Sahara; otherwise, most things in the world pass us right by. But when Lomark gets a new dentist, that pretty much has to be a direct result of global upheaval. In fact, we owe his arrival directly to the speech given by South Africa’s President Frederik Willem de Klerk on 2 February, 1990. That was the day De Klerk lifted the ban on the African National Congress. He also announced the release of Nelson Mandela, the leader and symbol of the struggle against apartheid. ‘He’s a man with a vision as wide as God’s eye,’ Mandela’s supporters say, and they put him on a par with the Great Soul of India.

  In 1990 Mandela walked out the prison gates, and a few hours later he was giving his first speech in twenty-seven years. An amusing detail is that he forgot his reading glasses in his cell, and had to make do with a pair he borrowed from his wife. Three years later Mandela and De Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 1994 Mandela succeeded De Klerk as president of South Africa.

  The country’s turnaround brought huge social tensions, and rivalry for both power and resources. Julius Jakob Eilander, dentist, and his wife Kathleen Swarth-Eilander were fourth-generation Afrikaners. They watched as their neighbours raised the walls around their villas and installed alarm systems so sensitive that a falling leaf or a rustling lizard made the sirens scream. The Eilanders didn’t wait to see the country transformed. They packed and left for Europe, back to ‘die ou Holland’ their ancestors had left behind in the nineteenth century.

  In January of 1993 they arrived at Schiphol Airport. After a few weeks with distant relatives and a few months in a holiday cottage amid pine trees and mobile homes, Julius Eilander took over the practice of Lomark’s only dentist, a man who had been rigging our mouths with fillings, crowns and bridges for as long as anyone could remember.

  Eilander’s office is on the first floor of the building people here call the ‘the White House’, but which the plaque on the façade calls ‘Quatres Bras’. And Julius and Kathleen have a daughter, Picolien Jane: P.J. for short. After Joe and India, she’s the third exotic import at our school.

  We can’t believe our eyes. She wears a crown of boisterous blond curls that fall dazzlingly to her shoulders. All I can think of are oceans and foam, my diaries are full of her. Her skin is pale, her face broad, with slightly sloping blue eyes the likes of which I’ve never seen. Between classes the girls throng around her, running their hands over the corkscrew curls that bounce back like elastic when you tug at them. The girls all want to be P.J.’s friend. The way she talks gives everyone a thrill. Afrikaans, so close yet still so mysterious, makes you swing back and forth between hilarity and the chill that lovely language brings.

  She comes, we are told, from Durban. A name that will become as magical as Nineveh or Isfahan. The sky over Durban is crisp, the salt on your skin tastes like liquorice. I think about P.J. walking through Durban; in my diary, the cockatoo cries and the monkey fiddles with his nuts. The sky there is definitely not like our own; P.J.’s eyes reflect horizons beyond ours, and secrets that truly signify something, not the fainthearted ruses we bore ourselves with. Real secrets, ones that have more to do with light than with the darkness in which we brood on festering sins with no hope of absolution, because the priest is deaf and can’t hear our whispered confessions. P.J. was born of a fusion of light, her skin is as pale as potato feelers in the cellar, she seems transparent, but her hair is all flaming wheat . . .

  There is a clear boom in presentations on South Africa.

  She says, ‘Wat kyk jullie so vir my?’ and that just has to be something special, for otherwise why wo
uld it make us all melt?

  While our parents sit flinching in pain and fear beneath her father’s lamp, as he wrenches, pounds and drills away in their mouths, we sit breathless in the light of P.J.’s countenance. Come on, say something else, make us shiver, don’t hold out on us.

  It was in those days that Joe first had his hair buzzed. He sat on an old engine block in the garage behind his house while Christof ran the clippers in swathes across his scalp. The thick hair floated to the ground, leaving only a shadow of itself with pale scars shining through. Now, with those slightly slanted eyes of his, he looked completely like a nomadic horseman of the steppes, an Uighur or a Hun: Joe the Hun on his tireless Mongol pony, a slab of raw meat tucked under the saddle. People sometimes asked him whether a Negro had ever played an active role in his family, or an Asian perhaps, for Joe’s features were a confusing convergence of specific racial traits. Joe was all things to all men, but what I saw most of all in that strange face of his was a horseman of the steppes.

  The duo Joe & Christof was expanded to include Engel Eleveld, my endearing piss mate. It started the day Joe and Engel went fishing together in a scour-hole. Joe caught a pike; there are lots of them in those pools. Engel said his father had told him that you could see Our Lord’s suffering in the head of the pike. The fish’s skull contains bones in the shape of a hammer, nails and a cross. They tore open the skull but couldn’t find anything like that. Joe and Engel were friends ever after.