Joe Speedboat

by Tommy Wieringa

  You’re right, all of you.

  Who would lie down in the grass at mowing time?

  The front wheel of the tractor crushed my sternum and broke my back, but the blades missed me. The man up on top saw me, but too late. Some call that luck, others misfortune. Musashi says: the Way of the Samurai is the unflinching acceptance of death.

  As to what happened afterwards I can only guess. Although I was clearly on my way to the end, sometimes I think I waited – for some reason to come back, a single reason to grasp at a branch along the river of death and start in on the road home, inch by inch, back to where I came from.

  Maybe Joe was that reason.

  That was a long time ago, and I can’t really get to it anymore, I was too far gone for clear-cut memories. Sometimes it’s so far away that it seems as though I made it all up – the tractor, the dream of the hero, the return to that brighter place.

  The memory of my dreamtime.

  The body floats just below the surface. There is no pain, no one is missed. Close to the surface, where the light breaks through the water, it is clearer, you can taste the sun.

  ‘Look,’ someone says, ‘he’s dreaming.’

  The hero’s dream. A hero will come, the sound of his heavy footsteps precedes him, those who are outside go in and close the doors; heroes never bring only good fortune. It’s cold, we smell woodsmoke. It tumbles from the chimneys and mixes with the mist that has settled over the fields and roads.

  The newcomer whistles a quiet song. He will bring good cheer and sow confusion. He bears new times like a sword. He will shatter our illusions and break through our terse backwardness. His feat will bring beauty, but we will chase him away; this is no time for heroes.

  There are hands that lift you up, there are hands that put you down. The body approaches the surface, it has grown lighter, a little lighter all the time. That light, oh hell, it breaks through my forehead like a thermal lance. I am born for the second time. Blind and helpless, I wash ashore. Around my bed they’re talking about Joe.

  I’ve learned to shuffle around on thin, crooked legs, always holding onto something with my good arm to keep from falling. I wait, in the little house at the back of the garden, for my parents to die. I live in a rectangle. There is a twin electric hotplate, a microwave oven, a table and a toilet. The bed is behind the table, against the wall. Ma’s the one who put the plants on the windowsill. You don’t have to do much with them, they stay green all the time anyway. At the back I look out on the old cemetery, at the front I see my parents’ kitchen and dining room. At meals they sit with the lamp on above the table; every day The Potato Eaters is called to mind at least once. I eat at my own table, I don’t like being watched. For me, eating consists largely of waiting: waiting for the spasms to go away and then quickly taking a bite. Sometimes that works, other times not, you can’t always feel the tremors coming.

  Every morning Ma waves to me from the kitchen across the way. Then she brings Pa his coffee. I don’t have to be there to hear what that sounds like. After breakfast she comes over and helps me dress. I get coffee and a sandwich. When I go out I roll over the tile walkway in the garden to the bike gate, which leads to the street. At lunchtime Ma brings me a warm meal, at night I heat up a pop-top can of hot dogs and eat them with lots of mustard.

  Sam built the shelves for my diaries, I like the looks of them. I see order. Artificial order imposed on everything that’s happened.

  Every word I write, I write between spasms. During an attack the biro sometimes goes flying through the air.

  The inside walls of my house are covered in light-brown plastic panelling with a wood pattern. That’s easy to clean; in the winter the garden house is humid and a speckled mould grows on the walls like barnacles on a ship’s hull.

  Dirk has already moved out of the house, he prefers to live alone with his covert filth. Sammie’s only home at the weekends, the rest of the time he stays at a boarding school for young people with learning disabilities. The junkyard is doing well, business there always runs in direct proportion to the general prosperity. Dirk works there full time and someday he’ll take over, although Pa doesn’t seem anywhere near stopping.

  ‘Good morning, dearie,’ Ma says when she comes in in the morning. ‘How’s about a nice cup of coffee?’

  To that end she brings with her a faded plastic vacuum flask from which she pours strong Java. I drink my coffee with a straw, just like all other hot beverages that can cause second-degree burns when you knock them over in your own lap. My favourite straws are the flexi ones you can bend to a forty-five-degree angle. Ma makes my bed, then sits down at the table.

  ‘Oh, that’s nice. It was time to take a load off.’

  That’s just the way she talks, her words are pure comfort. And that’s how she keeps the peace around here. Ma’s kind of small, but still she’s a mountain of a woman. Her flanks are covered with a floral-patterned dress. She tells me things she’s heard from other women. Usually about disasters. She likes disasters the way she likes cookies with her coffee. I listen to news of accidents, illnesses and bankruptcies. By talking to each other all the time about other people’s misfortunes, women pass fear along. Fear with a capital F. And although they feel compassion for the luckless bastard in question, they’re thrilled that it happened a few doors down; the volume of suffering in the world is divided into unequal portions, and the bigger the neighbours’ portion the smaller yours will be. Sometimes there’s information in there that I’ll be able to use someday for my History of Lomark and Its Citizens (don’t laugh). Looking at Ma as she talks, the melancholy love I feel seizes me right by the throat.

  We’re condemned to each other; me, her damaged fruit and very personal catastrophe, and she, who, like old horses, carries the world’s suffering on her back.

  From this side of the table at least she seems to be getting smaller. I’ll be around long enough to see her grow completely translucent and then disappear without protest from the face of the Earth – good mother Marie Hermans, née Maria Gezina Putman. Always there to lend a helping hand, a good woman and a loving mother. God rest her soul.

  At the registrar’s office in the town hall I once tried to find out about the background of the Putman family, but got no further than Lambertus Stephanus Putman, the first Putman to live in Lomark. He came here in 1774, betrothed to a local girl. They didn’t marry in the village itself, but just across the border; in those days after the Reformation the Catholic Church was banned around here. Lambert drowned in the great dyke-break of 1781, but with five children he had scattered enough seed to become the patriarch of a new Lomark family.

  Not a family that made much of an impression, though. Only a few things have been preserved in the ‘Old Judiciary Archive of the Right Seigniory of Lomark’, such as cadastral drawings, deeds, procès-verbals and baptism certificates. Whenever a Putman had to sign something it almost always says, ‘This cross being the signature of So-and-so Putman, having declared the inability to write.’

  Even the crosses weren’t very good.

  They worked at the brickyard or as fishermen or farmers with a few fruit trees in the orchard, and that was pretty much it.

  I think about them often. The air I breathe contains molecules they must have inhaled too, I look at the same river they did. It’s been partly channelized now and there were no breakwaters back then, but it’s still the same water with the same cycle of rest and flood. I sometimes wonder whether all the Jakobs, Dirks, Hanneses, Jans and Henriks felt the same way I do, whether they also hoped so badly that it would all turn out better someday.

  Sometimes at night they stand around my bed, the cousins from way-back, speaking quietly to each other in a language I don’t understand. They look at me with big eyes, like African children seeing a missionary for the first time. I look back helplessly, they’re so dingy, so innocent, I don’t know what they want from me; they just stand there and laugh like the ringing of a bell, as though I’m the weirdest thing they
’ve ever seen.

  I was scared of them at first, I thought they came from the old cemetery behind my shed-house, but that’s nonsense. They don’t do any harm, they just stand there and are amazed at me the way I’m amazed at them.

  Maybe I should note here that I’m not the first person in our family to see such things. Grandma Geer, my mother’s mother, used to live with us. She was a widow and had the room that became Dirk’s after she died. I must have been about eight when, at breakfast one morning, Grandma Geer laid her knife on her plate and looked around the circle of faces.

  ‘He’s a-come,’ she said in her thick Lomark dialect. ‘Our Thé’s a-come. He sayed: “It’d be all over, girlie, I’m comin’ ta fetch ye.”’

  And she went back to eating her breakfast.

  ‘Our Thé’ was her late husband and my late grandfather, Theodorus Christoforus Putman, who had come to sit on her bed that night and promised to fetch her soon.

  One week later Grandma Geer was dead; she died in her sleep, seventy-one years old but seemingly fit as a fiddle.

  The Hermanses are another story altogether. Pa’s family lived here already in the Middle Ages – maybe before that, they may even have arrived with the troops of Claudius Drusus. But when the Vikings showed up they were sitting in the church along with all the rest, praying to be saved while ‘the cock that showed its pluck’ did their dirty work for them. In the archives I found Hendricus Hermanus Hermans, better known as ‘Hend’, who was beaten to death with a ‘pry of iron’ by the bailiff of Lomark in the summer of 1745. Afterwards, his head was ‘removed from his bodye with a sharpe ax’ and impaled on an iron stake ‘in recompense for that committed and as fereful Exampel to all’.

  This Hend was found guilty by the magistrate and aldermen of Lomark of the murder of Manus Bax, a fisherman. Hend tortured Manus for three hours to make him confess to the theft of some fishing nets, then beat his brains out with an iron crowbar.

  Hend Hermans was married to Annetje Dierikx, who bore a son in the winter after Hend’s execution. That son, Hannes Hermans, appears in court records describing the theft of fire-wood and illegal fishing. Hannes sired four children before his first wife died. The second also bore four children, two of whom died in the same flood of 1781 that killed the above-mentioned Lambert Putman. The children who drowned were girls, and after that no girls were born to the Hermans family. Not even stillborn. Only boys. Pa and his brother both have three sons. Like I said: a bloodline of gnarls, and not of soft things. And somehow they all find wives as well, to keep the whole thing going in perpetuity.

  Although the Putmans and the Hermanses must have known each other, it took almost two hundred years before a Hermans married a Putman: Pa and Ma. We are the product of that union, descendants of Lambert but especially of Hend, from whom Dirk gets his rage and his thirst for torture. Dirk knows that that’s what we’re remembered for. That only makes him even more furious.

  Sammie is sort of the exception, maybe he’s more of a Putman, they’re not like that.

  And although I had promised myself never to become a Hermans, I know now that I’m just the same. Hend is in us. You can’t get him out just like that.

  The November before our final exams a pile of junk appeared in the garden, undoubtedly brought there from the wrecking yard. The focal point was a washing machine, around which Pa had piled planks. On top of it all was a kind of cake tin with a lever attached. I didn’t want to know what it was supposed to represent, once assembled, because I sensed it would not be to my advantage. A few days later Pa threw a tarpaulin over the whole thing. Now it was a work of art awaiting its unveiling. I kept acting as though I hadn’t seen it. Some things go away if you ignore them, while others come bearing down on you.

  Ma didn’t say anything about it either, so I knew it was bad news. She usually told me everything; her silence now told me that she felt badly about it.

  At supper I could see Pa and Ma discussing subjects that I could tell had to do with me; sometimes, when the spark of disagreement jumped the gap, I would see Pa shove his chair back abruptly and raise his voice as he pointed an angry finger toward the garden. I could see that Ma was defending me, but after a while the subject became snowed under – literally as well, for the carload that fell around Christmas covered the garden and the thing along with it. In the morning Ma would defrost a little circle on the kitchen window and wave to me through it.

  I went outside less than usual; exams were coming up in May and I planned to pass them without a hitch and graduate with honours. I wanted to deliver one proof of intelligence. I would not go on to university, would not learn a trade, would remain outside the arena of competition, and so I wanted to finish off one thing so that people would say, ‘Did you know that the Hermans kid, the poor sod, passed his exams with an 80 percent average!?’

  After the fight in the Sun Café, the summer before, a certain distance had grown between me and Joe. It wasn’t that he condemned me for it, it was more like I felt bad about it. I had failed to live up to an unspoken but important agreement about the kind of people we were going to be. It had to do with purity, with making sure no one could claim that we were part of a defective world or that we helped increase the volume of idiocy in it. We would form a disdainful fifth column, that was the agreement. But before you knew it, you had blood on your hands.

  I had, that is. Not Joe.

  That he continued being an example to us, that was a comfort. Sometimes I wondered whether he really saw things as clearly as it seemed; at such moments I thought he was simply indifferent to most things and just sort of laughed at them. But most of the time I was sure that Joe was good at holding people and situations up to the light. Ever since I’d met him I had tried to look at the world through his eyes and weigh it in the balance. The brawl had ruined things, but I really wanted to do better and get my purity back. No matter how Joe laughed at Catholics and their methods, I would do penance and cleanse my soul of the filth I had inherited from Hend. I would go through the fire of purification, come out clean at the other end, and while I was at it I’d cut out the cognac and cola at the weekend, when there was live music at Waanders’ roadhouse out along the highway.

  But oh, it was a great temptation.

  When I’d had a few I stopped caring what people thought, as long as they kept raising that glass to my lips. Until my blood alcohol had risen far enough for me to hold my own glass, that is; alcohol relaxes the muscles and makes the spasms less intense. I was the only person in the crowd who got a steady hand from drinking. I drank therapeutically, as it were.

  It would be hard to stay away from Waanders’. People acted different when they were in there. They dared to say more and didn’t look past me so skittishly. Others had no problem with feeding me like a lamb raised on the bottle. Sometimes I felt positively cheerful. Elvis or Dolly Parton was playing on the jukebox, outside night had fallen and smoke rose from the copper ashtrays. We were passengers aboard the drunkards’ ship, we had slipped our moorings and were drifting to where no one could ever find us. But when the whole thing was over there was always someone who pushed you out the door, cart and all, because they wanted to sweep the floor and turn off the lights. After all, what would become of the world if everyone stayed drunk all the time? I would put up a struggle, swat at the hands that pushed me, yank on the brakes, but they just pushed the whole thing out the door anyway.

  ‘Hey, Frankie, take it easy, man!’

  When they laughed, it was in annoyance at the struggle against what was always an untimely end to all things good and easy.

  It was a bad winter for Mahfouz. He’d taken on the tint of unvarnished garden furniture. ‘It’s my blood,’ he complained. ‘It’s not good.’

  He was wearing three sweaters and a ski jacket and had a wool cap pulled down far over his ears. All you could see was his moustache and a pair of rheumy eyes.

  He wasn’t the only one who’d been feeling poorly. Christof’s grandmother had died, even th
ough she must have expected to see the daffodils come up one last time. But March arrived too late for her, and she remained behind in February. February is a real bastard.

  The day they put old Louise Maandag in the ground the heating in the church was turned up high; the east wind cut through your clothes like a scythe. The people actually kept their coats on inside to save up a little heat for the procession to the grave. The church was filled to the rafters. A dead Maandag always receives a lot of attention, because so many people are dependent on them in one way or another. Nieuwenhuis gave it everything he had, he sprinkled his water and swayed his incense with the holiest of holies he had in him.

  I was parked in the aisle, Joe was sitting beside me at the inside end of the pew. Beside him was Engel, his legs crossed in godless elegance. Two rows up ahead I saw the blond curls belonging to P.J., who was sitting ridiculously close to Joop Koeksnijder. Old Look-at-how-cool-I-am Koeksnijder, finished school two years ago and the proud owner of a Volkswagen Golf. Outside you could hear a truck backing up; my eyes traced the contours of P.J.’s shoulders. She had the broad, straight shoulders of a swimmer.

  Sometimes the sight of her would suddenly enrage me. I’d never had that with Harriët Galma or Ineke de Boer, who had been the very first in our class to bear fruit and already went bowed beneath their weight. Sometimes I stared at P.J. for the longest time, just to see whether there was something not quite right there, something ugly or weird to make it hurt less, and sometimes I drove my cart along right behind her to see if she stank. But she didn’t stink. Then I would grow furious and feel like crushing something. But the angry flame always leapt to the inside.

  Up at the front of the church, Nieuwenhuis was blaring, ‘And when You call us to You, we bow to Your majesty!’

  Joe leaned over to me.

  ‘So you finally get around to being dead and you have to god-damn bow all over again!’