Joe Speedboat

by Tommy Wieringa

  I sat in my cart in the dark by the back wall, because it amused me not only to look at the mice, but also at the people doing the same thing. They were so intent on the sparkling light source in the darkness that they usually didn’t see me. It was the vantage point I liked most: looking without being seen. Creeping into their minds and trying like hell to figure out what was going on in there.

  From the sniggering you could tell that mice were doing it, otherwise it was mostly women complaining about ‘that smell, it’s like ammonia’, and children growing ecstatic at the pileup of hundreds of filthy animals.

  The black curtain opened and some of the twilight leaked in, I saw the sheen of P.J.’s hair. Joe was behind her.

  ‘Oh, that smell!’ P.J. said.

  The curtain fell heavily into place behind them, and P.J. approached Mousetown with the enthusiasm of a child.

  ‘Oh, look, what a darling! The one with that crippled leg.’

  She stuck her arm over the moat and tried to pet some of the mice. Her finger scared the daylights out of dozens of little animals.

  IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN

  TO TOUCH MOUSETOWN!!!!!!!

  was written on at least six pieces of cardboard.

  ‘Picolien Jane!’ Joe said in mock rebuke.

  I breathed as quietly as I could, the longer they were in here the more painful it would be to have them spot me. My heart was pounding. People I knew seemed very strange whenever I eavesdropped on them. I drifted far away from them; paradoxically enough it wasn’t the intimacy but the alienation that grew.

  P.J. wouldn’t stop teasing the mice. She leaned far over the moat and was busy trying to cut off one particular mouse from the rest. She succeeded in manoeuvring him toward the drawbridge, then blocked the road into town with her right hand, her fingers spread slightly like the pickets in a fence. All the animal could do was cross the bridge to the island in the moat.

  ‘Come on, Robinson, there you go.’

  In a panic he ran across the bridge onto the island; P.J. raised the drawbridge and isolated him from the rest.

  ‘That’s kind of mean,’ Joe said.

  ‘Nooo, Robinson’s always been kind of a loner.’

  Joe laughed a little reluctantly and followed her to the curtain at the other end of the room, where the EXIT sign spread its soft green glow.

  ‘Bye, Robinson,’ P.J. said. ‘Be a good boy now!’

  They went out through the curtain, P.J. laughing at something Joe said, and I was alone again. I took a few deep breaths and looked at the castaway mouse, who was now on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He sniffed around at his new surroundings, and I noticed then that mice have lovely beady little eyes.

  Although it was early spring and the heating season was almost over, I jacked up my daily production of briquettes. Working helped ward off bad thoughts. ‘You’d think they were eating those things for breakfast,’ Pa said each time he loaded a new batch onto the trailer.

  We could be outside now without freezing to the ground or being washed away by rain; the greenery in its pots shot up high. Each day the rushes in the ditch grew a few centimetres as well. The silhouettes of trees, hard in winter, were coming into light-green bud and the chestnuts were full of pale candles. Sometimes a happy feeling started swirling around inside you that had nothing to do with good news or anything that had happened. ‘It’s in the air,’ that’s what they always said, and because I have no better explanation I’ll leave it at that.

  I was in the garden, waiting for the newspapers to spin-dry.

  It was eleven o’clock, Ma had already called out, ‘Coffee, Frankie?’, when Joe suddenly appeared at the bike gate.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘on this glorious Day of Labour.’

  It was indeed 1 May, and Joe had a bee in his bonnet: I’d known him long enough to see that. Hands in his pockets, he took a look around the junk store that I had secretly started thinking of as Briquetterie F. Hermans & Son, the son being the result of a glorious union between a certain Ms Eilander and yours truly.

  ‘Yup, today’s a lucky day,’ Joe said.

  He took the aluminium ladder from its hook at the back of the house and asked for a claw hammer. Then he began prying at the horseshoe above my door. Ma came to the kitchen window, waving and pointing to ask me what he was up to. I shrugged. The door opened.

  ‘Good morning, Joe! What are you doing?’

  From his perch halfway up the ladder, he looked at her over his shoulder.

  ‘Mrs Hermans, good morning. I’m turning the horseshoe around. It brings bad luck if you hang it upside down. It’s sort of asking for trouble, if you know what I mean.’

  With a couple of blows that made the windows rattle in their frames he hammered the horseshoe back in place, with the points up. Wednesday began cawing and jumping around in his cage. I’d been neglecting him for the last few months, and I promised myself to do something about that.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Ma yelled back. ‘Has that poor boy been living all these years . . . ?’

  I hissed at her to make her shut up. She stood in the doorway wringing her hands, our Marie Hermans, laden with guilt and motherly love.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Joe said as he hung the ladder back in place. ‘Today’s a lucky day anyway, Mrs Hermans.’

  He pulled out a pack of Marlboros. Since he’d started at Bethlehem he smoked cigarettes from a pack; it was too much trouble to roll them while he was working.

  ‘Smoke?’

  Oh yes, something was definitely up. He had that Half-a-league-half-a-league-half-a-league-onward look in his eye that held a promise, a Change of Gear.

  I waited. For a while we sat across from each other like that in the crystal clarity of the first May morning, blowing clouds of smoke into air so fresh you felt like licking it up. The neighbours had the blankets hanging out the windows. Joe looked at the briquettes drying on their racks.

  ‘How many of these things have you made, anyway?’ he asked suddenly. ‘A thousand? Two thousand?’

  I nodded. A thousand, two thousand, how should I know?

  ‘And how many are you planning to make?’ Joe asked. ‘Another thousand?’

  I held up five fingers.

  ‘Five thousand! You’re kidding me! Jesus Christ, Frankie, are you going to keep squeezing newspapers for the rest of your life?’

  I nodded solemnly. Pressing newspapers into fuel was my mission. I couldn’t imagine anything better. Joe pushed his cigarette butt into the ground with his thumb. It left a little planting hole.

  ‘You know, I don’t believe it for a minute. What I wanted to say, Frankie, is that I’ve had plenty of time to think in the last few months up on that bulldozer, and I’m going to tell you why this is our lucky day. I think your arm means something. A lot more than you even realize. And I’ve figured out how we can put that special arm to use to obtain the two things for which all humans are condemned to strive: money and prestige. Because you, Frank Hermans, are an arm wrestler.’

  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 o
n 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.