Joe Speedboat

by Tommy Wieringa

  His expression actually went all soft when he said things like that.

  ‘Everything’s different now,’ he said, ‘even though nothing much has really changed. Except the thing with P.J. I wake up with the feeling that something’s waiting for me, something good and important. Every day is a promise. And when I go to sleep that feeling’s still there. It’s a kind of perpetual motion, an uninterrupted flow of energy that doesn’t need any fuel. Except for a telephone call, sometimes, or a kiss.’

  I nodded, the bile rose in my throat. I was capable of hating him. I was vaguely shocked by the ease with which I could accept that idea. Somehow, though, the thought wasn’t unwelcome; it would be easier, after all, to hate the man who possessed what I wanted most in the world. Meanwhile, with masochistic pleasure, I let him tell his story. I always encouraged him to tell me more. Only never about sex, he never talked about that, maybe out of reverence, or maybe it was simply discretion.

  He had taken her to the Dolfinarium, in Harderwijk. The dolphin show in the big tank had been set against the background of a story with witches and fairies. The actors were laughably bad, the dregs of the profession. The whole thing revolved around a magic pearl, which the fairy queen consistently referred to as the ‘magical poil’. The dolphins themselves were completely irrelevant to the story; all the animals had to do was a little synchronized jumping out of the water, for which they were rewarded with a herring. At the end the fairies and the witches had sung a song of reconciliation. The dolphins jumped through a hoop. Joe and P.J. were beside themselves with laughter, the story of the ‘magical poil’ was to become one of their pet memories.

  The November sky was clear and cold, full of orange contrails that lit up like fireworks. Down here on the ground everything was in its naked form. Disorderly clouds of lapwings rose up above the washlands, slow explosions of thousands of specimens heading southwest before the freeze rolled in.

  Joe spent all his free time in Dirty Rinus’s barn, working on his bulldozer. Once, when I went down to visit him there, I saw the plane again for the first time in years. It stood against the back wall, damaged and dismantled. There, in such miserable condition, stood the object that once filled me with such mad hope – of there being a way out that had to do with the will and the ability to think big. And it no longer interested Joe at all. I felt a lump in my throat. I made my way between a stripped Citroën 2CV, an antique hay tedder and a few other machines from the early days of industrialized farming. Dirty Rinus never threw anything away. He was so frugal that he even locked the garbage can when he left the house. People in the village weren’t particularly fond of him, but he was still remembered for his pronouncement during the oil embargo in the Seventies: ‘Oil crisis? What oil crisis? I used to spend twenty-five at the pumps, and I still do!’

  The wings of the plane were leaning against the wall, with nasty rips in them. I reached out and tapped my index finger against the tail. The canvas was as taut as when Engel had first fastened it with tie-rips. It made a pleasant sound. This plane belonged in an aviation museum, it was a miracle that a couple of boys had actually built something airworthy, it should have been the showpiece in some private collection. The worst damage was up at the front; rods were sticking through the torn fuselage, you could see right through it. The propeller had been taken off and was lying on the floor, everything was covered in a layer of sticky dust.

  ‘Roofing tiles fell on it,’ Joe shouted from the front of the barn.

  I looked around, he was standing on the ladder of the bulldozer, from up there he could see me amid all the rubbish. I saw the hole in the barn’s roof, the sky above. Around the plane lay mossy, broken roofing tiles. It galled me that Joe no longer even looked at the thing, but that’s the way he was. He made something, tested its possibilities, then let it fall from his hands. Conservatism was foreign to him; he let time and roofing tiles do their work while he started in on a new chapter in his study of mobility. He didn’t think much about things that weren’t there; neither tomorrow nor yesterday were there, and so of little importance to him. I wasn’t like that. There were days when I bridled at the sense of standing with my back to the future: a river running back uphill into the mountains.

  Joe had always been obsessed with motion. Motion driven by the internal combustion engine. I remember a dark hotel room that smelled of old overcoats, somewhere in Germany or Austria I think, with Joe lying on the other bed and orating about his favourite subject. Every once in a while I could see his cigarette flare up.

  ‘Fear and overconfidence,’ he said, ‘those are the prime movers of history. First you have fear, which is all the thoughts and feelings that tell you something can’t be. There are lots of those. The problem is, they’re often true. But all you have to know is what’s needed, nothing more than that. Knowing too much leads to fear, and fear leads to stagnation. The drudges are the people who tell you that you can’t do something if you’re not trained to do it, but talent doesn’t pay any attention to that. Talent builds the engine, the drudge checks the oil: that’s how it works. What do you think, you think Anthony Fokker knew what he was doing? He didn’t even have a pilot’s license, only talent and a lot of luck. Overconfidence is every bit as important as talent: I can’t do it, but I’m going to do it anyway. You see for yourself whether it works or not. Some people get lucky, others don’t, that’s pretty much all you can say. There was no way we could build an airplane, we didn’t have the technology to do it. But I can do my arithmetic, and Engel can too. In fact, Engel is a giant at arithmetic. And that’s what you need if you’re going to build a plane. Together, the two of us did the strength calculations for the wings and fuselage. Calculating and weighing, weighing all the time. We fudged a little with the battery, it weighed something like thirteen kilos, so that was the last thing we put in, a little ways to the back because the plane was nose-heavy.’

  I heard a deep sigh in the dark.

  ‘I was more afraid of it not getting off the ground than I was of crashing.’

  His face was lit up by the flame he used to find the ashtray.

  ‘And one other thing, Frankie. Energy that isn’t put to use, that isn’t applied, reverts to heat. Heat is the lowest form of energy. Then comes kinetic energy, like in an engine, and then electricity or maybe nuclear energy. But heat is the lowest level. A person who’s sweating is converting motion into heat, the way a stove does with fuel. And heat is loss. Entropy, Frankie: the law of irreversible loss. That’s why the heated, high-entropic world is so simple, because it’s all about loss. Anyone who doesn’t know that doesn’t know what’s happening. People spend most of their lives looking for warmth. A little monkey that can choose between two artificial mothers – a steel one that provides food or a terrycloth one without food – will choose the terrycloth one. Warmth and affection: eternal babies is what we are. Fleaing each other. But too much warmth makes you dull, makes you drowsy. That’s the oppressive thing about so many marriages – and once things get to that point, the spirit screams bloody murder. So what do you do? You buy a car or build a boat, the way Papa Africa did, because motion is the basis of all life. The molecular speed of an object determines its temperature – and if you add the factor of speed to that . . . Jesus, like having a rocket up your ass! For a lot of men the car is the only escape they have left, the only release from the cloying warmth of all the promises they’ve made: their marriage, their mortgage, the indignities tossed at them at work. Driving fast and fucking on the sly. That’s why adultery is a bourgeois act, Frankie, something for people who promise too much, because the promise summons up its own violation. So watch out for people who promise too much. That’s all I’m trying to say.’

  He yawned.

  ‘Man, am I ever tired.’

  Joe had bought the bulldozer, a yellow Caterpillar of solid, functional design, in order to take part in the Paris–Dakar rally. No one had ever driven Paris–Dakar in a bulldozer before and, seeing as there were no rules against it,
Joe was going to be the first to try. I didn’t understand what he saw in it, but he considered the bulldozer the crown of his kinetic creation. It took a hell of a lot of work though to modify that heavy machine and make it suited for the rally.

  Joe’s biggest problem was how slow the thing was. It had engine power aplenty, he explained, but the gearing was too low, so it could never produce the kind of speed he wanted. He had ordered four larger gears from a machine plant, one for each wheel, and meanwhile he went on rebuilding the cab. The standard cab construction was too rigid to sit in during a rally, especially on the kind of stony desert substrates he was expecting. That’s why he was putting the whole thing up on springs, and Joe had also added a pneumatic driver’s seat from a truck in order to keep his kidneys in place while tearing at a hundred kilometres per hour or so across stones and through craters. In order to get to such speeds, which were insanely high for a bulldozer, he jacked up the revs by putting a heavier spring in the fuel pump. Now the engine could get up to 2500 rpm; parked there in Dirty Rinus’s barn was a racing car that weighed almost nine thousand kilos.

  We were in Halle, at the close of a nerve-racking tournament in which I’d barely squeaked into third place, when we heard about Engel. Joe phoned home from the hotel room. I remember that the window was open, letting in street noises and a breath of spring. After a while he hung up gingerly and looked at me.

  ‘Engel is dead,’ he said.

  There was only one thing I was really sure of at that point: that I longed blindly for the moment before that announcement, when the world hadn’t been wrenched from its pilings.

  Joe wanted to go home right away. I would rather have stayed in the hotel, to let them refill the minibar so I could keep drinking it dry until the world recovered its old shape, but a little later we were driving wordlessly through the night. The radium dials on the dash spread their greenish glow, never before had I so felt the lack of a voice with which to speak hollow words of dismay.

  All we knew was that Engel had been killed in an accident. I thought banal thoughts, about how his things would have to be brought home, how the price of his work would now go up, and about how long it would take before the remains would stop looking like Engel. It was a disappointment to discover that a friend’s death produced no finer thoughts. At four in the morning we drove into Lomark. Light spots in the sky announced the new day, we drove down the Lange Nek to the Ferry Head, to Engel’s parental home, where the lights were still on. Joe cursed, and I think it was only then that we realized what Engel’s death must mean for his father.

  ‘Come on, let’s go in.’

  Joe pushed me along the flagstone path at the side of the house. In the front room, under the lamp above the table, we saw a form hunched over. We both wished right then that we could turn around and leave. Nets were hanging in the backyard, the eels would start migrating soon, and the outboard motor was clamped to the edge of an oil drum. Joe knocked on the door to the pantry. We heard someone stumbling about, then the light went on and Eleveld opened the door. It didn’t look like he had been to bed yet.

  ‘Boys.’

  Joe shuffled his feet hesitantly.

  ‘Mr Eleveld, we were in Germany . . . we came right away. Is it true? About Engel . . .’

  ‘It’s terrible, boys. Terrible.’

  He led us through the pantry, his head bowed. I’d never seen anything that broke my heart like that. Engel’s racing skates were hanging from a nail, on the floor was the row of shoes he used to wear, arranged neatly pair by pair.

  We sat down at the living-room table. Eleveld was alone, he had heard the news that afternoon when a policeman called from Paris.

  ‘Whether I was Engel’s father, the man asked, and he gave his description. “Yes, sir,” I said. “That’s my son.” Then he told me he had bad news.’

  Eleveld turned away from us. Lying on the table were prospectuses from Griffioen’s Funeral Services. I pulled them over and, not knowing what else to do, began flipping through the booklet entitled Ideas for Funeral Arrangements. The suggested illustrations for mourning cards consisted of weeping willows, ships at sea, Christian pictograms, and doves carrying a wreath. At the back I found examples of texts beside which Eleveld had put an X:

  6. Until we meet again

  10. Words are not enough

  19. No need to struggle anymore, rest is yours

  21. A fine memory is so dear that only flowers can speak of it

  A glance at the prospectus ‘Recommended Price List Accompanying the Book Ideas for Funeral Arrangements’ made it clear to me how Griffioen paid for his Mercedes S600.

  ‘But how did it happen?’ Joe asked hoarsely. ‘Did they say?’

  Eleveld shook his head.

  ‘I’m not so good with foreign languages . . . from what I understood, a dog fell on Engel’s head. From the balcony of an apartment building. A dog.’

  I couldn’t imagine that Eleveld really knew what he’d just said: a dog had landed on his son’s head, in Paris? It was so surreal that, if only for a moment, it opened up a hopeful prospect: what if it wasn’t true, what if Engel was alive and only scaring people with art? But looking at old Eleveld you knew that couldn’t be right; Engel might have laughed at our reactions, but he would never do that to his father. Two days from now they were going to bring him home, the insurance company had arranged for a funeral transport firm to pick him up from a cold store along the Seine.

  We left Eleveld as day was dawning. The clock in Lomark struck five, birds were singing everywhere.

  ‘Engel discovered the law of gravity,’ Joe mumbled as he loaded me into the car.

  But he shared my doubts; when we got to my house, he said: ‘I’ll believe it when I see him.’

  On Tuesday morning, that is what happened. Engel’s viewing was held at Griffioen’s funeral home, I went there with Joe and Christof. An attendant closed the door quietly behind us, we were alone with the coffin in the middle of the cool, soundproof room. There were four big candles around it.

  ‘It’s really him,’ Joe said quietly.

  I got up and had to lean on the back of my cart to see him, lying beneath a stretch of cheesecloth spread over the end of the coffin. Under his chin was a brace that kept his lower jaw in place, his lips were colourless, his cheeks sunken. His cheekbones protruded in saintly fashion. This was Engel, my first corpse. My arm started shaking, I had to sit down. The cooling element zooming away beneath the bier was a monotonous requiem to our friend’s absence. In a chair on the other side of the coffin, I could hear Christof weeping. I had never heard him cry before. It annoyed me. The noises he made came in phrases, to match the rhythm of his breathing. To me it felt like he was coopting Engel’s memory by making more noise than we were.

  Suddenly I realized that Joe, Christof and I once again formed a triangular construction, just like when we were younger and I only knew Engel as my silent helper at the urinal.

  Joe lifted the cheesecloth frame from the coffin and laid his damaged hand on Engel’s cheek. He stared in concentration at the face, which you could now see had been broken by the impact. We had no idea what kind of dog it was, only that the animal had fallen from the ninth floor of an apartment building in a Paris suburb, right onto the head of Lomark’s next-to-last Eleveld. There was something about that family and things falling from the sky, be it dogs or Allied thousand-pounders delivered to the wrong address. I’d gladly have given a finger for Engel’s last thoughts before fate struck him down in the form of Canis familiaris, man’s faithful servant for more than fifteen thousand years.

  That afternoon Ma took me to Ter Staal’s to buy a suit. My arm had become too big for the sleeve – ‘My land, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing,’ Ma grumbled – and my misshapen undercarriage was going to be a true test of her inventiveness with the sewing machine. Matching shoes were out of the question; it would have to be the same old wooden blocks, only shined to a polish.

  ‘I suppose it’s f
or the Eleveld boy?’ the salesgirl asked.

  I felt that the girl needed to mind her own business, but Ma joined in enthusiastically in the female choir that likes to sing of other people’s calamity.

  ‘Terrible, a thing like that,’ she said. ‘Some people just seem born for misfortune. Frankie spent a lot of time with him.’

  ‘And the father? I guess he’s all alone now? First his wife, now his son . . .’

  Ma raised her eyes devoutly.

  ‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways.’

  ‘He never came in here,’ the salesgirl said. ‘I think he bought his clothes in the city, at least that’s the way it looked.’

  She tugged unpleasantly on the jacket, trying to get it off my shoulders, and I braced myself a little in the hope that she’d pull till it ripped. We left Ter Staal’s with a black polyester suit so inflammable it should have had a NO SMOKING sign on it.

  On Wednesday Ma came in with the Weekly containing the funeral notice. For some strange reason, Eleveld had chosen ‘No need to struggle anymore, rest is yours’, which seemed more appropriate for an old person who had died after a lingering illness than for a young artist hit on the head by a falling dog.

  ‘The poor man is all confused,’ Ma said, two pins in her mouth as she went to work taking in my new trousers.

  They were glorious spring days, the sap was flowing in the trees, the tinkling chirp of sparrows could be heard in the bushes between the house and the old cemetery.

  ‘Engel will be buried on Friday morning. He was fond of flowers.’

  That was news to me as well, but on Friday morning his grave was indeed surrounded by piles of flowers in crackly cellophane bouquets. The service held beforehand was in true Nieuwenhuis style: the empty rhetoric of the resurrection and he-who-lives-on-in-our-thoughts. I couldn’t imagine that people still found comfort in phrases durable as linoleum tiles.

  I sat on the aisle in the second row, beside P.J., with Joe and Christof on the other side of her. I had a hard time concentrating on Engel’s service. From one corner of my eye I saw that Joe and P.J. were holding hands, and I knew Christof couldn’t have missed that either. His reaction would be pretty similar to my own. All we could do was accept it, gritting our teeth all the while; within a friendship, rivalry like that takes place beneath the surface, where the hot beast of jealousy gnaws at the bars and poisons our souls with unsettling whispers. In Christof and me in equal measure. The only effective antidote was masturbation, but with the gradual return of energy after orgasm the jealousy returned in full force as well.