“Show me how you’d do it,” he’d say.
I’d bunch three fingers together.
“No, no,” he’d say. “You do it this way.”
He’d take my ring finger away and flatten the index and middle fingers side by side. Next he’d put his palms together, thumbs in front, fingers facing down.
“Okay, now in.”
I’d slide my two flat fingers between his palms, which gave slightly.
“See how much more comfortable that is?”
I’d nod, pretending to understand. Committing it to memory.
After a while he would get up from the bed and replace Sledge with another American, Aaron Neville, then lie back on the bottom bunk and put his hands behind his head. “Now this is music. Soul music. Not that Tchaikovsky ballet quartet shit you’re always playing.”
He’d puff his cheeks. Exhale. Stare at the mattress slats under the top bunk. Then he’d pick up an old thread. Beate, for example. He might be getting bored with her. He wasn’t sure. What did I think? Oh, and did I see Horseface today? That was the name we gave to a girl two years older than us in the dance program, whose actual name we didn’t know. She had short dirty blond hair and wild-looking eyes. The uniform shirt seemed tighter on her than on anyone else. Her nipples showed through.
“I saw her,” Dirk said dreamily. “She was walking down the hall eating a pickle.”
When the sky began to darken Dirk would see me off. Open the French doors to the garden, where I would lift my bike off his, and walk next to me to the top of the street. Usually only in his socks or slippers, though the season was getting on.
“A bientôt, mon petit!”
He liked to swing around the stop sign post two or three times, a little Dancing in the Rain, then we’d embrace and I’d get on the saddle.
“Or maybe, de Vries, we shouldn’t go to school tomorrow. Eh? Maybe fly away to Paris instead. Or Mombasa. Or Kinshasa. Or Lake Titicaca.”
One time, or only one time that I can recall, I invited Dirk to my house. I did it under duress.
“My house is not fun,” I said.
“Not fun yet,” he answered. “But you have no idea what it could be. What I could make of it.”
That was what I was worried about. It was one thing for Dirk to turn his house upside down, another thing for him to do the same to mine. What would my parents think of him? For one, he had no table manners. I loved this about him, of course. But on the occasions when our family ate together my parents were not shy about pointing out my infractions. And what about his foul mouth? I’d yet to even mutter the F-word in their company. What if Dirk sensed their dislike, and confused it for mine?
Then there was the other side. What if Dirk came to my house and saw I wasn’t the person he imagined I was? What if he saw me for who I actually was, and decided I did not pass the test? He had cut off Lise overnight. What if he did the same to me?
He was persistent, though, so one day we met at the bike racks after school as usual, but instead of turning right at the end of the asphalt drive, we turned left. We followed the main road until we came to one of the rutty lanes that led past grazing fields.
The view opened. Rusty bathtubs that had been turned into troughs were set behind barbed-wire fences. Patches of grass sprouted irregularly from the chewed-up ground.
Dirk, who had been riding just behind me, stopped. He looked over the scene as though he hadn’t been in the countryside for ages, even though he passed through it every day on his way to school. Milling in the distance was a flock of sheep, barely more than white fluff. Dirk stretched out his neck, fixed his lips like a trumpet’s horn, and cut loose the most aggressive Baa-aah I’d ever heard.
We rode on. A few minutes down the road we approached a solitary goat, and Dirk’s eyes widened. He straightened his arms, stood up on his pedals, and poured out a sound like a goat bleating into a megaphone.
“Ghyuuuuuuuuuuchhhh.”
He turned to me. “Now try,” he said.
“Try what?”
“Try ghyuuuuuuchh.”
I stood on my pedals and let out my best effort, which dissolved into a string of coughs. Dirk reached under his shirt, turned one of his nipples like a radio dial, and spoke into his chest. “We’re going to need a better effort, roger, over.”
We took turns riding with our eyes closed, counting out loud, pushing each other to make it to the next intersection, bend in the road, bridge. When we got to edge of Vlijmen we instinctively knew it was time to race, and he and I fought for the lead through the roundabout, along the main road, right up to the driveway.
No one was at the house, and Dirk broke the stillness by emitting satyr sounds. We went upstairs to my room. Orderly, bright, spare—the opposite of Dirk’s. When he saw my box of records at the foot of the bed he jumped towards it.
“Nice,” he said, flipping through the albums, all classical. “I myself have great fondness for the Gherkin Polonaise.” He stopped at the Enigma Variations by Edward Elgar, a version by the London Symphony Orchestra and André Previn, and examined the cover.
“Just look at the turtleneck on this fucker.”
I snatched the album from his hands.
“Actually the B-side on this is amazing,” I said. “Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.”
Recently I’d been listening to it at very low volume every night before I went to bed. It was becoming a soundtrack.
“What’s it like?” Dirk asked. “The so-called Fantasia?”
As usual, I couldn’t tell if he was serious or kidding. I slipped the record from the cover.
“There’s this mist of violas and cellos on one side, and a swarm of violins on the other. At first they’re separate, off in their corners, but then they meet and become this big, shape-shifting, moving thing.”
“Like a rolling fog?”
I ignored the comment, lay the record on the turntable, and switched on the stereo. The silence at the beginning of the recording dragged on. Then, finally, came the initial wave of strings. I felt a change in the atmospheric pressure. Dirk was with me at first, but he soon became restless.
“More like a pittering rain, Old Man.”
I quickly lifted the needle and switched off the stereo, wary of more mockery.
“Or is it a pattering rain? A turgid wind? A disappointed riverbank? A nonplussed oxbow?”
Dirk stood up and began circling the room, revisiting certain pictures and objects as if he were looking for particular details.
“No, it’s good, de Vries. I appreciate your geekiness. It’s important. Valid. A sclerotic bog is what that piece is, actually.” Then he looked directly at me. “I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat? Let’s go check.” He raced out of the room.
When I arrived in the kitchen I found him searching through cupboards, throwing doors open and clapping them shut two at a time.
“My stomach is crying, de Vries. Hunger in the midst of a first world nation.”
When Dirk ran out of cupboards to open, his eyes went to the living room. I followed them as they fell on the piano. My piano.
“Dirk, no,” I said, my voice rising.
He went over to it and ran his thumb under the Grotrian’s rear lid, threatening to lift it.
“I wonder what’s under here,” he said. “I wonder if it’s cake.”
He rapped his knuckles against the frame, as if sounding the depths.
“Seriously, Dirk,” I said. “This is not a good idea.”
“Possibly, Old Man. But possibly it’s a great idea.”
He sat at the bench, quietly lifted the fallboard, and began to touch keys at random. Tink … tink … tonk … I froze, waiting for an explosion. But Dirk surprised me. Adjusting his posture, he hunched close to the keys and began to play softly, almost shyly. Single notes, intervals, repeated intervals, then again, with more confidence. A largo version of “Chopsticks.” He shifted to the left side of the bench, making room for me.
After the piece petered out he stood up from the bench and requested a sad song. “Something morbid,” he said, “or morbidly obese. A rolling, flatulent dog.”
Against a soundtrack of “Morning Prayer,” from Tchaikovsky’s Album for the Young, Dirk performed a new, original work: “Soldiers Recently Returned from Front of Unspecified Twentieth-Century War, as Dramatized by the Documentary Division of Dutch National Television.” He stooped from the edge of a kitchen stool as he spoke. His face barely registered emotion. Aside from musical direction, my job was to whisper the word “action.”
“The Krauts are relentless … Their commander, Bratwurst von Mustardsauce, has ordered the entire battalion to burn every four-legged stool in a fifty-mile radius … We’ve held them off with nothing but toothpicks and dental floss, but I fear there may not be enough left over to get that bit of celery from the back …”
When my parents came home they insisted Dirk stay for dinner. We all ate together, which was unusual for weekdays, and my parents were in a good mood.
Dirk transformed himself into the perfect dinner guest. Napkin on lap, elbows down, holding fork by handle not tines, not interrupting my parents, never coming close to swearing. He took seconds. He accepted my father’s offer of a sip of Scotch after dessert. He complimented my mother’s cooking and, really winning her heart, cleared the dishes despite her protests.
When cleanup was over and Dirk had thanked my father and kissed my mother on the cheek, I walked him to the corner. As soon as we were out of sight of the house, Dirk’s hunch returned. The loping strides. The fiddling with his ear. The sly smile.
“Thanks,” I said.
“For what?” he said. “You were the one who graced me with the invitation.”
“You know what I mean.”
Dirk tilted his head, as if he heard a sound in the distance. Then he came back to the present.
“So,” he said, “my place tomorrow?”
“Obviously.”
“Goddamn right.”
He got on his bike.
“Mañana, Old Man.”
I’d passed. Not that I stopped trying to prove myself, but, from then on, I felt he would give me the benefit of the doubt. After that one visit to my house we stuck to his. And as the term wore on I stayed in Den Bosch later and later.
I remember the first time I spent the night. It was a Friday and Dirk’s parents were out of town for the weekend, which was common. Without his parents’ arrival hovering over us, the house seemed larger and stranger. Dirk made use of the extra room by filling it with whoops and hollers. Instead of wrestling in the kitchen, we went to the living room, where Dirk slid the couch out of the way to make a mini arena.
“Gladiatorum res gestae. This time I’m putting one hand behind my back, but only because two would be an insult.”
As I sat on the floor afterwards, rubbing my neck from the headlock, Dirk suggested I stay for dinner.
“We have an extensive menu. We’ll eat on my parents’ bed, watch television, then do something else. I don’t know what. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”
I hesitated. I wanted to stay. I had heard Pirm talking about the legendary sleepovers. Cigars. Drugs. Pym, who had been standing by, nodded at everything Pirm said. Still, I was supposed to be home for dinner. That was the deal I’d struck with my parents.
“Friday nights, you know.”
“Exactly,” Dirk said.
“I don’t get it.”
“Jesus of Nazareth, de Vries. Tomorrow’s Saturday. No school.”
I hesitated. Dirk whistled a long descending note. The sound of a plane in a tailspin. Then krrrrrrr-schhhhhh. The plane crashing nose first into the ground.
“Okay, okay,” I said.
“Only okay, de Vries?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir, Dirk, sir. Kindly pleased to stay for dinner.”
I told him I just had to call my parents. He said I should explain that he was alone in the house, his parents were out of town, and that although it wouldn’t technically be my fault if he was murdered in his sleep or had his testonies cut off by intruders or pirates, it would nonetheless haunt me for the rest of my life, and I should therefore stay overnight.
“Say that word for word, okay, Old Man? Do you need me to repeat it? Do you know what a testony is? Should I write this down for you?”
My father asked me what time I’d be home tomorrow, that was all. Dirk seemed to have anticipated the good news because he scooted out of the room as soon as I hung up and came back a second later clutching eight beer bottles against his chest.
“Time to start the party.”
“Where’d you get those?”
“The Cask of Amontillado. Also known as my dad’s liquor cabinet.”
“And it’s okay? To take this?”
“Okay? These are three-hundred-year-old beers brewed by three-hundred-year-old monks on top of some hill in France, or something. It’s definitely okay.”
“Dirk. Seriously.”
“Seriously, de Vries. Se-ri-ous-ly. There’s stuff in that cabinet from the twelfth century. Dust, actually, but still.”
He winked, held a bottle to the corner of the little kitchen table in the bay window, and brought his fist down on it. The cap shot across the room. He opened another and handed it to me. Then he went to the sink and filled a cauldron-sized pot with water and set it on the stove.
Having downed his first beer, Dirk opened two more and giggled as he rapidly took sips. When the water reached boiling, he spilled in what looked like two kilograms of pasta and set a timer. We went back to the beers, Dirk making sure I was keeping up before sending another round of bottle caps flying. When the timer rang, Dirk drained the pasta into a colander and doused it in butter, salt, pepper, and cheese.
“Primo, pasta con fasta. Secondo, rigatoni ecce romano!”
I could barely break a quarter of the portion he served, and Dirk soon felt similarly sick, but proud of it. After a while we gave up on food altogether and Dirk knocked open the last of his father’s beers.
“Prost, de Vries!”
That one went straight to my head. I felt like I was swimming, and Dirk must have been feeling it too, as wet gobs of rigatoni arced off the end of his fork into the general vicinity of the sink.
“Just trying to clean up, you know.”
“What about the plan to watch TV in your parents’ room?” I asked.
“I didn’t forget,” Dirk said, tapping his head with his finger. “But I have a better idea. Come.”
He raced up the stairs and I stumbled after him, unbalanced by the drink. Next thing I knew he was racing back down, past me.
“Go ahead. I’m going to get a few more beers.”
Dirk’s room was in form. Homework from that day, the day before, and the year before was piled on the desk like garbage. Both cupboard doors were wedged open. Clothing overflowed from the shelves inside. Dirk appeared behind me, passed the beers, and held up his finger.
“Back in one second.”
I heard him rummaging in his parents’ room. I put the beers on the desk and went to the bookshelf. Maybe it was having climbed the stairs, but the sense that my brain was swimming in alcohol had softened. I could read the small-print titles of the records on Dirk’s shelves. George Clinton. Parliament-Funkadelic, whatever that meant. The O’Jays, which Dirk said was a present from his brother, who was in university in England. Archie Bell and the Drells, which Dirk had on regular rotation.
Hi, everybody. I’m Archie Bell and the Drells, from Houston, Texas. We don’t only sing but we dance just as good as we want.
Next to the records were stacks of photographs. I picked one up and sifted through. Pictures of a younger Dirk. Paler. Shorter hair, though still unruly. The front tooth already chipped. On the shelf above the records and photos were books. Some
were required reading from school, which Dirk took to mean voluntary. War and Peace. Death in Venice, which was probably where he kept a copy of Bushwoman. But most of them were the sci-fi paperbacks he collected. Almost all Frank Herbert. Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune.
The sound of Dirk’s lazy, dragging footsteps came down the hall, and I turned to see him standing in the doorway, holding his parents’ TV set, which had a built-in video cassette player.
“Special delivery, de Vries. Please sign.”
He used a foot to clear some space on the floor in front of the bottom bunk. He placed the television down carefully, at least for him, and ran the cord to the outlet under his desk. Next he went to his closet and, after rooting in the back, pulled out a grey gym bag, the kind everyone had in elementary school, knotted at the top.
He held it out to me. “All yours.”
He watched as I undid the knot.
“I wonder what’s inside, de Vries.” His voice was taunting, but he was smiling.
I felt my heart start to beat. I knew, somehow, from something Pym had said, or the way Pirm looked, that Dirk was including me in some kind of special, Dirk-patented plan. When I pulled my hand out I saw I was holding a videocassette. The cover showed two women wearing bras, stockings, frilly panties, and fresh white caps with red crosses on them. One had a stethoscope hanging around her neck. The other was holding a needle and looking directly at me.
“De Vries? Hello? Don’t tell me you’ve seen this one already.”
I was silent. Dumb.
“Do you like the German ones?” he asked.
“Where did you get this, Dirk?”
“I have a subscription. Kidding. Sisi gave it to me. Actually Sisi bought it for me. And by me, I mean you. I told her it was your birthday and this is what you really, really wanted.”
Sisi, with the enormous breasts. Two years older than us. Did she even know who I was?
Dirk took the case from my hands and pointed to the cupboard. “Somewhere in there are pyjama bottoms. Find two pairs. Can’t be wearing school pants in bed!”
I changed in the corner with my back turned. Dirk knelt in front of the TV, pushing various buttons. He then propped two big pillows on the bottom bunk.
School of Velocity Page 3