Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

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 on 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.

Joe and P.J. came through the bike gate without me hearing them, and suddenly we were standing there face to face, all three of us speechless somehow. I looked for something to cover myself with, but my shirt was on the bed. Withering under P.J.’s gaze, I crippled my way through the briquette machinery and into the house. Joe came after me. I frantically tried to pull on my shirt, but the little sparrow claw was unwilling and the other arm was spasming out of control.

‘Don’t act so pissed off,’ Joe said. ‘How was I supposed to know you were walking around half naked? Here, let me. .’

I slapped his hand away. It had to be on purpose: the only, the really one and only time I went outside uncovered and he had exposed me to her eyes. Outside, P.J. seized the handle of the press and pulled it down. She was less pale than usual, her skin was now the lightest shade of beige, her eyes an even more whopping turquoise. Later I heard that she’d been to a Greek island with Lover Boy Writer.

Joe had come by to ask me to go along to collect his things in Enschede. P.J. would be going too. We had to pick up Engel first, at Ferry Island. He buttoned my shirt for me, murmuring, ‘Mean-tempered bastard’ as he did. The black T-shirt he wore had DEWALT written on it in yellow letters.