Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

Joe parked close to the front office. There, inside, was the social heart of the enterprise: the coffee and powdered-soup dispenser. Joe opened the door on my side, I swung myself out of the cart and he unloaded it. He rolled me over the rusty metal plates into the yard. I looked around, but nowhere did I see a sign reading BRIQUETTES FOR SALE, which made me wonder how Pa actually brought them to people’s attention.

Dirk was running the mobile crane. In its jaws was a freshly crushed wreck, which he manoeuvred into place with pinpoint accuracy atop a pile of other wrecks. The press flattened the car bodies until they were only thirty centimetres thick, the noise it made was like an accident in slow motion. When Dirk caught sight of us, the wreck stopped, swaying, in midair.

‘PA’S IN THERE!’ he roared.

‘Man, has he ever gotten fat,’ Joe said quietly.

We were at a safe enough distance for unfavourable remarks about Dirk’s appearance. My brother had grown fat, not in the gradual way that makes the skin glow a friendly pink, but explosively fat, without giving his surroundings a chance to get used to his new shapes. He had red spots on his neck and acne rosacea on his cheeks from the high blood pressure. Old Dirk had at last started resembling what he had always been: a weird, cracker-barrel alcoholic who smelled faintly of loneliness.

We went into the stripping shed. Coming from a mezzanine floor covered in metre-high crates we heard the sound — amplified to the power of ten — of someone searching irritably for a little wrench at the very bottom of a metal toolbox.

‘Anybody home?!’ Joe shouted.

The racket stopped, Pa appeared.

‘Boys.’

The tail end of a rice-paper rollup was stuck to his lower lip. I’d once seen him toss a butt like that on the ground, where it landed on the wet nicotine gob and remained standing upright. Pa came down the steps on his leather clogs.

‘What can I do for you?’ he said to Joe.

His false teeth radiated light in the dusky shed.

‘Well. .’ Joe began.

That was when I saw Pa stiffen in fright. Not a big fright, just an explosion on the seabed far below. I was trained in reading such micro-expressions. His eyes darted to and fro between me and something behind me. I turned my head as far as I could, but the angle was too sharp. Seizing the handle of my cart I twisted the front wheels around and turned ninety degrees. The back wall was in the shadows, but I could still see it with paralyzing sharpness: a tower of paper briquettes. . piled up against the brick wall. One thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, who’s to say.

A long, cold shiver ran through me. The briquettes were neatly piled up, as though to form a wall of insulation. All this time Pa had barely sold a single briquette, but he had kept paying me for more and more of them, ‘It’s like they’re eating those things for breakfast, Frankie,’ and the price he paid for his failed business instinct had been my weekly wage — to give me a goddamned sense of self-worth or whatever it was those two had tried to palm off on me.

Pa coughed like an engine on a cold morning. That was the most horrible thing about it, that he was as embarrassed about the situation as I was. I heard Joe ask him something about a radiator, so far away that it sounded like he was in a different room. Pa was silent with despair, I saw my own shame reflected in his eyes, and we stood there gaping at each other in that hall of shameful mirrors.

‘OK,’ said Joe, ‘then I’ll just wait for a while.’

I left the stripping shed and went to the car. Dried mud crunched beneath my wheels. A few minutes later Joe came out of the shed carrying a hammer and a screwdriver and gestured to me that he’d be there in a minute. The car radio was tuned to the weather report. They were talking about rain.

What was left but to try and become an arm wrestler? I went into training; Joe and I set our sights on the first tournament in Liege, in late October. Dumbbells were brought into the house and Joe got a good deal on a batch of protein supplements in the flavours strawberry, vanilla and lemon. In powder form, to mix with milk. The flavours had more to do with colour than with fruit; they were all identically sweet and creamy, with an aftertaste like chalk.

The most important weight training I did while sitting on the floor: with my elbow on a low table and a dumbbell in my hand, I curled the weight up toward me slowly, then lowered it again until right above the tabletop, keeping up the tension all the time to stimulate the muscles to maintain maximum force. I had to keep doing that until flames shot out of my arm. We’d started with sixteen kilos and three sets of twenty repetitions, with a thirty-second break between each set. Gradually the number of reps decreased and more metal discs were added to the dumbbell. Five weeks later I had thirty-eight kilos hanging on the thing, which is a lot of weight for an exercise aimed only at the biceps. My forearm I trained with wrist curls, a minute flexing of the wrist with weights in hand.

I lived on a diet prepared by Ma and strictly monitored by Joe. My face grew thinner (Ma’s perception: worried) and my arm and upper body grew heavier (Joe’s perception: enthused). Because there were only so many repetitions I could do, I also propelled myself each day back and forth between Lomark and Westerveld. That was a journey of 4.2 kilometres out and 4.7 back, because on the way home I always rode past the White House, where P.J.’s parents lived. The house hadn’t been white for years, though, and the thatched roof was dark brown, mossy and in need of replacement. Even after all this time, my primal fantasy concerning the women of that house seemed possessed of an auto-regenerative force. One could say that I went sniffing around there each day like a dog, drawn by lures more powerful than any visual stimuli. One could also say that I was bored to death and wanted to fill my head with sweet illusions, and that I hated myself for it afterwards because it violated my abstinence from deranging ‘P.J. things’.

As a result of all the heavy training, my sleeve now contained an elephant’s leg in miniature. It was completely out of proportion to the rest of my body, but then again: symmetry had gone out the window years ago. Joe did a lot of reading-up on ways to make me not only stronger, but also heavier. That resulted in an additional eleven kilos. Eleven kilos. That added up to a total of sixty-four, which meant that my heaviest opponents could outweigh me by more than twenty kilos, for the lightweight category went up to eighty-five. Even if I stuffed my face morning, noon and night I would always remain an extremely light lightweight. I consulted Musashi about this, but nowhere did he say anything about the ideal weight of the true samurai.

I concentrated on rereading the essays ‘Water’ and ‘Fire’ in Go Rin No Sho . They’re not so much about strategy, but are of a more practical nature in instructing the reader in the way one should fight. Written by a man who, at the age of fifty-nine, had never lost a single fight.

When I’d read the book as a youngster I had revered it as a kind of Bible: this was the world of Kensei, the Sword Saint. But I had also understood only the topmost layer of what he was talking about, the things that stimulated knightly fantasies, if only because of the names of the tactics you could use to defeat your enemies. The Fire and Stones Cut, for example. That one I had tried out on Quincy Hansen in the schoolyard, and with my broomstick sword broke the defences of his book-bag shield. And, lest I forget, there was the Body of a Rock, which I practiced without an opponent: ‘When you master the Way of this strategy, your body can suddenly change to rock. The Ten Thousand Things are then powerless against you. That is the body of a rock. No one can move you.’