Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

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.