Joe Speedboat (12 page)

That's how something like that gets started.

And how far do you have to go to be purged of their pity? Not very far. I drank till I fell on my face, lowing like a cow, and they lifted me back into my cart and bought me no more beer. By that time Dirk was already so pissed off that he would have whacked me one if it hadn't been so unseemly to punch a cripple in public.

What surprised me most was how much noise I made. They thought that was funny at first. The alcohol kindled a fire under my usual soundlessness. It was as though my gullet ripped open, oxygen swirled around and I screamed, man, I screamed. It had been a couple of years since Dirk had heard me make a sound, he couldn't believe his ears. Once the novelty had worn off, the men just grimaced a bit uneasily as I blasted my foghorn.

‘That'll be enough of that,' the barman said.

Dirk yanked on my arm. He could fuck off. The men turned
back to the bar, one of them said, ‘They're all the same, the lot of them.' And although Dirk knew exactly what he was referring to, he was glad to be able to turn his attention to something else.

‘So what's that supposed to mean?'

‘What? What are you talking about?' the man said without turning around.

‘That we're all the same.'

The man looked at him as though he smelled something foul. This was Dirk in due form, this was what he was known for. I saw the iron descend into his body and the rage darken his eyes; this was the Dirk I knew: old Dirk If-you-can't-pound-the-shit-out-of-it-then-try-fucking-it Hermans.

‘What's eating you, asshole?' the man said.

‘That's what I thought,' Dirk said. ‘You dirty piece of shit.'

And before I knew what was happening Dirk had slammed the man's forehead down on the bar. Blood spattered from his wrinkles. The man came off his stool with a roar and threw himself on my brother, but got such a hard thump that the glasswork tinkled on the shelf. The others jumped up, apparently compelled somehow to act as a unit in the event of an attack from outside, and now Dirk had five on him instead of only one. But, like I said before, he couldn't count past three anyway. The bastard went down like a drowning man. Two of them dragged him toward the door and the others kicked and punched him so hard that they hurt themselves. They ignored me. When I saw that crowd of mechanics and masons piling onto Dirk, for whom I'd never felt one millisecond of sympathy, let alone brotherly love, something weird happened: I got angry. Almost too angry to breathe. Raging inside me was something you might call ‘the cry of blood', in any case something I'd never counted on. Reeling under this new sensation, I
threw off the brakes and rammed my cart as hard as I could into the scrimmage.

I smashed into a guy who had his back turned to me as he whacked away at Dirk. My cart hit him behind the knees, buckling his legs forward and throwing his upper body back so that I could grab him by the throat with the only weapon I had: my hand. It found his windpipe and squeezed. His arms flailed but found no purchase. The hand squeezed harder, the fingers sinking into flesh. I felt muscles contracting in mortal fear, and the wild pounding of blood. I remember pleasure and the need to kill him. It was going to be easy. Just don't let go and squeeze harder, that was all. Tear out his gullet. My fingers were tingling. The others let Dirk go and started in on me, they yanked on my arm with that purple head and lolling tongue attached to the end of it, and punched me in the head without mercy. Amid the rain of blows I saw the face growing darker all the time. Oh God please let me murder him—

That's all I remember.

Only that face, which I remember as being black. And after that day, there were two things I knew:

1. that the man I had wanted to kill was a roofer by the name of Clemens Mulder, and that he would never be my friend;

2. that I had found a new love, namely the release of alcohol, and would be true to it for the rest of my days.

It's like a chain of little spiders,' was India's comment when she saw the stitches on my eyebrow.

She brought me to the garage behind the house, where Joe was jabbing at his arm with a needle.

‘Joe, what are you
doing
?!' India said.

Along the length of his left forearm he had tattooed the letters of his own name: JOE – still bloody, but a clear aquamarine beneath. It was August, the dog days had us all in their grip.

‘What's up, Frankie, been in a fight?' Joe asked.

All you had to do was look at me: both eyes blackened with old blood, six stitches across my brow. Joe never got into fights, things like that didn't happen to him. I realized that I'd crossed the line into the bastards' domain, joined the ranks of the murderous and, what's worse, of a family in which the boys started swinging their fists as soon as they came of age. (The Hermans have no girls; ours is a bloodline of gnarls and knots, not of soft things.)

I, who had vowed never to become like them, had plunged headfirst into the first brawl that came my way. If no one had stopped me I would have strangled that roofer. I had fallen, and Joe could tell. He didn't say much that day, just sat there jabbing more ink into his arm. His jaw muscles pulsed each time the needle pierced his skin.

I left after a while and didn't see him for a couple of weeks.

In the days that followed I worked on my diaries more than ever, going back to do some necessary checks and amendments.

My thoughts went back to the years before I'd met Joe, before I'd left the world behind for 220 days. So many questions back then. So many that it made me dizzy. There had to be more to it than this, I was sure of it: people couldn't
really
be content to live and die the way they did. Some secret was being kept from me, some thing they knew but weren't telling, something a thousand times more real than this. Wondering why, they say, is the start of all philosophy. For me it was the start of a kind of hell.

‘No whys about it,' Pa would say. ‘That's just the way it is.'

And when I kept asking he would smack me up against the side of the head. He was the wrong person to ask, in other words, but that didn't mean there was no answer; I wasn't too ignorant to know ignorance when I saw it. So I waited. Somewhere a door would open, someone would explain how it went, and until then I would keep my eyes wide open and keep asking why.

People, I knew, liked to think of life as a stairway. You started at the bottom and kept climbing as life went on. Nursery school, kindergarten and then primary school, where they told you that ‘higher education' was the answer. That's where you'd find out about the things you couldn't see from here.

I believed them. But I was consumed by impatience, so I went on asking why until it started getting really irritating. In their eyes I was just being cheeky, overplaying my hand. As though I was asking to speak to God himself.

I wouldn't want to pretend that I, with all those questions of mine, was the kind of kid you'd have found endearing. More
like autistic. Back then my thinking had an aggravating severity to it that I've never even approached since. The same kind of barebones austerity I later came to admire in the philosophy of the samurai.

And the answer didn't come. I'd expected a lot from high school. Biology, history, literature . . . that's where it was going to happen. It had to be buried somewhere inside that pile of books I lugged around each day.

But the books spoke with the voices of teachers, or the teachers spoke with the voices of books: how that worked was never quite clear to me. They taught me skills, but provided no answers.

Until then, my ‘why' had always been referred on. But this, for the time being, was where the buck stopped, this was where I was going to stay for the next five years; these same mouths would speak to me the whole time and, to my horror and dismay, I discovered that my question wasn't particularly popular here either. Things
were
what they were, and it didn't do to go poking around in it too much – just like Pa said.

I caught a glimmer of an abysmal truth. The people here wanted to pass the time as comfortably as possible, without having to deal with questions that couldn't be answered with a simple ‘yes', ‘no', or ‘I don't know'. No one around me was doing anything except the best imitation they could of what they'd seen other people do before. Parents imitated
their
parents, kindergarten teachers other kindergarten teachers, pupils other pupils, and clergymen and educators each other and their books. The only variation was in what they forgot to imitate.

None of them knew the way, rank amateurism was all it was. And I lay awake at night, my eyes wide open, more afraid of the things that weren't there than of the things that were.

Some people say they were born in the wrong body; I,
however, was born not only in the wrong body but also in the wrong family in the wrong village in the wrong country and so on. I read a lot, and in those books I thought I sometimes perceived a shimmer of light. I devoured every book in the Lomark library, except for the large-print section. When I discovered the samurai, I was impressed by their Spartan self-discipline. They at least saw the need, when you had lost your honour and life was rendered meaningless, to stick a knife in your own belly.
Seppuku
: the clean, straight cut you could never practice, because the first time was also the last. More people should give it a go.

At church I sat in the back pew playing cards, while up in front Nieuwenhuis was saying ‘He that searches for the truth comes to the light,' but I still couldn't see a thing.

Nieuwenhuis's conviction was born of the need to be convinced, that much was clear to me. But exactly what he was convinced
of
was less clear. Repression was the only thing that could have kept that trap spring-loaded for two thousand years. But now that the internal combustion engine and social democracy had taken some of the tension out of it, you saw repression making way for tolerance and guitars in the church. It was like the way old people who had been real bastards all their life would suddenly break down and weep over nothing when their number was almost up.

Looking back on it, I think I wasn't even searching for the truth or anything, just for something that shed a little light.

My first year of high school was one huge disaster. It made me sick. Everywhere I looked I saw mediocrity and submissiveness. And an innocence that ruined everything, because it meant no one could really help it. If we were, in fact, the measure of all things, what hope was there of redemption?

By the end of my second year I was furious. A long vacation
followed, and I watched July go by. Then August came, and I waited for nothing. I lay on my back in the tall grass that was already turning yellow. The dryness rustled, little bugs crawled over my arms and legs. I let them. Somewhere I heard the pounding of a galloping horse, the corn was still half high and the rust-brown sorrel stuck out above it. I looked up at the blank sky. A lovely blue and all, but otherwise nothing. Growling monotonously, a little plane crossed the void.

At the edges of my vision the woolly thistles were bursting their buds, butterflies fluttered aimlessly and I had the feeling I was sinking. I sank to a dark and quiet place.

It was a day for cyclomowers.

I must have heard it, the tractor pulling the snapping blades, cutting through grass and flowers. Whack whack whack. No sleep so deep but that you would hear that. Who could fail to hear the roar of a 190-horsepower John Deere? Who would lie down and sleep in the grass at mowing time? Who would do something like that? Then you've got only yourself to blame.

You're right, all of you.

Who would lie down in the grass at mowing time?

The front wheel of the tractor crushed my sternum and broke my back, but the blades missed me. The man up on top saw me, but too late. Some call that luck, others misfortune. Musashi says: the Way of the Samurai is the unflinching acceptance of death.

As to what happened afterwards I can only guess. Although I was clearly on my way to the end, sometimes I think I waited – for some reason to come back, a single reason to grasp at a branch along the river of death and start in on the road home, inch by inch, back to where I came from.

Maybe Joe was that reason.

That was a long time ago, and I can't really get to it anymore, I was too far gone for clear-cut memories. Sometimes it's so far away that it seems as though I made it all up – the tractor, the dream of the hero, the return to that brighter place.

The memory of my dreamtime.

The body floats just below the surface. There is no pain, no one is missed. Close to the surface, where the light breaks through the water, it is clearer, you can taste the sun.

‘Look,' someone says, ‘he's dreaming.'

The hero's dream. A hero will come, the sound of his heavy footsteps precedes him, those who are outside go in and close the doors; heroes never bring only good fortune. It's cold, we
smell woodsmoke. It tumbles from the chimneys and mixes with the mist that has settled over the fields and roads.

The newcomer whistles a quiet song. He will bring good cheer and sow confusion. He bears new times like a sword. He will shatter our illusions and break through our terse backwardness. His feat will bring beauty, but we will chase him away; this is no time for heroes.

There are hands that lift you up, there are hands that put you down. The body approaches the surface, it has grown lighter, a little lighter all the time. That light, oh hell, it breaks through my forehead like a thermal lance. I am born for the second time. Blind and helpless, I wash ashore. Around my bed they're talking about Joe.

I've learned to shuffle around on thin, crooked legs, always holding onto something with my good arm to keep from falling. I wait, in the little house at the back of the garden, for my parents to die. I live in a rectangle. There is a twin electric hotplate, a microwave oven, a table and a toilet. The bed is behind the table, against the wall. Ma's the one who put the plants on the windowsill. You don't have to do much with them, they stay green all the time anyway. At the back I look out on the old cemetery, at the front I see my parents' kitchen and dining room. At meals they sit with the lamp on above the table; every day
The Potato Eaters
is called to mind at least once. I eat at my own table, I don't like being watched. For me, eating consists largely of waiting: waiting for the spasms to go away and then quickly taking a bite. Sometimes that works, other times not, you can't always feel the tremors coming.