Joe Speedboat (7 page)

‘You mean you've never seen her? I don't believe you!'

‘I probably have,' Joe said, just to calm him down.

How did we find out that P.J.'s mother, Kathleen Eilander, was a nudist? Perhaps it was the postman who delivered
Athena
, the club magazine of the naturists' association of the same name, to a ‘Mrs K. Eilander-Swarth' every three months? Or was it a barge
captain from Lomark who claimed to have seen her naked on one of the beaches between the breakwaters? Or then again maybe it was only a rumour, a bit of gossip congealing into such solid factuality that one day Kathleen Eilander felt the irresistible and hitherto unknown urge to go down to the river, take off all her clothes and go skinny-dipping. However it happened, we knew. Never in our lives had we seen a nudist. But the term smacked of
very serious
nudity indeed, and of things for which we had been waiting for a long time.

Engel looked at me. His eyes were the same colour as the ink in my favourite fountain pen. He knew how much I liked those afternoons when Joe climbed onto his soapbox and pronounced theories with their feet on the ground and their head in the clouds.

Bright and early each morning, Christof claimed, Mrs Eilander jogged down to the river to go bathing. He also said she walked around naked in the garden behind the White House. Her legs, Christof said, were long and kind of strange, but legs hardly played the leading role in my fantasies about the nudist. No, I saw other things. Things that took my breath away. She was a mother, and therefore an old lady, but after hearing the news about her nudism I noticed she was transformed into a sexual creature with a secret to which we just happened to be privy, and which filled our heads with burning questions and our guts with melted sugar.

Reluctantly, Joe descended to the subject of Mrs Eilander's legs.

‘Can we get a look?' he asked, but Christof shook his head.

‘Wall around the garden,' he said, ‘and it's still dark when she goes swimming.'

Joe toyed pensively with a screwdriver, twirling it in the fingers of his good hand like a majorette. Wednesday was
dozing on my shoulder. The wrinkly membranes were pulled down over his beady eyes. He had become a beauty of a bird, a jaunty, proud creature trained to come back whenever I whistled. Joe had made a lucky pick, I don't think a more handsome jackdaw could be found. The feathers at his neck and on the back of his head were silvery-gray as graphite; when he walked the bobbing of his head lent him a certain consequence. It's not like with starlings, birds that seem to radiate a sort of lowliness. Starlings fly in spectacular eddies and shimmering spirals, that's true enough, but in such huge numbers that you can't help but be reminded of big cities where people hate and tread on each other, but strangely enough can't get along without the others.

Wednesday possessed an inner nobility that placed him above inferior garbage eaters like starlings and gulls. He would be able to see Mrs Eilander walking naked in her garden, but jackdaws weren't interested in things like that. I often tried to put myself in Wednesday's place as he flew over Lomark, to imagine what the world looked like from a bird's-eye view. It was my dream of omniscience – nothing would ever be hidden from me again, I would be able to write the History of Everything.

We all looked at Joe, waiting to hear his thoughts. Joe looked at Wednesday as the screwdriver propellered faster and faster through his fingers. It was amazing how fast he could do that. When the screwdriver fell at last and all four of us, wakened from the spell, looked at the concrete floor where it had landed with a clear tinkle, Joe raised his eyebrows.

‘It's actually quite simple,' he said. ‘If we want to see her naked, we'll need our own plane.'

The airplane was the crowbar that man needed to force his way into the air, the final element; that's what Joe had said that afternoon in the garage. But it wasn't until he came up with the idea of building his own plane that I realized what he meant; the plane would be the crowbar with which we would part the heavens between Mrs Eilander's legs. The plane would allow us a view of that
terra incognita
, and Joe was the engineer who would make it happen.

I watched the airplane grow, starting with the eighteen-inch moped wheels we found at the junkyard right up to and including the fine, varnished propeller Joe wangled from a nearby airfield.

They started work on the high-wing plane in a shed at the edge of the factory grounds, amid black mountains of broken asphalt scraped from old roads and dumped there for reuse. The big grinding machine had broken down years ago. Now it stood in slow collapse between chunks of unprocessed asphalt on one side and the pointy hills of a finer structure that it had spit out on the other.

In the mineral world of the asphalt plant, bulldozers trundled back and forth between piles of blue porphyry, red Scottish granite, bluish quartzite and sands of many varieties. The ground stone came in by ship from German mills along the
Upper Rhine. A sharp eye might find among it pieces of mammoth bone and tusk, and the occasional fossilized shark's tooth. Christof had a sharp eye. Pointing at the piles of sand and gravel, he would speak of himself as the curator of a ragtag collection of prehistory, what he called the ‘Maandag Museum'. And Christof was the boss's son, so no one interfered; the three of them could do whatever they liked, as long as they didn't get in the way.

There came a day when the plane was a full eight metres long: a fuselage of steel wires, tubes, cables and crossbars, schematic as an articulated insect's rump. Structural elements, Joe told me, were always arranged in the form of a triangle.

‘Geometrically speaking, the triangle provides a solid construction,' he said. ‘A square will shift, change its shape. But the triangle is the basis of every solid construction.'

The thing remained wingless until the end. I could never really believe that the plane was actually meant to take off, especially after I found out that the gas and choke handles were made from the gearshifts of a racing bike. Had foreman Graad Huisman of Bethlehem Asphalt known the real purpose of their activities in the shed, he would definitely have kept the boys from coming there. But they talked about their plans to no one else, and no one ever asked me a thing.

The hangar floor was littered with sketches, blueprints and manuals. Dunhill in the corner of his mouth and one eye squeezed shut against the smoke, Engel pored over sheets of paper covered in calculations. For shock absorbers they had pulled the suspension springs off an old Opel Kadett at the Hermans & Sons junkyard and welded them between the fuselage and the wheels. Then the plane was hoisted on a rope a metre and a half off the ground and Joe climbed into it. We held our breath. Joe yanked on the rope, the knot slipped and the
plane crashed to the ground. Everything remained intact, except for Joe, who climbed out with a ‘goddamn sore back'. Thereby demonstrating that the plane would not fall apart during the landing.

‘OK,' Engel said, ‘now we can put the canvas on it.'

Each new phase in construction was preceded by a rash of thievery. What was needed now was tarpaulin.

‘Blue tarp, and nothing but blue,' emphasized Engel, who was in charge of the plane's aesthetics. ‘Sky blue or nothing at all.'

The stands for the Friday street market were always set up the night before, the tarps laid in readiness on the tables where the stallholders could find them the next morning. But one Friday morning in October the market superintendent found himself besieged by a group of unhappy vendors. Where were their tarps? How were they supposed to set up their stands? Was this what they paid stallage for? That day they were given last year's ratty old tarps, and that week's
Lomarker Weekly
ran a little article about the theft.

Meanwhile, at a secret location, the tarps were sewn together with angelic patience. Engel was the right man for the job; his father, the last of the Lomark eel fishers, had taught him how to mend fish traps and tie knots that would never come loose. Engel cursed regularly as he worked, but the final result was stunning. Using tie-rips, he stretched the tarps over the fuselage until they were tight as the head of a drum.

Joe was in charge of the wings. The frames were made from fourteen aluminium strips attached to the main girder of each wing, which presented the difficult task of bending twenty-eight ribs into exactly the same silhouette. Without being asked, I took over right away; a strong hand that knows its own strength is a more delicate instrument than any bench-vice or pair of tongs. Taking each rib between thumb and fingers, I
bent them to the right curvature. Twenty-seven and one for good luck makes twenty-eight, there you go, sir.

They were flabbergasted.

‘Jesus, talk about a vice-grip,' Engel mumbled.

‘Frank the Arm,' said Joe.

From then on I was called on more often when it was time to bend things or to tighten them so they'd never move again.

At Pa's yard they tore an aluminium engine out of a pleated Subaru and installed it in the nose of the plane. The fuel tank was the kind used in small boats. The plane, they had calculated, needed to produce 130 kilos of pull in order to get off the ground. A weigh beam was attached to the wall and linked to the tail with a steel cable. Joe climbed in and started the engine. Holy Toledo, it ran like a dream. The cable went taut, the pointer on the weigh beam shot up to eighty kilos, then ninety. The propeller flailed, one hundred, the motor roared and papers flew through the shed. Wednesday left my shoulder with a panicky caw-caw, at a hundred and ten Engel put his hands over his ears, the engine was approaching 5500 rpm and making a horrible racket.

‘HUNDRED TWENTY!' Christof screamed.

The pointer kept crawling along, Joe gave it a tad more throttle and Engel shouted, ‘STOP!'

A hundred and thirty kilos of traction: the plane had passed the test.

One day Joe asked me to help him with a little experiment. He rolled me over to the workbench in the hangar, then sat down on the other side. The workbench Engel used for his drawings was between us. Taking my right hand in his he moved our elbows to the middle, so that our forearms formed sixty-degree angles with the tabletop. In one quick move Joe pushed my arm
down, making me lean over crookedly in my cart. He brought my arm upright and pushed again, but with less force this time, so it took longer for me to tilt over. The back of my hand touched the tabletop. I looked at him, wondering what it was he wanted from me. He set me upright again.

‘Put a little muscle into it this time,' he said.

I put a little muscle into it. So did he. We sat there across from each other like that for a while. Then he threw his shoulder into it and pushed harder. I didn't budge, he pushed harder and his eyes bulged. I gave a little.

‘Put some muscle into it, damn it!' he groaned.

I buckled down and brought our hands back to the middle of the table.

‘Push!'

I pushed him down. He groaned and let go.

‘Was that difficult?' he asked.

I shook my head.

‘A little bit difficult?'

Not very difficult. Joe nodded contentedly and got up. He went out of the shed and came back with a couple of rusty iron bars under his arm. The bars were of different thicknesses; he clamped the thinnest one between the jaws of the bench-vice at the end of the table.

‘Bear with me here, Frankie,' he said, and rolled me over to the bench-vice. ‘Now, can you bend that?'

I grabbed the bar and bent it. Joe put the next one in the vice. This one was thicker. When I bent it back at an angle I didn't feel much resistance, but the dent of the iron still glowed hot in my hand. Bending things felt good.

Joe fastened the final bar in the vice. It was a lot thicker than the first two. I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled, but the bastard wouldn't budge. I went at it, I didn't want to disappoint
Joe. A weird noise came from my throat, I pulled like my life depended on it, but nothing much happened. What I did hear was the sound of breaking glass, and metal clattering against stone. Then it gave – it came slowly in my direction. What was that running out of my nose; was it blood or snot?

‘Whoa, big fella!'

I let go and, to my surprise, the bar sprang back like elastic. There was a loud crash. I groaned in disappointment: the iron hadn't bent, it was only the other side of the workbench lifting off the floor – the sound I'd heard was falling beer bottles and tools. I had failed.

‘Fantastic,' Joe said, ‘really fantastic. Do you have any idea how much that bench weighs?'

He squatted down beside me. His face was close to mine, he didn't blink, and I noticed that his left eye shone differently from the right one – the left eye was shooting fire, tempered in turn by the right one, which held a sort of compassion greater than I could grasp.

‘That arm of yours might take you places,' he said. ‘Keep it in good shape, you never know.'

It was winter, the river left its banks. Around Ferry Island the current rose, and metre by metre the washlands disappeared beneath grim, sloshing water.

Then the Lange Nek went under, and before long only the traffic signs, lampposts and trees still stuck out above the water. Piet Honing brought the ferryboat to safety in a quiet inlet a ways north and ran the service between Lomark and Ferry Island with the amphibian that belonged to Bethlehem Asphalt.

Every morning and every evening the shivering asphalt men waited for him, the managers with their attaché cases and the workers with lunchboxes in hand. Most of the asphalt men were on bad-weather leave, though; once it was no longer possible to travel by regular means between Ferry Island and the shore, production had halted. Repairs and administrative work were all that went on. Piet Honing steered standing at the back of the amphibian and didn't mind the cold – his face had that leathery texture that weathers but doesn't wear out with the years.