Joe Speedboat

by Tommy Wieringa

  As I said earlier, Engel was one of those people you might not notice for years on end, until suddenly you saw him with a kind of light all around. That’s how it was with Engel and the fairer sex as well. He never took part in the games of kissing tag, never passed love letters in class. Instead he drew aerodynamic wonders in his hardcover notebook, and made casual discoveries that would have knocked the world for a loop if only he hadn’t forgotten them right away. One day Heleen van Paridon and Janna Griffioen both fell in love with him. For no apparent reason. That same week they were joined by Harriët Galama (breasts) and Ineke de Boer (even bigger breasts). After that, things took off. Former cavaliers lost both their lustre and the struggle for attention, two or three other girls also fell in love with Engel, and so, out of the blue and without having done a thing to earn it, he became the uncontested blue-ribbon stud of the schoolyard. His pockets bulged with folded scraps of paper on which shaky fingers had embossed red hearts.

  To me Engel seemed as clear and spontaneous as water. Musashi, in his essay on ‘Water’ in Go Rin No Sho, once said something about that: ‘With water as its basis, the spirit becomes like water. Water assumes the shape of the vessel; sometimes it is flowing, sometimes it is like a roaring sea.’

  And Engel was, I have to admit, stupendous in his new role as Casanova. He dealt out tokens of attention with a light hand, conjured up shy smiles on their faces, but it interested him too little to really do much about it.

  Like Joe, he had become fascinated early on by natural scientific phenomena. At home one day, having opened the medicine cabinet in the bathroom too brusquely, a bottle of mouthwash, a strip of vitamin pills and an old toothbrush fell to the floor; though up to his knees in an explosion of glass and glycerine, Engel noticed that the bottle, the strip and the toothbrush all hit the tiles at the same moment, despite their differing weights.

  ‘Newton,’ was all Joe said when Engel told him of his discovery.

  ‘Oh,’ Engel said, ‘too bad. I really thought . . .’

  ‘Listen, forget Newton. The guy wore a wig. Goodyear’s our man.’

  No one knew what he was talking about.

  ‘Charles Goodyear,’ Joe said, ‘was the first person to vulcanize rubber. It was a revolution. Copernicus made the world round, Goodyear made it drivable. Back then rubber was a real problem, it got too soft when it was hot and hard as a rock when it was cold. There wasn’t much they could do with it, but Goodyear was nuts about it, about the idea of rubber. He experimented for years but couldn’t get it right. Until one day he mixed sulphur with the rubber and accidentally spilled some on a hot stove. Then it happened: it got hard, it vulcanized. That’s what they’d all been waiting for, that was the start of the whole thing, after that rubber made the world go round. On rubber tyres! But it didn’t do Goodyear much good, he couldn’t even defend his patent. He died without a penny. Martyrs, that’s what they are, they give their lives for a cause.’

  That made us feel sad and a little quiet, the same way you feel when you hear about jazz musicians whose playing was out of this world but who never got a cent from royalties. You wished it could have been their own stupid fault, just so you wouldn’t have to feel like that.

  On those afternoons, when they were all sitting around back in Joe’s garage, India would roll me out to them. India was good to me. Ever since the day I came by to ask Joe help me get Sam down out of the tree, she seemed to have developed a fondness for me. When I would come down Achterom on one of those vacant afternoons and see their bikes standing out in front, I’d pound on the door with the flat of my hand till she opened up. She’d roll me out back with a kind of breezy helpfulness and park me in between Joe, Christof and Engel. The garage was always full. There was only one chair, for Engel. In any case, he was the only one I ever saw sit in it. He probably wanted to keep his duds clean; I never met anyone else who wore tailored suits at the age of sixteen. Joe would sit on the workbench, Christof on the engine block. That garage was the smithy of their plans. In that smoke-brown shack that smelled of welding rods and burnt oil they dismantled the world, in order to put it back together as they saw fit.

  ‘But rubber tyres won’t do you much good if the roads are rotten,’ Joe said. ‘You need roads: asphalt roads, not the kind of sandy paths and broken stone they had back then. Those were bad for cars, and everyone you passed choked on your dust. Which brings us to Rimini and Girardeau.’

  Joe looked at Christof, who was twiddling his fingers absent-mindedly.

  ‘It’s also the story behind Bethlehem Asphalt, Christof. Your people owe it all to them. The engineers, ah yes!’

  He made a clacking sound with his tongue. Engel nodded to him to go on.

  ‘It was easy as pie, really. Rimini and Girardeau came up with the idea of taking all the rocks out of the road and filling the potholes. After a steamroller smoothed the whole thing out, men with huge watering cans would sprinkle boiling tar all over the road. A thin layer of sand over that, let it dry for a couple of days, and you have the first highway.’

  ‘You forgot the internal combustion engine,’ Christof said. ‘That seems more important to me than rubber and roads.’

  ‘Ooof,’ Joe said, as though someone had punched him in the stomach. ‘That’s a different story altogether. Horse and wagon, steam turbine, internal combustion engine. Here’s how I see it: you’ve got four elements, OK? That’s what man had to tame: fire, water, earth and air . . .’

  That caught my attention right away: those were also the names of the first four chapters of Musashi’s book: ‘Earth’, ‘Water’, ‘Fire’ and ‘Wind’. (The last chapter consists of only one page: ‘The Void’.)

  ‘Fire is the first element,’ Joe said. ‘Fire brought light into the darkness of prehistory.’

  He waved his hand over his shoulder, as though prehistory were back behind the hardboard dividing wall with the shapes of tools outlined on it in marking pen, the way traffic and murder victims are outlined in chalk. You never saw the tools themselves hanging there; in the workshop behind Joe’s house, the tools went their own way.

  ‘Then you’ve got fire, which is the start of civilization. After that comes water, important for farmers, water is. Irrigation means greater productivity and prosperity for many. Then earth: soil for the farmer, roads for the merchant. From the road comes the wheel. The merchant and the soldier are the ones who profit most by the wheel, and each wheel is a little cog in the big gearbox of the Earth. After a manner of speaking. Together, the two things form a mechanism. The wheel leads to the combustion engine, which goes along with the wheel. The combustion engine sets the wheel in motion, the wheel makes the world go round. That’s three.’

  I thought about my own form of propulsion, which I owed to wheel, rubber and asphalt. I, half man, half vehicle, saw myself for a moment as a tiny link in Joe’s view of world history; my wheels rolled across the surface of the earth and contributed to making the world go round.

  ‘OK,’ Joe said. ‘So air was the final element they had to force their way into.’ The airplane was the crowbar they needed. In the late nineteenth century, the first person to really fly was an engineer too: Otto Lilienthal. He just kept picking himself up and dusting himself off, until finally he flew with a pair of wings on his back that he’d copied from the birds. That was the mistake they all made, every single person who tried to fly; imitating the birds is ridiculous of course – in proportion to its body, a bird’s wing muscles are so huge that you could never reproduce that with your arms, no matter how strong you were. That mistake in their thinking kept people on the ground much longer than necessary. But Otto flew fifteen metres, which is incredible! Within a couple of years the first zeppelin was floating in the sky, silent and beautiful, but also a flying bomb. No, the real potential lay in the marriage of the combustion engine with a pair of wings. The first time the two kissed was in America, when one of the Wright Brothers flew thirty-six metres: more than twice as far as Lilienthal – a revolution of twen
ty-one metres! After that it was wide open; aviators started popping up everywhere, breaking one record after another. A one-kilometre flight above Paris – world news! Crossing the Channel in a monoplane – England went bonkers. Anthony Fokker flying above Haarlem – the end of days!

  When he got excited like that, Joe seemed more and more like some nutty sorcerer’s apprentice.

  ‘It’s weird to think that, at the same time atomic science was being developed, planes didn’t amount to much more than a little bamboo, ash wood and canvas.’

  ‘No, that’s normal,’ said Engel, lighting a gold-rimmed cigarette. ‘The mind always has a head start on the invention. An idea is weightless; it floats out in front of matter. We can think up all kinds of things, but try carrying them out. That’s the bitch.’

  ‘Engineers are patient, though,’ Joe said solemnly.

  ‘Did you guys know that P.J.’s mother is a nudist?’ Christof broke the train of thought.

  ‘P.J.?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Picolien Jane,’ Engel said. ‘New girl? Blond pin-curls? South Africa?’

  Joe shrugged. Christof hopped up onto the engine block.

  ‘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.