I held up five fingers.
‘Five thousand! You’re kidding me! Jesus Christ, Frankie, are you going to keep squeezing newspapers for the rest of your life?’
I nodded solemnly. Pressing newspapers into fuel was my mission. I couldn’t imagine anything better. Joe pushed his cigarette butt into the ground with his thumb. It left a little planting hole.
‘You know, I don’t believe it for a minute. What I wanted to say, Frankie, is that I’ve had plenty of time to think in the last few months up on that bulldozer, and I’m going to tell you why this is our lucky day. I think your arm means something. A lot more than you even realize. And I’ve figured out how we can put that special arm to use to obtain the two things for which all humans are condemned to strive: money and prestige. Because you, Frank Hermans, are an arm wrestler.’
Joe’s joy beamed all the way into the garden next door.
‘Isn’t that what friends are for, to see things in you that you never saw before?’
I frowned, took a newspaper from the pile and a pencil stub and scribbled What do you mean, arm w restler? in the margin.
‘Arm wrestler, you know, two people sitting at the table with their arms in the middle and trying to push the other one down. You’re a natural! They way I see it, you’ve been at training camp for about ten years now, with that cart of yours and squeezing those briquettes and stuff, and now it’s time to put that to good use. You remember out in the hangar, when I asked you to bend those metal rods? When I was working in Germany I saw steel benders, these guys were real monsters, who couldn’t do half what you did! You’re pretty much unbeatable, Frankie, all we have to do is get started. There are competitions all over Europe. I’ll be your manager: we split the take, and have fun doing it.’
He looked at my arm with something close to infatuation, as if I wasn’t attached to it, making me feel a kind of confused jealousy toward my own limb. This was his plan: first I had to go on a balanced diet of protein shakes, carbohydrates and fats. At the same time I would start a daily training program in the techniques of arm wrestling, based on the information he’d looked up at the library on the Internet. He was going to be my coach. We would spend the whole summer studying and training, and our very first tournament would be in Liège in October. The main prize was about seven thousand smackers. Second place got five thousand, third place took three.
‘Fat city,’ Joe said contentedly.
He’d already drawn up a tournament schedule that would take us all over Europe. Eastern Europeans in particular were crazy about arm wrestling. Two men, one table and then push until one of you lands on his ass.
‘But make no mistake about it,’ my self-appointed coach and manager said, ‘there’s more technique involved than you ever dreamed possible.’
The first six months of the season we’d spend warming up, a tournament here and there, finding out where I stood in the arm wrestling hierarchy. And because Joe was irrationally optimistic about it, in May of next year we would take part in the world championships in Poznan, Poland.
‘The only thing you lack is weight; weight is our Achilles’ heel. Shoulder, chest and arm, that’s what we’ve got going for us. Trapezium, biceps, triceps, pectoralis major and forearm, they all have to be in harmony, but then we’re off like a shot. The way I see it. .’
I held up my hand to stop him.
‘Right, now you.’
I picked up the pencil and wrote two letters at the edge of the newsprint: NO.
Joe pursed his lips, as though he’d stumbled upon an interesting chess problem.
‘No?’
I shook my head.
‘Why, I mean, think about it. . Why no, why so fast?’
Don’t feel like it.
And after a while, when Joe went on waving his hands wildly and giving me a bug-eyed explanation of the advantages of his plan, I got tired of listening to him.
Piss off.
Behold if you will what happens when someone comes by on a good day and offers to expand your world ten thousand times over: you panic. Joe offered me competition. I, the man-of-no-contest, who had always seen himself as unfit for the struggle, who had placed himself outside the arena as observer and commentator, was being asked to arm wrestle. They would look at me, judge me and boo or cheer. What Joe was offering was nothing less than a place in the world, a freedom of movement I couldn’t comprehend. It was horrible. So I said no. And I didn’t just say no, I clammed up. Everything had to stay the way it was, because the way it was was good. And if it wasn’t good, it would get better. Suddenly I found myself bitterly defending the value of a converted garden shed, a briquette installation and a few hundred square metres of room in which to move. Anyone who shook a finger at that risked having it chopped off.
I watched Joe walk out of the garden. He left in dumb amazement at my choosing the beaten track instead of the thrill of adventure. I was relieved and disappointed to see him give up so soon.
So I had become fused with my immobility. I explained that to myself as a kind of harmony with my surroundings and the people in it. You can’t call that happiness, happiness burns brighter than that; it was more like the absence of revulsion and the longing for death.
A couple of days after Joe had shown up in the garden, Wednesday flew off. I let him out of his cage and for the first time he didn’t come back. Ma said it was because it was springtime, that nature was like that, but I felt sort of heartbroken. Whenever I heard a jackdaw I thought it was Wednesday, but the cage remained empty.
Joe seemed to have abandoned his arm wrestling plans, or at least he’d stopped talking about them. Instead he occupied himself with buying a car, his first: a long, black bomb that had served for years as Griffioen’s hearse. Christof’s grandmother had ridden in it to her final resting place. It was a real Joe car, an Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser, all straight lines and an impressive quadrangular grille. It needed a little work but it had been kept up well and didn’t have a lot of mileage. Joe put in a huge stereo installation, so you could hear the stamping bass long before he himself showed up.
‘It gives me the shivers,’ Ma said. ‘It’s like having Death pull up in front of your door. I knew everybody they ever took away in that thing. Couldn’t Griffioen have sold it somewhere else? For the sake of the next of kin?’
Joe unbolted the passenger seat so I could go out cruising with him; there was enough space there for me, cart and all. We drove back and forth along the dyke, tooled along the state highway and stopped in for soft ices at the roadhouse like a couple of old fogies. At least he did: I got beer with a straw, because we all know the joke about the spaz who tries to eat an ice-cream cone. We looked at the traffic and the reflection of the setting sun in the windows. In the little playground a father was waiting for his daughter at the bottom of the slide.
‘One more time! One more time!’ the little girl shouted each time she got to the bottom, and she kept it up until the tears started.
Christof and Engel had been gone from Lomark for a year already, Joe had come back and found a steady job at Bethlehem. He seemed content with that. I mean, how was he supposed to have become something when he already was something: Joe, a three-dimensional, mint-condition product of his own imagination. I was thankful he’d come back.
In July they came trickling in, though, one by one. First Engel, then Christof, and finally P.J. too. The periods away from home had grown longer and longer, just as they had with Wednesday, until finally he never came back at all.
Engel had made it through his first year with ease; he was considered an exceptional talent and had received a grant to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the second semester of next year. Things like that, things that in anyone else’s life would have resulted in a proud banging of the gong, he merely accepted with an impassivity that drove me mad with envy. I saw the same kind of impressive stoicism in Joe. As far as that went, Christof had a chicken heart more like my own: we were always on the lookout, reading the omens and judging them fair or dangerous; we lived with nervous noses sniffing the wind, so to speak.