The way it swings and pounds, this ferry scares the daylights out of some folks. Sometimes the water comes washing over the deck, but there’s nothing to worry about. The thing’s been in operation since 1928, it’s just old. And it was actually built for quiet waterways, not for the river with all its strange moods. Pa says, ‘That thing’s a public menace. It should have gone through the cutter at Hermans & Sons a long time ago.’ As though he gives a shit about public safety, not if he can’t earn anything off it. But Piet keeps his ship running, cost what it may, even if it’s little more than a pilothouse and a sheet-metal plate just big enough for six cars.
If you ask Piet, he’ll tell you that his cable ferry was motorized when inland vessels started getting faster and faster; it became too dangerous to cross by power of the current alone. Because that’s what a cable ferry actually does. It’s attached by cables to three old buoys upstream, what they call the bochtakers. The last buoy is nailed to the riverbed with a huge anchor. At the end of the sling is the ferryboat. The ferry sweeps across the water like the drive chain of a clock, the ones with metal pinecones at the bottom. By winching in one cable and letting the other one slide, the current brings the boat to the far shore; these days, though, Piet needs the engine to keep the river monsters from rolling right over him. Sometimes the ships run up against the cables between the buoys, and Piet has some damage. Then he’s closed for business for the day while he makes repairs.
Piet comes out of the pilothouse. ‘And a fine evening it is, buddy.’
I look up at him and a big blob of spit gushes from my mouth. I’ve got litres of that stuff in me. I could raise goldfish in it. A barge, loaded with mountains of sand, is bearing down on us.
‘The old landing could use a little fixing up,’ Piet sighs. ‘Like back in the old days, with a nice little waiting room where you could order coffee and cake. When it was cold they all used to huddle around the stove till I got there. But the bridge and that highway put an end to that. Just look at it now. Wait, though, till those roads get too packed, then we’ll show ’em who’s got the fastest connection around here.’
Lately he seems a little sad. The barge cuts past us. Its deck hatches are wide open, piles of sand poke up out of the hold like crests on a dragon’s back. A range of hills sailing up to Germany. No wonder this country’s so flat, the way we export all our hills.
There’s one cloud up in the sky, in the shape of a foot. Is anybody there, I wonder. Anybody there? You know what I mean?
Joe never told anyone his real name, not even Christof, who’d become his best friend by then. We knew his last name was really Ratzinger, but his first name was a secret. Normally, when they give you a name, you don’t know any different. It’s your name and you don’t go whining about it. In fact, you’ve got nothing to say about it: you are your name, your name is you, together the two of you are one; after you die, your name lives on for a while in a few people’s heads, then it fades away on your gravestone and that’s that. But that wasn’t enough for Joe. We’re talking about back before he lived in Lomark. With that real name of his, he knew, he could never become what he wanted to be. With a name like his you could never become something or someone else. For example, you might as well have some disease that kept you from leaving the house. It was a misunderstanding, he was born with the wrong name. So when he was about ten he decided to do something about that name, that name like a club foot. He was going to be called Speedboat. Where he came up with it I don’t know, but Speedboat fit him to a tee. He didn’t have a first name yet, but that didn’t worry him; now that he had a last name, the first one would come of its own accord.
It didn’t take long. One day, as he was walking past a scaffolding, one of those ones with a long chute on it they use to dump rubble down into a container, Joe — who wasn’t called that at that moment — got some dust in his eyes and stopped to rub at them. On the scaffolding was a radio all covered in grit and paint splatters, and at that moment, from that radio, his name appeared. Happy as a child spotting its mother in a crowd, he heard his own first name for the first time: Joe. In the song ‘Hey Joe’ by Jimi Hendrix: ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand / Hey Joe, I said where you going with that gun in your hand / I’m going down to shoot my old lady / You know I caught her messing ‘round with another man.’
Joe it was. Joe Speedboat. A name like that you could take with you into the world.
His vocation Joe found in the little front yard of the house on Achterom. It was in the early spring after their first winter in Lomark. I was still in the hospital recovering. Joe was raking dead leaves onto a pile; fresh, cold light poured down over the rotten remains of the seasons. From beneath the leaves brownish-yellow grass appeared, and translucent snail shells. Then, from up toward Westerveld there came a sound — a sound of something ripping, something that hurt. It grew fast, in waves. The young poplar in the yard shivered nervously. Joe clutched the rake to his chest and waited, in the classic pose of parks department employees everywhere.
Then he saw them: seven glistening Opel Mantas, black as the night, with exhaust pipes vomiting fire and smoke. At their wheels were boys with grim, inbred faces and hair on the palms of their hands. Cigarette smoke was sucked from rolled-down windows, left arms rested casually on the doors, and Joe looked on in amazement as the procession passed like slow thunder. He dropped the rake and lifted his hands to cover his ears. The mufflers gleamed like trumpets, the world seemed to shrivel in all-consuming noise as the boys punched the gas with clutches to the floor, just to let everyone know they were there, so that no one might doubt it, for if it doesn’t reverberate, it doesn’t exist.
It was Joe’s first lesson in kinetics, in the beauty of motion, as driven by the internal combustion engine.
The autocade left a bubble of silence in its wake, and in that silence Joe heard his mother’s voice at the open window: ‘Assholes!’
Regina Ratzinger (anyone accidentally calling her ‘Mrs Speedboat’ was amiably but decidedly set aright) wore out her back each morning as housekeeper to the Family Tabak, and spent each afternoon knitting herself a case of bursitis in order to supply the whole village with woollen sweaters. Those sweaters were of excellent quality, a fact that ultimately turned against her; their indestructibility meant that, once the saturation point had been reached, she barely sold a one. The sharp spike in the success of her sweaters was also due in part to the finely detailed Lomark cocks she conjured up with fine thread on the breast of each one.
Their house was full of baskets of wool, and that drew moths. At strategic spots, therefore, she had hung bait, sticky strips of cardboard laced with the aroma of mothly sex. Visitors would sometimes hear Regina Ratzinger shouting, ‘A moth! A moth!’, followed by a resounding smack, India’s cry of ‘Oh, that’s mean!’ and Joe’s chuckle.
Not knowing Joe’s real name drove Christof crazy. One day he approached Regina Ratzinger.
‘Mrs Speed — Sorry, Mrs Ratzinger, what’s Joe’s real name?’
‘I’m not allowed to say, Christof.’
‘But why not? I won’t tell anyone. .’
‘Because Joe doesn’t want me to. He believes that everyone should have one secret in life, however big or however little. Sorry, Stoffy, but I can’t help you.’
Christof had been named after his grandfather, whose likeness appeared in one of the paintings in the house on Brugstraat; immortalized against a backdrop of classical ruins, he looked out on the parlour the truck had destroyed. At the moment Regina called him ‘Stoffy’, Christof decided he wanted to be called Johnny, Johnny Maandag. Which was a fine name, absolutely, as long as you didn’t know that his real name was Christof and that he had changed it in imitation of Joe Speedboat.