‘Shall I hang it up in here?’ he asks. ‘Then you can sort of see where I am.’
It’s a nice, big classroom map on a scale of 1:75,000,000, a Wenschow relief-like map. Joe has traced the route with magic marker.
Outside the poppies stand out remarkably red against a seashell-gray sky, at times the sun breaks through at evening and colours the clouds. Wood pigeons and magpies hop about on the roof of my house, I can hear them clear as day. They pick at the moss growing on the corrugated asbestos.
I can move freely again, but Lomark feels different. The dyke, the streets have become foreign to me. The hope once prompted by Joe’s arrival is extinguished, we are what we were and always will be. Joe is a redeemer without promise; he didn’t bring progress, only motion.
‘We do our best,’ he said a long time ago, ‘we build an airplane in order to see the secret, but then you find out that there is no secret, only an airplane. And that’s fine.’
He cast a spell on our world, but after it rains the colours wash right off again.
The E981 is getting closer all the time, you can already see the machines in the distance and after dark there is a flood of artificial light from over there. The provincial highway is one big obstruction, people complain, but too late. Egon Maandag is rubbing his hands in glee, the E981 means a mega-order for him. In the end, though, I think it will work out badly for Bethlehem too; the lack of an exit will hurt his company’s logistics.
Summer blends into fall, I’m getting back into decent shape and sometimes wrestle against Hennie Oosterloo to keep the rhythm going. I don’t think Joe and I will be attending any tournaments this year, he’s too busy with other things. After Paris — Dakar we’ll see how it goes.
One day I run into India on the dyke, she’s moved out of the house and is studying ‘something with people’ in the west of the country. A light drizzle is falling from the yellow sky. India is pleased to see me, she’s dyed her hair black, which makes her face very pale.
‘Frankie, I haven’t seen you for such a long time,’ she says.
She looks like she’s going to cry. I take out the notepad and write that she looks like an Indian, with that hair of hers. The paper grows soggy in the rain. India runs her hand matter-of-factly through her hair.
‘This isn’t hair,’ she says, ‘this is a mood.’
We move off together toward Lomark, when we part she seems very concerned.
‘Keep an eye on Joe a little, would you, Frankie? He seems kind of. . kind of lost lately. You know what I mean?’
I know very well what she means, and watch her go, in her olive-green army coat that Joe once wore and that belonged to their father, if I’m not mistaken. The coat is dark with rain and hangs heavily on her shoulders. She turns and gives me a little wave, the girl who you think smells faintly of peaches.
On 20 December Joe takes off for Marseille, to be there for the start of the race. He doesn’t have enough money for a flatbed, he’ll have to drive the whole way himself.
‘Gives me a chance to test the thing right away,’ he says.
He has meticulously traced out a route along the back roads; on the main roads there’s too much of a chance of being stopped and asked troublesome questions. Once the rally starts, though, he’s home free. I admire his stoic disregard for time, effort and gravity.
In the early morning hours the three of us — Joe’s mother, P.J. and I — go out to wave goodbye. It’s cold, it’s raining, the world is full of blue shades. Regina holds her umbrella over me so that only my left side gets wet. She’s dried up ugly, as we say around here when a woman doesn’t grow old gracefully. Dull is what she’s become, crushed by love.
The bulldozer is growling on the parking lot in front of the bank. Joe says, ‘Well, I guess I’ll get going now,’ and P.J. cries a little. They hug and Joe whispers something in her ear that I can’t hear. She nods sadly and bravely, they kiss. Then Joe holds his mother tight and tells her not to worry, that he’ll come home safely because ‘nothing can happen to you in one of these babies’. He shakes my hand and smiles.
‘Don’t forget your calcium, Frankie, OK? I’ll see you next year.’
He hugs P.J. one more time, she doesn’t want to let go.
‘See you soon, girlie. I’ll call.’
He climbs into the cab, it’s an awesome sight to see him up on that thing. He touches the gas, the wipers sweep across the glass, the monster starts to move. Joe sticks his hand out the open window, rolls out of the parking lot, honks and heads down the street. This is the last we’ll see of him until 1 January.
Then there is the TV bulletin on RTL 5, each night from eleven-thirty to midnight, with all the news about the rally. I watch in my parents’ living room, we see the drivers in a park near a grandstand, there’s a marching band and a cadmium-yellow bulldozer sticks out above all the rest — covered with stickers from Bethlehem Asphalt, Van Paridon Rentals, Bot’s butcher shop and a few other lesser sponsors. He made it, he got to Marseille along the back roads, and that in itself is a miracle. Now he only has to drive 8552 kilometres to Sharm el-Sheikh. At the table, Pa mutters that Joe’s ‘not right in the head, ever since those bombs, too’.
The first day, the caravan heads to Narbonne; the next day to Castellon in Spain, close to Valencia. In the harbour of Valencia the whole shooting match is loaded onto a ferry to north Africa. In Tunis Joe drives into the sun, one day later he reaches the desert. Sometimes, when the rally is filmed from the air, we catch a glimpse of him with a huge cloud of dust fanning out behind. The drivers make a beeline south, and on the fourth day Joe gets in just before the time limit. If you don’t make that, you can turn around and go home. I hear him mumble something about ‘the nick of time’. It seems like he was mistaken, that the bulldozer isn’t as perfect a desert vehicle as he thought. The landscape is beautiful but demanding, the first drivers become stranded in sand dunes and deep holes in dried-up wadis. The rest arrive in Ghadamès, a dot just across the Libyan border, in that part of the world where the map turns yellow with 6,314,314 square kilometres of desert. Joe is really in the Sahara now, with a bulldozer. .
On the seventh day, and for the first time, he appears on the screen by himself, after a puzzling 584-kilometre stage along the Algerian — Libyan border. It’s already dark by the time he comes in off the desert and drives up to the encampment.
‘That’d be him,’ says Ma, who’s only half paying attention to the screen.
Joe’s face is brown and dirty, the camera crew’s lamps illuminate him against a royal-blue sky and a decor of tents, satellite dishes and men in motorcycle leathers bustling on and off. Joe looks over the interviewer’s shoulder and says hello to someone we can’t see. His T-shirt reads BETHLEHEM ASPHALT, LOMARK, with smaller letters underneath saying FOR ALL YOUR PAVED NEEDS. Why, the interviewer asks, did he decide to take part in a bulldozer?
‘It’s only a small step from a truck to a bulldozer,’ Joe says. ‘Except for a camel, I figured it was the best means of transportation in the desert.’
‘And is it?’
Joe grins tiredly.
‘No.’
‘Are you having a rough time?’
‘I’m sore all over, and it’s a pity that you don’t get to see much of the desert. I came here for the desert, but you have to concentrate on the road all day. Especially the ergs, dunes and stuff, sometimes that sand is like talcum powder. The landscape moves and you have to find your way through it.’
‘You’re taking part under the name “Joe Speedboat”, what does that mean?’