The first time Lomark heard of Joe and his family was when the Scania crashed through the ancestral gabled home of the Maandag family on Brugstraat. All the way up to its ass in the front room, where son Christof was sitting in front of the tube playing a video game. He never flinched. When he finally looked up the first thing he saw was a headlight poking like an angry eye through the whirl of dust and debris. Then it gradually dawned on him that there was a truck in his house. The only sound the whole time was the toing-toing of the video ball
bouncing across the screen.
Hanging down over the grille of the Scania was the torso of a man, his arms dangling limply like a scarecrow fallen from heaven. The man’s lower body was pinned inside the cab and he was dead, clear enough. But there was still movement inside: the door on the passenger side of the cab swung open slowly and the boy Christof saw climbing down was roughly his age, twelve or thirteen. He was wearing a gold lamé shirt, sandals and a pair of knickerbockers. Your parents would have to be slightly bonkers to dress you like that, but he just peered around the room matter-of-factly, the mortar swirling down onto his head and shoulders.
‘Hello,’ Christof said, the joystick still in his hand.
The other boy shook his head, as though something peculiar had occurred to him.
‘Who are you?’was all Christof asked him then.
‘My name’s Joe,’ the boy said. ‘Joe Speedboat.’
And so he came like a meteorite into our village, with its river that floods its banks in winter, its permanent web along which gossip scuttles,and its rooster,the rooster in our coat of arms,the same rooster that chased a band of Vikings from Lomark’s gates a thousand years ago or so while our ancestors were in the church praying, for Christ’s sake.‘It was the cock that showed its pluck,’ we say around here. Something that keeps something else at arm’s length, that’s our symbol. But Joe came roaring in with such force that nothing could have stopped him.
The accident had left him a partial orphan; the man hanging out the windshield of the truck was his father. His mother was lying unconscious in the cab, his little sister India was staring at the soles of her father’s shoes. Christof and Joe looked at each other like creatures from different galaxies--Joe stranded in his spaceship, Christof holding out his hand to make the historic
first contact. Here was something that would free him from the leaden immobility of this village, where the only thing that showed any pluck was the cock, that hateful animal you ran into everywhere: on the doors of the fire engines, above the entrance to the town hall and in bronze on the market square.
The rooster that was pulled around on a float during Carnival parades, that crowed at you from decorative roofing tiles beside dozens of front doors and whose incarnation at the local patisserie was the ‘Cocky’ (a crumbly dog biscuit strewn with granola flakes). On sideboards, mantelpieces and windowsills
you found glass roosters, ceramic roosters and stained-glass roosters; oil-painted roosters hung on the walls. When it comes to that cock, our creativity knows no bounds.
Joe looked around in amazement at this house into which Fate (read: faulty steersmanship aggravated by violating the speed limit in a residential zone) had tossed him. In the house where he’d grown up, the one they had traded in for the house in Lomark, there were no oil-painted portraits staring at you gravely from the walls, as though you’d stolen something. And of course you’d always stolen something, which meant those faces would always keep looking like that so that you didn’t have to be afraid, just give them a friendly nod and say, ‘Come, come, boys, a little smile wouldn’t hurt.’
The chandelier was real nice too, he thought, as was the antique refreshment trolley bearing Egon Maandag’s crystal decanters filled with whiskeys of provenances from Loch Lomond to Talisker. At Joe’s place all they had were squat bottles of elderberry wine, deep purple and homemade with a water seal that bubbled and belched like a gastric patient. The wine was always either not quite ripe or just a tad past its prime. ‘But the flavour is really quite special, isn’t it, love?’ (his mother speaking to his father, never the other way around).
After which they would guzzle manfully, only to flush the rotgut down the toilet the very next day; the hangovers it produced resembled nothing so much as the near-death experiences of Russian rubbing-alcohol drinkers.
Later Joe would found out that he had landed in the salon of the Maandag clan, the most important family in Lomark, owners of the asphalt plant by the river. Egon Maandag employed twenty-five men at his factory, not to mention a housemaid and at times an au pair from yet another land beyond the dykes.
Joe just stood and stared around.
Later Christof said he did that in order not to have to see the dead man hanging from the windshield. When he finally took his eyes off Christof and his surroundings, he turned and looked at his father. He reached out his hand and laid it on the back of the man’s blood-smeared head. He stroked his hair gently and said something Christof couldn’t make out. His shoulders shook, then he walked over to the hole the truck had knocked in the front wall. Climbing over the rubble he stepped outside, into sunlight. He walked down Brugstraat to the
winter dyke, climbed over it and made for the river. Heifers were gambolling in the washlands; wilted grass left behind by winter floods hung from the barbed wire like flaxen Viking beards. Joe reached the summer dyke and the ferryboat jetty behind. Once on board he climbed up onto the railing, his legs dangling over the water, and didn’t even look up when Piet Honing came out of the pilothouse to collect his fare.
That Joe and Christof would become friends was as inevitable as fish on Friday. It started with that gleam in Christof’s eye when he looked so greedily at the powder-covered boy who emerged from the moving van. Sunlight poured into the salon through the shattered wall behind Joe, filling the room with the hum of a spring day. Christof had never seen anything like it. The image of the boy against that flood of light filled him with a longing to cast off his old life.
But Christof wasn’t like that, and never would be. He was too skittish for that, and too much a doubter. In his longing to be just like the boy from the truck there was also the kind of envy that makes your canines ache, the vampirish urge to suck the life right out of someone.
The accident with the moving van formed them. It reinforced the stoic in Joe, and brought out something oldish in Christof, something worrisome. If Joe talked about building an airplane, Christof would say, ‘Shouldn’t you fix your bike first?’
If the monthly air-raid sirens went off atop the bank at the very moment Joe had finished knocking together equipment that allowed him to hijack the Sunday broadcast of the evangelical community – ‘Radio God’, as the locals call it – and replace it with speed metal played backwards, that for Christof was a signal that building jamming stations was a bad idea. For Joe it meant that it was twelve o’clock, time for lunch.
Joe celebrated our first meeting with a doozy of a bomb, that’s how I see it. The very same evening, after we had met at Hoving’s farm: tout Lomark, straight up in bed. It’s a gift. Dogs bark, lights go on, people crowd together in the street. Joe’s name is on everyone’s lips. In bed I lie grinning f
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