Read Online Joe Speedboat by Tommy Wieringa - Free Book Online Page B

traction: the plane had passed the test.
    One day Joe asked me to help him with a little experiment. He rolled me over to the workbench in the hangar, then sat down on the other side. The workbench Engel used for his drawings was between us. Taking my right hand in his he moved our elbows to the middle, so that our forearms formed sixty-degree angles with the tabletop. In one quick move Joe pushed my armdown, making me lean over crookedly in my cart. He brought my arm upright and pushed again, but with less force this time, so it took longer for me to tilt over. The back of my hand touched the tabletop. I looked at him, wondering what it was he wanted from me. He set me upright again.
    â€˜Put a little muscle into it this time,’ he said.
    I put a little muscle into it. So did he. We sat there across from each other like that for a while. Then he threw his shoulder into it and pushed harder. I didn’t budge, he pushed harder and his eyes bulged. I gave a little.
    â€˜Put some muscle into it, damn it!’ he groaned.
    I buckled down and brought our hands back to the middle of the table.
    â€˜Push!’
    I pushed him down. He groaned and let go.
    â€˜Was that difficult?’ he asked.
    I shook my head.
    â€˜A little bit difficult?’
    Not very difficult. Joe nodded contentedly and got up. He went out of the shed and came back with a couple of rusty iron bars under his arm. The bars were of different thicknesses; he clamped the thinnest one between the jaws of the bench-vice at the end of the table.
    â€˜Bear with me here, Frankie,’ he said, and rolled me over to the bench-vice. ‘Now, can you bend that?’
    I grabbed the bar and bent it. Joe put the next one in the vice. This one was thicker. When I bent it back at an angle I didn’t feel much resistance, but the dent of the iron still glowed hot in my hand. Bending things felt good.
    Joe fastened the final bar in the vice. It was a lot thicker than the first two. I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled, but the bastard wouldn’t budge. I went at it, I didn’t want to disappointJoe. A weird noise came from my throat, I pulled like my life depended on it, but nothing much happened. What I did hear was the sound of breaking glass, and metal clattering against stone. Then it gave – it came slowly in my direction. What was that running out of my nose; was it blood or snot?
    â€˜Whoa, big fella!’
    I let go and, to my surprise, the bar sprang back like elastic. There was a loud crash. I groaned in disappointment: the iron hadn’t bent, it was only the other side of the workbench lifting off the floor – the sound I’d heard was falling beer bottles and tools. I had failed.
    â€˜Fantastic,’ Joe said, ‘really fantastic. Do you have any idea how much that bench weighs?’
    He squatted down beside me. His face was close to mine, he didn’t blink, and I noticed that his left eye shone differently from the right one – the left eye was shooting fire, tempered in turn by the right one, which held a sort of compassion greater than I could grasp.
    â€˜That arm of yours might take you places,’ he said. ‘Keep it in good shape, you never know.’

It was winter, the river left its banks. Around Ferry Island the current rose, and metre by metre the washlands disappeared beneath grim, sloshing water.
    Then the Lange Nek went under, and before long only the traffic signs, lampposts and trees still stuck out above the water. Piet Honing brought the ferryboat to safety in a quiet inlet a ways north and ran the service between Lomark and Ferry Island with the amphibian that belonged to Bethlehem Asphalt.
    Every morning and every evening the shivering asphalt men waited for him, the managers with their attaché cases and the workers with lunchboxes in hand. Most of the asphalt men were on bad-weather leave, though; once it was no longer possible to travel by regular means between Ferry