Free Joe Speedboat by Tommy Wieringa

Island and the shore, production had halted. Repairs and administrative work were all that went on. Piet Honing steered standing at the back of the amphibian and didn’t mind the cold – his face had that leathery texture that weathers but doesn’t wear out with the years.
    In winter the inhabitants of Ferry Island, like Engel and his father, became real islanders. They did enough shopping in Lomark to last them a week, then locked themselves away in their restored isolation. The island used to be full of real anarchists, radical folk who drank potato moonshine andhunted hares with impunity, for the arm of the law wasn’t long enough to cross the water. They were notorious for smacking each other over the head at the slightest provocation. That’s all changed, though, people aren’t like that anymore. They’ve grown tame. Everyone can afford a bottle of store-bought gin, and when you see them out walking their dogs you wonder who’s been domesticating whom.
    The river lapped against the winter dyke now, an expanse of water so vast it made our hometown look like Lomark-by-the-Sea. When darkness came along the drowned stretch of the Lange Nek, the streetlights would pop on and leave regular rings of light on all that hectic water bustling toward the sea.
    Ferry Island had been cut loose from the rest of the world, but I was the one who felt adrift. I was outside the circle of light, missing the final construction work on the plane. Joe and Christof crossed with the amphibian, I patrolled the dyke like a nervous watchdog, looking out across the water from the winter dyke to the plant. Most of the time they stayed inside and out of sight. Wednesday perched on my shoulder. He stuck his beak in my ear.
    A cold front was coming in, and before long even Piet Honing and his amphibian would be landlocked. Only the courageous would venture out onto the sea of ice then, two by two, roped together at the waist and carrying a pair of ice picks in case one of them went through. ‘Raise the water, add lots of ice and then shut the lid on it’: that’s what they say here when the wash-lands freeze over.
    What I kept wondering, though, was how the plane was supposed to take off; you needed more or less the length of a football field for that, and it just wasn’t there.
    The factory grounds were quiet, the bulldozers idle among the piles of gravel, the sky was sharp and clear. Finally I spottedmovement on the other side. Looking through my telescope I saw Joe sliding open the doors of the shed. Christof and Engel pushed the sky-blue, wingless fuselage outside. Even knowing that the wings were coming later, it was hard to imagine the thing ever leaving the ground. For me, seeing it was like seeing the first airplane ever built. Over yonder, the pure desire to pull a fast one on gravity had materialized in the form of a long, kind of chunky box on wheels. There was a tailpiece, a propeller and an engine, and whether the thing ever left the ground or not I felt something for which I would find the right words only later, when reading about the history of cinema: the triumph of the will. Joe was the one who’d had the creative flash, Engel had stylized the idea into a sky-blue spacecraft . . . and then you had Christof, who checked the oil. And me? I was the one who’d bent the ribbing into the right shape.
    Wednesday polished his beak on my shoulder and I set my cart rolling.
    After going home to warm up a little beside the fire, I came back. They still didn’t have the wings on it. Joe was driving the plane around the grounds with Engel and Christof running along behind. Over here on the dyke, I could almost hear their excitement.
    Joe had said he needed a football field in order to take off. Now there was a plane, but still no runway. For the first time, seeing Joe driving around in circles in his watch cap and ski goggles, I began having doubts about his foresight and – let me be