John Brady - Poachers Road

“Lie,” she said, turning, and drew up her leg.

“I don’t,” he tried.

“I know I know,” she said, and she pushed against his chest.

She was not tender now. She moved around a lot, tugging and releasing, only to use her tongue in the intervals.

“You should stop,” he said again.

When he felt it, he tried to pull her up.

“Giuliana!”

She pushed at him and then he was lost to the brushing of her hair on his belly. She worked harder, even when he cried out. He tried to sit up again, but then he let go and her mouth clasped around him, and he went still.

Things cascaded through him, an avalanche, as the last tics got weaker. Guilt, some frantic wish he couldn’t pin down, and his senses exploding as everything raced through him, fled, and then crashed over him again.

“Not fair,” he said weakly. “Not fair.”

Then her face was over his. He felt her breasts drag across his chest. She looked at him with an expression that was almost a smile.

“Let me,” he said.

But as he reached for her, she was up.

“We’re not finished,” he called out.

He heard a tap running.

“Be quiet,” she said. “I know. I can’t just get off like that. Not now.”

He listened to the tap water, heard it divert and splash.

When she came back there were water drops on her breasts.

She knelt on the bed and sat back on her legs.

“Let me,” he said. “I want to.”

She smiled now, and it reminded him of how he’d seen a blindman smile.

“I know,” she murmured and let herself be pushed back. “You are so spoiled, kiddie, so spoiled.”

It took until four to get to Kitzbuhel proper. Felix didn’t want to flog the Polo to death to get there a half an hour early, especially with the rack and bike frame on top. It would be light until nine anyway, now.

Giuliana had dozed on and off for an hour after they’d hit the M1. He’d stopped to fill the tank just before Spittal, right off the autobahn. They had semmels and wurst not-bad cured ham and the buns were still warm and a few slices of Havarti in a bakery next to the Fina. They sat at a bench to eat them, just as the sun came out. He bought beer before they left.

They were soon amid thickening traffic that he guessed was Salzburg-bound, and he was glad to get off again at Bischofshofen.

He stayed on the main road after, rather than the slower and more scenic route that would have led them by St. Johann.

Giuliana put down a guidebook on Thailand. She looked at the sharp edges on the crests of the Kitzbuheler Alpen that had risen up steadily to their right.

“I can’t stop thinking about that,” she said. “What you did up there. It would give me nightmares for sure. The two, you know…?”

“Who knows,” he said. “You do what you have to. Mom will tell you how squeamish I was when I was a kid.”

Kitzbuhel was fairly cluttered already, with more tour buses than Felix expected. He let the Polo through the outer streets toward the zentrum, eyeing the Beemers and Audis and SUVs. A tour bus with a lot of Asians was jammed at the curve that led to the train station. Giuliana giggled as they inched by and looked up at the faces.

“Banzai!”

“How do you know they’re Japanese?”

“They look like rabbits.”

“Are you one of those racist cops who picks on Albanians and Nigerians, huh?”

“Ouch. Are you Red Brigades? Humour, please, liebchen.”

“Don’t ‘liebchen’ me. I’m not one of your Alpine maidens.”

He turned down the lane he had found the first year he’d come with the ski club in hochschule. They’d gotten drunk before going on the lift and nearly fell off.

He pulled in beside a cream Fiat with a German plate and a Munich crest on the window.

“That might be one of our guys,” he said. “See the rack?”

He looked over at Giuliana and looked around her face, at the faint glow of perspiration high on her forehead. The air conditioning in the Polo had failed a couple of years ago now. It wasn’t worth fixing.

He liked how her hair rattled out into a loose bundle as the breeze had tugged at it, mile after mile. She gave him a skeptical stare.

“What?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I know that look.”

“You do, uh?”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Last night.”

“Oh,” she said and batted at him. He laid his hand on her leg.

“I have X-ray vision,” he said. “They teach it at the Gendarmerie school.”

She smacked his hand and then opened the door.

“Stop it. Come on. Get the stuff.”

He took the bike frame down and laid it on the grass margin that ran along the front of the car park. He took out the wheels then, and the Velcroed pouch that held the tools.

Giuliana still kept her first rucksack from when she was a kid.

She had filled it with books and paper and fruit and nuts and God knows what else. He began strapping the wheels to the frame, paying a lot of care to where the spokes rested. Then he tested the weight of the package.

Giuliana chewed on an apple, looking off over the roofs toward the cable car lines that rose from the town up the slopes of the Hochkitzbuhel. A cable car was moving slowly at one of the steepest sections, a 70-degree length close to the top of the Streif. It was that sheer drop where skiers made their bones, where they could declare they had skied the Hahnenkamm, complete with the Mousetrap, the section that had ended so many Olympic hopes.

Felix thought about the trail up beyond the hotel there, the Ehrenbachhohe, over the ridges that led to Penglestein summit and on to Blaue Lacke.

He checked the glove compartment before settling the parking permit better on the dashboard. Giuliana checked the doors a second time while he loaded up his pack.

The streets were busy, with people standing around, moving in groups slowly down the sidewalks, pausing to look at the souvenirs and clothes. There were plenty milling about the steps to the Andreaskirche too. The cafes on Klostergasse were close to full. A deeply tanned man with designer stubble and unnaturally white teeth he liked to display, along with his bare feet in those Americanstyle moccasins, gave Felix the thumbs-up from behind a glass of beer.

“Sehr gut, mann!”

Felix sniffed the air for signs of chemical happiness. He couldn’t manage even a fake smile.

“Have a nice day, man,” he replied.

A cluster of Asians with silly hats stood listening intently to a woman dressed up in a flowery Tyrolean dirndl, with the endless pigtails and the stout shoes. To round things out, a youth in lederhosen was explaining something in fluent Italian to two heavy-set, sweating women that Felix decided could only be nuns in civvies up from Rome. They listened, nodding gravely, and looked up the path of the cable cars above.

He bought the three-day pass and let the ticket seller eye how he had kitted up the bike. It was a slack time for ascents, apparently. They walked through the empty passageway toward the ramp.

“Well, now you have company,” Giuliana said. “Your playmate.”

Peter was the real mountain man. He had been loud and clomping from birth, Felix had concluded early on after their first meeting at the Gendarmerie intake in Graz. Schwartz Peter, they called him soon enough the joker of the pack. Felix had soon learned there was something behind the pose, however. The same Peter very ably rested a keen brain, and big ambitions behind the goofy pose. The same Peter Moser had already impressed the CO at his post in Graz that he should be training at the central Gendarmerie college in Modling.

“My God, Giuliana,” he called out in that deep Styrian voice, the bellen that Schwarzenegger had exported to the world. “I was hoping you’d bring someone decent this time.”