John Brady - Poachers Road

“I just don’t want a false alarm, or to waste people’s time.”

“Okay,” was Speckbauer’s parting advice. “So if it turns out to be nothing, we’ll take it out of your pay.”

The minutes seemed to hang there in the still air of the room. Felix wasn’t sleepy anymore. He was even able to lean his head against the window and not feel drowsy. The occasional sound came from the old house, but never even a tiny gurgle from the pipes for the heating. The system had been turned off, he was sure, by his grandfather, a man who placed his faith in the kachelofen, the massive stone and tile fireplace. Opa was still a guarder of schillings, or cents, or Euro as they had come to be. Windows flung open to cool air, and bedcovers back until midday were still the ways here.

If you couldn’t see your breath in the morning over the bedcover, well that meant it must be summer, right?

Felix toured the house in his mind again, seeing the kitchen door out, then back to the hall door that no one used. Down the hall his mind moved, like an arcade game, a PlayStation shooter, he thought. Except he had no shooter.

Again, he tried to quench the worry by letting his mind out over the twisting, narrow roads that led down from the mountains.

He thought of Speckbauer making his way up from the distant motorway, blasting by Weiz no doubt, and slowing only for the narrow roads that were the last parts of the journey. It was relief as much as embarrassment he was feeling. At least things were in motion, and he couldn’t stop them now. Hadn’t Speckbauer said it was okay? Well he’d throw it back at him if he was grumpy.

Giuliana, yes, again. He should text her, not sit there watching a farmyard in the middle of the night. With his thumb over the key pad, lust descended over him. Instead of the yard bathed in the garish light that had probably burned into his retina forever now, he was seeing her violin shape as she lay on her side. There was that stripe across her back last year where her swimsuit strap covered.

He’d get her to go over to the lake at Stubensee, and lie there again by the lakeside like last summer: half asleep, half soused with the Chianti that went down so well with the snack.

Then his heart leaped. Where had that thud come from? He sat up, and tilted his head, and listened. His gaze fixed on the bedroom door.

There was a lesser, longer, fart this time. Opa was probably not even awake. Felix smiled and for a moment his grandfather’s face came to him from the darkness near the door, his wink of glee lighting up the whole face of this 70-something-year-old kid. It was now 20 minutes since the phone call: 20 hours it might as well have been.

Was this what they meant in the drug-use lectures at the Gendarmerieschule, this half-crazy, half-panicky agitation that druggies got, a skin-crawling need to do something? He looked around the yard again. It was like a yellowed stage, a set for some weird movie. He began to imagine questions he’d put in the Dienstprufung, the final exam:

Describe the effects of crack on a user who hasn’t had any recently. Would it be: A) paranoid B) aggressive C) skin-crawling D) antsy E) panicking F) jumpy G) berserk…

He stopped at the H, and made it the all of the above.

He decided to head downstairs. From the kitchen widow, he might catch a glimpse of the lights of Speckbauer’s car down the valley. He held the binoculars against his chest, and he tiptoed toward the door. His mind was already running to excuses for his oma or opa, if he woke them: I can’t sleep, I’m reading. I’m going to the klo.

The door had a small squeak at the end of its travel. He stood in the threshold, listening for Berndt. Then he made his way to the stairs. He waited there for any sound from his grandparents. The sound of the clock from downstairs came to him, and the manifold smells of the house, something stale to do with the dog probably, his bed or food, and the ever-present soupy scent from the kitchen mixed with the smells of firewood, and dried herbs and ashes.

He stopped on the landing.

Kerosene?

His heart pounded hard enough for him to wonder if wasn’t echoing through the house. He sniffed again, but it wasn’t there this time. He descended a few steps and waited. Nothing. Wasn’t there such a thing as smell hallucinations? He looked down the hall to the Berndt’s place by the kitchen door. Half-deaf or not, the dog’s head came up when Felix stepped off the stairs, a faint creak following him.

“You know me, Berndt,” he whispered as loud as he dared.

“Lass. Lie down.”

The biscuits were in the usual place. The dog stayed in his basket and crunched on them. Felix crouched by him, looking through the doorways, trying to hear anything above the chewing and slobbering. He had a view out the kitchen window here, toward the road. There were no high beams from Speckbauer’s Passat snaking through the bends and darkness up to the village.

He dropped to his knees after a while, and soon he had settled on the floor a short arm’s-length from the dog, with his back against the door jamb. He kept patting and stroking the dog, but paused several times, not a little surprised that he could now simply sit there like this, waiting.

An ache began to make itself known above the tension that clawed at him steadily still. Though he couldn’t pin it down, Felix began to believe that it had something to do with the fact that he was a not kid anymore, a kid just sitting with the dog. It had been Olli in those years before Berndt, a supremely stupid but goodnatured dog that his grandfather hadn’t the heart to get rid of, but no different from this slob here: an uncomplicated presence, a beating heart, warmth.

The ache grew in him. He remembered how his grandmother had told him so often he was truly his mother’s son, when she saw him with animals. Even now this old house seemed to breed contentment. The rare visits to his Opa Kimmel made him feel he was a kid again, but a kid being sent to the office. Was it possible that happiness left something of itself in the walls of this house? His father had been drawn to this place, and so much so that he had pretty well made it his home. With his eye on their teenaged daughter, he had still been able to relax here in the company of the Nagls, that elderly pair now sleeping above.

Berndt gave a low grunt of contentment, and ran a wet tongue over Felix’s knuckles.

“Enough is enough,” he whispered, but his hand seemed to be independent of him, and it had returned to rubbing the dog’s head.

He looked at the darkness on the kitchen window again, but there were no car lights anywhere down the valley. He checked his phone again, and saw that there was still a signal. Then he went through the menu to be sure he had set it to vibrate.

Thinking about Speckbauer driving through the darkness out there, he realized that he had forgotten something. Opa Kimmel had been up in Gasthaus Maier for cards too, along with Berger Willi Hartmann when Karl Himmelfarb had come by. No, he reflected, maybe forgotten wasn’t the right word. Maybe the word was hidden, hidden it from his thoughts so he wouldn’t have to do it. But it was either he talk to his grandfather first, or Speckbauer would find his own way to do it. He’d bring the maps too, and see what the old man would say about the marks on them.

With that, Felix’s thoughts passed across the village and out to his Opa Kimmel’s farm. It was two kilometres from the Nagls’ house, out on its own, at the end of the road. Pfarrenord, they called it locally, but no one else would know it even had a name. Indeed it was the North Parish, and it always seemed windy and cooler there.

The place where the hailstones break, he’d heard it referred to.