Philipp Winkler - Hooligan

“There,” Jojo said and needlessly pointed in the direction, almost puncturing Ulf’s cheek with his index finger.

“Jojo, dude, what’s the point?” Ulf asked.

“Try to get as close as you can,” he just answered.

Of course we didn’t get close. A little farther on, the road went to the left, but naturally it was blocked by the police. We stopped on the curve. Jojo insisted. A cop, who was pretty drained and understandably annoyed, walked right up our car, saying he’d had enough of the rubberneckers. What kind of sick puppies we were, and if we didn’t all want to spend the night in a cell together, we’d better get moving. I think it was the first and last time I’d ever agreed with a piece of shit cop.

Luckily, Jojo restrained himself and Ulf did the talking. He nodded in agreement with everything the patrol cop had to say. Even apologized. Then we kept on driving.

I think we all thought it’d finally be okay, but less than five minutes later Jojo said that Ulf should let him out.

“Are you crazy, seriously?!” Kai bellowed and raised his hand in question.

Completely calm, Jojo answered, “Guys, I don’t expect you to understand. Go home. I just want to sit here for a while, somewhere out here, and think.”

“Can you tell me how you think you’ll get back?” Ulf asked and pounded the balls of his fists against the top of the steering wheel.

“Taxi.”

“Hey, fuck it, okay,” Kai groaned, “just let him be. If he needs it.” He planted his face in his hands and rubbed his eye sockets. His elbows were resting against his knees and his feet against the dashboard.

Jojo was half out the door when I spontaneously unbuckled, grabbed my phone from the seat, and opened the door.

“Heiko.” Kai’s chin dropped.

“It’s okay, I’ll stay with him. We’ll take a taxi home. We’ll be able to explain where we are somehow”—I bent inside the car—“at least I hope.”

It was cold. As cold as it can be when you’re in the middle of the-hell-if-I-know-where. Ulf started the motor but rolled down the window once more.

“If the cops were watching us and saw how we stopped and everything, they’ll probably send someone over. So I’d suggest you guys get the fuck away from here. That’s exactly what we’re doing, too.”

I thanked them and they left us. The red from the taillights moved down our bodies like mercury in a thermometer.

We stopped the next field over and approached the illuminated site of the accident. Until Jojo said it was enough, and he was good there. I could see ant-sized figures scurrying through the lights on the tracks. We climbed on top of a shed with three walls that stood in the fenced-in field. It smelled of manure, and the wind whistled by our cheeks. There was an old bathtub sitting in front of the shed, which apparently served as a watering trough for the cows or horses that grazed there during the day.

Soon we didn’t have anything left to smoke. But we sat there till dawn, and talked between the waves of silence. About Joel. About Tonga. About their father, Dieter. And my father, too. At some point I kept nodding off, and Jojo said we should leave. It wasn’t far to the next town. We got breakfast at the village baker. We nodded off in the taxi till the driver let us out in Wunstorf.

My window was open last night. I must have been so fast asleep I didn’t hear a thing. The windowsill is covered with a film of water, and a large dark spot has formed on the wall below it. I press an old towel against the sill. It’s immediately soaked. Then I look outside. Raindrops fall from the leaves of the old oak that stands next to the house. I can see only an even, gray surface through the treetop.

I go down to the kitchen. There’s a scrap of paper held down by a cup. Arnim scribbled something in his barely legible scrawl using a permanent marker. After nearly three years of living with him, I’m halfway able to decipher what he considers writing.

He writes that he’s away on business. I mentally add the quotation marks around the word “business.” No mention of approximately when he might return, but I’m supposed to take care of the animals. That was the agreement from the beginning. Sure, back then I thought I’d be living for free in a place where no one would get on my nerves. Feed a couple critters every now and then in exchange. No problem. But at the time, I didn’t have the slightest clue what kind of animals he had.

“I guess I’m a full time zookeeper now,” I say to the empty kitchen. No one there to laugh at my joke.

I wash out the coffee machine from who knows when—it’s full of slime—dump some grounds into the filter, and smoke a cigarette while I wait for the morning’s black milk. The back door isn’t closed all the way. It was banging softly in the cool draft.

After going in the bathroom briefly to toss water on my face and notice how my stomach muscles are threatening to disappear under a thin layer of fat, I do various exercises in the living room for half an hour. I have them from a manual Kai gave me. It was written by a legendary inmate and street fighter from England who called himself Charles Bronson. Like the actor. It has instructions about how you can exercise your body without any equipment. Even if you’re cooped up in a tiny prison cell. The best book I’ve ever read. Also pretty much the only one I’ve read, if you leave aside all the crap we were served up in school. But all you had to do was buy the CliffsNotes, with all the content and interpretation and stuff that was in it.

I slip into the boxer shorts from yesterday because I still haven’t been to the laundromat. Doesn’t matter. Don’t want to go anywhere important today anyway. I pull on my rubber boots on the stoop behind the back door. The ground looks pretty soggy. I take on the dogs first.

Two Amstaffs that Arnim’s probably had for at least two years. He got the white one, Poborsky, from a breeder of fighting dogs in Olomouc. At the time, Kai, Ulf, and me even went with him to Bohemia to pick it up. But we were along just to get drunk. Although Kai absolutely wanted to go see the breeder and check out the setup with the dogs, I was able to convince him not to. I told him he really didn’t want to come along, and he should trust me.

Arnim had gotten the other one, a seven-year-old brown monster of a dog with the name Bigfoot, in exchange for a pit bull that had pulled in one win after another for Arnim. What his exchange partner didn’t know was the pit bull had a heart defect and wouldn’t last very long. The dog came from Russia. From beyond the Urals. From a place no one had ever heard of, not to mention the whole pronunciation thing. Which is why Bigfoot only understands Russian. Or as the previous owner said, “Beegfood.”

I’m guessing it doesn’t matter what language you speak to it. It’s pumped so full of steroids it doesn’t even notice when it has a massive flesh wound.

I thought it was all pretty exciting after moving in and recognizing what’s going down here in Wunstorf. But that ended after I was at one of Arnim’s events, which he puts on randomly from time to time. I mean sure, we slap each other around and sometimes something breaks. But this! Ulf asked me how I could tolerate it and square it with my conscience. How I could still live with Arnim. But I didn’t even tell him everything I saw here. I didn’t have a real answer for him either. I guess you get numb over time. Tune out some things. Fuck it. It is what it is.

Poborsky only notices me when I come out of the house. He starts to yap. Only then does Bigfoot catch on and start to yap too. Although yapping is probably the wrong word for the two of them. That sounds more like a dachshund or something. The two of them are like four-legged subwoofers. They throw themselves at their cages’ fencing. Their cages are built together. Of course, there’s a fence between the two of them. They’d tear each other to pieces in an instant otherwise. Sometimes they try to go at it even so, but dogs like that usually do catch on pretty fast when a fence can’t be beat. Even these dogs. I walk past the cages and call out to them in a singsong voice: “All right already, I’m on my way.”