Philipp Winkler - Hooligan

“What’s up? How late is it?” I ask.

Arnim is covered with drops of sweat. From his medicine-ball-sized head down to his old man chest, which must have been muscular once. His much too deeply cut wifebeater sticks to his paunch.

“The time has come! I’m getting it. I’m finally getting it!”

“What, huh?” I ask and rub a hand over the stubble on my head.

“Man, the tiger, my boy. The tiger!” But he pronounces “tiger” like “tigger.” Because I’m still busy rubbing my eyes and not really registering things, all I can think to say is a meager “Huh.”

“My dear boy,” he booms, “you’re sure slow on the uptake today.”

“Yeah, I understood: Tiger. You’re getting a tiger.”

“Oh, knock it off. It’s finally happening. I’m getting it next month!”

Gradually, I grasp the significance of what’s he’s been jabbering, and I peer at him through my fingers.

“Holy shit! For real? Don’t jerk me around!”

“Nope. Not shitting you, my boy. An honest-to-God fucking Bengal tiger! Here in our house.”

I drop my hands from my face. “What, that’s it? Is it here? Where’d you put the beast? You didn’t put it in with Poborsky or Bigfoot, right?”

He flips me off, pushing his flabby skin up on his forehead.

“Did they take a shit in your skull, my boy? Naw, the month after next. Then it’ll be time. I can pick it up.”

He turns around, almost skipping down the hallway like the fattest kid in the world, calling out to me, “Come on, pull yourself together, it’s time to pack!”

After I’ve gathered my wits and figured out that I slept late into the afternoon, I go down to the kitchen. The dogs are barking their asses off at each other and don’t stop. Arnim’s yelling at them that they should shut up only spurs then on. I bend over the sink filled with weeks’ worth of dirty dishes and look outside. In the back of the yard, which seems unusually well lit, there’s a small yellow backhoe. I move through the door. The yard really is getting more light than usual, though the sky is cloud-covered. The camouflage netting is rolled up in front of the shed. Arnim swings himself up behind the backhoe’s controls, spots me, and waves with a grin. Which once again makes him look like the fattest, sweatiest, most heavily tattooed kid over fifty. He starts the motor and all at once you can hardly hear Poborsky and Bigfoot.

“Arnim!” I shout. “Arnim!”

He stares at me, eyebrows raised, and turns it off again.

“What?”

“What are you doing? Where’d you get the backhoe?”

“Don’t scream your head off like that. Borrowed it from a buddy.”

Ah, okay, borrowed. I ask ironically if he’s planning to dig a tiger’s pit.

“Whadda you think? Sure, that’s gonna be a tiger pit. Top-notch tiger pit, my boy.”

“I-I can’t believe it,” I stammer.

“What?!” He calls, “Come and lend me a hand!”

Using the scoop of the backhoe, Arnim had done most of the dirty work of clearing the earth out of the planned pit, whose edges he’d marked beforehand with an X and wooden stakes. All the while I’m standing in the increasingly deep hole and going at it with a shovel. Shove it into the earth, which luckily isn’t too hard, scoop, and toss it over my head and out of the hole like a no-look pass. After a couple hours, the arm of the backhoe doesn’t reach deep enough. It’s raining. The soil is soft and soggy. I’m covered with a thin film of mud, but it’s only drizzling. I pray it stays that way. Or it really starts pouring and we have to stop. Though Arnim wouldn’t hear of it anyway. Arnim joins me, jumping into the pit, and the slurry splashes. Together we shovel out the remaining pile in the middle, because the arm of the backhoe was too short to come that far. Arnim had estimated about fifteen square meters and a depth of four meters. After leveling off the inside of the pit, we start to work toward the desired depth. The whole dirty job drags on into the evening. My hands have blisters despite the work gloves.

I come back from the shitter and gulp down a gallon of tap water when a voice calls out from the pit: “Heiko! Heiko! You there?”

I step over to the edge of the pit. Arnim takes a step back from the earth wall so he can see me better.

“Can’t get out of here!”

I laugh at him, which he doesn’t think is very cool, and he bellows up at me, “Come on and hand me the ladder! I have to piss.”

For a minute I consider leaving him in the tiger pit, just to give him hell, but he’d given me a leg up so I could reach to top edge. So I get the aluminum extension ladder from the shed and let it slide down. When he steps on the lowest rung, it slides farther down, and under his monstrous weight the bottom sinks into the soggy earth.

“What’d you have planned for the walls?” I ask and hold the ladder tight.

“What d’ya mean?” he wheezes.

“Well, did you ever see one of those tigers for real? I mean in the zoo or a TV nature show? In the end, they’re still cats. Fucking huge cats, but cats. You probably don’t think it could scramble up a dirt wall with its claws.”

Arnim gets off the ladder and stands still, with his hands resting on his knees, breathing deeply. Then he snorts and says, “Sure did cross my mind, my boy. Everything’s lined up. It’ll get fine accommodations with walls of aluminum siding.”

By now it’s late in the evening. Arnim had set up extra floodlights after taking a piss and pointed them into the pit. We need another two hours to reach the depth of four meters.

I chuck the shovel out of the pit in a high arc and sigh, “Finally,” and start to climb up the ladder when Arnim holds me back.

“Not so fast, my boy. The lid’s going on before we knock off.”

There are tons of aluminum studs and wooden boards stacked in front of the shed. I pass Arnim one after the other. He temporarily spreads them out next to the pit while I bring over screwdriver, square, and other tools, and then we put this monstrous fifteen-square-meter lid together, drilling, screwing, and nailing it under the shine of the floodlights.

“So, tomorrow the walls, and then you’re released for the time being,” he says, and tosses two big-ass steaks into the sizzling skillet.

I stuff myself full of meat till the meat in my throat hits other meat, and Arnim tells me the old story for the nth time while I keep on nodding off at the table: “My boss offered me 10,000 marks. That was a real stack of cash at the time. I hadn’t even earned that much in a year as a butcher. Maybe earned, but I didn’t get it.” He shakes with laughter at his own joke. “Well, I thought, can’t be that hard. Knocking someone off. You see it on TV all the time. In all the movies. People are constantly being offed. I can hack it, I told myself. So one day I went over to the farm of my boss’s neighbor. With a gun. Double barrel. In case one bullet wasn’t enough, y’know? Went over there. Ski mask, you say! Why would you need it? A dead person can’t identify you, I thought. The thing might slide in front of my eyes and I’d end up blasting away at my own foot. Which would be pretty stupid. Nope. So I head over. Looked around and didn’t see no one in the yard. I went into the loafing shed. It was already evening. Not so light anymore. And there, standing between his cows, I see him bending over a cow’s ass. Snuck up, but he probably heard me. Doesn’t matter because he’ll be dead in a sec, I thought to myself. Gets up and makes to turn around, and I cock it. But I don’t shoot from the hip. Could go who the hell knows where. I might even shoot a cow in the ass. I cocked, and pulled the trigger right away. Boom! Right in his face. Did a top-notch pirouette, the dumbass. Well. And then he lay there, arms all twisted under his body and the legs cockeyed, like he’s climbing a steep staircase. Wouldn’t recognize him. Sure did take care of his face. That’s where the bullet came out, ’cause I shot him in the side of his head and it came out front. I’m telling you, it looked all messed up. A hole about”—he used the thumbs and fingers of both hands to form a big hole—“about yea-big in his kisser. I split from there as fast as I could. Yeah, and I got into really deep shit, you know? Because that wasn’t him. It was the vet. The actual target, the dumb fucker, was on the latrine. Shittin’ away. The vet was there to look at the cow because it was supposed to drop one soon. Then it all got out, and less than two days later the marshals came and popped me at my place. Locked, cocked. Yep, that’s what happened. Went to Hainholz, in the slammer. Sat there for ten years. Never saw the cash either. But I’d wasted the wrong guy, after all. Fucking vet.”