Philipp Winkler - Hooligan

“Probably left over from last year,” Ulf said, and had poppy seed cake crumble out of his mouth.

“They’re desecrating the beautiful, white snow with their explosions.”

Kai gave me a light kick to the shins, leaned over to me, and whispered: “You remember? The dead rat?”

He threw back his head and laughed diabolically.

One fall, I’d just left grade school, and we were shooting off the leftover fireworks from the previous New Year’s. We had found a rat carcass in a construction pit close to the main train station in Hannover, and we shoved a thin, powerful firecracker from Poland into its asshole and lit the fuse. Had underestimated the explosion radius and hadn’t moved far enough away.

“Pssst,” I said and whispered out of the corner of my mouth, “sure. That was a huge mess.”

Mie had been scared to death when she found the innards still stuck to my clothes in the laundry basket. The memory made me grin.

Jojo came into the kitchen.

“He’s not in the bedroom, but I looked out the window and the footprints go across the lawn to the garden shed.”

Mrs. Seidel wiped her hands on the kitchen towel and went to the window.

“He can’t be tinkering again. Dieter knows when coffee’s served.”

“Let him be,” Jojo said, pulling on his rubber boots and heading out into the garden.

“Eat. Eat,” his mother encouraged us. Ulf didn’t have to be told twice and pushed another brick-sized piece of cake onto his plate.

The coffee and cigarettes from before were already having a little brown fiesta in my abdomen, and I was preparing for a nice round of fecal bobsledding.

Jojo came back into the kitchen through the living room, leaving tracks.

“Joachim, take your boots off!”

“You guys have to help. The door to the shed isn’t locked, but something’s pushed against it from the inside.

The three of us fetched our shoes, putting them on in front of the patio door, and followed Jojo through the snow to the pitiful garden shed his father had repurposed as his personal carving shop.

“Look.” Jojo pushed against the door, which gave way slightly, but couldn’t be opened completely. “Doesn’t open.”

We helped him, pressing our hands and shoulders against the wooden door.

“You smell that too?” Kai asked, face twisted.

Something inside gave way, and something could be heard crashing down. A cupboard fell over and spilled tools onto the floor. Screwdrivers and bits rolled against the rifle lying there and the foot belonging to Jojo’s father.

Ulf and I meet up in Ricklingen. Amid all the look-alike housing projects, nail salons, drug dealer hangouts, and shabby internet cafés, this is where our favorite betting parlor, Wanna Bet?, struggles to stay afloat.

We used to hang out in betting offices nearly every day. After all, football’s being played almost constantly somewhere. And someone’s betting on it. That’s why I used to have the teams from the top leagues in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan memorized. On weekends, our first stop was at the bookies before we went over to Timpen to watch football and get shitfaced. Over the years, that changed when betting went online and things like SureBets emerged. But also because the betting offices are always changing hands, became increasingly impersonal and standardized. But the ownership usually just moved within a family, for example from father to son, then to the cousin, and back again. Wanna Bet? is a century-old oak in a forest full of Tipicos and Bet-and-Wins. Then, around five years ago, the owner, Kallhein, turned his back on football gambling exclusively and has been showing horse races from all over the world ever since. Mainly from Great Britain, of course. That was always his specialty. And the old fart still has fabulous connections to famous bookies from the island. Here everything works like way back when. There aren’t any electronics aside from the televisions, the kind with tubes, and the coffee machine. The whole nine yards along with the counter, behind which Kallhein is always seated, and the paper betting slips. There are brochures and magazines on the big horse races circulating around. And the clientele hasn’t changed over the years either. Except maybe more and more walkers have taken their place at the tables. At some point, Kallhein had to build a ramp over the front steps for that reason.

Accompanying all this are the best fried pastries in all of Lower Saxony. Every couple of hours, his wife, who runs the bakery next door, brings over a tray of warm, fresh pastries. The old farts aren’t the only fans around here. Once in a while we come by and without any real expertise place bets on random horses, most of which fail fabulously and are the last to crawl over the finish line. Then Kallhein shakes his head and his chin flaps, and he grouses about how clueless kids are these days. Besides us, he probably doesn’t know anyone under forty. We only do it to make our contribution to Kallhein and keep his gambling den alive until he’s lying dead and cold behind his counter.

Ulf is already seated at one of the round tables when I come in. Two tickets in hand.

I was just in the neighborhood visiting Gaul and had him give me a new tat. He does it at his kitchen table in his place in the projects. Right next to the 96 in the circle over my heart, I had a full-size jungle knife inked over my sternum. I had recently seen something similar in a movie Kai lent me. All about the Vory gangsters, which is kind of like the Russian version of the mafia. They basically have the coolest tats. If I were to land in a Siberian prison for some reason, I’d regret it a little less because of the tattoos.

“Heiko.” Ulf gets up when he sees me.

The cling wrap under my clothes rustles. We shake hands.

“You doin’ okay?” I ask him and sit down. “Why’d you want to chat with me?”

He folds his tickets, then unfolds them, then smooths them flat with his fingers. Breathes out through pursed lips, his cheeks puffing slightly. Old boozers saunter past our table, greeting us with curt nods, as was the custom in the good old days. Ulf shifts the words around in his mouth.

“Spit it out already,” I urge him.

“It’s just…” He places his open hands, the sides parallel, on the tabletop between us, “after I picked you guys up in Braunschweig…”

“Yeah, thanks again, man. Don’t know how we would’ve handled it without you. How we’d have gotten out in one piece.”

The pressure spreading in my chest reminds me of my short encounter with my uncle in the gym, when he asked if I knew what happened to the van. I’d pretended I was clueless, no idea. I couldn’t think of anything better on the spot.

“No problem,” Ulf says and clears his throat. “When I came home, Saskia was sitting in the kitchen. Had stayed up for me. Couldn’t sleep anymore after I’d driven off.”

A misgiving arose in me, but I kept listening.

“I’d told her from the beginning the way we roll. Had tried to explain it to her so she could understand a little, even though she wasn’t familiar at all. Or at least accept it. And she did. But now our little one is almost ready for preschool, and of course he picks up more and more and understands more.”

“Ulf—”

“Hear me out, Heiko. She said it’s enough. I’ve done it for years and she’s tried to ignore it, because of course she didn’t think it was all that great when I came home with injuries and everything. But at some point, it’s enough, she said. And before it gets even worse, she’d like for me to quit.”

“She’d like that?” I press him. “And what would you like?”

“That’s not what this is about right now.”

Before I’d even realized it, I was standing and planting my fists on the table.