Hooligan Read online

  “I’ll be right back. Getting another.”

  “Forget it. Here.” Jojo returned the beer. “I want to go. Can we go?”

  We asked what was wrong and tried to keep up with him as he led the way with slow strides and swinging hands. He eased off just enough so we could catch up, then pulled out his phone and showed us a photo he’d snapped of the thousands of candles and bouquets. They seemed to stretch for hundreds of meters on the stadium grounds, and in the picture they morphed into a single indefinable mass of dots of light.

  I pressed Jojo on why he wanted to get out of there so soon, and in the effort to keep up with him, my beer sloshed out of the thin plastic cup, spilling over my fingers and dripping on my pant leg.

  “Maybe,” Jojo said, “I just kneeled to put my candle down. But maybe then I had to think about Joel as well. And maybe a little raindrop fell on my face. And maybe, just maybe, I smashed one of those press fuckers who thought it’d be a great shot.”

  Kai and I briefly stood in shock and then had to make up two strides to catch up with him.

  “What’s going on?” Kai asked. I couldn’t miss the way his voice went higher with excitement.

  “I just told you. I was back in the crowd quickly and vanished. Before anyone really caught on to what happened.”

  I think Kai wanted to pat him on the back, but I silently made him understand that he should control himself.

  And so we padded back, zigzagging via the narrowest alleys all the way to the city center. We looked around and behind us, but no one was there, of course. There’s legitimate caution that can become paranoia—which necessarily make it less legitimate—and there’s just being wet behind the ears. Which we were, in a sense, I have to admit. As if anyone could have found us in that mass of people, if they would’ve even tried.

  On the ride back from the city, I sat on the backseat with Jojo. He was looking out the window the whole time. The cold early-winter wind hissed through the slits of the cracked windows and made Jojo’s curls bounce excitedly. I could simply have looked away, but for some reason I didn’t. And the constant twirling of his hair was driving me crazy.

  I asked him if everything was okay, quietly enough so Ulf and Kai in the front wouldn’t have to hear. Kai had put on a personally mixed dubstep CD, but we only had to tolerate it at half-volume because Ulf was able to control it, thanks to the knob on the steering wheel.

  “Yeah,” he said without looking over, “yeah. You know …,” then silence for a while.

  I thought about what I could say. Fucking hell, I was never good at this kind of thing. Can’t even do it today. Express my feelings, as Manuela would say. I just can’t think of anything, my brain gets blocked, and instead of producing something sensible, I just get angry. But not in that moment, strangely enough. I wanted nothing more than to be beamed out of the car or something, but fuck it, I thought, Jojo’s your friend, and that means more than just hanging out and getting drunk.

  I was growing more and more impatient, and if Jojo hadn’t said something, I bet it wouldn’t have been long before I became typically enraged. All at once, Jojo bent forward so his head was floating over the middle console. He looked straight ahead through the windshield and spoke so loudly everyone could hear.

  “I want to go to the spot.”

  “What kinda spot?” Kai asked.

  The music was turned down. In the rearview mirror I saw Ulf glance back every couple seconds.

  “To the train crossing. You don’t have to come along if you don’t want.”

  “Wait up, wait up. What the hell are you talking about?” Ulf stammered. I’d known as soon as Jojo had said the word “crossing,” but I didn’t make a sound. Couldn’t.

  “Where he killed himself.”

  “Who?” Kai asked, and turn around for a sec. Maybe to make sure Jojo hadn’t gone crazy. Had a mad stare or something.

  “Enke.”

  The station wagon bumped into the curb and briefly howled in pain when Ulf shifted into the wrong gear.

  “Sorry, Jojo, I don’t really mean what I’m about to say, but”—Kai raised his voice—“are you fucking nutso or what?!”

  Jojo slumped against the door. His gaze wasn’t obviously crazy. So not at all. But strangely calm and very focused. I can’t really remember exactly. But it definitely seemed spooky to me.

  We were out in the country. In Walachia. In the middle of the night. Dark as a bear’s backside. The station wagon’s headlights were the only source of light far and wide. The nearest lights were more than a mile away. Some random villages close to the suburbs. We followed the paved road that for its part roughly followed the train tracks. At any rate, we guessed we were still close to the tracks because every now and again we could make out the swaths that cut through the fields and meadows. We passed through some woods. No one said anything for a while, with the exception of Ulf’s increasingly annoyed groans. Well, and of course the approximate directions from Jojo, who had Ulf turn here and there. From one nameless road to the next. When we came out of the woods and Jojo craned his neck to see if the tracks were still nearby, we saw it all at once. Various headlights that melded into a single, frayed cone. A couple hundred yards to the left of us. In the middle of nowhere. Accompanied by some flashing police lights making silent circular patterns in the broad fields.

  “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 w
alls 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.”

  The whole area behind the house is covered with multiple layers of camouflage netting from which water is dripping. The netting is draped over wooden posts and, along with the oak and the other trees on the property, offers perfect visual cover. Arnim is the most paranoid guy I’ve ever run into. But he has to be with his “hobby,” as I like to call it, although he does earn money from it. One corner of the shed is still full of acoustic panels he’s been meaning to attach to the cages since forever.

  The shed is another one of Arnim’s masterpieces of manic-paranoid underground architectural art. Everything here he’s put together himself. Everything except the house. He inherited that ages ago. Even though the shed was already here, he completely redid the interior so his little arena would fit inside. Everything done by hand. He only has to close the shed doors and no one outside of a hundred-yard radius would have a clue what’s going on in there. And no one just happens to come by either, because he owns the surrounding land. Inherited that too.

  I push the huge shed door open wide enough to slip inside. It’s not a joke like the one at my parents’ place. But my grandpa had only had little tractors. There must have been some massive equipment in here. I fill the salad-sized bowls with food and water and set them outside. The dogs go crazy as soon as they pick up the scent. I pull two steaks as thick as my hand from the cooler in the kitchen and inject them with hell-if-I-know-what from the syringe in the “morning” box. Don’t even want to know what the stuff is. Use the steaks to lure the dogs out of their kennels and into their cages. I toss the steaks through the window around head level. Then I can use a rope setup to close the doors to the fenced run area so I can safely go inside and change out the dishes. Also one of Arnim’s DIY numbers. Everything in exactly that sequence. You don’t go inside the cage to change out the bowls when the mutts are running around free in there. Otherwise you’re short of at least two limbs in no time flat. After changing out the dishes, checking twice to see if the cage doors are really closed, and hastily rinsing out the used dishes, I reopen the doors. The two of them race out in tandem, broad muzzles straight to the food dishes, which they scrape across the floor against the mesh fence. They’ve already scarfed down the steaks.

  After the second round of coffee and cigarettes, I go down into the basement, which extends beneath the entire house and stinks of moist mildew and rot. Down there I fill a bucket full of pig and cattle bones. I use the electric mortar and pestle to smash the bones into bite-sized pieces. I garnish the meal with a clutch of dead chicks and bring it all the way up to the second floor along with a deep bowl filled with fresh water. I knock on the first door on the left, saying, “Siegfried, are you awake yet? Yummy, yummy.”

  Something in the room rust
les. I open the door. A narrow beam of light falls through the space between the window and the cloth hung in front of it, hitting me eye-level as I enter. I duck underneath it. Avoiding it.

  “Siegfried?“ I toss the question into the room. There’s more rustling. The sound comes from the corner between the window and the slope of the roof. Siegfried’s favorite spot. My eyes have readjusted to the darkness. I can see him now. He’s sitting on the back of an ancient armchair completely covered in shit. It was already there before Arnim’s time. Siegfried hardly moves. He still has his head hidden under a wing. Just peeks out a little to see who’s talking and bringing him breakfast.

  “It’s me, old pal,” I say, my voice like a refrigerator’s monotone hum, “brought you some treats.”

  The floorboards are almost completely covered with newspapers where Siegfried can relieve himself. But he still prefers his armchair. Only a hint of its turquoise color remains after years of gathering dust and all that bird shit. I take a big step over the middle stretch of papers and dump the contents of the bucket in a pile in the far right corner of the room. Then he can pick out whatever he feels like. Then I step back, careful not to walk in the piles of crap, and approach the window. Taking care not to make any rash movements. I continue to reason with Siegfried. The meaningless chatter is more for my benefit. To be honest, I don’t think the old bird gives a damn. I always lay out the papers so I have about one and a half feet of free space to the window. The whole time, my gaze stays glued to Siegfried, who shakes out his feathers. Maybe it’s like when people yawn. Although I don’t know if birds are able to yawn. At least I’ve never seen Siegfried do it.

  “Sleep okay, old boy?” I ask and carefully lift the heavy blanket from the nails that keep it in front of the window. Thousands of dust particles float through the tilted rectangle of cloudy daylight. Siegfried pulls out his head and immediately has a closer look at me with his healthy, red-rimmed pupil while shaking out his wings, big as sails. I let the blanket slide to the ground and take a couple steps back. Keep my hands waist-high.