Trouble & Strife

by Simon Wood

  As if the pounding in my head and the rip in my heart weren’t enough, the weather had also turned sour, or Seattle-like. As I followed my GPS’s instructions along Highway A7 I noted clouds as dark and foreboding as any Seattle could conjure, rolling in over the hills and threatening to suffocate Germany’s infamous Black Forest, which is believed to be the inspiration for many of the Grimm Brothers’ tales. I’d checked the weather app on my phone at my last bathroom break and, sure enough, it seemed I had indeed brought the Seattle weather with me. “Rain with a chance of more rain,” I said aloud. Or as my British grandfather from London’s East End would have said in his thick cockney accent, “Pleasure and pain.”

  The pain and the rain I could relate to. It was the pleasure I’d always had trouble with, and never more so than on this evening drive. I wondered if “drunk as a skunk” was another of the cockney rhyming slang and, if not, I thought it should be synonymous with “foul” which was definitely my mood.

  The sun set at just after seven on this early April evening and I soon found, as I drove the winding road, that the rain in Germany was nothing like the rain in Seattle and they didn’t call it the Black Forest for nothing. Unlike Seattle, where drizzle all day qualified as rain, in Germany the rain left no doubt. It fell from the sky in torrents. I had the windshield wipers swiping at their highest setting and I was still having trouble seeing out the windshield.

  As I came around a bend in the road lightning sheeted, illuminated the gray clouds, a brilliant flash of color that, for the briefest of moments, allowed me to see Neushwanstein. Ludwig had built his castle on the top of a mountain still flecked with lingering winter snow. It was glorious.

  “I’ll be damned,” was all I could muster before the thunder detonated—a loud throng that sounded directly over me and left my ears ringing a German symphony that would have impressed Beethoven or Brahms—or some other German composer.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “It’s all fun and games until old Richie’s car gets lit up like a Christmas tree.”

  As lightning crackled and emerged from the cloud layer in barren spindly tree branches, and the thunder exploded without reprieve, I decided the castle could wait another day, or honeymoon perhaps, and took the first exit I came to. My GPS loudly protested and insisted that I reroute, spewing out directions until I turned it off.

  Peering out the windshield, I searched for shelter from the rain, money being no object. I’d saved five thousand dollars for my honeymoon and I was determined to spend every euro on wine, women and debauchery, or at least a comfortable place to sleep.

  The exit, however, had deposited me on a two-lane road that plunged me deeper into the Black Forest. After fifteen minutes, without a town or even a street lamp in sight, I pondered turning around and getting back on my original course. Just as I had that thought, however, I emerged from the wall of trees and noted fence posts strung with barbed wire, an indication of civilization. A town couldn’t be far, could it? Beyond the fencing, tall green grass swayed and swirled in the storm’s gusting wind. I looked for animals, or at least the shadow of animals—cows or sheep or, I don’t know, llamas perhaps, but if any had been in the field they’d had the good sense to get out of the deluge, something I now wished I had done hours earlier. Cinderella’s castle—by myself, what the hell had I been thinking?

  I continued navigating the winding road, left then right, a horseshoe turn, back the other way. I searched for a street sign, lamp post, or other indication of human habitation. Lightning struck and I shifted my eyes to the bruised colored sky for just a brief instance, but in that instance I heard and felt a sickening thump. By the time my gaze had shifted back to the road a blurred shadow whizzed past my driver’s side window.

  “Shit!” I hit the brakes, the car skidding to a stop. Rain beat down on the roof of the car and the wiper blades hummed a staccato beat.

  I had no idea what I had hit, but was certain I had hit something. The headlights illuminated the rain, big, heavy droplets that slanted right to left with each gust. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and looked in the driver’s side and my rearview mirror. The darkness prevented me from seeing anything beyond the back of the car. I wanted to drive on, but the boy in me, the one who’d grown up with animals, wouldn’t allow me to do so. What if I’d hit a dog and it was lying along the side of the road, hurt?

  I drove the rental forward and pulled partially into a culvert, left the engine running and the headlights on, and grabbed my dark blue Gore-Tex jacket from the passenger seat. I quickly slipped it on, pulling the hood over my head. Then I flicked the screen of my phone with my finger, hit the flashlight icon, and pushed out of the car.

  The damage to the front fender and grill was more than I had anticipated. I’d hit something all right, and based on the damage it hadn’t been Fido. More likely I’d hit a deer. I didn’t know the extent of the damage to the engine, but at least there was no steam spewing out from under the hood, which made reaching the next town, if one actually existed, still a likely possibility.

  Something caught my attention and I reached to dislodge a clump wedged in the grill. It looked like dead grass. I lowered it to the car’s headlights to better view it. The strands of yellow-brown hair were of differing lengths, more a mat of hair, and not what I would have expected had I hit a deer, though I was far from an expert on the subject. I didn’t even like to kill spiders. I wasn’t squeamish. It just seemed to me that everything had a right to live. I usually trapped them and released them outside. Call me a wuss. I don’t care.

  I shone the light of my phone on the darkened road behind me, but it did little to dent the foreboding blanket of ink-black night. I could see where the Black Forest got its name. The Germans were so damned practical. I stepped to the side of the road and walked along the edge, back the direction I had driven. Water dripped from the small visor of my hood and I could feel the rain finding gaps in my outer shell. I looked for prints in the dirt—okay, I was actually looking for a deer carcass, but barring that, I looked for hoof prints. Twenty yards behind where I had stopped my car, I reached the tall grass with the fence posts and barbed wire. I looked for signs of a wounded animal, blood or where something had trampled the grass. I saw no such evidence. About to turn away, I noticed something on the barbed wire. I stepped across the small culvert and climbed the slope to the wire. There I removed another clump of hair.

  As I examined the tuft, I heard a sound above the splatter of falling rain. I froze, listening intently. I heard the nose again, but what the hell was it? The third time I deciphered a low, guttural growl. Had I hit a dog? Was it lying in the thick grass? Shit, that’s all I needed, to have killed some family pet. I stepped to the edge of the field of grass, shining my light, squinting against the rain and the darkness and heard another growl, this one louder, or perhaps closer?

  I took a step back from the fence.

  The growling intensified. I looked to the grass, from where the sound seemed to be emanating. Was it the growl of a wounded animal, or a predator? Did they have predators in the Black Forest? Bears? Cougars? Mountain lions?

  I didn’t know, and I wasn’t looking to become some evidence of proof. I’d tell the rental company I’d hit a deer and be done with it.

  About to turn and retreat down the slope to the road, movement in the grass caught my attention. The blades continued to sway in the gusts of wind, but I saw what looked to be a path in the grass, except the blades were not falling away from me. They were falling toward me. And as that realization struck, so did another. The path was not being made by something attempting to flee, but by something seeking to attack, and, whatever it was, it was closing ground fast.

  Another growl, this time louder, more distinct.

  Shit.

  I turned, my brain having already told my feet to run, slipped and slid down the hill on my ass. My shoes plunged into the water in the culvert. I got up. Heard the growl and glanced over my shoulder, then turned for t
he road. Lights blinded me. I heard the squeal of brakes and the skid of tires struggling to grip wet pavement. A moment later I felt like a croquet ball smacked with an enormous mallet, the blow knocking me off my feet and propelling me backward.

  I struck pavement and rolled.

  My body felt like a battered piñata. The pain was bad enough that I didn’t immediately try to sit up. I was clearly disoriented and confused. As my senses slowly came back online, I realized I wasn’t staring up at a cloud-darkened sky spitting rain at me. I was staring up at a box-beam ceiling. In my peripheral vision I noted blurred faces, several of them, hovering above and around me. I could differentiate men from women, but that only added to the confusion. I had no idea where I was or how I had got there.

  My confusion quickly became anxiety and I started to sit up, but felt the gentle pressure of a hand on my chest. My head felt like a cannon ball weighing me down.

  “Easy,” a woman said. “You do not wish to get up quickly.”

  Her voice was heavily accented. German I deduced, unless the blow of whatever had hit me—a car I presumed—had knocked me back to Switzerland, or perhaps to France. Geography had never been my strong subject in school.

  “Where am I?” I barely recognized my raspy, weakened voice.

  The woman said something in German. Then to me she said, “You are in Bierengarten. How is it that you feel?”

  I sat up, this time getting as far as my elbows. Several pairs of hands assisted me to a sitting position that allowed me to consider my surroundings. I’d been lying on a wooden table, with someone’s jacket balled into a makeshift pillow beneath my head. Around the room candle flames flickered in their holders along the wall, illuminating about two dozen men and women seated or standing near sturdy but nicked and scarred wooden tables and benches. Carefully, I swung my legs over the table’s edge and, with help, eased down onto a wooden bench. Someone handed the woman a glass and she handed it to me. I sipped cool water then set the glass on the table. The men and women stared at me as if awaiting a papal blessing.

  “What happened?” I asked. “How did I get here?”

  An elderly man stepped to the edge of the table. Balding, he had a ring of white hair and a concerned expression, though concern for me or for himself I couldn’t tell. He wore a raincoat that extended past his knees to the tips of rubber boots, and he kneaded a tweed cap in his hands. “You were standing in the middle of the road,” he said. “I couldn’t see you. The lights of your car blinded me when I came around the bend. By the time I saw you…”

  “Ernst hit you with his truck.” The woman completed Ernst’s sentence for him. “Luckily he saw you in enough time to hit his brakes, but the pavement was slick from the rain.”

  “You hit your head,” Ernst said.

  I reached up and felt a knot on the back of my head, painful to the touch, which explained the headache. “What about the animal?” I asked.

  The woman glanced at the others, a quick twitch. Ernst shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “I hit an animal…a deer I think. That’s why I was out of my car. I got out to see what I’d hit. That’s why my car was parked on the side of the road.”

  “There was nothing,” Ernst said.

  “I hit an animal with my car,” I repeated. “I got out to see if I could find it.” The night came back to me in bits and pieces. “I heard it. I heard a growl.”

  “I found nothing,” Ernst said. “I carried you here in my truck. Emma said to put you on the table.”

  “Do you need for a hospital?” the woman, whom I presumed to be Emma, asked.

  I contemplated Emma’s question before deciding that, though sore, nothing seemed to be broken. After a minute to further get my bearings I said, “No. I’m all right.”

  “Get him a beer,” a portly man in a white T-shirt covered by a long apron said. The proprietor of this establishment, I presumed.

  “Could it have been a bear, or perhaps a mountain lion?” I asked those gathered around me, but my question went unanswered.

  “Are you hungry?” Emma asked.

  “No. No I don’t think so.” I inhaled and exhaled several times. “I think I’d better just get going.”

  “You won’t be going anywhere tonight,” the man in the apron said. “Power is out and so too is the road.”

  “What do you mean the road is out? You mean washed out?”

  “You’d have to drive around,” the portly man said. “Thirty miles before you get to the expressway, and in this weather it would not be wise.”

  “I’m sorry, but who are you?”

  The man put out a thick hand. Dark stubble colored his cheeks. “I am Heinrich. I own this establishment…along with my wife, Emma. And I think you may want to have your car looked at. The damage isn’t inconsequential.”

  “That’s why I think maybe it was a deer, but…” I noticed the eyes of nearly everyone in the bar quickly glance at each other before refocusing on me. I was fading again and I wondered if perhaps I had a concussion. Maybe driving wasn’t the best thing at that moment.

  I remembered the clump of hair I’d found in the car grill and pulled it from my pocket. Apparently I’d dropped the second clump I’d found on the barbed wire. When I held it up, several people stepped back from the table. “I found this in the grill of my car. It doesn’t look like hair from a deer. Do these woods have any wild animals?”

  “Wild animals?” Emma said. “What do you mean?”

  “I heard something in the grass…saw something…”

  “What was it?” Emma asked.

  “I don’t know. It was a growling, maybe a dog or…” I was struggling to find the word. “A wolf,” I said finally. “Or a mountain lion, perhaps.”

  Again I noticed the eye glances. “There are no wolves or…mountain lions in the Black Forest,” Heinrich said, taking the clump of hair and examining it before slipping it into a kangaroo pouch of his apron.

  I looked to the man whose car had hit me. “You didn’t see anything behind me? Nothing chasing after me?”

  “Nothing,” Ernst said.

  I suppose it could have been my imagination, running wild in the darkness and the rain. Maybe the noise had simply been branches rubbing against one another and the moaning the wind through the forest. Except I hadn’t just heard something growling. I’d seen the grass being trampled as whatever it was came quickly through it, toward me. I looked to the others, about to try to explain, but I could tell from the expressions on their faces that they weren’t interested in hearing anything more about it, at least not this night. “Is there someplace close by that I could spend the night? A hotel, perhaps?”

  “There are rooms upstairs,” Emma said.

  “A hotel would be fine,” I said, getting a weird vibe from those in the room and deciding it best to move on. “I don’t want to be a bother.”

  “You don’t want to go out tonight,” Emma said. She then quickly added. “We’ve already put your things in your room.”

  This gave me pause. “You grabbed my bag from the car?” I asked.

  “I told Ernst to do so,” Emma said. “Before your things were towed away along with the car.”

  “Towed?” I stood up and wished I hadn’t. I felt lightheaded and dizzy. I dropped back into the chair. “Who towed my car?”

  “The tow service,” Emma said.

  This was quickly going from bad to worse. “Why did the tow service tow my car?”

  “You couldn’t very well have driven it,” Heinrich said. “Not in the condition you were in.”

  That, of course, was true. Practical. Damn Germans. “How do I get it back?”

  “You can call the tow service Monday morning,” Emma said.

  “Monday morning?”

  “It will be closed tomorrow, Sunday.”

  I wasn’t going to wait that long. I figured I could call the rental car company. I patted the pockets of my jacke
t, then my pants. “My cellphone,” I said to Ernst. “I had it in my hand when you hit me with your car.”

  Ernst shook his head.

  “We can look for it in the morning,” Emma said. “Come now, Mr. Quinn, and I’ll show you to your room.”

  Hearing my name gave me further pause. Up to this point, I was certain I hadn’t mentioned it. Slowly, so as not to make a scene, or to look ungrateful, I reached and felt my back pocket. At least my wallet was there. “How did you know my last name?” I asked.

  “It’s on the tag on your suitcase,” Emma said. “Richard Quinn.”

  It was indeed. Anna and I had purchased matching suitcases for our trip.

  “You sure you won’t have anything to eat,” Emma asked again.

  I couldn’t recall when I had last eaten, but if I had once had an appetite, I’d lost it.

  The room upstairs was comfortable, even cozy, warmed by wood crackling in a cast iron stove in the fireplace. I could hear the rain beating on what I presumed to be tile shingles. Someone, probably Emma, had pulled down the corner of the sheet and the patchwork quilt on the wrought iron bed. My suitcase was at the foot.

  “We serve breakfast until ten,” Emma said. She pointed to a small table on which I noted a pitcher of water and two glasses and a coffee maker on a table beneath an arched window. “You can make coffee or tea here in your room. The bathroom is just down the hall. Do you need anything?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  Emma nodded and stepped from the room, closing the door. When her footsteps faded down the hall I walked to the door and turned an old-fashioned skeleton key, locking it, and slipped the key in the front pocket of my pants. I lifted my bag onto the bed, about to open it when something made me look back to the door. I shoved the wooden chair under the doorknob.