Burning Down George Orwell's House, page 17
He was spending another quiet evening at home with the whisky when he heard someone or something approach the house. In the absence of mechanical or digital noise, every footstep could be heard in the bed of mud and stone outside. He roused himself from the easy chair and grabbed the shotgun, which he had taken to keeping handy and as fully loaded as himself. Pitcairn was certain to seek revenge for whatever indignities he imagined Ray had perpetrated upon his daughter. Ray crept upstairs with the shotgun in one hand and a bottle of twelve-year-old in the other. The bedroom window afforded the best view of the front door. He wasn’t going to shoot Pitcairn, obviously, but he wasn’t going to let him in the house either. They had no further business to discuss.
The footsteps outside came slowly. Ray took a long gulp and put the bottle down. Something was approaching the house. He would fire a warning shot into the air if he had to. He went to slide open the window when—blam!—the gun went off. The glass crashed onto the intruder below. “Holy shit!” Ray yelled.
“Holy shite!” Farkas yelled.
It had only been a matter of time: firing the gun was something he could now check off his list of things to do. He knocked away the loose glass and stuck his head through the window frame. “Are you okay?”
“Right as rain, Ray. Only in this instance the raindrops are made of broken glass. I do appear to be bleeding the tiniest bit. Might I come in?”
Ray ran downstairs. Farkas stood panting in the mudroom. A thin line of blood had found a path through the forest of his eyebrows and came to a rest at the tip of his nose. Nestled in his arms he carried a fresh case of scotch, duly delivered as ordered.
“Come in, sit down. I’m so sorry!”
Farkas took a seat next to the fireplace. “I did ask you not to shoot me, but try not to let it worry you. I would, however, appreciate a little sip of something to calm the old nerves.”
Ray poured two healthy drams from the best bottle in the house. The glass shook in his hands. He could’ve easily killed Farkas—or himself. He took a big sip and topped his whisky up, then carried the drinks to the sitting room. Farkas mopped at his face with a handkerchief. His nose twitched. “Now this is a treat.”
“Only the best for my attempted homicide victims. Can I get you a towel or something?”
“I’m fine. Do you suppose this is the first time I’ve been shot at?” Farkas asked. His laugh sounded like a sea lion mating with a dump truck.
“No, I can’t imagine it is.”
“I’ve brought you your case of malt, though the truth is, Ray, that I came to see if you were still alive, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“Well, our dear friend Gavin, as you’ve discovered, suffers from certain, shall we say, sociopathic tendencies. And I thought he might have paid you a visit with the intention of causing some not insubstantial physical harm.”
“He did throw me into the whirlpool.”
“Aye, he mentioned something about that. I’m pleased to see you on this side of the ground.”
“I thought you were him. That’s why I had the shotgun out.”
“I imagine it does have a safety mechanism. And a wee bit more caution might carry you a long way.”
“Are you saying I don’t have to be worried?”
“About your marksmanship? Most definitely. About our Gavin? It’s hard to say, hard to say.” He took a sip of whisky and groaned with delight. “It’s true that he’s liable to get a bellyful one night and come knocking. He believes that you behaved inappropriately towards Molly and feels honor bound to respond.”
“That’s not true. I only gave her a place to stay after he hit her. Did you see her black eye?”
“Aye, but he’s worried about more than that. A girl of her age.”
Now Ray understood. “I need to make this perfectly clear: I swear to you that my relationship with Molly is … was … totally innocent. I never laid a hand on her. If Pitcairn doesn’t believe me there’s not a thing I can do about it, but that’s the truth.”
Farkas appeared relieved. “I am glad to hear that,” he said. “However, you of all people should appreciate the distinction between perception and reality. I’ll talk to him. Sometimes he listens to me, although most of the time he doesn’t.”
“What should I do?” Ray asked.
“If you decide to reload that shotgun of yours, please do mind the safety. Many thanks for the whisky. I should be getting back.”
“But you just got here. How about a refill?”
“I’d love to, Ray. Next time, next time.”
Something didn’t feel right. Farkas had come a long way just to stop in for a quick drink. He had something up his sleeve beyond lugging a case of whisky through the mud. Maybe it was an espionage mission. That was it. Farkas was serving as a spy for the rest of the island. He had infiltrated the foreign enemy’s compound in order to collect intelligence. The locals were no doubt sitting around at the hotel lounge waiting for him to report back. “Farkas, did you come all the way up here to find out if I fucked Molly?”
“Not precisely, no,” he said, but he looked guilty. “I’ve come to deliver your whisky and your mail. Some of it looked important.” He stood and handed over a large paper bag full of envelopes.
Maybe that was all there was to his visit after all—the mail. Farkas seemed like a good guy, even if he was delusional. “Thank you, I appreciate this a lot,” Ray said. “It’s difficult being so out of touch. I came here with all kinds of romantic notions of communing with nature or whatever, and for a while I felt like I was getting close, but it ultimately hasn’t really worked out.”
“Give it time, Ray. Give it time. Thanks again for the whisky. I suppose I’ll see you in Craighouse next Friday evening. You’ll be joining in the carnage, is that right?”
“The hunt—yes. I wouldn’t miss the chance to practice my aim.”
“I wouldn’t think so. I’ll come meet you at the end of the public road, save you a bit of a walk.”
“You’re obviously a very good sport about all of this, so let me ask you something. How do you know you’re a werewolf? You have to admit that it sounds a bit far-fetched. What evidence do you have?”
Farkas took a deep breath. “To tell you the honest truth, I don’t think in terms of evidence. I have memories of doing things—atrocious, horrible things beyond the ken of mankind. They’re more like visions or dreams than memories, but they’re as real as you or me. There comes a time every so often, usually around the time of the new moon, when I cannot control my actions, when my body operates at odds with my best rational thoughts. I hate it. I hate it more than I could possibly convey to you. I’m not an educated man, but I know what I know, and I know that I’m capable of terrible things.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“Aye, but until you’ve awoken with the taste of blood so strong on your lips, and tufts of some pelt beneath your nails, you cannot hope to understand the things I’ve done.”
“Have you considered the possibility—and I hope you’ll forgive me for this—have you ever wondered if you’re delusional?”
“Ray, I pray that I’m delusional because that would be preferable to the waking nightmares I’ve had all these years. And now I should be off. Good night.”
From the doorway, Ray watched Farkas’s progress into the utter darkness of Jura. A biblical swarm of insects sought the light of the sitting room, so he went in and poured another drink, and then another. Farkas didn’t sound crazy, except that he kind of did.
It was a good hour before Ray felt ready to read his mail. A black, imageless postcard read “Rio de Janeiro At Night” on one side. On the other:
Ray, I hope you still
feel as optimistic as
I do. With love —f.
He was overjoyed to learn that Flora was still thinking about him. He read her haiku again and again looking for clues about the true nature of their relationship. “With love,” it said. He then opened the three identical greeting cards:
Thinking of you
and wishing you all
the blessings of our
Lord and Savior.
Next he tore into the large envelope from Helen. She had used her personal stationery, not her lawyer’s, and had had it reprinted to redact his name from her own. He scanned the cover letter for the only news that really mattered … and … there it was. Molly would be ecstatic.
Helen had agreed to his final and somewhat awkward stipulation of the divorce settlement, perhaps in violation of her own precious ethical standards: upon the successful completion of the minimum requirements of admission, Molly Pitcairn was to receive a full, four-year scholarship to attend the university where Helen taught. The offer included a generous housing stipend and a work-study job in the college of fine arts to cover additional expenses. Ray had it in writing. He had secured Molly’s ticket off Jura and couldn’t wait to tell her. Her father would be furious, perhaps murderously so, but there was nothing that could be done about that. Ray had acted in Molly’s best interests and anyone who didn’t like it would be cordially invited to go fuck himself.
In exchange for the scholarship, Ray had surrendered all rights to his share of the condo and agreed not to pursue additional monies from Helen. He was now broke. It felt liberating.
HE FOUND A PEWTER flask under the sink and filled it with a young and lightly peated scotch, tucked the legs of his trousers into his socks, and without locking the door behind him trekked out to meet Farkas, who simultaneously was and was not a werewolf. The shotgun he left behind. Ray had nearly killed himself and, besides, a real weapon would never work against an imaginary beast.
Hiking to the public road would be some of his greatest physical exertion since Molly’s abduction. Jura’s terrain had all but destroyed his canvas sneakers. The blisters under his socks begged to come out for an encore; he would need to finally pick up a pair of wellingtons from Mrs. Bennett if she was still open. Whisky formed a warm kiddie pool in his belly. He drank half the flask before he got up the hill and past sight of Barnhill.
The evening grew colder and worked its way through his sweater, his feet ached, and although he wasn’t much closer to piecing together the bits of his fractured mind he felt something like happiness about the night ready to unfold, about participating in a werewolf hunt on the Isle of Jura on the night of the summer solstice.
Farkas stood waiting for him next to his compact car, an Eastern European model that had gone out of production shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Sorry about the mess,” he said. “You can throw that shite on the seat into the back.”
“Good to see you, Farkas. What can I expect from this affair tonight?”
“I don’t fully participate, for reasons you can appreciate, so I can’t rightly say. But if these goings-on are at all consistent with every other aspect of life on Jura, it’s fair to warn you to keep your expectations to a minimum.”
“A salient point. I’ve brought some scotch—care for a blast?”
“Wouldn’t say no to a wee sip, would I?” Farkas took Ray’s flask in his hairy hand and, steering with the other, drank what appeared to be the entire contents. He looked disgusted and rolled down his window to spit it out. “Have I insulted you in some way, Ray?”
“Insulted me? No!”
“Then why in heaven’s name are you giving me this new malt? That shite is best left to the tourists, and that flask of yours might have done with a good washing up as well, I might add.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
Farkas handed the empty vessel back and reached into his own pocket. “Try on this tasty little fellow for size,” he said. He passed over a flask that contained a whisky so delicious it might have come from the Virgin Mary’s own tender nipples and been used to suckle the baby Jesus in his downy crib as mother and child were serenaded by a host of angels.
“What on earth is this?” Ray needed to know.
“I told you that we—” he hit the brakes to let a family of red deer pass. They scampered off unaware of their near collision and of the fictional wolf in its make-believe den waiting for darkness to come in order to find the most vulnerable among them. “I told you that we Diurachs save the best of the whiskies for ourselves. Well I personally keep a small collection, an archive if you will. And what you have here was aged for twenty-eight years and will never again see the light of day. When this final bottle is gone it will be gone for good. Try it again while you can.”
Ray took another sip. It tasted entirely different the second time down, and even better. More nuanced. It tasted like caramel and wood smoke and moonlight glowing on a winning lottery ticket. It tasted like drinking joy itself. “I didn’t know whisky could be this good.”
“It can’t. Not anymore, at any rate.”
“Nevermore. Right around here is where I did that face plant off the bike.”
“Aye, nevermore. That would be a nice name for a whisky. Things are different nowadays—maybe that’s Gavin’s point. No going back, as they say.”
“I don’t mean any offense, but just how different are things? It feels to me like the island is stuck in time.”
“Only everything is different, Ray, and that’s the truth. It’s a matter of perspective. The water’s different now. The air we breathe. The whole climate. All of it affects the whisky.”
Darkness settled in and the beginnings of Ray’s reflection appeared in the passenger-side window. He hadn’t trimmed his beard in a few weeks; the locals were liable to mistake him for the wolf. “Maybe change isn’t always bad, though?”
“When I say that malt whisky is the lifeblood of this little island, I want you to understand that literally,” Farkas said. “This new RAF flight plan changes the amount of the jet fuel in our atmosphere, and our atmosphere is not only what we breathe, but what the whisky breathes. Do you mind if we make a quick stop? There’s something I’d like you to see. I know you’re expected at the hotel, so we’ll do this with some haste.”
Farkas pulled into the grounds of the distillery, which sat on a hill and took up a large chunk of downtown Craighouse. Not that Craighouse had much in the way of a downtown. The distillery compound contained two white plaster structures that stood three or four stories tall. They had been built on top of some old, painted-over ruins and were big enough to be seen all the way from the mainland. A warehouse of blue sheet metal loomed above them and the height of the smokestack dwarfed that. The hotel across the street was even larger. People were already gathering over there and Ray was eager to join them, but not before a free tour of a working distillery.
They got out and Farkas conjured a key ring the size of a basketball hoop and festooned with more keys than there were cars and houses on Jura. For decorative purposes, three oak barrels stood in a pyramid next to the entrance. “I thought you didn’t lock your doors here,” Ray said.
“Aye, I know you’re teasing me, Ray, but you understand that our distillery, she’s a different story—she must be locked or casks would be drained dry before you could blink.”
“By who, Mr. Fuller and those guys? They do seem like troublemakers.”
“By me. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve awoken here after one of my new-moon escapades, my hands in the cookie jar, as it were. I cannot always control my own actions, Ray, and that’s the sad truth. Besides, seeing as I’m still considered an outsider on Jura, I don’t feel quite as obliged as some of the others to obey every little superstition.” Farkas found the light switches and revealed a reception area. “Now follow me,” he said. “We’ll do the short tour now, and I’ll show you around the whole works another time.”
Rooms were filled with a network of tanks and tubs and tubes: the equipment that produced all that delicious single-malt scotch. The distillery turned out to be a highly technical operation; this was no backyard still, but rather a modern facility that used computers and specialized, carefully calibrated machinery for maximal yield and quality. Farkas led him to a grimy room containing two huge wooden vats suspended up high on a catwalk. Their shoes clanked against the metal steps. The pungent stink reminded Ray of one of those extinct, old-timey bars in Chicago and Ray saw why: the tanks looked like swimming pools full of stale beer.
“Here put these on,” Farkas said and handed him a pair of sweaty rubber gloves and an oar from a rowboat. “I use only Scottish barley, though much of it comes in by ship. We let it germinate in one of the buildings out back for two or three weeks until it’s ready to get dried in the kiln, which is where it picks up that peat flavor. After that, we grind it to a fine grist that we brew with hot water in the mash tun. What you’re seeing here is the fermentation. We take the wort and add the yeast until we have what might in lesser hands form the basis of beer. We have machines to stir it during the wash, these blades that rotate automatically, but I prefer to do it by hand when I can. Watch me now. Skim the paddle across the top of it, like so.”
Farkas moved with more precision than his frame and usual level of intoxication led Ray to believe possible. He stretched over the railing and stirred the very top of the broth.
Ray followed his lead, but the sweeping motion was more challenging than it looked. “Is this the wort—is that what you called it?—that gets distilled?”
“Right you are! Now don’t chop at it, Ray. Gently now, that’s it. Once I have this where it needs to be, it follows through there to the stills.” He pointed to the pipes leading through the wall to another room. The door sat beneath the smaller of the two tanks. They climbed back down. A sign affixed to the low catwalk said MIND YOUR HEAD. Good advice.
Ray didn’t grasp the nuances of the entire process, but Farkas appeared to be in a rush to get upstairs. He had come fully to life inside the distillery and moved like a man half his age. The whisky-to-be flowed from the vats, through the walls and into the actual stills, eight containers shaped like big butt plugs that stretched to the ceiling. That was what they looked like. More tubes led at right angles from the tops of the stills to some holding tanks in another room.
