Burning Down George Orwell's House, page 19
“You’re full of bad ideas tonight, Chappie. I have half a mind to go over to the rescue and rehoming center and adopt a cute little puppy just so I can name it Welter and have the pleasure of kicking it every night.”
“Would you hurry along, eh?” Pete shouted. “They’ll have shot that wolf before we’ve even left the car park.”
“You heard what the man said,” Pitcairn said. He lifted the front of his soiled soccer sweatshirt to show Ray the wooden handle of a small, antique pistol. “Now be a good lad and get in, Chappie. It wouldn’t do to make a scene here.”
Pete and Sponge squeezed over to let him in. Sponge, who was pressed against the door, swigged from a bottle of whisky, but Pitcairn let go of the clutch and nearly cost him his front teeth. The bagpipe cassette provoked the same sensation in Ray’s skull that a hacksaw might have. They pulled from the relative safety of the parking lot and turned south into the foggy night. The headlights couldn’t penetrate more than a few feet in front of the truck, so Pitcairn turned them off. He plunged the truck, at full speed, into total darkness.
“What are you doing, eh?” Pete asked.
“I know this island like the back of my wanking hand.”
Ray closed his eyes and sat sandwiched by sweaty, half-drunken Scotsmen in a truck with no lights on. Pitcairn didn’t slow down. The cabin of the truck vibrated like a motel room bed. The road turned and climbed and twisted and every so often the tires ran off the road. Pitcairn somehow corrected his course in the dark and only turned the headlights on again in time to swing the wheel onto a trail even worse than the path to Barnhill.
Several pairs of eyes appeared in the headlights, froze for a moment, and then disappeared. The afterimage remained glued onto Ray’s vision and imposed itself on everything he looked at. “Where are we going anyway?” he asked.
“Why to the Paps of course,” Pitcairn said.
THE TRUCK SLID TO a stop in the cleavage between two of the island’s three mountains, a mossy patch of land the locals called the bealach. Three men were playing bagpipes that sounded out of tune even by the lax standards of that instrument’s repertoire. A bonfire blazed in the center of the clearing and, yes, several grown men were shimmying around it naked, including Singer, who at his advanced and flaccid age looked like a dancing skeleton celebrating the Day of the Dead. Ray got out of the truck. The whisky had hit him hard, but that didn’t deter him from partaking again from every bottle that passed by. The alchemical process that had produced their contents utilized little more than earth and air and water and time. Single-malt scotches, he had come to understand, were as individual as people and, like people, became toxic in large doses.
The rest of the caravan had already arrived and the celebration carried over from the hotel, but the laughter had taken a turn; the men still made jokes, told stories, but the voices were quieter, if only marginally. A subtle seriousness had overtaken the proceedings, maybe a greater sense of purpose. Wagers were made, liters of whisky consumed. The flames curled to the sky as if to chase off the fog and Fuller toiled around it in preparation for a feast. A goat rotated slowly on a spit. At dawn, at the conclusion of the hunt, two cauldrons full of seawater would be set to boil; they awaited the dozens of lobsters, caught nearby, that tangled and jousted in their ice chests. There was fresh cheese and bread and an entire cask of single malt, all of it local. That the food was organic went without saying. Jura had its own ecosystem, its own cycle of consumption and replenishment. Ray thought about what Farkas had said. Had his own presence contributed to the isle’s natural life or disrupted it?
Men unpacked rifles from truck-bed lockers and loaded them with lead shot. The younger participants had the responsibility of lighting torches from the bonfire, which they would soon carry off into the shortest night of the year.
Ray watched as Pete took a long, three-Mississippi swallow from his bottle and handed it to Pitcairn, who with noisy deliberation hacked up a butter pat of green phlegm and drooled it into the remaining whisky. It bobbed in the beam of his flashlight like a bloated worm. “I’m supposing the rest of this belongs to me now,” he said.
“You’re an arsehole,” Pete said. He took the bottle from Pitcairn and, undeterred, drank another long swallow. Sponge looked on in disgust that verged on awed respect and then opened his hunting bag, from which he produced a bottle labeled ISLAY. He peeled off the foil, pulled the cork, and enjoyed a long taste.
Pitcairn climbed onto the bed of his truck. The crowd grew quiet, the bagpipes wheezed their last breaths. Even with everyone’s attention, he didn’t speak right away. He surveyed the assembled party with approval, then took a drooling gulp from a bottle handed up to him. He lit a cigarette while his congregation awaited his gospel. “I thought I might say a few words,” he said, and took another gulp. He swayed on his feet. “The problem we face, gentlemen, is one that is within our power to fix so long as we can come together on a night like this under the moonless sky to fix it.”
A few voices spoke out in assent from the crowd.
“I’m talking about an invasive species that has come to savage our lambs in the night and to ruin our very livelihoods and those things most precious to us.”
“Aye,” a few more men said.
“We’re talking not only about this wolf we are going to skin this night”—a cheer went up—“but about the parasites bleeding us dry.”
“Aye!” said the crowd.
“I’m talking about the men who come from Glasgow to harvest our peat and sell the very soil out from beneath our fucking feet!”
“Aye!”
“I’m talking about the bloody fucking tourists who leave their bottled water on our beaches and pollute our seas.”
“Aye!”
As the token American, Ray could see where things were headed and slinked out of Pitcairn’s line of vision.
“Here we go,” Farkas whispered. He had appeared out of the fog.
“I didn’t think you’d be here,” Ray said.
“I’m not.”
“I’m talking about the scholars,” Pitcairn continued. “The intellectuals like old Eric Blair who deem fit to grace us with their presence and treat our Jura like their own private museum, who turn our proud heritage and our way of life into some kind of tourist attraction. Have they forgotten that we actually live here?”
“Yeah!” Ray shouted from the back of the crowd. He was enjoying himself despite the hatemongering now directed fully at him. “Those fucking intellectuals!” he yelled. “Let’s string ’em up!”
Laughter rippled through the men. “Good on you,” someone said behind him. Pitcairn tried to continue, but his audience had turned—not against him necessarily, but the mood had shifted with the sea breeze. “The danger is worse than you think,” he warned them all, but a dozen other conversations had begun. More wagers got placed. People were eager to get the hunt started and then, no doubt, climb into their warm beds. “You ungrateful bastards will wish you listened to me one day.”
“Not today!” someone answered, inciting a good deal of amusement. It sounded a bit like Fuller, but who could tell?
“Shut your gobs one more minute, you fuckers,” he shouted, but it was too late. The bagpipes squawked back to life. Pitcairn stumbled while climbing back down and landed in a heap on the ground. A hunting dog licked at the whisky on his lips and it yelped when he punched it in the face.
The men congealed into parties of five or six. Each group had one torchbearer, who was armed with either a flashlight or a real fiery torch and who was also responsible for carrying the bottles of whisky. Every man kept his voice low now. They peeled off into the darkness. Some headed straight up the inclines of the Paps, others toward the shore or along some unseen paths leading into the fog that seemed to extinguish the torches like so many birthday candles. Only a few people remained. Fuller tended the fire in preparation for what looked like a lavish feast.
“You’re coming with me, Chappie,” Pitcairn said. He stood at a trailhead that Ray hadn’t noticed and shined a flashlight in his eyes. Ray squinted in time to see Sponge and Pete go on ahead and get swallowed whole by the encroaching fog.
“I think I’ll stay here and help Mr. Fuller,” Ray said.
“Oh so you’re now a gourmet chef, are you? I think Mr. Fuller can manage without the benefit of your expertise.”
“But …”
“You go ahead, Mr. Welter,” Fuller said. “I can take care of this. One word of advice: it’s easy to get lost on the moors at midday, not to mention on a night such as this one. Keep an eye on where you’re going.”
“He’s right, Chappie. We wouldn’t want you wandering off, now would we?”
“I don’t have a flashlight.”
“I don’t have a flashlight.”
There was no point in arguing. Resistance was futile. Anyway, Pitcairn wouldn’t dare hurt him, not with Sponge and Pete as witnesses.
“Not to worry. You just stay close to Mr. Pitcairn,” Fuller said. “Bring us back some fresh meat to add to our feast.”
“You heard the man, Chappie, you stay close.” Pitcairn turned and went off into the night. He took four paces before his flashlight blinked out of view.
Ray followed after him, but the bonfire behind him soon evaporated and the darkness hit his body like a sudden fever. He couldn’t see a goddamn thing. “Pitcairn?” No answer. The soles of his sneakers sucked at the muddy ground, and just like that he was lost. Nothing existed except nothingness itself. The entire universe consisted of the absence of light. Panic swelled in Ray’s windpipe like a chunk of unchewed beef. Sweat tickled him from beneath his beard. The fog seemed to distort the sounds of the wind in the bushes. Somewhere there were waves lapping against the stony shore, but he couldn’t tell which direction they came from. He stumbled over unseen rocks and roots and divots, but walked in what he hoped was a straight line. Then he felt the terrain change and found himself on an incline. A hill, maybe the base of one of the Paps. If the peak jutted above the fog, maybe he could gain his bearings from there. Even if the lights in Craighouse and at the ferry port and over on Islay only illuminated small patches of fog, that would be enough to figure out which direction the hotel was in.
The mountain was too steep to climb straight up, so he circled it in progressively higher rings the way the groove of a record album eventually terminates in the middle. His sneakers were worse than useless and his intense intoxication didn’t help. The flask was empty. His ankles twisted back and forth. His progress—if he was making progress at all—was slow and laborious. His eyes had not adjusted to the light because there was so little light for his eyes to adjust to. The worst part was that Pitcairn had done this to him. Getting him lost out here, that had been totally intentional. It had to be. That asshole purposely led him out here into the black night with the purpose of getting him lost. That had been his agenda all along.
Ray climbed, blind, for twenty minutes, maybe more, and the higher he went the better he came to appreciate the reality of his circumstances. The seas would eventually rise again, as Farkas said, and that was thanks in some part to global warming and the thousands of SUVs he had unleashed. Ray had come to Jura in order to escape the consequences of his actions, but that was impossible. For the time being, however, here he was on one of the Paps of Jura, high above the cares of the mundane and overcrowded world.
He had to be nearing the top and so he hiked faster, his treads skidding on the rock surfaces, until a horrible sound reached his ears. It was a disgusting, retching howl that came from above him and echoed between the Paps then returned to its maker. There was something out here with him. The noise came again, closer, but this time it sounded like someone coughing up the boozy contents of his stomach. A halo of light bobbing in the fog guided Ray to the peak of the mountain, where he was actually glad to see Pitcairn. “I want you to take a deep breath, Chappie,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
Ray did so. He stopped and tasted the sea on his tongue. The Scottish night felt so clean, so good and pure; it was unpolluted and sweet in his lungs. “Mr. Pitcairn, I’m so—”
“What you have a hold of there is fresh air. Something you won’t bloody well find in your Chicago.” He pronounced it She-cah-go. “Do you know why I wanted you to come up here with me tonight?”
“To shoot me?”
“That’s a very good guess, but I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to shoot you or not. I wanted you to come with me so that you might understand why it is that I don’t want you filling my Molly’s head with ideas.”
“If you ask me, her head’s already full of ideas,” Ray said. His heartbeat made its presence felt now in his neck. “Nothing you or I do is going to change that.”
“That’s what I’m talking about, Chappie.” Pitcairn spoke quietly. A bird peep-peeped at them from some nearby overgrowth. “I’m not asking you. No one is asking you any such fucking thing. No one has come pleading for your almighty opinion. Understand that. Right now, we are standing on Beinn a’ Chaolais. While you can’t see her at the moment you can believe me when I tell you that to our left is Beinn an Òir and on her other side is Beinn Shiantaidh.”
The three Paps. Translated from the Gaelic, they were called Mountain of the Kyle and Mountain of Gold. The easternmost one—hidden behind Beinn an Òir—was Holy Mountain. On a clear day they could be seen in all their glory from as far away as Northern Ireland.
The buzz Ray had going alleviated most of the pain in his feet and his fear of Pitcairn. He felt at home in the natural splendor of the Inner Hebrides. The wind pockmarked the cloudbank and exposed a pair of stars above. The swatches of night sky were remembered and forgotten like good intentions.
“I guess you heard about Molly’s scholarship?” Ray asked.
“And what scholarship is that, Chappie?”
“I know that Mrs. Campbell told you about it.”
“Told me what, then?”
“That’s how you want to do this? Fine. As part of my divorce settlement I got—at tremendous personal expense, I might add—a full-paid scholarship for Molly to attend a university back in Chicago. I’m talking about a world-class education for her, and it’s absolutely free.”
Pitcairn started walking again, following the crest of the mountain, and this time Ray stayed close to the light. It would be easy—way too easy—to get lost again. “I’ll need you to keep your voice down, Chappie,” he whispered, “if we’re planning to kill this wolf.”
“There’s no goddamn wolf, Gavin. You know that. Why the charade?”
“I said to keep your fucking voice down. If there’s no wolf, what’s slaughtering our sheep? I know what you’re thinking here, Chappie. Maybe in the vast recesses of that sophisticated brain of yours you really do believe that you, above everybody else on God’s green earth, know what’s best for us bampots out here on Jura. Free education? There’s a free education from Beinn a’ Chaolais. Under the stars. Even if you can’t see them, Chappie, they’re still twinkling all the same. I also suppose it’s equally possible that you think you’re helping Molly by getting away from her big, bad da. For all your books and your advertising awards and your prissy clothing you don’t understand the first thing about what this world is really like.”
“Yes, but—”
Pitcairn stopped again and turned to face him. He had in his hand the old-fashioned six-shooter. Maybe it was loaded with silver bullets. “Now just keep your gob shut for once in your entire bloody life. Do you smell that, Chappie? That’s the sea air in your lungs, not smog or fast food grease or petrol exhaust from all your sport utility vehicles. What makes you believe for one instant that I would allow you or any man to deprive Molly of this? I would rather be dead than live in Chicago, because they’re pretty much the same thing. Do you even know how it feels to be alive?”
“Don’t you think that it’s up to her? I understand that—”
“Here’s what it feels like,” Pitcairn said.
The loud crack hit Ray’s ears first, echoed four or five times off the Paps, and then came back to rest in his stomach. He had been shot.
The pain arrived as a new sensation. It wasn’t like anything. Not the sharp sting of an insect or like being hit with a hammer. It didn’t feel like anything except what it felt like to get shot. He knew now. It fucking hurt. His own fluids glued his clothing to his body. The wound wasn’t a small toothless mouth or a reproduction of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte done the size of an Indian Head nickel: it was a bullet hole in his stomach. The metaphors arrived slowly. His belly now contained a tiny baby of lead who sucked the nutrients from his body. Then it was a fisherman’s sinker plugging a hole in the ocean. A .44-inch paperclip fastening his mortality to his immortality.
He had been shot. Pitcairn had shot him. The smoke danced from the barrel of the pistol and was lost amid the fog. The pain was mesmerizing. Ray fell to the ground and remained there. Pitcairn looked down at him and spat into the cold heather in which Ray now wanted to sleep. Just a short nap. The ground was comfy. The fog blanketed him.
Pitcairn’s boots grew smaller, quieter. Ray closed his eyes. The earth itself grabbed wetly at his clothes; it found his skin, pulled him closer, held him tight. Shhhhhh, the wind said. Every so often a gust blew away some of the fog and the stars would poke through the shifting windows of starry sky. All the tensions and tightnesses inside him gave way and his body deflated even further to the ground.
Another breeze brought with it a sharp odor of putrefaction, something animalic and rotten.
A live wolf stood not three feet away. It smelled of iron, of decaying earth. Its luxurious coat glimmered like polished silver even in the little light afforded by the stars. The creature looked him in the eye and growled ever so quietly, a low sonic rumble Ray felt in his chest. His body purred along involuntarily with the wolf’s breath. He felt the weight of the creature’s heartbeat, heard the blood sluicing through its taut musculature. He became aware of his own pulse beating at the base of his neck, and the enormous wolf sensed his quickened pulse too; it wanted to find the source of Ray’s remaining warmth with its teeth, to drill its hungry muzzle into the too-small bullet hole.
