Pitcairn stepped out of the truck with a groan. Sponge and Pete sat fidgeting in the cab like bored children. Pitcairn stretched his shoulders and cracked something in his back. He looked calm, which was unnerving. Outright hostility, even violence, might have been preferable. He had already tried once to kill him. That was no joke — the man was capable of murder. “Care to join us, Farkas?” Pitcairn asked.
Farkas was already smashed out of his gourd. Whisky and drool glistened in his immense beard. He held to the railing of the porch for balance. “Not this time, Gavin,” he said.
“How about you, Chappie? You ready?”
“With all due respect,” Ray said, “I think I’ll stay here with Farkas.”
“Respect now, is it? Well there’s a lovely fucking change of scenery. Oh no — you’re coming with us. I’m not supposing you have a gun, now do you, Chappie?”
“No, unfortunately I don’t.”
“You’re not much of an American, are you? I thought all of you Yanks had guns.”
“Here’s where I’ll say my goodbyes,” Farkas said on his way back in to the lounge. “Catch me if you can!”
Farkas clearly didn’t want to know about whatever it was Pitcairn had in mind for Ray. He wasn’t going to stick his neck out for a foreigner. On Jura, as back in the advertising world, remaining noncommittal on all things was the key to self-preservation. It was a shame, but Ray couldn’t count on Farkas’s help, not even with someone as dangerous as Pitcairn.
The last of the other trucks rumbled off into the fog. The engine noise tapered to oblivion, leaving a pocket of silence. Behind the hotel, the water slapped against the docks and seawall. A slight wind sounded in the palm trees, the tops of which were rendered invisible by the mist. There were no lights to be seen beyond the hotel grounds. The mainland — and all of civilized, gridlocked Europe — was so close that Ray could feel its magnetism, but with no direct route of escape it seemed so distant. Jura was another planet unto itself. “I have an idea,” he said. “I’ll stay here at the hotel until you guys are done. At that point we can discuss anything that’s on your mind.”
“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.”