Andrew Ervin - Burning Down George Orwell's House

“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.