He took the quilt from the foot of the bed and used it to blot the remaining moisture from his body. It didn’t feel right to dry his bare ass on someone’s hand-sewn blanket, but there was no avoiding it. A musty odor escaped from his suitcase. All of Ray’s clothes were wet, as were his books. Even if he could eventually get the paperbacks dry they might never be readable again. The only dry thing he owned was, thankfully, his first edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He had quadruple-wrapped it in plastic.
He hung some clothes over the radiator and despite his hunger felt an overwhelming desire to sleep, if only for a minute, but they were waiting for him downstairs. He pulled a damp T-shirt over his grumbling belly. The clammy boxer shorts made his entire body shiver all over again. He climbed back inside his new sweater, some tube socks, and a pair of not-entirely-soaked blue jeans. The clothes felt eel-like against his skin.
The hollering and cigarette stink assaulted Ray before he got downstairs. Pitcairn was the loudest of the bunch by far: “So I says to him, ‘What do I look like? Some kind of taxi service?’ For a so-called genius he sure is a simple fucker.”
“Actually, you are a taxi service,” someone else said, and that sent the others into convulsions of breathless laughter, which mutated into the kind of coughing made possible by lifelong smoking habits.
“Aye, but he doesn’t know that, does he?”
“Here he is now, then,” said a man of impossible hairiness. He was the hairiest person Ray had ever seen. It was unreal. Five people occupied the lounge, six including Molly, who sat behind the bar reading. The crinkled book resembled his own paperbacks upstairs. The lounge had another fire that roared but gave off little heat. A pile of peat bricks sat on a browning newspaper next to the hearth and a cirrocumulus cloud of cigarette smoke clung to the ceiling.
“So nice of you to join us, Chappie.”
“Hello, gentlemen, I’m Ray.”
The hairy man stood up and shook his hand. Everyone else remained seated. “The name’s Farkas,” he said. “This here’s Pete, Sponge, Fuller, and you’ve met Gavin and Molly Pitcairn.”
“Watch out for Farkas, eh?” Pete said. “He bites.”
That drew a big laugh.
“And that Pete’s a real salt of the earth type.”
“We’ve got some stew on for you,” Fuller said. “I hope you’re hungry?”
“You have no idea. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
“Well I’m afraid the menu’s limited to venison this evening, Mr. Welter.”
“I suppose that’ll work. Now who do I have to talk to in order to get a whisky around here?”
“Salt of the earth? Peat? Get it?”
Dozens of bottles — brands Ray had never heard of — covered the three-tiered counter behind the bar. They twinkled in gold and bronze in the firelight. The sight made him feel a little better about his life.
“You like your malts, do you?” Pete asked.
“Maybe a bit too much.”
“What’ll it be, then, Chappie?” Pitcairn asked. “A dram of the local?”
“That sounds perfect, in fact.”
“You heard the man, Molly. Six of the local.”
She put her book down with a sigh and slid from her stool. After pulling the cork from the cello-shaped bottle, she poured six healthy drams of the scotch distilled here in Craighouse. Ray wondered if it would taste different so close to the source. He couldn’t wait to find out.
“Should I charge these to your room?” she asked.
“Sure, I’ll pick up this round. Room—”
“Room eleven, I know.”
Molly distributed the whiskies. The men diluted them with water poured from small pitchers the way some people put milk in their coffee.
“Thank you, Welter, eh?” Pete said. He looked to be about fifty with prematurely wrinkled skin and thinning hair. If Ray didn’t know better, he would’ve thought the man possessed a deep and permanent sunburn.
“Please call me Ray.”
“Or Chappie!”
The first sip tasted like the sweet ambrosia of the gods. It came as a revelation, a divine benediction, and it immediately washed away the hunger and exhaustion of his journey. Ray had drunk from the River Lethe. The second swallow tasted even better. The world began to feel stable. The voices around him grew vague and indistinct. Some moments later, Pitcairn’s coughing fit shook him from his swoon. “Goddamn that’s good,” Ray said.
“A man who likes his malt, now there’s a good sign, eh?” Pete said. He wore a tracksuit so out of fashion that were it dry cleaned and disinfected it would fetch hundreds of dollars at one of the boutiques back in Ray’s old neighborhood.
Two of them — Pitcairn and Fuller — were approximately his age, maybe four or five years older. It was hard to get a good look at Farkas beneath all that hair. Sponge appeared to be in his eighties. He sported a wool jacket and a stained tartan tie and sat silently at the head of the table, content to listen to the others. “What kind of name is Sponge?” Ray asked.
“One word of advice,” Fuller said, placing an enormous bowl of stew and a basket of bread in front of him. “Don’t take your eye off your whisky for one instant whilst that man is present. Good appetite.”
“Thank you. This smells … interesting.”
When Fuller retook his seat he found that his dram had been drained. Only an empty glass remained. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Sponge.”
“Please excuse me,” Ray said and moved his bowl and the bread to a table next to the fire. He wondered how many fireplaces the hotel possessed. “All my clothes are wet, I’m freezing.”
“That stew will warm you right up,” Fuller said.
“Not to mention the malt, eh? Best thing for you on an evening such as this.”
Upon closer inspection in the firelight, the chunks of animal material—meat would’ve been a generous exaggeration — appeared half-cooked at best. The severed white tendons gaped open and one of them winked at him from amid the gristly pool. A blue oil spill floated atop the broth. His hiking boots might have been added to the pot for additional flavor, but Ray had an audience and so he forced himself to lift the spoon to his mouth. The texture resisted his attempts at mastication. He ground every tooth he owned against it, but the chunk of meat would not disintegrate. Fortunately, the eye-watering amount of salt came close to masking the rotten meat flavor. If he wasn’t being watched, and if he had possessed a napkin, he would’ve spat the chunk out. Swallowing the meat proved to be a separate ordeal. The whisky chaser helped. He finished his dram and asked for another, and then another, which Molly brought over, each time complaining the entire way. The men watched him with obvious amusement. He hoped they didn’t see how repulsed he felt.
“Not bad, is it?” Fuller wanted to know.
“No — not bad. But I’m stuffed.”
“I bet you are,” Pitcairn said and the other men laughed.
He tried to soak up some of the salt and gasoline in his gut with a slice of bread, but it was so stale that he thought it might be toasted. He snapped off a piece, dipped it in the broth, and tried not to wince when he put it in his mouth. “Well, that was great,” Ray said. He pushed the bowl away from his body. “But I need to get some sleep, gentlemen.”
“How about one more wee dram?”
His mouth filled with rancid saliva, which he forced back down his gullet with an audible gulp. “Next time. It’s been a long day.”