Highland Laddie Gone

CHAPTER TWO

“POOR Cluny!” cried Elizabeth, glancing again into the rearview mirror. “Does he look hungry?”

“He’s gazing longingly at my throat,” said Geoffrey. “It may not be the same thing.”

“We’d better feed him. Can you reach that cooler on the floor of the backseat?”

“With my hand?”

“I can’t believe that he would condescend to bite you, but I’ll stop the car anyway.”

Cluny, the clan mascot, was a regal bobcat who embodied the Chattan motto: Touch Not the Cat. He lounged on the backseat, wearing a tartan ribbon over his metal collar, and a look of heavy-lidded insolence. Several times a year, Cluny’s owner lent him out to attend Scottish festivals, where he enjoyed overeating and sneering at the antics of the primates. Since Cluny was de-clawed and had never found anyone worth the energy to bite, he was generally believed to be tame, but his expression of cordial dislike kept most admirers at bay. “My ancestors used to eat your ancestors,” he seemed to be thinking behind his yellow stare.

Elizabeth stopped the car on a level stretch of grass beside the road. “Poor pussums,” she cooed. “Is-ums hungry?”

Cluny yawned and flexed a paw against the upholstery.

“I wish you had been that solicitous when I wanted to stop and eat,” Geoffrey remarked.

“Get the cooler out of the backseat,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll walk him around.”

Geoffrey hoisted the plastic ice chest, which was heavier than he expected, and deposited it ungently on the grass. “What’s in this thing? Judge Crater?”

“The bobcat bill of fare for the entire weekend. All I have to do is keep adding ice to the cooler-and there should be lots of that around, considering how those doctors drink. Come on, Cluny, din-din.” She opened the box. “Let’s see what we have here. How about ground chuck?”

“As opposed to Geoffrey Tartare,” murmured Geoffrey, edging out of the way.

“He must be very expensive to feed,” Elizabeth remarked as Cluny inhaled a fist-size chunk of meat.

“Consider the alternative.”

“Dry cat food?”

“Door-to-door salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses…”

“I keep telling you, he’s not dangerous. Just a little reserved. I hope he’ll get along with dogs. Marge may be there.”

Geoffrey smiled. “Does she know what you think of her?”

“What?… Oh, I see. What I meant was that Marge Hutcheson always brings border collies to the games, and I wouldn’t want them to chase Cluny. Or vice versa. Marge was always one of my favorite people at the games. I used to help her set up the gates and ramps for the herding competition.”

“Do you mean to tell me there will be sheep at this ordeal?” asked Geoffrey, inspecting the sole of his shoe as if anticipating future indignities.

“No. Of course, in Scotland border collies herd sheep; but for the games here, sheep are too much trouble to haul around, so most exhibitors use ducks. It’s amazing what the dogs can get those ducks to do.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll bet if we got a giant carnivore to slink around after you, you’d be doing amazing things, too.” He paused to look at Elizabeth, who was hopping on one foot with one hand arched over her head.

“I’m shedding,” she informed him, placing her left foot in front of her knee, then behind it, then in front again.

“A balsam conditioner would do you a world of good, but why are you bouncing around like that?”

Elizabeth pretended to stop in order to answer his question, and Geoffrey pretended not to see her gasping for breath. “Shedding,” she said between heaves. “Name of… dance step… Highland fling… practicing.”

“You’re not going to practice too much, are you, dear? Father insisted that we learn CPR, but it’s been years.”

“Dinna worry about me, laddie!” snapped Elizabeth.

“Oh, now really, this is too much! I can take the costumes and the peculiar dancing, but if you start lapsing into a vaudeville Scottish burr, I will lock you in the trunk for the duration of the festival.”

“You’re not going to be any fun at all.”

“Nonsense! I shall be indispensable. With all those demented hams running around pretending to be Jacobites, I shall be that all-important figure: the audience. I expect to enjoy myself hugely.”

“You’ll be lucky if no one brains you with a bagpipe,” muttered Elizabeth.

Dr. Colin Campbell glared at the gaggle of pipe-band members trying to dash across the road to the cafe, apparently trusting their youth and stamina to transport them before his Winnebago mowed them down. They couldn’t be presuming on Dr. Campbell’s good-will: the nonexistence of that was an accepted fact among the games crowd.

Just what you’d expect of a Campbell, most people said, thereby overlooking an important psychological point. Highland games festivals spent a lot of time emphasizing Scottish traditions and lauding Bonnie Price Charlie, whose band of overconfident nincompoops were slaughtered, sword in hand, by the musket-toting Campbells. To the idealists enamored of lost causes, coming to a battle well fed, with state-of-the-art weaponry and a sizable army to back you up, was cheating; and the Campbells were vilified in song and jest for their calculating and unsportsmanlike behavior. Some two hundred and forty-odd years after the Battle of Culloden, the Campbells were still considered the flies in the broth of Scotland, which explains why Colin Campbell thrived on ill will. What other sort of person would go, year after year, to a gathering at which he was guaranteed to be hated?

Dr. Campbell waited until he could see the whites of the pipe band’s eyes before pumping his horn, which blared out, “The Campbells are coming! Hooray! Hooray!” As he sped off in the direction of the campsite, he could see them in his rearview mirror shaking their fists and shouting Campbell epithets. Colin smiled; it was an auspicious beginning for the games.

Jerry Buchanan winced as he removed his kilt from the monogrammed clothes bag. Whoever had inquired “What’s in a name?” had not been a Buchanan of Scottish origin. In Scotland, last names denote clan affiliation, and thereby clan tartan, which meant that Jerry Buchanan would spend a lifetime of Highland festivals running around in a tartan of red, green, and yellow with a predominant orange stripe, in marked contrast to the muted grays and browns he wore the rest of the time. Why couldn’t he have been a Gordon or a Douglas, with their tasteful blues and greens?

Jerry was tired of having to be good-natured about the jokes-that Barnum and Bailey were septs of Clan Buchanan; that Buchanan was Gaelic for rainbow. He’d almost rather be a Campbell. He had considered quitting the games circuit, but he did enjoy the sporting events, and he had quite a reputation as a hurler. The trophies looked good in his office waiting room, and it gave him something in common with MacDonald and Ogilvy, his partners at the clinic. Someday it might even be worth more than that.

Jerry glanced out the window to see if a battered old AirStream had pulled into the campgrounds yet. Someday all this Highland business might pay off very well indeed, he told himself. Jerry didn’t usually dabble in politics, but this was different. He wondered what news would be arriving with the man in the AirStream. Perhaps he would speak to him about changing the Buchanan colors-when he had the power to do it, of course. When he was the Earl of Buchanan.

Jerry smiled, picturing his little dental office tucked into the turret of a castle and his receptionist decked out in a kilt of tasteful blue and gray.

Cameron Dawson hadn’t said anything for six miles, ever since he had realized that nobody was going to talk about porpoises; but his hosts hadn’t noticed his silence. Probably never would, at the rate they were nattering about this festival they were taking him to. From what he could gather, they all thought it was the most amazing stroke of good fortune that their visiting professor from Scotland had arrived just as the Highland festival was about to begin: it solved the problem of how to entertain him for the weekend.

Cameron Dawson was less sanguine about the coincidence: he would have preferred to be given a tour of fast-food restaurants and then left alone with a big-screen color television hooked up to cable. But it was not to be. He wasn’t sure just what to expect of an American Scottish festival, but if the previous hour’s conversation was any example, it was going to be the longest weekend of Cameron Dawson’s life.

“You’re sure you don’t have a kilt, Dr. Dawson?” asked Mrs. Carson with a disbelieving smile.

“Positive,” said Cameron, trying to smile back. And you’re sure you don’t wrestle alligators? he wanted to answer.

“Dawson-what clan is that, anyway?” asked Andy Carson, the assistant dean of biology. Opinions in the department were divided over whether he had taken up the study of salamanders because he looked like one, or whether he had grown to resemble them after long years of close association.

“Clan MacThatcher,” said Cameron, going for broke.

Betty Carson giggled. “You can’t fool us! There’s no such clan. I’ll look you up.” She held up a small book called Scottish Clans and Tartans, which Cameron realized he was expected to know by heart. “Dawson… Dawson…” she murmured, flipping pages. “Ah, here it is! ‘Dawson is a corruption of Davidson, and the Davidsons are now a branch of Clan Chattan.’ I’ll turn you over to one of them for the parade of clans. I expect you’ll want to be with your clan, won’t you?”

Cameron blinked. “Do any of them know anything about porpoises?”

Betty Carson considered it. “If they’re like most clans, they’ll be M.D.s. Andy always introduces himself as Professor Carson, rather than Doctor, so that people won’t try to talk to him about AMA politics.”

“Or tax shelters,” Andy Carson grunted. “They certainly prescribe good Scotch, though, at these festivals. What’s your brand, Scotty?”

“Schweppes,” murmured Cameron. He’d be damned if he’d be called Scotty for the duration of his stay. If they persisted, he’d have to think up a nickname “that they called him back home.”

“Well, maybe they’ll let you enter the sporting events without the kilt,” said Betty Carson. “Since you’re a real Scot. Is there any particular one you specialize in?”

“Soccer.” He remembered not to call it football.

She frowned. “Not Scottish. The choices are caber toss, sheaf toss, hammer toss, stone throw-”

“Betty won the haggis hurl last year,” said her husband proudly.

Cameron tried to imagine a group of women vomiting suet pudding in a distance competition. That couldn’t be it.

Ice. Americans were really quite demented on the subject of ice, thought Heather McSkye.

While her new husband, Dr. Hutcheson, was conferring with festival officials, Heather climbed into the camper to check on the ice supply. She had filled the cooler before they left, but in this stifling climate it might have melted; and if so, she would have to send Batair to town for more. He would insist on having the other clan chiefs in for drinks tonight, and they would need more ice than a fishmonger to accommodate that crowd.

Usually Heather enjoyed entertaining: sheathed in a black dress to accentuate her blondness, she would glide among the guests, murmuring introductions or offers of drinks, and accepting compliments on the newly redecorated house. Batair had protested, of course-men are such sticks about change-but she had told him she simply couldn’t live with Marge’s old chintzes and cottage oak antiques. She’d wanted to hold a yard sale, but Batair, in an uncharacteristic display of firmness, insisted on sending the old furniture to Marge at the farm. He hadn’t even wanted to readjust the settlement to compensate for it. The divorce agreement had allowed Marge to keep their farm, where she raised her border collies, and Dr. Hutcheson had kept the house in town and most of the stocks and bonds.

Heather would have liked to see more acrimony in the relations between her husband and his first wife, but she was too clever to instigate it. She contented herself with the purchase of some lovely chrome and glass furniture to complement the scarlet settee and the black pile carpet.

Batair seemed to think that, since she was from Scotland, she should be as daft about antiques as he was, but it wasn’t as if she’d grown up in a sodding castle, then, was it? Heather liked new things; in fact, she would have preferred motor racing to Scottish games for entertainment, but the games were not entertainment as far as she was concerned. They were a means to an end.

She had sized up the Scots-Americans and decided that they were the U.S. equivalent of the Sloanes back home: conservative snobs with more money than sense, in search of a bit of antiquity on which to hang their pedigrees. When Heather mentioned her ties to the Scottish nobility, Batair had practically drooled, hadn’t he? If the other Americans’ reactions were as funny as that, it should be an amusing weekend indeed.

James Stuart McGowan hadn’t said anything for quite a long time; but since he was only ten years old, his parents considered that a blessing. Even an ominous silence was better than the leveling remarks that were his usual conversational contributions on outings.

James Stuart, who had the soul of an aging Baptist minister, had been cursed with whimsical parents. They were always trying to drag him off to carnivals and ball games, where they’d buy noxious quantities of hot dogs and cotton candy that they attempted to pass off as dinner; God knows what this cuisine had done to his metabolism. If his parents didn’t get a grip on themselves by the time he reached puberty, he’d probably die of terminal acne. At least he’d gotten them to stop swiping his copy of Nietzsche and replacing it with Paddington Bear, the threat to call the child protection agency had finally done it. He wondered which of his parents had put the sign on his door: Killjoy was here. This latest obsession of theirs, the Highland games, appeared to involve leaving a perfectly comfortable home to camp out like gypsies on the top of a mountain amid bears, poison oak, and fellow psychotics. His mother and father (he steadfastly refused to call them Babs and Stewie) even wanted to buy a kilt for him, insisting how adorable he’d look in the family tartan. James Stuart had countered by demanding to see the family checkbook, and pointing out that $150 worth of cuteness was clearly beyond their means.

Although he felt obliged to radiate displeasure at his parents’ latest escapade, James Stuart secretly felt that the Highland games might prove interesting after all. There should be crowds of people there, so that he could easily give his parents the slip and stay gone for hours. Besides, feeling superior and contemptuous was James Stuart’s favorite pastime, and the weekend promised a limitless opportunity to indulge in it.

Lachlan Forsyth counted the campers in the parking area and decided that it was time for him to set up his souvenir stall. He could afford, at most, a two-drink delay. The opening ceremonies were set to begin at 6 P.M., by which time an assortment of the curious, the obnoxious, and the deluded would be packed three-deep around him, demanding tartan ties, Nessie key rings, and directions to the loo. His answer to all of these queries was: “Right over there on the table.”

Often people would recognize his burr and want to know where he was from, in which case a glance at their tartan was always helpful. He told the MacDonalds that he was from Kintyre, while the Campbells were led to believe that he hailed from Argyll; no one ever knew the difference.

Occasionally a well-traveled soul would try to chat him up about various places in Scotland, but Lachlan, well-traveled himself, could field questions indefinitely. He could always recommend a pub or a bed-and-breakfast anywhere between Orkney and the Borders. He could, with equal ease, recite Burns, tell instantly which tartan went with which surname, and settle arguments about the minutiae of Scottish history. It was all part of his job as a professional Scot. The least agreeable part of this lucrative business was having to suffer fools gladly; but he always managed with a straight face to find a tartan for an Olaffson (MacDonald of the Isles: Viking intermarriage), dredge up a family ghost for any family at all, and listen sympathetically to one more “direct descendant of Flora MacDonald and Bonnie Price Charlie.”

Lachlan began to dust off his Highland games coffee mugs and straighten his tartan scarfs and ties. The new blue and beige ones should go like hotcakes-the Princess Diana tartan, that was. And the Royal Stewart was always a big seller. Never mind that none of the purchasers had the least right in the world to wear the colors of the royal family. It was pretty, easy to find, and usually cheaper than special-ordering the tartan of a lesser-known clan, so it always did well at Scottish gatherings. Lachlan always laid in a generous supply before the festival, and he had never failed to sell out. Between the ignorant and the deluded “descendants” of the Prince, business was always brisk.

“Excuse me,” said a woman at his elbow, “could you tell me what tartan my family should wear? We’re kin to Mary, Queen of Scots, on my mother’s side.”

Lachlan Forsyth smiled. Let the games begin.