Fair is Foul; Foul is Fair: A Clem MacDougall Adventure, Take I

I. PROLOGUE. It had just gone eight-thirty Thursday morning. Clem MacDougall was preparing himself, as was his custom, to go to court. The case was Weingarten v. Weingarten, which had been churning demons of dread in the recesses of his mind ever since his less-than-pleasant interview with Gladys Weingarten the Friday before. Opposing him was Doctor Weingarten’s lawyer, Marty Goniff, known at the Green County Bar as “The Prince of Darkness.” Marty Goniff’s skill in wielding his briefcase full of unintelligible papers and other dirty tricks (the “Briefcase of Darkness”) sometimes left even the great trickster Clem MacDougall feeling like a raw beginner. Marty Goniff was an acknowledged virtuoso in the business of helping people use the so-called legal system to beat the living excrement out of each other. Clem MacDougall wasn’t sure whom he feared and despised the most – Marty Goniff, Doctor Weingarten, or the fair Gladys, the elephant-voiced battleaxe he himself had the honor to represent. The music of the pipes usually brought comfort and grounding – and a consuming fire – to the soul of Clem MacDougall. He played a set of century-old full silver mounted MacDougall pipes, handed down directly from his great-grandfather, Hamish MacDougall. In the time of Queen Victoria, Greatgaffer MacDougall had fashioned Highland bagpipes in the Old Country that were as treasured today as a Stradivari to a fiddler. Inclining a fond ear to the subtle blending of drones and chanter, Clem MacDougall had parley with old folks of old affairs. In the ecstasy of the moment, he stood by the cairn of kings, knew the color of Fingal’s hair and saw the moon-glint on the hook of the Druids. Then his damned bass drone quit. With an oath, he pulled the offending pipe out of its stock, flicked the reed tongue with his thumb, and stuck the whole works down his throat and blew on it, gagging himself in the process. “Blasted black sticks o’ the Deil,” he muttered. He winced as he pulled a hair off his head and threaded it under the tongue of the reluctant reed. Now, when he blew on it, it sounded like a bull walrus in rutting season. After several more minutes of cursing under his breath and fiddling with bits of wax and hemp, he placed the drone, now chastised and compliant, back into its stock and soon he was lost again in the spell of his music. Clem MacDougall caressed the chanter with knowing fingers; the harsh yet curiously sweet voice of the Scottish Highlands and Western Isles drifted over the manicured fairways and greens of the Excelsior Mews Condominiums and Golf Club outside Excelsior City. As he paused and began to play the third variation of A Flame of Wrath for Squinting Patrick (Lasan Padruig Caogach), Clem MacDougall closed his eyes and waited to feel the good old molten fire in his belly and bowels. In all his years, the music of the piob mhor had never once failed to deliver its promise: there would be a foe’s blood on his blade this day. And so Clem MacDougall prepared to go to court, just as his ancestors back into the mists of time had prepared to go into mortal combat. MORE TO COME.