Wolfgang zoomed in on what I was holding and then zoomed away. “Got it!” He grinned, satisfied.
She coolly took her hand from mine. “I’m going to go investigate the caves,” she said. “Do you know there are hermits living in them? Some of them are saints. There’s a woman up there, a German woman. She’s been living there for years, meditating. Barren Indian women go lay gifts outside her cave and suddenly become pregnant.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, Claire, it’s true. Such wonders do exist.”
I watched her turn and walk, lithe and swaying, down the path and away from the tea shop.
“Be careful!” I called after her. I sighed. You never knew what she was going to do. She was danger personified, that girl.
That afternoon, two policemen came from Lower Dharamsala, officious, tidy little men in crisp uniforms, very different from the soft, small bundles of people they passed. They came quickly, briskly. A man in a lavender felt topee scooted along beside them, evidently trying to keep up. They marched up past the stupa and the prayer wheel toward our little camp. Wolfgang, in charge, stood up right away and broke out in a sweat. The last thing he wanted was the police. I felt, rather than saw, Chartreuse flinch and draw back. Instinctively he knew that they’d come for him.
“Oh, no,” I cried out. I put my arm into the air as though to shield him. He smacked my arm away. Perhaps, after I’d accused him he thought I was going to take hold of him for them. He pushed himself away, backward, and disappeared into the bushes. I saw him go up toward the path. I saw the bright color of his scarf through the trees climbing upward. I remember thinking, I hope they don’t catch him, but catch him they did and right away, too. He didn’t struggle, but came back with them, insulted, indignantly protesting his innocence. He looked very small and guilty. The man in the lavender felt topee accused him of stealing his bicycle. “That’s preposterous,” Harry said, but the man was adamant. A small crowd was gathering. Then Chartreuse admitted to taking it, but he maintained that he’d only quickly borrowed it to run down to Dharamsala and he would have brought it back eventually. He’d had to carry the heavy canister of benzene, he explained, and so had left it there, but then that jarred one of the local people’s memory, I guess, because then he accused Chartreuse of siphoning benzene from his truck in the night when everyone else was asleep. This was very serious, now.
While the second policeman took Chartreuse aside, the first policeman asked if anyone knew about this. There was silence. Then, “Well, it is true,” Wolfgang, falling apart, admitted, “that Chartreuse goes out in the night.”
I remember thinking then that that was the absolute wrong thing to say. I mean, even if he had, Wolfgang shouldn’t be a snitch. A rat, really. I have to tell you that I was astonished at that. They searched Chartreuse’s things and of course it didn’t help that he had a big plastic straw and a funnel, both still redolent of benzene. To our horror, he was carted off to the jail in Lower Dharamsala. We stood there, shocked and worried. Even Wolfgang hadn’t thought to use his camera. I picked up Chartreuse’s guitar and ran it after him. “Ah!” the policeman said, allowing him to take it. “Rock and roll!”
“Hey!” Isolde grabbed hold of me. “Let’s go look through his stuff,” she said, her eyes sparkling.
“What, now? What about the police?”
“Fuck them.”
“All right.” We snuck into the van and went through his private stuff. But there was nothing there.
The next day I announced that I thought I would go down into Lower Dharamsala and see what I could do to help Chartreuse. I imagined him in some little jail with rats or worse and I thought it must be too horrible to bear.
Reiner said, “I, for one, am glad he’s off the streets.”
“Yes,” agreed Vladimir.
Blacky said, “You might want to give a thought to the hardworking people he’s stolen from, Claire.”
“I know. But all I can imagine is poor, weak Chartreuse, his disastrous life.”
“He certainly doesn’t give a thought to others,” Wolfgang sniffed. “He might have cost us the whole film. They might have kicked us out of here!”
But I’d seen him feel for others. “I’ve seen him care for me.”
“That’s not compassion, darling,” Blacky said. “It’s sex.”
I clenched my fists. “We none of us would be here, maybe, if he hadn’t bravely stood his ground that time near Mount Ararat.”
Nobody said anything to that. They shifted uncomfortably, knowing it was true.
“But there’s no more benzene to be had!” Harry cried. “This is a world crisis!”
“Yeah, well, you were all fine with the idea of driving to the leper colony, even though you knew the benzene came from shady dealings. Why, Chartreuse practically admitted it.” I let that sink in. “I can’t help pitying him,” I went on, “in that jail with nothing but his thoughts and his nightmares.”
“How can you feel sorry for him when he stole from these poor people?” Isolde said.
“I don’t know how I can. I just do. And he doesn’t think they’re poor. He told me he doesn’t.”
“Really, Claire.” Isolde shied away from me. “Have you no compassion for the victims?”
“Of course I do! I feel so empty!” I turned away. “I don’t know what I feel anymore.”
“Well, then, go,” Blacky said. “I suppose we can’t just leave him there. Find out how much they’ll take for bail.”
Happily, I wrapped myself in a brown woolen Kashmiri cloak. I passed beneath the open window on my way and overheard Daisy sniff, “It’s because she’s American. Americans have no real feelings but for themselves. It’s obvious. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Isolde. It’s not her fault. She grew up that way. We wouldn’t be in this oil crisis if it weren’t for the Americans, would we?”
I set off. It had rained the night before but now the weather was just misty and soft. It took a long time to get down there and find the jail and then they wouldn’t even let me see him. There was an American girl they kept there. She must have been a drug burnout, or schizophrenic, because she swept and swept and babbled to herself. When I inquired about her they told me she was better off here because no one would rape her, she was at least safe. Frustrated, with nothing left to do, I bought some Assam tea from a street vendor and set off back to McLeod Ganj. There were only bicycles, yaks, and donkeys on the road and it was all uphill. The sun came out as I marched along and I was glad because the local people spoke forebodingly of the time when the rains would begin in earnest.
There was a commotion out in the street in McLeod Ganj. Everyone was pointing to the roof of Hula’s Tea shop. “Look at this!” Betty, the pregnant English girl, ran down the road pointing. “The roof ’s moving!”
I looked quickly, fearing I’d miss it, but it was in fact the sun reflecting a swarm of undulating, phosphorescent butterflies. Yellow and red, they were, and the size of baseballs.
They wriggled and hovered along the roof, lighting it up like the insides of abalone, all purple and pink and blue. The roof seemed to move and shimmer in waves, a magical sight. Then, as I neared the camp, I heard Tupelo singing. She was singing that old Etta James song, “At Last.” I was delighted that she was up and about and feeling her old self and I went to go see. Our vans were set off to the side of the wagon-maker’s house—this being held up entirely by poles and stilts. She was all alone underneath that house, washing her short hair over an enamel Chinese pail, the kind you’d use to wash your feet.
“I can’t believe how easy life is with short hair,” she marveled when she saw me.
“You Dummkopf! It’s much too cold for that.”
“No. It’s lovely out.” Her eyes were shining and I thought she really did, now, look as though she had cancer. It was something about her eyes, deep and glowing. I don’t know how to describe it.
I went over to her. She had a fever. “Where’s Blacky?” I asked.
“He’s interviewing both the doctor and the sister of the Dalai Lama. All in one day. So he’s happy. Happy when busy, you know him. Did you know that the sister runs an orphanage here? I didn’t even know there was one, did you?”
“No.”
“Must be very quiet children.” She started to cough.
“Here. Let me help you rinse the soap off.” I steered her over to the pump. She let me. That was when I began to get really worried. Tupelo never let you help her do anything. I toweled her hair dry and let her sit against the house, out of the wind. The sun was no use—it wasn’t strong anymore. I put one of Harry’s fox fur hats on her. We sat together. I kept trying to make her laugh. I usually could, but I couldn’t that day. “Do me a favor,” she said, trying not to cough. “Give this emerald to Isolde. And give the rest of my stuff to Daisy.” She reached up behind her neck and unhooked her green pearls. She put them in my hand. They were warm and slithery from her skin. “No,” I protested.
“What the heck.” She smiled. “Now you’ll never forget me.”
“As if I ever could.”
She looked out over the snowcapped Himalayas and said, “It’s like we’re waiting for a taxi.” After that I mostly stayed with her.
One morning I left her sleeping and was sitting outside reading. It was one of Tupelo’s favorites: Great English and American Poems.
Isolde came dashing up the path. “What’s the matter?” I said. “You look like you’re fuming.”
“You know, Claire,” she roughly pushed up her sleeves, “I know Tupelo’s sick, and I suppose it reminds you of when you were sick and we all took off, so you want to help out, but Reiner’s doing all the work up at the orphanage. And you could at least hold the lights or the reflector for Wolfgang. You know Chartreuse is in jail.”
I led her away from the van so we wouldn’t wake Tupelo. “I have to just … help her through this.”
Isolde gave an impatient wave. “Look. Wolfgang’s right. He did me the favor of taking you on. He only did that because you’re my friend. I never thought you’d be slouching off like this! What do you think it makes me look like?”
“Ouch. Has he said something else?”
She didn’t answer that. She just said, “I mean, Tupelo will be fine. Blacky’s a thoroughly competent doctor. Why are you wearing her pearls?”
I realized the time had come. “The thing is,” there was no way to break it to her gently, “Tupelo has cancer. She really is dying.”
She stopped, impacted. “What do you mean, dying? Now?”
The wind was blowing. I wiped my hair off my face. “Soon.”
She looked at me as though I were crazy. “Who said so?” she asked suspiciously. She held her ears from the wind, like I’d been screeching.
“She’s known all along,” I added.
Just then Daisy came up behind her. “What’s up?” she said.
I told her what I’d just told Isolde.
“I knew it!” Daisy said, turning pale. “I just knew she was really ill. I was fed up trotting back and forth with this and that for her and I was thinking, ‘Who does she think she is?’ and I went to tell her so, once and for all, and there was Blacky, shooting her up with a great bloody needle. I said to myself, ‘Hello! What’s going on here?’”
Isolde was stunned. “I had no idea,” she whispered.
Harry came over. He had a tin plate full of muffins. I sighed and told him, too.
We all sat down in the middle of the road and ate the muffins. Reiner and Wolfgang came and sat with us and Daisy told them the news.
“They’ll never buy our film now,” Reiner said, devouring the last of them.
“Are you kidding? They’ll be falling over each other to get at it, the buzzards,” Harry said. He took out his cylinder of Pickup Stix and dumped them onto the road, out of the wind. We all stayed where we were. There was no danger of traffic since the oil crisis. Nobody went anywhere.
“What can we do?” Isolde offered.
“Wait,” I said. “We just, you know, make her as comfortable as we can. Give her anything she wants, I guess.”
Isolde was lost in thought. Finally she said, “You mean Blacky knew this all along and he never told me?”
I tried to soothe her. “I didn’t know, either, until Rishikesh.”
“Well, this really stinks,” said Harry.
I left them playing and went back to the van and opened the side door. Van doors open with that enormous metal sound but Tupelo didn’t jump up. I couldn’t see her and I put my hand down on the bedclothes and realized she wasn’t there. I thought, Oh, she went to the outhouse, and so I started down the trail to see if she needed newspaper—sometimes, when you had to run, you forgot to bring it and there was no such thing as toilet paper. But she wasn’t there and I went, puzzled, back to the others.
A little brown Tibetan man, his face a mass of wrinkles, came tumbling down the road. He was terribly agitated about something but the wind was going the other way and nobody could make out what he was saying. “Probably the road to Delhi’s out again,” Reiner surmised and went back to his game. The man came running and slipping down the mountain toward us, unloosing a small avalanche of stones and pebbles. He was pale. He looked shocked. He held his heart. For a moment I thought he’d been shot. Of course he hadn’t. I relaxed. He couldn’t catch his breath. His eyes were wild and still he couldn’t speak. At last he said, “Pretty lady, pretty lady!” He closed his eyes and pointed up past the waterfall.
No one knew what he meant, except Isolde. “He means Tupelo!”
We ran up the steep path, all of us, clattering to the top above the slender slope to a precipice, a ledge where people liked to go and look out over the snow peaks. It wasn’t far but I wondered how she’d managed it, weak as she was. The ground was spongy.
A bevy of monks came running from the meditation center. They held their long skirts in their hands and, excited, ran up the steep path in a chain of burgundy worry.
When we got to the ledge, we crammed into the one spot. We held one another back, every one of us afraid to be pushed off the side. And it was muddy on the ledge. You could go over by just standing too close. There was a crow hovering right there in front of us, out in the sky not twenty feet away: a raven, huge looming wings black as licorice, and he looked me right in the eye. As long as I live I will still see that bird. It was as if he’d found his prey and knew I’d come to take it from him. When I craned over Daisy’s shoulder to look, I saw her blue dress first. My blue dress. She lay in a bush on a ledge with her eyes wide open. We were so far up but you could see her eyes were open. She was looking up at us like she couldn’t believe it, and then I realized she really was looking at us and she wasn’t dead at all.
“Tupelo!” I cried.
She was turning over, feeling herself for anything broken, but she was actually all right—in a sense—no bones broken, just a wallapalooza of an egg on her head.
Wolfgang leaned over the precipice. He hadn’t turned his camera off.
We all raced down the side of the mountain, taking different trails to reach her. When I got there she was holding her head, rocking to and fro.
Harry picked her up. “She fell.” He said it over and over to anyone they passed, informing them more clearly than if he’d spelled it out that she had jumped. He lugged her together with Reiner, and then Reiner, hugely strong, and more encumbered by Harry than helped, just took her himself and carried her easily—she was so thin—back to the van.
chapter nineteen
It was Sunday. We were all eating lunch outdoors. Reiner had found a blue-painted door and we’d put it on some crates and sat around on cushions like at a table. Isolde had set herself to work, cooked a chicken rubbed with cumin at a campfire, and then made soup besides.
Somebody had to go to Lower Dharamsala to visit Chartreuse. They wanted me to go but I hadn’t had any luck before and anyway, I wouldn’t leave Tupelo. I thought it would happen without me there a
nd I didn’t want to miss the death. It had become the biggest thing. The truth was, we were all waiting for it. “Let Blacky go,” I persuaded them, “he’ll be the most impressive.” Everyone agreed that this was so. Blacky showed me how to put the morphine into the syringe, looked once or twice doubtfully over his shoulder, and he went off, walking.
For a long while I was fine. But when she started to get uncomfortable, I prayed that Blacky would make it back. I wanted him to be there. It had seemed so important to me that I be there when she died and now all I wanted was Blacky. I couldn’t bear to see her suffer and I was afraid to give her the needle. What if I did it wrong? She would be joking around and then, like a fish caught on a hook, she would lurch upward from the shock of the pain. There was no comforting her in those moments. I was just there, helpless. Also, she’d had a terrible night. Terrible. There’d been no helping her. She was pretty stoic, I’ll give her that. But once in the early morning hours she’d lashed out, “I thought he wasn’t going to let me suffer!”
I went and found an extra one of the pills Blacky had saved. He’d told me not to give her more than one and she’d had her dose a short while ago. “It could kill her,” he’d warned. Without hesitation, I cut it up and ground up three-quarters of it and put it into yak butter, if you can believe it. I eased it into her mouth from a spoon. After that she slept like a baby.
There were some good moments that week—an hour or two after she’d had her morphine and before she finally went into a coma—where we talked together as right as rain.
Pack Up the Moon Page 27
