Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  “Next time ask, nerdball,” says Suzie.

  Rockstar says sorry and then he grabs this pen he sees in Jenkins’s pocket, not bothering to ask for that either. He tries writing something with it on the white border at the bottom of the Polaroid but can’t.

  “Hey,” he says. “What the fuck kind of bloody pen is this?” He looks at the tip. There’s no ballpoint there. There’s just a small steel tip.

  Jenkins says, “It’s a pen for writing things into plastic, wood and metal. Like names. So people won’t steal them.” Dave told me later that Jenkins had a traveller’s cheque or two missing.

  “Hey, Dr. Livingstone,” says Rockstar, sticking Jenkins’s pen in his back jean pocket. “You got a pen I can borrow?” Patrick has about six in his shirt pocket, but he says, “No, Mr. Sodomlak, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Rockstar says, “Poofter. You got all kinds.” And he grabs one, writes something in the small white border at the bottom of the Polaroid, hands it to Suzie. I can’t see what it says but Dave tells me it said, “The Queen of the Castle.”

  I’m not surprised. I had Rockstar pegged for a closet romantic the minute I first laid eyes on him.

  Suzie looks at the picture and then she looks at Rockstar. “You’re bloody crazy, aren’t you?” she says to Rockstar, handing him back the picture.

  That’s Suzie for you. Real swift on the uptake.

  Rockstar smiles at her. “I’m crazy about you,” he says. A tour guide finally comes out and tells us all to fall into line and follow her into the castle, which was a blast. All those winding stairs and keeps and dungeons and bedrooms and religious paintings and kitchens, etc. Patrick got off on it too. He snapped off a couple rolls of film before we got out of there. He never did ask for his pen back, I don’t think.

  Our next pici-stop was a town called Oberammergau, where Pete stopped at this religious wood-carving shop and I noticed Patrick whipping out his Chargex. He spent about a thousand francs on a couple of crucifixes, which probably made Pete happy. He got kickbacks from every shop we stopped at, like I maybe mentioned before.

  I also happened to notice that Rockstar watched Patrick’s every move as he signed that Chargex slip and put the card back in his wallet.

  And Teach got upset again. She wanted to go visit some theatre where some passion play is always held but Pete said nope, couldn’t, didn’t have time and besides it’s closed for the season, end of discussion.

  “And there’s no percentage in it, is there?” said Teach.

  Pete ignored her. So then she stalked off. That’s what Teach got real good at doing. Stalking off.

  The rest of the way to Innsbruck was on mountain highway that had crucifixes every twenty yards or so. They marked the places where people were killed in accidents, I guess. They made me think about the Pacific Coast Highway, and how lucky I was to be alive.

  Dave claims I can thank him for being alive, and I can also thank him for the fact that it’s only a hand I’ve got missing and not a whole lot more.

  Okay, I’ll take your word for it. Thanks, Dave. Thanks a whole bunch.

  Mary deLuca’s daybook entry

  October 15, nineteen seventy-eight

  all this fresh air streaming through the windows, and still there’s not nearly enough of it to dispel the stink of sickness and tobacco (i’m sorry but it is a fact, not a fallacy, that most non-smokers are allergic to tobacco smoke) that permeates the air, along with the constant blare of rock music, so many facts are known, tobacco causes cancer cells, alcohol and loud music kills brain cells, perhaps there really is a Satanic influence upon the earth that promotes some of God’s creatures toward self-destruction. we can see it on this modern Appian Way we are travelling today, the white marble crosses are reminders of the martyrs our mad technological age has spawned, the automobile is an insentient thing but in its own way it judges just as inexorably as the Divinity does, whoever you perceive His Messenger to be. there is a Beauty to be seen, it’s there in the autumn landscape, cornflowers, knapweed and larkspur, stretching away towards alpine range, there was a tarnished sense of it in the wood-carving shop in oberammergau, where figurines of Christ could be purchased with paper or plastic, it may have been there in the theatre of the famous Passion Play that has been played out every decade without fail but for the decade when the Nazi monster was loosed upon the earth, but we will never know, our schedule does not permit, it was definitely not there this morning, on the slopes of the

  Olympic ski jump, we have just entered the outskirts of innsbruck. it may be there in innsbruck’s wonderful churches, i pray we’re allowed to see for ourselves.

  Mick

  We got to Innsbruck near sunset. Pete let us out downtown to walk around some, but it was a Sunday so all the shops had their metal grates down and shut. Nothing moved except for this guy selling sausage from the back of a wagon. He yodelled for us when Pete slipped him a sawbuck.

  We had some time to kill, though, because Tim and Teach took off to look at some sarcophagi in churches, as Patrick put it, so me and Jenkins took a stroll down by the River Inn, where we walked past this movie theatre that was showing Schmier. John Revolting and Olivia Newton Loo-stop were on the poster. All these cute little Swiss girls streaming out of the theatre with popcorn on their breaths, their perky little bosoms all aflutter. Just thinking about it makes the place where my right hand used to be ache. Made me wish I was a teenager again.

  Me and Jenkins ended up on the bank of the river and just kind of stood there looking at the water.

  After a while, I said, “Hey, Jenkins, tell me something I don’t know,” and so he told me about those two girls he knew who were supposed to be on the bus but didn’t make it.

  He said he’d met Charole,—“that’s C-H-A-R-O-L-E,” he said—at a yoga class, and fell in love with her the minute he laid eyes on her. He said the reason she spelt her name like that was because she’d had her old name changed to give her what she called balanced energy.

  “I think it worked,” he said. “She can walk a high wire, no problem. My problem is that my energy is about as haywire as a fence after a bull’s ploughed through it. I only met her about six months ago and three months ago I asked her to marry me, which spooked her some, I guess, because the next thing I know she’s talking about going to India with this friend of hers.” He stared up at the sky for a minute. The sun was down and the mountains had pink-tinged shadows.

  “Well, the thought of not seeing her for six months made

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  me a little nuts, I guess, so I casually invited myself along on the trip and they were too polite to tell me to go to hell.”

  He picked up a flat stone and threw it across the water; it skipped about twelve times. “I’m not the brightest guy in the world,” he said. “I should’ve read between the lines. But we all have our blind spots, don’t we?” He looked at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We do. I’ve got lots of them.”

  He asked what kind, and I said, oh, the usual ones, when it comes to women, and then we decided it might be smart to head it back to the bus, we didn’t know which campground we were staying at.

  It was a nice campground, lots of trees, right by the river. But Innsbruck is high in the mountains. That night it got cold enough to freeze the nipples off a grease monkey.

  Rockstar didn’t have much of a sleeping bag and he kept getting up all through the night and dancing around to keep warm. Once he stepped on my face. I told him to watch it, asshole. Not thinking straight at all.

  Rockstar took out that steel-tipped pen of Jenkins’s and stuck it under my throat and said, “What’s that you say, Muck-hole?”

  I said, “Nothing, Rockstar. Just giving you an eight out of ten on your jive rhythm, that’s all.”

  Rockstar gave my throat a little nick, enough to draw blood, and let out a little hyena chortle.

  I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep that night.

  I spent most of it talking to Dave. Asking him abou
t Rockstar. He told me Rockstar had a very unbalanced personality.

  And can you blame him, he said, with a last name like Sodomlak?

  I said no, maybe not.

  And can you blame him, said Dave, given that his mother used to iron his shirts with him inside them?

  I said well, yeah, that could knock a brain for a loop.

  And can you blame him, he said, given that his mother chopped off one of his testicles when he was seven years old after she caught him playing with himself?

  I said you’re kidding.

  He said nope, scout’s honour.

  I said so that’s why he wanted to talk to Suzie about her

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  work as a sex surrogate.

  Well, Dave said, he wanted to talk to her about it. But he never got around to doing it. All he did was ask her for a kiss and she told him she’d think about it.

  And so I asked Dave, not for the first time, what went down between Suzie and me, that first night of the trip.

  But Dave likes to play games with me. He gave me the same answer he gave me before when I asked. He promised me I’d find out eventually, and then he hung up.

  I love to pick at scabs, and the next morning I had a nice little scab on my neck to pick at, on the way to Venice.

  I remember Venice real well. Venice was where I met Kelly Winter.

  Tim deLuca’s daybook entry

  October 16 th

  I look behind me, as we head toward the Italian Alps, and see white wine bottles on the tables, the bottles that Patrick bought to aid his digestion. I see people playing cards. I look out the window and see more of those marble crosses, marking the places where people have died on their way to see lovers and wives.

  The acrid scent of vomit still hangs in the air about one’s head and idle smoke rings still swirl and dance down the aisle and the weight of yesterday morning’s beer pancakes still sits like tire irons in one’s stomach.

  But today something is different. Today we have Innsbruck behind us. Innsbruck, with its fine old frescoed houses and its magnificent Court Chapel, built at the height of the Italian Renaissance. Inside the chapel, the amazing cenotaph of Maximilian who ruled as the Count of Tirol from 1490 onward. The huge marble sarcophagus contains no less than 28 bronze statues of his ancestors and favourite heroes, along with 24 marble reliefs depicting scenes from his life. Astounding, is the only word I can think of, and that does little to do the Court Chapel justice. It really has to be seen to be believed, and this is merely my futile attempt to pay it some homage.

  But it also serves to drive home another point. You never know what spectacles you’ll see, throughout a given day, when you get up in the morning.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Oct. 16

  An Ital. truck driver with halitosis & 2 missing fingers drove us all through the night to Venice, & asked us for our addresses when he dropped us off 3 blocks away from the campground. (He didn’t want to have to turn his rig around.) C told him we were going to a monastery where there was no post office & the altitude was too high for carrier pigeons. We beat the bus. Snoozed some this morning, then washed clothes & chatted up the campground cat. C.’s still sleeping. Air feels heavy & the campground’s quiet. City’s still in mourning for the pope.

  Mick

  I was practically puking up mountain range by the time Pete got on the blower and said, “Okay, people, we’re a few clicks from Venice, and I’ve got some good news for you and I’ve got some bad news for you. The good news is that you won’t have to put up any tents tonight, you’ll be staying in army barracks.”

  Suzie let out a little cheer. She must’ve been a cheerleader in high school. A hippy-dippy little cheerleader who had an intimate relationship with everyone on the Moonie Ponds’s high school football team. And I’m not far wrong, according to Dave.

  “The bad news,” said Pete, “is that there aren’t any cold showers here, which might mean trouble, knowing you people as well as I do already.”

  That got another cheer out of Suzie.

  After her cheers died down, Pete said, “Another thing. I hear from HQ that we have a couple of new people joining up with us here. I want you people to make them feel real welcome, hear?”

  Patrick was sitting across from me at the tables, reading The Honourable Schoolboy. He looked at me and said, “I wonder if these people might happen to be of the feminine persuasion, Mr. McPherson.”

  I did a little reconnoitering with Dave and said, “Eight to one they’re female,” and I plunked down a ragged and dirty thousand-lire note.

  Patrick laughed and said, “You’re on, Mr. McPherson.”

  I had my eyes peeled for the girls as soon as we pulled into camp, and I did see a few girls walking around, but Dave said that those weren’t the ones.

  After I stashed my suitcase in the men’s barracks and had a shower, I wandered over to this little cantina, where Patrick was sitting at a table with a bottle of Italian rough red in front of him.

  “By all means, join me, Mr. McPherson,” he said, and I

  did.

  “Any sign of the new girls yet?” I said.

  “Not that I know of,” he said.

  I helped him knock back his bottle of wine, and then a dinner bell clanged and we went into this long mess hall and had us some broiled chicken and salad, and some more of that rough red, and I was chewing on a wishbone when Patrick nudged my knee with his and said, “Two birds at ten o’clock, Mr. McPherson.”

  I took a look, and I didn’t have to have Dave tell me it was her. Standing there in the doorway, gawking around, looking uncertain and nervous.

  Back in Kits I asked Dave what he thought about me going on this trip. He told me well, if you take the Taurus Tours bus, your heart will definitely be at risk.

  For a while I thought he was maybe talking about Dana. But Dana was actually more his type.

  The two girls looked a little alike. The girl with the honey-blonde hair and the cast on her wrist and the perfect body reminded me some of Lauren Bacall. I knew with one look she was out of my league.

  But the girl with the long dark hair wearing the glasses and the India cotton blouse and the long maroon skirt and sandals, different story.

  “What do you think, Mr. McPherson?” said Patrick. “Would it not be correct and proper to venture over and make our new travelling companions welcome?”

  I told him to keep his one-eyed bandit behind bars. I suddenly had the sweats and my hands were all greasy and some goose had laid an egg in the back of my throat.

  I always have this problem with opening lines. And Dave’s no help. I’ve tried some of his and they’ve gone over about as well as a stripper at a Baptist picnic.

  Patrick pointed out that Jenkins was already beating a path in their direction, which he was.

  “That’s because he knows them,” I said. “One of them’s his girl friend.”

  Patrick looked at me. “You’re a veritable fount of information, aren’t you, Mr. McPherson?”

  “Yep, that’s me,” I said, taking a huge swig of wine to get rid of that dryness in my throat. “Now pay up.”

  Patrick reluctantly pulled eight thousand lire out of his wallet and gave it to me.

  I was sure glad to see it was the blonde that Jenkins hugged and kissed and not the brunette.

  Me and Patrick did wander over to where they were sitting, eventually, after the chicken was just gristle and bones and Jenkins and the girls had time to get reacquainted.

  By that time, Suzie and Dana had already moved in as well, and for a while there, naturally, the introductions were flying like lovesick geese. And when I gave Kelly my standard, how ya doin’, call me Mick number, our eyes met, and there was more than just a little tingle of chemistry there. I felt it. It was like I’d stuck a pin in an electric socket.

  Kelly felt it too. She told me so later.

  For the record, her eyes were brown. Which was perfect. I’ve never dated a blue-eyed woman in my life. Do
n’t know why, it’s just one of those things.

  Jenkins and Charole took off somewhere fairly quickly to have what looked like a serious heart-to-heart, which left Kelly as the centre of attention. Which made her uncomfortable as hell, I could tell.

  She explained that Charole had that cast on because she fell off a bike in Hyde Park and she did some talking about the hitch-hiking she and Charole had done down through Europe—they ran into a French pervert along the way, she said, who exposed himself to Charole while he was driving —and I just sat there, drinking in every word—she had a great voice, kind of soft and husky—and I’m not sure if it was her voice or that Italian rough red, but I ended up getting kind of drunk. Actually I was knocking back that rough red like it was Perrier. I love Perrier, and I can blame Hasheeba for that. She used to make this great drink, gin and Perrier and Blue Curacao, which she served in a champagne saucer and called a Tidy Bowl.

  I didn’t say much until Kelly told us what she used to do, which was work with autistic kids in Great Falls, Montana. She mentioned how some of the autistic kids were able to throw her thoughts back at her as though they were psychic. I said, right out of the blue, I guess because I was drunk, “Oh, well, maybe that means I’m autistic.”

  She said, “Pardon?”

  By this time it was almost dark and there was a candle on the table, throwing nice shadows around her face.

  I wouldn’t call it a beautiful face, exactly, but it had this nice healthy glow. Maybe it was her aura. Like I maybe mentioned before, Dave lets me see auras every once in a while, and when he showed me Kelly’s, think it was in Sivas, it was a nice banana yellow, with little prisms dancing around the edges of her skull.