Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  “Bloody bitch,” said Rockstar.

  But he kept on pumping away. I could hear the Li-lo squeaking. And when Suzie finally came, after about ten minutes of this, she let out a little whimper and said there just ain’t nothing like it.

  “There sure ain’t,” said Rockstar in a real tender voice.

  And I had to say to myself, gee, ain’t romance sweet?

  And Dave just said to me, you forgot to mention the mysterious daybook entry. Oh, yeah. The mysterious daybook entry. It looked as if Rockstar maybe wrote it. Hardly anybody said anything about it. Particularly Rockstar. But he hardly ever read the daybook. Dave says it was Patrick who wrote it. I don’t doubt it.

  I could write the daybook entry down if Dave would recite it to me, but he said to forget about it, it’s not that important. If it’s meant to be part of the book, he said, it’ll get to be part of the book.

  Oct. 27

  Mick still hasn’t taken his turn yet, and neither has Kelly. If we wait for them to take their turns, this is all there’s going to be of the daybook and yes, I plan on winning this thing when we get to Kathmandu so I thought about this and I’ve decided that unless these people take their turns I’m going to write in here for them and I know lots of little things about them I could tell while I’m doing it. Don’t worry, Rob. I won’t tell everything. As for you, Mick, I can’t promise you the same thing.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Oct. 27

  below Mt. Olympos12

  she was stretched out on her blanket on the beach catching a few late day rays

  her nipples dippled ripples against the Mediterranean haze

  what are you doing? he asked

  tempting Zeus she said

  Mick sang “Isis” from the Desire album last night. I asked him if he ever got the feeling he was Osiris looking for Isis. He said every day. But I’m not sure he knew what I meant. C’s wrist still hurts & her back hurts. She tried lifting something she shouldn’t have. So I gave her a back massage near midnight. Then there was a knock on the tent pole. F. He said R.’s always either masturbating like crazy or screwing S. & would we mind if he changed tents. C hemmed & hawed until there was another knock on the tent pole. D, sputtering something about what an insensitive asshole Pete is & could she spend the night with us? C said sure. Probably wishing she could simply change places. We spent the next hr. listening to D. harangue about Pete & how all he cares about is getting his own rocks off, until C. gave her a Valium & she drifted off. I should’ve taken one too. A sleepless horny night in a crowded tent, F between D. & me. Clothes on the bottom, sleeping bag on top. This morning the 2 of cups and the Chariot card in the layout. All this energy being reined in. Played chess with Pat. Life is like a chess game. Defence mitigates offence. Gambling destroys prudence. Everything is a tenuous balance, a high wire act. But what’s life without a little risk? I’ve either got to take my id down off the high shelf & dust it off, or leave it there & just forget about it. Kind of hard to forget about it, though, given a high school atmosphere & Mick’s song choices. Nickel says take it down. So do the cards. Next new moon is Hallowe’en, as good a time as any. We’re on our way to Kavalla. Looks like storm clouds ahead. Later. As above, so below. The storm erupted within the bus, between R. & T. T made a good accounting of himself. Everything’s tombstone quiet & those clouds are getting closer.

  Mick

  On the way to Kavalla, Kelly sat down beside me and asked me exactly when I was born. I told her. January 6, ’55. She had this book called an ephemeris. She looked up something in it and told me that my Mars was right on her Venus.

  “Is that good?” I said.

  “Depends,” she said.

  Then she started telling me about how she was born on a new moon in Taurus, May 3, ’54, and they’ve always had a powerful effect on her and how the ancient Romans used to get married only on new moons because that was the best time to start anything, crops, marriages, you name it, and so I said, what are you getting at here, Kelly?

  She said, “There’s a new moon on Hallowe’en. It’d be kind of nice if something special happened on it, that’s all.”

  She was looking at me with those spooky eyes of hers, and I was almost mesmerized. Mesmerized enough that I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  She shrugged her shoulders as if to say that what she’d just said wasn’t all that important.

  “It’s something to think about, that’s all,” she said, and then she took her little diary out of her knapsack and stood up and walked up to the tables and sat across from Suzie, which is when I noticed that Suzie had two big hickies on her throat, and she was real quiet and smoking up a storm. Teach was sitting in the seat just in front of the tables.

  I was wondering if maybe Rockstar was some kind of modern-day vampire that I’d read about once, one of these freaks who goes out with blood bank nurses, when Teach suddenly got mad and screamed at Suzie to either get herself to the back of the bus or at least be decent enough to open up a window. Suzie stood up and screamed right back at her, calling her a fucking iron pants, a bloody nitwitted bitch, and a few other things. Tim deLuca stood up and told Suzie to sit down, which was when Rockstar, who’d been sacked out on the back seat, under a blanket, likely jacking off, walked down the aisle and grabbed Tim deLuca by the neck of his shirt and lifted him about a foot off the floor.

  “Don’t yell at my girl,” he snarled at him. And he spit in Tim’s face.

  Tim deLuca kicked Rockstar in the belly and then stuck a finger under his ear and pressed it hard. Rockstar let out a scream.

  Pete by this time is yelling, “Hey, what’s going on back there?” and he’s braking the bus hard, which sends Rockstar and Tim deLuca sprawling backwards on the floor where they start kicking and gouging at each other. By the time Pete finally gets the bus stopped, Tim deLuca has Rockstar in some kind of judo hold and he’s saying, in this real quiet voice, “Say uncle or I’m going to break your neck.”

  Rockstar said, “Uncle, bloody hell.”

  He seemed just a little surprised.

  Everyone seemed just a little surprised.

  Dave just told me I have a wonderful gift for

  understatement.

  He also told me that Tim deLuca was a master of Kung Fu and has a black belt in judo and practised things like Tai Chi.

  Teach, of course, is shrieking her head off through all this. Pete picks Rockstar up by the scruff of his neck, drags him down to the front of the bus and I could tell he was planning on throwing him outside, but Rockstar grabs onto a seat and doesn’t let go and then he starts kicking at Pete and then his shirt goes rip and he races down the aisle to the back seat where he crawls up inside the tent cage and he just crouches there, glowering at everybody.

  “Come and get me,” he snarls at no one in particular, looking all over the bus at everyone, those searchlights in his eyes going nuts.

  All of a sudden the bus is quiet as a dead church mouse.

  Pete doesn’t say a thing. He just looks at Rockstar. And then he helps Tim deLuca to his feet, who seemed just a little stunned, asks him if he’s alright. Teach revs herself down to a sniffle. Then Pete gives Rockstar a last, long stare, says, “You’re on real thin ice, mister.”

  Rockstar lets out a long, weird chitter like a demented monkey would make and starts scratching at his armpits. Kind of goes like, “Chitter, chitter, Mr. Peter, chitter, chitter, shriek, ooh, ooh,” to kind of a punk-rock beat.

  Something about it brings that dead church mouse I mentioned to life and sends it skittering up and down my spine.

  Pete finally goes back to his seat, grabs the gearshift, and we’re back on the road.

  Think it was then I picked up Lucille, tuned her up a bit. Took a look out the window and saw all these black clouds in the south, moving in our direction. Seemed like a good time to sing “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”

  I looked at Kelly while I sang it. I got the feeling she thought it was very appropriate.


  There was about half an hour left on that trip to Kavalla. The tension was so thick it needed a girdle. The only sound was me singing and the wind picking up. Teach had her window open and the wind whistled in like a cowboy banshee.

  By the time we got to Kavalla the rain was coming down like nails and there was a small hurricane blowing. We had to put up our tents on a beach that wouldn’t take tent pegs worth a damn. We might as well have been trying to pound them into Jello.

  We were in a little inlet with high cliffs to both sides and it created a vortex effect. It was like we were camped inside a giant vacuum cleaner and some giant bull was pissing down on us.

  I had a choice to make that night. Pete came up to me in the cook tent after supper and told me I did. I could either sleep on the bus with Rockstar or I could put up our tent and sleep in that.

  Kelly was with me when he told me this, and when he left, she said to me, in a low voice, because Suzie, wearing a face as long as Long Island, was washing some dishes a few yards away. “I have a big sleeping bag. It could probably fit two.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “As long as you promise to behave,” she said.

  “I promise,” I said.

  Rockstar spent the evening on the bus, thinking who knows what. And so the rest of us spent the night in our tents. Which was eerie. That wind was so bad that it kept pulling the stakes out of the sand, and finally me and Jenkins had to go looking for rocks in the rain. We did find some. But they weren’t quite big enough.

  It was spooky, in a fun kind of way, for a while. The four of us, me and Kelly, Jenkins and Charole, sitting around in our tent with this candle flickering and swaying like a belly dancer on speed. We just drank ouzo and talked, while the tent walls billowed in and out and the rain lashed the canvas. Talked about all kinds of things. Rockstar and Suzie and Keith Moon’s corpse and the Camp Dave peace accords and this guy who’d given Kelly and Charole a ride in France who’d seen the Grateful Dead play at The Big Pyramid in Egypt, back in September, under a full moon. Yeah, we talked for a long time. I got the feeling that Charole didn’t want to go back to their tent with Jenkins alone because Jenkins was going to lay some big heavy emotional number on her. He hardly said anything all night, just stared at that wild candle flame.

  And finally, when there was a lull in the conversation, Charole suddenly stood up and said, “I have to talk to Pete.” She said goodnight to no one in particular and then she

  disappeared out into the storm, zip, zip, and gone.

  Jenkins let out a long breath.

  “You’re going to have to be patient with her,” said Kelly in the voice of a know-it-all parent. “She’s just going through a phase.”

  But Jenkins wasn’t in the mood to listen to such homespun advice. He got up and left too, with kind of a mumbled see ya in the morning.

  Which left me and Kelly alone in the tent. Just us and that candle, which was burning low.

  Kelly peeled off her top, real casual-like, like she was combing her hair. Pretty little peach-sized boobs, as innocent as Easter eggs, except for those thimble-sized nipples, light pink in colour, that poked themselves in my direction.

  But I tried to be casual. I just glanced at her boobs, to be polite, didn’t stare at them or anything.

  Kelly said, “I heard somewhere that it’s warmer when you sleep in the nude.”

  “Yeah, I heard that too,” I croaked.

  Then she blew out the candle.

  Of course she wasn’t playing fair. But I was up for making a game of it regardless.

  I shucked my clothes and crawled into that sleeping bag beside her, and it wasn’t just my imagination. When I got into that sleeping bag, the wind outside picked up a knot or two. It began to howl.

  Of course our bare little bodies had to touch here and there but nowhere important. And I kept my hands to myself.

  “Goodnight,” I said, “sleep tight.”

  Kelly whispered, “Goodnight, Mick.”

  And it took about half an hour. But finally Kelly’s hand strayed over to my hip and rested there for a while. I didn’t move a muscle. Not any voluntary muscles, at least. And I’m sure her hand was getting ready to move somewhere else when all of a sudden one corner of the tent was lifted up. Either wind or Rockstar, was the thought I had. And then another corner was lifted up, and down came the tent poles. One of them boinked me in the head. And then I’m kissing damp canvas.

  “Leave it,” said Kelly, taking her hand off my hip.

  “I will,” I said, and I burrowed my head deep into the

  sleeping bag where it was nice and warm.

  Neither one of us moved for about five minutes. I phoned Dave up and asked him what he thought of this situation. He said, well, it could be very promising, depending on what move I made. I said, I know that, idiot. He said, well, then, wait for her to make the move.

  When Dave hung up, Kelly said, “It’s probably best if we don’t take any chances on things getting carried away. Like this tent could, at any minute. I don’t want to take a chance of spoiling the new moon.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “But don’t you think it’d be wise if we maybe just necked a bit, so that we kind of got to know each other?”

  “Getting to know each other,” she said, “is how things get carried away.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  And so I changed the subject and we talked about Rockstar and how he had one thing going for him, he tended to make every day interesting, and Kelly said, yeah, there was no doubt about that, and shortly after that we said goodnight.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Oct. 28

  Last night, in an intimate moment (our 1st breaths commingled, beneath stale eiderdown & wet canvas & a transit of Venus & a dying moon: 2 spoons, 1 penis in a thigh squeeze), M. whispers in my ear about the things he loves most: old movies, pepperoni and mushroom pizza, & women with witchy bodies & mysterious eyes. This morning I woke up to kisses on my breasts. After breakfast, Mary lent me a book called A Thief in the Night & voted against carrying on to Istanbul, she just wasn’t up for it, & so we’re staying put. Just the same, tensions still run high. S was almost drowned. C went shopping for groceries with Pete. F is sulking. & D. has decided to get an abortion.

  Mick

  The next day Pete had a long talk with Rockstar on the bus and according to Dave, Rockstar promised to behave from here on in. Cross my heart, spit to die, he said. Apparently he said it like he meant it and he apologized and when he got off the bus, he apologized to Tim deLuca and Teach. It’s one thing to apologize, though, and another to have the apology accepted. Teach just shrank back away from him. She had this look of fear and loathing in her eyes.

  According to Dave, she spent the night in a complete panic. The most horrible night of her life, I heard her say to Kelly and Charole. I also heard her trying to talk Tim into leaving the trip, but Tim reminded her that they had some family and friends they had to see in Tehran and that was the end of it. Then Pete told us that according to the itinerary we had to stay in Kavalla for another day, and we could change that, but only if everyone voted to move on. Teach voted to stay. She probably wasn’t up for spending the day on the bus with Rockstar. And so we stayed.

  I should probably mention here, though, that this wasn’t the last time we were going to have a vote like this on the trip, and that the next time we voted, the rules changed.

  Later that morning Pete drove some of us into Kavalla, mainly to get groceries, and I was hoping that Kelly would sit next to me, but it was just like nothing had happened the night before. She sat with Charole, and when we got to Kavalla, she took off with Pete and Charole. It was her and Charole’s turn to cook. And so it happened that Rockstar latched onto me, and we ended up standing underneath an awning in front of a butcher shop because the rain started pouring down again, and while we watched the rain come down, Rockstar told me all about the time he fell in love with one of Charlie Putrid’s groupie
s. Just as though he hadn’t been involved in anything out of the ordinary the day before either. Her name was Sally, he said. He told me that she shot Chuck’s butt full of heroin one night, right on stage, and Chuck was so zapped after the concert that Rockstar was able to go to bed with the groupie, but Chuck found out about it and he threw Sally out of a window that happened to be ten storeys up. And he said he was going to do the same thing to Rockstar.

  “And that’s why I had to kill him,” Rockstar told me. “Because he was going to kill me, Muckle.”

  “Gee, I’m really glad you shared that with me, Rockstar,” I said.

  I decided I’d rather look around a butcher shop than listen to Rockstar’s stories and so I went inside. Rockstar followed me in.

  Inside the butcher shop I heard some squealing from way in the back. Both me and Rockstar went back to take a look, and what they were doing back there was killing pigs. They were hanging them on hooks and then cutting their throats. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  When I mentioned this to Kelly that afternoon on the bus, she said, “And all that fear that pig was feeling is what you eat whenever you eat a BLT.”

  She’d been talking to Teach too much.

  Kelly also found a campfire book at the bottom of the book box that afternoon, and her and me were having a great time, singing old folk songs, but then Patrick and Suzie, who we’d left behind in town because they hadn’t shown up on time, got dropped off by some Serbs or Slavs or Greeks in what looked like a Volvo. They were both drunk. Which wasn’t good. Because Rockstar was sitting by himself, back on the back seat, and when Suzie got on the bus she went into this long harangue about men. She said, “Christ, I hate some bloody men. Especially nerdball men who go on a tour bus thinking that it’ll be full of desperate women looking for men. Well, I got something to say. If you can’t get it at home, you ain’t going to get it here! You hear me?” She shouted this at Rockstar.