Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  There was another long silence. And then she said, “I never thought I’d feel such emotional pain again, though of course I was wrong. But I’ve been terrified of goodbyes ever since.” She finally looked at me. “Do you know what I’m saying?”

  I said, “No, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying what’s the point of getting emotionally involved with each other if we’re just going to have to say goodbye in a month and a half? Would it be worth the pain? Because, you see, I don’t tend to do things with half-measures.”

  I took out a pack of Marleys, lit one up.

  She looked away. “Another thing is, I’m sexually confused, and I have a feeling a relationship with you would only complicate matters.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. “You mean about that professor who broke your heart?” I said.

  She said, “That’s part of it. It’s just very hard for me to trust anyone.” She didn’t say anything for a minute. “He took pictures of me,” she said finally. “He wouldn’t give them back. Even when I threatened to tell his wife about us.”

  “Did you?” I said.

  “Almost,” she said.

  Then we heard a noise. Someone was coming over. Jenkins and Charole. We clam up. Charole’s telling Jenkins that she just wants some time to get to know Pete, that’s all, nothing’s going to happen. They both stand still and look down into the valley at the few lights left on in Pamukkale. I scratch at those bug bites.

  Jenkins doesn’t say anything. Dave just gave me a close-up of him. He had his eyes closed, trying to hold back tears.

  Charole says, “Please try to understand.” Then she kisses him on the cheek and walks away.

  I could tell Kelly was about to say something, but Jenkins turned around and headed off across the waterfalls while Charole was still in earshot.

  “Good old heartbreak,” I said, after a while.

  Kelly said, “We should put something on those bites of yours, they look awful.”

  She grabbed me by the hand, stood up.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “We’ll see what we can find,” she said.

  We went to the cook tent, squeezed in under the flap, turned on a flashlight and then Kelly rummaged around until she found some meat tenderizer.

  “This’ll do the trick,” she said. “Take off your clothes.” She gave me a wicked smile.

  I told her I didn’t mind being treated like a piece of meat by a woman but this was just a touch ridiculous.

  “It’s a famous Winter home remedy,” she said.

  She mixed the tenderizer with some water and dabbed the stuff onto all my bites. Back, legs, everywhere. Everywhere except certain places I could reach myself. Kelly the witch. It worked like magic. Bites stopped itching just like that.

  “You’re amazing,” I said. “You’re fantastic.”

  But Kelly was what you call a modest woman. She pretended not to hear all this. She put that tenderizer solution in a little plastic capsule that used to hold malaria tablets and gave it to me, told me not to lose it, and then we walked over to her tent where she stopped and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and then unzipped the tent flap, disappeared inside.

  Left me standing there feeling lonesome.

  All this kissing on the cheek, I said to myself, can get to be hard on the heart.

  I stared down at Pamukkale for a good half hour. Then I decided it was time to hit the sack. When I was walking past the thermal pool, I heard something splash and a voice came out of the darkness, saying, “Care to join me, handsome?” It was Dana’s voice. I knelt down by the side of the pool and waited until she swam over.

  “I enjoyed your exhibition this afternoon,” she said. “Nice buns.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Heard you had a bit of a rough jog.”

  She was right below me. The moon shone on her face, wet, gleaming, her eyes laughing up at me. Her cleavage saying come up and see me sometime. And even in that light I could see the bruise starting to form on her left eye. Same eye that bruised up on me, back in that apple grove near Dubrovnik.

  Something I forgot to mention. Dana’s haircut. Think she got it cut by Kelly back in Canakkale. Kind of a short pageboy.

  Made her look really good, really suited her. “I can’t blame them,” she said. “I’m the evil infidel, flaunting my flesh. Destroy while you can. Have you ever noticed that evil is an anagram for live?”

  “And Elvis is an anagram for lives,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “Want to join me? Nothing quite like a midnight swim.”

  I felt hard-pressed. I said, “I’ve got this thing about Kelly.” “That’s too bad,” she said. “It could’ve been like in the movies. That point of hesitation, just before. If you ever change your mind, offer’s still open. Doesn’t matter when.” I said yeah, okay, and then she swam away, slowly. Disappearing into the darkness. There wasn’t even the sound of her strokes.

  On the way to the tent, Dave rings me up. Smooth move, man, he says, and then hangs up.

  When I get to the tent, Rockstar’s talking to Jenkins about this time he was in Morocco. Keeps talking while I get undressed. Of course I don’t get in my sleeping bag. I lay out Tribunes on my Li-lo and I put my kangaroo jacket on my legs, a sweater on my body, the sleeping bag on top. While Rockstar’s talking about some hash he scored, how it made it seem like the ceiling of his room was raining molten lava.

  “If I closed my eyes it was there, if I opened them, it was there, and I could feel it burning.”

  “So why do you smoke the stuff?” asked Jenkins.

  “That was just bad stuff, man, too powerful. That’s why you should always test it out. Some of it’s real bad shit. Not like that bloody shit those bloody Turks had tonight.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Jenkins.

  Kelly’s malaria tablets must’ve been pretty mean stuff. That night I dreamed about this young kid I went to school with back in Miller High in Regina. He got knifed in a schoolyard fight and I dream about him a lot for some reason. In this dream he’s driving my old man’s ’66 Buick and I’m in the back seat with Kelly, necking up a storm. And Kelly’s sucking on my tongue, sucks it right out of my mouth, and when I look, I see this big semi coming right at us, down the highway. Next thing I know I’m hanging upside down and there’s a cow coming straight at me, in slow mo, its guts hanging out, and then I wake up.

  That was my first malaria nightmare. That’s what we called them.

  At breakfast Dana caught my eye with her bruised eye, gave me a wink. I think that abortion did something to her personality. She was kind of different afterwards. More, I don’t give a damn.

  Nobody asked her what happened. They all knew.

  And on the bus the talk eventually segued into discussing malaria nightmares. Seems like just about everyone had one. Kelly had one where she jumped off that cliff at Canakkale, found herself drowning in a sea of fast food garbage and this rat came out of nowhere and started chewing on her neck. She couldn’t wake up. This rat just kept on chewing.

  I asked her what she thought it meant at the lunchbreak when we were kind of off from everyone else. She said, “It’s just my obsession with death. The rat was death. Either that or the spirit of capitalism eating away at my soul.”

  Made sense to me.

  Then I told her about the dream I had and asked what she thought it meant.

  She said, “It sounds like an affirmation of our decision to be just friends. If we renege on that, we’ll be hit with disaster. Don’t you think?”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But if that’s the way it’s got to be, try not to drop your skirt whenever I’m around, okay?”

  She put a bored look on her face. “It’s only flesh, Mick.”

  “No, you’re wrong there, Kelly,” I tell her. “It’s not only flesh. It’s your flesh.”

  That surprises her.

  I decide to get while the
getting’s good. Get up, head for the bus. Pete was revving it up. Sat at the tables, gargled raki all the way to Alanya, and did my best to be cool, no catchum of Kelly’s eyes, because I knew I’d given her something to think about for a change.

  Alanya probably had the best beach of all those beach towns. Warm white sand as fine as salt. There was some kind of fort floating about a quarter mile off shore. We all went across there and had a great seafood supper. Shrimp and scampi and scallops, all of it with this incredible sauce. It almost put everyone in a half-decent mood. It was one of the

  best nights of the trip, actually. Even Jenkins did his best to look like he was having a good time.

  Back on shore. I hit the sack around midnight. Out underneath the stars. Away from the tent-stink. And I conk out right away. Maybe thanks to all that raki I drank. And then I hear Kelly whispering my name. She’s standing there above me wearing this swimsuit that makes her look like a starved pigeon. She lifts up this plastic bag she has in her hand. It has steaks in it. Care to have a steak, she says. I say sure, and the next thing I know we’re sitting beside a bonfire watching the steaks sizzle and talking about old movies like Beach Blanket Bingo, and Kelly looks real spooky, with the firelight and shadows dancing across her face. The flames on her glasses made her eyes look like little fire pits burning inside a skull’s face. Made her look like the bride of the Great Bazuzu. Then I notice other little fire pits out in the darkness. Cats, circling us. Hungry, yowling. Kelly takes one of the steaks off the fire, blue rare, tosses it at them, but that only

  makes them yowl louder. We grab our steaks, start eating them, and the next thing I know all these cats are flying at us from all directions, they’re sinking their fangs and claws into our skin and about twenty of them are hanging all over Kelly. She stumbles back into the fire and just stands there with all these cats suddenly going up in smoke. I don’t want to do that so I take off into the darkness and head for the tent, bend down and unzip it and that’s when the cats get to my face, and when I look up, there’s one big cat, about twenty feet tall, bending towards me with an open mouth. I still don’t wake up. It’s only when I’m sliding down his throat that I do. I wake up in time to hear myself moaning in terror. And sure enough, from somewhere I can hear cats fighting, and I don’t get back to sleep until almost morning.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 9

  We’re in Silifke, the last campground. Tents & stove have to be cleaned, they’re going into storage, sun is shining, it’s a day off from the road while the tents dry out inside. Strange

  breakfast this morning. Pete brought his short-wave out & we listened to “Casey Casern’s Top 40” & the news on US Armed Forces radio. There’s a revolution brewing in Iran, the Shah is shooting down students in the streets. So Iran has supplanted malaria nightmares as the day’s hot topic. While washing clothes, Mary told C. & me about how a friend of hers told her that the Maharishi has sent a letter to all his male siddhas this spring to go to 5 trouble spots in the world this fall & meditate, to lower tension levels, because he received some sort of divine intuition that this fall could hold the trigger point for the Apocalypse. The 5 spots are Korea, Cambodia, El Salvador, Afghanistan & Iran. C. wanted to know why only male siddhas.

  Mick

  I think it was in Silifke where we all heard about Iran. At least that’s where I heard about it for the first time.

  Silifke was where we had to clean out the tents because we were packing them up for good. From Urgup east we stayed in sleazy, run-down hotels. Some of them put the Hotel Santa Sophia to shame as far as the sleazy and run-down goes.

  Just before supper, Rockstar comes into the tent. He says he’d just scored some hash off some Turk on the beach. We all noticed that Rockstar got real introverted and didn’t say much whenever he smoked hash. So whenever he wanted to smoke some, I made the supreme sacrifice for the troupe as a whole and had a few hoots too, just so he wouldn’t feel alienated.

  After supper, which was more of Suzie’s burnt French toast, Pete and Charole were cleaning out the stove before packing it away and Pete had the radio on some American Armed Forces station that was playing Top 40, a lot of disco shit (disco can disco to hell, that’s what I say). The rest of us were sitting around drinking coffee and talking about our latest malaria nightmares. I’d had a doozy about these four women tying my arms and legs to saddle horns on the saddles of four horses and stretching my ugly into a long thin whip and using it to whip the horses with. They took off in four different directions. Then I woke up, and it was a good hour of listening to

  Rockstar’s Li-lo squeak before I was able to get back to sleep.

  When the news came on, Pete told us to shut up about our nightmares, and we did, and that was when we heard that the Shah’s army was mowing down demonstrators in Tehran and that the Shah had declared martial law.

  Dana was the one who was more concerned about this than anyone.

  She said, “We can’t go through there. They’ll think we’re Americans and shoot us too.”

  Pete kind of laughed at this and said, “I don’t think it’s that serious.”

  Dana said, “Have you ever had a fat despot grinding your face into the mud while he sucked you dry for fifty years?”

  “Not that I recall,” said Pete, and he picked up his shortwave and took off to his tent with Charole tagging half a pace behind him.

  Dana looked at the rest of us. She looked as if she was about to say something about Pete, or Americans, or both. But she must’ve remembered that Kelly and Charole and Jenkins and Tim and Teach were all Americans and all she said was, “I’m just amazed Iran hasn’t done this before.”

  And then she poured herself more coffee.

  Dave says that Dana was about as anti-American as you can get, she just didn’t broadcast it, that’s all. It’s what you call style, says Dave. Because basically what the US is, he says, is a conglomerate of companies that dish out enough money to make sure the president they want gets into office, and then they have him make sure that corporation taxes are kept low and that the war machine is kept in high gear. Every once in a while a Nixon gets in the cogs of the machine and a Carter gets into office as a result, but Carter’s humane approach to things is just a temporary anomaly according to Dave. Next election they’ll get some old movie actor to play the role of head honcho and they’ll push his buttons and things will carry on as planned.

  In a way it’s a good thing, says Dave. Those guys aren’t going to risk a nuclear war. They’re making too much money.

  All the planet has to worry about, says Dave, is a malfunction in the computer circuits that’ll send Exocet missiles racing towards Moscow.

  Or some madman filling the vacuum of power that’s being created in Iran right now, according to the Bangkok Posts that Soon brings me every afternoon around two.

  I’m actually lifting some of this from a conversation Dave and Dana had in Varanasi, but Dave says it’s okay to throw it in now.

  I had Lucille under my arm, right where she belonged, and so I strummed a few chords from “Street-fighting Man,” since it sounded like there were a few of those in Tehran’s streets from what the broadcast said.

  “I had a feeling this was going to happen while I was packing my bags,” said Teach. “Honest I did.”

  She was looking at Tim.

  “I know, dear,” said Tim, in that world-weary voice of his.

  “Your mother wrote you that birthday card,” said Tim in a quiet voice, and he went over and sat beside her. “She said some things.”

  Teach’s face was white and her chin was trembling just a tad.

  “You thought she was exaggerating,” said Tim, in a voice so low I could hardly hear it. “She’s exaggerated things before.”

  Then Teach began crying and all of us heard it. I think even Tim was surprised.

  He looked at us and smiled a smile as thin as smoke. “My wife’s been under a great deal of stress lately, you must forgive her.”r />
  Then he took her by the arm and led her away.

  We watched them go. Sad sight, that.

  Then Patrick and Dana got into a heavy discussion about geopolitical bullshit. I’ve always been bored with politics, but Dave says I should put down the conversation anyway. Too bad. I think it’s more important to talk about what I was thinking about, so fuck you, Dave.

  Teach’s tears brought back a whole flood of memories, I remember. Tears always do that. Dad dying. Mom. How they did try to get something across to me, every once in a while. But Peggy dil-Schmidt. When she broke up with me it was the first week of August. There was summer sun in the sky. The Buffalo Days exhibition was on in Regina. After she met me at the Kentucky Fried Chicken store on Elphinstone and

  Dewdney and gave me back my ring and gave me the letter and then took off, I walked over to the exhibition. Walked through all those smells and lights and barkers and couples eating hot dogs and corn on the cob until I got to the ferris wheel and then I bought a string of tickets and gave them to the guy and told him to please just let me ride until they shut things down and he saw the look in my eye, he said sure, man, be glad to, and he let me ride all night long on that ferris wheel while I cried my heart out.

  So yeah, I knew what Kelly was talking about when she talked about leaving yourself wide open.

  When I came back to reality, Dana and Patrick were still going at it hot and heavy. And I got the feeling that Patrick didn’t like the Americans too much either.

  I could tell Kelly could care less, she was off in her own little dream world, looking up at the skies, looking for falling stars, wondering what life might be like somewhere just to the left of the moon and the right of Venus and Mars. But Jenkins was this guy who felt, well, you’ve got to stand up for your country when they’re shitting on the flag or something, we all have flaws in our character, and I guess he’d finally had enough and said, “Well, the rest of Iran would’ve stayed sunk in poverty anyhow even if the oil companies hadn’t moved in and at least now more people have fridges and TVs, thanks to the oil profits.”