Last India Overland (10 page)

“Could’ve used a bit more beer,” I said.

Tim screwed up his bearded, beetle-like face—Patrick said once he had a face like Peter Lorre’s—and handed me a kitchen knife. “Or a little less beer,” he said.

Tim and Teach were people who didn’t have any bad habits, or at least they thought so, though of course they did have one bad habit which was putting down other people’s bad habits.

“Nope, not enough beer, I think,” I said.

End of conversation.

Our first loo-stop for the day was the Olympic ski slopes, where Rockstar went a little nuts. He grabbed this baby goat that was wandering around lost on the slopes and pretended to hump it. Teach got real upset. She didn’t see that Rockstar was just trying to be funny. She went up to him and told him to leave the little goat alone, and he said, “What’s the matter, Teach? Ya jealous?”

Teach didn’t know what to say, she just stood there flabbergasted. Then she ran off to the bus, where Tim deLuca was, reading some book, I think.

Tim deLuca didn’t even get off the bus to see half the things we stopped to see. He had this thick book of Buddhist prayer he was always reading.

A few minutes later, Pete gave the horn a honk and when I got on the bus I could see Teach was crying.

I felt a little sorry for her. I liked Teach a lot, though I don’t think she ever picked up on it. I guess it’s because she reminded me of my old lady. The old lady was always getting her knickers in a twist over nothing. Usually some pizza joint waitress the old man was having coffee with a bit too often.

Our second loo-stop was this castle with a mouthful for a name. Neuschwanstein, I think is the way it’s spelt. Pete told us it’s the castle that gave Disney the idea for Disneyland, and come to think of it, it looked a lot like that castle in
Sleeping Beauty,
which is maybe the third movie the old man ever took me and Hasheeba to. The first was a Tarzan movie.

This was a great looking castle. Way up high on a tall hill, surrounded by trees. All kinds of great turrets against clear blue sky.

Pete told us that the king who built the thing, King Ludwig II, was rich and more than a little wigged out. He heard weird voices in his head, said Pete, and one day the voices told him to go jump in the lake, and so he did.

Yeah, I guess there’s no getting around it. I guess I’m going to have to do it and this is as good a time as any to talk about Dave. That little voice I hear from behind my left ear. The little voice that tells me how to spell words like Neuschwanstein.

I’ve always had blackouts, as far back as I can remember. I think they might’ve started way back when I was three and the old man took off for the first time. He was gone for a year. He claimed it was because my old lady was crazy just because she was still breast-feeding me when I was three going on four. But the old lady claimed he’d shacked up with some waitress in Moose Jaw.

When he came back, the pots and pans flew for a while and a cast iron frying pan hit me in the head. When I came to, I was five going on six. After that I had maybe two or three blackouts a year. Some of them lasting six months. But the thing was, I kept going to school and my grades got better.

After a while, when my questions about what was going on got to be too much, my mother took me to a psychiatrist but he couldn’t find anything wrong. He said it was probably just a neurological dysfunction in some synapses and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

I didn’t start hearing Dave’s voice until after the old man was killed. That was when I was eighteen.

I was with the old man when he got blown away at The Olde Salvador Deli. For a while I managed to blot it out, but then one day it came back to me and now it’s as clear to me as those palm trees outside the window. I’ll never forget his head just kind of disappearing in this huge shower of blood and the noise that didn’t seem to stop or the guys that did it. They were wearing stocking masks. One of them looked at me and said, “Have a Happy Father’s Day, kid.” And then the stock of a shotgun was coming straight for my eyes. And then I was swallowed up by a black hole and the next thing I know I’m waking up in a hospital but I can’t speak, and there’s this weird voice somewhere and it’s saying to me, come on, now, that’s it, you can do it, and I say I don’t know what happened, and the voice says I got whacked on the head. It said I went into some kind of shock, I was unconscious for a couple days. But now I’ve got to snap out of it, if I don’t, I’ll die, they’ll cut off my life support. So try opening your eyes, said the voice. When I opened my eyes it was dark, so I said who is it, who’s talking, and the voice said, well, it’s kind of complicated, but I’m your brother. My brother? I said. Yeah, he said. Your twin brother. The one our mother would’ve called Dave, if you hadn’t hogged all the food for yourself back there in the womb sweet womb. In the background there was some nice little cocktail-lounge piano playing “Stardust” and the next thing I know Hasheeba’s face floats into view and she’s saying oh, thank God, and then my mother’s face is there and then there’s nurses and doctors, and that was kind of a good feeling, to see how everyone was so happy that I’d decided to come back from the living dead.

I didn’t hear from Dave again for a while and I pretty much forgot about it, passed it off as a dream, until about a year later. I was trucking down the Pacific Coast Highway with Rice-Eater in the staff car, as we called it, that old black Buick which was the only thing the old man left behind, besides nine dozen beer bottles and fifty thousand dollars in gambling debts.

The old man was always betting on the Red Sox. They can’t lose forever, he’d always say.

Me and Rice-Eater were heading for Portland for a Who concert. I guess we were drinking tequila and smoking reefer and I guess I didn’t do a good job judging this one hairpin curve. A real Dead Man’s Curve.

I went through the front windshield and Rice-Eater went through the back. This time I almost died. I was in a hospital for four months, and what snapped me out of the coma I was in was a voice saying, wake up, Mickers, time for school, but it wasn’t my mother’s voice, it was the other voice, and that phony schmaltz-bar piano’s still playing. We’ll give it another shot a little bit later, says the voice. And then I get sucked into this big black pool of oil and I swirl around in there for I don’t know how long and when I come out of it, Dave tells me to try opening my eyes one more time. I do it, and this time I can hear things. I can hear Hasheeba reading something to me.
The Catcher in the Rye,
is what it was. Read the fart scene, I manage to say to her, and suddenly her face is looming over mine and after she gets her tears dried and everything under control, she tells me she loves me, and I say that I love her too and that everything’s cool.

To make a short story even shorter, I eventually get out of the hospital, about a week before Rice-Eater does, and one afternoon while the old lady’s watching “The Edge of Night” I ask her if she had any name in mind for my dead twin brother. She looks at me, as if to say, what’s it to you? I say, was it Dave by any chance? Which sort of surprises her. David, she says. How’d you know? I never told a soul about that, she says, not even your father. Just a lucky guess, I tell her, and then I am-scray, because Dave made me promise not to tell anybody about him. Otherwise we’d both end up in the

loony bin, he said.

And I never have. Up until this trip, I mean.
⁹

Getting back to Ludwig’s castle. I ring up Dave on the telephone. That’s how he likes to talk to me. It’s a black pay telephone on some kind of wharf. Green waves in the distance and a ship or two. A little breeze blowing. And me, wearing a Bogey hat, to complete the scene. It’s how Dave first used to talk to me, in dreams. He’d ring me up and tell me things like how the old man’s ghost used to float around near me, watching what I was up to. Until he got so disgusted with my lifestyle, all the drugs and all the time I spent whacking off, that he took off to hang around an old girl friend he knew when he was going to high school in Boston.

Anyway, back to Ludwig’s castle. I ask Dave not to ever tell me to go jump in a lake and he says to me, I promise you I’ll never tell you to go jump in a lake. Unless, of course, you need a shower.

Which might’ve been a hint. I hadn’t had a shower since that Frosty Freeze in Bruges.

I told him I was real glad to hear that and then I hung up because I had to save my breath for walking.

Dave rang me up just a moment ago. He said he was glad to see I finally spilled the beans about him, and while I’m at it, I might as well mention that he’s helping me write this thing. I said how’s that? He said there’s no way I’d have the energy to write a book, with all the germs I’ve got floating around in my body. Or with my lousy memory.

He’s probably got a point there.

And he says I better hope he doesn’t get an urge to go to Singapore because he can leave my body any time he wants to, he says, by jumping on a sneeze molecule and hitching a ride on the Ko Samui breeze.

I tell him to do me a favour and go ahead, and then I sneeze.

There’s this little silence but I can still hear a buzz on the line.

Then he says, maybe when the book’s finished.

Fine, Dave.

I gotta get back to the castle.

It was a mighty steep climb up to Ludwig’s castle. I was tempted to jump onto the back of one of these carts that old Clydesdale horses were hauling to the top, usually with a couple old ladies or an old couple on board. But they looked tired enough as it was.

I was walking up with Jenkins. Forget what we were talking about. Dave says it was about horses. How Jenkins had this favourite horse called Ginger, back home on the ranch. A Schmidecker horse. Good German breed, said Jenkins, and I got the feeling he was kind of apologizing for something. Dave says it’s because he was German on his mother’s side.

Jenkins said he loved that horse and he wished it hadn’t grown old. He hoped it would be a mild winter this year in Montana because if it was a tough winter the horse probably wouldn’t make it. He said his dad wanted to ship him to the glue factory in August but Jenkins wouldn’t let him.

“Dad doesn’t want to have to haul his body in off the pasture with a tractor,” said Jenkins. “But I don’t see what’s wrong with letting his bones lie out there. It’d be a way of remembering him.”

“I think that’s how I’d feel about it too, Jenkins,” I said.

When we got to the top we had to wait for the tour group that was in the casde to come out. And Rockstar takes his SX-70 out of its leather case, opens it up and points it at Dana, who was looking pretty nifty that day, probably for Pete’s benefit. Yellow T-shirt. Denim cut-offs cut just a bit too high. She ignores him. Rockstar plays with the focus and then he swings the camera over in Suzie’s direction. She’s standing right behind Dana. Presses a litde red button. Thing goes snap, whir and a picture slides out.

“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.