Last India Overland (14 page)

Patrick’s eyes bug out like the fenders on a ’59 Olds.

He manages to say, “Not particularly.”

Rockstar laughs, takes the pen away, saunters back to the back seat, where he sits and stares at Patrick until we get into Zadar.

I have to give Patrick credit. He’s a real actor. He picked up his copy of
The Honourable Schoolboy
and read it like nothing had happened.

I happened to notice, though, that he didn’t turn nearly as many pages as he usually did when he read.

I forget what Zadar looked like. Big empty city, as I recall.

Pete didn’t take us on any sightseeing tours. Everybody just sat around after supper, reading or writing letters home. I don’t know where Patrick was, he wasn’t around.

Me, I played a couple games of gin with Charole and did my best to keep my eyes from wandering over in Kelly’s direction. She was sitting talking to Teach about where her planets were. Kind of thing you’d expect a witchy-looking woman like her to do. And I said to myself that if I was going to let her cast any spells on me, I’d better save it until near the end of the trip, just in case I screwed things up. Because that’s one of the things I do best with women. Screw things up. And so I did my best not to look at her too much.

Instead I talked Charole out of finding some little Greek island and grabbing Jenkins off the bus. She said her wrist hurt and it needed some Mediterranean sunshine in order to heal.

I knew that if she got off the bus, Jenkins would get off the bus, and Kelly would get off the bus. And that would be terrible.

And so I managed to tell her that India is one of those places that changes your soul forever. This was Dave’s idea and I went along with it because I knew it was in my best interest.

I said, “People are always coming back from India and saying how it’s changed their perception of life right around and they’re never the same again. It’s the kind of experience, you know, that doesn’t even happen to people sometimes, let alone once in a lifetime. How can you pass that up?”

She looked at me like I was some kind of venereal fungus and said, “I don’t think you have the complete picture, Mick. Let’s switch this game to Hearts.”

I said fine.

She kept laying the Queen of Spades on me for the rest of the night and hardly said anything.

It wasn’t one of the more exciting nights on the trip.

(an aerogramme)

Zadar Oct. 18 Dear Dex,

We’re on the bus. Finally. After a strange trip through Europe.

C with a cast on her left wrist. Me with the Stuck in a Tour Bus Blues. We caught up to the bus in Venice. F went ahead without us. Which has left a few tense feelings. C.’s been giving him a sub-zero shoulder. Kind of a strange troupe we’re travelling with. Your expected lost souls, truth seekers & sybarites, none of whom know where they’re going so they’re going to India. & 1 borderline psychopath, a punk rocker named Rob who likes to wave his steel-tipped pen in people’s faces, & he can’t take a hint, he inflicts his personality on all & sundry & refuses to make himself scarce. He’s having a deadening effect on everyone’s psyches. He’s the main topic of conversation in the women’s cans. (We’re getting used to cold showers. & awful toilet paper, or none at all.) C wants us to leave the bus when we get to Athens. She wants to camp out on some small Greek island. But Mick, your basic rebel type, talked her out of it. Said the trip could change our lives, etc., we’d never know what we missed. & so we’re going to hang in there at least until Istanbul & take stock of our finances there. Right now we’re camped near a mass grave of plague & Holocaust victims. Place has all the ambience of that landscape in
The 7th
Seal. Be glad you aren’t here. Take care, K.

Mick

The next town down the road was Dubrovnik. I remember Dubrovnik real well. That was where Charole got this great idea to go picking apples. That was where I saved Patrick’s life the first time.

The drive there along the coast reminded me of that place on the Pacific Coast Highway where I cracked up the old man’s Buick. Lots of cliffs. Lots of water below.

It was after we got to this camp not too far from Dubrovnik, in a forest of apple trees, and after we set up the tents and had supper, that Charole got the idea to go picking apples. This is on the bus, when we’re all sitting around and Neil Young is on the tape player and I’m trying to get the words to “Comes a Time,” just in case I ever want to play it on guitar. The chords to that song are real easy.

So I don’t pay any attention to Charole at first but then

Kelly asks me and Jenkins to come along, so I do, and when Kelly spots some big juicy apples on some branches up out of reach, I’m the guy that’s fingered. Jenkins looked like he had a few more muscles than me, though nobody said that was the reason. They said it was because I looked lighter.

Anyway, I go along with it. Stick my sneaker in Jenkins’s hand and he boosts me up and Charole and Kelly are holding on to my legs as I go along from branch to branch, picking apples off twigs and dropping them into a gunny sack that Jenkins is holding out.

I guess I reached too far for one of the apples, as Charole put it in the daybook the next day.

And it’s really too bad that when I fell, her and Kelly didn’t let go of my legs sooner.

I came down with a thud that loosened at least one of my fillings.

Kelly was real sympathetic afterwards, after Jenkins and Charole had taken off to bake an apple pie in the bus’s portable oven. She asked me if I was hurt. I said just a tad.

She smiled at me.

“Want me to kiss it better?” she said.

I said, “Couldn’t hurt.”

Just a little surprised that she’d say such a thing. So she gave me a kiss on the cheek. The first time I felt her lips.

“Feel better?” she said.

“Lots,” I said.

Then there was the problem of what to say next. I wanted to say, hey, why don’t we go hump in the woods and get this over with so we can relate to each other on a normal basis. But I didn’t.

And then Kelly said, “Well, it’s been another long day on the planet, better catch some zeds,” and I said, “Yeah, sounds like a pregnant idea,” and then she was walking away from me through the dark.

Seems like every night on the trip there was somebody walking away from me, through the dark, even though it probably only happened maybe half a dozen times.

19/10/78

So this is what Kelly and I were so anxious to catch up to. A bus full of lazy tourists, reading or sleeping, sitting and sewing, drinking and gambling, while the spectacle of the Adriatic Coast cruises past the windows unnoticed. Ho hum. We don’t want to get too excited and waste all our energy too early, huh? We’re waiting for the Taj.

Though some people did get excited yesterday. We all know money is the root of all evil.

All of which leads me to the message our driver has asked me to pass along. If you boys can’t gamble in peace, this bus will adopt Merry Prankster principles: you’re either on the bus, or off the bus.

Only a warning.

Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.

Yesterday we got to camp next to a city sprawled over thirty-six square miles. Tonight we’re camped in an apple grove. Not to fear, there’s no snakes, no real snakes, in sight. So Kelly and I thought it’d be safe to maybe go pick some forbidden fruit, so we could make some tasty Yugoslavian apple pie and see how it compares to the American variety. We enlisted two of the more amenable Merry Globesters to help us pluck the fruit from those high, high branches, and things went swimmingly, for a while. But then the mission turned tragic. Maybe we should’ve been happy with the miserable worm-riddled, low-slung fruit we had. We definitely should’ve listened to the bleatings of the one Merry Globester we did hoist up beyond his petard. He really didn’t have much sense of balance. Or maybe it was all his fault. Maybe he shouldn’t have reached for that last lonely apple. Browning’s poetic musings about arm length and paradise work well on paper but are less practical in day-to-day reality.

Be that as it may, Kelly accepts full responsibility for the shiner that may soon bloom like a fat harvest moon on Mick’s face. She says she’s sorry, Mick, for coming up with the idea in the first place. You get the first piece of pie, as soon as it’s out of the oven. And now Kelly’s on to other things, primarily doing what she does best: getting writer’s cramp. In the last hour she’s composed nine aerogrammes home. A record, said Patrick, noting the gigantic size of the Slavic stamp, that won’t be licked any time soon.

By the way, would anyone like an apple? Mick picked lots before his fall.

Mick

The next morning was one of those grey, dreary mornings I’m used to in Vancouver, and if my jaw hadn’t been hurting so bad I would’ve got homesick. If my jaw hadn’t been hurting so bad I would’ve remembered that it’s usually smart to get on the bus last. That way you don’t get many unpleasant surprises.

I got on the bus and sat at the back and lit up a State Express. I was out of Marleys. Rockstar got on behind me and sat across the aisle from me, and took Patrick’s wineskin out from under his shirt and offered it to me.

If my head hadn’t been hurting and if Patrick hadn’t been way up at the front and if there hadn’t been brandy in it, instead of water or wine, I probably wouldn’t have accepted it. But there was brandy in it, not water or wine, and I didn’t see what harm it could do, and so I had a gulp or two, handed it back. The brandy burnt all the way down.

It made that State Express taste real nice. Almost as good as a Marlboro.

Rockstar took the wineskin and let the brandy gurgle down his throat and then he wiped his mouth and said, “You know, Muckle, you shouldn’t smoke.”

“I know, Rockstar,” I said. “But there ain’t a whole helluva lot I can do about it.”

“Me mom smoked lots,” he says. “And then she died.” “That’s the chance you take,” I said.

I finally looked at Rockstar’s eyes, which is something I usually tried to avoid doing.

On this particular morning they were wall-to-wall pupil. He had an acid vibe shimmering around his skull.

He tips up the wineskin again and lets way too much brandy gurgle down his throat and then he grins at me, wipes his mouth, offers me some more. I say no thanks.

By this time we’re on the outskirts of Dubrovnik. Which was a nice little city actually. Looked like one of those towns you see in old Frankenstein movies. Weren’t too many cars around, though. Made me think of that old Mel Brooks line in
The Producers.
Yugoslavia’s great, lots of nice scenery and baked potatoes, but on Saturday night Tito always gets the car.

Of course when we get off the bus, Rockstar latches onto me like a leech and the first thing we decide to do is go looking for some Yugo beer. Everybody else goes and walks around the rampart walls. But I didn’t want to do that because I’m not crazy about high walls .

We find a dingy little pub that sells beer, but I get the distinct impression that the bartender doesn’t like us too much because he makes a joke to two fat old men sitting in the comer and they laugh and he kind of smirks at us. And I think he probably charged us at least triple for the beer because it didn’t take us long to run out of dinars and have to go looking for a moneychanger.

Rockstar’s in a fine old mood as we walk around that city.

“We has to write a book about all the beers we drank in Europe on this trip, Muck-hole,” he says.

“That’d be a best seller for sure, Rockstar,” I say.

Before we find the moneychanger, though, we find Patrick, sitting by himself in a wicker chair in a little outdoor cafe, writing in the daybook. Even though it wasn’t his turn to write in the daybook. He’d just had his turn in Venice. Which maybe tells you something about the kind of guy Patrick is.

Rockstar punches me in my ribs with his elbow, which pretty well knocks a day’s worth of air out of me, and then says, “I bet Dr. Livingstone will lend us some dinners. Don’t you think so, huh, Muckle?”

I say, “Anything’s possible, Rockstar.”

Rockstar sneaks up on Patrick from behind. Patrick’s humming away as he writes, and he’s taking a sip from a tall glass of wine when Rockstar gives his left ear a yank. Patrick lets out a yelp and spills some wine.

Right about then I get this feeling that you get from nightmares, the ones that wake you up and are so bad that you don’t want to go back to sleep. I had one of those last night actually. Me and Kelly back in Venice, before we got lost. Those three nuns in black. I dreamed one of them stood up and took off her habit. There was nothing but bones underneath. Let’s make love, she said to me, and then I woke up. Saw palm tree shadows waving at me like happy gargoyles. Tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. Maybe because I remembered what day it was I’d got to in this.

Patrick’s daybook entry

On this, Day Ten of the Great Indian Trek, I take daybook in hand, once we park near the Stradun, and find my way to an outdoor cafe with covered tables, where I order a glass of wine and open the daybook. And pick up my pen. And wait for the Muse to descend. But by the time the wine arrived, a glass of musky red, sporting the bouquet of a beaker of diseased urine samples and the dubious appellation, Rebula, I had yet to write a single word. After all, what to say? There are no secrets on this bus. Everyone knows that the potato skins and bran flakes have yet to make an impact on my immovable bowels. Everyone knows that we should have stocks at the back of the bus for the benefit of one Herr Scheisskopf. Everyone knows that Mister McPherson will never get a job cleaning skyscraper windows.