Pack Up the Moon

by Mary Anne Kelly

  “Didn’t Chartreuse ask you not to take his guitar?”

  “He doesn’t know. He’s driving. Oh, all right. I knew I should have left it in his van but I wanted to practice.”

  “He specifically asked you not to, though.”

  “I know. It’s just, I thought I’d crack with boredom.”

  “Claire. Do practice somewhere else. You’re really dreadful. I can’t take it anymore!”

  “Oh, all right.” I crab-walked to the back. “I’ll put it on the bed.” I knew very well I ought to tell Harry about the gems. Of course he’d be outraged. He was so ethical. I was, I realized, forever protecting Chartreuse.

  “You know, of course,” he called over his shoulder, “you know who’s quite mad for you?”

  “Who?”

  “Wolfgang.”

  “Oh.” My heart sank.

  “Yes. And it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to give him a try. He’d be a sublime catch. He’s a professional. On a world scale, mind you. Any girl would give her eyeteeth to date such an important filmmaker. Can you imagine all the potential events?” He shifted gears. I could just imagine his eyes gleaming. “The mind boggles,” he said.

  “I know, I know. He’s very sweet. It’s just every time I look at him I think of a gnome.”

  “You could close your eyes and think of England, you know.”

  “No. Sorry. I couldn’t. I’m a Yank, remember?”

  “I wouldn’t go around spouting the news. They don’t much care for Yanks abroad anymore.” Harry sighed. “But you would have such an absolutely first-rate life, Claire. Even if you went with him for a couple of years. Imagine. He could teach you the ropes of the business.”

  I gazed out the window at the monotonous landscape. “We’ve been having such a good time together. Well, that’s all ruined. In my experience when someone falls for you it always ruins the relationship. They lose their sense of humor altogether and you always have to bend over backward to be understanding and kind no matter what sort of fools they made of themselves.”

  He started to say something but suddenly we screeched to a halt. Chartreuse’s guitar toppled onto me and I braced myself.

  “Claire! Claire!” Harry sobbed. Before us on the road, the cabin of a truck was stopped and facing us. The front of it had been sheered off and two men with absolutely nothing before them, both dead, stared back at us.

  A herd of cattle must have run into them as they’d turned the blind curve. All the cows had been decapitated and were strewn up and down the hill. The dawn was just lifting through a mist. A smattering of country people sat on the hill waiting for what would happen next. There was a sound, a humming. It was flies, I realized, come for the blood.

  Harry left the van and was sick. I took the wheel and maneuvered us through the mayhem. It was terrible. Terrible. I thought I’d better get us quickly through before some ambulance or the police arrived. I might not be much use in ordinary life but in an emergency I spring to action. All the vans followed ours and then we pulled over to the side of the road to regroup.

  Harry came running and jumping over the carcasses. He’d thought we were going to leave him behind, I guess, and he was hollering and waving for all his salt.

  We waited while Blacky went back and made sure the men were dead. I went back, too. We all knew they were but he couldn’t go on unless he was sure. When I mentioned getting the vans out of the way for the ambulances Blacky gave a snort and said, “There are no ambulances here, only vultures.” I looked to the wreck. Already people picked around the edges of the mayhem looking for scraps of value. I hurried back to the van. I hesitated. Often in my life I remember that moment and I still don’t know if I was right or wrong to do it, but I took out my camera. I got the shot.

  chapter eleven

  We spent the next days traveling east. All the Turks we met at gas stations and roadside chi shops were friendly and seemed to want to take us home with them. The men, solemn and hard, broke easily into tooth-scanty grins. The women, jabbering and mostly in packs, in scarves and ankle-length robes, shyly came forward to touch my red hair and Tupelo’s blond locks.

  Then one day there was some trouble because of our hair. Some village women were angry. Chartreuse told us we’d better cover our heads.

  “I’m an American,” I snorted.

  “Really, darling,” Isolde said, “it’s awfully gauche to be patriotic in this day and age.”

  “I don’t cover my head.”

  “You will if you don’t want to get us all in trouble,” Chartreuse said. I’d never heard him use that tone before. He who’d been a little slippery in Munich had become assertive—more of a leader—as we traveled. I was just about to ask him where he’d put his fancy new acquisition and put him in his place but then Wolfgang came over with his soppy face and said gently, “Look, Claire, we’re in their country now. What right have you to enter it and aggravate the women?”

  I supposed that made sense. I did as I was told. I covered my hair with a scarf. Reiner even put away his gold watch. I washed the dishes in the stream without complaint. I actually donned a voluminous skirt. Better to be hot than be hassled. It was funny, because how kind the peasant women were to us when I followed their code! So poor and yet they’d slip us extra grains of coffee and tomatoes from their green fields.

  At the chi shop in Enzurum, some French travelers pulled up like pirates: dirty, smelly. They warned us not to take “ze sheet ovair ze border.”

  “Yeah,” Wolfgang said, catching my eye. “We figured that. We’ll throw it all out before.”

  “And don’t take ze short cut,” they warned. “It’s dangerous. These people, they’re not people! They’re savages. Not the same as these peasants. A different tribe. Very bad.”

  “Ho ho.” Blacky laughed. “je n’ai pas peur.”

  I stirred my tea, certain now that we would take the shortcut. There was something about Blacky. Always daring the gods. Tell him he couldn’t and he would.

  As we traveled east, children began to appear along the sides of the road. They were brown-toothed and pinheaded, sprouting overgrown crew cuts. Many of the children were cross-eyed and most of them barefoot. They had their arms outstretched on the road for us to throw them filter cigarettes in passing. If we didn’t throw anything there were rocks in their other hands for our rear windshields. We’d heard it was a sort of unwritten law of the road—our fault if we didn’t comply.

  We bathed with Blacky’s antiseptic German soap and as far away from villages as possible. My fingers were toughening up, what with water so seldom available. We were in abject horror of all things communicable, from athlete’s foot to herpes. (“Don’t even touch the faucet!”) We stayed away from grungy camping places and waited for fresh water. And then, we reached the point where there were no faucets anywhere. Outhouses were our best bet and some of them were so filthy we chose to go behind trees and rocks.

  Outside Arzinshan, we found a stream dragging with willows. I waited for my chance. When everyone was busy I went to bathe in it. Blacky came upon me as I floated in what I’d imagined was privacy. I jumped, not sure how long he’d been standing there. “You startled me!” I yelled.

  He pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes, and smacked a French newspaper against his thigh. “You wouldn’t believe all the devastation in south Vietnam.”

  I wasn’t going there. I put my head underwater. When I came up he was still there.

  “I see you’ve graduated from Agatha Christie in German to Satsang with Baba,” he remarked, looking at my little pile of stuff.

  I kept my body well under the water. “It’s not bad,” I lied. I turned my face and watched a grasshopper, small as a fingernail and pale as milky jade. I wouldn’t look at Blacky. He’d done to me exactly what Tupelo had. No doubt they laughed about me behind my back. My heart pumped with fury and wounded pride.

  He crouched beside the stream.

  I said, “Aren’t you afraid someone will see you with me?”
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  “What do you mean?” He kicked at the mucky bank. “I have nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I mean, I’m beginning to understand that fearing something will draw it closer.”

  “I hope that doesn’t mean that you’re fearing me.” He lowered his chin and pulled me with his green eyes.

  “Is that in the hopes that we stay apart or that you don’t want to be feared?”

  “Hmm. Does it have to be one or the other? Can’t it be both?”

  A flagrant warmth had slid between my legs despite the cool, deep water. I thought I mustn’t let him notice this and paddled to the other side of the stream. “I’ll have to think about that,” I called across.

  “You do that,” he said, giving up, turning away.

  I’d irritated him and I was glad. And why did he think everything I thought would be about him? Even if it was true. The truth was, I didn’t know what I’d meant. What I’d really wanted was for him to come looking for me. So when he’d done just that, why hadn’t I responded with acceptance? Because Tupelo stood between us. My jealousy stood between us.

  Wolfgang appeared at the end of the path. “Afraid you’d get into trouble,” he explained. I didn’t know why he thought he had to look after me. We dispersed.

  At night, I kept the bunch of them entertained with stories of my family in Queens. They loved to hear about my loads of cousins and relatives. I didn’t have to embroider at all to make them laugh.

  “Really, Claire,” Harry would say, “there’s no end to the lot of you.”

  “It’s true,” I would agree. But I was tired of the same green hills. We all were. We pulled up stakes and continued on. There was that shortcut over northeastern Turkey that the Frenchmen had told us about. Wolfgang was very keen to use it because the people who lived in that region—if you got to see them—were enormously photographable. Chartreuse was wary. He’d heard stories, he said.

  “We’ll save two days,” Wolfgang pointed out.

  “Oh, come on,” Blacky urged us on. “What fun is it without a little adventure, eh?”

  “All right,” we finally agreed. There were so many of us. What could happen?

  And so we ventured toward the shortcut. The landscape changed quickly from lush to rocky and barren.

  On the second day the sun beat down with no mercy, even early on. I wiped my lip, beaded with sweat, with my wrist and smelled myself—that salty familiarity. It was something I hadn’t done since grammar school. “Hello,” I whispered.

  “Do you know,” Harry read from one of his obscure guidebooks, “that this Valley of Araxes is supposed to be the site of the Garden of Eden?”

  “Really?” I tried to find some trace of the Armenian River. But all was parched, sucked out and left to dry. I’d taken to writing down things as they happened into a small blue notebook. I had a feeling Wolfgang lost track of the sequence of things.

  We were saving lots of time by detouring this way, Reiner kept assuring us. He gave a toot on his whistle. There was only one catch. The road wasn’t a road but varying heights by now of a foot or two of dust.

  Everyone seemed edgy, nervous. We stopped for Chartreuse to refill the gas tanks with a canister and funnel. He looked over his shoulder at the sunburnt hills.

  There were no children on the road, which was odd.

  “Get back in the van!” Vladimir shouted at Isolde when she squatted quickly behind a boulder. “Mach’ schnell!”

  “All right, all right,” she said and climbed back in the van.

  I took some water from the thermos. Even that was hot.

  Russia was far off to the north on our left. The Iranian border ten hours in front of us to the east. Off in the distance, Ararat, honored mountain where the ark of Noah, legend has it, still lies unfound, petrified beneath the ice and snow.

  It was weird, this terrifying bleakness. The dust on the road got so deep that our vans became like boats, swaying as they went. Harry, beside me, was perspiring, his clothes soaked through. He squinted his eyes to concentrate. The road was hardly navigable.

  A figure loomed up in the distance.

  “What is it, Harry? A man?”

  “If it’s a man we’ve hit a time warp. Look at his clothes!”

  He carried a staff, wore sackcloth britches and a turban of violent colors on his head. A biblical vision. Sheep darted up, then ran off into caves along the road. Road? It wasn’t a road, it was a dust channel, endless. I waved at the vision and smiled. The vision stared then turned away.

  “Jesus, Claire,” Harry cried out, “the van won’t steer. We’re actually floating along.”

  It was like being on the moon, this pitted surface. No this or that in either direction, just the dust, behind us an unfathomable cloud our spunky wheels kept churning up.

  “If we ever get through this,” Harry sputtered, “I’ll never buy anything but a Volkswagen. I can’t believe we’re still moving!”

  The dust had coated our bodies, our faces, our teeth. We tried with the windows closed. The dust seeped in the vents. Hurriedly, I wrapped my camera in two scarves to protect it.

  A blind curve in the road led past a precipice of boulders. Until now we’d moved in a sort of straight if undulating line. We were moving at two kilometers an hour. Harry shifted down to one. It was horrifying. You couldn’t get the feeling you were in control. Up ahead there was no clearing of gravel. We kept going. I think all of us were clinging to the sides of the vans or the steering wheels. The tires couldn’t grip the road at all.

  “Will you look at that,” Harry said, “a village!”

  “It’s just another mess of boulders.”

  “No,” he shouted. “Look there!”

  “I’m looking, I’m looking.” And then I focused. Colors moved. We swooped closer and the colors turned into clothing, like the shepherd’s we’d passed. People, living like ants, bedecked in vibrant colors, scarlets, indigos, and purples against the powdery gray. They scattered and ran into what seemed to be the sides of hills. A spray of rubble came down on our roof, sounding like rain. A dog, not far away, barked furiously. I shot again. Whatever we shot we shot twice and, whenever possible, with two different cameras. You never knew when the film was faulty or the depth of field off.

  Just then we hit some sort of solid terrain. “Claire!” Harry called out with relief in his voice. “Land ahoy!” Gravel at last. It felt as though the danger was past. All the people we’d seen fleetingly had disappeared. Unfortunately, the stones here were so jagged that Blacky’s van immediately got a flat tire. We all stopped and disembarked.

  It took no time at all for the men to remove the tire. Reiner lived for just that sort of moment. Out he trotted with his tools, his energy, his rolled-up sleeves. Grudgingly, I was beginning to admire his capabilities. Isolde, Tupelo, Daisy, and I sat on boulders, watching them change the tire. We looked pretty funny, covered in soot. Nothing moved. I slipped out my camera and took everyone’s picture.

  “Tupelo,” Isolde said. “Look at your hair. What you’ll be needing soon is a root job.”

  She looked levelly back at her. “I don’t bleach my hair, Isolde.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” She laughed, still coughing from the dust. “I’m from Estonia, not America.”

  A man appeared from behind one of the boulders. Isolde jumped. He’d come from nowhere.

  At that moment other men began appearing. They were the same biblical-looking men in robes the color of the landscape and with vibrant headgear. I wasn’t frightened at all. I was charmed and poised my camera.

  “Don’t.” Chartreuse stood between me and the men I’d wanted to shoot. “They’ll kill us.”

  “Kill us?” Daisy shrieked.

  “Shut up,” Vladimir said in a low voice, stilled by the growing number of men.

  “Get back in the vans, will you?” Blacky said. “Hurry up.”

  The men—there must have been eighteen of them—stepped closer. They moved wi
th long, sideways steps, stopped, then moved again. Their shoes were puffy, like muffins. They carried glinting sickles.

  We scrambled into whatever van was nearest just as Vladimir and Reiner finished bolting the tire. Chartreuse stood guard, his arms crossed, while the last of us moved to our vans. “Drive!” he called out between grinning teeth. “Go!”

  One of them picked up a rock and threw it. It hit one of the windshields and made a nasty crash. That was Reiner’s van. Another crash alerted us that Chartreuse’s rear window was now history, too. Reiner, hit by a stone and terrified, jumped into Wolfgang’s van. Vladimir and Daisy clambered into Isolde’s. We all of us turned on our engines. I’d climbed into Isolde’s van because she was already at the wheel.

  Chartreuse stayed exactly where he was. He remained in that one place, still grinning and not moving.

  Before any of us knew what was happening, one of the men—he was younger, smaller than the rest, his brown teeth bared, his long robes tripping him—came rushing from behind with a raised, glinting sickle.

  Chartreuse stood there knowing they were coming for him. He waited until we were all in some van or other. Then he took off at a run. I saw his eyes. He was measuring the distance. He wasn’t going to make it.

  I watched a stinging rock fly past, just missing his head. As it was he got one on the hip and I heard him cry out with a yelp. Isolde, her mouth in a square and her teeth gritted, swirled the van around, making a shield of it between Chartreuse and the oncoming man. I struggled to open the side door. The centrifugal force was holding me back. Finally it slid open with a merciful groan of rolling metal and he flopped in. Daisy and I dragged him across the floor and we floated away in a pelting of stones.

  Reiner’s and Chartreuse’s vans remained aground where they’d left them. The men kept coming toward us, their sickles raised in throat-slashing gestures. Daisy and I groped to our seats. The dust behind us rose up thick as a curtain. We could make out just one of the men now, still following us at our own miserable pace, his brilliant colors and the glint of his sickle, unbidden, a blurry star in the muck of our rearview mirror.