I gathered up all my bags, hitched up my rucksack, and walked to the prayer wheel, making sure I had my camera, my tapestry sack. Blacky came up and stopped me. We faced each other, then sat on the stoop of the path that led around it.
“You didn’t take much stuff,” he said.
“Oh, me. You know me. ‘Have little and gain; have much and be confused.’”
“Lao-tzu.” His eyes twinkled.
“Right.”
He glanced over at the Tibetan Moon. Those new girls were coming down the stairs underneath shellacked parasols from Kuala Lumpur. They were laughing, stumbling in the growing dark. I could feel his eyes—though he forced them to attend to mine—I could feel his full attention waver.
I unwrapped my package and settled down with a pack of brick-hard, industrial Chinese chocolate. I thought of the view from my and Zinnie’s window, out past the maple tree branches in winter. Silver white icicles drop down like jewels from the ramshackle freight train tracks. I wondered who slept in that bed. Or if it still would be empty. It might very well be empty. My mother cooking crispy pork chops and my cousin dropping in. How long had it been since I’d had a good pork chop? I sighed. It might be nice to have a telephone again. To sit upstairs and talk on the phone and watch my dad come through the trellis with the mayor on his leash. It was Carmela who’d found him one day at the Regent’s Row pub. He would stand at the bar in his stubborn way, not begging, just waiting, speculating patiently until some sucker would relinquish his leftovers. Carmela had carried him, that enormous vagabond dog, right through the doorway and into the harrowing protests of visiting uncles and aunts. The mayor loved his leash. Having spent the first half of his life scuttling footloose from bar to bar in hopes of grill-fried hamburger, it was no wonder that he refused to budge without it. My mother cooked in different cultures and hefty portions found their way to the mayor’s dish.
“Claire!” Blacky bellowed at me.
“Oh, sorry. What?”
“Pay attention!”
“Well, what?”
“We’re all taking rooms at the Kailesh Hotel. Come on.” He waited, sure of me now. “It won’t be so bad.” He gave my shoulder a jolly push. “Not too many bedbugs. If there are two of us, they’ll have to divide their attention.”
He had it all figured out. I looked down the road. The coal truck was parked right outside the hotel. It was just starting up, the engine sluggish and trying.
“And we’ve got the whole week. Anything can happen in a week.” He gave me his charming, most disarming smile.
I shivered with cold and, let’s face it, fear. It started to rain harder. Night had come.
“What is it?” he pressed. He looked down Sangee Road to where I looked. He got it then. He blinked away the rain and put his foot down. “You can’t ride in a coal truck all the way to Delhi!”
“Funny thing is, actually, I can.”
“This is absurd!”
“Blacky, all I know is that the farther I went, the more the things stayed the same. Like, the answers were inside all along. I just had to step far enough back in order to see them.”
“Oh, come on.” He laughed brusquely, trying to get me in a scoffing way. “You just feel bad, as we all do. You’re exhausted. Why, look at you. What you need is a warm bath and—”
Yes, I knew what he thought I needed. But it would only put things off. So it wouldn’t be now, but soon. And in his way.
I stood my ground.
Blacky threw his head back. Thoroughbred, he. He became quite stiff. Höflich. Polite. Sometimes you recognize moments as important. If you listen, you can hear them. I knew this was it from the roaring in my ears.
He took my hand up into his and he kissed it, gently and carefully. He was saying good-bye.
I tried to smile. The burden, thick as hardened paint, fell with a gush from my heart to the ground. Just like that. He was a teacher whose words I would hear in my heart my life long. Nothing would change that.
The truck engine gave its meaty rumble. I grabbed his sleeve. “I’ll take a charter back to New York by the end of the week. Blacky. Look, I’ll be fine.”
And as I said it, I knew it. I thought to myself I might be scared, and I might not have love, but I have this incredible whole lot of faith. Bewildered, maybe, but genuine. That was the thing about me. I’d lost Tupelo but I felt her all around me now. She lived on in me, if nowhere else. And in the end, I’d got what I had come for. I shifted my camera and bag of film underneath my itchy anorak. The wind blew a gale and we held on to each other, Blacky and me, until it passed.
He kissed me on the neck.
I kissed him sweetly on the lips. After all, you should always be a gentleman; certainly a pistachio girl knew how to be a gentleman. We held each other’s gaze another time, one last lingering time, the membrane slain and feather light.
I walked away. Betty was walking by and I placed my bridesmaid’s hat upon her head. She liked that. “Say good-bye to everyone for me,” I told her. “Wait.” I fished around in my pocket for the antique Ganesha. “Give this to Harry,” I said. Then I ran—how was it? Just the way Swamiji had told me—I ran like the wind through the rain. I banged on the door of the truck. Hula’s husband didn’t speak much English but he’d heard enough of it to make out what I wanted. I offered him a fair pile of rupees. He was happy to have me, I think. I climbed up into the passenger seat next to another traveler, an avatar of Vishnu. His face was blue in the dark and his feet didn’t touch the floor. He was saying his beads and he let me have the window. Lucky, I thought, I could just squeeze in. There was the powerful smell of the coal. The mighty engine lurched and groaned and rumbled and we were off, bouncing through the night.
We tooled along the road that hugged the mountain, making time before it would slip away. We circled counterclockwise, pitching and chucking, lumbering through pits and holes to safer ground, on and on, until you could see across the whole pinescented Kulu Valley and to little McLeod Ganj, twinkling cozily and incandescent through the rain.
At the verge we had to wait and let an official car coming up the other way pass by. Our headlights reached like beacons. “Dalai Lama!” the driver cried excitedly. “Coming home! Coming home!”
I rolled the window down. “Me, too.” I smiled at last. “Me, too.”
All we in one long caravan
Are journeying since the world began …
Bhartrihari
Other Novels About Claire Breslinsky
The Cordelia Squad
Jenny Rose
Keeper of the Mill
Foxglove
Park Lane South, Queens
PACK UP THE MOON. Copyright © 2006 by Mary Anne Kelly. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
eISBN 9781429998161
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kelly, Mary Anne.
Pack up the moon / Mary Anne Kelly.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-34208-1
ISBN-10: 0-312-34208-X
1. Breslinsky, Claire (fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Americans—Germany—Munich—Fiction. 3. Europeans—India—Fiction. 4. Documentary films—Production and direction—Fiction. 5. Caravans—Fiction. 6. India—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.E3946P33 2006
813’.54—dc22
2006042917
First Edition: December 2006
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