Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  “Can it wait until tomorrow?” said Kelly.

  Patrick said no, he was afraid it couldn’t.

  So Kelly laid out six cards in a row. Only one of them was upside down. That Two of Swords. She said the one in the middle counted for two and the answer was yes.

  Patrick looked at me. Smiled a sad sick smile. “How interesting,” he said.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Oct. 20

  Blah day in Dubrovnik. A day of chat & churches, drizzle & Dylan. M calls him Uncle Bob. Some kind of private joke I think. Uncle Bob’s references to the King & Queen of Swords sparked a reading for M., not a positive one, mostly all swords. I made a vow to myself not to read them for other people any more & I broke it. I wait for the karmic boomerang. F & C had another spat. F’s been tagging along behind us like a lost puppy & C doesn’t like it. So she volunteered to shop for groceries with P & D, leaving F & me to walk the ramparts by ourselves. F did his best to be upbeat but failed. Most of us are failing at that. It’s not just the weather. There’s something like a mt. pressing down on all of us. We can see the same weight written plainly in the faces of Dubrovnik’s citizens. I haven’t heard laughter for days. After the ramparts, F & I walked through an indoor garden of concrete walls & autumn colours. It seemed like an abomination but it was nice to smell some pleasant scents for a change. D & P were there too, holding hands by the pallid roses. We decided to leave them in peace. We found Mary beside the Church of Sveti Spas, sitting alone on the rim of an empty fountain, littered with garbage. She looked like a still life. She said the church was the oldest orphanage in Europe. But where are the orphans? she said. M & Pat. just got on the bus. Pat.’s face is the colour of ashes, & his clothes are wet, his glasses gone. Something’s wrong. Asked him if he’d received bad news & he said no, he was feeling under the weather was all. Got into a conversation with Mary deLuca. Her & her husband are some kind of weird mix of Baha’i, Buddhist & Christian faith & whatever followers of the Maharishi are called, as well as being “veggies,” as M. calls them, fresh air freaks & ecological doomsayers. It’s a toss-up, she said, what will destroy us first, the nukes or toxic waste. She’s a Virgo, Tim’s a Pisces & their moons are exactly conjunct in Pisces.* She humoured me & gave me the dates but didn’t ask what conjunctions mean. M’s the only one I have any kind of connection with at all & we wouldn’t look at each other twice, in any other circumstance. Still haven’t talked to the girl named Dana. Too glued to the driver, who mumbles stats into his mike each morning & other than that keeps a careful distance from the rest of us. I’m keeping my distance from “Rockstar.” C said he gazes at her crotch too. It’s late. C has her head buried in her sleeping bag. Soothing patter of rain on canvas. Not quite soothing enough. Can’t sleep, psyche’s on the edge of turmoil. Did a reading for tomorrow. Both the Fool & the Chariot came up reversed. Fool came up reversed in M’s reading too. We were talking about walking edges before Pat. butted in. It would help, said M, to have a good sense of balance when you spend a lot of time out on the edge of things.

  YUGOSLAVIA Dubrovnik—Skopje

  Day 11

  Departure: 7:00 a.m. (early departure essential)

  Route: Kameno—Lepetane—Budva—Petrovac—Titograd

  —Mojkovac—Ivangrad—Rozaje—Kos Mitrovica—Pristina. Camp: Bellevue Motor Camp.

  Points: 1. Hope you got some sleep last night because this day’s a long one. It’s the single most treacherous piece of road in the known free world. You might want to explain to them why you have to take it. Which is because the Albanian cannibals don’t like Western tourists going through their country because they’re too salty. Or at least that’s how it was explained to me. And so you have to go around the country. The worst stretch of road is between Petrovac and Titograd. Take it very slow. A tour bus went off that road back in ’72.

  2. There’s a half-decent supermarket at Budva, has fruit in season.

  3. Depending on road and weather, it might be a good idea to stay put in Ivangrad and move on to Skopje in the morning. Hotel in Ivangrad is the Hotel Berane.

  4. If you do get to Skopje in one piece, you’ll definitely have a different perspective on the Turkish graveyard (you got it, another graveyard) that surrounds the city (pop. 161,984, mostly Serbs, Albanians, Turks and the occasional gypsy). The area was hit by an earthquake in 518 A.D. and the city is the most important strategic point in Macedonia, thanks to the four railways that converge upon it. When the Nazis took the town in ’41, they had the Balkans in the palm of their collective hand. Town is also a central distribution point for opium but don’t tell them that, there’s too many drugs as it is down the road. That river running through town is the Vardar. And Skopje is where Stephen Dusan wrote his famous Zakonik Tsara Dushana, a Book of Laws that proves the Serbs weren’t all that far behind the rest of Europe as far as so-called civilization is concerned.

  Mick

  The next morning it was still raining and Dave said to me that Pete had been thinking about staying put for another day

  but him and Dana had had a rough night in the tent. Pete wasn’t quite as gentle as Dana would’ve liked, said Dave. And so Pete was in the mood to move on, even though he knew what the roads might be like through the Black Mountains. He’d never been on the roads when it was raining, but they were dirt roads and that was all he needed to know, as Dave put it.

  Dave told me this when we were standing around in the cook tent, sipping Teach’s great coffee. Teach made better coffee than anybody on the trip. It had something to do with the way she mixed the milk into it before she added the water. I happened to watch her make it that day because I’m a caffeine freak at heart, basically. And I liked watching Teach, I have to confess. She just kind of closed in on herself and she was just this thing making little stirring movements with a spoon but I could see the blistering action going on inside that little skull of hers. Suzie was smoking a cigarette over in the comer of the tent and Teach was thinking about throwing a cup of boiling water at her, that’s what Dave told me. Maybe that’s why I never smoked when I was around Teach. Dave as much as told me to stay on Teach’s good side if I knew what was good for me.

  Anyway, it was cold that morning, though not as cold as it’d been in Innsbruck, and we were all standing around inside the cook tent, near the stove, sipping some of Teach’s piping hot coffee. All of us except Patrick and Jenkins. They were taking down the girls’ tents and loading them up along with the suitcases and sleeping bags. Basically earning brownie points.

  When Patrick finally showed his face, it looked sadder than a frog freak’s in a carny show.

  “Hey, Patrick,” said Rockstar. First time, I think, he’d ever called him Patrick. “Saved you some coffee, here.” This was Rockstar being nice. The look in his eye almost human.

  Patrick didn’t look at him. “No thanks,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” said Rockstar. Solicitous is the word Dave says I’m looking for.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” says Patrick. Then he looks at Pete. “Everything is loaded, Mr. Cohen.”

  Pete was talking to Charole about Joni Mitchell, which I thought was kind of strange. I was having trouble trying to peg Pete’s musical tastes. There was a Cat Stevens tape and an Al Stewart tape that he played lots so I guess he kind of liked the folkie sound, though he really didn’t mind me bugging him to play the new Stones and Dylan’s Street Legal.

  Pete said, “Thanks.” Then he went back to talking to Charole, and I could tell just by the way he was talking to her that it wouldn’t be long before he made a move on her. I looked over at Dana and she was giving the two of them the old evil eye. When Jenkins walked into the tent and squeezed out his hair, that’s the corner where his glance went to first as well. Pete and Charole were just having a great time. Pete was saying that Blue was his favourite album of all and Charole said yeah, that was hers too, and it’s too bad that she doesn’t junk this jazz thing she’s into.

  I sipped my coffee and listened
to the two of them talk. They were the only ones talking in the tent, so everyone was listening to them.

  Then Suzie said, “Patrick, you want something to eat?” She was in kind of a chipper mood. But all she was doing was trying to find out what had happened up on the ramparts. Suzie had to know everything that was going on. Otherwise she lay awake, listening to Patrick snore, thinking about it, that’s what Dave told me.

  Patrick said he wasn’t particularly hungry. Suzie let out one of her little brays which pissed off the rest of us. We all wanted some peace and quiet so we could listen to Pete and Charole flirt.

  Patrick said, “Really, Miss Byrnes, you’re very kind but my stomach is in a delicate state. It is not, I’m quite sure, in a state of receptivity. ...” He just let the thought trail off. Suzie was frying the eggs, and either it was the heat from that little Coleman stove or Aussies just like fried eggs you could use for basketballs, but Patrick wasn’t in the mood to taste them, and neither were the rest of us. We all opted for Teach’s mushroom quiche instead, which pissed Suzie off. I don’t know why Pete assigned the two of them to cooking duty together. Maybe he wanted everybody to try to get along. Or maybe he enjoyed a few fireworks. Dave says it was a little of both.

  “You’re still constipated, huh?” said Suzie.

  That little comment got a start out of Patrick. He glanced over at me. I gave my head a single shake. Then he looked at Rockstar. Rockstar just looked at him and sipped his coffee. It was a friendly look if anything. “Hey, I’m real sorry about yesterday, Pat—” he starts to say, but Patrick cuts him off, says it’s over and done with, it’s quite alright, please don’t mention it, and Rockstar shrugs his shoulders, says sure, whatever you say, Patrick.

  We all just listen to the rain while we eat breakfast and afterwards Pete says that it might be kind of a hairy drive today but there’s no telling how long this rain will keep up and so we might as well get through the Black Mountains while we still can, and when we walk out of the cook tent, the rain’s coming down harder than ever. Bloody sheets, like Rockstar says, and I thought about all the times I made love to Nancy Pickles when she had her period. She always had to go and get some cold water, first thing afterwards. I don’t know. I always kind of liked those things about her. I remember wondering what it was she was doing that day, and Dave told me I didn’t want to know.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Oct. 21

  Rain continues. We’re travelling a pitted road with few pit stops. Black Mts. Mary doesn’t like the name. There are sacred mts., she says, & there are evil mts. She thinks the peaks of most mts. are sacred places. There are some mts. in the Himalayas, she said, that the Tibetan gov’t won’t let climbers climb. F just asked me too many questions about C., none of which I could answer. I gave him the old drivel about how any relationship is just a preparation for the next one. Don’t think he bought it. Pat.’s still acting strange. Even S. has no idea what happened. Her guess is he lost his Chargex card. Road’s no longer paved & pitted, it’s turned to dirt, make that mud.

  Mick

  After we’re all loaded up and on the road, Pete picks up the mike and tells us that we’re in for a long haul today, mainly because we’ve got to go around Albania and the reason we have to go around Albania is because the last tourists that went through Albania got eaten.

  He kind of waited a second and then he said, “On second thought, maybe we should go through Albania.” Then he hung up the mike.

  Somebody should’ve groaned or something. I should’ve maybe. But nobody did. It was one of those mornings when Pete’s sense of humour just lay there on the airwaves like a pancake full of syrup, and it gave me a sick feeling, personally. I could feel all this static in my head. This buzzing sound. Dave says it has nothing to do with him. He says I’ve got a lot of wires crossed.

  The bus tipped its nose up and it wasn’t too long afterwards my ears began to pop, that’s the altitude we were heading towards. The highway we were on was as narrow and full of potholes as those Saskatchewan backroads I used to travel, looking for places to park and neck with Peggy dil-Schmidt.

  When the rain started coming down in big, filthy sheets, Pete had to slow the bus down to a crawl. Through the windows all we could see was a canyon full of cloud and mist. Which made me feel sicker. Real sick, as a matter of fact. Like I’d O-D’ed on acid. Like I was having a flashback.

  I gave up acid back in grade eleven when I started having those blackouts after the accident. When Dave started talking to me.

  I had to lie down on the back seat and close my eyes because I felt a migraine coming on, I get those every once in a while. They sneak up on you like a cat. You can almost see them coming. And I stayed that way for a long time. Then the bus came to a stop. I heard Pete come back to the tables and say, “I need a volunteer.”

  “To do what?” says Rockstar.

  “There’s a bridge that’s down to two planks up ahead. I need somebody to guide me across. Wanna do it?”

  “No bloody way,” says Rockstar.

  “I didn’t think so. You probably don’t know how to give directions anyhow, do you, mate?”

  “I can tell you how to go to bloody hell, Mr. Peter,” says Rockstar.

  “And I can tell you how to get off this bus, mate,” says Pete.

  I decide that maybe it’s time to sit up. I hate missing things. This is why God gave us commercials, I think. You need time to piss and pig out and catch some humans getting down to the nitty gritty area of life where every crisis ain’t a car chase.

  It’s Jenkins that says, “If you’re looking for volunteers, you got one here, Pete.”

  Pete says, thanks, and then Jenkins grabs his denim jacket that I’d been using for a pillow, and I decide to join the rest of the bus up at the front, and I have to hand it to Jenkins for what he did. There’s no way I would’ve walked across that plank. It was at least twenty feet long and only about a foot wide. There was nothing but chasm below him, and what with the wind and rain, he had to get down on his knees and crawl across. Just watching him, I could feel my head about to explode.

  When Jenkins was halfway across, Charole turned around and went back to the table. The rest of us kept our yaps shut and watched. I felt weak, watching. When Jenkins finally got to the end of the plank and stood up on the other side of the chasm, my own legs felt like Jello. And everyone was cheering, even Patrick. Especially Suzie. And Dana too. Everybody liked Jenkins, on the trip. Even Rockstar, I think. Rockstar never ever gave Jenkins any hassle. Though maybe Rockstar picked up on those muscles of Jenkins. Jenkins was a well-built guy. Though that didn’t stop Rockstar from hassling Pete.

  Anyway. So there we are, cheering away, until Pete tells us to shut up.

  Jenkins started motioning him across, every once in a while pointing some to the left, some to the right. We could feel the planks sagging and swaying a little beneath us. It was all a bit much. And I picked up a couple Hail Marys in my head. Maybe from a loose filling. Kind of shorted out and started acting as an antenna. Or maybe it was just Dave, passing along a few passing thoughts.

  But we got across, and everyone gave Jenkins a cheer when he got back on board. “The man who crawled to glory,” said Patrick. Kelly went and gave him a great big hug. Teach was blowing her nose. Dana went back to polishing her fingernails. Suzie gave him a kiss and Tim deLuca shook his hand. I said, “I’ll buy you a drink, Jenkins, how’s that sound?” and he said yeah, that sounded fine.

  I went and got one of Patrick’s bottles of white and I slipped him a few dinars, but he pushed them away and took out his little corkscrew. “This round is on me, Mr. McPherson,” he said.

  He grinned at me. It was like that whole business on the ramparts had never happened. But Patrick was a good little actor. He told me so, more than once.

  And that wasn’t the only bottle of warm white wine we drank that day. We drank three or four. Enough to make my hair hurt the next morning. Because it took us a long time to go through t
he Black Mountains, and there were one or two more scary moments. Once when we had to pass this stalled old pick-up truck and then another time when we got to this hairpin comer and it was partly washed out. I picked up static in my head, a couple fucks, a bloody Christ that might’ve been Pete’s, not to mention somebody thinking about Tim deLuca being naked. Dave told me that was Dana thinking that. Dave also told me afterwards that we were just a few millimetres away from oblivion on that turn. One wheel almost went over.

  I needed to talk to somebody after that. So I went and talked to Kelly. I told her that we’d almost gone over. I told her we’d almost ended up like so many corn flakes at the bottom of a Black Mountain ravine. She didn’t seem to hear me. I got the feeling that she didn’t like me coming on like this hot-shit psychic and so I made a mental note to cut it out.

  Kelly was staring out the window, her mind far away. I ask her where it was, point blank. She looks at me and gives me this little quizzical smile she sometimes farmed out to you, if you were lucky.

  “Just thinking about people,” she says. “That’s all. Sometimes it seems like everyone’s crazy. That they’re all on some kind of high wire.”

  Well this wasn’t exactly a revelation and I tell her as much.

  “Well, what I mean,” she says, “is that people are all polarities.” She thought about this for a minute. I didn’t say anything. Kelly was one of these people that you have to let think. If you don’t they’ll take it as an insult or something. “There’s nothing more boring than a saint,” she says finally. “There has to be a touch of earthiness, somehow. Some sense of sin for a person to be interesting. There has to be some cowardice in the hero, to make him human. There has to be some selfishness in a lover. The most interesting people are cauldrons. They have to be out there near the edge somehow.” She thought about it some more. I let her. “I think it’s probably spending two hours driving to work in traffic and spending eight hours in a tiny cubicle, that’s what drives people crazy. Like it’s great to be here. Out on the edge of a muddy road, high above nothing. This is why I’m here.”