Last India Overland (16 page)

and shuffled some more and laid out twelve cards in a circle.

Dave says it’s not important to go through that reading. We didn’t actually get through it thanks to Patrick. But I remember some of the cards. The Queen of Swords in what Kelly called the Eighth House. The house of death and sex and taxes. Had a picture of Kali on it. She had eight arms and six boobs and she was squatted like a vulture on this cat. And then there was the Nine of Swords in what Kelly called my Sixth House, of health. Guy laying flat on his stomach with nine swords sticking out of his back. Kelly pointed out he didn’t look healthy at all and I should maybe watch my health. And in what Kelly called the Seventh House, of marriage, there was the Two of Swords. Blindfolded woman carrying two swords. Kelly said this meant my love life was going to be presented with what she called the need for decision.

“There isn’t, necessarily, any right or wrong decision,” she said. “There is just the decision itself.”

She was telling me about the Queen of Cups in my Fifth House, of creativity and love affairs, but that was when Patrick sat down wearing what must’ve been a spare pair of glasses. Looked at this card called the Five of Wands. Had soldiers fighting on it. Told us some stupid limey joke but told it in this sad way designed to make me feel sorry for him or something. Patrick and his fucking sense of dramatics.

I would’ve been really pissed off. But it was kind of hard not to sympathize with him. And Kelly pushed all those cards together before she had a chance to tell me what the rest of them meant, and I called her on it, and she said they’re not meant to be taken all that seriously, Mick.

Patrick asked her if perhaps the cards could answer a question for him.

“I have quite an interest,” he said, “in matters arcane and occult.”

Kelly said, “I try to do only one reading a day.”

Patrick said, “But I’m afraid I have an important decision to make concerning my immediate future. It would be interesting to see what the metaphysical world had to say about it.”

“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.