Last India Overland (17 page)

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 the 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.”

I know what she’s getting at.

I say, “Yeah, I feel the same way.” But it comes out sounding kind of lame. I have to come up with something else. “But you know what happens when cauldrons boil too long, don’t you?” I say.

She looks at me. She’d been looking off into the mist in the canyon off to our left. “Since you asked, Mick,” she says. “Since you asked, I might as well tell you. I’m just a cauldron on simmer. For now.”

I can tell she instantly feels embarrassed about saying that. Or maybe she figured it was time for a dramatic exit or something. Because she got up and left and went and sat next to Charole, who was reading. Didn’t look like she was anxious for any conversation or anything. But I could dig that. Kelly gave me something to chew on, for the rest of the trip through the Black Mountains. And I chewed on it over a game of gin with Jenkins.

I didn’t mention anything else about his little trip across the plank. I was cool. Doesn’t mean I didn’t respect him for what he did, and I think Jenkins picked up on that and understood. Me and Jenkins didn’t have to talk much to each other. That was the funny thing about him and me. We just liked each other, though probably neither one of us could put an exact finger on why.

Just the same, I think most of our nerves were shot by the time we got to Skopje which was near midnight, I think. It was still raining. And I don’t know about anybody else but I crashed just as soon as we got the tents set up. The last thing I remember hearing was Rockstar asking Jenkins how he felt when he was out on that plank.

“Was ya scared?” he asks.

“Only shitless,” says Jenkins.

And when I woke up in the morning, I thought, you know, Mickers, there seems to be a theme developing here, and maybe that was the first time I got this idea to maybe write a book. All about a holiday in hell, with lots of sex and drugs and violence in it. Even though by that time there wasn’t much sex and there weren’t many drugs.

from Kelly’s diary

Oct. 22

Just left Skopje. Name says it all. A graveyard encircles the town. M called it Donut of the Dead. Yesterday a nightmare of washed-out roads & planks for bridges. F crawled across a plank to get us through a date with eternity. Stopped in a town called Ivangrad where Pete told us to spend all our dinars in the dining room of the Hotel Berane (they’re “worthless” in Greece) while he copped a nap on the back seat. C, D. & T & Μ. & I were the only ones with any to spend, so we gorged ourselves, shades of the Last Supper. But a grateful Last Supper. Talked about death. Mary said she’s never prayed so hard in her life as she did today. Talked about the poor male psyche, all those expectations of courage. Raised to fend off bullies & score hat tricks, all meaningless skills once they get past 20. After T. & M left, we got down to specifics. C’s feeling bad about how she’s treated F. Now that he’s a hero. D’s feeling bad about how Pete’s treating her. Seems he’s a heel. Then we talked about birth. D thinks she’s pregnant. Too soon to be Pete’s. Her boy friend dropped by the night before she left on the trip. Her diaphragm was at the bottom of the suitcase. Got to Skopje near midnight. Morning came too early. We’re on our way to Platamonas.

Mick

The next morning Jenkins woke me up, since Patrick didn’t bother to knock on our tent pole like he usually did, and when I crawled out onto the wet soppy grass, the first thing I saw was Dana, in her pyjamas, crawling out of Pete’s tent. She looked like something out of a Bergman movie. I said good morning to her, and she said is it, like she had her doubts. I said maybe, it was too early too tell.

But it wasn’t too early to tell. It was a bad morning. Or

noon. The showers were cold and there wasn’t any toilet paper. Brunch was coffee and com flakes. And it started raining again when we hit the highway. Besides that, I just wasn’t in a good mood. When I signed on with this trip, I was kind of hoping to have a fun holiday as part of the bargain and that just wasn’t working out.

I did my best to be philosophical about it, though. After all, Kelly was on the bus, and that day, on the way to Greece, I got into a long conversation with her about life and what it was about, and all we came up with was that neither one of us had any idea and that we’d probably have to wait until we died to find out, which has to be one of life’s biggest ironies. I’ve asked Dave about it and he claims it’s a mystery to him too, why there happens to be life on this particular ball of dirt, spinning around this particular small star in this out-of-the-way corner of the universe. But he did go to the trouble of throwing some odds at me. The odds of the temperature being just so, so many years ago, to let such and such protons and chemicals fuse together, and the odds are something like sixteen trillion to one, and so the odds, he says, are that there is some kind of master plan at work. And I said as much to Kelly, but she said, “I don’t believe in math.”

Then she smiled, so I smiled too. A little joke.

We also got into talking about suicide. She said she’d tried it once, in high school. For no particular reason, she said. She just felt like it one Saturday night. I asked her how she tried to do it and she said pills.

I said, “Oh. Gee, I kind of had you pegged for a razor lady, myself.”

“Maybe next time,” she said.

I told her about that time I tried to hang myself with Peggy dil-Schmidt’s pantyhose. And we figured it out. We did it in the same month. Which may or may not have cosmic significance, as Kelly said. We won’t know for sure until we

die, she said.

“If then,” I said.

“If then,” she said. And there was a brief moment there, when we caught each other’s eyes. It was a moment of real communication. We were on each other’s wavelength and both of us knew it. And we didn’t say anything after that. We didn’t need to. We just sat and watched the scenery roll past.

That was a great feeling. I could’ve sat there and watched the mountains roll past forever. But all the cosmic forces gave us was an hour.

At the Greek border, a border agent came out, looked at our passports and medical books and waved us through.

We camped that night at Platamonas which isn’t too far from Mt. Olympos. We put up the tents in a soft drizzle. The tents were just starting to get that mildew smell, from being packed up wet, and that mixed real nicely with the smell of Rockstar’s socks.

Speaking of Rockstar, though, he didn’t spend the night with me and Jenkins, which broke both our hearts.

“You don’t think he got lost somewhere, do ya?” said Jenkins.

I said, “Nope.”

We were just lying awake, listening to the rain patter on the tent canvas.