Last India Overland (32 page)

I say, “I think you and me have two different ideas about what an adventure involves.”

She just smiles. It was hard to talk because of the roar of the tractor.

As it turns out all the guys want to do is show us their little thermal pool that was out on the edge of this two-camel town. It was in a little shack that was heated by coals. Pretty hot. These guys got down to their skivvies and jumped in, waved at us to do the same. They did look pretty friendly, actually. Just kids.

Kelly looked at me and said, “I think they’re okay,” and she shucked her skirt.

I looked over to the comer. There was a shovel there I could use if the sight of Kelly in a wet T-shirt made the kids go crazy. I had that wine bottle. And since my bites were itching, I stripped down to my gotch, and Kelly took one look at my bites and said what are those.

“Love bites from some fans of mine,” I said, andjumped in.

It turned out okay. They didn’t slice open my throat and gang rape Kelly. We got out of there alive. The water, actually, was nice and warm, and it took some of the sting out of my bites.

On the way back to camp on the tractor the Turk kids sang songs for us and spent half their time looking back and grinning at Kelly.

It was Kelly’s idea to go for a walk on the waterfall after the kids dropped us off. She said the tractor ride had woken her up.

So we walked out onto the waterfall and we were quiet for a while and then she said, “It’s tough opening yourself up for someone.”

I said, “Yeah, you got that one right. Once burned, twice shy.”

She decided to sit down and so I sat down too. That rock was rough on the butt. She gazed up at the moon. She said, “The first time I left myself wide open was back in high school. I had this friend named Roxanne and I guess I fell in love with her. We liked the same books, the same movies. We were the weird ones. The ones who didn’t gather in the washroom and giggle about boys. We used to brush out each other’s hair.”

She looked at me and then stared down at the lights of Pamukkale.

“Did you ever have a friend like that?” she said in a whisper.

I thought of this guy I knew back in Miller High in Regina. Billie was his name. He started reading books about sex when he was fourteen, I think. He was the guy who told me about the clitoris. All the other guys talked about cunt and boobs. Billie talked about the clitoris and technique. We spent a lot of time driving down Albert in his old man’s Chrysler, talking about sex. Music, movies. He was a little like Patrick, actually. Maybe that’s why I liked Patrick.

I said, “Yeah. But we never brushed out each other’s hair or anything.”

Kelly looked away. “Where is he now? Any idea?”

I said, “I think he’s in Calgary, making a lot of money on some government job. ”

Kelly said, as if she hadn’t heard me, “One day Roxanne came up to me at lunch hour and said she was moving to Butte.” She let the thought trail away.

She was sitting hunched up, looking cold. I didn’t say anything. When she spoke again, there was just the smallest of cracks in her voice.

“The night she came to say goodbye, she didn’t come in. It was a warm summer evening and there was this screen door between us. And we just stood there laughing at each other, because we knew if we didn’t do that we’d cry. We couldn’t even say anything. And then suddenly she just turned around

and ran off and that was the last I ever saw of her. My laughter turned to these loud sobs, just like that, it was like there was no difference. My mother had to come and lead me away____”

There was another long silence. And then she said, “I never thought I’d feel such emotional pain again, though of course I was wrong. But I’ve been terrified of goodbyes ever since.” She finally looked at me. “Do you know what I’m saying?”

I said, “No, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying what’s the point of getting emotionally involved with each other if we’re just going to have to say goodbye in a month and a half? Would it be worth the pain? Because, you see, I don’t tend to do things with half-measures.”

I took out a pack of Marleys, lit one up.

She looked away. “Another thing is, I’m sexually confused, and I have a feeling a relationship with you would only complicate matters.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. “You mean about that professor who broke your heart?” I said.

She said, “That’s part of it. It’s just very hard for me to trust anyone.” She didn’t say anything for a minute. “He took pictures of me,” she said finally. “He wouldn’t give them back. Even when I threatened to tell his wife about us.”

“Did you?” I said.

“Almost,” she said.

Then we heard a noise. Someone was coming over. Jenkins and Charole. We clam up. Charole’s telling Jenkins that she just wants some time to get to know Pete, that’s all, nothing’s going to happen. They both stand still and look down into the valley at the few lights left on in Pamukkale. I scratch at those bug bites.

Jenkins doesn’t say anything. Dave just gave me a close-up of him. He had his eyes closed, trying to hold back tears.

Charole says, “Please try to understand.” Then she kisses him on the cheek and walks away.

I could tell Kelly was about to say something, but Jenkins turned around and headed off across the waterfalls while Charole was still in earshot.

“Good old heartbreak,” I said, after a while.

Kelly said, “We should put something on those bites of yours, they look awful.”

She grabbed me by the hand, stood up.

“Like what?” I said.

“We’ll see what we can find,” she said.

We went to the cook tent, squeezed in under the flap, turned on a flashlight and then Kelly rummaged around until she found some meat tenderizer.

“This’ll do the trick,” she said. “Take off your clothes.” She gave me a wicked smile.

I told her I didn’t mind being treated like a piece of meat by a woman but this was just a touch ridiculous.

“It’s a famous Winter home remedy,” she said.

She mixed the tenderizer with some water and dabbed the stuff onto all my bites. Back, legs, everywhere. Everywhere except certain places I could reach myself. Kelly the witch. It worked like magic. Bites stopped itching just like that.

“You’re amazing,” I said. “You’re fantastic.”

But Kelly was what you call a modest woman. She pretended not to hear all this. She put that tenderizer solution in a little plastic capsule that used to hold malaria tablets and gave it to me, told me not to lose it, and then we walked over to her tent where she stopped and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and then unzipped the tent flap, disappeared inside.

Left me standing there feeling lonesome.

All this kissing on the cheek, I said to myself, can get to be hard on the heart.

I stared down at Pamukkale for a good half hour. Then I decided it was time to hit the sack. When I was walking past the thermal pool, I heard something splash and a voice came out of the darkness, saying, “Care to join me, handsome?” It was Dana’s voice. I knelt down by the side of the pool and waited until she swam over.

“I enjoyed your exhibition this afternoon,” she said. “Nice buns.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Heard you had a bit of a rough jog.”

She was right below me. The moon shone on her face, wet, gleaming, her eyes laughing up at me. Her cleavage saying come up and see me sometime. And even in that light I could see the bruise starting to form on her left eye. Same eye that bruised up on me, back in that apple grove near Dubrovnik.

Something I forgot to mention. Dana’s haircut. Think she got it cut by Kelly back in Canakkale. Kind of a short pageboy.

Made her look really good, really suited her. “I can’t blame them,” she said. “I’m the evil infidel, flaunting my flesh. Destroy while you can. Have you ever noticed that evil is an anagram for live?”

“And Elvis is an anagram for lives,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “Want to join me? Nothing quite like a midnight swim.”

I felt hard-pressed. I said, “I’ve got this thing about Kelly.” “That’s too bad,” she said. “It could’ve been like in the movies. That point of hesitation, just before. If you ever change your mind, offer’s still open. Doesn’t matter when.” I said yeah, okay, and then she swam away, slowly. Disappearing into the darkness. There wasn’t even the sound of her strokes.

On the way to the tent, Dave rings me up. Smooth move, man, he says, and then hangs up.

When I get to the tent, Rockstar’s talking to Jenkins about this time he was in Morocco. Keeps talking while I get undressed. Of course I don’t get in my sleeping bag. I lay out
Tribunes
on my Li-lo and I put my kangaroo jacket on my legs, a sweater on my body, the sleeping bag on top. While Rockstar’s talking about some hash he scored, how it made it seem like the ceiling of his room was raining molten lava.

“If I closed my eyes it was there, if I opened them, it was there, and I could feel it burning.”

“So why do you smoke the stuff?” asked Jenkins.

“That was just bad stuff, man, too powerful. That’s why you should always test it out. Some of it’s real bad shit. Not like that bloody shit those bloody Turks had tonight.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Jenkins.

Kelly’s malaria tablets must’ve been pretty mean stuff. That night I dreamed about this young kid I went to school with back in Miller High in Regina. He got knifed in a schoolyard fight and I dream about him a lot for some reason. In this dream he’s driving my old man’s ’66 Buick and I’m in the back seat with Kelly, necking up a storm. And Kelly’s sucking on my tongue, sucks it right out of my mouth, and when I look, I see this big semi coming right at us, down the highway. Next thing I know I’m hanging upside down and there’s a cow coming straight at me, in slow mo, its guts hanging out, and then I wake up.

That was my first malaria nightmare. That’s what we called them.

At breakfast Dana caught my eye with her bruised eye, gave me a wink. I think that abortion did something to her personality. She was kind of different afterwards. More, I don’t give a damn.

Nobody asked her what happened. They all knew.

And on the bus the talk eventually segued into discussing malaria nightmares. Seems like just about everyone had one. Kelly had one where she jumped off that cliff at Canakkale, found herself drowning in a sea of fast food garbage and this rat came out of nowhere and started chewing on her neck. She couldn’t wake up. This rat just kept on chewing.

I asked her what she thought it meant at the lunchbreak when we were kind of off from everyone else. She said, “It’s just my obsession with death. The rat was death. Either that or the spirit of capitalism eating away at my soul.”

Made sense to me.

Then I told her about the dream I had and asked what she thought it meant.

She said, “It sounds like an affirmation of our decision to be just friends. If we renege on that, we’ll be hit with disaster. Don’t you think?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Maybe so,” I said. “But if that’s the way it’s got to be, try not to drop your skirt whenever I’m around, okay?”

She put a bored look on her face. “It’s only flesh, Mick.”

“No, you’re wrong there, Kelly,” I tell her. “It’s not only flesh. It’s your flesh.”

That surprises her.

I decide to get while the getting’s good. Get up, head for the bus. Pete was revving it up. Sat at the tables, gargled raki all the way to Alanya, and did my best to be cool, no catchum of Kelly’s eyes, because I knew I’d given her something to think about for a change.

Alanya probably had the best beach of all those beach towns. Warm white sand as fine as salt. There was some kind of fort floating about a quarter mile off shore. We all went across there and had a great seafood supper. Shrimp and scampi and scallops, all of it with this incredible sauce. It almost put everyone in a half-decent mood. It was one of the

best nights of the trip, actually. Even Jenkins did his best to look like he was having a good time.

Back on shore. I hit the sack around midnight. Out underneath the stars. Away from the tent-stink. And I conk out right away. Maybe thanks to all that raki I drank. And then I hear Kelly whispering my name. She’s standing there above me wearing this swimsuit that makes her look like a starved pigeon. She lifts up this plastic bag she has in her hand. It has steaks in it. Care to have a steak, she says. I say sure, and the next thing I know we’re sitting beside a bonfire watching the steaks sizzle and talking about old movies like
Beach Blanket Bingo,
and Kelly looks real spooky, with the firelight and shadows dancing across her face. The flames on her glasses made her eyes look like little fire pits burning inside a skull’s face. Made her look like the bride of the Great Bazuzu. Then I notice other little fire pits out in the darkness. Cats, circling us. Hungry, yowling. Kelly takes one of the steaks off the fire, blue rare, tosses it at them, but that only

         makes them yowl louder. We grab our steaks, start eating them, and the next thing I know all these cats are flying at us from all directions, they’re sinking their fangs and claws into our skin and about twenty of them are hanging all over Kelly. She stumbles back into the fire and just stands there with all these cats suddenly going up in smoke. I don’t want to do that so I take off into the darkness and head for the tent, bend down and unzip it and that’s when the cats get to my face, and when I look up, there’s one big cat, about twenty feet tall, bending towards me with an open mouth. I still don’t wake up. It’s only when I’m sliding down his throat that I do. I wake up in time to hear myself moaning in terror. And sure enough, from somewhere I can hear cats fighting, and I don’t get back to sleep until almost morning.