Last India Overland (36 page)

It’s nice to hear her laugh. I’d never really heard her laugh before. I really like women who can laugh.

When we get to the Biiyuk, she goes up to her room and gets me some of her aspirin and 292s.

“You don’t need ’em?” I say.

She just shrugs. “Not as much as I used to. Don’t worry, I’ve still got some.”

We’re kind of standing there, wondering what to do next, and then she gives me this funny look, and she says, “Could I cadge a cigarette off you, Mick?”

“Yeah, sure,” I say, and I fish out a couple Marleys. “Didn’t know you smoked.”

“I quit about a year ago,” she says. “Boy friend made me.”

While she’s putting the cigarette in her mouth, the lights in the hotel suddenly flicker, flicker some more, and finally go out, leaving us in darkness.

“Oh, isn’t this nice?” says Dana. Which was kind of a funny thing to say. Especially the way she said it. As though she meant it.

“Yeah, ain’t it?” I says and I flick my Bic. Dana leans toward the flame and I notice the way the shadows play across her cheekbones.

I put the Bic away and then it’s just the two of us standing there in that hallway, smoking our Marleys. We don’t say anything for a minute or two. The hotel’s real quiet. We can hear each other breathing.

“I suppose I should hit the sack,” I whisper.

“Well finish your cigarette first,” she says in a low voice.

She kind ot laughs. “I don’t like to smoke alone.”

“Yeah?” I say, sounding real stupid. “How does it taste after all this time?”

“Real good. Kind of like sex, after a year in the convent.” “Yeah?” I say. “You were in a convent?”

“Once. For two years. My last two years of high school. My parents sent me there because they didn’t like this guy I was dating.”

“Oh,” I say, and then we hear something coming up the stairs. It’s an old man, lighting the candles along the walls. This kind of thing must’ve happened a lot. He comes towards us and stops halfway down the hall and lights a candle in a small niche. He doesn’t notice us or the glow of our butts. We were still back in the shadows. He’s humming some sad song to himself as he shuffles his way back down the hall, and after he’s gone to the second floor, Dana says, “Wonder what his life is like.”

“Yeah, I wonder,” I say, and Dave throws me this flash of this guy getting hit in the ankle with a bullet and being hauled for miles over a snowy plain in a makeshift travois behind a horse, and he throws me another flash, of Dana screaming while a bald-headed black guy digs a mass of ectoplasm out of her.

“Uh, pardon me for asking, like, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but, uh, how did your abortion go, uh, back in Istanbul? I mean, like, was it okay?” This is me being my usual articulate self around women.

“No,” says Dana. “It wasn’t okay. Not really.”

And then we hear more noise from the stairs, and voices. We both drop our butts to the floor at the same time and grind them out.

It’s Pete and Charole. They’re holding hands. They stop near a candle on the wall and neck for a minute or two.

“I love you,” whispers Charole, and Pete says the same thing back, and I wonder how many people are saying exactly the same thing right now, all over the world. It’d be nice if I was one of them, but it’s late at night. Soon doesn’t come on shift for another five hours. Besides, she doesn’t like it when I tell her I love her.

Anyway, the generator picks a bad time to get its act back in gear. Presto, the lights flick back on, and there’s me and

Dana, caught with our pants down, so to speak.

Of course, Pete and Charole are just a little surprised to see us standing there. And not all that pleased.

“Hi, troop,” I say. “How’s tricks?”

“Fine,” says Charole, sounding, as they say in the paperbacks, somewhat disgruntled. She slides a key into a lock. Pete says goodnight to us, his tone not quite as friendly as it could’ve been, and they’re gone inside.

Dana lets out a laugh. “When I was a little girl I used to listen at my parents’ bedroom door late at night to see what I could hear. I got caught doing that too.”

She gives me what Dave says I should call a conspiratorial smile and then she says goodnight, see you in the morning, and she opens up her own door, gives me a little wave before she closes it.

I’m thinking to myself, hey, Dana’s not too bad a lady, as I head to my room, and as I open the door I can hear bedsprings squeaking. But they stop right away. Rockstar, beating off.

I don’t say anything, I just get out of my clothes and I get between those nice cool sheets that can’t have lice in them, it’d be just too much, and through the window I can see this moon, all five-sixteenths of it, rising above that cliff.

I try to go to sleep but I can’t. I’m waiting for Kelly to come walking down the hall. But it’s a while before I finally hear her and Suzie’s and Patrick’s footsteps. By that time, Rockstar’s bedsprings have gone back to squeaking. Not much, just enough so I can hear them. It’s a real lonesome sound.

But at least the aspirin had stopped my tooth hurting, although I knew there was a Big Fat Pain, all full of claws and fangs, lurking at the bottom of that hole in my tooth. I knew it was curled up and snoozing but that it wouldn’t be snoozing long.

Charole’s daybook entry

MERRY GLOBESTERS SET TO INVADE IRAN

I thought the latest news deserved headlines. Yessir, cowpokes and cowpokettes, they’re rioting in the streets in Iran, and

Pete, after conferring with the shadowy figures at the end of a telex line in London, has decided to institute Operation Redneck. Tim and Mary will reconnoitre with us in Kabul after they finish their surveillance mission into hostile territory with only their wits & bravado to keep them company in their quest for the perfect cup of chai and the perfect slice of baklava. (Highly suspect, that, since Suzie’s rumour mill has informed us that in actuality they’re leaving us because they can no longer stand listening to Mick Jagger singing “Some Girls” three times a day. Though this rumour, as with many others, might have been started just to stick a bone in a certain someone’s craw.) As for the rest of us, we’ve been told to keep what you call your basic low profile, which, translated, means no excess hell-raisin’, dope smokin’ & family feudin’. The plan is to sneak up on that border and impress those Savak troopers with our pressed Sears slacks and slicked back hair. Oh, late flash. Pete just got word from the head command that some of our Taurus kin are holed up in a Tehran hotel and if they can, they’re going to meet up with us in some town called Gorgan, and we’re going to make like a convoy across the rest of Iran. Stand by for further developments.

Mick

Dave just phoned me up and told me he had something he wanted me to see. Click, little TV in my left pupil dilates into blue. Below the sky, Teach and Tim, walking around these caves at a place called Cappadocia that Pete took us out to have a look at when we were in Urgup. Teach was crying. Likely something to do with the paintings on the cave walls. Moslem graffiti. Big Xs scratched into the eyes of those guys at the Last Supper, and Jesus on the cross, Mary at his feet. But Dave says that wasn’t all she was crying about. She was crying about Iran, and the fact that one of the reasons they’d come on the trip was because Teach’s father worked for Gulf in Iran and her mother worked in the American Embassy in Tehran. She hadn’t seen them in nine years, according to Dave. So they were talking about what they were going to do, and basically what Teach was saying was that she couldn’t come this far and this close without seeing her parents. Tim was wearing sunglasses, even though it was a cloudy day and they were in a cave. He didn’t say much, just held her as she cried. Dave says he wasn’t too happy about the idea of going to Tehran without the metal of the bus’s walls between them and the revolution. Dave says Tim started out on the trip with a certain attitude towards the idea of travelling on the bus but by the time we got to Urgup that attitude had Hip-flopped.

When we got back from Cappadocia, Pete told us to stay put on the bus. He went inside the hotel and came back a few minutes later. The telex wire was down, he said. So we’ve got to make this decision now on the little we know, and so he called a secret ballot. New rules. Majority rule. And passed around Patrick’s hat. I voted to go through. He counted up the votes himself and then said, “Okay, most of you voted to go through.”

Which was a lie, according to Dave. According to Dave, only me and Rockstar and Patrick and Kelly voted to go through, and Pete, of course. Charole talked Jenkins into casting a no vote. Which should’ve made it maybe a tie, and I would’ve called a recount, just to bug Pete if nothing else, but like I said, I voted to go through.

Anyway. That kind of got the bus buzzing for a minute or two. I remember this thrill running up and down my spine like a mouse on speed. This was going to be like the movies, I thought. A chance for some non-stop action. It all seemed just a little unreal. Like Christmas in March. While the buzz was going on, Tim and Teach were talking to Pete and a few minutes later they disappeared into the hotel.

Not a hell of a lot happened after that. Everybody kind of disappeared into their rooms and didn’t come out until suppertime. After supper the generator blew and Patrick got this great idea to write out our last wills and testaments. This was in the lounge, with candlelight bouncing off that suit of armour in the corner. That really cheered everyone up. It caused Teach to have another little crying jag and head for her room, Tim in tow. Just the same, Patrick got out the daybook and passed it around, and those of us who didn’t have our last will made up and in a vault somewhere actually wrote a few things down. Jenkins willed his cowboy boots to any feet that fit them. Rockstar willed his body to anybody who wanted to eat it.* I willed my paranoia to Kelly and Lucille to B.B. King.

The next morning, real early, when the rest of us were already on the bus, Tim and Teach came walking down the steps with two suitcases. There was a sad slouch to their walk, like the air was heavy. Pete put one suitcase in the undercarriage. Tim kept the other one. Then they both got on board. Teach went and sat next to Kelly and Charole while Pete put the bus in gear. He drove us all down to the bus station. The idea was to meet up with them again in either Herat or Kabul. Dave says that Pete also gave them the name of the hotel in Tehran where another Taurus Tours bus was holed up, according to one of the telexes Pete got, and that there was a chance they could join that group. At the bus station, Teach gave Kelly and Charole a couple hugs and then Teach came up to me and said that she’d heard my tooth was hurting and she gave me a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of extra-strength Nytol to help me sleep. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot.

“Gee, thanks, uh, Mary,” I said.

It was real nice of her.

I asked her if she was sure she didn’t need them.

She said she was certain she wouldn’t have much need for sleep.

I’m not sure what she meant by that.

I wanted to tell her to take it easy and be real careful in Iran but somehow it never came out. Then she turned around and walked away, and suddenly her and Tim were gone, sucked in by the bus station.

It was a real quiet bus ride to Sivas. Except for when Patrick got pissed off at Rockstar for drinking some of his raki.

“You one-ball wonder,” said Patrick. “I was saving that for Mick’s tooth.”

Rockstar didn’t say anything. He just looked at Suzie. Suzie had to hear this, she was sitting right in front of Patrick. And I could see her kind of freeze. But she kept her eyes glued to
The Women’s Room.
And then Rockstar did a funny thing. He came back to where I was sitting and handed me the bottle

*Mick is mistaken here. See following section.
—
D.W.

236

of raki, didn’t say a thing, and then he climbed up into the back of the tent cage and stayed there, staring out the back window, all the way to Sivas. Or was it Erzurum? Right, Dave. Sivas.

I drank a lot of raki on the way to Sivas. Sad little town, Sivas.

from the daybook

The Last Wills and Testaments of Certain Merry Globesters, Embarked as They Are Upon the Great Indian Trek

I, Patrick Ignatieff, being of fairly sound mind, given the glass of Buzbag in my hand, do submit my final will and testament, having wrestled dutifully with this body’s loathsome mortality vis-a-vis the inauspicious vicissitudes of our present situation. Ergo, I bequeath everything I own to the meek and the mild, and Melinda Dillon.

I, Charole Anchorage, being of sound mind (I think) but a less than sound body, bequeath my open plane ticket to Kelly Winter and my cast to Suzie, who will appreciate the graffiti on it.*

I, Kelly Winter, bequeath the stained glass, Colville’s
Moon and Cow,
all the candles, the ratty sofa, in fact, everything, to Charole Anchorage. Everything except my Snoopy pyjamas. Heaven might be chilly.

Anybody who has size 11 feet can have my boots, and Mick can have my sleeping bag, just in case he loses his again. Charole can have my sleeve and whatever’s on it. (achoo... damn cold) F.J.

Boo. Boo, boo! Boo boo boo! Mum can have my corps [sic] just in case she gets hungry in her old age.
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