Last India Overland (37 page)

Now that’s good thinking. She can have my corpse too, Rockstar. Best thing on it would be ketchup and pickles probably. Kelly can have my paranoia. Pete can have all my toenail clippings and I will Lucille to B.B. King.
¹⁸

I don’t think this is very bloody funny. My mum, Agnes Byrnes, in Rockhampton, can have everything I leave behind.*

(postcard: a picture of Urgiip on the front)

Urgiip, Turkey, Nov. 11

Dear Dex, As you’ve probably heard, Iran’s suffering a hit of indigestion these days. We’ve decided to go through, regardless. This is not meant to worry you. By the time you get this we will have made it (we won’t be stopping to see the sights) into Afghanistan safely. By now you should have received a telegram from me saying as much. We leave for Sivas at 7. I love you. Please don’t show this to Mom. Outta room, take care, K.
¹⁹

from Kelly’s diary

Nov. 12

Left Urgup at 7. We’ve voted to go thru Iran. Majority vote, that is. Despite the fact that a van of German tourists was blown up near Tabriz. Urgiip: saw caves with vandalized murals & a disco under construction. Mick doesn’t like the way I fraternize with Turkish males. How nice. He’s got possessive instincts. We’re in Sivas, a dirty city, the addled & the lame & the limbless walk the streets, staring. Mick, drunk on raki (he claims his tooth is hurting), says 1 of Somoza’s cousins must be mayor. In front of our hotel there’s a yawning hole in the street, pipes sticking out of the sides of the hole like severed arteries. I feel kind of hollow & at loose ends myself. Said goodbye to T & M this morning. Drove across a high plateau. S is upset because Pat. called R. a one-ball wonder. This morning before breakfast he caught her alone & told her he was going to kill her before the trip was over & so she better enjoy the scenery while she still can. I told her it was probably an empty threat but she should probably tell Pete about it. She said no way, he hasn’t even looked at her since she wrote those limericks on the bus windows back in Istanbul. It’s her bed. At lunch, C had lunch with me instead of Pete, she’s pissed off at him for not noticing the new sweater she bought in Urgiip.

Mick

Sivas was where I talked to Jenkins for the last time. In the flesh, I mean. He had a room with Kelly and I was sitting in there drinking with him. He was sitting on a chair and Kelly was drawing him. She had these three candles lit and the rest of the room was in this nice late afternoon twilight. Kelly was talking about how political ideologies have deluded us into thinking that each person we meet is not necessarily a living, breathing and incomparably mysterious human being, that’s how she put it. She was talking about pagan religion and how the horned gods are the best gods because they have the right tools for probing the deep dark mysteries. She was talking about belief systems. “Belief systems,” said Jenkins, and he looked at me and grinned. “Is that what BS is short for?”

I laughed. Kelly laughed. Yeah, Jenkins was definitely starting to snap out of his funk.

I’ll always remember the way that Kelly looked at Jenkins with this expression full of affection. Jenkins was everybody’s kid brother.

Then Jenkins said, “Actually I guess I do have a belief system, kind of.”

“Yeah, what’s that, Jenkins?” I said.

“Well, it’s something my dad used to say back in the days when he used to curl.” For a moment there, a sad look crossed his face. Then he said, “This is back when I was ten or eleven and he was trying to teach me the game.”

“You’re a curler, Jenkins?” I said.

He looked at me. Shrugged. “Oh, yeah, I’ve curled a few games. There ain’t much else to do in Montana in the middle of January when the Alberta clipper is hanging out icicles on everyone’s noses.”

Kelly looked at him. “You’re a poet at heart, Frank, you know that, don’t you?”

He just laughed.

I said, “My old man used to bet on curling games.” Not bothering to mention that my old man once bet on whether or not a cat was in heat and used a thermometer to find out. “He won a thousand bucks on the Briar one winter.”

“Yeah?” said Jenkins.

I said yeah. This was just before Hasheeba’s sixteenth birthday. He bought her this real nice dress she had her eye on. The old man was a generous guy. Too generous, the old lady would always say. Always leaving twenty per cent tips in pizza joints, that kind of thing. I don’t think he liked the feel of money.

“I watched Frank curl once,” said Kelly.

“Yeah?” I said. “What’d you think?”

She said, “I thought it was a bit like watching paint dry.” She dabbed a little blue onto Jenkins’s jacket. I was sitting against a wall just off to the left of her so I could watch her paint.

“Yeah,” said Jenkins, “that’s what a lot of people say.”

Then Kelly said, “But I happen to like watching paint dry.”

And we all laughed.

That was a grotty little room we were in, in Sivas. But there was a nice feeling in that room. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t just feel that way because I’d been knocking back raki all day.

Kelly said, “So what did your father say to you about curling?”

Jenkins rubbed his cheek and said in this quiet voice, “Well, it was before my very first game, right after he showed me how to swing the rock up and come out of the hack. He said, ‘Son, curling’s a lot like life. Just like you gotta keep your nose clean, you gotta keep the ice clean, and you got to learn how to hit the rocks thin and roll behind cover.’ ”

That was nice. Kelly glanced over at me to see whether or not I’d picked up on it too.

“You get your poetic soul from your father, Frank,” she said, looking back at her painting.

After that we got into talking about dads and everything they ever said to us. A little hard work won’t hurt ya. Save your money, you might need it some day. I can’t follow you around for the rest of your life so use your head and stay out of trouble and don’t do anything to break your mother’s heart.

And maybe Dave did whisper in my ear something about not saying anything to spoil the good vibes, but I had to ask, I was curious.

Jenkins said, in this matter-of-fact voice, “No, he isn’t. He died that next winter. Coming home from a curling game. There’d been this freezing rain. He came over this hill and there was this big semi full of hay jack-knifed in the middle of the highway.”

Yeah, there’s no doubt about it, I spoiled the mood with that stupid question. Not that they held it against me or anything. Kelly kept painting. Jenkins just looked down and fiddled with the little Kodak he had hanging around his neck.

And I was almost relieved when Patrick and Dana and Charole and Suzie came knocking, wanting to know if anyone wanted to find some place to eat.

Kelly and Jenkins said no thanks, but I was hungry and so I went along and we found this pastry shop and everyone but me pigged out on coffee and donuts and baklava and when we got back to the hotel, Patrick said he had a bottle of raki in his room, if I was up for a game of backgammon.

And at that time I didn’t think much about that night, it was just another night on the Great Indian Trek, as Patrick called it, but now looking back on it, I wish I’d stayed in that little hotel room with Kelly and Jenkins and talked about all the things that mattered till morning came and it was time to hit the road again.

from Kelly’s diary

Nov. 13

Malaria Monday, windy Monday. The wind so strong it blew over the transit bus in front of us. But it wasn’t as bad as it looked: a pregnant woman was worried about the condition of her unborn baby & that was about it. She hitched a ride into Erzurum with us. Another sad industrial city full of smoke & the disenfranchised. M got off at the hospital as well, for reasons he wouldn’t mention, & when he finally got to the hotel, he was acting strange & sounding stranger. He’s in a very self-destructive frame of mind these days, drinking raki from morning onwards. He got into a weird conversation with D & C. about bastard children, how Marilyn Monroe was one, & how it was Bobby Kennedy who killed both her & Jimmy Hoffa because Hoffa was wire-tapping the “love nest,” & then he & D went somewhere. He is, as C says, an independent spirit. We went out as well, in search of food. Pete has warned us that we won’t be stopping at very many restaurants on the way through Iran, & so we walked, me & C. & Pete, until we found a pie & chai shop still open, pigged out on baklava, got to keep our energy levels up, said C., the 1st shot of sugar hitting her bloodstream, her pupils dilating, her cheeks going flush, a graceless smile gracing her lips, while P. told us what it was like diving for bodies in cars off the Tasmanian shore, how the bodies bloat up & some explode. When it came time for the bill, C. said, what’s the difference between a Turkish transit bus & Canuck tourists? Pete bit. Turkish transit buses tip. Pete laughed. Too much, I thought. C then spent the last of her Turkish lire on 4 doz. donuts, for what Pat. is calling the Iranian trail.

Mick

Soon asked me this morning if she could read my book. I asked her where she learned to read English. She said her sister married an American soldier, and he taught her and her sister, with the help of a few Ross McDonald novels. So I gave her the first fifty pages. When she brought them back, she gave me a funny look and asked me if I’d found any mushrooms. I told her no, I hadn’t got around to that. She said, well, her brother-in-law grows whole fields of them on the other side of the island, he has lots, if I’m interested, after I get out of the hospital.

I said great, it’s a date.

So things are looking up.

What’s the next town, Dave? Erzurum. Last town before the Iranian border. Dirty little city, a lot like Hamilton. On the way there, high wind. We were trucking along and right in front of us that fucking wind tipped this Turkish bus, piled high with furs and boxes, up on its wheels, right wheels, it teetered along for a long time, kind of like a racecar at the midway, before finally plunking itself down in the ditch.

Of course, Pete being the good Samaritan that he is, stopped, had a look-see. Good thing the windows in Turkish buses are mostly all cardboard, wasn’t much broken glass, no major injuries that I could see. Maybe one broken arm, says Dave, but the guy was in shock and didn’t realize it until after we’d left. We did end up giving this pregnant woman a ride into Erzurum. Pete sat her down right across from Dana. When the bus got back on the road, Dana moved back to the tables, had a game of backgammon with Patrick.

I knew I was drinking too much raki that day. Thanks to the tooth, thanks to the fact that I kind of missed Teach, the bus really wasn’t the same without her. But I knew what I was risking. And so I wasn’t surprised when I woke up from a nap I took in the Erzurum hotel, that I was scrunched down beside one of the filthier Turkish Delights I’d seen on the trip and Rockstar’s squatting right above me, looking like a pieeyed vulture, and he’s saying, “Hey, Muckle, you better get your bloody butt in gear, the bus’s leaving in five minutes.”

My head was throbbing, my tooth was throbbing and something furry with claws was ping-ponging back and forth in my stomach. I managed to get my pants down and my ass over that black hole and make like Nagasaki in the nick of time.

Rockstar was horrified.

“Christ, Muckle,” he said. “Sounded like you lost half your personality there.”

“Got any t.p.?” I said.

“None to spare,” he said. He’d backed off a good ten feet through the door.

“Don’t worry, I’ll pay you for it,” I said.

“How much?” he said.

“Whatever you want,” I said.

It was a dark way to start a day, squatting over a filthy shitter that’d been visited by a few people with worse aim than me. Haggling with Rockstar over the price of toilet paper.

We settled on fifty lire.

I didn’t have much time to get my act together. Faces swam

in from of me when I got on the bus, so I kept my eyes front and centre and made a beeline for the back seat, and I wasn’t there more than two minutes when Dana’s voice came knocking on my skull.

“Do you need some Lomotil?” she said.

“Probably,” I said.

She had two pills in her hand, a plastic glass of water.

I took the pills and water, said thanks.

She said, “And I want to thank you too.”

“For what?” I said.

“Just for putting things in perspective for me last night.”

“Yeah?” I said. “How so?”

“About baby and all.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “No problem.”

She smiled and touched my cheek. “Take it easy with the raki today, okay?”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

She floated out of view beyond the back of the seat in front of me, and I called up Dave.

So what’s new? I said to him.

He said not much. I asked him if he’d taken over the night before.

He said he had. And he said he would in the future, without hesitation, whenever I was kind enough to give him the opportunity.

I decided to let that pass. I just wanted to know what had happened.

He said not much. He said he’d laid my little psychic spiel on Dana, and told her it was just as well she’d had an abortion because the baby would’ve been born without a brain had it gone to term.