Last India Overland (45 page)

Dave went to our room, Patrick was there, reading something. Feeling better, Mr. McPherson? he says. Dave says yeah, and then asks if he could borrow some money. Patrick says certainly, no hesitation, shells out a hundred Afghanis. Soon after that, Dave closes his eyes, and Patrick’s snoring comes rasping over the TV speakers. I change channels. Find Charole getting undressed, Kelly in bed behind her, Suzie saying, from somewhere I can’t see, “Rob says he’s going to wait until we’re in Kathmandu before he kills me because he might get kicked off the bus if he does it before.”

“That shows that he’s capable of thinking things through to a logical conclusion at least,” says Kelly. They disappear from sight. Suddenly I’m looking at a breast, and Dana’s weird fingertips pulling at a hair on the edge of her nipple. A little curly hair. A couple tries and finally she gets it. I’m somehow in Dana’s head. So that’s where Dave went when the phone was busy. Then Charole’s walking to the door, naked except for her blue panties, pulled up high on her hips, kind of a French look, I guess. Then darkness. “Another day gone,” says Kelly’s voice from the speaker. “And another day coming,” says Dana’s voice. Then nothing. I switch channels. I get “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Elly Mae pushing Jethro into the pool. Another channel. The news in some foreign language, people getting shot in Esfahan. Another channel, static, another has a test pattern, I finally turn it off, pick up that Les Paul, play all night, and when I turn on the TV again, I don’t know after how long, the room didn’t have a clock, we’re on the bus, and I’m looking at miles of desert. Strange mystical mountain out in the middle of nowhere, shimmering in the air like that piano chord from “A Day in the Life.” Camel caravans, more women in chadris, lots of hooked noses. This incredible blue sky, like Saskatchewan sky, the vault of heaven that can’t ever be busted open, not by sinners like me. I should’ve got religion. Should’ve been a Moonie. Hasheeba kicked drugs. Should’ve listened to her. I flip through the channels, get an episode of “The Honeymooners,” I watch that, I’d missed TV on the trip. When I switch back, Dylan’s singing “Senor” on the way into Kandahar. Love that song. I think Dylan must’ve wrote it when he was making
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
with Peckinpah. Has that same Mexican feel. Maybe Peckinpah cut it from the movie. I picked up the Les Paul and played along until Pete pulled up in front of the hotel we had in Kandahar. Lousy hotel from the look of it. Broken windows and desperadoes staring at us from the chai shop as we all file past. Smoking opium pipes and staring at us while we walk through to the room that Pete gives us, that was Kandahar, and it’s just like back in (jrgup when the lights go out about an hour after sunset, and I think that’s the only reason that Pete pays us a visit, we’re all in one room, something about rapists, town’s full of rapists, and zip your bags up tight, Afghanis don’t believe in fumigation. Also him and Charole they’re on the outs, I picked up on that, because she wasn’t staying in Pete’s room that night either. Pete had a hard time hanging onto women and I sensed some tension in the room when he showed up, mainly coming from Charole and Dana. Some coming from Suzie, Rockstar nowhere. Pete with a flashlight. Patrick looking hilarious in Kelly’s glasses, Kelly looking like a hoot owl. Rockstar sank his heel into Patrick’s glasses, did I mention that? Kelly rented hers to him, an Afghani an hour, whatever that is, not much. Dana was in good spirits, though. No more belly spasms. Her idea to have another little shadow show with the flashlight, since the conversation wasn’t moving along too crisp. Suzie came up with a chicken head that said bloody old rooster over and over. Bloody old rooster is so hard up, has to use his beak to speak and leak, I think that’s what she said. Dana’s cow head complaining about how there wasn’t any moon to jump over, nobody’s moon at all while Kelly’s horse head went into some weird mumbo jumbo about a heart missing a sweet Pegasus but it was Patrick’s cat’s head that got my attention. It was saying I’ll get you I’ll get you I’ll get you a diamond ring if only you will sing but Dave can’t sing worth a damn, but Patrick did lend him that money, so there’s this knock on the door, I open it up, and there’s a swimming pool there, I dive in, and when I surface, I can feel my ribs hurting, my tooth hurting, and Kelly’s handing me Lucille. Come on, troubadour, she says with a smile. But only if you’re feeling up to it. And so I took the hint and took Lucille and sang Loudon Wainwright’s “Dead Skunk.” Afterwards Patrick offers me some tea for my services, tells me it was opium tea, I knock lots back, because I’m feeling weird and thirsty. Things turn strange, pain goes away and I feel real tired. Not as tired as now though.

And when the flashlight’s gone and only a candle is flickering, Kelly talking to Patrick in low tones about his palms, heartline and lifeline, I sack out on one of those cots, mean cot, springs and teeth, and I close my eyes and when I open them there’s a rat sitting on my chest, pink eyes full of flame and I can’t speak can’t move too stoned and so I close my eyes and husde on down to the wharf where I phone up Dave and say hey Dave didn’t you used to be a cat in a past life and he says yeah and so I say well I got just the life for you right now, it was the least I could do. And when I got off that wharf I took a dive in the ocean and found this big black boat with a big white pillow in it and I curled up inside its feathers and went to sleep.*

’At this point, Mick’s handwriting began to deteriorate, and became harder to read.
—
D. W.

Nov. 26

I read a book somewhere that said the best cookie store in the world was the American cookie store in Kandahar. Naturally the Pastry Club had to check this out. It was a disappointment. Maybe it’s a bad year for cookies. Maybe it’s a bad year for Americans.

Nobody can say Pete doesn’t have his finger on the pulse of what turns us on. This afternoon, after a street by street search for missing Merry Globesters (they weren’t in Martyr’s Square, they weren’t trying to take a peek at Mohammed’s cloak), Pete took us to see a buzkashi game. I know it was right up my alley. Football always struck me as a game for wimps, you know. Boring. This is more like it. Guys on horseback playing polo with a calf’s headless body. A great excuse to mutilate your fellow man as far as I could see. They should start up a buzkashi league in Canada and the States.

Seriously, I was a little shocked, myself. So was Charole. One of her favourite times of the year, she said, “back home in Montana,” was when the newborn calves started dotting the various pastures. Sounds idyllic. But anything to do with home, these days, sounds idyllic.

Anyway, now we’re back at the Mowafaq. (Is this a hotel chain or what?) We like this place so much that we don’t want to leave. Why don’t we stay a week, Pete? I just loved waking up this morning and finding a dead rat lying on Mick’s chest. A real eye-opener, that, better than caffeine in the morning. Still, maybe it was just what the doctor ordered. Maybe dead rats are a cure-all, here in Afghanistan. Seeing is believing. Mick is up and about all of a sudden, as limber as ever. It’s amazing how effective home remedies in these ancient civilizations can be.

from Kelly’s diary

Nov. 27

M. spent the day with D. yesterday, I spent the day with Pat. This bus is like a high school: not much changes after the

graduation. We still play the old games, the ones with the emotions as markers. You make me jealous, I’ll make you jealous & we’ll dance around the green-eyed monster that might’ve been our love. We’re off to a late start this morning. Small perfect prisms are dancing & floating all over the bus, & that should be enough to cheer me up, but M.’s sitting with D. & Pat. is sitting at the tables, all smug with himself: he thinks he’s going to get laid 1 of these nights. Just had an eventful loo-stop. S told Rob to take a picture of a chadried woman in black, hauling water from a well, & Rob did, & almost had his throat slit as a direct result. Rob thinks she did it on purpose & threatened to slice open her throat. Pete no longer makes much of an effort to hide his scowls when the loo-stop calls become too frequent.

Mick

When I woke up, Dana’s face was on the screen, saying something about a dead rat and how Pete wasn’t kidding about the hotel needing fumigators. She picked up this rat by its tail took it to the window turfed it out through one of the broken panes, real nonchalant. Kelly lying on her side in bed staring at Dana. What were you saying about the future, Dana says to Dave. Then the sides and knobs of the screen fade and melt away and she’s saying Mick? And Dave’s in my ear, saying say it won’t be fire that destroys the earth this time, as everyone is predicting. It will be water. I pass this on.

“Water?” says Dana. “You mean it’s going to rain again for forty days?”

I close my eyes, like I’m listening to something, which is exactly what I’m doing of course. Then I say, “After Turkey joins the Common Market so it becomes what they called the ten-headed dragon in the Bible, a pope’ll be shot, a president and rock star too, but the pope and president will survive and he’ll kill Gadhafi’s daughter and then the Americans will shoot down an Iranian plane and then there’ll be a few years of peace, thanks to the Russians. They’ll even dismantle a few warheads, but then Shi’ite terrorists are going to bomb a nuclear station on the San Andreas Fault and that’ll cause a quake that’ll destroy both coasts and cause a dust cloud that’ll change the weather for twenty years. There’ll be a worldwide drought and the water supply will be poisoned by radiation and pure water will be worth more than gold and after that things will get nasty. Some sex disease is going to kill a quarter of the world’s population and the Mount of Olives will be split in two. Jerusalem will get hit by a quake. There’s going to be some kind of world ruler. Everyone’s going to have a Chargex number on their hand and if they don’t they’ll starve. A few million people will suddenly disappear up into the air and down into the Bermuda Triangle and all the fish in the oceans will die and then the economic system’s going to fail and then the bombs will start falling. The only survivors will be people high in the mountains, like in the Andes and the Alps and the Himalayas and some place called Cripple Creek, Colorado.”

By this time, Kelly was sitting up in bed and she had her glasses on.

I’d said all this real fast, and in a way I think it was Dave talking. He says it was. In a way. He’d got onto my delta wave,
²²
he said, and rode it for a while.

Kelly said, “How long is all this going to take?”

But Dave had hung up. So I said, oh, maybe thirty years. Because I didn’t want to depress anybody so early in the morning.

Dana said to Kelly, “He can sure shoot a wonderful line of bullshit, can’t he?”

Kelly nodded her head. “He certainly can,” she said.

I let it pass. I was hungry and feeling stiff. I got up and stretched and said, “So what’s on the agenda today?”

“I’m going to go find some aspirin somewhere,” said Dana. “I’m all out.”

“Hey, I could use some of that too,” I said.

Well this is depressing. About half an hour ago the guy across the hall hacked up his lunch and died, just like that. Kind of a bummer. Really put Soon in a bad mood. She kind of snapped at me when I asked her if she knew the guy from before. I think she maybe knew the guy. Maybe they went to school together. He was about her age. Dave says she did. Didn’t know a lick of English but he seemed like a nice guy. Dave says I’ll have to mourn him later. Good old heartless Dave. Daylight’s burning, he says.

Okay. So Dana asked Kelly if she wanted to come with us but she said no thanks.

So we’re talking about great concerts we’d seen as we shuffle down Kandahar’s main street. This after Pete had taken us out to see a weird game where a bunch of Afghanis rode around on horses and played polo with this headless calf s body. But everything seemed weird to me by this time.

Dana said she’d seen the Eagles once in a small club, that was her favourite concert, and actually my favourite concert was in a bar, Bim was playing, I really like Bim. Short little guy with glasses twice as thick as Kelly’s, a harelip, and he makes this great music, twitching his legs as if he’s on strings, some kind of marionette. Dana had never heard of him. I think it’s his name that does him in. Schoolyard name. He should change it.

Anyway it didn’t take me and Dana long to find a drug pusher.

We were looking at these Afghanis making bread in a small stone oven, and this young girl was handing us both a slice when this voice behind us says, “Yeah, that’s real good bread. Best bread in town, right here.”

It was an American voice. Washington State. I’d heard the accent before.

We turn around.

It’s an American albino dwarf, in the flesh, so to speak. Maybe four feet tall with a boot-shaped face full of zits and a boil on the tip of his nose. Sorriest excuse for a human being I’d seen since Freddy Freak.

He’s wearing this serape and torn jeans and worn-out moccasins. Had a leg brace on his left leg.

I take a bite of the bread. Soft and warm. “Not bad,” I say.

Turns out he comes from a town called Wilbur, up in the Cascades. I’d been there with the old man. Weird place. There’s all these lava flows. It’s like a moonscape.

We tell him where we’re from, etc. and it was just a matter of time before he got to the point, and we say, yeah, we might be interested in some drugs.

“Yeah, like which ones?” he says.

“Aspirin,” I say. “292s.”

He looks disappointed. “Hey, man, heavy doper.”