Last India Overland (6 page)

I remember Rob singing the lyrics to a few songs. The one I remember best was called “Adolph’s Love Song” and I remember Rob taking off, going to get even more Scotch and Glayva from the duty-free, and Patrick was telling me all about this international model he left behind in Somerset and I remember telling him some about Nancy Pickles and how I was sort of sorry to say goodbye to her because it wasn’t that often I’ve found a woman who actually got jealous over me. I remember Rob getting back with the booze with Jenkins in tow. And I remember it didn’t take the four of us too long to knock back the new bottles. And I remember that furrow of water stretching out behind the ferry. But I don’t remember chundering into the waves.

That’s what the Aussies call puking. Comes from the navy. Short for watch under.

I don’t remember getting off the ferry. Apparently it was Jenkins who helped me off. Don’t remember getting on another bus or driving into Bruges or Pete telling us to pick our tent mates or Rob sitting down beside me, asking me if I’d like to bunk in with him and Jenkins. This is what Jenkins said he said, and he said he should know since he was sitting right behind me when it happened. Or me saying yeah, sure, okay. Or helping to set up the tent. Or drinking for two hours in the camp cantina.

All I remember is waking up the next morning with my head throbbing like a jack hammer and my mouth drier than one of my mother’s breakfast martinis. With this naked female body beside me and this grey canvas twilight pounding down at me and this retch climbing up the back of my throat like a snake in heat.

I knew I had to move fast. I scrambled out of the sleeping bag and over to the tent flap. In the process, kneeing somebody in the stomach.

“Hey, what the bloody hell,” says a female voice with an Aussie accent. So that little question at the back of my mind is answered.

I get through the tent flap in the nick of time.

After that I go back inside, grab some clothes and head through this early morning mist that reminds me of Vancouver in early winter. Takes me a while to find a can. WC in big red letters above the door. Few minutes later I’m making like the Luftwaffe during the blitzkrieg and it’s not till I’m through that I notice there’s no toilet paper. So I decide to take a shower. Take off my clothes, turn the knobs. What comes out would freeze the nuts off R2-D2. But I know I don’t want to ride the bus all day with creeping underwear so I go for it and I must’ve turned bluer than B.B. King in the thirty-three seconds I was in there.

WEST GERMANY Bruges—Heidelberg

Day 2

Departure: 7:30 a.m.—9 hrs.; 560 km.

Camp: Heide; Ph. 06223/2111.

Points: 1. One thing you could point out, on the way out of town—in fact, you could drive across it—is the bridge over the River Reie, which gives Bruges its name. That castle in the near distance was built by Boudewijn, Count of Flanders in the ninth century. Yeah, you got it. Time to ease into the history. Things were fine in Bruges up until the fifteenth century, which is when the Zwin inlet silted up and made it difficult to trade with England. By the end of the sixteenth century the city was dead, almost. But then in 1895 a new harbour was built at Zeebrugge and a seven-mile canal was built, connecting the harbour to Bruges, and the city suddenly jumped off the table it was on, down in the morgue. And that’s all you probably need to say about Bruges.

2. My favourite town on the trip is Heidelberg. A nice romantic little university town at the head of Neckar Valley (or is it at the neck of Heider Valley?) where for some mysterious reason the beer always tastes better than anywhere else in the world. If by any chance you’re lucky and there’s a woman on board the bus who has grabbed your fancy, have a little chat with her while the sun goes down and you’re both gazing down at Heidelberg from one of the parapets of the Schloss Heidelberg. It works like a charm every time. The castle itself was begun in the thirteenth century by King Ruprecht III. Henry the Magnanimous built the beautiful early Renaissance wing in 1556 and the late Renaissance wing was added by Frederick IV in 1601. The castle’s been struck by lightning, attacked by the French, reduced to ruin and restored many times. The famous vat, down in the cellar, is 20 ft. high and 31 ft. long and holds 58,000 gallons, which would make for a decent New Year’s Eve party. The town’s famous university was a stronghold of Protestant learning back during the Reformation. The city got off lucky during World War II, suffering little damage. Pop. is about 117,000, most of whom live on or near the one long narrow street, the Hauptstrasse, which runs parallel to the River Neckar.

Mick

I had icicles hanging down my forehead when I made it back to camp, just in time to hear Pete explain to us how to take down tents and how we had to get our sleeping bags to the bus by five minutes before breakfast so Patrick could pack them. I managed to grab a cup of java and I sipped on that while me and Rob and Jenkins took down the tent, which was no problem since the old man and old lady used to drag me and Hasheeba on camping trips all the time when we were kids. Just the same, though, since me and Rob weren’t moving too swift, we were the last ones to get our tent to the bus.

Speaking of the bus, I guess I’d better describe it. It was a blue Mercedes Benz coach that had seats like the kind you’d find in a DC-9. It could’ve held about thirty people, I guess. Tent cage at the back, and a back door. Couple tables in the middle. In one of the front seats behind Pete there was a box full of books and another box full of cassettes, and the first thing I did when I got on the bus that morning was take a look through the cassettes while Pete pulled out of camp. There was about forty of them but the ones that caught my eye right off the bat were the new Stones,
Some Girls,
Dylan’s
Street Legal,
the new Neil Young,
Comes a Time,
all of which belonged to Jenkins, and a couple Bob Seger, the new one,
Stranger in Town,
and an old one, the one with “Goin’ to Kathmandu” on it. I took them up to Pete and asked him if he’d mind playing them, and he didn’t answer me. Instead he took the microphone out of its holster, cleared his throat, said, “Should tell you people about a little policy we have on the bus. I get to pick all the music that’s played. Except on those days when someone’s having a birthday, and then they get to pick the music. All day. And I was taking a look through the log this morning and I noticed that Susan Byrnes is turning thirty today—”

Suzie was sitting about five rows back, all by herself. “Thanks for broadcasting it out, mate,” she said.

Pete said sorry about that, and then he glanced at me. “So you’ll have to talk to her, mate.”

Well, that wasn’t the best news I ever heard, since I really wasn’t up for talking to Suzie.

But since I was kind of anxious to hear the new Stones, I 33

went back and sat across the aisle from Suzie. She pretended not to notice me. She was smoking a Craven Menthol and staring out the window.

Pete put the bus in gear and pulled out, so I said, “Well, looks like we’re on our way.”

She still didn’t look at me. “You got that one right, mate.” I took out my pack of Marleys and lit one up, and I noticed that Mary deLuca, who was sitting up ahead of me two seats, next to her husband, looked back at me and kind of wrinkled up her nose.

I said, “Listen, you wouldn’t mind asking Pete if he’d play these tapes, would you?”

Suzie looked at the tapes. “I hate that bloody Jagger,” she says. “Bloody stuck on himself. And I hate bloody Dylan too. And I’ve never heard of Neil Young.”

“I can tell we’re going to be real good buddies, here,” I said.

She gave me a long look. “You don’t even remember my name, do you?” she said.

I said, “Uh, well, as a matter of fact I do have this problem with—” And then I got this flash. Suzie. “Suzie, wasn’t it?” She nodded her head. “And you’re Mickers.” Kind of sarcastically.

“Well, Mick, actually,” I said. “You never heard of Neil Young? That’s real sad, Suzie. You haven’t really lived until you’ve sunk knee-deep in Neil Young angst.”

By this time we’re trucking through Bruges, an old city, like something out of the Middle Ages. I looked down this alley and saw an old woman sitting at a spinning wheel.

“Neil Young’s got the greatest voice in the world,” I said. “You gotta hear it. You’ll thank me for it.”

She finally gave in and said sure, she’d ask Pete to play it, just to get rid of me, likely. I could tell she wasn’t in a real communicative mood. She got up and asked Pete to plug Neil’s tape in and when she came back, she said, “Satisfied?” just as Neil was beginning to sing “Motorcycle Mama,” and I said yeah, great, thanks a lot, and she didn’t sit back down in her seat, she kept on walking down the aisle, all the way to the back, where she curled up on the long back seat in front of the tent cage. Which was fine by me. I lit up another Marley and leaned back and listened to Neil and watched the Belgian countryside roll past until Patrick tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I’d be interested in a little game of backgammon, and I said sure, and went back to the tables where he had a little backgammon board set up, and we played that until Pete got on the mike and said that it was so many clicks to Heidelberg and that we’d be stopping in Cologne for lunch, and then he held up a black book, the size and shape of your standard high school yearbook, and he said, “What you see here is the daybook. I think you people will find that there’ll be one or two things happen each day that you’ll want to get down on paper, kind of a record of the trip if you like. Best thing to do, I think, is for all of you to take turns alphabetically.

I put a list of all your names on the inside front cover so you’ll know what order to go in. B for Byrnes is first, so if you don’t mind taking the first turn, Susan, be much appreciated.” From the back seat I could hear Suzie groan. I guess she was a little hung over too.

“At the end of the trip,” said Pete, “we’ll have a little raffle and somebody will get to take the book home.”

Then he hung up the mike.

“Well,” said Patrick, “it shall behoove the would-be wordsmiths among us to come up with either superlative or egregious material for this tome, to make it a worthy keepsake. Don’t you agree, Mr. McPherson?”

I agreed with him and moved a checker. Eventually I won. Patrick said, “How would you feel about putting a wager on the next game, Mr. McPherson?”

“Mixed feelings,” I said.

“And why is that?” he said.

“Because,” I said, “you could be a shark, setting this poor little fishy up for the kill.”

Patrick let out a snort. “I’m afraid you overestimate my devious aspect, Mr. McPherson. A wager merely makes the game a trifle more interesting, that’s all.”

By the time we got to Cologne for lunch, Patrick had about fifteen of my American bucks in his pocket.

When we got downtown, Pete parked out beside a church that had been bombed in World War II and then he got on the mike and said that lunch committees would have stints of three days each and that me and Rob were the first lunch committee.

Well, if there’s one thing I am, it’s a good sandwich maker. Used to be, at least, when I had two hands. Just ask any of my old ex-flames. Nancy Pickles once told me that my tuna fish and cream cheese sandwich was so good that it made her wish she was born as two slices of magnolia rye so that her life would have some sort of ultimate meaning.

Just the same, it’s pretty hard to make a good sandwich when you don’t even have butter, mustard and pickles. When all you’ve got are rock-hard buns and salt and pepper, some lettuce, tomatoes and a sick looking Belgian cheese with green specks in it. Pete didn’t even have a jar of mayonnaise or margarine, and so I had no choice except to get a little heavy handed with the shakers, and that didn’t go over too well with a few people. Suzie threw her sandwich as far as she could throw it and Teach, that’s what we called Mary deLuca, after word got around that she used to be a teacher, had a sneezing fit. And well, yeah, maybe I did go too far. Even I was so thirsty after the sandwich that I poured myself a mug full of this stuff that Pete had in a plastic jug. It looked like thick lemonade. I knocked it back in one or two swallows. And immediately gagged it up. Tasted like sugar-sweetened STP. Turns out it was undiluted lime cordial. You’re supposed to mix it with five or six parts water. Suzie thought it was hilarious. So it didn’t take me long to make the daybook pages. Suzie took note and stuck my name on something she called the Blunder List. Right next to my name on the Chunder List.

Nope. Didn’t take long for me to make my mark at all.

Jenkins was nice enough to point out my mistake and pour some water into my lime cordial, and I was taking my first sip of the stuff and looking up at some birds flying around the church steeple, where you could easily tell the old bricks from the new bricks, when I sensed someone coming up behind me.

I turned around. It was Dana. The tall redhead.

“Are those peregrines?” she said, just as that lime cordial puckered up my taste buds. I knew I couldn’t swallow it, I had to spit it out.

“Excuse me,” I said, wiping my mouth.

“Rough night?” she said, smiling.

“Kind of,” I said.

“I’ve never seen anybody drink so much Scotch before,” she said.

“It’s a talent,” I said.

My mouth was suddenly way drier than it used to be. Dana was wearing a thin red blouse with spaghetti straps that day, and blue jean cut-offs, some sexy brown sandals. I must have some Italian blood in me. I love spaghetti straps.