Last India Overland (66 page)

The one in the black and orange bikini caught me looking at her. She gave me a sweet, come on, cowboy, kind of smile.

Well I guess what it comes down to is that I should’ve listened to what the old man said. Stay away from hookers and bookies, son, they ain’t good for your health, that’s what he told me. The old man was an authority on both.

But I was kind of depressed when I got to Ko Samui, and so when that beautiful Thai girl (God doesn’t make them any more beautiful than he does in Thailand) walked up to me and offered me a bite of her mango and a munch on her cocoa leaves, well, I went for it.

Up close I could see she’d seen better days. She was maybe thirty-three. She had a stretchmark or two here and there. But she was still cute.

She was up front about what she was. She told me the Bangkok scene was rough, it was much better out here on Ko Samui, where it didn’t cost so much to live.

I told her I didn’t have any money and so she was wasting her time if that’s what she was after. She said that wasn’t what she was after. She just wanted to know where I was from.

“Vancouver,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “I was in Vancouver once.”

“Yeah?” I said.

She said yeah. She said it was a beautiful city. I didn’t ask her why she was there. She was probably with some GI from Seattle.

She said her name was Porntip and through that long hot afternoon we told each other our life stories and ate mango and chewed cocoa leaves, and when the sun went down and Chou still hadn’t shown up, I took Porntip up on her invitation to go somewhere and have some fun.

The somewhere turned out to be my thatch-hut and the fun was pretty much what you’d expect, except it wasn’t what I’d expected.

I’d never met a woman who knew so many kinky little tricks.

After the fourth go-around, I just drifted off into dreamland, and I was dreaming about that guy I killed in Kathmandu. It was like he was in the corner of the thatch-hut, squatting there staring at me with his one good eye. I thought you was my friend, Muckle, he was saying. And then he stood up, walked slow towards me, and I woke up. And someone was coming towards me, a shadow against that blue Ko Samui sky. But it wasn’t Rockstar, it was Chow Bone Chew.

He was saying, come on, move, man, it’s going down.

Porntip was nowhere around.

It should’ve occurred to me to check my wallet and this moneybelt I’d picked up in Kathmandu. But it didn’t. My mind was too fuzzy.

Me and Chou drove down a narrow jungle trail for something like five miles until we got to this small opium den in the middle of the jungle which was surrounded by high bamboo walls. There was a guy standing guard with a machete in his belt and what looked like a Luger in his holster. Inside the opium den were three old guys who all looked like they belonged in a horror flick.
Fu Manchu Meets the Mummy,
something like that. I guess Rice-Eater, that buddy of mine back in Vancouver, was a nephew of theirs or something. I could kind of see the resemblance.

One of these old guys could speak a little bit of English and he wanted to know about Rice-Eater so I told him that he was going to make the cover of
Rolling Stone
any month now. Ace plays a mean bass. And these guys were good hosts. Or at least I thought so. They brought out a bowl of this white stuff and gave me a rolled up baht. I had a few snorts. And whatever it was, I thought it was coke, made my gum feel lots better. Made that tooth shrapnel in my gum feel like marshmallow fluff. Made my cracked ribs feel like soft goose feathers.

How I got that shrapnel in my gum and those cracked ribs is something I’ll get to in detail later.

Then everyone disappeared for a conference outside. I had a few more snorts. Maybe quite a few. One of the old guys seemed upset when they walked back inside and saw me down on my knees like a good little acolyte. All of a sudden they wanted to see the colour of my money. So I took out my wallet. And I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when I saw it was empty. And that the moneybelt was empty too.

I really shouldn’t have laughed though. That was a mistake. Because there’s nothing funny about an empty wallet, especially to a few bloodthirsty dope dealers. Bloodthirsty dope dealers don’t have much in the way of a sense of a humour, that’s one thing I’ve learned in life.

The next few minutes were kind of confused. I tried to explain what had happened but I was too high to make much sense, I guess, because all of a sudden I’m knocked to the ground and there’s this machete flashing through the air. Next thing I know my right hand is lying in the dirt, looking kind of silly, and there’s blood spurting all over the place. It was like a bad malaria nightmare. I thought I’d wake up from it. But I didn’t. Instead I blacked out, and when I opened my eyes, there’s sunlight in my eyes, morning sunlight, and there’s a nurse taking a thermometer out of my mouth. She’s cute as the dickens. She was smiling at me and wishing me a happy new year.

Afterword

On September 3, 1979, I got a postcard from Charole. On the front of the postcard was San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The message was simple: could I please pick her up at the Billings Airport at 2:37 on the 7th.

It was great to see her standing there waiting for her luggage by the carousel.

While we waited for her luggage, we traded the usual pleasantries and then I asked her about Kelly and the Firewalk.

Charole said, “She actually walked it.”

“She did?” I said.

“She did,” she said.

I grabbed her backpack and suitcase and we walked out towards my ’76 Chevette. The ’Vette, I called it.

We walked in silence for a moment or two.

“And now where is she?” I asked.

“She went back to Nagarkot. She met some guy there named Shamkar. The day before I left, this was in Bangkok, they went to see a doctor. Kelly’s pregnant.”

I took this in stride.

“Wonderful,” I said.

I asked what this Shamkar was like, after the luggage was stowed in the hatchback and I was behind the wheel.

“He’s okay,” said Charole. “A little lost in the stars maybe.”

I asked what the Firewalk was like.

Charole didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Well, it was scary at first. Actually I expected a pit of flaming fire but it was only a shallow pit of coals about seven by four feet. The coals were white hot, but Shamkar, he was there too, he’d done it before, he told her that all she had to do was think of the coals as ice cubes and keep her attention focussed on the sky just slightly above her normal line of vision and don’t walk slow, don’t walk fast, just walk normal, and she’d be fine. And he was right.” There was a slight pause. Then she looked at me, as I opened the car door for her. “It looked easy,” she said, “so I tried it too.”

“Really?”

She smiled. “Holding Kelly’s hand, of course.”

Then she said, “Can we go somewhere and eat? I’m dying for a pizza.”

I’ve since seen Charole do the Firewalk in person, by herself, at a psychic fair that came through Billings in the fall of 1986.

She made it look very simple.

Charole told me Shamkar and Kelly were married in the spring of 1979. According to a recent letter from Kelly, they now have two children, Michael and Francine.

Charole is now married to a rancher from Livingstone and working in the Bank of America in Great Falls.

She says she still thinks about Frank a lot, and wishes that things had turned out differently, that she’d handled things differently.

As for me, I’m married too.

When I finally got the book typed up, I took it up to Vancouver to show Hasheeba.

This was in 1982.

Her feeling was that she’d prefer not to see the book published until after her mother, who was quite ill at the time, died. She feared she might find the book, and read it, and be hurt by it. As it was, Hasheeba had told her that Mick was still alive and living happily with some girl on an island called Ko Samui. An island that doesn’t have a phone and post office.

Hasheeba felt that it wasn’t a complete lie. She thinks there’s a very good chance that Mick is still alive. She told me Mick was always making up lies when he was young, and playing tricks on her by playing dead.

“Charole didn’t see his body, did she?”

I said, “No, apparently not. Just his ashes.”

“He doesn’t want to pay his taxes, that’s all,” she said. “He likes that island and he likes that nurse. If I was him I’d stay there too.”

I know I liked Vancouver and I definitely liked Hasheeba. She’s quirky and has a wonderful sense of humour. She likes to live out on the edge of things.

A little like Mick.

I ended up living in Vancouver for a year, until my visa expired. About the same time that Hasheeba’s mother died.

Hasheeba came down and lived with me in Billings for six months, but she didn’t care much for Montana.

The day before she was going to leave, I asked her to marry

me. She said yes. Then she asked me if I’d mind moving back to her old hometown. Regina, Saskatchewan. She said she went to a psychic once and he told her an earthquake was going to devastate the whole west coast in 1991.

Mick’s prediction that Moslem terrorists would one day bomb nuclear installations on the San Andreas Fault also may have influenced her decision not to return to the west coast.

I told her I’d be happy to follow her wherever she wanted to go.

“Even Ko Samui?” she said.

“Even Ko Samui,” I said.

Ko Samui isn’t that far from Nepal. I would kind of like to see Kelly again.

So here we are, in Regina, Saskatchewan. A few hundred miles north of my old friends, my old haunts. It’s not the prettiest city in the world, but the air is fresh and it is sitting on solid tectonic plates.

Craig Grant

Craig Grant entered this particular incarnation a few minutes south of the forty-ninth parallel, near one hundred and seven degrees west longitude in south-western Saskatchewan. He was first published in
Archie
comics at the age of six. Since then Craig has published poetry and fiction in several journals,
Grain, The New Quarterly, Western People, CVII
and
Canadian Fiction Magazine.
Several of his poems have also been aired on CBC Radio’s
Ambience
and others have been published in the anthologies
New Poems From Saskatchewan
(1979) and
Blue Streak in a Dry Year
(1980). Excerpts from
The Last India Overland
have appeared in
Grain
(1981) and
The New Quarterly
(1983). Craig has been the recipient of two Saskatchewan Writers Guild Awards for poetry (1982 and 1986) and one for short fiction (1987). He has been awarded writing grants from the City of Regina, The Ontario Arts Council and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.

Craig read
On The Road
by Jack Kerouac while attending the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. That book, more than any other, was likely responsible for Craig finding himself, five months after graduating with a B.A. in English in 1978, on the last tour bus to go through Iran, before that country closed its borders to western traffic.

1

I phoned up the local public health nurse and she informed me that this particular drug is hard on the liver and would have made Mick’s condition worse. According to the same public health nurse there is no treatment for hepatitis.
—
D.W.

When I first read this, I had some doubts about whether or not Mick was calling his powers of imagination into play. But I’ve since had the opportunity to meet his sister, Hasheeba, concerning the publishing of this manuscript, and she verified these details.

The gunmen were never apprehended.
—
D. W.

2

The diary was approximately five by seven inches with a stitched leather cover that had two humanoid grasshoppers on it, male and female, riding a bicycle. The pages inside were blue, one for each day. A mistake. I should
Ve
got one without the constriction of dates.
—
D.W.

3

Certain things Mick says, obviously, need to be taken with a grain of salt.

— D.W.

4

This was written in Kelly’s most minuscule scrawl. It took a good fifteen minutes to decipher it.
—
D. W.

Half lager, half lemonade: a shandy.
—
D.W.

This is from Peter Cohen’s travel binder, courtesy of Taurus Tours. It is not my intention to use every one of his notes, which were written, presumably, by a higher-up in the organization. I’ll just use the notes when I need a bridge from one section to the next, or if I found a note particularly interesting (as was often the case, once the trip got into Asia). I did try phoning Taurus Tours to find out who wrote the notes, and to give credit where credit is due. But I had no luck. The India Overland was its main tour package and thanks to events in Iran and Afghanistan, and because the number of tourists that had booked onto their 1978 trips was less than expected, that package was no longer feasible following the fall of 1978. So the company folded. This according to someone I contacted at Sunrise Tours, in London.
—
D.W.