Last India Overland (8 page)

Patrick looked around at the rest of us. “I do believe we have just witnessed an infatuation in full bloom,” he said.

“That’s what it looked like to me,” said Jenkins. “It’s a real heart-warming thing to see, isn’t it?”

Patrick let out a snort. “I’m sure they deserve each other,” he said. He looked at me. “What do you think, Mr. McPherson?” he said. “You’re the expert on Ms. Byrnes. I heard that was quite a frolic you were engaged in last night.” “Yeah?” I said. “Who’d you hear that from?”

“The proverbial minuscule feathered creature who is known, upon occasion,” he said, “to take flight.”

“This little creature wouldn’t have been bullshitting you by any chance now, would he?” I said.

Patrick grinned that grin of his that made him look like

Sneezy. “Anything’s possible,” he said. “Only the future will tell how reliable the source was.”

“Well, there you go,” I said, and I signalled the waitress for another round.

WEST GERMANY Heidelberg—Munich

Day 3

Departure: 8:00 a.m. 240 mile Route: Karlsruhe—Stuttgart—Ulm

Camp: Campingplatz Munchen-Thalkirchen; tel.: 89/723 1707.

Directions: From end of motorway (roundabout), keep straight, but then veer off towards the left when you get to Veridstrasse. Turn absolutely right on 4th St. (major intersection). Meyer Beer Strasse next, then two more clicks and then a left, just past the rail overpass, onto Landsberger Strasse. Take a right on Furstenreider. Eight clicks to a T-junction. Left from Boschetsreider onto Wolfratshauser Strasse and then straight down to a right on Greinerberg and then another right towards Thalkirchen Bridge. 1st right after crossing the railway, camp’s on the left.
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Points: 1. Munich’s the third largest town in Germany and the capital of Bavaria. Those gravel banks belong to the Isar River. The name means “home of the monks.” Has a pop. of about 840 thou. Hank the Lion
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founded the place around about 1157. Lou the Bavarian expanded the town, made it rich, a prosperity which lasted up until the Thirty Years War. It wasn’t the last war the town was going to see. Half the town was destroyed in the Second World War. You’ll have to take them to the Hofbrauhaus, the pub where Hitler ranted and raved. Get them started on a beer drinking contest. That’ll loosen them up. Take them out to the Olympic Games site but don’t be maudlin and show them where the Israelis got mowed down at the airport. Show them the BMW Museum and maybe the Oktoberfest grounds, if you get in early. You can maybe tell them that twenty-five thousand beer mugs get stolen each year from Oktoberfest, which some say is a conservative estimate. What else? Well, they’ll appreciate a trip downtown to the Marienplatz, which is as good a place as any to stock up on essentials (the town has one of the biggest turnovers in fruits and vegetables in the country and there’s more than one brewery on the outskirts), depending, of course, on where the mark’s at. The Deutsches Museum is interesting, and you can take them on a drive through the old town, if anyone’s into baroque and rococo.

from Kelly’s diary

Oct. 13

Stranded on the shoulder of a dirt road somewhere in the boonies of Bordeaux & Bardot, where we wait for Godot, preferably with wheels & lacking in sexual perversion. C & I have decided that somehow this is all F.’s fault. Outside of Paris this morning (no time for the Mona Lisa or the Eiffel Tower) we caught a ride in a Volvo. Decent looking character behind the wheel, I thought, professor type. Abba on the tape deck. Closed my eyes in the back seat until C’s shriek opened them up. Our decent looking, professor type had unzipped himself. My opinion: C. should’ve kept her shriek to herself & enjoyed the show until we got to the nearest town. An opinion I haven’t bothered to share with her. As it is, the sun and her silent rage are pummelling my skull into citrus pulp. I’m thirsty. Knew I should’ve bought that wineskin in London.

Mick

The next day we drove the twelve-lane highway to Munich, every single lane chock full of V-dub bugs and Rabbits.

When we got into Munich, Pete picked up the mike and gave us the first language lesson of the trip. He went eins, zwei, hickle, fickle and told us how to say where’s the toilet, how much is the bill and where’s the beer in German.

I never ever paid a lot of attention to Pete’s language lessons. Like the old joke goes, I’m a cunning linguist, not a multilinguist.

After the language lesson, he gave us a little history spiel about Munich. How much of it got destroyed in the two world wars, how many Israelis got mowed down at the ’72 Olympics, how many beer mugs get stolen each year at Oktoberfest. He was always laying these little history spiels on us. At the beginning of the trip at least. But them and the language lessons got fewer and fewer the further east we went. He hardly told us anything about Iran or how to speak Farsi by the time we got to the Iranian border.

After the history spiel, he pulled up and stopped beside the Olympic Village, slammed open the doors and told us we had to be back at the bus in forty-five minutes. Anyone who wasn’t, he said, got left behind.

When me and Jenkins got off the bus together, Dana came up to us and asked if we’d mind if she tagged along.

Jenkins said no, not at all, it’d be a pleasure.

I was glad to have Jenkins along. He didn’t seem to get tongue-tied around Dana like I did. I couldn’t look at her without thinking about candles and soft saxophone music and kissing those full lips of hers, making them wet, they were a little bit chapped. Without thinking about easing the cork from a champagne bottle and easing the spaghetti straps of a sexy camisole down past her shoulders. Women have always had this effect on me since I was fourteen. I fell in love with Peggy dil-Schmidt when I was sixteen. But I didn’t talk to her until I was seventeen. I think the trouble with the world is that most of us don’t say what we think. What I wanted to ask Dana most was how did it feel to live inside a perfect female body. I wanted to ask her how she liked her sex, I mean rough and ready, or slow and gentle with lots of foreplay. I wanted to ask her how she lost her virginity and what was it like, the first time she was in love, all these things that you can’t find out until you actually get a person in bed.

One of my problems in my life is that I have a hard time getting across to women exactly how I feel about them. By the time I get around to it, it’s usually too late. I never told Peggy dil-Schmidt I loved her until she told me she wanted to call it quits. I think it has something to do with my mom and old man. The usual story. They were never around, and when they were around, they were usually giving me shit for something I did or didn’t do. It’s a sad story but it’s probably not a lot different than most people’s.

The thing about Soon is that I don’t have any trouble 47

talking to her at all. It’d be kind of neat if I fell in love with her. But she says she’s already involved.

The Olympic Village was like something out of a science fiction flick. There were needle towers and sway-backed stadiums and cube-shaped barracks. Jenkins and Dana took turns taking pictures of this and that, with me holding their Kodak and Instamatic every once in a while, and time just kind of blew past like your basic Tasmanian devil. We ended up being ten minutes late getting back to the bus.

Pete, who happened to come from Tasmania, according to Suzie, who did her best to find out what was up with everyone, was sitting behind the wheel, wearing a scowl like Travis Bickle’s.

“You guys can consider yourselves warned,” he said, as he slammed the doors shut behind us.

Pete, you see, had this thing about Dana, as it turned out. According to Suzie, there was this code between tour bus drivers. Unless they fucked the most beautiful woman on the bus by the time the destination rolled around, they had to chalk one up in their own personal Hall of Shame.

“How many warnings do we get, Pete?” I said.

“Not very damn many, mate,” he said.

“Well, that’s nice and specific,” I said.

Pete put the bus in gear and took off so fast that the three of us lurched into each other.

Which was okay as far as I was concerned.

When we got to the campground, Pete went into the office of the Campingplatz Munchen-Thalkirchen (see how good my memory is?) and got some mail. None for me. That was okay. I wasn’t expecting any. But even Rockstar got a letter. He marched up to the front of the bus and grabbed it out of Pete’s hand and turned around, said, “It’s from me mom!” Crowed’s more like it. And then he snapped open the buttons on his old army shirt, stuck out a belly whiter than Bruce the Shark’s and swaggered back down the aisle. I noticed, when he got close, little black pockmarks on his belly. Not many. But a few.

I looked at Tim and Teach. Teach’s face was white too. Looked like she’d just swallowed a live snail.

That night in our tent, I asked Rockstar where he got the pockmarks from.

“Me mom,” he said. “She used to use me for an ashtray sometimes.”

“Oh,” I said. “Real glad I asked.”

“Any time, Muck-hole,” he said. That’s the way he pronounced my name. Maybe it was just his Aussie accent. Maybe it was because I was the guy who first started calling him Rockstar.

Little while later his Li-lo started squeaking. Your basic unmistakable squeak. I was between Rockstar and Jenkins. On the other side of me, Jenkins let out a long sigh.

“So who’d you get mail from, Jenkins?” I said, just to cover up that noise, maybe stop it.

It stopped.

“My brother,” said Jenkins.

“Yeah?” I said. “How’s he doin’?”

“Not too good,” he said, in too loud a voice.

“Why’s that?”

“He’s got a lousy job.”

“What job’s that?”

“He’s one of the cowboys that has his thumb close to the red button in the missile silo near Great Falls.”

“Well, that should be an okay job.”

“It’s kind of boring. All those cowboys do is get stoned and play poker all day. It can get to you. So he says. Waiting for that phone call.”

I thought about that while I listened to Rockstar’s Li-lo start to squeak again, but slower.

“I suppose it would,” I said, finally.

Jenkins didn’t say anything back, and Rockstar’s Li-lo stopped squeaking. I said to myself, you know, you could be back in Kits right now, watching the first or second game of the World Series. I was thinking the Red Sox were probably in it. My old man was a big Red Sox fan. He was born in Boston. But I wasn’t back in Kits. Instead I was in Heidelberg, lying next to some guy with a mess on his stomach that he was probably scrubbing up with his sleeping bag. It made me feel real homesick.

Saturday, October 14

A, B, C . . . Yes. Susan’s right. It is my turn. But it’s tough being second because you don’t know if the person who led the way knew where he/she was going. So I’m going to take a chance and not spread malicious gossip and innuendo, and say, simply, that we’re in Munich, the cleanest city I’ve ever seen. You could eat Wiener schnitzel off the Marienplatz concrete. Guck! Da oben fliegt ein Vogel.
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Oh, tasty. And there’s music everywhere, buskers of all nationalities singing songs with their guitar cases open beside them, while fresh-faced blondes bounce past in their chiffon blouses and frilly skirts and tight, tight culottes. The guys love this city I’m sure. Patrick definitely does, by the looks of it. Two cases of German wine? Too bad we don’t have a fridge on board. Pete’s going to have to talk to the people at Taurus Tours about that.

For the record, yesterday we were in Heidelberg. That has to rate among the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen. Not that I’ve seen that many. But Halifax just doesn’t compare somehow. This afternoon we went to the Deutsches Museum. Technology bores and frightens me. Mick had the right idea. Get sozzled on wine instead. Then we saw Oktoberfest gardens. Too bad we didn’t show up here a couple of weeks earlier. And tonight we’re going to see what Saturday night is like at the Burgerbraukeller or the Hofbrauhaus or the Mathoser Beerhall, Pete still isn’t sure which. I’m sure he’ll make the right decision.

Mick

I’ve always been good at handing out nicknames. I gave Patrick his nickname too. Dr. Livingstone, I Presume. Couldn’t have done it without Rockstar, though, he helped. That first morning in Munich, Patrick was forking up some

of my ham and scrambled eggs and telling everyone at the table about this actor he knew back in Somerset who was hamming up Hamlet in such a ham-handed fashion that the audience started booing and when it got so bad that no one could hear his lines the actor finally turned to the audience and said, “What are you blaming me for, I didn’t write this shit.”

Then he looked at Teach. “Pardon mon Francais.”

Teach just nodded and said of course.

Nobody laughed at the joke. They only kind of smiled. Except Suzie. She didn’t even smile. She was mad at Patrick because he snored so loud and she made sure everyone knew it.

Just to change the subject, Patrick looked at me and said, “Please do not take this as a criticism, Mr. McPherson, but do you know in what regard this breakfast is sorely lacking?”

I said nope, what’s it lacking?

“A certain panache,” he said.

“Pancakes?” I said, even though I’d heard him right.