Tinker and Blue (14 page)

23

Blue Cacophony had played during the early stages of the commune's house party, the performance taking most of those who had been invited by surprise. The living room where the band played stayed empty except for a curious few who visited, listened and left the domestic auditorium to join the swelling crowd in the kitchen. Blue Cacophony's music, Peter? reminded the band members, wasn't for everyone. Not yet, anyway. Only one fan was present throughout the group's performance, sitting on a legless couch, his hands tapping their odd sense of timing on his thighs while Blue Cacophony cut across the tradition of music like a chainsaw across a stand of pulp.

“When I heard you guys at the café,” the fan told Blue as the group was packing up its instruments to join the party, “it didn't make any sense. But I took a hit of acid tonight and wow, man, you were really great!”

The silence that had fallen upon the living room helped ease the congestion in the kitchen. Tinker and Blue formed a huddle in one corner of the room, watching the party unfold into clusters of meaningful chatter while the stereo screamed socially conscious lyrics in electric rhythms. San Francisco parties were nothing like those that had shaped their experience back home. Neither Tinker nor Blue knew how to find their way into them. It made them homesick.

Blue reached out and grabbed a long-haired stranger who passed too close to their section of wall, mumbling indistinguishable lyrics to himself.

“I was just reminding Tinker here of the party they had for us the night before we left Cape Breton. It was up at Port Ban. You should see this place. A neat little cove that you have to climb down a hundred feet to get to, with a great waterfall to wash off a hangover in the morning. No cops can get within a mile of the place without being seen.

“Must've been a hundred people there that night, and a trainload of booze. I'm not kidding about the trainload, either. That's how the liquor gets to our town, by train. It has to come that way. Only way to keep the town from sobering up, as the other fellow says....”

“I gotta go to the bathroom, man,” Blue's audience apologized, backing away.

Blue turned to Tinker to continue his story when a commotion in the kitchen distracted them both. Moving casually to explore it, they saw people milling around someone in army fatigues, but someone not spit-polished and precise enough to be an enlisted man. It was army surplus all the way up to the black tam. In the middle of a welcoming embrace from Capricorn, the newcomer in camouflage caught sight of Blue.

“How's my favourite redneck?”

“Hell, Cory, you can't even see my neck anymore,” Blue said, grabbing a fistful of the hair that hung to his shoulders now. “Got a band, too. Blue Cacophony. Were you reading about us?”

“Got yourself a one-armed fiddler and a music philosopher for a manager. Why couldn't you just burn your guitar like everybody else? When I heard you had a band I said that horse trader he told me about must have been his father. I'm coming around to hear you sometime. But the last time I saw you, you were driving down a Colorado mountain getting as far away from us as you could.”

“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, as the other fellow says,” Blue answered. “Cappi here told me you joined the Panthers,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of Capricorn. “What the hell happened up there, Cory?”

“The FBI came, busted us, took Tulip and me in. Kept us for a while and then let us go, but I came out of their office through a different door than I went in. I couldn't hang on to all that peace and love shit, knowing what I know.” The last remark was directed at Capricorn, testing his attitude. Capricorn's shrug was judgement free.

“What were you doing when the FBI came, Cory?” Blue asked.

“I was over by the horses.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I was just standing there scratching the mare's forehead and staring at the mountains, thinking about nothing. That was the best part of being up there, thinking about nothing.”

“So how many cops were there?” Blue probed.

“Three cars and a van.”

“What'd you think when you saw them?”

“I'll tell you this, you're asking more questions than them.”

“Just trying to get the story, Cory. When I met you, we were standing with the horses, remember? Since then the commune's been raided by the FBI and the cops, you and Tulip and the rest were arrested, the whole commune was burned down, they kept the two of you for a few days before they let you go, and now you're a Black Panther and you'll probably never see another horse again as long as you live. Sounds like a hell of a story. What were you thinking when you saw the cops? The story, man.”

“The first thing I did was walk the horses in the paddock so they could munch the grass, then started watching the raid. Then for a fraction of a second I actually thought it was a movie. Four brand-new police cars roaring into the commune on that rut of a road and our people running from one building to another like they were going to get away from it. Somebody even screamed. I thought about running to the woods. I was far enough away from the action to do it. Shit, I've been in the back seat of a police car more times than I can remember but I've never gone running scared through a forest. So I stuck with the devil I knew, scratching the mare's forehead, waiting for it to end. I guess I knew way down that it had to end sometime, the commune that is. We're just not allowed to get away from it, man. The Man just won't let us!

“Then I got scared, really scared. There was a dozen cops in flacks, armed to fight a real enemy. Then it struck me that these cops
really
thought we were dangerous. It's a joke down here in the city where there's usually somebody watching the pigs, but it was no joke up there. They had us cornered and if they fired every bullet they owned into us, no one would have ever known. They really are at war with us, Blue,” Cory said, pausing a moment to re-imagine it. “That's about it, I guess.”

“About it! Christ, Cory, the cops haven't even captured you yet. How'd that happen?”

“When things began to get still around the cabins one of the cops looked my way and saw me and the horses. Then they came at me, five of them coming in a slow semi-circle, aiming their guns and walking like they were crossing a minefield, sighting me down the barrels. Strange thing was I stopped being scared. They made me lay in the grass and one of them searched me while the other four rested their barrels all over me, one on my head, one on my neck, one on my kidneys and one on my balls. They weren't very happy that I didn't have a gun. Then they pushed me over with the rest.

“They wanted Capricorn. Especially that creep, Wise. They had to settle for Tulip and me. Tulip because she's his woman and me because I was black.”

Tulip let out a small chuckle that turned the kitchen's attention to her.

“When Bud Wise was questioning all of us he kept asking us why we had a nigger up there. A couple of the cops said they'd probably know what Cory was doing up there if they took off his pants. Then Wise turned to Cory and asked him if he was a Black Panther.

“‘I am now,' Cory told him, and that's when they arrested all of us. Wrecked the place first, though, looking for evidence. Couldn't find guns or drugs.”

“Couldn't see the forest for the trees, you mean,” Cory reminded Tulip. “They sniffed every pot in the place looking for drugs, even held a conference over a bag of oregano. They never noticed the field I led the horses into, and the horses getting hungrier and hungrier. The more they ate, the hungrier they got. These guys are standing around us with guns, talking tough about drugs, and Tulip and I look at each other and get giddy. I could see her shoulders shaking and she was looking at the ground and I knew that if she looked up at me again we weren't going to get out of there alive because the only way we'd have been able to stop laughing is if somebody shot us. Then everybody else caught on and started laughing.”

“The cops thought they had it figured out then. I heard one of them tell another that we were on drugs and had to be watched very carefully,” Tulip remembered. “When they didn't find any, they took whatever they could, food they didn't recognize, books to prove we were subversives, anything that looked suspicious to them.”

“Then they put us in different cars and took us to the station,” Cory added, “The feds were using the state police office down in the town. I didn't laugh much after that.”

“So when did they burn the commune?” Blue asked.

“A couple of days afterwards, wasn't it?” Cory said, turning to Capricorn for confirmation. “They made it impossible to go back.”

“Not impossible,” Capricorn corrected. “Just difficult.”

“So I don't get it. You and Tulip spent time in jail because they wanted Cappi the Con here. Who's this Wise character?”

“Some other time,” Capricorn said.

“But why did you join the Black Panthers?” Tinker asked.

“Those cops gave me a good education,” Cory explained. “In Colorado I was pretending colour didn't matter. Even after they murdered King, I still tried to do it his way, follow his path of non-violence, but they straightened me out about that. And they let me know who they feared most of all because they kept asking me did I know Stokley, did I know Eldridge?”

“Who're they?” Blue asked.

“Stokley Carmichael? Eldridge Cleaver?”

Blue reflected for a moment.

“Cleaver. Wasn't he the guy on
Leave it to Beaver
?”

An uncomfortable quiet settled over the kitchen as Cory glared at Blue, his expression slowly changing to amusement.

“He means it,” Cory said to the rest, throwing his arm around Blue's shoulder and laughing. “The dude really means it. Listen Blue, this place you come from ... what's it called again?”

“Cape Breton.”

“Right. How did you get here from there? Spaceship?”

Cory's story got lost after that. The party shifted to other centres of attention, but Cory and Blue hovered at the edge, leaning side by side on the kitchen counter, each nursing a beer, listening to the music from the network of speakers that Capricorn had installed and the murmur under it. Blue's thoughts were mulling over a conversation Karma and Cory had had in their bedroom when Karma took Cory there to see the progress to date on her mural of lives. The three of them passed through the rattle of beads and the moment Cory looked at the wall he said, “Mayan. Were you Mayan?”

His question led to a long discussion between Cory and Karma about karma and cultures and the evolution of the soul. The figures in the first panel were just about finished, and while they talked Blue wondered who he would be living with in the next panel. He was still guessing at it back in the kitchen when Cory spoke.

“What did you mean before when you said I may never see another horse again?”

“We got this guy back home, eh, Farmer ... I told you about him. Well, he told me that he's never seen anybody go back to horses. He's been trading them all his life and he noticed that once people give up their horses they never go back. First, it's a truck and then it's a tractor and then the barn becomes a garage and pretty soon there's not even any room in it for horses. Those horses the farmers didn't want anymore Farmer began selling to the Americans. ‘From working horse to rocking horse,' was what Farmer used to say. Horses that lost their job on the farm were becoming toys for Cape Breton's summer people, see. But he'd never seen anyone, farmer or American, who went back to buying horses once they gave them up. I guess that's what I was thinking about when I said that to you.

“Actually, Cory, it was me Farmer was talking about when he told me this, which was after I told him about this trip Tinker and I were going on. He said he was sorry to hear about it because he was training me to be a horse trader, see, and when I told him I wanted to do some travelling he figures I'm never coming back. ‘Oh, you'll come back home,'he said, ‘but you won't come back to the horses'.”

“Will you?” Cory asked him.

“I used to think so, but the way I had it worked out then isn't the way it's working out. I don't know now whether Farmer is right or not, but I'm right about you, aren't I, Cory?”

“Probably. When I think about the future I don't see any horses in it. Not the horses, not the commune, not Capricorn.”

“Not that mustang of yours? How'd he get you to go up there anyway? A girl? Drugs? What?”

“No, man, his vision. There's nothing wrong with Capricorn except maybe he's on the wrong planet. He's not on mine, that's for sure, and there's no place for me on his. Right now, I'm where I should have been from the beginning, and where I belong right now. Eventually, we all wind up where we belong, I suppose.”

“I hope you're right,” Blue replied, “because I know where we belong, Tinker and me, and it's on the other side of the world. You belong in that uniform and we belong in Cape Breton.”

24

Tinker had drifted away while Blue and Cory were talking, he and Kathy slipping into the solitude of their room where Kathy opened her palm and presented two small pieces of paper to him. Tinker took one and examined it while Kathy placed the other one under her tongue.

It had been a curiosity stirring in him ever since he had seen people “dropping acid” and experiencing what Blue described as “visitations from the Little Flower.”

“Those drugs are just a shortcut to the DTs, Tinker,” Blue told him whenever they had watched people on the street or in the commune reaching out to touch or stroke the empty air in front of them, or just Wow!-ing over the colour or sound or shape of something as ordinary as a stone on the street or a weed growing through a crack in the sidewalk. “You can get away with that shit here in San Francisco but if they tried to pull that off back home they'd be delivered straight to the Little Flower.”

“You two are always doing that,” Kathy complained to Tinker, “talking to each other in telegrams. Blue says ‘the Little Flower' and you start to laugh and it's like a whole conversation has taken place with just three words but nobody else is included. You do it all the time.”

“Okay, I'll explain. The Little Flower is this place in Sydney where guys on the booze are sent to dry out,” Tinker explained.

“You send your drunks to Australia?”

“No, Sydney back home. I can't believe you never heard of it. It's the biggest city on the island. All its businesses even advertise on television. Everybody from home goes there to shop for Christmas, but whenever we say Sydney, everybody asks, ‘Australia?' Blue always said Americans don't learn about anything but themselves in school and he's beginning to sound right.

“Anyway, the Little Flower is this place where they take in drunks to dry them out, which is about the time they go in the DTs. So when Blue says that people on drugs are taking the shortcut to the Little Flower he means they don't get to enjoy a few months on the booze first. They just take a little pill and start seeing things, and seeing things is your passport to the Little Flower. Have you ever taken any of that stuff?”

Kathy, said that she had, a couple of times, and found it expanding, although her explanation of exactly what it was that expanded was lost on Tinker. But his curiosity had been fanned by the book he was reading.

He had told Blue about these people on the bus in the book and the way they took LSD, “like a Catholic taking Communion, Blue.”

“Sounds like a Black Mass to me,” Blue said. “Or a bunch of Holy Rollers. We got to stick with the booze, buddy. That's our culture. Just ask the other fellow. If God had wanted us to do drugs he wouldn't of turned that water into wine, would he? He'd of turned it into a barrelful of LSD.”

Tinker didn't tell Blue about the plans he and Kathy made.

Tinker's second thoughts about taking LSD were crushed by the fact that Kathy had already took hers, ruining any chance he might have of talking them out of it. He put it under his tongue and sucked terrifyingly, tracing the chemical's absorption into his blood, counted to ten and concluded that nothing was happening.

“I'm not feeling anything. I don't think it's going to work. You know, drugs never really have any effect on me. Not even aspirin. If I have a headache and take an aspirin nothing happens. There's a certain percentage of the population that doesn't react to drugs, you know. Any doctor will tell you that. I think I'm one of those. Nothing's going on. Maybe I'll try it again some other time.”

“It takes longer than thirty seconds to work, Tinker. Don't worry. It will happen.”

“Who's worried? I was just worried there that it wasn't going to work. I think it will be great if it does. But it could happen, couldn't it, that sometimes it just doesn't work? Well, if that happens to me then we'll just have to try some other time, okay? But if it does work ... ah ... does everybody do stupid things like talking to God or taking off their clothes and walking outside, you know that kind of thing?”

“I've never seen anybody taking their clothes off and walking outside, Tinker,” Kathy assured him.

“Oh, God, I hope I'm not the first! I don't mean I want to take my clothes off, Kathy. I mean that drugs make you crazy, right? You must have dreamed about not having any clothes on in church or someplace. Think of having that happen to you and not being able to wake up. But don't worry, I'm not going to take my clothes off.... I'm not going to take my clothes off.... I'm not going to take my clothes off.... No matter what happens I am not going to take my clothes off.... I will not take my clothes off.... I will—”

“What are you mumbling about, Tinker?”