Tinker and Blue (18 page)

“We got a saying back home, eh. A horse that's not for sale is worth a lot more than one that is.”

“I don't follow you,” the reporter said.

“I'm not Jesus Christ so you don't have to follow me, now do you? Unless you want to hear Blue Cacophony's music, that is, because it's not for sale. And you can quote me
and
the other fellow on that.”

30

Blue sat on the mattress, guitar in his lap, watching Karma at work on another panel, his thoughts drifting in a slow rhythm to the lazy swirl of incense that reminded him of High Mass. Where one of the walls had been, their ration of privacy was now defined by a canvas curtain. Blue sipped a beer and steered his thoughts away from the plan fermenting in his belly. Instead, he let snatches of sentences from the newspapers swim through his mind, caught them, let them go, then beckoned them back for encores. Some reviews, of course, he would never allow to survive in his ocean of memory, but other were confused or flattering or enthusiastic enough to merit his repeated appreciation.

Tulip's exhibit, to the commune's surprise, was applauded left, right and centre by the critics, one or two of whom, Capricorn pointed out with amusement, had stolen Blue's insights concerning the nature of Tulip's harmony and made them their own. Blue called them weasels for not crediting to him his own quotes. Tulip had mixed emotions about the unanimity of appreciation which applauded her work, missing, she said, “the right-wing fascist reactionary reflexes” that normally counter-attack abstract art, drawing dull parallels between the artist's work and the proverbial four-year-old child turned loose in a paint pit. “The establishment wants to hang me on their walls,” she said. “Whose victory is that, I wonder?”

Blue Cacophony inspired a wider spectrum of opinions, ranging from “a night noise” to “more performance than music ... not unlike listening to an abstract train crash,” to “a sound on the cutting edge, nay, the razor's edge, of an exciting new music era.” With few exceptions, the critics were reluctant to dismiss Blue Cacophony on the basis of relevancy, musical ability or even on the subject of dog-as-musical-instrument. Most publications avoided the trap of trying to assess the musical merits of Blue Cacophony by concentrating on the story – not the group's music, but its refusal to record.

Once Blue had told the first reporter that there would be no recordings of his songs, he then fell wholeheartedly into the spirit of the idea, going to every one of the music and art critics present, supporting and reinforcing Peter?'s position. Blue Cacophony would not sign with any record label regardless of the offers being made, Blue informed them, while eluding efforts to pin him down to exactly what offers had been made.

Impressed by Blue's anti-establishment convictions, the
Rolling Stone
critic wrote that “The singer/song-writer of Blue Cacophony is a disciple of non-commercialism and so, if for no other reason, this band deserves both support and encouragement....”

“They called me a disciple in this paper, Tinker,” Blue pointed out. “Remind me to send a copy to the old lady. She'll think her baby boy still has a chance to become a priest.”

“I don't think that's the kind of disciple they mean,” Tinker said, but Blue was already rambling on toward other subjects with Gerry and Nathan who sat with him around the kitchen table, reading the reviews and passing them along while they waited for Peter? to turn up for his share of the limelight.

Peter? did arrive, carrying an armful of the same newspapers, and with the news that Blue Cacophony had two more gigs, clubs willing to pay them, or at least divvy up the cover charge.

“But I've been thinking about it,” Peter? said, “and the thing that would make Blue Cacophony perfectly committed to its art would be the band's refusal to take any money for its performances. That coupled with a refusal to record—”

“Aw, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Peter?, where do you get these friggin' ideas? If anything should be committed around here it's you,” Blue argued. “Play for nothing! We've been so busy practising that we're not making a dime on the street anymore, and Capricorn is giving me funny looks like I'm not buying my share of sunflower seeds around here or something. It's one thing not to record, and it's another thing to hire a dog as my backup singer, but when it comes to no money, it's one thing too far, as the other fellow says. How about the rest of you guys?”

“I'm with you all the way about not recording,” Gerry said to Peter?, “and I hate to disillusion you, but I need some money.”

Nathan expressed similar capitalist aspirations, pointing out that he and Gerry and Blue used to do pretty well for themselves on the street. “We each had our own corner of the world out there. We pooled our talents with you and Blue to see where this road goes, but we have to eat along the way.”

Peter?, recognizing that his modern Republic had suffered a slight setback, did not push the issue, telling them that one performance site, The Buddha Tree, would guarantee one hundred dollars for the night, and at the place where it all began, the Aquarius Café, the band would get a dollar a head.

“Blue Cacophony's first world tour has begun,” Blue cheered, not bothering to note that the two gigs were three blocks apart.

—

Blue picked up the book that Karma had begun reading to him after she had given up trying to get him to read it himself. There wasn't a lot he could find to argue against in Kahlil Gibran's world, except that he wasn't Catholic, not even Christian. This book was probably on the Vatican's list of things Catholics couldn't read, along with
Fanny Hill
. Tinker, he noticed, was reading all the time now, working and reading. Still, Blue was careful not to be too critical of Gibran in case he might have been Karma's brother in an earlier life. Or cellmate in an asylum somewhere.

The last thought made him chuckle.

“What's so funny?” Karma asked.

“Oh, I was just thinking about something crazy,” Blue replied, and scrambling to escape further interrogation he opened the book to a random page.

“Listen to this. ‘Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by light. But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother's milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship.' So he's saying here that we have to eat meat, right, but it's okay as long as we say grace before and after meals. So how come you won't go for a burger with me?”

“You know I don't eat flesh, Blue. I can't make you or anybody else stop if you don't want to. It's something you have to discover for yourself, but when you think about the thousands and thousands of animals who have to die in order for you to live your life, doesn't it make you sad?”

“Aw, well, if you're going to think like that every time you sit down to eat, you're going to ruin a lot of good meals, girl. But I don't get it. You're saying it's not okay to eat meat, but it's not a sin if we do. That doesn't make sense. It's either right or it's wrong, right? It's a sin or it isn't. It's not a Commandment, so even if it's a sin, it's probably a venial one. Even Jesus ate meat, didn't he? Didn't he? So would that be a sin in your book?”

“Blue, there is only one sin in what you call my book, and that's our failure to love.”

“Listen, lady, I can commit a dozen sins before breakfast, and that's not including the thoughts that go through my head. If you only know of one sin in the whole world, then we live in different worlds. So is that sin of yours eating meat?”

“No, Blue, it's what I said. It's our failure to love. If people loved each other, then we wouldn't hurt each other.”

“So murder's not a sin, or stealing or sex or anything like that? Is that what you're saying?”

“They're just the symptoms of our failure to love, don't you see? If we loved each other we couldn't do the things we do. You told me once about the time you and Farmer dyed an old horse's eyebrows and then sold it back to the same person you bought it from, telling him it was a much younger horse, and sold it for a lot more than it was worth, remember. Well, suppose you had bought that horse from Tinker, would you have cheated him like that?”

“Hell, no. Tinker's my best friend. I'm not going to trick him.”

“Because you love him, right?”

“Well, I wouldn't go around using words like that about a guy, but he's my best friend. I wouldn't trick him, or cheat him, if that's what you mean.”

“If that man you bought the horse from was your father, would you have dyed it and sold it back?”

“And get my arse kicked up around my ears? Of course not!”

“Because you love your father, right?”

“Yeah, but that's not why I wouldn't do it. He'd kick the supreme shit out of me, Karma. I mean it.”

“Would you sell that horse to me, Blue?”

“No,” Blue said evenly. “But you're saying if I loved everybody in the world I wouldn't cheat anyone. How can I love everybody? I don't even know most of them.”

“But if you thought of everybody as your best friend, if you saw them as people you love, then you couldn't cheat them, could you? You can only cheat the people you don't love, so you see, Blue, the sin isn't cheating or any of the other awful things we do to each other, it's our failure to love people. That's all that Jesus or Buddha or any great spiritual leader has had to say to us, isn't it, to love one another.”

“If it's that simple, Karma, how come it takes ten years to become a priest? Even ministers have to study for years just to be Protestants. Because the Bible is that thick, that's why, and it's too confusing for just anybody to read. I tried to, and there's a lot more in it than those three little words. People have spent their whole lives studying exactly what Jesus really meant when he said ‘love one another,' you know. And here you are, a girl, for Christ's sake, with all the answers. Just love everybody. Do you love everybody, Karma? Could you love Hitler? Answer me that! Could you love Hitler, huh?”

“I wonder what would have happened if somebody did, Blue?”

“Oh, there's no talking to you, girl,” Blue said tersely, standing up, starting to leave the room.

“Don't be angry with me, Blue. I'm just trying to understand who I am, and I can't know that without knowing what I believe, can I?”

“How come everybody is so big on understanding themselves, and finding themselves?” Blue asked, turning back toward Karma. “That's what this is about, isn't it? Finding yourself? I don't even know what that means, Karma, or maybe I'm just lucky, because I know who I am. It's the things that tell me who I am that are important to me. One of those things is home. I know I talk about it too much for some people around here. I see Capricorn and other people rolling their eyes when I talk about it, so I know that I talk about it too much, but I'd rather bore them than forget where I come from. And I know who I come from, Karma. I can tell you six sets of grandparents down both sides of family all the way back to Scotland. Some of them looked like me, and some of them acted like me, and if you looked at my birth certificate and theirs, you'd find the same name over and over. I've been to school, just like you.

“I had to read the stories in my English books, but know what, none of them were any better than the stories the old man would tell about his old man, or about working in the mines, or even Farmer talking about why things are the way they are. And I believe what they believed. I was baptized in the exact same church as my two grandfathers, for God's sake. Besides, just because I tell stories about the nuns and priests doesn't mean that I don't love the Church. I do. That's where I know God, and when you start this business about meditation and one sin and all that crap, I have to remind myself about false prophets. Even this book is called
The Prophet
, for that matter. It's full of stuff to get a guy thinking. There's nothing wrong with thinking, but there's wrong thinking, as the other fellow says. It's not easy to hang on to everything I know when everybody else is different. Even Tinker's changing, everything's changing, and it scar— bothers me. I don't want to lose what matters most, and that's home.” Blue paused, trying to be finished. “And you,” he added apologetically.

“Blue, I don't want to take any of that away from you, and most of all I don't want to take me from you. But when you ask questions, there's only one way I can answer, and those answers always upset you. I can't say what you want to hear, but I love you, Blue. I want us to find a way not to hurt each other.”

“When you say that, do you mean you love just me, or do you mean you love me like in
love one another
, as the other fellow says?” Blue's voice edging back from an angry precipice.

31

When Blue came into the kitchen, Tinker was at the table reading another book. Blue ran a glass of water for himself and stared at the cover, trying to identify the white block on the spine.

“It's Audel's encyclopaedia of mechanics,” Tinker explained, holding the book up for Blue to examine closer. “Casey, this mechanic I'm working with, tells me I got good instincts about machines but he says I got the technique of a hog butcher. He's showing me things that Charlie forgot to mention, and he told me about these books that can teach you a lot about machines and fixing them, so I joined the library on my way home—”

“Joined the library!”

“Yeah! I just walked in there and nobody batted an eye, so I signed up and signed out this book. It's about everything I like, and you won't believe this but it knows a lot more about the Plymouth than I do. I'll let you borrow it after I'm finished.”

“Tinker,” Blue said, sitting himself across from his friend, “do you ever wonder what's happening to us? I mean, here we are stranded in 'Frisco until we get enough dough to go home. That's not really our fault, and you got a job and I got the band so I figure we should be home for Christmas. Know what would be really great? To be crossing the causeway on Christmas Eve. Not tell anybody, just come home on Christmas Eve with a carload of gifts that'll make the old lady cry. You know how soft she is, but I digress, as the other fellow says.

“But we're not home, Tinker. Which is my point. We're sitting in a purple and green kitchen full of nothing to eat, with somebody called the Gratefully Dead on the stereo instead of Scottie Fitzgerald on the radio, talking about library books. This is going to be a funny story someday but I'm not laughing right now. I feel like I'm getting squeezed. You know how when you're in a stall and a horse leans all its weight against you, squeezing the breath right out of you, well, that what's it's like here, except that it feels like everything I know is getting squeezed out of me. I know how to punch a horse back off me when that happens, but I don't know how to get out from under this, Tinker.”

“You'd know how to get out from under it if you were talking about Capricorn. You'd just punch him like a horse. So it must be Karma. Again.”

“What do you need to go to a library for, Tinker? You read me like a book. Yup, it's her again. I'm glad God made women so beautiful but I wish he hadn't made them so damn smart. Listen to this. There's only one sin in the whole world. Did you know that? Only one sin. The priests, the nuns, even the Pope got it all wrong with their mortal sins and venial sins because there is only one sin in the whole world, and it's not even sex. It's something called ... THE FAILURE TO LOVE,” Blue said, dropping his voice to the bottom of his larynx. “I won't try to explain it, but it's a heresy. I'm in love with a friggin' pagan, Tinker. What do you think about my idea for Christmas?”

“I like the idea, Blue, but I don't like what happens when I think it through. Christmas itself would be great, but then all that's left is February, and you have to love home a lot to want to be there in February. As the old man used to say, everywhere else in the world February is the shortest month but in Cape Breton it goes on forever. Think about it, Blue. The Big Ice, cold wind, frozen water pipes, snow storms to be shovelled away, your fingers and your toes curled up inside your gloves and boots trying to stay warm but they can't, and your ears stinging red, standing on John Beaton's Corner cursing the goddamned cold. When I think of home, it's always summer and that's when I'd like to go back. Besides, I like the tunnel. I feel a lot closer to home down there than I would freezing in my own bedroom next February. And Blue, I'm not interested in running away from Kathy.”

“I never ran away from anything in my life, you know that, so don't accuse me of it,” Blue snapped. “I was just thinking that it would be nice for us to go home for Christmas, that's all. I didn't know you didn't like home.”

“I didn't say I didn't like it. I just don't see the point in going home for the winter when I hate the winter, but you sound an awful lot like somebody who wants to run home to Mommy just because your girlfriend won't baby you.”

Blue's fist flashed across the table and Tinker jerked away from the surprise attack, tipping his chair, crashing to the floor. The table up-ended on top of him, and Blue dove into the mess of friend and furniture, swinging wildly. They rolled around, punching and kicking at whatever they thought was each other, cursing and grunting until the kitchen filled with the membership of the Human Rainbow Commune who wrestled them apart.

Blue and Tinker stood at opposite sides of the kitchen, glaring, panting angrily, but making no effort to shake off the people who held them apart. The others in the kitchen kept a confused silence until Karma lifted a cloth to wipe a trickle of blood from Blue's lip. He pushed her hand aside and ran from the room. A moment later, the front door slammed.

It was after midnight when Blue returned to the commune. He wavered in the doorway of the common room, then took a staggering step toward Tinker and Kathy's door when Karma intercepted him and guided him into their room, easing him onto the mattress.

“Gotta talk to Tinker,” he mumbled.

“Tinker's asleep. He has to work in the morning. You better sleep, too, Blue. There'll be a lot to talk about in the morning.”

“Tinker's not asleep. I know my buddy. He's not asleep. Get him for me.”

“Let him be, Blue. If you need to talk to someone, talk to me tonight. What do you want to talk about?”

“Winter. Have you ever been in Cape Breton in the wintertime, Karma? You should see it. The ice come down from the North Pole. People call it the Big Ice, and it covers up the whole ocean. It looks as calm as anything, but when you walk out on it you can feel the ocean rising and falling under it, all those waves trying to break, but can't. It feels like something being smothered and struggling under a pillow. And there are seals everywhere, big ones and little ones as cute as kittens. They get lost, you know. Seals get lost really fast, especially if the wind jams the ice up tight. Then they can't find a way into the water so they go looking for an opening. They might follow the river then and wind up inland. Once, eh, this guy back home that works at the Legion, well, he heard a knock on the door and when he answered it here was this seal barking like crazy. But the bartender wouldn't let him in. Said the seal didn't have any ID. He didn't care that the Legion had the approval of a seal, as the other fellow says.

“Another guy found one in his porch and beat it to death with a hockey stick. And the snowplows are always picking off seals that get caught on the roads. Most of them, though, people capture in garbage cans and take them back to the ocean, but it's not easy. A scared seal is a dangerous thing. When it's lost and doesn't know what's happening to it, even if you're trying to help it, it doesn't know that, does it? How can it? Like that guy in the porch. He didn't kill the seal because he wanted to. He scared the shit out of it and it scared the shit out of him and both of them had nowhere to go so he grabbed the hockey stick and ... two minutes for slashing, to quote the other fellow again.”

Blue paused.

“But Karma, if you could come down with me onto the Big Ice in February, it has to be February, at night, with a full moon, and just go out on the ice far enough to feel it moving under us, it's so still all you can hear is the rifle crack of ice shifting once in awhile, and maybe a seal barking, but mostly nothing at all, just silence and this strange snow-bright moonlight that lets you see all the way to Prince Edward Island. It's really beautiful. It is.”

“I know,” Tinker said, barely visible behind the beaded doorway. He pushed the beads aside and came into the room.

“My old buddy Tinker.” Blue stared up at him. “Told you he wasn't sleeping. So do you want me to say my act of contrition or what?”

Tinker made a sign of the cross over Blue's head and Blue stuck out his hand. “Shake on her, buddy,” he said, gripping Tinker's hand and hanging on to it for a moment. “My toes get just as cold as yours, you know, but there's things to remember and there's things to forget.”

“...as the other fellow says,” Karma and Tinker chimed in together.