Tinker and Blue (21 page)

“I didn't tell you about this before, Blue, because I didn't know where to fit it in, but this was the conversation the old man had with me the night before we left. I think maybe he was worried that I might not come back, so he wanted me to know why Cape Bretoners go around acting like they're God's chosen people.”

“Yup, we do, don't we,” Blue said, “and does that ever piss those mainlanders in Nova Scotia off, eh, because they know in the bottom of their hearts that we are.”

34

Tinker and Blue sat in the back booth of the greasy restaurant waiting for the waitress to bring their orders. During the conversation in the backyard of the Human Rainbow Commune, Blue had begun hinting to Tinker that a good cup of Cape Breton tea was what they both needed. Tinker picked up on the code word they had agreed upon at the hotel before moving into the commune, that when one of them said he wanted tea, it meant “T” as in T-bone steak or some other part of a red-blooded animal. Tinker agreed that a cup of tea would be nice if they could find a restaurant that served it right, then weakly extended the invitation to Karma and Kathy.

Karma declined on the grounds that Tinker and Blue put milk in their tea, to which Kathy added, “And ketchup on it.” Barney joined them instead, and was now curled up under the table, waiting for the manna to fall from the culinary Heaven above.

“When Kathy said that about ketchup,” Tinker said, “did you think she broke our secret code?”

“No way, man,” Blue assured him. “They'd never let us go hunting hamburgers. Did you see Karma's face when you were talking about the rabbits? It was just a lucky guess, that was all, trying to trick us into telling them the truth.”

“Why would they try to trick us unless they suspected the truth?” Tinker wondered.

“Women's intuition,” Blue explained. “You see, Tink, what you got to understand about women is that they have this extra instinct that warns them about men. God gave it to them so that mothers could use it to sense if something is wrong with their children, but some of them misuse it to sniff around and find out what their men are up to, not their children, and that's not really fair, like using snares to hunt rabbits.”

The waitress placed the plates in front of them, hamburgers with the works, french fries swimming in a grey pool of gravy, a couple of Pepsis.

“Hmmmm! Real food,” Blue said, inhaling the heat rising from dish, waiting for Tinker to finish squeezing ketchup onto his order. He flicked a gravy-sodden fry under the table and listened to the snap as Barney snagged it. “So how are things in the pit, buddy?”

“I like it, Blue. Casey, the chief mechanic, is really great to work with. If he's working on something and I'm helping him, he explains everything he's doing. If he tells me to go get a wing nut, he'll tell me exactly why he needs it and where it will go, and why it needs to be there. He doesn't treat people like flunkies. If you don't know something, he teaches it to you. When I finish working with him, I'll be able to go to any mine or tunnel in the world.

“And he's as strong as a bull, Blue. I bet he could straighten a horseshoe with his bare hands. So tell me how the record business is going.”

Blue chewed on a bite of hamburger, swallowed, and washed it down with a swig of Pepsi.

“Capi and me are working on it. He's practically living in the basement, for God's sake. Have you been down there since he started? There's enough wires down there to electrocute half the city.

“He's rigging up a microphone for me to wear. First he tried it on Barney, but most of the sound that came out of it was Barney scratching at it like a giant flea. So what we're going to do is fit it up to me, but getting the sound even is the big problem, he says. If I'm the only one wearing the mic then it's me you hear the most. I told him that that's okay with me, but you know what a stickler he is for democracy.

“Anyway, looking at all that wire lying around, it reminded me of the time when I was eleven or twelve and Burton's store used to pay seven cents a pound for copper. Remember when the Power Commission had that storehouse below the tracks? Nothing in it but big rolls of copper wire, all of them coated with insulation and most of them so heavy I had to drag them, five or six rolls I guess, down to the field above the beach and build a bonfire to throw them in. Burn the insulation off them, you see. Then when they had cooled down I pounded the wire as tight as I could, got a wheelbarrow and took the whole works up to Burton's. Twenty-five bucks' worth, my greatest crime. “Anyway, I tell this story to Capi and he chuckles, saying that it reminded him of something that happened in high school. He went to school in New York City, but we knew that much, right? Anyway, I guess he was always a wizard with electrical stuff, which makes him the right guy for the job he's doing for me.

“He says he was ‘competitively motivated at the time,' to quote the man directly, although it's the kind of thing the other fellow will say someday, don't you think? He wanted to be first in everything he did, but there was this exam he was worried about. The guy teaching the subject, who is the vice-principal of the school, to boot, doesn't like Capi one bit, and Capi thinks that just maybe the guy is small enough to flunk him just to keep him from getting a scholarship at the end of the year. So to protect himself, Capi stays in the school after it closed one afternoon and breaks into the vice principal's office, looking for the exam questions, but he can't find hide nor hair of them. So what he does then is wire the office, hoping to overhear the vice-principal discussing the exam questions. It was a long shot, Capi said, but it was his last shot at keeping this guy from flunking him. Then he sets up the earphones in an empty closet in the boys' locker room. He knows what time the teacher has a free period, so Capi sneaks to the closet at that same time to listen.

“What happens is that the teacher is not discussing exam questions at all, but talking dirty to his secretary, and Capi hears the whole thing. The two of them are talking real rot to each other, he says, while they are obviously taking off their clothes, and then obviously doing it.

“What Capi doesn't know is that when he wired the office he somehow, he still doesn't know how, connected his wiretap to the intercom so the whole school hears everything that's going on in the vice principal's office. Capi hears people pounding at the vice principal's door, and the vice principal and his secretary being caught red-handed. The secretary got fired and the principal got suspended, then transferred to the worst school in the city. Someone else gave the exam and Capi passed with flying colours.

“After he tells me all this, Tinker, and he's laughing out loud while he's telling me, he says that the story wasn't nearly as funny when it was happening as it was re-telling it, and I said to him, ‘You're getting the idea.'

“But getting back to your question, Capi says that we'll make recordings of a bunch of gigs and pick the clearest pieces for the album. We should have it out by Christmas or New Year's, but we have to be careful not to let any of the guys in the band go down into our basement.”

35

Blue whacked his elbow against the side of the van on the off chance that it would startle Capricorn, who was working inside, into jumping up and banging his head on the metal roof. Then he slid the door open and climbed inside.

Capricorn, seated on a wooden box, was mounting a reel-to-reel recorder on a shelf he had installed in the van. “We'll park the van behind your gig tonight,” he explained to Blue, “and hide a couple of mics inside and record the show. Three or four gigs should give us more than enough material to edit for an album.”

Getting Blue to hold a bolt firm with a screwdriver, Capricorn screwed on a nut from underneath, bolting down one side of the recorder, then repeating it on the other side of the shelf. Capricorn tested the firmness of the installed machine, took a couple of the wires hanging from it, lifted the lid of the box he had been sitting on, and revealed a dozen connected batteries. Attaching the wires to terminals, he turned on the recorder and the reels began to roll.

“There's enough juice to run the machine for four or five hours,” Capricorn explained, turning the recorder off.

“So how do you sneak the mics into the club?” Blue asked, pointing to the coils on the floor.

Capricorn moved to the front of the van, sat behind the wheel, turned the key and lurched away, tumbling Blue around until he eventually made his way to the passenger seat. “We're going to do that right now,” Capricorn informed him.

“We?”

“It's going to take two of us to do this.”

“But it shouldn't be me. I got to call a rehearsal. Tinker's the guy you want. He's really good at this.”

“Breaking and entering? Tinker's good at it?”

“Well, he hasn't actually done all that much of it, but he learns quick.”

“I think we can handle it ourselves,” Capricorn said, bringing the subject to a close unless Blue wanted to leap from the moving van, which he briefly considered before settling into the fact that he was on his way to a life of crime and probably life on Alcatraz.

“What are you going to do with your share of the money?” Blue asked as Capricorn drove them through the streets of the city.

“I'd like to see the commune move back to Colorado as soon as the heat's off the place. Hopefully that will happen before California slips into the sea. If there's any cash in this zany scheme it will help us get set up there again.”

“They say that, eh, that she's going to disappear into the ocean. Well, Tinker and me'll be back home by then, I hope. The last thing we need is to be part of the next Atlantis.”

“You think there was an Atlantis?” Capricorn asked with unmasked surprise.

“Well, it's a good story, and besides, Farmer and me found out that Cape Breton's part of that story.”

“Blue, you aren't going to tell me that Atlantis sunk in the Mediterranean and surfaced in North America as Cape Breton Island, are you?”

“No. Why would I tell you that? Atlantis sank in the Atlantic Ocean, the way I hear it, and it still hasn't surfaced that I know of, but that's a pretty good theory you have there, Cape Breton as Atlantis. I'll have to work that into a song. But there's a weird story to how I found out about Atlantis.”

“There's no chance I'm not going to hear that story, is there?” Capricorn mused.

“If you don't want to hear it—”

“I'm all ears, Blue.”

“Farmer – I told you about him, the horse trader – we brought a couple of Clydes to these hippies who were living up back of Brook Village.

“That was funny the way Farmer changed his mind about hippies. We'd see them hitchhiking on the road and Farmer'd be swinging the truck at them like he was going to run them over or something and they'd be jumping in the ditches, and he'd be calling them fruits and commies and all that stuff. Then one day this hippie comes up to him in town and says he looking for a team of Clydesdales to work the farm they bought in Brook Village. He explains to Farmer that the people living on the farm, a bunch of hippie brothers from Connecticut, ‘weren't into machines, man,' well, you know the way you guys talk, Capi, and so they wanted work horses.

“All of a sudden, Farmer realizes that there might be more business in these hippies than in the all truck-and-tractor farmers who have been slowly putting him out of business. So Farmer finds a team he can buy cheap and sells it to them for a bushel of American dollars.

“Anyway, we're putting these horses in the barn and the hippie is telling about how much he loves Cape Breton and how the earth speaks to him and all that. Later, Farmer said to me that if we smoked as much of the earth as those hippies did, it'd speak to us, too. Then the hippie tells us that the reason he and his brothers came to Cape Breton was because he read in a book that Cape Breton was one of the seven spiritual centres of the world. Some prophet in a coma told him that, he said.”

“Edgar Cayce?” Capricorn asked.

“Who?”

“Was the prophet's name Edgar Cayce? There was an American mystic named Edgar Cayce who people called the Sleeping Prophet.”

“That's it! I don't remember the name, but it was a sleeping prophet, that's for sure. What did I say? He was in a coma. Close. Anyway, this hippie is telling us about how Cape Breton is this spiritual centre and Farmer is saying he's not surprised because the island has been spitting out priests and nuns and ministers at the rate of two or three a family for two hundred years, so it must be spiritual, and all the time he's winking at me.

“Then the hippie begins telling us about the lost continent of Atlantis, and how in a previous life he used to live there. I wonder if he knew Karma? Anyway, it was kind of a paradise until it got screwed up, he said. That's what life's all about, the hippie told us, recreating Atlantis.

“By this time, Farmer can hardly keep a straight face, but while the hippie is telling us this he's holding the money for the horses in his hand so Farmer is nodding his agreement and not taking his eyes or his mind off the money.

“By the time we get out of there and down the road, Farmer can hardly keep the truck out of the ditch we're laughing so hard. Still, after that Farmer never saw a hippie he didn't pick up and give a ride to, and try to sell him a horse, of course.”

“So do you believe this story, Blue?” Capricorn asked as he pulled the van into an alley behind Club Peace & Love, the venue for Blue Cacophony's gig that night.

“Well, I didn't at first, not when the hippie was telling us, but then when Cape Breton got in the picture, being the spiritual centre of the Universe and all, it began to make sense.”

“I thought you said Cape Breton was one of seven spiritual centre of the world? Now it's
the
spiritual centre of the Universe?” Capricorn asked.

“You're right on both accounts, Capi, but this place looks like it's not open yet,” Blue noted as the van pulled to a stop.

“It isn't. That's why we're here. You're going through the window and coming around to open the door. Then we set up.”