Tinker and Blue (23 page)

“Well, for the love of God,” Mrs. Rubble laughed, “drink up before any of this stuff splashes over my husband. God couldn't be that cruel, could he?”

“How about another splash for yourself,” Blue said, taking the cup from her hand and passing it to Tinker. “How's the gin holding up, buddy? You're sure you wouldn't like some rum?” he asked Mrs. Rubble.

“I wouldn't touch rum unless it was the last drink in the bar. Ask me again when the gin is gone, dearie.”

Tinker left for the kitchenette, his walk more deliberately navigational, like a sailor aboard ship. Mrs. Rubble watched him go. “He's a nice boy,” she said.

“One of the best. So what was he like when he came home from the war?” Blue probed.

“He was a big useless prick, dearie, that's what he was, a big useless prick. As big and useless as his own prick was after he came back. Useless. The hardest work he ever did was finding me greasy spoon jobs. Do you know how hard one woman has to work to keep two people drunk? Damn hard! That's how hard. Where is that boy with the bottle?”

“Probably gone to the bathroom. I wouldn't say it in front of him, Tinker has his pride,” Blue explained, “but he doesn't have a lot of capacity, to quote the other fellow. Usually he just drinks, throws up and passes out.”

“If he's going to throw up you know where to point him,” she instructed Blue, pointing at the coffin.

“Do you know what's really, really, really stupid? I was sitting here before you boys came in, thinking how much I'm going to miss him. I went to bed every night praying the bastard would die in his sleep and when he did finally choke on his own vomit, the first thing I thought of was how much I was going to miss him and, God damn it, I still feel that way,” she admitted, tears welling up.

“We got this guy in the band I play in, Gerry, he felt the same way about his arm, but he learned to play the fiddle with his teeth so I don't think he even misses his arm, unless maybe he wants to pick that side of his nose. What you're feeling is called phantom pain. Losing your husband like that, it's just like losing an arm, and if you lose an arm, even if it's not much of an arm, you miss it.”

Tinker returned with the fingers and a thumb of one hand wound through the ears of three cups while with his other hand he carried the guitar he had retrieved from the Plymouth in the parking lot. “Nothing sadder than a woman with a crying jag,” he said to Blue when he saw Mrs. Rubble's tears, and offered her a cup.

Blue took his cup and relieved Tinker of the guitar, setting it at his feet, instructing Tinker to remind him to ask Gerry about phantom pain. They fell into another respectful silence for the length of time it took to empty their cups and have Tinker weave his way to the kitchenette for refills and return.

“Did your husband have a favourite song?” Blue asked, “'Cause Tinker here has a voice that'd make a nun fall in love.”

“The only song he ever listened to in his life was ‘Prisoner of War',” Mrs. Rubble remembered. “He'd get teary as a child when he heard that one.”

“So do I,” Blue answered, picking up his guitar, hitting the opening chords. Without hesitation, Tinker began.

Oh, the war ships had landed and I went ashore

For fighting was over for me evermore

For the enemy they found me

And took me a prisoner of war so they say

But the good Lord and his mercy was with me one day—

Suddenly Blue banged a note of discord from his guitar, startling the others into opening their eyes.

“You scared the living Jesus out of me there for a moment, buddy. I thought you were Christopher Lee,” Blue told the sombre-looking undertaker in a tuxedo who stood in the doorway looking appalled. “Doesn't he look just like Christopher Lee in a Dracula movie there, Tinker? What's the matter, buddy, you look like you just saw a ghost. Bet you saw a few of them in your time.”

“What! Are! You! Doing!?” the man hissed.

“We're friends of the family. Just helping the lady through a tough time. Oh, you mean the guitar. Normally we'd be playing that in the kitchen back home, but that kitchen you got back there isn't big enough for a decent pisser. Why don't you have a little snort and join us,” Blue invited.

“This is no way to behave in a funeral home. If you boys don't leave this minute I'll call the police and have you removed,” the undertaker whispered hoarsely. “We have another wake in this building and your noise is upsetting the family. Now leave!”

“These are my friends, and if you're throwing them out, then you'll have to throw me out, as well,” Mrs. Rubble replied. “How would that look in the papers? That a funeral home threw out the widow of one of its customers?”

“Then stop this music,” the undertaker ordered. “The doors close in fifteen minutes, and I want all of you to be on the other side of them when they do. Show a little respect for the dead, please.”

“You think we got no respect for the dead?” Blue asked. “Look, buddy, Tinker here and me got more respect for the dead than we do for the living. I've never punched a dead man but I've punched a living one—”

Tinker held out a hand to restrain Blue's threat to go toe-to-toe with the undertaker over the touchy subject of respect for the dead.

“Take her easy, there, buddy,” he told Blue. Then, turning to the undertaker, he said, “We'll be gone before you know it. If it will make you happy we won't even stop in to say hello at the other wake, although that'd be the polite thing to do.”

As silently as he had appeared, the undertaker withdrew, leaving Mr. Rubble's three mourners to say their farewells.

“Know what I'd like to do, Mrs. Rubble? Take Mr. Rubble and put him in the back seat of the Plymouth and bring him home and have a real wake. That's what I'd like to do, but Christopher Lee would probably have the cops chasing us all the way to Canada,” Blue decided.

“Give me those cups so we can empty those bottles and get out of here,” Tinker said, collecting the cups.

“It's a damn shame that we can't have a little music for my man,” Mrs. Rubble mourned. “He wasn't really so bad, you know. Only when he drank. Trouble was the bastard drank all the time.”

“I think we should give him a song,” Blue said, reaching for the cup Tinker offered.

“Do you know ‘The Old Rugged Cross'?” Mrs. Rubble asked.

Tinker and Blue exchanged uneasy glances.

“I'm sorry, Ma'am, but that's a Protestant hymn. We wouldn't be allowed to know that one even if we did,” Blue said. “But Tinker does a great job of ‘Ave Maria.' Monk, this guy we know back home who saw the Virgin Mary, told Tinker that the Holy Mother told him that the best version she ever heard of that hymn was when Tinker sang.”

“Monk didn't say that,” Tinker corrected. “He said he thought she probably liked the way I sang that hymn.”

“Like you said, Tinker, Monk
thought
she would of liked the way you sing ‘Ave Maria.' All I'm doing is improving on Monk's thought for him. Don't be modest, man. Your voice is a gift from God, as the other fellow says, and since Mr. Rubble here is obviously not a Catholic we can't go blaspheming that gift by singing ‘Ave Maria' at a Protestant wake. The Lord might turn your tongue to a pillar of salt. So what can we sing?”

The three of them pondered the contents of their cups while sipping inspiration from them, an inspiration that manifested itself to Blue first.

“Here's one the three of us can join in,” Blue said. “You and me will join in the chorus, Missus Rubble. If you don't know it, you'll pick it up first time around. Take her away, Tinker, old buddy,” Blue instructed, striking the opening chords on the guitar. Tinker tipped back his cup, drank, and began.

Look at the coffin

With golden handles

Isn't it grand, boys,

To be bloody well dead

“Here's the chorus,” Blue informed Mrs. Rubble.

Let's not have a sniffle

Let's have a bloody good cry

And always remember

The longer you live

The sooner you'll bloody well die

Look at the widow

Bloody fine female

Isn't it grand boys

To be bloody well dead

Let's not have a sniffle

Let's have a bloody good cry

And always remember—

The black-clad undertaker loomed in front of them, imposing silence with his speechless presence.

“Well, I guess it's time we were getting along there, Tinker, old buddy,” Blue said, putting down his guitar. “Can we drive you anywhere, Missus?”

“Yes, home would be nice,” Mrs. Rubble replied, rising and walking to the coffin to stare at her husband's remains while the undertaker shrank back to stand at the door like an usher, waiting for the mourners to leave the premises. After a quiet moment, Mrs. Rubble held her cup over her dead husband and watched a few droplets of gin trickle out, land on his forehead and run down to his ear.

“Nothing!” she shrugged. “He's finished, not Finnegan,” and walked out the door flanked by Tinker and Blue.

From the parking lot, they followed Mrs. Rubble's instructions until she told them to stop the car in front of a rundown apartment building where they let her out, both giving her a hug of comfort, then got back in the car.

“Will you be at the funeral tomorrow?” she asked as Tinker started up the Plymouth again.

“Sorry, Mrs. Rubble, but I'll be working,” Tinker apologized.

“And I'll be sick,” Blue groaned, his head already resting on the dash.

38

A spring-warm sun burned off a week of November damp and fog, filling Golden Gate Park with eager Sunday sun-worshippers. Barney rested on the brown grass, Karma and Blue using him as a pillow as they lay side by side. Blue plinked at the guitar lying across his chest, and studied the groupings of park people, quipping to Karma that it looked like a shopping mall of protests.

The hippies seemed to think that since they were in the park on a day that drew so many strolling civilians away from their normal routines, they had an obligation to turn the lazy flat-on-your-back-basking-in-the-sunshine day into something meaningful. One circle of flower children smoked marijuana in open defiance. On another slope, a colourfully clad group followed their choir leader's fingers like a bouncing ball, chanting “No More War!” Another group of freakily dressed boys and girls proudly proclaimed their sexual orientation. In a silent circle another group, holding posters of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, held an ongoing candlelight vigil for the murdered leaders.

The protests were listlessly inoffensive, increasing the tolerance of people passing by, and besides, there was plenty of commerce to distract people from confronting the country's social problems as presented by its runaway children. These people could not understand why these youngsters would choose to smoke dope when there was a much more socially acceptable addiction available to them: alcohol. They could not grasp why children who were raised on the heroic Hollywood deeds of John Wayne would suddenly turn on “The Duke” and challenge the patriotic intelligence of the White House and Pentagon. They could not understand why queers would want to advertise their sickness on street corners and demand the acceptance of society when their own families, the bedrock of that very society, probably threw them out of the house for talking back.

What the public in the park could understand, however, and upon which it hitched its hope for the future of this lost generation, was the greedy hustle of commerce among these strangely clad entrepreneurs. The flower child selling bouquets stolen from the city's gardens and greenhouses they could appreciate. That was just good old American know-how at work for the good old American dollar. The hippies exhibiting trays of jewellery or leather-works were also understandable. Maybe no passer-by would want to wear earrings made of fish skins or foreskins, but they could understand the economics of it. The guy selling lids of grass or the girl selling hits of acid were reprehensible, of course, but they still had a chance of growing up, of maturing in the business world, becoming the Joe Kennedys of the future, America's dynasties of tomorrow. They just had to break through the penny ante existence of being street-corner pushers and become the wealthy importers of contraband. Even the street singers with their begging caps on the ground in front of them were in business, some of them probably already destined to read their own names written the lights of Las Vegas's nightclub life. The heart of America took comfort in knowing that amid all the idealistic chatter of its children, the genetic urge to make money was already manifesting itself, and that instinct would save America from its dreams.

With Karma reading to him from Kahlil Gibran, Blue's mind drifted towards the great epic of his own life. He strummed while in his head he hummed the chorus of “The Red Lobster,” hoping that by repeating it over and over the momentum would fling him forward toward the eighty-first verse. As the words began to form from a swirl of uncertain images within him, Blue brought them to his lips, testing them softly, letting most of them escape. He kept the spontaneous phrase “a spider's web.” Inside each lobster trap there is a web of netting that lures and locks the lobster inside. Blue let that remembered knowledge spin itself out inside of him.

Already, Capricorn had recorded four sessions of Blue Cacophony performances and, according to Blue's understanding, was currently extracting from that mother lode the band's greatest gems. Capricorn called it editing, to which Blue replied, “If I wanted an editor I'd write a book,” but terms and titles aside, Blue Cacophony was only a few technical hurdles away from the covert distribution of its first album, and Blue was already plotting the content of their second release, the complete recording of “The Red Lobster.” But first, the song needed to be finished.

Karma's voice beside him, while he avoided the pagan words of her book, was soothing to Blue, and slowly from the chaos that coaxes the soul to creativity, images and rhythms and rhymes began to emerge. Blue turned them over in his mind, discarding the failures and polishing the survivors into poetry. Finally, with his head still resting on Barney's back and the blue hat tipped across his forehead, shading the sunlight, Blue gave the new verse its first run-through, not unaware that, as he began to sing, Barney's mad harmony fell in beside his own.

The net in the trap

Is like the spider's web

Cold as a heart

In January or Feb-

Ruary, oh I get wary

When you're around

Set the trap

Watch me drown

Red lobster, red lobster

Don't you dare sob, sir

'Cause love is you and love is her

You're the meat. She's the but-tur.

“Hey, I recognize you. You're the singer with Blue Cacophony,” spoke a voice Blue couldn't place. He lifted the rim of his cap to see a hippie wearing a fifteenth-century-era plume hat standing over him. Blue greeted him back, explaining that he was writing a work-in-progress.

“Oh, are you with Blue Cacophony, too?” the hippie asked. “I recognize the dog from the gig you had at Ellis Dee's. So how's it going, man?” the hippie asked, taking a seat in the grass beside Blue and Karma. “I'm Columbus.”

“Blue. This is Karma. You anything to Christopher Columbus?”

“Could be. I'm out to discover America, too, so it might be genetic.”

“What have you found so far?”

“Not much. The buffalo are gone. How about your own discoveries?”

“To tell you the truth, Cabot's my man,” Blue confided.

“Cabot?”

“John Cabot? You must of heard of him. He discovered Cape Breton. Columbus discovered the New World but Cabot discovered the real world, as the other fellow says.”

“Can't say our ships have crossed,” Columbus replied, getting up. “So this Cabot gentleman, where would I find him?”

“Just go northeast about four thousand miles, you'll come to a causeway with an island on the other side of it. Cross that, it'll cost you a buck and a half, and ask someone to point you to the Cabot Trail. He lives along there, just ask anybody.”

“Thanks, man, and your dog's great for the band.” Columbus said, then taking his bearings and setting his sails, he wandered away to the northeast.

Karma rolled onto her stomach to look down into Blue's face, putting her book away. “John Cabot doesn't live on the Cabot Trail, does he?”

“Not right on it, no. He has this little place just off the highway....”

“Blue, what if he tries to go there? The poor boy is obviously suffering delusions. Maybe he took too many drugs. Maybe he hurt his head,” Karma scolded.

“And maybe he's Christopher Columbus. You more than anybody should give the guy the benefit of the doubt. I recognize what you're putting in the latest panel on your mural. That's the Tower of London where the Brits kept the men they were going to decapitate.”

“And the women. Ann Boleyn. Mary Queen of Scots.”

“Aw, Karma, I hate it when you do this, you know.”

“Well, that's beside the point, anyway, which is that you may have sent that poor boy on a four-thousand-mile trip.”

“Pilgrimage, I'd call it. He'll forget about it the first time he stops to take leak, but even if he doesn't, I sent him to the safest place I know. What more can a brother's keeper do? So which one is it?”

“Which one what?”

“Ann Boleyn or Mary Queen of Scots? Which one is it?”

“I thought the subject of my previous lives frightened you,” Karma teased.

“I wouldn't say frightened, Karma. It's not like you're a Vincent Price movie or something, but it's weird. What if you were Ann Boleyn and I was John the Baptist? We wouldn't be able to do anything but look at each other from our respective platters and go to Heaven for never having committed the mortal sin that is the most fun of them all, but what fun would that be? It's a lot simpler being Catholic. Some night I'm going to baptize you in your sleep. But of course, before I wake you...” Blue winked.