Tinker and Blue (25 page)

“All roads lead to Karma, as the other fellow says,” Blue quipped, restless in the tension. When no one said anything, he broke the silence by asking if anyone was going to ask him what road he would choose. Their attention turned toward him although the question itself remained unasked.

“Well, I'll tell you this much, it wouldn't take me to Big Sur, no siree. If I was standing in the middle of a crossroads the first thing I'd do is build a store or a tavern and make tons of money off all the people who would be standing there scratching their heads, wondering which way to go, then I'd pick the road heading for Cape—”

“Jesus, what's this fool up to?” Tinker muttered, watching in his rear view mirror. Behind them, a half-ton truck was weaving recklessly through the traffic, which had grown increasingly heavy the closer they got to San Francisco.

Blue glanced out the back window, saw the truck, and said, “You can take him, Tinker.” Both girls leaned toward Tinker, intercepting Blue's challenge. “Please don't,” they pleaded, and Tinker stopped toying with the idea, deciding to let the truck pass without creating a karmatic link that, if he understood Kathy and Karma's theology, would cause the car and the truck to tangle in traffic over and over until the world ran out of roads and eternity ran out of time. He eased off the gas, and watched the truck's reflection approach in the rearview mirror.

Once the truck had pulled beside them, it seemed to stall there, pacing itself to the Plymouth. When Tinker looked across, a greasy head and tattooed arms leaned out the passenger window shouting words snatched away by the eighty-mile-an-hour wind. It was Blue, from the back seat, who caught them as they whipped past ... “fuckin' hippie fags....” Bent on countering the insult, Blue pulled himself half way through his window, leaning out to utter a few choice opinions of his own, but before he could, one of the tattooed arms with a bottle of beer in its grasp suddenly pulled back and fired.

Tinker didn't see the action taking place beside him until the bottle shattered across his windshield, washing it in a foam of beer. Trying to keep the Plymouth from drifting into the traffic, he fumbled frantically to find the wiper knob. Over-compensating, he pulled the car too far to the right, felt it buck against the guardrail with a screech of peeling paint that brought screams from inside the car. The Plymouth bounced off the rail and spun onto the road.

Blue, frozen in the backseat window, saw what Tinker could not, the half-ton pulling away from them in a squeal of rubber, the chorus of blasting horns behind them, and the on-coming traffic beginning to react as the Plymouth started spinning through a slow-motion moment that converged upon the path of a transfer truck. Brakes squealed all around them like slaughter-house pigs as the Plymouth sped blindly toward the truck and Blue closed his eyes, only to open them an uneventful moment later to discover that in an incomprehensible and forgiving choreography, the two vehicles had been released from the apparent fate of their violent ballet, allowed to miss each other and escape.

Charmed, the Plymouth spun across the highway, and Tinker, finding the wipers, cleared the windshield in time to see a wall of rock in front of them. He cranked the steering wheel hard to his right, pulling the Plymouth around so that it slammed against the wall sideways, and skittered along it until they were jolted to a halt against a culvert. Blue, when Tinker had turned the car away from the head-on collision with the wall, was sucked back inside the Plymouth by the force of the shifting direction, his head volleying hard against the door frame.

A silent stillness filled the Plymouth as the passengers took quiet inventory of themselves, listening and slowly flexing for signs of aches or breaks.

“Everybody all right?” Tinker asked at last, just as the first faces began to appear in the windshield, other drivers tentatively exploring the interior for blood and death. Barney, with a whine, leapt past Blue through the window and onto the road.

“I think so,” Kathy answered, her voice an unfamiliar pitch.

“Nothing broken,” Blue replied, feeling his head fill with pain.

“Karma?” Tinker asked.

“Karma, girl,” Blue said, giving her arm a soft shake, getting no response. “Karma?” he called louder. “Karma!”

The doors of the Plymouth opened and people began helping the passengers out, but Blue resisted, clinging to Karma, insisting that she answer, getting only terrifying silence in response.

A state trooper was suddenly in front of Tinker, asking questions to which he could barely reply, aware only of the rising panic in Blue's voice as he called to Karma. Kathy tried to climb into the back seat. Restraining arms forced her to sit and wait for the ambulance for which the trooper had already radioed.

Blue fought against efforts to pull him from the car until a woman leaned in the window on Karma's side of the car, dropping an Indian-pattern blanket over her un-responding body. “Keep her warm against shock,” the woman explained, adding, “I'm a nurse. Let me see if there's anything I can do.”

Blue released Karma from his hold, backing off, recognizing that the woman was offering more to Karma than he could. Slowly, he allowed himself to be drawn from the car while the nurse replaced him, her fingers reaching for a pulse in Karma's throat.

“You okay, buddy?” Tinker asked Blue who now stood ashen in front of him. “This Mountie here called for an ambulance.”

“State trooper,” the policeman corrected him. “Are you all from Canada?”

Before Tinker could explain, Blue's survival reflexes took over. “No. Tinker and me are. We just came down from Vancouver. We picked these girls up hitchhiking. They're Americans though, I know that. Isn't that right, Kathy?” he asked, including her in their story. Kathy nodded, indifferent, intent on the nurse who was now hunched over Karma in the back seat like a lifeguard over a drowning victim. An increasingly loud siren announced the ambulance's approach.

“I have no pulse,” the nurse told the attendants as they reached the Plymouth. The two white-clad men replaced the nurse, carefully removed Karma from the back seat and placed her on a stretcher, working over her even as they wheeled towards their flashing vehicle. Blue went running after them, leaping into the ambulance with the stretcher, leaving Tinker and Kathy to deal with the trooper.

“Are you family?” one of the attendants asked.

“Her husband,” Blue replied. “How is she? Help her, for the love of God, help her!”

“Sit back and let us do our work,” one attendant said, bending over Karma while the other one steered the ambulance back onto the highway, yelling to the police officer that they were going to Sausalito General. On the radio, he contacted the hospital. “No vital signs,” Blue heard, and softly sank back against the side of the ambulance and removed the rosary from around his neck.

“I believe in God….”

41

“I think I did it,” Blue told Tinker and Kathy in the lobby of the hospital.

“Did what?” Kathy asked.

“Brought Karma back to life. I think I did it.”

“You think you did what!”Kathy shouted angrily while Tinker arched his eyebrows. “You're a sick person, Blue, a really sick person.”

“I'm just telling you what happened. You can ask the doctors if you want. They took her in here from the ambulance. DOA, they said, Dead on Arrival is what that means, but they just kept working on her in the emergency room. And I just kept praying. All of a sudden, there's all this activity inside the emergency room and then this doctor comes out and tells me that Karma is alive, that it looks like she's going to be okay, but they're going to keep her here overnight for observation. She got a bad blow on the head and they want to be sure there's no concussion. The doctor thinks she must of hit her head on the post between the doors or something.

“When he was telling me this, I was still saying my rosary. I held it up and showed it to him. He said sometimes things happen that doctors can't answer.”

“So you're taking the credit for Karma's recovery,” Kathy said testily.

“I'm just telling you what happened, that's all. You can believe whatever you like, and so can I, and I don't believe I ever prayed like that in my life. I know I didn't. It was so deep it wasn't even prayer. It was just me and God, talking. It was really something, and when the doctor told me she was alive, I just ... I can't even explain it.”

“You're not thinking of going into the business or anything like that, are you, Blue?” Tinker asked.

“Raising people from the dead, you mean. No way, man. That's a job for the apostles and the priests, to quote the other fellow. But I know something now that I didn't know before. Praying is hard work, man. I'd hate to have to do it too often.”

The three of them walked out into the parking lot. Blue planned to remain at the hospital, close to Karma whom none of them had yet seen because she had been sedated and was under orders to have an undisturbed rest. The plan was for Tinker and Kathy to return the following day with the commune van to pick up Karma and Blue.

“The Plymouth looks kind of DOA itself,” Blue noted as they approached Tinker's car, where Barney – who had returned to the scene of the accident once the fuss had settled down – sat erect in the back seat. Its sides were badly caved in from the encounters with the guardrail and rock wall, and the grill was crumpled from its sudden stop against the culvert, its alignment more than slightly askew.

“It's still running, though. I got it this far,” Tinker said hopefully as Blue reached in to scratch the dog and assure him that Karma was okay. “It'll get us home and then we'll see. Maybe you could say a rosary for it.”

—

A few days later, Peter?, shrieking, swept into the common room of the Human Rainbow Commune, attracting the timid curiosity of the residents. Doors opened slowly, people tiptoeing toward the action, watching Peter? whirl like a wounded animal before finally collapsing into a legless armchair, his tirade wilting into the merest whimper as his head sank into unhappy hands, tears leaking between his fingers.

“You get hit by a truck or break up with Lee or what?” Blue asked.

Capricorn's efforts to examine him only resulted in having his exploring hand impatiently batted away from Peter?'s forehead. Finally, deep-breathing himself into a semblance of order, Peter? began uttering a broken brand of English. “Hear?” he asked. “Did you ... you know ... hear? The radio! Did you hear?”

“Hear what?” asked the Greek chorus of the commune.

“The radio! We're ruined, Blue, ruined!”

“Back up there and take another crack at her,” Blue advised. “Now do as the other fellow says and start from the beginning, Peter?, and, here, let me help you.... Once upon a time....” Blue began, his index finger informing Peter? that that was his cue to pick up the story from that point.

“Our plans! Remember our plans, Blue?” Peter? moaned. “Blue Cacophony was going to remain pure, was going to establish the soundtrack of man's next evolutionary leap, his intellectual giant step, then fade into the mythology of music with no trace left behind except its own legend? Remember how much we wanted that, all of us, you, Gerry, Nathan and myself, wanted to keep our music from being recorded for mass commercial consumption? Remember that, Blue?”

“I remember, Peter?” Blue said, sneaking a guilty peek at the others. “And we never will, old buddy, we never will.”

“Too late! Too late!” then dropping from the high drama of his performance, Peter? told them what had happened.

“On my way over here to visit Karma – how is the poor girl? – waiting for a light to change, this freak walked up to the van and asked me, ‘Hey, man, wanna buy any grass, hash, acid, Blue Cacophony records?' I thought he was indulging too much in his own wares, and the light changed before I could pursue his maddened statement. But it was the radio ... I'm listening to Janis one minute and trying to beat time to Blue Cacophony the next. It took a moment to register, but when it did, Blue, the whole world changed just like that,” Peter? said, snapping his fingers.

“Did you hear me, Blue? Blue Cacophony on the radio! We've been sold out, my friend. The deejay played a Blue Cacophony number, then says it's from the underground recording. Somewhere in this city some bastard is counting his thirty pieces of silver.”

“We'll find that bastard, Peter?, don't you worry about that, and when we do, we'll ... we'll ...we'll ... well, we'll think of something then to do to him. But it was on the radio, you said. You heard Blue Cacophony on the radio? Me? Singing? On the radio?” Blue asked, making excited turn-on-the-radio signals to the others with a hand held behind his back. “What song? How'd I sound?”

“Who cares?”

“Well, I do, Peter?. If somebody went through all that trouble to get our sound out there, I hope it's worth his while. I'm not saying it's not wrong, Peter?, but you ride the horse you're given, as the other fella says. It doesn't have to be the end of the world, you know,” Blue offered in consolation.

“Ah, but that's just the point,” Peter? replied sadly. “It is
not
the end of the world. But it was supposed to be, this pathetic world we live in anyway,” making a global gesture with his hands. “Now we're just an evolutionary dead end. Or a revolutionary dead end, if you can tolerate bad puns at a horrible moment like this. History's full of grand ideas that have been melted down and moulded into golden calves, and Blue Cacophony's just part of the herd now, Blue, nothing special at all.”

“Maybe whoever did it just couldn't keep it to himself,” Blue said. “Maybe he thought this world right here needs us more than the next one does. You never know what a fellow's thinking when he does something like that. Maybe someday we'll look back on this and drink a toast to him. It could happen, you know.”

“No, it couldn't. Something's gone, Blue. It's difficult to explain if you can't feel it yourself, but something is gone. Maybe this is how cynics are born.”

“Don't waste your time trying to wear the cynic's cloak, Peter? You're a rock, man. Peter? the Rock. You're the believer. Did you ever notice that people hardly ever ask each other what they believe? People ask each other how they feel or what they think, but not what they believe. Karma and me had a talk about this very thing once. Peter?, my boy, no matter how many bastards are around you, and that's a lot more than you might imagine, you're not interested in believing in anything but your fellow man. It's your unfortunate fate to care. Hell, you're such a believer, I bet I could sell you a lame horse every day if I wanted to.”

“Don't put my beliefs on your pedestal, Blue. Don't assume to know me so well,” Peter? said, rising from the chair. “I'm going out to find Nathan and Gerry. Do you want to be with me when I break the news?”

“I should be, I know, Peter?, but we're just about to have a meeting here. Some important commune stuff just came up, you know.”

“Your commune business is none of my business so I'll go find them. Try not to take it too hard, Blue,” Peter? said, walking like the father of a dead child to the door, leaving in his wake the now broken silence of Blue Cacophony.

“What's thirty pieces of silver worth these days?” Blue wondered aloud with an uninspired smile when the door closed behind Peter?. “Will somebody turn on the radio, for the love of God?”