Tinker and Blue (31 page)

50

The four of them sat in a booth, Tinker trying to stay in character as he told the real women with them about the concert.

“Blue Cacophony just did four or five songs. In the time they had, they could have done ten, at least, except Blue would rather talk than sing. But the crowd was up for it. The band even got a standing ovation for the song Blue wrote about me, but I have to tell you, buddy,” Tinker said, addressing Blue, “you even had me wanting to go out and buy one of your albums with that sermon about temptation. Farmer'd be proud of you.”

“Farmer'd be proud of you too, Tink! Most wanted man in the state of California! I thought you really were Mrs. Rubble. I didn't think you hippies knew anything about things like make-up and brassieres and stuff like that,” Blue said to Karma and Kathy. “It reminds me of the time Farmer took the old mare to the beauty parlour. I must have told you about that. Anyway, Farmer bought this old mare from this guy back home....”

—

While Blue retold the story about dyeing an old horse's brow and mane and reselling the same horse to the same owner as a younger horse, Tinker drifted off to ponder more urgent matters. At the Fillmore concert, it became clear that the FBI were seriously hunting him. Tinker didn't wink at the FBI agent as coolly as he made Blue believe. When he had come face to face with Wise outside the Fillmore, Tinker went weak just as a flake of mascara slipped into his eye, causing him to blink madly for a moment. When he regained his focus, he realized that Wise was winking back at him, and on the strength and stupidity of that gesture, Tinker regained his courage and continued on into the concert.

When Blue Cacophony started to bring “The Ballad of Tinker” to a close, Blue began ad libbing the words until the whole place was a frenzy of people chanting,

Special Agent Wise, go see a head-shrinker

It's you who's crazy, not Tinker!

The chanting grew more and more angry until Tinker wanted to be away from the place, and a dozen poorly disguised cops shared the sentiment, helping the old lady through the shouting crowd and out into the street where, they told her, she would be safe. He hurried off to the bus stop where Blue caught up to him.

There was also the fact that Peter?, along with his hero-writing, was setting up a meeting with Doctor Silver from Berkeley who wanted to discuss the concept of the oxygen engine in greater detail, but the more people wanted to know about his and Charlie's invention the less Tinker remembered about it. It all seemed to be spinning out of control and there was no telling how it would end up.

—

“...So now, every time Farmer takes a horse there, John Alex turns the hose on it full blast just to make sure the horse's coat won't run like a red shirt in white laundry,” Blue wound up with a chuckle. “So what are we going to order?”

While Kathy and Karma shopped in the menu's noodle department Blue and Tinker's carnivorous appetites were asserting themselves among the sweet-and-sour chicken balls. Covered with a thick crust of batter and swimming in a pool of red sauce, you'd hardly notice it was meat at all, Blue explained across the table. It was a good compromise, he thought, taking his proof from the fact that no one argued with him.

“I wish I had a picture of this,” Blue said to the girls, a nod of his head indicating his seat-mate. “Of course, Wise would sooner have a picture of you holding your number up, buddy, and personally, I think we should be out of here before your number's up – return to our own planet, as the other fellow says.”

“It's something we really have to think about now, Tinker,” Kathy said as Mr. Lo left with their orders. “I'm getting scared because nobody seems to be looking for me. What I mean is that it's my journal that started all this trouble. They arrested Cory and Tulip at the commune. Then they came looking for Cory again to try to find out about Tinker after they read the journal, but they never asked him about me. I went to see him yesterday just to make sure, and Cory told me that my name never came up in all the questioning, which is strange considering that my name is on the cover of the journal. So now I wonder if they aren't saying anything about me because they're trying not to scare me away, hoping to find me, then follow me to you.”

“You wouldn't believe the route she took just to get us here,” Karma said. “I think we walked halfway to Los Angeles through a maze of alleys.”

Silence fell over the table while they digested Kathy's theory and waited for their food.

“Makes sense to me, Tinker,” Blue said, lifting his elbows from the table so Mr. Lo could set his chicken balls and rice in front of him. “You and Kathy should pack up and leave for home right now. If you do, then in a week's time, this will all be nothing but a story to tell people who won't believe a word of it. Stay here and the other island awaits you, my friend, and I don't mean Alki-Seltzer, I mean Alki-traz.”

“You come with us, we'll leave right now,” Tinker said sharply.

Blue glanced across the booth at Karma, sensing that it wasn't a trip she was ready to take with him right now. The tone of Tinker's challenge told Blue that Tinker was sure Karma wasn't going anywhere. For a silent moment, he assessed the options while Karma gazed off as if she had never heard the conversation that had taken place between the two friends.

“Checkmate, as the other fellow says,” Blue finally said as he picked up his fork.

“Blue,” Tinker said at last, “I appreciate what you mean, but this isn't about you and me. The FBI aren't looking for you, just me. I'll decide when it's time for me to leave, okay? But I don't think you should attract any more attention to yourself like you did tonight. This is my problem, not yours. If I need your help I'll ask for it. You know that, don't you? But if I have to be thinking about your safety along with my own, then—”

“Then Tinker will lose his focus, Blue, and that's when mistakes get made,” Kathy said.

“Got you finishing his sentences for him, does he?” Blue asked sharply. “Maybe in a couple of weeks he won't have to say anything for himself because you'll be speaking for him.”

“Back off, Blue,” Tinker warned, pushing the brown wig toward the back of his head.

“A fight here would be really wonderful,” Karma said. “Then Mr. Lo can call the police and the two of you can explain your differences to them just before they put you in jail or deport you. Grow up, the two of you.

“Blue, Tinker is right. This is his problem. Your job is to be there for him if he needs you, but until then we have our own life to live. And Tinker, don't push Blue away. He just cares, although he won't use those words for it. Now, let's all of us go home, and Blue and I will take the leftovers for Barney. So say goodnight to Kathy, Blue, and kiss Mrs. Rubble on the cheek and we can go home to bed.”

51

One wall of their room in the relocated Human Rainbow Commune had been divided into three panels by Karma, and within the space of one of them, she explored her seventh memory. The life within it hadn't yet begun to emerge from the blue wash of sky and desert-brown landscape but Blue was already guessing a wagon train.

“I saw the movie,” he teased. “You die in the desert, arrows sticking out of everywhere, and Audie Murphy rides up just in time to hear your last words, then he buries you under a pile of stones and the rest of the movie belongs to him, or so he thinks because what old Audie doesn't know is that ... dun duh dah ... you're coming baaaack.”

“Blue, why do you suppose so many people believe in an afterlife as long it's anywhere else but here?”

“Because it's like the other fellow says, everybody's dying to get off this planet. I think it would be a rotten trick to find out you have to come back, although,” he said, reaching out to touch her, “some things just might be worth coming back for.”

“You're right, you know,” Karma said, giving his hand a squeeze then returning it to the vicinity of himself, the message clear. “It is a wagon train. I'll know more about it when I have to think about the people I'm painting.”

—

“Well, Barney, old buddy, if the other fellow had told me a year ago that I'd be in San Francisco tonight with a hit record and my best friend on the Most Wanted list, I'd of had him in detox fifteen minutes after he said it, but here we are one year later and whaddya know, the other fellow was right,” Blue confided, one hand scratching Karma's dog behind the ear, the other raising a beer to his lips. He sat in front of a blank scribbler page at the kitchen table, Barney sitting up quietly behind him, absorbing the affection. The rest of the commune was in bed, slumbering through the hours between midnight and dawn.

“Last March, I was still in school trying to get a handle on economics and find a girl who'd go all the way. You're not a Catholic, Barney boy, so you don't know the embarrassment of going into the confessional month after month to tell the priest about your dirty deeds and hearing him ask if you committed them with somebody else. And when you say no, he asks you if it was with yourself. Who else, if there wasn't anybody there but yourself. But the priests like to catch you
red handed
, as the other fellow says, make you admit what they already know. It's not like a guy wants to be bragging to a priest or anything, but if he hears you month after month telling him that you haven't been with a girl, he's going to start thinking you're a real loser or something. Well, I'll have something to tell him when I go home, won't I, Barney?

“When I go home. Four little words I'm going to write right here, When. I. Go. Home. Those words scare me, Barney, know why? I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach when I say them now that says maybe they're not true, that maybe ... there's been guys from back home who've gone away and never made it back, fell in love or got killed or something like that. I never planned to be one of them, but this frigging city is like quicksand, just sucks you into it. Look at Tinker, in love and wanted by the law. Those things would never of happened to him back home. If we never left, he'd still be at Charlie's Guesso whistling at the girls and talking about his oxygen engine. His invention would never get him in trouble in Cape Breton, and then someday he'd get lucky and knock some girl up and marry her and make little Tinkers. But now the FBI want him to make licence plates, and if he winds up doing that, then it'll all be my fault, buddy,” Blue confessed to Barney as he went to the fridge for another beer then returned to his chair. He reached over to the chair across from him and retrieved his guitar.

“If I go home...roam...dome...gloam...” Blue hummed, strumming his way through potential rhymes.

“If Tinker goes to jail it's going to be my fault, Barney, because tonight he put it right to me, come with me and we'll go right now, and I hesitated, and it's like the other fellow says, he who hesitates is lost. Only it might not be me who's lost, but Tinker, because I won't be going to jail. I'll just be sending my best friend there. He made me choose, but he knew what I was going to choose when he asked me. He knew I was going to choose to stay with you and Karma and the band. Well, to hell with him, that's what I say. To hell with him,” Blue repeated, lifting the fresh bottle to his lips.

I just want to go home

never more to roam....

“I hate that, home and roam together. Almost every time you hear a song with home in it, the writer rhymes it with roam. Of course, they're natural partners because one is the opposite of the other, you either stay home, or you roam. I roamed and look where it got me, as far from home as a man can walk on this frigging continent. It's just a matter of turning around and walking back, is that what you think, Barney? Not that simple, my boy. Too many pieces of me scattered around this city for me to cram them all back into a suitcase and just go back home. There's Tinker. What do I tell his mother when I go home without him? That I lost him somewhere along the way? And what would the band do without me and you harmonizing us right into fame? And Karma, God bless her, and I think that He has. I can't turn my back on her even to face homeward, so what we got to do, Barney, old buddy, is wait.

“It feels like spring here but it's only the first of March back home, and that means summer's a long way away yet. By June, if we hang in here, everybody will feel different, feel like being home for the summer. Tinker will hear the call to go home and we'll be just like two salmon coming back to the Margaree River to give birth to their young; Tinker and I'll be homeward bound. And Karma and Kathy, too, I hope, and me and you. I know you're Karma's dog, but sometimes you feel like mine, know what I mean?”

Blue thought about what he meant by his last remark as he drank deeply off his beer.

“What I mean is that I used to have a dog once, too. Cu we called him. Cu, you see, is the Gaelic word for dog. We Scots are good at that, calling a thing what it is. Back home, our town faces a broad cove on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and to the north there's this big river, and to the south there's this little brook. Those three things pretty well make the borders for the town. Know what we call them? Broad Cove, The Big River and The Little Brook. That's what I mean, you call a thing what it is, so when it came to naming the puppy I had, I called him Cu, not that I had any Gaelic of my own, of course, but everybody grows up knowing a few words like
poch ma hon
which means kiss my arse and stuff like that, and
cu
's a pretty easy word to remember and just as easy to spell which doesn't happen often in Gaelic, so since Cu was a
cu
, I called him Cu.

“Cu was no German shepherd like you. The dogs back home don't pay a lot of attention to their nationalities. Like if this Scotch terrier was walking down street and saw a French poodle in heat, he's not going to spend a lot of time worry about race, creed or religion, as the other fellow says, he's just going to join the pack that's howling around her, and good luck to the children. So by the time I got a puppy, this kind of activity had been going on among the different dogs in our town for longer than I was alive, so the only thing you could be sure of about Cu was that he was a dog. ‘What kind?' some people asked. Now if they were asking me what kind of person I was, well I could take them all the way back to Scotland and the Hebrides and recite my great-grandfathers for seven or eight generations, but I never held it against my dog that he didn't even know who his father was.

“Anyway, Cu was my best friend until Tinker came along, but you know, in some ways Cu was still my best friend because we used to do this a lot, this very thing. Some nights I'd have to stay up late studying, or just stay up after a dance and sit in the kitchen beside the coal stove and Cu would lay beside me and we'd listen to a hockey game if I could pick one up on the radio, or listen to WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, or we'd just talk. That's what this reminds me of, me and you reminding me of me and Cu, and me telling Cu my troubles, stuff I couldn't even tell Tinker, stuff not sinful enough to tell the priest, so I'd confess to Cu that I wish I could be a musician and have all these girls wanting to go out with me and make lots of money. When you get right down to it, the things I told my dog were much more important than anything I could tell my priest or my mother or my best friend. With a dog, you can be scared or lonely or sad, and they just look up at you with big brown eyes just the way you're doing now, and never say a word about it.

“Did I ever tell you what Farmer once said to me about Cu's eyes? Farmer was eating a sandwich with lots of meat in it and Cu just lay there looking up at him – not begging 'cause I taught him not to, just looking – and Farmer's trying to ignore him. Finally he tears off half the sandwich and throws it in front of Cu and says to me, ‘If I had that dog's eyes I'd never have to buy another drink as long as I live.'

“So this whole thing is making me homesick, Barney, me and you in the kitchen talking like a couple of old friends, sharing a beer, trying to figure life out. Sometimes, just when I figure I got it figured out, along comes something new to smash my figuring all to hell, like Tinker tonight, and Karma, too. I thought I was trying to get us all safely out of the city and back home and what happens? I get my bluff called and I didn't even know I was bluffing. I thought I just wanted to go home.

I just want to go home

But Karma just wants to go ooohm....