Tinker and Blue (33 page)

“No way! Maybe. I don't know. He should of told me. Wherever he is, he should of told me.”

“Unless he couldn't.”

“Unless he couldn't. When we get back to the commune, we're going to start watching the watchers, as the other fellow says. We're going to take shifts watching the task force's office, seeing who goes in, who comes out. See if we can figure out what they're up to. Maybe we'll see Capricorn or Tinker.”

“Or Kathy,” Karma said.

“Both our best friends gone just like that,” Blue noted with a snap of his fingers. “Happy Easter,” he said as Mr. Lo placed their food in front of them, then ordered a burger without the bun to go.

54

It wasn't the brightest idea I ever had, Blue told himself, as he sat in the shadowed doorway across the street from the FBI offices where Wise's task force was located. The drizzle made it hard for him to write in the surveillance scribbler in which they noted the comings and goings of the agents. They weren't sure how they would use the information, but they agreed some record should be kept.

The commune members were divided into shifts, two working together from the parked van during the day, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and one person observing during the night shift. Blue was doing the first four-hour shift, eight-to-midnight, of the around-the-clock watch. Leadership, he decided, wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Because it was late, and a holiday, there wasn't much activity around the door of the building, although God knew what was taking place behind its walls. The same grey Chev that Wise had been driving the night of the raid on the former commune house was in the parking lot beside the building. Blue tried to kill time by working on some songs, but discovered that whenever he was writing lyrics he sang them aloud, sometimes the same line over and over, and that wasn't such a great idea under the current circumstances. The rain reminded him of a story.

It was raining the night the Mounties arrested Monk for running a still. It was inevitable they were going to catch him sometime because no matter how carefully he hid his operation, he could not hide his reputation. The Mounties couldn't help but know who made the best moonshine on Cape Breton Island. Nobody turned Monk in, but nobody drinking Monk's booze would wake up blind in the morning, either. People respected his product, talked about it. Word gets around, so the Mounties had been watching for a long, long time, but Monk stayed invisible.

Then one night they walked in on him as he sat in a drizzle not much different that the one Blue was sitting in now. He was sitting around as casual as a man feeding wood to his kitchen stove, except that it was an open flame under a copper pot. He didn't put up any resistance.

The Mounties were red-faced when Monk went before the judge, and faced the evidence against him, a bottle filled with the contents of his still. It was strong stuff ... for tea. The judge had a good laugh over that and let Monk go.

Remembering, it reminded Blue of how Capricorn talked half the city of San Francisco into carrying around plastic bags of oregano, but the judges here didn't have the same sense of humour as the ones back home. Blue realized that the imaginary audience for this story he was telling about Monk was Capricorn, and wondered if he was inside the building. He didn't seem to be in any of the city's lockups. Between them, Cory and Peter? knew enough people in the jails to quickly learn that no one resembling Capricorn was in any place prisoners are normally kept. In case Capricorn was inside the FBI offices, Blue cast the telling of his story in that direction, a light-hearted jail story to pick up Capricorn's spirits.

What Monk did every time he walked out to his still, Blue continued telling Capricorn, was stop and make a cup of tea. He made it in a copper pot attached to coils of pipe that could have easily been mistaken for a still. By the time he got a fire lit and the water boiling in the vat, then added the tea, waited for it to steep and poured himself a cup, Monk figured that if the Mounties were following him, they would have made their move by now. So Monk would enjoy his tea, put the fire out and continue on his way to where he hid his still.

“You're the luckiest son of a bitch in the world,” Farmer told Monk. “There must be something to that business of yours of putting a rosary in the still when you're running the shine.”

In a few minutes, Blue would be getting relieved and he checked the scribbler to see his night's work.

9:15 - a guy went into the building.

10:16 - two guys come out of the building.

10:17 - one of the guys runs back into the building.

10:18 - the other guy is standing in front of the building.

10:26 - the first guy comes back out with a briefcase.

11:43 - a guy goes into the building.

55

Media silence concerning Capricorn's arrest carried over into Easter Monday, increasing to panic the level of alarm members of the Human Rainbow Commune felt for his safety. Blue could feel the failing expectations of those around him as minutes dragged into hours and hours into days. They had hoped Blue would come up with a plan that would free Capricorn, or at least verify that he was still alive and all right. The fact that newspapers and television stations had ignored his news leak left him frustrated and edgy with everyone.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked Karma. “Go to the newspapers and write the story myself?” Hearing his own question, he picked up his guitar case, called Barney and left the commune for a rehearsal, a decision that did not rest easy with the rest of the commune's population who felt that Blue was escaping into an activity that could have waited until Capricorn came back.

—

“Peter??” Blue asked, as the band prepared for its rehearsal. “How well do you know that people at that paper you write for?”

“
The Subterranean
? Pretty well. Why?”

“I called every newspaper and television station in San Francisco telling them about Capricorn's arrest. None of them care.”

“Of course they don't care, Blue. Fucdepor Petroleum or their subsidiaries probably own most of the mainstream media in this city, and people like Reginald Regent III sit on the boards of the others. If someone like Reggie Regent the Third puts the word out to ignore any rumours about Capricorn's arrest, then it will be ignored. To the establishment, freedom of the press means the freedom not to print any story that doesn't go well with morning coffee, or one that might upset the Masters of the State, as I call them.”

Blue explained his rationale behind getting out the information that Capricorn had been arrested: first for his protection, and also to get the FBI to acknowledge that they had him in custody.

“You should have come to me earlier,” Peter? told Blue, ignoring Blue's explanation that they had wanted to involve as few people as possible, especially with Reginald Regent the Turd throwing around words like “kill” and “disappear.”

“
The Subterranean
is preparing to go to press this afternoon,” Peter? continued. “Tomorrow is its distribution day. No one over there's going to be happy to hear from me at the last minute, but I'll see what I can do.

“But I need something from you, too, Blue. I've got this gig lined up for Saturday night. I know you have a lot on your mind but this could turn into something really big. Promise me you'll be there.”

“It's a promise so long as there's nobody's wake I have to go to, or if I'm not in jail myself. Life must go on, as the other fellow says.”

—

Karma's seventh life was finished when Blue entered the room later that afternoon. She wasn't there, so Blue had time to sit on a chair and study it. He had been right. It was a covered wagon. It had been making its way across the desert, and beyond that parched distance he could see hazy blue mountains, snow-capped, almost hear the cold streams of water leaking down the mountainside in trickles and rushes to feed the fertile foothills that rose gently before them. Those images were probably the last this family saw before thirst overtook them. The horses lay in brown heaps of death beside the weathered, torn wagon, and four people – a father, a mother holding an infant, and a young boy lying beside the father – were exposed to a sun whose only act of mercy was that it had finally taken the suffering away from this lost family.

Blue felt the conviction in Karma's painting, knew somewhere inside himself that this was more than a picture, that this was a painful portrait that had nothing to do with Audie Murphy. That Karma believed she was one of the victims she depicted wasn't the important thing, the tragedy was. Her other lives had not all been pleasant pictures but they had been filled with life.
The Covered Wagon
, as Blue found himself naming it, was not. Yet it was filled with a disturbing sense of peace at last.

Blue heard the beads of the door tinkling behind him and grew more alert. “What do you think?” Karma asked.

“Where's the arrows? These people should of been full of arrows, shouldn't they?”

“It wasn't Indians who killed them, Blue,” Karma said quietly. “It was the heat. They died of thirst.”

“Art buyers would pay a lot more for arrows sticking out of those bodies, I bet,” Blue went on. “So where was your old buddy Buddha this time? When the lion was dying, he fed them the meat of his own bones, you told me. You'd think he'd of at least turned himself into a bucket of cold water for these people, especially with a baby with them. Which one are you?”

Karma didn't answer.

“Did you hear any more about Capricorn?” she asked. Blue told her about Peter? and his hope that the story would begin to come out on Tuesday, forcing the FBI to acknowledge that they had Capricorn. Peter? was going to talk to a couple of radio stations, as well, but wanted Blue to do the interviews since he had a high profile at the moment because of Blue Cacophony, and especially because of “Failure To Love.”

“That worries me,” Karma said. “It will draw so much attention to you. How do you feel about it?” she asked.

“I'd rather be in Philadelphia, as the other fellow says, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do, and I guess I got to go on the radio and tell people about Capricorn. It might help Tinker, too.”

“I think about Kathy a lot,” Karma confided.

“You think about her, but do you worry about her, too?”

“I try not to, Blue. Worrying is destructive to the person doing the worrying, and it doesn't resolve anything. When I find myself starting to worry, I paint or I meditate, or pray that she's okay.”

“You keep doing that because if she's okay there's a good chance Tinker is, too. But that tells me something about your painting there. If you were painting that picture instead of worrying, then I think all those dead people laying around there are your worries about Kathy and Tinker, your fears for them and their unborn children, that's what I think.”

Karma studied her own work thoughtfully from Blue's observations. “Maybe you're right. Maybe I am, but of all the people in the world, you're the last person I want to have to defend my life to.”

“Well, you'll just have to do what you were talking about just now. When I'm bothering you, forget about me, and when I'm not bothering you, love me, and I'll do the same for you. Oh, yes, and it's a really, really good painting. Even without the arrows.”

—

Despite challenging Karma on her claim that she did not worry, or at least tried not to worry, Blue experimented with loosening the lump of fear in his stomach by taking up his guitar and turning his thoughts to the ninety-sixth verse of “The Red Lobster,” which he hadn't been able to get moving for some time now. Leaving Capricorn and Tinker to look after themselves for a while, he plunged his imagination into the cold water of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and swam around looking for images he could mould into lyrics for his epic undertaking.

After several efforts, resulting in numerous scratched-out lines on several scribbler pages, Blue began to find a direction he could follow, and following it to the end, he squiggled out the last almost illegible words before sitting back finally with his guitar to feel the verse flow along the instrument's strings to find its proper place in the sequence of romantic insights that comprised the slowly-completing-itself song:

You're so pretty

and such a fine talker

your words lure me

out of Davy Jones' locker

But I lie gasping

for air on dry land

It feels like

I'm going to be eaten

right out of your hand

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

56

Blue could hardly believe that in the more than three hours he was lost in his own creativity there hadn't been a thought of Capricorn or Tinker or Kathy. He actually felt relaxed, in a tired kind of way, and brought his eyes up to study Karma's painting again. Maybe she was right, that there was nobody dead in that desert sand but her and her family a hundred ago or whenever it was. And maybe, he thought, recalling Tinker's and his crossing of the desert, that if they had met ghosts that night it wouldn't have been a war party of Indians at all, but a wagon train of dead people, Karma among them because they were fated to meet somewhere or sometime. He'd have to remember to tell her that.

Or maybe not.

He wanted to stay in their bedroom, ease himself into verse ninety-seven, but the day was growing dully toward evening and his shift in the doorway across from the FBI's offices. He went to the kitchen to make a sandwich to eat and one to take with him.

Tulip had the surveillance reports from the first shifts spread across the table, studying them. “I wonder if we shouldn't be trying to follow the agents who leave the office. Maybe they are going to where Capricorn is.”

“Wise's car was there all day until I left at midnight,” Blue said, looking at the reports. “It says here he left after one in the morning and came back before eight. The flies go where the honey is, to quote the other fella. I think Wise'd be where Capricorn is. We don't have enough people to follow everyone who comes and goes.”

“Blue, I'm worried,” Tulip confided, her admission bringing back the lump of worry that he had made disappear using Karma's technique.

“Nothing to be worried about, Tulip. We just watch the FBI office until they bring Capricorn out.”

“Then what?”

“We'll follow them, for one thing, see where they take him, but you know what we really need? A camera. If we could take Capricorn's picture with Wise, that'd really prove we're right. We could give it to the papers, to Peter?'s friends' paper, at least. That's what we need, a camera.” He was glad he had thought of a camera, although there wasn't a hell of a lot he knew about them: point, click and hope the FBI doesn't notice the flash? He'd have to talk to somebody who knew more than he did. Knowledge is not knowing something but knowing where to find it, according to the other fellow.

—

Blue left early for his shift, taking Barney with him, and taking a long detour by way of Mr. Lo's just in case. Nothing. No Tinker. No Kathy. No messages. Barney fared better, leaving the restaurant with a thick bone, compliments of Mr. Lo. “Looks like we both got something to gnaw on tonight,” Blue told the dog.

Barney slowly chipped the bone down with his canine teeth while Blue, sitting beside him in the shadowed doorway, was having less success reducing the solid lump of fear that swelled inside him, sometimes choking off his ability to breathe, forcing him to take huge gulps of air.

By the time he had left the commune, Karma had already begun to block out her eighth life on their bedroom wall, and when she was involved in her work, she just disappeared. Blue's brief reprieve into “The Red Lobster” had passed, the fear growing through him again like a malignant tumour. When forced to discuss it publicly, as with Karma this afternoon, he referred to it as worrying, but it was fear, there was no doubt about that. Blue had felt fear before, the night lost in the boat for example, but it had formed and dissolved in a few dark hours. This fear was in its fourth day and getting stronger by the minute. To just sit and stare at the doorway across the street was maddening.

He was sure Capricorn was inside. Wise's car confirmed that for him. Tinker might be as well, because regardless of what Tulip said about Capricorn not betraying them, the FBI had techniques for extracting information like a dentist without novocaine. Sure, Capricorn might be able to suffer enough to protect the commune. It was his friggin' commune, wasn't it? And he loved Tulip. One thing the movies teach a guy is that men sometimes do heroic things for the women they love. But Tinker wasn't really part of the commune. He didn't even live there anymore. He had an establishment job in the tunnel. And Capricorn knew that he lived with Mrs. Rubble, although he didn't know where Mrs. Rubble lived. But it would take the FBI six minutes to find her if they wanted to. And Mrs. Rubble's husband fought for his country, so she'd have his pension. The FBI were no different than the politicians back home who went around to the old people at election time threatening to take their pensions away unless they voted for them. So maybe Tinker and Kathy never left Mrs. Rubble's at all. Maybe Capricorn gave up Tinker and Kathy for a promise from the FBI that they would leave the commune alone. It was a thought that Blue felt should make him mad, but he suspected that under torture he might give up the commune to protect Tinker. So maybe Wise came to Mrs. Rubble's door with his agents and took them away, telling Mrs. Rubble not to say a word or she would lose her pension. Old people believe in governments, Blue told himself, vaguely recalling his own fondness for all things patriotic.

And the reason why nobody knew about the arrests, Blue reasoned, was that Reginald Regent III wanted Tinker dead, but he also wanted Tinker's plans for the oxygen engine. Powerful people got what they always got, and that was whatever they wanted. Reginald Regent III got Tinker, and as a bonus, Capricorn was in the hands of his long-time enemy, Wise. Both Tinker and Capricorn were as good as dead, Blue decided, except for the plans. Reginald Regent III wanted Tinker's plans, and only two people on the planet knew the truth about those plans, Tinker and Blue. The plans didn't exist, but they would torture Tinker until he told them. Or until he died.

Imagining what Tinker and Capricorn were going through across the street worked the emotional alchemy of transmuting Blue's fear to anger – rage, really. He wanted to charge across the street and storm the FBI building. That anger told him a lot about the guys he'd seen in war movies who, when they were pinned down and helpless for hours and days by German gunfire, some of them, even the cowards who were cowering the deepest into the mud, would finally crack and charge from their foxholes into the machine guns or the artillery and get blown to bits. Once in a while, one of the soldiers, if he had a bigger part in the movie, might get a hand-grenade away, blow out the enemy position before he died. It always seemed so foolish before, watching them run toward their own deaths, but Blue was beginning to appreciate their frustration. Anything, anything at all would be better than sitting in a doorway scared to death and helpless.

Barney, sensing the disturbed stillness beside him, gave the bone a rest and instead rested his huge head on Blue's lap. Blue dug his fingers deep into the fur of Barney's thick neck and scratched, grateful for the company.

“Know what I saw once in a war movie, Barney? These guys were pinned down and they couldn't get out because the Germans were in a bunker and had them trapped. The Americans – it was always the Americans; see enough war movies and you'll be convinced they were there all alone – anyway, this American platoon had a dog, a German shepherd like yourself, for sniffing out mines and stuff. What they did in the end was strap explosives to his back and send him into the bunker. Blew the Germans from here to Kingdom come. The dog, too, of course, but in the end, they gave him a military funeral and he was decorated with medals and stuff. It was kind of sad, but it was kind of sick, too. I wouldn't ask you to do anything I ... wouldn't ... do.”

—

Tulip arrived with the articles Blue had ordered while he kept his watch. From a nearby phone booth he had phoned the telephone booth at the corner of the street where the commune was located, letting it ring until someone passing by picked it up. Blue asked the unknown voice on the other end of the line to carry an emergency message to the address he gave him, asking someone to come to the booth for an urgent call. The strange voice on the other end of the phone told Blue that he would deliver the message, and left the phone hanging there for Blue to listen to the street noises while he waited. Tulip came a few minutes later, listened and shortly after arrived with Barney's harness, sunglasses and a walking stick that she had hurriedly painted white at Blue's request.

With his cane tick-tick-ticking along the concrete walk, Blue let Barney lead him past the FBI offices where Blue suddenly wrenched the harness, forcing the dog toward the door. Blindly feeling the glass, Blue eventually found the handle, opened the door and let Barney lead him inside where a uniformed security man behind an information desk asked what the visitor wanted. Looking away from the voice toward a plant in the corner in imitation of someone blind, Blue asked if this was the Crosby Building. Learning that it wasn't, Blue explained that his dog must have made a mistake although he'd always sniffed out the Crosby Molasses Company before.

“You don't happen to be eating biscuits and molasses?” Blue asked the security officer, who denied any such indulgence.

“I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave,” the security guard said, coming around and reaching a hand out to guide Blue to the door only to jerk his hand back when Barney bared teeth capable of amputation.

“Easy, Barney,” Blue told the dog. “Just lead me out of here so the man can get back to his biscuits and molasses.”

“I'm not eating molasses. To tell you the truth, what you're describing sounds gross. Molasses is used for baking if I remember my mother's kitchen correctly.”

“Not where I come from, sir,” Blue said just as he managed to manoeuvre Barney into a position where he walked Blue into a marble pillar in the foyer. A noisy kick from Blue's boot to the base of the pillar, synchronized with his head seemingly striking the pillar, set off a dramatic sequence in which Blue first wavered backward, then sank slowly to his knees before collapsing into a heap on the floor. Barney licked his face.

“Are you alright, sir?” the security man asked Blue from a safe distance beyond the dog's teeth. “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

Blue did not want an ambulance. To fend off professional assistance, he moaned, groaned, righted his askew glasses, began slapping the floor in a circular search for his cane, to which the security officer verbally guided him without ever exposing a hand to the seeing-eye dog. On his feet, Blue leaned against the information desk and went into his idea of someone feeling woozy. He asked for an aspirin and perhaps a glass of water if you would be so kind? The security guard waffled on the request, then decided that the quicker he got the pair of them out of there, the safer he was from the dog. Asking Blue to stay put, he rushed through a door.

Blue walked immediately toward the bank of elevators only to have one reach the ground floor just as he got there. He scurried back to the information desk and was gazing aimlessly around from behind his glasses when the elevator doors opened and two men got out. He almost stared when he saw Wise. From behind him, Blue heard the security officer returning, the glass being set on the counter, aspirin gripped in his hand. The activity attracted Wise's attention. He walked over to the desk. A low growl began in Barney's throat.

“Is there a problem here?” he asked.

“No sir,” the security agent assured him. “This gentleman and his dog were looking for some molasses company's office and wandered in here by mistake. He had a slight accident.”

“What's wrong with that dog?” Wise asked as the threatening tone increased. He looked at the dog, then studied Blue. “Do I know you from some place?”

“Can't tell, mister. I can't see you,” Blue explained. Wise sifted quickly through his memory files for a place where these two fit, a blind hippie and a cross dog, but he was in a hurry.

“Get these two out of here,” he ordered the security officer. “This is a secured area. No visitors who haven't already been cleared. You know that,” and the FBI agent left the building, with the security guard asking Blue if wouldn't mind taking his dog and going.

“You mean you want my dog to take me and go, don't you?” Blue said.

—

“Capricorn's in there,” Blue told those who were still awake when he got home. “We have to keep watching.”

“You took a big chance trying that,” Karma said. “What if you had been caught?”

“I know he pretty near recognized me there. He kept looking from me to Barney like he was trying to remember where he saw us before, but we didn't look much like the stars that were shining on the stage of the Fillmore that night, so he couldn't put it together, but even if he did, as soon as he reached for me Barney would have had his hand or his gun or something and I would of been out of there faster than a rabbit in a field of greyhounds.”

“And what would have happened to Barney?” Karma asked.

“Barney would of got away, too, unless they shot him,” then seeing the expression on Karma's face he changed his assumption to a joke, telling her he was only kidding. “We would both of gotten away, Karm. It's not like he was carrying a bagful of explosives on his back or anything like that, you know.”