Tinker and Blue (4 page)

6

Around the bonfire, some of the commune members stared off into a world of their own lost thoughts while others passed around joints which Blue and Tinker rejected, or sipped from a wine bottle which they did not refuse. Some people murmured to each other, and one girl sang to herself until her song spread its influence around the circle, drawing some people into its soft chorus while others paused to listen.

Blue took a swig from the bottle and passed it to the one who called himself Capricorn.

“Good stuff,” he said.

“Tulip made it,” Capricorn told him.

“She makes her own wine?” Blue responded, looking at the hippie sitting beside Capricorn. He was impressed. “You'd be a big hit with some people I know back home. They drink 74. Ever try it? Sweet but cheap, as the other feller says.”

When the bottle made its way back to him again, it was down to its last taste. Blue drained it and tossed it over his shoulder only to hear it drop at his feet a moment later. Barney panting for a pat, lay at his feet.

—

In a gasoline alley near Cheyenne, their friendship had been cemented. Blue found himself alone when Karma and Kathy went to use a laundromat and Tinker opened the hood to investigate an unfamiliar tick. Across the street, a hamburger joint beckoned him in, so Blue, not wanting to alert Karma to his carnivorous ways, nor disturb Tinker at his obsession, quietly slipped over and entered. When he came out with a fistful of meat between buns, chomping on his first bite, Barney was waiting. Half way through the burger, Blue broke before the unrelenting and pitiful stare of the dog. “Probably feeds you sunflower seeds, eh, boy?” he said, surrendering the last half of the patty to Barney. While Barney swallowed, Blue crumpled the napkin and made a bad jump shot toward the garbage bucket, missed and left it there. Barney retrieved and returned it, forcing Blue to walk over and drop the evidence in the can. When they got back into the car, Barney leapt into the front seat, propping himself between Tinker and Blue, and the rest of the way they travelled in that formation, Blue's arm around Barney, his thoughts surrounding Karma.

—

Capricorn was older than the rest, Blue guessed. Perhaps even thirty. His hair hung in two long braids down his chest and a buckskin jacket protected him from the cool mountain air. He wore sandals. When he stood up to feed the fire, Blue watched him, and decided that, whether he admitted it or not, Capricorn was in charge here. Blue saw a subtle deference in everyone's approach to him, and despite the ease with which he answered questions, solved problems, and spoke of non-violence and harmony, the sinewy stealth with which he moved suggested to Blue that Capricorn could survive anywhere, on any terms. The terms chosen confused Blue.

The second bottle of wine circled the bonfire and when it reached Blue barely any of it was gone. If these people are trying to get drunk, they're not very good at it, he thought, opening his throat for a generous share of the bottle's delights. He passed it to Capricorn.

“What's going on here, buddy?” he asked.

As if he hadn't heard, Capricorn stared into the fire, the bottle, still untasted, in his hand.

“It's about being a part of something, not being apart from it,” Capricorn said finally without shifting his focus to Blue. “There's an unpopular teaching that you'll find among the greatest people who ever lived – not the most powerful, but the greatest – that says that we are responsible for what happens on this planet, and to it, and to each other. Buddha said it. Christ said it. Ghandi said it. King said it. And it bothers a whole lot of people that there are other people who listen to those words, who want to be a part of that vision, that truth.”

“Yeah,” Blue said. “Tinker and me are a part of something. We're a part of Cape Breton, two little chips off the old block, as the other fellow says, eh, Tink?

“We'll always be a part of Cape Breton, boy, but how long will you be a part of this?” Blue asked, the thin air and wine revving him a bit.

“We're here now. That's all that matters. At this moment, everything on the planet is perfectly safe from us,” Capricorn explained. “I've done enough damage to it already.”

“I could tell you weren't born no frigging saint,” Blue said. “What's ya do?”

“I've shed that concept of myself and I have no interest in reviving it,” Capricorn said, standing to bring the conversation to a close. He played with the fire, forcing it to flare again.

Blue looked around the bonfire, reminded of bonfires from other summers in a more familiar setting. Driftwood piled upon the sandy beach of his hometown, him and Tinker and the rest of the gang bantering out of a life-long knowledge of each other, urging girls over the beach for a kiss and a quick feel.

–

Yeah, we were a part of something there, Blue thought, something as good as this anyway. So we hunt and fish a little, and buy and sell animals – eat them, too. And Christ, punching a guy in the head isn't violence, not when he's your best friend or your cousin, and back home everybody's either or. And we don't write protest songs; we dance to a music that's a thousand years old. The priests and the politicians might have the power but the fiddler is the king of the island – and when he's done playing there's stories to be told, or old wounds to be argued again, some of them as old as the music. When your people and your culture's been slaughtered on the fields of Culloden and the remains of it is gathered up just like Cory's people – except that we weren't even worth the buying and selling part – and shipped to a new land to try to piece together what they could from what was left, you have to admire what they did, because you're the result, and if it ain't perfect, well, that's just too frigging bad!

—

All he knew here were Tinker, sitting across the fire from him beside Kathy, and Karma who moved around speaking to everyone, not ignoring him but treating them all as if they were as special to her as he wanted to be.

“Give us a song, there, Tinker,” he said, but Tinker shrugged off the request, saying he didn't know any songs they might like to hear. It wasn't until Kathy prodded him that Tinker relented, breaking uncomfortably into “The Wild Colonial Boy,” and it wasn't long before Tinker's natural enthusiasm forgot his foreign audience and he was deep into the role he loved. Tinker's Irish rebel songs didn't offend anyone at the Human Rainbow Commune that Blue could notice, although he had hoped that Tinker's singing would drive home the differences between them and the hippies. Instead, everyone, including Capricorn, became caught up in Tinker's energy and quickly joined the rousing chorus of “By the Rising of the Moon.” Blue, sullen, refused to contribute his own voice, oblivious to the mercy of that decision, nor any of his own songs. Instead, he watched Karma, who smiled at him when their eyes met but who seemed to lose track of him immediately after looking away.

The fire burned down without anyone re-feeding it, and people began wandering away to their own places. Blue watched Karma wave good night and disappear into the darkness, then watched it swallow Tinker and Kathy. Blue stood up, said good night to the straggling remnants of the night's festivities and walked to the car. He stretched out on the back seat with Barney on the floor beside him and fell asleep waiting for Tinker to return.

7

Tinker's non-committal smile told Blue nothing of the night he had spent, but the morning sun, baking the interior of the car, was already too hot for Blue to pester the truth from his groggy friend in the front seat. The air outside the car, cool and refreshing, evaporated the wine-rage of the previous night. The commune appeared to be already several hours into its day as Blue walked to where Capricorn and Cory were working on the construction of another hut, offering his help. They sent him to eat first, pointing to the pot on an outside stone fireplace covered with a grate.

Blue was delighted to discover that the pot, nearly empty, contained porridge laced with raisins and walnuts. He plopped a ladle-full into a bowl, ate and went back to the construction site. From the rafters, surveying the commune, he could see no sign of Karma but he could see Tinker, who the heat had also beaten out of his sleep, roaming around a van in the yard.

“Your friend said last night that he was going to have a look at the Volkswagen this morning. It quit last week and nobody can get it going,” Capricorn said.

“Well, you're lucky there,” Blue informed him. “Tinker's a mechanical genius. Ran a garage back home for three weeks and everything. Someday, he's going back to Cape Breton and buy that same garage.”

Blue, realizing that he was the third man on a two-man job, jumped down from the hut, explaining that he would see if Tinker needed a hand.

“I like the way he works, man” Capricorn said. “He's been tuning himself in to that van for twenty minutes now. Seems to want to get to know it before he starts. Very Zen, man.”

Blue joined Tinker as his friend strolled around the van, his hand feeling its way while he studied the vehicle.

“Blue, where the hell do you suppose the motor is in this thing? Charlie was right, you know. He told me that the Volkswagen was Hitler's last revenge. Opened one of those Bugs once and the motor was full of suitcases. The engine was in the trunk, if you can believe that. But look at this thing. No nose and no trunk. If I can get into her, though, I know I can fix her.”

Karma and Kathy joined them, and the way Tinker moved toward Kathy told Blue more than Tinker's silence had. A sense of betrayal rippled toward the back of his mind to be dealt with later. Karma was what he wanted to deal with now, although he was baffled about what that thought meant and oblivious to the contradiction.

It was Kathy who unlocked the mysteries of the Volkswagen van for Tinker, showing him what she had seen other people do, lifting a panel in the back of the van, giving him access to its internal organs which he pounced upon immediately, pulling loose every part that could be removed by hand before he started tapping its stationary parts with his ballpeen hammer.

—

Being a product of Charlie's scholarly attentions, Tinker used a hammer to gain access to problem areas more frequently than conventionally trained mechanics. The hammer, Charlie had tutored him, was the neglected tool of the trade, yet it was the most fundamental tool known to mankind, being the one that most faithfully represented the stone-age club. “It got us from there to here and a man should never lose track of his roots,” Charlie said. When more modern concepts like wrenches and screwdrivers failed, the hammer could always be counted on.

—

Karma's general invitation to go for a swim was turned down by Tinker who had work to do, and Kathy who offered to stay and help, but not by Blue who was prepared to swan dive into a bonfire with her if she asked.

As Karma and Blue walked away, followed by Barney who was happy to have a moment of undivided loyalties, Kathy sat in the grass watching Tinker's oily hands work their wonders, removing parts of the engine she thought were as permanently attached as her head to her neck.

“That's the Germans for you,” Tinker narrated. “They make an engine that won't quit and when it does they dare you to fix it. Our cars now, the ones from Detroit and Windsor, they make them to break down so they'll be easy to fix, but the Germans have to spend a lot of time inventing an engine that won't breakdown just to fuck people around when they do. Sorry about that word – I was ten before I found out it wasn't Gaelic.”

“Oh, I've heard the word before,” Kathy said.

“You'll never hear Blue use the word, though. He used to. As a matter of fact I picked it up from him. But there's this guy who used to be from back home, Long Lauchie they called him. Well, he had this curse he'd say all the time, ‘Lightning Jesus.' Every time something went wrong, Long Lauchie'd say ‘Lightning Jesus.' He used to work in a hardrock mine in Ontario and one time he was grabbing the skip, this big iron bucket for taking up the ore, but what he didn't know was that there was a thunder and lightning storm going on up on the surface. By Jesus, just when he grabbed the bucket, a bolt of lightning hit the head-frame, came down the steel cable and fried him.

“When Blue heard that story, well he just gave up saying the F word. Said that if Long Lauchie was struck dead by lightning for saying ‘Lightning Jesus,' then Blue didn't want some priest or the police coming to his mother's door to tell her how he died – though, there's far worse ways to die,” Tinker said, sharing a secret smile with Kathy.

Tinker was more used to singing while he worked. Except for Charlie's hovering guidance and Blue's awed approval, no one had ever just sat there and watched him work before, but, remembering the new and wonderful experience Kathy had led him through the night before, this was something he wanted her to know about him.

“I know this guy back home, eh, Charlie. He taught me everything I know. Well, Charlie was up in a big hospital in Halifax for three weeks one time. This car blew up in the garage, but that's another story. Anyway, Charlie was walking around the hospital and he saw this guy in an iron lung and it gave him an idea. He figured that if an iron lung could breathe for a guy, why couldn't it breathe for a car? That's what keeps us going, right, oxygen. If you breathe in the oxygen in the front end, Charlie thinks, and breathe it out the back end, it would give you propulsion, which is what makes things move.

“When I explained to Blue about this front-end-back-end business, he said it sounded like we'd have to train the car to fart which I thought was kind of funny, so I told Charlie. Charlie thought it was a great idea. What's a fart, he says, but gas? If you take the oxygen in, he says, and turn it into gas and ignite it then you get jet propulsion. That might be the missing key to our idea, he told me, but said not to say anything to Blue because he'll expect to get a cut of the royalties, Charlie thinks. That's about the only important thing I never told Blue, but I'll give him some of my money when the cheques start rolling in.

“Charlie's been writing to hospitals all over the place for a long time now asking if they have a spare iron lung he could have. He's in a good place for looking, too. When tourists stop for gas and the licence plate says New York or something, Charlie always asks, ‘Do you have any hospitals back where you come from?' and gets an address and writes them. Once we get the iron lung, though, Charlie figures we'll have to invent a stomach for it because nobody but a cow has a spare one of those.”

To Kathy, Tinker and Charlie's theory sounded no less mysterious than E=mc², which she had studied and comprehended about as well as ninety-nine per cent of the world's population. What excited her, though, was not the physics of the challenge Tinker and Charlie had set for themselves, but its ecological implications.

First, she had to define for Tinker the meaning of the word “ecological,” as he tried tracking her through an elaborate explanation of the fragile eco-systems endangered by fossil fuel consumption, of multinational conspiracies to foil development of cheap or even free solar energy.

“You want to give this planet one of its greatest gifts, Tinker, an engine that runs on oxygen. Maybe it could even be adapted to factories and everything. That would force oil companies and coal companies to stop raping the earth and poisoning it with its own bile.”

“I wasn't thinking of putting anybody out of work,” Tinker said as the scale of his own mind was revealed to him. “If I put coal companies out of work I could never go home again. Coal's all we got in Cape Breton, really. Pulp and fish, of course, but in the town where I come from, we're down to our last coal mine and barely making a living at that. They'd skin me alive if my invention closed that mine.”

“But you could put everybody to work building the engine you and Charlie are inventing. It's your engine. You can build it wherever you want,” Kathy argued.

“You've got something there, I suppose,” Tinker said, trying to imagine his father, who was in his thirty-third year underground, giving it up to go to work for his own son.

“But Tinker, promise me you won't talk too much about what you are doing. It could get you into a lot of trouble. The FBI works for the government, and the government works for the multinationals and they don't want people like you threatening the establishment. They'd love to get their hands on people like you and Capricorn....”

“Is he inventing an engine, too?”

“No, he's inventing something even worse as far they're concerned, a spiritual revolution. The FBI are looking for him. There's this one agent ... well maybe Capricorn will tell you about it himself, but those same people, along with the oil companies, will be looking for you if they learn about your invention.”

—

Karma, Blue and Barney stood looking up at a waterfall which dropped thirty feet into a deep pool before the river journeyed on along its rocky course. Beyond the grassy riverbank a wall of trees protected the natural chamber, catching the warmth of the sun and holding it there in a stillness that was enhanced by the torrent of water roaring above them. After absorbing it in silence for a moment, Karma turned to Blue.

“Ready?” she asked, slipping off her blouse and jeans in an easy gesture that left her standing naked beside the river, preparing to dive.

Blue, his shirt off, froze in embarrassed wonder watching Karma turn from him and propel herself into the air, arcing into the water, a mirage disappearing before his eyes, surfacing suddenly at the far side of the pool, waving for him to join her. Blue's thumbs hooked into the band of his underwear but no force on earth could give him the strength to follow through. Instead, removing the rosary that he wore around his neck like a medal, he raced to the river's edge and jumped, hoping to bury in the depths of the water the awkward tent that had misshapen his cotton fig leaf.

—

One April, when he was twelve, during the spring break-up of polar ice that covered the Gulf of St. Lawrence all winter, Blue and some friends spent an afternoon riding the loose pans of ice like rafts, propelling them with clothes-props. When rafting turned to jousting each other, Blue was knocked from his ice raft into the water. He walked home in pant legs stiff as stove pipes and suffered from hypothermia. The water in this river was warmer, but not much.

—

Karma swam over to where he treaded water while listening to his own chattering teeth, and began talking about how refreshing it was before leaping and disappearing like a trout in front of him. He was not too cold to take in the glimpses of her that her playfulness exposed, and when she lay back floating like an offering to the sky, the length of her hair spread across the surface of the pool in a dark ripple. He grew aware that part of himself was torn between the throb of desire, and the desire for that same part of his anatomy to shrink into itself before it froze to death.

Still, he tried to copy Karma's gender-indifferent enthusiasm, but all his imagination and energies could not un-focus themselves from the fact that he was frolicking in a river with a bare-naked girl who didn't seem to notice anything peculiar about their circumstances.

Karma swam away from him, surfacing and disappearing as she moved toward the waterfall, feeling her way carefully up its rocky ledge to stand under the cascade, arms stretched above, inviting the river to wash over her. Blue listened to the joyful laughter thread its way through the river's own rugged voice, tempering its fierceness. Inside her massive shower, Karma turned slowly, lost in delight, while Blue watched, strangely distracted from his general points of anatomical interest to appreciate the shimmering aura of beauty that was Karma herself, a wholeness that overwhelmed him with a longing for something more than he had ever imagined before.

Karma stepped out from behind the veil of water to stand above him, smiling, then dove, the dive taking her under him where he could feel a gentle electricity from the trail of her hair brush against his chest. She swam to the bank and hoisted herself onto it; Blue, turning blue, gratefully followed.

Karma dabbed herself with her blouse, dropped it, walked over to where Barney was shading himself in the meager shadow of a large, flat rock, and sat on it.

“Would you mind if I meditate for a while?” she asked Blue who, drying himself, discovered his own lustful resurgence and crouched on the grass to conceal it.

“No,” he answered, watching her position herself on the rock, hair draping over her breasts, ankles moving effortlessly across their opposite thighs, hands resting on her knees, thumbs and forefingers forming perfect circles, lids dropping over her brown eyes, silence emanating from her.