Tinker and Blue (5 page)

Blue lay on his belly, studying her, no longer needing to make it a covert activity. The chill of the water played only a minor role in the trembling that now shook his body and threw his thoughts into a confused upheaval of fears and desires. Nothing in Farmer's encyclopedic revelations about what women really want seemed to apply here the way he thought it did in the back seat of the Plymouth where his confidence had always been reinforced by the certainty that he would be offered a little but refused a lot by the girls he dated, girls who did not lounge around the Plymouth, meditating in casual nudity.

Over and over again, Blue's imagination rose from the spot where he lay and wandered across the clearing to the rock where Karma sat, not knowing whether to talk or to touch, to caress or take her.

Karma's eyes opened slowly, staring into his own which had been caught at their hungry task.

“Do you want to do it?” she asked.

“Do you?” Blue gasped with disbelief. “Yeah, sure, if you want to.” He struggled to remain calm as Karma stood and walked toward him.

“Here,” she said, positioning him. “It's easy, really. Just cross your legs and put your hands like this,” she instructed a disappointed Blue. Taking her position in front of him, Karma told him to close his eyes and go very still inside.

Closing his eyes was the last thing Blue wanted to do, but he was so grateful that she hadn't recognized his misinterpretation that he slammed his lids shut like a little boy forcing himself to sleep.

The sun poured over his shoulders as he sat there wondering what was supposed to happen, and whether or not it was a pagan activity that he would have to confess along with the litany of impure thoughts that he had already racked up that day. If nothing else, it relaxed him more than he had been relaxed since they had started this hippie adventure at the river's edge. The greatest appeal of just sitting there was that he was in Karma's presence for as long as it went on, an appeal reaffirmed by a series of just-to-make-sure peeks. Ending the moment with a slow walk back to the commune was what he wanted to delay, so he was prepared to sit there until the next Ice Age.

When he looked again, Karma was watching him, her meditation obviously over. Smiling softly, she reached across and put her hands in his, allowing a subtle transfer of control to take place, one that he tested with a slight pressure, pulling her toward him, ready to allow her resistance, and to pretend that he had never tried anything at all, but there was no resistence. Karma's mouth grazed his, her lips soft, her hands tracing first his face, then his shoulders and arms, while Blue's hands, with a knowledge of their own, followed her lead all the way into realms he had never explored before.

Later, still undressed, Blue sat on the riverbank. Karma, lying on her back, her head in his lap, toyed playfully with his disheveled hair. Blue clung to the moment while trying to sort through a tangle of thoughts. He had lost track of the number of times Farmer had left him alone in the truck to smoke the horse trader's tobacco while he disappeared into a house for twenty minutes or half an hour, returning to the boy with a wink and the promise that “Someday, we'll have to get you some of that.” It was a promise unfulfilled during the years when Farmer teased Blue about the boy having to marry his own hand. Farmer's harem of widows and unhappy housewives, Blue believed, would eventually result in himself discovering the pleasure of servicing women in heat, as Farmer described them. A few drinks and don't take No! for an answer was all he needed to know, really, according to his mentor, and the rest would come naturally. He looked at Karma and felt a vague gratitude.

—

Tinker had reassembled the Volkswagen's engine into an approximation of itself and turned the key. A cheer rose from across the commune as its residents heard the dead van groan, grind and finally roar to life. Behind the wheel, Tinker nodded to himself with satisfaction. Then, looking through the windshield his smug pride turned to a smile as he saw his buddy whose usually groomed and duck-tailed hair was parted in the middle and hanging down well over his ears.

8

“You know what's wrong with those people, Tink?” Blue said, picking up the thread of a favourite theme as the Plymouth rolled down a western slope of the Rocky Mountains. “They don't come from anywhere. Me and you, we got a home. One thing about Cape Breton, you can scrub at it all day with Javex and not get it out of your system. It's like the coal dust around the old man's eyes, there for life. That's a good thing to know because if we run out of money we can wire somebody back home to send us a hundred bucks which we'll probably have to do, and we'll get it, because if you ask, you shall receive, as the other fellow says.

“Take Cory back there. Says he's from down South. What does that tell you, Tinker? Nothing, because everything south of where you happen to be standing at the moment is down south, right? And Capricorn comes from New York but never wants to go back there, he says. Now what kind of a way is that to talk about your hometown? And Karma, she's a child of the Universe. Figure that one out. Her past life isn't important, she says, as if her soul migrated like a dead Buddhist into an ant or a butterfly. It's fine for her to be a child of the Universe as long as she doesn't need help from home, I suppose, but if she does, who does she phone? Who's the Father of the Universe? The Lord may work in mysterious ways, to quote the other fellow, but he don't wire money, Tinker. He don't wire money.”

A few days into their visit at the Human Rainbow Commune, Capricorn asked Tinker and Blue about their plans. It was a friendly chat which didn't fail to make the point that if they were planning to stay they would be expected to accept the commune's vision which included, among other things, the recognition that the earth belonged to itself, as did each living thing occupying it.

“We don't expect you to grasp that primary principle overnight,” Capricorn told them, “but we try to help each other work in that direction by owning nothing ourselves and sharing what we hold in common. If you want to come along with us, and believe me, it's a tough trip, man, you're welcome. If not, then perhaps you shouldn't exhaust our hospitality. Think about it, ok?”

The Cape Breton summit was held in the front seat of the Plymouth where Blue discussed with Tinker the obvious to him fact that they had just been thrown out of Human Rainbow Commune.

“I don't think that's what he meant,” Tinker reasoned. “He just said that we could belong if we want, either in or out. It's up to us. What do you want to do?”

Blue was angry over being ripped apart by choices he didn't want to make. The image of waking beside Karma put him in direct conflict with everything else he knew about his life, which didn't include weaving baskets in a commune.

“I bet that bastard wants Karma for himself. That's why he's doing this, you know.”

“Capricorn and Tulip are together, Blue. And you and Karma. And Kathy and me. Maybe we should try it.”

“Look, Tinker,” Blue argued, “we're Catholics. We can't get involved in all this sharing shit. Sure, the sex part might be a sin but we can dump all that in one confession. It's the rest that scares me. Think about this, Tinker. Commune. Commune-ism. Communism! Communists are atheists, everybody knows that.”

“I'm not so sure, Blue,” Tinker replied, his words eluding his feelings.

“Well, how sure are you about this, old buddy? Did you hear what that hippie said? He said nobody here owns anything, everybody owns everything. That means the Plymouth, Tinker. How do feel about that?”

Tinker ran his hands tenderly along the rim of the steering wheel as if it was Kathy's skin. There was nothing else in the world he owned that meant as much to him as the rusting vehicle he had brought back to life with his own two hands and Charlie's help.

“Well, what'll it be, buddy?” Blue asked. “Me or this place, because I'm going down the road.”

They had left the following morning, but first Blue had to drag Barney out of the car where he stubbornly insisted on joining them. Then Capricorn told them that he was sorry about something called the bad vibes that he felt from them. “Every soul has its own timetable,” he assured Tinker when they shook hands. Blue mumbled something that passed for politeness.

Kathy and Tinker took their goodbye a private distance from the gathering of hippies who flashed hand signals like umpires and said “Peace” and “Love” as if one syllable could soothe Blue's hurt feelings.

Karma squeezed his hand as the Plymouth began to move, then released it as easily as if she were freeing petals to the wind. Barney chased the car for miles before they managed to lose him in dust and exhaustion.

“It's just you and me now, buddy, the way it's suppose to be,” Blue said, trying to draw his friend back from a distance of thought that didn't confide itself to Blue. “Next stop, San Fran. It's going to be great to plant our feet in the real world for a change. How we doing for gas?”

“We'll be alright,” Tinker smiled. “Full tank. Ever since Charlie's accident I make it a policy not to work on anybody's car if they have gas in the tank, not if I can help it. I syphoned their Volkswagen back there but the only thing large enough to hold all that gas was the Plymouth. Never got around to putting it back.”

“Same old Tinker,” Blue said, punching his friend on the shoulder.

—

“Tinker?” Blue asked, wandering back from recent memories. “Do you think Karma is presumptuous?”

Tinker rummaged around in his mind for Blue's point, which was not always what he said.

“You mean promiscuous?”

“Whatever. I mean, I really like her, eh? I'm not going to be boasting about this. When we get back to the John Beaton's Corner she's not going to be anybody else's business. I don't care what that Caprihorny says, everybody owns something and I own this, but you were there, buddy. You know. What I can't figure is why a girl like that would have anything to do with a guy like me. She's about the most beautiful thing I ever saw except for my own mother and as a good son I have to lie about that. I mean, I've seen the women Farmer bangs. I'd be in and out of the house in twenty minutes, too. But when I get to thinking about all the women in Cape Breton who wouldn't touch Farmer with a ten-foot pole, what it comes to is the best and the most of them. Why is that? Sure, I know some women can't stand the smell of a horse, but most of them just can't stand the man. I like Farmer, you know that. But if Karma knew him I bet she would've made a big circle to get around me. I'm not rotten or anything, but I'm not exactly a hippie's delight, if you know what I mean.

“Christ, I couldn't even talk to her. Made me a good listener, though, but trying to follow her conversations was like trying to follow the flight of a bat. I think she really believes all this peace and love shit, I mean
really
believes it. A girl like that would have to believe a lot of strange things to believe in me, and that's what she said, Tinker, that she believes in me. The apostles didn't believe in Jesus Christ in three days, I bet, but she says she does, and that as soon as I find myself I'll believe in me, too. Find myself! Now you tell me, Tinker, what the hell does that mean? If anybody is lost, it must be Karma because whoever she was in her
previous life
didn't drive around in the back seat of a rusty Plymouth, I'll tell you that, so her head must be really screwed up to screw somebody like me.”

“That's what I thought,” Tinker said with a laugh. “Look, she liked you. What's so hard to believe about that? Hell, I even know you and I still like you. Kathy liked me. I don't care why, I'm just glad she did, but you know what scares me, Blue? What if my time with her was the best time I'm ever going to have in my whole life?”

“You know what I remember most about Kansas, Tinker?” Blue asked.

“Meeting Karma, I suppose.”

“Nope. How cool it was in Kansas. It was barely a hundred degrees back there. Cool as a cucumber, as the other fellow says. Where are we now? Utah? Boy, this place is for the birds except that it would cook them in mid flight,” Blue said. They drove through a night heat that hadn't noticed the sun's departure, forgetting to dip by a single degree according to the sweat still covering them, making him homesick for the cool evenings of other summers.

“Tinker, what do you think of this plan? We get out to San Francisco, get somebody to take our pictures with some frigging hippies for evidence and then we head back home where we belong?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Strange things live

On the floor of the sea

But nothing so strange

As what you do to me

From under my rock

Like a lobster I crawl

When you snap your fingers

or give me a call

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

“Verse thirty-eight, Tinker. I'm making my way to the one hundred mark.”

Blue was stretched out in the back seat, feet stuck through the window into the night. He had been soothing himself with the company of his guitar, something the mere act of driving did for Tinker.

Tinker passed few judgements on Blue's musical aspirations. He let “The Red Lobster” grow without forming an opinion on it, as the diplomacy of friendship dictates. He was just grateful that Blue wasn't interested in coaxing Tinker's Irish voice to share his compositions, but there are times when a friend has to risk the friendship itself if it means anything at all, and an hour earlier, Tinker had done just that. Blue's new composition-in-progress, “My Karma,” only got as far as

With my Karma

On my arm a

million dollars

Couldn't make me happier

But without her

Life couldn't be crappier

before Tinker, trying to keep a straight face, told his friend that there was no way a love song could survive when it had to depend on crap, which was as close as he could come to telling Blue the truth about his song. Blue sulked for a few moments, strumming his guitar, occasionally humming a phrase that ended in “sappier,” “trappier” or “snappier,” until “My Karma” was announced stillborn, buried and forgotten, the best idea Blue had since he suggested going home, Tinker thought.