Tinker and Blue (8 page)

13

“What did she look like?” Blue asked, trying to recall the features of the umbrella person they were following.

“I don't know. I just saw the umbrella.”

“Vision time!”

The psychedelic umbrella revived Blue's interest in a game that they had laid aside years ago, a game he had created himself, one in which he and Tinker took turns creating a “vision” by choosing the most attractive features of all the girls and women they knew in town, composing an imaginary perfection of beauty. It made them virginal connoisseurs of the town's beauty, an expertise that never got them very far, not even when they threw in the Plymouth as added bait, but walking along wondering about the girl under the umbrella, Tinker asked the first question.

“Eyes?” Tinker asked.

“Karma's,” Blue replied.

“Smile?”

“Karma's.”

“Hair?”

“Karma's.”

“This isn't working very well, Blue.”

“If I'd of known I was going to have to live with her anyway, I'd of stayed in Colorado. Do you know how many times I've seen her since we got to this city? Every time I see a girl with long hair, that's how many times. She's like Danny Danny Dan's funeral, gone just when I think I see her. If I don't get my best song out of this, Tinker, I never will.”

The rain had stopped as they followed the umbrella around a corner, slowing as they watched it hurry toward, then disappear into, a forest of placard and peace signs demonstrating in front of an army recruitment centre. A denim brigade was hurling slogans at the Pentagon outpost, indicting it for crimes against humanity. Beyond them, an assembly of America the Beautiful gathered, disturbed, restless and angry with the criticism.

Tinker and Blue stood at a detached distance, polite visitors not interfering with domestic tensions. News cameras really didn't make this stuff up, they realized.

“Maybe we should get out of here. This thing is going to blow and if we get caught in it we could get deported,” Tinker warned, watching the crowd of roughly two hundred, totalling both sides.

“That's one way to get home, I suppose,” Blue jibed back, “but we got to see this. We never had a riot back home. These hippies are going to get the shit kicked out of them.”

“I know, but I wish somebody would tell me why,” Tinker remarked.

“If that's all you want to know, buddy, I'll tell you. It's about freedom. It's about the moth and the butterfly, as the other fellow says. The butterfly just flies around enjoying the heat from the sun, but the moth is foolish and flies into the flame. They're both free, right? But there's a right and a wrong way to be free.

“Look, it's like going to a dance in Glencoe and the fiddler is playing and there are five or six sets on the floor. Now, everybody is dancing to the same music or trying to. But down in the corner of the hall you get a hippie set and they're stomping and screeching and hollering. Nobody says much about it, but it's a piss-off. They don't have enough respect for the music to learn how to dance to it. Well, it's the same thing here in the States. These hippies are pissing a lot of people off because if they get control ... well, imagine six or seven sets of them in Glencoe. It wouldn't be a dance, it would be chaos and the Communists love chaos. They set the fire then suck the moths into it.”

While Blue argued eloquently for the rights of man according to established theories of “Them and Us” as expressed in Modern World Problems and confirmed by Farmer's wartime experiences, the protest in front of the recruitment centre rose to new tensions. The civilian militia, composed of rained-out construction workers and men old enough to have fought in the nation's earlier wars began heckling the hippies who were heckling two soldiers with stoic faces who stood watching from inside the recruitment centre door. The shouting became a mishmash of indistinguishable noise as accusations from both sides collided in mid-air like fighter planes in Battle of Britain movies. Hippies with fingers raised in a mockery of Churchill's Victory “V” provoked a response of closed and threatening fists from their unhappy audience.

A crewcut workman stepped into the DMZ between the two sides and began walking back and forth in front of the long-hairs affecting a limp wrist and swivelling his hips in an effeminate exaggeration of what he figured was the protesters' sexual orientation. A roar of hilarious approval rose from his supporters, encouraging him on. Suddenly he grabbed one of the protesters whose hair fell almost to his waist and threatened to kiss him with heavily pursed-lips. The protester, unable to wriggle free of the loving arms that enfolded him, exploded in a rage completely out of sync with the purpose of his non-violent mission in front of the recruitment centre and shoved his undesired suitor away from him. The man stumbled backwards, almost falling. Enraged by embarrassment over the hippie's surprising strength and the laughter rising from his own supporters, he charged the hippie, connecting with a right hook that sent the younger man sprawling into a protesting mass of his peers. Other hippies moved to the front line to protect their wounded warrior, a movement mistaken for an attack by the anti-protesters who swarmed toward them.

Within seconds, the demonstrators were surrounded by a pushing and shoving, punching and kicking mob of angry people who were not afraid to stand up for their country and be counted while they dropped hippie after hippie for the count. But within the time it takes for four police cars and a wagon to wail its way across two city blocks where they had been discreetly parked, the law enforcement agents arrived like the U.S. Calvary to the rescue.

While most of the hippies broke from the melee and ran in whatever direction they hoped freedom might be waiting for them, the uniforms moved with billy clubs among the long-hairs and the short-hairs, arresting and dragging people off to the wagon, tapping with their clubs those who offered passive resistence. Not one ally of the State found himself among the stack of protesters piled on top of each other in the police wagon as peace was restored to a San Francisco street. Policemen spoke and laughed with the men who glowed with pride over their courage and with the two recruitment soldiers, and within minutes the street was as empty as any heavy rain could have accomplished.

Tinker and Blue had attracted no attention at all, and with the street to themselves they walked along surveying the spoils of war; soggy cardboard signs, a sandal, a hundred shiny beads from a broken necklace, dark smudges of blood. Blue picked up a twisted umbrella and examined it. It was an ordinary umbrella, black nylon, its surface hand-painted with the colours he and Tinker had followed. Up close, it wasn't nearly as impressive, the lines not particularly straight, the colours not particularly true. He didn't know what had happened to the girl under it, whether she had fled to freedom or had been carted off in the paddy wagon. He turned to show it to Tinker who had picked up a beaded bandana, examined it, then put it on his head to keep the clumps of wet hair out of his eyes. Blue shook his head and shoved the umbrella into a trash can.

—

Tinker sat in the Plymouth behind their hotel, examining his new headband in the rearview mirror. He liked it. He turned his attention to the sound of the engine, listening for any sound that called out for his assistance. They had not moved the Plymouth for several days to save on gas money. He had worried that the Plymouth, left unattended in a parking lot filled mainly with over-flowing dumpsters, would become too much of a temptation for skid-row bandits. The Plymouth couldn't tell him how many times it had been examined by such creatures and judged to have been stripped and abandoned already. The only vestige of self-esteem the Plymouth possessed anymore was Tinker's uncompromising appreciation for it. Salty Cape Breton winters had devoured dark holes around its doors, through the trunk floor, around the headlights. Bitter winter temperatures had cracked its padded dash and seats. But Tinker loved it in sickness and in health, saw only its undying determination to go on despite the ravages of time and weather. He had promised the Plymouth that when they got back home he would spend a week at Charlie's garage removing its acne of rust with body work and fresh paint.

The rain and the periods of no rain which had kept the city opening and closing its umbrellas all afternoon compromised now into a steady drizzle. Blue was up in the room working on a new song and Tinker had no desire to leave the solitude of the Plymouth. He needed to escape from Blue's logic which always managed to out-manoeuvre his own even when he felt unconvinced by his friend's command of how the world works.

What had bothered him most about the scene he had witnessed on the street earlier in the day wasn't the politics of the Vietnam war, which he hadn't really cared about or studied with Blue's intensity, but the people involved in the fight. There was almost no one among the hippies, as far as he could tell, who was much older than either of them. And among the other side, there was almost no one who was as young as them.

Blue had his own Highland history and he hoarded all the stories he could gather about it. If you know where you come from, then you know where you are going, Blue was fond of saying. Or was it the other fellow? Tinker's knowledge of his own history was less factual than Blue's, but more lyrical. There were the Irish rebel songs and famine songs from his father's side of the family, and he had even memorized “Evangeline,” Longfellow's love poem about the expulsion of the Acadians which his mother told him in her Acadian accent was a sentimental American's version of the darkest time in history for her people. But the Highlanders and the Irish and the Acadians did not escape their past by escaping to Cape Breton. They each brought their pasts with them, stories, songs, ten-generational memories of their families. In the past, each of those generations had known their oppressor. Tinker didn't even know if he was being oppressed.

What he did know was that there was a revolution going on in this country between people who wanted peace and people who wanted war. It reminded him of Monk who was known all over the place back home as a deserter from the army during the war. Monk lived in the woods back of town for almost two years toward the end of the war, hiding on the military police or any soldiers home on leave who didn't think much of his cowardice. He made the best moonshine on the island in his makeshift home in the hardwood forest, a talent that played a major role in the fact that he had never been betrayed even by those who hated that he had deserted, their logic being that if Monk was arrested he wouldn't be sent back to the war but to jail. Since neither the war nor the local population would benefit from his incarceration, Monk was left to his self-imposed solitary confinement in the forest.

A dozen different versions of Monk's desertion circulated the island, among them stories claiming that he was a coward who ran in the face of battle, or that he met a girl he wanted to marry in England and she was killed in the Blitz, making him not care about anything anymore, or that he sympathized with the Germans.

Monk's version was much simpler.

Blue had once invited Tinker along with him and Farmer during a horse sale once, and when Farmer got the money from the sale he drove directly to Monk's place. It wasn't in the woods anymore. Following the end of the war amnesty, Monk moved to a small un-farmed farm outside town. They all sat around Monk's kitchen table, which was the only room Monk lived in, and Farmer poured himself shots from the bottle of shine he had purchased from his former drinking partner. The key to Monk's exceptional shine, according to Farmer, was that when he set a vat he always added his rosary to it to protect it from the impurities that ruined a lot of other people's moonshine, not to mention ruining some of the lives of the people who drank it. Monk, who hadn't had a drink since an encounter with the Virgin Mary, spent a lot of his time selling shine to Farmer while at the same time trying to save him from the habit of alcohol.

The talk that November day was about the Armistice Day parade which was a few days away. Farmer was trying to coax Monk into joining the rest of the vets in the parade “just for the hell of it.” Monk wasn't interested, nor was he keen to relive the war which was strong on Farmer's mind. All through the conversation, the question was forming itself then retreating from Blue's lips until he finally blurted it out. “Why'd you desert, Monk?”

Monk looked at him as if Blue asked him if he thought it would rain that day.

“Well,” Monk said, scratching his three-day stubble, “I enlisted for three years and when my time was up they told me I was in for the duration. Never asked me a darn thing about it, just told me. I didn't think much of being played with like that so I left. The way they came after me, you'd think that as soon as Hitler heard I wasn't there to stop him anymore he was going to send submarines up the Margaree River and take over the whole country. Getting taken for granted like that told me that those officers didn't think any more of me than the gun I was carrying. I did what I had promised to do when I enlisted, then I came home.”

“You should of stayed, buddy,” Farmer said. “You'd be sitting pretty on a pension right now. I can't figure it out myself. I was with you. You weren't no damned coward. That's what bothers all of us at the Legion when it comes up. Why the hell did Monk run? There's not a guy who was over there who thinks you were scared.”