Tinker and Blue (9 page)

“I would have stayed,” Blue said. “You too, Tinker.”

“Maybe,” Tinker answered, “but if they told us in June after a whole year of school that we would have to keep going for July and August I'd go to the woods too.”

Monk turned to him and stuck out his hand. “Put her there, buddy.” Then turning to Farmer while he shook Tinker's hand he said, “This is the first man who's ever heard what I was saying.” For Tinker, it was the first time in all his fourteen years that anyone had called him a man.

—

The people in front of the recruitment centre chanting “Hell, no! I won't go!” wasn't the same thing as Monk going to war, doing what he said he would do, then coming home. Monk had no trouble living with himself. Not now, anyway, although Tinker could remember when he was drunk all the time, and people said it was because he couldn't live with the idea that he was a coward. But Tinker, listening to Monk talk about it, wasn't so sure about that, because Monk had told him a lot more about himself later on. He would like to talk to Monk now, hear what he had to say about people who wouldn't go to war at all, not even against the Communists. The difference, Tinker guessed, was that the people who chased Monk for leaving the war were the ones who were in it themselves. This afternoon's fight on the street was between the young people who wouldn't go off to war and the other people who wanted them to go while they stayed home and watched it on television.

Confused by his own thoughts, Tinker turned his attention to the steering wheel, revved the Plymouth's engine in neutral and matted it down an imaginary road toward home.

14

Tinker Dempsey sat on the sidewalk strumming Blue's guitar. Chording for himself was the limit of his interest in the instrument, but it felt like company, which was more than Blue had been as their days in San Francisco stretched into weeks. Leaving Tinker to hustle their daily bread, Blue found numerous excuses to explore the territory, waving and nodding and winking his way along the street, greeting people with a “Hi, cousin!” or calling out a first name when he knew it. Bit by bit, he had introduced himself, Tinker, Farmer, Monk and most of Cape Breton Island to anyone in the Haight-Ashbury area who stood still long enough to listen. He dispensed stories about “This guy we have back home, eh?” and gathered items of interest to bring back to Tinker.

“Tinker, old buddy, I was walking by that vegetable restaurant up there and potatoes being pretty near a vegetable it reminded me of the time a crew from home went picking potatoes on Prince Edward Island. You heard that one, didn't you, about how they got into the wine the first night they were paid and began playing baseball in the middle of the field and by morning had smashed about an acre of potatoes right out of Yankee Stadium? They were heaving their hungover guts over the side of the ferry the next morning on their way back to Nova Scotia. They say it was the most people ever fired at one time on PEI except for the day after an election.

“Well, I see this guy sitting on the step of that restaurant so I figured if he liked vegetables he'd like that story. His head moves as slow as cold molasses when he looks up at me and I realize that this guy is on whacky tobaccy or acid or speed or all of the above, as the other fellow says. Then he says to me, ‘Are you really there, man?,' like I'm something he'd see in the DTs or something. I told him my name was Danny Danny Dan and kept on going.”

The streets of San Francisco held less fascination for Tinker than for Blue. Singing on the streets wasn't nearly as much fun as singing for the hell of it or tinkering with a transmission. When he first started strumming Blue's guitar the tips of his fingers hurt, and he saw that the calluses of his mechanic's career, along with the tattoos of grease and oil embedded in them, had turned clean and tender. Except for the radio, his hands hadn't taken anything apart since the Volkswagen van in Colorado. The radio had been a three-dollar pawnshop bargain bought to liven up the evenings in their hotel room, which it did until Tinker became curious about the metropolis of tubes and transformers that resembled an amber city skyline. Reassembled, static monopolized the air waves. Their next radio was filled with transistors protected inside a case of seamless plastic, Blue's idea.

For Blue, the days and weeks hadn't disappeared into a boring rhythm of street songs, hotdogs and the nightly racket in the corridor beyond their hotel room. Instead, he was slowly adapting to the foreign landscape, enjoying it, turning it into ballads on the pages of his scribbler. The biggest surprise the city held for him wasn't the strange food, one-armed fiddlers or weirdly arrayed hippies, but the revelation that Tinker was shy.

At first, Blue put Tinker's reluctance to join him on people-meeting escapades down to a lack of interest in the city. He even thought Tinker might be a little scared of it, hovering in the background when they did find themselves among other people. He could understand his friend's behaviour among the unknown, the hippies for example, but Tinker acted the same in the hotel.

Occasionally, they joined some of the winos in one of the rooms, sharing a bottle or two. This was so familiar, the passing of the bottle, the men telling their stories, listening to Blue's stories with actual comprehension, that it made him homesick. But even in this almost-like-home atmosphere, Tinker held back when he wasn't hiding behind a song. It took Blue a long time to put two and two together, to think the unthinkable, that off the island where he was born his buddy, the same guy who once wore only his long underwear and a necktie to a high school winter carnival dance, was shy. Blue had been planning his remedy for a week.

Walking along the street, he stopped to remind those people to whom he had already spoken, and recruited those he had missed. Gerry, the one-armed fiddler shrugged a “Why not,” Patsy and Sasha, leather-crafting sandals and shoulder bags said, “Sure,” and Daisy, the girl who had given them a bowl of soup their first day in the neighbourhood, was pleased with the prospect. The scheme was shaping up for Blue but just as he was about to activate the gathering of musicians and street artists, hustlers and speedsters, whom he had secreted around the corner, out of Tinker's sight, his instructions faltered and he fell silent, listening.

Blue's ear isolated a faint new noise which had joined the collision of sound that was the soundtrack of San Francisco: rock music and traffic and screaming seagulls. After a moment spent assuring himself he wasn't being haunted by homesickness, he raised his hand to the gathered crowd to hold them there while he ran off to explore the origins of the unmistakable sound.

He followed the thread of sound, thinking all the time that he must be crazy, until he turned the corner and saw a guy his own age in sandals, jeans, tie-dye shirt and glengarry holding under his arm like a trapped insect the bladder of his bagpipes, the pipes themselves flaring out their beetle-on-its-back legs while the boy's fingers ran along the chanter like happy children, releasing the notes to “Strawberry Fields.”

The oddity of the creature on the corner, hippie and Highlander, piper and rock star, had stopped a small crowd, their faces a gallery of bemused expressions. Blue shouldered his way to the front of the listeners, waiting for the tune to finish. The drone of the bagpipes had played in the background of his growing up and had been, like the inflections of the Gaelic, generally rejected by his modern generation in favour of more exciting instruments. Travelling with Farmer had exposed Blue to a smattering of both the Gaelic and the pipes. Standing in the company of the utterly ignorant, Blue marshalled his vague knowledge into the stuff of authority so that when the young piper finished his piece to the awkward applause of his audience, Blue tested the musician's repertoire to see if it equalled his own.

“Do you know ‘Lord Lovat's Lament'?” Blue asked while people tossed their offering of coins into the tin can at the piper's feet.

The piper did a double-take but being openly pleased by the presence of a connoisseur amid his audience began preparing his pipes for the tune. As Blue adopted the stoic expression of the hard to impress, the music flowed from the instrument with a graceful sadness that reminded Blue of what he had heard about the tune, that it was composed for Lord Lovat while he watched from the deck of a transport ship as Scotland receded from his sight forever. He listened to the oddly brisk lament thinking that the first time that lament was played on dry land it was on the shores of the New World where Highlanders were washing up by the thousands after the Clearances. Cape Breton maybe.

A small silence, like a final note in the tune, followed the piper's performance, giving Blue time to rise out of the reflective spell cast upon him by the piper.

“You from the Cape?” Blue asked him.

“Where?”

“The Cape. Cape Breton. You can't play like that and not be from the Cape, boy ... I mean, buddy.”

“I'm from Seattle,” the piper said.

“Get outta here,” Blue said. “Seattle! What's the world coming to, as the other fellow would say. How can you play like that and not know the island?”

“What island? I've been in a pipe band since I was eight.”

“They'd get a big kick out of you back home, boy. An American playing the bagpipes. Next thing you know you guys will be playing hockey. Can you play anything you want on those things?”

“Pretty well.”

Blue told him what he wanted and the piper replied that Blue's request was about as simple as requests got, and pocketing his money followed Blue to the corner where the others were still waiting.

“I'm Blue, by the way,” Blue offered his hand.

“Nathan Goldstein.”

“Get outta here!”

15

Tinker had seen pictures of the fife-and-drum and the ketchup-stained bandages leading Fourth of July parades in the United States and this wasn't one them. This September parade was led by a hippie piper, a one-armed fiddler, a couple of strung-out street guitarists, several girls in granny dresses dancing to the music of their own tambourines, followed by a beggars-and-thieves chorus of about forty familiar faces from around the neighbourhood. Under normal circumstances, Tinker would have sat back and watched the music ensemble pass on its way to protest some foreign or domestic injustice, but normal circumstances were absent from this assembly which was being parade-marshalled by Blue who carried a case of beer under each arm while directing the pace and participation of everyone in the choir, their discordance worthy of Blue's impassioned prompting. The parade made its way toward Tinker just as he recognized the melody.

“You know what the other fella says, don't ya, Tink? Next to Jesus Christ's, the most important day of the year is a guy's own birthday. Happy birthday, buddy.”

While others heaped their best wishes on top of Blue's, Blue ripped open a case and began snapping the caps off the beer bottles with his belt buckle and passing them out to the party people. Tinker took one and joining a toast to himself, tipped the bottle to his lips.

“Forgot all about it,” he said. “Where did you find a piper?” he asked Blue.

“You're going to love this,” Blue answered, beckoning the piper closer. “Tell him your name.” The piper told him.

“Wouldn't they get a kick out of that back home, Tink? Know what they'd call you back where we come from, Nathan? Scottie! That's how we adopt foreigners, see. There's fiddlers back home that play Scotch music who aren't really Scotch, so we call them Scottie. There's Scottie LeBlanc and Scottie Fitzgerald. Damned good, too, just like you. Scottie Goldstein, that's who'd you'd be back in Cape Breton. You should come back with us. Play at the Broad Cove concert.”

“No Jewish people where you live?” Nathan inquired.

“Oh, yeah! We have one. He owns the clothing store.”

Nathan Goldstein rolled his eyes and Tinker, running interference, asked Nathan, as Blue had before him, where he came from, how he learned to play the bagpipes and requested a tune as a birthday gift. “Anything fast. Don't make me cry,” Tinker joked.

Nathan Goldstein chose a lively march and the gathering grew quiet, some to listen, some because their conversations couldn't compete with the fiery music.

“You release those notes just as smooth as a hen scooping oats from the ground, to quote the other fellow,” Blue exploded when the last wisps of sound had been whisked away by the September breeze. “There's quite an instrument,” he continued, addressing the whole gathering. “We got this fellow back home, eh? Farmer. He fought in Italy during the war and he told me about this time when some Cape Breton Highlanders were pinned down by the Germans. It didn't look very good so the major sent a message back to headquarters that he needed two tanks or one piper to get his men out of there. That's the kind of effect bagpipe music has on Scotchmen. Farmer told me that that story is so true he didn't have to add anything to it.”

Nathan sat beside Tinker. “Is everyone Scottish where you come from?” he asked.

“You must have heard the one about Saint Peter giving the new souls the tour of Heaven,” Tinker said. “He takes them to a place where everybody is just sitting in the sky, meditating. ‘This is Nirvana where the Buddhists stay,' he says. Then he takes them to an oasis where there are old men and eternal virgins and Saint Peter tells them that this is where the Moslems spend eternity. Then he takes them to another place where people are just sitting by the River Jordan singing hymns. ‘This is where we keep the Baptists,' he says. Then they come to this big high stone wall and Saint Peter puts his finger to his lips and they all tiptoe past. When they get past, one of the new souls asks what's behind the stone wall. Saint Peter whispers, ‘That's where we keep the Catholics. They think they're the only ones here.'

“Well, it's kind of like that with the Scots in Cape Breton, Nathan. They think they're there all alone. But there's plenty of other kinds of people too. Me, I'm Irish.

“Look, I don't play this thing very well but I'll trade you a song for the tune you played.” Keeping the theme constant he began the words to “Will You Go, Lassie, Go.” A short way into the song soft notes from Gerry's violin joined him, and Nathan produced a chanter and added that to the growing orchestration.

“Great voice,” Nathan complimented when Tinker had finished, and Gerry added that he liked to come by and listen to Tinker when he wasn't playing himself.

“You should drop into the Aquarius Café sometime,” Nathan advised him. “It's not far from here and anybody can play. They just have a mic and an amp. You go in, you sing or play, you pass the hat. It's a great place to hear some good sounds. Lots of people got their break there.”

“Where's this place?” Blue chimed in, listening intently to the instructions.

The street party carried on into the early evening as music, information and stories criss-crossed like girders of a bridge spanning a chasm. Food mysteriously appeared and the beer disappeared, cigarette and marijuana smoke stained the air, temporary bands composed of bagpipes and violins and guitars and tambourines formed and dissolved, songs of the day and songs centuries old sharing the same sidewalk.

“Nathan, old buddy,” Blue said, giving the piper a slap on the back during a lull in the singing, “I can't thank you enough for what you did for old Tinker here. He's as homesick as he is lovesick. He thinks I don't know that,” Blue continued, convinced that he was whispering. “About being lovesick, I mean, but that's another story, to quote the other fellow. Anyway, the way you play those pipes is enough to make a grown man cry. Not that there's anything wrong with a crying jag, mind you. Hank Williams makes me think about crying all the time. But you know what I mean? You must miss Seattle enough to make you want to cry sometimes.”

“I can't honestly say I ever broke down and wept for Seattle,” Nathan said with a smile.

“No? Well, look at her this way, buddy. You guys have been waiting for the promised land for as long as there's been a Bible, right? Well, we Cape Bretoners got ours, and let me tell you, Nathan, my man, it's worth the wait. I can't wait to go home myself.”

“Where is this place, anyway?” Nathan asked, and Gerry and a few others murmured their wondering as well.

“They don't teach you Americans any geography at all, do they?” Blue scoffed. “I haven't met anybody on this side of the border yet who knows where Cape Breton is. Well, Cape Breton is this island just off the coast of Nova Scotia which is in Canada and Canada, are you listening, students, Canada is in ... North America, just like the United States, and we got more pipers there than a horse has kicks. And fiddlers, too, Gerry. The best in the world.

“You should come back with us when we go. All of you,” Blue added with an invitational sweep of his hand. “What would be great, eh, is if we got a bus and filled her up with gas and all of us and headed for home. You'd like that, I bet. There's tons of hippies there already so you'd be right at home. And so would we, huh, Tinker? How about it, buddy? What do you say? We trade in the Plymouth for an old school bus and head east like three times three times three wise men?”

“I'll never get that drunk,” Tinker said, picking Blue's hat from the top of his friend's head and shaking it to demonstrate how empty it was. “You get the bus and I'll drive the Plymouth ‘and I'll be in Cape Breton afore ye!'” Tinker sang, teasing his intoxicated friend.