“Blue wants me to take the pledge,” Tinker said, dropping to his knees. “Father Blue, bye, I swear on the sacred heart of Jesus, his mother, father and all the rest of them saints and sinners that I will not take another hit of acid until I get a note from my mother saying it’s okay. Okay?”
Then Tinker collapsed on the floor in belly-bursting laughter while Blue gave him a worried look.
Kathy came into the kitchen and talked Tinker back onto his feet. Cory cautioned Blue to be quiet, hushing a burst of angry blame that had begun to erupt from him toward Kathy. Blue held his peace as Tinker and Kathy started to leave the kitchen. Tinker turned in the doorway, solemn and sad-looking, and addressed Blue’s judgementally knitted brows.
“Now listen to me, Blue. I know you’re pissed off and all that, but listen to me because this is important, really important, so listen to me, old buddy, old pal! If I talk to the Other Fellow or the kitchen sink or Jesus Christ or anything like that again tonight, I want you to pray for me, okay, buddy? Pray for me! But what’s really important, are you listening to me, Blue, what’s really important is that if I start to take my clothes off you have my permission to shoot me.”
26
Blue was curled up behind Karma on their mattress the following morning. Having slipped away from the party to spend most of the night finishing her Mayan existence, Karma was now planning the next panel in her mural. Blue’s thoughts drifted and swirled like cigarette smoke but kept coming back to the party and the fact that Tinker had taken drugs.
He had heard Tinker earlier in the kitchen making tea and toast, knowing it was him because it wasn’t the hushed sound of a hippie making herbal tea. It was the sound of someone steeping a pot of real tea, humming a jig, and Blue knew he was the only one in the commune who could name that tune. It would have been the perfect time to try to talk some sense into Tinker about using drugs, but the comfort of being curled up behind Karma, stroking his hopeful way toward a post-party private celebration of their convenient nakedness, left Tinker and his drug problems in the kitchen by themselves. There was all afternoon to preach to him, Blue concluded, his hand sliding its slow way toward Karma’s breast.
“The next panel will be from a life in India. Sometimes it feels Hindu and sometimes it feels Buddhist. Maybe I spent two very different lives there, one of each. That’s possible. I’ll have to know before I start.”
“Haven’t you ever been a Catholic?” Blue asked, his hand retreating from her breast as from a live coal gripped in the depths of hell.
“I believe so. I have very strong feelings about being a nun in the Middle Ages.”
“There you go!” Blue said, sitting up. “That just proves it. You’re wrong about this reincarnation business. If you’d been a Catholic nun in the Middle Ages you wouldn’t be a hippie in the ... whatever age this is. You’d be in Heaven. There’s no way a nun or a priest is going to live a whole life for God and not get into Heaven. Everybody knows that.”
“Every Catholic, maybe,” Karma said, “but there are some other spiritual ideas in the world, Blue. Do you really think that just because you are a Catholic you are going to Heaven and I’m not?”
“Not me, necessarily,” Blue admitted, unable to take his eyes from her breasts that became exposed when she turned to talk to him. “But a nun, for God’s sake! She has to go to Heaven. She goes to Mass and Communion every day, lives in a convent where she has no chance at all to commit a sin, or even think of one, I bet, and she teaches little children all about God. Where do you think I learned so much? So if you were a nun in another life, Karma, you wouldn’t be here. Unless, of course, you were the most awful nun who ever lived, and you’re not, Mother Saint Sebastian is, just ask Tinker. He’ll back me up on that one. One time she broke a guy’s nose with her pointer.”
“And will she go to Heaven, Blue?” Karma asked, teasing her hand along his thigh as she did.
“Maybe a day in Purgatory first. Aw, don’t do that when we’re talking about God, Karma,” Blue said, weakly pushing at her hand, then letting it go. “I got a better idea. Let’s not talk about God.”
“But I want to,” Karma smiled. “I want to know what you think, Blue. I want to know how you feel.”
“You’re feeling how I feel right now,” Blue moaned.
“Okay then, I want to know what you believe. Everyone always asks ‘What do you think?’ or ‘What do you feel?’ but nobody ever really asks ‘What do you believe?’ Except Capricorn. He makes me really think about what I believe,” Karma said, removing her teasing hand, becoming more serious.
“Oh, yeah. And where were the two of you when Caprihorney asked you that?”
“Blue, you are a jealous, possessive monster and I think Barney should have bit you the moment you came into my life, but he didn’t. I just wish you’d spend as much time thinking about me and you as you do thinking about me and other people. Do you, Blue? Do you ever think about us?”
“Of course I do. What do you mean, anyway? How can I not think about you. You’re right here with no clothes on, for Christ’s sake. I even think about that when you’re not here. What are you looking at me like that for?”
Karma got up from the mattress, pulled on her painting smock and sat on her meditation pillow staring at the panel she would paint next.
Blue watched through the wall of silence that Karma had drawn like a blind between them. He heard the sound of the door closing, Tinker leaving the house.
—
Tinker walked aimlessly through the streets of San Francisco, needing to be away from the commune, needing something to do, something to fix, something to put right. Afternoons of tinkering with the Plymouth and the van in the backyard of the commune had been empty acts of disassembling and reassembling vehicle parts, although there had been some disturbing benefits to his daily routine. Practising over and over began revealing to him the role of cogs and plugs and belts and chokes, the finely tuned difference between one setting and another. He had begun hearing the motors, always adjusting them now for a sound that told him the car or the van not only ran well, but that it felt good. Charlie had taught him a lot, Tinker acknowledged, and because of it he felt a sense of betrayal to his mentor to suddenly discover that he may not have learned as much as he thought about motors in Charlie’s Guesso Station.
He needed a job. It had been hinted at during the weekly council of commune members that not everyone was contributing enough to meet the needs of the commune. Tinker realized that the general direction of this complaint was toward Blue and him. Blue and the band spent so much time practising that there was little street revenue being produced, and Tinker hated street singing so much that without Blue pushing him he no longer did it, choosing instead to go out walking alone, where he passed small greasy spoons advertising for dishwashers and knew that eventually he would have to walk into one. It was the kind of job that didn’t require a lot information about social insurance numbers and citizenship. He paused often in front of garages where mechanics in grease-stained coveralls worked at the internal organs of a car, but those opportunities were beyond him, or his connections.
Capricorn had told him that a lot of the civic crap about citizenship and green cards could be overlooked if Tinker could just meet someone who operated a small shop, who needed a hand and who would pay in cash. Bureaucracies, with their psychotic need to document everyone’s existence, Capricorn told Tinker, were the grinding stones of civilizations, that every civilization had eventually been ground to dust by its own bureaucracies.
“Ignore their games. It’s a big city and somewhere in it there is a place for you and your skills, Tinker,” Capricorn assured him. “Believe it and be patient.”
Capricorn spoke the same kind of clichés as mothers, priests and teachers but coming from Capricorn, words like “Believe it and be patient” didn’t have the same trite tone. “The next thing you know, he’ll be asking y
ou to stick your finger in his side,” Blue remarked when Tinker told him that Capricorn sounded like he really believed what he said.
An image from the previous night flashed through his mind as he thought about Capricorn’s words, an image of Capricorn composed of music, of everyone composed of music, of his own music. He tried to recall the song of himself he had hummed when he had looked down at his own hand and found its flesh replaced by strands of music which he recognized as himself, believing he would remember it forever, like the back of his own hand or the colour of his own eyes, but it was gone now, vanished, like the Other Fellow, who suddenly flashed through his thoughts and faded away so fast that Tinker laughed.
Sitting in the doorway of an empty building, examining a montage of memories surfacing from his acid trip, Tinker tried not to think about Blue who had a tendency to turn into a priest when his own commandments were broken. He rehearsed his defence while watching the activity around a construction site at the intersection. Disrupted intersections were everywhere along the busiest streets, and people walked over steel-covered holes in the sidewalk or were redirected to pedestrian detours made from sheets of plywood. He had noticed them often since their arrival without giving them any thought until now.
Watching two men in white hard hats talking at the site, one in a business suit, the other in coveralls with muckers, which miners named their steel-toed rubber boots, on his feet, Tinker realized what these sights meant: a subway. Under his feet this very minute men were tunnelling their way beneath the city, mucking, drilling, loading, blasting.
He had never been underground but his father had, and his grandfather and most of the men back home. His father still worked in the town’s last coal mine, but many of the others who lost their jobs had left for the hard rock mines of northern Ontario and the tunnels that needed to be blasted through mountains or under cities all over North America. And then they came home with their stories, and through them Tinker and Blue and the boys they hung around with all came to know the dampness and the darkness and the tragedies of the mines, and their wild, drunken romance. Their geography included Sudbury, Timmons, Thompson, Blind River, Elliot Lake, names more familiar to them than the capital cities of the ten provinces. Perhaps none of those young eavesdroppers would ever get to Regina but a lot of them expected to go to Sudbury. That was where Tinker and Blue would be this minute if they had not decided on San Francisco instead.
An impulse propelled Tinker to his feet and he walked toward the two men.
“Excuse me, are you guys working on this subway?”
The two men turned toward the interruption.
“I was just wondering if you knew if anybody from Cape Breton is working here.”
“What are you talking about?” the man in the suit asked, not hiding his impatience.
“I was just wondering if anybody from Cape Breton is working here,” Blue explained. “Guys from back home work all over the world on jobs like this and I was just wondering, that’s all.”
“Canadians,” the man in the muckers explained to the other, then turned to Tinker. “Not that I know of and, in my experience, if there were any here we’d be aware of it. I worked with crews from that place, an island isn’t it, up north a couple of times. Good miners.” The last two words were directed toward the man in the suit.
“What were their names?” Tinker asked.
The man in the muckers looked at Tinker again, puzzled. “I don’t remember, really. One was called Angus, there was another named—”
“You don’t remember his last name? Or his nickname?”
“Look, son, we’re busy here. What is it you want? Are you a miner?”
“No, but my father is,” Tinker replied proudly. “I’m a mechanic myself.”
“Really,” the man in the muckers said with more interest. “Have you ever worked on underground equipment?”
“No, but I’d like to learn,” Tinker said.
The man in the muckers pulled a stained notebook from his pocket explaining to the man in the suit as he did so that they needed mechanics underground. He wrote down an address, ripped the page from the pad and passed it to Tinker.
“Go to this address and ask to see Hank. He’ll look after hiring you. And get that hair cut. You can’t work around dangerous machines looking like a girl. You could get scalped down there. Or gang-banged.”
27
Blue came back from band practice and found Karma still working on her India panel. She didn’t acknowledge his entry into the room although he knew she must be aware of him. He took out his guitar, sat on the bed and began strumming, humming “The Red Lobster” air, distractedly toying with the sixty-ninth verse.
“That’s a nice-looking litter of puppies,” he said, tossing the comment to her as an ice-breaker.
“It’s not a litter of puppies. It’s a tiger and her cubs.”
“I’d of gotten that in a few more guesses, I think. I can see what you mean. They’re tigers alright. And being in India of course they’d be. You weren’t a lion tamer, by any chance? Or a tiger trainer, I mean.”
“This is the starving tiger and her cubs that the Buddha fed himself to out of compassion during the lifetime when he was Mahasattva. It was a wonderful thing to do, don’t you think?”
“Fed himself to? How do you mean ‘fed himself to’?”
“He allowed a hungry and sick tiger to eat him so she could get her strength back and feed her young. He sacrificed himself, just like Christ.”
“Whoa! That’s going a bit far, don’t you think? Just like Christ? Jesus Christ didn’t lay down his life for a bunch of dumb animals. He did it for me. And you. Everybody. Your Buddha’s got a screw loose, if you ask me. You know what those tigers grew up to eat? Christians, that’s what.”
“Those were lions, I believe. If you think your life is more important that any other life then what I believe does sound stupid, I suppose. Do you think I’m stupid, Blue?” Karma turned to lock his eyes with the question, a tease of a smile on her lips.
Trapped me, Blue thought, scrambling for a weasel path that would leave the relationship no more wounded than it already was.
“No, I don’t think you’re stupid, but I think you could use some horse sense, though. You watch the next time you see a horse coming to a river that it wants to cross. You’ll see him stretch his chin along the surface. Some people think it’s to drink and some say it’s to test the temperature, but what he’s really doing is measuring how deep it is by using the fine hairs under his lip. Farmer told me that those hairs are so sensitive they work like sonar. That way the horse knows what he’s getting into. I could use a few of those hairs myself, I think,” Blue said, scratching his hairless chin. “Might teach me when to keep my mouth shut.
“Look, Karma, I don’t care what the Buddha did with his body so I sure as hell don’t want to get in more trouble with you because of him. About what I said this morning, about you being naked, remember? That wasn’t what I meant by what I said. Some of the things I feel sound really, really stupid when I try to say them.”
“I’ve noticed,” Karma said.
“I don’t mean about you being naked. I mean about you being not there. Like when I have dreams where I wake up and you’re not there and you’re not coming back so when I really wake up I need to prove you’re still there. Sometimes, when Farmer and I would go to pick up a horse, eh, an old minker, say, that people had owned since it was a colt, well, when we’d be trucking it away the woman would be crying, sometimes even the man would have to walk away as if we couldn’t guess what he was doing. I could never understand it, you know, but sometimes if I think about you not being here I get this image from being with Farmer. I’m even writing a song about it,” Blue said, picking up his guitar. “The chorus goes like this.”
You’re gone and I’m alone with
nothing to do but drink
&nbs
p; And feel sorry for old horses
and ladies dressed in mink
A knock on the door casing interrupted Blue’s song.
“Can we come in, Blue? I got something to tell you,” Tinker said, pushing aside the strings of beads, holding them to let Kathy go ahead of him.
“You joined the frigging army!” Blue said, staring at Tinker’s hair.
“Oh, Tinker, you didn’t,” Karma said, alarmed.
“No, I got a job,” Tinker said, explaining the events of the morning including the haircut which Kathy had supplied with a pair of scissors and a great deal of sadness.
“The pay is great and I get to work with diesel mechanics and big equipment and everything.”
“What about your social insurance number?”
“When I went to the office there was a form belonging to someone else who’s been hired and I memorized the numbers and then just changed the last three around.”
“I can’t believe nobody from home knows about this job,” Blue said. “A tunnel right here in San Francisco. Big money, I bet. You know, Tinker, if we call the Legion back home and tell whoever’s there to spread the word I bet we could have a hundred guys out here next week,” Blue said excited, unaware of the uncertainty in the glance that passed between Karma and Kathy. “You could probably get them on at the tunnel, eh, Tink? We could put them up here at the commune until they found a place. Or at the hotel. They’d fit right in there, some of them, anyway.”
“I better put in my first day before we start hiring other people,” Tinker said. “But I was thinking that I could put a word in for you first chance I got.”
“That might not be such a good idea there, Tinker. I ... uh ... my fingers, right? Hate to lose my fingers underground and not be able to play the guitar. Besides, with the band there’s just not going to be time for working underground. We artists can’t be too careful but you go right ahead, but looking at that haircut, know what it does? Makes me homesick as hell. That’s just what you looked like when we were crossing the causeway on our way out here. Same ears and everything.
Tinker and Blue Page 15