With the wind whipping through his rolled-down window, it occurred to Blue for the forty-fifth time since the weekend began that they had broken the bonds of urbanization and were now in a world where ocean and landscape replaced skyscrapers and subways. “Look at that, Tinker, we’re right in the middle of miles and miles of nowhere, just like home.”
“This reminds you of home?” Karma asked, studying the way the continent sheered off in steep cliffs to a rocky shore-line hammered by the pounding surf of the Pacific Ocean. “Does Cape Breton look like this?”
“What makes it remind me of home, Karma, is how much it’s not like home. Know what I mean?”
“Probably not,” Karma said. “It reminds you of home because it doesn’t remind you of home? Is there another way to explain that mystery, oh, Master and Wise One, a way that a simple-minded girl like myself can grasp?” she asked, placing her hands together and bowing slightly Buddhist-like before a spiritual master.
“It’s like when you see a woman who doesn’t look anything like your mother so you say, ‘She doesn’t look anything like my mother,’ and just by thinking she doesn’t look anything like your mother, you’re reminded of your mother. Well, that’s why this place reminds me of home, because it’s not like home at all. Isn’t that right, Tinker?” Blue asked, leaning ahead from the back seat, where he and Karma and Barney were sitting, to solicit confirmation of his logic by speaking into Tinker’s ear against the roar of wind.
Tinker shrugged, his thoughts closer to the landscape around him than the one he had grown up in. Going to Big Sur had been his idea, the seeds of the trip planted by one of the books Kathy had given him to read, and in reading it, he realized that Big Sur was part of their geographic neighbourhood. He had never been anywhere that people wrote about. In school, all the stories and poems in the English books were from England or the United States or other places far from Cape Breton. Home was a good place to live, he had concluded, but not a great place to write about.
It took very little to talk Kathy and Karma into taking the trip, but when Tinker told Blue he wanted to go to a place called Big Sur because a guy had written a book by that name, Blue borrowed the novel. He returned it to Tinker’s room an hour later, throwing it on the bed and informing Tinker that the guy didn’t even know how to punctuate “and if you meet him up there, tell him Sur is spelled s-i-r.” When Tinker mentioned that his pay cheque was going to pay for the weekend away, however, Blue made certain that Blue Cacophony was gig-free, since neither him nor Barney would be available.
The weekend had been a literary and literal washout.
By the time they discovered that Big Sur was south of San Francisco they were cold and wet and in Oregon arguing whether it was Tinker, who had read the book, or Blue, who had read the map, who was to blame. Both lacked the innate wonder that Karma and Kathy expressed over finding themselves amid mountains ranges and mile-high trees, noticing instead only the stinging needles of rain riding in at an angle on a bitter wind. “I guess it’s November all over the world,” Blue observed while fighting a mild war with Karma over fair and equal shares of a sleeping bag that was too small to hold them both, but large enough to cover them, Barney between them like a nun at a high school dance.
They spend two days among monster trees that attracted rain clouds the way metal rods on barn roofs attract lightning, and slept two nights in the Plymouth after being turned down at two motels. Eating hamburgers from a tray hanging on the window of the car was the best part of the whole trip, according to Blue, Tinker and Barney. Tinker and Blue had enough tact to apologize for the pleasure they took in not having a choice. Barney didn’t. Karma and Kathy nibbled at lettuce and cheese melted on their “hold the meat” hamburger buns and delivered to the car for the same price as a cheeseburger.
It was when they turned the car around to bring the sad adventure to an end that Tinker and Blue stopped sniping at one another about their navigational problems, realizing simultaneously that they had been heading north, heading home. Although the car zipped toward San Francisco, their imaginations were still driving a phantom Plymouth in the opposite direction.
“You see what this road was telling us, Tinker? We didn’t get lost. No, buddy, we were on the right road all along, just like the smelts making their way back to the Big River after being gone from Cape Breton all winter. I don’t care what the other fellow, says, you can go home again, and the next time we drive up this road there won’t be any turning around, I’ll tell you that. Vancouver, then east to the Canso Causeway. Big Sur’s got nothing to do with us, that’s why we never got there. Hell, if the five of us had any sense we’d still be travelling north, right Barney, old buddy,” Blue asked, scratching the dog’s ears and wrestling him around the back seat.
“Do you believe there are no wrong roads?” Karma asked, her question generally directed at Blue, but inviting the participation of all. “If you were standing at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, which way would you walk?”
“Didn’t you think this was a wrong road?” Tinker asked, pointing to the highway that had led them away from their destination. “We couldn’t find a place to sleep, we barely found a place to eat, and we’ve been wet all weekend.”
“You make it sound like Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem. Good thing you girls weren’t pregnant,” Blue said.
“But what Karma is asking is, do all those things make it the wrong road?” Kathy said, drawing them back to the question. “If I was standing at a crossroads, I would blindfold myself and twirl around until I lost all sense of direction, then I would start walking in the direction I’d be facing when I stopped. What about you, Tinker?”
“That’s easy,” Blue said. “He’d just follow you down that same road.”
“Are you saying I don’t have a mind of my own?” Tinker asked, a mild edge to his voice.
“No, you have a mind of your own, but what I’m saying is that that’s not necessarily what does a guy’s thinking for him.” The remark brought a nasty glare from Kathy, a head-shake of disbelief from Karma and, in the rearview mirror, Tinker’s eyes flared with anger. Sensing that he was taking the conversation down a wrong and unwelcome road, Blue began extricating himself from the mire of his own words. “I don’t mean anything dirty, that’s just your own minds at work, so see, I’m saying you have your own mind, after all, Tinker, but what I really meant is all these books you’re reading, they’re changing your mind faster than I can argue with you. You read a book and it changes your mind. You read another one and it changes your mind again. So I guess it takes Karma’s question right back to where we are, right? On the wrong road. Myself, I’d say we’re not on the wrong road, just travelling in the wrong direction.”
“Then let Tinker answer the question,” Karma said.
“I guess I like the road less travelled by, like the poem says,” Tinker said.
“There’s a perfect example of what I mean,” Blue countered. “When did you start reading poetry?”
“In grade nine, remember. That’s where I know that poem from. I’ve heard you quote it yourself, except when you did it was the other fellow who said it, not Robert Frost. So I suppose I would look at all the paths to see which one had the fewest people using it then go down that one to see where it took me. That’s exactly how we got out here to San Francisco, Blue, by picking a road nobody else we knew was on. What about yourself, Karma?”
“That’s an easy one,” Blue said. “She’d just send three of her lives down the other roads and take the one that was left,” his remark ignored by the rest.”
“It wouldn’t matter to me,” Karma answered. “Oh, I might pick a road that was lined with buttercups, or choose another one because it was going into the sunset, or it’s opposite because it was going into the sunrise, or one that goes up into the mountains. Eventually, they would all bring me to the same place, myself.”
“All roads lead t
o Karma, as the other fellow says,” Blue quipped, restless in the tension. When no one said anything, he broke the silence by asking if anyone was going to ask him what road he would choose. Their attention turned toward him although the question itself remained unasked.
“Well, I’ll tell you this much, it wouldn’t take me to Big Sur, no siree. If I was standing in the middle of a crossroads the first thing I’d do is build a store or a tavern and make tons of money off all the people who would be standing there scratching their heads, wondering which way to go, then I’d pick the road heading for Cape—”
“Jesus, what’s this fool up to?” Tinker muttered, watching in his rear view mirror. Behind them, a half-ton truck was weaving recklessly through the traffic, which had grown increasingly heavy the closer they got to San Francisco.
Blue glanced out the back window, saw the truck, and said, “You can take him, Tinker.” Both girls leaned toward Tinker, intercepting Blue’s challenge. “Please don’t,” they pleaded, and Tinker stopped toying with the idea, deciding to let the truck pass without creating a karmatic link that, if he understood Kathy and Karma’s theology, would cause the car and the truck to tangle in traffic over and over until the world ran out of roads and eternity ran out of time. He eased off the gas, and watched the truck’s reflection approach in the rearview mirror.
Once the truck had pulled beside them, it seemed to stall there, pacing itself to the Plymouth. When Tinker looked across, a greasy head and tattooed arms leaned out the passenger window shouting words snatched away by the eighty-mile-an-hour wind. It was Blue, from the back seat, who caught them as they whipped past ... “fuckin’ hippie fags....” Bent on countering the insult, Blue pulled himself half way through his window, leaning out to utter a few choice opinions of his own, but before he could, one of the tattooed arms with a bottle of beer in its grasp suddenly pulled back and fired.
Tinker didn’t see the action taking place beside him until the bottle shattered across his windshield, washing it in a foam of beer. Trying to keep the Plymouth from drifting into the traffic, he fumbled frantically to find the wiper knob. Over-compensating, he pulled the car too far to the right, felt it buck against the guardrail with a screech of peeling paint that brought screams from inside the car. The Plymouth bounced off the rail and spun onto the road.
Blue, frozen in the backseat window, saw what Tinker could not, the half-ton pulling away from them in a squeal of rubber, the chorus of blasting horns behind them, and the on-coming traffic beginning to react as the Plymouth started spinning through a slow-motion moment that converged upon the path of a transfer truck. Brakes squealed all around them like slaughter-house pigs as the Plymouth sped blindly toward the truck and Blue closed his eyes, only to open them an uneventful moment later to discover that in an incomprehensible and forgiving choreography, the two vehicles had been released from the apparent fate of their violent ballet, allowed to miss each other and escape.
Charmed, the Plymouth spun across the highway, and Tinker, finding the wipers, cleared the windshield in time to see a wall of rock in front of them. He cranked the steering wheel hard to his right, pulling the Plymouth around so that it slammed against the wall sideways, and skittered along it until they were jolted to a halt against a culvert. Blue, when Tinker had turned the car away from the head-on collision with the wall, was sucked back inside the Plymouth by the force of the shifting direction, his head volleying hard against the door frame.
A silent stillness filled the Plymouth as the passengers took quiet inventory of themselves, listening and slowly flexing for signs of aches or breaks.
“Everybody all right?” Tinker asked at last, just as the first faces began to appear in the windshield, other drivers tentatively exploring the interior for blood and death. Barney, with a whine, leapt past Blue through the window and onto the road.
“I think so,” Kathy answered, her voice an unfamiliar pitch.
“Nothing broken,” Blue replied, feeling his head fill with pain.
“Karma?” Tinker asked.
“Karma, girl,” Blue said, giving her arm a soft shake, getting no response. “Karma?” he called louder. “Karma!”
The doors of the Plymouth opened and people began helping the passengers out, but Blue resisted, clinging to Karma, insisting that she answer, getting only terrifying silence in response.
A state trooper was suddenly in front of Tinker, asking questions to which he could barely reply, aware only of the rising panic in Blue’s voice as he called to Karma. Kathy tried to climb into the back seat. Restraining arms forced her to sit and wait for the ambulance for which the trooper had already radioed.
Blue fought against efforts to pull him from the car until a woman leaned in the window on Karma’s side of the car, dropping an Indian-pattern blanket over her un-responding body. “Keep her warm against shock,” the woman explained, adding, “I’m a nurse. Let me see if there’s anything I can do.”
Blue released Karma from his hold, backing off, recognizing that the woman was offering more to Karma than he could. Slowly, he allowed himself to be drawn from the car while the nurse replaced him, her fingers reaching for a pulse in Karma’s throat.
“You okay, buddy?” Tinker asked Blue who now stood ashen in front of him. “This Mountie here called for an ambulance.”
“State trooper,” the policeman corrected him. “Are you all from Canada?”
Before Tinker could explain, Blue’s survival reflexes took over. “No. Tinker and me are. We just came down from Vancouver. We picked these girls up hitchhiking. They’re Americans though, I know that. Isn’t that right, Kathy?” he asked, including her in their story. Kathy nodded, indifferent, intent on the nurse who was now hunched over Karma in the back seat like a lifeguard over a drowning victim. An increasingly loud siren announced the ambulance’s approach.
“I have no pulse,” the nurse told the attendants as they reached the Plymouth. The two white-clad men replaced the nurse, carefully removed Karma from the back seat and placed her on a stretcher, working over her even as they wheeled towards their flashing vehicle. Blue went running after them, leaping into the ambulance with the stretcher, leaving Tinker and Kathy to deal with the trooper.
“Are you family?” one of the attendants asked.
“Her husband,” Blue replied. “How is she? Help her, for the love of God, help her!”
“Sit back and let us do our work,” one attendant said, bending over Karma while the other one steered the ambulance back onto the highway, yelling to the police officer that they were going to Sausalito General. On the radio, he contacted the hospital. “No vital signs,” Blue heard, and softly sank back against the side of the ambulance and removed the rosary from around his neck.
“I believe in God….”
41
“I think I did it,” Blue told Tinker and Kathy in the lobby of the hospital.
“Did what?” Kathy asked.
“Brought Karma back to life. I think I did it.”
“You think you did what!”Kathy shouted angrily while Tinker arched his eyebrows. “You’re a sick person, Blue, a really sick person.”
“I’m just telling you what happened. You can ask the doctors if you want. They took her in here from the ambulance. DOA, they said, Dead on Arrival is what that means, but they just kept working on her in the emergency room. And I just kept praying. All of a sudden, there’s all this activity inside the emergency room and then this doctor comes out and tells me that Karma is alive, that it looks like she’s going to be okay, but they’re going to keep her here overnight for observation. She got a bad blow on the head and they want to be sure there’s no concussion. The doctor thinks she must of hit her head on the post between the doors or something.
“When he was telling me this, I was still saying my rosary. I held it up and showed it to him. He said sometimes things happen that doctors can’t answer.”
> “So you’re taking the credit for Karma’s recovery,” Kathy said testily.
“I’m just telling you what happened, that’s all. You can believe whatever you like, and so can I, and I don’t believe I ever prayed like that in my life. I know I didn’t. It was so deep it wasn’t even prayer. It was just me and God, talking. It was really something, and when the doctor told me she was alive, I just ... I can’t even explain it.”
“You’re not thinking of going into the business or anything like that, are you, Blue?” Tinker asked.
“Raising people from the dead, you mean. No way, man. That’s a job for the apostles and the priests, to quote the other fellow. But I know something now that I didn’t know before. Praying is hard work, man. I’d hate to have to do it too often.”
The three of them walked out into the parking lot. Blue planned to remain at the hospital, close to Karma whom none of them had yet seen because she had been sedated and was under orders to have an undisturbed rest. The plan was for Tinker and Kathy to return the following day with the commune van to pick up Karma and Blue.
“The Plymouth looks kind of DOA itself,” Blue noted as they approached Tinker’s car, where Barney – who had returned to the scene of the accident once the fuss had settled down – sat erect in the back seat. Its sides were badly caved in from the encounters with the guardrail and rock wall, and the grill was crumpled from its sudden stop against the culvert, its alignment more than slightly askew.
“It’s still running, though. I got it this far,” Tinker said hopefully as Blue reached in to scratch the dog and assure him that Karma was okay. “It’ll get us home and then we’ll see. Maybe you could say a rosary for it.”
—
A few days later, Peter?, shrieking, swept into the common room of the Human Rainbow Commune, attracting the timid curiosity of the residents. Doors opened slowly, people tiptoeing toward the action, watching Peter? whirl like a wounded animal before finally collapsing into a legless armchair, his tirade wilting into the merest whimper as his head sank into unhappy hands, tears leaking between his fingers.
Tinker and Blue Page 24