“What do you think?” Tinker whispered.
“I guess we have to. We haven’t been to confession since we left home. We don’t really have to go until Easter. According to the other fellow, Heaven’s waiting for us as long as we make our Easter Duties, but now that we’re face to face with it, I guess it would be nice to be able to go to Communion tonight, and considering the nature of our current lives, we’re in no state to just walk up to the altar there, stick out our tongues and say Amen.”
The two of them stepped into the shortest line, then into cubicles on either side of the same priest, waiting in the dark for the small hatch door to slide back, making the priest’s silhouette vaguely visible through a thin dark fabric while a sinner confided his or her venial and mortal mishaps. Blue was busy rehearsing his litany of sins when a sound, as familiar in San Francisco as it was in Cape Breton, caused him to catch his breath, the sound of the priest pushing back the wooden panel. It was Blue’s turn, a chore that was never easy. But never in his whole life, had he had to say what he was about to say:
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been more than ... six ... months ... since my last confession.” He waited for the priest to begin an investigation of the circumstances that would keep a Catholic boy away from the sacraments for half a year; a list of sins so severe that he feared confessing them, sins that included living with a non-Catholic, luring her every night, or at least every night he could, into the sin of sex, knowing that he was inflicting upon her mortal soul an eternity of damnation because Karma not being Catholic she didn’t have the great escape of confession enjoyed by Catholics. He began to regret his presence here, to fear it, to sweat.
“Sí?” asked the priest.
“Huh?” asked Blue.
“No hablo inglés,” said the priest.
“Sorry, Father, but my Latin’s pretty weak,” Blue answered, then with a deep breath he began to confide the depths and despairs of his soul, finishing with the fact that as early as a few hours ago he had lied about his age to a bartender who sold them beer, lots of beer, “but I don’t feel drunk.” He managed to get it all out without interruption, although a number of times the holy father had tried to interject. But Blue, once on a roll, was not about to allow himself to be interrogated if he could help it. He ended with a fervent Act of Contrition, asking God’s blessing for having sinned against Him, promising never to repeat any of them again.
“That’s all, Father,” Blue finished up.
“No hablo inglés. Tiene que encontrar otro cura.”
“What’s that, Father? Three ‘Hail Marys’ and ‘Three Our Fathers’? I can do that, thank you very much.” He left the confessional, giving Tinker’s door a happy rap with his knuckles as he walked past. Tinker eventually came out scratching his head and knelt beside Blue. Bowing their heads, they prayed together.
After Mass, outside the church at 1 a.m., they waved at the rare passing taxi with no success. They started walking toward home, hoping that eventually a cab would pull up. As they walked, Tinker studied the urban geography around him, finally declaring, “This is around where Mrs. Rubble lives, Blue,” a fact that opened their Christmas hearts to the lonely widow, who was an additional excuse to delay their return to the commune where they envisioned Karma and Kathy waiting with the patience of snipers for their return.
Certain that they had the right neighbourhood, they scanned the tenant names of one apartment building after another until Tinker pointed to Mrs. Rubble’s name. Her husband’s name had been scratched off with a pencil. They pushed on the buzzer to no avail, and finally decided to stand out on the street screaming, “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Rubble,” a greeting that seemed to have aroused a large number of Mrs. Rubbles of both sexes, all yelling for them to go home. Finally, a timid voice ventured down from a night window, asking, “Who wants me?”
“It’s us, Mrs. Rubble. Tinker and Blue. Remember your husband’s wake? We brought you a gift,” Blue said, lifting two bottles from one of their shopping bags, allowing them to clink together with an unmistakable sound.
“Come on up, boys.”
Mrs. Rubble was obviously trying to make the best of her first widowed Christmas. Her small, near-slum apartment was immaculately clean. A tiny tree, not a foot tall, stood on the television, glittering under the weight of more than one box of tinsel, four blinking lights and a half dozen miniature plastic snowballs. Her table was covered with a Christmas tablecloth, virgin white except along the dust lines where it had been folded and put away year after year.
Mrs. Rubble herself was also dressed in the Christmas spirit, her hair having recently returned from the hairdresser’s where it was newly fluffed, the grey that Blue remembered having vanished under a mahogany tint. Her best dress, a red velour, was stretched around her, trying to contain the noticeable difference in Mrs. Rubble since those slimmer days when she had purchased it. Christmas carols spilled quietly from the radio. On the end table beside the chair in which she obviously had been sitting, was an open box of chocolates and a tall glass of something inebriating. Mrs. Rubble was celebrating Christmas.
“Maybe she wasn’t calling out our names when she was sitting here tonight, but I don’t think my own mother would be more happy to see us,” Tinker whispered to Blue when Mrs. Rubble went to the kitchen for glasses.
“You really didn’t have to bring me anything,” Mrs. Rubble said on returning, and placing the glasses on the table she began looking through the shopping bags with a possessive assurance that here was a Santa Claus. Tinker and Blue looked at one another and, discovering each other’s cowardice, shrugged, letting Mrs. Rubble oooh! and aaah! over Capricorn’s sandals, Tulip’s tubes of paints, the various trinkets and baubles that were bought with others in mind. Her loudest gasp was spared for the sparkling gold chain and cross that Blue had purchased for Karma. Her second loudest utterance was for Kathy’s silk shawl. She wrapped herself in it, then, bending her neck, asked Blue to close the clasp of her necklace.
Sitting around the living room, Tinker and Blue quickly overcame the sobering lull that had been midnight Mass and soon the three of them were toasting each other with more joy than on their previous social encounter. After a few drinks served by Mrs. Rubble, her manners wore out and it was every man for himself. It was then, going into the kitchen to get his own drink for the first time, that Blue saw the turkey on the counter.
“That friggin’ thing is bigger than some of the horses me and Farmer used to truck around,” he said.
“Oh, some social workers or something brought that around. I can hardly lift it and it won’t fit in my tiny oven. I suppose some poor family with ten kids is trying to share a little bit of a bird while I have that monstrosity. There’s enough meat there to feed an army.”
“How about if they were an army of pacifists, Mrs. Rubble? There’s enough meat there to feed half the vegetarians in San Francisco and we know exactly where they are, don’t we, Tink?”
—
With Blue carrying the turkey and Tinker dragging along their two shopping bags, now filled with potatoes, carrots, onions and half the ingredients from Mrs. Rubble’s cupboard, the three of them stood out on the street waiting for a taxi. “I bet this is why Joseph and Mary had to take a donkey,” Blue observed, looking down the quiet street. Finally, a taxi pulled up. They climbed inside, wished the cabbie a merry Christmas, and gave him the address.
44
“Fire!”
Capricorn’s voice roared its alarm through the Human Rainbow Commune, waking the few residents who hadn’t already been lured from their bedrooms by a familiar, yet foreign, smoky odour that had awakened them in the early morning hours.
“There’s no fire here, buddy,” Blue corrected Capricorn while addressing his remarks to the group of curious onlookers who clustered in the kitchen doorway. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” Tinker chimed, th
rowing his greetings over his shoulder while he continued the busy employment that kept his back to the crowd and his hands in the sink.
“Merry Christmas,” added Mrs. Rubble, standing up with a creaking back-stretch from her inspection of the oven.
Capricorn returned their greetings with a distracted nod while looking around the kitchen, his open hands asking a speechless question.
“We’re cooking you Christmas dinner,” Blue explained, lifting his beer in a toast to the project, then setting it down beside several empties that explained the festive glow in his eyes.
“What kind of a dinner?” Capricorn inquired, staring at the stove.
“Turkey with the works, as the other fellow says,” Blue answered, pointing to Tinker who was peeling vegetables at the sink. “We’re going to put out a spread that’ll make your mouth water. Our gift to you.”
“Blue, I know it slips your mind, but this is a vegetarian commune.”
“I know that, Capi, but this is Christmas! Christmas without turkey is like ... is like ... turkey without stuffing, and I’m even making my mother’s own stuffing. I watched her do it a few times, and it isn’t all that hard, bread and empty the cupboard as near as I could tell. But let’s make a few introductions here. Mrs. Rubble, this is everybody. Everybody, this is Mrs. Rubble.”
—
“It’s just not the same when you don’t have to fight over the legs, is it, Tinker?” Blue observed from his self-promotion to the head of the table, carving knife in hand. “Sure I can’t interest any of you in a slab of breast? Turkey’s hardly meat at all, more like an evolved vegetable.”
“So that’s what today’s fashionable carnivore is devouring,” Capricorn said, pointing to the platter where Blue was trying to chop off a leg for Tinker, his swinging hand rising higher each time the turkey successfully fended off the amputation. Finally, he struck the gladiator’s blow that allowed him to raise the leg high over his head, a Roman arena champion displaying his enemy’s heart, and say, “Hey, Tink, catch.”
Once the vegetarians had come to terms with the turkey in their oven, the idea of Christmas dinner acquired a cheerful appeal. A communal competition of ideas and recipes erupted, along with a theological dialogue on the ethics of gravy. By the time they found their way to the table only Karma and Capricorn had resisted Mrs. Rubble’s gravy ladle, but there were just three for turkey, and Barney brooding under the table.
With dinner set on Mrs. Rubble’s Christmas tablecloth, Blue halted the proceedings, ordered everyone to stand, and began singing “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Jesus, happy birthday to you...” his carving knife conducting the others to join him, after which he drove it into the chest of the golden turkey. “Let’s eat!” The table became a murmur of memories.
The chatter led Mrs. Rubble and Tulip to discover that they grew up a generation and a few blocks apart in Lowell, Massachusetts. They began mining each other’s memories. Blue insisted that Tinker tell the one about the Christmas his Grandmere died, a story that led Capricorn to wonder if, besides themselves, there were any other living Cape Bretoners “since the national hobby back there appears to be burying each other.” The talking took them through dinner and into a fruit salad dessert hurriedly made by Kathy and Karma. Clearing off the table, Blue took the turkey into the kitchen, carved away huge chunks of it, added some gravy and put it down in a corner where he knew Barney would discover it long before Karma would. He scratched Barney behind the ears as the dog devoured his Christmas dinner.
“Blue,” Karma said, standing behind him.
“I dropped it, Karma, and Barney ran in before I could pick it up and you should never try to take food away from a dog unless you don’t need your hand,” Blue explained, drawing Karma’s attention to the fact that her vegetarian dog was lapping the last of the gravy from the plate. She held out a small package to him, Christmas wrapped.
Blue took the gift, his eyes resentfully finding the gold chain and cross around Mrs. Rubble’s neck. Opening the package silently, his mind scrambled for an excuse. Inside, he found a silver ring in the lobster claw shape of Cape Breton Island, a fragment of turquoise inset on the western coast to indicate his hometown. She had commissioned it from one of the silversmiths in the district.
“Karma, I ... my ... your ... gift...” he said, slipping the ring on his wedding finger, finding it a perfect fit. His stammering excuse was rescued by a sudden disturbance in the living room and Tinker’s voice wishing Cory a merry Christmas.
“It’s Cory, Karma. Let’s wish him a merry Christmas,” Blue said, guiding Karma out of the tight corner he found himself in.
Cory, in black beret and fatigues, was a long way from Colorado where Blue first saw him, beads and headband, among the horses. They passed around the handshakes and hugs, offered him a Christmas dinner which he accepted, but adding, “I don’t bring good news, man. That FBI agent, special agent Bud Wise picked me up again yesterday. Lots of questions about Colorado.”
“He’ll never stop hunting Capricorn,” Tulip said.
“No. That’s the strange thing. It’s Tinker he was asking about,” Cory said. “It’s Tinker they’re looking for.”
“Me? The FBI are looking for me?” Tinker said with disbelief.
“You, man. He picked me up yesterday, grilled me for a few hours and let me go. Told him I didn’t know anything. I waited until today to come over, making sure there was no tail on me.”
“But why?” Capricorn asked.
“Some wild idea that an illegal alien named Tinker was inventing something. He asked me over and over what kind of research was going on up there. He’s crazy, man, crazy, but then again he’s with the FBI and so insanity is prerequisite, right,” Cory said.
“What do they mean ‘illegal alien’?” Blue said, recovering from the shock of Cory’s news. “Tinker’s not Mexican, he’s Canadian.”
“An illegal alien is anyone who is in this country illegally,” Capricorn explained. “You fit the description.”
“No we don’t, we’re Canadian—”
“We’re fucked, that’s what we are, Blue. At least, I am. What did he say about inventing, Cory?”
“Something subversive to undermine the American energy industry, Tinker, but they didn’t go into details so I don’t know what he meant. In fact I’m not sure he knew what they meant.”
“I do,” Kathy said, tears rising with her words. “It’s my fault. When you told me in Colorado that you were planning to invent an oxygen engine, I thought it was a wonderful thing to do. With an oxygen engine we can stop poisoning the planet with fossil fuels. I wrote about it in my journal. They took my journals away along with everything else when they raided the commune, including Cory and Tulip. I’m sorry, Tinker, but I never thought—”
Tinker’s touch assured her there was no blame, but his mind swirled around the wild, unwakable dream that he was ... “wanted by the FBI. I’m wanted by the fucking FBI. Blue, what are we going to do?”
“We can be in Vancouver by tomorrow night, and home for New Year’s Eve, Tinker.”
“But they’ll be watching the bus stations. You’ve seen the movies. You know how they are. When the FBI has you in its sights they got you, man. I’m fucked.”
“We won’t need a bus, buddy,” Blue said.
“Whatever we’re going to do, we have to decide quickly,” Capricorn said. “The FBI looking for you brings them close to me. If they picked up Cory, they’ll be looking for Tulip next.”
“So there’s your choices, Tinker. Cell mates with Capi in Alcatraz or buddies with me back home. What’s to decide here? We drop the FBI a postcard from Calgary and they stop looking for you and the heat’s off Capi here.”
“I got to think about this,” Tinker said, getting up, taking Kathy by the hand and leading her toward their room.
“Oh, shit
,” Blue groaned.
—
While Tinker and Kathy were in conference, Blue tried to forget the fact that it was Kathy to whom Tinker was talking the situation over with and not him. When Peter?, Gerry and Nathan arrived at the commune, Blue threw himself into assisting Mrs. Rubble and Tulip, who expanded the dinner preparations of a Christmas plate for Cory to include their most recent guests. Soon they were sitting at the table again, the band members being filled with turkey and filled in on Tinker’s unexpected notoriety. Their appetites for turkey soon turned the Human Rainbow Commune back into a vegetarian stronghold – no scrap of meat to be found.
When Tinker and Kathy returned, Tinker announced that he didn’t want to leave San Francisco, not his job nor Kathy who was not prepared to leave the city with him. “I’m learning a lot in the tunnel. I’m learning a lot period. They never caught you, Cap, maybe they won’t catch me. I’ll just have to lay low for a while.”
“And where are you going to lay low?” Blue asked. “The FBI knows you’re some kind of a hippie. They’ll go through here like the SS, arresting everybody. You know where the best place to lay low is, Tinker. You may not like winter in Cape Breton, but it’s not prison.”
“I know a place,” Mrs. Rubble offered. “I don’t have a spare room but I do have a day bed, and I don’t know a single FBI agent so there’s no reason for them to go looking for you at my apartment, is there?”
“It could do for a while,” Tinker said thoughtfully, noting that Mrs. Rubble’s apartment was within walking distance of work. “It will give me some time to think about what I really want.”
Tinker and Blue Page 26