Tinker and Blue

by Frank Macdonald

  “I have to go,” Blue told Karma as he threw the bedclothes back and got up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I haven’t been to church since Christmas, and something tells me it might be a good idea to make my Easter Duties. The only thing that can guarantee a Catholic will go to hell is if he dies without making his Easter Duties, going to confession and communion. Miss that and that’s the biggie when it comes to sins.”

  “I’m coming with you, Blue,” Karma said, getting up as well.

  A couple of hippies in a crowd of Easter bonnets, Blue thought after coming out of the confessional. He and Karma made their way down the aisle, looking for a pew that wasn’t jammed with once-a-year families, most of whom frowned at the threat of intrusion from these two denim-clad dregs from Haight-Ashbury. Finally, Blue pushed his way into a pew, making room for the two of them, and knelt to say his penance before Mass began.

  A decade of the rosary and three “Our Fathers,” not bad for a guy who just confessed to being the head of a commune that was filled with all sorts of non-Catholic theories about how the world should be run. Finishing his penance, Blue remained kneeling.

  God, he said in his head, yesterday, Tulip said we were all in the same boat, and I’ve been thinking ever since about that night Tinker and me stole Rory Dave’s lobster boat to pull some of his traps and make some money selling our own live lobsters. First, the engine quit, then the sea started heaving us around, then Tinker and I started heaving our suppers over the side and nobody even knew we were out there. We made some pretty serious deals that night and we didn’t drown. We didn’t even get caught. You just washed us up near the Marsh wharf at dawn, and we walked home. The big question in town for a week was how did Rory Dave’s boat get tied up way down there? We never told a soul.

  I didn’t keep all the promises I made that time, but God, I was only sixteen, just a kid. But I never forgot, and I’ll never forget how it felt to crawl into my bed that morning, tired and warm and safe when I suppose I should of been dead or at least in jail. That was my dark night of the soul, to quote the other fellow, and ever since then I’ve known You were there, even when I didn’t wear the halo I promised.

  I’m not a kid any more, God, but I’m in just as much trouble. More! We all are, like Tulip said, in the same boat and people are hoping I can get them out of it. I wouldn’t say this to just anybody, but You already know that I’m scared as hell— I mean heck, scared as heck, don’t You? It’s a different kind of a boat, but the fear’s the same. At least this time, I’m in a state of grace which is more than I can say for that other time in the boat. I’ve been to confession, as You’ve heard, and Karma and me didn’t even do it last night or anything. Actually, we haven’t even done it for quite a while, which probably makes You happier than me, but I’ll offer that up for Your help. I don’t know what to do.

  And God, Tinker’s been gone for a couple of days and I haven’t heard from him. I think he’s safe, but the truth is no one’s safe anymore, not really. I know Tinker promised You that night in Rory Dave’s boat that he’d join the priesthood, but don’t hold it against him now, please. Just get the two of us out of this, okay, and Capricorn and Karma and Kathy and Tulip and all the others at the commune. Thanks for Your time, God, and I’ll probably be talking to You again. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance of that. Oh, and Happy Easter. Amen.

  “Let’s walk to Mr. Lo’s and get breakfast,” Blue suggested after Mass. “You never know, maybe there’s a message....”

  There wasn’t. They sat across from each other in what had become their own booth and waited for Mr. Lo to bring breakfast, bacon and eggs for Blue, unbuttered toast and jam for Karma, tea for both of them, Mr. Lo’s choice since Blue had long since given up arguing that the restaurant should be offering King Cole on its menu.

  “I’ll tell you one thing for sure, Tinker put his last tank of Fucdepor gas in the Plymouth,” Blue said, making small talk to drown out the noise in his head.

  “Did they take the Plymouth?” Karma asked.

  “That’s a question I didn’t ask Mrs. Rubble, but of course they did. Tinker might go somewhere without me, but he’d never go anywhere without the Plymouth.”

  “Would he go back to Canada without you?”

  “No way! Maybe. I don’t know. Nobody’s ever wanted to kill Tinker before. Well, maybe this nun in grade nine. Kathy wanted him to go, said she’d go with him, and he’s only one day’s hard driving away from Canada, and that’s not far when your life’s at stake. There would of been a message, though, I know that.”

  “Unless there wasn’t time,” Karma said. “Would you be angry if he is gone?”

  “No way! Maybe. I don’t know. He should of told me. Wherever he is, he should of told me.”

  “Unless he couldn’t.”

  “Unless he couldn’t. When we get back to the commune, we’re going to start watching the watchers, as the other fellow says. We’re going to take shifts watching the task force’s office, seeing who goes in, who comes out. See if we can figure out what they’re up to. Maybe we’ll see Capricorn or Tinker.”

  “Or Kathy,” Karma said.

  “Both our best friends gone just like that,” Blue noted with a snap of his fingers. “Happy Easter,” he said as Mr. Lo placed their food in front of them, then ordered a burger without the bun to go.

  54

  It wasn’t the brightest idea I ever had, Blue told himself, as he sat in the shadowed doorway across the street from the FBI offices where Wise’s task force was located. The drizzle made it hard for him to write in the surveillance scribbler in which they noted the comings and goings of the agents. They weren’t sure how they would use the information, but they agreed some record should be kept.

  The commune members were divided into shifts, two working together from the parked van during the day, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and one person observing during the night shift. Blue was doing the first four-hour shift, eight-to-midnight, of the around-the-clock watch. Leadership, he decided, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  Because it was late, and a holiday, there wasn’t much activity around the door of the building, although God knew what was taking place behind its walls. The same grey Chev that Wise had been driving the night of the raid on the former commune house was in the parking lot beside the building. Blue tried to kill time by working on some songs, but discovered that whenever he was writing lyrics he sang them aloud, sometimes the same line over and over, and that wasn’t such a great idea under the current circumstances. The rain reminded him of a story.

  It was raining the night the Mounties arrested Monk for running a still. It was inevitable they were going to catch him sometime because no matter how carefully he hid his operation, he could not hide his reputation. The Mounties couldn’t help but know who made the best moonshine on Cape Breton Island. Nobody turned Monk in, but nobody drinking Monk’s booze would wake up blind in the morning, either. People respected his product, talked about it. Word gets around, so the Mounties had been watching for a long, long time, but Monk stayed invisible.

  Then one night they walked in on him as he sat in a drizzle not much different that the one Blue was sitting in now. He was sitting around as casual as a man feeding wood to his kitchen stove, except that it was an open flame under a copper pot. He didn’t put up any resistance.

  The Mounties were red-faced when Monk went before the judge, and faced the evidence against him, a bottle filled with the contents of his still. It was strong stuff ... for tea. The judge had a good laugh over that and let Monk go.

  Remembering, it reminded Blue of how Capricorn talked half the city of San Francisco into carrying around plastic bags of oregano, but the judges here didn’t have the same sense of humour as the ones back home. Blue realized that the imaginary audience for this story he was telling about Monk was Capricorn, and wondered if he was inside the build
ing. He didn’t seem to be in any of the city’s lockups. Between them, Cory and Peter? knew enough people in the jails to quickly learn that no one resembling Capricorn was in any place prisoners are normally kept. In case Capricorn was inside the FBI offices, Blue cast the telling of his story in that direction, a light-hearted jail story to pick up Capricorn’s spirits.

  What Monk did every time he walked out to his still, Blue continued telling Capricorn, was stop and make a cup of tea. He made it in a copper pot attached to coils of pipe that could have easily been mistaken for a still. By the time he got a fire lit and the water boiling in the vat, then added the tea, waited for it to steep and poured himself a cup, Monk figured that if the Mounties were following him, they would have made their move by now. So Monk would enjoy his tea, put the fire out and continue on his way to where he hid his still.

  “You’re the luckiest son of a bitch in the world,” Farmer told Monk. “There must be something to that business of yours of putting a rosary in the still when you’re running the shine.”

  In a few minutes, Blue would be getting relieved and he checked the scribbler to see his night’s work.

  9:15 - a guy went into the building.

  10:16 - two guys come out of the building.

  10:17 - one of the guys runs back into the building.

  10:18 - the other guy is standing in front of the building.

  10:26 - the first guy comes back out with a briefcase.

  11:43 - a guy goes into the building.

  55

  Media silence concerning Capricorn’s arrest carried over into Easter Monday, increasing to panic the level of alarm members of the Human Rainbow Commune felt for his safety. Blue could feel the failing expectations of those around him as minutes dragged into hours and hours into days. They had hoped Blue would come up with a plan that would free Capricorn, or at least verify that he was still alive and all right. The fact that newspapers and television stations had ignored his news leak left him frustrated and edgy with everyone.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he asked Karma. “Go to the newspapers and write the story myself?” Hearing his own question, he picked up his guitar case, called Barney and left the commune for a rehearsal, a decision that did not rest easy with the rest of the commune’s population who felt that Blue was escaping into an activity that could have waited until Capricorn came back.

  —

  “Peter??” Blue asked, as the band prepared for its rehearsal. “How well do you know that people at that paper you write for?”

  “The Subterranean? Pretty well. Why?”

  “I called every newspaper and television station in San Francisco telling them about Capricorn’s arrest. None of them care.”

  “Of course they don’t care, Blue. Fucdepor Petroleum or their subsidiaries probably own most of the mainstream media in this city, and people like Reginald Regent III sit on the boards of the others. If someone like Reggie Regent the Third puts the word out to ignore any rumours about Capricorn’s arrest, then it will be ignored. To the establishment, freedom of the press means the freedom not to print any story that doesn’t go well with morning coffee, or one that might upset the Masters of the State, as I call them.”

  Blue explained his rationale behind getting out the information that Capricorn had been arrested: first for his protection, and also to get the FBI to acknowledge that they had him in custody.

  “You should have come to me earlier,” Peter? told Blue, ignoring Blue’s explanation that they had wanted to involve as few people as possible, especially with Reginald Regent the Turd throwing around words like “kill” and “disappear.”

  “The Subterranean is preparing to go to press this afternoon,” Peter? continued. “Tomorrow is its distribution day. No one over there’s going to be happy to hear from me at the last minute, but I’ll see what I can do.

  “But I need something from you, too, Blue. I’ve got this gig lined up for Saturday night. I know you have a lot on your mind but this could turn into something really big. Promise me you’ll be there.”

  “It’s a promise so long as there’s nobody’s wake I have to go to, or if I’m not in jail myself. Life must go on, as the other fellow says.”

  —

  Karma’s seventh life was finished when Blue entered the room later that afternoon. She wasn’t there, so Blue had time to sit on a chair and study it. He had been right. It was a covered wagon. It had been making its way across the desert, and beyond that parched distance he could see hazy blue mountains, snow-capped, almost hear the cold streams of water leaking down the mountainside in trickles and rushes to feed the fertile foothills that rose gently before them. Those images were probably the last this family saw before thirst overtook them. The horses lay in brown heaps of death beside the weathered, torn wagon, and four people – a father, a mother holding an infant, and a young boy lying beside the father – were exposed to a sun whose only act of mercy was that it had finally taken the suffering away from this lost family.

  Blue felt the conviction in Karma’s painting, knew somewhere inside himself that this was more than a picture, that this was a painful portrait that had nothing to do with Audie Murphy. That Karma believed she was one of the victims she depicted wasn’t the important thing, the tragedy was. Her other lives had not all been pleasant pictures but they had been filled with life. The Covered Wagon, as Blue found himself naming it, was not. Yet it was filled with a disturbing sense of peace at last.

  Blue heard the beads of the door tinkling behind him and grew more alert. “What do you think?” Karma asked.

  “Where’s the arrows? These people should of been full of arrows, shouldn’t they?”

  “It wasn’t Indians who killed them, Blue,” Karma said quietly. “It was the heat. They died of thirst.”

  “Art buyers would pay a lot more for arrows sticking out of those bodies, I bet,” Blue went on. “So where was your old buddy Buddha this time? When the lion was dying, he fed them the meat of his own bones, you told me. You’d think he’d of at least turned himself into a bucket of cold water for these people, especially with a baby with them. Which one are you?”

  Karma didn’t answer.

  “Did you hear any more about Capricorn?” she asked. Blue told her about Peter? and his hope that the story would begin to come out on Tuesday, forcing the FBI to acknowledge that they had Capricorn. Peter? was going to talk to a couple of radio stations, as well, but wanted Blue to do the interviews since he had a high profile at the moment because of Blue Cacophony, and especially because of “Failure To Love.”

  “That worries me,” Karma said. “It will draw so much attention to you. How do you feel about it?” she asked.

  “I’d rather be in Philadelphia, as the other fellow says, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, and I guess I got to go on the radio and tell people about Capricorn. It might help Tinker, too.”

  “I think about Kathy a lot,” Karma confided.

  “You think about her, but do you worry about her, too?”

  “I try not to, Blue. Worrying is destructive to the person doing the worrying, and it doesn’t resolve anything. When I find myself starting to worry, I paint or I meditate, or pray that she’s okay.”

  “You keep doing that because if she’s okay there’s a good chance Tinker is, too. But that tells me something about your painting there. If you were painting that picture instead of worrying, then I think all those dead people laying around there are your worries about Kathy and Tinker, your fears for them and their unborn children, that’s what I think.”

  Karma studied her own work thoughtfully from Blue’s observations. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am, but of all the people in the world, you’re the last person I want to have to defend my life to.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to do what you were talking about just now. When I’m bothering you, forget about me, and
when I’m not bothering you, love me, and I’ll do the same for you. Oh, yes, and it’s a really, really good painting. Even without the arrows.”

  —

  Despite challenging Karma on her claim that she did not worry, or at least tried not to worry, Blue experimented with loosening the lump of fear in his stomach by taking up his guitar and turning his thoughts to the ninety-sixth verse of “The Red Lobster,” which he hadn’t been able to get moving for some time now. Leaving Capricorn and Tinker to look after themselves for a while, he plunged his imagination into the cold water of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and swam around looking for images he could mould into lyrics for his epic undertaking.

  After several efforts, resulting in numerous scratched-out lines on several scribbler pages, Blue began to find a direction he could follow, and following it to the end, he squiggled out the last almost illegible words before sitting back finally with his guitar to feel the verse flow along the instrument’s strings to find its proper place in the sequence of romantic insights that comprised the slowly-completing-itself song:

  You’re so pretty

  and such a fine talker

  your words lure me

  out of Davy Jones’ locker

  But I lie gasping

  for air on dry land

  It feels like

  I’m going to be eaten

  right out of your hand

  Red lobster, red lobster

  Don’t you dare sob, sir,