Tinker and Blue

by Frank Macdonald

  ’Cause love is you, and love is her

  You’re the meat. She’s the but-tur

  56

  Blue could hardly believe that in the more than three hours he was lost in his own creativity there hadn’t been a thought of Capricorn or Tinker or Kathy. He actually felt relaxed, in a tired kind of way, and brought his eyes up to study Karma’s painting again. Maybe she was right, that there was nobody dead in that desert sand but her and her family a hundred ago or whenever it was. And maybe, he thought, recalling Tinker’s and his crossing of the desert, that if they had met ghosts that night it wouldn’t have been a war party of Indians at all, but a wagon train of dead people, Karma among them because they were fated to meet somewhere or sometime. He’d have to remember to tell her that.

  Or maybe not.

  He wanted to stay in their bedroom, ease himself into verse ninety-seven, but the day was growing dully toward evening and his shift in the doorway across from the FBI’s offices. He went to the kitchen to make a sandwich to eat and one to take with him.

  Tulip had the surveillance reports from the first shifts spread across the table, studying them. “I wonder if we shouldn’t be trying to follow the agents who leave the office. Maybe they are going to where Capricorn is.”

  “Wise’s car was there all day until I left at midnight,” Blue said, looking at the reports. “It says here he left after one in the morning and came back before eight. The flies go where the honey is, to quote the other fella. I think Wise’d be where Capricorn is. We don’t have enough people to follow everyone who comes and goes.”

  “Blue, I’m worried,” Tulip confided, her admission bringing back the lump of worry that he had made disappear using Karma’s technique.

  “Nothing to be worried about, Tulip. We just watch the FBI office until they bring Capricorn out.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ll follow them, for one thing, see where they take him, but you know what we really need? A camera. If we could take Capricorn’s picture with Wise, that’d really prove we’re right. We could give it to the papers, to Peter?’s friends’ paper, at least. That’s what we need, a camera.” He was glad he had thought of a camera, although there wasn’t a hell of a lot he knew about them: point, click and hope the FBI doesn’t notice the flash? He’d have to talk to somebody who knew more than he did. Knowledge is not knowing something but knowing where to find it, according to the other fellow.

  —

  Blue left early for his shift, taking Barney with him, and taking a long detour by way of Mr. Lo’s just in case. Nothing. No Tinker. No Kathy. No messages. Barney fared better, leaving the restaurant with a thick bone, compliments of Mr. Lo. “Looks like we both got something to gnaw on tonight,” Blue told the dog.

  Barney slowly chipped the bone down with his canine teeth while Blue, sitting beside him in the shadowed doorway, was having less success reducing the solid lump of fear that swelled inside him, sometimes choking off his ability to breathe, forcing him to take huge gulps of air.

  By the time he had left the commune, Karma had already begun to block out her eighth life on their bedroom wall, and when she was involved in her work, she just disappeared. Blue’s brief reprieve into “The Red Lobster” had passed, the fear growing through him again like a malignant tumour. When forced to discuss it publicly, as with Karma this afternoon, he referred to it as worrying, but it was fear, there was no doubt about that. Blue had felt fear before, the night lost in the boat for example, but it had formed and dissolved in a few dark hours. This fear was in its fourth day and getting stronger by the minute. To just sit and stare at the doorway across the street was maddening.

  He was sure Capricorn was inside. Wise’s car confirmed that for him. Tinker might be as well, because regardless of what Tulip said about Capricorn not betraying them, the FBI had techniques for extracting information like a dentist without novocaine. Sure, Capricorn might be able to suffer enough to protect the commune. It was his friggin’ commune, wasn’t it? And he loved Tulip. One thing the movies teach a guy is that men sometimes do heroic things for the women they love. But Tinker wasn’t really part of the commune. He didn’t even live there anymore. He had an establishment job in the tunnel. And Capricorn knew that he lived with Mrs. Rubble, although he didn’t know where Mrs. Rubble lived. But it would take the FBI six minutes to find her if they wanted to. And Mrs. Rubble’s husband fought for his country, so she’d have his pension. The FBI were no different than the politicians back home who went around to the old people at election time threatening to take their pensions away unless they voted for them. So maybe Tinker and Kathy never left Mrs. Rubble’s at all. Maybe Capricorn gave up Tinker and Kathy for a promise from the FBI that they would leave the commune alone. It was a thought that Blue felt should make him mad, but he suspected that under torture he might give up the commune to protect Tinker. So maybe Wise came to Mrs. Rubble’s door with his agents and took them away, telling Mrs. Rubble not to say a word or she would lose her pension. Old people believe in governments, Blue told himself, vaguely recalling his own fondness for all things patriotic.

  And the reason why nobody knew about the arrests, Blue reasoned, was that Reginald Regent III wanted Tinker dead, but he also wanted Tinker’s plans for the oxygen engine. Powerful people got what they always got, and that was whatever they wanted. Reginald Regent III got Tinker, and as a bonus, Capricorn was in the hands of his long-time enemy, Wise. Both Tinker and Capricorn were as good as dead, Blue decided, except for the plans. Reginald Regent III wanted Tinker’s plans, and only two people on the planet knew the truth about those plans, Tinker and Blue. The plans didn’t exist, but they would torture Tinker until he told them. Or until he died.

  Imagining what Tinker and Capricorn were going through across the street worked the emotional alchemy of transmuting Blue’s fear to anger – rage, really. He wanted to charge across the street and storm the FBI building. That anger told him a lot about the guys he’d seen in war movies who, when they were pinned down and helpless for hours and days by German gunfire, some of them, even the cowards who were cowering the deepest into the mud, would finally crack and charge from their foxholes into the machine guns or the artillery and get blown to bits. Once in a while, one of the soldiers, if he had a bigger part in the movie, might get a hand-grenade away, blow out the enemy position before he died. It always seemed so foolish before, watching them run toward their own deaths, but Blue was beginning to appreciate their frustration. Anything, anything at all would be better than sitting in a doorway scared to death and helpless.

  Barney, sensing the disturbed stillness beside him, gave the bone a rest and instead rested his huge head on Blue’s lap. Blue dug his fingers deep into the fur of Barney’s thick neck and scratched, grateful for the company.

  “Know what I saw once in a war movie, Barney? These guys were pinned down and they couldn’t get out because the Germans were in a bunker and had them trapped. The Americans – it was always the Americans; see enough war movies and you’ll be convinced they were there all alone – anyway, this American platoon had a dog, a German shepherd like yourself, for sniffing out mines and stuff. What they did in the end was strap explosives to his back and send him into the bunker. Blew the Germans from here to Kingdom come. The dog, too, of course, but in the end, they gave him a military funeral and he was decorated with medals and stuff. It was kind of sad, but it was kind of sick, too. I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I ... wouldn’t ... do.”

  —

  Tulip arrived with the articles Blue had ordered while he kept his watch. From a nearby phone booth he had phoned the telephone booth at the corner of the street where the commune was located, letting it ring until someone passing by picked it up. Blue asked the unknown voice on the other end of the line to carry an emergency message to the address he gave him, asking someone to come to the booth for an urgent call. The strange voice on the other end of the ph
one told Blue that he would deliver the message, and left the phone hanging there for Blue to listen to the street noises while he waited. Tulip came a few minutes later, listened and shortly after arrived with Barney’s harness, sunglasses and a walking stick that she had hurriedly painted white at Blue’s request.

  With his cane tick-tick-ticking along the concrete walk, Blue let Barney lead him past the FBI offices where Blue suddenly wrenched the harness, forcing the dog toward the door. Blindly feeling the glass, Blue eventually found the handle, opened the door and let Barney lead him inside where a uniformed security man behind an information desk asked what the visitor wanted. Looking away from the voice toward a plant in the corner in imitation of someone blind, Blue asked if this was the Crosby Building. Learning that it wasn’t, Blue explained that his dog must have made a mistake although he’d always sniffed out the Crosby Molasses Company before.

  “You don’t happen to be eating biscuits and molasses?” Blue asked the security officer, who denied any such indulgence.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave,” the security guard said, coming around and reaching a hand out to guide Blue to the door only to jerk his hand back when Barney bared teeth capable of amputation.

  “Easy, Barney,” Blue told the dog. “Just lead me out of here so the man can get back to his biscuits and molasses.”

  “I’m not eating molasses. To tell you the truth, what you’re describing sounds gross. Molasses is used for baking if I remember my mother’s kitchen correctly.”

  “Not where I come from, sir,” Blue said just as he managed to manoeuvre Barney into a position where he walked Blue into a marble pillar in the foyer. A noisy kick from Blue’s boot to the base of the pillar, synchronized with his head seemingly striking the pillar, set off a dramatic sequence in which Blue first wavered backward, then sank slowly to his knees before collapsing into a heap on the floor. Barney licked his face.

  “Are you alright, sir?” the security man asked Blue from a safe distance beyond the dog’s teeth. “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  Blue did not want an ambulance. To fend off professional assistance, he moaned, groaned, righted his askew glasses, began slapping the floor in a circular search for his cane, to which the security officer verbally guided him without ever exposing a hand to the seeing-eye dog. On his feet, Blue leaned against the information desk and went into his idea of someone feeling woozy. He asked for an aspirin and perhaps a glass of water if you would be so kind? The security guard waffled on the request, then decided that the quicker he got the pair of them out of there, the safer he was from the dog. Asking Blue to stay put, he rushed through a door.

  Blue walked immediately toward the bank of elevators only to have one reach the ground floor just as he got there. He scurried back to the information desk and was gazing aimlessly around from behind his glasses when the elevator doors opened and two men got out. He almost stared when he saw Wise. From behind him, Blue heard the security officer returning, the glass being set on the counter, aspirin gripped in his hand. The activity attracted Wise’s attention. He walked over to the desk. A low growl began in Barney’s throat.

  “Is there a problem here?” he asked.

  “No sir,” the security agent assured him. “This gentleman and his dog were looking for some molasses company’s office and wandered in here by mistake. He had a slight accident.”

  “What’s wrong with that dog?” Wise asked as the threatening tone increased. He looked at the dog, then studied Blue. “Do I know you from some place?”

  “Can’t tell, mister. I can’t see you,” Blue explained. Wise sifted quickly through his memory files for a place where these two fit, a blind hippie and a cross dog, but he was in a hurry.

  “Get these two out of here,” he ordered the security officer. “This is a secured area. No visitors who haven’t already been cleared. You know that,” and the FBI agent left the building, with the security guard asking Blue if wouldn’t mind taking his dog and going.

  “You mean you want my dog to take me and go, don’t you?” Blue said.

  —

  “Capricorn’s in there,” Blue told those who were still awake when he got home. “We have to keep watching.”

  “You took a big chance trying that,” Karma said. “What if you had been caught?”

  “I know he pretty near recognized me there. He kept looking from me to Barney like he was trying to remember where he saw us before, but we didn’t look much like the stars that were shining on the stage of the Fillmore that night, so he couldn’t put it together, but even if he did, as soon as he reached for me Barney would have had his hand or his gun or something and I would of been out of there faster than a rabbit in a field of greyhounds.”

  “And what would have happened to Barney?” Karma asked.

  “Barney would of got away, too, unless they shot him,” then seeing the expression on Karma’s face he changed his assumption to a joke, telling her he was only kidding. “We would both of gotten away, Karm. It’s not like he was carrying a bagful of explosives on his back or anything like that, you know.”

  57

  Blue stood beside the mesh gate through which the men tunnelling a route for the city’s subway went to work. He had not gone to sleep after his attempt to get into the building where Wise was keeping Capricorn. Hours had been spent discussing with the others what he had done.

  “What would you have done if you did get into the elevator?” Karma asked.

  “Make it up from there,” he answered, but he wasn’t totally satisfied with the answer. The truth was he was pissed off and charged into the building without thinking his plan all the way through. What would he have done? Made for the third floor which had the most lights on at night, maybe? Maybe the blind guy could strike again. All he needed was a story to get him there, Blue thought as he watched the after-the-holiday faces approaching the tunnel entrance, looking for the one familiar face he knew, praying that it would be the next guy to come down the street with a lunch can under his arm. But Tinker never showed for that morning’s shift. Blue waited well past any reasonable expectation that his friend was late, then found his way home to bed.

  —

  Peter? argued his story about Capricorn’s arrest onto the front page of The Subterranean. It hit the newsstands in the early afternoon while Blue was still sleeping. Readers of the article got the facts without Peter?’s usual editorializing.

  Using an unnamed source, he described the overheard conversation in which Fucdepor president, Reginald Regent III, had ordered FBI agent Bud Wise to take extreme measures in containing the so-called terrorist, Tinker. Capricorn, Peter? reported, entered Fucdepor Petroleum’s office building on Good Friday morning to gather evidence that the oil giant had ordered the death of the mysterious inventor of the oxygen engine. During that break-in, several Fucdepor employees, including Reginald Regent III, arrived at work and caught Capricorn red-handed breaking into the president’s office.

  The FBI arrived on the scene a few moments later and Capricorn was taken from the building, placed in agent Wise’s vehicle and driven away. He had not been seen or heard from since.

  A spokesman for the FBI had denied that the series of events described in the article ever took place. No one at Fucdepor Petroleum would comment.

  “Wake up, Blue,” Peter? insisted for the Nth time, slapping him impatiently with a copy of The Subterranean. “You have a radio interview this afternoon.” Blue struggled up from his plans to spend the day in a coma, groggily combed his hair, splashed water on his face and let Peter? lead him from the commune. Peter? nudged him awake when they got to the radio station.

  —

  “I have a special treat for everyone today,” Vinyl Vinny told his listening audience. “In the studio this afternoon we have Blue, lead singer of Blue Cacophony and the man who penned the underground hit, ‘Failure To Love.’ But
music is not Blue’s main concern these days. Instead, he is worried about the fate of Capricorn, founder and guru of the Human Rainbow Commune, who has been reported missing and, according to this week’s Subterranean, is being held incommunicado by the FBI. Have I got that right, Blue?”

  “If you know the FBI are holding Capricorn in Communicado then you know more than I do,” Blue said. “I don’t even know where that is.”

  Vinyl Vinny experienced the first dead air of his deejaying career before he recovered. “Oh, I get it. A pun. In Communicado. Very good.”

  “Huh?” said Blue.

  “Tell me, Blue, why are you concerned about the disappearance of Capricorn?”

  “Because the FBI are holding Capricorn at one of their secret offices in San Francisco. We are positive of that. He’s under arrest because the FBI have wanted him for a long time, but they’re keeping him hidden because they want Tinker even more, and they think Capricorn can lead them to him. If they find Tinker, I’m afraid he’s a dead man.”

  “But the FBI have denied the whole story, called it a figment of someone’s imagination, an elaborate, unsubstantiated lie, to be exact,” Vinyl Vinny said.

  “Lie! What’s FBI but FIB spelled backwards?” Blue argued back.

  “Do you seriously believe that the FBI intend to kill this Tinker?”

  “Look,” Blue said, “if this was a movie, I’d walk out of it, the plot is so bad, but I can’t do that. What’s happening to these guys is scary. The FBI is controlled by the oil industry and who knows who else. Farmer, this horse trader I know back home, he was in the war, the real one, fighting the spread of Hitler, and he told me that you should never trust an officer unless he’s leading you into battle, but if he’s sending you, and you’re willing to go, then, Farmer says, you’re a sucker and that officer just sold you a sick horse, and Farmer should know because he’s sold his share of sick horses in his day.”