Tinker and Blue

by Frank Macdonald

  “Believe it, Blue, because here it is,” Capricorn said, placing a canvas bag on the table. “I’ve bundled it into equal shares but you’re welcome to count it if you like.”

  Blue reached into the bag and pulled out a bundle of bills, flipping it. “I believe you. I’m not even going to check your expenses page there. Twelve thousand bucks! What are you going to do with yours?”

  “This money,” Capricorn said, pulling a bundle out of the bag, “will go a long way toward rebuilding the commune in Colorado. I’m thinking of driving up there in a couple of weeks and assessing the damage. See if I can figure out what it will take to move back. Maybe even design it better, use an Indian village model, perhaps. I’d like to move the commune itself out of here by June or July. What are you going to do with your share?”

  “Get you to hang on to it, along with everybody else’s. The band’s bringing in enough money to pay the piper, as the other fellow says, and the fiddler, too, come to think of it. I don’t know what Nathan and Gerry are going to do when I pass them twelve thousand dollars, and I don’t even want to think what Peter? will do. Kill me, maybe. I hope he really means this pacifist stuff. Anyway, the band’s doing fine, so if you don’t mind hanging on to it for a while longer, I’d appreciate it.

  “You know, Capi, I bet we could make twice as much if we recorded ‘The Red Lobster.’ Just one great closing number and I’m finished writing it.”

  Capricorn held up surrendering hands. “It was a one-time thing, Blue. Quitting while you’re ahead must have come up somewhere in that economics class of yours.”

  “I get what you mean. Run a horse long enough and it’s bound to pull up lame, says the other fellow.”

  65

  “I’m telling you, Mrs. Rubble,” Blue said while spearing another pork chop from the platter, “we got this guy back home, Farmer, I probably mentioned him....”

  “Wasn’t he the man who was in the same army with my husband?”

  “Same war, anyway. Anyway, what I was going to say was that if Farmer knew what a great cook you were he’d be at your table all the time.”

  “He would be at more than her table from what I hear,” Kathy quipped.

  “What was that, dear?” Mrs. Rubble asked.

  “Nothing,” Blue said. “It’s just that Farmer has this reputation for chasing widows and other women orphaned by love, as the other feller says. But he’d like your cooking, I know that.”

  —

  When Tinker departed Mrs. Rubble’s apartment to return to commune life, his former landlady extracted from him a promise that he and Blue would return every Sunday for dinner, a promise the two friends had no trouble keeping week after week, because Mrs. Rubble’s fondness for cooking wine didn’t affect her fondness for cooking. The first couple of Sundays they had gone alone, returning to the commune stuffed, laughing and a little lonesome for home. It was a pattern Karma and Kathy decided to share, their decision made welcome by Mrs. Rubble who piled on the extra carrots and potatoes required to meet their dietary habits although she made no pretense of understanding.

  On the first Sunday afternoon the four set out together for Mrs. Rubble’s, Tinker and Blue made no apologies for what might happen there.

  “You have to consider Mrs. Rubble’s place like the demilitarized zone they talk about in Vietnam, the DMZ, as the other fellow says. If we walk into Mrs. Rubble’s and there happens to be a dead animal or two lying on her table, then the only civilized thing for Tinker and me to do is eat it. You girls can have all the bread and vegetables you want, but you are not allowed to squish up your faces when we do the poor woman the honour of eating whatever she offers. It’s only polite,” Blue explained.

  —

  “A toast to the holiday,” Blue said, lifting his glass of wine to the others. Tinker raised his glass but the rest of the drinkware remained on the table while Karma, Kathy and Mrs. Rubble looked to each other for an explanation of what they had missed. Blue and Tinker held their glasses, waiting to be joined.

  “What holiday?” Kathy finally asked.

  “The twenty-fourth of May. Queen Victoria’s birthday, of course. It’s the long weekend that says summer’s coming—”

  “Blue,” Tinker said with slow dawning recognition, “it’s not a holiday in the United States.”

  “Of course it’s not,” Blue realized. “You Americans really shot yourselves in the foot with that revolution of yours, didn’t you. Missed out on a great holiday. Tomorrow, while Canadians are still hugging their pillows, all you Americans will be getting up and going to work. You can blame George Washington for that. Not that I’m a big fan of the kings and queens of England, mind you, they crucified my own people, but I am a big fan of holidays. I’m just sorry that I don’t have a real job not to get up to tomorrow so I can enjoy it.”

  “I’ve always wondered, why didn’t Canada join the revolution?” Mrs. Rubble mused.

  “Well, there was no Canada back then, for one thing,” Tinker observed. “That came later. I’m not really sure why.”

  “We wouldn’t of joined that revolution for all the tea in Boston, to quote the other fellow, but when we heard that you Americans were having a sexual revolution down here, well, I said to Tinker, let’s go right down there and enlist in a worthy cause. So here we are,” Blue said, raising his glass again and this time all the other glasses at the table rose to join him in a toast to himself. Putting down his glass with a smack of his lips, Blue continued. “There’s another thing about the long weekend in May that you may not know. It’s the holidays that says, ‘Gentlemen, prepare to pack your suitcases.’

  “In places like Sudbury, Toronto, Windsor, Boston, anywhere where two or more are gathered in Cape Breton’s name, to quote the other fellow, every one of them knows that this is the long weekend in May. Even if they’re working in the States like me and Tinker, where the holiday doesn’t even exist, they’re celebrating it in their hearts because they know they are only a few away weeks from home. Just a few weeks away from home, Tinker, old buddy, and then we’ll be crossing the c auseway.

  “And there’s a big back seat in the Plymouth, big enough for two more passengers and a dog,” Blue added, eyeing Karma and Kathy for a reaction, unable to detect much of anything. He looked back at Tinker who shrugged back at him.

  “Know what we should do after dinner? Drive down to Fisherman’s Wharf and try to get somebody with a boat to take us over to Alcatraz. What do you think, Tink, put our foot on that island before we head back to our own?”

  Tinker’s eyes brightened at the thought, then dimmed. “Can’t. We promised Peter? and Doc Silver that we would meet them this afternoon. He’s still interested in the engine, I guess. Besides, I don’t know if I want to get any closer to a prison than I already was, even a closed one.”

  “Then it’s me and you, Karma.”

  “Why go over there, Blue? It’s so dark and dreary just to look at or think about.”

  “Dark and dreary is the history of mankind, according to the other fellow, but it’s just history. Wouldn’t you like to stand in the same cell as Al Capone? If I was visiting the Tower of London, and I bet that’s a dark and dreary place, too, I’d want to stand in the same cell as yourself back when you were whoever you were back then.”

  Smiling, Karma shook her head in refusal. She told Blue that he was welcome to go alone, but that she wanted to work on her painting. Tinker and Kathy offered her a ride back to the commune on their way to the meeting at Peter?’s.

  “That leaves just you and me, Mrs. Rubble,” Blue said. “Interested in Alcatraz?”

  “If you want something surrounded by water, Mr. Blue, we can do these dishes together.”

  —

  Blue, with only Barney for company, left Mrs. Rubble’s, choosing to walk toward the bay while the others pulled away in the Plymouth. The late afternoon was warm and Blue,
lost in thought, barely noticed when he had covered the distance to Fisherman’s Wharf. A busy pedestrian traffic opened and closed around a street singer who had his guitar case hopefully open for donations. Blue dropped some change into it, giving the singer a knowing nod as he kept on going. Men and women sat on benches with faces basking in sunlight or blowing out cigarette smoke. Several people sat on the wall of the wharf, some dangling a line into the water, seemingly indifferent to whether or not anything happened to it. Most would be surprised to know they were meditating.

  Blue leaned over the wall and watched his spit swirl down to the oily lap of water against concrete, then he gazed across to Alcatraz. Karma was right. You couldn’t know about what went on there and not find it dark and dreary, practically haunted except that there was too much modern life swirling around the island, like boat engines and skyscrapers, for it to have a convincing ghost.

  Blue scratched Barney’s head while his attention examined Alcatraz in the distance. A moment later, it was drawn away by the music. The arrangement wasn’t anything Blue would have recognized, but the words were definitely those of “Failure To Love.” He walked Barney, who, unlike Blue, recognized nothing of the tune, over to the singer, where they stood and listened. When the singer finished, Blue spoke to him.

  “It’s not anything like I wrote it, but it sounded good enough so that I’m going to leave that money I put in your guitar case. Otherwise, I would be retrieving that substantial investment I made in your career a few minutes ago.”

  “You wrote ‘Failure to Love’?” the singer asked. “Then you must be with Blue Cacophony.”

  “I’m Blue. This here’s Barney. We’re the vocalists, but I’m the writer.”

  “I never heard you play live, but I heard ‘Failure to Love’ on the radio so I bought the album. I know it’s a bootleg, man, but I needed to learn that song. The more I think about the way you think, about the way that there’s just one sin in the whole world, then it’s easier to understand what’s wrong with the world. There aren’t a million things wrong with it, just one, our failure to love. That’s far out, man. Fixing one problem’s a lot more hopeful than trying to fix everything that’s wrong with everybody, right? That’s what you had in mind, right? I’m Randy, by the way, and I’m sorry about buying your album bootleg, but I’ll pay you for it right now by buying you something to eat. I’m almost starved myself.”

  “Tell you what,” Blue offered, “there’s not enough change in that guitar case of yours to buy yourself a decent meal. Let me look after your spot. I was thinking a few thoughts when I was standing there looking into the water and I need to be holding a guitar to really work them out.”

  Telling Blue it would be an honour to have him play it, Randy passed him his guitar and walked away toward some food vendors. Blue sat on the sidewalk, strumming. The words really had begun coming at him, rising from the bottom of the ocean while he watched, but he couldn’t hear them. Picking an ocean rhythm from the strings of the acoustic, he tried to help them find their way to him. Suddenly, like a trap breaking the surface after hand-hauling a hundred feet of rope, the final words to “The Red Lobster” roared out of him.

  You may throw me back

  Because you don’t want me

  Thinking perhaps

  There’s more than one in the sea

  If you do that

  Well, I don’t wanna boast

  But lady, you just gave up

  The best catch on the East Coast

  Red Lobster, Red Lobster

  Don’t you dare sob, sir,

  ’Cause love is you, and love is her

  You’re the meat She’s the but-tur!

  By the time Randy returned to his spot near the wharf, Blue was wailing out random samples from the one hundred complete verses of “The Red Lobster.” In the guitar case, there was a substantial improvement in the cash flow.

  “I can’t tell you all that money came from my singing,” Blue acknowledged. “Some of it was because people felt sorry for you after I told them how sick you are.”

  “I’m not sick,” Randy said.

  “Not yet, you aren’t, but if you have to live on the little bit I saw you make, you’re going to be. Check around this city. The streets are full of people trying to make money singing or selling flowers or doing magic tricks. There’s a lot of competition out there, Randy. I know. I’ve been there before I made it big. And if you’re willing to take a good look at yourself, what have you got to offer, really? You’re good looking and you sing well. You don’t look like a case full of welfare. You look like you don’t need any help at all, not when there’s girls in wheelchairs and one-armed fiddlers and everything competing against you. So I told some people that I was just filling in for you while you went to the hospital. TB, I told them, the non-contagious kind. What you got to do is learn to yodel a couple of Jimmy Rodgers songs, and cough like hell when you finish. I’ll guarantee you a decent living until you start getting some real gigs. Trust me. I know my horses, to quote the other fellow.”

  With that piece of advice, Blue asked for a piece of paper, which Randy tore from a scribbler filled with lyrics and passed to him. Blue jotted down the words that had risen from the bottom of San Francisco Bay as if they were lobsters that had swum all the way from the Gulf of St. Lawrence through the Panama Canal to get themselves to him. Euphoric, he and Barney began working their way back, Barney joining the chorus of Blue’s repeated version of his latest, and last, verse.

  —

  Tinker and Kathy, Peter?, Lee and Doc Silver were sitting around the table in Peter?’s apartment when Blue walked in.

  “How’d the meeting go?” he asked.

  “Pretty good, Blue,” Tinker said. “We were talking about—”

  “Whatever it was has nothing on what I have to tell you, buddy. It’s complete, finished, toot fini, as the other fellow says.”

  “What is?”

  “‘The Red Lobster.’ I just put the finishing touches to it today. One hundred frigging verses and one hundred frigging choruses! I can’t believe it!”

  “Blue’s been working on this song for ... what? ... must be two years now, and he’s finally got it finished.”

  “Are we going to hear a few bars?” Doc Silver asked.

  “Not yet,” Blue told him. “Not before I memorize it all, but I was thinking, Peter?, that maybe we could release it at the Fillmore or someplace. You know, Blue Cacophony’s epic masterpiece or something like that, posters, newspapers, the whole shebang. Think about it, okay, because that’s all I stopped by to say. Karma’s got to hear this good news,” Blue said, pausing in the doorway as his departure began. “Maybe we could launch it in Woodstock. You said they were expecting twenty, thirty thousand people there,” he added, giving a thumbs up to Tinker as he left.

  —

  Karma was asleep when Blue entered the room. He turned on the lowest lamp and began to undress, noticing as he did that Karma’s ninth life had finally begun. Weeks of sketches and torn pages and her final, blank panel on the wall. It was now a wash of forms that could have been waterfalls or cliffs, but at least it had begun. He slipped under the duvet beside her and began kissing her awake. “I finished ‘The Red Lobster’ he whispered when she began to moan her way toward consciousness. His words reached into her sleep and her eyes opened, smiling.

  “That’s wonderful, Blue! When?”

  “Well, I didn’t go to Alcatraz after all, so I could of asked you to come for the walk with me and Barney. But then maybe it wouldn’t of happened, right? Anyway, I was down at the wharf and I heard this guy singing, and guess what he was singing? ‘Failure To Love,’ if you can believe that.”

  “I can believe that.”

  “Here’s something you’ll like believing even better. He says the song changed his thinking about the world. It’s got more hope now or something like tha
t. Anyway, he went to get something to eat and I sat there with his guitar and before I even had time to think about it the words were all there. Me and Barney sang it all the way to Peter?’s where we went to tell Tinker, then all the way home to tell you. And what do I see but some progress of your own on the wall. You got your picture started.”

  “Started, yes, but I’m still guessing a lot about it.”

  “Well, I woke you up to celebrate my song,” Blue told Karma, who drew him to her.

  —

  Afterwards, Blue said, “When your painting is finished maybe we can celebrate it the same way.”

  “I hope so, Blue, I hope so.”

  “I suppose you’re going right back to sleep and I’m going to be awake all night just thinking about ‘The Red Lobster’,” Blue said, sliding into dreams before Karma closed her eyes.

  66

  Blue, Gerry and Nathan stretched their necks, uncomfortable in rented tuxedos. Each of them, faced with the manners of their respective upbringing, could not bring themselves to attend a wedding wearing nothing but dust and denim, ignoring the reason they were being paid. Only Barney, wearing a tie-dyed neckerchief, was in character. Getting ready on the stage, Blue surveyed the rented estate where the reception was being held, the couple having already arrived from the church leading a long convoy of gift-bearing guests. With her father picking up the price of the band, Blue figured that the newlyweds would come out ahead on this deal by a few thousand bucks.

  The wedding party milled around the food tents, sipping wine; most of them, Blue realized, weren’t any more comfortable in their formality than himself. They weren’t into long-haired music of any kind, classical or hippie rock, and Blue Cacophony was about to crash their party. The younger people might enjoy the band’s sound, he thought, but like most weddings, this one was more populated by friends of the bride and groom’s parents than their own. Blue guessed that the bride’s guests were Merle Haggard fans, and the groom’s were more comfortable with Frank Sinatra.