Tinker and Blue
Page 41
“The Plymouth? You want me to take the Plymouth home without you? Tinker, old buddy, are you sure this isn’t a sentimental gesture you will live to regret five minutes after I’m gone?”
“No. If I couldn’t have earned enough to stay in college, I think I might have been forced to sell it for whatever I could get. It’s worth a lot to me, but not much to anybody else.”
“Except me,” Blue replied. “I’ll see that it gets home, and two weeks from now, I want you to stop what you’re doing at eight o’clock on Thursday night because it’ll be midnight back home, and just listen. Your Plymouth will be parked at the Glencoe dance hall, and if you listen hard enough, you might even hear the music, just like I did the night I slept in it.
“Christ, Tinker, the Plymouth. Driving home. This changes everything.”
The two friends, no longer tied to bus schedules, lingered over their food, drinking each other’s health with toasts of Mr. Lo’s tea, until there was nothing left to say but goodbye.
Tinker watched the Plymouth pull away from the curb, while Blue watched him waving frantically in the rearview mirror until the car turned the corner and Tinker was gone from sight, and Blue was on his way home.
Tinker, standing on the street corner, laughed long after the Plymouth disappeared, wondering how long it would take Blue to realize he had driven off in the wrong direction.
Epilogue
Blue coaxed the Plymouth up the steep hill on the TransCanada Highway. On the other side of the hill lay Auld’s Cove, the last place on mainland Nova Scotia.
“Just keep your eyes on the top of this hill here, buddy. Don’t blink, because all of a sudden we’re going to get to the top, and just when we get there it’s going to look like an island is suddenly rising up out of the sea, so just keep your eyes glued to the summit. Any minute now ... any minute ... and there. There it is. Across the Strait of Canso, Barney, old buddy, Cape Breton Island. God’s Country, as the other fellow says.”
Frank Macdonald is the award-winning author of A Forest for Calum (CBU Press 2005) and A Possible Madness (CBU Press 2011), both long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and both finalists for Atlantic Book Awards. A long-time and award-winning columnist, Macdonald is also an accomplished writer of short stories, drama, poetry and songs. His humorous, often satirical columns in the Inverness Oran have twice been anthologized; Assuming I’m Right in 1990 became a stage production that has toured Nova Scotia and elsewhere in Canada. His play Her Wake won Best Canadian Play at the Liverpool International Theatre Festival in 2010 and, also in 2010, he published T.R.’s Adventure at Angus the Wheeler’s (CBU Press), a children’s book, illustrated by Virginia McCoy.
Frank has participated in a number of book and writers festivals, including The Word on the Street, Read by the Sea and the Ullapool International Book Festival.
Frank lives in Inverness, Cape Breton.