Tinker and Blue (16 page)

27

Blue came back from band practice and found Karma still working on her India panel. She didn't acknowledge his entry into the room although he knew she must be aware of him. He took out his guitar, sat on the bed and began strumming, humming “The Red Lobster” air, distractedly toying with the sixty-ninth verse.

“That's a nice-looking litter of puppies,” he said, tossing the comment to her as an ice-breaker.

“It's not a litter of puppies. It's a tiger and her cubs.”

“I'd of gotten that in a few more guesses, I think. I can see what you mean. They're tigers alright. And being in India of course they'd be. You weren't a lion tamer, by any chance? Or a tiger trainer, I mean.”

“This is the starving tiger and her cubs that the Buddha fed himself to out of compassion during the lifetime when he was Mahasattva. It was a wonderful thing to do, don't you think?”

“Fed himself to? How do you mean ‘fed himself to'?”

“He allowed a hungry and sick tiger to eat him so she could get her strength back and feed her young. He sacrificed himself, just like Christ.”

“Whoa! That's going a bit far, don't you think? Just like Christ? Jesus Christ didn't lay down his life for a bunch of dumb animals. He did it for me. And you. Everybody. Your Buddha's got a screw loose, if you ask me. You know what those tigers grew up to eat? Christians, that's what.”

“Those were lions, I believe. If you think your life is more important that any other life then what I believe does sound stupid, I suppose. Do you think I'm stupid, Blue?” Karma turned to lock his eyes with the question, a tease of a smile on her lips.

Trapped me, Blue thought, scrambling for a weasel path that would leave the relationship no more wounded than it already was.

“No, I don't think you're stupid, but I think you could use some horse sense, though. You watch the next time you see a horse coming to a river that it wants to cross. You'll see him stretch his chin along the surface. Some people think it's to drink and some say it's to test the temperature, but what he's really doing is measuring how deep it is by using the fine hairs under his lip. Farmer told me that those hairs are so sensitive they work like sonar. That way the horse knows what he's getting into. I could use a few of those hairs myself, I think,” Blue said, scratching his hairless chin. “Might teach me when to keep my mouth shut.

“Look, Karma, I don't care what the Buddha did with his body so I sure as hell don't want to get in more trouble with you because of him. About what I said this morning, about you being naked, remember? That wasn't what I meant by what I said. Some of the things I feel sound really, really stupid when I try to say them.”

“I've noticed,” Karma said.

“I don't mean about you being naked. I mean about you being not there. Like when I have dreams where I wake up and you're not there and you're not coming back so when I really wake up I need to prove you're still there. Sometimes, when Farmer and I would go to pick up a horse, eh, an old minker, say, that people had owned since it was a colt, well, when we'd be trucking it away the woman would be crying, sometimes even the man would have to walk away as if we couldn't guess what he was doing. I could never understand it, you know, but sometimes if I think about you not being here I get this image from being with Farmer. I'm even writing a song about it,” Blue said, picking up his guitar. “The chorus goes like this.”

You're gone and I'm alone with

nothing to do but drink

And feel sorry for old horses

and ladies dressed in mink

A knock on the door casing interrupted Blue's song.

“Can we come in, Blue? I got something to tell you,” Tinker said, pushing aside the strings of beads, holding them to let Kathy go ahead of him.

“You joined the frigging army!” Blue said, staring at Tinker's hair.

“Oh, Tinker, you didn't,” Karma said, alarmed.

“No, I got a job,” Tinker said, explaining the events of the morning including the haircut which Kathy had supplied with a pair of scissors and a great deal of sadness.

“The pay is great and I get to work with diesel mechanics and big equipment and everything.”

“What about your social insurance number?”

“When I went to the office there was a form belonging to someone else who's been hired and I memorized the numbers and then just changed the last three around.”

“I can't believe nobody from home knows about this job,” Blue said. “A tunnel right here in San Francisco. Big money, I bet. You know, Tinker, if we call the Legion back home and tell whoever's there to spread the word I bet we could have a hundred guys out here next week,” Blue said excited, unaware of the uncertainty in the glance that passed between Karma and Kathy. “You could probably get them on at the tunnel, eh, Tink? We could put them up here at the commune until they found a place. Or at the hotel. They'd fit right in there, some of them, anyway.”

“I better put in my first day before we start hiring other people,” Tinker said. “But I was thinking that I could put a word in for you first chance I got.”

“That might not be such a good idea there, Tinker. I ... uh ... my fingers, right? Hate to lose my fingers underground and not be able to play the guitar. Besides, with the band there's just not going to be time for working underground. We artists can't be too careful but you go right ahead, but looking at that haircut, know what it does? Makes me homesick as hell. That's just what you looked like when we were crossing the causeway on our way out here. Same ears and everything.

“Do you girls know what's going on back home right now?” Blue asked Karma and Kathy. “Colours. You'd love the fall colours. The mountains turn all red and gold. People drive all the way from these here United States just to take pictures of it. It's really something, isn't it, Tink? If we were there right now we could go walking up one of the mountains and you two could stop wherever you wanted and just paint pictures and write poems and Tinker and me could spend the day picking off rabbits. Some days, it's nothing to get ten—”

“What do you mean picking off rabbits?” Kathy asked.

“With the .22. There's nothing like it, huh, Tink? Go walking in the woods when the colours are changing, the sunlight streaming through the leaves in these great streaks like the rays you see coming from Jesus in holy pictures, and carrying the gun and watching for rabbits. Then we could take them home, you girls could skin them and stew them up for supper. Or make pies out of them.”

“You could kill ten rabbits in a day?” Kathy said. “How could you? They're so cute.”

“So if I shot ten rats would you feel the same way?” Blue asked.

“To kill ten of anything ... to kill
anything
seems so cruel. And it's so much bad karma,” Kathy said with a shiver.

“A hippie we picked up one time told us the same thing, that we'd have bad karma from eating so much meat, remember, Blue?” Tinker recalled.

“Yeah, and know what I learned since then?” Blue said. “I learned that I like my Karma bad,” forcing a smile out of everyone in the room.

28

Blue, Gerry and Nathan had partially earned their gig at the Warehouse Gallery by helping to move Tulip's huge canvases from the commune where they were hung on walls, stored in the basement and, in one instance, required the removal of a wall. Gerry, acting as foreman, directed with his one arm while Blue and Nathan cut the plaster and tried to release what everyone agreed was Tulip's masterpiece. Only Blue's opinion dissented, pointing out that Tulip's real mastery was wine-making, recalling and recounting for those who had not been there the evenings they spent in the Colorado Rockies sipping wine.

“That wine went down a lot smoother than this chalk,” Blue said, hacking up a white cloud of plaster as he stepped back and lit a cigarette.

“This isn't going to work,” Capricorn said entering the room, seeing the way despite their efforts to free the plaster from the wall, it was crumbling, threatening the painting itself. “There has to be another way.”

“There is,” Blue volunteered. “Why don't we go to the paint store, buy a bunch of cans, go to the Warehouse and squirt it all over a wall? Say it was this one? Who's going to know the difference? Bet Tulip herself wouldn't know.”

“Your appreciation of art is astounding, Blue,” Capricorn said. “And look at the three of you, so covered in plaster that I bet I could pass anyone of you off as Michelangelo's David at the show tonight.”

“What David would that be?” Blue asked as Nathan slapped him on the shoulder to draw him back to the problem at hand.

“Just somebody Capricorn met over in Italy, Blue.”

Capricorn's solution met with resistence from Blue who didn't think it was such a great idea to remove a whole wall.

“Just tear out the wall in the room behind it—”

“That's our bedroom,” Blue reminded him.

“We can put something else there,” Capricorn said.

“What do you mean, something else? Karma and I pay good rent for that room.”

“Yes, she does,” Capricorn conceded. “I mean something else like another wall, not another room. If we tear the plaster off the other side of this wall, then we can cut the studs and lift this whole wall away with Tulip's work intact.”

“If Tinker was here he'd come up with a better solution,” Blue muttered, but the work of art had to be at the show before Tinker got off his shift in the tunnel.

Peter?, who had taken several of Tulip's paintings to the gallery in the commune van, returned and began helping with the dismantling of the wall. Blue watched more than he helped as part of his room was being torn down to get at the studs. Shaking his head, he wandered into the common room hoping to see the painting crumble from the pounding hammers and prying bars. Capricorn was sitting alone on the legless couch studying the wall. Blue plunked himself down beside him and did the same.

“It's a marvellous creation,” Capricorn acknowledged. “I'm going to miss it.”

Blue looked at the smeared wall, unable to find a face or a flower, not a single recognizable moment or event, only the childish display of coloured oils that they were working hard to rescue. He kept his silence until he had examined the wall to exhaustion.

“Listen, Cap, can I ask you a serious question?”

“Sure.”

“Are you pulling my leg? I mean are you really going to miss this thing? I've seen a lot of Tulip's stuff and it all looks like this wall, only smaller. I know quite a bit about art, took it from primary to grade seven, including abstract art. The nun would get us to run our pencil around the paper every which way, then colour in the shapes that got made. Even then none of it got to look this bad. I mean I like Tulip, eh. Makes great wine and everything, but I'm not so sure she's the next Norman Rockwell. Tell me what you're going to miss about this wall.”

“Tulip's sense of harmony,” Capricorn explained. “It's in all her work, but this is her masterpiece, her first real masterpiece. There isn't a form or colour that's out of balance with any other aspect of the painting. If you could stop judging it, Blue, and just sit with one of Tulip's paintings I think you'd find yourself relaxing, almost meditating. It has the same effect as listening to peaceful music. Tulip's paintings tap into the fundamental truth that the underlying nature of the Universe is harmony, not violence.”

“Well, there's where I'd have to disagree with you, Cap. This painting looks pretty violent to me. It's like Tulip took everything she ever saw and put it in a Mixmaster. And if that's what she meant to do, then I don't have to look very far to see that she's right, people running around killing people, dropping bombs, burning them alive. We even crucified God, for Christ's sake! So when you say harmony is the nature of the Universe, well, that's saying a lot but it doesn't mean anything, just like this painting. People may say they believe in harmony and all that but when you come right down to it we don't. Not the way we act, anyway.”

“But the point Tulip is making is that harmony isn't a human value,” Capricorn explained. “It exists in and of itself and everything else exists because of it. Whether we look at an atom or the whole Universe, the relationship of everything to everything, protons to neutrons, planets to planets, depends on balance and harmony. Violence isn't natural, not even in humans. Blue, do you realize that less than one percent of the people in the world are at war or killing each other at this moment. The other ninety-nine per cent are just trying to get by, and most of them would just like to get along with everybody else. But that one per cent is like a drop of poison in a glass of clear water, distorting our perception of human nature out of all proportion. That's where we need to begin, Blue, trying to transform that one per cent. Tulip's paintings don't leave out that one percent, they absorb it into the natural harmony. She glimpses things then recreates them on canvas.”

Blue pondered the painting.

“If she's trying to say what you say she's trying to say then why doesn't she just say it? I live in a three-dimensional world here, buddy. I like my chairs to look like chairs if you know what I mean. So when artists go ahead and draw a chair that looks like a plop of cow shit then I begin to wonder, boy. You can say what you want about harmony but I'm the musician here, remember.

“Look, we got this guy back home, eh, Henry Bruce. Well, he's an artist. Used to be a few years ahead of us in school but everybody in town knew he could draw. When he drew a bird, boy, it practically flew off the page right there in front of you. Then he goes to art college. Ears and eyes start turning up in the weirdest places. And it just gets wilder and wilder the longer he's there, but I haven't told you anything yet. It was like he was becoming a hippie before he knew hippies were coming.

“The last few summers he's been holding parties out at his place. He's got this farm in the country, hayfields and trees and mountains, all this beautiful stuff and all he wants to do is put eyes in the middle of people's foreheads. He'd invite a few of us out there and supply us all with booze, eh, and food, lots of food. There'd be baloney and cheese and grapes, and beans on the stove and stuff like that. Tinker and I've been going almost every time Henry has one of his parties.

“What he does is get us all as drunk as we can get and then he wants us to eat ourselves sick along with it. He's got this old barn that's falling down. He's been tearing it down actually, board by board. People really go in for barn board nowadays. All the tourist places sell barn boards, but they don't sell Henry's barn boards, let me tell you.

“What Henry Bruce does with his barn boards is saw them into foot-long pieces and get us to throw up on them. I mean just get drunk and vomit on the boards. Then he puts those boards in the oven and dries them out. He'd have a dozen boards going at some parties. Then he examines the results, the way the vomit forms or something. Who knows? Anyway he'd pick his favourites, okay, and shellacs them, coat them with shellac and then you know what he does? Sends them to a gallery in New York and they get up to five hundred bucks apiece for some of them. And that kind of says it for me, Capi. Vomit! Everybody's selling horses, as the other fellow says.

“You know we're going to have to carry this friggin' wall all the way to the gallery, don't you? It won't fit in the van.”