Tinker and Blue (26 page)

42

There was something familiar about the abstract design on the cover of
Failure To Love
, the Blue Cacophony members agreed, although none of them could quite put a finger on it. “Well, I wouldn‘t have it hanging on my wall, if I had a wall,” Blue said, walking along the edge of an admission that no one picked up on. Having joined the rest of the band at Peter?'s, he brought with him several copies of the album which, he explained, he had wrestled from a street pusher, describing the bloody fight that had ensued. “But when I heard the cop sirens I had to run before I could make him tell me where he got them.”

Instead of resorting to violence, Peter? proposed that they call in the police, an idea Nathan and Gerry agreed with, but Blue opposed.

“We can't do that,” he reasoned. “If we do, Tinker and me'll be deported and the commune people, especially Capricorn, will go to jail. Besides, it's not like we're a legal band, paying taxes and all that. Capricorn says we could have the IRS all over us for tax evasion, same as Al Capone. Hell, they could re-open Alcatraz just for the four of us here. The last thing we need is the cops, believe me.”

Blue's reasoning altered the band's strategy for dealing with the bootleg album. Instead, they would each use their resources to track down the illegal operation, and kill it. Nathan and Gerry were frantic to capture the master recording and burn it at the stake, then hunt down every existing copy of
Failure To Love
, and smash them to fading fragments of a horrible memory in their musical careers.

—

Blue squatted beside the radio on the bedroom window sill, tirelessly twirling the dial back and forth across the amber station numbers, scanning the San Francisco skies for the sound of his song. It was a labour that paid off fairly frequently. “Failure To Love,” aided by the bootleg romance surrounding the recording, had caught the attention of a few of the city's deejays, and the air play created interest in the record. Commune members smuggled copies from the boxes in the basement to the distributors on the street. Explaining the series of blinds and double-blinds that he had set up to prevent the record from being traced back to the commune, Capricorn assured Blue that they were above suspicion in the pirating Blue Cacophony's music.

While San Francisco's radio stations squacked and squealed under Blue's unrelenting search for the squack and squeal of “Failure To Love,” which he never failed to recognize, it was not the song's success that occupied his mind, but Karma's exceptional quiet. She was intensely working on another of her past-life panels, one that reminded Blue of Russia.

The morning after the accident, Blue, who had spent the night stretched across three chairs in the waiting room, was allowed in to see Karma. She lay in the bed, and when Blue spoke her name, she turned her attention slowly towards him, as if reluctant to leave her thoughts, and smiled.

“Just because Tinker and me said we enjoy a good wake every once in awhile, you didn't have to go trying to oblige us, you know. For a while there, the doctors thought you were a goner. How are you feeling?”

“Fine, Blue. Is everyone else all right?”

“Yup, except for Tinker. He's not injured, just heartbroken because the Plymouth's pretty well totalled. Kathy didn't get a scratch. Barney bailed out the open window with a bark and a howl, and I got out alive myself, although I don't know how. I saw what was suppose to happen to us, and it didn't. It's like guys in the war who stand in the middle of sixteen million bullets and never get a scratch. If I live to be fifty, I'll never figure out how we didn't get creamed by a transfer truck. But we didn't. Fate foiled, as the other fellow says. Kathy and Tinker'll be coming to get us later in the van if the doctor lets you go home.”

Later that day, with a word of caution and a warning to get lots of rest, the doctor who attended Karma allowed her to be released. Tinker and Kathy picked them up at the hospital, and drove them back to the commune in the van. Shortly after they had returned, Blue polled the residents, casually wondering if they noticed anything different about Karma. The answers generally agreed that she was normal ... “for Karma.” Blue couldn't explain his worry that Karma wasn't the same after the accident as she was before it.

“She's not all that much fun anymore,” Blue confided in Tinker. “She just wants to meditate and paint. We talk and all that, but I don't know, Tinker, it's like too much of her came back from the dead or something.”

The tuner slipped past a familiar sound and Blue eased it back, picking up the lyrics of his song. Turning up the volume, he sang along, adding the original fractures to the recording that Capricorn's electronic skill and Tinker's voice had repaired. Karma put down her brush and turned to listen.

“How does it feel to hear your work on the radio?” she asked when the song ended.

“Pretty good, but they're really your words, aren't they, ‘the failure to love' and all that? Maybe I should say we both wrote it instead of feeling like I stole the idea from you.”

“Why, Blue? When you tell stories about Farmer and the people you know, you're not stealing them, are you? You're just repeating them. And if you hear a song you like and learn to sing it, does that mean you stole the song? This is no different. You heard me say something and you took it and turned it into a song that thousands of people are hearing, and it'' not my idea, really. It's been around for a long, long time. It's just that I think it's more than an idea. I believe it's true. Maybe someone who hears your song will believe it's true, too. Songs and poems are the oldest way in the world for ideas and stories to travel. As your other fellow might have said, minstrels were about the very first newspapers.”

“I almost forgot. We're back in the newspapers again, Karma. Peter? brought some clippings around today. I can't say they all said nice things about the album, but Peter? says there's no such thing as bad publicity, but he really hates it, though. I guess I didn't really know how serious he was about this not recording business. He still wants the band to stay together, but it's not the same for him. When I think of what he wanted, I feel bad, but when I hear “Failure To Love” on the radio, I know what I wanted. Two people running in opposite directions can't get to the same place....”

“...as the other fellow says,” Karma interjected. “No they can't, Blue.”

Karma's remark hung in a silence Blue was reluctant to explore. Instead, he turned his attention to the new panel. "Is that a Russian or what?”

“A Tartar, actually. I have strong impressions about having been a child in that culture a long time ago. If I'm right, then I never grew up. I died very young.”

“Your soul is kind of a song of its own, eh, travelling around the world like one of those ideas you were just talking about, India, Russia, England, all those places. So do you think a soul like yours is looking for the right place to be born or the right place to die? Because getting off the planet is what it's all about for you, right?”

“Something like that,” Karma said, picking up her brush and turning back to the panel. “And what's it all about for you, Blue?”

“Staying within screaming distance of a priest when my number comes up, then once he splashes me with the sacrament of Extreme Unction it's straight to Heaven for me. You should try being a Catholic, Karma. It's a lot easier. But until that day comes for me, in about a hundred years time, I hope, I have a career to think about. The album is getting us lots of work. Peter? said we even have an inquiry from the Fillmore. Stick with me, girl, and you'll be eating your sunflower seeds off gold plates with silver forks.”

43

All through December, Christmas bore down on Tinker and Blue like a runaway train, each day being one boxcar longer and heavier than the previous, with carols on the radio, store windows dressed with the season's scenes and sales, and the appearance of more and more charity Santas on the city's street corners. Being away from home was no longer a lark but a torment, one that enhanced their sentimentality, increased their beer binges, and drove them into each other's crying jags in the sullen belief that no one in all of San Francisco was able to appreciate the sad fate to which they had been sentenced but themselves. Feeding each other a steady diet of memories, they composed daydreams in which they took a train across Canada to Cape Breton where they caught the local bus on Christmas Eve which would take them home.

“It's the best bus in the world,” Blue reminded Tinker. “It picks up more hitchhikers than passengers, and it delivers you right to your door if it's raining or snowing. Greyhound won't do that for you.”

Talk of the bus made Tinker more mournful than ever. “If we had the Plymouth we wouldn't have to make up stories about trains and buses and planes and hitchhiking,” he sighed to Blue, remembering the mangled condition of his car following the accident. It had been parked out back of the commune until the night it disappeared.

Blue explained to Tinker that San Francisco had an abandoned vehicle policy, where the city paid wreckers to tow old cars away. They were taken to a salvage yard, stripped of anything valuable, and crushed into a cube of metal to be melted down and used again.

“They must of seen the Plymouth and thought it was a write-off. Who knows, maybe someday you'll buy a new car and feel all warm whenever you touch the front fender, and that's because it used to be the Plymouth's front fender,” Blue comforted Tinker.

“Rein-CAR-nated, Blue?”

“You never know. If my KAR-ma can do it, maybe your CAR can, too, buddy.”

—

On Christmas Eve homesickness reached its peak with both of them. There were no formal plans to celebrate the holiday at the commune, nor any to impede its celebration. The season's decorating took an independent path. Someone had strung the six-foot corn plant with blinking lights. Someone else set out an array of candles that flickered around a miniature Bethlehem scene on top of the stereo. A wreath hung on the door. But for Tinker and Blue, none of it was real because none of it was home.

They had gone shopping, wandering through stores, buying gifts for everyone at the commune. Their most delightful discovery was that there were stores where for a quarter more a woman would gift-wrap their purchases, adding ribbons and bows. “The only thing they'll wrap for you in the Co-op back home is the meat,” Blue told the woman while watching her turn the boxes over, every corner as crisp and sharp as a hospital bed. “Merry Christmas now,” they said in parting, carrying their shopping bags out of the store, stomachs grumbling with the sudden awareness that, unescorted by vegetarians, they were free to go to any restaurant they wanted. They walked into the first tavern they could find, ordered beer and burgers, and indulged each other's blue Christmas.

“I'll be home for Christmas

Please have some snow

And lots of Golden Glo

'Cause I'll be home for Christmas,” Blue sang, lifting his beer to Tinker. “Merry Christmas, buddy!” It was the first toast of a whole loaf as they talked themselves into deeper depths of homesickness and despair with the arrival of each fresh beer. They toasted each other, the commune, each and every person from back home who came up in their conversations or stories, and the baby Jesus, whose birthday they were celebrating.

The burgers they had for lunch had already been digested when they noticed that it was now time for supper, ordering more burgers. “We should of taken Barney with us. He'd of had a hell of a Christmas in here,” Blue moaned. They kept checking the clock, discovering, each time they did, that they just had time for one more beer.

Noting that it was almost too late to go home and face Karma and Kathy whom they were committed to taking out for a Christmas Eve dinner in a restaurant less bloody-minded than the one they currently occupied, Blue brought up the idea of delaying their return even longer by taking in midnight Mass.

“If we tell them that we were in a tavern all day, they'll get as grumpy as wives, but if we can go home and tell them we were at Mass, well, what can they say?” Blue reasoned. Tinker could find no flaw in that reasoning.

An inquiry of the bartender told them that they would find a Catholic church five or six blocks away. Carrying their shopping bags, they set off on unsteady steps seeking spiritual sanctuary.

“Just like home,” Blue said when they stepped inside the church, both of them inhaling deeply of the incense, noting the racks of flickering candles dedicated to the Mother of God, the manger scene in the corner of the church, the plaster saints holding vigil from a hundred nooks and crannies in the walls. Tinker elbowed Blue as they genuflected beside a pew, directing Blue's attention with a nod of his head to the lineup outside the confessionals where lights above the doors indicated that four priests were hearing confessions.

“What do you think?” Tinker whispered.

“I guess we have to. We haven't been to confession since we left home. We don't really have to go until Easter. According to the other fellow, Heaven's waiting for us as long as we make our Easter Duties, but now that we're face to face with it, I guess it would be nice to be able to go to Communion tonight, and considering the nature of our current lives, we're in no state to just walk up to the altar there, stick out our tongues and say Amen.”

The two of them stepped into the shortest line, then into cubicles on either side of the same priest, waiting in the dark for the small hatch door to slide back, making the priest's silhouette vaguely visible through a thin dark fabric while a sinner confided his or her venial and mortal mishaps. Blue was busy rehearsing his litany of sins when a sound, as familiar in San Francisco as it was in Cape Breton, caused him to catch his breath, the sound of the priest pushing back the wooden panel. It was Blue's turn, a chore that was never easy. But never in his whole life, had he had to say what he was about to say:

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been more than ... six ... months ... since my last confession.” He waited for the priest to begin an investigation of the circumstances that would keep a Catholic boy away from the sacraments for half a year; a list of sins so severe that he feared confessing them, sins that included living with a non-Catholic, luring her every night, or at least every night he could, into the sin of sex, knowing that he was inflicting upon her mortal soul an eternity of damnation because Karma not being Catholic she didn't have the great escape of confession enjoyed by Catholics. He began to regret his presence here, to fear it, to sweat.

“
Sí
?” asked the priest.

“Huh?” asked Blue.

“
No hablo inglés
,” said the priest.

“Sorry, Father, but my Latin's pretty weak,” Blue answered, then with a deep breath he began to confide the depths and despairs of his soul, finishing with the fact that as early as a few hours ago he had lied about his age to a bartender who sold them beer, lots of beer, “but I don't feel drunk.” He managed to get it all out without interruption, although a number of times the holy father had tried to interject. But Blue, once on a roll, was not about to allow himself to be interrogated if he could help it. He ended with a fervent Act of Contrition, asking God's blessing for having sinned against Him, promising never to repeat any of them again.

“That's all, Father,” Blue finished up.

“
No hablo inglés. Tiene que encontrar otro cura.
”

“What's that, Father? Three ‘Hail Marys' and ‘Three Our Fathers'? I can do that, thank you very much.” He left the confessional, giving Tinker's door a happy rap with his knuckles as he walked past. Tinker eventually came out scratching his head and knelt beside Blue. Bowing their heads, they prayed together.

After Mass, outside the church at 1 a.m., they waved at the rare passing taxi with no success. They started walking toward home, hoping that eventually a cab would pull up. As they walked, Tinker studied the urban geography around him, finally declaring, “This is around where Mrs. Rubble lives, Blue,” a fact that opened their Christmas hearts to the lonely widow, who was an additional excuse to delay their return to the commune where they envisioned Karma and Kathy waiting with the patience of snipers for their return.

Certain that they had the right neighbourhood, they scanned the tenant names of one apartment building after another until Tinker pointed to Mrs. Rubble's name. Her husband's name had been scratched off with a pencil. They pushed on the buzzer to no avail, and finally decided to stand out on the street screaming, “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Rubble,” a greeting that seemed to have aroused a large number of Mrs. Rubbles of both sexes, all yelling for them to go home. Finally, a timid voice ventured down from a night window, asking, “Who wants me?”

“It's us, Mrs. Rubble. Tinker and Blue. Remember your husband's wake? We brought you a gift,” Blue said, lifting two bottles from one of their shopping bags, allowing them to clink together with an unmistakable sound.

“Come on up, boys.”

Mrs. Rubble was obviously trying to make the best of her first widowed Christmas. Her small, near-slum apartment was immaculately clean. A tiny tree, not a foot tall, stood on the television, glittering under the weight of more than one box of tinsel, four blinking lights and a half dozen miniature plastic snowballs. Her table was covered with a Christmas tablecloth, virgin white except along the dust lines where it had been folded and put away year after year.

Mrs. Rubble herself was also dressed in the Christmas spirit, her hair having recently returned from the hairdresser's where it was newly fluffed, the grey that Blue remembered having vanished under a mahogany tint. Her best dress, a red velour, was stretched around her, trying to contain the noticeable difference in Mrs. Rubble since those slimmer days when she had purchased it. Christmas carols spilled quietly from the radio. On the end table beside the chair in which she obviously had been sitting, was an open box of chocolates and a tall glass of something inebriating. Mrs. Rubble was celebrating Christmas.

“Maybe she wasn't calling out our names when she was sitting here tonight, but I don't think my own mother would be more happy to see us,” Tinker whispered to Blue when Mrs. Rubble went to the kitchen for glasses.

“You really didn't have to bring me anything,” Mrs. Rubble said on returning, and placing the glasses on the table she began looking through the shopping bags with a possessive assurance that here was a Santa Claus. Tinker and Blue looked at one another and, discovering each other's cowardice, shrugged, letting Mrs. Rubble oooh! and aaah! over Capricorn's sandals, Tulip's tubes of paints, the various trinkets and baubles that were bought with others in mind. Her loudest gasp was spared for the sparkling gold chain and cross that Blue had purchased for Karma. Her second loudest utterance was for Kathy's silk shawl. She wrapped herself in it, then, bending her neck, asked Blue to close the clasp of her necklace.

Sitting around the living room, Tinker and Blue quickly overcame the sobering lull that had been midnight Mass and soon the three of them were toasting each other with more joy than on their previous social encounter. After a few drinks served by Mrs. Rubble, her manners wore out and it was every man for himself. It was then, going into the kitchen to get his own drink for the first time, that Blue saw the turkey on the counter.

“That friggin' thing is bigger than some of the horses me and Farmer used to truck around,” he said.

“Oh, some social workers or something brought that around. I can hardly lift it and it won't fit in my tiny oven. I suppose some poor family with ten kids is trying to share a little bit of a bird while I have that monstrosity. There's enough meat there to feed an army.”

“How about if they were an army of pacifists, Mrs. Rubble? There's enough meat there to feed half the vegetarians in San Francisco and we know exactly where they are, don't we, Tink?”

—

With Blue carrying the turkey and Tinker dragging along their two shopping bags, now filled with potatoes, carrots, onions and half the ingredients from Mrs. Rubble's cupboard, the three of them stood out on the street waiting for a taxi. “I bet this is why Joseph and Mary had to take a donkey,” Blue observed, looking down the quiet street. Finally, a taxi pulled up. They climbed inside, wished the cabbie a merry Christmas, and gave him the address.