Tinker and Blue (40 page)

“I didn't even think of it, Barney. It never occurred to me that Karma would be leaving me. Know what I was worrying about? Leaving her. I kept thinking what if summer comes and it's time to go home and Karma won't come? How is she going to handle me leaving her behind? I don't know if I could of left her behind, though. Maybe I would of decided to stay here with her, but that was a thought to be chased away like a mortal sin, so I never really let myself think about it. It was just too scary. But what was I worrying about, huh? She had it all planned right from the start. Right from the start of her new life anyway, and all of a sudden I'm just another one of her past lives, something to move away from. Christ, I should of left her first, then I wouldn't have to explain to everybody— to hell with everybody! I wouldn't of left her anyway, would I, Barney? Would I?

“I didn't even ask her when she was leaving. I hope she didn't mean she was going tonight. She can't be gone already. It's getting dark as death out here, and Karma might be gone before I get to say ... what? Christ, Barney, what am I going to say to her? Help me think of something on the way back, buddy, because I'm not thinking so good on my own right now. Come on, boy, and remember that what you saw me doing before, you know what I mean, the tears, well, that's our secret, okay? Nobody has to know that. Nobody!”

67

Karma wasn't gone. She was in their bedroom, meditating. The painting was finished. In it, Karma was in the water, Blue and Barney standing beside the waterfall pool, preparing to join her. Blue sat in the chair and watched Karma's trance-like presence. He didn't notice when she had opened her eyes but was suddenly aware that she was watching him. He shrugged uncomfortably.

“I thought maybe you were already gone,” Blue said.

“Would it be better if I was?” Karma asked. “I can move—”

“I mean, I was afraid you were already gone,” Blue corrected. “When are you going?”

“I have a ticket for next Friday night. The arrangements in India have already been made. There's a Master there who is taking me as a student. How are you, Blue?”

“You know me. I'll be okay. Barney, too, once he gets back to Colorado where he can chase squirrels in the mountains instead of cars in the city. We'll do just fine.”

The next few days were filled with preparations for Karma's departure. Blue was soon conveying the impression that Karma's trip to India was his idea. Alone in their room, he touched her greedily, as if assuring to himself that she hadn't already gone.

On Friday evening, Blue borrowed the Plymouth and drove Karma to the airport. In the departure lounge they said their goodbyes.

Blue was afraid to speak, feeling a lump in his throat that threatened to produce more tears.

“You really have to do this, don't you?” he said finally.

“Yes, Blue, I really do. I know it hurts, but I believe we'll find each other again, sometime.”

“In another life, you mean. That's the difference between us, you have all these lives to throw away trying to be perfect while I just have this one, and I'm going to be spending the rest of it wondering what ever happened to you once you got on that plane. India's a big place, the dark continent, as the other fellow says.”

“That's Africa, Blue, not India.”

“Whatever. Anyway, you'll just disappear into those millions and millions of people and I'll never know where you are or what became of you.”

“I guess I'm luckier than you.”

“How?” Blue asked.

“Because I'll always know where you are. When I think about you, there's the ocean you love so much and the horses and the people and the stories. My mind will always know where to find you, and if I ever have to find you in the flesh, all I need to do is walk into that diner you're always talking about – the one that you told Mr. Lo always puts two King Cole tea bags in a one-cup teapot – or walk into that tavern or Legion of yours, and ask someone where I can find Blue.”

“But you won't.”

Karma shook her head. “Probably not, but it's comforting for me to know that I can find my best friend if I ever need him.”

“Best friend? When did that happen?”

“You've been that since shortly after we met, Blue. We've been that to each other, more than that, I know, but always that. That won't change ever. I love you.”

Then Karma was gone into a tunnel that took her onto a plane that took her to a place halfway around the world, leaving Blue standing there like someone by a graveside. He forced himself to leave, getting in the Plymouth and spending hours driving around the city, country radio blaring, his mind forming decisions, his eyes still too misty to go back to the commune.

—

Blue let himself slide off the hood of the Plymouth, stood and chugged the last of the beer, and walked back to the stage. Tinker was still crooning, backed by Gerry and Nathan, but the crowd was beginning to show its age. Most of the older guests were weaving their way toward seats or cars, guided by wives who thought it was time to go home, leaving behind them the young friends of the bride and groom, and Blue knew that now was the time for Blue Cacophony to show its stuff.

Taking his place on the stage, he changed the band's persona by playing “Failure To Love,” letting the wedding guests who still remained know that Blue Cacophony was here at last. The apron of plywood that formed a dance floor in front of the stage filled up. They were open to anything that would keep the party going, and those were conditions in which Blue Cacophony thrived. The band played its material and the dancers made the most of it. After an hour, Blue introduced a new number.

“We got this guy back home, eh, Farmer. He's this horse trader who told me one time that every once in a while he'd be loading a horse he just bought or sold, and all of a sudden he would just know that this was a
horse
, not some burnt-out minker or broken-down Clyde, but a real horse, the kind they make movies about. Well, that's how I feel about this next song. I finished it the other day. Took me two years but what I got me here is a real horse, as the other fellow would say.”

Behind him, Nathan and Gerry cast anxious eyes at each other.

In the crowd, Tinker, trying to anticipate where Blue was going, guided Kathy closer to the stage.

Peter? walked toward the stage transfixed.

“This is a song with a hundred verses, and it's never been sung all the way through before. It's never even been rehearsed before so you can imagine how my band feels right now, but with them or without them, I'm going to sing for you my latest composition, ‘The Red Lobster.' Give me some noise back there, Nate.”

Blue began to sing. There was nothing at first. Stares, shrugs, indifference.

As Blue returned over and over to the repetition of the chorus, it began to take with the crowd. Shoulders that had shrugged were now moving to a sort of timing, but because each listener tended to find something rhythmically different in Blue Cacophony's music, the audience rarely swayed in sync. Soon Blue was being joined by a few dozen voices when he sang:

Red Lobster, Red Lobster

Don't you dare sob, sir

'Cause love is you, and love is her

You're the meat And she's the but-tur

Because there had been no rehearsals, Gerry and Nathan were not shackled to Blue's arrangements. Under his voice, the violin and pipes began to find a beat that the wedding guests could dance to, and they did. It became a joyful, drunken, giddy marathon that eventually forced many from the dance floor, but a few hung in as the song approached its last verse which, in Blue's current emotional condition, had taken on prophetic proportions. Karma had cast him back into the sea, and now it was just him and his song.

From the dance floor where he and Kathy were actually dancing to Blue's music, Tinker exchanged winks with his friend, giving him the thumbs up while in front of the stage a hyper Peter? was yelling “It works! It works!” and hollering instructions to Gerry and Nathan to remember what they were improvising.

Blue reached the end of his song, and exhausted dancers staggered from the stage.

“If somebody would bring a few beers up here, we'll get this party started,” Blue hollered into the mic, half drunk from earlier beers and high on the moment. “Hell, we have a long way to go. There hasn't even been a decent fight yet, and what's a wedding without a few family friends punching it out. So fill her up for a set, as the other fellow would say.”

Blue Cacophony played until weariness overcame the band, and the members wandered off the stage. The wedding party had slowed to a low murmur of survivors still drinking whatever they could find. No one could, or wanted to dance anymore.

Blue, Tinker, Kathy, Gerry, Nathan and Peter? sat around one of the picnic tables, talking about the future as Peter? envisioned it. “The Red Lobster” would become the anthem of the revolution.

“Peter?, I love you, old buddy, but your revolution sucks. Nobody's every going to hear ‘The Red Lobster' again. Isn't that what you want? Music nobody hears, only hears about,” Blue asked, emptying the bottle in front of him and excusing himself. “I have to see a man about a horse, as the other feller says.”

Blue wandered off to find a private place to carry out the business at hand, and discovered that place against the back wheel of the Plymouth. He took a couple of steps toward returning to his friends, but second-thinking it, decided that the best place for him right now was to savour the triumph of “The Red Lobster” alone. He opened the back door and climbed into the back seat of Tinker's car, lay down and went to sleep.

“Is he going to be all right?” Nathan asked Tinker.

“He'll get over it. Blue's not used to losing, but you've all heard him. He's almost convinced he talked Karma into going. For me, that's a healthy sign that Blue'll be okay,” Tinker said.

“He's wounded, no doubt about that,” Peter? said. “But he's a pro, isn't he? Did you see him up on stage tonight? Not a sign that he wasn't in control.”

“Maybe we should keep him on stage then, because when he wasn't singing, he was being a complete bastard,” Gerry said, reminding Peter? of the way he had snapped at the band members when he didn't have a microphone in his hand.

“Blue's got two problems,” Tinker observed. “He's lovesick and he's homesick. Nasty combination, like throwing up and having the shits at the same time.”

“Sounds like something the other fellow would say,” Gerry said, running the bow across his violin.

“Blue's not the only one who's homesick tonight, though,” Tinker said. “Gerry, would you do me a favour? Would you try playing a few tunes for me if I jig them for you first?” Gerry agreed, and Tinker began making the mouth music which, according to Cape Breton history, was the way the music of the Highlands was preserved when the British banned the music and the instruments after the battle of Culloden. Later, in Cape Breton, those who had learned to jig the airs in the form of Gaelic mouth music called
puirt-a-beul
, passed them on to new generations who translated them back to the fiddle, the pipes, the piano.

At this point in any party back home, the fiddle would be winding down to the slow airs, and it was the most haunting of those tunes that Tinker chose to give to Gerry, who captured the tunes in his impressive memory then turned them into stringed offerings that Tinker listened to while his gaze and his thoughts drifted far, far from where they were gathered.

68

“I heard the call loud and clear, Tinker,” Blue told his friend the next day. Although it was late afternoon, both still showed traces of ill health from the previous night. “It's time to go home when I was sleeping in the Plymouth last night, I dreamed of fiddles, man. It was so real that when I woke up I thought I was at the Glencoe dance hall, not a wedding in San Francisco. I figure that car of yours has absorbed so much music driving to all the dances back home that it's kind of haunted, but in a good way. Then I had to throw up so I climbed out of the car and was heaving my guts out behind it and I could still hear the fiddle, then the music put me right back to sleep. That's a sure sign, as the other fellow says.”

Tinker decided that Blue would enjoy telling that story as gospel much more than he would appreciate hearing the corrected version.

“But if you go home now, Blue, what about the band? What about playing in Woodstock?”

“Let me ask you something, Tinker. When I told you that, that we were going to be playing in Woodstock, what did you think?”

“That you'd be playing in Woodstock, I guess.”

“Woodstock where?”

“New Brunswick.”

“That's because you studied the same geography book as myself, and the way I had it figured, we'd play Woodstock, then drive a couple of hours down the TransCanada Highway to Nova Scotia and four hours after that we'd be home, maybe playing the Cabot Trail Tavern or something, but these frigging Americans can't let anybody have anything to themselves. Turns out there's another Woodstock, some little piss-hole in New York, and that's where the concert is, and get this, the concert isn't until August. If we wait until August to go home, we'll miss the Broad Cove Concert, and if you miss the Broad Cove Concert, then you've missed the summer, to quote the other fellow.”

“Blue—” Tinker started, the address followed by a lingering silence.

“I'm listening,” Blue replied. “What's on your mind, buddy?”

“Blue, I'm not going back. Not this summer, I mean.”

Blue slapped the table hard with his hand. “I knew it! I friggin' well knew it! Why didn't you tell me this before? I might of been long gone except I was waiting for you.”

“I tried to tell you at Peter?'s the night we had the meeting with Doc Silver, Blue, but you were after finishing ‘Red Lobster' and ... well, then it just got harder to bring it up, but I've decided. I'm going to go to college here, Blue.”

“College! How the hell are you going to go to college here? You're a friggin' illegal immigrant, you got no money and these colleges down here cost a friggin' arm and a friggin' leg, and your grade twelve report card isn't exactly something worth framing, if I remember correctly.”

“Doc Silver says he can get me into Berkeley. Kathy and me will have to drive up to Vancouver sometime in July and apply from there, but he'll give me a recommendation, and he says he can find me some obscure scholarships that nobody ever applies for, and a couple of those, along with a job on campus, maybe washing dishes in the cafeteria, and I'll be able to pay my way.”

Blue looked at his friend in sad understanding.

“You know why he's doing this, don't you? To get his hands on your oxygen engine. There's money to made there, buddy, lots of it, enough to kill for, if you recall. They want you at that university to pick your brains.”

“I'm not going to study science. I want to take up acting.”

“Holy shit, Tinker, what's going on here? Have we been in the same city for the past year or what? Living in the same house? Acting? You must be good at it because you sure fooled me. We've been together all our lives and you never once mentioned acting. This is Kathy, isn't it? Her and her friggin' playwriting? A friggin' actor, for frig sakes. Who do you think you are, Paul-frigging-Newman or somebody?”

“Listen to me, Blue. I never knew anything about acting before, but now I do, and I want to try it. Hell, when Kathy and me went away to get ready to break out Capricorn, it was the first time I ever really tried acting. She got tapes about the American army, how to march, how to salute, how to do all sorts of things so I could act like a soldier. Then she wrote scripts that she made me memorize, and now am I ever glad that the nuns made us learn how to memorize poems like ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus' in school. Anyway, it wasn't until I got in that building that I knew I could act. Jesus, Blue, I was so scared that I was shitting in my pants. That Wise would have shot me in a minute if he knew who I was, but it was the acting that I liked. When I think about it now, it wasn't the thrill of breaking Capricorn out because, like I said, I was scared, but being an actor, convincing people I met that I was who I said I was, that was the really exciting part.

“It was almost the same when I phoned Reginald Regent III and pretended that I was Wise. That was acting, too. I've been acting all my life in some ways, acting like other singers, like Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, anybody I ever imitated. Blue, I could have spent my whole life doing something else like working in the tunnel, and enjoyed it, but I would never even have known I was an actor except that Kathy showed me that I was. We want to see where it takes us, my acting, her writing. This is an opportunity I'm not going to pass up. I'm sorry, Blue, but I am not going home, not right now.”

—

“I'll take the bus up to Vancouver, then take the CNR across Canada,” Blue explained to Capricorn. He had spent the past couple of days making arrangements for his departure. “I'd like you to do me a favour, though. I talked to Peter? and Gerry and Nathan about breaking up the band. It was Peter? who took it the worst, of course, seeing his revolution coming to an abrupt end like this, but I'm not interested in it anymore. Me and the fat lady may never sing again, to quote the other fellow.”

“What will you do when you go back home, Blue? There's not a lot of work, according to what you and Tinker say about the place,” Capricorn asked.

“I'll do what I've always done, buddy, sell horses.”

“But you told me horse traders were a dying breed, that your friend, Farmer, was one of the last of them.”

“Farmer's old, Capi, set in his ways. Sure, horses are disappearing from all the farms in Cape Breton just like they disappeared from all the farms everywhere else, but a guy has to ask himself where did they all go? What I mean is there's lots of horses in Cape Breton, hundreds of them, a thousand maybe, but they're all at race tracks now. Harness racers. Pacers and trotters. Farmer doesn't pay any attention to race horses because he doesn't know anything about them, and we all know what the other fella says about old dogs and new tricks. So I figure I'll hire on at the race track back home for a summer, learn all I need to know then go into the business of selling them.”

“You think you can learn all about horse racing in a summer, Blue?” Capricorn asked skeptically.

“I said I could learn all
I
need to know in a summer. All I need to know is enough to convince buyers that I have what they want, or sellers that I am doing them a favour just taking the old nag off their hands. Of course, if I'm any good at my job, and believe me, Capi, I am, then that old nag will make me about thousand per cent profit when I sell her.

“But there's something I have to tell you. I told the guys that the band was breaking up, but when it came time to tell them about the record, I just couldn't. I don't know, maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, but I just didn't want to see the look on Peter?'s face when he found out that my middle name is Judas. So I'm taking the weasel path. I'm not going to tell them about it at all. You are. Coming from you, with your way of being so moral and holy and all that, they'll be more forgiving. Peter?, anyway. I don't think Gerry or Nathan will care, especially when you pass them each a wad of money.

“You'll be in Colorado about the time I get back to Cape Breton. That's good. Good for Barney, anyway. Take good care of him because it's time for me to get going, Capi,” Blue said, picking up his suitcase and a large cardboard-wrapped package. “If the landlord is asking where part of the wall in our room went, well, I'm taking it home with me, a souvenir. If there's a bill, Tinker will tell you where to send it. But listen, if you get into trouble with the FBI again, I know a great place for your commune, if you're not scared to take your followers there, considering that for a little while there while you were in jail I used to be king of this particular castle. I might launch a coop de thaw, as the other fellow says.

“I have one stop to make, then I got to go meet Tinker. He's driving me to the bus station, but let's shake on her, Capi. You turned out to be one of the good guys, after all.”

—

Blue wobbled into Mr. Lo's weighted down with his suitcase and his package.

“Sorry I'm late, buddy,” he apologized as he slipped into the booth across from Tinker. “I had to see Cory before I left. Told him one time that he'd never go back to horses in that commune in Colorado, but I wanted to let him know that if he ever does, then I'll give him a really good deal, better than that guy that sold them those old nags they had there. So where's Kathy?”

“She says goodbye, but she thinks we should be alone, that maybe you'd rather not see her.”

“Give her my best, but that's not true anymore, that I'd rather not see her, Tinker. She's your partner now. Maybe I didn't like it when she was trying to be your partner, and you were listening more to her than me, but now that's all water under the bridge, so to speak. I'm going home and there's nothing I want more. Well, almost nothing, but that's just water and bridges again.”

Mr. Lo set the menus in front of the two of them, and they ordered combination plates of his Chinese food, telling him that Blue was leaving the city, going home. Mr. Lo tore up the bill before he even went to prepare their food. The two of them sat looking out the window, around the diner, anywhere but into each other's eyes.

“How long have we got before the bus leaves?” Blue asked.

“An hour, a little longer. It won't take long to get there, don't worry.”

“I'm not worried. If I miss the bus, there's always another one leaving this city. Aw, Christ, Tinker, I wish you were coming with me. It's like half of me isn't going home at all. But since you're serious about this college business, I'd like you to have this,” he said, pushing an envelope across the table top.

Tinker picked it up and looked inside.

“Jesus Christ!” he gasped, flipping the bills in the envelope. “There must be ... must be a thous— a couple of ... Jesus, Blue, there must be—”

“Ten thousand dollars,” Blue clarified, explaining about the success of the record.

“But this is all your money—”

“No. I still have a couple of grand. If I had of landed home with twelve thousand bucks in my pocket, I'd of killed myself trying to party it away. A couple of thousand will just maintain me in a style to which I am accustomed, to quote the other fellow. Can't have you going to college with no money, and when you mentioned washing dishes in a cafeteria, I thought, oh boy, a chore neither of us care for, so I said, Lord, if you can let this cup, and saucer, and dinner plate pass, as the other fellow said in Gethsemane, Tinker would be forever grateful. So as one friend to another, it was possible for me, if not the Lord, to spare you that.”

“I'll pay you back, Blue. You know that.”

“Yes, I know that, but there's conditions on the loan. No ‘Your cheque's in the mail,' as the other fellow says. I want cash in my hand, and I won't be travelling out here to get it, if you get my meaning.”

Tinker, thick-throated, nodded his understanding that Blue wasn't going to let him get lost in California the way it sometimes happens.

Mr. Lo brought them their dinners which they ate slowly and not completely, each mulling over the moment and their pending parting.

“Blue,” Tinker said, pushing his plate aside. “Since you're going home and I'm not, will you bring something back for me?”

“No problem. If it'll fit on the bus I'll wrestle it across the causeway.”

“It won't fit on the bus, Blue,” Tinker said, sliding his keys across the table.

“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.