“A turd of hurtles?” Blue asked, sensing the inaccuracy in his remark without actually recognizing it. Tinker did, and fed the line back to him, which made them both giddy.
“You thought you saw a herd of turtles?” Blue said, finally and correctly. “That’s the funniest thing I heard since John Alex John R. John C. tried to put the harness on himself when he was in the DT’s.” Turning to the hippie, Blue explained, “We got this guy back home, eh, John Alex John R. John C—”
“Who are they, man?” the hippie asked in studied interest.
“They? No, no, John Alex John R. John C.! He’s one guy, eh, John Alex. But we call him John Alex John R. John C. because— Why do we call him John Alex John R. John C., Tinker?”
“To tell him apart from John Alex John R. the Butcher, of course,” Tinker answered without taking his eyes from the rain-splashed highway where strange creatures might be lurking in ambush.
“Yeah. Well, the point is ... help me out here, Tinker. What was the point here?”
“The point was ... ahh ... leave me alone. I have to drive.”
“Right! Turtles. Keep your eye out for those turtles, Tink.” Convulsions of laughter exploded from the two of them.
“Laughing is good,” the hippie observed seriously.
“Know what else would be good?” Blue offered. “Food. I’m frigging starving.” Turning to the hippie he apologized. “Sorry we have no food to give you. We made a loaf of baloney and mustard sandwiches at a picnic park this afternoon but two hours later they turned green as snot. My mother could cook Sunday dinner in the heat in this part of the country, boy.”
“I don’t eat dead animals,” the hippie replied.
“So is it hard to take a bite out of a live cow?” Tinker asked, this time snapping Blue in the ribs.
“All life is sacred, man,” the hippie explained. “Eventually we’ll all know that. The only reason we’re alive is to learn that all life is sacred.”
“But to stay alive you got to eat,” Blue said, moving into a philosophical mood. “Man can’t live on bread alone, as other fellow says.”
“Have some sunflower seeds,” the hippie offered, digging into his pack and pouring some into Blue’s palm. Tinker declined.
Blue chewed on the seeds, thinking as he did so that it was about the worst thing he had ever eaten, but his raging appetite wasn’t discriminating. He put his hand over the back seat for more.
“Just what a guy would need after a hard day in the coal mine, Tink. A handful of sunflower seeds. Who could think of roast beef after a feast like this,” he remarked as he began chewing again.
“You eat a lot of meat, man?” the hippie asked.
“Three times a day where we come from, bacon and eggs in the morning, beans and baloney at dinner and hamburg and potatoes for supper. Chicken on Sunday,” Blue mumbled, his mouth full.
“That’s a lot of bad karma, man,” the hippie warned.
The storm raged over them in a series of frightening flashes and thunder claps.
“Nature, man! Wow!” the hippie remarked from the back seat. “This your guitar, man?” he asked, shifting to make himself comfortable among the baggage and garbage that was collecting there. The Plymouth had an acre of trunk with a hole in its floor almost as large, so the back seat served as a closet for Tinker and Blue as well as a crowded bed for one of them who wanted to sleep while the other drove.
“Yeah,” Blue answered, rising out of a lazy haze of half thoughts that had overcome him. “I like to pick a little country once in awhile. I write my own songs, you know.”
“Country? Country Joe and the Fish, man. Yeah. I know where you’re coming from. They’re far out, man.”
“Do they play the Opry?” Blue asked, trying to place the unfamiliar name.
“They play everywhere, man,” the hippie replied from somewhere that sounded like the edge of sleep.
They were coming out the back end of the storm. Blue was humming the tune to “The Red Lobster,” looking for more elusive lyrics. Tinker treaded the highway well below the speed zone, scouting the ditches for turtles.
Sometime later, Blue woke to the hippie’s voice, excited by the rising dawn.
“Mornings, man. I love the morning. Let me out up ahead. I’m going to have a sun shower.”
“If I go up to Canada, I’ll look you up,” the hippie promised as he slipped himself and his pack out of the back seat to stand on the shoulder of the road.
“Just turn right at Toronto and you can’t miss us,” Blue said, walking around to the driver’s side to relieve Tinker who climbed into the back seat for a snooze.
“Peace, man,” the hippie said, raising the two-fingered salute that accompanied the salutation.
Tinker and Blue lifted fingers awkwardly in reply and drove off down the road.
“Whaddya think of your first hippie, Blue?” Tinker asked, shifting bags and the guitar case to make a nest for himself.
“I wouldn’t touch a drug after meeting that guy, Tinker. Give me a beer any day. What do you think happens to you when you smoke that stuff?”
“Ahh, Christ,” Tinker said suddenly. “That friggin’ hippie went and spit his sunflower seed husks all over the floor back here.”
“Seed husks?” Blue replied. “What the hell do you mean, seed husks?”
3
“Go west, young man, go west, as the other fellow says, and look at us, Tinker, here we are, almost there,” Blue remarked. “So this is Kansas, huh? Looks different in the movies. Tougher. They have tornadoes here. I read one time about a little girl who got caught in one ... no! ... it’s a story about a girl who meets a lion and something else...”
“Sounds like The Wizard of Oz,” Tinker said from behind the steering wheel.
“Right! That movie we saw when we were kids. And there was just this little guy behind the wizard, making people believe in magic. I remember now.”
“Wouldn’t it be great to visit a different world, Blue? Where people look like us, I mean, not creatures from outer space. I think about that sometimes, visiting a different world,” Tinker admitted.
“Not me, boy. I like the world just the way it is. Farmer told me that when he was in Italy during the war, it was like a different world. The Italians don’t eat potatoes, Tinker. Spaghetti! That’s all. I don’t mind eating a can or two a week myself, but I likes me meat and potatoes, as the other fellow says. I’d hate to go somewhere that only had spaghetti to eat.”
The guitar was welding with sweat to Blue’s belly as he banged out the chords to “The Wild Colonial Boy” which Tinker flawlessly bellowed for the third time through without stopping. Blue’s voice moved in to support him on the chorus but Tinker was unaffected by the discord. At summer beach parties and kitchen gatherings where Tinker was always coaxed by friends and even adults to lead the singing, Blue always considered himself an indispensable part of the duo. Tinker, unable to discourage his friend from the enthusiasm of that conviction, had trained himself not to hear the amusical contribution – the way people living beside the ocean no longer hear its eternal roar.
They had been picking up and examining hippies along the way, comparing those specimens to what they knew of the more predictable world where men didn’t spill over into the women’s domain of abundant hair and sandals and abrupt shifts in fashion. Some offered joints or an unappetizing handful of dried mushrooms or spitball-sized bits of paper called “orange barrel” or “blotter,” but Tinker and Blue forsook them all in favour of a cold beer.
Blue was getting more and more comfortably involved in dialogues with the backseat passengers, whether they travelled with them for an hour or a day. He had long ago put the screwdriver back in the cubby hole, convinced that there was no lurking danger in their passengers that he couldn’t handle with his own two fists. People who live on sunflower seeds, he noted to Tinker,
probably couldn’t go two rounds with either of them.
“You know what I think, Tink ... Think, Tink ... Think, Tink, Tink, Tink,” plinking the sound on his guitar. “Hey, that’s not bad. I’ll have to use that in a song. But know what I think, Tink? I think these people are really frigged up. Must be the drugs. Why else would they want the Commies to win in Southeast Asia so they can invade California next?
“After Vietnam, bang! bang! bang! Right across the Pacific and we’re next. I learned all about it in Modern World Problems. Made an eighty in it, too. My best subject because it was interesting. My homework was right there on the front page of the Herald every day. I just had to glance at it on my way to reading the comics. You should of took it, boy. You’d know more about the world than you learned in chemistry and math.”
In high school Blue had tried to reason with his friend. “You can’t bullshit your way through trigonometry,” he had argued, trying to protect his friend from the pitfalls of high school that included math, science and French. But Tinker, who planned eventually to join his mechanic mentor, Charlie, in Charlie’s dream of inventing an engine that ran on oxygen, understood abstractly that a knowledge of math would be beneficial. He persevered and passed, much to Blue’s dismay, and they graduated together.
What had set Blue reflecting on his front-page intelligence of the Vietnam war was his conversations with the hippies they picked up, which always found their way back the war. Blue, without a lot of support from Tinker, tried to reason with them about what was at stake if the Communists won the war.
“We have this guy back home, eh, Farmer. He’s not a farmer, though. He’s a horse trader, but, to quote the other fellow, they call him Farmer because he planted so many seeds in Cape Breton he’s going to have more descendants than Abraham. Well, Farmer was in the Second World War with the Cape Breton Highlanders and he told me if it wasn’t for our soldiers we’d all be Nazis. I talked to him about Vietnam because he was wounded in Casino and everything so he knows all about war. Farmer said the Commies are just as bad as the Nazis, and there’s billions of them in China. In Korea, eh, the Chinese sent more soldiers than the Allies had bullets. They just kept piling up like yellow snow, Farmer said. He wasn’t there but he talked to guys who were. We beat them in Korea, so now they’re trying to sneak through Vietnam. If they come across the Pacific and the Russians come over the North Pole, which is the big plan, Farmer says, then the world won’t be safe for capitalism.”
The rides weren’t long enough for him to convert anybody with the logic of what he had learned in Modern World Problems and from Farmer, who had taught Blue much of what he understood about the world.
“I bet if it was Canada over there in Vietnam you and I would be full of medals by now, not hiding in a haystack of hair, eh?”
Tinker’s thoughts rose slowly out of the deepening silence imposed on him from the heat and the weird menagerie they had been accumulating and discharging over the miles.
“What if they really are burning babies over there, Blue? Everybody says—”
“Hold her right there, buddy! They have a word for that in Modern World Problems. Propaganda! The Communists are geniuses at it. They spread lies and make people believe them. Do you think our side would do anything like that? Even if some crazy soldier wanted to, do you think the President of the United States would let him? He’s the frigging President of the United States, for God’s sake. He’s even more important than the Prime Minister.”
“But everybody we talked to—”
“Everybody we talked to was a frigging hippie, Tinker! Think! Except for waitresses, we haven’t talked to a real human being since we crossed the border.... Oh, oh! Look! Let’s pick those two up.”
4
Two hippies were standing with heavy packs piled between them on the side of the road on a straight stretch of highway that allowed Tinker and Blue to study them as they approached.
“I can’t be sure, but they might be two girls,” Blue said with excitement as Tinker glided the Plymouth to the shoulder.
One of the hikers ran over to the open window on Blue’s side of the Plymouth.
“Hi!” she said, a warm smile spreading across the most beautiful face Blue had ever seen. “We’re going to Colorado. Can you help us?”
A garbled sound that passed for “sure” forced its way through Blue’s lips.
“Great!” she said, running back to get her friend and their gear.
“Is Colorado on our route?” Tinker asked as Blue watched her easy gait take her back to their roadside camp.
“It is now, even if we have to go in reverse to get there,” Blue cracked, watching the girls pick up their packs. He opened the door to help then when he saw the third figure rise and stretch from its slumber.
“A German shepherd! They got a frigging German shepherd with them, Tinker!” he almost shouted as his well-intentioned open door closed like a suit of armour between him and the lolling-tongued dog that trotted over to sniff the tires.
“This is great,” the girl said as she and her friend reorganized the crowded back seat around to accommodate their massive packs and even more massive German shepherd.
Blue watched the curtain of waist-long dark hair ride across her back as she made domestic arrangements to their quarters and settled in beside her friend.
“Lay, Barney!” she commanded, and the dog collapsed at her feet, sniffing sunflower seed husks.
Blue was grateful for the big, friendly name that removed much of his terror of the German shepherd. “Lay, Killer!” or “Lay, Tiger!” might have stopped his heart, which, with the exception of the time he saw Danny Danny Dan’s funeral, was racing far faster than any activity that internal organ had engaged in before, spurred on by a beauty he could only have imagined as the fictional subject of one of his best songs.
“I’m Karma. This is Kathy.”
“I’m Blue and this here’s Tinker,” Blue said as Tinker gawked into the back seat through the rearview mirror while easing the car back onto the road.
“Blue is such a wonderful name! I paint so I use a lot of blue,” Karma said. “Someone once told me that before the New Testament there’s practically no reference to the colour blue, that it’s like blue appeared out of the clear blue. Do you think that’s true? Some people think that blue was the colour of Christ’s eyes, that Jesus Christ brought the colour blue into the world with him and left it behind to assure us he would be back. His mother is always wrapped in blue when you think about it. I think Jesus is so cool! Not like church religion or anything, but like the new Buddha.”
Blue felt Tinker’s blow to his ribs and glanced at his friend with a glare that rejected Tinker’s amusement.
“God’s the captain of a whole fleet of churches, as the other feller says,” Blue said.
“Oh, are you Christian?”
“Nope, Catholic.”
—
Karma, who described herself as an artist, and Kathy, who wanted to write plays, were on their way to the Human Rainbow Commune in northern Colorado, a slight detour of three or four hundred miles, which Blue offered to make without consulting Tinker who, the first time he had a chance to talk to Blue alone, related two significant observations: “We’re getting low on gas money and those girls aren’t wearing any brassieres!”
The latter observation severely weakened any financial argument against the detour, so Tinker caved in to Blue’s rationale that nobody else was going to pick up two girls with a German shepherd, omitting the part where they had gotten from New Hampshire to Kansas without the Plymouth. Blue also preyed on Tinker’s pride. Tinker, like Blue, was the product of a culture whose favourite past-time was telling stories and whose central myth was hospitality. He also sensed that back home this would someday become a story grounded in a generous gesture of their hospitality. So Tinker joined Blue in exporting their Cape Breton hospitality to
northern Colorado. An hour later, Kansas was behind them.
Along the way, Tinker and Blue fought over the rearview mirror, which Blue kept adjusting to his benefit instead of the driver’s. Growing less shy, he eventually abandoned the rearview mirror and began craning his neck, then shifting to rest on one elbow, finally turning to kneel on the seat with his elbows on the back of it, staring at Karma and trying to find a place to start a conversation. He saw nothing of the Colorado landscape except for the mini-images of it reflected in Karma’s dark eyes. Kathy, who was quietly writing in a journal, he barely noticed; Tinker, now the sole owner of the rearview mirror, was picking up that slack.
With his butt on the dash and his chin resting on one hand while the other reached down and stroked Barney’s ears, Blue tried to pretend that his only interest in the back seat was the dog.
“I’m so glad Barney’s not biting you,” Karma said, watching Blue’s hand caress her dog. “Barney is my spiritual seeing-eye dog. Animals sense things about people that people can’t tell about each other. Like if he growled at you or Tinker, Kathy and I wouldn’t have gotten into this car.”
“Does he bite many people?” Blue asked, casually retrieving his hand from its close proximity to Barney’s mouth before the dog sensed the flock of unspoken fantasies flitting like swallows across Blue’s thoughts.
“No, but he growls a lot. I totally trust his instincts. Barney looks after me.”
“Like your guardian angel, you mean?”
“Exactly,” Karma said brightly. “Do you believe in guardian angels?”
“Well,” Blue said thoughtfully, dropping his hand back to Barney’s head, “the way I see it is that we’re all angels. What I mean is that people turn into angels when they do something for someone else. They may not even notice it themselves. Say, for example, that if Tinker and I had passed you on the road instead of stopping to give you a lift....”
Blue’s theological musings were interrupted by Tinker’s coughing fit, so severe he had to pull the Plymouth over to the side of the road and get out and walk away from the car. Karma became alarmed when he began rolling on the ground a hundred feet from the car, his arms gripping his sides, but Blue, telling her not to worry, assured her, “I’ll fix him!”
Tinker and Blue Page 2
