Tinker and Blue

by Frank Macdonald

  Tinker’s laughter had ebbed to a head-shaking chuckle a few minutes later as the two friends sat on the shoulder of the road watching Karma and Kathy play with Barney on a patch of grass.

  “You see that dog, Tinker? Well, he just met his Santa Claus. I can be as nice as the next guy when I want to, so shake hands with the nicest guy in the world at this moment. If that dog gets car sick he can throw up in my shirt pocket.”

  —

  Blue gazed wistfully at the graceful scene across the road, snapping memory photos that he would never forget. Karma, dressed in torn jeans and peasant blouse, jewelled in turquoise and silver, had an Indian mystique that reminded Blue of “Running Bear,” one fine song if he ever heard one. He would never hear it again without drowning heroically holding Karma in his arms.

  Tinker, with more interest than obsession, watched Kathy and worried that Blue might actually engineer his scheme of setting them up with these two girls. He was often paired off with some girl who posed a threat to Blue’s plans to take her best friend home from a dance. By doubling them up, Blue got the two things he wanted most, the girl and the back seat of the Plymouth. They would park at the beach with WWVA, Wheeling West Virginia, on the radio, and make their moves, beginning with Tinker and Blue telling jokes to each other while fumbling for something bright to say to the girls who sat with their hands on their laps, thinking impenetrable thoughts.

  The next step, according to the manual, was to make some mild yawns with wide stretches of the arms until one arm came to rest with innocent casualness across the shoulder of the date. From there, they depended on the music to soften the girls up. “Sixteen Tons” was no good at all for romancing, but “Mary of the Wild Moor” worked wonders. Dead mothers, half-frozen babies and old men ripping out their hair had a way of making girls mellow enough to kiss. Blue had even added that song to his repertoire for that very reason.

  But passionate kisses and brief caresses were no preparation for what Tinker might be expected to know if Blue manoeuvred himself into the back seat of the Plymouth this time. And despite Blue’s streetcorner chit-chat with the guys, Tinker knew that Blue was in the same sorry state of inexperience as himself. Tinker could account for every night of Blue’s life since they were in grade nine and thought it unlikely that his best friend had been any more successful before then. He was counting on the fact that neither girl had shown the least bit of romantic interest in either of them, a point that Blue had overlooked, to save him from his own ignorance.

  While Karma and Kathy prepared a picnic of apples, oranges, raisins and sunflower seeds, Blue coaxed Barney across the road to the field where he tossed a stick. Barney watched curiously as the one-way boomerang arced through the air and landed in the grass an arm’s throw away.

  “Fetch, boy,” Blue commanded while Barney gazed up at him, tail wagging in the slow rhythm of uncertain friendship. “Go on, now. Get it!” Blue instructed with as much success as his own teachers had had in instructing him. Finally, he half led, half dragged Barney to the site of the fallen stick and tried to shove it in the dog’s unwilling mouth, causing the tail to stop its movements in favour of a low growl from the other end. For the next several minutes Barney followed Blue back and forth across the field as the human threw and then retrieved the stick while the dog tried to make sense of the activity. The futility of trying to teach a three-year-old dog new tricks finally dawned on Blue, and he walked back to the picnic site with Barney at his side.

  “Kind of makes those dead animals we passed on the highway look appetizing, doesn’t it?” Blue remarked to Tinker as he examined the spread of food while Karma and Kathy were filling a canteen with fresh water from a spring.

  “This is great,” Blue said to Karma as she quartered the food into shares and passed him his. He passed on the sunflower seeds.

  Tinker, playing Russian roulette with his own fears and feelings, stretched out beside Kathy, leaning on one elbow, flicking raisins in the air, catching them in his open mouth which kept him from having to use it to converse with the attractive girl who seemed as much at a loss for words as himself.

  “This is so beautiful,” Karma said, absorbing the world around her with a slow sweep of her eyes.

  “It certainly is,” Blue agreed, absorbing Karma with the lingering gaze of his own eyes while devouring an apple in three greedy bites and tossing the core over his shoulder.

  “I suppose that’s all right,” Karma remarked, watching the gesture. “Apples are biodegradable.”

  “Sprayed with DDT, you mean?” Blue inquired, but before Karma could reply to his confusion over her choice of six-syllable words, Barney dropped the apple core in Blue’s lap. He tossed it again and Barney snagged it out of the sky and brought it back to Blue. After a half a dozen futile attempts to be rid of the apple core Blue stuck it in his shirt pocket, but not before noticing Karma’s awe over the neat trick he was able to teach her dog – picking up litter.

  Gathering up all traces of their presence more conscientiously than Blue and Tinker might have done if they were alone in the spot with some take-out burgers and fries, the four travellers re-entered the brown and rusting Plymouth, the two front-seat drivers following the vague directions of the back-seat passengers as they made their way toward the Human Rainbow Commune.

  5

  Reaching the Human Rainbow Commune required the service of six separate roads once the main highway had been left behind. Each road diminished in quality as it lured them to the cooler heights of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains until the Plymouth came to the end of a long rut, parking amid an anarchy of architecture. Wooden igloos and log cabins, a swayback barn and an outhouse formed a semblance of a meaningful circle around a small commons, stained darkly at the centre by bonfire ashes. People moved about with listless ease, an attitude evidently adopted and copied by a few goats, one cow and two horses that Blue estimated were worth maybe ten bucks as pet food.

  Karma and Kathy coaxed Tinker and Blue out of the car, introducing them to a rollcall of names that ranged from Bob and Mary to Capricorn and Tulip. The bead-and-bangle fashion show overwhelmed Blue who found himself standing on a mountain somewhere high above the civilized world where nothing familiar existed, no streets or stores, flagpoles or monuments. It reminded him a little of when Tinker would drive a carload of friends to the top of Cape Mabou with a case of beer, parking in an abandoned hayfield where they could get hammered without worrying about the cops.This was on a much larger scale, one Blue found as difficult to grasp as the height of the mountain he was standing on.

  Nor could Blue figure out what was holding things together. No one was in charge of the commune, according to Karma, just a bunch of people appreciating their lives. He appreciated his with plumbing.

  They were just in time for supper, a point several people made, and which told Blue just how strapped for news they were up here, but it was an invitation his own hunger was grateful for until it was time to eat. Pots and dishes of food were brought from the living quarters that were circled like wagons against the wildness around them. A community table was set and laden with food, but with nothing he or Tinker recognized. Blue sampled a grainy substance called tabouli and with undiplomatic frankness gave his opinion of it by imitating a barf before he moved on to the bean salad before finally settling for a pound of heavy brown bread with butter.

  “Know what this place needs, Tinker? A good squirt of ketchup,” Blue remarked to his friend who was spooning out his second helping of tabouli. “You got guts eating that stuff, boy.” But Tinker wasn’t feeling conspiratorial. “It’s not that bad, you know,” was all he said as he wandered away from Blue to accidentally turn up somewhere in Kathy’s proximity.

  Without Tinker’s company, and Karma nowhere to be seen, Blue wandered over to the only other familiar thing he could cling to, an ancient bay mare. For the first time since they had crossed the Canso Causeway, Blue missed F
armer, missed driving around in the horse trader’s truck watching him cheat a living for himself. Blue became a one-person audience for Farmer when he was only twelve years old and had earned what few bucks he could while serving an informal apprenticeship over the next eight years. But Farmer, by his own admission, was among the last of a dying breed. “The trouble with these modern times, Blue,” the horse trader once lamented, “is that they’ve taken a great profession like horse trading and turned it into a used car lot.” Blue knew he could never sell cars, and horses were quickly vanishing from the Cape Breton landscape. He assessed the mare, his quick hands feeling its legs for heat or pain. Then turning gentle, those same hands stroked the mare’s mane.

  A hippie approached him, asking if he liked horses.

  “You bet, boy. This one yours?”

  The black hippie, about his own age, froze, studying Blue’s smile for a hint of menace.

  “I thought I left all that shit down there,” he said with a sweep of his hand that took in the whole world. “Don’t call me ‘boy’ again,” the order enforced by an assertive fore-finger.

  “Anything you say, buddy,” Tinker said, mystified. “Where ya from?”

  “South,” the hippie whom Blue now recalled was named Cory, replied.

  “The South! No wonder you’re hiding up here. I read all about that stuff in Modern World Problems, segregation in Alabama and apathy in Africa and everything.”

  “You mean apartheid?”

  “Whatever,” Blue went on. “It made a guy wonder what he’d be like if he lived in one of those places.”

  “I have an idea what you’d be like,” Cory said, wrapping his words in a soft smile.

  “Yeah? Well, I wish to hell I knew, but when I thought about it, all I knew anything about, really, was home. Cape Breton. Where I come from. And we’re clannish.” The word caused Cory to raise curious eyebrows.

  “If I’m walking down a street in Toronto, eh, and I see one of you guys, or even if it’s a Chinaman or a Frenchie, and he’s wearing a Cape Breton tartan shirt or necktie or something, well, I’m going to stop him and we’re going to get a bottle and maybe sing Charlie MacKinnon songs or something, and tell a few stories. I bet we find somebody we both know back home before we get half way down the bottle. I mean, the island’s big, but it’s not that big! Even Farmer, this horse trader I know back home, well, he sampled all the colours and he says there’s no difference. Of course, he was talking about women.

  “That’s not to say there aren’t guys back home I can’t stand. Punched a few of them, as a matter of fact, but there’s really nobody on the island I hate. Even the Campbells and the MacDonalds sort of get along. So on studying that issue in Modern World Problems, race and colour and stuff, I came to the conclusion that segregation was stupid. Got a good mark on it, too.”

  “Doesn’t sound like any place I’ve lived,” Cory said, rubbing the mare’s muzzle.

  “Best place in the world. Ask anybody who lives there. You plow that field with her?” Blue asked, studying the large garden and the ancient plow lying nearby.

  “Her and the other one,” Cory said. “We bought the pair of them in the spring from a man down the hill for two hundred dollars.”

  “You paid two hundred dollars for these minkers? The man’s name wasn’t Farmer, by any chance?”

  “No. Mister Wood. He was happy to find a home for them.”

  “I’ll bet he was,” Blue said.

  “Oh, he was. But I don’t like living things being bought and sold, and I don’t like people who do it for a living, like that friend of yours. Farmer?”

  Blue thought about this for a moment.

  “That’s your history speaking, I bet. But back where I come from you can’t eat tourists in February, as the other fellow says. In the summer, Cape Breton is this really great place. On the side of the island where I live we have the warmest water north of Florida, and the whole island is full of mountains and rivers and people you know, but it’s like I just said, you can’t eat tourists in the winter. You have to do whatever it takes to make enough money to get by on. As for Farmer, that’s his living. So it depends on how you look at it, I guess, but if everybody was like you, feeling sorry for the horses, what good would they be to us?”

  “Not any good, at all,” Cory answered. “That’s why I’m glad to see horses working on farms or racing at a track. It gives us a reason for keeping them around, because when people have no use for something, they get rid of it, or lock them in a ghetto.”

  “Well,” Blue answered thoughtfully. “You might have something there. Wherever I see a tractor I never see a horse.”

  “They’re just so beautiful, man. My image of freedom is a mustang running wild. Nobody owns it. It just is.”

  “Maybe,” Blue said, “but if I were to walk off with this nag tonight, though I can’t imagine why I would, you’d say I stole it, wouldn’t you, because somebody owns it, right? You. Or all of you hippies here.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I like horses, and I’ve seen some fine-looking ones in my day. Farmer got two thousand bucks for one once,” Blue said, “but a free horse ... there’s no such as a thing, as the other fellow says, no such as a thing!”

  Behind them, in the growing darkness, a bonfire, fed by deadwood, roared to life. Cory and Blue walked back together, leaving the mare to forage for herself. Cory pointed to the star-punctured sky above the mountain stillness while Blue, who had never imagined mustangs without the perfect toss of his own lasso, glanced back at the misshapen form of the mare and shook his head.

  6

  Around the bonfire, some of the commune members stared off into a world of their own lost thoughts while others passed around joints which Blue and Tinker rejected, or sipped from a wine bottle which they did not refuse. Some people murmured to each other, and one girl sang to herself until her song spread its influence around the circle, drawing some people into its soft chorus while others paused to listen.

  Blue took a swig from the bottle and passed it to the one who called himself Capricorn.

  “Good stuff,” he said.

  “Tulip made it,” Capricorn told him.

  “She makes her own wine?” Blue responded, looking at the hippie sitting beside Capricorn. He was impressed. “You’d be a big hit with some people I know back home. They drink 74. Ever try it? Sweet but cheap, as the other feller says.”

  When the bottle made its way back to him again, it was down to its last taste. Blue drained it and tossed it over his shoulder only to hear it drop at his feet a moment later. Barney panting for a pat, lay at his feet.

  —

  In a gasoline alley near Cheyenne, their friendship had been cemented. Blue found himself alone when Karma and Kathy went to use a laundromat and Tinker opened the hood to investigate an unfamiliar tick. Across the street, a hamburger joint beckoned him in, so Blue, not wanting to alert Karma to his carnivorous ways, nor disturb Tinker at his obsession, quietly slipped over and entered. When he came out with a fistful of meat between buns, chomping on his first bite, Barney was waiting. Half way through the burger, Blue broke before the unrelenting and pitiful stare of the dog. “Probably feeds you sunflower seeds, eh, boy?” he said, surrendering the last half of the patty to Barney. While Barney swallowed, Blue crumpled the napkin and made a bad jump shot toward the garbage bucket, missed and left it there. Barney retrieved and returned it, forcing Blue to walk over and drop the evidence in the can. When they got back into the car, Barney leapt into the front seat, propping himself between Tinker and Blue, and the rest of the way they travelled in that formation, Blue’s arm around Barney, his thoughts surrounding Karma.

  —

  Capricorn was older than the rest, Blue guessed. Perhaps even thirty. His hair hung in two long braids down his chest and a buckskin jacket protected him from the cool mountain air. He wore sandals. When he stood up to feed
the fire, Blue watched him, and decided that, whether he admitted it or not, Capricorn was in charge here. Blue saw a subtle deference in everyone’s approach to him, and despite the ease with which he answered questions, solved problems, and spoke of non-violence and harmony, the sinewy stealth with which he moved suggested to Blue that Capricorn could survive anywhere, on any terms. The terms chosen confused Blue.

  The second bottle of wine circled the bonfire and when it reached Blue barely any of it was gone. If these people are trying to get drunk, they’re not very good at it, he thought, opening his throat for a generous share of the bottle’s delights. He passed it to Capricorn.

  “What’s going on here, buddy?” he asked.

  As if he hadn’t heard, Capricorn stared into the fire, the bottle, still untasted, in his hand.

  “It’s about being a part of something, not being apart from it,” Capricorn said finally without shifting his focus to Blue. “There’s an unpopular teaching that you’ll find among the greatest people who ever lived – not the most powerful, but the greatest – that says that we are responsible for what happens on this planet, and to it, and to each other. Buddha said it. Christ said it. Ghandi said it. King said it. And it bothers a whole lot of people that there are other people who listen to those words, who want to be a part of that vision, that truth.”

  “Yeah,” Blue said. “Tinker and me are a part of something. We’re a part of Cape Breton, two little chips off the old block, as the other fellow says, eh, Tink?

  “We’ll always be a part of Cape Breton, boy, but how long will you be a part of this?” Blue asked, the thin air and wine revving him a bit.