“Two summers ago, eh, there was this party at Port Ban. You were there but there’s no reason for you to remember it because all you did after a few beers was pass out, wake up, throw up, pass out, wake up, throw up, but you wouldn’t give the keys of the Plymouth to anyone. Everybody else decided to stay and sleep right there on the beach but I had to give Farmer a hand moving a horse in the morning so I walked up the cliff from the beach by myself. I had a little skate on so I wasn’t worried, but when I got to the top and onto the Sight Point Road I was getting pretty sober, sober enough to realize where I was.
“Look, Tinker, and you probably know this yourself, but I bet there’s more ghosts on that road than anywhere else on the planet. That’s where my people first settled, so the ghosts go back two hundred years, some of them. I don’t know about the Irish or the Acadians, Tinker, but I don’t think that us Highlanders like to be dead. Too many of them keep trying to come back, so I plan to put off dying as long as I can myself.
“But I digress, as the other fella says. Anyway, here I am on the Sight Point Road, a dirt road, twenty feet wide at it widest, trees shaking hands from either side of the road so it’s like walking through a black tunnel. It doesn’t help matters that there’s not a house for miles with anyone living in it, just the dark shapes of barns falling down and empty homes, and each one of them claiming at least two ghosts each.
“Well, I’m trying not to think about just how much I know about this road – it’s amazing how much a fellow learns when he’s not wasting his time in school. That night, trying not to think about all the information I picked up over the years, I realized that I knew a hell of a lot more about my family, my people – and Cape Breton, for that matter – than I thought I knew. I say ‘family’ Tinker, because, just for your information when we get to him, Danny Danny Dan would of been a first cousin to my grandfather on my father’s side. His father and my great-grandmother would be brother and sister, see.
“Anyway, everything’s going great until I get this spooky feeling. Okay, I was feeling spooky anyway so I get this extra spooky feeling. At first, I thought it was just the shadows of trees moving in the breeze, then suddenly these shadows take shape. Look, Tinker, we’re out in the middle of nowhere and if these tires go we’re as good as dead ourselves so I have no desire to die with a lie on my lips. What I am going to tell you is the absolute truth, so help me God!
“Two black horses were pulling a wagon, not one as snazzy as Dracula’s or anything, but it was no hay wagon either. It was a funeral wagon. They were moving slow as death along the road with this guy driving who had a face so white it should of been in a coffin itself. I don’t know who he was because he didn’t look like anybody we know. I’m frozen on the side of the road as it moves by and this cold spot of air moves across me. I don’t think I’m even breathing now. The coffin is on the back with a cross on top of it, no flowers, just a cross and I know from hearing the story before about other people who saw the funeral parade that inside is Danny Danny Dan. It all just moves along as slow as a clock hand, and soundless as a graveyard.
“Behind it, there must have been a hundred people, maybe everybody who ever lived there at the time, and they just passed by, one sad white face after another, men and women and children, lots of black clothes and you know how uncomfortable farmers look in suits, well, they looked like that. And I’m standing there with every hair on my body standing up like they had their hats off for the passing funeral, and I’m sweating scared but a part of me is standing there as calm as you please looking for my grandfather or grandmother’s face because they were at that funeral, you know, but I couldn’t tell because they would of been young then and I only knew them old.
“It felt like it took forever to go by but it didn’t. The sliver of moon hadn’t moved an inch in the sky that I could tell. Nothing awful happened. It was awful enough as it was, considering how scared I got. But it told me something I can never not know again, Tinker. It told me that there’s more than we know going on all the time.
“The story behind the funeral, because I talked to Monk about it later and he knows more about this stuff than anybody, was that Danny Danny Dan wasn’t dead. There was a sickness in his family that faked death. When he said that, it scared the shit out of me worse than the funeral did because I’m a relative, right? But when Monk and I traced the family back it was something that came down Danny Danny Dan’s mother’s side of the family, not his father’s which would be my side of his family, so when I die I’ll probably be dead.
“What Monk said was that Danny Danny Dan was alive in his coffin but couldn’t tell anybody. The funny thing about it, Monk noticed, was that the only person who wasn’t a ghost at that funeral that I saw was Danny Danny Dan. That’s why his funeral still haunts the Sight Point Road, because he was buried alive. Remember Ray Miland in the Premature Burial? Well, you didn’t hear me laughing the last time I saw that movie, boy.”
—
When Blue took the wheel from Tinker near dawn the Plymouth had begun a slow ascent into cooler heights as they rose out of the darkness and the desert, leaving behind them a history of desert ghosts they hadn’t encountered, and they smiled tiredly to each other when they crossed the California state line.
10
“Well, there she is, Tinkers. Alcatraz! The most famous island on this side of the world.”
Tinker and Blue were sitting on the dock of the bay. Their location wasn’t lost on them, Otis Redding’s song of the same name having pulsed itself through the car radio, off and on, all across America. Blue had spent much of his time scanning the dial for new country and western stations as each faded behind them. Tinker, when Blue slept through or chattered on against the music of his own choice, slipped the dial to music he found less predictable, more challenging to imitate. Blue scolded him for it, citing the dangers of rock and roll, which had the girls dancing so far away from the boys that when you tried to ask to take one of them home you had to holler so loud that three girls in the general proximity of the question might say yes. “Then what do you do?”
But driving across the States, “Dock Of The Bay,” considering their destination, even had Blue singing into the handle of the same screwdriver he had once employed as a weapon to fend off drug-crazed hippies. From their seventy-mile-an-hour front-seat stage, Blue would reach across with the mic, holding it before his friend, saying, “Take her away, Tink,” and Tinker’s voice joined Redding’s in a commendable harmony. On the actual dock of the bay, though, it was Blue’s voice Tinker had for company as their homesick hearts were poured into the words that Tinker sang and Blue fumbled with, recreating out of his own poetic soul new lines for those he didn’t know.
They had been in San Francisco for more than a week, each day exploring a little more of the city than they planned to, Blue charting their course with a street map and a dyslexic attitude toward details such as east, west, right, left.
In the Mission and Market area they found a room for twenty-two dollars a week in a hotel where, on the first night, they barricaded their door with a badly battered three-legged dresser, a security lock against the mob rule that seemed to govern the place.
Whole families huddled in some rooms, rummies who could afford a room occupied others, and an oddly high number of senile old men and women were residents of the remaining rooms. By day tolerable, by night terrifying, the room was affordable for the moment and so became their home away from home for a while. On the other side of the door family wars were being fought, the domestic screams barely covering the sound of someone throwing up in the hall or two men arguing and threatening to “Cut your god-damned throat with this bottle as soon as it’s empty.”
Each morning, Tinker and Blue were awakened at six o’clock by a pounding on their door, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of a mouth bugling reveille. The call to consciousness moved from door to door and for the first two mornings the boys arose in the
belief that they were obeying hotel regulations until the seedy clerk at the front desk told them not to pay any attention to General Jones, an old man trapped inside a one-day loop of boot camp regulations. The old soldier was lost somewhere between the Second World War and his discharge, the clerk explained, but was harmless.
A couple of days later, Blue, desperate for a leak, was pulling the bureau away to go to the floor’s only washroom when General Jones began rousing the young recruits. Blue came into the hall as the stiff-legged old man hobbled to the next set of army barracks. Blue saw the old man drop something and ran in the dim, night-light darkness, to retrieve and return it. It was a turd, and as Blue stood paralysed with shock over the sickening turn of events which he held in his hand, he watched another one fall from General Jones pant leg.
“Aw, Jesus, Tinker, we got to get out of here. We’re on the skids, boy,” he complained to his friend who reminded him that by the end of the week they would be out of money and out of the hotel, so his complaints were academic.
The two goals they had set for themselves they hadn’t yet achieved. They had not found Haight-Ashbury despite having been pointed in that direction several times by those whom they asked, only to have Blue improvise on the advised approach with a short-cut of his own. Because they had not gotten there yet, they could not point the Plymouth toward home.
The second goal, like the hotel rent, was also academic. With or without visiting Haight-Ashbury, their planned return home posed a few problems related to the financial feasibility of crossing a continent on a pocketful of change. Wiring home for money was something they discussed and even expected to do when the going got tough, but faced with the reality of it, their pride forced them to delay. It was one thing, they agreed, to be stranded and desperate in the middle of a desert. People back home had seen enough movies to know what that was like, a situation that would have probably placed them in a slightly heroic role once the guys back home heard about it. Being stranded in San Francisco lacked that desert romance, so all telegrams were placed on hold.
After the first couple of days of swimming against the traffic on one-way streets, four-way stops, red lights, amber lights, green lights and numerous threats on their lives, Tinker and Blue opted for a walking tour of the city, roaming the urban hills to exhaustion, fuelled by vendor hot dogs. Always they were drawn back to the water, stunned by its commerce.
The Gulf of St. Lawrence, the arm of the Atlantic upon whose shores they grew up, looked much the same to them as it did to the Highlanders who squatted on its shores two hundred years before. They were familiar with its northern Atlantic moods: grey and foreboding in autumn, besieged by an armada of polar ice floes all winter, its spring palette of blue hues shifting slowly toward summer, and summer itself when a couple of hundred people from the town enjoyed the two-mile length of sandy beach that stretched between the rise of two mountains. They were also familiar with a rare treasure of the eastern continent, an ocean sunset.
The expanse of water back home was sprinkled with lobster boats or ground fishermen at their work and, occasional enough to be noteworthy, a Montreal-bound tanker would be sighted on the horizon. They had known the ocean as a place for children to enjoy.
They couldn’t have imagined San Francisco Bay in a million summers with its noisy, oily traffic of monstrous ships gliding through the sunlight or emerging like phantoms from the fog to bellow their way through a congestion of ferries and cruisers and barges. Except for the tourist shops that did more business on one wharf than the whole Cape Breton tourism industry put together, it was no place for children. In San Francisco, the ocean was put to work full time, like a mine or a forest. Their fascination with it brought them back again and again.
Tinker looked across at Alcatraz, the gnawing worry in his stomach becoming a constant condition. Blue had always managed the financial end of their partnership, scheming dance fares and gas money with skill, but Tinker suspected that Blue was too far out of his element now. Because of this, he had scanned the want ads of newspapers he picked up from park benches, but found that there was only a market for certified mechanics and, he suspected, certified Americans. Passing the days walking the streets of San Francisco, “just picking ’em up and laying ’em down, as the other fellow says,” brought them closer to flat broke than Tinker cared to think about.
“We got to do something about money, Blue,” he said, punctuating his remark with a spit that he watched squirt from between his teeth, arc out and fall to the water below. “Maybe I should call the old man.”
“We’re in the richest state in the world, Tinker. If we can’t make her here, boy, we may never leave home again. You know what the other fellow says, don’t ya? The world is our oyster, Tinker, and I’m partial to pearls if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t like oysters,” Tinker replied, streaming another spit into the Pacific.
11
Haight-Ashbury, when they finally did stumble upon it, explained a lot to Blue.
“No wonder we couldn’t find it. Look at the way these Americans spell Hate.”
No masquerade dance they had ever attended prepared them for Haight-Ashbury, and they had seen some weird costumes come out of the Halloween imaginations of the people back home.
“No doubt about it, Blue,” Tinker said. “This is the hippie mother lode. It’s not so bad when you see them scattered all over the place, but a crowd of hippies like this looks like a grade one art class went crazy with their crayons and then the whole works came alive.”
They walked along through the swarm of people, nudging and pointing out for each other their own winning choices from among the braids and ponytails, ponchos and beads, the faces painted with peace symbols and petals, the clash of colourful clothes that had turned goodwill stores into the fashion centres of the decade, the shiny-eyed people sitting on the sidewalk smoking drugs and offering a drag to complete strangers. They walked through clouds of incense and marijuana and music spilling out of every window, Sgt. Pepper joining Bob Dylan and a dozen other performers in a mass jam session of albums, their popularity in competition with street musicians who played in front of a cap or hat sprinkled with a few coins and loads of encouragement from those passing by or stopping to listen.
“It would be nice to find out where they keep all that free love we keep hearing about,” Blue said, his own progress through the busy street peppered with winks at the prettiest girls. “There must of been a hell of a bonfire here when they all burned their bras,” he remarked to Tinker whose head was swivelling from one beautiful fantasy to another. “I may not think much of a guy who would burn his draft card but I got nothing but respect for a girl who burns her bra, boy.”
A boy in long, straggly hair approached them for a hand-out and when Blue apologized for having nothing to offer, he just sneered the word “Tourists!” at them and walked away.
“What the hell does he mean, tourists, Tinker? Do we look rich? Are we driving over the Cabot Trail? Hell, we’re not even Americans! I’ve got a good mind to go back and clock that guy.”
They sat on a step and within a minute a voice from behind them said, “Hi.” They turned to see a girl in a granny dress, wearing round spectacles, standing in the doorway. “Would you like some soup?”
She brought them two bowls of soup, asking only that they think good thoughts of the earth that provided the vegetables for the soup while they ate, and to just leave the bowls behind when they were done. The soup was hot and tasted of things unfamiliar as they sat there spooning it into their mouths, letting the street’s swirl of colours and music wash past them while they watched, Blue commenting that it was the biggest un-chaperoned teen dance in history. “These hippies are caught up in a Godless communism and they don’t even know it, Tinker,” Blue said with a sad shake of his head.
“Kathy said there was no such thing as a hippie, Blue. What do you make of that? She said that’s someb
ody else’s word for something they don’t understand.”
“Tinker, Tinker, Tinker, you’re so easily led astray. I have to keep a close eye on you, boy. Look, there are Liberals and Tories, Catholics and Protestants, Cape Bretoners and the rest of the world, and hippies and us. Even Saint Thomas believed in Jesus once he put his hand into his side, didn’t he? Well, how much proof do you need?”
“I don’t know, but when I talked to Kathy, you know, like it was weird at first, but after a while she just got to be like another person. I didn’t think about a hippie every time I looked at her even with the way she dressed or talked.”
“I bet you didn’t, buddy. I know what you were thinking of. With Karma, eh, the more I got to know her the weirder she got, but the more I liked her anyway, but the one thing I know for sure, Tinker, is that she’s a hippie. She’d blend into this street like flour into my mother’s biscuits. Everybody belongs some place and she belongs here, but not us, old buddy, not us. If we belonged out here with these hippies, I’d be freezing my arse off in a river in Colorado right this minute.”
In the silence that followed, Tinker felt relaxed, as if the soup had soothed for a moment the gnawing in his stomach. He let his thoughts stop taking charge of him for a while, freeing them like children for the summer from the school of his own conflicts, and let them drift, forgetting about the poverty of their pockets and the war zone of their hotel. Inside his own silence the throbbing energy of the music and the flow of people on the street, moving as if life itself were something to be danced away joyfully, filled him with the ache of a stranger who did not know how to belong to a world not his own.
Blue surveyed the scene with the eye of a survivor washed up on a foreign shore and who now must learn how to forage for food in an unfamiliar forest. Not much of what Farmer had taught him applied here, where the rules were not clear enough for Blue to manipulate to his own advantage. They were broke and he tried not to cast himself in the desperate role of the hippie who had asked them for money. Standing on a street corner bumming spare change was a wino’s economy. Some of the winos back home were artists at that particular existence, setting up shop on John Beaton’s Corner or some other high pedestrian traffic area like the Co-op parking lot, hustling people they knew with a new story every morning. But bumming was not Blue’s field of expertise, nor did he want it to be. So he examined everyone and everything on the street looking for another point of entry until a wide grin of self-satisfaction erased the lines of concentration from his forehead.
Tinker and Blue Page 6
