Tinker and Blue

by Frank Macdonald

  Everyone contributed what they could financially, and each person was delegated a domestic chore each day; sweeping, scrubbing, shopping, laundry and whatever other jobs God had originally delegated to mothers to perform for their children. Tinker and Blue explained that the only household chore in which they were well-trained was hauling kindling and scuttles of coal from the shed in the back yard to the stove in the kitchen, a trade for which there was little demand at the centrally heated Human Rainbow Commune. They were now apprenticed to each other as this day’s dish washers, tomorrow’s grocery shoppers.

  There were eleven people living in the three-story commune besides Tinker and Blue; Capricorn and Tulip, Karma and Kathy, and the rest were familiar faces with forgotten names from Colorado, but Blue missed one member from the Colorado location.

  “Where’s Cory?”

  “Cory’s gone political, man,” Capricorn replied. “After they arrested him on the mountain and he found out what happened while he was hiding up there ... that’s his own word, hiding ... when he found out about the trial in Chicago, and about Bobby Seale gagged and chained to his chair right there in the courtroom, well, Cory lost it. Not much political news reached us in Colorado. That’s how we wanted it, an unpolluted new beginning. The commune tried to have no interest in any of what was happening down here, especially the war and the president. So the story of the Chicago Seven, well, we heard there was a trial but didn’t chase the details, not what happened to those people in the courtroom. Even if I did know it all, I don’t think I would have told the rest, even Cory, although he has a cultural stake in what happened there.

  “What we were trying to do there – what we are still trying to do here – is transcend cultures, creeds and politics. That doesn’t mean that none of us have political views. We all do because how can a person not have opinions, but they are just that, opinions. None of us are bound to someone else’s opinion. We are not a political movement because we are not on a power quest; we are on a spiritual quest. We recognize that violence is wrong. The path of non-violence is the one thing common to everyone in this commune. It’s not a religion we have here because that in itself is a power quest. We welcome all religions that teach that violence to each other and the planet is wrong.

  “But the path you choose doesn’t automatically transform itself into your destiny. That’s what Cory discovered, that he isn’t ready to live separate from what is happening to his people. He thought he could make an individual choice for himself, but a week in police custody and an overdose of newspapers and television broadcasts about political America taught him more about himself than he learned during eighteen months on a mountain top. That’s what he told Tulip.

  “Spiritually, it’s not up to us to judge Cory for going militant in his rage. Destinies unfold at their own pace and Cory’s right now has led him to join a cell of the Panthers.”

  “The Black Panthers?” Blue gasped. “You mean Cory’s one of them now? When I heard what they did to that guy in Chicago it even made me mad. Reminded me of the story they tell back home about the strike at the coal mines when the police shot Bill Davis to death. Ever hear about that? It’s a holiday we hold every year now for miners murdered by the police or the coal companies. Davis Day! Besides, most mine accidents are murders, you know, but you never hear of a coal company going to jail, just miners going to their graves. So we know where Cory’s coming from, but the good news is he’s still here and not in jail. Where?”

  “I’ve run into him a few times, and last week he dropped in here to visit Tulip, but ideas are like continents, once they begin to drift apart an ocean opens up between them and it’s hard to communicate across an ocean,” Capricorn explained.

  “Well, I’m sorry Cory’s gone but I’m glad he’s doing something he believes has to be done. I guess there’s something Tinker and me should tell you before you sign us up for this path you’re talking about. We’re Catholics and we’re Liberals.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if the Catholic Church is non-violent or not. Tinker and I have been battered around by a few nuns in our day but who hasn’t, and if the Pope tells us to go to war we have to go. And we were born Liberals, just like we were born Catholics. That’s pretty well the way it works back home, you’re either Catholic and Liberal or Tory and Protestant. There’s exceptions, of course, but it generally breaks down that way and the Liberals really like it because Catholics have so many kids who grow up to vote like they’re supposed to. So we belong to a church that’s not afraid to throw a punch, as the other fellow says, and the Liberal Party, both of which we inherited from our fathers who would kick our arses all the way back to Cape Breton if we ever converted to something else, like becoming a Protestant or a Tory.”

  “Or becoming a hippie living in a commune in San Francisco learning how not to fight,” Tinker added. “Okay, I understand this not fighting bit, but when is it all right to fight?”

  “Never,” Capricorn replied. “We practise non-violence with people, animals and insects.”

  “Yeah, I got that part when I was in Colorado. I think it’s a great philosophy to have as long as nobody’s bothering you, but what if somebody comes along and wants to steal your van? How do you stop him if you can’t crack him in the jaw?”

  Something like a smile threatened to twist Capricorn’s serious mouth and he changed the subject. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the van, Tinker. It’s been behaving badly since we got to the city and if you don’t object, I’d like to make van maintenance one of your responsibilities.”

  “That’s vantastic, Tink,” Blue said. “Get it? Vantastic?”

  21

  Wondering what he had gotten himself into, Blue watched Karma blocking out the bare wall for her painting. When he asked what she planned to paint, she had replied that she was going to create a mural of her lives.

  “Your lives?”

  “Yes, in panels like a comic book page.”

  “You don’t mean lives like you were once Napoleon or anything like that, do you?”

  “No, Blue, of course not!”

  “Whew! For a minute there I thought you were talking about reincar—”

  “I was never Napoleon. I have no feel for his time at all and that must be because I wasn’t here at the time, don’t you think?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Karma, for the love of Christ, hold her right there, girl! You’re not serious about this?”

  “I know what you mean. It used to scare me, too.”

  “It doesn’t scare me!” Blue snapped. “I read all about that Budoo stuff, where you come back as an ant or a carrot or something. All those lives might make a good religion for cats but I’ll take my chances with good old Catholicism myself.”

  “I’m surprised, Blue. It’s such a good story I thought you’d like it, everybody being born over and over and over until each of us gets it right. That’s the happiest ending I can imagine; everyone fated to fulfill themselves, and God just waiting for us to get there.”

  “There are stories and there are stories, and some stories should be banned in Boston, as the other fellow says. Explain to me where we go between lives, if you please? Do we just slip out during a heart attack and hang around with the angels just waiting for some chick to get knocked up in the back seat of a Chev so we can come back? I don’t think that’s what God’s got in mind, girl. Why would you want to believe that?”

  “Because if we’ve chosen the lives we’re living then there’s a point to everything, isn’t there? And God’s not to blame for anything, we are. Capricorn has this theory about a spiritual evolution. Maybe it takes millions of years for a soul to grow up. That’s exciting, don’t you think? I decided to believe it instead of horrible stories about Heaven and hell, spiritual winners and losers. With reincarnation, we’ve all chosen our crosses so they can’t really be crosses, can they? So they must be somethi
ng we need.”

  “Funny you should say that. We got this nun back home, eh....”

  “Not Sister St. Farmer, I hope, Blue.”

  “No, Mother St. Agnes. She was our grade six teacher and one time she told us that if everybody in the world could put the crosses they had to bear in one big pile in the middle of a field, and then each one of us was allowed to go through the pile and choose whatever cross we wanted to carry instead of our own, well, Mother St. Agnes said that once we got a good look at the crosses everybody else had to bear, that we would just pick up our own again and be grateful. You know how sometimes somebody says something to you and it just sticks there like something you already knew, well, this story was something like that.”

  “So was my story,” Karma said. “It just felt so perfectly true that I can’t imagine believing anything else.”

  “I’ll say this about dying in one place and getting born in another, Karma. I hope it’s true, because if Tinker and I don’t get some money together soon that may be the only way we’ll ever see Cape Breton again.”

  Karma pulled a chair to the wall, stood on it and began sketching in the upper left-hand corner. The shape that began to emerge had little recognizable reality for Blue, resembling an ugly mask more than any person Karma might have been in her previous lives. While she worked he wondered if she meant to be drawing what she was drawing or if she was just really bad at it.

  Karma stepped down and back a few feet to study the lines on the wall. Blue got up off the mattress and started to tip-toe from the room in case she might ask him....

  “What do you think?”

  Blue froze in mid-stride, his back to the drawing, then turned slowly, looking thoughtful. “Hmmmmm,” he said, then repeated that profound observation again. “Well, it’s—”

  Karma covered his mouth with her hand.

  “I’m not into violence, Blue, but if you tell me it’s ‘interesting’ I’ll tear your tongue out.”

  Her light-hearted warning slammed the lid shut on the only word Blue could come up with under this sudden pressure of needing to appreciate art. Without “interesting,” he was as helpless as a parent trying to guess what his three-year-old expects him to see in the picture she has drawn for him.

  “I like it a lot better than Tulip’s stuff, I’ll tell you that. I have an idea of what you’re drawing, but Tulip’s....” The statement could only be finished with a baffled shake of his head, recalling the wildly painted canvases hanging on the walls of the Human Rainbow Commune.

  “I think Tulip’s work is wonderful. Lots of people do, and the Warehouse Gallery is going to exhibit her work next week. I’m learning a lot from her paintings,” Karma said, looking to the wall again, drawing Blue’s reluctant attention back to the point he was hoping to avoid.

  “It kind of reminds me of a face,” Blue said, then gambled. “Maybe a Halloween mask?”

  “Close,” Karma said.

  Blue sighed with relief.

  “It’s a Mayan ceremonial mask. This panel will be filled with Mayan impressions that I’ve had for as long as I can remember. I used to have dreams about the Mayans when I was just a little girl. Warm, sunny, primitive dreams – and I’d never even heard of Mayans at the time. I just knew about them.”

  Blue decided to be blunt about this. “What’s a Mayan?”

  “They live in Central America, Blue. They used to have this really great civilization but it got ruined, first by themselves, I think, and then by us. That’s my earliest impression of a previous life. Once the colours go on I think you’ll like it a lot.”

  “I’m sure I will,” Blue replied, terrified already of the remaining panels on the unpainted wall.

  22

  “Tinker, you remember Silly Sadie?” Blue asked, wandering into Tinker and Kathy’s room, but the subject froze on his tongue when he saw his friend look up at him over the pages of a book.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  Tinker shrugged apologetically, explaining that Kathy had given him the book to read.

  “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” Blue read, running his fingers along the title. “You got to be kidding. Who’d buy a book called something that? You better be careful there, buddy. I know you, remember? You read two books and the next thing you’ll think you can write one.”

  “I’ll leave that job to Kathy. What about Silly Sadie?” Tinker asked, slipping out from under a conversation he didn’t want to have.

  “Wouldn’t you say she was just about the craziest person in town? Remember the time you dropped the fire cracker behind her and she chased you over street yelling, ‘The Devil will piss on you yet, Tinker Dempsey.’

  “Anyway, she was a weird sight, wasn’t she, wandering around town with a pair of bloomers on her head and pink hair rollers sticking out of the legs holes and no teeth and muttering to herself and taking fits. They say the moon played her like a tide. Well, I must of told you what Farmer told me about her, huh.”

  “What was that?” Tinker asked on cue.

  “About when she was young? Farmer’s about her age and he said she was be-u-ti-ful. She really was something to look at and a guy can put up with a lot of weird stuff if he figures there’s a pot of poontang at the end of the rainbow, Farmer said. She used to take fits even back then. Nobody minded much, though, because she was so pretty, but the older she got the uglier and crazier she got. Is Farmer ever glad now that she wouldn’t have anything to do with him back then because he said she was pretty enough to marry.

  “Think if something like that happened to you. Say, for instance, you married Kathy and her being a hippie and everything you can’t tell what’s just hippie talk and what’s really her. Suppose sometime she started talking about, oh ... say, being Napoleon or something like that and you were so much in love with her you couldn’t tell whether or not she was hatching into another Silly Sadie, what would you do?”

  “This is about Karma, right?”

  “Aw, Jesus, Tinker, she thinks she’s Chinese. You know the way they have all these lives in their religion, well, she’s one of those. Or all of those. Could be a phase, as the other fellow says, or it could lead straight to a straightjacket. I need a second opinion.”

  Offering the book in his hand as evidence, Tinker’s thoughts shaped themselves into words.

  “There’s not a single book in this commune that you or I ever heard of in school, Blue. I know. I went through all the titles. The guys in this here book here make Silly Sadie look sane and they’re all supposed to be geniuses, for Christ’s sake. Capricorn says the real difference between the people in this book and the establishment isn’t long hair or music. It’s questions. People who ask questions that nobody wants to answer should jump in a bus, just like these guys, and drive as far away from society as they can get, according to Capricorn.”

  “Bet he wants to be the driver.”

  “I don’t really care who’s driving as long as I’m the mechanic. What have you got against him anyway? He treats us fair, doesn’t he?”

  “When somebody you don’t know is treating you fair, you better wonder why, boy. That’s the first lesson Farmer ever taught me. But what does that book have to do with Karma?”

  “Remember when we picked her and Kathy up in Kansas? Well, if the bus in this book had picked the two of them up they would have been right at home in it, more at home than in the Plymouth. That’s what I think. I don’t think the people in this book and the people in this house would have to explain much to each other. Not like us. Every time we open our mouths somebody is asking us what we mean, and every time they say something to us we have to ask ‘Huh?’ I don’t think crazy enters into it, Blue. We’re just a long way from home.”

  Blue collapsed on a wooden chair beside the bed and his eyes wandered around the room, growing more and more interested in what he saw.

  “That�
��s a flower over there,” he said, pointing to a water-colour thumb-tacked to the wall.

  “Yeah,” Tinker confirmed. “Kathy did that. She drew all of these things to go with a story she wrote.”

  “A flower in a jug,” Blue went on, nodding his approval. “And that’s a building on that wall over there, a whole street of buildings, and a dove perched on one of those peace signs everybody wears. You’re lucky, Tinker. You don’t have to guess at anything Kathy does. You should see Karma’s paintings. But even her paintings are simple to get compared to Tulip’s. Did you see hers? Looks like something Monk did in the DTs, but I guess you must need some kind of talent to live in this commune. Good thing we can sing. But you think Karma’s okay?”

  “I like her, but what difference does it make anyway, Blue? We’re not going to live here forever. Besides, the way it stands right now, we’re in a foreign country, broke, no jobs and not many places to crash unless you want to move back to the hotel. We’re sort of trapped here, but it could be worse, couldn’t it? We could actually be back at that hotel. So we make the peace sign, sing the right songs and we’ll get along just fine. If we have to be trapped anywhere, here’s as good a place as any. It’s like we’re prisoners of peace instead of prisoners of war.”

  “We’re prisoners of a piece of something, Tinker old buddy, that’s for sure,” Blue said. “What bothers me, Tink, is that I can’t see a minute beyond where we are right now. I used to be able to imagine every mile of the drive back home. That was the whole point of leaving home, for Christ’s sake. Make some money and get the hell back where we belong, telling our stories until we’re broke again.

  “Now I can’t see me without Karma no matter how many different ways I try to figure out how to get us out of here. I’m the guy who saw Danny Danny Dan’s funeral, for Christ’s sake. It shouldn’t be any problem for me to imagine going home next summer, should it? But if Karma won’t come I’m probably not going to go either. But if she does come— Christ, that’s too scary to even think about. Farmer told me you had to be careful around women. Not get led by the brainless head, as the other feller says. I’m glad he’s not here to see this. I went and drowned my first time in the water, Tink. I’m in love. So this is what sex is all about.”