Tinker and Blue (15 page)

25

Silently chanting his mantra, waiting for the naked madness to strike him, Tinker talked to God about mini miracles, like not letting the acid work, like protecting him from the Devil if the drugs did work, and offering to take the pledge for life. “No drugs ever again if this cup can be passed from me. Please God, don't let it work. Please God, don't let me take my clothes off....”

Tinker's prayerful pleadings continued until the walls started to breathe, or, he quickly reminded himself, until they
looked
like they had started to breathe, seeming to expand and contract like a chest wall, like an iron lung. He killed off the hallucination by reminding himself that the room was candlelit, that he had seen the same effect when the power failed in his own home during winter storms and lantern light flickering on the wind-pounded wall made the house appear to be breathing. He turned his attention to the lone candle and studied its flame which was so still it could have been painted on the top of the candle, but the walls, when he looked at them, continued to breathe. His winter storm theory collapsed and he became vividly aware that the house was alive; it had swallowed them all.

“We've got to get out of here,” he whispered to Kathy, uncrossing his legs to stand and run from the building. When he stood he screamed and leapt onto the mattress, gripping his feet and warning Kathy not to touch the floor.

“It's full of electric currents. We're trapped here. We can't get out and the house is going to swallow us, me, you, Blue, Karma, the band, the music, your writings, everything is going to be swallowed. We're being eaten alive,” he said in a voice reaching panic.

Kathy came to him on the mattress, soothing him with a calm voice, reaching to take his feet in her hands.

“Tinker, you sat with your legs crossed for too long. Your feet fell asleep, that's all. The house is not alive. We're not being swallowed. Just relax and listen to the music and let it happen, but don't let it scare you. I won't let anything happen to you, I promise.”

Tinker watched the walls. They were still breathing, but Kathy's assurance was stronger than the inhaling and exhaling around him. He began to relax, listening to the music. He found it funny that he had to stop and listen for it since the music was everywhere, wild rock rhythms spilling down on them from the ceiling like an invisible rain.

“Why is music invisible?” Tinker asked Kathy, but the question created its own answer for Tinker. Music wasn't invisible. Kathy, as he looked at her, was transforming herself into music. A vapour of soft notes surrounded her and began replacing her physical presence with a gently constructed harmony.

“You're made of music,” he told her excitedly. “I can see you and you're made of music. If I could read music I could read you, I could sing you!”

“That sounds better than being eaten alive by a house, Tinker. Do you want to stay here where it's quiet or go join the party? We'll do what's most comfortable for you. Stay here?”

Tinker could barely discern Kathy's features through the veil of music encompassing her, and he could feel the notes from the stereo pattering off his head and exposed arms. He wanted to walk into it, walk into the forest of dense music that he knew waited in the common room beyond the bedroom.

“Hold on to me,” he said, reaching for Kathy's hand, letting himself be led into the strobe-lit action of the party.

The music was raining so thick he could barely move through it toward the corner where Kathy was leading him, a safe place to sit and watch. The music smelled of things familiar, sandalwood and cigarettes and marijuana, and it broke over them like a storm, pounding and pushing with its two-fisted bass, and soaring and diving like a family of screeching eagles, but the wildness of the music remained leashed to a harmony that kept it from flying apart into a violent cascade of brutal sound.

Tinker sat on a pillow in the corner, huddled close to Kathy, studying the impressions that flowed toward him through the music. Everyone in the common room was made of music, he realized, as he detected each presence through the atmosphere of music that encased them. Some were wonderfully complete in their personal melody, and some were sadly fractured and poorly composed in the essence of their music. It seemed as if everyone's soul had slipped outside for Tinker to see, making him wonder about himself.

He looked down at his arm and it was barely there because it was encased in a musical haze, and the song of it grew inside and began sounding itself through him. Unheard through the torrent of music from the stereo he began to hum the tune of himself, an air so pleasing that he knew he would remember it for as long as he lived. He felt happy to be composed of music that made him feel like singing, because looking around the room he could see that more than a few people at the party would not be happy to encounter the truth in the music of which they were composed. Some people were enveloped in their music, some were shrouded in it.

A motion of music swaying near the stereo caught his attention, and Tinker recognized it as belonging to Capricorn. He was surprised that he recognized Capricorn through the music, but it was music that couldn't belong to anyone else. What surrounded him was powerful and uncomplicated, a music focused on a single, simple, uncluttered theme.

“Capricorn means exactly what he says,” Tinker whispered to Kathy. “I'll have to tell Blue. He won't like to hear that.”

Tinker's eyes moved around the room trying to find Blue, unable to anticipate what kind of music sang the essence of his friend. When he located Blue it was through the rectangular door of the kitchen, leaning on the counter beside Cory. In the harsh electric light under which the two of them stood, Tinker's perception of the music within people faded. There was no aura of any kind surrounding the people in the kitchen, just their stark physical presence. Watching from his place on the cushion beside Kathy, Tinker grew curious.

“Who's that standing beside Blue?”

“That's Cory. You were talking to him earlier, Tinker.”

“I know Cory, Kathy. I mean standing on the other side of Blue.”

“There's no one on the other side of Blue.”

“Yes there is, and I know him from somewhere,” Tinker said just as the unidentified figure turned toward the doorway and beckoned Tinker with a finger. Tinker was slow to rise from the comfort of Kathy's company but curious about the stranger who had the dress and manner of someone from home. Blue was paying the guy no attention at all as he and Cory leaned beside each other on the counter, no longer talking, just gawking through the doorway at the swirl of the party.

“There's only Blue and Cory out there,” Kathy stressed as Tinker started to rise.

“And that other fellow,” Tinker said, stopping suddenly. Recognition exploded across his face. “That's who it is! It's the Other Fellow! So help me God, Kathy, it's the Other Fellow!”

He released himself from Kathy's grip and walked slowly toward the kitchen, the way he would approach someone whose name he was trying to remember as they were about to meet on the street. The awareness of music evaporated as the Other Fellow's presence grew more solid and confident. He smiled at Tinker and nodded, the expression on the Other Fellow's face reminding Tinker of the nun who taught them in grade nine. But he resembled Farmer, too, but a Farmer with a beard not unlike Christ's. The face seemed always familiar but forever changing. The Other Fellow, Tinker realized, had been conjured into being by all the borrowed, stolen and original sayings that fired Blue's imagination and shaped his opinions.

I think I'm seeing a figment of Blue's imagination, Tinker concluded, at the same time trying to protect his sanity by reminding himself that his mind was, temporarily, he hoped, stranded on the foreign shore of a phantom island inhabited by people composed of music, and by the Other Fellow, who bore a striking resemblance to the whole town he grew up in.

“How's she goin', bye?” the Other Fellow asked in an exaggerated accent from back home.

“Not bad,” Tinker replied.

“What's not bad?” Blue asked.

“Me,” Tinker answered.

“You? You what?” Blue asked.

“Me. I'm not bad,” Tinker replied.

“So who's asking?” Blue wondered.

“The Other Fellow,” Tinker said, nodding toward Blue's left.

Blue glanced over his shoulder at an empty space beside him, shrugged and said to Cory, “Looks like my buddy's had ten too many beers. Geared to the gills, as the other fellow says.”

“I never said that,” the Other Fellow complained to Tinker who relayed the message.

“The Other Fellow never said that.”

“Never said what?”

“Geared to the gills. He always says ‘geared to the ears.' You're always doing that to the Other Fellow, making him say what you want instead of repeating what he really said.”

“Who told you that?”

“The Other Fellow,” Tinker said, turning to listen to what else the Other Fellow had to say. “If you don't start quoting him right, the Other Fellow's going to take off and find somebody else to travel with.”

“Are you planning to frig off on me? Is that what you mean?” Blue asked, lost and confused by Tinker's rambling.

“I'm not going anywhere on you, Blue,” Tinker promised. “But the Other Fellow could use a little more respect. That's all I'm saying.”

“Frig the other fellow and the ship he rode in on, as the other fellow says....”

“What I said was ‘the horse you rode in on.' You'd think a horseman like Blue would get that much right at least, wouldn't you?” the Other Fellow sighed hopelessly to Tinker.

“...because what I want to know is whether or not you and the Plymouth are planning to take a trip without me?”

“I think Tinker has already taken a trip without you, Blue,” Cory said, assessing Tinker's determination to hold a conversation with the kitchen sink into which Blue was flicking his cigarette ashes.

“What do you ... mean?” Blue asked, comprehension arriving with his question. “Aw, Jesus, Tinker. Don't tell me you're doing drugs. Not the acid, man. Not the acid!”

“What did you call me?” Tinker asked. “Man! That's what you called me, not ‘boy,' or ‘bye' as the other fellow would say.” Tinker turned to wink at the Other Fellow who had suddenly disappeared, just a thin vapour of him hovering around Blue, as if he had been reabsorbed.

“This isn't funny, Tinker. This is serious business. You're scrambling your brains, boy. It's going to be just great if I have take you home in a straight-jacket and sit you in the tavern and feed you beer through a straw for the rest of your life while you carrying on conversations with imaginary men. If you're going to have imaginary conversations, for Christ's sake, have them with women. That's how you practice on women, by pretending to talk to them. But you're hallucinating. The Other Fellow, for the love of God! Please, Tinker. Throw it up or something. And promise me right now that you'll never do this again.”

“Blue wants me to take the pledge,” Tinker said, dropping to his knees. “Father Blue, bye, I swear on the sacred heart of Jesus, his mother, father and all the rest of them saints and sinners that I will not take another hit of acid until I get a note from my mother saying it's okay. Okay?”

Then Tinker collapsed on the floor in belly-bursting laughter while Blue gave him a worried look.

Kathy came into the kitchen and talked Tinker back onto his feet. Cory cautioned Blue to be quiet, hushing a burst of angry blame that had begun to erupt from him toward Kathy. Blue held his peace as Tinker and Kathy started to leave the kitchen. Tinker turned in the doorway, solemn and sad-looking, and addressed Blue's judgementally knitted brows.

“Now listen to me, Blue. I know you're pissed off and all that, but listen to me because this is important, really important, so listen to me, old buddy, old pal! If I talk to the Other Fellow or the kitchen sink or Jesus Christ or anything like that again tonight, I want you to pray for me, okay, buddy? Pray for me! But what's really important, are you listening to me, Blue, what's really important is that if I start to take my clothes off you have my permission to shoot me.”

26

Blue was curled up behind Karma on their mattress the following morning. Having slipped away from the party to spend most of the night finishing her Mayan existence, Karma was now planning the next panel in her mural. Blue's thoughts drifted and swirled like cigarette smoke but kept coming back to the party and the fact that Tinker had taken drugs.

He had heard Tinker earlier in the kitchen making tea and toast, knowing it was him because it wasn't the hushed sound of a hippie making herbal tea. It was the sound of someone steeping a pot of real tea, humming a jig, and Blue knew he was the only one in the commune who could name that tune. It would have been the perfect time to try to talk some sense into Tinker about using drugs, but the comfort of being curled up behind Karma, stroking his hopeful way toward a post-party private celebration of their convenient nakedness, left Tinker and his drug problems in the kitchen by themselves. There was all afternoon to preach to him, Blue concluded, his hand sliding its slow way toward Karma's breast.

“The next panel will be from a life in India. Sometimes it feels Hindu and sometimes it feels Buddhist. Maybe I spent two very different lives there, one of each. That's possible. I'll have to know before I start.”

“Haven't you ever been a Catholic?” Blue asked, his hand retreating from her breast as from a live coal gripped in the depths of hell.

“I believe so. I have very strong feelings about being a nun in the Middle Ages.”

“There you go!” Blue said, sitting up. “That just proves it. You're wrong about this reincarnation business. If you'd been a Catholic nun in the Middle Ages you wouldn't be a hippie in the ... whatever age this is. You'd be in Heaven. There's no way a nun or a priest is going to live a whole life for God and not get into Heaven. Everybody knows that.”

“Every Catholic, maybe,” Karma said, “but there are some other spiritual ideas in the world, Blue. Do you really think that just because you are a Catholic you are going to Heaven and I'm not?”

“Not me, necessarily,” Blue admitted, unable to take his eyes from her breasts that became exposed when she turned to talk to him. “But a nun, for God's sake! She has to go to Heaven. She goes to Mass and Communion every day, lives in a convent where she has no chance at all to commit a sin, or even think of one, I bet, and she teaches little children all about God. Where do you think I learned so much? So if you were a nun in another life, Karma, you wouldn't be here. Unless, of course, you were the most awful nun who ever lived, and you're not, Mother Saint Sebastian is, just ask Tinker. He'll back me up on that one. One time she broke a guy's nose with her pointer.”

“And will she go to Heaven, Blue?” Karma asked, teasing her hand along his thigh as she did.

“Maybe a day in Purgatory first. Aw, don't do that when we're talking about God, Karma,” Blue said, weakly pushing at her hand, then letting it go. “I got a better idea. Let's not talk about God.”

“But I want to,” Karma smiled. “I want to know what you think, Blue. I want to know how you feel.”

“You're feeling how I feel right now,” Blue moaned.

“Okay then, I want to know what you believe. Everyone always asks ‘What do you think?' or ‘What do you feel?' but nobody ever really asks ‘What do you believe?' Except Capricorn. He makes me really think about what I believe,” Karma said, removing her teasing hand, becoming more serious.

“Oh, yeah. And where were the two of you when Caprihorney asked you that?”

“Blue, you are a jealous, possessive monster and I think Barney should have bit you the moment you came into my life, but he didn't. I just wish you'd spend as much time thinking about me and you as you do thinking about me and other people. Do you, Blue? Do you ever think about us?”

“Of course I do. What do you mean, anyway? How can I not think about you. You're right here with no clothes on, for Christ's sake. I even think about that when you're not here. What are you looking at me like that for?”

Karma got up from the mattress, pulled on her painting smock and sat on her meditation pillow staring at the panel she would paint next.

Blue watched through the wall of silence that Karma had drawn like a blind between them. He heard the sound of the door closing, Tinker leaving the house.

—

Tinker walked aimlessly through the streets of San Francisco, needing to be away from the commune, needing something to do, something to fix, something to put right. Afternoons of tinkering with the Plymouth and the van in the backyard of the commune had been empty acts of disassembling and reassembling vehicle parts, although there had been some disturbing benefits to his daily routine. Practising over and over began revealing to him the role of cogs and plugs and belts and chokes, the finely tuned difference between one setting and another. He had begun
hearing
the motors, always adjusting them now for a sound that told him the car or the van not only ran well, but that it
felt
good. Charlie had taught him a lot, Tinker acknowledged, and because of it he felt a sense of betrayal to his mentor to suddenly discover that he may not have learned as much as he thought about motors in Charlie's Guesso Station.

He needed a job. It had been hinted at during the weekly council of commune members that not everyone was contributing enough to meet the needs of the commune. Tinker realized that the general direction of this complaint was toward Blue and him. Blue and the band spent so much time practising that there was little street revenue being produced, and Tinker hated street singing so much that without Blue pushing him he no longer did it, choosing instead to go out walking alone, where he passed small greasy spoons advertising for dishwashers and knew that eventually he would have to walk into one. It was the kind of job that didn't require a lot information about social insurance numbers and citizenship. He paused often in front of garages where mechanics in grease-stained coveralls worked at the internal organs of a car, but those opportunities were beyond him, or his connections.

Capricorn had told him that a lot of the civic crap about citizenship and green cards could be overlooked if Tinker could just meet someone who operated a small shop, who needed a hand and who would pay in cash. Bureaucracies, with their psychotic need to document everyone's existence, Capricorn told Tinker, were the grinding stones of civilizations, that every civilization had eventually been ground to dust by its own bureaucracies.

“Ignore their games. It's a big city and somewhere in it there is a place for you and your skills, Tinker,” Capricorn assured him. “Believe it and be patient.”

Capricorn spoke the same kind of clichés as mothers, priests and teachers but coming from Capricorn, words like “Believe it and be patient” didn't have the same trite tone. “The next thing you know, he'll be asking you to stick your finger in his side,” Blue remarked when Tinker told him that Capricorn sounded like he really believed what he said.

An image from the previous night flashed through his mind as he thought about Capricorn's words, an image of Capricorn composed of music, of everyone composed of music, of his own music. He tried to recall the song of himself he had hummed when he had looked down at his own hand and found its flesh replaced by strands of music which he recognized as himself, believing he would remember it forever, like the back of his own hand or the colour of his own eyes, but it was gone now, vanished, like the Other Fellow, who suddenly flashed through his thoughts and faded away so fast that Tinker laughed.

Sitting in the doorway of an empty building, examining a montage of memories surfacing from his acid trip, Tinker tried not to think about Blue who had a tendency to turn into a priest when his own commandments were broken. He rehearsed his defence while watching the activity around a construction site at the intersection. Disrupted intersections were everywhere along the busiest streets, and people walked over steel-covered holes in the sidewalk or were redirected to pedestrian detours made from sheets of plywood. He had noticed them often since their arrival without giving them any thought until now.

Watching two men in white hard hats talking at the site, one in a business suit, the other in coveralls with muckers, which miners named their steel-toed rubber boots, on his feet, Tinker realized what these sights meant: a subway. Under his feet this very minute men were tunnelling their way beneath the city, mucking, drilling, loading, blasting.

He had never been underground but his father had, and his grandfather and most of the men back home. His father still worked in the town's last coal mine, but many of the others who lost their jobs had left for the hard rock mines of northern Ontario and the tunnels that needed to be blasted through mountains or under cities all over North America. And then they came home with their stories, and through them Tinker and Blue and the boys they hung around with all came to know the dampness and the darkness and the tragedies of the mines, and their wild, drunken romance. Their geography included Sudbury, Timmons, Thompson, Blind River, Elliot Lake, names more familiar to them than the capital cities of the ten provinces. Perhaps none of those young eavesdroppers would ever get to Regina but a lot of them expected to go to Sudbury. That was where Tinker and Blue would be this minute if they had not decided on San Francisco instead.

An impulse propelled Tinker to his feet and he walked toward the two men.

“Excuse me, are you guys working on this subway?”

The two men turned toward the interruption.

“I was just wondering if you knew if anybody from Cape Breton is working here.”

“What are you talking about?” the man in the suit asked, not hiding his impatience.

“I was just wondering if anybody from Cape Breton is working here,” Blue explained. “Guys from back home work all over the world on jobs like this and I was just wondering, that's all.”

“Canadians,” the man in the muckers explained to the other, then turned to Tinker. “Not that I know of and, in my experience, if there were any here we'd be aware of it. I worked with crews from that place, an island isn't it, up north a couple of times. Good miners.” The last two words were directed toward the man in the suit.

“What were their names?” Tinker asked.

The man in the muckers looked at Tinker again, puzzled. “I don't remember, really. One was called Angus, there was another named—”

“You don't remember his last name? Or his nickname?”

“Look, son, we're busy here. What is it you want? Are you a miner?”

“No, but my father is,” Tinker replied proudly. “I'm a mechanic myself.”

“Really,” the man in the muckers said with more interest. “Have you ever worked on underground equipment?”

“No, but I'd like to learn,” Tinker said.

The man in the muckers pulled a stained notebook from his pocket explaining to the man in the suit as he did so that they needed mechanics underground. He wrote down an address, ripped the page from the pad and passed it to Tinker.

“Go to this address and ask to see Hank. He'll look after hiring you. And get that hair cut. You can't work around dangerous machines looking like a girl. You could get scalped down there. Or gang-banged.”