Tinker and Blue (2 page)

2

Driving through the various states, the litter of hippies hitchhiking along the highway never let up, but the drives they offered were carefully considered: people with haircuts who resembled themselves; people they could talk to without gawking like a couple of old women. But their curiosity was growing. So were the clouds that loomed ahead of them, promising a soothing shower of summer rain. The first splashes on the windshield were large, followed by a not so soothing, pelting downpour that they followed into darkness.

The lone figure with his fingers forming a peace sign struck a lonely image in the headlights and without discussion Tinker pulled the Plymouth to the side of the road. A moment later, a hippie with wet matted hair sat in the back seat among suitcases, Blue's guitar and fast-food cartons.

“Wow, man, like, I was thinking the Good Samaritan and then your headlights were there. I knew there was good people in this vehicle. Like, you're angels, man.”

Blue reached across and poked Tinker in the ribs, which served in the darkness for the eye rolls they normally communicated with when passing mutual judgement.

“Everybody's an angel, man, that's what I've discovered so far. Angels don't come from Heaven, see. What happens is, people turn into them for a moment without even noticing. They just do things angels get the credit for doing. Like stopping for me. You could have passed by but you didn't. Why? Angels, man, the world is full of them. How far you going?”

“'Frisco.” Blue tossed the word into the back seat nonchalantly, as if it was the name of a village just down the road from home. He took the opportunity to peer into the back seat at the dark form occupying it. Even night didn't disguise a wet hippie.

“Comin' from New York, man?”

“Cape Breton,” Blue answered, clarifying who they were.

“Where's that, man?” the hippie asked, which resulted in a “stupid Americans” poke in the ribs for Tinker again.

“In Canada,” Blue answered. “Eastern Canada. Nova Scotia. Know it?”

“Canada! Wow! You really got your shit together up there, man. I got lots of friends ducking 'Nam in Canada. Maybe you know them?”

“I don't think so,” Blue replied. “It's a big country. Bigger than the United States, you know,” quoting the passenger a fact of national pride.

“No, I didn't know that, man. Life's an endless learning. Wanna do some weed?”

“Huh?” Blue asked with a head snap while the Plymouth jerked under Tinker's shocked reflexes.

“Weed, man. Mary Jane. Marijuana. Wanna do some? I have a Colombian right here, already rolled. It's all I got to offer to this trip.”

Tinker and Blue, who thought nothing of losing the occasional weekend to a trunk load of beer, drew the line at drugs. In fact, this was as close to an addicted hippie as they had ever been.

“Ah, well, I don't know if I feel like it. What about you, Tink?”

Tinker was having a hard time finding words to match Blue's relaxed panic, but managed a “Nah. Not while I'm driving.”

“I respect that, man,” the hippie said. “Mind if I light up?”

“Lotta cops on the road tonight,” Tinker lied self-protectively. “We were stopped twice already.”

“Oh, wow, man, the pigs! I'd hate to get busted again. What I'm going to do is smoke this joint so that if they do stop us again we're clean, man, clean. Any problem?”

The logic was irrefutable in the stunned state with which Tinker and Blue were trying to handle this unexpected turn of events. A match flared in the back seat and an unfamiliar smell rolled through the car in a cloud of smoke.

“Where you headed?” Blue asked, trying to glimpse the face of the addict in the back seat. He had already opened the cubby hole and taken out a screwdriver which he placed on the seat between him and Tinker. Things might get rough once the hippie got high.

“Up there somewhere.” A shadowy hand pointed generally in the direction they were travelling. “It's not the destination, man, it's the journey.” He drew and exhaled heavily, his breath hesitating, holding itself between those functions. Blue smoked Buckingham plains but this smoke was stronger, filling the air, bothering his eyes with its thickness, choking him. A rolled-down window let in too much rain. He rolled it up again.

“There's places to go just to go through the places that take you there,” the hippie continued, wandering through a monologue that involved details about commune living, hitchhiking and more angels.

Soon Blue, half choked with smoke, began having a hard time following the hippie's drugged thoughts and the pattern of rain on the windshield was far more interesting than anything he had seen since they left home.

Suddenly, the world exploded in a sustained flash of lightning that exposed a gruesome scowl of sky. Rain fell with a force unimagined in the worst Cape Breton autumns, bouncing a foot off the pavement as it pounded down, and the wind began to rock the moving car.

“Christ, this is a blizzard without snow,” Tinker said, leaning heavily across the steering wheel to peer through the ocean washing against the windshield. Suddenly he slammed on the brakes, jolting them to a stop, and began staring into the night.

“What is it?” Blue asked, trying to find out what Tinker was seeing.

“Nothing,” Tinker replied, easing his foot down on the gas, the car moving slowly ahead. “I just thought I saw a herd of turtles on the road.”

Tinker's words drifted over to Blue who gathered them in and studied them until comprehension occurred some moments later.

“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.”