Tinker and Blue (20 page)

“The way I got her figured, people want what they can't have. If mothers wouldn't let their kids have carrots the kids'd be stealing them all the time and be a lot healthier. So now that everybody knows that they can't have Blue Cacophony's music, they'll want it. They call it the law of supply and demand, and laws are made to be obeyed, as the other fellow says, so I'm simply obeying them.

“Now all you have to do, Capi, is figure out how to record the band, find a way to make the records, organize the people in the commune to sell them without letting Peter?, Nathan or Gerry know, and I'll take care of the rest.”

“And just what would ‘the rest' be, Blue?”

“All the other stuff. Do you think we can do it?”

Capricorn let the challenge roll across his mind, then spoke. “We can do it, but why would we?”

“For the money, of course. I worked that part out, too. The commune gets twenty per cent. Peter? gets twenty per cent. Nathan gets twenty. So does Gerry. Barney and I get the rest.”

“Do you see a problem here, Blue?” Capricorn quizzed him. “Like how do you cut the band in and out at the same time?”

“They're good musicians but they haven't got any common sense at all, so it's a good thing I do. They don't need to know about the money until they need it, right? Really need it, I mean. Until then we'll just keep it for them.”

“Oh, I see,” Capricorn said, his voice rising sarcastically. “You'll look after it for them. I thought there was an angle we were missing.”

“Not me. You. You'll take care of it for all of us, Capi. We could be talking about hundreds of dollars here, and I know thyself, as the other fellow says. The way I am, I can't be trusted with money, even my own. The last time Tinker and me had a fight like we did yesterday was last June at the race track back home. We split on the quinella, eh, and it came in and paid fifty-four dollars. Tinker told me to collect it because he had to go pump gas at Charlie's Guesso. So I cashed the ticket, and then I got this really good feeling about the exactor and put the whole works on a longshot combination, eh. Going to surprise Tinker, you see. Well, I surprised him all right. The two smelts came in just the way I picked them, but I didn't pick them to come in seventh and eighth.

“So when Tinker came to me to collect his money that evening I had to tell him I lost his twenty-six bucks. He called me a bastard for losing his money because he was going to buy dingle balls for the Plymouth, then he punched me in the face, so I kicked him in the balls and away we went. So the point is that I'm honest. I won't steal a guy's money if he knows I got it. But I might get ideas he won't like very much, like long-shots at the race track. So that's why you're going to look after the money for all us, Capi.”

“Not afraid I'll keep it all myself, Blue?”

“Now that would tell me the truth about you in a hurry, wouldn't it, about whether or not you're more Judas than Jesus there, Capi, old buddy? So are you in or what?”

Capricorn turned his attention to the rest of the table. “Blue is offering us an interesting ethical adventure here, don't you think? Common sense tells me to stay as far away from it as possible. It's clearly rooted in the concepts of greed and ego and for that reason alone the commune should walk away from it, but it's so insanely charming I doubt if I can resist. How do the rest of you feel?”

The decision to have the Human Rainbow Commune venture into the record producing business was unanimous.

33

Tinker was bent over the fender of the Plymouth. Beside him, a crescent wrench held open an encyclopaedia, its pages tattooed with greasy thumb prints. Disassembling the innards of a vehicle in order to apply new knowledge gleaned from library books and his job, re-ignited Tinker's passion for things mechanical. Peter?'s van, the commune's van and the Plymouth which Tinker now considered his fleet, were all healthier than they had been for years. The difference was noticeable to everyone driving or riding in them.

Blue, watching Tinker from the window of his and Karma's bedroom, noticed the difference more profoundly than the others, who felt the difference only in the vehicles. Blue saw the difference in Tinker. He missed the reckless confidence with which Tinker used to pound out a dull, rhythmic thud on the engine with a ballpeen hammer, or feverishly tore at wires and filters. The methodical approach that Tinker now used, removing parts and holding them as references while he leafed through the encyclopaedias, or his newly acquired habit of listening to the engine like a doctor listening to a heartbeat, had Blue concerned for his friend. While he watched Tinker bend to read from the book, Karma came and stood beside him at the window.

“It's in his people, you know,” Blue explained.

“What's in whose people?” Karma asked, raising her eyebrows to another of what she now called out-of-the-Blue remarks.

“Reading. It's in his people. They were all like that. Every time you'd go into his house, you'd catch his mother reading something. They say his old man even carries a book in his lunch can. Tinker told me that when he was a little kid, his mother used to read to him every night. When he started school, they used to be on him all the time about reading on his own, but he was stubborn. Funny, isn't it, how he got away with not reading all the time he was with them, then the minute he gets free of them, the first thing he does is pick up a book. The genes will out, as the other fellow says.”

“What is it with you and reading, Blue? You treat it like it's something evil. It's not like you can't read and it's not as if you're stupid. It's like, I don't know, like you're scared of books or something.”

“I'm not scared of books,” Blue snapped. “I just don't have time for them. There's lots more important things in the world, you know, and better places to learn about the world than in books which are just somebody else's opinion anyway.

“Sometimes when Farmer gets a horse that's broken down, he takes it to this guy's farm – a sound horse is worth money but an unsound horse is just dog food, as the other fellow says.

“Lauchie Dan is just an average Joe except that he knows how to heal horses. He'll check the horse for Farmer and if it's really old, or really lame and he can't do anything for it, he'll say so. Farmer calls him the last honest man on the planet. Anyway, this one time, Farmer took this young gelding up there for Lauchie Dan to check over. So while Lauchie Dan was running his hands over the horse Farmer was telling him that the farmer who used to own the horse had the vet in to look at it. The vet told him that the horse had stifles and tendon problems and that he would never be any good for work, so the guy sold it to Farmer for next to nothing. But Farmer thought it was a shame that a horse so young was worth so little, ‘so I wanted your opinion,' Farmer told Lauchie Dan.

“Lauchie Dan never even glanced up from checking the horse all the time Farmer was talking to him, but when Farmer finished, all Lauchie Dan said in this accent that he has was, ‘Dos vets, dey don't know naughting, dey just learned it from a buk.'

“Well, that pretty well said it for me, Karma, girl. ‘Dey just learned it from a buk,' because a month later, once Lauchie Dan had worked on him, that gelding was as sound as the day it was born and the vet's book-learning had nothing to do with it. And a fifty-buck deal turned into seven hundred bucks when Farmer sold that gelding.

“Everybody back home is always saying get an education, it's the only way to get ahead in the world. Then the next day they're all complaining that all the people with an education leave the island and never come back. So who wants to never come back? Not me.”

“Some educated people must come back, Blue. There are teachers and doctors and lawyers, aren't there?”

“Exceptions to the rule, says the other fellow,” Blue replied. “And now Tinker's into the books.”

“With Tinker working every day, and you playing or practising so many nights, the two of you don't get to see much of each other, do you?” Karma said.

“Weird, huh. Here's me and my best buddy sleeping next door to each other in the same house, and hardly ever seeing one another anymore. Do you suppose he notices that?”

“Of course, he does, Blue. It's just that sometimes circumstances get in people's way. Nobody means anything by it. It just happens. Capricorn told me once that most of our relationships with other people are circumstantial, that once the circumstances change, the relationship no longer exists. But the real friendships are those that don't depend on circumstances, just on each other.”

Blue, watching Tinker from the window, dwelled upon his own knowledge of what Karma said.

“My father tells these stories about when he was young and working the mines up north, or factories in Toronto, eh, and it was always with other guys from home. Same as Tinker and me, I guess. They travelled together, worked together, got drunk together and all that stuff, and then most of them eventually came home and settled down, but you hardly ever see them talking to each other.

“There was this one guy, Alex John, that my father went away with. The old man told more stories about the two of them when they were on the road than an accountant can count. But then they came back and lived in the same town ever since and I don't think I ever saw them do more than wave to each other. Then Alex John got killed in a car crash and the old man went to his wake, but didn't even take time off work to go to his funeral. He just said that the stories about him and Alex John were from a long time ago and far away. It's like they had nothing in common when they came back home, like they didn't even know each other anymore.

“But then there's this other guy from home, Andrew. He lives in Manitoba. Doesn't get home except maybe every five years. He's the old man's best friend. Andrew comes in the house and they're into the stories right away like they were just picking up where they left off yesterday. Is that what you mean?”

“I believe so, Blue.”

“And you say it was Capricorn who told you that? I wonder where he got the idea from?”

“Probably stole it from some old book, Blue,” Karma said.

“Know what we should do, Karma? Go down there and visit Tinker.”

—

“Hey, Tinker,” Blue called out from the back step where he stood with Karma, taking a deep breath of cool, early December air. “Know what this weather reminds me of? Your mother's chicken frico and rabbit pies. Karma and me were just talking about her, and the first thing I thought off was her frico.”

Tinker lifted his head from under the hood. “What were you talking about my mother for?”

“The way she reads, and the way you took after her,” Blue answered, pointing to the open book on the fender. Then he turned to Karma, telling her more about Tinker's mother as they walked down the steps and toward the Plymouth.

“Tinker's mother is French, you know—”

“Acadian,” Tinker corrected.

“Whatever,” Blue continued. “Anyway, Tinker's mother cooks these really great things. What would you call her chicken frico, Tinker, soup or stew?”

“Frico,” Tinker said, settling his elbows on the fender to wait while the visitors approached.

“The French back home are stubborn like that. They'd even rather speak French than English,” Blue explained. “Anyway, her frico is like stew or soup, but the best thing of all is her rabbit pie. In the fall, if Tinker and me get a couple of rabbits, we bring them to her and she makes rabbit pie for us. You'd love ... well, maybe you wouldn't, but most people would love it. I'd give my eye teeth for a piece right now, wouldn't you, Tink?”

Tinker sniffed the air with closed eyes, as if he could smell what Blue described.

“Remember the time—” Blue asked, and before he could get any further, Tinker laughed, pulling his thoughts from under the engine hood to the story at hand.

“The rabbit in the snare?” Tinker asked, and getting a confirming nod from Blue, went on. “One time Blue and I were hunting rabbits ... we got a couple that day, I remember ... and we were coming through the woods kind of quiet in case we see any more. And we do, only this one's caught around the neck in a snare. Snares really piss Blue and I off. They're cruel as hell. Some people might not even check their snares after they set them, so a rabbit strangles in it and then just rots.

“The rabbit is still in a coma, so Blue gives me the dead rabbits and his gun to carry and loosens the snare and takes off his jacket and wraps the rabbit up in it. We figure if we can get it home maybe we can save it, have it for a pet or something. So we start making our way back to town.

“There's this place in the woods up behind the race track where lots of people go to drink. We come out of the woods at just that spot and we see this old guy passed out, snoring a cord of wood a minute. Blue whispers to me that maybe the old guy's caught in a snare, too, and we start to laugh, but when Blue see the guy's big hat – he was wearing one of those salt-and-pepper hats ten times too big for him – he gets an idea and tiptoes up beside him, takes the rabbit out of his jacket and puts it under the hat, then he sneaks back to where I am in the woods and tells me that we're going to show the old guy some magic.

“Blue says what we'll do is walk out of the woods making all kinds of noise to wake the old guy up and then Blue will tell him that he knows magic, and then he'll pull the rabbit out of the man's hat. But before we could get ready to play our trick we hear this scream and go running to where the old guy is, and there he is chasing his hat around the clearing. He'd leap for it and the hat would leap away and the old guy would land on his face and get up and try it again.

“Well, Blue and I took to laughing so hard that we fell down, and finally the hat leapt off into the woods and the old guy just sat there trying to shake what he thought was the DTs from out of his head.

“Once the rabbit took off into the woods and I realized it was okay, I asked Blue if he wanted to go hunt it, but Blue said, ‘Ah, let it go'.”

“It was getting dark,” Blue explained to Karma.

The laughter brought Kathy from the house, curious about the carry-on in the back yard, and when she asked about it, Tinker promised he would tell her the story later.

“Where you come from, does everybody drink?” Karma asked Tinker and Blue. “Every time you tell a story, somebody is drinking too much in it, it seems.”

“No,” Blue assured her. “Not everybody drinks. Hardly any of the nuns do, huh, Tink?” sending the two of them off into laughter again. Then taking Karma's question more seriously, Blue added, “Not everybody drinks a lot, but a lot of the stories happen when people drink. We got this guy back home who lives next door to me, eh. He never had a drink in his life. Not so much as a taste of beer. That's all everybody ever says about him, that he's never had a drink in his life. He's kind of famous for it, but that's all anybody has to say about him. Now you take some of the other people we know, Farmer or Monk. They've tasted the devil, as the other fellow says, and their hell, in our humour, wouldn't you say, Tinker?”

Tinker looked across at Blue leaning on the opposite fender, wondering what he might add.

“It's kind of like that novel you gave me to read,” Tinker said, directing his explanation to Kathy. “You know when you're reading it that there's a whole town there, but the story is about just a few of the people. If nobody in the story gets sick, then the story doesn't need a doctor, and if there are no children in it, the story doesn't need a school, but that doesn't mean the rest of the people don't exist. Just because the story's not about them doesn't mean they don't have stories of their own.”

“But don't you ever talk about anything else?” Kathy asked. “Even to each other?”

“Not in mixed company,” Blue said, winking at Tinker.

“I'm serious,” Kathy said. “I know more about your home town than I do about my own, and I've never even been there. Putting the two of you together is like watching two magnets pulling toward each other, except that it's Cape Breton that you're pulled toward.”

“The way my old man explains us,” Tinker replied, “is that everybody back home, the Irish, the Acadians, the Scotch, all have the same story – homeless people thrown out of their own countries by the frigging British, but they all washed up on the same shore, Cape Breton, see. And the old man says that an island is the easiest kind of land in the world to love, so they all just loved the island for being there to catch them when they were floating across the ocean.

“The old man's Irish, see, and they had a potato famine in Ireland so his father's father had to leave Ireland and come to Cape Breton. My mother's people, the Acadians, got thrown out of Nova Scotia by the British. Most of them were shipped to Louisiana during the expulsion of the Acadians, but some of them sneaked away before they could be expelled and came up to Cape Breton. And, of course, the Scots had their own problems, as they never tire of telling us. So just about everybody on the island comes from a lost home, and according to the old man they remember those homes with sad songs and funny stories, He says there are two things about Cape Breton that we're born knowing, that it's home, and that we'll probably have to leave it someday.