Tinker and Blue (29 page)

47

Any hope that his notoriety would soon blow over and the FBI would move on to bigger and better criminals vanished on a February afternoon when Tinker, on his way home from work, glimpsed a headline of the cover of
The Subterranean
at a sidewalk newsstand: “Energy inventor sought in FBI manhunt.” Buying a copy more furtively than he ever purchased
Playboy
, Tinker carried it under his jacket until he got to Mrs. Rubble's. Dropping his lunch can on the kitchen table he pulled out the paper, opening it to the article as he walked into the living room, and read the byline.

“Peter?” he muttered. The article heralded the arrival of a messiah whose pending invention would topple the military-industrial complex with the most democratic of notions, an economy sustained by oxygen instead of fossil fuel.

Once the economy of Mankind begins to be powered by the oxygen engine, the very substance that sustains life itself, that economy will become as organic as the cardio-vascular system. The greed that inspires us to rob the graves of ancient forests to fire the engines of capitalism will dissipate, and the nature of Mankind's bartering will become more benign because the economy, like our very lives, will depend on not polluting that environment. The more dependent we become on not polluting the environment, the more conscious we will become of our environment, making us more appreciative of it and each other. A species positively self-aware threatens the multinational plot to turn us all into fodder for the Dow Jones average.

Understandably, the FBI, the flunky arm of an Establishment which thrives on exploiting the masses, has launched a nation-wide manhunt for the renegade genius who goes by the alias of Tinker. This reporter has had the pleasure of sitting at the feet of this great teacher, listening hypnotically to his vision of the world as it will be AOE (After the Oxygen Engine). The place he describes conjures visions of an island paradise shimmering just out of reach, a mere causeway away for those of us who are prepared to believe in this Utopia, a place so clear in his mind that one is almost tempted to believe that he was born there, a child of Atlantis....

“I'm going to kill that guy,” Tinker said, trying to evoke enough anger to overwhelm the sickening sensation in his stomach.

“What's that, dear?” Mrs. Rubble called from the kitchen.

“I said I'm going to drive over and see Kathy.”

“Is that safe?”

“If I'm going to be gunned down, I'm going to be gunned down,” Tinker called as he walked out the door, hoping he was joking.

—

Blue, leafing his way to the entertainment section of the
San Francisco Herald
in search of his name, paused over a headline, yelled to Capricorn who came into the kitchen and began reading over Blue's shoulder.

AGENT CONFIRMS FBI SEEKING FUGITIVE INVENTOR

FBI sources confirmed yesterday that they are searching for a fugitive who uses the alias “Tinker.”

“Some papers are trying to sell this guy as some kind of folk hero,” FBI agent Bud Wise told the Herald. “But he's a Commie through and through. We are very anxious to apprehend him before he begins a campaign of terror throughout the United States of America.”

Wise said that “Tinker” has been linked to the Human Rainbow Commune, led by a cult figure known as “Capricorn,” who is wanted, Wise told reporters, in connection with the bombing of a New York factory. Both Capricorn and Tinker eluded capture during an FBI raid on the commune's Colorado hideout where written documentation was obtained that there is a plot to undermine the safety of the American way, Wise said. In addition, FBI agents have questioned members of the militant Black Panthers regarding “Tinker's” whereabouts.

“There appears to be a conspiracy of militant Communist organizations converging around this ‘Tinker' character,” Wise warned when questioned yesterday while leaving the Fucdepor Petroleum Building. Wise said that his presence at the building was to warn Fucdepor officials that there may be a plot to explode refineries owned by the powerful oil company. Wise denied that his visit was the result of reports that “Tinker” was inventing an oxygen engine that threatens the future of fossil fuel corporations.

“This is a dangerous criminal who threatens the peace and security of great American institutions like Fucdepor,” Wise said. “The public's help is required in apprehending him, but no one should try to be a hero. We have reason to believe that this ‘Tinker' is dangerous.”

The FBI agent said the public could expect an artist's sketch of “Tinker” in the near future.

“Alcatraz awaits, as the other fellow says,” Blue quipped to Capricorn who was still hovering over his shoulder, re-reading the article.

—

While the commune council gathered round the kitchen table to discuss the media attention being directed toward them, Tinker was parked across the street watching the house, waiting to attract the attention of someone who could carry a message to Kathy. He spent his time assembling what little he knew about being “on the run.”

Escape to Canada was an option that lay at the bottom of his knowledge like a concrete foundation. If everything else went wrong, he and Blue and the Plymouth could make a run for the border and the safety beyond. Knowing that a “weasel path,” as Blue called it, was available to him, along with Kathy's refusal to travel to Canada, gave him the courage to stay in San Francisco. His current circumstances, he felt, were the best he could hope for. Mrs. Rubble, happy with his company and his appetite for her cooking, wasn't going to betray him. At work, he was Al Dempsey, short-haired mechanic's assistant whom no one had ever heard called Tinker. There were no pictures, no fingerprints, no previous criminal record. Besides, the FBI was searching for a hippie in the Haight-Ashbury area, and Tinker's description no longer filled that look, or fitted that address. As long as his contacts with Kathy and Blue were carefully arranged, there was little chance that FBI agents would locate him.

—

“It's time to go into mercury mode,” Capricorn told the commune council, explaining to Blue that among the properties of mercury was its ability, when touched, to fragment into a dozen silvery pieces scattering away from the finger – in this case the long arm of the law – to re-form when the threat was withdrawn. It was clear that the commune's location, while still undiscovered by the FBI, was widely known in the district and it was only a matter of time before someone sold them out to Wise to escape a drug bust.

“Any suggestions?” Capricorn asked, his question bringing a flurry of responses. Each commune member could find his or her own pad, keep little contact with each other except through the most trusted of methods, scribbling messages amid the graffiti on the washroom walls of Aquarius Café. Karma was apprehensive about the group splitting up, possibly becoming lost to each other.

“Maybe we should do what Tinker is doing, hide in plain sight,” she said. “There are houses for rent right across the street. If we could get someone like Peter? to rent one of them for us, we could just move over there one piece of furniture at a time. That way, we could keep a watch on this house.”

“And an eye on whoever might be watching this house,” Capricorn added, liking the suggestion. “I think I can help us there,” he said, passing a sketch around the table. It was a portrait of a middle-aged man with a large boozer's nose, small, mean eyes and a cruel twist to his mouth. “This is a drawing Tulip did from my information. The face you are looking at is my memory of FBI Special Agent Bud Wise. Watch for it squinting over the top of a newspaper, from behind the wheel of a parked car, from a shadowy doorway. He's picked up our ... well, my scent again. We've been just missing each other for years, but his lies about Tinker increases the pressure on us. He's scaring the hell out of the city to try to flush the two of us out. Wise is our biggest problem.”

Blue studied the sketch. “Thine enemy is my enemy, as the other feller says; if this creep is out to get Tinker, then I'm out to get him.”

“I have as much at stake here as anyone, but I've learned from personal experience that revenge is a spiritually unhappy act,” Capricorn warned Blue. “We have no desire to get caught, but we're not going to jeopardize the commune's karma with acts of revenge.”

“Revenge? I wouldn't think of it because vengeance is mine, sayeth the other fellow,” Blue said, thumb jerking Heavenward. “No, Capi, my friend, I'm not thinking about revenge, I'm thinking about Monk, this guy we got back home. Monk used to be a hell of a boozer, one of the best until he saw the Blessed Virgin Mary and she took the taste for liquor right away from him.

“Anyway, this other guy we got back home, Farmer, was telling me about the time a bunch of them were on the booze at Monk's house for a few days. This was when Monk still had what the other fellow calls his discriminating taste. There were cases of empties piling up in the porch from all the drinking they were doing. When one of them would go to sleep, of course, the other guys would steal his booze. The big mystery, though, was that when Monk went to sleep they could never find his booze. They'd look under the bed where he was sleeping, and in the fridge and even in the flush tank of the toilet but they couldn't find it. Whenever Monk woke up, though, a couple of minutes later, he'd be sipping away at his own liquor. Later, after the Virgin Mary straightened him out, he told Farmer that what he was doing was putting his booze out in the porch with all the empties, hiding it in plain sight as Karma just said. Nobody looking at all those bottles would guess one of them was full,” Blue finished with firm nod of his head at the ingeniousness of it all.

“There's a point to this story, or is it just comic relief?” Capricorn asked.

“Oh yeah, right! I almost forgot. There is a point I was trying to make and this sketch here is it. In the newspaper, the FBI guy said that they would be putting out an artist's sketch of Tinker soon, probably putting it up in all the post offices. Well, we got a lot of artists of our own right here, right, and what if we made our own sketches of Tinker and took them to a friendly printer and got our own FBI posters made? What I was thinking was that if we made maybe ten different sketches of Tinker, bearded, bald, white, black, Chinese, all kinds of different faces, then we could take them around to the post offices ourselves and put a different sketch in each post office. That way, we could confuse the hell out of the police. When they get their own sketch of Tinker, wherever they're going to get it I don't know, it would look like just another empty bottle among all the other empty bottles.”

Kathy, liking Blue's idea, expanded on it, suggesting that they not make up faces but go out in the street, she and Karma and Tulip, and begin sketching real faces so that when they did put the posters up, other people would recognize them and the FBI and the police would be running all over the city arresting the wrong Tinkers.

—

When Kathy, Karma and Tulip came out of the Human Rainbow Commune, San Francisco branch, each carrying a sketch pad, they spoke together briefly on the sidewalk and then went their separate ways. Kathy walked past the Plymouth and once she had gone a block beyond his parking spot, Tinker checked the rearview mirror for any nondescript cars that might be pulling out to follow her, checked, too, the nearby doorways for lurking strangers, and the sidewalk for unfamiliar hippie faces that might be narcs or undercover agents.

Satisfied that Kathy was not being tailed, Tinker eased the Plymouth away from the curb and began his own surveillance. When she turned the corner at the intersection, he drove the car past her, pulled over to the curb and waited. Kathy walked past, forcing Tinker to make a meek toot with the Plymouth's horn which caught her attention and brought her into the vehicle.

“I didn't recognize it without the rust,” Kathy apologized as the Plymouth pulled away, then told him about the commune council's meeting, the decision to move across the street, and the plans for Tinker's wanted poster.

“I'm sorry about all the trouble my journal is causing you, Tinker, you and Capricorn, because police are looking harder for him now, too. What can I do to make it better?”

“Nothing,” Tinker assured her. “They took what you wrote and made it mean what they wanted it to mean, the same way people screw around with the Bible. It's not your fault so there's nothing you can do besides what you're doing with the posters.”

“If you are only staying here because of me, Tinker, then I could go to Canada with you. You would be safe there,” Kathy offered.

Tinker braked the car suddenly as if Kathy's offer was a child standing in the middle of the street. “You'd do that? Come with me even though you don't want to?”

“You know that it's not that I don't want to go, Tinker, it's that I don't want to leave here.”

“Then we won't leave until we have to,” Tinker replied, “because I don't want to leave, either. We've been through this before, kind of, but it's a lot easier to stay when your reason's a real person,” he said, giving her hand a passionate squeeze. “If we drive around for a while, Mrs. Rubble will be going to bingo and we'll have the place to ourselves for a couple of hours.”