Tinker and Blue (6 page)

9

Another day and a restless sleep in the Plymouth and Tinker and Blue were making their way across the Mojave Desert under a full moon, canvas bags of water hanging in front of its grill as suggested by a mechanic when they stopped to gas up from the diminishing funds. The car filled the sandy silence with a rattle of exhaust, a pinging piston and Tinker's voice sounding out the words to Tom Jones's “Delilah.”

“How can you sing at a time like this, anyway?” Blue asked him, himself in a near panic from the incredible heat. He spent his time rolling down his window only to have the hoped-for cool breeze pound into the car like a blast furnace, and rolling it up again to become trapped in a smothering stillness of heat.

“You know what the other fellow said about the levels of hell, eh? That they get hotter and hotter the deeper you go. I though Kansas was hell, then Utah, but cripes, man, this desert....”

For several miles, Blue was terrified that the Plymouth would break down and they would be caught in a swarm of snakes. All along the highway, dead snakes were common as porcupines slaughtered on the roads of Nova Scotia. Blue acknowledged few fears but snakes were first and foremost among them.

It was Tinker who finally realized that they were not dead snakes littering the road but retreads burned off of vehicles that had preceded them. It was a milder consolation, but not much milder. They were riding on retreads themselves, one they bought from Charlie and three they stole from the back of his garage the night before they left. In Kansas, the tires softened on the hot pavement and Tinker and Blue joked about it, but it had been civilized back there. Out here there was no obvious help.

Under the silvery blue moonlight the desert stretched out on either side of them, a featureless grey monotony of heat. They had become so accustomed to the sameness of it that at first it seemed like a midnight mirage of snow, an expanse of sand bleached white under the moonlight, peopled by cactus that raised their arms in surrender to the merciless heat. It stirred both imaginations to the memory of movies where all the deserts looked like this, the real West.

“Bet a lot of people died out there,” Blue noted. “Wagon trains, war parties, Indian hunters. Wouldn't it be great to see a band of Indian ghosts? From in here, I mean. Maybe they've been riding across this desert for a hundred years, caught between their village and their Happy Hunting Ground, not knowing which one they're looking for because they don't know they're dead. I like Indians, Tinker. Know why? Because they remind me of my own people.

“When you really think about it, we had a lot more in common with them that we did with the Limeys. You see, nobody in Europe cared about the Scottish Highlanders because they couldn't make any sense of them. I mean they lived up in the mountains, wore their hair long, walked around in strange clothes, and spoke a language nobody could understand. Remind you of anybody?”

“Those hippies we stayed with?” Tinker asked.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Tinker! Are you getting crazy? Hippies! For the love of Christ! Are you listening? I'm talking about Indians here. Indians, not wackos. Anyway, the only real difference, I suppose, was that they called the Highlanders barbarians and the Indians savages, which pretty well means the same thing anyway, which would make no difference at all between us and them, would it? And the Highlanders lived in clans and the Indians lived in tribes, which is about the same thing, too, so there you have it.

“Then when the Limeys convinced our clan leaders that there was more money to be made raising sheep than raising MacDonalds and MacDougalls and MacDonnells, they sold us out, gathered us up and shipped us over here so the sheep could feed on our land. Then when we get over here, what happens but they take the Indians and gather them up and put them on reservations and gave their land to us, and they still expect us to love the Queen. No way, boy! I always cheered for the Indians in the movies, even when I didn't know this, so that says we know a hell of a lot more than we realize even when we don't know it, right?

“That's why I'd like to see some Indian ghosts, but to tell you the truth, I'd be scared to be walking out there when I do. It's not like bumping into a ghost on the back roads back home. Our ghosts are friendly, eh, not like those ones that scare the shit out of you in the movies. In Cape Breton they just walk around startling people sometimes, but not scaring them. You know what I think? I think they don't want to leave Cape Breton. I mean, every ghost you ever heard of in Cape Breton is somebody's relative, right? When you know your ghosts they don't scare you, but they sure as hell can make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Danny Danny Dan's funeral?”

“No, I don't think so,” Tinker said, making himself comfortable behind the wheel, ready to hear it for the hundredth time.

“Two summers ago, eh, there was this party at Port Ban. You were there but there's no reason for you to remember it because all you did after a few beers was pass out, wake up, throw up, pass out, wake up, throw up, but you wouldn't give the keys of the Plymouth to anyone. Everybody else decided to stay and sleep right there on the beach but I had to give Farmer a hand moving a horse in the morning so I walked up the cliff from the beach by myself. I had a little skate on so I wasn't worried, but when I got to the top and onto the Sight Point Road I was getting pretty sober, sober enough to realize where I was.

“Look, Tinker, and you probably know this yourself, but I bet there's more ghosts on that road than anywhere else on the planet. That's where my people first settled, so the ghosts go back two hundred years, some of them. I don't know about the Irish or the Acadians, Tinker, but I don't think that us Highlanders like to be dead. Too many of them keep trying to come back, so I plan to put off dying as long as I can myself.

“But I digress, as the other fella says. Anyway, here I am on the Sight Point Road, a dirt road, twenty feet wide at it widest, trees shaking hands from either side of the road so it's like walking through a black tunnel. It doesn't help matters that there's not a house for miles with anyone living in it, just the dark shapes of barns falling down and empty homes, and each one of them claiming at least two ghosts each.

“Well, I'm trying not to think about just how much I know about this road – it's amazing how much a fellow learns when he's not wasting his time in school. That night, trying not to think about all the information I picked up over the years, I realized that I knew a hell of a lot more about my family, my people – and Cape Breton, for that matter – than I thought I knew. I say ‘family' Tinker, because, just for your information when we get to him, Danny Danny Dan would of been a first cousin to my grandfather on my father's side. His father and my great-grandmother would be brother and sister, see.

“Anyway, everything's going great until I get this spooky feeling. Okay, I was feeling spooky anyway so I get this extra spooky feeling. At first, I thought it was just the shadows of trees moving in the breeze, then suddenly these shadows take shape. Look, Tinker, we're out in the middle of nowhere and if these tires go we're as good as dead ourselves so I have no desire to die with a lie on my lips. What I am going to tell you is the absolute truth, so help me God!

“Two black horses were pulling a wagon, not one as snazzy as Dracula's or anything, but it was no hay wagon either. It was a funeral wagon. They were moving slow as death along the road with this guy driving who had a face so white it should of been in a coffin itself. I don't know who he was because he didn't look like anybody we know. I'm frozen on the side of the road as it moves by and this cold spot of air moves across me. I don't think I'm even breathing now. The coffin is on the back with a cross on top of it, no flowers, just a cross and I know from hearing the story before about other people who saw the funeral parade that inside is Danny Danny Dan. It all just moves along as slow as a clock hand, and soundless as a graveyard.

“Behind it, there must have been a hundred people, maybe everybody who ever lived there at the time, and they just passed by, one sad white face after another, men and women and children, lots of black clothes and you know how uncomfortable farmers look in suits, well, they looked like that. And I'm standing there with every hair on my body standing up like they had their hats off for the passing funeral, and I'm sweating scared but a part of me is standing there as calm as you please looking for my grandfather or grandmother's face because they were at that funeral, you know, but I couldn't tell because they would of been young then and I only knew them old.

“It felt like it took forever to go by but it didn't. The sliver of moon hadn't moved an inch in the sky that I could tell. Nothing awful happened. It was awful enough as it was, considering how scared I got. But it told me something I can never not know again, Tinker. It told me that there's more than we know going on all the time.

“The story behind the funeral, because I talked to Monk about it later and he knows more about this stuff than anybody, was that Danny Danny Dan wasn't dead. There was a sickness in his family that faked death. When he said that, it scared the shit out of me worse than the funeral did because I'm a relative, right? But when Monk and I traced the family back it was something that came down Danny Danny Dan's mother's side of the family, not his father's which would be my side of his family, so when I die I'll probably be dead.

“What Monk said was that Danny Danny Dan was alive in his coffin but couldn't tell anybody. The funny thing about it, Monk noticed, was that the only person who wasn't a ghost at that funeral that I saw was Danny Danny Dan. That's why his funeral still haunts the Sight Point Road, because he was buried alive. Remember Ray Miland in the
Premature Burial
? Well, you didn't hear me laughing the last time I saw that movie, boy.”

—

When Blue took the wheel from Tinker near dawn the Plymouth had begun a slow ascent into cooler heights as they rose out of the darkness and the desert, leaving behind them a history of desert ghosts they hadn't encountered, and they smiled tiredly to each other when they crossed the California state line.

10

“Well, there she is, Tinkers. Alcatraz! The most famous island on this side of the world.”

Tinker and Blue were sitting on the dock of the bay. Their location wasn't lost on them, Otis Redding's song of the same name having pulsed itself through the car radio, off and on, all across America. Blue had spent much of his time scanning the dial for new country and western stations as each faded behind them. Tinker, when Blue slept through or chattered on against the music of his own choice, slipped the dial to music he found less predictable, more challenging to imitate. Blue scolded him for it, citing the dangers of rock and roll, which had the girls dancing so far away from the boys that when you tried to ask to take one of them home you had to holler so loud that three girls in the general proximity of the question might say yes. “Then what do you do?”

But driving across the States, “Dock Of The Bay,” considering their destination, even had Blue singing into the handle of the same screwdriver he had once employed as a weapon to fend off drug-crazed hippies. From their seventy-mile-an-hour front-seat stage, Blue would reach across with the mic, holding it before his friend, saying, “Take her away, Tink,” and Tinker's voice joined Redding's in a commendable harmony. On the actual dock of the bay, though, it was Blue's voice Tinker had for company as their homesick hearts were poured into the words that Tinker sang and Blue fumbled with, recreating out of his own poetic soul new lines for those he didn't know.

They had been in San Francisco for more than a week, each day exploring a little more of the city than they planned to, Blue charting their course with a street map and a dyslexic attitude toward details such as east, west, right, left.

In the Mission and Market area they found a room for twenty-two dollars a week in a hotel where, on the first night, they barricaded their door with a badly battered three-legged dresser, a security lock against the mob rule that seemed to govern the place.

Whole families huddled in some rooms, rummies who could afford a room occupied others, and an oddly high number of senile old men and women were residents of the remaining rooms. By day tolerable, by night terrifying, the room was affordable for the moment and so became their home away from home for a while. On the other side of the door family wars were being fought, the domestic screams barely covering the sound of someone throwing up in the hall or two men arguing and threatening to “Cut your god-damned throat with this bottle as soon as it's empty.”

Each morning, Tinker and Blue were awakened at six o'clock by a pounding on their door, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of a mouth bugling reveille. The call to consciousness moved from door to door and for the first two mornings the boys arose in the belief that they were obeying hotel regulations until the seedy clerk at the front desk told them not to pay any attention to General Jones, an old man trapped inside a one-day loop of boot camp regulations. The old soldier was lost somewhere between the Second World War and his discharge, the clerk explained, but was harmless.

A couple of days later, Blue, desperate for a leak, was pulling the bureau away to go to the floor's only washroom when General Jones began rousing the young recruits. Blue came into the hall as the stiff-legged old man hobbled to the next set of army barracks. Blue saw the old man drop something and ran in the dim, night-light darkness, to retrieve and return it. It was a turd, and as Blue stood paralysed with shock over the sickening turn of events which he held in his hand, he watched another one fall from General Jones pant leg.

“Aw, Jesus, Tinker, we got to get out of here. We're on the skids, boy,” he complained to his friend who reminded him that by the end of the week they would be out of money and out of the hotel, so his complaints were academic.

The two goals they had set for themselves they hadn't yet achieved. They had not found Haight-Ashbury despite having been pointed in that direction several times by those whom they asked, only to have Blue improvise on the advised approach with a short-cut of his own. Because they had not gotten there yet, they could not point the Plymouth toward home.

The second goal, like the hotel rent, was also academic. With or without visiting Haight-Ashbury, their planned return home posed a few problems related to the financial feasibility of crossing a continent on a pocketful of change. Wiring home for money was something they discussed and even expected to do when the going got tough, but faced with the reality of it, their pride forced them to delay. It was one thing, they agreed, to be stranded and desperate in the middle of a desert. People back home had seen enough movies to know what that was like, a situation that would have probably placed them in a slightly heroic role once the guys back home heard about it. Being stranded in San Francisco lacked that desert romance, so all telegrams were placed on hold.

After the first couple of days of swimming against the traffic on one-way streets, four-way stops, red lights, amber lights, green lights and numerous threats on their lives, Tinker and Blue opted for a walking tour of the city, roaming the urban hills to exhaustion, fuelled by vendor hot dogs. Always they were drawn back to the water, stunned by its commerce.

The Gulf of St. Lawrence, the arm of the Atlantic upon whose shores they grew up, looked much the same to them as it did to the Highlanders who squatted on its shores two hundred years before. They were familiar with its northern Atlantic moods: grey and foreboding in autumn, besieged by an armada of polar ice floes all winter, its spring palette of blue hues shifting slowly toward summer, and summer itself when a couple of hundred people from the town enjoyed the two-mile length of sandy beach that stretched between the rise of two mountains. They were also familiar with a rare treasure of the eastern continent, an ocean sunset.

The expanse of water back home was sprinkled with lobster boats or ground fishermen at their work and, occasional enough to be noteworthy, a Montreal-bound tanker would be sighted on the horizon. They had known the ocean as a place for children to enjoy.

They couldn't have imagined San Francisco Bay in a million summers with its noisy, oily traffic of monstrous ships gliding through the sunlight or emerging like phantoms from the fog to bellow their way through a congestion of ferries and cruisers and barges. Except for the tourist shops that did more business on one wharf than the whole Cape Breton tourism industry put together, it was no place for children. In San Francisco, the ocean was put to work full time, like a mine or a forest. Their fascination with it brought them back again and again.

Tinker looked across at Alcatraz, the gnawing worry in his stomach becoming a constant condition. Blue had always managed the financial end of their partnership, scheming dance fares and gas money with skill, but Tinker suspected that Blue was too far out of his element now. Because of this, he had scanned the want ads of newspapers he picked up from park benches, but found that there was only a market for certified mechanics and, he suspected, certified Americans. Passing the days walking the streets of San Francisco, “just picking 'em up and laying 'em down, as the other fellow says,” brought them closer to flat broke than Tinker cared to think about.

“We got to do something about money, Blue,” he said, punctuating his remark with a spit that he watched squirt from between his teeth, arc out and fall to the water below. “Maybe I should call the old man.”

“We're in the richest state in the world, Tinker. If we can't make her here, boy, we may never leave home again. You know what the other fellow says, don't ya? The world is our oyster, Tinker, and I'm partial to pearls if you know what I mean.”

“I don't like oysters,” Tinker replied, streaming another spit into the Pacific.