Free Tinker and Blue by Frank Macdonald

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.
    â€œAw, 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