The Urban Fantasy Anthology (4 page)

My hands shook as if they had engine knock. I wanted to go to the bathroom. Steve clumped up on stage, read my name from the slip of paper in his hand and peered out into the dark room for me. I hung the banjo over my shoulder and went up there to die for my art.

I scrapped the short opening I’d practised and played the whole chord progression instead. The first couple measures were shaky. But banjos give out a lively noise that makes you want to have a good time, and I could feel mine sending those messages. By the time I got around to the words, I could remember them, and sing them in almost my usual voice.

I got a bird that whistles, honey, got a bird,
Baby, got a bird that will sing.
Honey, got a bird, baby, got a bird that will sing.
But if I ain’t got Corinna, it just don’t mean,
It don’t mean a natural thing.

At the back of the room, I could just see the halo of Lisa’s hair. I couldn’t see her face but at least she’d stopped to listen. And down front, Willy Silver sat, looking pleased.

I did “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight” and “Newry Highwayman.” I blew some chords and forgot some words, but I lived through it. And people applauded. I grinned and thanked them and stumbled off the stage.

“Do they clap because they like what you did,” I asked Willy, “or because you stopped doing what they didn’t?”

Willy made a muffled noise into his coffee cup.

“Pretty darn good,” said Lisa, at my elbow. I felt immortal. Then I realised that she was stealing glances at Willy. “Want to order something, now that you’re not too nervous to eat it?”

I blushed, but in the dark, who could tell? “PB and J,” I told her.

“PB and J?” Willy repeated.

We both stared at him, but it was Lisa who said, “Peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Don’t you call them that?”

The pause was so short I’m not sure I really heard it. Then he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a coffeehouse where you could order a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

“This is it,” Lisa told him. “Crunchy or smooth, whole wheat or white, grape jelly or peach preserves.”

“Good grief. Crunchy, whole wheat, and peach.”

“Non-conformist,” she said admiringly.

He turned to me when she went towards the kitchen. “You
were
pretty good,” he said. “I like the way you sing. For that last one, though, you might try mountain minor.”

“What?”

He got an eager look on his face. “Come on,” he said, sprang out of his chair, and led the way towards the back.

We sat on the back steps until the open stage was over, and he taught me about mountain minor tuning. His guitar was a deep-voiced old Gibson with the varnish worn off the strategic spots, and he flat-picked along with me, filling in the places that needed it. Eventually we went back inside, and he taught me about pull-offs. As Steve stacked chairs, we played “Newry Highwayman” as a duet. Then he taught me “Shady Grove,” because it was mountain minor, too.

I’d worked hard at the banjo, and I enjoyed playing it. But I don’t think I’d ever been aware of making something beautiful with it. That’s what those two songs were. Beautiful.

And Lisa moved through the room as we played, clearing tables, watching us. Watching him. Every time I looked up, her eyes were following his face, or his long fingers on the guitar neck.

I got home at two in the morning. My parents almost grounded me; I convinced them I hadn’t spent the night raising hell by showing them my new banjo tricks. Or maybe it was the urgency with which I explained what I’d learned and how, and that I had to have more.

When I came back to Orpheus two nights later, Willy was there. And Lisa, fair and graceful, was often near him, often smiled at him, that night and all the nights after it. Sometimes he’d smile back. But sometimes his face would be full of an intensity that couldn’t be contained in a smile. Whenever Lisa saw that, her eyes would widen, her lips would part, and she’d look frightened and fascinated all at once. Which made me feel worse than if he’d smiled at her.

And sometimes he would ignore her completely, as if she were a cup of coffee he hadn’t ordered. Then her face would close up tight with puzzlement and hurt, and I’d want to break something.

I could have hated him, but it was just as well I didn’t. I wanted to learn music from Willy and to be near Lisa. Lisa wanted to be near Willy. The perfect arrangement. Hah.

And who could know what Willy wanted?

Fourth of July, Independence Day 1970, promised to be the emotional climax of the summer. Someone had organised a day of Vietnam War protests, starting with a rally in Riverside Park and ending with a torchlight march down State Street. Posters about it were everywhere—tacked to phone poles, stuck on walls, and all over the tables at Orpheus. The picture on the posters was the photo taken that spring, when the Ohio National Guard shot four students on the Kent State campus during another protest: a dark-haired woman kneeling over a dead student’s body, her head lifted, her mouth open with weeping, or screaming. You’d think a photo like that would warn you away from protesting. But it gives you the feeling that someone has to do something. It gets you out on the street.

Steve was having a special marathon concert at the coffeehouse: Sherman and Henley, the Rose Hip String Band, Betsy Kaske, and—surprise—Willy Silver and John Deacon. True, we were scheduled to go on at seven, when the audience would be smallest, but I didn’t care. I had been hired to play. For money.

The only cloud on my horizon was that Willy was again treating Lisa as one of life’s non-essentials. As we set up for the show, I could almost see a dotted line trailing behind Willy that was her gaze, fixed on him.

Evening light was slanting through the door when we hit the stage, which made me feel funny. Orpheus was a place for after dark, when its shabby, struggling nature was cloaked with night-and-music magic. But Willy set his fiddle under his chin, leaned into the microphone, and drew out with his bow one sweet, sad, sustained note. All the awareness in the room—his, mine, and our dozen or so of audience’s—hurtled to the sharp point of that one note and balanced there. I began to pick the banjo softly and his note changed, multiplied, until we were playing instrumental harmony. I sang, and if my voice broke a little, it was just what the song required:

The sun rises bright in France, and fair sets he,
Ah, but he has lost the look he had in my ain country.

We made enough magic to cloak
three
shabby coffeehouses with glamour. When I got up the nerve to look beyond the edge of the stage, sometime in our fourth song, we had another dozen listeners. They’d come to line State Street for the march and our music had called them in.

Lisa sat on the shag rug in front of the stage. Her eyes were bright, and for once, her attention didn’t seem to be all for Willy.

Traditional music mostly tells stories. We told a lot of them that night. I felt them all as if they’d happened to friends of mine. Willy seemed more consumed by the music than the words, and songs he sang were sometimes almost too beautiful. But his strong voice never quavered or cracked like mine did. His guitar and fiddle were gorgeous, always, perfect and precise.

We finished at eight-thirty with a loose and lively rendition of “Blues in the Bottle,” and the room was close to full. The march was due to pass by in half an hour.

We bounded off stage and into the back room. “Yo,” said Willy, and stuck out his right hand. I shook it. He was touched with craziness, a little drunk with the music. He looked…not quite domesticated. Light seemed to catch more than usual in his green eyes. He radiated a contained energy that could have raised the roof.

“Let’s go look at the street,” I said.

We went out the back door and up the short flight of outside stairs to State Street. Or where State Street had been. The march, contrary to the laws of physics governing crowds, had arrived early.

Every leftist in Illinois might have been there. The pavement was gone beneath a winding, chanting snake of marchers blocks and blocks and
blocks
long. Several hundred people singing, “All we are saying/Is give peace a chance,” makes your hair stand on end. Willy nudged me, beaming, and pointed to a banner that read, “Draft Beer, Not Boys.” There really were torches, though the harsh yellow-tinted lights of State Street faded them. Some people on the edge of the crowd had lit sparklers; as the line of march passed over the bridge, first one, then dozens of sparklers, like shooting stars, arced over the railings and into the river, with one last bright burst of white reflection on the water before they hit.

I wanted to follow the march, but my banjo was in the coffeehouse, waiting for me to look after it. “I’m going to see what’s up inside,” I shouted at Willy. He nodded. Sparklers, fizzing, reflected in his eyes.

The crowd packed the sidewalk between me and Orpheus’s front door, so I retraced our steps, down the stairs and along the river. I came into the parking lot, blind from the lights I’d just left, and heard behind me, “Hey, hippie.”

There were two of them, about my age. They were probably both on their school’s football and swimming teams; their hair was short, they weren’t wearing blue jeans, they smelled of Southern Comfort, and they’d called me “hippie.” A terrible combination. I started to walk away, across the parking lot, but the blond one stepped forward and grabbed my arm.

“Hey! I’m talking to you.”

There’s nothing helpful you can say at times like this, and if there had been, I was too scared to think of it. The other guy, brown-haired and shorter, came up and jabbed me in the stomach with two fingers. “You a draft dodger?” he said. “Scared to fight for your country?”

“Hippies make me puke,” the blond one said thoughtfully.

They were drunk, for God’s sake, and out on the town, and as excited in their way by the mass of people on the street above as I was. Which didn’t make me feel any better when the brown-haired one punched me in the face.

I was lying on my back clutching my nose and waiting for the next bad thing to happen to me when I heard Willy say, “Don’t do it.” I’d heard him use his voice in more ways than I could count, but never before like that, never a ringing command that could turn you to stone.

I opened my eyes and found my two tormenters bracketing me, the blond one’s foot still raised to kick me in the stomach. He lost his balance as I watched and got the foot on the ground just in time to keep from falling over. They were both looking toward the river railing, so I did, too.

The parking lot didn’t have any lights to reflect in his eyes. The green sparks there came from inside him. Nor was there any wind to lift and stir his hair like that. He stood very straight and tall, six metres from us, his hands held a little out from his sides like a gunfighter in a cowboy movie. Around his right hand, like a living glove, was a churning outline of golden fire. Bits of it dripped away like liquid from the ends of his fingers, evaporating before they hit the gravel. Like sparks from a sparkler.

I’m sure that’s what my two friends told each other the next day—that he’d had a sparkler in his hand, and the liquor had made them see something more. That they’d been stupid to run away. But it wasn’t a sparkler. And they weren’t stupid. I heard them running across the parking lot; I watched Willy clench the fingers of his right hand and close his eyes tight, and saw the fire dim slowly and disappear. And I wished like hell that I could run away, too.

He crouched down beside me and pulled me up to sitting. “Your nose is bleeding.”

“What are you?” I croaked.

The fire was still there, in his eyes. “None of your business,” he said. He put his arm around me and hauled me to my feet. I’m not very heavy, but it still should have been hard work, because I didn’t help. He was too slender to be so strong.

“What do you mean, none of my business? Jesus!”

He yanked me around to face him. When I looked at him, I saw wildness and temper and a fragile control over both. “I’m one of the Daoine Sidhe, Johnny-lad,” he said, and his voice was harsh and coloured by traces of some accent. “Does that help?”

“No,” I said, but faintly. Because whatever that phrase meant, he was admitting that he was not what I was. That what I had seen had really been there.

“Try asking Steve. Or look it up, I don’t care.”

I shook my head. I’d forgotten my nose; a few drops of blood spattered from it and marked the front of his white shirt. I stood frozen with terror, waiting for his reaction.

It was laughter. “Earth and Air,” he said when he caught his breath, “are we doing melodrama or farce out here? Come on, let’s go lay you down and pack your face in ice.”

There was considerable commotion when we came in the back door. Lisa got the ice and hovered over me while I told Steve about the two guys. I said Willy had chased them off; I didn’t say how. Steve was outraged, and Lisa was solicitous, and it was all wasted on me. I lay on the floor with a cold nose and a brain full of rug fuzz, and let all of them do or say whatever they felt like.

Eventually I was alone in the back room, with the blank ceiling tiles to look at. Betsy Kaske was singing “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues.” I roused from my self-indulgent stupor only once, when Steve passed on his way to the kitchen.

“Steve, what’s a—” and I pronounced Daoine Sidhe, as best I could.

He repeated it, and it sounded more like what Willy had said. “Elves,” he added.

“What?”

“Yeah. It’s an Irish name for the elves.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said. When I didn’t add to that, he went on into the kitchen.

I don’t know what I believed. But after a while I realised that I hadn’t seen Lisa go by in a long time. And she didn’t know what I knew, or almost knew. So I crawled up off the floor and went looking for her.

Not in the front room, not in the kitchen, and if she was in the milling people who were still hanging out on State Street, I’d never find her anyway. I went out to the back steps, to see if she was in the parking lot.