The Urban Fantasy Anthology Read Online Free PDF Page A

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