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“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.”
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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.”
