• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Is she with the city?”

I nodded.

“And you still love her? She still loves you?”

“Well, we’re not celibate—I mean, it’s been six and a half years now.We had six months together before the butter spirit conjured up the allergy, but . . .” I shrugged. “So, yes, we still love each other, but we see other people.” I paused, then added, “And you need to know this because?”

“I need to know everything I can about the situation. You do want me to help, don’t you?”

“I’ll take any help I can get.”

“Good man. So, are you all tuned up yet?” she asked, abruptly shifting conversational gears. When I nodded, she added, “Then I think it’s time to start playing again.”

I was going to have to fight the tuning of my guitar for the rest of the night as the new set of strings stretched. But better that—better to lose myself in the mechanics of playing and tuning and the spirit of the music—than to have to think about that damned butter spirit for the next hour or so.

Except I never did get him out of my head. At the very least, throughout the set, I carried the worry of my strings snapping on me again.

4

Miki wasn’t at all forthcoming about her plan to deal with the butter spirit. The first time I pressed her harder for details—“Hello,” I told her. “This concerns me, you know.”—she just said something about the walls having ears, and if she spoke her plan aloud, she might as well write it out and hand it over the enemy.

“Trust me, Conn,” she said.

So I did. She might get broody. She might carry a hard, dark anger around inside her. But it was never directed at me, and I knew I could trust her with my life. Which was a good thing because if the Grey Man ever did get hold of me, it was my life that was forfeit.

THE MONTH WENT BY quickly.

We finished up our gigs in the Southwest, did a week that took us up through Berkeley and Portland, and then we were back in New-ford and it was time to start the two-hour drive out to Harnett’s Point for our opening night at the Harp & Tankard.

Harnett’s Point used to be a real backwoods village, its population evenly divided between the remnant of back-to-the-earth hippies who tended organic farms west of the city and locals who made their living off of the tourists that swelled the village in the summer. But it had changed in the last decade, becoming, like so many of the other small villages around Newford, a satellite community for those who could afford the ever-pricier real estate and didn’t mind the two-hour commute to their jobs.

And where once it had only the one Irish bar—Murphy’s, a log and plaster-covered concrete affair near the water that was a real roadhouse—now it sported a half dozen, including the Harp & Tankard, where we were playing that night.

Have you ever noticed how there seems to be an Irish pub on almost every corner these days? They’re as bad as coffee shops. I can remember a time when the only place you could get a decent Guinness was in Ireland, and as for the music, forget it. “Traditional music” was all that Irish-American twaddle popularized by groups like the Irish Rovers. Some of them were lovely songs, once, but they’d been reduced to noisy bar jokes by the time I got into the music professionally. And then there were the folks who’d demand “some real Irish songs” like “The Unicorn,” and would get all affronted when first, you wouldn’t play it for them, and second, you told them it was actually written by Shel Silverstein, the same Jewish songwriter responsible for hits like Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone.”

Miki and I played an even mix of bars, small theatres, colleges, and festivals, and I usually liked the bars the least—probably a holdover from when I was first trying to get into the music in a professional capacity. But Miki loved them. It made no sense to me why she kept taking these bookings—she could easily fill any medium-sized hall—but they kept her honest, she liked to say. “And besides,” she’d add, “music and the drink, they just