“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said, sounding more like her brother than I’d ever tell her. “What the hell just happened?”
I shrugged. “Guess I got a set of bum strings. It happens.”
“Yeah, right. Every string breaking at the same time.” She paused and studied me for a moment. “Has it happened before?”
I shook my head. I was telling the truth. But other things just as strange had—no more than two or three times a year, but that was two or three times too many.
I set my guitar in its stand and went to the back of the stage, where I got my string-winder and a fresh set of strings.Miki was still sitting on her stool when I got back to my own seat. Usually she’d be off the stage by then, mixing with the audience.
“So what aren’t you telling me?” she asked.
“What makes you think I’m not telling you something?”
“You’ve got that look on your face.”
“What look?”
“Your ‘holding back something juicy’ look.”
“Well, it was strange to have them all break at once like that.”
“Try impossible,” she said.
“You saw it.”
“Yeah, and I still don’t quite believe it. So give.”
I shook my head.
“It’s nothing you want to hear,” I told her.
She stood and came over to my side of the stage so that I had to look up at her. Though perhaps “up” was stretching it some since she wasn’t much taller than me, and I was still sitting down. Her hair was bright orange that week, short and messy as ever, but it suited her. Truth is, there isn’t much that doesn’t suit her. She might be too small and compact ever to be hired to walk down the runway at a fashion show, but she could wear anything and make it look better than it ever would on a professional model.
That night she was in baggy green cargos and a black Elvis Costello T-shirt that she’d cut the arms off of, but she still looked like a million dollars. She’d kill me if I ever said that in her hearing—because she’s probably the best button accordion player I’ve ever heard; certainly the best I’ve ever played with—but I’m sure that half the reason we sell out most of our shows is because of her looks. Sort of pixie gamine meets sexy punk. It drew the young crowd, but she was too cute to put off the older listeners.And like I said, she can play.
“I just asked, didn’t I?” she said.
“Yeah, but . . .”
I’d learned not to talk about certain things around her because it just set her off. I can still remember asking her if she ever read any Yeats—that was in the first week we were out on the road as a duo. She’d given up on fronting a band, because it cost too much to keep the four-piece on the road, and had hired me to be her accompanist in their place.
“Don’t get me started on Yeats,” she’d said.
“What’s wrong with Yeats?”
“Yeats, personally? Nothing, so far as I know. I never met the man. And I’ll admit he had a way with the words. What I don’t like about him is all that Celtic Twilight shite he was always on about.”
I shook my head.
“What?” she said.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems that for a woman born in Ireland, who makes her living playing Celtic music, you don’t care much for your own traditions.”
“What traditions? I like a good Guinness and play the dance tunes on my box—those are traditions I can appreciate. I can even enjoy a good game of football, if I’m in the mood, which isn’t bloody often.What I don’t like is when people get into all that mystical shite.” She laughed, but without a lot of humor. “And I don’t know which is worse, the wanna-be Celts or those who think they were born to pass on the great Secret Traditions.”
“Which is a good portion of your audience—especially on the concert circuit.”
She had a sip of her draught and smiled at me over the brim of her glass. “Well, you know what they say. Doesn’t matter what your line of work, there’ll always be punters.”
That was so Miki, I soon discovered. She was either irrepressibly cheerful and ready to joke about anything, or darkly cynical about the world at large, and the Irish in particular. But she hadn’t always been that way.
I didn’t know her well before she hired me; but we’d been at a lot of the same sessions and ran with the same crowd, so I already had more than a passing acquaintance with the inimitable Ms. Greer before we started touring together.
Time was she was the definition of good-natured, so much so that a conversation with her could give some people a toothache. It was her brother Donal who was the morose one. But something happened to Donal—I never quite got all the details. I just know he died hard. Overseas, I think. In the Middle East or someplace like that. Some desert, anyway. Whatever had happened, Miki took it badly, and she hadn’t been the same since. She was either up or she was down and even her good humor could often have a dark undercurrent to it. Not so much mean, as bitter.
None of which explained her dislike of things Irish, particularly the more mystical side of the Celtic tradition. I could understand her distancing herself from her roots—I might, too, if I’d been brought up the way she had by a drunken father, eventually living on the streets with Donal, the two of them barely in their teens. But while my background’s Irish, I grew up in the Green, what they used to call the Irish section of Tyson before it got taken over, first by the bohemians, then more recently by the new waves of immigrants from countries whose names I can barely pronounce.
The families living in the Green were dirt-poor—some of us still didn’t have hot water and electricity in the fifties—but we looked after each other. There was a sense of community in the Green that Miki never got to experience. I’m not saying everyone was an angel. Our fathers worked long hours and drank hard. There were fights in and outside of the bars every night. But if you lost your job, your neighbors would step in and see you through. No one had to go on relief. And my dad, at least, never took out his hardships on his family the way Miki’s did.
There was magic in the Green, too. It lay waiting for you in the stories told around the kitchen stoves, in the songs sung in the parlors. I grew up on great heaps of Miki’s “Celtic Twilight shite,” except it was less airy, more down-to-earth. Stories of leprechauns and banshees and strange black dogs that followed a man home.
And, at least according to my dad, not all of it was just stories.
“Well?”Miki said.
“Well, what?”
“Do you need a bang on the ear to get you going?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
She looked at her watch. “Then you better get started, because we’re back on in twenty minutes.”
I sighed. But as I restrung my guitar, I told her about it.
2
I remember my dad took me aside the day I was leaving home. We stood on the stoop outside our tenement building, hands in our pockets, looking down the street to the traffic going by at the far end of the block, across the way to where the Cassidy girls were playing hopscotch, anywhere but at each other.
“If it was just a need for work, Conn,” he finally said, trying one more time to understand. “But this talk of having to find yourself . . .”
How to explain? With four sisters and three brothers, I felt smothered. Especially since each and every one of them knew exactly what they wanted out of life. They had it all mapped out—the jobs, the marriages, the children, the life there in the Green. There were no unknown territories for them.
I only had the music, and while it was respected in our family, it wasn’t considered a career option. It was what we did in the evenings, around our kitchen table and those of our neighbors.
I’d tried to put it into the words before that day, but it always came out sounding like I was turning my back on them, and that wasn’t the case. I just needed to find a place in the world that I could make my own. A way to make a living without the help of an uncle or a cousi
n. It might not be music. But with a limited education, and the even more limited interest in furthering what I did have, music seemed the best option I had.
Besides, I lived and breathed music.
“I know you don’t understand,” I said. “But it’s what I need to do. I’m only going to Newford, and I won’t be gone forever.”
“But wouldn’t it be easier on you to live with us while you . . . while you try this?”
I’ll give them this: my parents didn’t understand, but they were supportive, nevertheless.
I shook my head. “I need the space, Dad. And there aren’t the venues here like there are in the city.”
He gave a slow nod. And maybe he even understood.
“When you do find yourself a place,” he said, “make peace with its spirits.”
I guess you might find that an odd thing for him to say, but we O’Neills are a superstitious lot. “Everything has a spirit,” Dad would tell us when we were growing up. “So give everything its proper respect, or you’ll be bringing the bad luck down upon yourself.”
The presence of spirits wasn’t something we talked about a lot—and certainly not in the mystical way people do now, where it’s all about communicating with energy patterns through crystals, candles, or whatever. It was just accepted that the spirits were there, all around us, sharing the world with us: Ghosts and sheerie. Merrow, skeaghshee, and butter spirits. All kinds.
“I will,” I told him.
He pressed a folded twenty into my hand—a lot of money for us in those days—then embraced me in a powerful hug. I’d already said my other good-byes inside.
“There’ll always be room for you here,” he said.
I nodded, my throat suddenly too thick to speak. I’d wanted and planned for this for months, and suddenly I was tottering on the edge of giving it all up and going to work at the factory with my brothers. But I hoisted my duffel bag in one hand,my homemade guitar case in the other. It was made of scavenged plywood and weighed more than the instrument did.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “Just . . . thanks.”
We both knew that simple word encompassed far more than the twenty dollars he’d just given me and the reminder that I’d always have a home to return to.
He clapped me on the shoulder, and I turned and headed down the street, where I had an appointment with a Newford-bound bus.
THINGS DIDN’T go as planned.
I’d set up a few gigs before I left home, but my act didn’t go over all that well. I’m not a strong singer, so I need the audience actually to be listening to me for them to appreciate the songs. But people don’t have that kind of patience in a bar. Or maybe it’s simply a lack of interest. They’ve gone out to drink and have fun with their friends, and the music’s only supposed to be background.
“You’re a brilliant guitarist,” the owner of the bar I played on the second weekend told me. “But it’s wasted on this lot.You should hook up with a fiddler, or somebody with a bigger presence. You know, something to grab their attention and hold it.”
In other words, I wasn’t much of a front person. As though to punctuate the point, he didn’t book me for another gig.
Worse, I knew he was right. I didn’t like being up there on those little stages by myself, and even though I knew nobody was really listening, I could barely mumble my way through my introductions. It was different sitting around the kitchen at home, or in a session. I loved backing up the fiddlers and pipers, the flute and box players. And when I did sing a song, people listened.
So I put the word out that I was available as an accompanist, but all the decent players already had their own, and the people who did contact me weren’t much good. It was so frustrating. I ended up tak- ing gigs with some of them anyway, but they didn’t challenge me musically or help my bank balance—my bank being the left front pocket of my cargo pants, which I could at least button closed.
I ended up busking a lot—in the market, at subway entrances, down by Fitzhenry Park—but since I didn’t have enough presence onstage, where I had the benefit of a sound system, I sure didn’t have what it took to grab the attention of passersby on the street, where I was competing with all the traffic and city noise as well as audience indifference.My take after playing was never more than a few dollars. By the end of a month I was out of money and had to leave the boardinghouse where I was staying. I ended up in Squatland, sleeping in one of the many abandoned buildings there with the other homeless people, keeping my busking money for food.
I could have gone home, I guess. But I was too proud. Though not too proud to find another way to make a living.
I finally found a job as a janitor at the Sovereign Building on Flood Street. I got the gig through Joey Bennett, this cab driver I met when I was busking at the gates of Fitzhenry Park. He’d stand outside his cab, arms folded across his chest, listening to me while he waited for a fare. He was a jazz buff, but we got to talking on my breaks. When he heard I was looking for work, it turned out he knew a lawyer who had an office in the Sovereign, and the lawyer got me the job.
I guess it wasn’t much different than getting a job through an uncle or cousin, except Joey and the lawyer were my connections. I’d done it on my own.
I didn’t mind the job that much. I like seeing things put to order and kept clean, and it’s very meditative being in a big building like that, pretty much on my own. There are other cleaners, but we each have our own floors, and we don’t really see each other except at break time.
Now here’s the thing.
I’d paid my respects to the spirits at the boardinghouse, and later my squat—feeling a little foolish while I talked into thin air to do so. No one answered, and I didn’t expect them to. But I never thought about doing it at work. So, when I saw the kid tracking muddy footprints down the hall I’d just spent a half hour mopping down, I wasn’t thinking of house spirits and respect. I just told him off.
When he turned in my direction, I saw that he wasn’t really a kid—more a kid-sized, little man with brown skin and hair that looked like Rasta dreadlocks. He was wearing a dark green cap and shirt, brown-green trousers, and was barefoot—unless you counted the mud on them as footwear.Over his shoulder, he had a coil of rope with a grappling hook fastened to one end. In his hand, he carried a small cloth bag that bulged with whatever it was holding.
It was raining outside, so it wasn’t hard to figure out where the mud had come from. How he’d gotten into the building was a whole other story. Used the grappling hook to get up the side of the wall, I suppose, then forced a window.
He glared at me when I yelled at him, dark eyes flashing.
“How’d you get in here, anyway?” I demanded.
He pointed a gnarled finger at me.
“I give you seven years,” he said in a gravelly voice that felt like it should have come from a much larger person.
“Yeah, well, I’ll give you thirty seconds to get out of here,” I told him.
“Do you know who I am?”
Until he said that, I hadn’t actually considered it. Not after my first impression when I thought he was just some kid, nor when I realized that he was a weird little man who’d somehow found his way into this locked office building. But as soon as he asked, I knew. And my heart sank. I’d done the very thing my dad had always warned us against.
Though I’ll tell you, while I grew up with his stories of faeries and such, accepting them the way you do things that are spoken of in your family, I’d never really believed in them. It was like any other superstition—spilling salt, walking under ladders, that kind of thing. Most people don’t believe, but they avoid such situations all the same, just in case.Which is why I’d paid my respects to invisible presences in the boardinghouse and my squat. Just in case.
“Listen,” I began, “I didn’t realize who—”
But he cut me off.
“Seven years,” he repeated.
“Seven years and what?”
“You’ll be my tith
e to the Grey Man.”
My dad had stories about him as well. How the brolaghan known as Old Boneless was like a Mafia don to the smaller faeries, offering them his protection in return for a tithe—the main protection he offered being that he himself wouldn’t hurt them. The tithe could be anything from tasty morsels, beer or whiskey, to pilfered knickknacks and even changelings. It just had to be something stolen from the human world.
Dad’s stories didn’t say what the Grey Man did with any of those things. Being a creature of mist and fog, you wouldn’t think he’d have any use for material items. Maybe they helped make him more substantial.
I certainly didn’t want to find out firsthand.
“Wait a sec’,” I said. “All I did was—”
“Disrespect me. And just to remind you of my displeasure,” he added.
He pointed that gnarled finger at me again, and my pants came undone, falling down around my ankles. By the time I’d stooped to pull them up, he was gone. I zipped up my fly and redid my belt.
They came undone, and my pants fell down once more.
I suppose that’s what really convinced me that I’d just had an encounter with a genuine faerie man. No matter how often I tried, I couldn’t get my pants to stay up. Finally, I sat down there in the hall holding them in place with one hand while I tried to figure out what to do.
Nothing came to mind.
And the worst thing about it, there was this totally cute girl named Nita Singh that I’d been spending my breaks with. She worked the floor below mine, and while I hadn’t quite figured out yet if she was seeing anybody, she was friendly enough to give me hope that maybe she wasn’t. She certainly seemed to return my interest.
So of course she had to come up looking for me when I didn’t come down at break time.
“Are you okay?” she asked as she came down the hall from the stairwell.
Nita was almost as tall as me, with shoulder-length, straight dark brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Like all of us, she was wearing grubby jeans and a T-shirt, but they looked much better on her.
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