“You’re the only one who wants something important from me.”
“Music?”
“Of course, music.”
The rug fuzz had been blown from my head by his anger and mine. “Is that why you sing that way?”
“What the devil is wrong with the way I sing?”
“Nothing. Except you don’t sound as if any of the songs ever happened to you.”
“Of course they haven’t.” He was turning stiff and cold, withdrawing. That seemed worse than when he was threatening me.
The poster for the protest march still fluttered in the doorway. I grabbed it and held it out. “See her?” I asked, jabbing a finger at the picture of the woman kneeling over the student’s body. “Maybe she knew that guy. Maybe she didn’t. But she cares that he’s dead. And I look at this picture, and I care about her. And all those people who marched past you in the street tonight? They did it because they care about a lot of people that they’re never even going to see.”
He looked fascinated and horrified at once. “Don’t you all suffer enough as it is?”
“Huh?”
“Why would you take someone else’s suffering on yourself?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. I said finally, “We take on each other’s happiness, too.”
He shook his head, slowly. He was gathering the pieces of himself together, putting all his emotional armour back on. “This is too strange even for me. And among my people, I’m notoriously fond of strange things.” He turned and walked away, as if I’d ceased to exist.
“What about tonight?” I said. He’d taken about a half-dozen steps. “Why did you bother to scare off those guys who were beating me up?”
He stopped. After a long moment he half-turned and looked at me, wild-eyed and…frightened? Then he went on, stiffly, across the parking lot, and disappeared into the dark.
The next night, when I came in, Willy’s guitar and fiddle were gone. But Steve said he hadn’t seen him.
Lisa was clearing tables at closing, her hair falling across her face and hiding it. From behind that veil, she said, “I think you should give up. He’s not coming.”
I jumped. “Was I that obvious?”
“Yeah.” She swept the hair back and showed a wry little smile. “You looked just like me.”
“I feel lousy,” I told her. “I helped drive him away, I think.”
She sat down next to me. “I wanted to jump off the bridge last night. But the whole time I was saying, ‘Then he’ll be sorry, the rat.’”
“He wouldn’t have been.”
“Nope, not a bit,” she said.
“But I would have.”
She raised her grey cat-eyes to my face. “I’m not going to fall in love with you, John.”
“I know. It’s okay. I still would have been sorry if you jumped off the bridge.”
“Me, too,” Lisa said. “Hey, let’s make a pact. We won’t talk about The Rat to anybody but each other.”
“Why?”
“Well…” She frowned at the empty lighted space of the stage. “I don’t think anybody else would understand.”
So we shared each other’s suffering, as he put it. And maybe that’s why we wouldn’t have called it that.