Free A Separate War and Other Stories by Joe Haldeman

store, classical on Wednesdays and rock on Thursdays. That eked out my sideman income, which was irregular all the time and shrank to almost nothing in the summer—bands that book college towns when the students are away don’t make enough money to hire someone like me. (Someone who’s the best damned guitar player in town, and modest besides.)
    The teaching gig is how I met Laura, got the lute, fell in love, and turned my life into something mad and magical. And I do mean madness and magic, not metaphor.
    I later found out that Laura had seen me perform at a gig that turned out to be a kind of one-man-band freak show. It was a pretty good folk-rock quintet that changed its name about once a week. When I worked for them they were Jerry & the Winos, though if you’ve ever heard of them it was probably as Baked Alaska, with their hit single and album “Straighten Up and Die Right.” Cheerful bunch.
    Anyhow, one of Jerry’s winos was poleaxed with something like Montezuma’s Revenge—they’d just come from New Mexico and figured the spices might have gotten him, not to mention the thirty-two-hour drive. So they hired me to pick up for the guy, who doubled on twelve-string and electric bass, no problem.
    (I have an apartment so full of musical instruments that you have to move one to sit down. That’s relevant.)
    It turned out that it wasn’t the food, though, but a bug, and the quintet that had become a quartet wound up being just Jerry and me, with the rest of his band in the hospital. Jerry may have beaten the the thing because he was such a total drug addict that he couldn’t tell the difference between being sick and being well. Or maybe the heroin killed off all those microorganisims before it finally killed Jerry, six or seven years later.
    But that was one hell of a gig. He had the lungs and the energy of his namesake Garcia, and a kind of stoned concentration that was a marvel to watch. The afternoon three of his guys took a fast cab to join their buddy in the GI ward, Jerry and his sound man laid out all their arrangements on the floor of the stage and we walked down the line, the two of them basically arguing about what instrument I was going to play when. Jerry knew I could play anything from a Roland to a rattle, and he decided to make a virtue out of a necessity—not to mention saving a few hundred bucks by not hiring another sideman or three.
    I was in seventh heaven. I also got a lot of ego gratification and local publicity out of it, because Jerry was generous in explaining what had happened and how I’d saved his sorry butt. So I just danced from keyboard to fingerboard; frets to fretless—if there’d been a saxophone onstage I would’ve tried to learn it. We had it set up so Jerry went between electric and acoustic while I went from one music stand to the next, reading like a son of a bitch on five instruments. Jerry vetoed the sound man when he wanted to use the Roland’s computer-generated percussion, which was good. Jerry did rhythm while I did lead, and vice versa. By the end of the second night we were playing like we’d been together forever, and Jerry said if the other guys weren’t pals, he’d leave ’em in the hospital and we could hit the road together.
    But he and the Winos moved on, and I went back to doing what I did, with one huge difference: Laura had been there both nights. Friday with a date, and then Saturday alone.
    I hadn’t seen her—with the lights you don’t see a lot past the stage—and if I had, I probably wouldn’t have taken special notice. She was one of those women who could be beautiful when she wanted to be, but preferred the anonymity of being plain. A kind of protective coloration: whatever she was, it wasn’t ordinary.
    She showed up the next Wednesday at the store and asked about classical lessons. No, she didn’t have a guitar, which was good; my secondary