Out in the middle of the river the sun sparkled and hurt Leo’s eyes. Nothing was floating downstream like it would in the spring; no trees, no boards, no drowned dogs. One year, a live chicken swept by. Leo was nine or ten years old and he’d walked down the road with his father after supper. It was probably April, and cold enough he wore a coat. Jim was in his coveralls with a wool shirt underneath. Leo could see his breath in front of him, but still Jim was sipping an after-dinner iced coffee. When the chicken came by, Leo almost missed it. It was all white, but yellow around the beak, perched on the corner of a wooden box that turned slightly as it floated downriver, and the chicken could not have looked less worried. No little jerks of the head. No spreading wings. “She’s out for a drive,” Jim said, and Leo laughed.

Now he turned and headed back for the house. How some men could call Chick Donovan chicken, he didn’t know. A real chicken wouldn’t have gone down to a Negro city riot to pass out communist pamphlets, a real chicken wouldn’t have jumped out of his truck to face a beating. And man, that was a punch and a half that Chick hit Floyd with. There was a beauty to that kind of move; seeing it was like watching someone do a flawless dive into the water, or skate on ice with their hands behind their back. Watching Ryder and Jim play together fit in there somewhere too. Leo hoped he hadn’t soaked up too much of that Louisville Kid stuff last night. He thought of Bill O’Donnell again, the way he walked out on them like Leo was bad news. But the thing is, Leo didn’t think he’d done near enough that day; he should have tried harder to get the bat back from Floyd after snatching it. Floyd had still been woozy from Chick’s hook, but Leo ran, and they broke Chick’s bones and put him in a coma, and now Chick is on the mend and Allie is a complete Mystery Girl.

But no way in heaven was Leo Suther going to do anything about that. He walked into his kitchen, pulled two bottles of Coke from the fridge, grabbed the window fan, and went to his room. In fact, he couldn’t wait for this week to hurry up and get over with so she’d know he wasn’t calling not because her mother said so, but because Leo was pretty damn busy with other things. Like his music. Even last night, so drunk he had to close one eye, he played well enough in the parlor to keep up with his father and Ride. Honest-to-God blues till past midnight. They played a lot of Leadbelly, real street cracker tunes that Jim sang as loud as if he had a big audience instead of just the three of them. Ryder blew the reeds like he wanted to take off and fly, and Leo found himself playing a happy one-eyed backup, the harp-playing Leweyville Kid.